Dragon and Judge

CHAPTER 4

In those first crucial seconds as the man's hand closed on her wrist, Alison tried her best to break free. But the man was a good eight inches taller and a lot of pounds heavier than she was. He also knew all the same tricks she did, and he clearly wasn't in any mood to be trifled with. A moment later, despite her best efforts, she found herself being hauled bodily down the street.

"Who are you?" she demanded, hearing her voice crack with strain. "Let me go. Let me go."

The man ignored her. Alison thought about her Corvine, tucked away out of sight beneath her jacket. But she was pretty sure he would be ready for something like that, too. Clenching her teeth, trying to keep from getting dragged off her feet, she left the gun where it was.

It was probably just as well that she did. As the man pulled her into a cafe with a closed sign on the door, a second hard-faced man slipped out of concealment in one of the nearby doorways and followed them in.

The inside of the cafe was deserted. "What in Gringold's mother is going on?" Alison demanded as her captor dragged her to one of the back tables where they'd be less visible to the people passing by on the street. "Are you cops?"

"Got a news flash for you, buddy," the second man said as he frowned at Alison. He looked a lot like the first, except that instead of a bushy mustache he had wide muttonchop sideburns. "This is definitely not Virgil Morgan."

"No kidding," Mustache growled. He plucked the comm clip from her collar and slid the bag off her shoulder. Almost as an afterthought, he reached under her jacket and took the Corvine from its holster. Putting his palm against her chest, he shoved her backward into one of the chairs. "Morgan played it cute and sent in a stooge to pick up his goods."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Alison insisted. "That's my bag and my stuff."

"Where is he?" Mustache asked, sitting down in the chair facing her. Checking to make sure the comm clip was still off, he set it and the bag onto the table in front of him. The Corvine he tucked away inside his own jacket.

Alison had had plenty of time to get her puzzled look ready. "Where is who?" she countered. "I don't know any Morgans."

"Of course you don't," Mustache said. "You just happened to find a lockbox key lying there on the street."

"No, I went in and opened my own lockbox," Alison said.

"I don't think so," Mustache said. "I paid good money to be alerted when Virgil Morgan's box was opened. It was. You were the only one who left the bank." He picked up her comm clip. "You want to call Morgan and tell him to show or we kill you? Or would you rather I do that?"

"Okay, look," Alison said, feeling sweat breaking out on her skin. This was not what she'd signed up for here. "I don't know any Virgil Morgan. I'm a thief—okay? I tap into bank computers and find out which lockboxes haven't been opened for a while. Then I go in and clean them out."

"Right," Mustache said contemptuously. "And you just happened to pick Morgan's box first?"

"What first?" Alison countered. "This is the fifth box I've opened at that bank this week."

"And the manager didn't notice anything strange about that?" Sideburns put in.

"The manager's a Trin-trang," Alison said scornfully. "And the two tellers were Compfrins. They couldn't pick out a human face between them."

"So you've been here a week?" Mustache asked.

"Three weeks," Alison corrected. "I came in from Pintering on the Missing Link."

"You have a payment receipt, of course?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," Alison said. She did, too, since one of the first lessons her father had hammered into her was to always, always carry proof of having been somewhere else. "You want to see them?"

"Maybe later," Mustache said, looking at Sideburns again. "What do you think?"

"I think we should call the boss and see what he wants to do," Sideburns said, pulling out a flat, palm-sized UniLink. Punching a couple of buttons, he held it up to his ear.

Slowly, Alison looked around the room. A UniLink instead of a comm clip meant that the boss was off-planet, and that he liked the kind of privacy that a UniLink's heavy encryption provided. Whoever had accidentally sicced Mustache and Sideburns on her, it wasn't just somebody with a casual grudge against Virgil Morgan.

"Semaline, sir," Sideburns said. "We just had a ping on Morgan's lockbox . . . no, sir, it was a girl. She claims not to know Morgan, that she taps bank lockboxes for a living."

He listened a moment, then looked at Alison. "Empty your pockets," he ordered. "Everything on the table."

Alison complied, laying out her set of keys, her makeup kit, her wallet, her small multitool, and her pen and notebook. Sideburns gestured to the keys, and Mustache picked them up and sorted quickly through them. He paused a moment at the one Alison had showed the Trin-trang, then continued on. "No bank keys here," he reported when he'd reached the end.

"How'd you open the box?" Sideburns asked.

"How do you think?" Alison retorted. "I picked the lock."

"Right in front of them?"

"I'm good at what I do."

"She says she picked it," Sideburns relayed. Again he listened a moment, then gestured to the wallet. Mustache tossed it to him, and he opened to the ID. "Alison Kayna," he read aloud. "No, sir, not to me."

He looked at Alison. "He wants to know if you do anything besides simple lock picking," he said.

Alison shrugged. "Sure. Combinations, time-beats, freeze-darks—pretty much the whole range."

"Let's find out." Sideburns glanced around, pointed at a half-curtained doorway leading to the cafe's back room. "There'll be a safe somewhere back there. You're going to open it."

Alison didn't miss a beat. "Oh, no, you don't," she said darkly. "I know how these little games work."

"What, you think we're cops?" Mustache scoffed.

"I'm not doing it," Alison said firmly, folding her arms across her chest. "And you try to repeat what I just told you and I'll flat-out deny it. You cops are all alike."

Mustache gave a theatrical sigh and dropped his hand to his side.

And suddenly there was a gleaming pistol six inches from Alison's face, pointed squarely between her eyes. "Listen to me, little girl," he said quietly. "You're, what, fifteen?"

"Fourteen," Alison managed between suddenly dry lips. In that single heartbeat she was back on Rho Scorvi again, fighting for her life.

"Do you want to live to reach fifteen?" Mustache asked. "The boss wants the safe open. You're going to open it."

Alison's pulse was thudding in her throat, her arms and legs starting to tremble, her stomach wanting to be sick.

Then, like a slap across the face, something slid subtly across her skin beneath her shirt . . . and in that instant, the terrible feeling of helplessness vanished.

Because she wasn't alone. She had Taneem. And if the young K'da female wasn't nearly as well trained as Jack's own poet-warrior friend, Alison had seen enough of Taneem's abilities to know the kind of help she would be in a pinch.

She took a careful breath, rubbing her shoulder gently as if massaging a stiff muscle. Taneem took the hint and subsided. "All right," she said. "For five hundred."

She had the satisfaction of seeing Mustache's eyes widen slightly. "What?"

"Five hundred," Alison repeated. "I know the law. If you pay me to commit a crime, it's entrapment and you can't charge me."

"This is not—"

"Give her the frinking money," Sideburns snapped.

Glowering, Mustache put his gun away and pulled out his wallet. "Two hundred up front," he growled, dropping the bills on the table in front of her.

"All right," she said, forcing calmness into her voice as she stood up. She'd convinced them—maybe—that she wasn't associated with Jack or Virgil Morgan. But cracking safes wasn't really her area of expertise, not like it was Jack's. The whole thing could still blow up in her face. "I'll need my tools."

Mustache gestured to the items scattered around the table. "Help yourself."

Alison picked up her multitool and makeup kit. On the other hand, she would bet heavily that her collection of gadgetry was a lot more impressive than anything Jack had.

The safe was in a tiny office, tucked away beneath a cluttered desk to the right of the kneehole. It looked to be a typical low-end device: standard tumblers, with probably only a single-stage hazer to block audio intrusion. "Well?" Sideburns prompted.

"Patience is a virtue," Alison reminded him as she opened her makeup kit and pulled out the slender powder case.

"What's that?" Mustache asked.

"It's powder and powder applicator," Alison said, throwing him a scornful look as she snapped it open. "Don't you know any actual women?"

"What's it for?"

"It helps cover skin blemishes and imperfections—"

"I know what it's supposed to be for," Mustache snapped. "What are you going to do with it?"

"With the powder?" Alison asked, unscrewing the mirror set into the case. "Nothing." Setting the case aside, she held the mirror by the edge and squinted through one of the pinholes in the back.

They were there, right where she'd expected: a trio of infrared lasers slicing invisibly through the space in front of the desk. "Got some pingers blocking access," she said, handing the mirror to Mustache.

He peered through the pinhole a moment, then handed it back. "Nice gadget," he said. "Must have set you back some."

"You just have to know where to shop," Alison said, setting down the mirror and pulling out her mascara tube. Unscrewing the bottom end, she wedged it into her ear. Then, being careful to avoid the lasers, she pressed the open end of the tube against the escutcheon plate beside the combination dial.

A soft hum of static issued from the earphone: the hazer she'd expected. She counted off the seconds as the tiny computer inside the tube analyzed the sound, patterned it, and phase-countered it.

Before her count reached thirty, the sound was gone. Single stage, all right. Leaning forward, again being careful not to brush the laser pattern, she got a grip on the dial and started turning.

Two minutes later, with the clicks from the tumblers as loud and solid as if the whole thing had been a basic training exercise, she had it.

"Careful," Mustache warned as Alison pulled the door open a couple of inches.

"I know," Alison assured him, stopping the door's swing before it reached the nearest of the laser beams. "I trust there's nothing in here you actually wanted?"

Mustache raised his eyebrows at Sideburns, who had been murmuring a running commentary on Alison's progress into the UniLink. "Go ahead and close it," Sideburns said. "We'll continue the conversation in the main room."

"Okay," Alison said when the three of them were back in the cafe proper again. "What now?"

"The boss is impressed," Sideburns said. "He wants to offer you a job."

Alison shook her head. "Sorry. I'm kind of booked at the moment."

"Interesting choice of words," Sideburns said, gesturing to the shoulder bag. "Considering we have some stolen property here with your fingerprints and DNA all over it."

Alison glared at him. "You said you weren't cops."

"We're not, but we don't mind turning scum like you over to them," Mustache said.

"Or you can listen to the boss's offer," Sideburns suggested.

"Like I have a choice?" Alison growled, suppressing a sigh. Jack had made it clear he didn't really want her on the Essenay. This was his big chance to get rid of her for good. "What's the job?"

"Basically, the same thing you just did," Sideburns said. "He wants you to open a safe."

"Where?"

"You'll see when you get there."

"Where?" Alison repeated. "I need to know up front how dangerous it's going to be."

Sideburns made a face. "She wants to know where," he said into the UniLink. He listened a moment, then nodded. "It's on Brum-a-dum."

"No police, no curious bystanders, no awkward questions," Mustache added.

"That helps," Alison said. Brum-a-dum was the planet where Jack had briefly been made a slave a couple of months back. Interesting that whoever was chasing Virgil Morgan had also picked that world to—

Her throat seemed to squeeze shut. Someone currently on Brum-a-dum. Someone looking for Virgil Morgan. Someone who desperately needed a safe opened.

Arthur Neverlin.

Oh, no, she thought, her heart suddenly racing. No no no no no.

"You'll get twenty thousand for doing the job," Sideburns went on. "Any equipment you need will also be provided."

And if that was Neverlin on the other end of the conversation, that meant the safe had to be one of the ones from Draycos's advance team, containing the rendezvous data for the main fleet. The information Neverlin needed if he was going to destroy the refugees.

The same information Jack and Draycos needed if they were going to save them. "Must be a tricky safe," she managed.

"Very tricky," Sideburns agreed, his voice darkening. "I trust you weren't going to try to talk up the price?"

That had, in fact, been exactly what Alison had been planning to do. It would be expected of a professional thief.

But one look at Sideburns's face and she changed her mind. "Twenty is fine," she said. "But I also want private passage away from there when I'm done, someplace like Capstone or Glitter. Brum-a-dum isn't a place I want to get stuck on."

An actual, real smile touched Sideburns's lips. "I don't blame you," he said. "Don't worry, they'll make sure you get out of there."

Alison felt a shiver run through her. Yes, they'd get her off Brum-a-dum all right.

But not to some nice, safe, civilized world. More likely to some nice, quiet, lonely grave. "Okay, it's a deal," she said. "How do I get there?"

For a minute, Sideburns listened to the UniLink, his forehead creased with concentration. "Yes, sir," he said. "Yes, sir. Don't worry—we'll be there."

Shutting off the device, he put it away. "The boss has a ship he can divert this way," he told Mustache. "It'll be in the system in four hours—I've got the coordinates for a quiet rendezvous."

"Fine." Mustache pointed at the shoulder bag. "What about this?"

"Might as well send it along," Sideburns said. "Unless it's full of money."

Mustache opened it and peered inside. "Old newspaper and magazine clippings, copies of bills of lading and invoices, and a few fuzzy photos," he reported, sifting through the contents. "And a couple of data tubes. No money."

"In that case, send it along," Sideburns said. "The boss might like to see what Morgan's been hiding all these years."

Mustache handed the bag to Alison. Looping the strap over her shoulder, she scooped up the rest of her personal belongings from the table and stuffed them back into her various pockets. She reached for her comm clip—

Mustache's hand got there first. "I'll take this," he said. He started to put it in his pocket, then paused. "Let's check, shall we, just for the fun of it?" Clicking it on, he held it to his own collar. "Hello, Virgil?"

Alison held her breath. But from the wry pucker of Mustache's lips she could tell that Uncle Virge had anticipated this possibility. "I see you like classical music," he said. "Beethoven, isn't it?"

He handed the comm clip to her. Alison held it against her collar, to find that Uncle Virge had piped in the feed from one of Semaline's music broadcasts. "Schubert, actually," she said, starting to fasten it back on.

"Don't bother," Mustache said, taking back the clip and shutting it off again as he put it into his pocket. "There won't be any news or music broadcasts for you to listen to along the way."

"Come on, girl," Sideburns said, gesturing toward the door. "You're in the big time now. Don't want to keep them waiting."

Alison shivered. "No," she murmured. "Of course not."