Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III (12 page)

Then Lennay said, “Lady Delur, your people are waiting.”

She looked at Grimes, who nodded.

She rose, saying, “Then let us go.”

She led the way from the chamber, Grimes following, Lennay bringing up the rear. Dinnelor did not accompany them. They made their way along the tunnel. Ahead of them was a muffled thudding of drums, a subdued shrilling of pipes, a chanting of male voices only.

Delur . . . Delur . . . Delur . . .

There was no mention of Samz. Grimes began to feel miffed.

Delur . . . Delur . . . Delur . . .

The great chamber in which, not so long ago, they had performed their ritual lovemaking was now more parade ground than temple. Grimes was amazed at the martial appearance of those whom he had derided in his mind as the prize awkward squad of the entire Galaxy. In the front rank stood the three men who had been entrusted with the machine pistols, holding the weapons proudly at salute, flanked by the four men, two to each stretcher, with the light machine guns. Behind them was the crew of the heavy machine gun which had been dismantled—the carriage on one stretcher, the barrel assembly on another, magazines and ammunition on two more of the litters. Then there was the mortar, similarly broken down, with its projectiles, and two men each carrying a bundle of sticked rockets. Behind them were the ranks of the riflemen, the flaring gaslight reflected from their fixed bayonets. Unluckily these latter must be left behind; only three freight trucks would be available.

Delur . . . Delur . . . Delur . . .

She looked at him questioningly.

“Get the show on the road,” he told her spitefully.

She said, “You’re the military expert, Grimes.”

He said, “And you’re the chief figurehead.”

She shrugged almost imperceptibly. She asked the Dog Star Line Agent, “Mr. Lennay, will you escort us down to the railway?”

“To hear is to obey, Lady Delur.”

Lennay barked orders in his own language. With himself in the lead, with Grimes and Tamara following, the raiding party made its way from the huge chamber, through the tortuous approach tunnel, to the open air. It was dark still outside. A thin, warm drizzle was falling. It was very quiet but, from a great distance, came the muffled panting and rattling of a steam drawn train. Grimes doubted if any Shaara would be aboard at this hour; they operated, whenever possible, during daylight only. Of course one of the native airships might be overhead, silently drifting, but this was not likely. Unless there were traitors in the underground nobody would know of the location, the existence even, of the cave temple. Nobody would be expecting this attack.

Lennay led the way down the almost completely overgrown path, the light from his dimmed lantern throwing a pool of wan light around his feet. Grimes and Tamara kept close behind him to get the benefit of what little illumination there was. Behind them the men carrying the heavy weaponry were surprisingly sure-footed although their heavy breathing almost drowned out the noise of the approaching train.

They came at last to the faintly gleaming tracks. Lennay took his stance between the parallel lines of wet metal, adjusting his lantern so that the beam was shining uphill. Suddenly the locomotive came into view, its pressurized gas headlight throwing a glaring shaft of yellow radiance through the misty air. Ruddy sparks erupted from its high tunnel.

The thing was obviously slowing. It came to a halt, with a screeching of brakes and a strident hiss of escaping steam, just two meters short of where Lennay was standing. Somebody called out from the driver’s cab. Lennay replied. A man jumped down from the engine, led the way to the first of the tarpaulin covered trucks. He tapped securing bolts with a hammer. A door in the side of the truck crashed down.

Grimes watched, saw the native machine gun lifted aboard, its ammunition, its carriage. The mortar followed it, then the crews of both weapons. The door was lifted up and re-secured. The Shaara light machine guns went into the second truck, the rockets, their crews and the three men with Shaara machine pistols. The third truck, obviously, was reserved for Delur and Samz and their High Priest. Although it was little more than an iron tank of triangular cross section somebody had tried to make it comfortable. There were cushions—only sacking-covered pads of some vegetable fibre but far better than nothing. There was a big stone jug of wine, an almost spherical loaf of bread, a hunk of something unidentifiable in the dim light of Lennay’s lantern but which Grimes later found to be strongly flavored smoked meat.

When they were aboard the railwayman bowed low. “Delur . . .” he murmured. “Samz . . .” The door was lifted back into place by two riflemen who, their escort duties over, would be returning to the cave. The securing bolts were hammered home. Almost immediately the engine chuffed loudly, there was a sudden jerk and the train had resumed its journey.

Chapter 23

IT WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME
that Grimes had travelled by railway. On such Man-colonized planets that favored this mode of transportation he had enjoyed being a passenger in the luxurious tourist trains, fully agreeing with their advertising which invariably claimed that the only way really to see a country is from ground level at a reasonable speed. But this was no superbly appointed tourist coach with skimpily uniformed stewardesses immediately attentive to every want. This was a dirty freight track—damp as well as dirty; the tarpaulin spread over the open top of it was leaking in several places. There were only rudimentary springs and the padding of the cushions was soon compressed by the weight of their bodies to a boardlike hardness.

They rattled on.

Lennay extinguished his lantern but there was now enough grey light seeping under the edges of the tarpaulin and through the worn spots for Grimes to be able to distinguish the faces of his companions. Tamara had adopted a pose of bored indifference. Lennay looked, somehow, rapt and was mumbling something in his own language. A prayer? Or was he calling down curses on the collective head of the management of the Blit to Plirrit Railway? Grimes looked at the wine and the food hungrily but waited for one of the others to make the first move. He was conscious of the fact that there were no toilet facilities in this crude conveyance.

They rattled on.

Abruptly Tamara rose unsteadily to her feet and said, “Turn away, both of you . . .” She went to the far end of the truck, after a short while returned. The smell of urine was sharp in the air. How was it, Grimes wondered, that the writers of the adventure stories that he had enjoyed as a boy, still enjoyed, could always so consistently ignore the biological facts of life? The bladder of the thriller hero was similar to the sixshooter of the protagonist of the antique Western films which, every now and again, enjoyed a revival; one never needed emptying, the other was never empty.

They rattled on.

Tamara actually slept. Lennay went on mumbling his prayers. Grimes went over and over again in his mind his plan of campaign. He would almost certainly have to play by ear, he realized, but he tried to work out courses of action to suit all eventualities. He joined the others in a simple meal of meat and bread and the thin, tart wine. He smoked a cigarillo. He hoped that he would find his pipe and tobacco aboard
Little Sister.

Late in the afternoon the train stopped at Korong. After fifteen minutes of bone rattling shunting it was on its way once more, bound for the riverside wharves at Plirrit. Tamara slept again, Grimes dozed. Lennay lapsed into silence. Darkness fell again but, as the drippings through the tarpaulin had ceased, it must have stopped raining.

Then, quite suddenly, came the final halt.

There were voices outside the truck, the sharp sound of a hammer knocking out the retaining bolts of the side door. It fell down with a metallic crash. There were men outside with lanterns, their red eyes gleaming eerily in the darkness. All of them made the salaaming gesture. Grimes put his hastily drawn pistol back into its holster; these were friends. Or worshippers. He heard them murmur, “Delur . . . Samz . . .”

Tamara got to her feet. Her long, pale legs, her smooth shoulders were luminescent in the near darkness. She raised her arms in blessing.

Grimes said to Lennay, “Is all in order?”

“Yes, Lord Samz. The steamer and the barges are waiting.”

“Then the sooner we get moving the better.”

He jumped down to the ground beside the railway tracks, staggered then recovered. He looked past the welcoming committee to what must be the wharf. He could make out a high funnel from which smoke was pouring and an occasional flurry of sparks, the humped profile of paddle boxes. Turning back to the train he saw that the arms were being unloaded and that the heavy machine gun crew already had their cumbersome weapon almost reassembled. The two Shaara guns and the mortar were being carried down to the edge of the wharf to a position somewhat abaft the steamer. He followed them, watched as a small crane with a hand winch lifted them, swung them out and lowered them on to a flat barge that was little more than a floating oblong box. The heavy gun was wheeled up on its carriage, sent to join the light weapons on top of the hatch boards.

“It is well, Lord Samz,” said Lennay.

“I hope so,” said Grimes.

He jumped down to the deck, stood there to catch Tamara as she followed him. Lennay used a ladder set between the wharf piles then made a brief check of personnel and equipment. He reported to Grimes that everybody and everything were aboard the barge, then shouted something to one of the men on the shore. There was more shouting back and forth, a brief toot from the whistle of the little steamer. Grimes, standing forward in the barge, saw that this vessel had let go her moorings, that the paddles were starting to turn. The bight of the towline lifted from the water but before it came taut the barge’s lines were slipped. The wharf pilings began to slide slowly astern as the gap between the rivercraft and the bank widened. The steady
thunk, thunk, thunk
of the paddlewheels became faster and faster; spray pattered down on the foredeck of the barge.

To port now was the city, poorly lit by the gas street-lamps, with only the occasional window showing a gleam of light. There were no signs of movement, no noise. Presumably patrols would be aboard but the passage of a regular copper shipment downriver would not excite their attention. Then, ahead and to starboard, there was a flashing of bright lights, the beat of mighty engines. Grimes cursed. It was obvious to him that
Baroom
was about to lift, was already lifting. The Queen-Captain was taking her ship to elsewhere on this continent, or on this planet. And with her would go
Little Sister—
and without a ship, even only a very small ship, the anti-Shaara forces would be able to do no more than fight a long delaying action with almost certain defeat at the end of it.

But was
Little Sister
accompanying the Shaara ship?
Grimes could not hear the distinctive note of her inertial drive. He began to hope again.

“Captain Grimes, we are too late,” said Lennay heavily. And was that relief or disappointment in his voice? Either way Grimes had been demoted; he was no longer the Lord Samz.

“What do we do now, Grimes?” asked Tamara.

He said, “We come in to the bank for a landing as has already been arranged. We stage a diversion.” Then to Lennay, “Pass the orders, please.”

“But, Captain Grimes, we are too late!” Lennay pointed upwards to
Baroom,
lifting fast and with her lateral thrust driving her northwards. Her shape was picked out by only a few sparse lights and she looked as insubstantial as one of her own blimps or one of the native airships.

But she was the only spaceship aloft, of that Grimes was certain. He said,
“Baroom’s
away to raise hell some other place, but it stands to reason that the Rogue Queen will leave some sort of force here. A princess or two, a squad of drones, a few workers—and a ship.
Little Sister.
Things are much better than I thought they’d be.”

“The eternal optimist,” commented Tamara tartly.

“Too right,” agreed Grimes cheerfully. His doubts, his misgivings were fast evaporating. He stared ahead. According to the chart that he had studied there should be a tall, prominent tree on the bank, just inshore from a spit extending into the river. The steamer, of course, would steer well clear of this hazard but the barge, by application of full starboard rudder, would sheer on to it at speed, at the same time slipping the towline. The paddle-boat would continue her noisy passage downstream with no cessation of the beat of her engines and any Shaara listeners would suspect nothing amiss.

He could see the tree now, in silhouette against a faint glow from inland.

“Starboard rudder,” he ordered quietly. Lennay relayed the order.

The towline was now leading broad out on the port bow of the barge, the tree was almost ahead. “Let go!”

Again Lennay passed on the order. The riverman standing by the bitts cast off a couple of turns, then two more. The rope hissed around the posts, running out fast. Grimes had to step back to avoid being hit by the end as it whipped free, and then the barge was on her own, still making way through the water, still answering her helm—not that it mattered now; the current would carry her on to the spit.

She grounded gently. Her stern swung inshore so that she fell alongside the spit as to a jetty, held there by the stream. It could hardly have been better.

Grimes said to Lennay, “Just stay put, all of you. I’m going to have a look-see.”

He stepped up on to the low gunwale, looked down. There was only a narrow ribbon of black water between the side of the barge and the pale sand. He jumped, landing on dry ground. He walked slowly inland, the sand crunching under his boots. He clambered up the low bank, through the scrub. He reached the top.

He looked across the cultivated fields with their neat rows of low bushes, slightly less dark than the soil from which they grew, to the Shaara camp. There was a low dome, probably a large inflatable shelter, quite brightly illuminated from within, looking like a half moon come down from the sky and sitting on the ground. But his main attention was focused on the slim, golden torpedo shape dimly gleaming a little to the right of the luminescent hemisphere.