Ride the Star Winds (89 page)

Grimes, accompanied by Captain Rowse, the Port Erikson harbormaster, went aboard
Pamir
. He was received by Ralph Listowel, the lightjammer’s master.

“Glad to have you aboard, sir,” said Listowel.

“Glad to be aboard, Commander.”

Listowel scowled. “That’s right, sir. Rub it in. I suppose you’ll be taking over my quarters.”

Grimes grinned. “No. You’re to be my sailing master—and, as far as I’m concerned, this is still your ship and you’re still the master of her. You’ve quite palatial passenger accommodations. That’ll do me.”

Listowel’s scowl faded from his lean, dark face. “Thank you, sir. But what is going on?”

“Your ship has been requisitioned—and you and your officers have been called up for active duty in the Rim Worlds Navy.”

“I know that. But what
is
going on?”

“I was hoping that you’d be able to tell me.”

Listowel waved his visitors to seats, took a chair himself. He said, “Let’s face it, Commodore. To date the lightjammers have been lucky, fantastically lucky. Even in
Flying Cloud
, where we had to make up the rules as we went along, we all came through in one piece. But sooner or later luck runs out.”

“You think that’s what happened to
Sea Witch
and
Lord Of The Isles
?”

“There are so many things that could happen. When we’re running under sail, building up to a velocity just short of light, we could hit something—”

“And the flare of the explosion would be seen from Llanith.”

“All right, all right. Something could go wrong with the magnetic suspension of the sphere of anti-iron—”

“And with matter and anti-matter canceling each other out the burst of released energy would be even more spectacular.”

“Yes, Commodore. But what if it happened at translight speed? We know very little of conditions outside the ship at that velocity. Would the explosion be witnessed in this Universe—or in the next universe but three?”

“Mphm. You have something there, Listowel. Even so, we’ve two ships missing, one after the other. There’s an old saying: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

“There hasn’t been a third time,”
said Listowel.

“Yet,” pointed out Grimes. “But there’s still the apparent jamming of
Lord Of The Isles’
last call to be considered.”

Back in Rowse’s office Grimes asked for the manifests of the cargoes carried by the two missing ships. It was possible that there had been some item of freight which, at translight speeds and with the reversal of atomic charges, had become chemically or physically unstable with fatal consequences. This was an idea worth considering. But no radioactives had been listed. No industrial chemicals, dangerous or otherwise, had been listed. Mainly the freight carried in each ship had consisted of luxury goods—preserved foodstuffs, liquor, fine textiles and the like. A few shipments of machine tools and some drugs had also been part of the cargoes.

One drug in particular—Antigeriatridine—caught Grimes’s attention. The substance was not manufactured on any of the Rim Worlds. It came from Marina, a planet in the Pleiades Sector. It was an extract from the glands of an indigenous sea slug and could not be synthesized. It was fantastically expensive and, on most worlds, was controlled by the state, rationed out only to deserving citizens. It was Marina’s main source of income, exported to any planet that could afford to pay for it. In recent years the Llanithi Consortium had been placed on Marina’s list of customers. Transshipment for Llanith was made from Lorn.

Grimes’s memory carried him back to the long-ago days when he had been a newly commissioned ensign in the Federation Survey Service. He had played a part in bringing the pirates who had captured the merchant vessel
Epsilon Sextans
to book.
Epsilon Sextans
had been carrying Antigeriatridine, which had made her a worthwhile prey.

Perhaps Admiral Kravitz’s insistence that
Pamir
be armed made sense.

But piracy?

It was not the continued existence of the crime itself that Grimes found hard to comprehend, but rather the actual mechanics of it. Piracy was not unknown along the spaceways, but both predators and victims had always been conventional starships, with inertial drive and Mannschenn Drive and auxiliary rocket power for use in emergencies. Under inertial drive only, maintaining a comfortable 1G acceleration, a ship could build up almost to the speed of light if she took long enough about it. But, as soon as possible, she usually ran under Mannschenn Drive which, in effect, gave her FTL velocity. In these conditions she was untouchable unless the vessel attacking her succeeded in synchronizing her own rate of temporal precession. The captains of warships—and of such vessels as have from time to time sailed on the plundering account—were reasonably competent in the practice of this art.

But it would be impossible for a ship proceeding under inertial drive only to match velocities with a lightjammer under sail. And a ship running under Mannschenn Drive would have to return to the normal Space-Time continuum before her weapons could be brought to bear on a lightjammer—and, once again, the matching of velocities would be impossible.

Hijacking was a form of piracy, of course.

Grimes turned from the missing ships’ cargo manifests to their passenger lists. The names meant nothing to him, neither those of Rim Worlds citizens nor of Llanithans. No doubt the police could help him in this respect. Perhaps one or more of those passengers had a criminal record. But the hypothesis made little appeal to him. He just could not imagine the officers of either of the vessels submitting meekly—and he could not imagine any passenger being able to handle a lightjammer. Sail spacemanship was an art rather than a science and the only practioners of the art—Grimes told himself—consisted of the handful of Rim Runners’ personnel trained and qualified for lightjammers,

He filled and lit his pipe, looked down at the manifests and passenger lists on the desk. He had a hunch that the manifests meant more than the passenger lists—no more than a hunch, but his hunches were often right. Any ship—even a pirate ship—anywhere in space between Lorn and Llanith and in position to receive the beamed Carlotti transmissions from one planet to the other, would be able to read the routine signals sent immediately after the liftoff of one of the lightjammers. Date and time of departure—passengers carried—a listing of freight aboard. Nothing was encoded. There had never been any need for secrecy until now.

Only the actual mechanics of attack, seizure and boarding puzzled him.

He called Sonya, told her that she had better come to Port Erikson. “You’re the intelligence officer in this family,” he said. “This job calls for intelligence.” Reluctantly she agreed to join him.

The following morning he stood in the Port Erikson control tower, looking out through the wide windows at the bleak landscape.
Pamir
was alongside at her wharf, a great, dull-gleaming torpedo shape on the dark water. The sleekness of her lines was broken only by the pods that housed her airscrews and their engines. Out on Coldharbor Bay a small tug,
Bustler
, was chuffing busily back and forth, functioning as an icebreaker, keeping the harbor clear of any accumulation of ice heavy enough to impede surface maneuvers. Grimes had decided that
Pamir
must keep to her original schedule, which meant that her conversion to an auxiliary cruiser would be a skimpy one.

There would be time for the installation of an extra generator and the fitting of two batteries of laser cannon, but no more.

A familiar voice issued from the traffic controller’s transceiver. “Pinnace
Firefly
to Port Erikson. Do you read me? Over.”

“Loud and clear,
Firefly
. Pass your message. Over.”

Grimes went to stand by the traffic control officer. He heard Sonya say, “My ETA Port Erikson oh-nine-four-five hours, your time. Over.”

So neither she—nor Admiral Kravitz—had wasted any time. And Sonya was doing her own piloting, which was typical of her.

“I have her on the screen, sir,” announced the radar operator.

Grimes went to the window overlooking the Nullarbor Plain, almost featureless under the blanket of snow. It was one of the rare clear days, and on the horizon stood the distant, jagged battlements of the Great Barrens. And was that a tiny, glittering speck in the pale sky? Yes. It expanded rapidly and even in the control tower, through the thick glass of the windows, the irritated snarl of an inertial drive unit operating at maximum capacity was distinctly audible.

“That’s her,” said Captain Rowse.

“That’s her,” agreed Grimes. He shrugged into his heavy cloak, put on his cap and went down to the airstrip to meet Sonya.

“The trouble with you, John,” she said, “is that you’ve read too much of the wrong kind of history. Wooden ships and iron men and all that sort of thing. Pieces of eight. Broadsides of carronades. The Jolly Roger. Oh, there have been space pirates, I admit. But I still get my share of the bumf issued by the Federation Survey Service’s intelligence branch—and I can tell you that today there just aren’t any pirates. Not that sort of pirate, anyway. There’s still the occasional hijacking.”

Grimes’s prominent ears flushed. He indicated with his hand the passenger lists. He said, “I’ve asked the Port Forlorn chief of police if any of these people have criminal records. He assures me that none of them have and that everybody aboard
Lord Of The Isles
and
Sea Witch
was a little, innocent woolly lamb—”

“He’d know, wouldn’t he?” She herself was flushed, her fine features literally glowing under the glossy auburn hair. “And you have all these bright ideas and drag me out here, where all the brass monkeys are singing falsetto, to join you in this comfortless shack to help you think.”

“Not comfortless,” said Grimes. The quarters that he had been given were commodious and comfortable enough, although lacking in character. ACCOMMODATION, MARRIED COUPLE, FOR THE USE OF. . .

“Well, what do you intend doing? Put me in the picture.”

“
Pamir
will sail on time, having loaded the cargo that’s been booked for her. That will include a shipment of Antigeriatridine. The usual routine signals will be made once she has lifted off. And then we wait to see what happens next.”

“We?”

“I suppose you’ll be coming along.”

“I might as well get a free trip to Llanith out of it.”

“All right. You. Me. Ralph Listowel and his officers. The gunnery officer from the Navy who’ll be looking after the laser batteries. The two dozen or so marines who’ll be traveling as passengers.”

“Anybody would think that you were contemplating embarking on a career of piracy yourself.”

Grimes laughed. “Why not? After all, one of my ancestors sailed on the account.”

“And what happened to him?”

“He was eventually hanged from his own yardarm.”

She joined him in his laughter. “Then you’d better be careful. After all, the lightjammers are the only ships that run to masts and yards!”

II

Pamir
was ready for space. The extra generator had been installed, as had been the batteries of laser cannon. Stores for the voyage and the cargo had been loaded. The passengers were embarked. Grimes and Sonya, together with Major Trent, the marine officer, and Lieutenant Fowler, the gunnery officer, sat with Listowel and his wife, Sandra, in the master’s day cabin.

Listowel sipped his coffee rather glumly. He asked Grimes stiffly, “Have I your permission to cast off, sir, at the arranged time?”

“Of course, Listowel. You’re the master still. The rest of us are just along for the ride.”

“It’s a ride I’m looking forward to,” put in Fowler enthusiastically. He was a young giant with short-cropped yellow hair, the perpetual schoolboy so common in all the armed services. “It’ll give me some time in sail and I’ll be all set for our own ships of the line when they come out.”

“It’s not a free ride we’re here for,” commented the major sourly,

“More coffee anybody?” asked Sandra cheerfully.

“No thanks,” replied Listowel, looking at his watch. “It’s time we got the show on the road.”

“Can I come up to control, sir?” asked Fowler.

“Of course, Lieutenant. You’re welcome on the bridge. And so are you, Major.”

Grimes and Sonya went along with the others. They had witnessed
Pamir
’s departure from the control position before, but it was so unlike the liftoff of a conventional spaceship as to remain fascinating. This time there was no need to use the tug, no need for the transverse thrust of the airscrews. The wind, what little there was of it, was northerly, blowing the ship bodily off from the wharf, the brash ice piling up along her lee side but not impeding her. When she was well out into the bay water, ballast was dumped and—the sphere of anti-matter giving her positive buoyancy—she went up like a balloon or a rocket—silently. Within seconds she was driving through the low cloud ceiling and then had broken through into the clear upper air: Fast she rose—and faster—into blackness, while below her Lorn became an opalescent globe hanging in nothingness.

The directional gyroscopes rumbled and whined, rumbled again and then lapsed into silence. She was steadied on course now, with Lorn to one side and the Lorn sun astern. The tiny cluster of stars—the anti-matter suns around which revolved the planets of the Llanithi Consortium—was directly ahead.

The control room guests crowded to the side ports of the bridge, looking aft to watch as Listowel made sail. The stubs of the telescopic masts extended themselves rapidly, sprouting yards as they elongated. The yards and the great sails, spreading to catch the star wind, the royals, the topgallants, the upper topsails and the lower topsails, the main courses . . . The polarized glass of the viewports dimmed the glare of the sun and black against it stood the driving surfaces, filling to the photon gale. The inertialess ship was already scudding before it and the Doppler Log was clicking and flashing like a clock gone mad.

“Roll and go,” murmured Listowel.