Chapter 2

A dozen men clustered around the bartending robot--his cousin and family lawyer, Nikkolay Trask; Lothar Ffayle, the banker; Alex Gorram, the shipbuilder, and his son Basil; Baron Rathmore; more of the Wardshaven nobles whom he knew only distantly. And Otto Harkaman.

Harkaman was a Space Viking. That would have set him apart, even if he hadn’t topped the tallest of them by a head. He wore a short black jacket, heavily gold-braided, and black trousers inside ankle-boots; the dagger on his belt was no mere dress-ornament. His tousled red-brown hair was long enough to furnish extra padding in a combat-helmet, and his beard was cut square at the bottom.

He had been fighting on Durendal, for one of the branches of the royal house contesting fratricidally for the throne. The wrong one; he had lost his ship, and most of his men and, almost, his own life. He had been a penniless refugee on Flamberge, owning only the clothes he stood in and his personal weapons and the loyalty of half a dozen adventurers as penniless as himself, when Duke Angus had invited him to Gram to command the Enterprise.

“A pleasure, Lord Trask. I’ve met your lovely bride-to-be, and now that I meet you, let me congratulate both.” Then, as they were having a drink together, he put his foot in it by asking: “You’re not an investor in the Tanith Adventure, are you?”

He said he wasn’t, and would have let it go at that. Young Basil Gorram had to get his foot in, too.

“Lord Trask does not approve of the Tanith Adventure,” he said scornfully. “He thinks we should stay home and produce wealth, instead of exporting robbery and murder to the Old Federation for it.”

The smile remained on Otto Harkaman’s face; only the friendliness was gone. He unobtrusively shifted his drink to his left hand.

“Well, our operations are definable as robbery and murder,” he agreed. “Space Vikings are professional robbers and murderers. And you object? Perhaps you find me personally objectionable?”

“I wouldn’t have shaken your hand or had a drink with you if I did. I don’t care how many planets you raid or cities you sack, or how many innocents, if that’s what they are, you massacre in the Old Federation. You couldn’t possibly do anything worse than those people have been doing to one another for the past ten centuries. What I object to is the way you’re raiding the Sword-Worlds.”

“You’re crazy!” Basil Gorram exploded.

“Young man,” Harkaman reproved, “the conversation was between Lord Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don’t understand, don’t tell him he’s crazy. Ask him what he means. What do you mean, Lord Trask?”

“You should know; you’ve just raided Gram for eight hundred of our best men. You raided me for close to forty vaqueros, farm-workers, lumbermen, machine-operators, and I doubt I’ll be able to replace them with as good.” He turned to the elder Gorram. “Alex, how many have you lost to Captain Harkaman?”

Gorram tried to make it a dozen; pressed, he admitted to a score and a half. Roboticians, machine-supervisors, programmers, a couple of engineers, a foreman. There was grudging agreement from the others. Burt Sandrasan’s engine-works had lost almost as many, of the same kind. Even Lothar Ffayle admitted to losing a computerman and a guard-sergeant.

And after they were gone, the farms and ranches and factories would go on, almost but not quite as before. Nothing on Gram, nothing on any of the Sword-Worlds, was done as efficiently as three centuries ago. The whole level of Sword-World life was sinking, like the east coastline of this continent, so slowly as to be evident only from the records and monuments of the past. He said as much, and added:

“And the genetic loss. The best Sword-World genes are literally escaping to space, like the atmosphere of a low-gravity planet, each generation begotten by fathers slightly inferior to the last. It wasn’t so bad when the Space Vikings raided directly from the Sword-Worlds; they got home once in a while. Now they’re conquering planets in the Old Federation for bases, and staying there.”

Everybody had begun to relax; this wouldn’t be a quarrel. Harkaman, who had shifted his drink back to his right hand, chuckled.

“That’s right. I’ve fathered my share of brats in the Old Federation, and I know Space Vikings whose fathers were born on Old Federation planets.” He turned to Basil Gorram. “You see, the gentleman isn’t crazy, at all. That’s what happened to the Terran Federation, by the way. The good men all left to colonize, and the stuffed shirts and yes-men and herd-followers and safety-firsters stayed on Terra and tried to govern the galaxy.”

“Well, maybe this is all new to you, captain,” Rovard Grauffis said sourly, “but Lucas Trask’s dirge for the Decline and Fall of the Sword-Worlds is an old song to the rest of us. I have too much to do to stay here and argue.”

Lothar Ffayle evidently did intend to stay and argue.

“All you’re saying, Lucas, is that we’re expanding. You want us to sit here and build up population pressure like Terra in the First Century?”

“With three and a half billion people spread out on twelve planets? They had that many on Terra alone. And it took us eight centuries to reach that.”

That had been since the Ninth Century, Atomic Era, at the end of the Big War. Ten thousand men and women on Abigor, refusing to surrender, had taken the remnant of the System States Alliance navy to space, seeking a world the Federation had never heard of and wouldn’t find for a long time. That had been the world they had called Excalibur. From it, their grandchildren had colonized Joyeuse and Durendal and Flamberge; Haulteclere had been colonized in the next generation from Joyeuse, and Gram from Haulteclere.