Chapter 11
UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES of the three Shaara they divested themselves of their finery—and much good had it done them!—climbed into their longjohns and then their spacesuits. The one that Tamara put on had belonged to the Baroness. She had told Grimes, “You may as well keep it. You may be carrying a passenger some time. And, all too probably, you’ll be getting into a situation where life-saving equipment is essential . . .”
“You will leave the ship first, Captain,” said the princess. “And then your passenger. You will assist her to make the jump.”
“Did you ever try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs?” asked Grimes. It was obvious that no passenger could make a space jump without guidance.
“I do not understand,” said the princess. “But do not delay any further. Go. I shall be quite capable of operating your simple airlock controls.”
Grimes sealed his helmet. The suit radio was working; he could hear Tamara’s ragged breathing. He checked the seals of her spacesuit then made his way to the airlock. The inner door closed behind him. He watched the needle of the pressure gauge on the bulkhead drop to zero. The outer door opened. He clambered from the chamber into the emptiness, being careful to keep a grip on one of the recessed handholds. Little Sister was still accelerating and if he cast adrift too soon he would follow a weird trajectory relative to her and might well expend all the reaction mass in his suit propulsion unit trying to get back.
The outer door closed.
While he was waiting for it to open again he looked across to the Shaara ship, a huge, menacing hulk against the starry blackness. All her lights were on, making it easy to see her. That inside the open airlock door was green, slowly flashing.
Tamara emerged from Little Sister.
She whispered, and even the distortion of the helmet phones could not hide the shakiness of her voice, “I’ve never done this before.”
Grimes said, “And I don’t make a habit of it.”
And another voice—the princess aboard the pinnace? The Queen-Captain aboard Baroom?—ordered, “Do not delay. Make the jump.”
“Hang on to me,” said Grimes. “You’ll have to let go of the hand-holds first.”
And that latter went for him too. He realized that Little Sister was falling up away from him. He got his left arm around her and both her arms went about his body. He could see her face through the transparency of her helmet. She was very pale, and blood was still oozing from the cuts on her cheek. He was lucky, he thought. Looking over her space-suited shoulder he could see that he was lined up for the flashing green light. With his left hand he thumbed the button of the propulsion unit at his waist. He felt the not-quite-violent nudge at the small of his back as the miniature rocket fired. Had neither ship been accelerating he would have cut the drive at once, completing the journey under free fall. But in these circumstances he was obliged to maintain his own personal acceleration.
Deceleration would be the problem, although not an insuperable one.
He said, “Hang on to me.”
She muttered, “I somehow can’t see myself letting go . . .”
He took his right arm from about her shoulders. The grip of her arms about him tightened at once. With his right hand he found the propulsion unit control at her left side and was thankful that the Baroness had spared no expense in the equipping of her yacht; the space-suit gloves were of the very latest—and most costly—pattern, with fingertip sensors. Had it not been so he might never have found the button in time.
He made a slight adjustment of trajectory so that he was now aiming for a lighted port ahead of the airlock door. The Shaara ship was big now, very big, an artificial planetoid hanging in the void.
Now!
He released the pressure on his own firing button and, simultaneously, pressed the one on Tamara’s suit. He was expecting the sudden pressure of deceleration; she was not. He heard the air whoosh explosively from her lungs.
And they were in the green-lit chamber, still moving fast but not dangerously so. By the time they made contact with the inner door they had slowed almost to a halt.
They thudded against the metal surface. He cut the drive of Tamara’s suit. They dropped the few centimeters to the deck.
He said, “You can let go now.”
She let go.
He watched the outer door shut. On a dial on the bulkhead a little yellow light began to move slowly clockwise. It stopped, changed to red. The chamber was repressurized.
The inner door opened. Beyond it a princess was standing in a dimly, ruddily illuminated alleyway, towering above a half dozen drones. These latter swarmed over Grimes and the woman, hustling them out of the airlock. Two shrouded figures brushed past them, looking and moving like competitors in a sack race with large bags over their heads as well as covering the lower parts of their bodies. The door closed after them.
Workers, thought Grimes. Two technicians to make up the prize crew . . .
The princess lifted the claws at the ends of her two forearms up to her head, made a twisting motion. Grimes understood the gesture, unsealed his helmet.
The Shaara officer said, “You will follow me to the queen.”
The air inside the Shaara ship was warm, too warm, and laden with smells that were not quite unpleasant. There was a cloying sweetness intermixed with frequent hints of acidity. There was the acridity of hot machinery and the subdued hammering of the inertial drive, the thin, high whine of the Mannschenn Drive that the Shaara manufactured under license for use in their vessels, having found it more reliable than their own dimension warping device—which Grimes had heard described by a Terran engineer as ‘a pigknot of pendulums’. In a human ship the sounds of voices, laughter, music would have drifted through the alleyway, the combination of tunnel and spiral staircase. Here there was only a subdued humming, vaguely ominous. Luckily there were no obstructions underfoot; the lighting was too dim for human eyes.
Up they climbed, up, up, and round and round, the princess in the lead, the armed drones surrounding Grimes and Tamara. Up, up . . . And then they came into a huge, hemispherical chamber, more a conservatory than the captain’s quarters aboard a spaceship. Moss covered was the deck and every pillar was entwined with broad-leaved vines, the darkness of the foliage relieved by huge, fleshy flowers. Grimes wondered briefly what it would have looked like in normal (to him) lighting; as it was the leaves were almost black and the blossoms glowed a sickly pink.
In the middle of this compartment was the queen-captain. Flabby, obese, she reclined in a sort of hammock slung between four pillars, sprawling among huge cushions. Two princesses stood by her, and a quartet of workers, as tall as their officers but with much broader bodies, fanned her with their wings.
“Captain Grimes,” said the queen.
Grimes wondered whether or not to salute, decided to do so. Perhaps the capture of his passenger and himself was not piracy but only the result of some sort of misunderstanding.
Perhaps.
Nonetheless, he brought his hand up to his helmet.
“Captain Grimes; Superintending Postmistress Haverstock. You understand, Captain, and Superintending Postmistress, that your lives are forfeit. Always it has been the way with our people, long before we flew into Space, that any organism so hapless as to be in the path of our swarms has died.”
“Royal Highness,” said Grimes stiffly, “we were not in the path of your swarm. Your ship would never have passed close to mine if you had not made a deliberate alteration of trajectory.”
“I should not have made an alteration of trajectory if you had not attracted attention to yourself,” said the flat, mechanical voice.
“Even so,” said Grimes, “I demand that Madam Haverstock and I be returned to our ship and allowed to proceed on our voyage.”
“You demand, Captain? Only those with sting may demand.”
“The Survey Service has sting.”
“From what I have heard, Captain Grimes, I do not think that the Survey Service, even if it knew of your predicament, would lift a claw to save you. But you will not be killed at once. I may find uses for you and your companion. Go.”
Telepathic orders were given and the swarming drones hustled the two humans from the Presence.