by Timothy Zahn
"I understand the reasoning," Draycos said, a bit tartly. "That does not mean I have to enjoy my part in this."
The last kid had gotten off the bus. "Okay," Jack muttered, taking a deep breath and picking up his pace. "Nice and easy. Here we go."
And as the last boy in line walked through the white building's door, Jack closed the gap and stepped in right behind him.
He found himself in a large reception room with a pair of ornate desks at the far end beneath a huge wood carving of the Whinyard's Edge insignia. The woman who had escorted the teens in from the bus was seated at one of the desks, while an older gray-haired man sat at the other.
Off to either side of the main room, near where Jack had entered, were a pair of unmarked doorways. One of the doors was slightly ajar, and through it Jack caught a glimpse of the simple desk and filing cabinets of a secretarial work station. On the far back wall, behind the fancy desks and directly beneath the wooden insignia, was a door with a picture of a dagger painted on it and what looked like a motto stenciled around its edge.
The number of teens in the reception room was a surprise. Even huddled together like sheep the way they were, they filled the room all the way to the walls. The bus Jack had seen pull up must have been only the last of a group of them, possibly bringing in new recruits from several different parts of the spaceport. Apparently, the Whinyard's Edge was holding an even bigger recruitment drive than he'd realized.
Briefly, his mind flicked back to his confident statement to Uncle Virge that there were no major wars going on anywhere. He hoped he hadn't been wrong about that.
"Over there," Draycos murmured, just loud enough for Jack to hear over the soft buzz of conversation. The dragon's snout rose slightly from Jack's upper chest beneath his shirt, pointing to the left. "That boy has papers."
"Uh-huh," Jack said. More than just papers: it was an official looking document with a blue-paper backing sheet. A document that Jack himself didn't have.
This was not good.
Carefully, casually, he eased through the crowd and came up behind the boy. "Some place, huh?" he commented.
"Terrific," the other said, his voice trembling slightly. First time away from home, all right.
"Hey, buck up," Jack said, trying for a cheerfully encouraging tone he suddenly wasn't feeling anymore. The paper the boy was holding was an official indenture agreement.
On an official Whinyard's Edge form. With an official Whinyard's Edge signature on the bottom.
And suddenly Jack's plan of simply talking his way inside as part of the group wasn't looking so hot anymore.
"Yeah, right," the boy said. "Just like summer camp. How long you in for?"
"Probably the same as you," Jack improvised, searching the form for the correct number. There was a small bit of weight at his collarbone as Draycos lifted an eye up to look over the boy's shoulder. "Two years, right?"
The boy snorted under his breath. "I guess your folks must not need the money," he said, waving the form up into Jack's face. The name at the top caught Jack's eye: Jommy Randolph. "I'm in for five. Five whole years."
"Put a quark in it," a girl at Jack's other side growled. She was maybe thirteen, with jet-black hair and eyes that were so dark they were almost black, too.
"You talking to me?" Jommy demanded, his voice threatening.
"You see anyone else in here whining about life?" she countered.
"Maybe it's just that no one else gets it," Jommy said, taking a half step toward her. Clearly, he wasn't in the mood for criticism.
The girl stood her ground. "Or maybe it's just that no one else's glue is melting," she said. "You'd think they were drop-kicking you into prison or something."
"Oh, they're drop-kicking us, all right," Jommy shot back. "I had an uncle once—-"
"Quiet back there!" a deep voice snapped from the far end of the room, the words cutting through the buzz.
The buzz instantly evaporated. Grimacing to himself, Jack backed away from Jommy and the girl and started to ease his way to the exit. Uncle Virge had been right; this had been a lousy idea. Time to wave bye-bye and head for the tall grass.
"There is a guard," Draycos whispered.
Jack looked over his shoulder. There was a guard, all right, standing at attention between him and the door. A very big guard, in full uniform, with a very big gun belted at his waist.
So much for a gracious retreat. "I'm open to suggestions," he muttered, turning away from the guard.
"To your left," Draycos said. "The room with the open door."
"Good idea," Jack said, drifting in that direction. The buzz of whispered conversation was starting to come back now, despite the order for silence. Maybe they all thought it was going to be like summer camp. "We'll try for a window."
"You will not be going into the room," Draycos said. "I will need five minutes alone. Unfasten your sleeve."
Jack frowned. But he obeyed, unsnapping the cuffs of his leather jacket as he eased toward the slightly open door. Beneath his shirt, he could feel Draycos sliding along his skin, moving as much of his two-dimensional form as he could onto Jack's left arm.
Obviously preparing to spring out the end of that sleeve. Problem was, Jack couldn't see what that would gain them.
He had reached the door now, listening as best he could over the murmurs of the crowd. He hadn't spotted anyone in the room earlier, and he couldn't hear anyone in there now. But that didn't prove anything. They would just have to gamble that the office was indeed empty. "Ready?" he whispered.
Draycos's affirmative was signaled by a light claw-tap on his arm. Jack stepped to the office door, swung his left hand smoothly into the open gap—
And with a sudden brief surge of weight, Draycos went three-dimensional as he leaped out through the end of the sleeve. Jack caught a flicker of gold scales as the dragon dodged out of sight behind the door, and then was gone.
Keeping his movements smooth, Jack dropped his arm back to his side and kept moving. No startled screams came from behind him; the office must have been empty after all.
He continued his apparently aimless wandering along the edge of the crowd, trying to figure out what Draycos had in mind. Was he planning on going out a window and jumping the door guard from behind? Jack had seen the K'da poet-warrior in action, and knew he could pull it off.
But going outside and coming in again would mean showing himself on a busy street. Surely he wouldn't do that. Not unless they were desperate. They weren't that desperate yet, were they?
The minutes ticked by. Jack stayed near the back of the crowd, occasionally wandering around some more so that it wouldn't look suspicious when he eventually returned to the office. The guard at the door stayed put, and no golden-scaled dragon suddenly appeared from the doorway behind him.
Slowly, the crowd shrank as the teens were processed and disappeared through the dagger-decorated door. Slowly; but still too fast for Jack's comfort. Already the back of the group had pulled away from the area around Draycos's office. That meant that when Jack went back to retrieve his companion, he would no longer have people standing all around to help mask his movements.
Too bad he hadn't known any of this was coming. Aboard the Essenay he had a whole collection of time-delay firecrackers designed for use as diversions. Too late now.
In the old days, Uncle Virgil would have been right there beside him, ready to jump in with an improvised change of plans. But then, in the old days he and Uncle Virgil never had any life-and-death situations hanging over them. They never had the fate of two entire species depending on whether they could pull off some scam or theft. All they'd ever had to worry about was closing a deal, or popping a safe, and then getting out before the cops arrived.
How had he gotten himself into this, anyway?
Jack looked around the room at the other kids, feeling his throat tighten. He knew the facts of how this had happened, of course. How he'd bumped into the ambushed K'da/Shontine ship and found Draycos dying amid t
he wreckage. How they'd escaped from the people who had attacked Draycos's people, and gone on to solve the frame-up that Jack had been hiding from in the first place.
But in the old days, that would have been the end of it. Uncle Virgil would have calmly and cheerfully gone back on his promise to help Draycos find the people who had attacked him. He would have kicked the dragon out to fend for himself, and he and Jack would have flown off to get on with their lives. Nice, neat, and very simple.
So what was Jack doing here? Draycos had already said he wouldn't force himself on a host who didn't want him. Why didn't Jack simply dump him on StarForce like Uncle Virge wanted?
Was it because he'd made Draycos a promise? Could this K'da warrior-ethic thing actually be starting to rub off on him?
He hoped not. He desperately hoped not. It was all well and good for Draycos to be strong and noble—he was an adult, and he'd been trained for that sort of thing. But Jack was only fourteen years old, and very much alone in the universe. There was no way he could deal with the complications a K'da warrior ethic demanded of a person.
More to the point, he didn't want to deal with them. Life was hard enough without making it any harder.
Draycos's five minutes were up. As casually as he could manage, Jack strolled back to the office door.
He reached it and turned to lean his back against the jamb, gazing blankly out at the crowd. As he did so, he dropped one hand to his side and scratched gently against the wood.
From inside came an answering scratch. Good; Draycos was ready. Now if only the guard over by the exit could conveniently be looking somewhere else.
He wasn't. He was staring straight at Jack, a very unpleasant look on his face.
Jack let his eyes drift away, trying hard to look as innocent as a newborn kitten. It looked like he was going to have to do this right under the guard's nose.
Okay. No problem. Bracing himself, hoping the dragon really was ready, he turned around suddenly as if startled and leaned his head slightly into the office. As he did so, his right hand dipped into the open doorway—
The sudden weight on his palm nearly toppled him over onto his nose. Fortunately, it disappeared almost immediately as Draycos flattened himself into two-dimensional form onto Jack's skin and slithered up his arm beneath his shirt. Jack regained his balance and turned back around.
And was suddenly hauled nearly off his feet by the front of his jacket.
The door guard was no longer at the door. He was standing right in front of Jack, a fistful of Jack's jacket clutched in his hand.
And the unpleasant expression had become downright ugly.
Chapter 3
"What do you think you're doing?" the guard demanded. His voice was surprisingly quiet, almost civilized. It made the glare on his face even scarier by contrast.
"I thought I heard something," Jack said, trying to sound nervous and flustered. It didn't take much acting. "Like there was someone in there."
"So?" the guard demanded. He turned his hand a little, twisting the wad of jacket in his grip. "What's it to you?"
Jack would have thought the conversation was quiet enough to have escaped notice. He was wrong. "Sergeant?" the deep voice called from the other end of the room.
"Got a candidate here for an Intelligence assignment, sir," the guard called back. "Caught his nose where it wasn't supposed to be."
"Bring him," the voice ordered.
The guard let go of the front of Jack's coat, shifting his grip to the back collar, and quick-marched him across the room. The crowd of teens magically parted in front of them, leaving a clear path to the two desks.
Jack hadn't yet had a good look at the man at the second desk. Now, as the guard shoved him forward, he saw that the other was younger than he'd first thought. He was probably no older than his late twenties, though the gray hair made him seem twice that age. His expression was cool and thoughtful as he watched Jack approach. His collar insignia was that of a lieutenant; the small nameplate over his right shirt pocket read BASHT.
He waited until Jack had been deposited directly in front of him before speaking again. "Name?" he asked.
"Jack Montana," Jack said, pulling out the fake ID he'd put together aboard the Essenay. "From Carrier," he added, holding it out.
Lieutenant Basht made no move to take the card. "What was the commotion about?"
Jack swallowed. "I thought I heard a noise in there," he said. "I just looked in, just for a second."
"He didn't just look in," the guard insisted. "He had his hand inside the door—"
Basht silenced him with a glance. "You always investigate noises in places you have no business being?" he asked.
"It's my uncle," Jack explained hesitantly. "He told me once about a mere group that liked to hide soldiers in their recruitment centers. They'd pop out suddenly and start shooting."
A murmur of reaction went through the teens behind him. Basht's face didn't even twitch. "No reputable mercenary organization would ever do a thing like that," he said in a precise voice. "We don't waste people for no good reason."
"They figured anyone who was fast enough to duck had what they were looking for," Jack said, making his voice tremble a little. "The rest weren't worth the effort to train."
For a long moment Basht stared up at him in silence. Jack dropped into what Uncle Virgil used to call "little-boy mode": making eye contact with the man, cringing and letting his gaze drop away, then forcing himself to look at him again. It was supposed to make Jack look all innocent and scared, and to hopefully squeeze a little pity out of the opposition.
Problem was, he wasn't sure that was the effect he wanted here. It might get him off this particular hook, but it might also get him booted straight out the door behind him. That wasn't exactly what he and Draycos had had in mind.
"So," Basht said at last. "You looked in."
Jack nodded. "Yes, sir."
"Just looked in?"
"Yes, sir."
"Really," Basht said, his voice suddenly the temperature of a walk-in freezer. "Then how do you explain that your papers are halfway into the office?"
Jack blinked. "Excuse me?"
Basht pointed past Jack's side. "Those are your papers, aren't they?"
Jack turned around. Lying on the floor partway into the office, half visible from where he stood, was a neatly folded set of papers with a blue backing. The same blue backing, he realized, that had been on Jommy Randolph's indenture agreement.
Only then did he finally catch on. An office, a secretary's work station, neat stacks of blank Whinyard's Edge forms conveniently lying around ...
And a clever and resourceful K'da poet-warrior.
Score one for the dragon.
"I don't know," he said, fumbling at his inside jacket pockets as if looking for something that should have been there. "I guess ... I guess so."
Basht's eyes flicked to the side. "You," he said to one of the teens. "Go get it."
The teen hurried to the office and returned with the blue-backed paper. "Jack Montana," Basht read aloud. He frowned as he looked down the sheet. "Who filled this out, your baby sister?"
"My parents didn't have much school-learning," Jack improvised. Draycos's reading skills were improving rapidly, but his penmanship still needed a lot of work.
"Let's hope yours was better," Basht said. "Are you satisfied yet that we aren't going to shoot you in the back?"
Jack swallowed again. "Yes, sir. I'm ... I guess I was just..."
"Don't make excuses, Montana," Basht said coldly. "Edgemen do their jobs right and take the credit, or they do them wrong and take the consequences. There's no middle ground. Is that clear?"
Jack straightened up. "Yes, sir."
Basht watched him a few seconds longer, as if determined to make him wiggle as much as possible. Then he jerked his head fractionally toward the door behind him. "Go get your gear," he ordered.
For the first time in several minutes, Jack took a clear breath. "Yes, sir.
"
Behind the door a short corridor branched off in two directions, the doors marked by the interstellar symbols for male and female. Jack took the door to the right, and found himself in a large chamber filled with locker-room—style changing benches. Along one wall was a long supply counter with a dozen men working behind it. At the far end was a stack of footlockers. Fifty or so of Jack's fellow recruits were already gathered around the changing benches, in various stages of changing from their street clothes into light gray Whinyard's Edge uniforms.
"Welcome to paradise," Jack murmured to himself, and joined the line at the counter.
The supply men were very efficient. In a few dizzying minutes Jack had had a quick blood sample drawn and a full-body scan taken, been issued a dress uniform, boots, and four sets of fatigues, collected a field kit and operations manual, and had been pointed toward the stack of footlockers. Finding an open space at a bench along the back wall, he started to change.
He had stripped to his underwear, and was shaking out the uniform shirt, when he suddenly realized all conversation in the room had stopped.
He turned around. The whole room was standing frozen in place, from the new teenage recruits to the supply men behind their counter. All of them staring at him.
No. Not at him. At the K'da warrior wrapped around his body.
Jack felt suddenly sick. He'd gotten so used to having Draycos riding his skin that he'd completely forgotten about him. With his mind still focused on his near-miss out in the reception room, he hadn't even stopped to think about what he was doing.
Now, with a single act of unthinking carelessness, he'd ruined everything. Draycos's secret was gone, announced to the whole Orion Arm from a grubby mercenary changing room.
And as Draycos's secret crumbled, so did any hope for his people. Their enemies would silence him with ease now; and in five months the K'da and Shontine refugee fleet would arrive at their new home only to find a deadly ambush waiting.
They were dead. They were all dead. And Jack was the one who had killed them.