Dragon and Judge

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.