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

another five years, they’d be coming home to teach; in the meantime, he was bringing teachers to Tanith from Gram. There was a school at Tradetown, and others in some of the larger villages, and at Rivington there was something that could almost be called a college. In another ten years or so, Tanith would be able to pretend to the status of civilization.

If only Andray Dunnan and his ships didn’t come too soon. They would be beaten off, he was confident of that; but the damage Tanith would take, in the defense, would set back his work for years. He knew all too well what Space Viking ships could do to a planet. He’d have to find Dunnan’s base, smash it, destroy his ships, kill the man himself, first. Not to avenge that murder six years ago on Gram; that was long ago and far away, and Elaine was vanished, and so was the Lucas Trask who had loved and lost her. What mattered now was planting and nurturing civilization on Tanith.

But where would he find Dunnan, in two hundred billion cubic light-years? Dunnan had no such problem. He knew where his enemy was.

And Dunnan was gathering strength. The Yo-Yo, Captain Vann Humfort; she had been reported twice, once in company with the Starhopper, and once with the Enterprise. She bore a blazon of a feminine hand dangling a planet by a string from one finger; a good ship, and an able, ruthless captain. The Bolide; she and the Enterprise had made a raid on Ithunn. The Gilgameshers had settled there and one of their ships had brought that story in.

And he recruited two ships at once on Melkarth, and there was a good deal of mirth about that among the Tanith Space Vikings.

Melkarth was strictly a poultry planet. Its people had sunk to the village-peasant level; they had no wealth worth taking or carrying away. It was, however, a place where a ship could be set down, and there were women, and the locals had not lost the art of distillation, and made potent liquors. A crew could have fun there, much less expensively than on a regular Viking base planet, and for the last eight years a Captain Nial Burrik, of the Fortuna, had been occupying it, taking his ship out for occasional quick raids and spending most of the time living from day to day almost on the local level. Once in a while, a Gilgamesher would come in to see if he had anything to trade. It was a Gilgamesher who brought the story to Tanith, and it was almost two years old when he told it.

“We heard it from the people of the planet, the ones who live where Burrik had his base. First, there was a trading ship came in. You may have heard of her; she is the one called the Honest Horris.”

Trask laughed at that. Her captain, Horris Sasstroff, called himself “Honest Horris,” a misnomer which he had also bestowed on his ship. He was a trader of sorts. Even the Gilgameshers despised him, and not even a Gilgamesher would have taken a wretched craft like the Honest Horris to space.

“He had been to Melkarth before,” the Gilgamesher said. “He and Burrik are friends.” He pronounced that like a final and damning judgment of both of them. “The story the locals told our brethren of the Fairdealer was that the Honest Horris was landed beside Burrik’s ship for ten days, when two other ships came in. They said one had the blue crescent badge, and the other bore a green monster leaping from one star to another.”

The Enterprise and the Starhopper. He wondered why they’d gone to a planet like Melkarth. Maybe they knew in advance whom they’d find there.

“The locals thought there would be fighting, but there was not. There was a great feast, of all four crews. Then everything of value was loaded aboard the Fortuna, and all four ships lifted and spaced out together. They said Burrik left nothing of any worth whatever behind; they were much disappointed at that.”

“Have any of them been back since?”

All three Gilgameshers, captain, exec, and priest, shook their heads.

“Captain Gurrash of the Fairdealer said it had been over a year before his ship put in there. He could still see where the landing legs of the ships had pressed into the ground, but the locals said they had not been back.”

That made two more ships about which inquiries must be made. He wondered, for a moment, why in Gehenna Dunnan would want ships like that; they must make the Space Scourge and the Lamia as he had first seen them look like units of the Royal Navy of Excalibur. Then he became frightened, with an irrational retrospective fright at what might have happened. It could have, too, at any time in the last year and a half; either or both of those ships could have come in on Tanith completely unsuspected. It was only by the sheerest accident that he had found out, even now, about them.

Everybody else thought it was a huge joke. They thought it would be a bigger joke if Dunnan sent those ships to Tanith now, when they were warned and ready for them.

There were other things to worry about. One was the altering attitude of his Majesty Angus I. When the Space Scourge returned, the newly-titled Baron Valkanhayn brought with him, along with the princely title and the commission as Viceroy of Tanith, a most cordial personal audiovisual greeting, warm and friendly. Angus had made it seated at his desk, bare headed and smoking a cigarette. The one which had come on the next ship out was just as cordial, but the King was not smoking and wore a small gold-circled cap-of-maintenance. By the time they had three ships in service on scheduled three-month arrivals, a year and a