Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
He mentioned this to Harkaman and Alvyn Karffard; they both laughed. "Just holding ship's meetings," Karffard said. "They'll be yakking back and forth for a couple of hours, yet." "Yes; Valkanhayn and Spasso don't own their ships," Harkaman explained. "They've gone in debt to their crews for supplies and maintenance till everybody owns everything in common. The ships look like it, too.
Two years and six months after the Nemesis had come out of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso on Tanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to sell a cargo and get repairs. They bought his loot he had been raiding some planet rather above the level of Khepera and below that of Amaterasu and healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it.
"And there'll be no more of this raiding villages for food or anything else. We will pay for anything we get from any of the locals." "We'll have trouble about that," Valkanhayn predicted. "Our men think anything a local has belongs to anybody who can take it." "So do I," Harkaman said. "On a planet I'm raiding. This is our planet, and our locals. We don't raid our own planet or our own people.
And we'll have the Mardukan navy coming out of hyperspace on Tanith," Valkanhayn added. "So we go to Marduk and smash him now, while he's still little enough to smash." There had been a few who had wanted to do that about Hitler, and a great many, later, who had regretted that it hadn't been done. "The Nemesis, the Corisande, and the Space Scourge for sure?" he asked.
They have an organized society, and anybody who has that is starting toward civilization." "I hate to think of what'll happen to this planet if Spasso and Valkanhayn stay here long." "Might be a good thing, in the long run. Good things in the long run are often tough while they're happening. I know what'll happen to Spasso and Valkanhayn, though. They'll start decivilizing, themselves.
"We will do nothing of the kind," Trask told him. "I will be running things here on Tanith. You people may allow your orders to be debated and voted on, but I don't. You will inform your respective crews to that effect. Any orders you give them in my name will be obeyed without argument." "I don't know how the men'll take that," Valkanhayn said.
They seemed to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the nine-hundred-odd hours in which they had been exposed to the figurative mercies of Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso. It hadn't saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and there were evidences of shelling.
"How do you get food for them?" Harkaman asked. "Or don't you bother?" "Oh, we gather that up all over," Valkanhayn told him. "We send parties out with landing craft. They'll let down on a village, run the locals out, gather up what's around and bring it here. Once in a while they put up a fight, but the best they have is a few crossbows and some muzzle-loading muskets.
"Paul, can you cut in on that Eglonsby station yet?" "What are you going to do?" Valkanhayn wanted to know, against it in advance. "Summon them to surrender. If they don't, we will drop a hellburner, and then we will pick out another city and summon it to surrender. I don't think the second one will refuse. If we are going to be murderers, we'll do it right, this time."
That evening, he played off the recording he had made of the conversation for Harkaman and Valkanhayn and Karffard and some of the others. Somebody instantly said: "That temple stuff came from Chermosh. They're Buddhists, there. That checks with the Gilgamesher's story." "He got the furs on Imhotep; he traded for them," Harkaman said. "Nobody gets anything off Imhotep by raiding.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking