Dragonback 03 Dragon and Slave Read Online Free

be
invited.
    For a fourteen-year-old thief, this was the only way to get that
invitation.
    "What is a consular adjunct?" Draycos asked.
    Jack frowned. "A what?"
    "There," Draycos said, and Jack felt the dragon's tongue slide
across his collarbone toward the house he was standing in front of.
    He turned to look. Like the rest of the houses in the area, it had
the darkened windows of a place that had shut down for the night. But
on a decorative post by the front walkway was a small glowing sign:

    INTERNES CONSULAR ADJUNCT

DAUGHTERS OF HARRIET TUBMAN

    "You got me," Jack said, frowning at the sign. "Some kind of
official Internes office, I guess. But I don't know what an adjunct is.
Or what a Harriet Tubman is, either."
    "Why would an Internes office be placed so close to a slave
dealer's territory?" Draycos asked. It wasn't easy for a whisper to
sound suspicious, but the dragon managed it without any trouble. "You
told me the Internes does not condone slavery."
    "It doesn't," Jack said. "Keep your voice down, will you?"
    "I am sorry." The dragon didn't sound sorry, but he did lower his
voice. "Could the Daughters of Harriet Tubman be a pro-slavery faction?"
    "I've never heard of any pro-slavery factions in the Internes,"
Jack told him. "Look, can we skip this until we get back to the ship?
We've got a job to do."
    "Of course," Draycos said, sounding subdued. "My apologies."
    "Okay." Jack turned back to the gatekeeper's house, slipping his
backpack onto one shoulder and pulling out what looked like a portable
music player. "Let's do it."
    The house was surrounded by a modest lawn consisting of tall,
cactus-like plants rising up out of a tightly meshed, clover-like
ground cover. A quick scan with the sensors in the music player showed
that there were no field-effect or laser-grid alarm systems guarding
the surface of the lawn. It took a more cautious, step-by-step check to
make sure there were no hidden tripwires or pop plates lurking
underneath the clover itself.
    But the lawn was clean, and he made it across without trouble. "I
presume we are not going to try the front door?" Draycos murmured as
Jack slunk along the side of the house toward one of the rear corners.
    "Not the front door, the back door, or the side door," Jack
agreed, still watching for tripwires as he edged his way along. "See
that second-floor bay window up there?"
    "The window that sticks out from the wall?"
    "Right," Jack said. "The species profiles say that Brummgas like
to soak in their bathtubs for hours at a time, staring out a window and
thinking whatever deep thoughts Brummgas have at a time like that.
Probably, they mostly wonder where the soap has gotten to."
    "We wish to enter through his bathing room?"
    "It beats going through a bedroom window and landing on someone
trying to sleep," Jack pointed out, crouching down and checking his
bearings. He was right under the edge of the bay window. Perfect. "I
did that once," he added. "I thought he and I were going to have a
joint heart attack right there."
    Tucking the music player back inside his pack, he pulled out a
pair of six-inch-long cylinders. Each cylinder had what looked like a
suction cup at one end and a thin, four-foot-long rope wrapped around
it ending in a loop-stirrup. Officially, these things were
mountain-climbing tools called step-lifters, designed to help a climber
work his way up smooth cliff faces.
    In Jack's business—his former business, that is—they were known as
bootstraps, and had been adapted for less innocent climbing purposes.
    He unwrapped the ropes and got his feet snugged into the stirrups.
Holding the cylinder in his left hand horizontally, he lifted it a
couple of feet up the wall. The attached rope pulled his left leg up as
he did so, rather like a marionette's string. He pressed the cylinder
end firmly against the wall, and there was a faint hiss as the suction
cup secreted quick-set glue and locked itself in place. Pulling down on
the cylinder with his hand as he