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

a great deal of equipment, had been working here in the estimated five or six years since Andray Dunnan⁠—or somebody⁠—had constructed this base.

Andray Dunnan. They found his badge, the crescent, blue on black, on things. They found equipment that Harkaman recognized as having been part of the original cargo stolen with the Enterprise. They even found, in his living quarters, a blown-up photoprint picture of Nevil Ormm, draped in black. But what they did not find was a single vehicle small enough to be taken aboard a ship, or a single scrap of combat equipment, not even a pistol or a hand grenade.

Dunnan had gone, but they knew whither, and where to find him. The conquest of Marduk had moved into its final phase.

Marduk was on the other side of the sun from Abaddon with ninety-five million miles⁠—close, but not inconveniently so, Trask thought⁠—to spare. Guatt Kirbey and the Mardukan astrogator who was helping him made it within a light-minute. The Mardukan thought that was fine; Kirbey didn’t. The last microjump was aimed at the Moon of Marduk, which was plainly visible in the telescopic screen. They came out within a light-second and a half, which Kirbey admitted was reasonably close. As soon as the screens cleared, they saw that they weren’t too late. The Moon of Marduk was under fire and firing back.

They’d have detection, and he knew what they were detecting⁠—a clump of sixteen rending distortions of the fabric of space-time, as sixteen ships came into sudden existence in the normal continuum. Beside him, Bentrik had a screen on; it was still milky-white, and he was speaking into a radio hand-phone.

“Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector of Marduk, calling Moonbase.” Then, slowly, he repeated his screen combination twice. “Come in, Moonbase; this is Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector, speaking.”

He waited ten seconds, and was about to start again, when the screen flickered. The man who appeared in it wore the insignia of a Mardukan navy commodore. He needed a shave, but he was grinning happily. Bentrik greeted him by name.

“Hello, Simon; glad to see you. Your Highness, I mean; what is this Prince-Protector thing?”

“Somebody had to do it. Is the King still alive?”

The grin slid off the commodore’s face, starting with his eyes.

“We don’t know. At first, Makann had him speaking by screen⁠—you know what it was like⁠—urging everybody to obey and cooperate with ‘our trusted Chancellor.’ Makann always appeared on the screen with him.”

Bentrik nodded. “I remember.”

“Before you left, Makann kept quiet, and let the King make the speech. After a while, the King wasn’t able to speak coherently; he’d stammer, and repeat. So then Makann did all the talking; they couldn’t even depend on him to parrot what they were giving him with an earplug phone. Then he stopped appearing entirely. I suppose there were physical symptoms they couldn’t allow to be seen.” Bentrik was cursing horribly under his breath; the officer at Moonbase nodded. “I hope for his sake that he is dead.”

Poor Goodman Mikhyl. Bentrik was saying, “So do I.” Trask agreed, mentally. The commodore at Moonbase was still talking:

“We got two more renegade R.M.N. ships, within a hundred hours after you left.” He named them. “And we got one of the Dunnan ships, the Fortuna. We blew out the Malverton Navy Yard. They’re still using the Antarctic Naval Base, but we’ve knocked out a good deal of that. We got the Honest Horris. They made two attempts to land on us and lost a couple of ships. Eight hundred hours ago, they were joined by the rest of Dunnan’s fleet, five ships. They made a landing on Malverton while it was turned away from us. Makann announced that they were R.M.N. units from the trade-planets that had joined him. I suppose the planet-side public swallowed that. He also announced that their commander, Admiral Dunnan, was in command of the People’s Armed Forces.”

Dunnan’s ground-fighters would be in control of Malverton. By now, the odds were that Makann was as much his prisoner as King Mikhyl VIII had been Makann’s.

“So Dunnan has conquered Marduk. All he has to do, now, is make it stick,” he said. “I see four ships off Moonbase; how many more have they?”

“These are Bolide and Eclipse, Dunnan’s ships, and former Royal Mardukan Navy ships Champion and Guardian. There are five orbiting off the planet: Ex-R.M.N.S. Paladin, and Dunnan ships Starhopper, Banshee, Reliable and Exporter. The last two are listed as merchantmen, but they’re performing like regulation battlecraft.”

The four that had been circling Moonbase broke orbit and started toward the relieving fleet; one took a hit from a Moonbase missile, which staggered her but did no evident damage. Two ships which had been orbiting the planet also changed course and started out. The command room was silent except for a subdued chuckling from a computer which was estimating enemy intentions by observed data and Games Theory. Three more came hurrying out from the planet, and the two in the lead slowed to let them catch up. He wanted to be able to engage the four from off the satellite before the five from the planet joined them, but Karffard’s computers said it couldn’t be done.

“All right, we have to take all our bad eggs in one basket,” he said. “Try to hit them as soon after they join as possible.”

The computers began chuckling again. The serving-robots were doing a rush business in hot coffee. Prince Bentrik’s son, sitting beside his father, had stopped being Ruthless Ravary the Demon of the Spaceways and was a very young officer going into his first space battle, more scared and at the same time happier than he had ever been in his short life. Captain Garravay of the Vindex was making signal to the other ships from Gimli: “Royal Navy; smash the traitors first!” He could understand and sympathize, even if he couldn’t approve of putting personal ahead of tactical considerations, and made