Timothy Zahn - Dragon and Slave

"Stay down," the dragon said sharply. He was crouched beneath the box, his long neck twisted as he peered cautiously up at it. "I heard a spring twitch as you opened the door, and then a click. A trap may have been activated."

"Oh, great," Jack muttered. Keeping low to the floor, he skittled around to the wall beside the box. Then, gingerly, he eased himself upward.

One look was all it took. "There was a trap, all right," he said. "But it's already been sprung. Have a look."

Carefully, Draycos straightened up. "There," he said, his tongue flicking out to point at the hinge side of the box lid. "There is the spring I heard."

"That's the trigger," Jack agreed. "And there's the trap, that little hole between the first and second row of keys. See it?"

"Yes," Draycos said. "I assumed it was merely a defect in the material."

"It's supposed to look that way," Jack said. "It's the lens of a security camera, set to go off as the door is opened. One of us just got his picture taken."

Draycos muttered something evil-sounding under his breath. "My fault."

"Don't blame yourself," Jack told him, peering at the disguised lens. Probably a

remote camera, with a light-pipe system carrying the image through the wall to somewhere else. "That kind of trigger is hard to detect. Especially when you're looking at it with the box closed the way you K'da do."

"It is still a disaster," Draycos said in a low, pain-filled voice. "I have failed."

"Let's not panic yet, okay?" Jack said. "You said you heard the click when the camera went off. When was that, exactly?"

"It closely followed the sound of the spring," Draycos said slowly. "I believe had already gone back to my three-dimensional form, hoping to protect you from any deadly weapon."

And to take the full impact of that weapon on himself? Probably. Typical K'da warrior thinking. "So you think you'd already come out when the camera fired?"

"Yes, I am certain," the dragon answered. "I was between you and the box at the time."

Wedged in rather tightly between Jack and the box, too, as Jack remembered it,

"So you were pressed up against the box," he said. "Blocking most of the light.

And with, what, your back to the camera?"

"Most likely my right shoulder," Draycos said. "I was twisting that direction, but did not yet have my back to the box."

"So in other words, they haven't got a picture of Jack Morgan with his fingers in the candy dish," Jack concluded. "All they've got is a close-up of a K'da scale pattern."

"But surely they will not be able to identify it," Draycos said hopefully.

"No one here has ever seen a K'da."

"We're assuming that, yeah," Jack said grimly. "Problem is, we don't know for sure. We do know that these guys supply Brummgan mercenaries to whoever the Valahgua are working with. What if they're not just suppliers, but also partners?"

"If so, they may show the picture to the Valahgua," Draycos said. "You are right. We must destroy that picture."

"If we can," Jack said, glancing over his shoulder at the kitchen clock. They were running dangerously low on time. "First things first. As long as we're here, let's take a look at these keys."

The labels had, of course, been printed in Brummgan script. But someone had thoughtfully added hand-written translations in English and Dynsci, probably for the benefit of slaves for whom one of the Orion Arm's major trade languages was more familiar.

And as Jack ran his eyes over the labels, he realized that the lack of security here wasn't nearly as big a mistake as he'd hoped. Most of the keys were to meat lockers, or pastry storage areas, or even one to a freezer temperature control.

If they'd tipped off the Valahgua for this, they'd paid a pretty high price for pretty cheap goods.

Then he spotted a single small and oddly-shaped key on one of the hooks in the bottom row, looking almost like an afterthought. Leaning down, he squinted at the label.

And smiled tightly. As Uncle Virgil used to say, at least until he had decided it was safe to swear in Jack's presence—"Bingo," he murmured.

"What?" Draycos asked.

"A key to the slave hotboxes," Jack told him, taking the key and dropping it into his pocket. "And since it says hotboxes, plural, I'm guessing it opens all of them. That could be extremely useful."

"They will notice the loss," Draycos warned.

"Only if they look really closely," Jack said, shifting one of the spare keys onto the now-empty hook. "This ought to make it less obvious."

"What about the camera?"

"We'd have to take the whole box off the wall to see where the optic line goes,"

Jack said, closing the door and relocking it. "And then we'd have to trace it to the camera itself. We'll just have to hope no one bothers to check the pictures every day."

"But if they do—"

"Then we may be in trouble," Jack cut him off harshly. He didn't like this any more than Draycos did. But there wasn't a knitted, purled, or darned thing either of them could do about it. At least, not right now. "Or not. I doubt there are any Valahgua here in the house—you'd probably have smelled them if there were. And a close-up view of K'da scales isn't going to be very helpful to anyone else."

"Perhaps," Draycos said reluctantly. "What now?"

"We go back to Gazen's office," he told Draycos, heading for the door again.

"And hope he's not getting up extra early this morning."

Getting the recorder set up took longer than Jack had expected. The cable feed from the security camera vanished back into the wall a short distance from Gazen's office, and it took him and Draycos several precious minutes to track it into the conference room next door.

Once there, though, things went quicker. From the inside of a handy ventilation grille, Draycos dug a short tunnel into the soft material to the point where the cable ran through the wall. Wiring the recorder into the circuit, Jack stashed the device out of the way and resealed the grille.

"You realize, of course, that this communication cable is one of the wires we punctured earlier," Draycos pointed out.

"That's okay," Jack assured him, brushing the last bits of telltale dust from beneath the grille, trying to spread it evenly across the floor. "They'll fix it as soon as they realize they're not getting a picture. Probably have it back up in an hour."

"And then?"

"That camera has a perfect view of Gazen's keyboard," Jack said. "We come back tomorrow and retrieve the recorder, and we ought to have a complete record of what it takes to get into the Chookoock family computer system."

He felt a ripple across his skin as the dragon shook his head. "Sometimes you amaze me, Jack."

"With my creativity?"

"With your sheer nerve," Draycos corrected. "Who else would use an enemy's own security system against him?"

"Oh, pretty much any thief worth his bail money," Jack said with a tight smile.

"That's how we do our job."

"How you did your job," Draycos corrected. "You are reformed now."

"Right," Jack muttered. "Sure couldn't prove it by me."

He stood up, brushing the remaining dust off his hands as he surveyed the area.

Not perfect, but good enough. Stepping to the door, he opened it a crack and peered out.

He'd pushed his timing just a little too far. Across the big entry chamber, he could see muted lights and hear a quiet commotion coming from the kitchen.

The breakfast crew, apparently, had started work.

"The way to the stairway is still clear, if we hurry," Draycos murmured in his ear.

Jack swallowed. "Let's go."

Luck, or K'da warrior fortune, was with them. The slave activity was confined to the kitchen, and most of the residential area was still asleep. They ran across only one Brummga already on the move, and Draycos's ears caught his footsteps in time for Jack to duck out of sight behind a large decorative planter. Two minutes later, they were back in Her Thumbleness's room.