ment in Mardukan
industries. Some of the interstellar trading companies would like
a chance at the Tanith planets; others would resent Tanith ships
being given access to theirs. And Zaspar Makann's party were already
shrieking protests about the _Nemesis_ being repaired by the
Royal Navy.

And a couple of professors who inclined toward Makann had introduced
a resolution calling for the court-martial of Prince Bentrik and an
investigation of the loyalty of Admiral Shefter. And somebody else,
probably a stooge of Makann's, was claiming that Bentrik had sold
the _Victrix_ to the Space Vikings and that the films of the battle of
Audhumla were fakes, photographed in miniature at the Navy Moon Base.

Admiral Shefter, when Trask flew in to see him the next day, was
contemptuous about this last.

"Ignore the whole bloody thing; we get something like that before
every general election. On this planet, you can always kick the
Gilgameshers and the Armed Forces with impunity, neither have votes
and neither can kick back. The whole thing'll be forgotten the day
after the election. It always is."

"That's if Makann doesn't win the election," Trask qualified.

"That's no matter who wins the election. They can't any of them
get along without the Navy, and they bloody well know it."

Trask wanted to know if Intelligence had been getting anything.

"Not on how Dunnan found out the _Victrix_ had been ordered to
Audhumla, no," Shefter said. "There wasn't any secrecy about it;
at least a thousand people, from myself down to the shoeshine boys,
could have known about it as soon as the order was taped.

"As for the list of ships you gave me, yes. One of them puts in
to this planet regularly; she spaced out from here only yesterday
morning. The _Honest Horris_."

"Well, great Satan, haven't you done anything?"

"I don't know if there's anything we can do. Oh, we're investigating,
but.... You see, this ship first showed up here four years ago,
commanded by some kind of a Neobarb, not a Gilgamesher, named Horris
Sasstroff. He claimed to be from Skathi; the locals there have a few
ships, the Space Vikings had a base on Skathi about a hundred or so
years ago. Naturally, the ship had no papers. Tramp trading among
the Neobarbs, it might be years before you'd put in on a planet where
they'd ever heard of ship's papers.

"The ship seems to have been in bad shape, probably abandoned on
Skathi as junk a century ago and tinkered up by the