This time, Greenberg did not blame her for halting. He could not yet see what had gone wrong, but he could hear that something had. He snapped, "What is it, Jennifer?"

"They found a soft spot in the line somehow?the M'Sak in the T'Kai line, I mean." Another wait, this time for Jennifer to collect herself. "Hundreds of them are pouring through. They're turning in on the T'Kai left wing and?rolling it up, is that the phrase?"

"That's the phrase," the master merchant said grimly.

Along with Koniev and Marya, he ran to try to stem the rout. Long before he reached the rupture point, he knew it was hopeless. No mere thumb could repair this dike. The few M'Sak the humans dropped did not influence the battle in the least.

From the Flying Festoon, Jennifer said, "I'm sorry I didn't notice anything going wrong."

"I don't think there was anything to notice, Jennifer," Koniev told her. "V'Zek didn't find that soft spot in our line?he made it. He lured the left out till the T'Kai got overextended, and then?and now?"

"And now," Jennifer echoed ruefully. "A few minutes ago, I was thinking V'Zek a fool of a general for letting himself get driven down the slope. He must have done it on purpose. That makes me the fool, for not seeing it."

"It makes all of us fools," Greenberg said.

"But he shouldn't have been able to do it," Jennifer protested. "Humans are a lot more sophisticated than any G'Bur, let alone barbarians like the M'Sak. We had the drones watching every move he made, too."

"He managed, though, in spite of everything," Greenberg said. "And that makes him a very nasty enemy indeed."

No one argued with him.

"We are undone!" K'Sed cried. It was not a shout of panic, but rather of disbelief. "They tricked us!" The M'Sak surged against his line and pushed it back. Maybe, he thought much too late, he should not have called for pursuit down off the slope the T'Kai had held. Then, perhaps, he would not have had these screaming, clacking savages in his rear, rolling up his warriors like a molt-ling folding a shed piece of grasping-claw.

"I did not know trickery was against the rules," B'Rom said. The vizier made as much a point of pride at being unimpressed with everything as V'Zek did with being unafraid. He went on, "After all, we tried to do the same to the M'Sak with what we learned from the Soft Ones."

"The Soft Ones!" K'Sed shouted. "They tricked us, too! They said we would win if we fought here. This whole botch is their fault."

"Oh, twaddle, Your Highness."

K'Sed stared at B'Rom. Under other circumstances, that would have been lese majesty enough to cost the vizier his shell, one painful bit at a time. But now?K'Sed mastered his anger, though he did not forget. "Twaddle, is it?"

"Certainly." Whatever his shortcomings in behavior, B'Rom was no coward. "They told us nothing of the sort that I recall. They said this was a good place to fight, and it is. You can see that with three eyes closed, as can I. But they are traders, not generals?that, unfortunately, is not a deficiency from which V'Zek suffers."

"Unfortunately." K'Sed could play the game of understatement, too. Staying detached was not easy any more, though, not when the line was unraveling like a poorly woven basket and the guards were almost as busy behind the prince as in front of him. He did try. "All these unfortunate things being true, what do you recommend now?"

One of B'Rom's eyestalks pointed behind him and to the left. "Running for the forest yonder seems appropriate at the moment, wouldn't you say? We'll save a remnant that way, rather than all staying in the trap."

"Our right?"

"Is on its own anyway."

K'Sed hissed in despair. B'Rom had a way of being not just right, but brutally right. With a more forceful prince, he would have been killed long since. K'Sed wished he were that sort of prince. The T'Kai confederacy could use such a leader, to oppose V'Zek if for no other reason. He was as he was, though; no help for it. "Very well. We will fall back on the forest." He hoped all the practice he'd put in with the shortspear would stay with him.

Chaos also gripped the T'Kai right claw, if in a less crushing embrace. Still under assault from the M'Sak before them, the T'Kai warriors could do nothing to rescue their cut-off comrades. In fact, the northerners pouring through the gap where the center had been tried to roll them up and treat them like the left.

"Here they come again!" Marya shouted. The humans expended more precious stun charges. M'Sak fell. Others advanced past them. Dying in battle, even strangely, held few terrors for them. They did not know the stun guns were not lethal, but they had seen enough to be sure the weapons were not all-powerful.

Pavel Koniev perturbed them more than the stun guns could when he sprang out and shrieked "Boo!" at the top of his lungs. The cry was as alien to their clicks, hisses, and pops as his fleshy body was to their hard integuments. Not even their stories held ghosts as strange as he.

But the M'Sak were soldiers, and they were winning. As with the Flying Festoon, the mere appearance of the unknown was not enough to daunt them. They rushed forward, weapons ready. The humans snapped shots at them. As with any hurried shooting, they missed more often than they wanted to. And they had time to press trigger buttons just once or twice before the M'Sak were on them.

Marya's scream made the shout Koniev had let out sound like a whisper. The warrior in front of her was startled enough to make only a clumsy swipe with his partisan. She ducked under it, stunned him at close range, then dashed up to crush the brain-nodes under his suddenly flaccid eyestalks.

Koniev did not use his stunner. He killed his foe with exactly the same move he had practiced on the way north. Then, orange body liquids dripping from his mace, he stood on the fallen M'Sak's carapace and roared out a challenge to the local's comrades. The challenge went unanswered.

Greenberg did not find out till later how his friends fared. At the time, he was too busy staying alive to pay them much attention. He threw himself flat to avoid a halberd thrust, then leaped up and grabbed the polearm below the head to wrestle it away from the M'Sak who wielded it.

That was a mistake. G'Bur were no stronger than humans, but their four grasping-limbs let them exert a lot more leverage. Greenberg found himself flung around till he felt like a fly on the end of a fisherman's line. He lost his grip and fell in a heap. The M'Sak swung up the halberd for the kill.

Before he could bring it down, he had to parry a blow from a T'Kai. The soldiers from the southern confederacy were frantically counterattacking. Greenberg scrambled to his feet. "Thanks!" he shouted to the warrior who had saved him. He doubted the local had done so out of any great love for humans. But if the right wing of the T'Kai army was to escape as a fighting force, it could not let itself be flanked like the luckless left. Greenberg did not care about why the local had rescued him. Any excuse would do.

The M'Sak gave ground grudgingly, but they gave ground. More and more of them went off to finish routing the left?and to plunder corpses. That was easier, more profitable work than fighting troops still ready to fight back. The T'Kai right broke free of its assailants and retreated south and east along the bank of the stream that protected its flank. The three humans trudged along with it.

Jennifer turned on the Flying Festoon's spotlight. A finger of light stabbed down from the sky. The ship descended, its siren wailing. She wished it were a rocket like the ones she read about?then it might incinerate thousands of M'Sak with its fiery blast. Sometimes mundane contragravity was too safe to be useful.