easy; the locals hadn't had anything to fight with.
Small arms, and light cannon which hadn't been able to fire more
than a few rounds. Wherever they had attempted resistance, the
combat cars had swooped in, dropping bombs and firing machine guns
and auto-cannon. Yet they had fought, bitterly and hopelessly--just
as he would have, defending Traskon.

Trask busied himself getting coffee and a cigarette from one of the
robots. When he looked up, Spasso had gone away, and Harkaman was
sitting on the edge of the desk, loading his short pipe.

"Well, you saw the elephant, Lucas," Harkaman said. "You don't seem
to have liked it."

"Elephant?"

"Old Terran expression I read somewhere. All I know is that an
elephant was an animal about the size of one of your Gram megatheres.
The expression means, experiencing something for the first time
which makes a great impression. Elephants must have been something
to see. This was your first Viking raid. You've seen it, now."

He'd been in combat before; he'd led the fighting-men of Traskon
during the boundary dispute with Baron Manniwel, and there were
always bandits and cattle rustlers. He'd thought it would be like
that. He remembered, five days, or was it five ages, ago, his
excited anticipation as the city grew and spread in the screen and
the _Nemesis_ came dropping down toward it. The pinnaces, his four
and the two from the _Space Scourge_, had gone spiraling out a
hundred miles beyond the city; the _Space Scourge_ had gone into
a tighter circle twenty miles from its center; the _Nemesis_ had
continued her relentless descent until she was ten miles from the
ground, before she began spewing out landing craft, and combat cars,
and the little egg-shaped one-man air-cavalry mounts. It had been
thrilling. Everything had gone perfectly; not even Valkanhayn's gang
had goofed.

Then the screenviews had begun coming in. The brief and hopeless
fight in the city. He could still see that silly little field gun,
it must have been around seventy or eighty millimeter, on a
high-wheeled carriage, drawn by six shaggy, 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-cav