"Will there not be code-locks?" the dragon asked, ignoring the sarcasm.
"Like cold on ice." "Pardon?"
"They'll be all over the place," Jack translated. "But Uncle Virgil taught me a few tricks."
For a few minutes he worked in silence. The sewer-rat approach, as Uncle Virgil had called this technique, was nearly always effective with human-designed computers.
Trouble was, it was also pretty slow. Jack could feel sweat gathering on his forehead beneath his mask as he punched the keys. Sooner or later, he knew, the patrols out there were going to get tired of their search and come home. The computer chugged on, the sewer-rat code words chewing away at the defenses.
And then, abruptly, Draycos stiffened. "Footsteps," he hissed. "Someone is coming."
CHAPTER 8
For a second Jack hesitated. To give up now, when they were so close . . . "Where?" he hissed back.
"On the stairway at the near end of the corridor," Dray-cos said. "Moving slowly upward."
"Which floor?" Jack asked. "I mean, are they coming from first to second or second to third?"
Draycos's other ear twitched toward the cracked door. "First to second," he said. "And there is only one person."
Jack chewed at his lip. A single person implied a night watchman making his rounds. If he went through the second floor before coming up here to the third, there might still be time to find and pull the records he needed.
And then Draycos's tongue flicked out. "There is an odd odor," he said. "It tastes . . . unpleasant."
Frowning, Jack crossed to his side. "Let me smell," he whispered. The dragon moved away, and Jack took a careful sniff.
One was enough. "We're out of here," he muttered, closing the door all the way and heading for the window at the far side of the room. As he passed the computer, he shut it off. "Come on."
"What is it?" Draycos asked, hurrying to catch up with him.
"He's laying a sopor mist ahead of himself," Jack said, looking around. Unfortunately, this room hadn't come equipped with any handy extension cords. "A few more whiffs and you and I would have been snoozing blissfully away. You see anything to climb with?"
"No need," Draycos said, stepping to the window. With forepaws and muzzle he slid it open. "I will jump first and stand below. You may drop onto my back."
"You must be kidding," Jack growled, going back to the desks. The computers themselves were standard fold-top portables, with a whole spaghetti mix of cables connecting them to printers and scanners and other equipment. "I'd break your back. Or else miss completely and break mine. Help me get these cables loose."
Two minutes later, Jack had the cables knotted together. "It will be too short," Draycos warned, running an eye over the makeshift rope.
"It'll be close enough," Jack insisted, carrying the lumpy coil across the room and feeding one end out the window. "Here," he added, handing the other end to the dragon. "Hold tight."
There was no way he could slide down quickly, not on a rope with as many knots in it as this one had. Just the same, he went down as fast as he could manage. The watchman back there could burst in on Draycos at any time, and he probably had something a lot nastier than sopor mist in his arsenal.
But there were no shots from above, and none of the knots gave way, and a few seconds later he had reached the end. Draycos had been right; he found his feet dangling about six feet short of the ground. Bending his knees slightly, he dropped the rest of the way.
He'd barely landed when the collection of cables fell into a heap beside him. Draycos was right behind them, dropping into a crouch away from the tangle. "Anyone nearby?" Jack whispered.
The dragon's long neck turned back and forth, his green eyes glowing like a pair of control panel status lights as they probed the darkness. His tongue darted out, and his ears twitched back and forth like small, pointed radar dishes. "I sense no one," he said.
"Okay." Pulling off his bag mask, Jack tossed it to the breeze. It would have been nice to have its protection all the way back to the barracks, but he didn't dare risk it getting caught in some bush nearby once he finally threw it away. Grisko and his buddies would come hunting for the intruder soon enough, and marking which of the three barracks he had come from would be making it far too easy for them. He would just have to trust that Draycos was right about the coast being clear. "Let's go."
The trip seemed even longer this direction than it had going the other way. But again, there were no shouts or lights or other signs of discovery. Either they'd made it out ahead of the general alarm, or else Grisko had decided to play it cool. Draycos boosted Jack up to the window, then followed.
Three minutes later, undressed again, he was safely back under the blankets.
"What now?" the dragon murmured from his shoulder.
Jack took a slow, deep breath, listening to his heart thudding in his ears. That had been close. Too close. Uncle Virge would definitely not be happy with this one.
Especially since they hadn't even accomplished what they'd set out to do. "I don't know," he had to admit. "If we hadn't left that pile of computer cables on the ground, they might have figured it was a false alarm. No chance of that now, though."
"My fault," Draycos said, his whisper sounding subdued. "I am accustomed to thinking as a warrior. Not as—" He paused.
"A thief?" Jack suggested.
"Yes," Draycos said reluctantly. "I apologize. I know you are trying to move away from that part of your life."
"It's okay," Jack soothed him. "Actually, it's kind of nice to know I've got something useful to bring to this team."
"You are the reason I am alive," Draycos reminded him. "For my part, that is very useful."
"And you're very welcome for it," Jack said. "I just meant it's good to be something other than your personal RV."
"Pardon?"
"Recreational vehicle. Mobile home." Jack shook his head. "Skip it."
"Ah. I see."
"Anyway, don't worry about the cables," Jack went on. "Even if you'd thought to pull them back inside, leaving them tied together like that would still have been a dead giveaway. You sure didn't have time to put everything back the way it was."
"What will we do next?"
Jack stared at the dark underside of the bunk above him. "Depends on whether they nail us or not," he said. "If they grab me tomorrow, we wait our chance and try to break out."
"It would be useful in that case to have transport ready."
Jack peered down his nose at his chest. "Are you suggesting we ask Uncle Virge for help? You?"
"My feelings about Uncle Virge's life philosophy do not prevent me from working with him," Draycos said stiffly. He shifted a little across Jack's skin, like a K'da version of fidgeting.
"Even if Uncle Virge isn't exactly your sort of soul mate?"
"I do not know that word," the dragon growled. "The point remains. I am a poet-warrior of the K'da. My personal feelings cannot be permitted to intrude upon my work."
"Glad to hear it," Jack said, rather enjoying this. Draycos was always so calm and in control that it was nice to see him squirm a little for a change. "I'll make sure I have my comm clip along tomorrow in case we have to whistle him up."
"Assuming he is close enough to be of assistance."
"He is," Jack assured him. "Anyway, if they don't grab me, we might as well finish the last four days of training before we take off."
"We will not try again?"
"With them alerted?" Jack retorted. "Not a chance. We'll have to pick another mercenary group and try again."
"Then why not leave now?"
"Because it'll be easier to sneak out after graduation than before," Jack told him. "And because Alison has proved it helps if you're not starting from scratch."
"Perhaps," Draycos said, sounding doubtful. "We must be alert, though. They may decide not to take you immediately."
"Oh, I'll be careful," Jack said. "Trust me. I've had enough people do that slow vulture circle around me
, watching and hoping I'll make a wrong move. I know what it looks like."
"That will be helpful," Draycos said, not sounding entirely convinced. "You had best sleep now."
"Sounds good to me," Jack said with a sigh. The excitement and tension of their midnight excursion was fading, and his eyelids were suddenly feeling very heavy. "See you at reveille."
"Yes," Draycos murmured. "I wonder . . ."
With an effort, Jack propped open one eyelid. "You wonder what?"
"I wonder if perhaps I was not seen at all," the dragon said. "Perhaps it was something else that drew the patrols to the camp perimeter."
"Such as?"
"Perhaps the Essenay," Draycos said. "You suggested it would be close at hand."
Jack thought it over. It was possible, he had to admit. After five days of not hearing from him, Uncle Virge might well have gotten impatient and brought the ship in for a closer look. Without knowing the Edge's security system, he could have tripped some alarm in the process. "Could be," he told Draycos. "We'll ask him about it later." He lifted his eyebrows. "If it was Uncle Virge, you have my permission to never let him live it down."
"I was not thinking of how to place blame," the dragon said. "I was merely wondering if the ship might have taken damage."
Jack winced. "I guess we'll find that out soon enough, too."
CHAPTER 9
No one came storming into the barracks in the predawn darkness before reveille. No one came and grabbed him in the shower, or on his way to breakfast, or even at breakfast. Everything, in fact, settled nicely into the normal morning routine, from the rotten food to the blaring trumpet calling the recruits to the morning parade-ground maneuver.
It wasn't until they'd finished the first two drills that the routine was abruptly broken.
He spotted the officer angling across the field toward Grisko as the sergeant shouted out the commands that ended the second drill. Grisko set the recruits to attention and for a moment he and the officer talked quietly together. Then the officer turned to face the trainees, and Jack saw that it was Lieutenant Basht from the recruiting office.
"All right, listen up," Grisko bellowed across the ranks. "The following fall out and go with Lieutenant Basht: Brinkster, Kayna, Li, Mbusu, Montana, Randolph."
The sodden breakfast, which had already been lying heavily on Jack's stomach, suddenly picked up about a ton of extra weight. Heart pounding in his ears, he left his position and moved up through the ranks.
"Form up: two by three," Basht ordered as the six recruits reached the front. They did so, Alison and Jommy taking the front two spots. Jack stepped into place behind Jommy, with Rogan Mbusu falling in behind him. Brinkster and Li, both girls, took their places behind Alison.
Basht glanced over their formation, and for a second Jack thought he was going to make some snide comment. But he merely did a crisp military turn and strode off the field.
They followed, automatically falling into step with him. As they walked, Jack tried to puzzle out what was going on.
His analysis didn't get very far. Jommy and Alison were certainly the best of the bunch, which might imply this group had been singled out for special commendation. Problem was, he and Rogan were here, too, and neither of them was exactly near the top of the list. As for Brinkster and Li, Jack had noticed them along the way but neither had struck him as being either particularly good or particularly bad. So ordinary and unnoticeable were they, in fact, that he'd never even heard their first names.
Maybe it was a random sample, then. But with a hundred eighty boys and only twenty girls in the group, it didn't seem likely that a spin of the dart board would end up with three of each.
He was still trying to come up with some explanation when he suddenly realized that Lieutenant Basht was leading them straight toward the headquarters building.
Jack's heart had been starting to quiet down. Now, it picked up its pace again. So that was it. They'd figured out somehow that he was last night's casual visitor, and this whole thing was a smokescreen to get him away from the main group.
Beneath his shirt, he felt Draycos shifting around against his skin. Apparently, the K'da had figured it out, too. "Easy," he muttered a warning. The first rule Uncle Virgil had hammered into him when facing the authorities was not to do their job for them. You're innocent until they absolutely prove otherwise, he had told Jack over and over. And for ten minutes after that, too, he'd usually added.
There didn't seem to be any extra security hanging around the building as Basht opened the door and led the way inside. Jack rather expected him to take them straight upstairs to the records room, or maybe to split Jack off from the others and take him up there. To his mild surprise, Basht led them instead to a first-floor room.
To his even greater surprise, the room was filled with computer stations. The stations were unoccupied, but a thin man wearing colonel's insignia was standing near the front beside a double stack of sealed cartons. From the way he eyed them as they filed in, Jack guessed he'd been waiting specifically for them.
"Parade rest," Basht ordered as they formed into their two-by-three again. "Mbusu. Tell me about Sunright."
Sunright? Frantically, Jack searched his memory. Then he remembered: it was one of the worlds that had been listed in the Current Whinyard's Edge Missions section of their training manual.
And that was about all he remembered. If Basht called on him, he was going to be in serious trouble.
For a second it looked like Rogan was already there. "Uh—" the boy floundered. His voice quavered the way it always did whenever he had to talk to a superior officer, and Jack winced in sympathy.
Then the mental wheels seemed to catch. "Sunright, sir," Rogan said, his voice still trembling a little. "Third planet of the Gamma Lartrin system. Human colonized in 2115; ceded to the Parprins and Agri by the Treaty of Mcdougall in—"
"Lose the sniveling," Basht cut him off. "Kayna? What are the Edge's interests in the place?"
"The Edge has been hired by a Parprin daublite mining colony to protect its interests from a group of Agrist claim-jumpers," Alison said briskly. So she was on top of this, too. That figured. "Troops have been in position on the ground for the past sixteen months."
"Planetary bio stats?"
"Atmosphere is slightly oxygen-heavy, but well within human tolerances," Alison said. "Gravity is three percent less than Earth Standard; temperatures average two degrees cooler."
Basht nodded. "Who are we facing there? Randolph?"
"The Agri have their local military group," Jommy said. "Mostly volunteers. They've also hired units of the Shamshir mercenaries."
"Relative strengths?" Basht asked. "Li?"
Li seemed to shrink behind the smooth skin of her face. "I don't remember, sir," she said in a barely audible voice.
For a long second Basht's eyes burned into her, as if he was trying to set her on fire. Then, the glare flicked over her shoulder. "Brinkster? What's our strength?"
Out of the corner of his eye Jack saw the girl wince. "I think we have eight hundred troops on the ground, sir."
"You think?"
"We have eight hundred troops, sir," she said, more firmly this time.
"And the Shamshir?" Basht asked, his eyes finally focusing on Jack. "Montana?"
Jack braced himself to follow Li down in flames. But even as he opened his mouth to tell Basht he didn't know, there were seven rapid pinpricks on the back of his forearm, the urgent tapping of a K'da claw. "They have seven hundred, sir," he said, hoping he was reading Draycos's signal right.
He held his breath. Basht's eyes flicked again to Li, as if silently pointing out that she was the only one not up to speed here. Then he turned and nodded curtly to the colonel. "Sir."
He stepped back as the colonel came forward, and Jack let out a silent sigh of relief. He hadn't realized that during all those hours of study Draycos had actually been reading the manual over his shoulder. Lucky for him.
Over his shoulder. On top
of his shoulder. Whatever.
"My name is Colonel Elkor," the other introduced himself. "Late yesterday we received word from Sunright that the Shamshir have made a major blunder. We've been nibbling around the edges of their main InterWorld transmission station, so they've set up a new one. It's in a mountainous area marked as November Six on our maps."
He looked them all over, as if expecting them all to know where November Six was. Jack tried to remember if the Missions section had included a map of the Sunright area, but he couldn't.
"The convenient part about that is that we happen to have a forward observation outpost in that region," Elkor went on. "That means that if we put some specialized computer equipment in there, we'll be able to tap directly into all their off-planet transmissions."
He jerked his head back at the boxes he'd been standing beside when the group came in. "Those are the computers," he said. "You are now the computer operators. Any questions?"
There was a moment of uncertain silence. "Why aren't there any questions?" Elkor demanded. "You all already know everything?"
Jornmy lifted a hesitant hand. "Sir? I don't know anything about communications work."
"That's better," Elkor rumbled. "Fact is, none of you do. That's why you're here. Lieutenant Basht will be running you through three days of training that will include electronic eavesdropping, decoding, and some preliminary analysis techniques."
"Plus giving you all the access codes you'll need to work our systems," Basht added. "By the time you're done, each of you will be a fully qualified Whinyard's Edge systems operator."
"I presume none of you objects to a change in specialties?" Elkor said, lifting his eyebrows. "If you do, say so now. Plenty of other recruits marching back and forth out there for us to choose from."
The implications were obvious: stay here and do inside work, or go back outside and sweat. There was another silence from the group, this one a lot more positive than the last. "Good," Elkor said briskly. "The six of you are now designated as Technical Squad Tango Five Zulu. Carry on, Lieutenant."