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.