"You mean, he really is on Marduk?"
"I thought you knew that, and I was wondering how you'd found out. Yes: Fortuna, Bolide, and two armed merchantmen, a Baldurbuilt ship called the Reliable, and your friend Honest Horris."
"You didn't really believe Dunnan was on Marduk?" Boake Valkanhayn asked.
"Actually, I didn't. I had to have some kind of a story, to talk those people out of that crusade against Omfray of Glaspyth." He left unmentioned Valkanhayn's own insistence on a plundering expedition against Xochitl. "Now that it turns out to be true, I'm not surprised. We decided, long ago, that Dunnan was planning to raid Marduk. It appears that we underestimated him. Maybe he was reading about Hitler, too. He wasn't planning any raid; he was planning conquest, in the only way a great civilization can be conquered—by subversion."
"Yes," Harkaman put in. "Five years ago, when Dunnan started this programme, who was this Makann, anyhow?"
"Nobody," Bentrik said. "A crackpot agitator in Drepplin; he had a coven of fellow-crackpots, who met in the back room of a saloon and had their office in a cigar box. The next year, he had a suite of offices and was buying time on a couple of telecasts. The year after that, he had three telecast stations of his own, and was holding rallies and meetings of thousands of people. And so on, upward."
"Yes. Dunnan financed him, and moved in behind him, the same way Makann moved in behind the King. And Dunnan will have him shot the way he had Prince Edvard shot, and use the murder as a pretext to liquidate his personal followers."
"And then he'll own Marduk. 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.
Harkaman and Valkanhayn agreed; Valkanhayn thought the Viking's Gift of Beowulf would go along, and Harkaman was almost sure of the Black Star and Queen Flavia. He turned to Bentrik.
"Start that pinnace off for Gimli at once; within the hour if possible. We don't know how many ships will be gathered there, but we don't want them wasted in detail-attacks. Tell whoever's in command there that ships from Tanith are on the way, and to wait for them."
Fifteen hundred hours, less the five hundred Bentrik was in space from Marduk. He hadn't time to estimate voyage-time to Gimli from the other Mardukan trade-planets, and nobody could estimate how many ships would respond.
"It may take us a little time to get an effective fleet together. Even after we get through arguing about it. Argument," he told Bentrik, "is not exclusively a feature of democracies."
Actually, there was very little argument, and most of that among the Mardukans. Prince Bentrik insisted that Crown Princess Myrna would have to be taken along; King Mikhyl would be either dead or brainwashed into imbecility by now, and they would have to have somebody to take the throne. Lady Valerie Alvarath, Sir Thomas Kobbly, the tutor, and the nurse Margot refused to be separated from her. Prince Bentrik was equally firm, with less success, on leaving his wife and son on Tanith. In the end, it was agreed that the entire Mardukan party would space out on the Nemesis.
The leader of the Bigglersport delegation attempted an impassioned tirade about going to the aid of strangers while their own planet was being enslaved. He was booed down by everybody else and informed that Tanith was being defended where a planet ought to be, on somebody else's real estate. When the Bigglersporters emerged from the meeting, they found that their own space-yacht had been commandeered and sent off to Amaterasu and Beowulf for assistance, that the regiment of local infantry they had enlisted from the King of Tradetown had been taken over by the Rivington authorities, and that the Gilgamesh freighter they had chartered to transport them to Gram would now take them to Marduk.
The problem broke into two halves: the purely naval action that would be fought to relieve the Moon of Marduk, if it still held out, and to destroy the Dunnan and Makann ships, and the ground-fighting problem of wiping out Makann's supporters and restoring the Mardukan monarchy. A great many of the people of Marduk would be glad of a chance to turn on Makann, once they had arms and were properly supported. Combat weapons were almost unknown among the people, however, and even sporting arms uncommon. All the small arms and light artillery and auto-weapons available were gathered up.
The Grendelsbane came in from Beowulf, and the Sun Goddess from Amaterasu. Three independent Space Viking ships were still in orbit on Tanith; they joined the expedition. There would be trouble with them on Marduk; they'd want to loot. Let the Mardukans worry about that. They could charge it off as part of the price for letting Zaspar Makann get into power in the first place.
There were twelve spacecraft in line outside the Moon of Tanith, counting the three independents and the forcibly chartered Gilgamesher troop-transport; that was the biggest fleet Space Vikings had ever assembled in their history. Alvyn Karffard said as much while they were checking the formation by screen.
"It isn't a Space Viking fleet," Prince Bentrik differed. "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. His most junior staff officer, Count Steven of Ravary, didn't seem to appreciate the compliment.
"We arereSpace Vikings!" he insisted. "And we are going to battle with the Neobarbarians of Zaspar Makann."
"Well, I won't argue the last half of it, Steven," his father told him.
"Are you people done yakking about who's civilized and who isn't?" Guatt Kirbey asked. "Then give the signal. All the other ships are ready to jump."
Trask pressed the button on the desk in front of him. A light went on over Kirbey's control panel as one would on each of the other ships. He said, "Jumping," around the stem of his pipe, and twisted the red handle and shoved it in.
Four hundred and fifty hours, in the private universe that was the Nemesis; outside, nothing else existed, and inside there was nothing to do but wait, as each hour carried them six trillion miles nearer to Gimli. At first, the ruthless and terrible Space Viking, Steven, Count of Ravary, was wildly excited, but before long he found that, there was nothing exciting going on; it was just a spaceship, and he'd been on ships before. Her Highness the Crown Princess, or maybe her Majesty the Queen of Marduk, stopped being excited about the same time, and she and Steven and Mopsy played together. Of course, Myrna was only a girl, and two years younger than Steven, but she was, or at least might be, his sovereign, and beside, she had been in a space action, if you call what lies between a planet and its satellite space and if you call being shot at without being able to shoot back an action, and Relentless Ravary, the Interstellar Terror, had not. This rather made up for being a girl and a mere baby of going-on-ten.