"Forget it," Jack said, trying not to let his anger at Fleck and the Brummgas spill over onto Draycos. "Tell you what. As soon as your people get settled in on Iota Klestis, we'll bring a few of your buddies in and make Fleck pick up every berry he spilled. And eat them. How's that sound?"

Draycos seemed to think that one over. "You are joking, of course."

"Mostly," Jack said. "But it's still kind of nice to think about."

"But not very productive."

"Maybe not," Jack said. "But there's not a whole lot of productive I can be at the moment."

"Still, it is not good for your mind to dwell on such things," Draycos said.

"It can have a negative effect on your judgment."

"You didn't seem to have any trouble killing that guy aboard the Star of Wonder," Jack said.

"That was different," Draycos said, a little stiffly. "That was justice. It is not at all the same as revenge."

"I know," Jack conceded. He really shouldn't toy with Draycos and his warrior ethic this way, he knew. But it was just too easy sometimes to hot-start the dragon's buttons and play a little tune on them. "How much longer will it take you to get through that hedge?"

"Not long," Draycos said. "Perhaps two days. Three at the most."

"And then?"

"Once we are both at the hedge, I will cut through the last few branches,"

Draycos said. "We will then be clear to enter the Chookoock family areas."

"And from then on it's up to me," Jack said, nodding. "Then you'd better get to work. The sooner we get out of here, the better."

CHAPTER 11

They waited until the camp was dark and quiet. Then, Jack slid his hand under the door, and Draycos slipped out into the night.

The trip to the thorn hedge had become a familiar one over the past few days.

Draycos moved silently along the uneven ground, habit and experience keeping him to shadows and cover wherever possible.

His mind, though, was a million restless leaps away. The injustice of what had just been done to Jack still throbbed in his brain like an angry percussion master with a full set of concert drums.

For that matter, this whole situation was beginning to get beneath his scales.

This was an important mission, and part of his job was to keep personal feelings from affecting his judgment.

But in this case, knowing that and doing it were two very different things.

This was a slave colony, and it was simply not possible for a poet-warrior of the K'da to completely suppress his anger and contempt.

And as to Jack's idea about coming back to make Fleck regret his actions, it was sadly short of the mark. What this place needed was not a few of Draycos's friends, but six assault squads of K'da and Shontine warriors. Three squads to free the slaves, the other three to burn the entire place to the ground.

He flicked his tail sternly. That was not a proper thought for a warrior, and he knew it. Justice was a vital part of the K'da warrior ethic. Vicious, bitter vengeance was not.

And any chance for justice was still a long way in the future. Jack could claim that everything beyond the hedge was his job if he wanted to, but Draycos knew better. There was a large expanse of ground they would have to deal with before they even reached the mansion. Worse, much of that ground was open, without any cover to speak of.

No. Before he could allow Jack through the hedge, he would have to do a thorough check of the area on his own. He would have to examine the grounds, search for hidden guard posts, and study the outside of the mansion itself. His task was far from over.

And perhaps it was because he was thinking too much about the task ahead that he made it to within sight of the thorn hedge before he noticed the faint taste of Brummga in the air.

He stopped abruptly, dropping flat into the shadow of a bush, silently cursing his lack of attention. A well-known route, a routine duty—that was where a warrior faced the greatest threat of trap or ambush or simple mistake.

It was a good and timely reminder. He could only hope it hadn't already been a

fatal one.

For a long minute he lay in the shadows, his nostrils and tongue sampling the air. There was definitely a Brummgan presence nearby; the scent was too strong to be simply left over from the day's activities. But the light breeze kept switching directions, hindering his efforts to pin down a location.

And then, as he strained every sense, he heard a soft cough.

Soft, but loud enough. His pointed ears twitched onto the direction, his eyes probing the darkness.

There he was, sitting beneath the same type of bush Draycos himself was hiding beside. A Brummgan soldier, complete with infrared-view detectors and a short but nasty-looking automatic weapon.

Sitting where he had a perfect view of the spot where Draycos had been digging his tunnel through the hedge.

Slowly, carefully, Draycos gave the rest of the area a complete check. He spotted two more Brummgas, similarly equipped, one in another shadow, the other beneath a sheet of camouflage webbing.

One of them Draycos could have handled, had he decided that such a move would aid their goal. But with three of them in widely spaced positions, an attack was out of the question. Slowly, carefully, he began to crawl back the way he'd come, his belly pressed tightly against the ground. Not until he was a hundred yards out of the watchers' sight did he finally stand fully upright again.

The taste of defeat on his tongue.

So all his work, all his cleverness, had been for nothing. The Brummgas had spotted his tunnel, and had set a trap for him. It was only the fact that they couldn't possibly have anticipated the arrival of a K'da warrior that had prevented them from nailing him on the spot.

What they were expecting, clearly, was one of their slaves. And if they were smart enough to watch one end of the darter's hole, they were probably smart enough to be watching the other end, too.

Earlier, he had left Jack and the hotbox without much more than a quick and casual check of the area. There hadn't been any alarm, which meant he must not have been spotted.

He didn't know yet how they'd managed to miss him. But however it had happened, he knew he couldn't count on being that lucky twice in a row. This time he approached the slave colony like the warrior he was supposed to be: slow, alert, and flat on his belly.

He hadn't noticed anything odd when he'd left, and now he discovered why. For one thing, the enemy observer was off to the side, where he could watch the doors into the two sleeping huts but didn't have a clear view of the three hotboxes. For another, the observer wasn't a Brummga. It was a human.

Not just any human, either. It was Gazen himself.

Draycos looked across the starlit patch of ground, watching Gazen idly fingering his rifle. Under normal circumstances, he could easily tell one human scent from another. But having just spent an hour in the hotbox with Jack, and a particularly strong-smelling Jack at that, he hadn't noticed the taste of Gazen in the air.

He twitched his tail in annoyance. First he had wasted time with thoughts of vengeance. Now he was wasting equally precious time making excuses.

For two months he had been trying to gently push Jack toward the path of a K'da warrior. He had tried to teach the boy to think and behave with a sense of justice and honor, instead of reacting like the selfish thief his Uncle Virgil had raised him to be.

Now, he wondered if perhaps some of the training had ended up going the other way.

He twitched his tail again. More rationalization. More excuses.

More wasted time.

All right, he ordered himself firmly. So Gazen himself was here. That meant he was taking this attack on the thorn hedge very seriously. And given that Jack was the newest arrival, he might have expected that Gazen's suspicions would immediately have turned his direction.