The Dragon Circle (2 page)

And away from Mum.

Useless making plans now. As long as the beacon sent its signal, the IMPs could find the O'Hara brothers and terminate their dreams. All that had kept the law away from here till now was finding the weird jump point.

“We have to leave,” he muttered.

He stared at the device again.

“We can't leave until the crystals regrow.” Konner launched again along the narrow access shaft at the extremity of
Sirius'
rim. At the next hatch he grabbed a handle and changed direction. One deft somersault put him into the largest cargo hold.

Strangely, the load of black market pearls remained undamaged, despite the wild maneuvers through which Loki had put the ship in escaping IMP patrols. Konner had added to the hold the antique computers and lab equipment that had been left behind by the original colonists of the planet. A wealth of information about the first colony and the civil war that destroyed them lay encrypted on the hard drives.

From the hold, he dove into the crystal room. A vacuum-inducing force field encased each of the monopole drivers. Nitrogen flooded the field, causing the green crystals to spit out electrons along the fiber optics to the red directionals. Six new directional crystals stood in sealed baths shaped to the exact dimensions of the finished crystal. The original seeds stood at the peak of the bath cage and grew down and out. Limited by the cage and the precisely measured minerals in the baths, the red crystals would stop growing when they reached the shape and size needed. Each would need a little polishing and tuning to finish them, but they could be used the moment they completed growing.

Each bath was connected by fiber optics to the king stone and thus to every crystal on the ship. The ship's power, navigational, and communication systems had to grow as a family in order to synchronize and propel the ship across the vast distances between stars. More than that, the king stone had to be connected to a mother stone at its place of origin in order to find its way around the galaxy.

Konner had disconnected the crystal drive from its mother stone upon entering this star system. Just as Konner and his brothers were out of contact with Mum.

They weren't going anywhere until he reconnected that dangling orange fiber optic lying just outside the crystal circle. But if the ship could not find its way home with the connection severed, the IMPs could not find them through the connection.

Except for the damned locator beacon he still held in his palm.

“Another week to finish growing,” Konner grumbled. “Another week for the IMPs to search for the jump point that should not exist but did.”

Another twist and rebound took Konner up the gangway to the bridge. He slapped the comm port even before he anchored himself in his chair.

The lights blinked furiously red for an interminable ninety seconds. Then they dropped back to normal black.

“Damn!” Neither of his brothers had an active communicator close at hand.

“We haven't got time for this!”

A quick sensor sweep showed the inner planetary orbits free of man-made objects other than
Sirius
. He hadn't time to search the vast distances of the outer planets for a tiny moving vessel.

He pounded his fist against the edge of his interface. The locator beacon dug into his palm.

He had designed the thing to survive the fire and ice and massive radiation of space travel. He needed more weight than he had access to to crush the thing.

Only the sustained heat of molten lava at the heart of the planet would fry the femto-bots inside the beacon beyond their self-repair capabilities.

A half smile crept across Konner's face. He had access to that molten core. If he dared.

Could he face the ghost of Hanassa on his own?

“Captain Leonard, sir.” Kat Talbot nearly squirmed with delight in her chair at the helm of Imperial Military Police Cruiser
Jupiter
.

Commander Amanda Leonard, captain of the
Jupiter
, glanced up from the screen full of reports she studied. She looked bored.

“Captain, I think I found it.”

“Found what?” Commander Leonard lost the bland vacancy in her eyes. She touched the screen in front of her own chair so that it corresponded with Kat's.

“The jump point, Captain.” Now Kat could not contain her excitement. “And the beacon.”

“Show me,” Leonard demanded. At the tone of her voice, the rest of the bridge crew keyed their own screens to share in Kat's discovery.

Lieutenant Josh Kohler, Chief Navigator and Kat's best friend aboard ship, flashed her a begrudging grin. They had a bet on this jump point. If she found it first, he would do her laundry for a week. If he beat her to the discovery, then she would sleep with him. Kat had no intention of allowing him to win the bet.

“Summon Lieutenant Commander M'Berra to the bridge, Englebert,” Leonard said to the communications officer. Kat figured she would want the second-in-command in on this discovery.

Lucinda Baines, the diplomatic attaché who had hitched a ride aboard the IMP cruiser, hastened to Kat's side. She bent her petite body over Kat's shoulder, resting her hands on the back of the helmsman's chair. Her perfume suddenly overwhelmed all other scents. The usual citrus smell of the recirculated air took on rotten overtones, as if it had spent too much time in waste recycling and not enough in the scrubbers.

Kat shifted as far away from the woman as her station chair allowed. Then she highlighted the anomaly her sensors had discovered with her electronic pencil.

“I don't see it,” Commander Leonard hesitated.

Kat brought up some new data. Commander Leonard's thick eyebrows raised as she digested a string of numbers and symbols that showed a femto's difference from normal space energy fluxes. In the past week of parking in deep space Kat, with M'Berra's help, had adjusted and fine-tuned the ship's sensors to detect smaller differences than any other IMP vessel could find.

And there was the beacon blaring through the tiny hole in space. If you only knew where to look and what to look for.

Lieutenant Commander M'Berra ducked his curly black head as he stepped onto the bridge. He suppressed a yawn. Other than that single sign that he'd just gone off a twelve-hour shift, he looked as refreshed and crisply fresh as he had half a day ago. He immediately went to his station beside the captain. Leonard briefed him on the latest development in hushed tones.

“Are you certain that is a jump point and not just a reflection of the normal radiation currents?” Commander Leonard was known as a cautious leader. Bets aboard
Jupiter
favored that she'd easily make full captain, and get a bigger vessel at the next review board.

“Captain, sir, the outlaws jumped from these exact coordinates to somewhere. That anomaly is the only indication of something
different
about this area. And I am getting a hint of the beacon frequency that was highlighted on the memo from Command Base.”

“Ms. Baines, do you have any objections to a further delay in delivering you to Annubis IV for your annual leave?” Commander Leonard asked.

“If the notorious O'Hara brothers disappeared from here, I have no objections to chasing them,” the diplomatic attaché replied. Her eyes narrowed and the planes of her perfect face became sharper. “Commander Leonard, do you have to be reminded that capturing those three is highest priority for all Imperial Military Police.”

Kat wanted to rear away from the menace in her tone.

Lucinda Baines, daughter of a planetary governor, granddaughter of an Imperial Senator, and great-niece of the previous emperor had a grudge against the O'Haras.

So did Kat.

“Inform Judge Balinakas that his services will soon be required,” M'Berra ordered.

Ensign James Englebert busied himself at the comm board.

“Prepare for jump,” Commander Leonard ordered.

“Aye, Aye, sir,” Kat replied with enthusiasm.

K
IM O'HARA stared at the pristine piece of dried pulp in front of him. He'd spent hours peeling layers of stringy wood fibers, soaking them, and finally pounding them into an approximation of paper. Each day he made a few new pieces. Each day he scribbled notes recording the day's events.

Nearly five months had passed since Kim and his brothers had landed—almost on their butts—on a planet where dragons were real and magic worked. He had filled nearly three pages of his primitive paper with a description of Iianthe, the nearly invisible purple-tipped dragon. He'd given up trying to bind his scribblings. He now had five neat stacks of the papers, each confined within a separate box made of the same fibrous wood. One for each month of their time shared with the Coros—the name the local inhabitants gave themselves.

He could have cleared some space on a reader and used it as a daily log. He wanted more. He needed a journal he could leave behind, as well as an alphabet and basic grammar. Reading was a precious gift. He did not agree with his brothers that they should forbid the skill to the Coros.
His
people. He had to create something for them to read and learn from.

Enforced ignorance might keep the local tribes from developing industrialization, but it would also stunt the growth of the civilization, stunt the minds and souls of people who deserved better.

Where to begin today? His mind spun with the facts of the harvest. Five acres of barley to cut tomorrow. Five acres of wheat threshed yesterday. Three acres of soybeans gathered and drying. The yield was bigger than he expected in all three fields.

Still, the harvest should stretch to feed them all if no more outcasts joined the village.

Two more refugees from outlying villages had made their way here today, swelling their numbers to seventy-five. Many of those who sought out the Stargods—Kim and his two brothers—had disabilities, missing limbs, or chronic ailments. Some of them had simple minds and damaged emotions. No one else wanted them.

How did he
know
to plant the extra acres to feed seventy-five rather than the thirty-two who began the village? How did he
know
events to come? How did he lay his hands upon an injury and make it right?

Time to think seriously about it. He gritted his teeth and grabbed a reader with a few gigs of free space. When he had a coherent text, he'd transfer his musings to his journal. Paper was too precious to waste.

Begin at the beginning,
his mother's voice whispered in the back of his mind. Not quite Mum, though. The voice took on the sonorous overtones of Iianthe, the purple-tipped dragon.

Kim thought back to the beginning of the current adventure; to the day when he and his brothers had run so desperately from an IMP cruiser. The captain had seemed to anticipate every evasive maneuver, every jump through space, and every weapon blast the O'Hara brothers could imagine. It was almost as if the IMPs read his and his two brothers' minds. Since then, Loki, the eldest brother, had developed and learned to control his telepathy. Quite possibly, in the stress of the escape from IMP patrols, he had broadcast his thoughts on a wide band.

Konner had begun to hone his ability to move objects with his mind. Mostly, he did it unconsciously in moments of stress.

Kim's precognitive talent kicked in when he least expected it. Aboard
Sirius
he'd had a vision of a safe haven inhabited by dragons. The vision had given him the symbolic coordinates of the jump point that had brought them here.

How to describe it?

He took a deep breath, felt refreshed, and filled his lungs once more. Ideas and flickers of memory crowded the edges of his vision. One more deep breath and . . .

He relived the numbness that shot through his body, the disembodied sensation of floating in a null g sensory deprivation chamber. Then the bright tangle of lights streaked across his vision. More than lights. Chains of light, each a different hue pulsing with life. Then blackness again.

He looked into the reader screen. Words scrolled rapidly across the screen as he dictated. The mini computer inside the reader prompted the word “void?” As good as any to describe the place in the mind between here and there.

His memory, triggered by the vivid description, pulled forth more images and sensations. Tumbling through darkness into atmosphere. The shuttle
Rover
tumbling toward a planetary surface and a . . . a dragon. A huge dragon with all the colors of the rainbow on its wing veins, horns, and claws, iridescent and awesome in its beauty, appeared out of nowhere. The wondrous creature shot forth a river of flame. Its dagger-length teeth and claws reached forward to rip . . .

Kim woke with a start and a whimper. He'd come out of the true vision with the same startling abruptness. Were the images more vivid in his memory than they had been originally? Or had the symbols become clearer with time and recall?