“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s an important thing to understand, isn’t it? Before we make agreements. Peace means no fighting.”

“That’s not enough.”

“Well, it means being safe from your enemies.”

“That’s not enough.”

“What is enough?”

The pale face contemplated the floor, something elsewhere.

“What isenough, Saitas?”

The elf only stared at the floor, far, far away from the questioner.

“I need to talk to deFranco.”

“Who?”

“DeFranco.” The elf looked up. “DeFranco brought me here. He’s a soldier; he’ll understand me better than you. Is he still here?” The colonel reached and cut the tape off. She was SurTac. Agnes Finn was the name on her desk. She could cut your throat a dozen ways, and do sabotage and mayhem from the refinements of computer theft to the gross tactics of explosives; she would speak a dozen languages, know every culture she had ever dealt with from the inside out, integrating the Science Bureau and the military.

And more, she was a SurTac colonel, which sent the wind up deFranco’s back. It was not a branch of the service that had many high officers; you had to survive more than ten field missions to get your promotion beyond the ubiquitous and courtesy-titled lieutenancy. And this one had. This was Officer with a capital O, and whatever the politics in HQ were, this was a rock around which a lot of other bodies orbited: thisprobably took her orders from the joint command, which was months and months away in its closest manifestation. And that meant next to no orders and wide discretion, which was what SurTacs did. Wild card. Joker in the deck. There were the regs; there was special ops, loosely attached; there were the spacers, Union and Alliance, and Union regs were part of that; beyond and above, there was AlSec and Union intelligence; and that was this large-boned, red-haired woman who probably had a scant handful of humans and no knowing what else in her direct command, a handful of SurTacs loose in Elfland, and all of them independent operators and as much trouble to the elves as a reg base could be.

DeFranco knew. He had tried that route once. He knew more than most what kind it took to survive that training, let alone the requisite ten missions to get promoted out of the field, and he knew the wit behind the weathered face and knew it ate special ops lieutenants for appetizers.

“How did you make such an impression on him, Lieutenant?”

“I didn’t try to,” deFranco said carefully. “Ma’am, I just tried to keep him calm and get in with him alive the way they said. But I was the only one who dealt with him out there, we thought that was safest; maybe he thinks I’m more than I am.”

“I compliment you on the job.” There was a certain irony in that, he was sure. No SurTac had pulled off what he had, and he felt the slight tension there.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“ Yes, ma’am. There’s always the chance, you understand, that you’ve brought us an absolute lunatic. Or the elves are going an unusual route to lead us into a trap. Or this is an elf who’s not too pleased about being tied up and dumped on us, and he wants to get even. Those things occur to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” DeFranco thought all those things, face to face with the colonel and trying to be easy as the colonel had told him to be. But the colonel’s thin face was sealed and forbidding as the elf’s.

“You know what they’re doing out there right now? Massive attacks. Hitting that front near 45 with everything they’ve got. The Eighth’s pinned. We’re throwing air in. and they’ve got somewhere over two thousand casualties out there and air-strikes don’t stop all of them. Delta took a head-on assault and turned it. There were casualties. Trooper named Herse. Your unit.” Dibs. O God. “Dead?”

“Dead.” The colonel’s eyes were bleak and expressionless. “Word came in. I know it’s more than a stat to you. But that’s what’s going on. We’ve got two signals coming from the elves. And we don’t know which one’s valid. We have ourselves an alien who claims credentials— andcomes with considerable effort from the same site as the attack.”

Dibs. Dead. There seemed a chill in the air, in this safe, remote place far from the real world, the mud, the bunkers. Dibs had stopped living yesterday. This morning. Sometime. Dibs had gone and the world never noticed.

“Other things occur to the science people,” the colonel said. “One which galls the hell out of them, deFranco, is what the alien just said. DeFranco can understand me better. Are you with me, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So the Bureau went to the secretary, the secretary went to the major general on the com; all this at fifteen hundred yesterday; and theyhauled me in on it at two this morning. You know how many noses you’ve got out of joint, Lieutenant? And what the level of concern is about that mess out there on the front?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m sure you hoped for a commendation and maybe better, wouldn’t that be it? Wouldn’t blame you. Well, I got my hands into this, and I’ve opted you under my orders, Lieutenant, because I can do that and high command’s just real worried the Bureau’s going to poke and prod and that elf’s going to leave us on the sudden for elvish heaven. So let’s just keep him moderately happy. He wants to talk to you. What the Bureau wants to tell you, but I told them I’dmake it clear, because they’ll talk tech at you and I want to be sure you’ve got it—it’s just real simple: you’re dealing with an alien; and you’ll have noticed what he says doesn’t always make sense.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t yes ma’am me, Lieutenant, dammit; just talk to me and look me in the eye. We’re talking about communication here.”

“Yes—” He stopped short of the ma’am.

“You’ve got a brain, deFranco, it’s all in your record. You almost went Special Services yourself, that was your real ambition, wasn’t it? But you had this damn psychotic fear of taking ultimate responsibility. And a wholesome fear of ending up with a commendation, posthumous. Didn’t you? It washed you out, so you went special ops where you could take orders from someone else and still play bloody hero and prove something to yourself—am I right? I ought to be; I’ve got your psych record over there. Now I’ve insulted you and you’re sitting there turning red. But I want to know what I’m dealing with. We’re in a damn bind. We’ve got casualties happening out there. Are you and I going to have trouble?”

“No. I understand.”

“Good. Very good. Do you think you can go into a room with that elf and talk the truth out of him? More to the point, can you make a decision, can you go in there knowing how much is riding on your back?”

“I’m not a—”

“I don’t care what you are, deFranco. What I want to know is whether negotiateis even in that elf’s vocabulary. I’m assigning you to guard over there. In the process I want you to sit down with him one to one and just talk away. That’s all you’ve got to do. And because of your background maybe you’ll do it with some sense. But maybe if you just talk for John deFranco and try to get that elf to deal, that’s the best thing. You know when a government sends out a negotiator—or anything like—that individual’s not average. That individual’s probably the smartest, canniest, hardest-nosed bastard they’ve got, and he probably cheats at dice. We don’t know what this bastard’s up to or what he thinks like, and when you sit down with him, you’re talking to a mind that knows a lot more about humanity than we know about elves. You’re talking to an elvish expert who’s here playing games with us. Who’s giving us a real good look-over. You understand that? What do you say about it?”

“I’m scared of this.”

“That’s real good. You know we’re not sending in the brightest, most experienced human on two feet. And that’s exactly what that rather canny elf has arranged for us to do. You understand that?