Space Viking

by H. Beam Piper

  XV

  As soon as the _Space Scourge_ was unloaded, she was put onoff-planet watch; Harkaman immediately spaced out in the _Nemesis_,while Trask remained behind. They began unloading the _Rozinante_,after setting her down at Rivington Spaceport. After that was done,her officers and crew took a holiday which lasted a month, until the_Nemesis_ returned. Harkaman must have made quick raids on half adozen planets. None of the cargo he brought back was spectacularlyvaluable, and he dismissed the whole thing as chicken-stealing, buthe had lost some men and the ship showed a few fresh scars. A gooddeal of what was transshipped to the _Rozinante_ was manufacturedgoods which would compete with merchandise produced on Gram.

  "That load will be a come-down, after what the _Space Scourge_ tookback, but we didn't want to send the _Rozinante_ back empty," hesaid. "One thing, I had time to do a little reading, between stops."

  "The books from the Eglonsby library?"

  "Yes. I learned a curious thing about Amaterasu. Do you know why thatplanet was so extensively colonized by the Federation, when theredon't seem to be any fissionable ores? The planet produced gadolinium."

  Gadolinium was essential to hyperdrive engines; the engines of aship the size of the _Nemesis_ required fifty pounds of it. On theSword-Worlds, it was worth several times its weight in gold. If theystill mined it, Amaterasu would repay a second visit.

  When he mentioned it, Harkaman shrugged. "Why should they mine it?There's only one thing it's good for, and you can't run a spaceshipon Diesel oil. I suppose the mines could be reopened, and newrefineries built, but...."

  "We could trade plutonium for gadolinium. They have none of theirown. We could charge our own prices for it, and we wouldn't need totell them what gadolinium sells for on the Sword-Worlds."

  "We could, if we could do business with anybody there, after whatwe did to Eglonsby and Stolgoland. Where would we get plutonium?"

  "Why do you think the Beowulfers don't have hyperships, when theyhave everything else?"

  Harkaman snapped his fingers. "By Satan, that's it!" Then he lookedat Trask in alarm. "Hey, you're not thinking of selling Amaterasuplutonium and Beowulf gadolinium, are you?"

  "Why not? We could make a big profit on both ends of the deal."

  "You know what would happen next, don't you? There'd be ships fromboth planets all over the place in a few years. We want that likewe want a hole in the head."

  He couldn't see the objection. Tanith and Amaterasu and Beowulfcould work up a very good triangular trade; all three would profit.It wouldn't cost men and ship-damage and ammunition, either. Maybea mutual defense alliance, too. Think about it later; there was toomuch to do here on Tanith at present.

  There had been mines on the Moon of Tanith before the collapse ofthe Federation; they had been stripped of their equipment afterward,while Tanith was still fighting a rearguard battle against barbarism,but the underground chambers and man-made caverns could still be used,and in time the mines were reopened and the steel mill put in, andeventually ingots of finished steel were coming down by shuttle-craft.In the meantime, the shipyard had been laid out and was taking shape.

  The Gram ship _Queen Flavia_--she had been the one found unfinishedat Glaspyth--came in three months after the _Rozinante_ startedback; she must have been finished while Valkanhayn was still inhyperspace. She carried considerable cargo, some of it superfluousbut all of it useful; everybody was investing in the Tanith Adventurenow, and the money had to be spent for something. Better, she broughtclose to a thousand men and women; the leakage of brains and abilityfrom the Sword-Worlds was turning into a flood. Among them was BasilGorram. Trask remembered him as an insufferable young twerp, but heseemed to be a good shipyard man. He very frankly predicted thatin a few years his father's yards at Wardshaven would be idle andall the Tanith ships would be Tanith-built. A junior partner ofLothar Ffayle's also came out, to establish a branch of the Bank ofWardshaven at Rivington.

  As soon as the _Queen Flavia_ had discharged her cargo andpassengers, she took on five hundred ground-fighters from the_Lamia_, _Nemesis_ and _Space Scourge_ companies and spaced out ona raiding voyage. While she was gone, the second ship, the one DukeAngus had started at Wardshaven and King Angus had finished, the_Black Star_, came in.

  Trask was slightly incredulous at realizing that she had spaced outfrom Gram almost exactly two years after the _Nemesis_ had departed.He still hadn't any idea where Andray Dunnan was, or what he wasdoing, or how to find him.

  The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by thescheduled liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds,and then by trading ships and outbound Space Vikings to the OldFederation. Two years and six months after the _Nemesis_ had comeout of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso onTanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to sell a cargoand get repairs. They bought his loot--he had been raiding someplanet rather above the level of Khepera and below that ofAmaterasu--and healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it. Hehad been dealing with the Everrard family on Hoth, and professedhimself much more satisfied with the bargains he had gotten onTanith and swore to return.

  He had never even heard of Andray Dunnan or the _Enterprise_.

  It was a Gilgamesher that brought the first news.

  He had first heard of Gilgameshers--the word was usedindiscriminately for a native of or a ship from Gilgamesh--on Gram,from Harkaman and Karffard and Vann Larch and the others. Sincecoming to Tanith, he had heard about them from every Space Viking,never in complimentary and rarely in printable terms.

  Gilgamesh was rated, with reservations, as a civilized planet thoughnot on a level with Odin or Isis or Baldur or Marduk or Aton or anyof the other worlds which had maintained the culture of the TerranFederation uninterruptedly. Perhaps Gilgamesh deserved more credit;its people had undergone two centuries of darkness and pulledthemselves out of it by their bootstraps. They had recovered allthe old techniques, up to and including the hyperdrive.

  They didn't raid; they traded. They had religious objections toviolence, though they kept these within sensible limits, and wereable and willing to fight with fanatical ferocity in defense oftheir home planet. About a century before, there had been afive-ship Viking raid on Gilgamesh; one ship had returned and hadbeen sold for scrap after reaching a friendly base. Their ships wenteverywhere to trade, and wherever they traded a few of them usuallysettled, and where they settled they made money, sending most of ithome. Their society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and theirreligion an absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of theFederation period, plus doctrinal and ritualistic innovations oftheir own. Aside from their propensity for sharp trading, theirbigoted refusal to regard anybody not of their creed as more thanhalf human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos in which theyhid from social contact with others, made them generally disliked.

  After their ship had gotten into orbit, three of them came down todo business. The captain and his exec wore long coats, almostknee-length, buttoned to the throat, and small white caps likeforage caps; the third, one of their priests, wore a robe with acowl, and the symbol of their religion, a blue triangle in a whitecircle, on his breast. They all wore beards that hung down fromtheir cheeks, with their chins and upper lips shaved. They all hadthe same righteous, disapproving faces, they all refusedrefreshments of any sort, and they sat uneasily as though fearingcontamination from the heathens who had sat in their chairs beforethem. They had a mixed cargo of general merchandise picked up hereand there on subcivilized planets, in which nobody on Tanith wasinterested. They also had some good stuff--vegetable-amber andflame-bird plumes from Irminsul; ivory or something very like itfrom somewhere else; diamonds and Uller organic opals andZarathustra sunstones. They also had some platinum. They wantedmachinery, especially contragravity engines and robots.

  The trouble was, they wanted to haggle. Haggling, it seemed, wasthe Gilgamesh planetary sport.

  "Have you ever heard of a Space Viking ship named the _Enterprise_?"he asked the
m, at the seventh or eighth impasse in the bargaining."She bears a crescent, light blue on black. Her captain's name isAndray Dunnan."

  "A ship so named, with such a device, raided Chermosh more than ayear ago," the priest-supercargo said. "Some of our people tarry onChermosh to trade. This ship sacked the city in which they were;some of them lost heavily in world's goods."

  "That's a pity."

  The Gilgamesh priest shrugged. "It is as Yah the Almighty wills,"he said, then brightened slightly. "The Chermoshers are heathensand worshipers of false gods. The Space Vikings looted their templeand destroyed it utterly; they carried away the graven images andabominations. Our people bore witness that there was much wailingand lamentation among the idolators."

  * * * * *

  So that was the first entry on the Big Board. It covered,optimistically, the whole of one wall in his office, and for sometime that one chalked note about the raid on Chermosh, and the date,as nearly as it could be approximated, looked very lonely on it. Thecaptain of the _Black Star_ brought back material for a couple more.He had put in on several planets known to be temporarily occupied bySpace Vikings, to barter loot, give his men some time off-ship, andmake inquiries, and he had names for a couple of planets raided bythe blue crescent ship. One was only six months old.

  The way news filtered about in the Old Federation, that waspractically hot off the stove.

  The owner-captain of the _Alborak_ had something to add, when hebrought his ship in six months later. He sipped his drink slowly,as though he had limited himself to one and wanted to make it lastas long as possible.

  "Almost two years ago, on Jagannath," he said. "The _Enterprise_ wason orbit there, getting some light repairs. I met the man a fewtimes. Looks just like those pictures, but he's wearing a smallpointed beard, now. He'd sold a lot of loot. General merchandise,precious and semiprecious stones, a lot of carved and inlaidfurniture that looked as though it had come from some Neobarb king'spalace, and some temple stuff. Buddhist; there were a couple of biggold Dai-Butsus. His crew were standing drinks for all comers. Someof them were pretty dark above the collar, as though they'd been ona hot-star planet not too long before. And he had a lot of Imhotepfurs to sell, simply fabulous stuff."

  "What kind of repairs? Combat damage?"

  "That was my impression. He spaced out a little over a hundred hoursafter I came in, in company with another ship. The _Starhopper_,Captain Teodor Vaghn. The talk was that they were making a two-shipraid somewhere." The captain of the _Alborak_ thought for a moment."One other thing. He was buying ammunition, everything from pistolcartridges to hellburners. And he was buying all the air-and-waterrecycling equipment, and all the carniculture and hydroponicequipment, he could get."

  That was something to know. He thanked the Space Viking, and then asked:

  "Did he know, at the time, that I'm out here hunting for him?"

  "If he did, nobody else on Jagannath did. I didn't hear about it,myself, till six months afterward."

  That evening, he played off the recording he had made of theconversation for Harkaman and Valkanhayn and Karffard and someof the others. Somebody instantly said:

  "That temple stuff came from Chermosh. They're Buddhists, there.That checks with the Gilgamesher's story."

  "He got the furs on Imhotep; he traded for them," Harkaman said."Nobody gets anything off Imhotep by raiding. The planet's in themiddle of a glaciation, the land surface down to the fiftiethparallel is iced over solid. There is one city, ten or fifteenthousand, and the rest of the population is scattered around insettlements of a couple of hundred all along the face of theglaciers. They're all hunters and trappers. They have somecontragravity, and when a ship comes in, they spread the news byradio and everybody brings his furs to town. They use telescopesights, and everybody over ten years old can hit a man in the headat five hundred yards. And big weapons are no good; they're too welldispersed. So the only way to get anything out of them is to tradefor it."

  "I think I know where he was," Alvyn Karffard said. "On Imhotep,silver is a monetary metal. On Agni, they use silver for sewer-pipe.Agni is a hot-star planet, class B-3 sun. And on Agni they aretough, and they have good weapons. That could be where the_Enterprise_ took that combat damage."

  That started an argument as to whether he'd gone to Chermosh first.It was sure that he had gone to Agni and then Imhotep. Guatt Kirbeytried to figure both courses.

  "It doesn't tell us anything, either way," he said at length. "Chermoshis away off to the side from Agni and Imhotep in either case."

  "Well, he does have a base, somewhere, and it's not on anyTerra-type planet," Valkanhayn said. "Otherwise, what would he wantwith all that air-and-water and hydroponic and carniculture stuff?"

  The Old Federation area was full of non-Terra-type planets, and whyshould anybody bother going to any of them? Any planet that wasn'toxygen-atmosphere, six to eight thousand miles in diameter, andwithin a narrow surface-temperature range, wasn't worth wasting timeon. But a planet like that, if one had the survival equipment, wouldmake a wonderful hideout.

  "What sort of a captain is this Teodor Vaghn?" he asked. "A goodone," Harkaman said promptly. "He has a nasty streak--sadistic--buthe knows his business and he has a good ship and a well-trainedcrew. You think he and Dunnan have teamed up?"

  "Don't you? I think, now that he has a base, Dunnan is gettinga fleet together."

  "He'll know we're after him by now," Vann Larch said. "And he knowswhere we are, and that puts him one up on us."