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You make slaves out of people, and some will always be slave-drivers; they will bow to you, and then take it out on the others. Harkaman's nose was twitching as though he had a bit of rotten fish caught in his mustache. "We have about eight hundred of them. There were only three hundred that were any good for work here; we gathered the rest up at villages along the big river," Spasso was saying.
Revenge, Avenger, Retribution, Vendetta; none appealed to him. A news-commentator, turgidly eloquent about the nemesis which the criminal Dunnan had invoked against himself, supplied it, Nemesis it was. Now he was studying his new profession of interstellar robbery and murder against which he had once inveighed. Otto Harkaman's handful of followers became his teachers.
While he was trying, a big melon-shaped thing fell away from the Nemesis, and in the jiggling, radiation-distorted intership screen Harkaman's image was laughing. "Hellburner just went off; target about 50° south, 25° east of the sunrise line. That's where those missiles are coming from." Counter-missiles sped toward the big metal melon; defense missiles, robot-launched, met them.
Then, as they passed close together, guns hammered back and forth along with missiles, and then the Enterprise was out of sight around the horizon. Another ship, the size of Otto Harkaman's Corisande II, was approaching; she bore a tapering, red-nailed feminine hand dangling a planet by a string.
"Yes, he's crazy, and Captain Harkaman's allowing for that," Rovard Grauffis said. "Dunnan hates all of us. He hates his Grace, here. He hates Lord Lucas, and Sesar Karvall; of course, he may think he killed both of them. He hates Captain Harkaman. So how could he score all of us off at once? By taking Tanith." "You say he was buying supplies and ammunition?" "That's right.
All he knew of history was the little he had gotten from reading some of Harkaman's books, and the long, rambling conversations aboard ship in hyperspace or in the evenings at Rivington.
The communication screen in front of them lit at once; Trask shoved over his chair beside Harkaman's, his hands tightening on the arms. Would it be Dunnan himself, and what would his face show when he saw who confronted him out of his own screen? It took him an instant to realize that the other ship was not the Enterprise at all.
He'd read about somebody who'd done something like that, in one of Harkaman's Old Terran history books. Baron Rathmore had stayed on Gram; so had Rolve Hemmerding. The rest of the gentlemen-adventurers, all with shiny new titles of nobility, had returned. From them, as the two ships were getting into orbit, he learned what had happened on Gram since the Nemesis had spaced out.
After all, Tanith would be a feudal lordship, and the three ships together a fleet. Admiral Harkaman's first act of authority was to order a general inspection of fleet units. He wasn't shocked by the condition of the two ships, but that was only because he had expected much worse. They were spaceworthy; after all, they had gotten here from Hoth under their own power.
The city was familiar, from Otto Harkaman's descriptions and from the pictures Vann Larch had painted during the long jump from Gram. As they came in, it looked impressive, spreading for miles around the twin buildings that spired almost three thousand feet above it, with a great spaceport like an eight-pointed star at one side.
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