There were twenty-odd who weren't, and the sick bay was full of wounded who had gone up with cargo, and more were being helped off the vehicles as they were berthed. The car in which he had been riding had been hit several times, and one of the gunners was bleeding under his helmet and didn't seem aware of it. When he got to the command room, he found Boake Valkanhayn, his face drawn and weary, getting coffee from a robot and lacing it with brandy.
"That's it," he said, blowing on the steaming cup. It was the battered silver one that had been in front of him when he had first appeared in the Nemesis' screen. He nodded toward the damage screen; everything had been patched up, or the outer decks around breached portions of the hull sealed. "Ship secure." He set down the silver mug and lit a cigar. "To quote Garvan Spasso, 'Nobody can call that chicken-stealing.'"
"No. Not even if you count Tizona giraffe-birds as chickens. That Gram gum-pear brandy you're putting in that coffee? I'll have the same. Just leave out the coffee."
XIV
The Lamia's detection picked them up as soon as they were out of the last microjump; Trask's gnawing fear that Dunnan might attack in their absence had been groundless. Incredibly, he realized, they had been gone only thirty-odd Galactic Standard days, and in that time Alvyn Karffard had done an incredible amount of work.
He had gotten the spaceport completely cleared of rubble and debris, and he had the woods cleared away from around it and the two tall buildings. The locals called the city Rivvin; a few inscriptions found here and there in it indicated that the original name had been Rivington. He had done considerable mapping, in some detail of the continent on which it was located and, in general, of the rest of the planet. And he had established friendly relations with the people of Tradetown and made friends with their king.
Nobody, not even those who had collected it, quite believed their eyes when the loot was unloaded. The little herd of long haired unicorns—the Khepera locals had called them kreggs, probably a corruption of the name of some naturalist who had first studied them—had come through the voyage and even the Battle of Beowulf in good shape. Trask and a few of his former cattlemen from Traskon watched them anxiously, and the ship's doctor, acting veterinarian, made elaborate tests of vegetation they would be likely to eat. Three of the cows proved to be with calf; these were isolated and watched over with especial solicitude.
The locals were inclined to take a poor view of the kreggs, at first. Cattle ought to have two horns, one on either side, curved back. It wasn't right for cattle to have only one horn, in the middle, slanting forward.