United States or Kosovo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Before he had left Marduk, Admiral Shefter had ordered a ship to Gimli to check on the Honest Horris; a few men and a pinnace would be left behind to contact any ship from Tanith. He sent Boake Valkanhayn off in the Space Scourge. Lionel of Newhaven's Blue Comet came in from Gram with a cargo of general merchandise.
The real loot was at these two other towns; a steel mill and big stocks of steel at one, and all that skunk-apple oil at the other. So what did they do? They dropped a five-megaton bomb on each one, and blew both of them to Em-See-Square. That was a terror-raid pure and simple, but as Boake inquires, just who were they terrorizing?
"Sounds like Dunnan," Hugh Rathmore said in disgust. "He just went kill-crazy. The bad blood of Blackcliffe." "There are funny things about this," Boake Valkanhayn said. "I'd say it was a terror-raid, but who in Gehenna was he trying to terrorize?" "I wondered about that, too." Harkaman frowned. "This town where he landed seems, such as it was, to have been the planetary capital.
Now it was time to take a count of his own ships, and then begin thinking about the Battle on Marduk. The Black Star was gone. So was RMNS Challenger, and RMNS Conquistador. Space Scourge was badly hammered; worse than after the Beowulf raid, Boake Valkanhayn said. The Viking's Gift was heavily damaged, too, and so was the Corisande, and so, from the looks of the damage board, was the Nemesis.
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.
Spasso looked at Valkanhayn, then shrugged. "That's how the man wants it, Boake. You want to give him an argument? I don't." "The first order," Trask said, "is that these people you have working here are to be paid. They are not to be beaten by these plug-uglies you have guarding them. If any of them want to leave, they may do so; they will be given presents and furnished transportation home.
They seemed to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the nine-hundred-odd hours in which they had been exposed to the figurative mercies of Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso. It hadn't saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and there were evidences of shelling.
Three thousand hours had passed since the first warning had reached Tanith, that made five thousand since Viktor's ships were supposed to have left Xochitl. There were those, Boake Valkanhayn among them, who doubted, now, if he ever had. "The whole thing's just a big Gilgamesher lie," he was declaring.
Everybody else had, on a different planet. "Where's yours?" "Abaddon," the Count of Ravary's tutor said. When he saw that the name meant nothing to Trask, he added, "The ninth, outer, planet of the Marduk system." He said it disgustedly. "Yes; remember how you had Boake and Manfred out with their ships, checking our outside planets to see if Prince Viktor might be hiding on one of them?
Then the screen flickered, and Boake Valkanhayn was looking out of it, from the desk in the newly refurbished command room of the Space Scourge. He was a newly refurbished Boake Valkanhayn, too.
Word Of The Day