The Dragon Never Sleeps Read Free Page B

world.
    The High City floated a thousand meters up, connected to UpTown by a flexible tube containing passenger and freight lifts. The proconsuls of the House, the very rich and their hangers-on, remained safely isolated there.
    The legs of UpTown lifted it, too, above the perils of a world poorly tamed and, especially, above the taint of the tamers. Administrators and functionaries; Canon garrison if there was one; House dependent, cadet, and allied merchants; contract operators; these lived UpTown.
    DownTown was the base of the social pyramid. Its own gradient declined toward the deepest shadow beneath the belly of UpTown.
    Some were big, some were small, but that basic structure formed the capital on ten thousand worlds.
    Jo activated her suit and bounced to her right. Her squad followed. Sensors systems came up, displaying in color on the sensitized inner surface of her face plate, defining her surroundings. She could breathe the air. It was not too cold out there. But the info she cared about was that there were no unfriendly weapons nearby.
    Data from
VII Gemina
, relayed from the lander, interrupted once a minute for five seconds, mapping the city as Probe saw it. The krekelen remained stationary near the heart of DownTown.
    City work. Jo hated it. Cities were treacherous. You never knew who would hit you with what from where. The system was not great at detecting non-energy weapons.
    Linkup. Circle complete. Nothing would get out. Came the order to advance.
    Jo glanced up at the High City, at the flaming star of
VII Gemina
, which seemed tangled among fairy spires. How frightened they must be, those Cholot lordlings, wondering if the landing party had come to end the Ban by toppling UpTown and killing the High City's gravs.
    There was no resistance. The few beings Jo saw stood rigidly immobile, staring with terrified eyes. Seldom had she seen so many sports, discards, and bizarre aliens. And this world had been allowed no outside contact for centuries. The creepy-crawlies were taking over.
    The target did not move till the circle was under a kilometer in diameter. Jo's faceplate began displaying
Gemina
track in five second alternates with suit local. Up on battalion net, for all officers and NCOs: "A reminder from up top, people. We
will
take it alive." No commentary, of course. That was there only in tone.
    I Am A Soldier.
    Corollary: I Obey.
    On platoon net: "It's headed our way, people."
    Jo matched
Gemina
-feed with a suit-local heat trace a hundred meters out. She outlocked
Gemina
, fixed the track, switched on squad tac. "Coming right down our throats, guys."
    "Why can't we see it? You see it, Sarge? Anybody see it?"
    No one did. But it ought to be visible. It was on top of them.
    Top! She looked up, adjusted to max enhancement. There. Something scuttling along a beam.
    Her bolt edged it perfectly. It went into nerve lock, clung to a stress lattice branching from a pylon, slowly changed into what looked like a black plastic film. Jo switched to platoon tac. "Platoon, Second Squad. We got it."

— 6 —
    The chamber was a perfect globe a thousand meters across. A great mass floated near its heart, slightly upward as gravity was oriented. Lightning leaped from the curved walls to the mass. Tin-sheet thunder beat its chest and howled around the cavity. Gouts of red, gaseous flame exploded across the darkness. Self-congratulatory devil's laughter pranced between the valleys of the thunder.
    A woman stood in the mouth of a corridor ending at the wall of the chamber. "He's in a dramatic mood today." Her companion was a youth who looked seventeen. She looked twenty-one. He was. She was not. She was much older and more cruel. The sorrow of the torturer looked out through her pale blue eyes.
    "When will we kill him?" The boy's dark eyes were not those of an adolescent. The rest of him looked naive and young and innocent, but his eyes were those of a predator.
    She slapped him. "Don't say that! Don't even think it this