"More often if you've actually done something to annoy her," Draycos murmured.
"Yeah, well—yeah," Jack said. "But every time we try to drop-kick her off the ship, she refuses to go."
"She has Taneem to think about now," Draycos reminded him. "They're beginning to share the same symbiotic bond that you and I do."
"And, what, Alison thinks the two of them will be safer from Neverlin and the Valahgua if they hang around us?" Jack shrugged.
"Maybe. I don't know, though. I still think she's working some angle."
"Perhaps," Draycos said. "Only time will tell."
Jack snorted gently. "Or else time will slap us flat across the head," he muttered. "I guess we'll find out which."
CHAPTER 2
Jack couldn't remember ever having walked the soil of Semaline. But the soil itself, or at least the aromatic variety around the NorthCentral Spaceport, had most certainly found its way into the ship during their brief visits.
Now, as he walked down the Essenay's ramp, the half-remembered smells flooded across his face like a softly smothering blanket. For a moment his feet seemed to tangle against each other, as if unwilling to move him deeper into the aroma.
"Are you all right?" Draycos asked quietly from his right shoulder.
"I'm fine," Jack assured him, working on getting his stride going again. "I just . . . there's a smell here that really gets to me."
The K'da's head, flattened into its two-dimensional form across Jack's shoulder, rose slightly against his shirt, his tongue flicking out briefly as he tasted the air. "I don't detect anything dangerous," he said.
"I didn't say it was dangerous," Jack countered tartly. "I just said it got to me."
Draycos didn't answer, and Jack grimaced. That had been rude. "Sorry," he apologized. "I guess I'm a little on edge."
"Maybe you should reconsider letting Alison go with you," Uncle Virge suggested from the comm clip on his left shirt collar. "I could be out there in two minutes," Alison's voice seconded.
Jack squared his shoulders. Whatever was on this world, he could handle it. He and Draycos. Not he and Alison Kayna. "Thanks, but I can do this," he said. "You just take care of Taneem. Help her with her English lessons if you get bored."
"Jack, lad—" Uncle Virge began.
"And you just take care of them, okay?" Jack cut him off. "I can do this."
Uncle Virge sighed. "Whatever you say."
The spaceport was laid out in a series of concentric rings, with the ground and air transport pickup point in the center. "Odd design," Draycos commented as the trickles of passengers and crews from the docking slots on the outer edges began to form themselves into a more densely packed inward-moving crowd. "Why would anyone deliberately build a spaceport that actually creates congestion?"
"You got me, buddy symbiont," Jack said, dodging out of the way as a couple of Compfrins pushed past him. "Maybe they don't want big crowds coming through here. It's only a small regional spaceport, you know, on a small out-of-the-way world."
"Not a very wealthy one, either," Draycos commented.
"No, but it could have been," Jack said as he ducked past a group of chattering Jantris through the doorway into the next ring inward. "There are supposed to be some really nice beryllium and iridium deposits in the Golvin territories east of here."
"Why weren't they developed?"
Jack shrugged. "Uncle Virgil told me that some mining corporation had managed to get the whole area tangled up in red tape and paperwork."
Something brushed his back, pulling at the light jacket he'd put on to help conceal the tangler belted at his waist. Jack twitched himself free and kept moving. The brush came again, more insistent this time. Again, Jack pulled away, then turned to see what the problem was.
He found himself gazing half a head down at a Golvin. The alien's long face was gazing up at him, his thin, wiry body visibly trembling. He wore nothing but a knee-length tan-colored vest covered with bulging pockets. "Is there a problem?" Jack asked.
"It is he," the Golvin said, his voice sounding like sandpaper rubbing across slate. "It is the Jupa."
"The Jupas are gone," another Golvin voice objected from behind Jack. Jack turned to find that two more of the wiry creatures had come up behind him. They joined the first in pawing at his jacket, their wide noses snuffling like bloodhounds on a fresh scent.
"Then perhaps this is a third Jupa they have sent to us," the first Golvin said firmly. "He smells much as they did."
"But the Jupas are gone," the second Golvin repeated.
"But there is so much that needs to be done," the first countered. "He smells like the Jupa Stuart and the Jupa Ariel. He must therefore be a Jupa."
"Or I'm just a human," Jack interjected, wondering what in space aJupa was. "Maybe what you're smelling is just normal human scent."
"I have smelled other humans," the first Golvin insisted. "You are a Jupa."
"The One will know the truth," the third Golvin spoke up. "We should take him to the One."
"Yes, indeed," the first Golvin said, brightening. "You must come with us, Jupa."
"Wait a minute," Jack protested, trying to pull away. But their hands had some sort of odd stickiness to them, and the more he pulled the more he seemed permanently attached. "I can't go with you. I have to get to the bank."
"You are the Jupa," the first Golvin said firmly. "We have awaited your arrival for a long time."
"I have to go to the bank," Jack insisted, twisting his arms free of his jacket. But the three sets of sticky hands merely transferred themselves to his shirt and jeans. "Look, you're confusing me with someone else. I'm not who you think I am. Really."
"Jack?" Draycos murmured urgently from his shoulder.
"No—stay down," Jack warned quietly, eyeing the crowd around them. The last thing he and Draycos needed right now was for the K'da's existence to burst into public knowledge. He and Alison needed a certain freedom of movement if they were going to stop Neverlin and the Valahgua.
The Golvins were moving Jack along now, herding him like a prize sheep as they headed for one of the exits into the inner transportation area. Maybe out in the open, Jack thought, he would have a better chance of escaping.
He was still waiting for that chance when the Golvins ushered him into the backseat of a cramped, beat-up old air shuttle and piled in around him. The driver produced a starter from one of his vest's pockets, and ten seconds later they were in the air and heading east.
It was only then that Jack noticed that both his comm clip and his tangler were missing.
"Where was he when you lost him?" Alison asked, checking the clip in her compact Corvine 4mm pistol as she raced toward the airlock.
"Third ring toward the middle," Uncle Virge said, his voice as agitated as Alison had ever heard it. "He was talking to someone—at least two people, maybe more—and then the transmission cut off."
So whoever they were, they'd made sure to shut off Jack's comm clip when they grabbed him. That was a bad sign. "He's got the spare in his shoe, right?"
"If he can get to it," Uncle Virge said grimly. "There's a comm clip for you on the shelf in the airlock."
"I've got my own," Alison reminded him.
"This one's already tuned to my frequency and pattern specs."
"Fine," Alison growled. "Whatever."
Taneem was waiting in the airlock, her gray scales shimmering in the light as she paced restlessly around the room. "There is danger?" she asked anxiously as Alison picked up the comm clip Uncle Virge had mentioned and fastened it to her collar.