But Uncle Virge was in control of the Essenay. And despite Jack's instructions, the Essenay had apparently followed him to Point Two and rendezvoused with Neverlin's Advocatus Diaboli.
Neverlin, whose attempted frame-up of Jack for theft and murder had gotten him into this whole thing in the first place. Neverlin, who Jack had only recently discovered had been directly involved with the murder of Jack's parents.
Coincidence? Jack didn't know that, either.
He swallowed against a lump that had suddenly appeared in his throat. It was possible Uncle Virge had betrayed him. Maybe Alison had betrayed him, too. Certainly she wasn't someone he could completely trust.
But he had Draycos.
He could only hope that he could still say that fifteen minutes from now.
As part of their overall plan for the Gatekeeper's air ducts to double as back-door access routes, the ship's designers had made sure that the ventilation grilles would be difficult to see through from inside the rooms. Draycos was therefore able to move silently and invisibly toward his goal.
To his surprise, the invisibility part proved less important than he'd expected it to. At first there were plenty of Brummgas striding through corridors or lounging about the various rooms he passed. But as he approached the Number Four weapons bay, that number became less and less. The last three rooms he passed, in fact, were completely deserted.
Something was wrong.
He took the last stretch of duct at a careful crawl, his tongue flicking out as he went, trying to analyze the scents of Brummga and human and Valahgua drifting on the air around him.
And it was no doubt because he was taking such care that he spotted the small object sitting just inside the weapons bay's auxiliary control room grille.
He froze in place ten feet away, peering hard at the object. It looked like a tube or perhaps a section of thick cable, about six inches long and one inch in diameter. It was too wide to have gotten through the small holes in the grille, which meant someone must have opened the grille in order to put it there.
He flicked out his tongue again. This close to the grille, he should be able to pick out the specific scents coming from that room. There was one human in there, he decided, plus four or five Brummgas. No Valahgua.
He frowned, his tail arching with sudden suspicion. Only a handful of defenders for one of the precious remaining Death weapons?
Not a chance. Especially since his earlier checks had showed guard contingents three times that size. Could the rest of them be spread out in the corridor, where they would have a better field of fire?
Backing up, he slipped into the duct that paralleled the corridor outside the room. He flicked his tongue at the nearest grille, looking for the scent of nervous Brummgas.
But it wasn't there. The corridor was deserted, or nearly so.
Something was definitely wrong.
He returned to the room's duct again and took a cautious pair of steps toward the object lying inside the grille. From here he could see that it was vibrating slightly with the air flowing across it. Something light, then. Something light that had been rolled up into a cylindrical shape?
A piece of paper?
Carefully, he continued forward. It was a rolled-up piece of paper, all right, which had partially unrolled to its current diameter. Picking it up, he looked cautiously through the grille into the room beyond.
The room had changed since his quiet reconnaissance two nights ago. As he'd already surmised, the crowd of guards that had lined the bulkheads was gone. Instead, the walls were lined with a double bank of video monitors. It was hard to tell at his distance, but they seemed to be carrying the feeds from various security cameras. One group of monitors, he saw, showed images from the tween gap area.
As he'd also surmised, there were only five Brummgas in the room. Three of them were standing around the control end of the Death weapon, their backs to Draycos behind his grille. Two more were standing watchful guard by the door, with the grille at the edge of their peripheral vision.
Standing two paces behind the three at the controls, the stiffness of his back betraying his tension, was Wing Sergeant Langston.
Draycos eyed the group, his warrior's instincts tingling. Five Brummgas out of over three hundred, and a human whom they clearly didn't trust. Bait, if he'd ever seen it.
Which meant that this whole thing was a trap.
Taking one last look through the grille, Draycos picked up the rolled-up paper and retreated quietly along the duct.
He found a hidden spot away from any of the grilles, one where he had three different escape routes available to him. Crouching down, he unrolled the paper.
It was a note, as he'd expected, written in small but precise letters. Leaning close to give it all the light from his eyes that he could, he began to read.
Draycos:
I hope you get this message. I don't have much real information for you—they still don't completely trust me—but rumor is that the Valahgua are expecting you and Jack to try to hit the last two Death weapons before we reach Point Three.
They've now got cameras inside all the hull-gap access doors near both weapons bays to watch for your arrival. The ventilation system seems untouched so far—I don't think they realize you'll fit in there. I'm hoping that's the approach you'll use, since I can't get this note into any of the hull-gap doors without making a lot of noise.
Draycos nodded grimly to himself. Nothing really new, except that Langston had figured out the designers' system of back doors.
Unfortunately, as soon as he hit this particular Death weapon, the Valahgua would know about it, too. That would leave him only the equipment crawl spaces, which covered limited areas of the ship, and didn't reach the weapons bays at all.
They also fixed the Death weapon that you and Jack sabotaged. Not the two you shredded—they were furious about that, by the way—but the first one you hit, in the port-side weapons bay.
Again, nothing new there. The heavy guard on the other Death weapon alone had pretty well proved it had been fixed.
On the other hand, just because the Valahgua thought they'd fixed it didn't necessarily mean that they had. If they'd missed Jack's secondary sabotage, the weapon could still blow up in their faces when they tried to fire it. He could hope, anyway.
Speaking of that port-side weapon, rumor is that the Valahgua moved it sometime during ship's night. I don't know where.
Draycos frowned. They'd moved it? But it was already in as secure and inaccessible a place as the Gatekeeper had to offer.
And then, suddenly, he understood.
Langston and a handful of Brummgas, alone in a critical part of the ship. Bait for a trap, Draycos had already suspected.
Now he knew what the trap was.
"Jack, we're in trouble," he said quietly into the comm clip. "The Valahgua have moved the other Death weapon to cover this one.
"The minute I come into the open, they're going to kill me."
CHAPTER 18
For a few seconds Jack lay motionless in the crawl space, staring at the low ceiling above his head as he silently berated his carelessness. He'd gotten so used to dealing with Brummgas and their slow and unimaginative brains that he'd forgotten there were also humans and Valahgua in the mix.
Apparently, one of them had come up with something clever.