They played off the tapes that evening. They weren't particularly informative. The locals who had been interrogated hadn't been in actual contact with Dunnan's people except in combat. The man who had been carrying the 10-mm Hoylbar was the best witness of the lot, and he knew little. He had caught one of them alone, shot him from behind with a shotgun, taken his pistol, and then gotten away as quickly as he could. They had sent down landing craft, it seemed, and said they wanted to trade; then something must have happened, nobody knew what, and they had begun a massacre and sacked the town. After returning to their ships, they had opened fire with nuclear missiles.
"Sounds like Dunnan," Hugh Rathmore said in disgust. "He just went kill-crazy. The bad blood of Blackcliffe."
"There are funny things about this," Boake Valkanhayn said. "I'd say it was a terror-raid, but who in Gehenna was he trying to terrorize?"
"I wondered about that, too." Harkaman frowned. "This town where he landed seems, such as it was, to have been the planetary capital. They just landed, pretending friendship, which I can't see why they needed to pretend, and then began looting and massacring. There wasn't anything of real value there; all they took was what the men could carry themselves or stuff into their landing craft, and they did that because they have what amounts to a religious taboo against landing anywhere and leaving without stealing something. The real loot was at these two other towns; a steel mill and big stocks of steel at one, and all that skunk-apple oil at the other. So what did they do? They dropped a five-megaton bomb on each one, and blew both of them to Em-See-Square. That was a terror-raid pure and simple, but as Boake inquires, just who were they terrorizing? If there were big cities somewhere else on the planet, it would figure. But there aren't. They blew out the two biggest cities, and all the loot in them."
"Then they wanted to terrorize somebody off the planet."
"But nobody'd hear about it off-planet," somebody protested.
"The Mardukans would; they trade with Tetragrammaton," the acknowledged bastard of somebody named Morvill said. "They have a couple of ships a year there."
"That's right," Trask agreed. "Marduk."
"You mean, you think Dunnan's trying to terrorize Marduk?" Valkanhayn demanded. "Great Satan, even he isn't crazy enough for that!"