Dragon and Slave

CHAPTER 17

Back aboard the Star of Wonder, the wiring for the purser's office security cameras had been hidden inside the walls. Here, in the middle of the Chookoock family stronghold, the designers had apparently decided not to be so fancy.

The wires from Gazen's camera ran along the outside of the office wall, snugged up close against the ceiling.

It was a place most intruders wouldn't have a hope of reaching without a ladder, Jack included. Fortunately, he had Draycos instead. By standing on Jack's shoulders, the dragon was just able to reach up to the wires. A delicate puncture with one of his claws, and the camera was out of the game.

The lock on the door itself was only a little trickier. With the help of a flat lockpick Jack had hidden in his other shoe, he had it open in under two minutes.

And with less than fifteen minutes gone since they'd sneaked out of Her Thumbleness's room, they were inside Gazen's office.

"Okay," Jack breathed, standing with his back to the door and giving the room a

quick once-over of his own. It looked clean, all right. Gazen definitely liked his privacy. "It should be downhill from here."

"Pardon?"

"It should be easy," Jack translated, crossing the room and sitting down in Gazen's chair. It was a very comfortable chair, soft and smooth and luxurious, and he found himself feeling a twinge of discomfort as he settled against the smooth material. He shouldn't be even touching something this nice, let alone be sitting in it.

He blinked, an ugly shock running through him. I shouldn't even be touching something this nice? What in space was that supposed to mean? Because he'd certainly touched fancier stuff than this. Way fancier. He could remember standing on a carpet once that would have cost Gazen's entire year's salary, in the middle of a room decorated with original da Vincis and Michelangelos and ancient Chinese urns. What was this nonsense about not being good enough to sit in Gazen's lousy chair?

Because he was a slave, that was why. And even in the short time he'd been playing that role, the whole slave mindset had wiggled its way into him.

Quietly, subtly, and a lot deeper than he'd realized.

Until now.

Back in the slave compound, he'd often wondered why none of the others seemed interested in escaping from such a horrible place. Greb and Grib he could understand—they'd grown up there. But that didn't explain the others.

Now, he was finally beginning to understand. Once a person got used to something, it became normal. Normal, and familiar, and in a weird way even sort of comforting.

You knew what the boundaries were. You knew what you could do, and you knew what everyone else could do. You didn't have to think, or plan, or take any real responsibility for your life. In spite of all the work, and all the drabness, in some ways being a slave was easy.

And apparently for most of those back in the compound, that was what mattered.

Deliberately, defiantly, he ran his hands along the arm of the chair, pressing his fingers hard into the material. He was not a slave, and he would not think like one.

"Your language seems overfilled with these odd figures of speech," Draycos murmured. "I sometimes wonder that you can find any rules in it at all."

"We didn't exactly sit down and map the thing out ahead of time," Jack reminded him, forcing his mind back on track. Giving the arm of the chair one last squeeze, he leaned forward and switched on Gazen's computer. "The next time we invent a language, we'll take better notes."

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it," Jack said, watching as the computer ran through its startup procedure. Still, to be honest, were the slaves back there doing anything worse than what he himself had done?

Because he'd stolen and conned and cheated people knowing full well that it was wrong. He'd taken the easy route himself, sitting back and letting Uncle Virgil tell him what to do.

So he had no business feeling superior to Lisssa and Maerlynn and the others.

In a lot of ways, he'd been a slave, too.

And he'd only had Uncle Virgil to keep him there. Not a laser-equipped wall and a few acres of armed Brummgas.

"You will be using your sewer-rat program, I presume," Draycos commented.

"Someday I must meet the creature it is named after."

Jack frowned down at what he could see of the dragon's head beneath his shirt.

That was the second time in as many minutes that Draycos had cut through some unpleasant thoughts with an odd and vaguely humorous comment. Was he getting nervous?

Or could he somehow be sensing Jack's dark mood and trying to nudge him out of it? "I'm sure you'd both be charmed," he said, hitching his chair closer to the keyboard. "And yes, that's what we're going to use. Unless you want to try slicing open the computer and seeing if you can sift all the right zeros and ones out of it."

"No, thank you," Draycos assured him.

The display finished its sequence and cleared to an impressive image of the Chookoock family mansion with the rising sun shooting rays of light across the sky behind it. "They don't think much of themselves, do they?" Jack muttered, peering down at the keyboard. It was all done up in Brummgan letters, naturally.

Carefully, making sure he got it right, he keyed in the first part of the sewer-rat sequence.

Nothing happened.

Draycos's head rose slightly from his shoulder. "When will something happen?" he asked.

"In theory, about three seconds ago," Jack said. He tried the sequence again, double-checking it as he did. Still nothing. "We got trouble," he told the dragon, calling up the computer's spec page. A triple column of Brummgan words scrolled down on top of the picture of the mansion.

Even with the alien words, one glance was all it took. "Great," he growled.

"This piece of junk isn't using a human operating system. It's running something Brummgan. Pretty old-fashioned, too, from the looks of it."

The dragon's head lifted higher, pushing the collar against the side of Jack's neck. "The sewer-rat trick works only with human-designed systems?"

Jack let his hands fall uselessly back into his lap. "You got it."

"Did you not consider this possibility? This is a Brummgan facility, after all."

"Sure, but Gazen is a human." Pushing back from the desk, Jack crossed his foot across his knee. A brief stab of pain ran through the thigh as he did so, a souvenir of one of Her Thumbleness's casual kicks. "Besides, who doesn't use human operating systems these days?"

The dragon's tongue flicked out toward the computer. "The Chookoock family, apparently," he said.

"Yeah," Jack agreed. Pulling out the hidden comm clip, he clicked it on.

"Uncle Virge?"

"I'm here," the computer voice came back. "Are you all right, lad?"

"I'm alive," Jack said sourly. "For a slave, that's doing pretty good. Where are you?"

"Still at the Ponocce Spaceport," Uncle Virge said. "I've been putting Gazen's credit line to use fixing some of the damage and deterioration we've collected over the past few months."

"I hope you aren't letting them take apart anything vital," Jack warned. "We may need to get out of here on a minute's notice."

"Don't worry, I'm not," Uncle Virge said. "I hope that means that this call is good news."

"Actually, it's kind of mixed," Jack said. "The good news is that I'm in Gazen's office. The bad news is that the Chookoock family's using an old Brummgan operating system."

"How old?"

"Uh—" Jack peered at the complicated script, trying to find the registration date.

"There," Draycos said. A foreleg rose from the back of Jack's right hand, an extended claw pointing to the lower left part of the display. "If I read correctly, that would be... forty years ago."

Uncle Virge whistled softly. "Forty years? I'm sorry, lad, but all the tricks I

know are for modern computers with modern operating systems. Not for something that came off the Ark."

Jack sighed. "I was afraid of that."

"What about other information sources?" Draycos asked. "Surely someone has broken into such systems in the past."

"Yeah, what about that?" Jack asked. "Any of Uncle Virgil's old friends ever work on Brum-a-dum? Or could someone have a file in a thieves' database somewhere?"

"I can look," Uncle Virge said, his voice tight. "But unless we're very lucky, I

don't think we'll have enough time to find anything."

An uncomfortable shiver ran up Jack's back. "Why not?"

"Gazen has set up a special slave auction for five days from now," Uncle Virge said. "The prize item up for sale is you."