Space Viking

Lucas Trask

Trask moves through the galaxy as a nobleman-adventurer whose private war against Andray Dunnan slowly becomes something larger: the founding of a new civilization on Tanith. He is courteous, calculating, and unflinching — he will threaten a city with nuclear fire and then negotiate its surrender with the same calm voice. His early arc matters because every alliance he builds and every raid he orders is measured against two competing hungers: the old need for revenge and the newer ambition to plant something that lasts.

Otto Harkaman

Harkaman commands the Nemesis for Trask and treats the whole galaxy — rival captains, hostile planets, awkward nobles — with the same amused, unflappable competence. His scarred face and easy banter mask a professional's cold judgment about when to fight and when to bluff. He matters because he gives Trask something the prince lacks: a partner who can read a situation, crack a joke, and still put a missile exactly where it needs to go.

Andray Dunnan

Dunnan is the wound at the center of Trask's story — a killer who escaped Gram and turned himself into a legend among the Space Vikings, gathering ships and reputations while Trask builds Tanith. He is never quite onstage in the early chapters, only reported: a blue crescent here, a green monster there, a feast on Melkarth where four crews drank together. That absence is the point: he is the enemy Trask must find in two hundred billion cubic light-years, and the hunt shapes every decision Trask makes.

Simon Bentrik

Bentrik is a man of a stratified world trying to understand men who refuse to bow — he is genuinely shocked that Trask's crew expect to drink in the best places in town. He is a democrat by conviction and a prince by inheritance, and the contradiction leaves him both useful and uneasy as an ally. His early role is to give Trask a foothold on Marduk and to show the reader what Tanith's new order looks like from the outside: strange, dangerous, and possibly the future.

Zaspar Makann

Makann is the domestic face of the same violence Trask fights in space: a rabble-rouser who seized a kingdom with Dunnan's ships at his back and ruled through terror and torture. He is glimpsed mostly through the wreckage he leaves — barricades of furniture and statuary, prisoners herded for veridication, a king brainwashed into a ventriloquist's dummy. His fate in the Throne room, crown on the floor and pistol in hand, is the story's warning about what happens when a Viking war comes home.

Boake Valkanhayn

Valkanhayn first appears as a rival squatting on Tanith with Garvan Spasso, then becomes one of Trask's captains — a man whose instinct is to loot and whose new commander keeps telling him not to. He is aghast at the idea of burning an unlooted city, and that very reluctance makes him useful: he is the reader's measure of how far Trask has moved from ordinary Viking practice. His presence in the fleet keeps the story honest about what the Vikings actually are.