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Audhumla.
Trask and the Mardukan were shaking hands with themselves at each other in
their screens; everybody in the Nemesis command-room was screaming: "Well
shot, Victrix! Well shot!"
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Then the Yo-Yo was coming around again, and Vann Larch was saying, "Gehenna
with this fooling around! I'll fix the expurgated unprintability!"
He yelled orders-a jumble of code letters and numbers-and things began going
out. Most of them blew up in space. Then the Yo-Yo blew up, very quietly, as
things do where there is no air to carry shock- and sound-waves, but very
brilliantly. There was brief daylight all over the night side of the planet.
"That was our planetbuster," Larch said. "I don't know what we'll use on
Dunnan."
"I didn't know we had one," Trask admitted.
"Otto had a couple built on Beowulf. The Beowulfers are good nuclear
weaponeers."
The Enterprise came back, hastily, to see what had blown up. Larch put off
another entertainment of small stuff, with a fifty megaton thermonuclear,
viewscreen-piloted, among them. It had its own arsenal of small missiles, and
it got through. In the telescopic screen, a jagged hole was visible just below
the equator of the Enterprise, the edges curling outward. Something, possibly
a heavy missile in an open tube, ready for launching, had gone off inside her.
What the inside of the ship was like, or how many of her company were still
alive, was hard to guess.
There were some, and her launchers were still spewing out missiles. They were
intercepted and blew up. The hull of the Enterprise bulked huge in the
guidance-screen of the missile and filled it; the jagged crater that had
obliterated the bottom of Dunnan's blue crescent blazon spread to fill the
whole screen. The screen went milky white as the pickup went off.
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All the other screens blazed briefly, until their filters went on. Even
afterward, they glared like the cloud-veiled sun of Gram at high noon.
Finally, when the light-intensity had dropped and the filters went off, there
was nothing left of the Enterprise but an orange haze.
Somebody-Paytrik, Baron Morland, he saw-was pounding him on the back and
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screaming inarticulately in his ear. A dozen space-armored officers with
planet-perched dragons on their breasts were crowding beside Prince Bentrik in
the screen from the Victrix, whooping like drunken bisonoid herders on payday
night.
"I wonder," he said, almost inaudibly, "if I'll ever know if Andray Dunnan was
on that ship!"
MARDUK
I
PRINCE TRASK of Tanith and Prince Simon Bentrik were dining together on an
upper terrace of what had originally been the mansion-house of a Federation
period plantation. It had been a number of other things since; now it was the
municipal building of a town that had grown around it, which had, somehow
escaped undamaged from the Dunnan blitz. Normally about five or ten thousand,
the place was now jammed with almost fifty thousand homeless refugees from
half a dozen other towns that had been destroyed, overflowing the buildings
and crowding into a sprawling camp of hastily built huts and shelters, and
already permanent buildings were going up to accommodate them. Everybody,
locals, Mardukans and Space Vikings, had been busy with the work of relief and
reconstruction; this was the first meal the two commanders had been able to
share in any leisure at all. Prince Bentrik's enjoyment of it was somewhat im-
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paired by the fact that from where he sat he could see in the distance, the
sphere of his grounded and disabled ship.
"I doubt we can get her off-planet again, let alone into hyperspace."
"Well, we'll get you and your crew to Marduk in the Nemesis, then." They were
both speaking loudly, above the clank and clatter of machinery below. "I hope
you didn't think I'd leave you stranded here."
"I don't know how either of us will be received. Space Vikings haven't been
exactly popular on Marduk lately. They may thank you for bringing me back to
stand trial," Bentrik said bitterly. "Why, I'd have anybody shot who let his
ship get caught as I did mine. Those two were down in atmosphere before I knew
they'd come out of hyperspace."
"I think they were down on the planet before your ship arrived."
"Oh, that's ridiculous, Prince Trask!" the Mardukan cried. "You can't hide a
ship on a planet. Not from the kind of instruments we have in the Royal Navy."
"We have pretty fair detection ourselves," Trask reminded him. "There's one
place where you can do it. At the bottom of an ocean, with a thousand or so
feet of water over her. That's where I was going to hide the Nemesis, if I got
here ahead of Dunnan."
Prince Bentrik's fork stopped half way to his mouth. He lowered it slowly to
his plate. That was a theory he'd like to accept, if he could.
"But the locals. They didn't know about it."
"They wouldn't. They have no off-planet detection of their own. Come in
directly over the ocean, out of the sun, and nobody'd see the ship."
"Is that a regular Space Viking trick?"
"No. I invented it myself, on the way from Seshat. But if Dunnan wanted to
ambush your ship, he'd have thought of it, too. It's the only practical way to
do it."
Dunnan, or Nevil Ormm; he wished he knew, and was afraid he would go on
wishing all his life.
Bentrik started to pick up his fork again, changed his mind, and sipped from
his wineglass instead.
"You may find you're quite welcome on Marduk, at that,"
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he said. "These raids have only been a serious problem in the last four years.
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I believe, as you do, that this enemy of yours is responsible for all of them. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]