Space Viking Part 10

"Are we interested?" Harkaman asked.

"Not very, I'm afraid. Of course, we've just landed; Tanith may have great possibilities. Suppose we reserve 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 Elaine was walking with him. The noise from inside, where the _Nemesis_ crew were feasting with those of the _Lamia_ and _s.p.a.ce Scourge_, grew fainter.

To the south, a star moved; one of the pinnaces 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 Valkanhayn and Spa.s.so had enslaved. Elaine went away quickly.

"Have your fill of s.p.a.ce Viking glamour, Lucas?"

He turned. It was Baron Rathmore, who had come along to serve for a year or so and then hitch a 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. They're a pack of s.a.d.i.s.tic brutes, and piggish along with it."

"Well, brutality and bad manners I can condone, but Spa.s.so and Valkanhayn are a pair of ignominious little crooks, and stupid along with it. If Andray Dunnan had gotten here ahead of us, he might have done one good thing in his 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 Nevil Ormm. Ormm's ambitious, and Dunnan is 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 Tanith. That would be something constructive; Dunnan'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 s.h.i.+p is finished. Then he'll come in and shoot the place up, the way--" He bit that off abruptly.

"The way he did my wedding; I think of it all the time."

The next morning, he and Harkaman took an aircar 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 contragravity 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 Tradetown.

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, n.o.body was in sight. They seemed to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the nine-hundred-odd hours in which they had been exposed to the figurative mercies of Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spa.s.so. It hadn't saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and there were evidences of sh.e.l.ling. 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," Harkaman said. "They have gunpowder, for one thing, and I can think of some rather impressive Old Terran civilizations that didn't have that much. They have an organized society, and anybody who has that is starting toward civilization."

"I hate to think of what'll happen to this planet if Spa.s.so and Valkanhayn 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 Spa.s.so and Valkanhayn, though. They'll start decivilizing, 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 turned the aircar 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 Spa.s.so and Valkanhayn 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 Xochitl," he agreed. "There'll be four or five s.h.i.+ps, s.p.a.ce Vikings, traders, Gilgameshers and so on, on either of those planets all the time. If we had the cargo Dunnan took to s.p.a.ce in the _Enterprise_, we could start a base like that.

But we haven't anything near what we need, and you know what Spa.s.so and Valkanhayn have."

"We can get it from Gram. As it stands, the investors in the Tanith 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 profit to boot. And there ought to be planets above the rowboat and ox-cart level not too far away that could be raided 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 Spa.s.so and Valkanhayn are in the habit of raiding, though. And besides machinery, we can get gold, and valuable merchandise that could be sold on Gram. And if we could make a go of it, you'd go farther hunting Dunnan by sitting here on Tanith than by going looking for him. That was the way we used to hunt marsh pigs on Colada, when I was a kid; just find a good place and sit down and wait."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

They had Valkanhayn and Spa.s.so aboard the _Nemesis_ for dinner; it didn't take much guiding to keep the conversation on the subject of Tanith and its resources, advantages and possibilities. Finally, when they had reached brandy and coffee, 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," Spa.s.so broke in eagerly. "This is a wonderful planet--"

"It could be. All it has now is possibilities. We'd need a s.p.a.ceport, for one thing."

"Well, what's this, here?" Valkanhayn wanted to know.

"It was a s.p.a.ceport," Harkaman told him. "It could be one again. And we'd need a s.h.i.+pyard, capable of any kind of heavy repair work.

Capable of building a complete s.h.i.+p, in fact. I never saw a s.h.i.+p come into a Viking base planet with any kind of a cargo worth d.i.c.kering over that hadn't taken some damage getting it. Prince Viktor of Xochitl makes a good half of his money on s.h.i.+p repairs, and so do Nikky Gratham on Jagannath and the Everrards on Hoth."

"And engine works, hyperdrive, normal s.p.a.ce and pseudograv," Trask added. "And a steel mill, and a collapsed-matter plant. And robotic-equipment works, and--"

"Oh, that's out of all reason!" Valkanhayn cried. "It would take twenty trips with a s.h.i.+p 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 gentlemen the truth,"

Harkaman chuckled.

"I intend to." He laid his cigar down, sipped some of his brandy, and explained about Duke Angus' Tanith 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 Tanith and work to the disadvantage of the home planet in the end." He told them about the _Enterprise_, and the cargo of industrial and construction equipment she carried, and then told them how Andray Dunnan 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 s.h.i.+p out, Dunnan 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 s.h.i.+p at my own expense, took on Captain Harkaman, who had been left without a command when the _Enterprise_ was pirated, and came out here to hunt Dunnan down and kill him. I believe that I can do that best by establis.h.i.+ng a base on Tanith 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," Spa.s.so insisted.