First Command (71 page)

The yacht was not equipped with robot probes—a glaring omission that, said the Baroness, would cost the shipyard on Electra dearly. There were, however, sounding rockets, a necessity when landing on a world with no spaceport facilities; a streamer of smoke is better than nothing when there are no Aerospace Control reports on wind direction and velocity—and at least as good as a primitive windsock.

The Far Traveler
dropped steadily down through Farhaven’s atmosphere. She was in bright sunlight although the terrain below her was still dark. Grimes had told Big Sister that he wanted to land very shortly after sunrise—S.O.P. for the Survey Service. The almost level rays of a rising luminary show up every smallest irregularity of a surface and, when a landing is being made on a strange world, there is a full day after the initial set-down to make preliminary explorations and to get settled in.

Grimes, during his first orbitings of Farhaven, had selected his landing site—an unforested plain near the mouth of one of the great rivers, a stream that according to Belton’s charts was called the Jordan.
Epsilon Pavonis
had set down there. So had
Investigator. A
little way upriver was what Captain Lentigan had referred to as a large village and Commander Belton as a small town. Neither Lentigan nor Belton had reported that the natives were hostile; their troubles had been with their own crews. None of the material that Grimes had seen so far went into very great detail but he could fill in the gaps from his imagination. (He had experienced his own troubles with his own crew after the Botany Bay landing.)

Big Sister broke into his thoughts. She said, her voice metallic yet feminine, issuing from the speaker of the NST transceiver, “I would suggest that we fire the first sounding rocket, Captain.”

“Fire at will,” ordered Grimes.

(In a normal ship some alleged humorist would have whispered, “Who’s Will?”)

He watched in the stern view screen the arrow of fire and smoke streaking downward. Its trail wavered.

“Ideal conditions, Captain,” commented the Baroness.

“It would seem so, Your Excellency,” agreed Grimes.

But from his own, highly personal viewpoint they were far from ideal. Over many years he had regarded his pipe as an essential adjunct to shiphandling—and for those many years he had been absolute monarch in his own control room. But the Baroness neither smoked nor approved of smoking in her presence.

He allowed his attention to stray briefly from the controls to what he could see of the sunlit hemisphere through the viewports. Farhaven was a wildly beautiful world but, save for ribbons of fertility along the rivers and coasts, it was a barren beauty. To the east, beyond the narrow sea, reared great, jagged pinnacles, ice-tipped, and to the west similar peaks were already dazzlingly scintillant in the first rays of the rising sun. Unless there were considerable mineral wealth about all that this planet would be good for would be a holiday resort—and it was too far from anywhere for the idea to be attractive to those shipping companies involved in the tourist trade.

Big Sister said, “I would suggest, Captain, that you pay more attention to your controls. It was, after all, with some reluctance that I consented to let you handle the landing.”

Grimes felt his prominent ears burning as he blushed furiously. He thought,
I’d like five minutes alone back on Electra with the bastard who programmed this brass bitch!
He saw, in the screen, that the sounding rocket had hit and that its luminous smoke was rising directly upwards. But it was thinning, would not last for much longer.

He ordered, “Fire two!”

Big Sister said, “It is not necessary.”

Fire two!” repeated Grimes sharply. He added, grudgingly, “Wind can rise suddenly, especially just after sunrise, especially in country like this.”

“Fire two,” acknowledged Big Sister sullenly as the second rocket streaked downwards, striking just as the first one expired.

And there was wind, Grimes noted with smug satisfaction, springing up with the dawn. The luminescent pillar of smoke wavered, then streamed seawards. Grimes applied lateral thrust, kept the flaring rocket head in the center of the screen.

The sun came up relative to the land below the ship, topping the serrated ridge of the range to the eastward. The plain toward which
The Far Traveler
was dropping flared into color—blue-green with splotches of gold and scarlet, outcroppings of gleaming white from which extended long, sharply defined black shadows.
Boulders . . .
thought Grimes, stepping up the magnification of the screen. Yes, boulders . . . And the red and yellow patches must be clumps of ground hugging flowers since they cast no shadows. The sounding rocket, still smoking, was almost in the center of one of the scarlet patches; there was no unevenness of the ground there to worry about.

The ship dropped steadily. Grimes was obliged to make frequent small lateral thrust adjustments; that wind was unsteady, gusting, veering, backing. He reduced the rate of descent until
The Far Traveler
was almost hovering.

“I am not made of glass, you know,” remarked Big Sister conversationally.

“I had hoped to make the landing some time before noon,” said the Baroness.

Grimes tried to ignore them both.
That bloody wind!
he thought.
Why can’t it make up its mind which way to blow!

He was down at last—and the ship, suddenly and inexplicably, was tilted a full fifteen degrees from the vertical. She hung there—and then, with slow deliberation, righted herself, far more slowly than she should have done with the lateral thrust that Grimes was applying. There was no real danger, only discomfort—and, for Grimes, considerable embarrassment. He had always prided himself on his shiphandling and this was the first time that he had been guilty of such a bungled landing.

When things had stopped rattling and creaking the Baroness asked, with cold sarcasm, “Was that really necessary, Captain?”

Before he could think of a reply Big Sister said, “Captain Grimes was overly cautious.
I
would have come down fast instead of letting the wind play around with me like a toy balloon. I would have dropped and then applied vertical thrust at the last moment.”

And you, you cast-iron, gold-plated bitch,
thought Grimes,
deliberately made a balls-up of my landing . . .

“Perhaps, Captain,” said the Baroness, “it will be advisable to allow Big Sister to handle her own lift-offs and set-downs from now on.”

The way she said it there wasn’t any “perhaps” about it.

Chapter 15

Big Sister
carried out the routine tests for habitability. The captains of
Epsilon Pavonis
and
Investigator
had reported the atmosphere as better than merely breathable, the water suitable for drinking as well as for washing in and sailing ships on, a total absence of any micro-organisms capable of causing even mild discomfort to humans, let alone sickness or death. Nonetheless, caution is always advisable. Bacilli and viruses can mutate—and on Farhaven, after the landing of
Lode Venturer,
there had been established a new and sizeable niche in the ecology, the bodies of the original colonists and their descendants, just crying out to be occupied. The final tests, however, would have to wait until there was a colonist available for thorough examination.

Finally Big Sister said, speaking through the control room transceiver, “You may now disembark. But I would recommend . . .”

Grimes broke in. “You seem to forget that I was once a Survey Service captain. Landings on strange planets were part of my job.”

The Baroness smiled maliciously. “I suppose that we may as well avail ourselves of Captain Grimes’ wide range of experience. Quite possibly he was far better at trampling roughshod over exotic terrain than bringing his ship to a gentle set-down prior to the extra-vehicular activities.” She looked away from Grimes, addressed the transceiver. “Big Sister, please have the small pinnace waiting for us. We shall board it from the ground. Oh, and an escort of six general purpose robots. Armed.”

“Am I to assume, Your Excellency,” asked Grimes stiffly, “that you are placing yourself in command of the landing party?”

“Of course, Captain. May I remind you that your authority, such as it is, does not extend as much as one millimeter beyond the shell of this ship?”

Grimes did not reply. He watched her sullenly as she unbuckled herself from her seat and left the control room. Then he unsnapped his own safety belt, got up and went down to his quarters. He found that the robot stewardess had laid out a uniform of tough khaki twill with shoulderboards of gold braid on purple, a gold-trimmed purple beret, stout boots, a belt with attached holsters. He checked the weapons. These were a Minetti projectile pistol—as it happened, his favorite side-arm—and a hand laser. They would do; it was highly unlikely that heavy artillery would be required. He changed out of his shorts and shirt uniform—he had made it plain that he did not consider full dress suitable attire for shiphandling—slowly. Before he was finished the too familiar voice came from the speaker of the playmaster in his day cabin, “Captain Grimes, Her Excellency is waiting for you.”

He buckled on the belt, went out to the axial shaft, rode the elevator down to the after airlock. He walked down the golden ramp to the blue-green not-quiet-grass. The pinnace was there, a few meters from the ship, a slim, torpedo shape of burnished gold. The Baroness was there, in khaki shirt and flared breeches and high, polished boots, looking like an intrepid White Huntress out of some archaic adventure movie. The general purpose robots were there, drawn up in a stiff line, staring at nothing. From belts about their splendidly proportioned bodies depended an assortment of hand weapons.

“We are waiting,” said the Baroness unnecessarily. “Now that you are here, will you get the show on the road?” Somehow she contrived to put the question between quotation marks.

Grimes flushed angrily. “Your orders?” he asked, adding, “Your Excellency,” to avoid further acrimony.

“To take this pinnace to the settlement reported by
Epsilon Pavonis
and
Investigator.”
Then, when Grimes made no immediate move, “Don’t just stand there.
Do
something.”

He turned to the robots, tried to imagine that they were Survey Service Marines, although the handling of such personnel he had always left to their own officers or NCOs. “Embark!” he ordered sharply.

The automata turned as one, strode in single file to the pinnace’s airlock, stepped aboard.

He said to the Baroness, “After you, Your Excellency.”

He followed her into the pinnace, saw that she had taken the co-pilot’s seat in the control cab. The robots were standing aft, in the main cabin. The airlock doors closed while he was still making his way to his own chair; he noted that the Baroness had not touched the instrument panel before her. He sighed. This was Big Sister again, showing him who was really in command.

He buckled himself into his seat. Before he was finished the voice of the ship’s computer-pilot came from the transceiver, “Proceed when you are ready, Captain Grimes.”

The inertial drive was already running, in neutral gear. He switched to vertical thrust, lifted. The river was ahead; in the bright sunlight it was a ribbon of gleaming gold winding over the blue-green grasslands. There was altogether too much gold in his life these days, he thought. He flew at a moderate speed until he was directly over the wide stream and then turned to port, proceeding inland at an altitude of about fifteen meters. Ahead of him were the distant, towering ranges, their glittering peaks sharp against the clear sky.

The Baroness was not talkative. Neither was Grimes. He thought,
If
those were
real
Marines back there they’d be making enough chatter for all of us.

He concentrated on his piloting. The controls of the pinnace were very similar to those to which he had become accustomed in small craft of this type in the Survey Service but he still had to get the feel of this one. The river banks were higher now, rocky, sheer, with explosions of green and gold and scarlet and purple where flowering shrubs had taken hold in cracks and crevices. He considered lifting to above cliff-top level, then decided against it. While he was here he might as well enjoy the scenery. There was little enough else to enjoy.

The canyon became deeper, narrower, more tortuous. And then, after Grimes had put the pinnace through an almost right-angled turn, it widened. The actual river bed was still relatively narrow but, strung along it like a bead, was an oval valley, lushly fertile, bounded by sheer red cliffs unbroken save for where the stream flowed in and out.

The valley was as described in the two reports. The village was not. It was utterly deserted, its houses dilapidated, many of them apparently destroyed by fire at some long past date. Shrubs and saplings were thrusting up through the charred ruins.

Grimes set the controls for hovering, took binoculars from their box to study the abandoned settlement. There were few houses of more than one story. The structural material was mud or clay, reinforced with crude frames of timber. The windows were unglazed but from some of them bleached rags, the remains of blinds or curtains, fluttered listlessly in some faint stirring of the air.

The Baroness had found her own glasses, was staring through them.

She said softly, “A truly Lost Colony . . . And we have come too late to find any survivors . . . “

A voice—
that
voice!—came from the transceiver.

“May I suggest, Your Excellency, that you observe the cliff face to the north of your present position?”

Big Sister, thought Grimes, was still watching. She would have her sensors in and about the pinnace and every one of the robots was no more—and no less—than an extension of herself.

He turned the boat about its short axis to facilitate observation. He and the Baroness studied the forbidding wall of red rock. It was broken, here and there, by dark holes. The mouths of caves? He thought that he could detect motion in some of them. Animals? And then a human figure appeared from one of the apertures and walked slowly along a narrow ledge to the next cave mouth. It was naked. It was a woman, not old but not young, with long, unkempt hair that might, after a thorough wash, have been blonde. The most amazing thing about her was her apparent lack of interest in the strange flying machine that was shattering the peace of the valley with its cacophonous engine beat. Although it was quiet inside the pinnace—its builders had been lavish with sonic insulation to protect the delicate ears of its aristocratic owner—the racket outside, the arythmic clangor of the inertial drive echoing and re-echoing between the cliff faces, must have been deafening.