First Command

by A Bertram Chandler

  Meanwhile, he did not forget his promise to Captain Davinas. He made out the message, using the simple code that he and the tramp master had agreed upon. To: Davinos, d/s/s Sundowner. Happy Birthday. Peter. There would be little chance of such a short transmission being picked up by the Waverley monitors. It was transmitted on a tight beam, not broadcast, directed at the Carlotti relay station on Elsinore. There it would be picked up and immediately and automatically retransmitted, broadcast, at regular intervals, until it was acknowledged by Sundowner. Davinas would know from whom it came and what it meant. The Elsinore station would know the exact direction from which it had been beamed—but the straight line from Discovery to Elsinore was a very long one, stretching over many light-years. In the unlikely event of the broadcast’s being received by any station within the Empire of Waverley it would be utterly meaningless.

  The message on its way, he started to write his report on the happenings on and around the unlucky planet of 1717. It would be a long time before this report was handed in, he knew, but he wanted to get it on paper while the events were still fresh in his memory. It would not be, he was well aware, the only report. Brandt would be putting one in, probably arguing during the course of it that expeditions such as this should be under the command of scientists, not mere spacemen. The disgraced Swinton would be writing his, addressed to the General Officer Commanding Federation Space Marines, claiming, most certainly, that by his prompt action he had saved the ship. And officers, petty officers, and ratings would be deciding among themselves what stories they would tell at the inevitable Court of Inquiry when Discovery returned to Lindisfarne Base.

  Grimes was still working on his first, rough draft when his senior officers—with the exception of the Mad Major—came to see him.

  “Yes?” he demanded, swiveling his chair away from the paper-strewn desk.

  “We’d like a word with you, sir,” said Brabham. The first lieutenant looked as morose as ever, but Grimes noted that the man’s heavy face bore a stubbornly determined expression.

  “Take the weight off your feet,” Grimes ordered, with forced affability. “Smoke, if you wish.” He set the example by filling and lighting his pipe.

  Brabham sat stiffly at one end of the settee. Vinegar Nell, her looks matching her nickname, took her place beside him. Dr. Rath, who could have been going to or coming from a funeral on a cold, wet day, sat beside her. MacMorris, oafishly sullen, lowered his bulk into a chair. The four of them stared at him in hostile silence.

  “What is it you want?” snapped Grimes at last.

  “I see you’re writing a report, sir,” said Brabham, breaking the ominous quiet.

  “I am writing. And it is a report, if you must know.”

  “I suppose you’re putting the rope around Major Swinton’s neck,” sneered Vinegar Nell.

  “If there’s any rope around his neck,” growled Grimes, “he put it there himself.”

  “Aren’t you being . . . unfair, Captain?” asked Brabham.

  “Unfair? Everybody knows the man’s no more than a uniformed murderer.”

  “Do they?” demanded MacMorris. “He was cleared by that court-martial.”

  And a gross miscarriage of justice that was, thought Grimes. He said, “I’m not concerned with what Major Swinton did in the past. What I’m concerned about is what he did under my command, on the world we’ve just left.”

  “And what did he do?” persisted Brabham.

  “Opened fire against my orders. Murdered the entire crew of an airship bound on a peaceful mission.”

  “He did what he thought best, Commander Grimes. He acted in the best interests of the ship, of us all. He deserves better than to be put under arrest, with a court-martial awaiting him on Lindisfarne.”

  “Does he, Lieutenant Commander Brabham?”

  “Yes. Damn it all, sir, all of us in this rustbucket are in the same boat. We should stick together.”

  “Cover up for each other?” asked Grimes quietly. “Lie for each other, if necessary? Present a united front against the common enemy, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty?”

  “I wouldn’t have put it quite in those words, Captain, but you’re getting the idea.”

  “Am I?” exploded Grimes. “Am I? This isn’t a matter of bending Survey Service regulations, Brabham! This is a matter of crime and punishment. I may be an easygoing sort of bastard in many ways, too many ways—but I do like to see real criminals, such as Swinton, get what’s coming to them!”

  “And is Major Swinton the only real criminal in this ship?” asked Vinegar Nell coldly.

  “Yes, Miss Russell—unless some of you are guilty of crimes I haven’t found out about yet.”

  “What about yourself, Commander Grimes?”

  “What about myself?”

  “I understand that two airships were destroyed. One by the major, when he opened fire perhaps—perhaps!—a little prematurely. The second by . . . yourself. Didn’t you maneuver this vessel so that the backblast of your rockets blew the airship out of the sky?”

  Grimes glared at her. “You were not a witness of the occurrence, the accident, Miss Russell.”

  “I know what I’ve been told,” she snapped. “I see no reason to disbelieve it.”

  “It was an accident. The airship was well beneath us when it crossed our trajectory. It was not backblast that destroyed it, but turbulence.” He turned to Brabham. “You saw it happen.”

  “I saw the airship go down in flames,” said Brabham. He added, speaking very reasonably, “You have to admit, sir, that you’re as guilty—or as innocent—as the major. You acted as you thought best. If you’d made a normal liftoff, using inertial drive only, there wouldn’t have been any backblast. Or turbulence. But you decided to get upstairs in a hurry.”

  “If I hadn’t got upstairs in a hurry,” stated Grimes, “I’d never have got upstairs at all. None of us would. The next round—or salvo—would have been right on.”

  “We are not all gunnery experts, Captain,” said Dr. Rath. “Whether or not we should have been hit is a matter for conjecture. But the fact remains that the airship was destroyed by your action.”

  “Too right it was!” agreed MacMorris. “An’ the way you flogged my engines it’s a miracle this ship wasn’t destroyed as well.”

  “Gah!” expostulated Grimes. Reasonable complaints he was always prepared to listen to, but this was too much. He would regret the destruction of the second dirigible to his dying day, but a captain’s responsibility is always to his own vessel, not to any other. Nonetheless he was not, like Swinton, a murderer.

  Or was he?

  “You acted as you thought best,” murmured Brabham. “So did the major.”

  “Major Swinton deliberately disobeyed orders,” stated Grimes.

  “I seem to remember, Captain,” went on Brabham, “that you were ordered to make a sweep out toward the Rim.”

  “If you ever achieve a command of your own,” Grimes told him coldly, “you will discover that the captain of a ship is entitled—expected, in fact—to use his own discretion. It was suggested that I make my sweep out toward the Rim—but the Admiralty would take a very dim view of me if I failed to follow up useful leads taking me in another direction.”

  “All that has been achieved to date by this following of useful leads,” said Rath, “is the probable ruin of a zealous officer’s career.”

  “Which should have been ruined before he ever set foot aboard this ship!” flared Grimes.

  “Then I take it, sir,” said Brabham, “that you are not prepared to stretch a point or two in the major’s favor.”

  “You may take it that way,” agreed Grimes.

  “Then, sir,” went on the first lieutenant, speaking slowly and carefully, “we respectfully serve notice that we shall continue to obey your legal commands during the remainder of this cruise, but I wish to make it clear that we shall complain to the proper authorities regarding your conduct and actions as soon as we are back on Lindis
farne.”

  “The inference being,” said Grimes, “that if Swinton is for the high jump, I am too.”

  “You said it, Commander Grimes,” put in Vinegar Nell. “The days when a captain was a little—or not so little—tin god are long dead. You’re only a human being, like the rest of us, although you don’t seem to think so. But you’ll learn, the hard way!”

  “Careful, you silly cow!” growled MacMorris.

  Grimes forced himself to smile. “I am all too aware of my fallible humanity, Miss Russell. I’m human enough to sympathize with you, and to warn you of the consequences of sticking your necks out. But what puzzles me is why you’re doing it for Major Swinton. The Marines have always been a pain in the neck to honest spacemen, and Swinton has all a Marine’s faults and precious few of the virtues. And I know that all of you hate his guts.”

  “He is a son of a bitch,” admitted the woman, “but he’s our son of a bitch. But you, Commander Grimes, are the outsider aboard this ship. Lucky Grimes, always on the winning side, while the rest of us, Swinton included, are the born losers. Just pray to all the Odd Gods of the Galaxy that your luck doesn’t run out, that’s all!”

  “Amen,” intoned Rath, surprisingly and sardonically.

  Grimes kept his temper. He said, “This is neither the time nor the place for a prayer meeting. I suggest that you all return to your duties.”

  “Then you won’t reconsider the action you’re taking against the major, Captain?” asked Brabham politely.

  “No.”

  “Then I guess this is all we can do,” said the first lieutenant, getting up to leave.

  “For the time being,” added Vinegar Nell.

  They left, and Grimes returned to his report writing. He saw no reason why he should try to whitewash Swinton, and regarding the destruction of the second airship told the truth, no more and no less.

  Chapter 21

  Grimes went down to the farm deck to see Flannery.

  He could have sent for the telepath, but did not like to have the man in his quarters. He was always filthy, and around him hung the odors of stale perspiration, cheap whiskey, and organic fertilizers. Possibly this latter smell came from the nutrient solutions pumped into the hydroponic tanks—at times the atmosphere in the farm deck was decidedly ripe—and possibly not.

  The PCO, as always, was hunched at his littered table, with the inevitable whiskey bottle and its accompanying dirty glass to hand. He was staring, as he usually was, at the spherical tank in which was suspended the obscenely naked canine brain, which seemed to be pulsating slowly (but surely this was an optical illusion) in the murky life-support fluid. His thick lips were moving as he sang, almost inaudibly, to himself, or to his weird pet.

  “Now all you young dukies an’ duchesses,

  Take warnin’ from what I do say;

  Be sure that you owns what you touchesses.

  Or ye’ll jine us in Botany Bay!”

  “Mphm!” Grimes grunted loudly.

  Flannery looked up, turned slowly around in his chair.

  “Oh, it’s you, Captain Bligh. Sorry, me tongue slipped. Me an’ Ned was back in the ould days, when the bully boys, in their pretty uniforms, was ridin’ high an’ roughshod. An’ what can I be doin’ for ye, Captain?”

  “What were you getting at when you called me Captain Bligh?” demanded Grimes.

  “Not what ye were thinkin’. Yer officers an’ crew haven’t decided to put ye in the long boat, with a few loyalists an’ the ship’s cat . . . yet. Not that we have a cat. But ye’re not loved, that’s for sure. An’ that murtherin’ major’s gettin’ sympathy he’s not deservin’ of. Ned has him taped, all right. He doesn’t like him at all, at all. He can remember the really bad bastards who were officers in the ould New South Wales Corps, floggin’ the poor sufferin’ convicts with nary a scrap o’ provocation, an’ huntin’ down the black fellows like animals.”

  “I still don’t believe that dingo of yours had a racial memory,” said Grimes.

  “Suit yerself, Captain. Suit yerself. But he has. An’ he has a soft spot for ye, believe it or not, even though he thinks o’ ye as a latter-day Bligh. Even—or because. He remembers that it was Bligh who stood up for the convicts against the sodgers when he was governor o’ New South Wales. After all, that was what the Rum Rebellion was all about.”

  “You’re rather simplifying,” said Grimes.

  “No more than the descendants o’ those New South Wales Corps officers who’ve been blackenin’ Bligh’s memory to try to make their own crummy forebears look like plaster saints by comparison.” His voice faded, and then again he started to sing softly.

  “Singin’ tooral-i-ooral-i-addy,

  Singin’ tooral-i-ooral-i-ay,

  Singin’ tooral-i-ooral-i-addy,

  An’ we’re bound out for Botany Bay. . . .”

  “I didn’t come down here for a concert,” remarked Grimes caustically.

  Flannery raised a pudgy, admonitory hand. “Hould yer whist, Captain. That song niver came from me. It came from outside.”

  “Outside?”

  “Ye heard me. Quiet now. T’is from far away . . . but I could be there, where iver there is. They’re a-sittin’ around a fire an’ a-singin’, an’ a-suppin’ from their jars. T’is a right ould time they’re after havin’. They’re a-sendin’ . . . oh, they’re transmittin’, if it’s the technicalities ye want, but they’re like all o’ ye half-wits—beggin’ your pardon, Captain, but that’s what we call ye—ye can transmit after a fashion, but ye can’t receive. I’m tryin’ to get through to someone, anyone, but it’s like tryin’ to penetrate a brick wall.”

  “Mphm.”

  “Tie me kangaroo down, sport, tie me kangaroo down. . . .”

  “Must you try to sing, Mr. Flannery?”

  “I was only jinin’ in, like. T’is a good party, an’ Ned an’ me wishes we was there.”

  “But where is it?”

  “Now ye’re askin’. There should be a bonus for psionic dowsin’, there should. Ye’ve no idea, not bein’ a telepath yerself, how it takes it out of yer. But I’ll try.”

  Grimes waited patiently. It would be useless, he knew, to try to hurry Flannery.

  At last: “I’ve got it, Captain. That broadcast—ye can call it that—comes from a point directly ahead of us. How far? I can’t be tellin’ ye, but t’is not all that distant. An’ I can tell ye, too, that it comes from our sort o’ people, humans.”

  “I somehow can’t imagine aliens singing ‘Botany Bay,’ “ said Grimes. And many of the lodejammers were out of Port Woomera, in Australia.”

  “I’ve found yer Lost Colony for ye,” said Flannery smugly.

  Chapter 22

  So Grimes ordered the splicing of the mainbrace, the issue of drink to all hands at the ship’s expense. He sat in the wardroom with his officers, drinking with them, and drinking to the Lost Colony upon which they would be making a landing before too long. He did not need to be a telepath to sense the change of mood. They were behind him, with him again, these misfits and malcontents. He responded, smiling, when Brabham toasted, “To Grimes’s luck!” He clinked glasses with Vinegar Nell, even with the Mad Major. He joined in heartily when everybody started singing “Botany Bay.”

  Botany Bay.

  He rather hoped that this would be the name given by the colonists to this chance-found world circling Star 1716 in the Ballchin Catalog. It might well be; such colonies as had been founded by the crews and passengers of the gaussjammers of the New Australian Expansion tended to run to distinctively Australian names.

  He left when the party began to get a little too rowdy. He did not retire at once, but sprawled in his easy chair, his mind still active. When people recovered from this letting off of steam, he thought, he would have to discuss his plan of campaign with the senior officers, the departmental heads. Then, suddenly but quietly, the outer door of his day cabin opened. He was somehow not surprised when Vinegar Nell came in. She was (as before) carrying
a tray, with coffee things and a plate of sandwiches. But this time she was still in uniform.

  Grimes gestured toward the supper as she set it down on the low table. “So you still think of me as Gutsy Grimes?” he asked, but he smiled as he spoke.

  “Lucky Grimes,” she corrected, smiling back, a little lopsidedly. “And I hope, John, I really hope that your luck rubs off on the rest of us.”

  “I do, too,” he told her.

  She straightened up after she had put the supper things down, standing over him. Her legs were very long, and slightly apart, her skirt very short. One of her knees was exercising a gentle but definite pressure on Grimes’s outstretched thigh, but with a considerable effort he managed to keep his hands to himself. Then she stooped again as she poured him his coffee. The top two buttons of her shirt were undone and he glimpsed a nipple, erect, startlingly pink against the pale tan of the skin of her breast.

  He whispered huskily, “Miss Russell, would you mind securing the door?”

  She replied primly, “If you insist, Commander Grimes.”

  She walked slowly away from the table, away from him, shrugging out of her upper garment, letting it float unheeded to the deck. He heard the sharp click of the lock as it engaged. She turned, stepping out of her brief skirt as she did so. The sheer black tights that were all she was wearing beneath it concealed nothing. She walked past him into the bedroom, not looking at him, a faint smile on her face, her small breasts jouncing slightly, her round buttocks smoothly working, gleaming under the translucent material. He got up, spilling his coffee and ignoring it, following her.