Dragon and Judge

CHAPTER 23

"Three days," Frost growled as he led Alison up the wide stairway. "Three days."

Alison didn't answer. Frost and Neverlin had been getting more and more this way over the past two days, annoyed and impatient and positively twitchy.

But then, Alison was starting to feel a little annoyed herself.

Because despite their veiled accusations, she hadn't been idle all this time. In fact, she'd probably worked harder, and thought and sweated harder, than she ever had in her entire life.

None of it had done any good. She was stuck. Had been stuck, in fact, for the past day and a half.

"Well?" Frost prodded as they reached the heavily guarded corridor leading to the Patri's private suite. "Say something."

"Like what?" Alison retorted. "It's tricky. You all knew it was tricky. That's why you hired me."

"Which so far doesn't seem to be doing much good," Frost countered. Apparently, he was in the mood for an argument this morning.

"Relax, will you?" Alison said as soothingly as she could manage through her irritation. "When I blow the thing up, then you can complain about it."

Without warning, Frost came to a halt, his hand snaking out to grab Alison's upper arm and yank her around to face him. "Who told you about that?" he demanded.

"Told me about what?" Alison asked, shrinking back as his fingers dug into the skin beneath her thin shirt. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the Brummgan corridor guards reaching warily for their weapons.

For a long, tense moment they stood there, Frost staring hard into Alison's face. Then, slowly, his hand relaxed its grip. "The first two guys Mr. Arthur brought in blew up the safes they were supposed to open," he said at last. "Well, blew up the contents, anyway."

Alison swallowed hard. So that was what was in the mysterious packet Taneem had seen fastened to the safe's inside ceiling. Like Neverlin had done with his own vault aboard the Advocatus Diaboli, the K'da and Shontine advance team leaders had thoughtfully added a self-destruct mechanism to their safes. "What did— I mean—did it kill them?"

"In a way," Frost said. "The Patri had them both shot."

"I see," Alison said, forcing herself back on track. "And none of you were planning to mention this bit of recent history?"

"I think Mr. Arthur would probably have said something when you got ready to actually open it," Frost said. "Only so far, you haven't gotten that far, have you?"

Reaching up, Alison pushed at the hand still holding on to her arm. For a moment Frost resisted, probably just to show her that he could. Then, he let her push the hand away. "You just let me work my own way," she told him. "I'll get it open."

"You'd better." Turning, Frost started down the corridor again.

Neverlin and the Patri were seated in their usual armchairs, well back from the safe resting on a transfer platform in the middle of the room. "Good morning, Alison," Neverlin greeted her, his voice neutral. He wasn't any happier about the delay than Frost, Alison knew. But at least he hid his impatience better. "Is this going to be the day?"

"I don't know," Alison said. "We'll see."

Neverlin inclined his head to her. "Then let's begin."

Alison nodded back, then nodded politely at the Patri. The old Brummga made no response, but remained slumped in his chair, his eyes half-closed as if he were about to fall asleep.

It was all an act, of course. Brummgas were hardly the most intelligent or insightful beings in the Orion Arm, and it was easy to dismiss them as mobile stacks of brainless muscle. But their personal survival instinct was as good as anyone else's. The Patri had entered into this scheme with every expectation of making a huge profit out of it.

But things were not going well. They were certainly not going the way Neverlin and Frost had originally intended. It was entirely possible that the Patri's glacier-speed thought processes were even now reexamining the whole situation.

In fact, as Alison turned and stepped over to the safe it occurred to her that perhaps that was the real reason for Frost's nervousness. Maybe this grand alliance was starting to show cracks.

In the meantime, Alison had a safe to open.

She laid out her tools, studying the safe as she did so. It was a big thing, about the size of a small desk, rectangular in shape, its single door equipped with a double-twist combination lock and a break bar for pulling open the door once it was unlocked. Along the safe's left-hand wall, midway between top and bottom, was a horizontal line of twenty indentations big enough and deep enough to fit the first joint of a Brummga's finger. The whole thing was made of an incredibly hard metal that the Patri's experts had apparently been unable to identify.

A hard metal that had impact and heat-stress marks over nearly a third of its surface, and that had been warped visibly from its original shape. Clearly, this was the safe that had been aboard the Havenseeker, the only one of the four advance team ships to crash.

Frost had now said two other safes had been destroyed. Neverlin had apparently decided, not unreasonably, to let her practice on the one whose contents might already have been ruined by the crash.

Which meant there was a fourth, undamaged safe somewhere. Possibly somewhere in this very house.

"You said yesterday it was a simple combination lock," Neverlin reminded her as she put together her audio sensor.

"I said it was straightforward," Alison corrected. "I didn't say it was simple."

"Then what's the delay?" Neverlin persisted.

"There are still a few problems to work out," Alison said. "Unless you want this one to blow up like the other two did."

She had the minor satisfaction of seeing Neverlin turn a dark glare on Frost. Setting the end of the sensor against the door above the lock, she pretended to be digging out yet more deep, mysterious clues.

And tried desperately to think.

Because the lock really was pretty simple. The problem was much farther in.

Taneem had spent over two hours over the past three days peering into the safe's interior as Alison sat with her back pressed against one or the other of the safe's side walls. Late at night on each of those days, after Alison had run the most recent data through her MixStar computer, the K'da had described what she'd seen, giving the girl a verbal map of the safe's interior. Alison had listened, and asked questions, and tried to make sense of it all.

But that sense refused to come.

For one thing, the safe was way too big, with enough room in there for two or three good-sized travel cases. Alison herself could probably fit inside, in fact, though it would be a tight squeeze. Yet the only contents were a handful of little plastic or ceramic diamonds the size of Alison's thumb.

There was also that packet fastened to the ceiling, which was connected to a wire grid that covered the entire inside of the safe. Now that Alison knew the packet was a self-destruct bomb, she realized that the grid itself was part of the whole defense system. Anyone trying to cut or blast their way through the walls would cut one or more of those wires, blowing the bomb and destroying the diamonds.

But the bomb wasn't just attached to the grid. There were also two other cables, longer and thicker, stretching from the bomb to the wall with the twenty indentations. In fact, from Taneem's description, Alison had concluded that the cables disappeared into the wall exactly opposite to the fourth and sixth of those indentations.

And at that point, she had found herself stuck with a whole stack of unanswered questions.

Had there been other cables connecting the bomb to the other indentations, cables that might have been knocked off in the crash? From Taneem's description it looked like the packet had places where such cables could have been attached.

But the K'da couldn't see anything lying loose inside the safe except the diamonds. Could the cables have somehow been destroyed?

A look at the last undamaged safe might provide some answers. But Alison didn't dare ask for such a thing. Especially since she wasn't supposed to know that a fourth safe even existed.

Leaving the sensor attached to the metal above the lock, she sat down with her back pressed against the safe door and pulled out her notebook and pen. She felt Taneem shift around on her back, once again using that ever-so-useful K'da trick for looking through walls.

"You know, we can get you a chair," Frost said.

"No, thanks," Alison said, making little marks in the notebook as if she was taking actual notes. Taneem's job today was to see if she could get a better look at the spots where the two cables and the wall connected.

For a few minutes Alison stayed as she was, pretending to listen to the sensor's output and making more little squiggles in her notebook. Then she felt Taneem shift again on her skin, and there was the touch of K'da claws on her right side. Alison half turned, moved the sensor to a new position, and then resettled herself against the door a few inches farther to her right.

The next three hours were spent mostly in silence. There was an occasional clink as she rearranged the components of her equipment, or a muted clunk as she attached or reattached the various sensors. Sometimes she would accidentally kick the safe as she moved around it. Twice during the morning a messenger slipped in to deliver a murmured message to the Patri.

But aside from that no one spoke. The three watchers, for that matter, hardly even moved in their seats. It was, Alison reflected grimly, rather like working in a tomb.

A little before noon, she finally called a halt. "I need to go back to my room for a while," she informed the others. "I need to do some thinking."

"You can't think here?" Frost asked.

"I want to lie down," Alison explained. "Humans do their fastest thinking standing up, but they do their best thinking lying down."

The Patri stirred in his seat. "It is stalling," he rumbled.

Alison turned to him, her mouth gone suddenly dry. There hadn't been a single scrap of doubt in that voice that she could hear. "I'm not stalling," she protested. "All I want to do is—"

"What do you mean, Patri Chookoock?" Neverlin cut her off, his eyes suddenly hard and cold.

"It makes the same moves over and over," the Patri said. He gestured toward the safe, his eyes never leaving Alison's face. "Today it does the same as it did two days ago."

"I'm checking my readings," Alison put in before Neverlin could say anything. "Some safes have floating codes and chron flippers."

"It is stalling," the Patri accused again. "It cannot solve the puzzle and thus seeks an opportunity to run away from it."

And out of the corner of her eye, Alison saw Frost stiffen.

She flicked her eyes toward him. But whatever it was she'd seen had instantly been buried behind an expressionless face. "With all due respect, I'm not going anywhere," Alison said. "I've got twenty thousand riding on this." She raised her eyebrows at Neverlin. "Forty if I can do it before Mr. Arthur finishes his Easter egg hunt."

Neverlin's eyes narrowed. "Look, Kayna—"

"Actually, I think we could all do with a break," Frost cut him off smoothly. "In any event, it is almost lunchtime. Kayna can eat in her room and take whatever thinking time she needs. When she's ready, we can all meet again. Is that acceptable?"

Neverlin had switched his narrowed-eyed stare to Frost. But he merely nodded. "Fine with me. Patri Chookoock?"

"If it is ever ready," the Brummga growled.

"She will be," Frost promised. "Come on, Kayna. I'll take you back to your room."

Neither of them spoke until they reached Alison's slave-level room. Alison walked inside; without waiting for an invitation, Frost followed. "Isn't it interesting how the human mind works?" he commented conversationally as he closed the door behind him. "I've been watching you for two weeks without a clue. And then, a single offhand comment from a fat, ugly lump with stuffed cabbage for brains, and suddenly it comes clear."

Alison held her breath. If he'd gotten a clean look at her in the Rho Scorvi forest . . .

"Running away." Frost leveled a finger at her face, his casual manner abruptly gone. "You're a deserter from the Malison Ring."

Alison's breath went out in a huff. Bad enough, but not as bad as she'd feared.

But definitely bad enough. "The what?" she asked. It might still pay her to play stupid.

It didn't. "Don't waste my time," Frost bit out. "Your hair's different—shorter and darker—but I remember the face from the newslist. You joined up about eight months ago, went through basic, then disappeared the week you were sent to your first post."

"All right," Alison said as calmly as she could. "I admit it. I got scared and ran."

"Oh, you didn't get scared," Frost said. "And you didn't just run. Because I also remember that your training camp CO reported there might have been a breach in his computer system during the six weeks you were there."

Alison grimaced. So she'd left a trail behind her on that job. Between the Malison Ring and the Whinyard's Edge, she wasn't running up a very good record here. "I was just trying to clear out my record," she said, letting a little tremor drift into her voice. "I knew I couldn't handle the job, and thought—"

"Spare me," Frost snarled. "I've had about as much of you as I can stomach."

"Okay, fine," Alison said, dropping the tremor. "Game's over. I'm not exactly thrilled by the company, either, if you want to know the truth. But you still need me."

"Maybe not as badly as you think," Frost said. "Like you said, the game's over. So here's what's going to happen. You're going back to that room—today—and you're going to open that safe."

Alison stared at him, her throat tightening. "I can't," she said. "I don't know how to deactivate the self-destruct bomb."

"Then you'd better figure it out, hadn't you?" Frost advised coldly. "Because if it goes off, the Patri will have you shot." He shrugged. "Either way, I'll be happy."

Across her back,Alison felt Taneem shifting position. Quickly, she put a warning hand on her shoulder. "Can I at least have an hour to think?"

"Sure," Frost said, opening the door again. "Take all afternoon if you want." He leveled his finger again. "But sometime before midnight tonight, you're going to open that safe." Stepping out into the corridor, he closed the door behind him.