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Updated: April 30, 2025
There were twelve spacecraft in line outside the Moon of Tanith, counting the three independents and the forcibly chartered Gilgamesher troop-transport; that was the biggest fleet Space Vikings had ever assembled in their history. Alvyn Karffard said as much while they were checking the formation by screen. "It isn't a Space Viking fleet," Prince Bentrik differed.
Incredibly, he realized, they had been gone only thirty-odd Galactic Standard days, and in that time Alvyn Karffard had done an incredible amount of work. He had gotten the spaceport completely cleared of rubble and debris, and he had the woods cleared away from around it and the two tall buildings.
What would Hitler have done if he'd told one of his big lies, and then found it turning into the truth? Maybe Makann had been on Marduk.... No; he couldn't have hidden half a dozen ships on a civilized planet. Not even at the bottom of an ocean. "I wouldn't be surprised," Alvyn Karffard was shouting, "if Andray Dunnan was Zaspar Makann.
But for Dunnan's purpose, it would be perfect. He called Prince Bentrik and Alvyn Karffard to him; they found the idea instantly convincing. They talked about it through dinner, and held a general discussion afterward. Even Guatt Kirbey, the ship's pessimist, could find no objection to it. Trask and Bentrik began at once making battle plans.
With a shock, Trask recalled that he was a professor of economics. Alvyn Karffard wouldn't need any twenty ships to loot Marduk. Just infiltrate it with about a hundred smart confidence men and inside a year they'd own everything on it. That started them all off on Zaspar Makann, though. Some of them thought he had a few good ideas, but was damaging his own case by extremism.
They didn't need the order; Vann Larch was speaking rapidly into his hand-phone, and Alvyn Karffard was hurling his voice all over the Nemesis, warning of sudden deceleration and direction change, and while he was speaking, things in the command room began sliding.
The two clumps of Dunnan-Makann ships were converging rapidly, and Alvyn Karffard was screaming into a phone to somebody to get more speed. At a thousand miles, the missiles started going out, and the two groups of ships, four and five, were equidistant from each other and from the allied fleet, at the points of a triangle that was growing smaller by the second.
The Lamia was overhauled as rapidly as possible. She was still far from being a good ship, but she was much closer being one than before. She was fitted with the best detection equipment that could be assembled, and put on orbit; Alvyn Karffard took command of her, with some of Spasso's officers, some of Valkanhayn's, and a few from the Nemesis.
None of the surface features, not even the major mountain ranges or rivers, were yet distinguishable, but Harkaman and Sharll Renner and Alvyn Karffard and the other old hands seemed to recognize it. Karffard was talking by phone to Paul Koreff, the signals-and-detection officer, who could detect nothing from the moon and nothing that was getting through the Van Allen belt from the planet.
Vann Larch, guns-and-missiles, who was also a painter; Guatt Kirbey, sour and pessimistic, the hyperspatial astrogator who tried to express his science in music; Sharll Renner, the normal-space astrogator. Alvyn Karffard, the exec, who had been with Harkaman longest of all.
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