Dragonback 05 Dragon and Judge Read Free

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 a Jupa 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