Chapter 15

As soon as the Space Scourge was unloaded, she was put on off-planet watch; Harkaman immediately spaced out in the Nemesis, while Trask remained behind. They began unloading the Rozinante, after setting her down at Rivington Spaceport. After that was done, her officers and crew took a holiday which lasted a month, until the Nemesis returned. Harkaman must have made quick raids on half a dozen planets. None of the cargo he brought back was spectacularly valuable, and he dismissed the whole thing as chicken-stealing, but he had lost some men and the ship showed a few fresh scars. A good deal of what was transshipped to the Rozinante was manufactured goods which would compete with merchandise produced on Gram.

“That load will be a come-down, after what the Space Scourge took back, but we didn’t want to send the Rozinante back empty,” he said. “One thing, I had time to do a little reading, between stops.”

“The books from the Eglonsby library?”

“Yes. I learned a curious thing about Amaterasu. Do you know why that planet was so extensively colonized by the Federation, when there don’t seem to be any fissionable ores? The planet produced gadolinium.”

Gadolinium was essential to hyperdrive engines; the engines of a ship the size of the Nemesis required fifty pounds of it. On the Sword-Worlds, it was worth several times its weight in gold. If they still mined it, Amaterasu would repay a second visit.

When he mentioned it, Harkaman shrugged. “Why should they mine it? There’s only one thing it’s good for, and you can’t run a spaceship on Diesel oil. I suppose the mines could be reopened, and new refineries built, but...”

“We could trade plutonium for gadolinium. They have none of their own. We could charge our own prices for it, and we wouldn’t need to tell them what gadolinium sells for on the Sword-Worlds.”

“We could, if we could do business with anybody there, after what we did to Eglonsby and Stolgoland. Where would we get plutonium?”

“Why do you think the Beowulfers don’t have hyperships, when they have everything else?”

Harkaman snapped his fingers. “By Satan, that’s it!” Then he looked at Trask in alarm. “Hey, you’re not thinking of selling Amaterasu plutonium and Beowulf gadolinium, are you?”

“Why not? We could make a big profit on both ends of the deal.”

“You know what would happen next, don’t you? There’d be ships from both planets all over the place in a few years. We want that like we want a hole in the head.”

He couldn’t see the objection. Tanith and Amaterasu and Beowulf could work up a very good triangular trade; all three would profit. It wouldn’t cost men and ship-damage and ammunition, either. Maybe a mutual defense alliance, too. Think about it later; there was too much to do here on Tanith at present.

There had been mines on the Moon of Tanith before the collapse of the Federation; they had been stripped of their equipment afterward, while Tanith was still fighting a rearguard battle against barbarism, but the underground chambers and man-made caverns could still be used, and in time the mines were reopened and the steel mill put in, and eventually ingots of finished steel were coming down by shuttle-craft. In the meantime, the shipyard had been laid out and was taking shape.

The Gram ship Queen Flavia--she had been the one found unfinished at Glaspyth--came in three months after the Rozinante started back; she must have been finished while Valkanhayn was still in hyperspace. She carried considerable cargo, some of it superfluous but all of it useful; everybody was investing in the Tanith Adventure now, and the money had to be spent for something. Better, she brought close to a thousand men and women; the leakage of brains and ability from the Sword-Worlds was turning into a flood. Among them was Basil Gorram. Trask remembered him as an insufferable young twerp, but he seemed to be a good shipyard man. He very frankly predicted that in a few years his father’s yards at Wardshaven would be idle and all the Tanith ships would be Tanith-built. A junior partner of Lothar Ffayle’s also came out, to establish a branch of the Bank of Wardshaven at Rivington.

As soon as the Queen Flavia had discharged her cargo and passengers, she took on five hundred ground-fighters from the Lamia, Nemesis and Space Scourge companies and spaced out on a raiding voyage. While she was gone, the second ship, the one Duke Angus had started at Wardshaven and King Angus had finished, the Black Star, came in.

Trask was slightly incredulous at realizing that she had spaced out from Gram almost exactly two years after the Nemesis had departed. He still hadn’t any idea where Andray Dunnan was, or what he was doing, or how to find him.

The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by the scheduled liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds, and then by trading ships and outbound Space Vikings to the Old Federation. Two years and six months after the Nemesis had come out of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso on Tanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to sell a cargo and get repairs. They bought his loot--he had been raiding some planet rather above the level of Khepera and below that of Amaterasu--and healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it. He had been dealing with the Everrard family on Hoth, and professed himself much more satisfied with the bargains he had gotten on Tanith and swore to return.

He had never even heard of Andray Dunnan or the Enterprise.

It was a Gilgamesher that brought the first news.

He had first heard of Gilgameshers--the word was used indiscriminately for a native of or a ship from Gilgamesh--on Gram, from Harkaman and Karffard and Vann Larch and the others. Since coming to Tanith, he had heard about them from every Space Viking, never in complimentary and rarely in printable terms.

Gilgamesh was rated, with reservations, as a civilized planet though not on a level with Odin or Isis or Baldur or Marduk or Aton or any of the other worlds which had maintained the culture of the Terran Federation uninterruptedly. Perhaps Gilgamesh deserved more credit; its people had undergone two centuries of darkness and pulled themselves out of it by their bootstraps. They had recovered all the old techniques, up to and including the hyperdrive.

They didn’t raid; they traded. They had religious objections to violence, though they kept these within sensible limits, and were able and willing to fight with fanatical ferocity in defense of their home planet. About a century before, there had been a five-ship Viking raid on Gilgamesh; one ship had returned and had been sold for scrap after reaching a friendly base. Their ships went everywhere to trade, and wherever they traded a few of them usually settled, and where they settled they made money, sending most of it home. Their society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and their religion an absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the Federation period, plus doctrinal and ritualistic innovations of their own. Aside from their propensity for sharp trading, their bigoted refusal to regard anybody not of their creed as more than half human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos in which they hid from social contact with others, made them generally disliked.