ng him on the
back and screaming inarticulately in his ear. A dozen space-armored
officers with planet-perched dragons on their breasts were crowding
beside Prince Bentrik in the screen from the _Victrix_, whooping
like drunken bisonoid-herders on payday night.

"I wonder," he said, almost inaudibly, "if I'll ever know if Andray
Dunnan was on that ship."

XIX

Prince Trask of Tanith and Prince Simon Bentrik were dining together
on an upper terrace of what had originally been the mansion house of
a Federation period plantation. It had been a number of other things
since; now it was the municipal building of a town that had grown
around it, which had, somehow, escaped undamaged from the Dunnan
blitz. Normally about five or ten thousand, the place was now jammed
with almost fifty thousand homeless refugees from half a dozen other
towns that had been destroyed, overflowing the buildings and
crowding into a sprawling camp of hastily built huts and shelters,
and already permanent buildings were going up to accommodate them.
Everybody, locals, Mardukans and Space Vikings, had been busy with
the work of relief and reconstruction; this was the first meal the
two commanders had been able to share in any leisure at all. Prince
Bentrik's enjoyment of it was somewhat impaired by the fact that
from where he sat he could see, in the distance, the sphere of his
disabled ship.

"I doubt we can get her off-planet again, let alone into hyperspace."

"Well, we'll get you and your crew to Marduk in the _Nemesis_,
then." They were both speaking loudly, above the clank, and clatter
of machinery below. "I hope you didn't think I'd leave you stranded
here."

"I don't know how either of us will be received. Space Vikings
haven't been exactly popular on Marduk, lately. They may thank you
for bringing me back to stand trial," Bentrik said bitterly. "Why,
I'd have anybody shot who let his ship get caught as I did mine.
Those two were down in atmosphere before I knew they'd come out of
hyperspace."

"I think they were down on the planet before your ship arrived."

"Oh, that's ridiculous, Prince Trask!" the Mardukan cried. "You
can't hide a ship on a planet. Not from the kind of instruments we
have in the Royal Navy."

"We have pretty fair detection ourselves," Trask reminded him.
"There's one place where you can do it. At the bottom of an ocean,
with a thousand or so feet of water over her. That's where I was
going to hide the