Dragonback 01 Dragon and Thief Read Online Free PDF Page B

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?"
    "Well, no, it's three-dimensional," Jack said. "It has length,
width, and thickness."
    "But it is two-dimensional where it meets the deck," Draycos
repeated. "At that meeting, it has only length and width. Do you agree?"
    Jack shrugged. "Fine. Whatever you say."
    "It is not a matter of what I say," Draycos said, sounding
impatient. "It is a matter of whether you understand. Consider the deck
to be a two-dimensional universe, with the data reader as a
two-dimensional object existing within it. There is no thickness there,
only length and width. Two dimensions only. Do you understand?"
    "I understood before," Jack said, a little impatience of his own
starting to peek out through the heavy curtain of weirdness hanging
over this whole thing. Having not been killed and eaten on the spot, he
was starting to lose some of his initial fear, and he had better things
to do than play word games with this Draycos character. "So what?"
    "Very well," Draycos said. "Now lift the data reader so that one
edge remains on the deck."
    Jack did as instructed. "Okay. So?"
    "In this picture, the data reader is still two-dimensional,"
Draycos said. "Yet to an observer within the two-dimensional universe
of the deck, it now appears as a one-dimensional portion of a line. It
has length only, but no