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

had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn’t he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Muslims, or the Albigensians, or somebody? XX

Marduk had three moons; a big one, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, and two insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock. The big one was fortified, and a couple of ships were in orbit around it. The Nemesis was challenged as she emerged from her last hyperjump; both ships broke orbit and came out to meet her, and several more were detected lifting away from the planet.

Prince Bentrik took the communication screen, and immediately encountered difficulties. The commandant, even after the situation had been explained twice to him, couldn’t understand. A Royal Navy fleet unit knocked out in a battle with Space Vikings was bad enough, but being rescued and brought to Marduk by another Space Viking simply didn’t make sense. He then screened the Royal Palace at Malverton, on the planet; first he was icily polite to somebody several echelons below him in the peerage, and then respectfully polite to somebody he addressed as Prince Vandarvant. Finally, after some minutes’ wait, a frail, white-haired man in a little black cap-of-maintenance appeared in the screen. Prince Bentrik instantly sprang to his feet. So did all the other Mardukans in the command room.

“Your Majesty! I am most deeply honored!”

“Are you all right, Simon?” the old gentleman asked solicitously. “They haven’t done anything to you, have they?”

“Saved my life, and my men’s, and treated me like a friend and a comrade, Your Majesty. Have I your permission to present, informally, their commander, Prince Trask of Tanith?”

“Indeed you may, Simon. I owe the gentleman my deepest thanks.”

“His Majesty, Mikhyl the Eighth, Planetary King of Marduk,” Prince Bentrik said. “His Highness, Lucas, Prince Trask, Planetary Viceroy of Tanith for his Majesty Angus the First of Gram.”

The elderly monarch bowed his head slightly; Trask bowed a little more deeply, from the waist.

“I am very happy, Prince Trask, first, I confess, at the safe return of my kinsman Prince Bentrik, and then at the honor of meeting one in the confidence of my fellow sovereign King Angus of Gram. I will never be ungrateful for what you did for my cousin and for his officers and men. You must stay at the Palace while you are on this planet; I am giving orders for your reception, and I wish you to be formally presented to me this evening.” He hesitated briefly. “Gram; that is one of the Sword-Worlds, is it not?” Another brief hesitation. “Are you really a Space Viking, Prince Trask?”

Maybe he’d expected Space Vikings to have three horns and a spiked tail and stand twelve feet tall, himself.

It took several hours for the Nemesis to get into orbit. Bentrik spent most of them in a screen-booth, and emerged visibly relieved.

“Nobody’s going to be sticky about what happened on Audhumla,” he told Trask. “There will be a Board of Inquiry. I’m afraid I had to mix you up in that. It’s not only about the action on Audhumla; everybody from the Space Minister down wants to hear what you know about this fellow Dunnan. Like yourself, we all hope he went to Em-See-Square along with his flagship, but we can’t take it for granted. We have over a dozen trade-planets to protect, and he’s hit more than half of them already.”

The process of getting into orbit took them around the planet several times, and it was a more impressive spectacle at each circuit. Of course, Marduk had a population of almost two billion, and had been civilized, with no hiatus of Neobarbarism, since it had first been colonized in the Fourth Century. Even so, the Space Vikings were amazed⁠—and stubbornly refusing to show it⁠—at what they saw in the telescopic screens.

“Look at that city!” Paytrik Morland whispered. “We talk about the civilized planets, but I never realized they were anything like this. Why, this makes Excalibur look like Tanith!”

The city was Malverton, the capital; like any city of a contragravity-using people, it lay in a rough circle of buildings towering out of green interspaces, surrounded by the smaller circles of spaceports and industrial suburbs. The difference was that any of these were as large as Camelot on Excalibur or four Wardshavens on Gram, and Malverton itself was almost half the size of the whole barony of Traskon.

“They aren’t any more civilized that we are, Paytrik. There are just more of them. If there were two billion people on Gram⁠—which I hope there never will be⁠—Gram would have cities like this, too.”

One thing; the government of a planet like Marduk would have to be something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the Sword-Worlds. Maybe this Goldberg-ocracy of theirs had been forced upon them by the sheer complexity of the population and its problems.

Alvyn Karffard took a quick look around him to make sure none of the Mardukans were in earshot.

“I don’t care how many people they have,” he said. “Marduk can be had. A wolf never cares how many sheep there are in a flock. With twenty ships, we could take this planet like we took Eglonsby. There’d be losses coming in, sure, but after we were in and down, we’d have it.”

“Where would we get twenty ships?”

Tanith, at a pinch, could muster five or six, counting the free Space Vikings who used the base facilities; they would have to leave a couple to hold the planet. Beowulf had one, and another almost completed, and now there was an Amaterasu ship. But to assemble a Space Viking armada of twenty.⁠ ⁠… He shook his head. The real reason why Space Vikings had never raided a civilized planet successfully had always been their inability to combine under one command in sufficient strength.

Besides, he didn’t want to raid Marduk. A raid, if successful, would yield immense treasures, but cause a hundred, even a thousand, times as much destruction,