Free Galactic Courier: The John Grimes Saga III by A. Bertram Chandler

Grimes!”
    He ignored this. “You’re a mess. The way you are a sex-starved second mate of a sixth rate star tramp wouldn’t look at you!”
    She glared at him, heaved herself to her feet. She shuffled to the drip tray on the bulkhead, used a scrap of rag to stop the outlet and then, using another piece of the rag from Grimes’ longjohns, washed herself all over. Somehow after the ablutions she was beginning to look as she had looked before the imprisonment. She struggled into her longjohns and the elastic fabric moulded and constrained her figure. Then, using her long fingernails as a comb, she tried to arrange her hair. Without proper treatment it would not regain its lustre but the worst snarls were out of it
    She snapped, “Am I fit for parade, Captain? ”
    He admitted, “It’s an improvement.”
    “Then may I suggest that you do something about yourself?”
    Grimes tried, but without depilatory cream it was an almost hopeless task. He pulled on the trunks that were all that remained of his space underwear.
    He sat down in a corner of the cell to wait.
    She sat down in the opposite corner to wait.
    At last a variation of the beat of the inertial drive told them that they were coming in to a landing.
    There was a very gentle jar. The inertial drive fell silent.
    There was a mechanical hooting sound that began suddenly, that stopped as suddenly.
    There was a brief thudding that could have been a burst from an automatic cannon. There was silence.
    She raised her eyebrows, asked, “Well?”
    He said, “I don’t know.”
    She sneered, “You’re the expert.”
    There was more silence.
    Suddenly the door opened, admitting six drones. Careless of the minor wounds they inflicted with their sharp claws they stripped the humans, dragged them out into the alleyway, down ramps to an airlock, both doors of which were open, admitting bright sunlight, a cool breeze. Instead of a ramp extending from the outer door to the ground there was a platform. On this was a cage—a light yet strong affair with aluminum bars. Grimes and Tamara were thrust into this and the door was slammed shut after them with a loud clicking of the spring lock. The deck of interwoven metal swayed under their feet, throwing them off balance.
    Grimes looked up, saw through streaming eyes (the sunlight was painfully bright after the dimness to which they had become accustomed) a blurred shape like a fat torpedo. It was a blimp, he realized, one of the non-rigid airships that the Shaara invariably used inside an atmosphere in preference to inertial drive powered craft. He looked down and back.
    Baroom had landed in a wide meadow, a field under cultivation, crushing beneath her bulk row upon row of low bushes. Close by her was the gold-gleaming Little Sister, dwarfed by the huge Shaara ship. Over and around both vessels flew the bee people—princesses, drones, workers—rejoicing in the exercise of their wings. There was another blimp in the air, motionless.
    He turned, barely conscious that his naked skin brushed Tamara’s bare breasts, looked ahead. There was a town or a village there, buildings of almost human architecture. Between this settlement and the spaceships was a charred patch on the ground, an untidy, cratered patch of dark grey in the yellow grass (or what passed for grass), a scattering of angular, twisted wreckage. A ground vehicle? The burst of a cannon fire that they had heard?
    “Where are they taking us?” she demanded. “Where are they taking us?”
    “To that town,” he replied.
    “But why? But why?”
    He made no answer. There was none that he could give. He looked up to the strong escort of armed drones that was accompanying the blimp. He looked ahead again. The air over the town was alive with swarming motes. He knew that these were more drones. And yet it was no Shaara city that they were approaching. Such a center of population would have consisted of domes great and little, not buildings that, in the main, were like