Space Viking Read online

  II

  A dozen men clustered around the bartending robot--his cousinand 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, evenif he hadn't topped the tallest of them by a head. He wore a shortblack jacket, heavily gold-braided, and black trousers insideankle-boots; the dagger on his belt was no mere dress-ornament. Histousled red-brown hair was long enough to furnish extra padding ina combat-helmet, and his beard was cut square at the bottom.

  He had been fighting on Durendal, for one of the branches of theroyal 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 theclothes he stood in and his personal weapons and the loyalty ofhalf a dozen adventurers as penniless as himself, when Duke Angushad invited him to Gram to command the _Enterprise_.

  "A pleasure, Lord Trask. I've met your lovely bride-to-be, andnow that I meet you, let me congratulate both." Then, as theywere 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 BasilGorram had to get his foot in, too.

  "Lord Trask does not approve of the Tanith Adventure," he saidscornfully. "He thinks we should stay home and produce wealth,instead of exporting robbery and murder to the Old Federationfor it."

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

  "Well, our operations are definable as robbery and murder," heagreed. "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 howmany innocents, if that's what they are, you massacre in the OldFederation. You couldn't possibly do anything worse than thosepeople 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 LordTrask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don'tunderstand, 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 ourbest men. You raided me for close to forty vaqueros, farm-workers,lumbermen, machine-operators, and I doubt I'll be able to replacethem with as good." He turned to the elder Gorram. "Alex, how manyhave you lost to Captain Harkaman?"

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

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

  "And the genetic loss. The best Sword-World genes are literallyescaping 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 theSword-Worlds; they got home once in a while. Now they're conqueringplanets 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 OldFederation, and I know Space Vikings whose fathers were born onOld Federation planets." He turned to Basil Gorram. "You see, thegentleman isn't crazy, at all. That's what happened to the TerranFederation, by the way. The good men all left to colonize, and thestuffed shirts and yes-men and herd-followers and safety-firstersstayed on Terra and tried to govern the galaxy."

  "Well, maybe this is all new to you, captain," Rovard Grauffissaid sourly, "but Lucas Trask's dirge for the Decline and Fallof the Sword-Worlds is an old song to the rest of us. I havetoo 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 usto sit here and build up population pressure like Terra in theFirst 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 centuriesto reach that."

  That had been since the Ninth Century, Atomic Era, at the end ofthe Big War. Ten thousand men and women on Abigor, refusing tosurrender, had taken the remnant of the System States Alliance navyto space, seeking a world the Federation had never heard of andwouldn't find for a long time. That had been the world they hadcalled Excalibur. From it, their grandchildren had colonized Joyeuseand Durendal and Flamberge; Haulteclere had been colonized in thenext generation from Joyeuse, and Gram from Haulteclere.

  "We're not expanding, Lothar; we're contracting. We stoppedexpanding three hundred and fifty years ago, when that ship cameback to Morglay from the Old Federation and reported what hadbeen happening out there since the Big War. Before that, we werediscovering new planets and colonizing them. Since then, we'vebeen picking the bones of the dead Terran Federation."

  * * * * *

  Something was going on by the escalators to the landing stage.People were moving excitedly in that direction, and the news carswere circling like vultures over a sick cow. Harkaman wondered,hopefully, if it mightn't be a fight.

  "Some drunk being bounced." Nikkolay, Lucas' cousin, commented."Sesar's let all Wardshaven in here, today. But, Lucas, this Tanithadventure; we're not making any hit-and-run raid. We're taking overa whole planet; it'll be another Sword-World in forty or fiftyyears."

  "Inside another century, we'll conquer the whole Federation," BaronRathmore declared. He was a politician and never let exaggerationworry him.

  "What I don't understand," Harkaman said, "is why you support DukeAngus, Lord Trask, if you think the Tanith adventure is doing Gramso much harm."

  "If Angus didn't do it, somebody else would. But Angus is going tomake himself King of Gram, and I don't think anybody else could dothat. This planet needs a single sovereignty. I don't know how muchyou've seen of it outside this duchy, but don't take Wardshaven astypical. Some of these duchies, like Glaspyth or Didreksburg, areliteral snake pits. All the major barons are at each other'sthroats, and they can't even keep their own knights and petty-baronsin order. Why, there's a miserable little war down in SouthmainContinent that's been going on for over two centuries."

  "That's probably where Dunnan's going to take that army of his,"a robot-manufacturing baron said. "I hope it gets wiped out, andDunnan with it."

  "You don't have to go to Southmain; just go to Glaspyth," somebodyelse said.

  "Well, if we don't get a planetary monarchy to keep order, thisplanet will decivilize like anything in the Old Federation."

  "Oh, _come_, Lucas!" Alex Gorram protested. "That's pulling it outtoo far."

  "Yes, for one thing, we don't have the Neobarbarians," somebodysaid. "And if they ever came out here, we'd blow them toEm-See-Square in nothing flat. Might be a good thing if theydid, too; it would stop us squabbling among ourselves."

  Harkaman looked at him in surprise. "Just who do you think theNeobarbarians are, anyhow?" he asked. "Some race of invading nomads;Attila's Huns in spaceships?"

 
; "Well, isn't that who they are?" Gorram asked.

  "Nifflheim, no! There aren't a dozen and a half planets in the OldFederation that still have hyperdrive, and they're all civilized.That's if 'civilized' is what Gilgamesh is," he added. "These arehomemade barbarians. Workers and peasants who revolted to seize anddivide the wealth and then found they'd smashed the means ofproduction and killed off all the technical brains. Survivors onplanets hit during the Interstellar Wars, from the Eleventh tothe Thirteenth Centuries, who lost the machinery of civilization.Followers of political leaders on local-dictatorship planets.Companies of mercenaries thrown out of employment and living bypillage. Religious fanatics following self-anointed prophets."

  "You think we don't have plenty of Neobarbarian material here onGram?" Trask demanded. "If you do, take a look around."

  Glaspyth, somebody said.

  "That collection of over-ripe gallows-fruit Andray Dunnan'srecruited," Rathmore mentioned.

  Alex Gorram was grumbling that his shipyard was full of them;agitators stirring up trouble, trying to organize a strike toget rid of the robots.

  "Yes," Harkaman pounced on that last. "I know of at least fortyinstances, on a dozen and a half planets, in the last eightcenturies, of anti-technological movements. They had them on Terra,back as far as the Second Century Pre-Atomic. And after Venusseceded from the First Federation, before the Second Federationwas organized."

  "You're interested in history?" Rathmore asked.

  "A hobby. All spacemen have hobbies. There's very little workaboard ship in hyperspace; boredom is the worst enemy. Myguns-and-missiles officer, Vann Larch, is a painter. Most of hiswork was lost with the _Corisande_ on Durendal, but he kept us fromstarving a few times on Flamberge by painting pictures and sellingthem. My hyperspatial astrogator, Guatt Kirbey, composes music; hetries to express the mathematics of hyperspatial theory in musicalterms. I don't care much for it, myself," he admitted. "I studyhistory. You know, it's odd; practically everything that's happenedon any of the inhabited planets happened on Terra before the firstspaceship."

  The garden immediately around them was quiet, now; everybody wasover by the landing-stage escalators. Harkaman would have said more,but at that moment he saw half a dozen of Sesar Karvall's uniformedguardsmen run past. They were helmeted and in bullet-proofs; one ofthem had an auto-rifle, and the rest carried knobbed plastictruncheons. The Space Viking set down his drink.

  "Let's go," he said. "Our host is calling up his troops; I thinkthe guests ought to find battle-stations, too."