Strangers Among Us

by Kelley Armstrong

  He looked down at the steps again, and leaned forward to get a closer look at the step right in front of the burned-out lamp.

  Just enough light came from the stars glittering above that Ambassador Hori could make out the shape of the dark lantern, and the indistinct Aspect of the God below it. He came abreast of it.

  Something slammed into his side. He toppled left. The steps were only a metre wide, and sloped downward. His upper body fell into nothingness, and dragged his legs with it.

  Prevarian gravity was very close to Earth’s. Ambassador Hori had just over four seconds to stare up at the whirling stars above him before, for him, they were blotted out forever.

  “I count the lights!” Lodolo shouted—screamed. Then the monk slammed into Kelvas from behind as something else shot over his head, brushing against his shoulder. Kelvas thudded to the steps, gasping, then rolled over.

  In the light from Kelvas’s torch, Lodolo struggled for balance on the very edge of the precipice, giant eyes enormously wide in terror, arms flailing. He tipped backward—

  Kelvas lunged forward.

  He grabbed the monk’s blue-skinned ankle, jerking Lodolo back onto the steps even as he toppled.

  The monk slammed down on the black stone harder than Kelvas had, and lost his breath completely, gaping soundlessly as his face purpled in the light from Kelvas’s headlamp.

  Kelvas whipped around again, searching frantically this way and that for their attacker.

  The circle of light slid over black stone.

  Nothing on the steps.

  Nothing on the—

  No—there!

  A flicker of movement, in the gaping mouth of the Aspect of the God.

  He raised his light. A round black ball, contracting as he watched, settled silently into place. An instant later the darkened lamp glowed back to dim green life.

  Kelvas got carefully to his feet and drew the weapon he wasn’t supposed to be carrying on the Tower, a tiny personnel stunner. He jammed it into the opening and triggered its powerful electric jolt. The thing in the mouth of the carved face sizzled and popped, then dropped to the steps. It rolled toward the edge of the sloping stair.

  Lodolo shot out a three-fingered hand and grabbed it. “I count the lights!” he gasped out, as he allowed Kelvas to slip the ball from his palm. It weighed far more than its size suggested: it would have to, since it had to have mass enough to force a grown man from the steps.

  “Indeed you do,” Kelvas said. “And you do a very good job of it.” He slipped the ball into his pocket to examine later, then held out his hand to the monk, who gripped Kelvas’s five fingers in his three and let Kelvas help him to his feet. Kelvas took a deep breath. Adrenaline had left him feeling a little shaky. “Let’s go down,” he said.

  But Lodolo, releasing his hand, tilted his head left then right then left again, the Prevarian equivalent of a human head-shake. “I count the lights.” He moved to the wall and touched the lamp, fully alight again. “Forty-six,” he said. And then he turned away from Kelvas and resumed climbing. “I count the lights,” he said nine steps farther along. “Forty-seven.”

  Kelvas hesitated. He put his hand on the heavy ball in his pocket. He looked down the steps for a moment. Then, moved by some strange and unexpected impulse, he climbed after Lodolo, following him all the way to the top of the Tower of the Silent God.

  Four Prevarian tri-days later, Kelvas sat in his office at the Embassy, his back to his desk, looking out over the city through the office’s single large window. In the middle-distance, the Tower of the Silent God pointed at the sky. The sun had almost set, and already the green lights were beginning to glow along the five hundred and sixty-seven steps.

  The black ball he had recovered had quickly revealed its secrets. Both it and the dousing of the light were triggered only by the presence of a Terran. It had been planted very specifically to kill the Ambassador . . . or any other human who happened to climb the Tower. But no human other than the Ambassador ever had, or had been expected to.

  It was clearly not Prevarian technology, but tracing it to its human source might have proved impossible had a lead not been forthcoming from a most unexpected source.

  Hence the visitors whose arrival Kelvas awaited even now.

  The tri-tone chimed in his earbud. He tapped it twice. “Yes, Simon?”

  “Eve and Tyrone Boynton are here,” Simon said.

  “Send them in,” Kelvas said. He turned to face the door, and stood as Eve and her brother entered. He nodded to Eve, whose face bore an interesting expression of mingled hope and pride, but when he rounded the desk, he went straight to Tyrone. “Tyrone,” he said. He held out his hand. Tyrone looked at it.

  “Shake his hand, Tyrone,” Eve said.

  Tyrone looked at her, then back at Kelvas’s hand. He held his hand out hesitantly. Kelvas took it and shook it firmly. “Thank you, Tyrone,” he said. “Without your help, we never would have solved Ambassador Hori’s murder.”

  “Mr. Kimblee . . . meet with bad man,” Tyrone said in his high-pitched voice, soft and lilting as a child’s. “I saw him.” He pulled his hand back, and turned around and pointed at the office door. “Out there.”

  “I know you did,” Kelvas said.

  He had returned from his climb of the Tower to find Tyrone and Eve waiting for him in his outer office, under the watchful eye of Simon. Simon had leapt to his feet as he entered. “I’m sorry, sir,” he’d said. “I called Eve as soon as she came off-duty, but she couldn’t get Tyrone to leave, either.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Kelvas,” Eve said, and he heard the worry in her voice; he knew she was afraid Tyrone’s strange stubbornness would convince Kelvas once and for all there was no place for her brother on Prevaria. “All he’ll tell me is that he has to talk to you. Over and over again.”

  Over and over again, Kelvas thought. Like Lodolo. And so Kelvas did what he would never have done before, and sat down next to Tyrone and asked the boy what he wanted to say.

  And Tyrone pointed at the POI screen and explained, in his halting fashion, that he had seen Mr. Kimblee talking to one of the people on that screen. He pointed out the man when his image rolled around again: a certain Peter Lagat, with known ties to one of the criminal syndicates bankrolling some of the more notorious of the planetary pillagers.

  Tyrone, it turned out, liked to walk around the Embassy compound late at night. “He doesn’t sleep well since Mom and Dad died,” Eve had explained. “He walks to make himself tired.”

  I wonder if he counts the Embassy’s lights? Kelvas thought in passing, while he busied himself with sending messages, and arranging an arrest detail. A little over half an hour after Kelvas’s return from the Tower, John Kimblee was in custody and under interrogation.

  As Kelvas’s second-in-command, Kimblee had been fully aware of the Ambassador’s plan to ascend the Tower of the Silent God. A thorough forensic audit of his assets revealed that he had also been in the pay of Legat’s syndicate. His enjoyment of the luxuries of the Core Worlds had not been feigned: he’d enjoyed them so much, during his last visit there, that he’d been massively in debt until he agreed to work with Legat to sabotage the Prevarian trade agreement.

  Of course, although the murder device had been of human manufacture, it had not been placed by a human: that had been the work of one of the Prevarian anti-trade factions: one whose own links to the waiting scavengers had been uncovered by the . . . forceful . . . investigations of the Prevarian government. The faction had made a deal to rule the planet on the scavengers’ behalf once the trade deal was dead and the Terran Navy gone. The sacrilege of Prevarians actually daring to climb the Tower of the Silent God in order to commit murder had shaken Prevarian society to its core, just as the corruption revealed on the Terran side had shaken Earth—and destroyed several fortunes, reputations, and political careers.

  The new Ambassador, Kuzue Akamatsa, even now awaited the descent of darkness so that she . . . and her entire staff . . . co
uld ascend the Tower. Once that had been done, the trade agreement would, at last, be formalized. Kelvas had spent the day making the security arrangements for the signing ceremony to be held the next day in the Great Hall of the Prevarian People, out of sight on the other side of the Embassy from his office.

  But that was for later. “You did a good job, Tyrone,” he said. “A very good job. Would you like to work for the Diplomatic Corps permanently?”

  He heard Eve’s gasp, but he didn’t look at her, only at Tyrone. Tyrone’s brows pulled together. “Perm . . . permanently?”

  “For good,” Tyrone said. “Work, and stay here with your sister. For good. “

  Tyrone’s face split into an enormous grin. “Yes, Mr. Kelvas! Yes, please!”

  Kelvas glanced at Eve. “He’ll work as a night watchman. He’ll walk the grounds just as he has been. He’ll report anything out of the ordinary he sees.” He returned his gaze to Tyrone. “Can you do that? Watch carefully every night? Report anything you see that you think is strange?”

  Tyrone nodded vigorously. “I see things,” he said. “I see when things are different. That’s how I saw Mr. Kimblee and the bad man. I can do that.”

  Kelvas held out his hand again. “Then welcome to the Terran Diplomatic Corps.”

  This time, Tyrone shook his hand without prompting.

  “Take him to HR and get the forms filled out,” Kelvas said to Eve. “They’re expecting you.”

  “I stay, Eve!” Tyrone cried to his sister. “I stay!”

  Tears glistened on Eve’s cheeks. She hugged Tyrone tightly. “You stay!” She smiled over his shoulder, rather wetly, at Kelvas. “Thank you, sir, thank you!”

  “You’re welcome,” Kelvas said softly.

  Eve led her brother out of the office, and Kelvas returned to his chair. He turned to look out the window once more. Darkness had descended at last. The new ambassador would be beginning her ascent of the Tower of the Silent God.

  Though he couldn’t see all of them, Alfred Kelvas began to count the lights.

  THE DOG AND THE SLEEPWALKER

  James Alan Gardner

  To the Dog, the starship’s bridge was quiet. He’d been told there was actually a din of chatter in the minutes leading up to a warp jump—members of the crew constantly calling out readings. But the noise was restricted to the brain-chip connections that linked everybody else. The Dog had no augmentations, so all he heard was the soft shifting of people in their seats on the rare occasions when they had to push buttons with their actual fingers instead of just doing it with their minds.

  After a long period of silence, the captain cleared her throat. “Mr. Bok,” she said aloud, “are you ready for jump?”

  “Yes, Captain,” said the Dog.

  “Very good,” she said. She looked to make sure the Dog’s hand was hovering above the insultingly large red button that was the one and only feature of the Dog’s control console. She nodded and said, “Jump in three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  The captain’s body went slack. So did the bodies of everyone else on the bridge.

  Except the Dog.

  Whatever warp-space was—and whenever the Dog asked, crew-members answered, “It’s hard to explain”—whatever warp-space was, it played hell with electronics. And with fancy nanotech particles. And hormone implants. And all the other add-ons that 99.9 percent of humans were now augmented with, beginning before they were born.

  All augs had to be shut down an instant before a jump, for fear they’d blow a gasket and injure or kill their hosts. That meant everyone went unconscious—people depended so much on their built-in devices, they went comatose without them.

  Except the Dog: he had no devices. He was an un-retouched human with no role in the world except to hit the red button that would restart every person and gadget on the ship when the jump was over.

  He didn’t push the button. He settled back onto his jump-couch.

  Now the bridge was totally quiet. The crew were still breathing, but nothing more.

  The ship’s systems were shut down too. No gravity. None of the faint sounds that usually filled the background: the distant hum of the engines, the whisper of the ventilators. Everything off.

  The room wasn’t totally dark, thanks to light-emitting diatoms in transparent sea-water tubes that ran across the walls and ceiling. Their glow was as dusky as twilight, but the eyes of the crew had amplifiers that let them see as easily as if everything was under floodlights.

  Or so the Dog had been told. His own eyes were simply accustomed to the dark.

  He pulled his zapper out of his pocket. It was nothing more than a battery with two metal terminals on top. In the normal universe, pressing a button made a blue electric spark arc between the terminals. When the Dog pressed it now, the result was a flat orange ribbon that rose from one terminal, a little like a candle flame. The other terminal surrounded itself with a cloud of utter blackness.

  Okay. The ship was still in warp-space. Whatever that was.

  When he started this job, the Dog had been told that less than one percent of warp-jumps fell short of completion. “Up and out in no time at all” . . . that was the phrase everybody repeated. A starship left normal space and returned several light-years from its starting point with no time elapsed during the gap. That was the theory—what crew-members believed.

  In the Dog’s experience, almost every jump took longer. He pictured warp jumps like jumps in skiing: skiers came down those ramps then soared into the sky, sailing, sailing, till they hit the bottom. Starship crews believed they jumped flawlessly, touching down exactly where they aimed. But usually, they didn’t; they landed short, then had to coast the rest of the way to where they wanted to go.

  A ship might only need a few seconds to settle out of warp-space and back into the normal universe. Then again, it might take longer. Hence the need for the Dog: someone who wouldn’t press restart until he knew for sure that the ship was back in safe normality.

  Ship designers had tried alternatives: hundreds of automated tricks intended to eliminate the need for Dogs. The tricks never worked reliably; warp-space had a knack for causing malfunctions in human-made devices. Either the ship would restart prematurely, in which case most of the crew died in agony as their body-mods went haywire . . . or the ship never booted at all, in which case a boatload of comatose crew-members eventually froze or suffocated because the ship’s life-support systems never came back online.

  In the earliest days of warp travel, someone joked they should just train a dog to push a big red button when the reboot time came. But no one trusted a dog enough to risk an entire ship and crew on canine judgment. Eventually, humans were used instead—humans who for one reason or another didn’t have augmentations. Such people came to be known as Dogs, even if no one ever used the name to their faces.

  Crew-members seldom talked to the Dog at all. Talking was a dying skill; children still learned to do it, to encourage the development of their lungs and their sense of hearing. But most people stopped speaking aloud when they reached adulthood. Every voice the Dog had ever heard was raspy with disuse.

  Except for the simulated voices of computers. Computers could talk just fine . . . and they did it to keep the Dog company. Actual humans were edgy around him—he was outside their comfort zone. People tended to treat him as if he were stupid . . . maybe even dangerous. “Different” meant “Can’t trust him.” There’d been incidents where Dogs suffered emotional breakdowns from lack of personal interaction.

  So computers had to fill in the gaps. They chatted and provided connection. It worked . . . mostly. Virtual intelligence software was almost good enough to simulate human contact—good enough that the Dog seldom thought about how lonely he was.

  Not while the computers were running. Which they currently weren’t.

  The Dog tried his zapper again. It still produced the orange ribbon and the black cloud. This jump was shaping up into a long one—if the ship didn’t slip quickly back into nor
mal space, the wait was often substantial.

  The ship’s clocks, of course, would register zero time, as would the internal clocks of the crew. They’d congratulate themselves on another perfect jump. No one would ask the Dog otherwise.

  He unstrapped himself from his jump-couch and floated out of the bridge. Every hatchway was open, as per standard jump procedure. Normal space always came with the risk some meteor pebble would punch through the hull; you had to keep all hatches closed so any air loss from the breach was confined to a single section of the ship. But warp-space had nothing in it—no pebbles, no matter at all. The greatest danger during a jump was going too long with life-support off. A place like the bridge, where a dozen unconscious people were breathing in a relatively small space, could run into problems. Opening all the hatches let everyone share the full supply of oxygen.

  Even so, without active ventilation and CO2 scrubbing, the bridge got musty fast. The Dog liked to go elsewhere if the lag-time looked lengthy. It meant one less person breathing the bridge’s restricted air.

  And what did it hurt if the Dog roamed the ship? No one would know he was gone.

  By the light of tubes filled with glowing plankton, the Dog floated down a corridor. He knew the ship well; he’d been its Dog for ten years. There was no point transferring anywhere else—career advancement didn’t exist for Dogs.

  Years ago, Dogs carried out other duties besides pushing the restart button. Gradually, however, such assignments were discontinued. Regular crew-members complained that Dogs mishandled every chore. The Dog didn’t believe it—more likely, the crew were just ill-at-ease with Dogs working beside them. But it meant that a job on one ship was exactly the same as another . . . so why would the Dog go elsewhere?