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

of slag and lava and scorched earth and burned forests. There had been a planetbuster; it had started a major earthquake. And half a dozen thermonuclears. There were probably quite a few survivors⁠—a human planetary population is extremely hard to exterminate completely⁠—but within a century they’d be back to the loincloth and the stone hatchet.

“We don’t even know Dunnan did it, personally,” Paytrik Morland said. “For all we know, he’s down in an airtight cave city on some planet nobody ever heard of, sitting on a golden throne, surrounded by a harem.”

He had begun to suspect that Dunnan was doing something of just the sort. The Greatest Space Viking of History would naturally found a Space Viking empire.

“An emperor goes out to look his empire over, now and then; I don’t spend all my time on Tanith. Say we try Audhumla next. It’s the farthest away. We might get there while he’s still shooting up Obidicut and Lugaluru. Guatt, figure us a jump for it.”

When the colored turbulence washed away and the screen cleared, Audhumla looked like Tanith or Khepera or Amaterasu or any other Terra-type planet, a big disk brilliant with reflected sunlight and glowing with starlit and moonlit atmosphere on the other. There was a single rather large moon, and, in the telescopic screen, the usual markings of seas and continents and rivers and mountain-ranges. But there was nothing to show.⁠ ⁠…

Oh, yes; lights on the darkened side, and from the size they must be vast cities. All the available data for Audhumla was long out of date; a considerable civilization must have developed in the last half dozen centuries.

Another light appeared, a hard blue-white spark that spread into a larger, less brilliant yellow light. At the same time, all the alarm-devices in the command-room went into a pandemonium of jangling and flashing and squawking and howling and shouting. Radiation. Energy-release. Contragravity distortion effects. Infrared output. A welter of indecipherable radio and communication-screen signals. Radar and scanner-ray beams from the planet.

Trask’s fist began hurting; he found that he had been pounding the desk in front of him with it. He stopped it.

“We caught him, we caught him!” he was yelling hoarsely. “Full speed in, continuous acceleration, as much as we can stand. We’ll worry about decelerating when we’re in shooting distance.”

The planet grew steadily larger; Karffard was taking him at his word about continuous acceleration. There’d be a Gehenna of a bill to pay when they started decelerating. On the planet, more bombs were going off just outside atmosphere beyond the sunset line.

“Ship observed. Altitude about a hundred to five hundred miles⁠—hundreds, not thousands⁠—35° North Latitude, 15° west of the sunset line. Ship is under fire, bomb explosions near her,” a voice whooped.

Somebody else was yelling that the city lights were really burning cities, or burning forests. The first voice, having stopped, broke in again:

“Ship is visible in telescopic screen, just at the sunset line. And there’s another ship detected but not visible, somewhere around the equator, and a third one somewhere out of sight, we can just get the fringe of her contragravity field around the planet.”

That meant there were two sides, and a fight. Unless Dunnan had picked up a third ship, somewhere. The telescopic view shifted; for a moment the planet was completely off-screen, and then its curvature came into the screen against a star-scattered background. They were almost in to two thousand miles now; Karffard was yelling to stop acceleration and trying to put the ship into a spiral orbit. Suddenly they caught a glimpse of one of the ships.

“She’s in trouble.” That was Paul Koreff’s voice. “She’s leaking air and water vapor like crazy.”

“Well, is she a good guy or a bad guy?” Morland was yelling back, as though Koreff’s spectroscopes could distinguish. Koreff ignored that.

“Another ship making signal,” he said. “She’s the one coming up over the equator. Sword-World impulse code; her communication-screen combination, and an identify-yourself.”

Karffard punched out the combination as Koreff furnished it. While Trask was desperately willing his face into immobility, the screen lighted. It wasn’t Andray Dunnan; that was a disappointment. It was almost as good, though. His henchman, Sir Nevil Ormm.

“Well, Sir Nevil! A pleasant surprise,” he heard himself saying. “We last met on the terrace at Karvall House, did we not?”

For once, the paper-white face of Andray Dunnan’s âme damnée showed expression, but whether it was fear, surprise, shock, hatred, anger, or what combination of them, Trask could no more than guess.

“Trask! Satan curse you⁠ ⁠… !”

Then the screen went blank. In the telescopic screen, the other ship came on unfalteringly. Paul Koreff, who had gotten more data on mass, engine energy-output and dimensions, was identifying her as the Enterprise.

“Well, go for her! Give her everything!”

They didn’t need the order; Vann Larch was speaking rapidly into his hand-phone, and Alvyn Karffard was hurling his voice all over the Nemesis, warning of sudden deceleration and direction change, and while he was speaking, things in the command room began sliding. In the telescopic screen, the other ship was plainly visible; he could see the oval patch of black with the blue crescent, and in his screen Dunnan would be seeing the sword-impaled skull of the Nemesis.

If only he could be sure Dunnan was there to see it. If it had only been Dunnan’s face, instead of Ormm’s, that he had seen in the screen. As it was, he couldn’t be sure, and if one of the missiles that were already going out made a lucky hit, he might never be sure. He didn’t care who killed Dunnan, or how. All he wanted was to know that Dunnan’s death had set him free from a self-assumed obligation that was now meaningless to him.

The Enterprise launched counter-missiles; so did the Nemesis. There were momentarily unbearable flashes of pure energy and from them globes of incandescence spread and vanished. Something must have gotten through; red lights flashed on the damage board. It had been something heavy enough