"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 RMN 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 RMN 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-RMNS _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 a quick sealed-beam call to Harkaman to be
prepared to plug any holes they left in formation if they broke away
in search of vengeance. He also ordered the _Black Star_ and the
_Sun Goddess_ to shepherd the lightly armed and troop-crammed
Gilgamesh freighter out of danger. The two clumps of Dunnan-Makann
ships were converging rapidly, and Alvyn Karffard was screaming into
a phone to somebody to get more speed.
At a thousand miles, the missiles started going out, and the two
groups of ships, four and five, were equidistant from each other and
from the allied fleet, at the points of a triangle that was growing
smaller by the second. The first fire-globes of intercepted missiles
spread from their seeds of brief white light. A red light flashed on
the damage-board. An enemy ship took a hit. The captain of the
_Queen Flavia_ was on a screen, saying that his ship was heavily
damaged. Three ships bearing the Mardukan dragon-and-planet circled
madly around each other at what looked, in the screen, like just
over pistol-range, two of them firing into the third, which was
replying desperately. The third one blew up, and somebody was
yelling out of a screenspeaker, "Scratch one traitor!"
Another ship blew up somewhere, and then another. He heard somebody
say, "There went one of ours," and wondered which one it was. Not
the _Corisande_, he hoped; no, it wasn't, he could see her rushing
after two other ships which were, in turn, speeding toward the
_Black Star_, the _Sun Goddess_ and the Gilgamesh freighter. Then
the _Nemesis_ and the _Starhopper_ were within gun-range, pounding
each other savagely.
The battle had tied itself into a ball of gyrating, fire-spitting
ships that went rolling toward the planet, which was swinging in and
out of the main viewscreen and growing rapidly larger. By the time
they were down to the inner edge of the exosphere, the ball had
started to unwind, ship after ship dropping out of it and going
into orbit, some badly damaged and some going to attack damaged
enemies. Some of them were completely around the planet, hidden
by it. He saw three ships approaching _Corisande_, _Sun Goddess_,
and the Gilgamesher. He got Harkaman on the screen.
"Where's the _Black Star_?" he asked.
"Gone to Em-See-Square," Harkaman replied. "We got the two
Dunnan-Makanns. _Bolide_ and _Reliable_."
Then young Steven of Ravary, who had been monitoring one of the
intership screens, had a call from Captain Gompertz of the
_Grendelsbane_, and at the same moment somebody else was yelling,
"Here comes the _Starhopper_ again!"
"Tell him to wait a moment; we have troubles," he said.
_Nemesis_ and _Starhopper_ sledge-hammered each other and parried
with counter-missiles, and then, quite unexpectedly, the
_Starhopper_ went to Em-See-Square.
There was an awful lot of Em being converted to Ee off Marduk,
today. Including Manfred Ravallo; that grieved him. Manfred was
a good man, and a good friend. He had a girl in Rivington....
Nifflheim, there were eight hundred good men aboard the _Black
Star_, and most of them had girls who'd wait in vain for them on
Tanith. Well, what had Otto Harkaman said, so long ago, on Gram?
Something about old age not being a usual cause of death among
Space Vikings, wasn't it?
Then he remembered that Gompertz of the _Grendelsbane_ was trying
to get him. He told young Count Steven to switch him over.
"We just lost one of our Mardukans," Gompertz told him, in his
staccato Beowulf accent. "I think she was the _Challenger_. The ship
that got her looks like the _Banshee_; I'm turning to engage her."
"Which way; west around the planet? Be right with you, captain."