"Are inside three inches of hardened metal with their own air supply," Jack cut him off. "Draycos?"
"Yes, you're right," Draycos agreed, a cautious hope in his voice. "They should be well protected against any of the Essenay's weapons."
"That's the nice thing about some traps—you can get them to work in either direction," Jack said, a grim and not entirely pleasant thrill rippling through him. After months of running and ducking and hiding, he and Draycos were finally going to take the battle to the enemy.
He was still psyching himself up for combat when a delivery truck pulled out of a blind driveway directly in front of him.
He jammed on the brakes. But he was going way too fast, and it was already way too late. With a horrible crunching of metal and plastic, he slammed full tilt into the truck's front left side.
For a short eternity the car spun and twisted terrifyingly around him. Then, abruptly, it came to a halt. Breathing heavily, Jack peered between the milky white balloons of the car's emergency protection system as they slowly receded back into their compartments.
He'd ended up half turned around, facing back toward the truck. The front left side of the other vehicle was a shambles, though not nearly as bad as the mess Jack had made of his own car. "Draycos?" he panted.
"I'm unharmed," the K'da said from his shoulder. "You?"
"I'm okay," Jack assured him. With a grating creak, the truck door opened and the Brummgan driver climbed rather shakily to the ground. "Looks like the other guy is, too."
"We'd best get out of here," Draycos warned. "The accident will hardly have gone unnoticed."
Jack looked through his broken windows. All around them Brummgas had stopped their cars or had appeared in open doorways or were peering out of windows. "No kidding," he said, pulling the door release and leaning against the panel.
For a wonder, it wasn't jammed, and with an ear-piercing shriek he got it open. With his hands shaking with reaction, it took another half minute to get his seat belts off. He had just gotten them clear when a large hand reached in, grabbed his left upper arm, and hauled him bodily out of the car.
And he found himself staring up at the dark Brummgan eyes and gleaming golden collar ring of a police officer. "Your vehicle license?" the Brummga demanded.
Jack felt his heart sink. Oh no. "Sure," he managed, pointing back into the car. "It's in the storage compartment." If he could get into the car and out the other side . . . "I'll get it."
But he'd barely started his turn when the grip on his arm tightened and pulled him back again. "This vehicle plate shows it stolen," the Brummga growled. "You come now to jail."
Jack? Draycos's urgent thought came.
From overhead came a faint whine. Jack looked up to see a formation of three long-range shuttles appear, losing altitude as they flew toward the Chookoock family's private hangar.
Frost's shuttles had returned.
And if the mercenaries were monitoring the police comm system, the sudden frantic flurry of reports claiming a dragon had attacked a cop would bring them down on him and Draycos in double-quick time.
Jack?
Don't bother, Jack told him wearily, his earlier thrill of anticipation burned into ash.
He was being put into the rear seat of the police car when he saw the Chookoock shuttles lift again into the sky. He watched them head for the stars, his stomach knotted tight enough to hurt.
Alison and Taneem were on their own now.
CHAPTER 3
The returning shuttles arrived sooner than Alison had expected. Far too soon, unfortunately, for Jack and Draycos to have had time to put together a rescue plan.
Neverlin and Frost were probably thinking along the same lines. They wasted no time getting their troops and the safe aboard and lifting off again.
Alison tried her burglar's pickup a couple of times during the flight. But the safe had apparently been secured someplace away from the passengers, and the background rumble of the engines masked whatever anyone might be saying.
There wasn't much conversation going on inside the safe, either. Taneem would answer any questions that Alison asked her, mostly questions about how the K'da was doing. But aside from that she lay quietly against Alison's skin, neither speaking nor moving.
Maybe she was conserving oxygen. More likely she was just terrified.
The flight didn't last long. An hour and a half after lifting from Brum-a-dum, Alison felt the subtle jolt as the shuttle docked with another vessel. A few minutes later the safe was rocked onto a lift cart and rolled through the shuttle's hatchway. Ten minutes and several turns later, they reached their destination. Another short flurry of rockings and bumps to get them off the cart, and the safe came to rest.
And once again silence descended.
For the next two hours Alison kept her microphone pressed against the safe wall, splitting her attention between the occasional and very distant background noises and the indicator on her gas mask canister.
The gas mask was a marvel of engineering. Along with a small oxygen tank, it included a catalytic reactor that could take their exhaled carbon dioxide and split it back into carbon and oxygen. Without such a converter, a mask that size wouldn't have kept her and Taneem alive for even a single hour, and several times during their quiet vigil Alison gave silent thanks that her father had provided her with such exotic and expensive equipment.
But even so marvelous a gadget had its limits. The carbon storage tube slowly but steadily filled with a black, sootlike powder as the oxygen tank just as slowly but steadily drained.
Finally, just under four hours into their ill-fated mission, Alison decided it was time. "It's been quiet out there for two hours," she told Taneem as she put away the microphone and got out her light. "It should be safe for you to take a look."
"All right," Taneem said softly.
Alison pressed her back hard against the safe's rear wall. She felt the familiar movement across her skin as Taneem leaned in her strange fourth-dimensional way over the metal. There was a pause, and somehow Alison had a sense that the K'da was surprised.
There was another wiggle, and Alison looked down through her open collar as Taneem's gray-scaled head and silver eyes slid back around onto her shoulder. "Is it clear?" she asked.
"Very clear," Taneem said. "And very familiar."
"How familiar?"
"Very," Taneem said again, a hint of wry humor finally peeking through her tension. "We're in the room containing the second safe you opened for Colonel Frost on our journey from Semaline to Brum-a-dum."
Alison felt her mouth drop open. "We're aboard the Advocator Diaboli?"
"Unless there are two such rooms," Taneem said. "You're surprised by this?"
"Well, no, I suppose it makes sense," Alison had to admit. "Neverlin will certainly want to be on hand for the big attack. I guess I'm just surprised he'd risk his own ship instead of bunking in with Frost and the rest of his people on their warships."
"Perhaps he wishes to travel in comfort," Taneem suggested.
"There's that," Alison agreed dryly. "Malison Ring ships aren't known for the kind of luxury Neverlin's accustomed to."
"Malison Ring," Taneem said, her voice suddenly thoughtful.
"What about them?"
"I was just noticing the curious similarity between your names," the K'da said. "Alison, Malison. Odd that I never noticed that before."
"Pure coincidence," Alison assured her. "Malison is an old Earth word meaning a curse. I presume General Davi was thinking he would be a curse to his enemies when he set up the group twelve years ago."
"They began so recently?" Taneem asked. "I assumed they were older than that."