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 look-alike 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 Jacks 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 self-pride? 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."