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
