He waved his hand in a wide sweep around him. "And on a ship like this, there are going to be some really serious valuables. Jewelry, data tubes, maybe even some one-of-a-kind art objects. It's going to be like breaking into a bank. Worse than a bank, really, because here there's no place to run after the job."

"You cannot do it?"

Jack shook his head. "Maybe Uncle Virgil could have done it, with the right tools and a week or two to get ready. He was good enough. But I'm not. Not alone."

Draycos's green eyes glittered. "But you are not alone, Jack," he said quietly. "I am here."

Jack gazed at the dragon, a strange feeling stirring inside him. Here was this alien creature, willing to help him out of a tight spot. Not only willing to help, but willing to stick his own neck into danger doing it.

It was like the feeling of slowly starting to thaw out again in a warm room after standing around half frozen in the cold all afternoon. For a moment, despite the trouble he was still in, Jack felt a distant glimmer of hope.

Then the rest of the reality caught up with him. Draycos wasn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart, or whatever was in his chest pumping all that black blood around. He had a fleet full of his people to rescue, and at the moment Jack was the only tool he had. If Jack went down, Draycos went down with him.

The dragon was here, but only until he found someone else to help him carry on his mission. When he did, it would be good-bye.

The warmth faded away, and the cold quietly closed in again. "I appreciate the offer," he said. "But unless you know a really good safecracker within a couple days' flight from here, I don't know how you can help."

"Do not give up hope," Draycos insisted. "I am a poet-warrior of the K'da. I am not without resources."

"Yeah, that must be some course of study," Jack said with a sniff. "Burglary-for-Warriors 102. Must first have taken Burglary-for-Warriors 101."

Draycos flashed his teeth once but made no comment. Bending back over the desk, he resumed his doodling and quiet singing.

Jack frowned at him, starting to feel irritated. His life was hanging by a piece of cobweb, and the dragon was playing with a notepad? "What are you doing?" he demanded.

"Attempting to unmask our enemy," Draycos said. "Come and see."

Frowning harder, Jack got up and crossed to the desk.

Draycos hadn't been simply doodling. He had been writing.

Writing?

"The spacecraft you were brought aboard had these words beside the entrance," Draycos explained, touching the notepad with the tip of his tongue. "Because the human Drabs took care to cover your eyes when you left, we may assume the words are important."

"Probably the name of the ship," Jack said, his heart starting to beat faster. "But I thought you said you didn't read or write our language."

"I do not," Draycos said.

"You memorized the shapes, then?"

"Not directly," the dragon said. "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da; and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song."

Jack blinked. "A song?"

"Yes. Observe."

Draycos set the stylus against the paper. "And to the right, from tail to head," he sang, "stands single soldier, tall but dead."

He drew a slightly wavy line that did indeed look kind of like a K'da seen from above. A capital "I," Jack decided, drawn in a stylized form.

"Just like the first; again it stands," Draycos went on. "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands."

He drew two more wavy lines, this time at an inverted-V angle that connected at the top. Another wavy line connected them midway up. An "A"?

"A Shontine waits to hear a sound; shall two eyes listen at the ground?"

He drew a vertical line, with two gogglelike eyes beside it. Seen from the side, Jack had to admit, it did look like the two eyes of someone with his ear pressed against the ground.

Seen upright, of course, it was a capital "B."

"Squeezed ring of fire; and what is more," Draycos sang, "a fire burns within its core."

A capital "O" with some sort of marking in the center. Jack couldn't tell what the mark was supposed to be, but it didn't matter. The thing was definitely an "O."

"A blade thrusts left, to base of hedge; naught can be seen except the edge."

Jack smiled at that one. It was a capital "L," with the same waviness as the other letters. Now that he thought about it, it did indeed look like light shining off the edge of a knife point with the rest of the knife in shadow. Draycos had an interesting way of looking at things.

"Stands final soldier, single one." Draycos drew another "I."

"Hand down, for now the tale is done."

He laid down the stylus. "And it is finished," he added.

"I will be dipped in butter," Jack said, shaking his head in admiration. "That was just plain flat-out brilliant."

"I merely made use of my talents and training," Draycos said modestly. Still, to Jack's ear he sounded pleased at the praise. "As you do yourself. Tell me, what do the words say?"

Jack swiveled the paper around to face him. "Advocatus Diaboli," he read. "Huh."

"You recognize the name?" Draycos asked.

Jack scratched his cheek. "I don't even recognize the words," he said, swiveling the desk computer around and punching for a dictionary. After all of that work, and his own compliments, he hoped Draycos hadn't messed up with this somewhere. "It doesn't even sound like English."

He typed in the words. "Aha," he said, nodding as the page came up. "It didn't sound like English because it isn't. It's a phrase in Old Latin: 'Devil's Advocate.' Says that's someone who argues against an authority's point of view. Odd name for a ship. Was there anything else written there?"

"There were no other words," Draycos said. "But beneath them was a small design. It may have been the same as the one on the sealed warehouse door."

Jack felt his throat tighten. "You mean the Braxton Universis logo?"

"It may have been," Draycos said. "As I have said, it is difficult to memorize alien designs."

"No, you nailed it just fine," Jack said sourly. "A Braxton cargo, a Braxton ship. The whole thing was Braxton, right from the start."

"But for what purpose?"

"How should I know?" Jack snapped, swiveling the computer back around. "A fancy plot to take down some rival, maybe. A big corporate merger that someone won't play ball over. How in blazes should I know?"

He stomped across the room and flopped back onto the bed, glaring bleakly into a corner of the room. All along, he'd been clinging to the hope that the Braxton cargo part had been pure coincidence. That it was some old rival of his uncle's looking for vengeance, not something coming at him from Braxton Universis itself.

But thanks to Draycos's cleverness, that hope was now shattered. This was some corporate game, all right. The vast power of Braxton Universis was on one side, some unknown player was on the other, and Jack Morgan was dead-center in the middle of it.

"You are troubled."

Jack shifted his glare to Draycos. "Your bet your tail I'm troubled," he growled. "And if you had any brains, you would be, too. This is Cornelius Braxton we're up against."

He took another look at the dragon's face, and instantly regretted his words. "I'm sorry," he said, a layer of guilt adding to the rest of his misery. "I know you just don't know."

"I am not offended," Draycos assured him. "Tell me about him."

"What's to tell?" Jack asked, shrugging uncomfortably. "In a spiral arm's worth of hardball businessmen, Braxton's one of the hardest. He inherited a business from his father and built it into an empire. He's smart, he's ruthless, and he gets whatever he wants."

Pulling the metal suitcase from under his bed, he opened it. "And whatever he's up to this time, this thing is the key," he said, taking out the cylinder. "I wish I knew what was in it."