Chapter 5

"They aren't as savage as the Xochitl locals were when Haulteclere took it over. You've been there; you've seen what Prince Viktor does with them now."

"We haven't got the men or equipment they have on Xochitl," Valkanhayn said. "We can't afford to coddle the locals."

"You can't afford not to," Harkaman told him. "You have two ships, here. You can only use one for raiding; the other will have to stay here to hold the planet. If you take them both away, the locals, whom you have been studiously antagonizing, will swamp whoever you leave behind. And if you don't leave anybody behind, what's the use of having a planetary base?"

"Well, why don't you join us," Spasso finally came out with it. "With our three ships we could have a real thing, here."

Harkaman looked at him inquiringly. "The gentlemen," Trask said, "are putting this wrongly. They mean, why don't we let them join us?"

"Well, if you want to put it like that," Valkanhayn conceded. "We'll admit, your _Nemesis_ would be the big end of it. But why not? Three ships, we could have a real base here. Nikky Gratham's father only had two when he started on Jagannath, and look what the Grathams got there now."

"Are we interested?" Harkaman asked.

"Not very, I'm afraid. Of course, we've just landed; Tanith may have great possibilities. Suppose we reserve decision for a while and look around a little."

* * * * *

There were stars in the sky, and, for good measure, a sliver of moon on the western horizon. It was only a small moon, but it was close. He walked to the edge of the landing stage, and Elaine was walking with him. The noise from inside, where the _Nemesis_ crew were feasting with those of the _Lamia_ and _Space Scourge_, grew fainter. To the south, a star moved; one of the pinnaces they had left on off-planet watch. There was firelight far below, and he could hear singing. Suddenly he realized that it was the poor devils of locals whom Valkanhayn and Spasso had enslaved. Elaine went away quickly.

"Have your fill of Space Viking glamour, Lucas?"

He turned. It was Baron Rathmore, who had come along to serve for a year or so and then hitch a ride home from some base planet and cash in politically on having been with Lucas Trask.

"For the moment. I'm told that this lot aren't typical."

"I hope not. They're a pack of sadistic brutes, and piggish along with it."

"Well, brutality and bad manners I can condone, but Spasso and Valkanhayn are a pair of ignominious little crooks, and stupid along with it. If Andray Dunnan had gotten here ahead of us, he might have done one good thing in his wretched life. I can't understand why he didn't come here."

"I think he still will," Rathmore said. "I knew him and I knew Nevil Ormm. Ormm's ambitious, and Dunnan is insanely vindictive--" He broke off with a sour laugh. "I'm telling _you_ that!"

"Why didn't he come here directly, then?"

"Maybe he doesn't want a base on Tanith. That would be something constructive; Dunnan's a destroyer. I think he took that cargo of equipment somewhere and sold it. I think he'll wait till he's fairly sure the other ship is finished. Then he'll come in and shoot the place up, the way--" He bit that off abruptly.

"The way he did my wedding; I think of it all the time."

* * * * *

The next morning, he and Harkaman took an aircar and went to look at the city at the forks of the river. It was completely new, in the sense that it had been built since the collapse of Federation civilization and the loss of civilized technologies. It was huddled on a long, irregularly triangular mound, evidently to raise it above flood-level. Generations of labor must have gone into it. To the eyes of a civilization using contragravity and powered equipment it wasn't at all impressive. Fifty to a hundred men with adequate equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of earth, cartload after cartload creaking behind straining beasts, timber after timber cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciate it. They even had it walled, with a palisade of tree-trunks behind which earth and rocks had been banked, and along the river were docks, at which boats were moored. The locals simply called it Tradetown.

As they approached, a big gong began booming, and a white puff of smoke was followed by the thud of a signal-gun. The boats, long canoe-like craft and round-bowed, many-oared barges, put out hastily into the river; through binoculars they could see people scattering from the surrounding fields, driving cattle ahead of them. By the time they were over the city, nobody was in sight. They seemed to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the nine-hundred-odd hours in which they had been exposed to the figurative mercies of Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso. It hadn't saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and there were evidences of shelling. Light chemical-explosive stuff; this city was too good a cow for even those two to kill before the milking was over.

They circled slowly over it at a thousand feet. When they turned away, black smoke began rising from what might have been pottery works or brick-kilns on the outskirts; something resinous had evidently been fed to the fires. Other columns of black smoke began rising across the countryside on both sides of the river.

"You know, these people are civilized, if you don't limit the term to contragravity and nuclear energy," Harkaman said. "They have gunpowder, for one thing, and I can think of some rather impressive Old Terran civilizations that didn't have that much. They have an organized society, and anybody who has that is starting toward civilization."

"I hate to think of what'll happen to this planet if Spasso and Valkanhayn stay here long."

"Might be a good thing, in the long run. Good things in the long run are often tough while they're happening. I know what'll happen to Spasso and Valkanhayn, though. They'll start decivilizing, themselves. They'll stay here for a while, and when they need something they can't take from the locals they'll go chicken-stealing after it, but most of the time they'll stay here lording it over their slaves, and finally their ships will wear out and they won't be able to fix them. Then, some time, the locals'll jump them when they aren't watching and wipe them out. But in the meantime, the locals'll learn a lot from them."

They turned the aircar west again along the river. They looked at a few villages. One or two dated from the Federation period; they had been plantations before whatever it was had happened. More had been built within the past five centuries. A couple had recently been destroyed, in punishment for the crime of self-defense.

"You know," he said, at length, "I'm going to do everybody a favor. I'm going to let Spasso and Valkanhayn persuade me to take this planet away from them."

Harkaman, who was piloting, turned sharply. "You crazy or something?"

"'When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.' Who said that?"

"On target," Harkaman grinned. "'What _do_ you mean, Lord Trask?'"

"I can't catch Dunnan by pursuit; I'll have to get him by interception. You know the source of that quotation, too. This looks to me like a good place to intercept him. When he learns I have a base here, he'll hit it, sooner or later. And even if he doesn't, we can pick up more information on him, when ships start coming in here, than we would batting around all over the Old Federation."

Harkaman considered for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, if we could set up a base like Nergal or Xochitl," he agreed. "There'll be four or five ships, Space Vikings, traders, Gilgameshers and so on, on either of those planets all the time. If we had the cargo Dunnan took to space in the _Enterprise_, we could start a base like that. But we haven't anything near what we need, and you know what Spasso and Valkanhayn have."

"We can get it from Gram. As it stands, the investors in the Tanith Adventure, from Duke Angus down, lost everything they put into it. If they're willing to throw some good money after bad, they can get it back, and a handsome profit to boot. And there ought to be planets above the rowboat and ox-cart level not too far away that could be raided for a lot of things we'd need."

"That's right; I know of half a dozen within five hundred light-years. They won't be the kind Spasso and Valkanhayn are in the habit of raiding, though. And besides machinery, we can get gold, and valuable merchandise that could be sold on Gram. And if we could make a go of it, you'd go farther hunting Dunnan by sitting here on Tanith than by going looking for him. That was the way we used to hunt marsh pigs on Colada, when I was a kid; just find a good place and sit down and wait."

* * * * *

They had Valkanhayn and Spasso aboard the _Nemesis_ for dinner; it didn't take much guiding to keep the conversation on the subject of Tanith and its resources, advantages and possibilities. Finally, when they had reached brandy and coffee, Trask said idly:

"I believe, together, we could really make something out of this planet."

"That's what we've been telling you, all along," Spasso broke in eagerly. "This is a wonderful planet--"

"It could be. All it has now is possibilities. We'd need a spaceport, for one thing."

"Well, what's this, here?" Valkanhayn wanted to know.

"It was a spaceport," Harkaman told him. "It could be one again. And we'd need a shipyard, capable of any kind of heavy repair work. Capable of building a complete ship, in fact. I never saw a ship come into a Viking base planet with any kind of a cargo worth dickering over that hadn't taken some damage getting it. Prince Viktor of Xochitl makes a good half of his money on ship repairs, and so do Nikky Gratham on Jagannath and the Everrards on Hoth."

"And engine works, hyperdrive, normal space and pseudograv," Trask added. "And a steel mill, and a collapsed-matter plant. And robotic-equipment works, and--"

"Oh, that's out of all reason!" Valkanhayn cried. "It would take twenty trips with a ship the size of this one to get all that stuff here, and how'd we ever be able to pay for it?"

"That's the sort of base Duke Angus of Wardshaven planned. The _Enterprise_, practically a duplicate of the _Nemesis_, carried everything that would be needed to get it started, when she was pirated."

"When she was--?"

"Now you're going to have to tell the gentlemen the truth," Harkaman chuckled.

"I intend to." He laid his cigar down, sipped some of his brandy, and explained about Duke Angus' Tanith adventure. "It was part of a larger plan; Angus wanted to gain economic supremacy for Wardshaven to forward his political ambitions. It was, however, an entirely practical business proposition. I was opposed to it, because I thought it would be too good a proposition for Tanith and work to the disadvantage of the home planet in the end." He told them about the _Enterprise_, and the cargo of industrial and construction equipment she carried, and then told them how Andray Dunnan had pirated her.

"That wouldn't have annoyed me at all; I had no money invested in the project. What did annoy me, to put it mildly, was that just before he took the ship out, Dunnan shot up my wedding, wounded me and my father-in-law, and killed the lady to whom I had been married for less than half an hour. I fitted out this ship at my own expense, took on Captain Harkaman, who had been left without a command when the _Enterprise_ was pirated, and came out here to hunt Dunnan down and kill him. I believe that I can do that best by establishing a base on Tanith myself. The base will have to be operated at a profit, or it can't be operated at all." He picked up the cigar again and puffed slowly. "I am inviting you gentlemen to join me as partners."

"Well, you still haven't told us how we're going to get the money to finance it," Spasso insisted.

"The Duke of Wardshaven, and the others who invested in the original Tanith adventure will put it up. It's the only way they can recover what they lost on the _Enterprise_."

"But then, this Duke of Wardshaven will be running it, not us," Valkanhayn objected.

"The Duke of Wardshaven," Harkaman reminded him, "is on Gram. We are here on Tanith. There are three thousand light-years between."

That seemed a satisfactory answer. Spasso, however, wanted to know who would run things here on Tanith.

"We'll have to hold a meeting of all three crews," he began.

"We will do nothing of the kind," Trask told him. "I will be running things here on Tanith. You people may allow your orders to be debated and voted on, but I don't. You will inform your respective crews to that effect. Any orders you give them in my name will be obeyed without argument."

"I don't know how the men'll take that," Valkanhayn said.

"I know how they'll take it if they're smart," Harkaman told him. "And I know what'll happen if they aren't. I know how you've been running your ships, or how your ships' crews have been running you. Well, we don't do it that way. Lucas Trask is owner, and I'm captain. I obey his orders on what's to be done, and everybody else obeys mine on how to do it."

Spasso looked at Valkanhayn, then shrugged. "That's how the man wants it, Boake. You want to give him an argument? I don't."

"The first order," Trask said, "is that these people you have working here are to be paid. They are not to be beaten by these plug-uglies you have guarding them. If any of them want to leave, they may do so; they will be given presents and furnished transportation home. Those who wish to stay will be issued rations, furnished with clothing and bedding and so on as they need it, and paid wages. We'll work out some kind of a pay-token system and set up a commissary where they can buy things."

Disks of plastic or titanium or something, stamped and uncounterfeitable. Get Alvyn Karffard to see about that. Organize work-gangs, and promote the best and most intelligent to foremen. And those guards could be taken in hand by some ground-fighter sergeant and given Sword-World weapons and tactical training; use them to train others; they'd need a sepoy army of some sort. Even the best of good will is no substitute for armed force, conspicuously displayed and unhesitatingly used when necessary.

"And there'll be no more of this raiding villages for food or anything else. We will pay for anything we get from any of the locals."

"We'll have trouble about that," Valkanhayn predicted. "Our men think anything a local has belongs to anybody who can take it."

"So do I," Harkaman said. "On a planet I'm raiding. This is our planet, and our locals. We don't raid our own planet or our own people. You'll just have to teach them that."

X

It took Valkanhayn and Spasso more time and argument to convince their crews than Trask thought necessary. Harkaman seemed satisfied, and so was Baron Rathmore, the Wardshaven politician.

"It's like talking a lot of uncommitted small landholders into taking somebody's livery-and-maintenance," the latter said. "You can't use too much pressure; make them think it's their own idea."

There were meetings of both crews, with heated arguments; Baron Rathmore made frequent speeches, while Lord Trask of Tanith and Admiral Harkaman--the titles were Rathmore's suggestion--remained loftily aloof. On both ships, everybody owned everything in common, which meant that nobody owned anything. They had taken over Tanith on the same basis of diffused ownership, and nobody in either crew was quite stupid enough to think that they could do anything with the planet by themselves. By joining the _Nemesis_, it appeared that they were getting something for nothing. In the end, they voted to place themselves under the authority of Lord Trask and Admiral Harkaman. After all, Tanith would be a feudal lordship, and the three ships together a fleet.

Admiral Harkaman's first act of authority was to order a general inspection of fleet units. He wasn't shocked by the condition of the two ships, but that was only because he had expected much worse. They were spaceworthy; after all, they had gotten here from Hoth under their own power. They were only combat-worthy if the combat weren't too severe. His original estimate that the _Nemesis_ could have knocked both of them to pieces was, if anything, over-conservative. The engines were only in fair shape, and the armament was bad.

"We aren't going to spend our time sitting here on Tanith," he told the two captains. "This planet is a raiding base, and 'raiding' is the operative word. And we are not going to raid easy planets. A planet that can be raided with impunity isn't worth the time it takes getting to it. We are going to have to fight on every planet we hit, and I am not going to jeopardize the lives of the men under me, which includes your crews as well as mine, because of under-powered and under-armed ships."

Spasso tried to argue. "We've been getting along."

Harkaman cursed. "Yes. I know how you've been getting along; chicken-stealing on planets like Set and Xipototec and Melkarth. Not making enough to cover maintenance expenses; that's why your ship's in the shape she is. Well, those days are over. Both ships ought to have a full overhaul, but we'll have to skip that till we have a shipyard of our own. But I will insist, at least, that your guns and launchers are in order. And your detection equipment; you didn't get a fix on the _Nemesis_ till we were less than twenty thousand miles off-planet."

"We had better get the _Lamia_ in condition first," Trask said. "We can put her on off-planet watch, instead of that pair of pinnaces."

* * * * *

Work on the _Lamia_ started the next day, and considerable friction-heat was generated between her officers and the engineers sent over from the _Nemesis_. Baron Rathmore went aboard, and came back laughing.

"You know how that ship's run?" he asked. "There's a sort of soviet of officers; chief engineer, exec, guns-and-missiles, astrogator and so on. Spasso's just an animated ventriloquist's dummy. I talked to all of them. None of them can pin me down to anything, but they think we're going to heave Spasso out of command and appoint one of them, and each one thinks he'll be it. I don't know how long that'll last, it's a string-and-tape job like the one we're having to do on the ship. It'll hold till we get something better."

"We'll have to get rid of Spasso," Harkaman agreed. "I think we'll put one of our own people in his place. Valkanhayn can stay in command of the _Space Scourge_; he's a spaceman. But Spasso's no good for anything."

The local problem was complicated, too. The locals spoke Lingua Terra of a sort, like every descendant of the race that had gone out from the Sol system in the Third Century, but it was a barely comprehensible sort. On civilized planets, the language had been frozen unalterably in microbooks and voice tapes. But microbooks can only be read and sound tapes heard with the aid of electricity, and Tanith had lost that long ago.

Most of the people Spasso and Valkanhayn had kidnaped and enslaved came from villages within a radius of five hundred miles. About half of them wanted to be repatriated; they were given gifts of knives, tools, blankets, and bits of metal which seemed to be the chief standard of value and medium of exchange, and shipped home. Finding their proper villages was not easy. At each such village, the news was spread that the Space Vikings would hereafter pay for what they received.

The _Lamia_ was overhauled as rapidly as possible. She was still far from being a good ship, but she was much closer to being one than before. She was fitted with the best detection equipment that could be assembled, and put on orbit; Alvyn Karffard took command of her, with some of Spasso's officers, some of Valkanhayn's, and a few from the _Nemesis_. Harkaman was intending to use her for retraining of all the _Lamia_ and _Space Scourge_ officers, and rotated them back and forth.

The labor guards, a score in number, were relieved of their duties, issued Sword-World firearms, and given intensive training. The trade tokens, stamps of colored plastic, were introduced, and a store was set up where they could be exchanged for Sword-World items. After a while, it dawned on the locals that the tokens could also be used for trading among themselves; money seemed to have been one of the adjuncts of civilization that had been lost along Tanith's downward path. A few of them were able to use contragravity hand-lifters and hand-towed lifter-skids; several were even learning to operate things like bulldozers, at least to the extent of knowing which lever or button did what. Give them a little time, Trask thought, watching a gang at work down on the spaceport floor. It won't be many years before half of them will be piloting aircars.

* * * * *

As soon as the _Lamia_ was on orbital watch, the _Space Scourge_ was set down at the spaceport and work started on her. It was decided that Valkanhayn would take her to Gram; enough _Nemesis_ people would go along to insure good faith on his part, and to talk to Duke Angus and the Tanith investors. Baron Rathmore, and Paytrik Morland, and several other Wardshaven gentlemen-adventurers for the latter function; Alvyn Karffard to act as Valkanhayn's exec, with private orders to supersede him in command if necessary, and Guatt Kirbey to do the astrogating.

"We'll have to take the _Nemesis_ and the _Space Scourge_ out, first, and make a big raid," Harkaman said. "We can't send the _Space Scourge_ back to Gram empty. When Baron Rathmore and Lord Valpry and the rest of them talk to Duke Angus and the Tanith investors, they'll have to have a lot more than some travel films of Tanith. They'll have to be able to show that Tanith is producing. We ought to have a little money of our own to invest, too."

"But, Otto; both ships?" That worried Trask. "Suppose Dunnan comes and finds nobody here but Spasso and the _Lamia_?"

"Chance we'll have to take. Personally, I think we have a year to a year and a half before Dunnan shows up here. I know, we were fooled trying to guess what he'd do before. But the sort of raid I have in mind, we'll need two ships, and in any case, I don't want to leave both those ships here while we're gone, even if you do."

"When it comes to that, I don't think I do, either. But we can't trust Spasso here alone, can we?"

"We'll leave enough of our people to make sure. We'll leave Alvyn--that'll mean a lot of work for me that he'd otherwise do, on the ship. And Baron Rathmore, and young Valpry, and the men who've been training our sepoys. We can shuffle things around and leave some of Valkanhayn's men in place of some of Spasso's. We might even talk Spasso into going along. That'll mean having to endure him at our table, but it would be wise."

"Have you picked a place to raid?"

"Three of them. First, Khepera. That's only thirty light-years from here. That won't amount to much; just chicken-stealing. It'll give our green hands some relatively safe combat-training, and it'll give us some idea of how Spasso's and Valkanhayn's people behave, and give them confidence for the next job."

"And then?"