to trade later. But don't
think you owe us anything. The man who did this to you is my enemy.
Now, I want to talk to every one of your people who can tell me
anything at all...."

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 All the available data for Audhumla was long out of
date; a considerable civilization must have developed in the last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.