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

even to jolt the huge mass of the Nemesis. At the same time, the other ship took a hit from something that would have vaporized her had she not been armored in collapsium. Then, as they passed close together, guns hammered back and forth along with missiles, and then the Enterprise was out of sight around the horizon.

Another ship, the size of Otto Harkaman’s Corisande II, was approaching; she bore a tapering, red-nailed feminine hand dangling a planet by a string. They rushed toward each other, planting a garden of evanescent fire-flowers between them; they pounded one another with guns, and then they sped apart. At the same time, Paul Koreff was picking up an impulse-code signal from the third, crippled, ship; a screen combination. Trask punched it out as he received it.

A man in space armor was looking out of the screen. That was bad, if they had to suit up in the command room. They still had air; his helmet was off, but it was attached and hinged back. On his breastplate was a device of a dragonlike beast perched with its tail around a planet, and a crown above. He had a thin, high-cheeked face, with a vertical wrinkle between his eyes, and a clipped blond mustache.

“Who are you, stranger. You’re fighting my enemies; does that make you a friend.”

“I’m a friend of anybody who owns Andray Dunnan his enemy. Sword-World ship Nemesis; I’m Prince Lucas Trask of Tanith, commanding.”

“Royal Mardukan ship Victrix.” The thin-faced man gave a wry laugh. “Not been living up to her name so well. I’m Prince Simon Bentrik, commanding.”

“Are you still battle-worthy?”

“We can fire about half our guns; we still have a few missiles left. Seventy percent of the ship’s sealed off, and we’ve been holed in a dozen places. We have power enough for lift and some steering-way. We can’t make lateral way except at the expense of lift.”

Which made the Victrix practically a stationary target. He yelled over his shoulder at Karffard to cut speed all he could without tearing things apart.

“When that cripple comes into view, start circling around her. Get into a tight circle above her.” He turned back to the man in the screen. “If we can get ourselves slowed down enough, we’ll do all we can to cover you.”

“All you can is all you can; thank you, Prince Trask.”

“Here comes the Enterprise!” Karffard shouted, with obscenely blasphemous embellishments. “She hairpinned on us.”

“Well, do something about her!”

Vann Larch was already doing it. The Enterprise had taken damage in the last exchange; Koreff’s spectroscopes showed her haloed with air and water vapor. Her instruments would be getting the same story from the Nemesis; wedge-shaped segments extending six to eight decks in were sealed off in several places. Then the only thing that could be seen with certainty was the blaze of mutually destroying missiles between. The short-range gun duel began and ended as they passed.

In the screen, he had seen a fat round-nosed thing come up from the Victrix, curving far out ahead of the passing Enterprise. She was almost out of sight around the planet when she ran head-on into it, and vanished in an awesome blaze. For a moment, he thought she had been destroyed, then she lurched into sight and went around the curvature of 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!”

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.

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 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.”

XIX

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.