If Delamere’s mother had not been a very good friend of a certain Admiral that would have been the finish of his career.
Grimes’ old enemy, Francis Delamere, was to take Grimes, Una and their prize crew to a rendezvous with the merchantman in his Lizard Class courier Skink.
As boat and ship were both proceeding under interstellar drive, with temporal precession rates synchronized, the boat was not destroyed but thrown into an alternate universe - although Delamere, seeing her vanish from his screens, assumed readily enough that hic old enemy and the girl who had spurned his advances had perished.