ngs, behind which Makann's People's Watchmen
and Andray Dunnan's Space Vikings were making resistance. They
entered rooms dusty with powdered plaster and acrid with powder
fumes, littered with corpses. They passed lifter-skids being towed
out with wounded. They went through rooms crowded with their own
men--"_Keep your fingers off things; this isn't a looting
expedition!_" "_You stupid cretin, how did you know there wasn't a
man hiding behind that?_" In one huge room, ballroom or concert room
or something, there were prisoners herded, and men from the
_Nemesis_ were setting up polyencephalographic veridicators, sturdy
chairs with wires and adjustable helmets and translucent globes
mounted over them. A couple of Morland's men were hustling a
People's Watchman to one and strapping him into a chair.

"You know what this is, don't you?" one of them was saying. "This is
a veridicator. That globe'll light blue; the moment you try to lie
to us, it'll turn red. And the moment it turns red, I'm going to
hammer your teeth down your throat with the butt of this pistol."

"Have you found anything out about the King, yet?" Bentrik asked him.

He turned. "No. Nobody we've questioned so far knows anything later
than a month ago about him. He just disappeared." He was going to
say something else, saw Bentrik's face, and changed his mind.

"He's dead," Bentrik said dully. "They tortured him and brainwashed
him and used him as a ventriloquist's dummy on the screen as long as
they could; when they couldn't let the people see him any more,
they stuffed him into a converter."

They did find Zaspar Makann, hours later. Maybe he could have told
them something, if he had been alive, but he and a few of his
fanatical followers had barricaded themselves in the Throne room and
died trying to defend it. They found Makann on the Throne, the top
of his head blown away, a pistol death-gripped in his hand, and the
Great Crown lying on the floor, the velvet inner cap bullet-pierced
and splattered with blood and brain tissue. Prince Bentrik picked it
up and looked at it disgustedly.

"We'll have to have something done about that," he said. "I really
didn't think he'd do just this. I thought he wanted to abolish the
Throne, not sit on it."

Except for one chandelier smashed and several corpses that had to be
dragged out, the Ministerial Council room was intact. They set up
headquarters there. Boake Valkanhayn and several other ship-captains
join