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Updated: June 7, 2025
"You know what this is, don't you?" one of them was saying. "This is a veridicator. That globe'll light blue; the moment you try to lie to us, it'll turn red. And the moment it turns red, I'm going to hammer your teeth down your throat with the butt of this pistol." "Have you found anything out about the King, yet?" Bentrik asked him. He turned. "No.
A dozen space-armored officers with planet-perched dragons on their breasts were crowding beside Prince Bentrik in the screen from the Victrix, whooping like drunken bisonoid-herders on payday night. "I wonder," he said, almost inaudibly, "if I'll ever know if Andray Dunnan was on that ship."
He wasn't planning any raid; he was planning conquest, in the only way a great civilization can be conquered by subversion." "Yes," Harkaman put in. "Five years ago, when Dunnan started this programme, who was this Makann, anyhow?" "Nobody," Bentrik said. "A crackpot agitator in Drepplin; he had a coven of fellow-crackpots, who met in the back room of a saloon and had their office in a cigar box.
"I am very happy, Prince Trask, first, I confess, at the safe return of my kinsman Prince Bentrik, and then at the honor of meeting one in the confidence of my fellow sovereign King Angus of Gram. I will never be ungrateful for what you did for my cousin and for his officers and men.
Prince Bentrik shook his head. "We don't know. The King was alive when we left Moonbase, but that was five hundred hours ago. We don't know anything about her mother, either. She was at the Palace when Prince Edvard was murdered; we've heard absolutely nothing about her. The King made a few screen appearances, parroting things Makann wanted him to say. Under hypnosis.
Trask's efforts to explain the political and social structure of the Sword-Worlds met the same incomprehension from Bentrik. "Why, it sounds like feudalism to me!" "That's right; that's what it is. A king owes his position to the support of his great nobles; they owe theirs to their barons and landholding knights; they owe theirs to their people.
The Government had already denied that, Prince Bentrik had captured the Nemesis and brought her in as a prize, and, the Space Vikings had captured Prince Bentrik and were holding him for ransom. Beyond that, the Government was trying to sit on the whole story, and the Opposition was hinting darkly at corrupt deals and sinister plots.
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.
If Viktor attacked and had his fleet blown to Em-See-Square, Xochitl would lie open and unprotected, and there was enough loot on Xochitl to cram everybody's ships. Everybody's ships who had ships when the Battle of Tanith was over, of course. He was apologetic to Princess Bentrik: "I'm very sorry you jumped out of Zaspar Makann's frying pan into Prince Viktor's fire," he began.
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