Dragon and Judge

"And give us a sense of the present, and point the way to the future," Jack finished for him. "Yes, I remember the spiel you gave Noy back in the Chookoock slave quarters."

"It was not a spiel," Draycos said stiffly. "The boy was ill, and I was trying to comfort him."

"I know," Jack said, his mind drifting back to that terrible time. At least these Golvins didn't seem to want him as a slave. "I wonder how he's doing."

"I'm sure he's fine," Draycos said. "He and the others had Maerlynn to look after them. Perhaps Fleck, too."

"Maybe." Jack took a deep breath. "Well, no point putting this off any longer. Climb aboard, buddy. Let's go see what the One Among Many wants with me."

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.