"I do, too. I'm not worried about what might happen on the ship. But we don't know what's been happening on Gram. Glaspyth and Didreksburg could have teamed up and jumped Wardshaven before Duke Angus was ready to invade Glaspyth. Boake might be landing the ship in a trap at Wardshaven."
"Be a sorry looking trap after it closed on him. That would be the first time in history that a Sword-World was raided by Space Vikings." Harkaman looked at his half-empty glass, then filled it to the top. It was the same drink he had started with, just as a regiment that has been decimated and recruited up to strength a few times is still the same regiment.
The buzz of the communication screen—one of the few things in the room that hadn't been looted somewhere—interrupted him. They both rose; Harkaman, still carrying his drink, went to put it on. It was a man on duty in the control room, overhead, reporting that two emergences had just been detected at twenty light-minutes due north of the planet. Harkaman gulped his drink and set down the empty glass.
"All right. You put out a general alert? Switch anything that comes in over to this screen." He got out his pipe and was packing tobacco into it mechanically. "They'll be out of the last microjump and about two light-seconds away in a few minutes."
Trask sat down again, saw that his cigarette had burned almost to the tip, and lit a fresh one from it, wishing he could be as calm about it as Harkaman. Three minutes later, the control tower picked up two emergences at a light-second and a half, a thousand or so miles apart. Then the screen flickered, and Boake Valkanhayn was looking out of it, from the desk in the newly refurbished command room of the Space Scourge.
He was a newly refurbished Boake Valkanhayn, too. His heavily braided captain's jacket looked like the work of one of the better tailors on Gram, and on the breast was a large and ornate knight's star, of unfamiliar design, bearing, among other things, the sword and atom-symbol of the house of Ward.
"Prince Trask; Count Harkaman," he greeted. "Space Scourge, Tanith; thirty-two hundred hours out of Wardshaven on Gram, Baron Valkanhayn commanding, accompanied by chartered freighter Rozinante, Durendal, Captain Morbes. Requesting permission and instructions to orbit in."
"Baron Valkanhayn?" Harkaman asked.
"That's right," Valkanhayn grinned. "And I have a vellum scroll the size of a blanket to prove it. I have a whole cargo of scrolls. One says you're Otto, Count Harkaman, and another says you're Admiral of the Royal Navy of Gram."
"He did it!" Trask cried. "He made himself King of Gram!"