John Grimes
1 primary work • 15 total works
Book 19
Derek Calver touches down on Lorn and is determined to join the Rim Runners to explore desolate planets.
He joins the crew of Lorn Lady and sets forth for Mellise, inhabited by intelligent amphibians; for Groller, where the natives have just qualified as humanoids; for Stree with its tea loving lizards; and for Tharn, home of a pre-industrial civilization.
- Pipe-smoking, action-loving spaceship commander Lieutenant John Grimes
(think Captain Kirk with more of a navy, salty attitude) moves out of the
Federation navy and finds his true calling adventuring along the spaceways of
the galactic rim.
In luck and out of luck, John Grimes was a living legend of the spaceways. He had been an officer of the service, he had been the victim of a mutiny, he had discovered lost worlds, he had served under strange masters and on strange ships, but he had never turned space pirate. Until this adventure.
How it happened was a complex story to begin with, but typical Grimes luck. How he became the terror of the star lanes developed, as usual, from his own efforts to make an honest living and other's efforts to use him for devious diversions.
This is a story of the loot of the stars, of how Grimes graduated from operator of a space courier ship to master of a fleet of dreaded carriers of the skull and crossbones!
Commodore John Grimes was finally getting his space wings back. On his old ship, Faraway Quest, Grimes was to venture forth to the very Rim of the known worlds, seeing ... The Outsider.
"The Outsider's Ship ... is a storehouse of science and technology ... we, and the Federation, and the Shaara Empire, and probably quite a few more, have sent expeditions. Every one has ended disastrously."
So, it is out to the Rim and find The Outsider. But the mystery ship is not always easy to find. And other worlds, too, yearn for the treasures of the alien technology. What Commodore Grimes finds at the Rim, and what finds him there, sends him racing through time tracks, surrounded by enemies and temporary friends, trying endlessly to discover the secret dangers of ... The Outsider.
His wild career as a space pirate ended, Grimes faced his toughest assignment - he was "punished" by being made governor of the anarchists' own planet! John Grimes, living legend of the spaceways, had been in and out of some cosmic catastrophes but this threatened to reach his luck's ultimate breaking point!
An influx of planetary refugees had made that world a paradise of cheap labor and the original anarchist colonists had become such masters of wealth that no mere outsider could hope to dictate "law and order" to them. They had their own ideas which included slavery, treachery, and utter villainy.
Grimes' first task as governor would be simply to stay alive with a whole world plotting his murder!
Being lost in space was no new experience to John Grimes, whose career as an interstellar officer had brought him into many such dilemmas. But being lost inside a colossal alien spacecraft had no precedent.
Complicating the matter was the discovery that the very universe was not their own but an alternate and that their captor seemed to be the omnipotent force of that entire other cosmos.
As Grime's only companion was the comely policewoman, Una Freeman, the fate that the Alien God selected for them required the creation of a Garden of Eden. But there were two serpents in this one - both of them bicycles!
"When Kinsolving's Planet crosses your path, beware!"
Commodore John Grimes would have done well to heed this warning. But the evil magic of Kinsolving draws him on, pulling him on a journey through the universes. Is Grimes a swiftly facing literary ghost, doomed to disappearance for the inadvertent theft of a meerschaum pipe? Or, is he a flesh and blood Commodore, sailing the spaceways from world to world, enjoying dangerous voyages to momentary safe ports?
It does not matter what role is the "true" John Grimes for none can protect him from the grasp of Kinsolving's Planet, an abandoned colony which reaches out for man, for the target, John Grimes, who is inexorably sucked toward his final destiny ...
Meet John Grimes at the very beginning of a career that will lead him to fame and glory out at the edge of the galaxy, out where the laws of men are nonexistent, and those of nature itself are sometimes tenuous.
Someday Grimes will be a Commodore in the secessionist Rim Worlds Navy, but for now he is merely a very junior lieutenant in another space navy entirely: that of the Federation. If he keeps his nose clean, one day he can be an admiral in that Service; all he has to do is follow regulations regardless of the consequences, and obey orders regardless of whether they are right or wrong - and he is determined to do just that.
But being John Grimes, he will find it a more difficult task than he expects - especially when he must turn a blind eye to the piratical acts of the Waldegrenese Navy, or ignore the plight of a beautiful damsel in distress. That's why, although he doesn't know it yet, he is already on . . . the Road To The Rim.
