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  "Who's to stop us? They have no—repeat, no—military security. If the survey team has followed the standard TO and E, the only weapons they have are to protect against unfriendly animals. Shit, they're all scientists and eggheads! I bet most of them don't even know how to use the few weapons they have. Besides, they're so spread out, they couldn't possibly reinforce Aquarius."

  "Why not, Cap'n?" Rhys Apbac chimed in enthusiastically. Rhys was always ready to go on a raid. He grinned fiercely at the others and recited the only piece of poetry he knew, an ancient highwayman's ditty he'd managed to memorize after years of practice:

  "Come tighten your girth and slacken your

  Buckle your holster and blanket again;

  Try the click of your trigger and balance your blade,

  For he must ride sure who goes riding a raid."

  Scanlon ignored Rhys, who sat there grinning triumphantly at the others after finishing his recitation. He said to Cameron, "The Confederation might get pissed enough to send a really significant naval force out here if we mess with 437, George."

  "Count on it," Cameron replied. "They'll send Marines, bet you money. But so what? Before that can be done, the Bureau of Human Habitability, or whatever they call it, will have to request a military force be dispatched there. That can take six months. By then the stuff we get will all be sold. There are a dozen wildcat mining and construction teams working throughout five or six systems who'll buy the sophisticated gear we can get on 437, no questions asked, cash on delivery. What's the Confederation going to do then? Investigate everybody in the whole damned quadrant?"

  Indeed, Scanlon owned two starship freighters that could go anywhere in Human Space. There was no limit to where they could go to conduct a raid, or where they could go to sell whatever they got.

  Scanlon thought a bit. Lowboy watched. He was beginning to dislike Cameron, who had just come into the Red 35 Crew, and was already worming his way into Scanlon's confidence. And he had that bitch Minerva too, Lowboy thought. Goddamn whore. Lowboy had tried to score on her once himself, and she'd rejected him. He detested her after that, and he'd grown to resent Cameron's relationship with her.

  "George, can you plan this raid and pull it off?" Scanlon asked.

  "You bet, Captain! Right down to the microns. Leave it to me."

  "Okay," Scanlon said with finality. Lowboy mentally kicked himself for not having thought of the raid first. Well, he reflected, maybe Pretty Boy Georgie would have an accident on Society 437.

  And the raid would have worked perfectly, just as Cameron had planned it, except for one horribly unforeseen circumstance.

  Back at the fire, Cameron nudged Minerva with the toe of his boot. She sat up sleepily. "What's for breakfast, Georgie?"

  "Raw beef, Minnie," Cameron answered. He grabbed a glowing brand from the fire to light his way. It seemed they were back in the Stone Age. That's another thing we need, he reflected: energy packs.

  Grinning, Minerva got up and followed him far back into the cave, away from where the others were just beginning to stir. "Georgie," she whispered, her breath hot in his ear, "are we going to make it?" meaning, Would they survive this ordeal?

  "You bet, honey," Cameron answered, by which he meant what they were about to do in the near darkness of the cave's recesses. What the hell, he thought, the future would still be there when they were done.

  Chapter 5

  Ulf Thorsfinni's Saga

  Ulf Thorsfinni was the last of his breed. Tall, muscular, athletic, blond, and cursed with an irresistible urge to see what lay beyond the horizon, plunder whatever was there, and bring the booty home.

  Tall, muscular, athletic, and blond were just as desirable physical characteristics in the mid-23rd century as they had been throughout all the history—and prehistory—of Northern Europe. But the irresistible urge to see what lay beyond the horizon was a curse, as all the horizons of Earth had long since been gone past and nothing new was left to see. Even if there had been, society in general frowned on plundering whatever was there. And the civilized people at home didn't even want the booty brought back.

  Had he lived in an earlier age, Ulf Thorsfinni's exploratory exploits might still be commemorated in sagas to rival those of Eric the Red, Lief Ericsson, or Ragnar Hairy-Breeks. Or he might have been a king, cast in the mold of Harold, Olaf, Haakon, or Magnus. Instead, it was his fate to be the scion of a family of commerce—and not merely a family of commerce, but the Family of Commerce.

  The Thorsfinnis had started small, back in the early 22nd century, when Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni sold the family fishing trawler and used the proceeds to purchase a pine tree strand, which he clear-cut and then replanted with hickory, oak, and other hardwoods. For some years Thorsfinniwold, as Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni named his wood strand, served as a nursery, providing saplings to architects and landscapers. When the trees that weren't sold as saplings grew large enough, some of them were culled and sold to wood-carvers and cabinetmakers at what would have been exorbitant prices had hardwoods not been so rare and difficult to come by. That provided the kroners (an archaic term even then) for Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni's grand plan.

  The profits of the nursery and hardwoods, and they were substantial, were used to buy a partnership in a fledgling venture capital bank. Unlike his partners, who used their income from the bank to live very rich lives, Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni used his share of the profits to quietly buy up portions of the shares of his partners, each of whom thought he was merely selling a few shares to the junior most partner so he could increase his earnings and begin to live as richly as they were. Needless to say, the partners were quite surprised when one day Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni announced that, as majority partner, he was taking full control of the bank and they could either sell the remainder of their shares to him or accept whatever dividends he deigned to declare. Few of them took him seriously enough to sell immediately. They all took him seriously when they discovered how small were the dividends that the majority owner doled out. Thorsfinnibank, as the business was quickly renamed, thereafter became the richest and most prestigious venture-capital bank in Scandinavia.

  Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni didn't merely lend to entrepreneurs who came to him for the financial backing they needed to make their—and Thorsfinnibank's—fortunes. He invested money in his many childrens' projects as well.

  Great-Uncle Leif went into mining in a big way with Thorsfinnimineral. Great-Aunt Emily built an amazingly successful tropical jungle theme park on the Arctic Circle, which she called Thorsfinniworld. With his Thorsfinniherring, Great-Uncle Haakon became one of the greatest fishing farmers in the North Atlantic. Great-Aunt Gertrude bought a failing spaceshipyard and converted it to Thorsfinniship, the world's first shipyard devoted entirely to starship construction. Great-Uncle Olaf and his Thorsfinni entrepreneurship went through a series of endeavors, each of which he sold at a humongous profit. Great-Aunt Mildred borrowed money from Thorsfinnibank to buy her way into the tiny remnant of European royalty and became Empress Mildred 1. Not that she had an empire to be empress of, but the entire world quickly came to know her as Empress Mildred, and wherever she went, which was just about everywhere, even the powerful bowed and scraped.

  Grandpapa Magnus Thorsfinni was the only failure of the lot. Everything he tried his hand at crumbled, went under, failed. As much out of pity as out of a feeling of family equity, Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni left two shares of his holdings to each of Grandpapa Thorsfinni's children for each single share he left to his other grandchildren. There were no business failures among Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni's grandchildren. By the time Ulf reached his majority, it seemed to the great-grandchildren of Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni that the Thorsfinnis owned all of Norway, most of the rest of Scandinavia, half of the rest of Europe, and significant chunks of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia, not to mention substantial holdings on other worlds. They didn't own quite that much, but it certainly felt to the great-grandchildren that they did.

>   Young Ulf looked around and felt despair. He saw no horizons left to go beyond. There was no major endeavor, other than the arts, in which the Thorsfinnis were not already a power—and Ulf was unable to draw a straight line even with a ruler and could not write a coherent sentence. He was tone deaf too. Moreover, he couldn't stand artists of any sort, so being an impresario was out of the question.

  What Young Ulf really wanted to do was build a dragonship and go a-Viking. But, as noted above, that was impractical. So he did the next best thing. He went to Uncle Herrman, who now owned and ran Thorsfinniship, Great-Aunt Gertrude's starshipyard, and bought a starship—at a family discount, of course.

  The Glittertenden was a magnificent ship, a Ragnarok-class cruiser, a civilian design based on the Confederation Navy's Crowe-class amphibious assault battle cruiser. In its appropriate military configuration, it carried a navy warship crew of three thousand plus an assault force of two full Marine FISTs, each two thousand men strong, and was powerful enough that, with a handful of destroyers in escort, it could single-handedly defeat any of the secondary worlds in the Confederation, or nearly any of the nonconfederated worlds in all of Human Space. In its civilian configuration, the Ragnarok-class cruiser could carry a crew of four hundred along with some ten thousand colonists, or an eight hundred member crew and six thousand vacationers.

  To please Young Ulf, Uncle Herrman had a dragon-head prow constructed on the part of the ship arbitrarily designated the bow. The dragon-head was totally nonfunctional, of course, but it made Young Ulf's chest swell with pride.

  Ulf then set about finding like-minded spirits who wanted to go a-Viking, and to find a suitable world on which they could do it.

  Finding a world was easy. About the time Great-Grandpapa Thorsfinni had bought into what became Thorsfinnibank, a deep-space probe discovered a planetary system 150 light-years from Sol. One planet of the system was within the liquid-water range of its primary. It had gravity within five percent of Earth and a breathable, though aromatic, atmosphere.

  There were, quite naturally, life-forms native to the planet. Some of the fauna was rather large and voraciously carnivorous. None were venomous to humans, however. Some of the flora was edible after a fashion. Which is to say a human being could eat it without being poisoned, and it would take months of a purely native diet before any nutrition-deficiency symptoms became apparent. The animals could be eaten as well, and with the same considerations.

  The planet in question had no name, just some meaningless, bureaucratic alphanumeric designation. It had no landmass of continental size. It did, however, have a proliferation of islands. The most desirable, in Ulf's eyes, was an oblong running roughly north to south, about the size of Scandinavia, and closer to one of the poles than to the equator. More, this large island was mountainous, craggy, rocky, and rent with coastal fissures that could accurately be called fjords. The island was cold in the winter and balmy in the summer, and surrounded by a gray, crashing ocean reminiscent of the North Atlantic.

  An attempt was made early on to colonize the planet. The attempt didn't take. The first problem was its distance from Earth. In the early days of interstellar colonization, few people were willing to go so far from home, so there weren't enough colonists to assure a sufficiently varied gene pool. The small number of willing colonists wasn't the only problem caused by distance. It was too expensive to ship everything needed for the colony, and would take generations with the then-existing technology to develop local resources to the point where the colony could sustain itself. Then there was the aromatic atmosphere—it was rank with the odor of fish. After less than a generation the bedraggled survivors managed to importune the Confederation to resettle them on a more hospitable world.

  But it was just the kind of home from which a proper Norseman would want to go a-Viking, and Ulf industriously went about lining up colonists.

  Eventually, the passenger manifest for the maiden voyage of the Glittertenden had eight thousand names on it, to go along with a crew of nine hundred. The Viking-colonists were of all ages, from suckling babes to oldsters—every stedding, Ulf believed, needed an elder. Alas, from Ulf's point of view, not all of them were Norwegian. There simply weren't that many Norwegians who wanted badly to go a-Viking—especially not once they learned the details of the world they were to populate. So Ulf had to fill out the ranks with non-Norwegians. He made every one of the foreigners adopt a Norwegian name, however, so Thorsfinni's World is populated in large measure by dark-haired, swarthy Neilsons, kinky-haired Knutsons, and sallow-skinned Sturulsons.

  Thorsfinniworld was the name of Great-Aunt Emily's tropical jungle theme park, so Young Ulf had to go against family tradition in naming his world. He called it, instead, Thorsfinni's World. He named the large island Niflheim. He married a woman he insisted adopt the name—and be called—Frigg. They had two sons, whom he named Balder and Thor. He built a proper dragon-head ship and sailed the seas—and took his sons with him as soon as they were old enough to scramble about the deck without falling overboard. Ulf Thorsfinni had a grand time.

  Until one day the Confederation Navy came knocking at his door and told him they needed to establish a base in that sector of Human Space and they were going to do it on his world.

  It was immediately evident to everyone that ten thousand 23rd century Vikings—the population had grown some in the twenty-five years since Ulf first went a-Viking—dressed in furs and chain mail and swinging broad swords were no match for the reinforced company of Confederation Marines backing up the admiral who made the announcement. So Ulf Thorsfinni grudgingly agreed to the base, even though few if any of the navy and Marine personnel assigned to his world would bear Norwegian names.

  He did, however, manage some concessions. The base was located on a remote section of Niflheim, well removed from the "major" centers of population. Only local building materials could be used in construction, which limited the navy and Marines to wood and stone. All construction had to be done by local contractors, which meant everything was made from wood, as there were too few stone masons to do as much construction as the base required.

  The construction concessions gave a slight boost to the economy, what with all those contractors getting the work and all those local suppliers supplying the materials. The contractors got more work when they built Bronnoysund, the liberty town that sprang up outside the main gate of Camp Major Pete Ellis, which became the home of 34th FIST, Confederation Marine Corps.

  In time, the citizens of Thorsfinni's World came to like the military presence on their world. The navy, based near New Oslo, gave them strange and exotic people to laugh at. And the Marines at Camp Ellis were more than happy to oblige the citizens of Bronnoysund in their favorite occupations of eating, drinking, brawling, and cuddling for warmth in the cold and dank.

  Chapter 6

  Freya Banak, a.k.a. "Big Barb"—a sobriquet she liked, incidentally, and had trademarked for her personal use—was deservedly famed for her evil disposition. A big woman in later middle age—around seventy-five—she weighed three hundred pounds and was six-foot-four in her wooden clogs. Big Barb had broken up more fights in her establishment than 34th FIST's battle standard had campaign streamers. And she ran a tight ship: No patron of hers was ever cheated by a waitress or a whore, and when one patron tried to abuse another at her bar, he could count on summary and violent ejection into the street. But Freya Banak had one weakness: Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass.

  "Charlie-e-e," Big Barb crooned after they were seated in her private office at the rear of the bar, "vat brinks you here dis afternoon? Coffee?" She poured a big mug full of the strong, steaming coffee the citizens of Bronnoysund liked so much. It couldn't, as Marine tradition had it, burn the camouflage paint off a Dragon, but Gunny Bass felt his nervous system tightening just at the smell of the stuff. Still, he took the proffered cup with thanks and sipped at it cautiously, feigning great pleasure.

  Barb sat hugely behind her antique desk, hands clasped under her ca
pacious breasts, fingers as big as sausages entwined, enormous thumbs twiddling nervously. Her gap tooth smile, reminiscent of an idiot's leer, was anything but, Bass knew. She was just enormously pleased to be alone in the back office with her favorite Marine. Despite himself, Bass was flattered. Oh, he could take Barb if he wanted to, but Mohammed's hairy balls, she was so damned fat! And yet the two of them had a lot in common. Both were used to having their way, and both knew instinctively when to act decisively, and when either made a decision—whether to toss out a bum or to attack a fortified position—it was done with rapid calculation and no second thoughts, just hi diddle diddle, straight up the middle.

  Bass carefully placed his nearly full cup on a corner of Barb's desk. He thought: She does have magnificent hair. It was done in long platinum braids that hung down on either side of her chest. Fat, yes, but her complexion was perfectly clear and lustrous. Bass sometimes thought if only she'd lose 150 pounds...

  "Barb, Diamunde was hard on the 34th—"

  "Yah, you lose some men. I hear all about it. Eagle's Cry, he vas killed and some odders. I am sorry, Charlie."

  Bass nodded. "I've had five men in my platoon promoted, Barb, and we need a place to throw a party. Can you rent me your big back room, next Saturday sundown through Sunday noon? We'll need beer, steaks, all that for let's say sixty people, the thirty men in my platoon plus guests. I expect the brigadier and Sergeant Major Shiro'll make an appearance, as well as Commander Van Winkle, Sergeant Major Parant, Captain Conorado, Top Myer, some buddies from other platoons the men might bring as guests. You know, the usual lineup for a platoon bash."

  Barb smiled broadly. "Sure, Charlie!" She made a note on a pad by her side. "Hey, I hear you now are platoon commander. Got you up to officer's slot, yah? But you still a gunny. How come you never go for an officer, Charlie?"