Dragonback 01 Dragon and Thief

  "Naturally," Jack agreed with a sinking feeling in his empty stomach. Right. Breaking into a strongly built and heavily protected vault aboard a luxury starliner should be just a walk in the park.

  Maybe for Uncle Virgil it would have been. Problem was, Uncle Virgil was dead. "And what's the pay?"

  "He gets his nephew back," Snake Voice said quietly. "In one piece, and with no Vagran warrant for his arrest."

  Jack swallowed. "Yeah," he muttered. "Under the circumstances, I think he'll take the job."

  "Excellent," Snake Voice said, his voice as calm and untroubled as if he'd just closed some simple business deal. "Drabs, have the bridge set up an InterWorld connection to the office here. Mr. Morgan will be placing a call to his uncle."

  "Yes, sir," Drabs said, closing and sealing the suitcase again. Lifting it off Jack's lap, he started back toward the door.

  Hesitantly, Jack lifted a finger. "Excuse me, but it's not quite that simple."

  "No?" Snake Voice asked, a definite hint of threat in his voice.

  "No," Jack said. "I'm not calling Uncle Virgil from here. You put me aboard the Star of Wonder, and I'll take it from there."

  "Impossible," Snake Voice said. "You're staying here as a guarantee of your uncle's behavior."

  Jack lifted his eyebrows. "Then get someone else to do the job."

  "You want me to change his mind, sir?" Drabs asked.

  "I'd like nothing better," Snake Voice said. "Unfortunately, Morgan will want guarantees that his nephew is unharmed."

  "You put him aboard the liner and he'll bolt," Drabs warned. "Sure as anything he will."

  "No, I don't think so," Snake Voice said thoughtfully. "He's smart enough to realize that once a warrant is issued on Vagran, he'll never be safe again. Not anywhere in the Orion Arm."

  Jack sighed. "Yes, thanks, I've got the message. How far away is the liner?"

  "Not far," Snake Voice said. "Across this very spaceport, as a matter of fact. Drabs will take you there and buy you a ticket."

  "Fine," Jack said. "What about clothes and tools?"

  "You can pick up a change of clothing aboard ship," Snake Voice said. "As for tools, I presume Morgan will bring his own. When you contact him."

  There was a slight shuffling noise, as if the man behind the desk was leaning forward. "You are planning to contact him as you promised, aren't you?"

  "Don't worry," Jack said, wishing fervently that he did have Uncle Virgil to call on. Or even Uncle Virge. "I know how to handle it," he added, trying to sound like he actually did. "I want my stuff back, though."

  "Your stuff?"

  "My multitool, EvGa, and tangler," Jack told him. "Your people took them from me on Vagran."

  "Of course," Snake Voice said. "Drabs will return your multitool before you board the ship. You won't be needing the other items."

  "But—"

  "Then that's settled," Snake Voice said. "One final point. The liner will leave here early this afternoon, make three more stops, then reach its final destination twelve days from now. Your uncle has just that long to complete his task. I suggest you don't wait too long to contact him."

  Twelve days. Terrific. "Sure," Jack said.

  "Good. Any questions?"

  "Yes, actually," Jack said. "What's in the real cylinder, and who am I stealing it from?"

  "So; no questions," Snake Voice said. "Excellent. You'll be contacted again in twelve days. I trust your uncle will be there to give me good news."

  An unseen signal passed, and Drabs got a grip on his arm. "On your feet, kid."

  Jack did as ordered. Halfway up, a black bag unexpectedly dropped over his head. "Hey!"

  "A necessary precaution," Snake Voice said. "Enjoy the cruise."

  They were out of the ship and into a land vehicle before the blindfold came off. Even then, they weren't taking any chances: the vehicle was a closed truck, and he and Drabs were in the back. "First class all the way, I see," Jack commented. "Where do I sleep on the liner, the engine room?"

  "Funny," Drabs growled. "Don't worry, I'll get you a real nice double cabin. Like the boss said, we want you to enjoy the trip."

  They rode the rest of the way in silence. Jack still hadn't had a chance to check on Draycos, but he could feel some slight movement on his skin now. He hoped the dragon was okay.

  Finally, they pulled to a stop. "End of the line?" Jack asked.

  "For me, yes," Drabs said. "For you, it's the beginning."

  "I can hardly wait," Jack muttered, standing up and heading back to the rear doors.

  Drabs blocked his way. "I just have one other thing to say to you," he said, his eyes locking onto Jack's face like twin lasers. "The boss told you you'd be in trouble with the cops if you mess this up. What I'm telling you is that if you duck out on us, odds are you won't have to worry about the cops. Odds are you'll be dead before they ever catch up with you. Get me?"

  "Sure," Jack said tiredly. "Matter of fact, I've had about as much of you as I'd ever want. Can we go now?"

  For another minute Drabs continued to glare. Then, he smiled. A very unpleasant smile. "Sure," he said. "Let's go."

  CHAPTER 17

  Drabs was as good as his word. The cabin he got for Jack was easily the nicest room the boy had ever been in, except for one ground-side hotel suite Uncle Virgil had rented them once during a high-stakes scam.

  Of course, the fact that Drabs had kept his promise on the cabin probably meant he would keep other promises, too. Such as his threat to hunt Jack down and kill him if he tried to run.

  The first job, after catching up on each other's stories, was to make up for the three days of missed meals. According to the map in his stateroom, the Star of Wonder had ten dining rooms and snack bars, four of which were open twenty-four hours a day. The room's status listing showed that Drabs had left a generous credit line for him to draw on, so eating and other incidentals wouldn't be a problem.

  But having also lived in the same set of clothes for those same three days, he didn't think the high-paying customers of the liner would appreciate mingling with him over lunch.

  Fortunately, his stateroom was fancy enough to have a small food synthesizer set off in one corner. The menu was limited to simple snacks, but there was enough of a selection for him to at least take the edge off his hunger.

  Not surprisingly, the synthesizer balked at preparing Draycos's favorite hamburger-and-tuna-and-chocolate-sauce sandwich. Jack solved that problem by ordering a hamburger, a tuna fish sandwich, and a chocolate sundae, then putting them together himself. The dragon had to make do without the motor oil.

  After that he took a trip to one of the shops for some changes of clothing, which Draycos insisted on. A shower was next, which Draycos insisted on even more firmly.

  With all of what Uncle Virge would have called housekeeping duties out of the way, Jack could finally get down to business. Sprawling across one of the two beds in the shirt and slacks of a suit he'd bought, he began going through the Star of Wonders information booklets, reading about the ship's services and studying the layouts of the various decks. Draycos, for his part, curled himself up on the chair at the small writing desk across the room, singing softly to himself and doodling on a notepad.

  "I don't know, Draycos," Jack sighed, letting the map drop onto the bed and leaning back against the bulkhead. It was hard to believe that after sleeping for three days straight he could be tired, but he was. He was tired, frustrated, and very, very scared. "I feel like I've been dropped into a deep hole, with the whole universe standing on top shoveling dirt in at me. What are we going to do?"

  The dragon paused in his singing and looked up. "About what?" he asked, readjusting the stylus he had gripped in one of his front paws.

  "What do you mean, about what?" Jack demanded, a flash of annoyance cutting through the fear. "About this whole stupid situation, that's what. Do you have any idea the kind of security they're going to have on the purser's safe?"

  "I do not know," Draycos sa
id. "What is a purser's safe?"

  "The purser is the guy on a starliner in charge of money," Jack told him. "His safe is the vault where passengers can store their valuables during the trip."

  He waved his hand in a wide sweep around him. "And on a ship like this, there are going to be some really serious valuables. Jewelry, data tubes, maybe even some one-of-a-kind art objects. It's going to be like breaking into a bank. Worse than a bank, really, because here there's no place to run after the job."

  "You cannot do it?"

  Jack shook his head. "Maybe Uncle Virgil could have done it, with the right tools and a week or two to get ready. He was good enough. But I'm not. Not alone."

  Draycos's green eyes glittered. "But you are not alone, Jack," he said quietly. "I am here."

  Jack gazed at the dragon, a strange feeling stirring inside him. Here was this alien creature, willing to help him out of a tight spot. Not only willing to help, but willing to stick his own neck into danger doing it.

  It was like the feeling of slowly starting to thaw out again in a warm room after standing around half frozen in the cold all afternoon. For a moment, despite the trouble he was still in, Jack felt a distant glimmer of hope.

  Then the rest of the reality caught up with him. Draycos wasn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart, or whatever was in his chest pumping all that black blood around. He had a fleet full of his people to rescue, and at the moment Jack was the only tool he had. If Jack went down, Draycos went down with him.

  The dragon was here, but only until he found someone else to help him carry on his mission. When he did, it would be good-bye.

  The warmth faded away, and the cold quietly closed in again. "I appreciate the offer," he said. "But unless you know a really good safecracker within a couple days' flight from here, I don't know how you can help."

  "Do not give up hope," Draycos insisted. "I am a poet-warrior of the K'da. I am not without resources."

  "Yeah, that must be some course of study," Jack said with a sniff. "Burglary-for-Warriors 102. Must first have taken Burglary-for-Warriors 101."

  Draycos flashed his teeth once but made no comment. Bending back over the desk, he resumed his doodling and quiet singing.

  Jack frowned at him, starting to feel irritated. His life was hanging by a piece of cobweb, and the dragon was playing with a notepad? "What are you doing?" he demanded.

  "Attempting to unmask our enemy," Draycos said. "Come and see."

  Frowning harder, Jack got up and crossed to the desk.

  Draycos hadn't been simply doodling. He had been writing.

  Writing?

  "The spacecraft you were brought aboard had these words beside the entrance," Draycos explained, touching the notepad with the tip of his tongue. "Because the human Drabs took care to cover your eyes when you left, we may assume the words are important."

  "Probably the name of the ship," Jack said, his heart starting to beat faster. "But I thought you said you didn't read or write our language."

  "I do not," Draycos said.

  "You memorized the shapes, then?"

  "Not directly," the dragon said. "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da; and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song."

  Jack blinked. "A song?"

  "Yes. Observe."

  Draycos set the stylus against the paper. "And to the right, from tail to head," he sang, "stands single soldier, tall but dead."

  He drew a slightly wavy line that did indeed look kind of like a K'da seen from above. A capital "I," Jack decided, drawn in a stylized form.

  "Just like the first; again it stands," Draycos went on. "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands."

  He drew two more wavy lines, this time at an inverted-V angle that connected at the top. Another wavy line connected them midway up. An "A"?

  "A Shontine waits to hear a sound; shall two eyes listen at the ground?"

  He drew a vertical line, with two gogglelike eyes beside it. Seen from the side, Jack had to admit, it did look like the two eyes of someone with his ear pressed against the ground.

  Seen upright, of course, it was a capital "B."

  "Squeezed ring of fire; and what is more," Draycos sang, "a fire burns within its core."

  A capital "O" with some sort of marking in the center. Jack couldn't tell what the mark was supposed to be, but it didn't matter. The thing was definitely an "O."

  "A blade thrusts left, to base of hedge; naught can be seen except the edge."

  Jack smiled at that one. It was a capital "L," with the same waviness as the other letters. Now that he thought about it, it did indeed look like light shining off the edge of a knife point with the rest of the knife in shadow. Draycos had an interesting way of looking at things.

  "Stands final soldier, single one." Draycos drew another "I."

  "Hand down, for now the tale is done."

  He laid down the stylus. "And it is finished," he added.

  "I will be dipped in butter," Jack said, shaking his head in admiration. "That was just plain flat-out brilliant."

  "I merely made use of my talents and training," Draycos said modestly. Still, to Jack's ear he sounded pleased at the praise. "As you do yourself. Tell me, what do the words say?"

  Jack swiveled the paper around to face him. "Advocatus Diaboli," he read. "Huh."

  "You recognize the name?" Draycos asked.

  Jack scratched his cheek. "I don't even recognize the words," he said, swiveling the desk computer around and punching for a dictionary. After all of that work, and his own compliments, he hoped Draycos hadn't messed up with this somewhere. "It doesn't even sound like English."

  He typed in the words. "Aha," he said, nodding as the page came up. "It didn't sound like English because it isn't. It's a phrase in Old Latin: 'Devil's Advocate.' Says that's someone who argues against an authority's point of view. Odd name for a ship. Was there anything else written there?"

  "There were no other words," Draycos said. "But beneath them was a small design. It may have been the same as the one on the sealed warehouse door."

  Jack felt his throat tighten. "You mean the Braxton Universis logo?"

  "It may have been," Draycos said. "As I have said, it is difficult to memorize alien designs."

  "No, you nailed it just fine," Jack said sourly. "A Braxton cargo, a Braxton ship. The whole thing was Braxton, right from the start."

  "But for what purpose?"

  "How should I know?" Jack snapped, swiveling the computer back around. "A fancy plot to take down some rival, maybe. A big corporate merger that someone won't play ball over. How in blazes should I know?"

  He stomped across the room and flopped back onto the bed, glaring bleakly into a corner of the room. All along, he'd been clinging to the hope that the Braxton cargo part had been pure coincidence. That it was some old rival of his uncle's looking for vengeance, not something coming at him from Braxton Universis itself.

  But thanks to Draycos's cleverness, that hope was now shattered. This was some corporate game, all right. The vast power of Braxton Universis was on one side, some unknown player was on the other, and Jack Morgan was dead-center in the middle of it.

  "You are troubled."

  Jack shifted his glare to Draycos. "Your bet your tail I'm troubled," he growled. "And if you had any brains, you would be, too. This is Cornelius Braxton we're up against."

  He took another look at the dragon's face, and instantly regretted his words. "I'm sorry," he said, a layer of guilt adding to the rest of his misery. "I know you just don't know."

  "I am not offended," Draycos assured him. "Tell me about him."

  "What's to tell?" Jack asked, shrugging uncomfortably. "In a spiral arm's worth of hardball businessmen, Braxton's one of the hardest. He inherited a business from his father and built it into an empire. He's smart, he's ruthless, and he gets whatever he wants."

  Pulling the metal suitcase from under his bed, he op
ened it. "And whatever he's up to this time, this thing is the key," he said, taking out the cylinder. "I wish I knew what was in it."

  "Or what is in the one you are to switch it for," Draycos said.

  "That, too," Jack agreed glumly, peering at the cylinder. "I don't know whether he's trying to plant this one on someone, or get the other one away from him. Either way, when the roof caves in, there's only going to be one fall guy."

  "Pardon?"

  "Fall guy," Jack repeated. "The guy who takes the fall, the blame for something someone else did. In this case, me."

  Draycos uncoiled from the chair and padded over to Jack's side. "What then do you propose we do?"

  For a moment Jack had the sudden urge to stroke the dragon's head, just like he might have petted a dog. He resisted the impulse. "I don't know," he confessed, turning the cylinder over in his hand instead. "Remember, I'm their guarantee of Uncle Virgil's good behavior. If they were willing to let me out of their sight, it's because I'm not going to be out of their sight."

  Draycos twitched the tip of his tail. "They will have someone watching you."

  "Watching me, and watching for Uncle Virgil," Jack said. "That means I can't run and I can't call the police. And I can't just sit around and do nothing. What's left?"

  The dragon was silent a moment. "There is a style of warfare the K'da call koi shike," he said. "It speaks of a large stone thrown into quiet water to force a response from hiding fish."

  "Yeah, we've got something like that, too," Jack growled. "We call it 'rocking the boat.' What's your point?"

  Draycos ran a paw thoughtfully along the side of the cylinder. "Let us do as they demand," he said. "Let us steal the item and replace it with this duplicate. We will then follow the ripples from the stone and see where they lead."

  Jack snorted. "You make it sound so easy."

  "I am a warrior of the K'da," Draycos said. "You are skilled in the arts of theft and cunning. Together we can surely find a way."

  Jack shook his head. "I wouldn't bet on that," he warned. "But I don't have anything better to offer."

  He returned the cylinder to its hiding place under the bed and stood up. "I guess the least we can do is go take a look at the safe," he added, stepping to the closet and getting out the suit coat that went with his new shirt and slacks. "You coming?"