Revenge -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
"And nobody to use it. If I were Dunnan, I'd go to Nergal, or
Xochitl. There are always a couple of thousand Space Vikings on
either, spending their loot and taking it easy between raids. He
could sign on a full crew on either. I suggest we go to Xochitl,
first. We might pick up news of him, if nothing else."
* * * * *
All right, they'd try Xochitl first. Harkaman knew the planet,
and was friendly with the Haulteclere noble who ruled it.
The work went on at the Gorram shipyard; it had taken a year
to build the _Enterprise_, but the steel-mills and engine-works
were over the preparatory work of tooling up, and material and
equipment was flowing in a steady stream. Lucas let them persuade
him to take more rest, and day by day grew stronger. Soon he was
spending most of his time at the shipyard, watching the engines
go in--Abbot lift-and-drive for normal space, Dillingham hyperdrive,
power-converters, pseudograv, all at the center of the globular ship.
Living quarters and workshops went in next, all armored in
collapsium-plated steel. Then the ship lifted out to an orbit a
thousand miles off-planet, followed by swarms of armored work-craft
and cargo-lighters; the rest of the work was more easily done in
space. At the same time, the four two-hundred-foot pinnaces that
would be carried aboard were being finished. Each of them had its
own hyperdrive engines, and could travel as far and as fast as
the ship herself.
Otto Harkaman was beginning to be distressed because the ship still
lacked a name. He didn't like having to speak of her as "her," or
"the ship," and there were many things soon to go on that should be
name-marked. _Elaine_, Trask thought, at once, and almost at once
rejected it. He didn't want her name associated with the things
that ship would do in the Old Federation. _Revenge_, _Avenger_,
_Retribution_, _Vendetta_; none appealed to him. A news-commentator,
turgidly eloquent about the nemesis which the criminal Dunnan had
invoked against himself, supplied it, _Nemesis_ it was.
Now he was studying his new profession of interstellar robbery and
murder against which he had once inveighed. Otto Harkaman's handful
of followers became his teachers. Vann Larch, guns-and-missiles,
who was also a painter; Guatt Kirbey, sour and pessimistic, the
hyperspatial astrogator who tried to express his science in music;
Sharll Renner, the normal-space astrogator. Alvyn Karffard, the
exec, who had been with Harkaman longest of all. And Sir Paytrik
Morland, a local recruit, formerly guard-captain to Count Lionel
of Newhaven, who commanded the ground-fighters and the combat
contragravity. They were using the farms and villages of Traskon
for drill and practice, and he noticed that while the _Nemesis_
would carry only five hundred ground and air fighters, over a
thousand were being trained.
He commented to Rovard Grauffis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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