Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (11 page)

And that would be the way of it, thought Grimes. Even if
Baroom
were not employed as a flying fortress the Shaara would have command of the air. Their blimps were helium filled and would mount long range weapons; the native airships were hydrogen-filled, pitifully vulnerable, and would be armed only with primitive, slow-firing, hand-powered machine guns. Too, the Shaara blimps could be—probably would be—used as carriers for platoons of drones, flying fighters who, with their laser hand guns, would make short work of the airships. And, he realized, there was his own
Little Sister—
a virtually invulnerable spacecraft also extremely maneuverable inside an atmosphere, a potential bomber, fighter, troop carrier, or all three.

So the Shaara would have to be stopped,
now.

But how?

He studied the map on which the location of the cave-temple had been marked by Lennay, on which was Korong, the town from which he and Tamara had been rescued, and, further to the south east, Plirrit, near which the Shaara had landed, where their ship still was. Grimes was surprised to discover how close he was to what he regarded as enemy headquarters. Since the first landing he had travelled many kilometers by blimp, but, he realized, it had just been a case of there and back, there and back, there and back. This was the most thickly populated part of Taraplan with the major industries, the coal mines, the natural gas wells, the iron and the copper.

He picked up a pair of dividers, did some measuring off. As the crow flew it was just over five hundred
drli
from the temple to Plirrit. He consulted the conversion scale; that was three hundred kilometers almost exactly. The cave was a mere six
drli
from the railway track, the line between Korong and the copper mining town of Blit in the mountains to the north west. He assumed that his army—
his army?—
would have to be assembled in or near the temple and then would have to be transported to Plirrit. It was too far to walk, and a convoy of rail cars would be conspicuous. And, talking of rail cars . . .

He asked, “Mr. Lennay, has there been any sort of search for us? Has anybody found the rail cars that we abandoned?”

Lennay replied, “Very little time has passed since your rescue, Captain Grimes, and we have never, as a people, been in such a hurry as you Earthmen.” He shrugged. “Often I have deplored this, but there are times, such as now, when this leisurely attitude is to the advantage of the True Believer. We have had ample time to ensure that the rail cars cannot be spotted from the air and that the marks of their precipitant passage through the bush have been erased. But there has been considerable activity by the Shaara flying patrols, up and down the railway line. And at least four square
drli
of the city of Korong have been burned, melted, vaporized with the marketplace as the focal point for the destruction.”

“How many killed?” demanded Grimes.

Lennay shrugged again. “Only seventeen—in exact retaliation for the number of Shaara killed. There were none of our people among them.”

“Wasn’t that fortunate?” said Grimes.

“You have a saying,” Lennay told him. “You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

It was Grimes’ turn to shrug. He realized that a sarong is not a suitable garment in which to perform such a gesture. But it did not matter. The god Samz would go clothed or unclothed as he saw fit. He resumed his study of the map, jabbed the symbol for Blit with the points of his dividers.

“Copper mines . . .” he murmured. “Smelters, presumably.”

“Yes, Captain Grimes.”

“And the copper from Blit goes where?”

“Some to the householdware factory in Korong. Some to Plirrit, to the arsenal. Some to be transshipped to barges to Plirrit for passage to the coast, to Blargo, for export.”

“Mphm.” Grimes traced the course of the Kahar River with his dividers. At one point it was less than a
drli
from the field in which
Baroom
and
Little Sister
had landed.

He asked, “Do you have people in Blit?”

“Yes.”

“In the railway service? But you must have. Those rail cars. The river steamer and barge crews?”

“Yes.”

“I’m thinking out loud,” said Grimes slowly. “Don’t hesitate to shove your oar in, Mr. Lennay, if I’m getting too far off the beam . . .”

“Please?”

“Interrupt me if what I’m saying doesn’t seem to make sense. What I have in mind is a consignment of copper ingots—it comes in ingots, doesn’t it?—from Blit. It will be a normal shipment, up to a point. Korong will get their full quota. So will Plirrit. But the trucks that should be full of transshipment copper won’t have any copper, although they’ll have a full load. Us.”

“I begin to understand, Captain Grimes. Our forces will proceed down the Kahar River in the copper barges, will be disembarked at the closest point to the Shaara ships and then attack. But what can we do with our puny weapons against what is no less than a flying battleship?”

“Precious little,” admitted Grimes. “But I do not intend to attack
Baroom—
or, if I do, it will be only as a diversion. My intention is to regain possession of my own ship,
Little Sister.
Once I have her I shall be able to do something.”

“Is she armed?” asked Lennay.

“She wasn’t when I was last aboard her, although the Shaara, by now, may have mounted a few cannon. But we must get her . . .” Another thought struck him. “How will you communicate with your people in Blit, in Plirrit? You have no radio, no telephones . . .”

“We have the railway,” said Lennay. “There are pick-up points, known only to our people, along the track for messages.”

“You were remarkably well prepared,” said Grimes.

Lennay made one of his abrupt transitions from Dog-Star-Line-Agent-cum-guerrilla-leader to religious fanatic. He declaimed rather than merely said, ‘This was all foretold in the Book of Deluraixsamz.”

“Mphm,” grunted Grimes dubiously—but he had no intention of looking a gift horse in the mouth.

***

He discussed matters with his fellow deity.

She said, “We have to go through with it. It’s the only chance we have to get the mail to its destination.”

He could hardly believe his ears. Was she serious? He could not be sure. He said, “The
mail?
At this tune, of all times, you’re worried about the mail!”

“Of course,” she said.

“I’m the wrong god,” he told her.

“What do you mean?”

“I should be Mercury, the Heavenly Messenger,” he grumbled.

“As long as you can make out as Ares . . .” She grinned. “You don’t do so badly as Aries.”

He grinned back. “All right, Superintending Postmistress Delur. I’ll get your bloody mail through. Eventually.”

Chapter 21

A GUERRILLA BAND
is not a ship’s crew; inevitably there are too many chiefs and not enough indians. Fortunately there were only two gods and Grimes was one of them. Unfortunately, as far as the worshippers were concerned, he ranked below Tamara/Delur, and she, as the top postal official of her planet, was convinced that she knew at least as much about running an operation as a mere spaceman.

It was an uphill struggle trying to lick the underground into some semblance of an army before the Shaara were too strongly consolidated. Like the majority of Survey Service spaceman officers Grimes had always rather despised marines, but at this period of his life he would have sold his soul for a tough sergeant major. He did have an ex-
tarawon—
a rank equivalent to first lieutenant—from the local army, but he had served in the catering branch and Grimes thought of him as a commissioned cook. He had three
langaras—
corporals—one ex and two still serving. One of these was employed in the arsenal at Plirrit and should have been useful. He was, at first, succeeding in sending a clandestine trickle of small arms and ammunition north west along the railway to the cave temple. His usefulness, however, abruptly ended. Having absented himself from his place of duty without leave he was put in charge of modifying the handgrips of the captured Shaara weapons. As an armorer he was naturally curious about these exotic killing devices. He tried to take apart one of the laser pistols to see how it worked. The resulting flare of energy killed him, destroyed three of the laser pistols and seriously injured his two assistants.

“You should personally have overseen the work, Grimes,” said Tamara.

“I told Lannay to tell him not to tinker,” Grimes said.

“I know from
my
experience,” she stated, “that merely telling people is not good enough.”

He found a carpenter who was able to fabricate wooden butts for the weapons. The trigger assemblies still were not quite right but they could not be fired either by Grimes or the natives without too much manual contortion. The main trouble was the limited life of the laser power cells, the lack of a supply of ammunition for the four machine pistols and the two light machine guns. The drum magazines for the former held two hundred rounds each and for the latter a thousand rounds. An experienced soldier would ration his firing to short, effective squirts; these enthusiastic amateurs would be liable to blow off an entire magazine in one wasteful burst.

There was a large cavern below the complex of caves used for the temple and for accommodation. This made an almost ideal firing range as the sounds of shooting could not be heard on the surface. The lighting—flaring natural gas jets—could have been better but the action, when it came, would be at night. Grimes sacrificed, in practice, one pistol magazine and part of another, leaving him only three of these weapons. He fired one short demonstration burst from a light machine gun, depleting its magazine from a thousand to nine hundred and fifty rounds. The three remaining laser pistols he did not demonstrate; there would be one for him, one for Tamara and one for Lennay who, as Dog Star Line Agent, had been allowed to play with such toys by one of the Dog Star masters who had been hoping to engage in arms dealing as a private venture.

Grimes was fascinated by the local weaponry, especially the heavy machine gun. This had six barrels rotating around a longitudinal axis and a gravity feed magazine. It was operated neither by recoil nor by surplus gases but was manually powered. All that the gunner had to do was point the piece in the right direction and crank a handle. The rate of fire was only about two hundred rounds a minute but the gun was sturdy and reliable. There was no shortage of ammunition—brass cartridges instead of the plastic ones to which he was accustomed, with heavy lead slugs.

There were pistols—primitive revolvers—and single shot rifles. There was a sort of mortar with a limited supply of gas shells. This Grimes could not try out in his sub-terranean shooting gallery because of its high trajectory, but with the projectiles that would be used extreme accuracy would not be necessary. There were rockets that would release a bright flare.

The lack of a common language, thought Grimes, would be the real problem; there was too little time for even a crash coarse in linguistics. Luckily Lennay and his wife were fluent in Galactic English and his chief clerk and three others of his office staff could understand and make themselves understood.

Meanwhile, there were the reports coming in from outside. A Shaara envoy to Kahtrahn, the capital of Desaba, had been mobbed and had escaped only by taking to the air, although not before her drone escort had inflicted heavy casualties on the natives. There had been an exchange of stiff notes between King Darrin of Desaba and President Callaray. Shaara blimps had flown over the archipelago of the Pinnerba Confederation and had been kept under close observation throughout by Pinnerban airships. In a world with no radio, no telephones or telegraphs, such news was old, brought in by the crews of merchant ships. More immediate information was that an unidentified airship, thought to be Desaban, had flown over Plirrit and that Grimes’ own
Little Sister,
aboard which laser weapons had been mounted, had disposed of her with contemptuous ease. There had been neither survivors nor any readily identifiable wreckage.

“If we don’t act soon,” said Grimes to Lennay, “we shall miss the bus.”

“Miss the bus, Captain Grimes? What is a bus . . . Oh, yes. A word rarely used now, but employed often by your Shakespeare. Buss. To kiss. But what has kissing to do with it?”

Grimes sighed. Tamara laughed and asked, “But isn’t kissing what your religion is all about? Kissing, and . . .”

Lennay said stiffly, “Our rituals are symbolic.”

Grimes grunted then said, “I suggest that we move against Plirrit as soon as possible. The men are as well trained as they ever will be. How soon can you arrange for the freight train to pick us up? And the river steamer and barge crews must be put into the picture.”

Lennay told him, “Word will go down the line to Plirrit and up the line to Blit at once. Our supporters among the railwaymen and the rivermen have been standing by awaiting our orders. If all goes well, the freight train will make an unscheduled halt tomorrow morning. Arrival at Plirrit will be after dark tomorrow evening. Late tomorrow night we attack.”

But he was not ready, Grimes thought. He never would be ready. He was not a soldier.

But once he had the controls of
Little Sister
under his fingertips he would be once again in his proper element.

Chapter 22

GRIMES WAS AWAKENED
by Lennay at an indecently early hour the next morning. He gulped tea, made a sketchy toilet, dressed himself in a knee-length black tunic, emblazoned back and front with the copulating deities, and a pair of heavy boots. It was better than the sarong, than nothing at all, but he did not feel at ease in this rig. He belted on one of the modified laser pistols. He followed the High Priest to the chamber where Tamara and Dinnelor were awaiting them. Tamara, too, was clad in a tunic although hers came only to mid thigh and left her smooth shoulders bare. Her belted pistol and the scabbarded sword over her other hip made her look more like a goddess of warfare than of love.

But goddess she was this morning, just as Grimes was a god. The two natives did not join them at their meal but humbly served them, anticipating their every wish, even to cigarillos when they were finished eating.