Space Viking, H. Beam Piper [best classic romance novels txt] 📗

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, 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.

The trouble was, they wanted to haggle. Haggling, it seemed, was the Gilgamesh planetary sport.

“Have you ever heard of a Space Viking ship named the Enterprise?” he asked them, at the seventh or eighth impasse in the bargaining. “She bears a crescent, light blue on black. Her captain’s name is Andray Dunnan.”

“A ship so named, with such a device, raided Chermosh more than a year ago,” the priest-supercargo said. “Some of our people tarry on Chermosh to trade. This ship sacked the city in which they were; some of them lost heavily in world’s goods.”

“That’s a pity.”

The Gilgamesh priest shrugged. “It is as Yah the Almighty wills,” he said, then brightened slightly. “The Chermoshers are heathens and worshipers of false gods. The Space Vikings looted their temple and destroyed it utterly; they carried away the graven images and abominations. Our people bore witness that there was much wailing and lamentation among the idolators.”

So that was the first entry on the Big Board. It covered, optimistically, the whole of one wall in his office, and for some time that one chalked note about the raid on Chermosh, and the date, as nearly as it could be approximated, looked very lonely on it. The captain of the Black Star brought back material for a couple more. He had put in on several planets known to be temporarily occupied by Space Vikings, to barter loot, give his men some time off-ship, and make inquiries, and he had names for a couple of planets raided by the blue crescent ship. One was only six months old.

The way news filtered about in the Old Federation, that was practically hot off the stove.

The owner-captain of the Alborak had something to add, when he brought his ship in six months later. He sipped his drink slowly, as though he had limited himself to one and wanted to make it last as long as possible.

“Almost two years ago, on Jagannath,” he said. “The Enterprise was on orbit there, getting some light repairs. I met the man a few times. Looks just like those pictures, but he’s wearing a small pointed beard, now. He’d sold a lot of loot. General merchandise, precious and semiprecious stones, a lot of carved and inlaid furniture that looked as though it had come from some Neobarb king’s palace, and some temple stuff. Buddhist; there were a couple of big gold Dai-Butsus. His crew were standing drinks for all comers. Some of them were pretty dark above the collar, as though they’d been on a hot-star planet not too long before. And he had a lot of Imhotep furs to sell, simply fabulous stuff.”

“What kind of repairs? Combat damage?”

“That was my impression. He spaced out a little over a hundred hours after I came in, in company with another ship. The Starhopper, Captain Teodor Vaghn. The talk was that they were making a two-ship raid somewhere.” The captain of the Alborak thought for a moment. “One other thing. He was buying ammunition, everything from pistol cartridges to hellburners. And he was buying all the air-and-water recycling equipment, and all the carniculture and hydroponic equipment, he could get.”

That was something to know. He thanked the Space Viking, and then asked:

“Did he know, at the time, that I’m out here hunting for him?”

“If he did, nobody