But the beast was too fast for him. It sank flat onto his skin again, and Jack's screech turned to a howl of pain as his attack succeeded only in bruising his own shoulder. Ignoring the pain, he struck again and again, stumbling sideways in a useless attempt to get away. Through the noise of his own panicked babbling, he was distantly aware that there were two different voices shouting at him.
He ignored them. Voices didn't matter. Nothing mattered but to somehow get this thing off him.
He was still flailing around when his foot caught on something and he toppled over onto his side.
Or rather, he should have toppled over onto his side. But even as he tried to get his arm around to break his fall, the feeling on his skin shifted, and something somehow broke his fall, setting him more or less gently onto the broken control board he'd been tumbling toward.
But gentle landing or not, the sudden fall snapped him out of his mindless attack on himself. Gasping for breath, he half sat, half lay there, his shoulder throbbing with the multiple blows he'd just brilliantly hammered down on it. In his left ear, he could hear Uncle Virge's voice shouting from the comm clip on his shirt collar, demanding to know what was happening.
In his right ear, the snakelike voice he'd heard earlier was speaking again.
'Everyone... shut... up,' he ordered between gasps. 'You hear me? Everyone just shut up.'
Both voices went obediently silent. Jack took a few more breaths, trying desperately to calm down. His efforts were only a limited success. 'All right,' he said at last. 'You—Voice Number Two—the one who isn't Uncle Virge. Who are you?'
'My name is Draycos,' the snake voice replied from somewhere behind him, the sound tingling strangely against his skin.
Jack twisted around to look, but there was nothing there. The dragon head had disappeared from his shoulder, but out of the corner of his eye he could just see the tip of the snout further around on his back. 'I am a poet- warrior of the K'da. Who are you?'
'I'm Jack Morgan,' Jack said, his voice starting to shake again. Now for the big question. 'Where are you?'
'Tell me first how you came to be aboard my ship,' Draycos said. 'Are you an enemy of the K'da and Shontine?'
'I'm not an enemy of anyone,' Jack protested, scrambling back to his feet. 'I saw your ship go down, and I came to check it out. That's all.'
'Did you see our attackers?' The voice, Jack noted uneasily, moved with him, still tingling his shoulder.
'Well...' Jack hesitated, wondering how much to say. 'We saw the battle,' he said. 'It looked like the guys in the little ships went aboard the big ones afterward. Are there more of your people up there?'
There was a soft sigh, even more snakelike than the voice. 'They were my people,' Draycos said. 'They are all dead now.'
'We don't know that,' Jack said, feeling an obscure urge to be comforting. 'Those Djinn-90s can't have had that many soldiers to put aboard.'
'There is no one left to fight them,' the dragon said sadly. 'The K'da and Shontine were already dead.'
'All of them?' Uncle Virge's voice asked, sounding surprised.
'All of them,' Draycos said. 'The weapon that was used against us kills all that it touches. It does not leave survivors.'
Jack thought back to the purple tornadoes he'd seen playing against the freighters' sides. A weapon that killed right through hull plates? 'What about you?' he asked. 'You survived.'
'An unintended mercy,' Draycos said. 'We were already falling, and they thought merely to save themselves further effort.'
Jack took a deep breath. It was pretty obvious by now what was going on. He still hoped he was wrong; but right or wrong, it was time to take the plunge and find out for sure. 'You're on my back, aren't you?' he asked. 'Wrapped around me like a—well, like a thin sheet of plastic.'
'Yes,' Draycos said.
'You're what?' Uncle Virge demanded. 'You're where?'
'It's like he's a picture painted there,' Jack said. 'Or a full-body tattoo, like you see sometimes on Zhandig music stars.'
'What do you mean, like a tattoo?' Uncle Virge said, sounding every bit as bewildered as Jack felt. 'How can something alive be like a tattoo?'
'What, you think I know?' Jack shot back. 'Look, if I could explain it—'
'Please,' Draycos cut in. 'Permit me.' Jack looked down. The dragon's head had slid back into view on his shoulder and was turning back and forth as if looking for something. 'There,' Draycos said. 'That data reader.'
'Where?' Jack asked, frowning at the debris.
A second later he jumped again as a sudden bit of extra weight came onto the back of his right arm, and a gold-scaled limb unexpectedly rose up out from that spot. A short finger or toe or whatever it was extended from the paw, pointing to a small flat instrument about three inches square lying among the debris on the deck. 'There,' Draycos said. 'Go and kneel down beside it.'
Swallowing, Jack obeyed. This was the very spot, he noted uneasily, where the dragon had been crouching when he came in. Could this thing be a weapon? 'Now what?'
'I will give you a picture of what I am,' Draycos said. 'Do you see how the reader lies on the deck? Where they meet, the reader is a two-dimensional object. Do you agree?'
