Hren led the way toward the forest, Jack following behind him with Alison bringing up the rear. She hadn’t said a word about Jack’s abrupt decision, and he didn’t have a clue as to what she thought of it. But at the moment, he didn’t really care.
There couldn’t be K’da here. There couldn’t. Draycos had told him the refugee fleet was coming from an entirely different arm of the galaxy. It had taken the advance team nearly two years of hyperspace flight to get here.
But if that wasn’t a K’da wrapped around Hren’s body, it was a terrific imitation.
Had Draycos spotted the tattoo? Jack didn’t dare ask, not with Alison right behind him. But he could feel the dragon shifting restlessly, and a couple of times he twitched as sharp claws brushed against his skin. Either Draycos had indeed seen the K’da or else he was a lot more agitated by Jack’s decision to join the Erassvas’ midday song than even Alison was.
Or maybe he had smelled the other K’da. Did K’da give off an aroma when they were in their two-dimensional form? Somehow, the subject had never come up.
“The Phookas will be gathering in the forest for the morning celebration,” Hren said as they reached the other Erassvas.
“Phookas?” Jack asked.
“Our friends,” Hren said. He gave Jack another knowing smile, like a child with a secret. “They usually hide when there are strangers near. But you are different. You they won’t mind.”
He gestured toward a wide path that had been worn in the grass between the trees. “Please. Join them.”
“Thank you,” Jack said, bowing the way Alison had earlier.
Hren smiled again and headed back to the outer edge of the forest to rejoin his fellow berry pickers. Squaring his shoulders, Jack started toward the path.
And stopped short as Alison grabbed his sleeve. “Wait a second,” she said in a low voice. “Are you forgetting what I said about there being big, nasty predators in there?”
“You said the legends put them in the deep parts of the forest,” Jack reminded her.
“Legends are sometimes a little off in their geography,” she countered. “You want to rely on that tangler of yours to deal with them?”
Jack thought about the K’da spread across his back. “We’ll be okay,” he said. “Trust me.”
She snorted. “I’d love to.” Bending down, she popped open one of her travel bags. “Fortunately, that won’t be necessary.”
And as Jack gaped in astonishment, she pulled a small Corvine 4mm pistol from the bag. “What the—?”
“What the what?” she asked as she pulled out a holster and spare ammo clip and fastened them to her belt. “I like to bunker my bets a little.” She checked the Corvine’s clip and safety, then settled the weapon into her right hand and picked up the bag with her left. “You can take the other bag.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Oh, may I?”
“Don’t be snide,” she said, starting toward the path. “And stay close.”
The path snaked its way through several rows of trees and bushes. The bushes in particular showed how the trail had been formed, their branches bent and broken on both sides by the stream of wide-bodied aliens who had pushed their way through during the past few days or weeks. Passing between two final bushes, Jack and Alison stepped into a large clearing.
And Alison came to a sharp halt. “Mother-of-pearl,” she breathed.
Jack nodded in silent agreement. All across the clearing, digging methodically into fallen trees or poking among the bushes or just wandering around in the sun, were K’da.
K’da of all sorts, too. Draycos had mentioned that his people came in many different color combinations. But Jack, with only the one example, had naturally come to think of them as gold-scaled dragons.
This group covered pretty much the whole rainbow. There were K’da with dark red scales, dark green ones, blue ones, and another of the brown-and-green ones like Hren was carrying. One of them, particularly striking to Jack’s way of thinking, was all gray with shining silver eyes.
“Jack, they’re dragons,” Alison whispered. “They’re real,live dragons.”
Jack nodded. “Sure looks that way.”
“But this can’t be,” she protested. “How could they—I mean, how come no one’s ever seen them before?”
Maybe because they’re usually wrapped around Erassvas bodies? “Why would they?” he said instead. “You said the only people who come here are miners and traders.”
“None of whom would bother with the forests,” she conceded reluctantly.
“And Hren said they usually hide from strangers,” Jack reminded her.
“Right,” she agreed, her voice going suddenly thoughtful. “So how come we’re different?”
Because Hren’s figured out I’ve got one wrapped around my body, too? “No idea,” he lied.
He felt her eyes on him. “If you say so.”
“I say so.” Jack took a deep breath. This might be risky, but he needed to make sure this wasn’t some kind of weird lookalike species. “Stay here. I’m going to get a closer look.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Alison insisted, bringing her gun up. “They’ve got teeth and they’ve got claws, and I’m betting they’re every bit as fast as they look.”
“They also seem very well fed,” Jack pointed out. “Most predators don’t kill when they’re not hungry.”
“Jack—”
“Just stay here and keep an eye on them, okay?” Jack cut her off. Without waiting for more argument, he strode off toward the dragons.
He was halfway there when it belatedly occurred to him that even if they were K’da, they might not be civilized. “Draycos?” he muttered, slowing down his pace a little. “What do you think? Are they all right?”
There was no answer. “Draycos?” he repeated. “Come on, buddy, wake up.”
“Look at them, Jack,” Draycos murmured darkly.
Jack glanced down into his shirt. “What?”
“I said look at them,” Draycos said, his voice going even darker. “Lying around, not watching for danger or threat, digging grubs—grubs—out of dead wood.”
A chill ran up Jack’s back. He studied the multicolored dragons as they wandered around, trying to see in them the powerful, clever, deadly poet-warrior that was Draycos. “But they are K’da, aren’t they?”
“No,” Draycos said bitterly. “Not K’da. Not anymore.
“They are animals.”
Over the next half hour the Erassvas gradually filtered into the clearing, lowering themselves in wide heaps onto the grass around the edges. Once settled, they began pulling out the berries they’d been stashing away in their pockets.
And as they ate, the group of K’da did a little dance. A nice, simple, pathetic little dance.
“Maybe they’re not real K’da,” Jack suggested hopefully as he sat against a tree a short distance away from the Erassvas. “You said yourself they don’t smell quite right.”
“No, they are K’da,” Draycos told him. His earlier anger and bitterness had passed, leaving an even more disturbing emptiness behind. “The change in odor is most likely a result of their diet. A diet of grubs.”
Jack winced. There was something about that part in particular that seemed to really bother his partner. Was it because these K’da were no longer true hunters? “Well, at least we now know where you came from,” Jack said. “The race of slavers who kidnapped your people all those years ago must have missed a few.”
Draycos snorted, a breath of hot air brushing across Jack’s chest. “If this was our original home, then our storytellers are liars,” he said flatly. “These Erassvas are hardly the proud and noble Dhghem spoken of in so many songs. They are primitives. And they are primitives by choice.”
Jack looked over at the robed mounds of flesh munching placidly away at their handfuls of berries. Draycos was right, of course. The Erassvas had clearly had enough contact with the rest of the Orion Arm to learn English, and yet didn’t have a single bit of the galactic community’s technology. “Some people like their lives just the way they are,” he offered.
“And they have no ambition?” Draycos bit out. “No selfpride? No desire for a better life for themselves and their offspring?” His tongue flicked out, tickling briefly against Jack’s skin. “What happens here when there is rain or snow? What happens when there is disease or predator attack?”
Jack suppressed a sigh. There were counterarguments for each of those, of course. Some people didn’t mind getting wet, while others didn’t have much trouble with disease or predators.
But then, this wasn’t really about the Erassvas. “Okay, so the K’da here aren’t as sophisticated as you are,” he said as soothingly as he could. “That doesn’t mean anything. There are backwoods cultures all over the Orion Arm that are still composed of intelligent, rational beings.”
Draycos didn’t answer. “Draycos?” Jack prompted. “Come on, buddy. It’s not that bad.”
Still no answer. With a sigh, Jack gave up.
A motion to his left caught his eye, and he looked up as Alison came out of the trees into the clearing. “Enjoying the show?” she asked, sitting down beside him.
“Actually, dance never really did much for me,” he said. “How’s your head count going?”
“Finished, I think,” she said. “Including children, there seem to be about two hundred Erassvas in this particular troop. About half of them are working the vines on the far side of those bushes.”
“They don’t like the dancing?”
She shrugged. “Maybe the Phookas will do a second show. Speaking of which, I count fifty of them, including the six who are across with the other group.”
Which wouldn’t include any who might be currently riding various hosts’ bodies. But Jack couldn’t exactly point that out. “I don’t see any young Phookas,” he said instead. “You suppose all of the ones here are male?”
“You’re welcome to try to find out,” Alison said dryly. “Me, I’m staying here. Let me see that tattoo of yours.”
The sudden change in subject caught Jack by surprise. “What?”
“Your tattoo,” she said patiently. “You didn’t have it taken off, did you?”
There was, unfortunately, no way around it. Suppressing a grimace, Jack unfastened his shirt and pulled it open, exposing Draycos’s head to view.
“Interesting,” she said, studying Jack’s shoulder and then looking over at the performing K’da. She looked back at Draycos, back at the K’da. “You realize your tattoo is the spitting image of a Phooka?”
“Really?” Jack asked, feigning surprise. He looked crosseyed down at his shoulder, as if trying to get a good view of the image there. “Yeah, there is some resemblance, isn’t there?”
“Resemblance, nothing,” she countered. “It’s the same head, same snout, same scale pattern. You’ve even got a sort of flattened version of that spiny crest that goes over their heads and down their backs.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Jack said, still pretending he couldn’t quite focus on his tattoo. “Huh. That’s funny.”
“More than just funny,” Alison said. “Where did you say you got that done?”
“I didn’t say,” Jack said. “If you must know, it was in a little shop in New Paris on Gaullia.”
“Mm,” Alison said, looking again at the dancing K’da. “I wonder how the artist could have known about Phookas.”
“Maybe he knows some Erassvas,” Jack said. This really wasn’t a topic he wanted to get into. “Or maybe he just had a good book about dragons. So where are your friends?”
“My friends?”
“The people you said you’d be rendezvousing with.”
“Oh. Them.” Alison peered up at the small patches of sky that could be seen through the tangle of tree branches. “Not here, obviously.”
“No kidding,” Jack said. “You sure you’ve got the right place?”
“This is definitely it,” she assured him. “They could just be late.” She made a face. “Or they could have gone to the wrong spot.”
“I don’t suppose you thought to bring a comm clip.”
“Actually, I did,” she said, a little coolly. “And I’ve already tried. If they’re here, they must be out of range.”
“How about we run it through the Essenay’s comm?” Jack suggested. “It’s got a lot more range. In fact, why don’t we just go ahead and pop the ship into orbit? That way we can cover half the planet at a single gulp.”
“Worth a try,” Alison agreed, getting to her feet and brushing some stray leaves off her jeans. “Is there any trick to starting up the engines?”
“There’s no trick,” Jack said. “There’s also no need.” He tapped his comm clip. “Unc—computer?”
“Computer,” Uncle Virge’s voice came back instantly.
“I need you to take the ship into low orbit and do an ID broadcast,” Jack said. “Alison’s comm clip frequency is—” He looked up at her and raised his eyebrows.
“Why don’t I just go aboard and plug it in?” she suggested. “I don’t like giving comm clip info to strangers.”
“And I don’t like strangers alone in my ship,” Jack countered. “Just give me the frequency, okay?”
“Fine,” she said crossly, digging a comm clip from inside her shirt and tossing it to him. “Whatever.”
Jack caught it and peered at the markings on the back. “Okay, here it is.” He read off the frequency and pattern specs. “Start with a parabolic upper-atmosphere dip,” he went on, tossing the clip back to Alison. “If you don’t get an answer, expand it to a complete orbit.”
“Acknowledged,” Uncle Virge said hesitantly. “With all due respect, Master Jack—”
“Carry out your instructions,” Jack cut him off. Normal P/S computers never argued with their owners. Uncle Virge, in contrast, never seemed to do anything but. Even if Alison hadn’t been standing right there listening, Jack was in no mood to listen to the computer personality’s objections. “Alison, what message should he send?”
“Just the word ‘winderlake,’” she said. “If he hears the response ‘harborlight,’ mark the location and let me know.”
“You get that?” Jack asked Uncle Virge.
“Acknowledged.”
“Then get going.” Jack tapped off the comm clip and gestured to the ground beside him. “Might as well get comfortable,” he told Alison. “This could take a while. You tried the berries yet?”
“No, and I don’t think you should, either,” she said, reluctantly sitting down again. “There’s something about the Erassvas’ eyes that weirds me out a little.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Jack said. “You think there’s some kind of mild narcotic in the berries?”
“Or maybe not so mild,” Alison said. “And if it’s strong enough to affect people their size, it would probably kill either of us. If you’re hungry, I’ve got ration bars in my bag.”
“Maybe later.” Beyond the trees, he heard the hum as the Essenay lifted into the sky. “What are you going to do if they’re not here?”
She shrugged. “Wait, I guess,” she said. “That’s why I bought all that camping gear.” She gestured at her bags. “You don’t have to wait with me if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t, and I wasn’t planning to,” Jack said, feeling a twinge of guilt. He knew how Draycos would feel about abandoning a companion in the middle of nowhere, even a companion as loosely connected as Alison. “But I might stick around another day or two, anyway.”
“Well, don’t mess up your schedule just for me,” she said. “Ah—show’s over.” She gestured toward the center of the clearing, where the Phookas had finished their dance and were wandering away back into the forest. “Let’s see if the rest of the Erassvas come in for a second performance.”
“Looks to me like the cast is leaving the stage,” Jack said. “Maybe there’s a dinner theater later for the—”
“Jack!” Uncle Virge’s voice came suddenly from the comm clip. “Incoming ships: one Kapstan long-range transport and two Djinn-90 pursuit fighters.”
Jack’s breath caught in his throat. Djinn-90s? “Get out of there,” he snapped. “Go to ground and hide.”
“Too late—they see me,” Uncle Virge said grimly. “I’m getting a signal—”
There was the click of a relay. “Hello, Jack Morgan,” a dark voice said. “And your slippery uncle Virgil Morgan, too, I presume?”
Jack’s first impulse was to lie, to use all of Uncle Virgil’s training to convince them that they had the wrong person. The Essenay was running under a false ID, after all. Maybe they weren’t really sure it was him.
But no. Neverlin’s allies had had plenty of opportunity at Brum-a-drum to record the Essenay’s description and parameters. They knew they had the right ship.
And that voice wasn’t showing a single scrap of doubt. Lying about it would just be a waste of effort. “Uncle’s not here at the moment,” Jack said instead. “Can I take a message?”
“Ah,” the voice said. “So you’re the boy who’s been causing my friend Mr. Neverlin such trouble.”
“Mr. Neverlin hasn’t exactly been giving me a free ride, either,” Jack countered. “And you are …?”
“Colonel Maximus Frost of the Malison Ring,” the voice said. “And I’m very much looking forward to meeting you.”