Dragonback 05 Dragon and Judge (15 page)

"There will be no rehearing," the One snapped.

Jack took an involuntary step backward. The sudden blaze of fury
was something he hadn't seen in these people before. "I understand your
anger," he said, keeping his voice calm. "But there may be
circumstances—"

"The circumstances are that he killed four of the Many, that he
was found responsible for those deaths, and that he will remain a
prisoner until his death."

"I understand," Jack said. "But as Judge-Paladin it's both my
right and my duty to investigate these matters."

"And you have done so," the One said. "Your investigation is now
ended."

For a long moment he and Jack gazed at each other. "Very well,"
Jack said. "With your permission, I have yet to eat my midday meal."

"Then eat and be filled," the One said. His surge of anger was
gone, his voice that of the calm leader again. "More arguments and
claims await you this afternoon." With a nod, he brushed past Jack and
headed for the exit.

And with that, apparently, the conversation was over.

But that didn't mean the subject was closed, Jack promised
himself. Not by a long shot.

The click of the stateroom door being unlocked was their only
warning. "Quick," Alison muttered, thrusting out her hand to Taneem.

Fortunately, they'd had a lot of practice in this lately. The K'da
was up her sleeve and out of sight before the door even started to
open. Alison even had time to flip her notebook back from the lock
mechanism diagrams she'd been drawing to the pages with a far more
innocent journal entry.

"Morning," Frost said as he strode into the stateroom. Dumbarton
and the Brummga Mrishpaw were trailing behind him. "Enjoying your
vacation?"

"Oh, it's great," Alison said. "Especially the sun deck. Are we
going to be able to get another volleyball game going by the pool again
before the formal dinner?"

"Cute," Frost growled. "I've got a job for you."

"If it involves scrubbing decks, the answer is no," Alison warned.

Frost's lip twitched. "It involves opening safes."

Alison raised her eyebrows. Taneem had told her Frost had
suggested to Neverlin that she practice on the ship's safes. But it had
sounded like Neverlin had scotched the idea.

Apparently, Frost had decided differently. This could be highly
interesting. "What kind of safes are we talking about?" Alison asked.

"Let's find out," Frost invited, gesturing toward the door. "Grab
your stuff."

The safe was a big walk-in vault with a keypad lock,
unimaginatively hidden behind a panel at the back of a closet in one of
the staterooms. It was, fortunately, a brand Alison had often worked
with.

Even more fortunately, the closet's cramped space meant she could
work without Frost or anyone else staring over her shoulder. That meant
she could make a big show of the operation, dragging out the procedure
and making the whole thing look more complicated than it really was.

She worked her sensors first, spending a couple of hours taking
all the readings she could think of. After that, she took a few
duplicates, just for show. Then, sitting down comfortably with her back
pressed against the vault door, she sifted through the data while
Taneem did her K'da over-the-wall magic.

She sat there until Taneem signaled by lightly touching her back
with her claws. Then, declaring it to be lunchtime, she asked Frost to
have some food delivered to her and returned to her stateroom.

There, after making sure no one had planted any new bugs in her
absence, she and Taneem compared notes.

It was just as well that they had. Alison's own inspection had
given her all she needed to get the vault open. But Neverlin had added
an extra bonus to the vault that her sensors hadn't picked up.

There was a self-destruct mechanism on the inside of the vault
door, designed to incinerate everything inside the vault if not
properly disabled. It probably wouldn't be very healthy for anyone
standing just outside at that moment, either.

Fortunately, Taneem's scouting had also shown the key to disarming
it. The bomb was wired through the keypad, which meant that some
special code had to be entered before the actual unlocking code was
used.

At that point, the rest was fairly easy. Alison had already
assembled the MixStar deciphering computer packed into her belt and the
soles of her shoes and was running her data through it. All she had to
do to fix the self-destruct problem was make sure to wait until the
computer had extracted two separate codes instead of stopping with just
one.

She had the two codes and was halfway through her meal when Frost
returned. "You ready?" he growled.

"These things take time, Colonel," Alison said. She took another
look at his eyes—"Fortunately, I've had all the time I need," she added
hastily.

"Good," Frost said coldly. "Let's go."

Alison braced herself. "I want something in return."

Frost stopped dead in his tracks. Slowly, deliberately, he turned
back around. "What did you say?" he asked quietly.

"I want Morgan's papers back," Alison said, fighting to keep her
voice steady. "I'll trade them for getting the vault open."

His forehead wrinkled. "Why? What are they worth to you?"

"I don't know yet," Alison said. "That's why I want them back."

For a moment Frost gazed hard at her. Then, to her relief, he gave
a casual shrug. "Fine," he said. "Of course, my associate will probably
want to see them when we get to Brum-a-dum."

"Then he can ask me nicely," Alison said, trying to imagine Arthur
Neverlin asking nicely for anything. "Is it a deal?"

"Sure," Frost said. "You can have the papers as soon as you get
the second safe open."

Alison froze halfway out of her chair. "The
second
safe?"

"Think of it as practice," he said blandly.

Alison grimaced. "Just exactly how many of these safes
are
there?"

"Four," Frost said. "But I don't know if I'll want you to open all
of them. We'll see." He gestured. "You coming?"

Alison sighed. "Well, the volleyball game was probably off
anyway," she said. "Sure, let's go."

The rest of the operation turned out to be something of an
anticlimax. With all the careful prep work behind her, plus Taneem's
scouting, all Alison had to do was punch in the two codes the computer
had given her, twist the handle, and pull open the vault door.

"There you are," Alison said.

"Good work," Frost said, taking her arm and pulling her out of the
closet and away from the vault. "You can take the rest of the day off."

"Thanks," Alison said dryly. As if she had any other pressing
matters on her hands anyway. "Unless you'd like me to start on the
other safe?"

"Tomorrow," Frost said, stepping into the vault. "Dumbarton, take
her back to her room."

Neither Frost nor any of his men bothered her any more that day.
Alison and Taneem spent the time working on Taneem's safe-cracking
lessons, breaking only for dinner and a hot bath before bedtime.

And now that Taneem had actually seen the inside of a safe, she
seemed to catch onto the theory even more quickly than she had before.
In two days, when they reached Brum-a-dum, she should be ready.

At least, Alison hoped so.

The next day went pretty much the same as the previous one. After
breakfast Frost collected Alison from her stateroom, and with Dumbarton
and Mrishpaw in tow took her to another part of the ship. Her second
project turned out to be a small safe inside a desk in a very luxurious
office.

Like the vault, the safe was keypad-operated. Also like the vault,
it again took her the entire morning to run her tests and scans. The
safe's smaller size meant that Taneem didn't have as much room for her
over-the-wall trick, but she was able to see enough to confirm that
this time there were no booby traps. After lunch and the computer
analysis, Alison opened the safe, and was dismissed again back to her
room.

But unlike the previous day, this success came with an extra
bonus. Frost himself delivered Alison her dinner tray . . . and with
the food he brought her the shoulder bag full of papers she'd taken
from Virgil Morgan's lockbox.

Privately, Alison had expected him to go back on his promise once
he'd gotten his half of the deal. Perhaps he'd found enough of interest
in the two safes that he felt Alison had earned herself a small reward.

Now she just had to make sure her work paid off.

The bag itself was the obvious target. But because it was so
obvious, it would be the first thing Neverlin's people would check.

Fortunately for Alison, she had something a little more subtle.

It took her nearly half an hour, working slowly and carefully, to
slide one of the needles from her sewing repair kit into concealment
inside the edge of one of the larger pictures from Morgan's collection.
The transmitter's range was fairly limited, but as long as she was
within a few hundred yards she should be able to pick up the signal
just fine.

Back on Rho Scorvi, Frost had bragged about having exotic
technology that wasn't even on the market yet. Apparently, it hadn't
occurred to him that two could play that game.

Just after noon the next day, ship's time, they reached Brum-a-dum.

The trip in was like the trip out from Semaline, only in reverse.
The
Advocatus Diaboli
's pilot found a nice, out-of-the-way
orbit to park the ship in, someplace far outside the normal traffic
patterns. Then Frost, Alison, and the rest of the inbound group climbed
aboard a shuttle and headed in.

Once in atmosphere, they were routed to a regional-sized
entrypoint that, if Alison was deciphering the Brummgan script
correctly, was named Ponocce Spaceport.

They breezed through customs without even a token inspection.
Outside, a half-dozen cars were waiting, each equipped with a Brummgan
driver and armed guard wearing close-fitting helmets and armored tunics
done up in red, black, and white.

Frost led Alison to the first car, the rest of his mercenaries
sorted themselves out into the others, and they were off.

"Can't say I'm very impressed by this friend of yours," Alison
commented as the driver wove them in and out of the traffic. "Doesn't
he even have a landing pad big enough for that shuttle?"

"He's got room for thirty of them," Frost assured her. "But there
was a little problem with the defense transponder system a while back."

Alison nodded to herself. Jack, undoubtedly, and his little sneak
escape a couple of months ago. "Not a big problem, I hope."

"Not really," Frost said. "But the simplest solution was to just
shut down the transponders. That way, if anything tries to go over the
wall—well, let's just say nothing will make it more than
halfway
over the wall."

Ahead and off to the right, between the other buildings, Alison
could see glimpses of something tall and white. "Let me guess," she
said. "Laser antiaircraft defenses?"

"And flame-jet antipersonnel ones," Frost said. "Don't worry your
little head. We've got things covered."

Alison hid a grimace. So when it was time for her and Taneem to
make their break, they were apparently not going to be going over the
wall.

The bits of white Alison had seen turned out to be the outer
boundary of their destination estate. But instead of being just a
simple vertical slab, the wall was shaped like a breaking ocean wave,
with the bottom section angling inward while the top section angled
back out. The very tip of the top part curved over and downward, in
fact, curving nearly back up beneath itself, again exactly like a
breaking wave. The whole thing was about thirty feet high and appeared
to be made of some sort of hardened ceramic.

Which meant she and Taneem wouldn't be going
through
the
wall, either. They were, she noted uncomfortably, starting to run low
on exit options.

The estate's main entrance gate was as impressive as the wall
itself, and just as intimidating. It was made of more white ceramic,
with gold-colored metal straps that were probably mostly there to
impress visitors. Eight armed Brummgas were waiting in front of it, all
of them dressed in the same red/black/white uniforms.

The car stopped by the guards and each passenger showed an ID
card. One of the guards looked ominously at Alison after her failure to
do likewise, but he nevertheless waved them through.

The gate opened and they continued on into the sort of elaborately
designed and beautifully sculpted landscape Alison had expected. Half
turning, she saw that each of the other cars in their convoy was
undergoing the same ID check.

She also saw that the breaking-wave shape of the wall was
duplicated on its inner side. An overall X shape, then, with an
overhang on both sides to discourage trespassers and escapees alike.

Or maybe she was being unfair. Maybe the Brummgas just liked the
look of a frozen white ocean on their property. Offhand, she wouldn't
bet on it.

The house was also impressive, in a stone-faced mausoleum sort of
way. The driver stopped at the front door, and with another group of
Brummgan guards in attendance Alison and Frost went inside.

Standing in the middle of a huge foyer, glowering at their
approach, was Arthur Neverlin.

Alison swallowed hard as they walked toward him, Frost's hand
pressing against the small of her back to make sure she didn't dawdle.
"So here she is," Neverlin said as they came up to him. His eyes
flicked briefly to the bag over her shoulder, then back to her face.
"The little girl who's going to solve all our problems."

"Kayna, this is my associate, Mr. Arthur," Frost introduced her.
"Mr. Arthur, Alison Kayna."

"Really," Neverlin said. "How do you know?"