Dragonback 01 Dragon and Thief (18 page)

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 opened 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?"

Draycos's response was to leap in through Jack's open-necked
shirt. "And then?" the dragon asked from his shoulder.

Jack took a deep breath. "We'll come up with something. I hope."

The purser's office was bigger than Jack had expected, probably
four times as big as his own stateroom. It had a chest-high counter
extending across the entire room near the door, where the purser stood
dealing with passengers who wanted to store their valuables. Behind the
counter, another man and woman dressed in white uniforms worked at
computer desks, presumably keeping track of what was in the safe and
doing other odd jobs.

The safe was bigger than Jack had expected, too. It was more like
a small bank vault, easily big enough for three or four people to walk
inside. Probably big enough for them to dance in, too. There was a flat
metal plate over the spot where the keypad or combination dial would be
on a normal safe door. There were also two emergency lights set into
the upper walls, one pointed at the vault, the other pointed at the
door.

All this he got from a single pass by the open door. The outer
door itself, he noted, had a standard lock setup. "We are not going
in?" Draycos asked as Jack continued down the corridor.

"In a minute," Jack said. A hundred feet down the corridor from
the purser's office was one of the ship's bars, with a small lounge
area across the hallway from it. On the far side of the lounge was a
glass wall that looked down onto a casino one deck below. "I thought we
might like to come up with a plan first," he added, stepping into the
lounge.

"Would not our room be safer?" Draycos murmured as Jack selected a
table by the glass wall, well away from the other half dozen people who
were talking or sipping drinks.

"This is safe enough," Jack assured him, swiveling his chair
around so that he could look down into the casino. With his back to the
rest of the lounge, no one would see his lips moving as he and Draycos
talked.

At the same time, the faint reflections in the glass would let him
keep an eye on the people coming and going in the lounge and corridor
behind him. If Snake Voice's agent aboard the
Star of Wonder
got careless, Jack might be able to spot him.

It took somewhat longer than the minute Jack had suggested. It
took nearly an hour, in fact, plus three fizzy-sodas, for them to
hammer out a workable plan.

At least, Jack hoped it was workable.

The purser was talking with an elderly woman when Jack returned to
the office. He waited behind her as patiently as he could, casually
looking around for anything he might have missed on his earlier stroll
past the place. It was pretty much as he'd noted then, except that
above the door were two more emergency lights. Taking several deep
breaths, as Uncle Virgil had taught him to do, he tried to relax.

Finally, the woman left. "May I help you, young man?" the purser
asked with a smile as Jack stepped up to the counter.

"Yes, sir, I hope so," Jack said, pitching his tone and manner to
make himself seem a couple of years younger than he really was. Uncle
Virgil had always said that the younger you were, the less likely
people were to suspect you of being trouble. "I'm Jack Morgan,
Stateroom 332. My uncle wanted me to put one of his data tubes in the
safe."

"Certainly," the purser said. "Do you have a deposit box?"

"No, not yet," Jack said. "How long will it take to get one?"

"No time at all," the purser assured him, stepping to one side and
lifting a section of the countertop. His other hand, Jack noted, stayed
out of sight beneath the edge of the counter as he did so. There must
be either a release catch he needed to operate or an alarm he had to
deactivate. The purser propped up the section of countertop and pulled
open the swinging door beneath it. "If you'll come this way, please?"

He led the way back to the vault and swung the metal plate back to
reveal a keypad set into the door. "If you'll just stand there, sir?"
he said, indicating a spot where the plate would block Jack's view of
the keypad.

Jack did as he was told, and the purser began punching in the
code. The plate covering the keypad had seemed easy enough to move,
with no secret switches the purser had to use first. But Jack had
already noticed the heavy ring the purser was wearing on that hand.
Probably a short-range radio transmitter that identified him and
deactivated the plate's alarms.

It was like a bank, all right, with all the cute security tricks
anyone could ever want. A terrible place to have to break into.

It was just as well, Jack thought, that he wasn't going to have to
do that.

"There we go," the purser announced, swinging the plate back over
the keypad. He pulled on the handle, and the heavy door swung
ponderously open.