XXVI
There was a little difficulty on Gimli with Fleet Admiral Bargham.Commodores didn't give orders to fleet admirals. Well, maybe regentsdid, but who gave Prince Bentrik authority to call himself regent?Regents were elected by the Chamber of Delegates, on nomination ofthe Chancellor.
"That's Zaspar Makann and his stooges you're talking about?" Bentriklaughed.
"Well, the Constitution...." He thought better of that, beforesomebody asked him what Constitution. "Well, a Regent has to bechosen by election. Even members of the Royal Family can't justmake themselves Regent by saying they are."
"I can. I just have. And I don't think there are going to be manymore elections, at least for the present. Not till we make sure thepeople of Marduk can be trusted with the control of the government."
"Well, the pinnace from Moonbase reported that there were six Royalnavy battleships and four other craft attacking them," Barghamobjected. "I only have four ships here; I sent for the ones on theother trade-planets, but I haven't heard from any of them. We can'tgo there with only four ships."
"Sixteen ships," Bentrik corrected. "No, fifteen and one Gilgamesherwe're using for a troopship. I think that's enough. You'll remainhere on Gimli, in any case, admiral; as soon as the other ships comein, you'll follow to Marduk with them. I am now holding a meetingaboard the Tanith flagship _Nemesis_. I want your four ship-commandersaboard immediately. I am not including you because you're remaininghere to bring up the late comers and as soon as this meeting is overwe are spacing out."
Actually, they spaced out sooner; the meeting lasted the whole threehundred and fifty hours to Abaddon. A ship's captain, if he has agood exec, as all of them had, needs only sit at his command-deskand look important while the ship is going into and emerging froma long jump; the rest of the time he can study ancient history orwhatever his shipboard hobby is. Rather than waste three hundred andfifty hours of precious time, each captain turned his ship over tohis exec and remained aboard the _Nemesis_; even on so spacious acraft the officers' country north of the engine rooms was crowdedlike a tourist hotel in mid-season. One of the four Mardukans wasthe Captain Garravay who had smuggled Bentrik's wife and son offMarduk, and the other three were just as pro-Bentrik, pro-Tanith,and anti-Makann. They were, on general principles, also anti-Bargham.There must be something wrong with any fleet admiral who remainedin his command after Zaspar Makann came to power.
So, as soon as they spaced out, there was a party. After that,they settled down to planning the Battle of Abaddon.
* * * * *
There was no Battle of Abaddon.
It was a dead planet, one side in night and the other in dimtwilight from the little speck of a sun three and a half billionmiles away, jagged mountains rising out of the snow that covered itfrom pole to pole. The snow on top would be frozen CO_2; accordingto the thermocouples, the surface temperature was well belowminus-100 Centigrade. No ships on orbit circled it; there wasa little faint radiation, which could have been from naturallyradioactive minerals; there was no electrical discharge detectable.
There was considerable bad language in the command room of the_Nemesis_. The captains of the other ships were screening in,wanting to know what to do.
"Go on in," Trask told them. "Englobe the planet, and go down towithin a mile if necessary. They could be hiding somewhere on it."
"Well, they're not hiding at the bottom of any ocean, that's forsure," somebody said. It was one of those feeble jokes at whicheverybody laughs because nothing else is laughable about thesituation.
Finally, they found it, at the north pole, which was no colder thananywhere else on the planet. First radiation leakage, the sort thatwould come from a closed-down nuclear power plant. Then a modicum ofelectrical discharge. Finally the telescopic screens picked up thespaceport, a huge oval amphitheater excavated out of a valleybetween two jagged mountain ranges.
The language in the command room was just as bad, but the tone hadchanged. It was surprising what a wide range of emotions could beexpressed by a few simple blasphemies and obscenities. Everybodywho had been deriding Sharll Renner were now acclaiming him.
But it was lifeless. The ships came crowding in; air-lockedlanding-craft full of space-armored ground-fighters went down.Screens in the command room lit as they transmitted in views.Depressions in the carbon-dioxide snow where the hundred-footpad-feet of ships' landing-legs had pressed down. Ranks ofcargo-lighters that had plied to and from other ships or orbit.And, all around the cliff-walled perimeter, air-locked doors tocaverns and tunnels. A great many men, with a great deal of equipment,had been working here in the estimated five or six years sinceAndray Dunnan--or somebody--had constructed this base.
Andray Dunnan. They found his badge, the crescent, blue on black, onthings. They found equipment that Harkaman recognized as having beenpart of the original cargo stolen with the _Enterprise_. They evenfound, in his living quarters, a blown-up photoprint picture ofNevil Ormm, draped in black. But what they did not find was a singlevehicle small enough to be taken aboard a ship, or a single scrap ofcombat equipment, not even a pistol or a hand grenade.
Dunnan had gone, but they knew whither, and where to find him.The conquest of Marduk had moved into its final phase.
* * * * *
Marduk was on the other side of the sun from Abaddon withninety-five million miles--close, but not inconveniently so, Traskthought--to spare. Guatt Kirbey and the Mardukan astrogator who washelping him made it within a light-minute. The Mardukan thought thatwas fine; Kirbey didn't. The last microjump was aimed at the Moon ofMarduk, which was plainly visible in the telescopic screen. Theycame out within a light-second and a half, which Kirbey admitted wasreasonably close. As soon as the screens cleared, they saw that theyweren't too late. The Moon of Marduk was under fire and firing back.
They'd have detection, and he knew what they were detecting--a clumpof sixteen rending distortions of the fabric of space-time, assixteen ships came into sudden existence in the normal continuum.Beside him, Bentrik had a screen on; it was still milky-white,and he was speaking into a radio hand-phone.
"Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector of Marduk, calling Moonbase."Then, slowly, he repeated his screen-combination twice. "Come in,Moonbase; this is Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector, speaking."
He waited ten seconds, and was about to start again, when the screenflickered. The man who appeared in it wore the insignia of aMardukan navy commodore. He needed a shave, but he was grinninghappily. Bentrik greeted him by name.
"Hello, Simon; glad to see you. Your Highness, I mean; what is thisPrince-Protector thing?"
"Somebody had to do it. Is the King still alive?"
The grin slid off the commodore's face, starting with his eyes.
"We don't know. At first, Makann had him speaking by screen--youknow what it was like--urging everybody to obey and co-operatewith 'our trusted Chancellor.' Makann always appeared on the screenwith him."
Bentrik nodded. "I remember."
"Before you left, Makann kept quiet, and let the King make thespeech. After a while, the King wasn't able to speak coherently;he'd stammer, and repeat. So then Makann did all the talking; theycouldn't even depend on him to parrot what they were giving him withan earplug phone. Then he stopped appearing entirely. I supposethere were physical symptoms they couldn't allow to be seen."Bentrik was cursing horribly under his breath; the officerat Moonbase nodded. "I hope for his sake that he is dead."
Poor Goodman Mikhyl. Bentrik was saying, "So do I." Trask agreed,mentally. The commodore at Moonbase was still talking:
"We got two more renegade RMN ships, within a hundred hours afteryou left." He named them. "And we got one of the Dunnan ships, the_Fortuna_. We blew out the Malverton Navy Yard. They're still usingthe Antarctic Naval Base, but we've knocked out a good deal of that.We got the _Honest Horris_. They made two attempts to land on us andlost a couple of ships. Eight hundred hours ago, they were joined bythe rest of Dunn
an's fleet, five ships. They made a landing onMalverton while it was turned away from us. Makann announced thatthey were RMN units from the trade-planets that had joined him. Isuppose the planet-side public swallowed that. He also announced thattheir commander, Admiral Dunnan, was in command of the People'sArmed Forces."
Dunnan's ground-fighters would be in control of Malverton. By now,the odds were that Makann was as much his prisoner as King MikhylVIII had been Makann's.
"So Dunnan has conquered Marduk. All he has to do, now, is make itstick," he said. "I see four ships off Moonbase; how many more havethey?"
"These are _Bolide_ and _Eclipse_, Dunnan's ships, and former RoyalMardukan Navy ships _Champion_ and _Guardian_. There are fiveorbiting off the planet: Ex-RMNS _Paladin_, and Dunnan ships_Starhopper_, _Banshee_, _Reliable_ and _Exporter_. The lasttwo are listed as merchantmen, but they're performing likeregulation battlecraft."
The four that had been circling Moonbase broke orbit and startedtoward the relieving fleet; one took a hit from a Moonbase missile,which staggered her but did no evident damage. Two ships which hadbeen orbiting the planet also changed course and started out. Thecommand room was silent except for a subdued chuckling from acomputer which was estimating enemy intentions by observed data andGames Theory. Three more came hurrying out from the planet, and thetwo in the lead slowed to let them catch up. He wanted to be ableto engage the four from off the satellite before the five from theplanet joined them, but Karffard's computers said it couldn't be done.
"All right, we have to take all our bad eggs in one basket," hesaid. "Try to hit them as soon after they join as possible."
* * * * *
The computers began chuckling again. The serving-robots were doinga rush business in hot coffee. Prince Bentrik's son, sitting besidehis father, had stopped being Ruthless Ravary the Demon of theSpaceways and was a very young officer going into his first spacebattle, more scared and at the same time happier than he had everbeen in his short life. Captain Garravay of the _Vindex_ was makingsignal to the other ships from Gimli: "_Royal Navy; smash thetraitors first!_" He could understand and sympathize, even ifhe couldn't approve of putting personal ahead of tacticalconsiderations, and made a quick sealed-beam call to Harkaman to beprepared to plug any holes they left in formation if they broke awayin search of vengeance. He also ordered the _Black Star_ and the_Sun Goddess_ to shepherd the lightly armed and troop-crammedGilgamesh freighter out of danger. The two clumps of Dunnan-Makannships were converging rapidly, and Alvyn Karffard was screaming intoa phone to somebody to get more speed.
At a thousand miles, the missiles started going out, and the twogroups of ships, four and five, were equidistant from each other andfrom the allied fleet, at the points of a triangle that was growingsmaller by the second. The first fire-globes of intercepted missilesspread from their seeds of brief white light. A red light flashed onthe damage-board. An enemy ship took a hit. The captain of the_Queen Flavia_ was on a screen, saying that his ship was heavilydamaged. Three ships bearing the Mardukan dragon-and-planet circledmadly around each other at what looked, in the screen, like justover pistol-range, two of them firing into the third, which wasreplying desperately. The third one blew up, and somebody wasyelling out of a screenspeaker, "Scratch one traitor!"
Another ship blew up somewhere, and then another. He heard somebodysay, "There went one of ours," and wondered which one it was. Notthe _Corisande_, he hoped; no, it wasn't, he could see her rushingafter two other ships which were, in turn, speeding toward the_Black Star_, the _Sun Goddess_ and the Gilgamesh freighter. Thenthe _Nemesis_ and the _Starhopper_ were within gun-range, poundingeach other savagely.
The battle had tied itself into a ball of gyrating, fire-spittingships that went rolling toward the planet, which was swinging in andout of the main viewscreen and growing rapidly larger. By the timethey were down to the inner edge of the exosphere, the ball hadstarted to unwind, ship after ship dropping out of it and goinginto orbit, some badly damaged and some going to attack damagedenemies. Some of them were completely around the planet, hiddenby it. He saw three ships approaching _Corisande_, _Sun Goddess_,and the Gilgamesher. He got Harkaman on the screen.
"Where's the _Black Star_?" he asked.
"Gone to Em-See-Square," Harkaman replied. "We got the twoDunnan-Makanns. _Bolide_ and _Reliable_."
Then young Steven of Ravary, who had been monitoring one of theintership screens, had a call from Captain Gompertz of the_Grendelsbane_, and at the same moment somebody else was yelling,"Here comes the _Starhopper_ again!"
"Tell him to wait a moment; we have troubles," he said.
_Nemesis_ and _Starhopper_ sledge-hammered each other and parriedwith counter-missiles, and then, quite unexpectedly, the_Starhopper_ went to Em-See-Square.
There was an awful lot of Em being converted to Ee off Marduk,today. Including Manfred Ravallo; that grieved him. Manfred wasa good man, and a good friend. He had a girl in Rivington....Nifflheim, there were eight hundred good men aboard the _BlackStar_, and most of them had girls who'd wait in vain for them onTanith. Well, what had Otto Harkaman said, so long ago, on Gram?Something about old age not being a usual cause of death amongSpace Vikings, wasn't it?
Then he remembered that Gompertz of the _Grendelsbane_ was tryingto get him. He told young Count Steven to switch him over.
"We just lost one of our Mardukans," Gompertz told him, in hisstaccato Beowulf accent. "I think she was the _Challenger_. The shipthat got her looks like the _Banshee_; I'm turning to engage her."
"Which way; west around the planet? Be right with you, captain."
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