"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's dummy. I talked 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," Harkaman agreed. "I think we'll put one of our own people in his place. Valkanhayn can stay in command of the Space Scourge; he's a spaceman. But Spasso's no 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 Tanith had lost that long ago.
Most of the people Spasso and Valkanhayn had kidnaped 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 and 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 Lamia 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; Alvyn Karffard took command of her, with some of Spasso's officers, some of Valkanhayn's, and a few from the Nemesis. Harkaman was intending to use her for retraining of all the Lamia 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 Tanith's downward path. A few of them were able to use contragravity hand-lifters and hand-towed 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 won't be many years before half of them will be piloting aircars.
* * * * *
As soon as the Lamia was on orbital watch, the Space Scourge was set down at the spaceport and work started on her. It was decided that Valkanhayn would take her to Gram; enough Nemesis people would go along to insure good faith on his part, and to talk to Duke Angus and the Tanith investors. Baron Rathmore, and Paytrik Morland, and several other Wardshaven gentlemen-adventurers for the latter function; Alvyn Karffard to act as Valkanhayn's exec, with private orders to supersede him in command if necessary, and Guatt Kirbey to do the astrogating.
"We'll have to take the Nemesis and the Space Scourge out, first, and make a big raid," Harkaman said. "We can't send the Space Scourge back to Gram empty. When Baron Rathmore and Lord Valpry and the rest of them talk to Duke Angus and the Tanith investors, they'll have to have a lot more than some travel films of Tanith. They'll have to be able to show that Tanith 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 Lamia?"
"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 fooled trying to guess what he'd do before. But the sort of raid I have in mind, we'll 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 Alvyn—that'll mean a lot of work for me that he'd otherwise do, on the ship. And Baron Rathmore, and young Valpry, and the men who've been training our sepoys. We can shuffle things around and leave some of Valkanhayn'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, Khepera. 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 Valkanhayn'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 solarelectric power, and nonnuclear 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 saved 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 Captains Spasso and Valkanhayn. Wait till we've hit Khepera and Amaterasu. They may be feeling like heroes, then."
XI
Khepera 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. Garvan Spasso—they had had no trouble in inducing him to come along—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'd 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 stellars."
And did ten times as much damage getting it, and there was 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 Tanith," Harkaman 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 stellars. Nearer a million and a half, but two million's nothing to pop about. Maybe it would be for the Lamia, 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 stellars. 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'll you before we get back to Tanith. 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 Harkaman's reputation, and some of the things Harkaman had done weren't his idea of an easy way to make money.
Khepera had been easy; the locals hadn't had anything to fight with. Small arms, and light ca
nnon 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 auto-cannon. 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 Harkaman was sitting on the edge of the desk, loading his short pipe.
"Well, you saw the elephant, Lucas," Harkaman 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 megatheres. 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 the fighting-men of Traskon during the boundary dispute with Baron Manniwel, 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 Valkanhayn's gang had goofed.
Then the screenviews 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 millimeter, 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 aircar landed directly under the muzzle. Gun, caisson, 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?" Harkaman, 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. Terro-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 Harkaman, while the fighting, if it could be so called, was still going on. Harkaman 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 Paytrik Morland had been on foot together in one of the big hollow buildings that had stood since Khepera had been a Member Republic of the Terran Federation. The air was acrid with smoke, powder smoke and the 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."
Trask 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 Andray 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 asmoke from burning villages Valkanhayn's men had pillaged the night before. There was no warning; Khepera 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 midafternoon, 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 carabaos on Tanith, with long hair like a Terran yak. He had detailed a dozen of the Nemesis ground-fighters who had been vaqueros on his Traskon 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 acclimate themselves to Tanith, but if they did, they might prove to be one of the most valuable pieces of loot from Khepera.
The third city was at the forks of a river, like Tradetown on Tanith. Unlike it, this was a real metropolis. They should have gone there first of all. They spent two days systematically pillaging it. The Kheperans 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 Kheperans 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 of wood. Fires 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."
Harkaman nodded. "Robbery and murder always are. You don'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 Traskon."
"You wish, now, that you'd kept Traskon 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 alcodote-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 realized that he was trying to hide it from himself.
XII
They came straight down on Eglonsby, on Amaterasu, the Nemesis and the Space Scourge side by side. The radar had picked them up at point-five light-seconds; by this time the whole planet knew they were coming, and nobody was wondering why. Paul Koreff 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 Lingua Terra.
Garvan Spasso was perturbed. So, in the communication screen from the Space Scourge, was Boake Valkanhayn.
"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 Coalsack. 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 Eglonsby station yet?"
"What are you going to do?" Valkanhayn wanted to know, against it in advance.
"Summon them to surrender. If they don't, we will drop a hellburner, 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."
Valkanhayn was aghast, probably at the idea of burning an unlooted city. Spasso was sputtering something about, "... Teach the dirty Neobarbs a lesson—" Koreff told him he was switched on. He picked up a hand-phone.
"Space Vikings Nemesis and Space Scourge, calling the city of Eglonsby. Space Vikings...."
He repeated it for over a minute; there was no reply.
"Vann," he called Guns-and-Missiles. "A subcrit display job, about four miles over the city."
He laid the phone down and looked to the underside viewscreen. A little later, a silvery shape dropped away from the ship's south pole. The telescopic screen went off, and the unmagnified screen darkened as the filters went on. Valkanhayn, 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 Eglonsby 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.
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