The man continued to stand there as the troop approached. He appeared to be alone. The ground was almost perfectly flat here and covered with yellow grass and low, scrubby plants, apparently leaving nowhere for other people to hide, but the Brigadier hard been ambushed once by men hiding in holes in the ground and wasn't about to make the same mistake again. He ordered the procession to come to a halt, therefore, while he, Shanks and Pettiwell went on to meet the man alone. If it did turn out to be an ambush, their escort would be outside the trap and could come to their rescue.

     “I think you should remain behind as well,” he said to the Kelvon diplomat. “Emperor Tyron will be most displeased if anything happens to you.”

     “But you're taking him?” asked Pettiwell, indicating the scientist.

     “He doesn’t seem to be affected by the arc oscillator,” said Shanks, his forehead creased with worry. “If they've already found a way to defeat the device, I may see some clue as to how they’re doing it.”

     “Well, If he can brave the danger, then so can I. Lead on, Brigadier.”

     The Brigadier nodded his lack of concern and geed his horse onto a slow forward walk, the other two men following him.

     The man waiting for them had a bushy black beard and was dressed in the white clothes of those taken to be adopted. He had bright white skin, he thought, but as they got closer he saw that he'd been wrong. His skin was glowing. Not brightly enough to be easily visible from a distance in the bright daylight, but evident as they closed to within a couple of dozen paces from him.

     He continued to simply stand there as they approached, squinting as he regarded them impassively, as if he was there for some important purpose and the three men approaching him were a distraction that he would rather not have had to bother with. He didn’t appear to be armed, and there didn't seem to be anywhere in his clothing where he could hide a weapon, but the Brigadier’s hand went to the hilt of his pistol nonetheless. If the man ahead was advanced enough in his adoption, he could curse him and Patterwell back to their animal forms with a simple touch.

     When only a dozen feet separated them the man finally held up a hand in a stop gesture and the Brigadier reined in his horse, his hand still on his pistol. “Please, go no further,” he said in the deep voice of a man who had once been in the habit of drinking a lot of cheap alcohol. “My masters can already sense that infernal machine or yours. It is causing disquiet in the city.”

     “Good!” shouted Shanks. “How disquieting will they find it when we drive it all the way to the front gates of their city? I've seen what it does to them! We'll drive them out of the city, and all their other cities as well! We'll chase them to the ends of the...”

     The Brigadier reached out and gently touched his arm. “Let's hear what the man has to say,” he said.

     “My masters wish to negotiate,” the bearded man said. “Their plan to bring peace and security to mankind...”

     “The same peace and security you gave to the Hetin folk!” interrupted the scientist. “They had a mighty civilisation and your masters destroyed it!”

    “Mister Shanks,” said the Brigadier calmly. “If you cannot remain in control of yourself I shall insist that you return to the column.” He gave the man a sharp look and Shanks nodded reluctantly. The Brigadier kept his eye on him for a moment longer, though. He understood the man's need to make his feelings known, but had he betrayed himself in the process?

     He had, it seems, because the bearded man was looking at him thoughtfully. “The fate of the Hetin civilisation wouldn’t mean so much to you unless you were one of them,” he said. “My masters told us that one of you was helping build the transmitter. Have you come to take revenge on them on behalf of your entire race?”

     “We have come to reach a peaceful settlement,” said the Brigadier before the scientist could  speak. “One in which humans, hetins and Radiants can live peacefully together. Do you have authority to speak on behalf of the Radiants?”

     “I was sent to invite you to enter the city, under a flag of truce, so that you can speak to the Radiants directly. Just two or three of you. The rest of you, including that infernal machine, must remain here.”

     “Why must we enter the city? Why can't we speak to them through you, by telepathy?”

     “I don't yet have telepathy. I was only adopted a few months ago. My raising has barely begun.”

     “So that's why the machine doesn’t affect you,” cried Shanks in relief. “It does work by affecting their telepathy, as we suspected.” The man bowed his head in reply.

     “There are a dozen of us representing different human nations,”  said the Brigadier. “They all have the right to be present at the negotiations. It is not your masters who are dictating the terms here, Mister Martin. It is we. The twelve of us are willing to leave our escort and enter the Radiant city alone, with the promise that the soldiers here behind us will avenge us if anything happens to us. If this is not acceptable to your masters, then we will all enter the city now, carrying the machine with us.”

     “I will have to pass on your... Your terms. Will you wait here while I go back to speak to them?” The Brigadier nodded. “By the way, how do you know my name?”

     “It was a guess really, but a rather easy one. You were clearly adopted very recently, and your accent places you as a Kelvon citizen. Your appearance matches a description I was given of a member of the Popular Uprising who worked for Lord Benjamin Hedley and who was carried off by the Radiants a few months ago.”

     “May I ask who gave you that description?”

     “A very courageous young man who gave his life saving human civilisation from your machinations.  His name was Malone.”

     John Martin laughed. “Ah yes, I remember him. Dog man! So he was undercover, was he? Well, he fooled me, I have to say. Did you know he murdered two Kelvon agents in cold blood? Benjamin had his doubts about him, so he had him kill an agent he'd captured, to test him. He did it without batting an eye. Very impressive! It's absolutely no shame to be taken in by a man like that. May I ask how he died?”

     “We think a Radiant killed him shortly after he killed Benjamin. He died well. There's no greater compliment that one soldier can give to another.”

     “If you two have finished reminiscing,” said Pettiwell impatiently, “Can we get back to the business at hand?” He turned back to John Martin. “You were going to deliver our terms to your masters.”

     “Yes, and I shall do so. Please give me until sundown before you do anything precipitant.” He then turned and began walking back to the city.

     The Brigadier watched him go for a moment or two, then dismounted. “While we're waiting,” he said, “we might as well make camp here and make ourselves comfortable. Get a bite to eat, perhaps.” He began leading his horse back towards where the rest of their men were waiting.

     Pettiwell laughed. “I think Kelvon made you a little soft, Brigadier. Thinking of your stomach when we're on the brink of victory?”

     The Brigadier gave him a stern look and the diplomat’s laugh died in his throat. Shanks grinned in amusement, then followed the Brigadier back to the main body of the column.

☆☆☆

     John Martin returned an hour before sundown to tell them that the Radiants had agreed to their terms. The Brigadier thanked him and told him that, since it was getting late, he, Shanks and the diplomats would enter the city first thing the next morning. John Martin left to take the message back to his masters and the invaders settled down for the night, leaving people awake to keep a careful watch.

     Shanks went to inspect the arc oscillator first, though. The Ministry of Science had found a couple of electrical engineers to be his apprentices and he'd left them in charge while he'd been with the Brigadier. They'd kept the machine in good order, but Shanks noted that their supply of chemicals for the batteries was running low faster than they'd expected. They’d be okay if the peace talks didn't go on for more than a day or so, but any longer than that and they'd have to either rely on the hand crank or let the machine stop working and hope that the Radiants didn’t try to attack them, just out of spite.

     He consoled himself with the thought that killing them would have little affect on relations between humans and Radiants. The instructions for building the arc oscillators had now been distributed all across the human world. The destruction of the Brigadier's expedition would only lead to a massive retaliation from massed human armies armed with radio machines and incendiary ammunition.

☆☆☆

     The next morning, the twelve men had a quick breakfast, saddled their horses and set off towards the Radiant city. John Martin was standing at the edge of their camp waiting for them, and he walked alongside them as they crossed the hard, stony ground towards the glow on the horizon, slowly fading as the sun rose behind them.

     “You're carrying weapons,” the adoptee remarked conversationally.

     “Yes,” replied the Brigadier.

     “Is it normal to carry weapons to a peace conference?”

     “This isn't going to be a peace conference. This is going to be us telling your masters what they have to do if they don't want us driving arc oscillators to every one of their cities we can find.”

     “So you’re expecting them to surrender to you? They're the owners of this planet. Cattle don't dictate terms to the farmer.”

     “If they think we're cattle, then this will be an educational experience for them.”

     The Brigadier refused to say anything else after that, and so the fourteen men walked in silence the rest of the way. The city came into view before anyone but the Brigadier, who alone had seen it before, knew what it was. At first they thought it was just a cloud lying on the horizon, shining by the reflected light of the rising sun, but it grew in size as they approached and they saw that it had a texture not quite the same as a normal cloud. It looked more like a huge pile of cotton wool that some giant had dropped into a cobweb that prevented it from touching the ground, sparkling with the light of hundreds of Radiants floating around and within in.

     There was something else, though. Some alien quality to it that none of them could quite put their finger on. Something that gave them the unsettling impression that it didn't belong there, that it was the product of another world. A foreign presence that contaminated the land above which it hung, the very air that passed across and through it. Every one of the approaching men, even the Brigadier himself, felt a sense of outrage at the very sight of it, but then he realised there'd been no such feeling the first time he'd been here. It's because, the first time I was here, I didn't know they were the enemy, he thought. I didn't know what their plans for us were. It's that knowledge that's making me feel this way, that's making all of us feel this way.

     There was another man waiting for them as they approached. Another adoptee, but further along the path of adoption and no doubt possessing telepathic abilities, as well as the ability to curse them all, except Shanks, if he so chose. The scientist’s hand went to the handle of the pistol the Brigadier had insisted he carried, the pistol loaded with incendiary rounds that would kill a human as easily as a Radiant.