Chapter 26

There was a little difficulty on Gimli with Fleet Admiral Bargham. Commodores didn’t give orders to fleet admirals. Well, maybe regents did, but who gave Prince Bentrik authority to call himself regent? Regents were elected by the Chamber of Delegates, on nomination of the Chancellor.

“That’s Zaspar Makann and his stooges you’re talking about?” Bentrik laughed.

“Well, the Constitution...” He thought better of that, before somebody asked him what Constitution. “Well, a Regent has to be chosen by election. Even members of the Royal Family can’t just make themselves Regent by saying they are.”

“I can. I just have. And I don’t think there are going to be many more elections, at least for the present. Not till we make sure the people of Marduk can be trusted with the control of the government.”

“Well, the pinnace from Moonbase reported that there were six Royal navy battleships and four other craft attacking them,” Bargham objected. “I only have four ships here; I sent for the ones on the other trade-planets, but I haven’t heard from any of them. We can’t go there with only four ships.”

“Sixteen ships,” Bentrik corrected. “No, fifteen and one Gilgamesher we’re using for a troopship. I think that’s enough. You’ll remain here on Gimli, in any case, admiral; as soon as the other ships come in, you’ll follow to Marduk with them. I am now holding a meeting aboard the Tanith flagship Nemesis. I want your four ship-commanders aboard immediately. I am not including you because you’re remaining here to bring up the late comers and as soon as this meeting is over we are spacing out.”

Actually, they spaced out sooner; the meeting lasted the whole three hundred and fifty hours to Abaddon. A ship’s captain, if he has a good exec, as all of them had, needs only sit at his command-desk and look important while the ship is going into and emerging from a long jump; the rest of the time he can study ancient history or whatever his shipboard hobby is. Rather than waste three hundred and fifty hours of precious time, each captain turned his ship over to his exec and remained aboard the Nemesis; even on so spacious a craft the officers’ country north of the engine rooms was crowded like a tourist hotel in mid-season. One of the four Mardukans was the Captain Garravay who had smuggled Bentrik’s wife and son off Marduk, and the other three were just as pro-Bentrik, pro-Tanith, and anti-Makann. They were, on general principles, also anti-Bargham. There must be something wrong with any fleet admiral who remained in his command after Zaspar Makann came to power.

So, as soon as they spaced out, there was a party. After that, they settled down to planning the Battle of Abaddon.

There was no Battle of Abaddon.

It was a dead planet, one side in night and the other in dim twilight from the little speck of a sun three and a half billion miles away, jagged mountains rising out of the snow that covered it from pole to pole. The snow on top would be frozen CO_2; according to the thermocouples, the surface temperature was well below minus-100 Centigrade. No ships on orbit circled it; there was a little faint radiation, which could have been from naturally radioactive minerals; there was no electrical discharge detectable.

There was considerable bad language in the command room of the Nemesis. The captains of the other ships were screening in, wanting to know what to do.

“Go on in,” Trask told them. “Englobe the planet, and go down to within a mile if necessary. They could be hiding somewhere on it.”

“Well, they’re not hiding at the bottom of any ocean, that’s for sure,” somebody said. It was one of those feeble jokes at which everybody laughs because nothing else is laughable about the situation.

Finally, they found it, at the north pole, which was no colder than anywhere else on the planet. First radiation leakage, the sort that would come from a closed-down nuclear power plant. Then a modicum of electrical discharge. Finally the telescopic screens picked up the spaceport, a huge oval amphitheater excavated out of a valley between two jagged mountain ranges.

The language in the command room was just as bad, but the tone had changed. It was surprising what a wide range of emotions could be expressed by a few simple blasphemies and obscenities. Everybody who had been deriding Sharll Renner were now acclaiming him.

But it was lifeless. The ships came crowding in; air-locked landing-craft full of space-armored ground-fighters went down. Screens in the command room lit as they transmitted in views. Depressions in the carbon-dioxide snow where the hundred-foot pad-feet of ships’ landing-legs had pressed down. Ranks of cargo-lighters that had plied to and from other ships or orbit. And, all around the cliff-walled perimeter, air-locked doors to caverns and tunnels. A great many men, with a great deal of equipment, had been working here in the estimated five or six years since Andray Dunnan--or somebody--had constructed this base.

Andray Dunnan. They found his badge, the crescent, blue on black, on things. They found equipment that Harkaman recognized as having been part of the original cargo stolen with the Enterprise. They even found, in his living quarters, a blown-up photoprint picture of Nevil Ormm, draped in black. But what they did not find was a single vehicle small enough to be taken aboard a ship, or a single scrap of combat equipment, not even a pistol or a hand grenade.

Dunnan had gone, but they knew whither, and where to find him. The conquest of Marduk had moved into its final phase.

Marduk was on the other side of the sun from Abaddon with ninety-five million miles--close, but not inconveniently so, Trask thought--to spare. Guatt Kirbey and the Mardukan astrogator who was helping him made it within a light-minute. The Mardukan thought that was fine; Kirbey didn’t. The last microjump was aimed at the Moon of Marduk, which was plainly visible in the telescopic screen. They came out within a light-second and a half, which Kirbey admitted was reasonably close. As soon as the screens cleared, they saw that they weren’t too late. The Moon of Marduk was under fire and firing back.

They’d have detection, and he knew what they were detecting--a clump of sixteen rending distortions of the fabric of space-time, as sixteen ships came into sudden existence in the normal continuum. Beside him, Bentrik had a screen on; it was still milky-white, and he was speaking into a radio hand-phone.

“Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector of Marduk, calling Moonbase.” Then, slowly, he repeated his screen-combination twice. “Come in, Moonbase; this is Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector, speaking.”

He waited ten seconds, and was about to start again, when the screen flickered. The man who appeared in it wore the insignia of a Mardukan navy commodore. He needed a shave, but he was grinning happily. Bentrik greeted him by name.

“Hello, Simon; glad to see you. Your Highness, I mean; what is this Prince-Protector thing?”

“Somebody had to do it. Is the King still alive?”

The grin slid off the commodore’s face, starting with his eyes.

“We don’t know. At first, Makann had him speaking by screen--you know what it was like--urging everybody to obey and co-operate with ‘our trusted Chancellor.’ Makann always appeared on the screen with him.”