Her last fuzzy thought was that Heinlein would have approved.

L'Rau's sun set. Across the sky, the moon rose. The shadow of the world had already begun to crawl across it. The M'Sak raised a clamor when they saw the eclipse. Their tumult sounded like thousands of percussion instruments coming to demented life all at once.

The translator could handle some of their dialect. Most of their threats were the same stupid sort soldiers shouted on any planet: warnings of death and maiming. But some M'Sak showed imaginative flair, not least the barbarian who asked the defenders inside D'Opt for the names of their females, so he would know what to call them when he got to T'Kai City.

The hubbub outside the walls faded. An enormous G'Bur came out from among the soldiers. This, Greenberg thought, had to be the fearsome V'Zek. "Surrender!" he shouted up at the T'Kai. He used the southern speech so well, the translator never hiccuped. "I give you this one last chance. Look to the sky?even the heavens declare your downfall is at hand."

Prince K'Sed waved a grasping-claw to Greenberg. The master merchant stepped out where the M'Sak could see him; he hoped the sight of a human still had some power to unsettle them. "You are wrong, V'Zek," he said. The translator, and amplifiers all along the wall, sent his reply booming forth, louder than any G'Bur could bellow.

"Roar as loud as you like, Soft One," V'Zek said. "Your trifling tricks grow boring, and we are no hatchlings, to be taken in by them. As the sky-f'noi makes the moon bleed, so we will bleed you tonight, and all T'Kai thereafter." The M'Sak warriors shouted behind him.

"You are wrong, V'Zek," Greenberg repeated. "Watch the sky if you doubt me, for it too will show T'Kai's power."

"Lie as much as you like. It will not save you." V'Zek turned to his troopers. "Attack!"

M'Sak dashed into archery range and began to shoot, trying to sweep defenders from the walls. The T'Kai shot back. Greenberg hastily ducked behind a parapet. He was more vulnerable to arrows than any local.

"What if you are wrong, Soft One, and your ploy fails?" Only B'Rom would have asked that question.

"Then we die," Greenberg said, a reply enough to the point to silence even the cynical vizier. B'Rom walked away; had he been a human, he would have been shaking his head.

Arrows ripped through the T'Kai banners above the master merchant. He glanced up. The grasping-claw that stood for the confederacy had a hole in it. Not liking the symbolism of that, he looked away.

Shouts and alarmed clatterings came from the wall not far away. The translator gabbled in overload, then produced a word Greenberg could understand. "Ladders!"

Though poles set into a wall sufficed for the G'Bur, when such aids were absent the locals, because of the way they were built, needed wider and more cumbersome ladders than humans used. That did not stop the M'Sak from slapping them against the walls of D'Opt and swarming toward the top. In fact, it made the defenders' job harder than it would have been in medieval human siege warfare?being heavier than scaling ladders made for humans, these were harder to topple.

Without exposing more than his arm, Greenberg expended a stun cartridge when the top of a ladder poked over the wall. The barbarian nearly at the level of the battlements tumbled back onto his comrades below. They all crashed to the ground. Cheering, the T'Kai used a forked pole to push over the suddenly empty ladder.

"Good idea!" Koniev shouted. He imitated Greenberg. Another set of crashes, another overturned ladder.

"I'd like it better if I had more than?" Greenberg checked the charge gauge, "?half a dozen shots left."

"Eight here," Koniev said. Marya was somewhere off around the wall's circuit. Greenberg hoped she would not stop an arrow. For that matter, he hoped he would not stop one himself.

"Ladders!" The cry came from two directions at once. The master merchant looked at the moon. L'Rau's shadow covered more than half of it, but totality was still close to an hour away. "Ladders!" This shout was further away. Click-pop-hiss-click: By now, Greenberg had heard the T'Kai word often enough to recognize it in the original, even if he needed electronics to reproduce it.

"Lad?" This time, the cry cut off abruptly after click-pop?an arrow must have found its mark. The M'Sak were throwing everything they had into this attack. Greenberg worried. Jennifer hadn't counted on the possibility of D'Opt's falling in a hurry. Neither had he. If that was a mistake, it was likely to be his last one.

"Forward!" V'Zek roared. "Forward!" He wished he could have gone up the first ladder and straight into D'Opt. Waiting behind the scenes for his warriors to do the job was the hardest part of being chieftain. He corrected himself: no, the hardest part was knowing he needed to hold back, and not giving in to the urge to go wild and slaughter.

If he suppressed that urge all the time, he wondered, would he be civilized? He found the idea ridiculous. He would only be bored.

He cast two critical eyes on the fighting, turned a third to Z'Yon, who was clipping a wounded M'Sak's shell so no sharp edges would further injure the soft tissues inside. His fourth eye, as it had been most of the night, was on the moon. The fully lit portion grew ever smaller.

"You were right, shaman," he said, an enormous concession from him. But even a chieftain felt small and insignificant when the natural order of the world turned upside down.

Z'Yon did not answer until he had finished his task?had his prediction been wrong, he would have dared no such liberty. What would have happened to him had he been wrong was unpleasant to contemplate anyhow. He hoped he sounded casual rather than relieved when he said, "So it seems."

"The warriors truly know the meaning of the prodigy," V'Zek went on. "They fight bravely. I think they will force an entrance into the town not long after the whole moon goes into the jaws of the f'noi in the sky. You did well in instructing them and insuring that they would be of stout spirit for the battle."

"I did as you commanded, my master." Z'Yon's eyestalks tingled in remembered fright. A ladder went over, directly in front of the shaman and his chieftain. Injured M'Sak flailed legs in pain. One lay unmoving. "They fight well inside D'Opt, too."

"Doubtless their leaders and the Soft Ones have filled them with nonsense so they will not despair at our might," V'Zek said scornfully. "And see over there!" He pointed with a grasping-claw. "We've gained a stretch of wall! Surely the end cannot be far away."

"Surely not, my master." Z'Yon wished he had not taken omens with the moltings; he would have had no qualms now about being as excited as V'Zek. He tried to stifle his doubts. He had been wrong before, often enough.

The last bit of white disappeared from the moon. V'Zek shouted in a voice huge enough to pierce the tumult. "Now we hold the moment between our claws! Strike hard and T'Kai falls. The sky gives us victory!"

"The sky gives us victory!" the warriors cried, and redoubled their efforts. The dim red light made seeing hard, but cries of alarm from the walls showed places where the M'Sak were gaining fresh clawholds. Z'Yon decided he had been wrong again after all.

The last bit of white disappeared from the moon. "Now's the time, Jennifer," Greenberg said quietly into his comm unit. "Get things rolling, or the T'Kai have had it."

The pause that followed was longer than speed-of-light could account for. The master merchant started to call down curses on Jennifer's head. He wished he could take her damned reader and wrap it around her neck. He was starting to get more creative than that when she said, "Initiated."