The Ulik wasted no time. He rammed an intercom button home. “Attention! Apprehend a Type 41 just leaving the Ulik Embassy.” He gave Gypsy’s dress.

There was silence on the other end for a moment, then the guard outside, working to handle the hordes of incoming people more than as a police force, responded, puzzled, “But, sir, I’ve been just outside your door the past hour. Nobody’s come out. Not a soul since that Czillian, anyway. And definitely no Type 41.”

“But that’s impossible!” Ortega roared, then switched off and looked over at the floor. The crushed butt, to his great relief, was still there.

The intercom buzzed and he answered it curtly. “Ambassador Udril here,” came a translator-colored voice.

“Go ahead,” Ortega told the Czillian ambassador. “On that information you wanted on those three Entries. The one, Marquoz, is a Hazakit and is, well, it’s hard to believe after only a few weeks…”

“Yes?”

“Well, Ambassador, he appears to be the new head of the Hazakit secret police.”

Ortega almost choked. “And the others?”

“Well, the woman, Yua, appears to be enlisting fellow Awbri into some sort of military force with surprising ease. And as for Mavra Chang…”

“Well?” Ortega prompted, feeling increasingly out of control.

“She seems to have appeared as a Dillian, enlisted some local help, and, well, vanished.”

“Vanished! Where? How?”

“A few days ago she and a small party of Dillians went into the mountains of Gedemondas. Nobody’s heard anything from them since.”

Hakazit

It was a harsh land. The planet for which it was a laboratory model must have been something hellish indeed, Marquoz thought. The terrain was a burned, ugly, hard-packed desert with jagged, fierce-looking volcanic outcrops. Occasionally earth tremors would start slides and the very rare but horribly violent storms sometimes turned dry, dusty gullies into deadly torrents which carved great gashes in the landscape.