Space Viking H. Beam Piper (life books to read .TXT) 📖

Mopsy was trying to lick his face. He took the dog by the collar and straightened.

“Lady Valerie, will you come with us?” he asked. “I’m going to find quarters for Princess Myrna.”

“Is it Princess Myrna, or is it Queen Myrna?” he asked.

Prince Bentrik shook his head. “We don’t know. The King was alive when we left Moonbase, but that was five hundred hours ago. We don’t know anything about her mother, either. She was at the Palace when Prince Edvard was murdered; we’ve heard absolutely nothing about her. The King made a few screen appearances, parroting things Makann wanted him to say. Under hypnosis. That was probably the very least of what they did to him. They’ve turned him into a zombie.”

“Well, how did Myrna get to Moonbase?”

“That was Lady Valerie, as much as anybody else. She and Sir Thomas Kobbly, and Captain Rainer. They armed the servants at Cragdale with hunting rifles and everything else they could scrape up, captured Prince Edvard’s space-yacht, and took off in her. Took a couple of hits from ground batteries getting off, and from ships around Moonbase getting in. Ships of the Royal Mardukan Navy!” he added furiously.

The pinnace in which they had made the trip to Tanith had taken a few hits, too, running the blockade. Not many; her captain had thrown her into hyperspace almost at once.

“They sent the yacht off to Gimli,” Bentrik said. “From there, they’ll try to rally as many of the Royal Navy units as haven’t gone over to Makann. They’re to assemble on Gimli and await my return. If I don’t return in fifteen hundred hours from the time I left Moonbase, they’re to use their own judgment. I’d expect that they’d move in on Marduk and attack.”

“That’s sixty-odd days,” Otto Harkaman said. “That’s an awfully long time to expect that lunar base to hold out, against a whole planet.”

“It’s a strong base. It was built four hundred years ago, when Marduk was fighting a combination of six other planets. It held out against continuous attack, once, for almost a year. It’s been constantly strengthened ever since.”

“And what have they to throw at it?” Harkaman persisted.

“When I left, six ships of the former Royal Navy, that had gone over to Makann. Four fifteen-hundred-footers, same class as the Victrix, and two thousand-footers. Then, there were four of Andray Dunnan’s ships⁠—”

“You mean, he really is on Marduk?”

“I thought you knew that, and I was wondering how you’d found out. Yes: Fortuna, Bolide, and two armed merchantmen, a Baldurbuilt ship called the Reliable, and your friend Honest Horris.”

“You didn’t really believe Dunnan was on Marduk?” Boake Valkanhayn asked.

“Actually, I didn’t. I had to have some kind of a story, to talk those people out of that crusade against Omfray of Glaspyth.” He left unmentioned Valkanhayn’s own insistence on a plundering expedition against Xochitl. “Now that it turns out to be true, I’m not surprised. We decided, long ago, that Dunnan was planning to raid Marduk. It appears that we underestimated him. Maybe he was reading about Hitler, too. He wasn’t planning any raid; he was planning conquest, in the only way a great civilization can be conquered⁠—by subversion.”

“Yes,” Harkaman put in. “Five years ago, when Dunnan started this programme, who was this Makann, anyhow?”

“Nobody,” Bentrik said. “A crackpot agitator in Drepplin; he had a coven of fellow-crackpots, who met in the back room of a saloon and had their office in a cigar box. The next year, he had a suite of offices and was buying time on a couple of telecasts. The year after that, he had three telecast stations of his own, and was holding rallies and meetings of thousands of people. And so on, upward.”

“Yes. Dunnan financed him, and moved in behind him, the same way Makann moved in behind the King. And Dunnan will have him shot the way he had Prince Edvard shot, and use the murder as a pretext to liquidate his personal followers.”

“And then he’ll own Marduk. And we’ll have the Mardukan navy coming out of hyperspace on Tanith,” Valkanhayn added. “So we go to Marduk and smash him now, while he’s still little enough to smash.”

There had been a few who had wanted to do that about Hitler, and a great many, later, who had regretted that it hadn’t been done.

“The Nemesis, the Corisande, and the Space Scourge for sure?” he asked.

Harkaman and Valkanhayn agreed; Valkanhayn thought the Viking’s Gift of Beowulf would go along, and Harkaman was almost sure of the Black Star and Queen Flavia. He turned to Bentrik.

“Start that pinnace off for Gimli at once; within the hour if possible. We don’t know how many ships will be gathered there, but we don’t want them wasted in detail-attacks. Tell whoever’s in command there that ships from Tanith are on the way, and to wait for them.”

Fifteen hundred hours, less the five hundred Bentrik was in space from Marduk. He hadn’t time to estimate voyage-time to Gimli from the other Mardukan trade-planets, and nobody could estimate how many ships would respond.

“It may take us a little time to get an effective fleet together. Even after we get through arguing about it. Argument,” he told Bentrik, “is not exclusively a feature of democracies.”

Actually, there was very little argument, and most of that among the Mardukans. Prince Bentrik insisted that Crown Princess Myrna would have to be taken along; King Mikhyl would be either dead or brainwashed into imbecility by now, and they would have to have somebody to take the throne. Lady Valerie Alvarath, Sir Thomas Kobbly, the tutor, and the nurse Margot refused to be separated from her. Prince Bentrik was equally firm, with less success, on leaving his wife and son on Tanith. In the end, it was agreed that the entire Mardukan party would space out on the Nemesis.

The leader of the Bigglersport delegation attempted an impassioned tirade about going to the aid of strangers