Chapter 15
THE NEXT MORNING DISCHARGE of Sister Sue’s cargo commenced under the supervision, from the shore end, of a bored Lieutenant Commander (S) and, aboard the ship, an increasingly exasperated Billy Williams.
“Damn it all, Skipper,” he complained to Grimes, “did you ever see such a shower of nongs? Stowbots that Noah must have used to load the fodder for the animals aboard the Ark and brassbound petty officers running them who wouldn’t be capable of navigating a wheelbarrow across a cow paddock! I’m not surprised that you resigned from the Survey Service if this is a fair sampling of their personnel!”
“That will do, Mr. Williams,” said Grimes coldly.
He looked out from the cargo port and saw the ground car wearing a Rear Admiral’s broad pennant approaching the ship. So here, he thought, was Damien coming to ask him if he had made his mind up yet.
He went down to the after airlock to receive his visitor, stood waiting at the head of the ramp. Damien extricated himself from his vehicle, came briskly up the gangway. Grimes saluted him while Kate Connellan, who was just happening by, sneered. The admiral glared at the second mate, then allowed Grimes to usher him into the elevator cage. They were carried swiftly up to the master’s quarters.
In the sitting room Damien, as though by right, seated himself behind the desk. Grimes looked at him resentfully, then took a chair facing the man who had once been his immediate boss. He needs something to rest his elbows on, thought Grimes, so that he can make a really good production of steepling his fingers . . . Damien did just that and regarded Sister Sue’s captain over the digital spire.
He said—and it was as much statement as question— “You have accepted the charter to El Dorado.”
“Yes, sir. Conditionally.”
“And your conditions?”
“My promotion to captain if I reenter the Survey Service.”
“That has been approved. You are now Captain John Grimes, Federation Survey Service Reserve. The necessary documentation should be aboard shortly.”
“I haven’t finished yet, sir. I have a particularly awkward second officer and I’d like to get shot of her.”
“That young lady in the airlock? A Donegalan, isn’t she?”
“Yes. She’s got the Guild on her side and I’ll be involved in wrongful dismissal suit if I empty her out.”
“Then you don’t empty her out, Grimes. It Is essential that you lift on time for El Dorado.”
“Mphm. Well, I was hoping to pick up a third mate here. That would improve matters. At the moment the Green Hornet is fifty percent of my control-room staff. But the Guild doesn’t seem to be in a mood to help me . . .”
“I wonder why not,” said Damien sardonically. “You know, of course, that all telephone calls made out from the Naval Station are monitored? No? Well, you know now. But not to worry, Grimes. I have already made arrangements for additional personnel for you. A Mr. Venner, who holds the rank of a Reserve Lieutenant Commander, will be applying to you for employment. He is a Guild member, of course, so there should be no difficulties. You will also be carrying a passenger—although actually he will be under your orders. If merchant vessels still carried psionic communications officers he would be on your books—but if you signed him on as PCO it would look suspicious.”
“A PCO, sir?”
“Yes. A Mr. Mayhew. Or Lieutenant Commander Mayhew.”
“Mphm. And I suppose that your Lieutenant Commander Venner has some skills not usually possessed by the average merchant officer.”
“He has, Grimes. His speciality is unarmed combat—and combat using any and all material to hand, however unlikely, as a weapon.”
“I remember one instructor, when I did a course,” said Grimes, “who demonstrated on a lifelike dummy the amount of damage you can do with a pipe . . .”
“Iron pipe? Lead pipe?”
“No, sir. This sort of pipe,” said Grimes, filling and lighting his.
“By asphyxiation?” asked Damien.
“No.” Grimes made a stabbing gesture. “Used as a dagger.”
“A poisoned dagger at that. Tell me, what arms do you carry aboard this ship?”
“A Minetti projectile pistol. Two hand lasers. That’s all.”
“And that’s all that there will be. Sister Sue is not a warship.”
“But, now, commanded by a Survey Service Reserve officer and with two other Survey Service officers on board.”
“Agreed. But you must be wondering, Grimes, just what all this is about.”
“Too right, sir.”
“You’ve been to El Dorado, haven’t you? You know the sort of people who live there. The filthy rich. You may have noticed that no matter how rich such people are they always want to be richer. And, too, there’s the lust for power. Your old friend Drongo Kane is in many ways a typical El Doradan, although he was granted citizenship only recently. Before he became an El Doradan he attempted to take over an entire planet, Morrowvia. You were able to shove a spanner into his works. He tried again, on the same world, some years later. Again you were on hand, as master of the Baroness d’Estang’s spaceyacht. The Baroness, an El Doradan, was well aware of Kane’s criminality. Nonetheless she married him . . .”
“I think that she rather regrets it now.”
“Does she? Oh, she got you out of a nasty mess on New Venusberg rather against her ever-loving husband’s wishes, but that doesn’t mean that a marriage dissolution is imminent.
“Well, we have learned that he has interested his El Doradan fellow citizens in another scheme of his, an ambitious one although not involving territorial acquisition. As you may know, El Dorado now has a navy . . .”
“One ship,” said Grimes. “An auxiliary cruiser, usually employed as a cruise liner, with Commodore Baron Kane as the captain.”
“Correct. But El Dorado, through Kane, has been chartering sundry obsolescent tonnage and not so obsolescent weaponry.”
“And upon whom is El Dorado going to declare war?”
“Nobody. But, as you know, there are always brushfire wars going on somewhere in the galaxy. Recently the Duchy of Waldegren put down a breakaway attempt by one of its colonies. The Shaara Galactic Hive has done the same, more than once. In such cases the rebel colonists have been outgunned and easily beaten. But suppose such rebels had been able to employ a mercenary navy?”
“Mercenaries like to be paid,” said Grimes. “Mercenaries with warships expect much higher pay than do, say, infantrymen.”
“Agreed. Now, just suppose that you’re the king or president or whatever of some world that’s decided to break away from whichever empire it’s supposed to belong. Your imperial masters take action against you. Your trade routes are raided, your merchant ships destroyed or captured. And then somebody presents himself at your palace, cap in hand, offering his services. At a price. It’s a price that you can’t afford to pay, especially since the salesman makes it quite clear that he’s not interested in the paper money that’s being churned out by your printing presses. But he makes a proposition. He offers his services free. Free to you, that is. All that you have to do is to issue Letters of Marque to his ships, which then become privateers. As such they raid the imperial trade routes, capturing rather than destroying. Your own navy, such as it is, is then free to deal with the imperial navy while the privateers make their fortunes harrying the merchantmen.”
“Mphm.”
“Now I’m demoting you, Grimes. You’re no longer this rebel king or prince or duke. You’re just the owner-master of a scruffy star tramp, delivering a cargo to El Dorado and not knowing where the next cargo is coming from. Or going to. You know people on El Dorado. You know Kane. He knows you. It may surprise you to learn that he has quite a high opinion of you. Or a low opinion. He’s been heard to say, ‘They call me a pirate—but that bloody Grimes could give me points and a beating if he really set his mind to it!’” He laughed. “And he could be right!”
“I’m flattered,” said Grimes, making it plain that he was not.
“I thought that you would be,” said Damien. “And I don’t mind telling you that Kane’s opinion of yourself coincides with mine.”
“Thank you. Sir.” Grimes scowled even more heavily. “So the idea is that I join Kane’s ragamuffin navy and then, somehow, switch sides.”
“More or less, although I don’t visualize any overt side switching. Hopefully you will contrive an incident, do something that will give us, the Federation Survey Service, an excuse to clamp down on the privateers. As you are aware, no doubt, the dividing line between privateer and pirate has always been a very thin one. You will, as instructed, break that line. You should be able to do so without any loss of life or injuries on either side, without, even, any serious damage to property—but you will commit an act of piracy. A suitable vessel to become the victim of your depredations has already been selected. She will, of course, carry a PCO who will, of course, be in telepathic touch with your Mr. Mayhew.”
“Very ingenious, sir,” said Grimes without enthusiasm. “And I suppose that I shall be secretly under Survey Service orders, as will be Mr. Venner and Mr. Mayhew. But what about the rest of my crew? Two refugees from an old men’s home. University professors and glorified garage hands for engineers. I can’t see any of them taking kindly to a career of piracy.”
“Privateering, Grimes, privateering. And you’d be surprised—or would you?—at what people will do when the money is big enough. And they’ll think that there’s no risk involved, that it will just be a matter of capturing unarmed vessels.”
“When a state of war exists, sir, merchant vessels are usually defensively armed.”
“You needn’t tell your people that.”
“The real spacemen will know without my telling them. And Billy Williams, my chief officer, was in the Dog Star Line—and they have always made a practice of arming their ships when they’re running through trouble zones.”
“So much the better. It will mean that you’ll have three reasonably competent gunnery officers aboard Sister Sue—yourself, Williams and Venner.”
“You’re forgetting one thing, sir.”
“And what’s that, Grimes?”
“I have a conscience. I don’t mind hiring myself out as a mercenary but I like to be able to approve of my employers.”
“Until this mess has been cleaned up, Grimes, we, the Federation Survey Service, are your real employers.”
“There have been times, Admiral Damien, when I have not approved of the Survey Service.”
“You do not surprise me. Many times I strongly suspected that. Nonetheless, you have never approved of Kane. This will be your chance to pay off old scores.”
And that, thought Grimes, was one quite good reason for accepting the assignment. Another reason was the prospect of making an honest, or a dishonest, profit. And—although he would never admit this to Damien—the Survey Service had been his life for so long that the prospect of returning to it, even as only a temporary reservist, was almost like coming home.