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bandy-legged beasts. They had gotten it unlimbered and were trying to get it
on a target when a rocket from an aircar landed directly under the muzzle.
Gun, caisson, crew, even the draft-team fifty yards behind, had simply
vanished.
Or the little company, some of them women, trying to defend the top of a tall
and half-ruinous building with rifles and pistols. One air-cavalryman wiped
them all out with his machine guns.
"They don't have a chance," he'd said, half-sick. "But they keep on fighting."
"Yes; stupid of them, isn't it?" Harkaman, beside him, had said.
"What would you do in their place?"
"Fight. Try to kill as many Space Vikings as I could before they got me.
Terro-humans are all stupid like that. That's why we're human."
If the taking of the city had been a massacre, the sack that had followed bad
been a man-made Hell. He had gone down, along with Harkaman, while the
fighting, if it could be so called, was still going on. Harkaman bad suggested
that the men ought to see him moving about among them; for his own part, he
had felt a compulsion to share their guilt.
He and Sir Paytrik Morland had been on foot together in
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one of the big hollow buildings that had stood since Khepera had been a Member
Republic of the Terran Federation. The air was acrid with smoke, powder-smoke
and the smoke of burning. It was surprising, how much would burn, in this city
of concrete and vitrified stone. It was surprising, too, how well-kept
everything was, at least on the ground level. These people had taken pride in
their city.
They found themselves alone, in a great empty hallway; the noise and horror of
the sack had moved away from them, or they from it, and then, when they
entered a side hall, they saw a man, one of the locals, squatting on the floor
with the body of a woman cradled on his lap. She was dead, half her head had
been blown off, but he was clasping her tightly, her blood staining his shirt,
and sobbing heart brokenly. A carbine lay forgotten on the floor beside him.
"Poor devil," Morland said, and started forward.
"No."
Trask stopped him with his left hand. With his right, he drew his pistol and
shot the man dead. Morland was horrified.
"Great Satan, Lucas! Why did you do that?"
"I wish Andray Dunnan had done that for me." He thumbed the safety on and
holstered the pistol. "None of this would be happening if he had. How many
more happinesses do you think we've smashed here today? And we don't even have
Dunnan's excuse of madness."
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The next morning, with everything of value collected and sent aboard, they had
started cross-country for five hundred miles to another city, the first
hundred over a countryside a smoke from burning villages Valkanhayn's men had
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pillaged the night before. There was no warning; Khepera had lost electricity
and radio and telegraph, and the spread of news was at the speed of one of the
beasts the locals insisted on calling horses. By mid-afternoon, they bad
finished with that city. It had been as bad as the first one.
One thing, it was the center of a considerable cattle country. The cattle were
native to the planet, heavy-bodied unicorns the size of a Gram bisonoid or one
of the slightly mutated Terran carabaos on Tanith, with long hair like a
Terran yak. He had detailed a dozen of the Nemesis ground
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fighters who had been vaqueros on his Traskon ranches to collect a score of
cows and four likely bulls, with enough fodder to last them on the voyage. The
odds were strongly against any of them living to acclimate themselves to
Tanith, , but if they did, they might prove to be one of the most s valuable
pieces of loot from Khepera.
The third city was at the forks of a river, like Tradetown ,, on Tanith.
Unlike it, this was a real metropolis. They should have gone there first of
all. They spent two days systematic ally pillaging it. The Kheperans carried
on considerable river-traffic, with stern-wheel steamboats, and the waterfront
was lined with warehouses crammed with every sort of merchandise. Even better,
the Kheperans had money, and s for the most part it was gold specie, and the
bank-vaults were full of it.
Unfortunately, the city had been built since the fall of the Federation and
the climb up from the barbarism that had followed, and a great deal of it was
of wood. Fires started almost at once, and it was almost completely on fire by
the end of the second day. It had been visible in the telescopic screen even
after they were out of atmosphere, a black smear until the turning planet
carried it into darkness and then a lurid glow.
"It was a filthy business."
Harkaman nodded. "Robbery and murder always are. You don't have to ask me who
said that Space Vikings are professional robbers and murderers, but who was it
said that ; he didn't care how many planets were raided and how many innocents
massacred in the Old Federation?"
"A dead man. Lucas Trask of Traskon. He didn't know what he was talking
about."
"You wish, now, that you'd kept Traskon and stayed on Gram?"
"No. If I had, I'd have spent every hour wishing I was doing what I'm doing
now. I can get used to this, I suppose."
"I think you will. At least, you kept your rations down. I puked myself empty
on my first raid, and had bad dreams about it for a year." He gave his
coffee-cup back to the robot and got to his feet. "Get a little rest, for a
couple of
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hours. Then draw some alcodote-vitimine pills from the medic. As soon as
things are secured, there'll be parties all over the ship, and we'll be
expected to look in on every one of them, have a drink, and say `Well done,
boys!' "
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