Just inside the airport’s departure lounge was a desk at which was sitting a bored-looking police lieutenant. Cadmus saluted the officer and announced, “Six Terran tourists from Calmira, sir.”
“And just in time, Sergeant. The ship will be embarking passengers in about ten minutes.” He looked up at Grimes and his party. “Names? Identification papers?”
“They have no papers, sir,” Cadmus told him. “They were robbed.”
“You can say that again,” muttered Fenella, the loss of whose wristwatch was still rankling.
“I trust that you will apprehend the miscreants responsible, Sergeant,” said the officer, indicating by his manner that he could hardly care less.
“Investigations are being made, sir.”
“And now, your names.”
Grimes rattled these off, the Smiths and the Browns and the others. The lieutenant wrote them down on a form, said, “Thank you, Mr. Smith. And now just wait in the lounge with the other passengers. And that will do, Sergeant. You’d better be getting back to Calmira.”
“Sir.”
Grimes shook hands with Cadmus.
“Thank you for your help, Sergeant. I shall see to it that the Terran Ambassador knows about what you have done for us.”
“It was only my duty, sir.”
Brasidus shook hands with Cadmus.
Shirl and Darleen, while the lieutenant looked on disgustedly, flung their arms about him and planted noisy kisses on his cheeks. (They had aimed for his mouth but he managed to turn his head just in time.)
Grimes led the way into the lounge. He had spotted a refreshment stall. (“But they’ll feed us aboard the ship . . .” protested Maggie.) As he had hoped, there were smokes of various kinds on sale. He bought a tin of tobacco of an unknown brand, paying for it out of the money provided by Cadmus. Now he could afford to fill his pipe properly from what remained in his pouch. He lit up and surveyed those who were to be his fellow passengers on the flight to Sparta City. There were, he estimated, about sixty of them. There was a group of Waverley citizens, male and female, who had stubbornly refused to go native insofar as apparel was concerned and were clad in colorful kilts in a wide variety of tartans. There were fat ladies from Earth for whom chitons did nothing but to make a desperate attempt to hide their overly abundant nakedness and their skinny husbands, looking, in their skimpy tunics, like underdressed scarecrows. There were the inevitable young people with their rucksacks and short shorts and heavy hiking boots. There were, even, three Shaara, a princess and two drones, surveying the motley throng through their huge, faceted eyes with arthropodal arrogance.
“And how long will it take that gasbag to get us to Sparta City?” asked Fenella.
“Three days is my guess,” said Grimes.
“Ugh! In this company!”
The public address system came to life. “All offworlders will now leave the lounge by departure gate three. All offworlders will now leave the lounge by departure gate three. Small hand baggage only.”
People began to straggle out from the lounge, along the paved path to the mooring mast, escorted by policemen who tried to hurry things up.
“I’ll never come here again for a holiday!” Grimes overheard. “They take our money, then treat us like criminals!”
“But you must make allowances, dear. They’re in the middle of the revolution.”
“Then why the hell couldn’t they have waited to have it when we were safely back home?”
By groups the tourists took the short elevator ride up to the top of the mooring mast, passed through the tubular gangway into the body of the ship. Flight attendants, surly men in shabby uniforms, chivvied them aft into a large cabin. There were rows of seats, of the reclining variety. There was, Grimes realized with a sinking heart, no sleeping accommodation. Obviously this was normally a short-haul passenger carrier pressed into service for the transport of those who were, now, little better than refugees.
Grimes, Brasidus and Maggie shared a bank of three seats on the port side of the cabin. Fenella and Shirl and Darleen sat immediately behind them. The cabin filled up.
No announcement was made when the flight commenced. There was no friendly “This is your captain speaking.” There was just a faint vibration as the motors were started and, through the viewport in the ship’s skin, the sight of the ground below receding.
Shortly thereafter a meal was served—bowls of greasy stew, stale rolls and muddy coffee. It made a sordid beginning to what was to be a sordid voyage.
Grimes, who was something of an authority on the history of transport, was to say later that it was like a long trip must have been in the Bad Old Days on Earth, during that period when the fuel-guzzling giant airplanes reigned supreme in the skies, before the airship made its long-deferred comeback as a passenger carrier. There were the inadequate toilet facilities. There was the flavorless food, either too greasy or too dry, or even, both at once. There was the canned music. There were the annoying restrictions surely imposed by some fanatical non-smoker.
“It took absolute genius,” he would say, “to reproduce aboard a modern dirigible, the only civilized means of aerial transport, conditions approximating those in Economy Class aboard an intercontinental Jumbo Jet of the late Twentieth Century . . . .”
What made it even worse for him was that he was not used to traveling as a passenger, or as a passenger not accorded control room privileges. As Commodore Grimes he would have spent most of the flight in the ship’s nerve center, observing, asking intelligent questions, conversing with the captain and officers. As Mr. Smith he was just one of the herd, livestock to be carted from Point A to Point B and delivered in more or less good order and condition.
It was impossible for him to have proper conversations with his companions, to discuss the course of action once they had disembarked at the Sparta City airport. There were too many around them who could overhear, including the flight attendants. From one of these they managed to obtain some paper and a stylus—the man had to be tipped—on the pretext of playing word games. They passed notes between their two rows of seats, hidden between the sheets of airline stationery upon which there were a sort of crude variation of Scrabble.
They ate, forcing the food down. They slept as well as they could. They listened to the loud—and mostly fully justified—complaints of the other passengers. They made bets on the frequency with which a particularly annoying, tritely sweet melody would come up on the canned music program. And, with the others, they became steadily scruffier and scruffier. The acridity of stale perspiration became the most dominant odor in the cabin’s atmosphere. It needed, said Grimes loudly, a strong injection of good, healthy tobacco smoke to purify it.
Their communication by written messages did not produce any worthwhile results. As Grimes said in his final note, after arrival at Sparta City they would just have to play it by ear.
At last, at long, long last, the airship’s captain broke his voyage-long silence.
“Attention, all passengers. We are now approaching our mooring at Sparta City Airport. After mooring has been completed you will disembark in an orderly manner and put yourselves into the care of the authorities. That is all.”
Grimes stared out through the port. The airship was making a wide sweep over the city. Surely, he thought, it was not usually as dark as this. The winding streets were no more than feeble trickles of sparsely spaced lights. The Acropolis was no longer floodlit. But around the Palace there was glaring illumination. And what were those flashes? Gunfire?
He asked one of the surly flight attendants the local time. It was 0400 hours. When the man was out of sight he took his wrist companion from his pocket and set it. Even though he would not be keeping a written log of events he always liked to know just when whatever was happening was happening.
The city lights fell slowly astern.
The vibration of the motors became less intense, then ceased. Sundry clankings came from forward as the ship was shackled to her mast.
<
br /> “We’re here,” said Grimes unnecessarily.
“Thank all the Odd Gods of the Galaxy for that,” said Maggie.
Chapter 33
At the foot of the mooring mast there was a small detachment of bored-looking police, obviously resentful at having to be up at this ungodly hour. They herded the disembarking passengers into a lounge where a sullen lieutenant ticked their names off on a list. The only persons at whom he looked at all closely were the three Shaara. They stared him down.
Coffee and little sweet buns were available. It was not the sort of refreshment which Grimes would have ordered had he any choice in the matter, but it was far better than the meals aboard the airship.
Sipping and munching, he stood close to three of the policemen.
“All this extra duty . . .” one was complaining. “And then, on top of it all, we have to be at the bloody Acropolis at ten in the bloody morning for the bloody coronation. If she is as bloody popular as she says she is, why does she want us to guard her? What’s wrong with her own bloody Amazon Guard? Answer me that.”
“Politics, Orestes, politics. Wouldn’t do, this early, if she showed herself relying too heavily on her own pet tabbies. For all this Queen Hippolyte reincarnation crap she wants to be crowned ruler of all Sparta, not of just one sex. But once she’s firmly in the saddle, then we shall see what we shall see.”
“What d’ye suppose did happen to Brasidus?” asked the third man. “With all his faults, he wasn’t a bad bastard.”
“Done away with, of course,” said the expert on politics. “We’ll never see him again.”
“And more’s the pity,” muttered the first man.
Grimes drifted away to where the others were seated in a corner of the lounge, close to one of the big sliding windows. There was nobody else within earshot.
“Maggie, your bug detector,” he said in a low voice, “It could be safe to talk here, but I want to be sure . . .”
She took the instrument out of her pocket, pressed buttons, watched and listened.
She said, “All right. We can talk.”
“To begin with,” said Grimes, “Ellena’s going to be crowned this morning. Queen of all Sparta. At ten.”
“I can’t believe that!” growled Brasidus.
“I’m afraid that you have to, old friend. The question is—do you want to stop her?”
“Yes. Yes. After all, she is only a woman.”
Fenella’s indignant squawk must have been audible all over the airport—but there had already been so many loud complaints from other passengers that it went almost unnoticed.
“I am the Archon,” went on Brasidus. “Now I am back where I belong. I shall resume my high office without delay.”
“Go for broke . . .” muttered Grimes.
“What was that, John?”
“Just a Terran expression. It means . . .” He fumbled for the right words. “It means that you stake everything on a single throw of the dice.”
“I like that,” said Brasidus. “I like that. And are you with me, John? And you, Maggie?”
“What about asking me?” demanded Fenella.
“And us?” asked Shirl and Darleen.
“Very well. Are you with me? All of you.”
“Yes,” they all said.
“First of all,” said Grimes, “we have to get out of the airport. That shouldn’t be difficult. After all, we aren’t prisoners. Nobody regards a bunch of offplanet refugees as being potentially dangerous.”
“And then we make for the Palace,” said Brasidus.
“Do we?” asked Grimes. “With all due respect to your lady wife, Brasidus, I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. And she is not a small woman. The way I see it is this. We go underground for a while until we find out which way the wind is blowing.”
“But you said ‘go for broke,’ John. There has to be a confrontation between myself and Ellena. Oh, I should never have married her—I’ve known that for quite some time—and, however things turn out, I shall not stay married to her for much longer.” All the built-up bitterness was coming out in a rush. “There must be a confrontation. A public confrontation so that the people can make their own choice between us. At the coronation.”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes. Go for broke, he thought. Why not? If things didn’t work out he could get a message out—somehow—to Sister Sue and she could come in and lift him and the others off New Sparta. If, that is, they would be, by that time, in any condition to be lifted off. But his luck had held so far. Why should it not hold for a little longer?
As inconspicuously as possible they drifted out of the lounge, first to the toilet facilities. In a cloakroom Shirl and Darleen found a pair of long cloaks that would conceal their not-quite-human bodies from curious eyes. Nobody stopped them when they found a door opening to the outside. The night, what was left of it, was almost windless. The clear sky was ablaze with stars.
Once they were clear of the airport Brasidus—after all, it was his city—led the way. The first part of their long walk was through orchards of some kind; the spicy scent of ripening fruit was heavy in the still air. Then they entered a built-up area. Shirl and Darleen, with their keen hearing, picked up the whine of an approaching hovercar before any of the others. They all found concealment in a side alley until the vehicle—a police patrol chariot?—was past. The next time they had to hide was from a detachment of soldiers on foot. Now and again they heard the rattle of automatic projectile weapons. Once they stumbled—literally—across a dead body, that of a policeman. His pistol holsters, Grimes discovered to his disappointment, were empty.
Then it was dawn and, only a little later, sunrise. People were emerging into the street, unshuttering shop windows. Presumably the coming of daylight signalled the lifting of the curfew.
Brasidus found an inn. Before leading the way into it he checked the remaining contents of the money pouch that Cadmus had given him, said there should be enough for breakfast for all of them. Grimes told him that he would have to do the ordering as he was the only one without a foreign accent. (But there were now so many Spartan citizens recently arrived from other planets that this did not much matter.)
They took seats at a table. They were the only customers. The sullen waitress made it obvious that she resented this disruption of her early morning peace and quiet. There were quite a few items on the blackboard menu that Grimes would have liked—even eggs and bacon!—but the girl told them that the cook was not yet on duty. She produced the inevitable muddy coffee—yesterday’s brew, warmed up—and stale rolls.
Other people drifted in.
These were regulars and received better treatment than the strangers had gotten. Their coffee smelled as though it had been freshly made and their rolls looked fresh. The waitress put on a pleasant face and joined in conversations.
“No, I shan’t be going to the coronation. Wouldn’t go even if I could get time off. That Ellena and her bunch of dykes! But I liked Brasidus. He was a real man . . . .”
“They say,” contributed a male customer, “that Ellena had him quietly murdered.”
“It’s time somebody murdered her,” muttered his friend.
“Careful,” whispered the third man. “You can never tell who’s listening these days . . .”
All three of them scowled suspiciously at Grimes and his party.
Brasidus called for the bill. He had enough money to cover it. He paid.
On the way out Grimes heard one of the men ask the girl, “And who were they?”
“Dunno. Never seen ’em before. Don’t care much if I ever see ’em again.”
“Shouldn’t mind seein’ more o’ those wenches,” said the first man.
“Probably Amazon Guard officers in civvies,” said the second.
“Shut up!” hissed the girl, noticing that Grimes was lingering in the doorway, listening. “Shut up, you fool!”
After their breakfast they had time to spare. They sauntered through the city, playing the
part of country cousins enjoying a good gawk. They saw street corner meetings being broken up by police—and noticed that, uncharacteristically, the law officers were using force only when absolutely necessary and then with seeming reluctance. They heard orators, female as well as male, screaming their support for Brasidus and demanding that he return to bring things back under control.
On more than one wall there were slogans crudely daubed.
ELLENA GO HOME! was a common one.
Brasidus laughed bitterly. “That’s what I’ve been thinking for years but I’ve never said it out loud. Now I am saying it. I promise you—and promise myself—that once I’m back in control Ellena will be shipped back to Earth by the first available vessel. Does that ship of yours have any passenger accommodation, John?”
“No,” lied Grimes.
“It doesn’t matter. A spare storeroom would be good enough for her.”
Not aboard my ship, thought Grimes.
They dropped into a tavern for wine, using the last of Cadmus’ money to pay for it. They mingled with the crowds—women, men, not too many children—who were converging upon the Acropolis. Shirl and Darleen took the lead; they had the ability to flow through and past obstructions like wild animals through dense undergrowth. Even so, it was not all that easy for Grimes and the others to keep up with them. Altercations broke out in their wake as toes were trodden and ribs painfully nudged.
But, eventually, they were standing in the front row, at the foot of the wide marble steps, facing a rank of black-uniformed police, all of whom had their stunguns drawn and ready. The dais at the head of the steps, with the white pillars of the Acropolis as its backdrop, was still empty. To either side of it were the news media cameras, at this moment slowly scanning the crowd.
Ride the Star Winds Page 40
