Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III Read online

  GALACTIC

  COURIER

  A. Bertram Chandler

  Baen Books by

  A. Bertram Chandler

  To the Galactic Rim (omnibus)

  First Command (omnibus)

  Galactic Courier (omnibus)

  Ride the Star Winds (omnibus, forthcoming)

  GALACTIC COURIER

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Star Courier, copyright © 1977 by A. Bertram Chandler.

  To Keep the Ship, copyright © 1978 by A. Bertram Chandler.

  Matilda's Stepchildren, copyright © 1979 by A. Bertram Chandler.

  Star Loot, copyright © 1980 by A. Bertram Chandler.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-3763-2

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First Baen paperback printing, December 2011

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chandler, A. Bertram (Arthur Bertram), 1912-1984.

  Galactic courier / A. Bertram Chandler.

  p. cm.

  "A Baen Books original" --T.p. verso.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3763-2 (trade pbk.)

  1. Science fiction, English. I. Title.

  PR6053.H325G35 2011

  823'.914--dc23

  2011035402

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  STAR COURIER

  Prologue

  THE RIM WORLDS CONFEDERACY would not be what it is today were it not for Rim Runners, the merchant fleet of our lonely and isolated planets. It is true that the first landings on the worlds to the galactic east, as well as the discovery of the anti-matter systems to the galactic west, were made by Faraway Quest, the Rim Worlds survey ship, an auxiliary cruiser of the Rim Worlds Navy. But Quest was never during her long and honourable career under the command of a regular naval officer. Her captain and crew—with the exception of the Marines whom she sometimes carried—were invariably reservists.

  The most famous of her captains was John Grimes who, in addition to holding the rank of commodore in the Rim Worlds Naval Reserve, was chief astronautical superintendent of Rim Runners. Grimes was a typical rim runner of his period inasmuch as he was not born a Rim Worlder and was of Terran origin. He came out to the Rim when, it was said, a valid certificate of astronautical competency counted for far more than any past record, no matter how black. In those days the Rim Runners’ fleet was captained and officered by refugees from shipping lines from all over the galaxy—the Interstellar Transport Commission, Waverley Royal Mail, Cluster Lines, Trans-Galactic Clippers, the Dog Star Line . . . And when spacemen resign or are dismissed from the service of companies of such high standing only an employer desperate for qualified personnel would be anxious to engage them.

  Grimes differed in one respect from his contemporaries. He was not initially a merchant spaceman. He had resigned his commission in the Survey Service of the Interstellar Federation rather than face a court martial. Nonetheless he, like all the others, had come out to the Rim under a cloud.

  It is difficult to paint a detailed picture of the commodore’s childhood as many records were destroyed during the Central Australian Subsidence of 375 AG. It is known, however, that he was born in the city of Alice Springs on Primus 28, 259. His father, George Whitley Grimes, was a moderately successful author of historical romances. His mother—who, as was the custom of the time, had elected to retain her own family name—was Matilda Hornblower, a domestic solar heating engineer.

  So far as can be ascertained no ancestral Grimes, on either his father’s or his mother’s side, was ever an astronaut. There are, however, seamen clambering in the branches of his family tree. One Roger Grimes, a minor pirate of the Seventeenth Century (old Terran reckoning) achieved the dubious distinction of being hanged from his own yardarm when Admiral Blake mounted his successful campaign against the corsairs who, at that time, infested the Mediterranean Sea.

  Another Grimes, in the Twentieth Century, commanded mechanically driven surface ships trading up and down the Australian coast and across the Tasman Sea.

  Neither seafaring Grimes, however, achieved the fame of that illustrious ancestor on the maternal side, Admiral Lord Hornblower.

  In an earlier age young Grimes might well have decided to go to sea—but on Earth, at least, there was little or no romance remaining in that once glamorous profession. Had he been born on a world such as Atlantia he quite probably would have gone to sea. On that planet the mariners still maintain that men, not computers, should command, navigate and handle ocean-going ships.

  So, as his ancestors would probably have done had they lived in his era, he wanted to become a spaceman. His own preference would have been the merchant service but his mother, conscious of her own family annals insisted that he try to obtain a scholarship to the Survey Service Academy in Antarctica.

  The once proud Royal Navy was no more than history but the Federation’s Survey Service had carried its traditions into Deep Space.

  Chapter 1

  GRIMES CAME TO TIRALBIN.

  Little Sister, obedient to the slightest touch on her controls, dropped through the dark, soggy clouds of the great rain depression to Port Muldoon, finally touching down almost at the exact center of the triangle formed by the vividly scarlet beacon lights.

  Aerospace Control commented, “A nice landing, Captain.”

  Grimes grunted. It should have been a nice landing, he thought. He was used to handling ships, big ships, and setting them down gently on their vaned tails; the careful belly flop that he had just achieved would not have been beyond the competence of a first trip cadet. Little Sister, as he had decided to call her, wasn’t a real ship. She was only a pinnace. A deep space-going pinnace with all the necessary equipment and instrumentation, and everything of very high quality, but a pinnace nonetheless.

  “Is that some sort of bronze alloy you’re built of, Captain?” asked Aerospace Control.

  “No,” replied Grimes. “Gold.”

  “Gold?” came the incredulous query from the transceiver. “You must be a millionaire!”

  “I’m not,” replied Grimes glumly.

  “But you said, when you made your first contact, that you’re Owner-Master . . .”

  “I did. I am. But the previous owner of this dreamboat wasn’t a millionaire either . . .”

  “No?”

  “No. She was—and still is—a trillionaire.”

  “It figures,” said Aerospace Control enviously. “It figures.” Then, in a businesslike voice, “Please have your papers ready. Port Health and Customs are on their way out to you.”

  ***

  Grimes stared out through the viewports to the low—apart from the control tower—spaceport administration buildings, gleaming palely and bleakly through the persistent downpour. There was nothing else to look at. There were no other ships in port and whatever scenery might be in the vicinity was blotted out by the heavy rain. A wheeled vehicle nosed out from a port in an otherwise blank wall, sped out to the pinnace in a cloud of self-generated spray.

  Grimes got ready to receive the boarding officers. His papers—even to the gift deed m
aking him owner of Little Sister—were in order but he was well aware that alcohol is the universe’s finest lubricant for the machinery of official business. Luckily the Baroness had been generous; the pinnace’s stores were even better stocked with luxuries than with necessities. Whether or not they continued to be so would depend to a great extent upon his business acumen.

  ***

  The Chief of Customs—a fat, bald man bulging out of his gaudy uniform—was thirsty. So was the Port Health Officer, who would have passed for an ill-nourished mortician if members of that profession were in the habit of wearing enough gold braid for a Galactic Admiral. Both of them told Grimes, more than once, that they never got real Scotch on Tiralbin. After he opened the second bottle Grimes decided that real Scotch would soon be once again as scarce on this planet as it ever had been.

  The officials were, naturally, curious.

  “A gold pinnace . . .” murmured the Customs man. “Solid gold . . .”

  “Modified,” said Grimes. “A most excellent structural material.”

  “Most excellent indeed. I’m surprised, Captain, that you didn’t give her a more fitting name. Golden Girl. Golden Lady. Golden Princess. Golden anything . . .”

  “Sentiment,” said Grimes. “The mother ship, The Far Traveller, had a pilot-computer. An intelligent one. Bossy. We called it—sorry, her—Big Sister. So . . .”

  “And you were master of this Far Traveller,” went on the Customs officer. “Owned by Michelle, Baroness d’Estang, of El Dorado . . . That must be a world! Better than this dismal dump . . .”

  “Better,” said Grimes, “if you happen to be a billionaire. But not for the likes of us.”

  “You didn’t do too badly, Captain,” said the doctor. “This Baroness must have thought quite highly of you to give you a present like this pinnace.”

  “In lieu of back pay and separation pay,” Grimes told him.

  “And so you brought the pinnace here to sell her,” said the Chief of Customs. “Her value as scrap would be quite enormous. Remarkable how gold has remained the precious metal for millenia. So I’m afraid that you’ll have to make out a fresh set of papers. She’s classed as an import, not as a visiting spacecraft to be entered inwards.” He began to look really happy. “Her value will have to be assessed, of course. And then there’ll be the duty to pay.”

  “I didn’t bring her here to sell her,” said Grimes. “I want, if I can, to earn a living with her.”

  The two officials looked around the tiny cabin. Their eyebrows rose. Then the Port Health Officer said, “I’m no spaceman, although I did do a passage-working trip in Cluster Lines, years ago, just after I qualified. But I know how spacemen do earn their livings. They carry cargo. They carry passengers. And I just don’t see how you could carry either in this flying sardine—ha! ha! goldfish!—can . . .”

  “There are mails,” said Grimes.

  “What’s sex got to do with it?” asked the Customs Officer. “Oh. Mails, not males. Letters. Parcels. It’ll have to be bloody small parcels, though, and precious few of them.”

  He drained his glass and held it out for a refill.

  Chapter 2

  GRIMES’ DECISION to make Tiralbin his base for operations had been influenced by his memory of an officer whom he had known while he was in the Survey Service. This gentleman—a Tiralbinian by birth and upbringing—had complained continuously about the infrequency of mail from home and the long, long time that it took to reach him. “It’s that damn Interstellar Transport Commission!” he would say. “It has the contract with our local government for the carriage of mails, but does it lug them a mere five light years to Panzania, the mail exchange for that sector of the galaxy? Like hell it does. Not it. Those bloody Epsilon Class rustbuckets drop into Port Muldoon when they feel like it, which isn’t often. And then they’re never going anywhere near Panzania . . .” Grimes recalled especially a parcel that his colleague had torn open with great indignation. According to the postmark it had taken just over a year to reach Lindisfarne Base. It contained a not readily identifiable mass that looked as though it would have been of interest only to a geologist. It was, in fact, a birthday cake that had been baked by the disgruntled lieutenant’s fiancée. (Grimes had wondered briefly if that cake ever had been any good . . .)

  So here he was on Tiralbin, John Grimes, ex-Commander, Federation Survey Service, Owner/Master of a little ship hardly bigger than a lifeboat but one capable of taking him, in fair comfort, anywhere in the galaxy. And here he was, in the company of the Chief of Customs, the Port Health Officer and the Port Captain (who had joined the party as soon as pratique had been granted and before the expensive Scotch had run out), sitting at a table in the Gentlepersons’ Club in Muldoon. Tiralbin, he was learning, was a planet on which class distinctions were maintained. Only those who could claim descent from the passengers of the First Ship could become members of a club such as the Gentlepersons’. Any guests, such as himself, must be vouched for by at least two hosts. As the trio of port officials were all First Shippers, Grimes was admitted after signing his name in four books and on six forms.

  The club was dull. The decor was archaic. Grimes, on Earth, had seen quite a few examples of mock Tudor. This was mock mock Tudor. There was music, of the canned variety, orchestral melodies that were as trite as they were sedate. There were no dancing girls. Some of the female gentlepersons drinking at the bar, seated around the tables, could have been attractive enough had they not been so dowdily dressed. The men, even those not in uniform, affected a flamboyance of attire; the women, almost without exception, wore neck-high, ankle-length grey. As for Grimes himself, he was a sparrow among peacocks. The only dress uniform he had aboard the pinnace was the gaudy purple livery that the Baroness had required him to wear aboard The Far Traveller and his only civilian suit—into which he had changed from his shipboard shorts-and-shirt working gear—was as drab as the ladies’ dresses.

  There were a few, a very few, exceptions to the feminine drabness. One of these was drinking at the bar, not far from Grimes’ table. She was a tall woman, made taller yet by the lustrous black hair elaborately coiled on top of her head. She was strong featured, her nose too large and chin too firm for mere prettiness. Her wide mouth was a scarlet slash across her pale face. Her eyes were a startling green. She was wearing a black, high-collared shirt, gold-trimmed, black, sharply creased trousers tucked into glossy, black, calf-high boots.

  “And who is that?” asked Grimes in a low voice. “The general of your women’s army?”

  The Chief Customs Officer laughed. “Not quite, although it is a uniform she’s wearing, and her rank is roughly equivalent to that of general.” He raised his voice. “Tamara! Why don’t you join us?”

  The tall woman came across from the bar, set her glass down on the table, lowered her generously proportioned body into the chair that the Port Captain found for her. She looked at Grimes and smiled slightly.

  “So you’re the famous John Grimes,” she said. “I’ve heard about you. My sister is engaged to an officer in the Federation Survey Service.”

  “The famous cake baker,” said Grimes.

  She laughed. “So you know about that silly business. I got blamed, of course.”

  “But how?” asked Grimes.

  “Tamara,” said the Customs Officer, “is our Superintending Postmistress.”

  “In person,” said that lady. She continued to address Grimes. “And you, Captain, held the rank of Commander in the FSS. You were captain of Discovery at the time of the mutiny. You were left on the newly discovered—or rediscovered—Lost Colony of Botany Bay when the mutineers left for parts unknown in your ship, wrecking the destroyer Vega in the process. You resigned your FSS commission rather than face a court martial, but Commander Delamere, captain of Vega, had other ideas. He tried to arrest you, but you were rescued by the Baroness d’Estang, of El Dorado, who just happened to have blown in in her spaceyacht, The Far Traveller. And now—with no Baroness, no spaceyacht�
�you bob up on Tiralbin in command of a glorified lifeboat.” She laughed. “Very glorified. The thing’s built of solid gold, they tell me.” She looked hard at Grimes. “Quite a story, Captain. Would you mind filling in the gaps?”

  “The Baroness and I split brass rags,” Grimes told her. “She gave me Little Sister—the pinnace—in lieu of back pay and separation pay.”

  “A literally golden handshake,” she said. “And now what do you intend doing?”

  Grimes said, “I was thinking of starting a courier service.”

  “You were, were you? Or you are, are you? You’ve come to the right shop. In my official capacity I know just how lousy the mails are out of and into this world. Unfortunately we have no ships of our own and must rely upon the service, such as it is, provided by the Commission.”

  “I’m surprised that you don’t have ships,” said Grimes.

  “We did, once,” the Port Captain told him. “Three, very second hand Epsilon Class tramps. Tiralbinian King, Tiralbinian Queen, Tiralbinian Prince. The King’s inertial drive packed up when she was coming in to a landing at Port Chaka, on Panzania and the auxiliary reaction drive did more harm than good; blew the arse off her. Luckily there were no fatalities, although she was a structural total loss. The Prince? Nobody knows what happened to her—except, perhaps, her crew. It’s assumed that her Mannschenn Drive went on the blink when she was on passage from Tiralbin to Atlantia. As for the Queen—her operating costs were astronomical. Repairs, maintenance and more repairs. We had a chance to sell her to Rim Runners and grabbed it with both hands. And that, Grimes, is the short, sad history of the Tiralbinian Interstellar Transport Commission.”