Dragonback 03 Dragon and Slave (3 page)

"So you've decided to sell him?"

"Like you, I'm a businessman," Uncle Virge said. "I spent a lot of
time and effort training this kid. Why not get all I can out of my
investment?"

"Why not indeed," Gazen said dryly. "All right, I'll play along. I
presume I don't have to tell you what happens if I find out you're
running a scam here?"

"Not at all," Uncle Virge said. "In fact, I believe your enforcers
are already gathering outside my landing bay."

"Excellent," Gazen said with satisfaction. "Brummgas are as dumb
as dirt soup, but they're efficient enough with the things that matter.
Where's the boy now?"

"Approaching the gatekeeper's house from the direction of the
spaceport," Uncle Virge said. "But he's still at least half an hour
away. Plenty of time for you to set up observers."

"His instructions?"

"To find the access codes for getting into the Chookoock estate."

There was a long, stiff silence. "Really," Gazen said at last, his
voice suddenly silky smooth. "What for?"

"As I told you: a demonstration," Uncle Virge said.

"You sure you didn't have anything else in mind?" Gazen asked. His
voice was still smooth, only now it was the smoothness of a bed of
quicksand. "Like maybe selling any codes he happens to find?"

"If I wanted to do that, would I have called you up in advance?"

"Not unless you were stupid," Gazen conceded. But the darkness was
still in his voice. "What do you want for the boy?"

"Let's make it sporting," Uncle Virge suggested. "Fifty thousand
auzes, plus another ten for every minute less than half an hour that it
takes him to get through the house alarms, find the gatekeeper's safe,
and crack it. What do you say?"

"Fine," Gazen said. "Let's see how he does."

"Excellent," Uncle Virge said. "I'll be in touch."

There was a double click, and the connection went dead. "It
appears to be working," Draycos commented.

"So far, anyway," Jack said, grimacing into the darkness. "Let's
try not to disappoint him."

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 Internes 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:

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

"Why would an Internes 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 Internes 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 Internes,"
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.