“Sure thing. Chan over and out.”

“Accepted. Phaeacia out.”

Chandra stood up. “Huh! What did you think of that?”

“I don’t know what to think of it. It was Malt’s voice, but he certainly didn’t sound like himself. He sounded-out of character. Do you suppose something’s wrong up there and he doesn’t want to tell us?”

Chandra pursed his lips and looked thoughtfully at his nails. “I’ll tell you what, and I’ll bet ten credits I’m right. He doesn’t plan to bring us back here once he’s gotten us away, and he doesn’t want us to know it.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” she objected. “Why wouldn’t he want us to know? He knows we’d be overjoyed to hear it.”

Chandra shrugged. “I’ve played cards with him; he’s the world’s most transparent faker. Think about it: The big hearty opening; that told me right away that he was going to withhold something from us. Then the big emphasis on coming back. His reaction when I suggested we shouldn’t. You know what I think? I think he’s decided these people are dangerous to us and he wants us out of here. And he thinks if we don’t know it we’ll act normal so the orcs won’t suspect anything.”

Anne Marie looked doubtful. “Well, I guess we’ll find out for sure tomorrow. He did sound strange, there’s no doubt about that.”

Draco clapped his palms and the slave moved smoothly to refill his cup. reacting with neither expression nor thought to his ill humor. The consul had resented having to make a critical decision on nothing more than suspicion and supposition. The star man supposed they wouldn’t return.

Well, he should know his commander.

And apparently Ahmed believed him. He’d proposed they not take the couple back to the sky chariot, but hold them hostage. They would threaten to torture them if a sky chariot, with weapons, wasn’t given to them. They would promise to return the hostages as soon as they had delivery and had been shown how to drive it and use its weapons.

What particularly bothered Draco was that Ahmed wanted to meet the chariot when it landed tomorrow. That could prove dangerous and seemed totally unnecessary; they could use the hostage’s “radio” to make their demands. But Ahmed had said he’d go alone if need be. He’d had the gall to imply that Draco might be afraid, and insisted it was the only way to know the star men’s thoughts when they learned the situation. The reasoning was trivial-they didn’t need to know their thoughts-and the Sudanese knew damned well he’d see through it.

Then, just a few minutes ago, Draco had been informed that, when the pair had been taken into custody, Ahmed’s men had questioned them, had wanted to know how to enter a sky chariot if the invisible wall was not in place. A few screams from the woman had broken the man’s refusal.

So the Sudanese dog planned somehow to capture the sky chariot tomorrow, unless this was a red herring covering still another intention.

It might be hard to counter Ahmed’s plan without knowing what it was. The best thing to do, Draco decided, was to make a move of his own. At least he was forewarned. When they went to the landing place he’d be fully alert, ready to react quickly if necessary.

And while they were gone, his own people would strike down the men who guarded Ahmed’s interest in the prisoners. Then they’d be solely his hostages, in his own dungeon. It was risky-Ahmed might even go to war over it-but he couldn’t let Ahmed have the initiative alone.

His hostages. The thought excited him. The woman had screamed and then sobbed, when all they had done was jerk her arm up behind her back and twist it, and strike her in the abdomen once or twice.

Ahmed slipped his helmet on his proud head and was turning toward the courtyard when his spy entered, obviously with something to tell him.

“Make it quick!” he snapped. “I have no time for trivia now.”

“In private, Lordship,” the man said, and that in itself proved its urgency. Ahmed strode into his chamber, Yusuf and the spy with him, and closed the heavy bronze door, leaving his retinue behind.

“Speak!”

“Draco plans to have the man and woman taken for his own! It will be done as soon as you’ve left the city to meet the sky chariot.”

The hardness in Ahmed’s mood eased discernibly. “Good.”

Yusuf’s expression sharpened.

“Our move is risky,” Ahmed explained. “Its success could seem to give us too great an advantage, and Draco might strike with his army immediately, before we could make use of it. His army is the stronger now. And if we kill him today, when perhaps we have a chance, his lieutenants would strike at once. He has been careful to give power to men who hate us as much as he does, and fear us more.

“But now he’ll have his own coup.” Ahmed jabbed the spy’s shoulder painfully with a rigid finger. “You must see to it that he is not foiled. Our success today can be decisive in the long run only if there is a long run, while his will mean little except to his vanity. If he succeeds in this he’ll be pleased with it, and unlikely to strike at us for awhile. By the time he sees its emptiness, it will be too late for him.

“Now let’s get out of here.” The heavy door was delicately balanced and opened easily at his pull. “We cannot be late.”

It was a beautiful carriage, delicate-looking, incongruous on the prairie; it would have been more apropos in a fairy tale. Its erect oval body, completely enclosing, was an opalescent pearly white, like the magical egg of some fabulous bird. The ornate crown around its top was gold plated and its tall wheels marked with gold. The pair of light geldings pulled it almost as easily as they would a sulky, and its springs were so well made that it rocked only modestly at their walking pace, hardly bouncing as it crossed the prairie’s humpy surface.

It was a parade carriage for captured royalty; its upper sides could be slid down for viewing prisoners. Had the detailed carvings of the crown been noticed by the men in the high-hovering Alpha, the triumphant depictions of butchery and rape might have shaken them.

Mikhail and Matthew were alone in the pinnace, watching the view screen. “Trojan horse,” Matthew muttered.

“How’s that?”

“I said ‘Trojan horse.’ It occurred to me that that carriage down there is big enough to conceal several soldiers. Let’s keep that in mind.”

The carriage was on a different course to the landing site, a longer, smoother route, and Draco eyed it suspiciously. It was probably the key to Ahmed’s scheme, though it might be nothing more than a ruse to hold the attention of those in the sky chariot, making them less likely to notice that the people in jump suits were not their people after all.

He looked them over. Ahmed had done a good job of selecting stand-ins; they were very close to the hostages in size and build. And the mellow brown of the star people’s skins had been easy to match. But they…

And then he read what was in the carriage, his gaze jerking toward it in alarm.

Ahmed was intent, and perhaps more anxious then Draco. For him the point of no return was well past, and he knew how easily things could go wrong in this. If the star men waited to land until the party was close to the landing spot, as they had the last time, then the odds were good. Unless of course they discovered the substitutions before they landed. In that case he would be a dead man; they all would.

But if they landed too soon and activated the force shield, there’d be little he could do. That would almost surely mean failure, and also probably death.

They stopped at the base of the little hillock, twenty meters from where the pinnace had landed before, and watched the Alpha begin to settle. One orc, at the rear of the party, dismounted.

Seated at the front of the parade carriage, his mind screened, the telepathic driver strained briefly to sense the minds of the star men above. His hand was on the lever which controlled the side panels. The rods had been shortened. When the lever was pushed they would drop abruptly instead of lowering slowly.