Dragon and Judge

But for Jack to have come from this kind of heritage was a twist he'd never expected. "That's incredible," he murmured. "How could Uncle Virgil have kept such a secret from you all these years?"

"Easily," Jack said, still sounding a little dazed. "All my book learning came from the Essenay's computer." Beneath his flattened body, Draycos felt the boy's muscles tighten again. "Essenay. 'S and A.' Stuart and Ariel."

"Exactly as Alison suggested back on Rho Scorvi," Draycos reminded him.

"I'm sure she'll love hearing she was right about that," Jack said. "I wonder what my real last name is. Anyway, like I was saying, everything I ever learned about the Judge-Paladins came from the Essenay's computer. It would have been easy enough for Uncle Virgil to delete any pictures from the ship's encyclopedias."

"Yes," Draycos murmured. "I know you've mentioned Judge-Paladins before, I believe in conjunction with the ongoing slave trade. But you've never told me exactly who and what they are."

"It's not a secret," Jack said, turning the hat over in his hands. "They were the Internos answer to the lack of courts and proper judges in some of the less populated worlds. Kind of like the old circuit riders they used to have back on Earth. They'd travel from planet to planet, region to region, dealing with whatever cases had accumulated since the last time they'd been there."

"What went wrong?"

Jack shrugged. "Nothing, as far as I know, except that there aren't nearly enough of them to go around. It started as just a human thing, like I said, on just the Internos worlds. But a lot of the alien governments in the rest of the Trade Association decided they liked the idea, and the Judge-Paladin project was extended to pretty much the whole Orion Arm. They fly around in these—"

He broke off with a snort. "In these really high-class ships with InterWorld transmitters and high-level P/S personality simulator computers," he went on. "Blast it all—Alison was right again. The Essenay really is way out of Uncle Virgil's class."

"Which leads to the question of how he acquired it," Draycos said.

And immediately wished he'd kept his jaws shut. There was one obvious answer as to how a thief and con man like Virgil Morgan might have done that, and at the moment it wasn't a possibility Draycos really wanted to burden Jack with.

Fortunately, Jack's own thoughts were already headed off in an entirely different direction. "Which leads me to the question of how come Alison's so smart," he growled. "Way too smart for someone who claims she's just running cons on mercenary groups."

"Perhaps there is more to her than we know," Draycos murmured.

"Bet on that, buddy." Jack looked up at the sky above them. "I just wonder what she's doing back there all alone with my ship."

"Uncle Virge answers to you, not her," Draycos reminded him. "What I don't understand is why your parents were not missed."

"I don't know," Jack said. "Maybe their schedule was random enough that no one could pin down where they'd been when they disappeared." He hissed between his teeth. "Or maybe no one tried very hard."

"You said the alien governments all approve of the program."

"The central governments do, yes," Jack said grimly. "But not all the local top hats like the idea of outsiders poking around their territories."

"Hence the Essenay's built-in weaponry?"

Jack shrugged. "I assumed that was part of the stuff Uncle Virgil added afterward, like the chameleon hull-wrap," he said. "But now; who knows?" He hunched his shoulders. "For that matter, I don't even know why I'm still alive."

The sky was growing noticeably darker, Draycos noted as he peered up through the opening in Jack's shirt. They should be heading back soon. "That poem your mother used to sing to you," he said. "The one that contained the unknown word?"

"You mean drue?" Jack asked. " 'We stand before, we stand behind, we seek the drue with heart and mind'?"

"Yes, that one," Draycos said. "I wonder if perhaps you simply remembered the word wrong."

"And you think it should be . . .?"

"Truth."

Jack looked at the hat in his hands. "We stand before," he began hesitantly. "We stand behind,

"We seek the truth with heart and mind.

From sun to sun the dross refined,

Lest any soul be cast adrift.

"We are the few who stand between

the darkness and the noontime sheen.

Our eyes and vision clear and keen:

To find the truth, we seek and sift.

"We toil alone, we bear the cost,

To soothe all those in turmoil tossed,

And give back hope, where hope was lost:

Our lives, for them, shall be our gift."

For a long moment they stood together in silence, and Draycos felt the subtle movement of Jack's shirt as a pair of teardrops hit it. "Jack?" he asked quietly. "Are you all right?"

"I hate this place, Draycos," the boy said, swiping a hand across his eyes.