Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (best book club books TXT) 📖

freighter Rozinante, Durendal, Captain Morbes. Requesting permission and instructions to orbit in."

"Baron Valkanhayn?" Harkaman asked.

"That's right," Valkanhayn grinned. "And I have a vellum scroll the size of a blanket to prove it. I have a whole cargo of scrolls. One says you're Otto, Count Harkaman, and another says you're Admiral of the Royal Navy of Gram."

"He did it!" Trask cried. "He made himself King of Gram!"

"That's right. And you're his trusty and well-loved Lucas, Prince Trask, and Viceroy of his Majesty's Realm of Tanith."

Harkaman bristled at that. "The Gehenna you say. This is our Realm of Tanith."

"Is his Majesty making it worth while to accept his sovereignty?" Trask asked. "That is, beside vellum scrolls?"

Valkanhayn was still grinning. "Wait till we start sending cargo down. And wait till you see what's crammed into the other ship."

"Did Spasso come back with you?" Harkaman asked.

"Oh, no. Sir Garvan Spasso entered the service of his Majesty, King Angus. He is Chief of Police at Glaspyth, now, and nobody can call what he's doing there chicken-stealing, either. Any chickens he steals, he steals the whole farm to get them."

That didn't sound good. Spasso could make King Angus' name stink all over Glaspyth. Or maybe he'd allow Spasso to crush the adherents of Omfray, and then hang him for his oppression of the people. He'd read about somebody who'd done something like that, in one of Harkaman's Old Terran history books.

Baron Rathmore had stayed on Gram; so had Rolve Hemmerding. The rest of the gentlemen-adventurers, all with shiny new titles of nobility, had returned. From them, as the two ships were getting into orbit, he learned what had happened on Gram since the Nemesis had spaced out.

Duke Angus had announced his intention of carrying on with the[Pg 76] Tanith Adventure, and had started construction of a new ship at the Gorram yards. This had served plausibly to explain all the activities of preparation for the invasion of Glaspyth, and had deceived Duke Omfray completely. Omfray had already started a ship of his own; the entire resources of his duchy were thrown into an effort to get her finished and to space ahead of the one Angus was building. Work was going on frantically on her when the Wardshaven invaders hit Glaspyth; she was now nearing completion as a unit of the Royal Navy. Duke Omfray had managed to escape to Didreksburg; when Angus' troops moved in on the latter duchy, he had escaped again, this time off-planet. He was now eating the bitter bread of exile at the court of his wife's uncle, the King of Haulteclere.

The Count of Newhaven, the Duke of Bigglersport, and the Lord of Northport, all of whom had favored the establishment of a planetary monarchy, had immediately acknowledged Angus as their sovereign. So, with a knife at his throat, had the Duke of Didreksburg. Many other feudal magnates had refused to surrender their sovereignty. That might mean fighting, but Paytrik, now Baron, Morland, doubted it.

"The Space Scourge stopped that," he said. "When they heard about the base here, and saw what we'd shipped to Gram, they started changing their minds. Only subjects of King Angus will be allowed to invest in the Tanith Adventure."

As for accepting King Angus' annexation of Tanith and accepting his sovereignty, that would also be advisable. They would need a Sword World outlet for the loot they took or obtained by barter from other Space Vikings, and until they had adequate industries of their own, they would be dependent on Gram for many things which could not be gotten by raiding.

"I suppose the King knows I'm not out here for my health, or his profit?" he asked Lord Valpry, during one of the screen conversations as the Space Scourge was getting into orbit. "My business out here is Andray Dunnan."

"Oh, yes," the Wardshaven noble replied. "In fact, he told me, in so many words, that he would be most happy if you sent him his nephew's head in a block of lucite. What Dunnan did touched his honor, too. Sovereign princes never see any humor in things like that."

"I suppose he knows that sooner or later Dunnan will try to attack Tanith?"

"If he doesn't, it isn't because I didn't tell him often enough. When you see the defense armament we're bringing, you'll think he does."

It was impressive, but nothing to the engineering and industrial equipment. Mining robots for use on the iron Moon of Tanith, and normal-space transports for the fifty thousand mile run between planet and satellite. A collapsed-matter producer; now they could collapsium-plate their own shielding. A small, fully[Pg 77] robotic, steel mill that could be set up and operated on the satellite. Industrial robots, and machinery to make machinery. And, best of all, two hundred engineers and highly skilled technicians.

Quite a few industrial baronies on Gram would realize, before long, what they had lost in those men. He wondered what Lord Trask of Traskon would have thought about that.

The Prince of Tanith was no longer interested in what happened to Gram. Maybe, if things prospered for the next century or so, his successors would be ruling Gram by viceroy from Tanith.

XV

As soon as the Space Scourge was unloaded, she was put on off-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 a dozen planets. None of the cargo he brought back was spectacularly valuable, and he dismissed the whole thing as chicken-stealing, but he had lost some men and the ship showed a few fresh scars. A good deal of what was transshipped to the Rozinante was manufactured goods which would compete with merchandise produced on Gram.

"That load will be a come-down, after what the Space Scourge took back, but we didn't want to send the Rozinante back empty," he said. "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 that planet was so extensively colonized by the Federation, when there don't seem to be any fissionable ores? The planet produced gadolinium."

Gadolinium was essential to hyperdrive engines; the engines of a ship the size of the Nemesis required fifty pounds of it. On the Sword-Worlds, it was worth several times its weight in gold. If they still 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 spaceship on Diesel oil. I suppose the mines could be reopened, and new refineries built, but...."

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

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

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

Harkaman snapped his fingers.[Pg 78] "By Satan, that's it!" Then he looked at Trask in alarm. "Hey, you're not thinking of selling Amaterasu plutonium 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 from both planets all over the place in a few years. We want that like we want a hole in the head."

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

There had been mines on the Moon of Tanith before the collapse of the 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, and eventually 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 unfinished at Glaspyth—came in three months after the Rozinante started back; she must have been finished while Valkanhayn was still in hyperspace. She carried considerable cargo, some of it superfluous but all of it useful; everybody was investing in the Tanith Adventure now, and the money had to be spent for something. Better, she brought close to a thousand men and women; the leakage of brains and ability from the Sword-Worlds was turning into a flood. Among them was Basil Gorram. Trask remembered him as an insufferable young twerp, but he seemed to be a good shipyard man. He very frankly predicted that in a few years his father's yards at Wardshaven would be idle and all the Tanith ships would be Tanith-built. A junior partner of Lothar Ffayle's also came out, to establish a branch of the Bank of Wardshaven at Rivington.

As soon as the Queen Flavia had discharged her cargo and passengers, she took on five hundred ground-fighters from the Lamia, Nemesis and Space Scourge companies and spaced out on a raiding voyage. While she was gone, the second ship, the one Duke Angus had started at Wardshaven and King Angus had finished, the Black Star, came in.

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

The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by the scheduled liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds, and then by trading ships and outbound Space Vikings to the Old Federation.[Pg 79] Two years and six months after the Nemesis had come out of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso on Tanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to sell a cargo and get repairs. They bought his loot—he had been raiding some planet rather above the level of Khepera and below that of Amaterasu—and healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it. He had been dealing with the Everrard family on Hoth, and professed himself much more satisfied with the bargains he had gotten on Tanith 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 used indiscriminately for a native of or a ship from Gilgamesh—on Gram, from Harkaman and Karffard and Vann Larch and the others. Since coming 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 though not on a level with Odin or Isis or Baldur or Marduk or Aton or any of the other worlds which had maintained the culture of the Terran Federation uninterruptedly. Perhaps Gilgamesh deserved more credit; its people had undergone two centuries of darkness and pulled themselves out of it by their bootstraps. They had recovered all the old techniques, up to and including the hyperdrive.

They didn't raid; they traded. They had religious objections to violence, though they kept these within sensible limits, and were able and willing to fight with fanatical ferocity in defense of their home planet. About a century before, there had been a five-ship Viking raid on Gilgamesh; one ship had returned and had been sold for scrap after reaching a friendly base. Their ships went everywhere to trade, and wherever they traded a few of them usually settled, and where they settled they made money, sending most of it home. Their society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and their religion an absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the Federation period, plus doctrinal and ritualistic innovations of their own. Aside from their propensity for sharp trading, their bigoted refusal to regard anybody not of their creed as more than half human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos in which they hid from social contact with others, made them generally disliked.

After their ship had gotten into orbit, three of them came down to do business. The captain and his exec wore long coats, almost knee-length, buttoned to the throat, and small white caps like forage caps; the third, one of their priests, wore a robe with a cowl, and the symbol of their religion, a blue triangle in a white circle, on his breast. They all wore beards that hung down from their cheeks, with their chins and upper lips shaved. They all had the same righteous, disapproving faces,[Pg 80] they all refused refreshments of any sort, and they sat uneasily as though fearing contamination from the heathens who had sat in their chairs before them. They had a mixed cargo of general merchandise picked up here and there on subcivilized planets, in which nobody on Tanith was interested. They also had some good stuff—vegetable-amber and flame-bird plumes from Irminsul; ivory or something very like it from somewhere else; diamonds and Uller organic opals and Zarathustra sunstones. They also had some platinum. They wanted machinery, especially contragravity engines and robots.