The Dragon Circle (12 page)

“How did you do that?” He ran his fingers over her damp brow and along the stress creases above her nose. Worry made him clench his jaw. He had to show a calm face. He had to keep her from going into hysterics.

“I do not know.” She stared at her palm. The skin looked red, not quite raw, but definitely painful. “It burns,” she whispered.

He should have known Dalleena would not panic.

“I have some salve for that.” Konner released the first aid kit from its place beneath the console. His hands felt empty and cold when he released her, but the kit was awkward to haul into position with only one free.

A quick swipe of Electro-Steri® killed off any stray bacteria. St. Bridget only knew how much bizarre bacteria lurked on the planet. Then a squirt of cooling gel sealed the burn.

“What miracle is this?” She held up the hand. Already the redness faded as the medicines leeched the heat out of her skin before it could blister.

“Just keep your hand up, above your heart, for a few seconds until the gel dries.” He held her hand in position. The softness of her skin despite the calluses sent micro amps of electricity up his arm and into his heart.

He jerked his gaze away from contact with her big brown eyes before he lost himself entirely.

“Is this strange ship in the skies friend or foe?” Dalleena asked. Ever practical. Ever logical. She returned to the cause of her hurt rather than dwelling on the injury itself.

Melinda, Konner's ex, had taken to her bed for three days when a splinter lodged in her finger on their honeymoon.

“Most likely a foe.” Konner let go of his memories of Melinda gratefully. As soon as he retrieved his son from her ungentle custody, he need never think of her again.

He could concentrate on Dalleena.

No. His place was not on this benighted planet. He belonged to the stars. He would not enter into a relationship knowing he had to leave very soon.

“What must we do to evade this enemy? Or defeat it?” Dalleena asked.

“Our first step is to find that beacon and destroy it.” Konner returned to his seat and put the shuttle back on manual control. Without hesitation, he boosted the speed. “The heck with fuel conservation.” He pushed the speed up another notch. “If we don't kill the beacon fast, we won't need the shuttle. We'll need holes in the ground to hide in.”

“I know of a number of caves on the headlands at the south end of the bay. Children often get lost exploring them. ‘Tis up to me to find them when they go too deep,” Dalleena offered.

“I'll keep that in mind.”

The coastline came into view. Konner called up the maps from Kim's initial survey of the planet. The central continent dominated the scans. It spread across nearly an entire hemisphere north and east of here. Only a few large islands and semicontinents, like the land of the Coros, dotted the ocean that covered the rest of the planet.

Konner and his brothers had dismissed the continent because the clusters of human habitation hugged the coasts with little or nothing in between. The climate of the interior appeared barely hospitable to human life.

He shed altitude. Somehow the initial survey had not picked up on the lively boat traffic that now came into view.

“Now where?” Konner asked. He might be close enough to pick up the beacon on one of his scanners. But he had to stay high enough not to disturb any locals.

“North. At the head of that bay.” Dalleena pointed and he changed course.

The scanners spit images and a data stream into the interface. Then the beacon blipped. An obscure frequency well below normal scan ranges. If the IMPs did not know where to look, they would never find it. Another strike against Melinda. She had to have sold the frequency to his enemies.

Konner suppressed the boiling in his blood. Giving in to his anger with Melinda would not help him this minute. He needed to save his emotions and be in control for the court date.

And use his copy of the prenuptial agreement she had not honored.

He locked in the frequency and pinpointed it on the map the computer formed, layer by layer as he circled the port.

“Just wonderful.” He nearly slammed his fist into the console. “An entire city full of people.” Several thousand crammed into a tiny space. Any one of them could have the beacon.

Frantically, he sought a landing place beyond the hordes of people, but close enough to walk into the city.

For some reason, the city seemed to be confined within a stout wall. It formed a large half circle around the harbor. Warrens of alleyways filled the enclosure. Buildings piled one atop another, threatening to tumble in a stiff breeze. The scanners picked up a large concentration of pollution in the water of the harbor. Mostly human and animal waste.

Konner wrinkled his nose at the thought of the stench of the city. Most civilized worlds were as crowded as this place. But air scrubbers built into the protective atmosphere domes replaced unpleasant odors with a citrus scent. Sewage disposal remained unseen and unsmelled, returning sanitized minerals and liquids to the environment and food tanks.

“Why do they not move beyond the wall?” Dalleena asked. She shifted her gaze from the growing map to the knot of dark brown below them.

Smart girl to have figured out the relationship between the map and the real view.

“I'm guessing the wall is protection. Marauders, dust storms, large predators. Something mean and dangerous lives in the steppes beyond that wall.”

The land stretched out in near endless waves of undulating hills dotted with low shrubs, covered with tall grasses, golden in the autumnal sunshine, and creased by ravines. A few lakes glinted in the distance.

Konner decided to hide
Rover
behind a long hill that rose slightly higher than its fellows a few hundred meters beyond the city wall and away from the small flocks of sheep and goats that dotted the hill-sides. Did the shepherds bring all of the livestock within the protection of the wall each night?

He circled around, banked, and cut the engines as he glided to his selected landing. He smiled as he rolled to a silent stop, completely hidden from the city. Loki could not have executed the maneuver any smoother or quieter.

Locking down the shuttle was an easy and familiar procedure. Collecting supplies required some thought.

“Water,” Dalleena said. She looked around the cabin.

Konner touched the pressure panel on one of the cupboards. An array of native waterskins, cloaks, knives, and other survival gear tumbled out.

She sighed and rolled her eyes at Konner. Immediately she began to sort, stack, and organize the jumble.

“Water is in here.” He stepped into the head and turned on the tap. Dalleena watched every move he made.

She quickly made sense of the sink and tap, filling the skins efficiently, with minimal waste. Then she inspected the shower with minute care. Very quickly she nodded in understanding. But the toilet seemed to mystify her.

“For waste,” Konner informed her succinctly. A quick flush and the light of understanding dawned on her expressive face.

He felt inordinate pride in teaching her this simple thing. This one part of civilization that seemed so elemental.

“Hats,” Dalleena said as she emerged from her inspection of the marvels of modern plumbing.

“Hats?” Konner looked up from his array of portable sensors and other gadgets. Almost as an afterthought he thrust six small diamonds into his pocket. The jewels were accepted as currency throughout the GTE when cash and credit limits did not cross borders into the Galactic Free Market—or black market.

“Hats?” he asked again as Dalleena peered into the corners of the supply closet.

“Desert sun. All of the locals will wear them as protection.”

He nodded compliance. He added brimmed straw hats to the collection of gear.

And then there was no more reason to stall and every reason to find that bloody beacon and destroy it. He estimated they had approximately seven hours before the IMP vessel descended upon the planet.

After that, the history of the place, the very nature of society here would change irrevocably. For members of the Galactic Terran Empire could not leave a planet pristine. They always had to ”improve.” Improve, as in industrialize, exploit, overpopulate, pollute.

Destroy.

“Come on, we're running out of time.” Konner flung the loosely woven cape of ubiquitous red cow's wool over his shoulders and began marching up the hill. He barely remembered to touch the remote to cloak the shuttle behind its light-bending force field.

Dalleena trotted behind him, uncomplaining, matching him long stride for long stride.

They crested the hill quickly. Looking downslope, the city lay before them, crammed into barely ten square kilometers. Every building was made of the same reddish mud bricks. At one time, the place had begun on a square grid with a well at every major intersection. But those spacious blocks had been divided and subdivided time and again. Alleys ran between buildings at odd angles. People crowded around the wells, now too few to accommodate them all. Dust covered everything, giving it a uniform reddish-brown pallor. No trees. No flowers. Nothing living except too many people and a few stray pigs and goats.

“Now where?” Konner asked.

“There.” Dalleena held up her hand, palm out. She indicated an area near the port, north of center where a larger than usual congregation of people shoved and pushed their way through the narrow streets.

Konner took a bead on her direction with his portable scanner. Dead on. He could not have pinpointed the beacon any closer with electronics.

He hurried down the hill and through the open gate in the wall. Five gates. All open. No visible guards. Whatever the wall protected the locals from, must not come out during daylight, or this phase of the moon, or until it rained. Just not right now.

Unchallenged, they made their way into the heart of the city. Roughly clad people with swarthy complexions and blond hair bumped against them, shoving to get past, too eager to go about their own business to pay attention to two strangers.

But then maybe strangers were not all that unusual here. This was a port, after all.

The pervasive odors of rotting fish, salt water, and seaweed lay atop the more subtle scents of humanity pressed into too tight quarters, dust, and a hint of exotic spices.

“Where did all these people come from?” Dalleena asked in hushed tones. She clung to a bit of his cloak, as if she feared becoming separated from him. “Did they sail here from Coronnan?”

“Possibly. A long time ago.” Konner did not want to give her a history lesson about the original human colonists who had fallen into civil war and genocide with a bioengineered plague. That plague still cropped up occasionally. He just hoped he'd managed to neutralize it last spring.

The babble of voices refused to settle into a recognizable pattern. The Coros spoke a dialect of Standard GTE, slowed to a creeping drawl and mutated over the last three hundred years. The denizens of this city spoke a rapid dialect that was similar. He almost caught a word here and there. And yet . . .

“Possibly they have been here as long as the Coros have held their lands. My brother Kim will be very interested to study the history of these people.” Perhaps the original colonists split, some coming here, others staying in Coronnan, before the devastating winter and crop failure drove Dalleena's ancestors to fight among themselves for generations until they fell back to bronze age technology and a tribal culture.

Perhaps there were many remnant cultures throughout this world. His feet itched to explore more. But he had to get the beacon. Now. Before the IMPs had a chance to pinpoint its location.

But once the IMPs landed, and they certainly would, now that they were in system, how could Konner and his brothers prevent them from informing the authorities back home about this pristine little planet ready for exploitation?

“The bee-kan is in there,” Dalleena said. She nodded discreetly toward a jumble of people and makeshift structures.

Voices rose higher and higher as people shouted at each other, waving their arms in wild gesticulations. Konner was about to jump in and separate two men seemingly bent upon throttling each other. Then a few coins changed hands and one of the men scooped up the pile of goods between them.

“It's a
souk!
” Konner smiled with understanding.

“A ‘sug?' ” Dalleena asked, never taking her eyes off the arguments and exchanges.

“A market.”

“Ah! We have these two times each year, at end of planting and end of harvest.”

“That is a market fair. This bazaar is open every day. All year.” They stepped beyond an invisible line that separated the normal crush of people going about their business from the frantic crush of people dealing with their business.

“Those metal disks they exchange. Are they markers against goods and services?”

“In a way. We call them coins where I come from. They are made of valuable metals.”

“But what good are they?”

How to explain the concept of money to a woman who had only known the concrete evidence of barter?

Before he could think of a coherent sentence, she darted ahead of him. He had to hurry to keep track of her in the shouting and milling crowd. They wended their way around rickety stalls, fragrant cooking pits with roasting beasts, and cauldrons of aromatic stews. Everywhere people pushed and shoved and raised their voices, doing their best to separate Konner from the Tracker.

Then he caught a brief glimpse of her cloak. Good thing she stood nearly as tall as he, half a head taller than most of the shoppers and merchants. He elbowed aside an insistent purveyor of a frothy beverage that smelled strongly alcoholic, and stepped over a tumble of fabric rolls to keep her in view. Halfway around a cart piled with leather goods he saw where she had stopped.