Dragon and Slave

CHAPTER 3

The windows on the street side of the gatekeeper's house were dark when Jack arrived. It looked like everyone had already gone to bed, but he took the time to walk around the entire block first just to make sure.

All the windows were dark, all right. And at nine o'clock. "They sure roll up the walkways early around here," he muttered to Draycos as he stopped in the shadow of a bushy tree.

"Pardon?"

"They close down shop and go to bed," Jack explained, eying the gatekeeper's house. So far he hadn't seen or heard anyone, not even on his walk around the block.

But they were there. He could feel it in the prickling of his skin. Gazen and his people were watching to see just how good a thief this kid was.

And if they decided he was good enough, they would buy him.

Not hire him, like he and Uncle Virgil had sometimes been hired to break into safes. Not even indenture him, like the Whinyard's Edge mercenaries had.

They would buy him.

He shivered. On the human-controlled Internos planets, slavery had been banned long ago. But on Brum-a-dum, as well as on many other worlds in the Orion Arm, it was perfectly legal. In some places, it was even common.

He hated this, he decided suddenly. It was one thing to sit in the cozy comfort of the Essenay's dayroom concocting grand and complicated schemes. It was something else entirely to be standing here a few minutes away from becoming a

slave.

Or, if he failed the test, those same few minutes away from being dead.

But he had no choice. That brief look from space had shown there was no other way into the Chookoock estate, at least not without a couple of divisions of StarForce Marines. The only way in was to be invited.

For a fourteen-year-old thief, this was the only way to get that invitation.

"What is a consular adjunct?" Draycos asked.

Jack frowned. "A what?"

"There," Draycos said, and Jack felt the dragon's tongue slide across his collarbone toward the house he was standing in front of.

He turned to look. Like the rest of the houses in the area, it had the darkened windows of a place that had shut down for the night. But on a decorative post by the front walkway was a small glowing sign: INTERNOS CONSULAR ADJUNCT

DAUGHTERS OF HARRIET TUBMAN

"You got me," Jack said, frowning at the sign. "Some kind of official Internos office, I guess. But I don't know what an adjunct is. Or what a Harriet Tubman is, either."

"Why would an Internos office be placed so close to a slave dealer's territory?"

Draycos asked. It wasn't easy for a whisper to sound suspicious, but the dragon managed it without any trouble. "You told me the Internos does not condone slavery."

"It doesn't," Jack said. "Keep your voice down, will you?"

"I am sorry." The dragon didn't sound sorry, but he did lower his voice.

"Could the Daughters of Harriet Tubman be a pro-slavery faction?"

"I've never heard of any pro-slavery factions in the Internos," Jack told him.

"Look, can we skip this until we get back to the ship? We've got a job to do."

"Of course," Draycos said, sounding subdued. "My apologies."

"Okay." Jack turned back to the gatekeeper's house, slipping his backpack onto one shoulder and pulling out what looked like a portable music player. "Let's do it."

The house was surrounded by a modest lawn consisting of tall, cactus-like plants rising up out of a tightly meshed, clover-like ground cover. A quick scan with the sensors in the music player showed that there were no field-effect or laser-grid alarm systems guarding the surface of the lawn. It took a more cautious, step-by-step check to make sure there were no hidden tripwires or pop plates lurking underneath the clover itself.

But the lawn was clean, and he made it across without trouble. "I presume we are not going to try the front door?" Draycos murmured as Jack slunk along the side of the house toward one of the rear corners.

"Not the front door, the back door, or the side door," Jack agreed, still watching for tripwires as he edged his way along. "See that second-floor bay window up there?"

"The window that sticks out from the wall?"

"Right," Jack said. "The species profiles say that Brummgas like to soak in their bathtubs for hours at a time, staring out a window and thinking whatever deep thoughts Brummgas have at a time like that. Probably, they mostly wonder where the soap has gotten to."

"We wish to enter through his bathing room?"

"It beats going through a bedroom window and landing on someone trying to sleep," Jack pointed out, crouching down and checking his bearings. He was right under the edge of the bay window. Perfect. "I did that once," he added. "I thought he and I were going to have a joint heart attack right there."

Tucking the music player back inside his pack, he pulled out a pair of six-inch-long cylinders. Each cylinder had what looked like a suction cup at one end and a thin, four-foot-long rope wrapped around it ending in a loop-stirrup.

Officially, these things were mountain-climbing tools called step-lifters, designed to help a climber work his way up smooth cliff faces.

In Jack's business—his former business, that is—they were known as bootstraps, and had been adapted for less innocent climbing purposes.

He unwrapped the ropes and got his feet snugged into the stirrups. Holding the cylinder in his left hand horizontally, he lifted it a couple of feet up the wall. The attached rope pulled his left leg up as he did so, rather like a marionette's string. He pressed the cylinder end firmly against the wall, and there was a faint hiss as the suction cup secreted quick-set glue and locked itself in place. Pulling down on the cylinder with his hand as he pushed down with the foot in the stirrup, he rose a couple of feet up the side of the wall.

Balancing on the stirrup, he lifted the cylinder in his right hand a couple of feet higher than the left-hand one and pressed it against the wall. The glue cup attached, and he again pulled himself up to its level. That left his left-hand cylinder down at about waist height. Pressing the release, he snapped the glue cup off, leaving it fastened to the wall. Another glue cup popped out of the cylinder from behind to take its place; lifting the cylinder and his left foot, he fastened it to the wall again and continued up.

The disadvantage of the bootstrap was that it left a trail of glue cups pointing straight at the thief's entry point. The saving grace was that, most of the time, Jack was long gone by the time anyone was awake enough to notice them.

The bay window consisted of small panes of plastic set into a spiderweb framework made of curved bars of metal-clad hardwood. The two outer sections of the window could be opened for ventilation, though they were currently locked shut.

There were also three separate alarms on the window. One was on each of the movable sections, guarding against unauthorized opening from the outside, while a third protected against breakage of any part of the window.

Again, no problem. A quick but careful wiring of the metal edges of the framework to another of Uncle Virgil's gadgets, and the breakage alarm was history. From his backpack, Jack retrieved a tube of goop whose label identified it as antibiotic first-aid cream. Attaching another glue cup to a strategically located window segment, he unscrewed the tube and squeezed a thin line of the stuff around the edges.

The acid ate silently through the plastic, sending up thin tendrils of brown smoke as it went. Crinkling his nose against the stink, Jack hung onto the wall like a giant spider and waited. The acid finished its work, and Jack pulled the section free. Easing a hand inside, he disabled the alarm on the nearest window section. Then, releasing the catch, he pulled the window open and squeezed through.

As he'd predicted, he found himself easing himself down into a wide, deep bathtub designed to look and smell like a Brummgan swamp. The tub was empty, fortunately, though he made sure to hang firmly onto the edge as he crossed, in case it was still wet and slippery.

The bathroom door led, logically enough, into a bedroom. At the far end of the room, to one side of another window, was a bed built on the same scale as the bathtub. Even for a Brummga, Jack decided uneasily, this gatekeeper must be an unusually large specimen. Keeping a wary eye pointed that direction, listening for any change in the rhythm of the snoring, he stepped carefully out onto the thick bedroom carpet and began to sidle crab-style toward the bedroom door.

The office and safe, he knew, would most likely be on the first floor.

"Stop," Draycos murmured in his ear.

Jack froze in midstep. "What?" he whispered back.

"There—in the carpet ahead," Draycos said, his voice so faint it couldn't have been heard more than two inches away. "A glint of metal."

Jack frowned, his foot still raised. What in the world was the dragon seeing?

And then he spotted it. A glint of metal, all right, resting along the top of the carpet.

A tripwire?

Carefully, he set his foot back onto the floor. Just as carefully, he eased down into a crouch for a closer look.

It was a tripwire, all right. In fact, it was a set of five tripwires, running not quite parallel to each other along the floor, directly across the path from the bathroom to the bedroom door.

Jack smiled tightly. No one put tripwires in their own bedroom. Not even Brummgas were that stupid. This had to be something Gazen had thrown together in the half hour since making his deal with Uncle Virge. A bonus challenge, something the average thief would never expect.

Luckily for Jack, he wasn't an average thief. Stepping carefully between the wires, he continued on.

The doorknob was gimmicked, too. A fairly sloppy job, really; but then, Gazen hadn't had that much time to play with.

No sonics or laser-grids or field-effect alarms greeted him as he eased the bedroom door open. Stepping out into the corridor, he closed the door silently behind him and headed for the stairs.

He ran into three more alarms along the way, including two motion detectors and another set of tripwires. Now that he knew the score, though, he spotted them easily and had them neutralized in a couple of minutes.

The safe was "hidden"—though Jack hesitated to even use that term—behind a decorative wooden slab mounted on the wall. One end of the slab held a Brummgan-style clock, with all twenty-six hours of their day marked off, while the other sported a dozen military-style ribbons.

Gazen had missed a bet: the slab itself wasn't wired. Either the slavemaster had run out of time to set his booby-traps, or else he hadn't expected Jack to get this far.

The safe was a standard keypad type, thought by many to be impossible to break into. Not exactly a piece of cake, but hardly a plate of stale cabbage, either.

Pulling out his equipment, Jack set to work, resisting the urge to see how much of Uncle Virge's promised half hour he had left. He wasn't supposed to know about the deal, after all, and if Gazen noticed him looking at his watch he might wonder why.

Maybe that had been the real reason for putting all those extra alarms in the gatekeeper's bedroom and hallway, in fact. Maybe Gazen wasn't so much worried about testing Jack's abilities as he was in trying to cheat Uncle Virge out of that extra ten thousand per minute.

If that was his goal, the safe itself was going to be a disappointment for him.

It might look like a top-class system, but under a spark-catcher stethoscope it turned out to be as electronically noisy as any Jack had ever cracked. Less than five minutes after he started, he set down his equipment, worked the handle, and swung the safe door open.

And as he did so, the darkened room suddenly blazed with light.