Matthew nodded. “Anne, tell them we’ve come from a world of the ancients, in a great starship that’s hovering five hundred kilometers directly above their city. They may not know what a kilometer is, so explain to them that the ship is above the sky, where there is no air to breathe and it’s always night. That should impress them.”

“I’m not up to that on short notice, Chief. I’ll need some review before I get very ambitious.”

“Use Anglic then. It should help strengthen our psychological dominance if they have to use our language. Tell them we don’t want to harm them. Say we want to know more about them and… no, wait. We’d better sound more business-like. Ask who their ruler is.”

As Anne Marie spoke, Matthew watched the two leaders. They consulted briefly in whispers too soft for the pickup to adjust to, but he got the impression that they were not friendly to one another.

The one who answered was not the one who had spoken before. “I am Ahmed and he is Draco. We rule together since the death of our great Master, Kazi, who was already great among the ancients, your forefathers. He fathered our people and ruled them from their beginning.”

“Wow!” Anne Marie exclaimed when he was done. “Sounds like they have some fantastic traditions. I can hardly wait to find out about them.”

“And they rule together,” Matthew mused. “Somehow I don’t believe that’s a happy and stable arrangement. Ask them the name of their nation.”

The shorter man answered again, back straight, head high. “Our nation is the Empire of Kazi. That is the City of Kazi and we are the Orcs.”

“Orcs,” Nikko said to herself, and frowned thoughtfully. Somewhere, she was sure, she had read or heard of orcs. Her mind sought back through courses in history, Earth geography, anthropology, but nothing came to her. Whatever orcs had been though, the word stirred aversion and distrust within her.

“Tell them we want to know more about them,” Matthew was saying. “Tell them we’re going to send two ambassadors among them. Tell them… tell them they are to treat our ambassadors as royalty and to answer all questions honestly and completely, or we will be angry with them. Got that?”

Anne Marie repeated it before switching the microphone on. Matthew searched the unreadable expressions of the listening orcs while she broadcast.

“I never knew you were so tough,” Mikhail murmured with a grin.

“Power is something these people obviously understand and appreciate,” Matthew answered. “If they think we have a lot of it, we’ll hold their respect. And as far as that’s concerned, can you imagine what we could do to them with our grenades and automatic weapons from an aircraft?”

Mikhail grunted. “The threat’s the thing though. Tough-looking characters like that would never imagine we wouldn’t follow through.”

The orc leaders consulted in whispers for minutes before answering; finally the one called Ahmed faced the Alpha again. “It will be necessary to prepare a proper apartment for our royal guests. We will be ready to receive ambassadors tomorrow.”

“Tell them we’ll be here at midday,” Matthew instructed, “with two ambassadors, a man and a woman. We’ll expect them to be furnished everything they wish in the way of comforts and servants. Tell them we are used to the best, and will expect the best when we are among them.”

Abruptly when Anne Marie finished, Matthew deactivated the shield and lifted Alpha vertically with sudden speed, out of sight without farewell.

Nikko raised her eyebrows at her husband. “You’re not exactly a paragon of courtesy today.”

He didn’t smile. “We’ll let the ambassadors be the diplomats. I want them to think of me as hard and mean.”

“Who are your ambassadors going to be?” Chandra asked expectantly. “They ought to include someone who speaks the language, don’t you think? And her husband?”

Matthew glanced over his shoulder at Chandra’s grin, and his unaccustomed grimness passed. “I tried to fix it so you wouldn’t even have to pack. Assuming Anne is willing.”

Anne’s voice and face were sober. “Of course. This is the kind of thing we came all this way for.”

“Like royalty,” Chandra said, rubbing his hands together. “I think we’re about to learn what the term ‘Roman splendor’ means.”

Draco glanced sourly toward Ahmed nearby, into whose ears Yusuf was pouring all they’d gleaned from the thoughts of the star men. Amazing that the ancients exposed their thoughts so freely. It was obvious they had no awareness at all of telepathy.

They rode on toward the City, both Draco and Ahmed digesting what they had learned, their earlier awe of the ancients replaced by a compound of greed and caution. Now they would have to agree on where, in the palace, the ambassadors would be quartered. It might take an adjustment of sectors to find a suitable apartment in a neutral location; neither would willingly let the other have control of them.

Nikko Kumalo’s searching had reached a dead end. She could not place the word orc.

In their small cabin aboard the Phaeacia she listened to Matthew’s slow even breathing. Usually she fell asleep quickly, but tonight her riddle had kept her awake. She had asked the computer what the word meant. It had printed out-Orc: Any of several large fish-like mammals of earth, especially Grampus Griseus.

But her subconscious insisted that was not the source of the word’s familiarity.

It would come to her eventually, she was sure.

Within the City of Kazi were approximately 22,000 slaves.

In a totally despotic society it can be difficult to define “slave”; in a sense, everyone below the ruling class is a slave. Within the context of the orc society, I have classified as slaves all who were not orcs.

A majority of the slaves, roughly 18,000 of them, were women and girls who served several purposes. They did most of the common labor and almost all of the domestic service. They provided the major sexual outlet for the orcs and were the source of almost all the vicious boy children who grew up, or more often died, in the rigid and brutalizing orcling pens. The orcs were the children of the slaves, and it was the orcs who victimized the slaves.

Slaves also provided the skilled labor and professional services upon which the city depended. They were the stone masons, smiths, armor artificers, mechanics; the civil engineers, physicians, accountants and bureaucrats. Skilled slaves enjoyed a degree of protection from the capricious cruelty and casual abuse of the soldiers, the degree of protection depending on the importance of the slave and the rank of the soldier. Slaves who were important enough were allowed to have families-in a very few cases even small harems or androecia-and given apartments. The consul Ahmed was the son of one such slave, although to apply the term “slave” in such a case rather stretches the concept.

But except at the uppermost level, security was tenuous even for the slave elite. An imprudent thought monitored by an orc telepath, an unintended offense to an officer, a momentary lapse in one’s servility, could collapse that small “private” world and expose the slave to the full force of orc brutality.

In such a society one might expect an underground to exist. But in a society using telepathic surveillance and ruthless repression-given to uninhibited and in fact mandatory sadism-that underground was certain to be small, fearful, and largely ineffectual.

Over the years there must have been innumerable small acts of opportunistic sabotage carried out on the spur of the moment by individuals and involving no conspiracy. But the term “underground” does not include such unaffiliated individuals. The real underground, in the sense of conspiratorial groups, consisted primarily of artisans and bureaucrats, slaves with some degree of private life-a slave intelligentsia, so to speak. It also included a very few orcs who had been sensitized by attachment to some slave and who had reacted against the culture which ravaged the slave.