It was like finishing a word puzzle. You sit staring at it, looking
for more spaces to print letters into, and suddenly you realize
that there are no more, that the puzzle is done. That was how the
space-battle of Marduk, the Battle _off_ Marduk, ended. Suddenly
there were no more colored fire-globes opening and fading, no more
missiles coming, no more enemy ships to throw missiles at. Now it
was time to take a count of his own ships, and then begin thinking
about the Battle _on_ Marduk.
The _Black Star_ was gone. So was RMNS _Challenger_, and RMNS
_Conquistador_. _Space Scourge_ was badly hammered; worse than after
the Beowulf raid, Boake Valkanhayn said. The _Viking's Gift_ was
heavily damaged, too, and so was the _Corisande_, and so, from the
looks of the damage board, was the _Nemesis_. And three ships were
missing--the three independent Space Vikings, _Harpy_, _Curse of
Cagn_, and Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan's _Damnthing_.
Prince Bentrik frowned over that. "I can't think that all three
of those ships would have been destroyed, without anybody seeing
it happen."
"Neither can I. But I can think that all those ships broke out of
the battle together and headed in for the planet. They didn't come
here to help liberate Marduk, they came here to fill their cargo
holds. I only hope the people they're robbing all voted the Makann
ticket in the last election." A crumb of comfort occurred to him,
and he passed it on. "The only people who are armed to resist them
will be Makann's storm-troops and Dunnan's pirates; they'll be the
ones to get killed."
"We don't want any more killing than...." Prince Simon broke off
suddenly. "I'm beginning to talk like his late Highness Crown Prince
Edvard," he said. "He didn't want bloodshed, either, and look whose
blood was shed. If they're doing what you think they are, I'm afraid
we'll have to kill a few of your Space Vikings, too."
"They aren't my Space Vikings." He was a little surprised to find
that, after almost eight years of bearing the name himself, he was
using it as an other-people label. Well, why not? He was the ruler
of the civilized planet of Tanith, wasn't he? "But let's not start
fighting them till the main war's over. Those three shiploads are
no worse than a bad cold; Makann and Dunnan are the plague."
It would still take four hours to get down, in a spiral of
deceleration. They started the telecasts which had been filmed and
taped on the voyage from Gimli. The Prince-Protector Simon Bentrik
spoke: The illegal rule of the traitor Makann was ended. His deluded
followers were advised to return to their allegiance to the Crown.
The People's Watchmen were ordered to surrender their arms and
disband; in localities where they refused, the loyal people were
called upon to co-operate with the legitimate armed forces of
the Crown in exterminating them, and would be furnished arms
as soon as possible.
Little Princess Myrna spoke: "If my grandfather is still alive,
he is your King; if he is not, I am your Queen, and until I am old
enough to rule in my own right, I accept Prince Simon as Regent
and Protector of the Realm, and I call on all of you to obey him
as I will."
"You didn't say anything about representative government, or
democracy, or the constitution," Trask mentioned. "And I noticed
the use of the word 'rule,' instead of 'reign.'"
"That's right," the self-proclaimed Prince-Protector said. "There's
something wrong with democracy. If there weren't, it couldn't be
overthrown by people like Makann, attacking it from within by
democratic procedures. I don't think it's fundamentally unworkable.
I think it just has a few of what engineers call bugs. It's not
safe to run a defective machine till you learn the defects and
remedy them."
"Well, I hope you don't think our Sword-World feudalism doesn't have
bugs." He gave examples, and then quoted Otto Harkaman about barbarism
spreading downward from the top instead of upward from the bottom.
"It may just be," he added, "that there is something fundamentally
unworkable about government itself. As long as _Homo sapiens terra_
is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until
he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe
a workable system of government is a political science impossibility,
just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility
as long as they tried to do it by chemical means."
[Illustration]
"Then we'll just have to make it work the best way we can, and when
it breaks down, hope the next try will work a little better, for a
little longer," Bentrik said.
* * * * *
Malverton grew in the telescopic screens as they came down. The Navy
Spaceport, where Trask had landed almost two years before, was in
wreckage, sprinkled with damaged ships that had been blasted on the
ground, and slagged by thermonuclear fires. There was fighting in
the air all over the city proper, on building-tops, on the ground,
and in the air. That would be the _Damnthing_-_Harpy_-_Curse of
Cagn_ Space Vikings. The Royal Palace was the center of one of
half a dozen swirls of battle that had condensed out of the
general skirmishing.
Paytrik Morland started for it with the first wave of
ground-fighters from the _Nemesis_. The Gilgamesh freighter, like
most of her ilk, had huge cargo ports all around; these began
opening and disgorging a swarm of everything from landing-craft
and hundred-foot airboats to one man air-cavalry single-mounts.
The top landing-stages and terraces of the palace were almost
obscured by the flashes of auto-cannon shells and the smoke and
dust of projectiles. Then the first vehicles landed, the firing
from the air stopped, and men fanned out as skirmishers,
occasionally firing with small arms.
Trask and Bentrik were in the armory off the vehicle-bay, putting on
combat equipment, when the twelve-year-old Count of Ravary joined
them and began rummaging for weapons and a helmet.
"You're not going," his father told him. "I'll have enough to worry
about taking care of myself...."
That was the wrong approach. Trask interrupted:
"You're to stay aboard, Count," he said. "As soon as things
stabilize, Princess Myrna will have to come down. You'll act as
her personal escort. And don't think you're being shoved into the
background. She's Crown Princess, and if she isn't Queen now, she
will be in a few years. Escorting her now will be the foundation of
your naval career. There isn't a young officer in the Royal Navy who
wouldn't trade places with you."
"That was the right way to handle him, Lucas," Bentrik approved,
after the boy had gone away, proud of his opportunity and his
responsibility.
"It'll do just what I said for him." He stopped for a moment, to
play with an idea that had just struck him. "You know, the girl will
be Queen in a few years, if she isn't now. Queens need Prince
Consorts. Your son's a good boy; I liked him the first moment I saw
him, and I've liked him better ever since. He'd be a good man on
the throne beside Queen Myrna."
"Oh, that's out of the question. Not the matter of consanguinity,
they're about a sixteenth cousin. But people would say I was abusing
the Protectorship to marry my son onto the Throne."
"Simon, speaking as one sovereign prince to another, you have a lot
to learn. You've learned one important lesson already, that a ruler
must be willing to use force and shed blood to enforce his rule. You
have to learn, too, that a ruler cannot afford to be guided by his
fears of what people will say about him. Not even what history will
say about him. A ruler's only judge is himself."
Bentrik slid the transpex visor of his helmet up and down
experimentally, checked the chambers of his pistol and carbine.
"All that matters to me is the peace and well-being of Marduk. I'll
have to talk it over with ... with my only judge. Well, let's go."
* * * * *
The top terraces were secure when their car landed. More vehicles
were coming down and discharging men; a swarm of landing craft were
sinking past the building toward the ground two thousand feet below.
Auto-weapons and small arms and light cannon banged, and bombs and
recoilless-rifle shells crashed, on the lower terraces. They put the
car down one of the shaftways until they ran into heavy fire from
below, at the limit of the advance, and then turned into a broad
hallway, floating high enough to clear the heads of the men on foot.
It looked like the part of the Palace where he had lodged when he
had been a guest there but it probably wasn't.
They came to hastily constructed barricades of furniture and
statuary and furnishings, behind which Makann's People's Watchmen
and Andray Dunnan's Space Vikings were making resistance. They
entered rooms dusty with powdered plaster and acrid with powder
fumes, littered with corpses. They passed lifter-skids being towed
out with wounded. They went through rooms crowded with their own
men--"_Keep your fingers off things; this isn't a looting
expedition!_" "_You stupid cretin, how did you know there wasn't a
man hiding behind that?_" In one huge room, ballroom or concert room
or something, there were prisoners herded, and men from the
_Nemesis_ were setting up polyencephalographic veridicators, sturdy
chairs with wires and adjustable helmets and translucent globes
mounted over them. A couple of Morland's men were hustling a
People's Watchman to one and strapping him into a chair.
"You know what this is, don't you?" one of them was saying. "This is
a veridicator. That globe'll light blue; the moment you try to lie
to us, it'll turn red. And the moment it turns red, I'm going to
hammer your teeth down your throat with the butt of this pistol."
"Have you found anything out about the King, yet?" Bentrik asked him.
He turned. "No. Nobody we've questioned so far knows anything later
than a month ago about him. He just disappeared." He was going to
say something else, saw Bentrik's face, and changed his mind.
"He's dead," Bentrik said dully. "They tortured him and brainwashed
him and used him as a ventriloquist's dummy on the screen as long as
they could; when they couldn't let the people see him any more,
they stuffed him into a converter."
They did find Zaspar Makann, hours later. Maybe he could have told
them something, if he had been alive, but he and a few of his
fanatical followers had barricaded themselves in the Throne room and
died trying to defend it. They found Makann on the Throne, the top
of his head blown away, a pistol death-gripped in his hand, and the
Great Crown lying on the floor, the velvet inner cap bullet-pierced
and splattered with blood and brain tissue. Prince Bentrik picked it
up and looked at it disgustedly.
"We'll have to have something done about that," he said. "I really
didn't think he'd do just this. I thought he wanted to abolish the
Throne, not sit on it."
Except for one chandelier smashed and several corpses that had to be
dragged out, the Ministerial Council room was intact. They set up
headquarters there. Boake Valkanhayn and several other ship-captains
joined them. There was fighting going on in several places inside
the Palace, and the city was still in a turmoil. Somebody managed
to get in touch with the captains of the _Damnthing_, the _Harpy_
and the _Curse of Cagn_ and bring them to the Palace. Trask attempted
to reason with them, to no avail.
"Prince Trask, you're my friend, and you've always dealt fairly with
me," Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan said. "But you know just how far
any Space Viking captain can control his crew. These men didn't come
here to correct the political mistakes of Marduk. They came here for
what they could haul away. I could get myself killed trying to stop
them now...."
"I wouldn't even try," the captain of the _Curse of Cagn_ put in.
"I came here for what I could make out of this planet, myself."
"You can try to stop them," said the captain of the _Harpy_.
"You'll find it even harder than what you're doing now."
Trask looked at some of the reports that had come in from elsewhere
on the planet. Harkaman had landed on one of the big cities to the
east, and the people had risen against Makann's local bosses and
were helping wipe out the People's Watchmen with arms they had been
furnished. Valkanhayn's exec had landed on a large concentration
camp where close to ten thousand of Makann's political enemies had
been penned; he had distributed all his available weapons and was
calling for more. Gompertz of the _Grendelsbane_ was at Drepplin;
he reported just the reverse. The people there had risen in support
of the Makann regime, and he wanted authorization to use nuclear
weapons against them.
"Could you talk your people into going to some other city?" Trask
asked. "We have a city for you; big industrial center. It ought to
be fine looting. Drepplin."
"The people there are Mardukan subjects, too," Bentrik began. Then
he shrugged. "It's not what we'd like to do, it's what we have to.
By all means, gentlemen. Take your men to Drepplin, and nobody will
object to anything you do."
"And when you have that place looted out, try Abaddon. You were
aground there, Captain Esthersan. You know what all Dunnan left there."
* * * * *
A couple of Space Vikings--no, Royal Army of Tanith men--brought in
the old woman, dirty, in rags, almost exhausted.
"She wants to talk to Prince Bentrik; won't talk to anybody else.
Says she knows where the King is."
Bentrik rose quickly, brought her to a chair, poured a glass of wine
for her.
"He's still alive, Your Highness. The Crown Princess Melanie and I
... I'm sorry, Your Highness; Dowager Crown Princess ... have been
taking care of him, the best way we could. If you'll only come
quickly...."
Mikhyl VIII, Planetary King of Marduk, lay on a pallet of filthy
bedding on the floor of a narrow room behind a mass-energy converter
which disposed of the rubbish and sewage and generated power for
some of the fixed equipment on one of the middle floors of the east
wing of the palace. There was a bucket of water, and on a rough
wooden bench lay a cloth-wrapped bundle of food. A woman, haggard
and disheveled, wearing a suit of greasy mechanic's coveralls and
nothing else, squatted beside him. The Crown Princess Melanie, whom
Trask remembered as the charming and gracious hostess of Cragdale.
She tried to rise, and staggered.
"Prince Bentrik! And it's Prince Trask of Tanith!" she cried.
"Just hurry; get him out of here and to where he can be taken
care of. Please." Then she sat down again on the floor and fell
over, unconscious.
* * * * *
They couldn't get the story. The Princess Melanie had collapsed
completely. Her companion, another noblewoman of the court, could
only ramble disconnectedly. And the King merely lay, bathed and
fed in a clean bed, and looked up at them wonderingly, as though
nothing he saw or heard conveyed any meaning to him. The doctors
could do nothing.
"He has no mind, no more mind than a new-born baby. We can keep him
alive, I don't know how long. That's our professional duty. But it's
no kindness to His Majesty."
* * * * *
The little pockets of resistance in the Palace were wiped out,
through the next morning and afternoon. All but one, far
underground, below the main power plant. They tried sleep-gas; the
defenders had blowers and sent it back at them. They tried blasting;
there was a limit to what the fabric of the building would stand.
And nobody knew how long it would take to starve them out.
On the third day, a man crawled out, pushing a white shirt tied to
the barrel of a carbine ahead of him.
"Is Prince Lucas Trask of Tanith here?" he asked. "I won't speak to
anybody else."
They brought Trask quickly. All that was visible of the other man
was the carbine-barrel and the white shirt. When Trask called to
him, he raised his head above the rubble behind which he was hiding.
"Prince Trask, we have Andray Dunnan here; he was leading us, but
now we've disarmed him and are holding him. If we turn him over to
you, will you let us go?"
"If you all come out unarmed, and bring Dunnan with you, I promise
you, the rest of you will be let outside this building and allowed
to go away unharmed."
"All right. We'll be coming out in a minute." The man raised his
voice. "It's agreed!" he called. "Bring him out."
There were fewer than two score of them. Some wore the uniforms of
high officers of the People's Watchmen or of People's Welfare Party
functionaries; a few wore the heavily braided short jackets of Space
Viking officers. Among them, they propelled a thin-faced man with a
pointed beard, and Trask had to look twice at him before he
recognized the face of Andray Dunnan. It looked more like the face
of Duke Angus of Wardshaven as he last remembered it. Dunnan looked
at him in incurious contempt.
"Your dotard king couldn't rule without Zaspar Makann, and Makann
couldn't rule without me, and neither can you," he said. "Shoot this
gang of turncoats, and I'll rule Marduk for you." He looked at Trask
again. "Who are you?" he demanded. "I don't know you."
Trask slipped the pistol from his holster, thumbing off the safety.
"I am Lucas Trask. You've heard that name before," he said. "Stand
away from behind him, you people."
"Oh, yes; the poor fool who thought he was going to marry Elaine
Karvall. Well, you won't, Lord Trask of Traskon. She loves me, not
you. She's waiting for me now, on Gram...."
Trask shot him through the head. Dunnan's eyes widened in momentary
incredulity; then his knees gave way, and he fell forward on his
face. Trask thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, and
looked at the body on the concrete.
It hadn't made the least difference. It had been like shooting a
snake, or one of the nasty scorpion-things that infested the old
buildings in Rivington. Just no more Andray Dunnan.
"Take that carrion and stuff it in a mass-energy converter," he
said. "And I don't want anybody to mention the name of Andray Dunnan
to me again."
He didn't look at them haul Dunnan's body away on a lifter-skid;
he watched the fifty-odd leaders of the overthrown misgovernment
of Marduk shamble away to freedom, guarded by Paytrik Morland's
riflemen. Now there was something to reproach himself for; he'd
committed a separate and distinct crime against Marduk by letting
each one of them live. Unless recognized and killed by somebody
outside, every one of them would be at some villainy before next
sunrise. Well, King Simon I could cope with that.
He started when he realized how he had thought of his friend. Well,
why not? Mikhyl's mind was dead; his body would not survive it more
than a year. Then a child Queen, and a long regency, and long
regencies were dangerous. Better a strong King, in name as well as
power. And the succession could be safeguarded by marrying Steven
and Myrna. Myrna had accepted, at eight, that she must some day
marry for reasons of state; why not her playmate Steven?
And Simon Bentrik would see the necessity. He was neither a fool nor
a moral coward; he only needed to take some time to adjust to ideas.
The rabble who had bought their lives with their leader's had gone,
now. Slowly, he followed them, thinking.
Don't press the idea on Simon too hard; just expose him to it and
let him adopt it. And there would be the treaty--Tanith, Marduk,
Beowulf, Amaterasu; eventually, treaties with the other civilized
planets. Nebulously, the idea of a League of Civilized Worlds began
to take shape in his mind.
Be a good idea if he adopted the title of King of Tanith for
himself. And cut loose from the Sword-Worlds; especially cut loose
from Gram. Let Viktor of Xochitl have it. Or Garvan Spasso. Viktor
wouldn't be the last Space Viking to take his ships back against
the Sword-Worlds. Sooner or later, civilization in the Old Federation
would drive them all home to loot the planets that had sent them out.
Well, if he was going to be a king, shouldn't he have a queen? Kings
usually did. He climbed into the little hall-car and started up a
long shaft. There was Valerie Alvarath. They'd enjoyed each other's
society on the _Nemesis_. He wondered if she would want to make it
permanent, even on a throne....
Elaine was with him. He felt her beside him, almost tangibly. Her
voice was whispering to him: _She loves you, Lucas. She'll say yes.
Be good to her, and she'll make you happy._ Then she was gone, and
he knew that she would never return.
Good-by, Elaine.
[Illustration: FIN]
Notes:
Inconsistent hyphenation; the former forms were all changed to the latter:
Space-Scourge (7) vs. Space Scourge (41)
Sun-Goddess (3) vs. Sun Goddess (3)
Jaganath (2) vs. Jagannath (4)
Amaterasun (1) vs. Amaterasuan[s] (1)
handphone (1) vs. hand-phone (3)
planetside (1) vs. planet-side (1)
slagpile (1) vs. slag-pile (1)
trade planets (3) vs. trade-planets (10)
two hand (1) vs. two-hand (1)
air cavalry (1) vs. air-cavalry (2)
smallarms (1) vs. small arms (5)
Thinkos:
Admiral of the Royal Mardukan Navy." [Chap. XIV]
was changed to
Admiral of the Royal Navy of Gram."
one of the Gram-Marduk freighters, [Chap. XXIII]
was changed to
one of the Gram-Tanith freighters,