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Updated: June 1, 2025
There were others at Rivington to whom it was not immediately evident. The professional Space Vikings, men like Valkanhayn and Ravallo and Alvyn Karffard, were disgusted. Here they'd been sitting, on combat alert, all these months, and, if they'd only known, they could have gone to Xochitl and looted it clean long ago. The Gram party were outraged.
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.
Just outside atmosphere, coming around the planet from the west." "Is she the Enterprise?" "Can't tell, yet," Karffard said, and then cried: "There she is, in the screen! That spark, about thirty degrees north, just off the west side." Aboard her, too, voices from speakers would be shouting, "Ship detected!" and the battle station board would be blazing red. And Andray Dunnan, at the command-desk
The telescopic view shifted; for a moment the planet was completely off-screen, and then its curvature came into the screen against a star-scattered background. They were almost in to two thousand miles now; Karffard was yelling to stop acceleration and trying to put the ship into a spiral orbit. Suddenly they caught a glimpse of one of the ships. "She's in trouble." That was Paul Koreff's voice.
He had finished it and was lighting a cigarette over his coffee when a red light flashed and a voice from one of the speakers shouted. "Detection! Detection from planet! Radar, and microray!" Karffard began talking rapidly into a hand-phone; Harkaman unhooked one beside him and listened. "Coming from a definite point, about twenty-fifth north parallel," he said, aside.
"There are only three Space Vikings in it. The rest are the ships of three civilized planets. Tanith, Beowulf and Amaterasu." Karffard was surprised. "You mean we're civilized planets? Like Marduk, or Baldur or Odin, or...?" "Well, aren't you?" Trask smiled. He'd begun to suspect something of the sort a couple of years ago. He hadn't really been sure until now.
You hearing this, Guatt?" "Yeah. It makes sense. Sort of. Now, stop pestering me. Sharll, look here a minute." The normal-space astrogator conferred with him; Alvyn Karffard, the executive officer, joined them. Finally Kirbey pulled out the big red handle, twisted it, and said, "All right, jumping." He shoved it in. "I suppose I cut it too fine; now we'll get kicked back half a million miles."
Karffard punched out the combination as Koreff furnished it. While Trask was desperately willing his face into immobility, the screen lighted. It wasn't Andray Dunnan; that was a disappointment. It was almost as good, though. His henchman, Sir Nevil Ormm. "Well, Sir Nevil! A pleasant surprise," he heard himself saying. "We last met on the terrace at Karvall House, did we not?"
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.
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.
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