The Dragon Circle Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  EPILOGUE

  ”I WOULD LIKE YOU TO GET OFF MY SHIP BECAUSE YOUR CLAWS ARE RIPPING HOLES IN ITS HIDE.”

  The dragon called Irythros leaped free of the shuttle. Its talons screeched against the cerama/metal.

  (Forgive my trespass,) Irythros said as he settled to the ground beside Konner.

  The beast towered above him, as big as the shuttle. It spread its wings before furling them. The moonlight turned them into shimmering transulcent veils. For a moment, Konner thought he could see star maps in the vein network.

  Konner shook his head free of his fanciful thoughts. Dragons were planet bound. They might speak enigmatically with a great deal of wisdom, but they did not carry star charts etched into their wing membranes.

  “Why did you seek me out?” Konner asked.

  (Hanassa speaks to the stars. We need to know why.)

  “But Hanassa is dead.” Konner began to shiver with a new chill. Twice he and his brothers had thought they had killed the man. Twice he had recovered and come back to threaten their friends as well as themselves. The third time they had made certain he stayed dead.

  (The body of Hanassa died. Yet he still speaks to the stars. We need you to tell us why. . . .)

  Be sure to read these magnificent

  DAW Fantasy Novels by

  IRENE RADFORD

  The Stargods:

  THE HIDDEN DRAGON (Book 1)

  THE DRAGON CIRCLE (Book 2)

  The Dragon Nimbus:

  THE GLASS DRAGON (Book 1)

  THE PERFECT PRINCESS (Book 2)

  THE LONELIEST MAGICIAN (Book 3)

  THE WIZARD’S TREASURE (Book 4)

  The Dragon Nimbus History:

  THE DRAGON’S TOUCHSTONE (Book 1)

  THE LAST BATTLEMAGE (Book 2)

  THE RENEGADE DRAGON (Book 3)

  Merlin’s Descendants:

  GUARDIAN OF THE BALANCE (Book 1)

  GUARDIAN OF THE TRUST (Books 2)

  GUARDIAN OF THE VISION (Book 3)

  GUARDIAN OF THE PROMISE (Book 4)

  Copyright © 2004 by Phyllis Irene Radford.

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1301.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trades names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  First Printing, August

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16701-4

  S. A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to all my

  Circle of writer friends

  Who have kept me going

  Through thick and thin.

  Thank you one and all.

  Karen, Lea, Lace, Mike, & Bob

  PROLOGUE

  THE DRAGONS of the nimbus hear a new voice. Or is it an old voice become new. It speaks to the stars. We do not know this thing.

  Stargod Konner, tell us who converses with the places beyond our ken. Tell us, so that we may be wary and know who listens to this voice and why.

  CHAPTER 1

  MARTIN KONNER O’HARA stared at the tiny device. Hardly as big as his palm and yet so dangerous. A red LED blinked at him in an ominously slow pattern.

  He could almost hear it shout across the light-years “Here I am. Come get me.”

  It had to have been here for months, possibly a full year . . . since the last time he and his brothers had space-docked.

  His ship Sirius was currently in silent orbit around an uncharted planet. While he made vital repairs, he had shut down all but the most essential systems, including spin. The star drive was quiescent, awaiting regrowth of a number of the directional crystals.

  Konner and his brothers had just run out of time for repairs.

  He pried the foreign device out from where it hid under the red directional crystal. It came away from the cerama/metal hull reluctantly. After a few curses, two broken fingernails, and a new set of bruises on his knuckles, he grasped the device in his palm, still blinking, still alerting authorities to his location.

  How could she have done this to him?

  Only his ex-wife Melinda could have taken one of his patented locator beacons and perverted it so. Many had a motive to track the O’Hara brothers and their . . . independent cargo shipments. The Galactic Terran Empire called Konner and his brothers smugglers.

  The people who received highly taxed and increasingly hard to get essential goods, like food, from the black market, called them saviors.

  Melinda had more personal reasons. She had probably sold the frequency of this beacon to the highest bidder. Or bidders.

  She could afford to spend a great deal of money to retrieve the damning evidence Konner had secreted aboard Sirius and a number of other key locations.

  Konner wondered if Melinda would brag about her betrayal to their son Martin. Did she know how her need to banish Konner from Martin’s life would destroy more than just her ex-husband?

  When the Imperial Military Police found the beacon, they would also find a pristine world ready for exploitation. Konner shuddered at the thought of thundering tractors, a myriad of people, mechanical threshers, and machine after machine throwing out air and noise pollution. Chemical fertilizers would seep into the groundwater and run off into the rivers, making them unsafe to swim in, drink from, or fish out of.

  Nine tenths of what the farmers produced would be shipped off planet to feed a hungry empire. The Coros would lose not only their way of life, but would have to learn to do with less than they had now.

  The Galactic Terran Empire would not stop there. They would strip this place of every valuable resource, beginning with the timber and ending with t
he minerals, until there was nothing left. Then the inhabitants would dome their cities, breathe artificial air, eat tanked food, and sue for full citizenship.

  And another bush planet would have to be found to feed the growing empire.

  He had to destroy the beacon. Now. Before the IMPs found the right jump point to bring them here.

  Konner bent his knees and pushed against the climbing rungs of the rabbit hole that afforded access to the outer array of crystals. As his body sprang back from his push through null g, he launched himself forward. Every ten meters he touched one of the climbing rungs on the inside of the conduit to adjust his angle of glide to match the curve of the saucer-shaped spaceship. At his back, the red directional crystals hummed a muted chatter only he could hear. As he sped along, the crystals became less harmonious.

  One hundred forty-four directional crystals lined the outer rim of Sirius. They linked to twelve green driver crystals by kilometers of fiber optic cable. At the center of the ship, the drivers were linked to a single blue king stone. The two-meter-high monster kept the crystal drive harmonious and connected. In gravity, the king stone would weigh nearly one hundred fifteen kilos. But an active king stone never entered gravity. It had to grow in concert with its family of crystals in null g and lived at the center of the vessel where gravity from spin never reached.

  He came abreast of the source of the strident note. A tiny crystal bud kept the port open while a new crystal grew at the center of Sirius. Five other reds had to be replaced as well. The disharmony among the array gave him a headache.

  “Soon, friends. Soon you’ll be whole again,” he murmured soothingly. “And we can get out of here.”

  All the while his guts churned. Melinda had betrayed him to the Imperial Military Police.

  If the IMPs showed up in this forgotten star system, they would take him and his brothers prisoner. Konner would never make it back to Aurora in time for his son’s final custody hearing.

  No wonder the IMPs had been able to follow Konner and his brothers across the galaxy. Their frantic flight from the law had kept Konner from meeting his son Martin at summer camp this year.

  His fist clenched around the beacon. Would the boy be disappointed? Or would he even notice that his usual counselor had gone missing.

  Five months ago, with the crystals damaged and the IMPs closing in, Konner and his two brothers had jumped blind into this uncharted star system three sectors off the maps. They had plunged into the adventure of a lifetime and found a place they could call home. A place where Konner could bring Martin to experience his true family away from Melinda’s self-centered greed, amoral manipulations, and emotional abuse. As well as her lies.

  And away from Mum.

  Useless making plans now. As long as the beacon sent its signal, the IMPs could find the O’Hara brothers and terminate their dreams. All that had kept the law away from here till now was finding the weird jump point.

  “We have to leave,” he muttered.

  He stared at the device again.

  “We can’t leave until the crystals regrow.” Konner launched again along the narrow access shaft at the extremity of Sirius’ rim. At the next hatch he grabbed a handle and changed direction. One deft somersault put him into the largest cargo hold.

  Strangely, the load of black market pearls remained undamaged, despite the wild maneuvers through which Loki had put the ship in escaping IMP patrols. Konner had added to the hold the antique computers and lab equipment that had been left behind by the original colonists of the planet. A wealth of information about the first colony and the civil war that destroyed them lay encrypted on the hard drives.

  From the hold, he dove into the crystal room. A vacuum-inducing force field encased each of the monopole drivers. Nitrogen flooded the field, causing the green crystals to spit out electrons along the fiber optics to the red directionals. Six new directional crystals stood in sealed baths shaped to the exact dimensions of the finished crystal. The original seeds stood at the peak of the bath cage and grew down and out. Limited by the cage and the precisely measured minerals in the baths, the red crystals would stop growing when they reached the shape and size needed. Each would need a little polishing and tuning to finish them, but they could be used the moment they completed growing.

  Each bath was connected by fiber optics to the king stone and thus to every crystal on the ship. The ship’s power, navigational, and communication systems had to grow as a family in order to synchronize and propel the ship across the vast distances between stars. More than that, the king stone had to be connected to a mother stone at its place of origin in order to find its way around the galaxy.

  Konner had disconnected the crystal drive from its mother stone upon entering this star system. Just as Konner and his brothers were out of contact with Mum.

  They weren’t going anywhere until he reconnected that dangling orange fiber optic lying just outside the crystal circle. But if the ship could not find its way home with the connection severed, the IMPs could not find them through the connection.

  Except for the damned locator beacon he still held in his palm.

  “Another week to finish growing,” Konner grumbled. “Another week for the IMPs to search for the jump point that should not exist but did.”

  Another twist and rebound took Konner up the gangway to the bridge. He slapped the comm port even before he anchored himself in his chair.

  The lights blinked furiously red for an interminable ninety seconds. Then they dropped back to normal black.

  “Damn!” Neither of his brothers had an active communicator close at hand.

  “We haven’t got time for this!”

  A quick sensor sweep showed the inner planetary orbits free of man-made objects other than Sirius. He hadn’t time to search the vast distances of the outer planets for a tiny moving vessel.

  He pounded his fist against the edge of his interface. The locator beacon dug into his palm.

  He had designed the thing to survive the fire and ice and massive radiation of space travel. He needed more weight than he had access to to crush the thing.

  Only the sustained heat of molten lava at the heart of the planet would fry the femto-bots inside the beacon beyond their self-repair capabilities.

  A half smile crept across Konner’s face. He had access to that molten core. If he dared.

  Could he face the ghost of Hanassa on his own?

  “Captain Leonard, sir.” Kat Talbot nearly squirmed with delight in her chair at the helm of Imperial Military Police Cruiser Jupiter.

  Commander Amanda Leonard, captain of the Jupiter , glanced up from the screen full of reports she studied. She looked bored.

  “Captain, I think I found it.”

  “Found what?” Commander Leonard lost the bland vacancy in her eyes. She touched the screen in front of her own chair so that it corresponded with Kat’s.

  “The jump point, Captain.” Now Kat could not contain her excitement. “And the beacon.”

  “Show me,” Leonard demanded. At the tone of her voice, the rest of the bridge crew keyed their own screens to share in Kat’s discovery.

  Lieutenant Josh Kohler, Chief Navigator and Kat’s best friend aboard ship, flashed her a begrudging grin. They had a bet on this jump point. If she found it first, he would do her laundry for a week. If he beat her to the discovery, then she would sleep with him. Kat had no intention of allowing him to win the bet.

  “Summon Lieutenant Commander M’Berra to the bridge, Englebert,” Leonard said to the communications officer. Kat figured she would want the second-in-command in on this discovery.

  Lucinda Baines, the diplomatic attaché who had hitched a ride aboard the IMP cruiser, hastened to Kat’s side. She bent her petite body over Kat’s shoulder, resting her hands on the back of the helmsman’s chair. Her perfume suddenly overwhelmed all other scents. The usual citrus smell of the recirculated air took on rotten overtones, as if it had spent too much time in waste recycling and not enough in the sc
rubbers.

  Kat shifted as far away from the woman as her station chair allowed. Then she highlighted the anomaly her sensors had discovered with her electronic pencil.

  “I don’t see it,” Commander Leonard hesitated.

  Kat brought up some new data. Commander Leonard’s thick eyebrows raised as she digested a string of numbers and symbols that showed a femto’s difference from normal space energy fluxes. In the past week of parking in deep space Kat, with M’Berra’s help, had adjusted and fine-tuned the ship’s sensors to detect smaller differences than any other IMP vessel could find.

  And there was the beacon blaring through the tiny hole in space. If you only knew where to look and what to look for.

  Lieutenant Commander M’Berra ducked his curly black head as he stepped onto the bridge. He suppressed a yawn. Other than that single sign that he’d just gone off a twelve-hour shift, he looked as refreshed and crisply fresh as he had half a day ago. He immediately went to his station beside the captain. Leonard briefed him on the latest development in hushed tones.

  “Are you certain that is a jump point and not just a reflection of the normal radiation currents?” Commander Leonard was known as a cautious leader. Bets aboard Jupiter favored that she’d easily make full captain, and get a bigger vessel at the next review board.

  “Captain, sir, the outlaws jumped from these exact coordinates to somewhere. That anomaly is the only indication of something different about this area. And I am getting a hint of the beacon frequency that was highlighted on the memo from Command Base.”

  “Ms. Baines, do you have any objections to a further delay in delivering you to Annubis IV for your annual leave?” Commander Leonard asked.

  “If the notorious O’Hara brothers disappeared from here, I have no objections to chasing them,” the diplomatic attaché replied. Her eyes narrowed and the planes of her perfect face became sharper. “Commander Leonard, do you have to be reminded that capturing those three is highest priority for all Imperial Military Police.”