Chapter 20

Marduk had three moons; a big one, fifteen hundred miles in diameter, and two insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock. The big one was fortified, and a couple of ships were in orbit around it. The Nemesis was challenged as she emerged from her last hyperjump; both ships broke orbit and came out to meet her, and several more were detected lifting away from the planet.

Prince Bentrik took the communication screen, and immediately encountered difficulties. The commandant, even after the situation had been explained twice to him, couldn’t understand. A Royal Navy fleet unit knocked out in a battle with Space Vikings was bad enough, but being rescued and brought to Marduk by another Space Viking simply didn’t make sense. He then screened the Royal Palace at Malverton, on the planet; first he was icily polite to somebody several echelons below him in the peerage, and then respectfully polite to somebody he addressed as Prince Vandarvant. Finally, after some minutes’ wait, a frail, white-haired man in a little black cap-of-maintenance appeared in the screen. Prince Bentrik instantly sprang to his feet. So did all the other Mardukans in the command room.

“Your Majesty! I am most deeply honored!”

“Are you all right, Simon?” the old gentleman asked solicitously. “They haven’t done anything to you, have they?”

“Saved my life, and my men’s, and treated me like a friend and a comrade, Your Majesty. Have I your permission to present, informally, their commander, Prince Trask of Tanith?”

“Indeed you may, Simon. I owe the gentleman my deepest thanks.”

“His Majesty, Mikhyl the Eighth, Planetary King of Marduk,” Prince Bentrik said. “His Highness, Lucas, Prince Trask, Planetary Viceroy of Tanith for his Majesty Angus the First of Gram.”

The elderly monarch bowed his head slightly; Trask bowed a little more deeply, from the waist.

“I am very happy, Prince Trask, first, I confess, at the safe return of my kinsman Prince Bentrik, and then at the honor of meeting one in the confidence of my fellow sovereign King Angus of Gram. I will never be ungrateful for what you did for my cousin and for his officers and men. You must stay at the Palace while you are on this planet; I am giving orders for your reception, and I wish you to be formally presented to me this evening.” He hesitated briefly. “Gram; that is one of the Sword-Worlds, is it not?” Another brief hesitation. “Are you really a Space Viking, Prince Trask?”

Maybe he’d expected Space Vikings to have three horns and a spiked tail and stand twelve feet tall, himself.

It took several hours for the Nemesis to get into orbit. Bentrik spent most of them in a screen-booth, and emerged visibly relieved.

“Nobody’s going to be sticky about what happened on Audhumla,” he told Trask. “There will be a Board of Inquiry. I’m afraid I had to mix you up in that. It’s not only about the action on Audhumla; everybody from the Space Minister down wants to hear what you know about this fellow Dunnan. Like yourself, we all hope he went to Em-See-Square along with his flagship, but we can’t take it for granted. We have over a dozen trade-planets to protect, and he’s hit more than half of them already.”

The process of getting into orbit took them around the planet several times, and it was a more impressive spectacle at each circuit. Of course, Marduk had a population of almost two billion, and had been civilized, with no hiatus of Neobarbarism, since it had first been colonized in the Fourth Century. Even so, the Space Vikings were amazed--and stubbornly refusing to show it--at what they saw in the telescopic screens.

“Look at that city!” Paytrik Morland whispered. “We talk about the civilized planets, but I never realized they were anything like this. Why, this makes Excalibur look like Tanith!”

The city was Malverton, the capital; like any city of a contragravity-using people, it lay in a rough circle of buildings towering out of green interspaces, surrounded by the smaller circles of spaceports and industrial suburbs. The difference was that any of these were as large as Camelot on Excalibur or four Wardshavens on Gram, and Malverton itself was almost half the size of the whole barony of Traskon.

“They aren’t any more civilized that we are, Paytrik. There are just more of them. If there were two billion people on Gram--which I hope there never will be--Gram would have cities like this, too.”

One thing; the government of a planet like Marduk would have to be something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the Sword-Worlds. Maybe this Goldberg-ocracy of theirs had been forced upon them by the sheer complexity of the population and its problems.

Alvyn Karffard took a quick look around him to make sure none of the Mardukans were in earshot.

“I don’t care how many people they have,” he said. “Marduk can be had. A wolf never cares how many sheep there are in a flock. With twenty ships, we could take this planet like we took Eglonsby. There’d be losses coming in, sure, but after we were in and down, we’d have it.”

“Where would we get twenty ships?”

Tanith, at a pinch, could muster five or six, counting the free Space Vikings who used the base facilities; they would have to leave a couple to hold the planet. Beowulf had one, and another almost completed, and now there was an Amaterasu ship. But to assemble a Space Viking armada of twenty ... He shook his head. The real reason why Space Vikings had never raided a civilized planet successfully had always been their inability to combine under one command in sufficient strength.

Besides, he didn’t want to raid Marduk. A raid, if successful, would yield immense treasures, but cause a hundred, even a thousand, times as much destruction, and he didn’t want to destroy anything civilized.

The landing stages of the palace were crowded when he and Prince Bentrik landed, and, at a discreet distance, swarms of air-vehicles circled, creating a control problem for the police. Parting from Bentrik, he was escorted to the suite prepared for him; it was luxurious in the extreme but scarcely above Sword-World standards. There were a surprising number of human servants, groveling and fawning and getting underfoot and doing work robots could have been doing better. What robots there were were inefficient, and much work and ingenuity had been lavished on efforts to copy human form to the detriment of function.

After getting rid of most of the superfluous servants, he put on a screen and began sampling the newscasts. There were telescopic views of the Nemesis from some craft on orbit nearby, and he watched the officers and men of the Victrix being disembarked; there were other views of their landing at some naval installation on the ground, and he could see reporters being chevied away by Navy ground-police. And there was a wide range of commentary opinion.

The Government had already denied that, (1) Prince Bentrik had captured the Nemesis and brought her in as a prize, and, (2) the Space Vikings had captured Prince Bentrik and were holding him for ransom. Beyond that, the Government was trying to sit on the whole story, and the Opposition was hinting darkly at corrupt deals and sinister plots. Prince Bentrik arrived in the midst of an impassioned tirade against pusillanimous traitors surrounding his Majesty who were betraying Marduk to the Space Vikings.

“Why doesn’t your Government publish the facts and put a stop to that nonsense?” Trask asked.

“Oh, let them rave,” Bentrik replied. “The longer the Government waits, the more they’ll be ridiculed when the facts are published.”

Or, the more people will be convinced that the Government had something to hush up, and had to take time to construct a plausible story. He kept the thought to himself. It was their government; how they mismanaged it was their own business. He found that there was no bartending robot; he had to have a human servant bring drinks. He made up his mind to have a few of the Nemesis robots sent down to him.

The formal presentation would be in the evening; there would be a dinner first, and because Trask had not yet been formally presented, he couldn’t dine with the King, but because he was, or claimed to be, Viceroy of Tanith, he ranked as a chief of state and would dine with the Crown Prince, to whom there would be an informal introduction first.

This took place in a small ante-chamber off the banquet hall; the Crown Prince and Crown Princess and Princess Bentrik were there when they arrived. The Crown Prince was a man of middle age, graying at the temples, with the glassy stare that betrayed contact lenses. The resemblance between him and his father was apparent; both had the same studious and impractical expression, and might have been professors on the same university faculty. He shook hands with Trask, assuring him of the gratitude of the Court and Royal Family.

“You know, Simon is next in succession, after myself and my little daughter,” he said. “That’s too close to take chances with him.” He turned to Bentrik. “I’m afraid this is your last space adventure, Simon. You’ll have to be a spaceport spaceman from now on.”

“I shan’t be sorry,” Princess Bentrik said. “And if anybody owes Prince Trask gratitude, I do.” She pressed his hands warmly. “Prince Trask, my son wants to meet you, very badly. He’s ten years old, and he thinks Space Vikings are romantic heroes.”