Seshat was the closest; they went there first. They were too late. Seshat had had it already, and on the evidence of the radioactivity counters, not too long ago. Four hundred hours at most. There had been two hellburners; the cities on which they had fallen were still-smoking pits literally burned into the ground and the bedrock below, at the center of five hundred mile radii of slag and lava and scorched earth and burned forests. There had been a planetbuster; it had started a major earthquake. And half a dozen thermonuclears. There were probably quite a few survivors--a human planetary population is extremely hard to exterminate completely--but within a century they'd be back to the loincloth and the stone hatchet. "We don't even know Dunnan did it, personally," Paytrik Morland said. "For all we know, he's down in an air-tight cave city on some planet nobody ever heard of, sitting on a golden throne, surrounded by a harem." He had begun to suspect that Dunnan was doing something of just the sort. The Greatest Space Viking of History would naturally found a Space Viking empire. "An emperor goes out to look his empire over, now and then; I don't spend all my time on Tanith. Say we try Audhumla next. It's the farthest away. We might get there while he's still shooting up Obidicut and Lugaluru. Guatt, figure us a jump for it." When the colored turbulence washed away and the screen cleared, Audhumla looked like Tanith or Khepera or Amaterasu or any other Terra-type planet, a big disk brilliant with reflected sunlight and glowing with starlit and moonlit atmosphere on the other. There was a single rather large moon, and, in the telescopic screen, the usual markings of seas and continents and rivers and mountain-ranges. But there was nothing to show.... Oh, yes; lights on the darkened side, and from the size they must be vast cities. All the available data for Audhumla was long out of date; a considerable civilization must have developed in the last half dozen centuries. Another light appeared, a hard blue-white spark that spread into a larger, less brilliant yellow light. At the same time, all the alarm-devices in the command-room went into a pandemonium of jangling and flashing and squawking and howling and shouting. Radiation. Energy-release. Contragravity distortion effects. Infra-red output. A welter of indecipherable radio and communication-screen signals. Radar and scanner-ray beams from the planet. Trask's fist began hurting; he found that he had been pounding the desk in front of him with it. He stopped it. "We caught him, we caught him!" he was yelling hoarsely. "Full speed in, continuous acceleration, as much as we can stand. We'll worry about decelerating when we're in shooting distance."