Dalmas, John – Yngling 02 – Homecoming

“How do you know so much about the orcs?”

“I have been in their city, been their prisoner, talked with Kazi himself and fought in their arena. Their language is strange to me, but I could see their pictures and look through their eyes and know their feelings. And of course, we have met them in war.”

Matthew changed direction. “And you were an assassin? How many men did you kill?”

“As an assassin, none. I was sent by the Inner Circle of the Kinfolk, the Psi Alliance, to assassinate Kazi, but I failed. It was in war I killed him.”

Inner Circle. Psi Alliance. I’m glad we’re getting this on tape, Matthew thought.

The big Northman sat quietly for a moment, and Matthew felt the man’s gaze. Then Nils Järnhann spoke again. “I have answered your questions. Now I will tell you things you have more need to know. You have left friends, people you love, a man and a woman, with the orcs. They are not safe. The orcs find their pleasure in giving pain, in breaking the body and mind. Especially tender minds. Your friends, if they are like you, must be very tempting to them.”

Until then Matthew had affected a faint hauteur; it was replaced now by wary intentness. The Northman continued, his voice seeming to grow louder, driving the words into their minds like a hammer.

“And how could that happen to the Star People? But you are few, and your weapons are not so powerful as you pretend. And you are not hard-minded: killing, violence, are foreign and unnatural to you, difficult to do or even to think about.

“And the orcs know that. They have many telepaths. They know every thought your friends have had since they have been among them, every word they have said in privacy. They have heard with their ears and seen with their eyes and felt their feelings. And they have shared their rememberings.”

A coldness washed through Matthew, a desolate sense of naked helplessness, a nightmare feeling of isolation hundreds of light years from the safe space of home. He was gripped by an urgent need to escape the Northman’s words and the mind that looked so relentlessly into theirs.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said to the others. “We need to think and talk.” Looking through the hull at Nils Järnhann, he thumbed the microphone switch again. “We’ll be back in an hour—before the sun is much higher.” With that he deactivated and sent Alpha sharply upward, not stopping until they were above the troposphere. He parked on the encampment vector, eighteen kilometers above the surface, and for a long moment no one spoke.

“Does anyone here have anything to say?” Matthew asked.

“Maybe we’d better get Chan and Anne out of that city,” Mikhail suggested, “while they’re still ambassadors instead of hostages. It would be damned attractive to the orcs to trade them for a pinnace complete with automatic rifles and grenades. And consider what that would mean in ruthless hands like theirs!”

Carlos Lao was a biologist who didn’t often say much. He spoke now. “We don’t actually know that the barbarian was telling the truth.”

“He must have been,” Nikko replied. “It fits with what Chan and Anne told us about the orcs, and with the implications of their calling themselves orcs in the first place.”

“You misunderstand me,” Carlos told her. “What I meant was, we don’t really know the orcs have telepaths.”

“I’m accepting it as a working assumption,” Matthew said. “There’s no doubt the barbarian’s a telepath, so why not some orcs too? Now, accepting that the orcs have telepaths monitoring them, how do we get them out? We can’t let Chan or Anne know what we’re doing. Otherwise the orcs will know too.”

They discussed the matter a little longer. “Okay,” Matthew said, “I think we know what we have to do. Now, in a few minutes we’ll be on the ground again, talking to the barbarian. We’re going to follow up this contact; as short as it was, it’s already been extremely valuable. But I don’t want to commit anyone else as an ambassador. What would you think of inviting them to send someone with us to the Phaeacia?”

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