 CHAPTER 7 THE OUTSIDE VIEW SCREEN, which had been vacantly gray for over three thousand hours was now a vertiginous swirl of color, the indescribable color of a collapsing hyperspatial field. No two observers ever saw it alike, and no imagination could vision the actuality. Trask found that he was holding his breath. So he noticed was Otto Harkaman beside him. It was something evidently that nobody got used to. Even Guat Kirby, the astrogator, was sitting with his pipe clenched in his mouth, staring at the screen. Then, in an instant, the stars, which had literally not been there before, filled the screen with a blaze of splendor against the black velvet backdrop of normal space. Dead in the center, brighter than all the rest, Ertado's star, the sun of Tannath, burned yellowly. The light from it was ten hours old. Pretty good, Guat, Harkaman said, picking up his cup. Good, Kahena, it was perfect, somebody else said. Kirby was relighting his pipe. Oh, I suppose it'll have to do, he grudged around the stem. He had gray hair and an untidy mustache, and nothing was ever quite good enough to satisfy him. I could have made it a little closer. Need three micro-jumps now, and I'll have to cut the last one pretty fine. Now, don't bother me. He began punching buttons for data and fiddling with set screws and veneers. For a moment in the screen, Trask could see the face of Andrei Dunin. He blinked it away and reached for his cigarettes, and put one in his mouth wrong end, too. When he reversed it and snapped his lighter, he saw that his hand was trembling. Otto Harkaman must have seen that, too. Take it easy, Lucas, he whispered. Keep your optimism under control. We only think he might be here. I'm sure he is. He has to be. No, that was the way Dunin himself thought. Let's be sane about this. We have to assume he is. If we do, and he isn't, it's a disappointment. If we don't, and he is, it's a disaster. Others, it seemed, thought the same way. The battle-stations board was a solid blaze of red light for full combat readiness. All right, Kirby said, jumping. Then he twisted the red handle to the right and shoved it in viciously. Again the screen boiled with colored turbulence. Again dark and mighty forces stalked through the ship, like demons in a sorcerer's tower. The screen turned featureless gray as the pick-up stared blindly into some dimensionless no-place. Then it convulsed with color again, and this time Ertado's star, still in the center, was a coin-sized disk, with little sparks of its seven planets scattered around it. Tanneth was the third. The inhabitable planet of a G-class system usually was. It had a single moon, barely visible in the telescopic screen, five hundred miles in diameter and fifty thousand off-planet. You know, Kirby said, as though he was afraid to admit it, that wasn't too bad. I think we can make it in one more micro-jump. Sometime, Trask supposed, he'd be able to use the expression micro about a distance of fifty-five million miles, too. What do you think about it, Harkaman asked him, as deferentially as those seeking expert guidance instead of examining his apprentice? Where should Guat put us? As close as possible, of course. That would be a light second, at the least. If the nemesis came out of hyperspace any closer to anything the size of Tanneth, the collapsing field itself would kick her back. We have to assume Dunnan's been there at least nine hundred hours. By that time he could have put in a detection station and maybe missile launchers on the moon. The Enterprise carries four penises, the same as the nemesis. In his place I'd have at least two of them on off-planet patrol. So let's accept it that we'll be detected as soon as we come out of the last jump, and come out with the moon directly between us and the planet. If it's occupied, we can knock it off on the way in. A lot of captains would try to come out with the moon masked off by the planet, Harkaman said. Would you? The big man shook his tousled head. No, if they have launchers on the moon they could launch at us in a curve around the planet, by data relayed from the other side, and we'd be at a disadvantage replying. Just go straight in. You hearing this, Guat? Yeah, it makes sense. Sort of. Now stop pestering me. Charle, look here a minute. The normal space-astrogator conferred with him. Alvin Carford, the executive officer, joined them. Finally Kirby pulled out the big red handle, twisted it, and said, All right, jumping. He shoved it in. I suppose I cut it too fine. Now we'll get kicked back half a million miles. The screen convulsed again. When it cleared, the third planet was directly in the center. Its small moon, looking almost as large, was a little above and to the right. Sun lit on one side, and planet lit on the other. Kirby locked the red handle, gathered up his tobacco and lighter in things from the ledge, and pulled down the cover of the instrument console, locking it. All yours, Charle, he told Renner. Eight hours to atmosphere, Renner said. That's if we don't have to waste a lot of time shooting up Junior there. Van Larch was looking at the moon in the six hundred power screen. I don't see anything to shoot. Five hundred miles, one planet buster, or four or five thermonuculars, he said. It wasn't right, Trask thought, indignantly. Minutes ago, Tanneth had been six and a half billion miles away, seconds ago, fifty odd million, and now a quarter of a million, and looking close enough to touch in the screen. It would take them eight hours to reach it. Why on Hyperdrive you could go forty-eight trillion miles in that time? Well, it took a man just as long to walk across a room today, as it had taken Pharaoh I, or Homo Sape. In the telescopic screen, Tanneth looked like any picture of any terra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seas and continents, and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green, topped at the pole by an ice-cap. None of the surface features, not even the major mountain ranges or rivers, were yet distinguishable, but Harkamon and Charles Renner and Alvin Carford and the other old hands seemed to recognize it. Carford was talking by phone to Paul Choreff, the signals and detection officer who could detect nothing from the moon and nothing that was getting through the Van Allen Belt from the planet. Maybe they'd guessed wrong at that. Maybe Dunnan hadn't gone to Tanneth at all. Harkamon, who had the knack of putting himself to sleep at will, with some sixth or nth sense posted as a sentry, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Trask wished he could, too. It would be hours before anything happened, and until then he needed all the rest he could get. He drank more coffee, chained smoked cigarettes, he rose and prowled about the command room, looked at screens. Signals and detection was getting a lot of routine stuff. Van Allen count, micrometeor count, surface temperature, gravitation field strength, radar and scanner echoes. He went back to his chair and sat down, staring at the screen image. The planet didn't seem to be getting any closer at all, and it ought to. They were approaching at better than escape velocity. He sat and stared at it. He woke with a start. The screen image was much larger now. River courses and shadow lines of mountains were clearly visible. It must be early autumn in the northern hemisphere. There was snow down to the sixtieth parallel and a belt of brown was pushing south against the green. Van Allen was sitting up, eating lunch. By the clock it was four hours later. Have a good nap, he asked. We're picking up stuff now, radio and screen signals. Not much, but some. The locals wouldn't have learned enough for that in the five years since I was here. We didn't stay long enough for one thing. On de-civilized planets that were visited by space vikings the locals picked up bits and scraps of technology very quickly. In the four months of idleness and long conversations while they were in hyperspace he had heard many stories confirming that. But from the level to which Tanneth had sunk, radio and screen communication in five years was a little too much of a jump. You didn't lose any men, did you? That happened frequently. Men who took up with local women, men who had made themselves unpopular with their shipmates, men who just liked the planet and wanted to stay. They were always welcomed by the locals for what they could do and teach. No, we weren't there long enough for that. Only three hundred and fifty hours. This we're getting is outside stuff. Somebody's there beside the locals. Dunnan. He looked again at the battle station's board. It was still uniformly red-lighted. Everything was on full combat ready. He summoned the mess-robot, selected a couple of dishes, and began to eat. After the first mouthful he called to Alvin Carford. Is Paul getting anything new? he asked. Carford checked. A little contra-gravity field distortion effect. It was still too far to be sure. He went back to his lunch. He had finished it and was lighting a cigarette over his coffee when a red light flashed and a voice from one of the speakers shouted, Detection! Detection from planet! Radar and micro-ray! Carford began talking rapidly into a hand-phone. Harkamon unhooked one beside him and listened. Coming from a definite point, about twenty-fifth North Parallel, he said, aside, could be from a ship hiding against the planet. There's nothing at all on the moon. They seemed to be approaching the planet more and more rapidly. Actually, they weren't. The ship was decelerating to get into an orbit, but the decreasing distance created the illusion of increasing speed. The red lights flashed once more. Ship detected, just outside atmosphere, coming around the planet from the west. Is she the Enterprise? Can't tell yet, Carford said, and then cried. There she is, in the screen. That spark, about thirty degrees north, just off the west side. Aboard her, too, voices from speakers would be shouting, Ship detected, and the battle-station board would be blazing red, and Andrei Dunnan at the command desk. She's calling us. That was the Choreff's voice, out of the squawk-box on the desk. Standard Sword World impulse code. Interrogative, what ship are you? Informative, her screen combination. Request, please communicate. All right, Harkamon said, let's be polite and communicate. What's your screen combination? Choreff's voice gave it, and Harkamon punched it out. The communication screen in front of them lit at once. Trask shoved over his chair beside Harkamon's, his hands tightening on the arms. Would it be Dunnan himself, and what would his face show when he saw who confronted him out of his own screen? It took him an instant to realize that the other ship was not the Enterprise at all. The Enterprise was the nemesis twin. Her command room was identical with his own. This one was different in arrangements and fittings. The Enterprise was a new ship, this one was old, and had suffered for years at the hands of a slack captain and a slovenly crew. And the man who sat facing him in the screen was not Andrei Dunnan, or any man he'd ever seen before. A dark-faced man, with an old scar that ran down one cheek from a little below the eye. He had curly black hair on his head, and on a V of chest exposed by an open shirt. There was an ashtray in front of him, and a thin curl of smoke rose from a cigar in it, and coffee steamed in an ornate but battered silver cup beside it. He was grinning gleefully. Well, Captain Harkamon of the Enterprise, I believe. Welcome to Tanneth. Who's the gentleman with you? He isn't the Duke of Bordshaven, is he? Eight. He glanced quickly at the show-back over the screen to assure himself that his face was not betraying him. Beside him, Otto Harkamon was laughing. Why, Captain Valkenhayn, this is an unexpected pleasure. That's the space scourge you're in, I take it. What are you doing here on Tanneth? A voice from one of the speakers shouted that a second ship had been detected coming over the North Pole. The dark-faced man in the screen smirked quite complacently. That's Garvin Spasso in the lamea, he said. And what we're doing here, we've taken this planet over. We intend keeping it, too. Well, so you and Garvin have teamed up. You two were just made for one another. And you have a little planet all your very own. I'm so happy for both of you. What are you getting out of it? Beside poultry. The other self-assurance started to slip. He slapped it back into place. Don't kid me. We know why you're here. Well, we got here first. Tanneth is our planet. You think you can take it away from us? I know we could, and so do you, Harkamon told him. We outgun you and Spasso together. Why, a couple of our penises could knock the lamea apart. The only question is, do we want to bother? By now he had recovered from his surprise but not from his disappointment. If this fellow thought the nemesis was the Enterprise, before he could check himself he had finished the thought aloud. Then the Enterprise didn't come here at all. The man in the screen started. Isn't that the Enterprise you're in? Oh, no! Pardon my remistness, Captain Vulcanhane. Harkamon apologized. This is the nemesis. The gentleman with me, Lord Lucas Trask, is owner aboard, for whom I am commanding. Lord Trask, Captain Boke Vulcanhane of the Space Scourge. Captain Vulcanhane is a space viking. He said that as though expecting it to be disputed. So I am told is his associate, Captain Spasso, whose ship is approaching. You mean to tell me that the Enterprise hasn't been here? Vulcanhane was puzzled, slightly apprehensive. You mean the Duke of Wardshaven has two ships? As far as I know the Duke of Wardshaven hasn't any ships, Harkamon replied. This ship is the property and private adventure of Lord Trask. The Enterprise, for which we are looking, is owned and commanded by one Andre Dunnan. The man with the scarred face and hairy chest had picked up his cigar and was puffing on it mechanically. Now he took it out of his mouth as though he wondered how it had gotten there in the first place. But isn't the Duke of Wardshaven sending a ship here to establish a base? That was what we'd heard. We heard you'd gone from Flambeirge to Graham to command it for him. Where did you hear this? And when? On Hoth. That'd be about two thousand hours ago. A Gilgamesher brought the news from Zoxchiddle. Well, considering it was fifth or sixth hand, your information was good enough when it was fresh. It was a year and a half old when you got it, though. How long have you been here on Tanneth? About a thousand hours. Harkamon clucked sadly at that. Pity you wasted all that time. Well, it was nice talking to you, Boak. Say hello to Garvin for me when he comes up. You mean you're not staying? Vulcan Hain was horrified. An odd reaction for a man who had just been expecting a bitter battle to drive them away. You're just spacing right out again? Harkamon shrugged. Do we want to waste time here, Lord Trask? The Enterprise has obviously gone somewhere else. She was still in hyperspace when Captain Vulcan Hain and his accomplice arrived here. Is there anything worth staying for? That seemed to be the reply Harkamon was expecting. Beside poultry, that is, Harkamon shook his head. This is Captain Vulcan Hain's planet, his and Captain Spasso's. Let them be stuck with it. But look! This is a good planet. There's a big local city, maybe ten or twenty thousand people, temples and palaces and everything. Then there are a couple of old Federation cities. The one we're at is in good shape, and there's a big spaceport. We've been doing a lot of work on it, and the locals won't give you any trouble. All they have is spears and a few crossbows and matchlocks. I know, I've been here. Well, could we make some kind of a deal? Vulcan Hain asked. A mendicant wine was beginning to creep into his voice. I can get garven on screen and switch him over to your ship. Well, we have a lot of sword-world merchandise aboard, Harkamon said. We could make you good prices on some of it. How are you fixed for robotic equipment? But aren't you going to stay here? Vulcan Hain was almost in a panic. Listen, suppose I talk to Garven and we all get together on this. Just excuse me for a minute. As soon as he had blanked out, Harkamon threw back his head in gefaud, as though he had just heard the funniest and bodiest joke in the galaxy. Trask himself didn't feel like laughing. The humor escapes me, he admitted. He came here on a fool's errand. I'm sorry, Lucas. Harkamon was still shaking with mirth. I know it's a letdown, but that pair of chiseling chicken thieves. I could almost pity them if it weren't so funny. He laughed again. You know what their idea was. Trask shook his head. Who are they? What I call them, a couple of chicken thieves. They raid planets like Set, and Hertha, and Melkarth, where the locals haven't anything to fight with, or anything worth fighting for. I didn't know they'd teamed up, but that figures. Nobody else would team up with either of them. What must have happened, this story of Duke Angus' tanneth adventure must have filtered out to them, and they thought that if they got here first, I'd think it was cheaper to take them in than run them out. I probably would have, too. They do have ships, of a sort, and they do raid after a fashion. But now there isn't going to be any tanneth base, and they have a no good planet and they're stuck with it. Can't they make anything out of it themselves? Like what! Harkamon hooded. They have no equipment and they have no men, not for a job like that. The only thing they can do is space out and forget it. We could sell them equipment. We could, if they had anything to use for money. They haven't. One thing we do want to let down and give them a chance to walk on ground and look at a sky for a while. The girls here aren't too bad, either, Harkamon said. As I remember, some of them even take a bath now and then. That's the kind of news of Dunnan we're going to get. By the time we'd get to where he'd been reported, he'd be a couple of thousand light-years away, he said, disgustedly. I agree. We ought to give the men a chance to get off the ship here. We can stall this pair along for a while, and we won't have any trouble with them. The three ships were slowly converging toward a point 15,000 miles off-planet and over the sunset line. The space scourge bore the device of a mailed fist clutching a comet by the head. It looked more like a whisk-broom than a scourge. The lamea bore a coiled snake with the head, arms, and bust of a woman. Vulcan Hain and Spasso were taking their time about screening back, and he began to wonder if they weren't maneuvering the nemesis into a cross-fire position. He mentioned this to Harkaman and Alvin Carford. They both laughed. Just holding ships meetings, Carford said. They'll be yacking back and forth for a couple of hours yet. Yes, Vulcan Hain and Spasso don't own their ships, Harkaman explained. They've gone in debt to their crews for supplies and maintenance till everybody owns everything in common. The ships look like it too. They don't even command, really. They just preside over elected command-councils. Finally they had both of the more or less commanders on screen. Vulcan Hain had zipped up his shirt and put on a jacket. Garvin Spasso was a small man, partly bald. His eyes were shade too close together, and his thin mouth had a bitterly crafty twist. He began speaking at once. Captain, Boak tells me you say you're not here in the service of the Duke of Wardshaven at all, he said aggrievedly. That's correct, Harkaman said. We came here because Lord Trask thought another Gramship, the Enterprise, would be here. Since she isn't, there's no point in our being here. We do hope, though, that you won't make any difficulty about our letting down and giving our men a couple of hundred hours' liberty. They've been in hyperspace for three thousand hours. See, Spasso clamored, he wants to trick us into letting him land. Captain Spasso, Trask cut in, will you please stop insulting everybody's intelligence, your own included? Spasso glared at him, belligerently, but hopefully. I understand what you thought you were going to do here. You expected Captain Harkaman here to establish a base for the Duke of Wardshaven. And you thought, if you were here ahead of him and in a posture of defense, that he take you into the Duke's service rather than waste ammunition and risk damage and casualties wiping you out. Well, I'm very sorry, gentlemen. Captain Harkaman is in my service, and I'm not in the least interested in establishing a base on Tanneth. Captain Hain and Spasso looked at each other. At least in the two side-by-side screens their eyes shifted, each to the other screen in his own ship. I get it, Spasso cried suddenly. There's two ships, the Enterprise and this one. The Duke of Wardshaven fitted out the Enterprise, and somebody else fitted out this one. They both want to put in a base here. That opened up a glorious vista. Instead of merely capitalizing on their nuisance value, they might find themselves holding the balance of power in a struggle for the planet. All sorts of profitable perfidies were possible. Why, sure you can land, Otto, Falcon Hain said. I know what it's like to be three thousand hours in hyper myself. You're at this old city, with the two tall tower buildings, aren't you? Harkaman asked. He looked up at the view-screen. All to be about midnight there now. How's the spaceport? When I was here it was pretty bad. Oh! We've been fixing it up! We've got a big gang of locals working for us! The city was familiar, from Otto Harkaman's descriptions and from the pictures Van Larch had painted during the long jump from Graham. As they came in it looked impressive, spreading for miles around the twin buildings that spired almost three thousand feet above it, with a great spaceport like an eight-pointed star at one side. Whoever had built it, in the sunset splendor of the old Terran Federation, must have done so confident that it would have become a metropolis of a populous and prospering world. Then the sun of the Federation had gone down. Nobody knew what had happened on Tanneth after that, but evidently none of it had been good. At first the two towers seemed as sound as when they had been built. Gradually it became apparent that one was broken at the top. For the most part the smaller buildings scattered widely around them were standing, though here in their mounds of brushed grown rubble showed where some had fallen in. The spaceport looked good, a central octagon mass of buildings, the landing berths and beyond, the triangular areas of airship docks and warehouses. The central building was outwardly intact, and the ship berths seemed clear of wreckage and rubble. By the time the nemesis was following the space scourge and the lamea down, towed by her own penises, the illusion that they were approaching a living city had vanished. The inner spaces between the buildings were choked with forest growth, broken by a few small fields and garden plots. At one time there had been three of the high buildings, literally vertical cities in themselves. Where the third had stood was a glazed crater, with a ridge of fallen rubble lying away from it. Somebody must have landed a medium missile about 20 kilotons against its base. Something of the same sort had scored on the far edge of the spaceport, and one of the eight arrowheads of docks and warehouses was an indistinguishable slag pile. The rest of the city seemed to have died of neglect rather than violence. It certainly hadn't been bombed out. Harkham and thought most of the fighting had been done with sub-neutron bombs or Omega-ray bombs that killed people without damaging the real estate. Or bio-weapons, a man-made plague that had gotten out of control and all but depopulated the planet. It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs to keep a civilization running. Snash the installations and kill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don't know how to rebuild, and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of the masses, and even if the planet and the know-how is left there's nobody to do the work. I've seen planets that de-civilized both ways. Tanneth, I think, is one of the latter. That had been during one of the long after-dinner bull sessions on the way out from Graham. Somebody, one of the noble gentlemen adventurers who had joined the company after the piracy of the Enterprise and the murder, had asked, but some of them survived. Don't they know what happened? In the old times there were sorcerers. They built the old buildings by wizard-arts. Then the sorcerers fought among themselves and went away, Harkamon said. That's all they know about it. You could make any kind of an explanation out of that. As the pinnaces pulled and nudged the nemesis down to her birth, he could see people far down on the spaceport floor at work, either Vulcan, Hain, and Spasso had more men than the size of their ships indicated, or they had gotten a lot of locals to work for them. More than the population of the Moribund City, at least as Harkamon remembered it, there had been about five hundred in all. They lived by mining the old buildings for metal and trading metalwork for food and textiles and powder and other things made elsewhere. It was accessible only by ox carts traveling a hundred miles across the plains. It had been built by a contra-gravity using people with utter disregard for natural travel and transportation routes. I don't envy the poor buggers, Harkamon said, looking down at the ant-like figures on the spaceport floor. Boke, Vulcan, Hain, and Garvin, Spasso have probably made slaves of a lot of them. If I was really going to put in a base here, I wouldn't thank that pair for the kind of public relations work they've been doing among the locals. Nine. That was just about the situation. Spasso and Vulcan, Hain, and some of their officers met them on the landing stage of the big building in the middle of the spaceport, where they had established quarters. Entering and going down a long hallway, they passed a dozen men and women gathering up rubbish from the floor, with shovels and with their hands and putting it into a lifter skid. Both sexes wore shapeless garments of coarse cloth, like ponchos and flat sold sandals. Watching them was another local in a kilt, buskins, and a leather jerken. He wore a short sword on his belt and carried a wickedly thronged whip. He also wore a space-viking combat helmet, painted with the device of Spasso's lamia. He bowed as they approached, putting a hand to his forehead. After they had passed, they could hear him shouting at the others, and the sound of whip blows. You can make slaves out of people, and some will always be slave drivers. They will bow to you and then take it out on the others. Harkham's nose was twitching as though he had a bit of rotten fish caught in his moustache. We have about eight hundred of them. There were only three hundred that were any good for work here. We gathered the rest up at villages along the big river, Spasso was saying. How do you get food for them? Harkham asked. Or don't you bother? Oh, we gathered that up all over, Falcon Hain told him. We sent parties out with landing-craft. They'll let down on a village, run the locals out, gather up what's around, and bring it here. It wasn't a while they put up a fight, but the best they have is a few crossbows and some muzzle-loading muskets. When they do, we burn the village and machine-gun everybody we see. That's the stuff, Harkham unapproved. If the cow doesn't want to be milked, just shoot her. Of course, you don't get much milk out of her again, but... The room to which their hosts guided them was at the far end of the hall. It had probably been a conference room or something of the sort, and originally it had been panelled, but the panelling had long ago vanished. Holes had been dug here and there in the walls, and he remembered having noticed that the door was gone and the metal groove in which it had slid had been pried out. There was a big table in the middle, and chairs and couches covered with coloured spreads. All the furniture was hand-made, cunningly pegged together and highly polished. On the walls hung trophies of weapons, thrusting spears and throwing spears, crossbows and quarrels, and a number of heavy guns, crude things, but carefully made. "'Pick up all this stuff off the locals,' Harkham unasked. "'Yes, we got most of it at a big town down at the forks of the river,' Valkenhayn said. "'We shook it down a couple of times. That's where we recruited the fellows we're using to boss the workers.' Then he picked up a stick with a leather-covered knob and beat on a gong, bawling for wine. A voice somewhere replied, "'Yes, master, I come.' And in a few moments a woman entered, carrying a jug in either hand. She was wearing a blue bathrobe, several sizes too large for her, instead of the poncho things the slaves in the hallway wore. She had dark brown hair and grey eyes. If she had not been so obviously frightened she would have been beautiful. She set the jugs on the table and brought silver cups from a chest against the wall. When spasso dismissed her she went out hastily. "'I suppose it's silly to ask if you are paying these people anything for the work they do or for the things you take from them,' Harkham unasked. From the way the space scourge and the lamea people laughed, it evidently was.' Harkham enshrugged. "'Well, it's your planet. Make any kind of a mess out of it you want to.' "'You think we ought to pay them?' Spasso was incredulous. "'Damn bunch of savages!' "'They aren't as savage as the Zachiddle locals were when Halta-Clear took it over. You've been there. You've seen what Prince Victor does with them now. We haven't got the men nor equipment they have on Zachiddle,' Falcon Hain said. We can't afford to coddle the locals.' "'You can't afford not to,' Harkham untold him. "'You have two ships here. You can only use one for raiding. The other will have to stay here to hold the planet. If you take them both away, the locals, whom you have been studiously antagonizing, will swamp whoever you leave behind. And if you don't leave anybody behind, what's the use of having a planetary base?' "'Well, why don't you join us?' Spasso finally came out with it. With our three ships we could have a real thing here.' Harkham unlooked at him inquiringly. "'The gentlemen,' Trask said, are putting this wrongly. They mean, why don't we let them join us?' "'Well, if you want to put it like that,' Falcon Hain conceded. "'We'll admit your nemesis would be the big end of it. But why not? Three ships. We could have a real base here. Nicky Greytham's father only had two when he started on Jaganeth, and look what the Greythams got there now.' "'Are we interested?' Harkham unasked. "'Not very, I'm afraid. Of course, we've just landed. Tanneth may have great possibilities. Suppose we reserve a decision for a while and look around a little.' There were stars in the sky and, for good measure, a sliver of moon on the western horizon. It was only a small moon, but it was close. He walked to the edge of the landing stage and a lane was walking with him. The noise from inside, where the nemesis crew were feasting with those of the lamea and space scourge, grew fainter. To the south a star moved. One of the penises they had left on off-planet watch. There was firelight far below and he could hear singing. Suddenly he realized that it was the poor devils of locals whom Valconhane and Spasso had enslaved. Elaine went away quickly. "'Have your fill of space viking glamour, Lucas?' he turned. It was Baron Rathmore, who had come along to serve for a year or so, and then hitcher-ride home from some base-planet and cash in politically on having been with Lucas Trask. For the moment, I'm told that this lot aren't typical. I hope not, there are a pack of sadistic brutes and pigish along with it. Well, brutality and bad manners I can condone, but Spasso and Valconhane are a pair of ignominious little crooks and stupid along with it. If Andrei Dunin had gotten here ahead of us, he might have done one good thing in this wretched life. I can't understand why he didn't come here." "'I think he still will,' Rathmore said. I knew him, and I knew Neville Orm, Orm's ambitious and Dunin's insanely vindictive. He broke off with a sour laugh. I'm telling you that." "'Why didn't he come here directly, then?' "'Maybe he doesn't want a base on Tannath. That would be something constructive. Dunin's a destroyer. I think he took that cargo of equipment somewhere and sold it. I think he'll wait till he's fairly sure the other ship is finished. Then he'll come in and shoot the place up, the way,' he bit off that abruptly. The way he did my wedding. I think of it all the time." The next morning he and Harkaman took an air-car and went to look at the city at the forks of the river. It was completely new, in the sense that it had been built since the collapse of Federation civilization and the loss of civilized technologies. It was huddled on a long, irregularly triangular mound, evidently to raise it above flood-level. Generations of labor must have gone into it. To the eyes of a civilization using contra-gravity and powered equipment, it wasn't at all impressive. Fifty to a hundred men with adequate equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of earth, cartload after cartload, creaking behind straining beasts, timber after timber, cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone after stone, and brick after brick that he could appreciate it. They even had it walled, with a palisade of tree trunks behind which earth and rocks had been banked, and along the river were docks, at which boats were moored. The locals simply called it Trade Town. As they approached a big gong began booming and a white puff of smoke was followed by the thud of a signal gun. The boats, long canoe-like craft and round-bowed, many oared barges, put out hastily into the river. Through binoculars they could see people scattering from the surrounding fields, driving cattle ahead of them. By the time they were over the city, nobody was in sight. They seemed to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the 1900 odd hours in which they had been exposed to the figurative mercies of Boak, Vulcanhane, and Garvin Spasso. It hadn't saved them entirely. A section of the city had been burned, and there were evidences of shelling. Light, chemical explosive stuff. This city was too good a cow for even those two to kill before the milking was over. They circled slowly over it at a thousand feet. When they turned away, black smoke began rising from what might have been pottery works or brick kilns on the outskirts. Something resinous had evidently been fed to the fires. Other columns of black smoke began rising across the countryside on both sides of the river. You know, these people are civilized, if you don't limit the term to contragravity and nuclear energy, Harkman said. They have gun powder for one thing, and I can think of some rather impressive old-terrain civilizations that didn't have that much. They have an organized society, and anybody who has that is starting towards civilization. I hate to think of what'll happen to this planet if Spasso and Vulcanhane stay here long. Might be a good thing in the long run. Good things in the long run are often tough while they're happening. I know what'll happen to Spasso and Vulcanhane, though. They'll start de-civilizing themselves. They'll stay here for a while, and when they need something they can't take from the locals. They'll go chicken-stealing after it. But most of the time they'll stay here lording it over their slaves, and finally their ships will wear out and they won't be able to fix them. Then some time the locals'll jump them when they aren't watching and wipe them out. But in the meantime the locals'll learn a lot from them. They turn the air-car west again along the river. They looked at a few villages. One or two dated from the Federation period. They had been plantations before whatever it was had happened. More had been built within the past five centuries. A couple had recently been destroyed, in punishment for the crime of self-defense. You know, he said at length, I'm going to do everybody a favor. I'm going to let Spasso and Vulcanhane persuade me to take this planet away from them. Harkaman, who was piloting, turned sharply. You crazy or something? When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy, ask him what he means. Who said that? On target, Harkaman grinned. What do you mean, Lord Trask? I can't catch Dunnan by pursuit. I'll have to get him by interception. You know the source of that quotation, too. This looks to me like a good place to intercept him. When he learns I have a base here he'll hit it sooner or later, and even if he doesn't we can pick up more information on him when ships start coming in here than we would batting around all over the old Federation. Harkaman considered for a moment, then nodded. Yes, if we could set up a base like Nergal or Zachidl, he agreed. There'll be four or five ships, space vikings, traders, Gilgameshers and so on, on either of those planets all the time. If we had the cargo Dunnan took to space in the Enterprise we could start a base like that. But we haven't anything near what we need, and you know what Spasso and Valkenhane have. We can get it from Graham. As it stands, the investors in the Tanneth adventure, from Duke Angus down, lost everything they put into it. If they're willing to throw some good money after bad they can get it back and a handsome prophet to boot. And there ought to be planets above the rowboat and ox cart level not too far away that could be rated for a lot of things we'd need. That's right. I know of half a dozen within five hundred light years. They won't be the kind Spasso and Valkenhane are in the habit of raiding though, and besides machinery we can get gold and valuable merchandise that could be sold on Graham. And if we could make a go of it you'd go farther hunting Dunnan by sitting here on Tanneth than by going looking for him. That was the way we used to hunt marsh pigs on Kolada when I was a kid. Just find a good place and sit down and wait. They had Valkenhane and Spasso aboard the Nemesis for dinner. It didn't take much guiding to keep the conversation on the subject of Tanneth and its resources, advantages, and possibilities. Finally when they had reached Brandy and Coffey, Trask said idly, I believe together we could really make something out of this planet. That's what we've been telling you all along, Spasso broke in eagerly. This is a wonderful planet. It could be. All it has now is possibilities. We'd need a spaceport for one thing. Well, what's this here? Valkenhane wanted to know. It was a spaceport, Harkman told him. It could be one again. And we'd need a shipyard, capable of any kind of heavy repair work. Capable of building a complete ship, in fact. I never saw a ship come into a viking base-planet with any kind of a cargo worth dickering over that hadn't taken some damage in getting it. Prince Victor of Zachiddel makes a good half of his money on ship repairs, and so do Niki Gratham on Jaganeth, and the Everards on Hoth. And engine works, hyperdrive, normal space and pseudo-grave, Trask added. And a steel mill, and a collapsed matter-plant. And robotic equipment works. And... Oh, that's out of all reason, Valkenhane cried. It would take twenty trips with a ship the size of this one to get all that stuff here. And how'd we ever be able to pay for it? That's the sort of base Duke Angus of Wardshaven planned. The Enterprise, practically a duplicate of the nemesis, carried everything that would be needed to get it started when she was pirated. When she was, Now you're going to have to tell the gentleman the truth, Harkham and chuckled. I intend to. He laid his cigar down, sipped some of his brandy, and explained about Duke Angus' tenet adventure. It was part of a larger plan. Angus wanted to gain economic supremacy for Wardshaven to forward his political ambitions. It was, however, an entirely practical business proposition. I was opposed to it because I thought it would be too good a proposition for Tanneth and work to the disadvantage of the home planted in the end. He told them about the Enterprise and the cargo of industrial and construction equipment she carried, and then told them how Andrei Dunin had pirated her. That wouldn't have annoyed me at all. I had no money invested in the project. What did annoy me, to put it mildly, was that just before he took the ship out Dunin shot up my wedding, wounded me and my father-in-law, and killed the lady to whom I had been married for less than half an hour. I fitted out this ship at my own expense, took on Captain Harkhaman, who had been left without a command when the Enterprise was pirated, and came out here to hunt Dunin down and kill him. I believe that I can do that best by establishing a base on Tanneth myself. The base will have to be operated at a profit, or it can't be operated at all. He picked up the cigar again and puffed slowly. I am inviting you, gentlemen, to join me as partners. Well, you still haven't told us how we're going to get the money to finance it, Spasso insisted. The Duke of Wardshaven and the others who invested in the original Tanneth adventure will put it up. It's the only way they can recover what they lost on the Enterprise. But then this Duke of Wardshaven will be running it, not us, Vulcan Hain objected. The Duke of Wardshaven, Harkhaman reminded him, is on Gram. We are here on Tanneth. There are three thousand light years between. That seemed a satisfactory answer. Spasso, however, wanted to know who would run things here on Tanneth. Well, have to hold a meeting of all three crews, he began. We will do nothing of the kind, Trask told him. I will be running things here on Tanneth. You people may allow your orders to be debated and voted on, but I don't. You will inform your respective crews to that effect. Any orders you give them in my name will be obeyed without argument. I don't know how the men will take that, Vulcan Hain said. I know how they'll take it if they're smart, Harkhaman told him, and I know what'll happen if they aren't. I know how you've been running your ships, or how your ships' crews have been running you. Well, we don't do it that way. Lucas Trask is owner, and I'm captain. I obey his orders on what's to be done, and everybody else obeys mine on how to do it. Spasso looked at Vulcan Hain, then shrugged. That's how the man wants it, Boke. You want to give him an argument? I don't. The first order, Trask said, is that these people you have working here are to be paid. They are not to be beaten by these plug uglies you have guarding them. If any of them want to leave, they may do so. They will be given presents and furnished transportation home. Those who wish to stay will be issued rations, furnished with clothing and bedding and so on as they need it, and paid wages. We'll work out some kind of a pay token system and set up a commissary where they can buy things. Discs of plastic or titanium or something, stamped and uncounter-fittable. Get Alvin Carford to see about that. Organize work gangs, and promote the best and most intelligent to foremen. And those guards could be taken in hand by some ground-fighter sergeant and given sword-world weapons and tactical training. Use them to train others. They'd need a seapoy army of some sort. Even the best of good will is no substitute for armed force, conspicuously displayed and unhesitatingly used when necessary. And there'll be no more of this raiding villages for food or anything else. We will pay for anything we get from any of the locals. We'll have trouble about that, Valkenheim predicted. Our men think anything a local has belongs to anybody who can take it. So do I, Harkamon said, on a planet I'm raiding. This is our planet and our locals. We don't raid our own planet or our own people. You'll just have to teach them that. End of Chapter 9. CHAPTERS 10 THROUGH 12 of SPACE VIKING by H. B. Piper. Read by Mark Nelson. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. SPACE VIKING. 10. It took Valkenheim and Spazzo more time and argument to convince their crews than Trask thought necessary. Harkamon seemed satisfied, and so was Baron Rathmore, the wards' haven politician. It's like talking a lot of uncommitted small landholders into taking somebody's livery and maintenance, the latter said. You can't use too much pressure. Make them think it's their own idea. There were meetings of both crews with heated arguments. Baron Rathmore made frequent speeches, while Lord Trask of Tannath and Admiral Harkamon, the titles were Rathmore's suggestion, remained loftily aloof. On both ships everybody owned everything in common, which meant that nobody owned anything. They had taken over Tannath on the same basis of diffused ownership, and nobody in either crew was quite stupid enough to think that they could do anything with the planet by themselves. By joining the Nemesis it appeared that they were getting something for nothing. In the end they voted to place themselves under the authority of Lord Trask and Admiral Harkamon. After all, Tannath would be a feudal lordship, and the three ships together a fleet. Admiral Harkamon's first act of authority was to order a general inspection of fleet units. He wasn't shocked by the condition of the two ships, but that was only because he had expected much worse. They were spaceworthy, after all, they had gotten here from Hoth under their own power. They were only combat-worthy if the combat weren't too severe. His original estimate that the Nemesis could have knocked both of them to pieces was, if anything, over-conservative. The engines were only in fair shape, and the armament was bad. We aren't going to spend our time sitting here on Tannath, he told the two captains. This planet is a raiding base, and raiding is the operative word, and we are not going to raid easy planets. A planet that can be raided with impunity isn't worth the time it takes getting to it. We are going to have to fight on every planet we hit, and I am not going to jeopardize the lives of the men under me, which includes your crews as well as mine, because of underpowered and underarmed ships. Spazzo tried to argue. We've been getting along. Harkamon cursed. Yes, I know how you've been getting along. Chicken stealing on planets like Set in Zapatotec and Melcharth. Not making enough to cover maintenance expenses. That's why your ship's in the shape she is. Well, those days are over. Both ships ought to have a full overhaul, but we'll have to skip that till we have a shipyard of our own. But I will insist, at least, that your guns and launchers are in order. And your detection equipment. You didn't get a fix on the nemesis till we were less than twenty thousand miles off-planet. We had better get the Lemia in condition first, Trask said. We can put her on off-planet watch instead of that pair of penises. Work on the Lemia started the next day, and considerable friction heat was generated between her officers and the engineer sent over from the nemesis. Baron Rathmore went aboard, and came back, laughing. You know how that ship's run, he asked. There's a sort of Soviet of officers. Chief Engineer, exec, guns and missiles, astrogator and so on. Spasso's just an animated ventriloquist, dummy. I talk to all of them. None of them can pin me down to anything, but they think we're going to heave Spasso out of command and appoint one of them, and each one thinks he'll be it. I don't know how long that'll last. It's a string and tape job, like the one we're having to do on the ship. It'll hold till we get something better. We'll have to get rid of Spasso, Harkamon agreed. I think we'll put one of our own people in his place. Vulcan Hain can stay in command of the space scourge. He's a spaceman, but Spasso's not good for anything. The local problem was complicated, too. The locals spoke lingua terra of a sort, like every descendant of the race that had gone out from the sol system in the third century, but it was a barely comprehensible sort. On civilized planets the language had been frozen unalterably in microbooks and voice tapes, but microbooks can only be read and sound tapes heard with the aid of electricity, and Tanneth had lost that long ago. Most of the people Spasso and Vulcan Hain had kidnapped and enslaved came from villages within a radius of five hundred miles. About half of them wanted to be repatriated. They were given gifts of knives, tools, blankets, and bits of metal, which seemed to be the chief standard of value in medium of exchange, and shipped home. Finding their proper villages was not easy. At each such village the news was spread that the space vikings would hereafter pay for what they received. The lamea was overhauled as rapidly as possible. She was still far from being a good ship, but she was much closer being one than before. She was fitted with the best detection equipment that could be assembled and put on orbit. Alvin Carford took command of her, with some of Spasso's officers, some of Alcan Hain's, and a few from the Nemesis. Harkman was intending to use her for retraining of all the lamea and space-scourge officers, and rotated them back and forth. The labor guards, a score in number, were relieved of their duties, issued sword-world firearms and given intensive training. The trade tokens, stamps of colored plastic were introduced, and a store was set up where they could be exchanged for sword-world items. After a while it dawned on the locals that the tokens could also be used for trading among themselves. Money seemed to have been one of the adjuncts of civilization that had been lost along Tanneth's downward path. A few of them were able to use contragravity hand lifters and hand-toed lifter skids. Several were even learning to operate things like bulldozers, at least to the extent of knowing which lever or button did what. Give them a little time, Trask thought, watching a gang at work down on the spaceport floor. It wouldn't be many years before half of them would be piloting air-cars. As soon as the lamea was on orbital watch the space scourge was set down at the spaceport and work started on her. It was decided that Valkenhayne would take her to Graham. Enough nemesis people would go along to ensure good faith on his part and to talk to Duke Angus and the Tanneth investors. Baron Rathmore and Patrick Morland and several other wards-haven gentlemen adventurers for the latter function, Alvin Carford to act as Valkenhayne's exec with private orders to supersede him in command, if necessary, and go out Kirby to do the astrogating. We'll have to take the nemesis and the space scourge out first and make a big raid, Harkamon said. We can't send the space scourge back to Graham empty. When Baron Rathmore and Lord Valprie and the rest of them talk to Duke Angus and the Tanneth investors they'll have to have a lot more than some travel films of Tanneth. They'll have to be able to show that Tanneth is producing. We ought to have a little money of our own to invest, too. But Otto, both ships? That worried trask. Suppose Dunnan comes and finds nobody here but Spasso and the Lamea. Chance we'll have to take. Personally, I think we have a year to a year and a half before Dunnan shows up here. I know we were fool trying to guess what he'd do before, but the sort of raid I have in mind will need two ships, and in any case, I don't want to leave both those ships here while we're gone, even if you do. When it comes to that, I don't think I do either. But we can't trust Spasso here alone, can we? We'll leave enough of our people to make sure. We'll leave Alvin, that'll mean a lot of work for me that he'd otherwise do on the ship, and Baron Rathmore and young Valprie, and the men who've been training our sepoys. We can shuffle things around and leave some of Alkenhain's men in place of some of Spasso's. We might even talk Spasso into going along. That'll mean having to endure him at our table, but it would be wise. Have you picked a place to raid? Three of them. First, Capara. That's only thirty light-years from here. That won't amount to much, just chicken-stealing. It'll give our green hands some relatively safe combat training, and it'll give us some idea of how Spasso's and Valkenhain's people behave, and give them confidence for the next job. And then... Amaterasu. My information about Amaterasu is about twenty years old. A lot of things can happen in twenty years. All I know of it, I was never there myself, is it's fairly civilized. About like Terra, just before the beginning of the atomic era. No nuclear energy, they lost that, and of course nothing beyond it, but they have hydroelectric and solar electric power, and non-nuclear jet aircraft, and some very good chemical explosive weapons, which they use very freely on each other. It was last known to have been raided by a ship from Excalibur twenty years ago. That sounds promising, and the third planet? Beowulf. We won't take enough damage on Amaterasu to make any difference there, but if we save Amaterasu for last, we might be needing too many repairs. It's like that? Yes, they have nuclear energy. I don't think it would be wise to mention Beowulf to Captain Spasso and Valkenhain. Wait till we've hit Capara and Amaterasu. They may be feeling like heroes then. 11 Capara left a bad taste in Trask's mouth. He was still tasting it when the colored turbulence died out of the screen and left the gray nothingness of hyperspace. Garvin Spasso. They had had no trouble in inducing him to come along. He was staring avidly at the screen as though he could still see the ravished planet they had left. That was a good one. That was a good one, he was crowing. He had said that a dozen times since they had lifted out. Three cities in five days, and all the stuff we gathered up around them, we took over two million stillers, and did ten times as much damage getting it, and there were no scale of values by which to compute the death and suffering. Knock it off, Spasso. You said that before. There was a time when he wouldn't have spoken to the fellow or anybody else like that. Gresham's law extended. Bad manners drive out good manners. Spasso turned on him indignantly. Who do you think you are? He thinks he's Lord Trask of Tannath, Harkamon said. He's right, too. He is. He looked searchingly at Trask for a moment, then turned back to Spasso. I'm just as tired as he is of hearing you pop your mouth about a lousy two million stillers. Nearer a million and a half, but two million's nothing to pop about. Maybe it would be for the lamea, but we have a three-ship fleet and a planetary base to meet expenses on. Out of this raid, a ground fighter or an able spaceman will get a hundred and fifty stillers. We'll get about a thousand ourselves. How long do you think we can stay in business doing this kind of chicken-stealing? You call this chicken-stealing? I call it chicken-stealing, and so you before we get back to Tannath, if you live that long. For a moment Spasso was still affronted. Then, temporarily, his vulpine face showed avaricious hope and then apprehension. Evidently he knew Otto Harkamon's reputation, and some of the things Harkamon had done weren't his idea of an easy way to make money. Capara had been easy. The locals hadn't anything to fight with. Small arms and light cannon, which hadn't been able to fire more than a few rounds. Wherever they had attempted resistance, the combat cars had swooped in, dropping bombs and firing machine guns and autocannon. Yet they had fought, bitterly and hopelessly, just as he would have, defending Traskon. Trask busied himself getting coffee and a cigarette from one of the robots. When he looked up, Spasso had gone away, and Harkamon was sitting on the edge of the desk, loading his short pipe. Well, you saw the elephant, Lucas, Harkamon said. You don't seem to have liked it. Elephant? Old Terran expression, I read somewhere. All I know is that an elephant was an animal about the size of one of your gram megathears. The expression means, experiencing something for the first time, which makes a great impression. Elephants must have been something to see. This was your first Viking raid. You've seen it now. He'd been in combat before. He'd led fighting men of Traskon during the boundary dispute with Baron Manuel, and there were always bandits and cattle-rustlers. He'd thought it would be like that. He remembered, five days, or was it five ages ago, his excited anticipation as the city grew and spread in the screen, and the nemesis came dropping down toward it. The pinnaces, his four and the two from the space scourge, had gone spiraling out a hundred miles beyond the city. The space scourge had gone into a tighter circle, twenty miles from its center. The nemesis had continued her relentless descent until she was ten miles from the ground, before she began spewing out landing-craft and combat cars, and the little egg-shaped one-man air cavalry mounts. It had been thrilling. Everything had gone perfectly. Not even Valkenhayne's gang had goofed. Then the screen views had begun coming in. The brief and hopeless fight in the city. He could still see that silly little field-gun. It must have been around seventy or eighty millimetre on a high-wheeled carriage, drawn by six shaggy, bandy-legged beasts. They had gotten it unlimbered and were trying to get it on a target when a rocket from an air-car landed directly under the muzzle. Gun, case on, crew, even the draft team fifty yards behind had simply vanished. Or the little company, some of them women, trying to defend the top of a tall and half-ruinous building with rifles and pistols. One air cavalryman wiped them all out with his machine-guns. They don't have a chance, he'd said, half-sick, but they keep on fighting. Yes, stupid of them, isn't it? Harkamon, beside him, had said. What would you do in their place? Fight, try to kill as many space vikings as I could before they got me. Tarot humans are all stupid like that. That's why we're human. If the taking of the city had been a massacre, the sack that had followed had been a man-made hell. He had gone down, along with Harkamon, while the fighting, if it could be so called, was still going on. Harkamon had suggested that the men ought to see him moving about among them. For his own part, he had felt a compulsion to share their guilt. He and Sir Patrick Morland had been on foot together in one of the big hollow buildings that had stood since Capara had been a member republic of the Terran Federation. The air was acrid with smoke, powder smoke, and smoke of burning. It was surprising how much would burn in this city of concrete and vitrified stone. It was surprising, too, how well kept everything was, at least on the ground level. These people had taken pride in their city. They found themselves alone in a great empty hallway. The noise and horror of the sack had moved away from them, or they from it. And then, when they entered a side-hall, they saw a man, one of the locals, squatting on the floor with the body of a woman cradled on his lap. She was dead, half her head had been blown off, but he was clasping her tightly, her blood staining his shirt, and sobbing heartbrokenly. A carbine lay forgotten on the floor beside him. Poor devil, Morland said, and started forward. No! Tras stopped him with his left hand. With his right, he drew his pistol and shot the man dead. Morland was horrified. Great Satan, Lucas! Why did you do that? I wish Andrei Dunnan had done that for me. He thumbed the safety on and holstered the pistol. None of this would be happening if he had. How many more happinesses do you think we've smashed here today? And we don't even have Dunnan's excuse of madness. The next morning, with everything of value collected and sent aboard, they had started cross-country for five hundred miles to another city. The first hundred, over a countryside, a smoke from burning villages, Valkenhayne's men had pillaged the night before. There was no warning. Capara had lost electricity and radio and telegraph, and the spread of news was at the speed of one of the beasts the locals insisted on calling horses. By mid-afternoon they had finished with that city. It had been as bad as the first one. One thing, it was the center of a considerable cattle country. The cattle were native to the planet, heavy-bodied unicorns the size of a gram bisonoid, or one of the slightly mutated Terran caribows on Tanneth, with long hair like a Terran yak. He had detailed a dozen of the Nemesis ground fighters who had been vaqueros on his Traskin ranches to collect a score of cows and four likely bulls, with enough fodder to last them on the voyage. The odds were strongly against any of them living to acclimat themselves to Tanneth, but if they did they might prove to be one of the most valuable pieces of loot from Capara. The third city was at the forks of a river, like Trade Town on Tanneth. Unlike it it was a real metropolis. They should have gone there, first of all. They spent two days systematically pillaging it. The comparens carried on considerable river traffic, with stern-wheel steamboats and the waterfront was lined with warehouses crammed with every sort of merchandise. Even better the comparens had money, and for the most part it was gold specie, and the bank vaults were full of it. Unfortunately the city had been built since the fall of the Federation, and the climb up from the barbarism that had followed and a great deal of it was wood. Fire started almost at once, and it was almost completely on fire by the end of the second day. It had been visible in the telescopic screen even after they were out of atmosphere. A black smear until the turning planet carried it into darkness and then a lurid glow. It was a filthy business. Harkamon nodded. Robbery and murder always are. You didn't have to ask me who said that space vikings are professional robbers and murderers, but who was it said that he didn't care how many planets were raided and how many innocents massacred in the old Federation? A dead man, Lucas Trask of Traskin. You wish now that you'd kept Traskin and stayed on Gram? No, if I had, I'd have spent every hour wishing I was doing what I'm doing now. I can get used to this, I suppose. I think you will, at least you kept your rations down. I didn't on my first raid and had bad dreams about it for a year. He gave his coffee-cup back to the robot and got to his feet. Get a little rest for a couple of hours, then draw some Alcadote vitamin pills from the medic. As soon as things are secured, there'll be parties all over the ship and we'll be expected to look in on every one of them, have a drink, and say, well done, boys. Elaine came to him while he was resting. She looked at him in horror and he tried to hide his face from her and then he realized that he was trying to hide it from himself. 12. It came straight down on Eglensby on Amaterasu, the nemesis and space scourge side by side. The radar had picked them up at 0.5 light seconds. By this time the whole planet knew they were coming, and nobody was wondering why. Paul Corref was monitoring at least twenty radio stations, assigning somebody to each one as it was identified. What was coming in was uniformly excited, some panicky, and all in fairly standard linguatera. Garvin Spasso was perturbed. So, in the communication screen from the space scourge, was Boke Valkenhayn. They got radio, and they got radar, he clamored. Well, so what? Harkaman asked. They had radio and radar twenty years ago, when Rock Morgan was here in the Colesack. But they don't have nuclear energy, do they? Well, no. I'm picking up a lot of industrial electrical discharge, but nothing nuclear. All right, a man with a club can lick a man with his fists, a man with a gun can lick half a dozen with clubs, and two ships with nuclear weapons can lick a whole planet without them. Think it's time, Lucas? He nodded. Paul, can you cut in on that Eglensby station yet? What are you going to do? Valkenhayn wanted to know, against it, in advance. Summon them to surrender. If they don't, we will drop a hell-burner, and then we will pick out another city and summon it to surrender. I don't think the second one will refuse. If we are going to be murderers, we'll do it right this time. Valkenhayn was aghast, probably at the idea of burning an unlooted city. Spasso was sputtering something about, teach the dirty neo-barbs a lesson! Korov told him he was switched on. He picked up a hand-phone. Space Vikings, Nemesis and Space Scourge, calling the city of Eglensby. Space Vikings! He repeated it for over a minute. There was no reply. Van, he called guns and missiles. A sub-crit display job, about four miles over the city. He laid the phone down and looked to the underside view-screen. A little later a silvery shape dropped away from the ship's south pole. The telescopic screen went off, and the un-magnified screen darkened as the filters went on. Valkenhayn aboard the other ship was shouting a warning about his own screens. The only unfiltered screen aboard the Nemesis was the one tuned to the falling missile. The city of Eglensby rushed upward in it, and then it went suddenly dark. There was an orange-yellow blaze in the other screens. After a while the filters went off and the telescopic screen went on again. He picked up the phone. Space Vikings calling Eglensby. This is your last warning. Communicate at once. Less than a minute later a voice came out of one of the speakers. Eglensby calling Space Vikings. Your bomb has done great damage. Will you hold your fire until somebody in authority can communicate with you? This is the Chief Operator at the Central State Telecast Station. I have no authority to say anything to you or discuss anything. Oh, good. That sounds like a dictatorship, Harkman was saying. Grab the dictator and shove a pistol in his face and you have everything. There is nothing to discuss. Get somebody who has authority to surrender the city to us. If this is not done within the hour, the city and everybody in it will be obliterated. Only minutes later a new voice said. This is Gunsalis Jan, Secretary to Pedrosan Pedro, President of the Council of Syndics. We will switch President Pedrosan over as soon as we can speak directly to the personage and supreme command of your ships. That is myself. Switch him to me at once. After a delay of less than fifteen seconds they had President Pedrosan Pedro. We are prepared to resist, but we realize what this would cost in lives and destruction of property. He began. You don't begin to. Do you know anything about nuclear weapons? From history we have no nuclear power of any sort. We can find no fissionables on this planet. The cost, as you put it, would be everything and everybody in Eglensby and for a radius of almost a hundred miles. Are you still prepared to resist? The President of the Council of Syndics wasn't and said so. Trask asked him how much authority his position gave him. I have all powers in any emergency. I think, the voice added tonelessly, that this is an emergency. The Council will automatically ratify any decision I make. Harkamon depressed a button in front of him. What I said, dictatorship with parliamentary false front. If he isn't a false front dictator for some oligarchy, he motioned to Harkamon to take his thumb off the button. How large is this Council? 16, elected by the syndicates they represent. There is the syndicate of labor, the syndicate of manufacturers, the syndicate of small businesses, the corporate state, first century pre-atomic entera. Benny the moose, Harkamon said. Let's all go down and talk to them. When they were sure that the public had been warned to make no resistance, the nemesis went down to two miles, bulking over the center of the city. The buildings were low by the standards of a contra-gravity using people, the highest barely a thousand feet and few over five hundred, and they were more closely set than sword-worlders were accustomed to, with broad roadways between. In several places there were queer arrangements of crossed roadways, apparently leading nowhere. Harkamon laughed when he saw them. Airstrips! I've seen them on other planets where they've lost contra-gravity. Four winged aircraft, powered by chemical fuel. I hope we have time for me to look around here. I'll bet they even have railroads here. The great damage caused by the bomb was about equal to the effect of a medium hurricane. He had seen worse from high winds at Traskin. Mostly, it had been moral, which had been the kind intended. They met President Pedrocin and the Council of Syndics in a spacious and well-furnished chamber near the top of one of the medium-high buildings. Valkenhayn was surprised. In a loud aside, he considered that these people must be almost civilized. They were introduced. Amaterasu and surnames preceded personal names, which hinted at a culture and a political organization making much use of registration by alphabetical list. They all wore garments which had the indefinable but unmistakable appearance of uniforms. When they had all seated themselves at a large oval table, Harkamon drew his pistol and used the butt for a gavel. Lord Trask, will you deal with these people directly? he asked, stiffly formal. Certainly, Admiral. He spoke to the President, ignoring the others. We wanted understood that we control this city, and we expect complete submission. As long as you remain submissive to us, we will do no damage beyond removal of the things we wish to take from it, and there will be no violence to any of your people, or any indiscriminate vandalism. The visit we are paying you will cost you heavily, make no mistake about that, but whatever the cost, it will be a cheap price for avoiding what we might otherwise do. The President and the Syndix exchanged relieved glances. Let the taxpayers worry about the cost. They'd come out of it with whole skins. You understand, we want maximum value and minimum bulk, he continued. Jewels, objects of art, furs, the better grades of luxury goods of all kinds, rare element metals, and monetary metals, gold and platinum. You have metallic-based currency, I suppose? Oh, no! President Pedrocin was slightly scandalized. Our currency is based on services to society. Our monetary unit is simply called a credit. Harkman snorted impolitely. Evidently he'd seen economic systems like that before. Trask wanted to know if they used gold or platinum at all. Gold, to some extent for jewelry. Evidently they weren't complete economic puritans. And platinum in industry, of course. If they want gold, they should have raided Stahlgeland, one of the Syndix said. They have a gold standard currency. From the way he said it he might have been accusing them of eating with their fingers, and possibly of eating their own young. I know, the maps we are using for this planet are a few centuries old. Stahlgeland doesn't seem to appear on them. I wish it didn't appear on ours either. That was General Degros Ector, Syndix for State Protection. It would have been a good thing for this whole planet if you decided to raid them instead of us, somebody else said. It isn't too late for these gentlemen to make that decision, Pedrocin said. I gather that gold is a monetary medal among your people. When Trask nodded he continued. It is also the basis of the Stahlgonian currency. The actual currency is paper, theoretically redeemable in gold. In actuality the circulation of gold has been prohibited, and the entire gold wealth of the nation is concentrated in vaults at three depositories. We know exactly where they are. You begin to interest me, President Pedrocin. I do. Well, you have two large spaceships and six smaller craft. You have nuclear weapons, something nobody on this planet has. You have contragravity, something that is hardly more than a legend here. On the other hand, we have a million and a half ground troops, jet aircraft, armored ground vehicles, and chemical weapons. If you will undertake to attack Stahlgeland, we will place this entire force at your disposal. General Draggros will command them as you direct. All that we ask is that, when you have loaded the gold hordes of Stahlgeland aboard your ships, you will leave our troops in possession of the country. That was all there was to that meeting. There was a second one. Only Trask, Harkamon, and Sir Patrick Morlin represented the space Vikings, and the Eglensby Government was represented by President Pedrocin and General Draggros. They met more intimately in a smaller and more luxurious room in the same building. If you're going to declare war on Stahlgeland, you'd better get along with it, Morlin advised. What? Pedrocin seemed to have only the vaguest idea of what he was talking about. You mean warn them? Certainly not. We will attack them by surprise. It will be nothing but plain self-defense, he added righteously. The oligarchic capitalists of Stahlgeland have been plotting to attack us for years. Yes, if you had carried out your original intention of looting Eglensby, they would have invaded us the moment your ships lifted out. It's exactly what I do in their place. But you maintain nominally friendly relations with them. Of course, we are civilized, the peace-loving government and people of Eglensby—yes, Mr. President, I understand—and they have an embassy here? They call it that, cried Draggros. It is a nest of vipers, a plague spot of espionage and subversion. We'll grab that ourselves right away, Harkman said. You won't be able to round up all their agents outside it, and if we tried to, it would cause suspicion. We will have to put up a front to deceive them. Yes, you will go on the air at once, calling on the people to collaborate with us, and you will specifically order your troops mobilized to assist us in collecting the tribute we are levying on Eglensby, Trask said. In that way, if any Stahlgonian spies see your troops concentrated around our landing-craft, they'll think it's to help us load our loot, and will announce that a large part of the tribute will consist of military equipment, Draggros added. That will explain why our guns and tanks are being loaded on your contra-gravity vehicles. When the Stahlgonian embassy was seized by the Space Vikings, the ambassador asked to be taken at once to their leader. He had a proposition. If the Space Vikings would completely disable the army of Eglensby and admit Stahlgonian troops when they were ready to leave, the invaders would bring with them 10,000 kilos of gold. Trask affected to be very hospitable to the offer. Stahlgon land lay across a narrow and shallow sea from the state of Eglensby. It was dotted with islands, and every one of them was, in turn, dotted with oil wells. Petroleum was what kept the aircraft and ground vehicles of Amaterasu in operation. Oil, rather than etiology, was at the root of the enmity between the two nations. Apparently the Stahlgonian espionage in Eglensby was completely deceived, and the reports Trask allowed the captive ambassador to make confirm the deception. Hourly, the Eglensby radio stations poured out exhortations to the people to cooperate with the Space Vikings, with an occasional lamentation about the masses of war materials being taken. Eglensby espionage in Stahlgon land was similarly active. The Stahlgonian armies were being masked at four seaports on the coast facing Eglensby, and there was a frantic gathering of every sort of ship available. By this time any sympathy that Trask might have felt for either party had evaporated. The invasion of Stahlgon land started the fifth morning after their arrival over Eglensby. Before dawn the six penises went in, making a wide sweep around the curvature of the planet and coming in from the north, two to each of the three gold troves. They were detected by radar eventually, but too late for any effective resistance to be organized. Two were even taken without a shot. By mid-morning all three had been blown open and the ingots and species were being removed. The four seaports from whence the Stahlgonian invasion of Eglensby was to have been launched were neutralized by nuclear bombing. Neutralized was a nice word, Trask thought. There was no echo in it of the screams of the still living, maimed and burned and blinded around the fringes of ground zero. The nemesis and the space scourge from landing craft and from the ships themselves landed Eglensby troops on Stahlgonopolis. While they were sacking the city with all the usual atrocities the space vikings were loading the gold and anything else that was of more than ordinary value aboard the ships. They were still at it the next morning when President Pedrocin arrived at the newly conquered capital, announcing his intention of putting the Stahlgonian chief of state and his cabinet on trial as war criminals. Before sunset they were back over Eglensby. The loot might run as high as a half billion Excalibur Stellars. Boke, Valkenhayn and Garvin Spasso were simply beyond astonishment and beyond words. The looting of Eglensby then began. They gathered up machinery and stocks of steel and light metal alloys. The city was full of warehouses and the warehouses were crammed with valuables. In spite of the socialistic and egalitarian verbiage behind which the government operated there seemed to be a numerous elite class and if gold were not a monetary medal it was not despised for purposes of ostentation. There were several large art museums. Van Larch, their nearest approach to an art specialist, took charge of culling the best from them. And there was a vast public library. Into this Otto Harkman vanished with half a dozen men and a contragravity scow. Its historical section would be much poorer in the future. President Pedrocin Pedro was on the radio from Stahlgonopolis that night. Is this how you space Vikings keep faith? He demanded indignantly. You've abandoned me and my army here in Stahlgaland and you're sacking Eglensby. You promised to leave Eglensby alone if I helped you get the gold of Stahlgaland. I promised nothing of the kind. I promised to help you take Stahlgaland. You've taken it, Trask told him. I promised to avoid unnecessary damage or violence. I've already hanged a dozen of my own men for rape, murder, and wanton vandalism. Now we expect to be out of here in twenty-four hours. You'd better be back here before then. Your own people are starting to loot. We did not promise to control them for you. That was true. What few troops have been left behind and the police were unable to cope with the mobs that were pillaging in the wake of the space Vikings. Everybody seemed to be trying to grab what he could and let the Vikings be blamed for it. He had been able to keep his own people in order. There had been at least a dozen cases of rape and wanton murder and the offenders had been promptly hanged. None of their shipmates, not even the space-scourge company, seemed resentful. They felt the culprits had deserved what they'd gotten, not for what they'd done to the locals, but for disobeying orders. A few troops had been flown in from Stogoland by the time they had gotten their vehicle stowed and were lifting out. They didn't seem to be making much headway. Harkamon, who had gotten his load of micro-books stowed and was at the command desk, laughed heartily. I don't know what Pedrosin'll do. Gehenna, I don't even know what I'd do if I'd gotten myself into a mess like that. He'll probably bring half his army back, leave the other half in Stogoland and lose both. Suppose we drop in, in about three or four years, just out of curiosity. If we make twenty percent of what we did this time, the trip would pay for itself. After they went into hyperspace and had the ship secured, the parties lasted three galactic standard days, and nobody was at all sober. Harkamon was drooling over the mass of historical material he had found. Spasso was jubilant. Nobody could call this chicken-stealing. He kept repeating that as long as he was able to say anything. Capara, he conceded, had been. Lousy two or three million Stellars. Puh!