Beyond the Galactic Rim

by A. Bertram Chandler

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

A journey to the Rim Worlds takes you straight to the edge of the unknown or right to the gaping void of the abyss. Out there you're beyond the borders, hovering between the warped contours of troubled space and time... Captain Clavering bought his ship on a lottery win. Now he's holed up on the dismal planet of Lorn filling in the time on a chemical-blasted airstrip waiting for a contract. Somewhere there must be a newly colonized planet needing charters or some threatened world that needs evacuating. He'd risk anything for money in the bank - even a dodgy landing on the gas-blasted plains of Eblis, if the Rim Runners fancy paying hard cash for an expedition to hell...

Release date: November 26, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 128

Sample

She was a large hunk of ship, was Sally Ann, too large and too imposing for the name she bore. She stood proudly in her berth at Port Forlorn, dwarfing cranes and gantries and administration buildings, towering high above Rimstar and Rimbound, both typical units of the Rim Runners’ fleet. Yet, to the trained eye of a spaceman, a relationship between Sally Ann and the smaller vessels would have been obvious – all three bore the unmistakable stamp of the Interstellar Transport Commission and all three had come down in the Universe. Sally Ann, for all her outward smartness, had come down the furthest; she had been a Beta-class liner, and now she was tramping. Rimstar and Rimbound had been Epsilon-class tramps and now they were dignified with the name of cargo liners.

Commodore Grimes, astronautical superintendent for Rim Runners, looked out from the window of his office towards the big ship, screwing up his eyes against the steely glare of the westering sun. His hard, pitted face softened momentarily as he said, ‘I’m sorry, Captain. We can’t use her. She just won’t fit into any of our trades.’

‘Fletcher, your agent on Van Diemen’s Planet, assured me that I should be sure of getting a charter as soon as I got out of here,’ said Captain Clavering. ‘I’ve delivered the load of migrants that you were clamouring for; now it’s up to you to at least give me profitable employment back to the Centre.’

‘You had nothing in writing,’ stated Grimes. ‘You took Fletcher’s word for it. I know Fletcher – he used to be a purser in your old concern, Trans-Galactic Clippers. He’s got that typical big ship purser’s knack of seeming to promise everything whilst, in reality, promising nothing.’ He got to his feet and pointed towards Rimstar. ‘There’s the sort of ship that you and your friends should have bought when you won that lottery. A tramp can always make a living of sorts out on the Rim – one of our captains came into a large sum of salvage money and bought a tramp; he’s running the Eastern Circuit on time charter to us …’

‘I heard about him,’ admitted Clavering. ‘He pulled Thermopylae off Eblis. I was in her for a while after she got back to her normal running … But, Commodore, what Calver’s doing has nothing to do with my problems. Surely there must be some passenger traffic on the Rim. Fletcher told me …’

‘Fletcher would tell you anything,’ snapped Grimes. ‘If you’ve seen one Rim World you’ve seen them all. Why should anybody want to proceed from Lorn to Faraway, or from Ultimo to Thule? The handful of people who must travel for business reasons we can carry in our own ships – they’re all fitted with accommodation for twelve passengers, and it’s rarely used.

‘In any case, why this desire on your part to run the Rim? We have a saying, you know – a man who comes out to the Rim to make his living would go to Hell for a pastime.’

‘Because,’ said Clavering bitterly, ‘I thought it was the only part of the Galaxy where a tramp passenger ship could make a living. It seems that I was mistaken.’

Grimes got to his feet, held out his hand to the younger man in a gesture of dismissal. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Captain, I mean it. I hate to see a good spaceman with a large white elephant hanging around his neck. If I hear of any profitable employment at all, I’ll let you know – but I can’t hold out much hope.’

‘Thank you,’ said Clavering.

He shook hands with Grimes and strode out of the office, walked with a briskness that masked his reluctance to face his shipmates, his fellow shareholders, across the windswept, dusty apron to his ship.

They were waiting for him in Sally Ann’s shabby, but still comfortable, lounge. There was Sally Ann Clavering who, in addition to being his wife, combined the functions of Purser and Catering Officer. There was Taubman, chief and only Reaction Drive Engineer, and Rokovsky, who was in charge of the Interstellar Drive. There was Larwood, Chief Officer, and Mary Larwood, the biochemist. The few remaining officers were not shareholders and were not present.

Clavering maintained his stiffness as he entered the lounge, by his bearing counteracting the shabbiness of his uniform. His lean face, under the greying hair, was expressionless.

‘So they have nothing for us,’ stated Sally Ann flatly.

‘They have nothing for us,’ agreed Clavering tonelessly, watching disappointment momentarily soften the fine lines of his wife’s face, watching it succeeded by a combination of hope – surely a hopeless hope – and determination.

‘We’d have been better off,’ growled burly, black-bearded Rokovsky, ‘if we’d never won that blasted lottery. What do we do now? Sell the ship for scrap, hoping that she’ll bring enough to pay our passages back to civilisation? Or do we lay her up and get jobs with Rim Runners?’

‘It was a gamble,’ said Larwood, ‘and it just didn’t come off. But we were all in it.’ And I’ll gamble again, said the expression on his dark, reckless face. And I, declared the mobile features of his wife.

‘At least,’ pointed out the slight, heavily bespectacled Taubman, ‘we have reaction mass enough to take us up and clear of the planet, and the Pile’s good for a few years yet.’

‘And where do we go from here?’ demanded Rokovsky.

‘And what do we use for money to pay the last of the bills?’ asked Sally Ann.

‘Buy another ticket in the Nine Worlds Lottery,’ suggested Larwood.

‘What with?’ she countered. ‘The prizes are big, as we know, but those tickets are expensive. And we have to get back to the Nine Worlds first, anyhow.’

‘Damn it all!’ exploded Clavering. ‘We’ve got a ship, a good ship. We didn’t show the profit that we should have done on that load of migrants, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no profit to be made elsewhere in the Galaxy. That Psionic radio operator of ours will just have to wake up his dog’s brain in aspic and keep a real listening watch for a change. There must be something somewhere – a planet newly opened up for colonisation, some world threatened by disaster and a demand for ships for the evacuation …’

‘He says that it’s time that he got paid,’ stated Sally Ann. ‘And so does Sparks.’

‘And the second mate,’ added Larwood, ‘And the quack.’

‘What fittings can we sell?’ asked Clavering hopelessly. ‘What can we do without?’

‘Nothing,’ replied his wife.

‘We could …’ began Clavering, then paused, listening. Faintly at first, then rising in intensity, there was the wailing, urgent note of a siren, loud enough to penetrate the shell plating and the insulation of the ship. Without a word the Captain got to his feet, strode towards the doorway of the axial shaft and the little elevator that would take him up to the control room. Wordlessly, the others followed. This, obviously, was some kind of emergency – and in an emergency the spaceman’s conditioned reflexes impel him automatically towards his station.

Clavering and his officers crowded into the little elevator cage, waited impatiently as it bore them upwards to the nose of the ship. They almost ran into the control room, looked out through the big ports.

The sun was down and the sky was already dark save for the pale glow in the west. Falling slowly, winking balefully, were the red stars of the warning rockets that had been fired from the control tower. Scurrying out on to the spaceport apron like huge beetles, the beams of their headlights like questing antennae in the dusty air, were two red painted fire trucks and the ambulance. There was activity around the two Rim Runners’ ships, Rimstar and Rimbound, as their personnel hurried out of the airlock doors and down the ramps.

‘There!’ cried Larwood, pointing.

Clavering looked up, almost directly overhead, and saw a fitful glare in the sky. There was a ship there, and she was coming down, and the siren and the red rockets and the lifesaving equipment made it obvious that she was in some kind of trouble. There had been, he remembered, a ship due that evening – Faraway Quest.

‘Switch on the transceiver,’ he ordered.

Larwood had anticipated the command. Suddenly there was a fresh voice in the control room – a crisp voice, calm, yet with an underlying note of anxiety.

‘Impossible to pull out and clear. Numbers one and two liners gone, number three tube liner starting to melt. Will try to bring her in on the other three – if they hold that long.’

Grimes’ voice replied. ‘Do your best, Captain.’

‘What the hell do you think I am doing? This is my ship, Commodore, and it’s the lives of my crew and passengers that are at stake. Do your best! What else is there to do?’

‘I’m sorry, Captain,’ replied Grimes.

‘Just keep off the air, will you?’ snapped the other. ‘I’ve a job of work to do, and I can’t do it if you keep nattering. Just have everything ready in case of a crash, that’s all. Over and out!’

‘Do you think he’ll make it?’ asked Larwood, of nobody in particular.

‘He has to,’ said Clavering shortly. He has to, he thought. He’ll have to fight her down every inch of the way, anticipating every yaw. The servo-mechanisms in those old Epsilon-class ships were never designed to cope with any real emergency …

He found his binoculars, adjusted the polarisation, stared up at the descending ship. He was no engineer, but even to him the irregular pulse of the exhaust looked unhealthy, as did the great gouts of flame that dropped from it, the incandescent, molten ceramic of the liners. He could make out faintly the shape of the vessel above the blinding glare of the back-blast, saw that her captain was maintaining her in an upright position.

The noise of her passage was audible now, drowning the screaming voice of the siren, pulsating as irregularly as the siren had done. At times it was almost the full throated roar of a full powered ship, at times it died to a querulous mutter. If the rockets failed entirely she would fall. Desperately, Clavering willed them not to fail, knew that the others with him were doing the same. If will power could have sustained Faraway Quest it would have done – but there is a limit to the weight that even a team of trained teleporteurs can handle, and even a small ship is far in excess of that limit.

Down she dropped, lower and lower, making for the berth midway between Sally Ann and the nearer of the two Rim ships. Still she was under control, alth. . .