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Updated: June 27, 2025
The one we're at is in good shape, and there's a big spaceport. We've been doing a lot of work on it. And the locals won't give you any trouble. All they have is spears and a few crossbows and matchlocks " "I know. I've been here." "Well, couldn't we make some kind of a deal?" Valkanhayn asked. A mendicant whine was beginning to creep into his voice.
"Sounds like Dunnan," Hugh Rathmore said in disgust. "He just went kill-crazy. The bad blood of Blackcliffe." "There are funny things about this," Boake Valkanhayn said. "I'd say it was a terror-raid, but who in Gehenna was he trying to terrorize?" "I wondered about that, too." Harkaman frowned. "This town where he landed seems, such as it was, to have been the planetary capital.
What was coming in was uniformly excited, some panicky, and all in fairly standard Lingua Terra. Garvan Spasso was perturbed. So, in the communication screen from the Space Scourge, was Boake Valkanhayn. "They got radio, and they got radar," he clamored. "Well, so what?" Harkaman asked. "They had radio and radar twenty years ago, when Rock Morgan was here in the Coalsack.
Valkanhayn was horrified, an odd reaction for a man who had just been expecting a bitter battle to drive them away. "You're just spacing right out again?" Harkaman shrugged. "Do we want to waste time here, Lord Trask? The Enterprise has obviously gone somewhere else. She was still in hyperspace when Captain Valkanhayn and his accomplice arrived here." "Is there anything worth staying for?"
Before he had left Marduk, Admiral Shefter had ordered a ship to Gimli to check on the Honest Horris; a few men and a pinnace would be left behind to contact any ship from Tanith. He sent Boake Valkanhayn off in the Space Scourge. Lionel of Newhaven's Blue Comet came in from Gram with a cargo of general merchandise.
I'm told that this lot aren't typical." "I hope not. They're a pack of sadistic brutes, and piggish along with it." "Well, brutality and bad manners I can condone, but Spasso and Valkanhayn are a pair of ignominious little crooks, and stupid along with it. If Andray Dunnan had gotten here ahead of us, he might have done one good thing in his wretched life.
If they're willing to throw some good money after bad, they can get it back, and a handsome profit to boot. And there ought to be planets above the rowboat and ox-cart level not too far away that could be raided for a lot of things we'd need." "That's right; I know of half a dozen within five hundred light-years. They won't be the kind Spasso and Valkanhayn are in the habit of raiding, though.
One was the altering attitude of his Majesty Angus I. When the Space Scourge returned, the newly-titled Baron Valkanhayn brought with him, along with the princely title and the commission as Viceroy of Tanith, a most cordial personal audiovisual greeting, warm and friendly. Angus had made it seated at his desk, bare headed and smoking a cigarette.
Either Valkanhayn and Spasso had more men than the size of their ships indicated, or they had gotten a lot of locals to work for them. More than the population of the moribund city, at least as Harkaman remembered it. There had been about five hundred in all; they lived by mining the old buildings for metal, and trading metalwork for food and textiles and powder and other things made elsewhere.
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.
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