Space Viking Part 25

"You need all your people for fighting men, don't you?" the boy count asked.

"Well, we need a good many. The smallest of our ships will carry five hundred men; most of them around eight hundred."

The captain lifted an eyebrow. The complement of the _Victrix_ had been three hundred, and she'd been a big ship. Then he nodded.

"Of course. Most of them are ground-fighters."

That started Count Steven off. Questions, about battles and raids and booty and the planets Trask had seen.

"I wish I were a s.p.a.ce Viking!"

"Well, you can't be, Count Ravary. You're an officer of the Royal Navy. You're supposed to fight s.p.a.ce Vikings."

"I won't fight you."

"You'd have to, if the King commanded," the old captain told him.

"No. Prince Trask is my friend. He saved my father's life."

"And I won't fight you, either, count. We'll make a lot of fireworks, and then we'll each go home and claim victory. How would that be?"

"I've heard of things like that," the captain said. "We had a war with Odin, seventy years ago, that was mostly that sort of battles."

"Besides, the King is Prince Trask's friend, too," the boy insisted.

"Father and Mummy heard him say so, right on the Throne. Kings don't lie when they're on the Throne, do they?"

"Good Kings don't," Trask told him.

"Ours is a good King," the young Count of Ravary declared proudly.

"I would do anything my King commanded. Except fight Prince Trask.

My house owes Prince Trask a debt."

Trask nodded approvingly. "That's the way a Sword-World n.o.ble would talk, Count Steven," he said.

The Board of Inquiry, that afternoon, was more like a small and very sedate c.o.c.ktail party. An Admiral Shefter, who seemed to be very high high-bra.s.s, presided while carefully avoiding the appearance of doing so. Alvyn Karffard and Vann Larch and Paytrik Morland were there from the _Nemesis_, and Bentrik and several of the officers from the _Victrix_, and there were a couple of Naval Intelligence officers, and somebody from Operational Planning, and from Ship Construction and Research & Development. They chatted pleasantly and in a deceptively random manner for a while. Then Shefter said:

"Well, there's no blame or censure of any sort for the way Commodore Prince Bentrik was surprised. That couldn't have been avoided, at the time." He looked at the Research & Development officer. "It shouldn't be allowed to happen many more times, though."

"Not many more, sir. I'd say it'll take my people a month, and then the time it'll take to get all the ships equipped as they come in."

Ship Construction didn't think that would take too long.

"We'll see to it that you get full information on the new submarine detection system, Prince Trask," the admiral said.

"You gentlemen understand you'll have to keep it under your helmets, though," one of the Intelligence men added. "If it got out that we were informing s.p.a.ce Vikings about our technical secrets...." He felt the back of his neck in a way that made Trask suspect that beheadment was the customary form of execution on Marduk.

"We'll have to find out where the fellow has his base," Operational Planning said. "I take it, Prince Trask, that you're not going to a.s.sume that he was on his flagship when you blew it, and just put paid to him and forget him?"

"Oh, no. I'm a.s.suming that he wasn't. I don't believe he and Ormm went anywhere on the same ship, after he came out here and established a base. I think one of them would stay home all the time."

"Well, we'll give you everything we have on them," Shefter promised.

"Most of that is cla.s.sified and you'll have to keep quiet about it, too. I just skimmed over the summary of what you gave us; I daresay we'll both get a lot of new information. Have you any idea at all where he might be based, Prince Trask?"

"Only that we think it's a non-Terra-type planet." He told them about Dunnan's heavy purchases of air-and-water recycling equipment and carniculture and hydroponic material. "That, of course, helps a great deal."

"Yes; there are only about five million planets in the former Federation s.p.a.ce-volume that are inhabitable in artificial environment. Including a few completely covered by seas, where you could put in underwater dome cities if you had the time and material."

One of the Intelligence officers had been nursing a gla.s.s with a tiny remnant of c.o.c.ktail in it. He downed it suddenly, filled the gla.s.s again, and glowered at it in silence for a while. Then he drank it briskly and refilled it.

"What I should like to know," he said, "is how this double obscenity of a Dunnan knew we'd have a ship on Audhumla just when we did," he said. "Your talking about underwater dome-cities reminded me of it.

I don't think he just pulled that planet out of a hat and then went there prepared to sit on the bottom of the ocean for a year and a half waiting for something to turn up. I think he knew the _Victrix_ was coming to Audhumla, and just about when."

"I don't like that, commodore," Shefter said.

"You think I do, sir?" the Intelligence officer countered. "There it is, though. We all have to face it."

"We do," Shefter agreed. "Get on it, commodore, and I don't need to caution you to screen everybody you put onto it very carefully." He looked at his own gla.s.s; it had a bare thimbleful in the bottom. He replenished it slowly and carefully. "It's been a long time since the Navy's had anything like this to worry about." He turned to Trask. "I suppose I can get in touch with you at the Palace whenever I must?"

"Well, Prince Trask and I have been invited as house-guests at Prince Edvard's, I mean Baron Cragdale's, hunting lodge," Bentrik said. "We'll be going there directly from here."

"Ah." Admiral Shefter smiled slightly. Beside not having three horns and a spiked tail, this s.p.a.ce Viking was definitely _persona grata_ with the Royal Family. "Well, we'll keep in contact, Prince Trask."

The hunting lodge where Crown Prince Edvard was simple Baron Cragdale lay at the head of a sharply-sloping mountain valley down which a river tumbled. Mountains rose on either side in high scarps, some topped with perpetual snow, glaciers curling down from them.

The lower ranges were forested, as was the valley between, and there was a red-mauve alpenglow on the great peak that rose from the head of the valley. For the first time in over a year, Elaine was with him, silently clinging to him to see the beauty of it through his eyes. He had thought that she had gone from him forever.

The hunting lodge itself was not quite what a Sword-Worlder would expect a hunting lodge to be. At first sight, from the air, it looked like a sundial, a slender tower rising like a gnomen above a circle of low buildings and formal gardens. The boat landed at the foot of it, and he and Prince and Princess Bentrik and the young Count of Ravary and his tutor descended. Immediately, they were beset by a flurry of servants; the second boat, with the Bentrik servants and their luggage, was circling in to land. Elaine, he discovered, wasn't with him any more, and then he was separated from the Bentriks and was being floated up an inside shaft in a lifter-car. More servants installed him in his rooms, unpacked his cases, drew his bath and even tried to help him take it, and fussed over him while he dressed.

There were over a score for dinner. Bentrik had warned him that he'd find some odd types; maybe he meant that they wouldn't all be n.o.bles. Among the commoners there were some professors, mostly social sciences, a labor leader, a couple of Representatives and a member of the Chamber of Delegates, and a couple of social workers, whatever that meant.

His own table companion was a Lady Valerie Alvarath. She was beautiful--black hair, and almost startlingly blue eyes, a combination unusual in the Sword-Worlds--and she was intelligent, or at least cleverly articulate. She was introduced as the lady-companion of the Crown Prince's daughter. When he asked where the daughter was, she laughed.

"She won't be helping entertain visiting s.p.a.ce Vikings for a long time, Prince Trask. She is precisely eight years old; I saw her getting ready for bed before I came down here. I'll look in on her after dinner."

Then the Crown Princess Melanie, on his other hand, asked him some question about Sword-World court etiquette. He stuck to generalities, and what he could remember from a presentation at the court of Excalibur during his student days. These people had a monarchy since before Gram had been colonized; he wasn't going to admit that Gram's had been established since he went off-planet.

The table was small enough for everybody to hear what he was saying and to feed questions to him. It lasted all through the meal, and continued when they adjourned for coffee in the library.

"But what about your form of government, your social structure, that sort of thing?" somebody, impatient with the artificialities of the court, wanted to know.

"Well, we don't use the word government very much," he replied. "We talk a lot about authority and sovereignty, and I'm afraid we burn entirely too much powder over it, but government always seems to us like sovereignty interfering in matters that don't concern it. As long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblance of good public order and makes the more serious forms of crime fairly hazardous for the criminals, we're satisfied."

"But that's just negative. Doesn't the government do anything positive for the people?"

He tried to explain the Sword-World feudal system to them. It was hard, he found, to explain something you have taken for granted all your life to somebody who is quite unfamiliar with it.