Dragon and Slave

He rounded a preparation island and stopped. There was the door straight ahead, a wide, dark shadow against the pale white kitchen walls. The dragon was nowhere to be seen. "Draycos?"

"Here," the other called from somewhere to Jack's left. "Come and see."

Frowning, Jack followed the voice. Behind a large food warmer, he found Draycos standing against the wall. Above his head was a wide, flat gray box set into the wall at Brummgan eye-level. "Trouble?" Jack asked.

"Just the opposite," Draycos said. "I was scouting and found the box you see above me. Do the words on it say what I believe they say?"

Jack stepped close and squinted at the box. In the dim light the lettering was hard to make out. "Spare... spare something," he said. "Spare...?" "Spare keys?" Draycos suggested.

Jack felt his heartbeat pick up slightly. Spare keys? "This is definitely worth a look," he agreed. Pressing his back against the box, he held a hand out to Draycos. The dragon put a forepaw on it and melted up his sleeve. There was the usual shifting on his skin as he leaned out over the box door.

And there was it was again: the same odd sensation Jack had felt outside Gazen's office. As if the dragon were somehow slipping...

Another wiggle, and he was back. "There are six rows of hooks inside, with five in each row," he reported. "Each hook is labeled, and holds one to three keys."

"Any alarms?"

"None that I could see," Draycos told him.

Jack looked at the side of the box, noted the simple-looking lock that held the lid in place. This seemed way too good to be true. "I guess they figured hiding it back here was enough," he said. "Could you see the labels?"

"Not well enough to read," Draycos said.

"Well, keys are always worth checking out," Jack said, pulling out his lockpick.

"Let's get this thing open."

He had the lock popped in ten seconds flat. Even with the out-of-the-way location, he thought dryly, whoever had been in charge of extra keys must not have read the Chookoock family security manual. Taking half a step back, he swung back the door.

And was slammed suddenly and violently backward as Draycos leaped out between him and the box.

He flailed for balance, but the shove had been too hard. Gurgling helplessly in his throat, he fell back onto the tile floor. "Draycos!"

"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 ru

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.