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Despreaux glanced quickly at Pahner, but the captain only looked back at her without expression.

"Yes, Sir. Understood," she said.

"Let's be on our toes," Pahner suggested as conversation died down and the king climbed to his feet. "Looks like time to party."

"We are gathered here tonight," Radj Hoomas said, "to honor the brave warriors who crushed the Kranolta and reopened the road to Voitan. Puissant warriors, indeed," he said, and his voice echoed hollowly through the wood-paneled hall.

"Puissant warriors, indeed," he repeated, and glanced around at his own massed guards. "I ask you, Your Royal Highness, Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock, could your puissant warriors defeat all the guards in this room? Before you fell yourself?"

"Possibly," Roger replied calmly. "Quite probably. And I would be trying very hard to survive."

The king gazed at him for a moment, then glanced at one of his guards... who stepped forward, and, with a smooth motion, shoved his spear into the back of the representative from Pasule. Jedal Vel screamed in a froth of aspirated blood as the bitter steel spearhead emerged from his chest, but the guard only grinned cruelly and twisted his wrist as he jerked his weapon free once more and the envoy thudded to the floor.

"Are you so confident?" the king asked, grunting in humor.

"What?" Roger asked, with a smile he didn't feel, as O'Casey recoiled towards the Marines and away from the twitching corpse at her feet. "You think that the 'puissant warriors' who defeated the Kranolta have never seen blood?"

He booted up the assassin program he'd used in Q'Nkok, and as the aiming reticle appeared, superimposed on his vision, he dropped it onto the forehead of the laughter-grunting guard captain.

It required more than well-written software to be truly phenomenal with an assassin program. Even with hard encoding, it required smooth, practiced muscles that could handle the high twitch-rate strains placed upon them. But Roger had practiced, and the pistol came up with the blinding speed which had so surprised Pahner in the Q'Nkok banquet hall. The weapon simply materialized in his hand, and the supersonic crack of the bead's passage blended with a meaty thump as the decapitated guard captain hit the floor.

The king opened his mouth to shout, his face covered in the bright crimson spray of the captain's blood, then froze as he found himself looking down the barrel of the bead pistol.

"Now, there's an old term for this," Pahner said quietly, his own pistol out and trained as he transmitted furious orders to hold fast over his toot. The orders had to be in text, because the subvocalization equipment was part of the combat helmet he wasn't wearing at the moment, and his toot had to rebroadcast it through the systems of the bodyguards' helmets. That meant the orders were necessarily one-way, but he could imagine Kosutic's distant cursing just fine.

"It's called a 'Mexican standoff,' " he continued. "You try to kill us, and our company blows your little town to the ground. Not that you personally will care, Your Majesty, because you'll die right here, right now."

"I don't think so," the king said with a grunt as guards moved to interpose their bodies between him and Roger's weapon. "But I don't intend to kill any humans today. No, no. That was never my intent."

"You don't mind if we doubt your word, do you?" Roger asked, deflecting the pistol's point of aim to the ceiling as the tension eased slightly. "And, by the way," he added, nodding to the guards between him and Radj Hoomas, "we'll cut through those fucking bodies like they were so much cloth when we start. Bodies aren't going to stop us."

"But doing that would take time and prevent you from killing all the other guards that would be killing you," the king said. "But, again, that was never my intent."

"Ask him what his plan is," O'Casey hissed, now relatively safe between the bulks of Pahner and Roger. She was a fair negotiator, but these were not, in her opinion, optimal conditions. In fact, her mouth was dry with fear and her palms were sweating. She couldn't imagine how Roger and Pahner were staying so calm.

"All right, O King, what's your plan?" Roger asked, carefully not swallowing. If he did, it would be obvious his mouth was as dry as the lakebed they'd landed on.

"I have certain desires," the king said, with another grunt of laughter. "You have certain needs. I think we could come to mutually acceptable terms."

"All right," and Pahner said grimly. "I can see that. But why in hell did you choose to open negotiations like this?"

"Well," the king responded, with yet another grunt that this time turned into a belly laugh, "your need is food, supplies and weapons. Unfortunately, there is no great supply of either in Marshad. My desire, on the other hand, is to conquer Pasule, where it chances that both are readily available. I was fairly sure you wouldn't care to conquer Pasule for me, so it seemed advisable to discover an incentive to... encourage you."

"An incentive," Pahner repeated tonelessly.

"Precisely. I feel confident that your warband will take Pasule for me when I tell them it's a choice between that and the death of their leaders."

* * *

"Okay, okay," Kosutic said, waving for quiet. "Let's just stay cold here, people."

"We should extract them immediately," Jasco said. "I know those aren't our orders, but orders given under duress are invalid."

"Sure, Sir," Kosutic said. "Tell it to the Captain."

"Well..."

The conversation was taking place in the third-floor "officers' quarters" of the visitors' area. The pale yellow room where the prince had prepared for the fateful dinner party was now filled with the temporary command group.

"Lieutenant," Julian said, tapping his pad, "we have upwards of a battalion of scummies outside this building. They hold the high ground, and our pack beasts. We would have to fight our way out and up to the throne room."

"The Captain's right, Lieutenant Jasco," the sergeant major said. "We wait for the right moment, and play along in the meantime. We have to wait until the odds favor us, instead of the other way around. We have the time."

"This isn't right!" the exasperated officer said. "We should be taking down that throne room right now. This is a member of the Imperial Family!"

"Yep," Kosutic said equably. "Surely is. Dangerous one, too."

* * *

Roger listened calmly to the brand-new guard commander's bloodthirsty pronouncements about what would happen to any human who did not obey orders. The new, heavily-armored commander explained at considerable length, and when he finished, Roger bared his teeth in a smile.

"You're next," he said pleasantly.

The guard captain glared at the prince, but the Mardukan's eyes fell before Roger's did, and the scummy withdrew, closing the door behind him.

Roger turned from the door and looked around. The suite was large and airy, with several windows which overlooked the back side of the castle. The far curtain wall, he noticed, was covered with torch-bearing guards watching the shadows for any attempt to escape.

The floor was scattered with the ubiquitous pillows and low tables of the Hadur, and there were "chamber buckets" for relieving wastes. It was quite pleasant, all things considered.

"We have to get out of here," he muttered.

"And you propose to do that, how?" Pahner asked, handing Despreaux back her borrowed helmet. Unlike the prince, the captain was the very picture of sangfroid.

"Well, I feel like taking a rifle and killing a guard an hour until they either let us go or figure out to stay out of sight," Roger snarled, glaring at the guards manning the wall.