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

with Prince Trask,” Her Majesty’s Prime Minister decided. “But it would have to be kept very secret.”

“Gee!” Myrna’s eyes widened. “A real secret treaty; just like the wicked rulers of the old dictatorship!” She hugged her subject ecstatically. “I’ll bet Grandpa doesn’t even have any secret treaties!”

In a few days, everybody on Marduk knew that a treaty with Tanith was being discussed. If they didn’t, it was no fault of Zaspar Makann’s party, who seemed to command a disconcertingly large number of telecast stations, and who drenched the ether with horror stories of Space Viking atrocities and denunciations of carefully unnamed traitors surrounding the King and the Crown Prince who were about to betray Marduk to rapine and plunder. The leak evidently did not come from Cragdale, for it was generally believed that Trask was still at the Royal Palace in Malverton. At least, that was where the Makannists were demonstrating against him.

He watched such a demonstration by screen; the pickup was evidently on one of the landing stages of the palace, overlooking the wide parks surrounding it. They were packed almost solid with people, surging forward toward the thin cordon of police. The front of the mob looked like a checkerboard⁠—a block in civilian dress, then a block in the curiously effeminate-looking uniforms of Zaspar Makann’s People’s Watchmen, then more in ordinary garb, and more People’s Watchmen. Over the heads of the crowds, at intervals, floated small contragravity lifters on which were mounted the amplifiers that were bellowing:

“Space Vi-king⁠—Go home! Space Vi-king⁠—Go home!”

The police stood motionless, at parade rest; the mob surged closer. When they were fifty yards away, the blocks of People’s Watchmen ran forward, then spread out until they formed a line six deep across the entire front; other blocks, from the rear, pushed the ordinary demonstrators aside and took their place. Hating them more every second, Trask grudged approval of a smart and disciplined maneuver. How long, he wondered, had they been drilling in that sort of tactics? Without stopping, they continued their advance on the police, who had now shifted their stance.

“Space Vi-king⁠—Go home! Space Vi-king⁠—Go home!”

“Fire!” he heard himself yelling. “Don’t let them get any closer, fire now!”

They had nothing to fire with; they had only truncheons, no better weapons than the knobbed swagger-sticks of the People’s Watchmen. They simply disappeared, after a brief flurry of blows, and the Makann storm-troopers continued their advance.

And that was that. The gates of the Palace were shut; the mob, behind a front of Makann People’s Watchmen, surged up to them and stopped. The loudspeakers bellowed on, reiterating their four-word chant.

“Those police were murdered,” he said. “They were murdered by the man who ordered them out there unarmed.”

“That would be Count Naydnayr, the Minister of Security,” somebody said.

“Then he’s the one you want to hang for it.”

“What else would you have done?” Crown Prince Edvard challenged.

“Put up about fifty combat cars. Drawn a deadline, and opened machine-gun fire as soon as the mob crossed it, and kept on firing till the survivors turned tail and ran. Then sent out more cars, and shot everybody wearing a People’s Watchmen uniform, all over town. Inside forty-eight hours, there’d be no People’s Welfare party, and no Zaspar Makann either.”

The Crown Prince’s face stiffened. “That may be the way you do things in the Sword-Worlds, Prince Trask. It’s not the way we do things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty of shedding the blood of its people.”

He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn’t, the people would end by shedding theirs. Instead, he said softly:

“I’m sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it’s too late now. You’ve torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.”

XXIII

The colored turbulence faded into the gray of hyperspace; five hundred hours to Tanith. Guatt Kirbey was securing his control-panel, happy to return to his music. And Vann Larch would go back to his paints and brushes, and Alvyn Karffard to the working model of whatever it was he had left unfinished when the Nemesis had emerged at the end of the jump from Audhumla.

Trask went to the index of the ship’s library and punched for History, Old Terran. There was plenty of that, thanks to Otto Harkaman. Then he punched for Hitler, Adolf. Harkaman was right; anything that could happen in a human society had already happened, in one form or another, somewhere and at some time. Hitler could help him understand Zaspar Makann.

By the time the ship came out, with the yellow sun of Tanith in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about Hitler, occasionally referred to as Schicklgruber, and he understood, with sorrow, how the lights of civilization on Marduk were going out.

Beside the Lamia, stripped of her Dillinghams and crammed with heavy armament and detection instruments, the Space Scourge and the Queen Flavia were on off-planet watch. There were half a dozen other ships on orbit just above atmosphere; a Gilgamesher, one of the Gram-Tanith freighters, a couple of freelance Space Vikings, and a new and unfamiliar ship. When he asked the moonbase who she was, he was told that she was the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu. That was, by almost a year, better than he had expected of them. Otto Harkaman was out in the Corisande, raiding and visiting the trade-planets.

He found his cousin, Nikkolay Trask, at Rivington; when he inquired about Traskon, Nikkolay cursed.

“I don’t know anything about Traskon; I haven’t anything to do with Traskon, any more. Traskon is now the personal property of our well loved⁠—very well loved⁠—Queen Evita. The Trasks don’t own enough land on Gram now for a family cemetery. You see what you did?” he added bitterly.

“You needn’t rub it in, Nikkolay. If I’d stayed on Gram, I’d have helped put Angus on the throne, and it