Chapter 29
HE CAME AWAKE as soon as Lennay touched him.
The native handed him a mug of coffee which Grimes sipped gratefully.
“We are one hundred kilometers from the coastline,” said Lennay. “The Lady Delur asked me to inform you that nothing of interest otherwise had appeared on the screen of the radar.”
“Mphm.” Grimes filled and lit his pipe, padded forward. Tamara smiled up at him from her chair. He smiled back, looked first through the forward viewscreen—not that he could see much; it was almost like peeping through a keyhole—and then into the radar screen. Yes, there was the coastline, distant still but closing steadily. That patch of greater brightness inshore a little must be the port city of Denb; he had made a good landfall, he thought. Or Little Sister, left to her own devices, had made a good landfall.
He grunted again, went aft to the little toilet. When he was finished he put on his familiar shirt and shorts uniform; he felt far happier in this rig than he had felt either in the ceremonial sarong or the slightly less hampering tunic. He was pleased that the Shaara had left most of his clothing aboard the pinnace, although, attracted by the plenitude of gold braid and buttons, they had stolen the finery that he had been obliged to wear when employed by the Baroness.
He relieved Tamara at the controls. She went aft to tidy up, saying that with things liable to start happening at any moment she might as well look her best. She returned with a tray of food, having persuaded the auto-chef to produce hot rolls with butter, a quite savory patÈ and a jug of chilled orange juice. Lennay, sharing the simple but satisfying meal, expressed gratification and amazement but when told that what he was eating was probably processed Shaara excrement abruptly stopped eating. He suggested that it was time that he started the gas turbine and went out through the airlock and down to the car. Grimes could imagine him throwing open a window and vomiting. With typical spaceman’s heartlessness, remembering how he, as a green cadet, had been nauseated when learning of the origin of a meal that he had just enjoyed, he was amused rather than otherwise.
Lennay came back after a long interval, reporting that the airship’s engine was in operation and the airscrew spinning. Grimes thanked him, then closed the airlock doors. From now on the ship was in fighting trim, invulnerable to almost anything save a direct hit by a missile with a nuclear warhead. Yes, thought Grimes, she was invulnerable but an explosion in her near vicinity could and would shake her like a terrier shaking a rat, and could her frail human crew survive such treatment? Possibly, as long as he and Tamara were tightly strapped into their chairs, as long as Lennay was well secured in one of the bunks . . .
He gave the necessary orders, set the example.
They were over Denb now. On their present course they would pass ten kilometers to the west of Kahtrahn. Grimes made an adjustment of course to starboard.
“Target,” reported Tamara. “Bearing green oh-one-oh. Range thirty-five. Closing.”
Grimes looked into the screen. Yes, there was the blip. It could not be Baroom; she would have been picked up at far greater range. There was very little metal, apart from the engine, in the Shaara blimps however. This could be a blimp, or a native airship.
Yes, the range was still closing and the bearing was unchanged. It, whatever it was, was on an interception course. Grimes brought Little Sister round ten degrees to starboard. Through the peephole in the camouflaging fabric he could see something silvery against the blue sky. He picked up the binoculars from their box, stared ahead through the powerful glasses. Yes, it was a blimp all right. It was too fat for one of the native dirigibles. Tiny motes danced around it—the drones swarming out of the car of their aerial transport.
Tamara said, “They’ll get a nasty surprise when you open up with the laser cannon.”
Grimes told her, “They won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I open up now I’ll give the game away and the Rogue Queen will be able to pick us off at long range. No, I’ll just keep on going through whatever those bastards sling at us and hope that there’s enough smoke to cover the rents in the camouflage. With any luck at all they’ll assume that we’re the local version of a kamikaze, but one too ill-armed and flimsy to take seriously . . .” He laughed. “That’s one thing about the Shaara. They’re never ones to use a power hammer to crack a walnut. They’ll use on us only the weaponry that past experience on this world has taught them is ample to swat a gasbag out of the sky. By the time they realize what we really are it will be too late for them to deliver a nuclear punch without doing for themselves as well as us . . .”
“Which they might do,” she said.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said.
“It will be fitting,” called Lennay from his bunk, “if the gods, the prophecy fulfilled, ascend to heaven on a pillar of the fire that has destroyed their enemies . . .”
Grimes sighed. It was all too possible, but, as far as he was concerned, he wanted the gods to ascend to heaven in a golden chariot, Little Sister.
The blimp was closing rapidly, directly ahead. There was a flickering of pale flame at the forward end of the thing’s gondola, a stream of sparks bright even in the bright sunlight. Tracer. Whoever was in command of the Shaara airship wanted to bring the intruder down herself instead of leaving the task to the drones. Faintly the noise of the bullets striking the outer skin of the pinnace rang through the cabin.
I should have thought of having a few gasbags of hydrogen packed in, thought Grimes. Our friends will be wondering when the fireworks display is going to start . . . But I suppose that there must be helium on this world and the inference will be that we’ve sacrificed lift for safety . . .
Grimes stood on.
The blimp stood on.
Stubborn bitch . . . thought Grimes of the Shaara airship’s captain. But she, princess or high-ranking worker, would be expecting the other aircraft to burst into flames at any second and, secure in the knowledge of the non-flammability of her own vessel, would be prepared to skirt closely or even to fly through the flaming wreckage. She was due for a big surprise.
She stood on, her automatic guns still hammering away. Hot metal flattened on the transparency of the pinnace’s forward viewport, fell away. Then her nerve failed. When there was nothing at all visible from Little Sister’s control cab but the huge, clumsy, grey bulk of her she pulled sharply to starboard. Grimes held his course, striking her a glancing blow. The blimp rebounded from the contact like a violently struck beach ball. The pinnace, with her far greater mass, stood on stolidly. Grimes hoped that the camouflage had not been torn from the pinnace’s port side exposing her true nature. He brought her round slowly, careful to maintain the impression that she was only a slow and clumsy airship, adjusted trim so that he had the Shaara blimp in sight. She swam into his limited field of vision. Her envelope was crumpled and she was settling slowly but as far as Grimes could see there were no fragments from his disguise adhering to the wreckage. He turned away from the disabled ship and from the squad of drones flying fast towards him, laser pistols drawn and ready. Probably they would succeed in setting fire to the sonic insulation with which Little Sister was covered; as long as the bright golden plating was not revealed thereby the resulting smoke and flame would be more to his advantage than otherwise.
He returned his attention to the radar screen.
Something big was ahead, was rising rapidly. It could only be Baroom. It could only be the Rogue Queen determined to make an example of the native dirigible that had dared to ram one of her airships.
And what weaponry would she be using?
Laser, probably, thought Grimes—but he was not surprised when he felt the muffled shock of close explosions and heard the faint clangs of shrapnel that had penetrated the disguising envelope and the vegetable fibre lagging. And these must be well ablaze by now although the smoke and flame, blowing astern, were not visible from the control cab. Nonetheless the temperature gauges showed that the outer skin was heating rapidly although the interior of the pinnace was still cool.
The Rogue Queen still had time to launch a nuclear missile, but time was running out for her. If she delayed firing such a weapon much longer she could not use it for fear of destroying her own ship. But, thought Grimes, she might take that risk. So he increased speed, hoping to be able to carry out his intentions before the last of the blazing camouflage was stripped away.
Baroom was in sight visually now. Grimes stared at her through the ragged, widening rent in the tattered fabric of the envelope. He saw the continuous flashes from her turret guns, the scintillating streams of tracer shells. The Shaara gunnery was not at all brilliant; whoever was in fire control was still assuming that the moving target was making only the normal speed of an airship. The Shaara, he remembered, did not use computers to any great extent; an organization of intelligent, social insects is, to a certain degree, an organic computer itself with built-in limitations, including a refusal to admit data known to be impossible, and until Little Sister was stripped of the last of her disguise her speed would fall into that category.
Baroom was close now. Grimes could see the people in the transparent dome of her control room—Shaara and a scattering of humanoids. He aimed for the rounded apex of the huge, conical spaceship and pressed the firing switches of the twin lasers. Reflected light almost blinded him, but it must have been worse, much worse, for the Rogue Queen, her officers and her allies before the automatic screening was actuated. In that instant they would have realized who their enemy was, but now it was too late for them to do anything about it.
Little Sister bored in viciously—but in almost the last instant before impact Grimes applied full stern power. Tough though his ship was he did not wish to subject her to the strain of a collision and, even if she survived the shock relatively unscathed, it was unlikely that her crew would do so.
But she struck, hard enough for her prow to make a deep dent in the shell of the Shaara control room. She struck, and as she did so Grimes cut the reverse thrust and came ahead again on his inertial drive, gently at first and then building up to the full capacity of his engines.
Something gave, but it was not the fantastically strong structure of the pinnace. Grimes fired his lasers through the widening crack in the Shaara warship’s stem. Only those directly in the line of fire would be killed but the others would be panicking—he hoped—and instruments and controls would be destroyed. He . . . pushed.
Baroom fell away from the vertical, slowly at first, then faster and faster.
Suddenly she toppled and had Grimes not applied full stern power Little Sister would have been dragged down with her. She plunged to the ground, driven to destruction by her own mighty engines rather than dragged by the force of gravity.
She struck, and it was only then that Grimes realized that the battle had taken place over the city of Kahtrahn. He watched in horror as tall buildings crumpled under the impact, as other buildings were rocked by the explosion of Baroom’s ammunition, as fires broke out among the ruins.
He turned to the others, said in a shaky voice, “We must go down. We must help . . .”
Lennay said, “What can we do, Captain? We have done enough . . .”
“You can say that again,” Grimes told him. “But we must render assistance.”
“Those people,” said Tamara, “must be hating all aliens, including us, by now. It’s time that we were getting out of here.”
Reluctantly Grimes conceded that she was right.