Chapter 11

Khepera left a bad taste in Trask’s mouth. He was still tasting it when the colored turbulence died out of the screen and left the gray nothingness of hyperspace. Garvan Spasso--they had had no trouble in inducing him to come along--was staring avidly at the screen as though he could still see the ravished planet they had left.

“That was a good one; that was a good one!” he was crowing. He’d said that a dozen times since they had lifted out. “Three cities in five days, and all the stuff we gathered up around them. We took over two million stellars.”

And did ten times as much damage getting it, and there was no scale of values by which to compute the death and suffering.

“Knock it off, Spasso. You said that before.”

There was a time when he wouldn’t have spoken to the fellow, or anybody else, like that. Gresham’s law, extended: Bad manners drive out good manners. Spasso turned on him indignantly.

“Who do you think you are--?”

“He thinks he’s Lord Trask of Tanith,” Harkaman said. “He’s right, too; he is.” He looked searchingly at Trask for a moment, then turned back to Spasso. “I’m just as tired as he is of hearing you pop your mouth about a lousy two million stellars. Nearer a million and a half, but two million’s nothing to pop about. Maybe it would be for the Lamia, but we have a three-ship fleet and a planetary base to meet expenses on. Out of this raid, a ground-fighter or an able spaceman will get a hundred and fifty stellars. We’ll get about a thousand, ourselves. How long do you think we can stay in business doing this kind of chicken-stealing.”

“You call this chicken-stealing?”

“I call it chicken-stealing, and so’ll you before we get back to Tanith. If you live that long.”

For a moment, Spasso was still affronted. Then, temporarily, his vulpine face showed avaricious hope, and then apprehension. Evidently he knew Otto Harkaman’s reputation, and some of the things Harkaman had done weren’t his idea of an easy way to make money.

Khepera had been easy; the locals hadn’t had anything to fight with. Small arms, and light cannon which hadn’t been able to fire more than a few rounds. Wherever they had attempted resistance, the combat cars had swooped in, dropping bombs and firing machine guns and auto-cannon. Yet they had fought, bitterly and hopelessly--just as he would have, defending Traskon.

Trask busied himself getting coffee and a cigarette from one of the robots. When he looked up, Spasso had gone away, and Harkaman was sitting on the edge of the desk, loading his short pipe.

“Well, you saw the elephant, Lucas,” Harkaman said. “You don’t seem to have liked it.”

“Elephant?”

“Old Terran expression I read somewhere. All I know is that an elephant was an animal about the size of one of your Gram megatheres. The expression means, experiencing something for the first time which makes a great impression. Elephants must have been something to see. This was your first Viking raid. You’ve seen it, now.”

He’d been in combat before; he’d led the fighting-men of Traskon during the boundary dispute with Baron Manniwel, and there were always bandits and cattle rustlers. He’d thought it would be like that. He remembered, five days, or was it five ages, ago, his excited anticipation as the city grew and spread in the screen and the Nemesis came dropping down toward it. The pinnaces, his four and the two from the Space Scourge, had gone spiraling out a hundred miles beyond the city; the Space Scourge had gone into a tighter circle twenty miles from its center; the Nemesis had continued her relentless descent until she was ten miles from the ground, before she began spewing out landing craft, and combat cars, and the little egg-shaped one-man air-cavalry mounts. It had been thrilling. Everything had gone perfectly; not even Valkanhayn’s gang had goofed.

Then the screenviews had begun coming in. The brief and hopeless fight in the city. He could still see that silly little field gun, it must have been around seventy or eighty millimeter, on a high-wheeled carriage, drawn by six shaggy, bandy-legged beasts. They had gotten it unlimbered and were trying to get it on a target when a rocket from an aircar landed directly under the muzzle. Gun, caisson, crew, even the draft team fifty yards behind, had simply vanished.

Or the little company, some of them women, trying to defend the top of a tall and half-ruinous building with rifles and pistols. One air-cavalryman wiped them all out with his machine guns.

“They don’t have a chance,” he’d said, half-sick. “But they keep on fighting.”

“Yes; stupid of them, isn’t it?” Harkaman, beside him, had said.

“What would you do in their place?”

“Fight. Try to kill as many Space Vikings as I could before they got me. Terro-humans are all stupid like that. That’s why we’re human.”

If the taking of the city had been a massacre, the sack that had followed had been a man-made Hell. He had gone down, along with Harkaman, while the fighting, if it could be so called, was still going on. Harkaman had suggested that the men ought to see him moving about among them; for his own part, he had felt a compulsion to share their guilt.