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When the colored turbulence washed away and the screen cleared, Audhumla looked like Tanith or Khepera or Amaterasu or any other Terra-type planet, a big disk brilliant with reflected sunlight and glowing with starlit and moonlit atmosphere on the other. There was a single rather large moon, and, in the telescopic screen, the usual markings of seas and continents and rivers and mountain-ranges.
He'd heard about that, on the voyage from Audhumla. Every person on Marduk would be retired on an adequate pension after thirty years regular employment or at the age of sixty.
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.
In the screen, he had seen a fat round-nosed thing come up from the Victrix, curving far out ahead of the passing Enterprise. She was almost out of sight around the planet when she ran head-on into it, and vanished in an awesome blaze. For a moment, he thought she had been destroyed, then she lurched into sight and went around the curvature of Audhumla.
Of course Dunnan and Makann were in collusion. Who tipped Dunnan off that the Victrix would be on Audhumla? Makann; his spies in the Navy tipped him. What about the Honest Horris; wasn't Makann blocking any investigation about her? Why was Admiral Shefter retired as soon as Makann got into power?
But there was nothing to show.... Oh, yes; lights on the darkened side, and from the size they must be vast cities. All the available data for Audhumla was long out of date; a considerable civilization must have developed in the last half dozen centuries. Another light appeared, a hard blue-white spark that spread into a larger, less brilliant yellow light.
Other beings were formed out of the dew that fell to the ground. They were the Daughters of the Frost, and Ymir, the Ancient Giant, married one, and their children were the Giants. "One day Ymir saw Audhumla breathe upon a cliff of ice and lick with her tongue the place she breathed on. As her tongue went over and over the place he saw that a figure was being formed.
The Mardukan officers were good company, and found their Space Viking opposite numbers equally so. The two crews had become used to working together on Audhumla, and mingled amicably off watch, interesting themselves in each other's hobbies and listening avidly to tales of each other's home planets.
And somebody else, probably a stooge of Makann's, was claiming that Bentrik had sold the Victrix to the Space Vikings and that the films of the battle of Audhumla were fakes, photographed in miniature at the Navy Moon Base. Admiral Shefter, when Trask flew in to see him the next day, was contemptuous about this last.
I think he knew the Victrix was coming to Audhumla, and just about when." "I don't like that, commodore," Shefter said. "You think I do, sir?" the Intelligence officer countered. "There it is, though. We all have to face it." "We do," Shefter agreed. "Get on it, commodore, and I don't need to caution you to screen everybody you put onto it very carefully."
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