office--and splashed a little more brandy into his glass.

"She'll be coming before long. We have enough of our people aboard
to make sure nobody else tries to take the ship. And I really
believe, now, that Valkanhayn can be trusted."

"I do, too. I'm not worried about what might happen on the ship.
But we don't know what's been happening on Gram. Glaspyth and
Didreksburg could have teamed up and jumped Wardshaven before
Duke Angus was ready to invade Glaspyth. Boake might be landing
the ship in a trap at Wardshaven."

"Be a sorry looking trap after it closed on him. That would be the
first time in history that a Sword-World was raided by Space Vikings."
Harkaman looked at his half-empty glass, then filled it to the top.
It was the same drink he had started with, just as a regiment that
has been decimated and recruited up to strength a few times is still
the same regiment.

The buzz of the communication screen--one of the few things in the
room that hadn't been looted somewhere--interrupted him. They both
rose; Harkaman, still carrying his drink, went to put it on. It was
a man on duty in the control room, overhead, reporting that two
emergences had just been detected at twenty light-minutes due north
of the planet. Harkaman gulped his drink and set down the empty glass.

"All right. You put out a general alert? Switch anything that comes
in over to this screen." He got out his pipe and was packing tobacco
into it mechanically. "They'll be out of the last microjump and
about two light-seconds away in a few minutes."

Trask sat down again, saw that his cigarette had burned almost to
the tip, and lit a fresh one from it, wishing he could be as calm
about it as Harkaman. Three minutes later, the control tower picked
up two emergences at a light-second and a half, a thousand or so
miles apart. Then the screen flickered, and Boake Valkanhayn was
looking out of it, from the desk in the newly refurbished command
room of the _Space Scourge_.

He was a newly refurbished Boake Valkanhayn, too. His heavily
braided captain's jacket looked like the work of one of the better
tailors on Gram, and on the breast was a large and ornate knight's
star, of unfamiliar design, bearing, among other things, the sword
and atom-symbol of the house of Ward.

"Prince Trask; Count Harkaman," he greeted. "_Space Scourge_, Tanith;
thirty-two hundred hours out of Wardshaven on Gram, Baron Valkanhayn
commanding, accompanied by chartered freig