Strangers Among Us

by Kelley Armstrong

  “You can’t predict them,” Darwin said. “They never do the same thing twice in a row. How are we going to time this thing?”

  Marion placed a finger across Darwin’s lips. “By learning to think like a G’rat’ch.”

  Darwin laughed and pulled her close. “Nobody knows how to do that.”

  But she did know the nature of the G’rat’ch character. Learned the hard way during ten years of labour in an alien gulag, working at tasks that made no sense—seemingly even to the G’rat’ch. Until she learned to see a pattern where none could exist.

  They had escaped—the Creebolt seven. Though only five had made it out of the mountains alive. And not Darwin. Marion felt the pressure of Darwin’s mouth on hers. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. Dead and gone, she thought. I killed him. No, came an answering voice. Young Marion’s voice. The G’rat’ch did.

  She was crying again. She leaned back on her haunches to wipe her face. Her knees cracked, and a sharp pain shot up the left side of her back. I’m getting too old for this, she thought. At least the work kept Fierce’s harsh whispers at bay.

  Why had they come back here? The G’rat’ch Ambasador and its counterpart, too. To Fergus? A backwater to both empires. Notable only as the place where the aliens decided they’d had enough of a war that spanned two dozen star systems and declared a unilateral ceasefire. Then waited thirty years to begin negotiations.

  But those bastards barely had a word for peace. And its other meaning wasn’t surrender, but madness.

  Hard heels echoed off the stairs, and Marion shifted her bucket against the wall. The soldiers barely gave her a glance. Age provided the invisibility cloak science had never mastered.

  In her tiny room, Marion pried a flagstone loose from beneath her cot. The surface of the wooden box was pitted despite the polish she applied, but the hinges and clasp gleamed. The knife inside fitted easily in her palm, the blade shimmering. The G’rat’ch never appeared in public without body armour. But what about in private?

  I know how to make them speak the truth, to negotiate in good faith, she thought, as she slipped the knife back into the box. The box snuggled nicely in her satchel beneath the brushes and cleaning cloths.

  The Creebolt seven had escaped; hundreds still languished in G’rat’ch prison camps in the highlands beyond the village.

  Marion shouldered her pack and her slugthrower and fell into line with the other grunts. A steady drizzle had turned the trail into a mudslide—but she wasn’t worried. The aliens had given it all they had; it wasn’t enough to break them. Now . . .

  Marion squeezed her eyes shut, but the images didn’t fade. All that youth. All that death.

  Even now, a hundred systems once again teetered on the brink of war. Marion followed the newscasts, letting the drone of pundits drown out the voices in her head. When that didn’t work, she trolled the dark sites the government both forbade and used in their incessant search for malcontents.

  Not that government eyes ever turned on her. She had not forgotten all she had learned in the aliens’ work camps, in their torture chambers—where she blubbered and screamed, mixing truth and fantasies into her confessions until she couldn’t tell the difference. The G’rat’ch kept asking their meaningless questions, indifferent to what she said. Maybe because, for them, the difference between reality and dream was scarcely discernable.

  Marion was at the top of the stairs now, her feet following pathways her mind refused to acknowledge. The G’rat’ch Ambassador—the sole representative of his people—was housed in the east wing, the only part of the old fortress untouched by war, spared the bombs and plasma beams that had scarred the rest and half-leveled the village below. The alien could hardly be expected to negotiate in constant reminder of its own people’s perfidy.

  Crazy Marion, the guards called her behind her back or sometimes to her face, a term of endearment as much as derision. The older ones, recruited in the last days of the shooting war were gentler, sometimes gave her a sweet or a smoke—still rationed after three decades—remembering what she had done on their behalf. That was mostly over now, the memory as faded as the patches on the military jacket she wore beneath her cleaning smock.

  Wander too far down the hall, and they would gently turn her back. “Not this way, Marion,” they would say, taking her arm, little knowing how hard it was for her not to strike at their knees or throats. Blows that made up for weakness with the precision of their aim.

  Fierce didn’t do that anymore. Being in hospital was too much like being in prison. The confinement, the drugs, the endless meaningless questions.

  The men—boys, really—at the first checkpoint waved her past without a glance at her proffered pass. They no more inspected her cleaning satchel, weighing heavy against her aching hip, than they listened to her mumbled reasons for being there. Why should they? The words that tumbled unbidden from her lips were nearly unintelligible: her language clouded by local idiom and the occasional electric click of G’rat’ch.

  Not every backway had been sealed. Tunnels that were closed by mortar and brick could be reopened with fingernails and fear. Fear of having no way out now replaced by fear of having no way in.

  Around the first bend, Marion paused at a spot invisible to the security cameras, listening for the sound of boot-steps before turning to look for followers. She withdrew her other pass from one of the jacket’s zippered pockets. Sergeant Dwyer was retired; this was nothing but an inactive memento, a courtesy to veterans who couldn’t let go. The dark net provided more than illicit information to those who feared the worst. Coward hungered after scraps, and Marion had acquired the military codes to re-activate the pass, if only to silence Coward’s moaning.

  Marion swiped the wafer of plastic across a hidden sensor. No flash of green, no chime of acknowledgement, merely a narrow crack in the smooth surface of the wall. Marion pressed her shoulder against the stone and slipped through into the narrow passage beyond. The door slid shut, and Marion leaned against it, eyes adjusting to the dim glow of bioluminescent strips while her ears strained for an alarm that didn’t come.

  She closed her eyes and breathed to quell the pounding of blood in her ears. Other bodies pressed against her in the dark, the air sighed from lungs, cut by the occasional involuntary mutter of expectation. When will we go? Wait for Marion. She knows.

  She had known, known enough to get away but not enough to keep them all safe. What else had she known she couldn’t now remember? It was lost down the corridors she was no longer willing or able to walk.

  She rummaged through her cleaning satchel for the metal wafers she had accumulated for this very day. This unanticipated day. She stripped off her maid’s smock and stuffed the devices into pockets or onto belt loops. She took the knife from its box and ran her fingers over the hard metal. It was all she had of the future.

  The greatest risk was she would come across a technician, restoring surveillance the G’rat’ch had discovered and neutralized. The Ambassador would—or should—have no way of knowing of the tunnel itself, but the probing microwaves and photon bursts would inevitably be detected.

  “What will you do,” Darwin asked, “if there’s a snitch?”

  Every other escape had died on the whispers of those the G’rat’ch had turned. “I’ll do what needs doing,” she replied. And so she had, turning the Creebolt eight into seven with the twist of a shiv.

  Was this the same? A tremor shook her left hand, the hand that held the knife. She paused in the semi-dark until she could will it to stop.

  The tunnel ended with no need to test her resolve, not sure if she could have done what needed doing. Marion pressed her hand against the dark wood, felt the heat from the other side. The G’rat’ch preferred warmth, pumped carbon and methane into the atmosphere of every planet they conquered.

  A holo-projector flickered beside the panel, projecting an illusion of solidity through the seams in the wood; on the other side, the wall would look like an unbroken sheet
rather than a door that could be opened with the touch of passcode.

  Marion jerked, uncertain how long she had been staring into the oscillating light. Had she been talking? Was the alien calling for security?

  Nothing to do, but move forward. Marion stretched, repeating the never-forgotten exercises to limber her stiffened joints, to heighten her metabolism. She recited the silent mantras that made pain fade, her muscles tighten and her lungs expand. She cracked a capsule between her teeth, tasted the bitter sweet syrup and felt the surge of power.

  She became—for a few minutes—all she could be. Which is little enough at sixty-nine, she thought.

  The men stilled, each seeking his own personal balance, readying for the charge that meant liberty or death. The tunnel could only take them so far. If Marion was right, a clear path would open though enemy lines; if not, they would die within seconds.

  Now or never. Marion expended her last chip to override the security protocols and disengage the projectors. She slapped the releases; the panel fell away and she leapt through, for a moment a soldier again. Her knee cracked, a tearing pain that threatened collapse. Her momentum carried her a third of the way across the chamber. She locked her leg to keep from falling, the pain nearly blinding her. She clutched the back of a massive wooden chair with her right hand, her left held straight out.

  The G’rat’ch curled on a scatter of cushions in front of the roaring fireplace. It chittered in alarm, unfolding to its feet with surprising quickness. The G’rat’ch elder—its age revealed by the pale patches of skin spackled across its long flat skull and by the generational ridges carved in the flesh of its chest—was sheathed in a loose grey skirt that barely reached its backwards bending knees. A sash displayed its rank and served as a belt for the ceremonial weapons no G’rat’ch ever went without.

  Its amber eyes flickered before focusing on the vibrating knife in Marion’s hand. It circled warily, buying time to extract a blade from its sash. The knife looked little more than a toy in the G’rat’ch’s massive three-fingered fist. Marion wasn’t fooled. She had seen those knives at work, their tempered ceramic blades so fine they cut through metal like butter.

  Marion feinted left, then shifted and thrust hard over the top of the chair. The tip of her blade found one of the soft tender dewlaps that draped the G’rat’ch’s throat. Blood, as red as any human’s, sprayed in a fine mist across Marian’s arm. It lurched back, free hand pawing at the wound, human curses spewing from its mouth. The first words we ever learn in any language, thought Marion, giddy from the almost forgotten flavour of battle.

  Marion responded in kind—epithets learned under the lash of her G’rat’ch captors. They meant little in translation but would infuriate her opponent. An angry enemy was a careless one.

  The drugs were fading; she had seconds to bring the G’rat’ch to the ground, force a truth oath out of him—make it deal with the human ambassadors as he would with a fellow G’rat’ch.

  It dropped into a low crouch, displaying a limberness of joints that Marion could only envy. But when it moved, it circled in the same direction as before, a repetition so unnatural for a G’rat’ch that Marion knew it could only mean one thing—a permanent weakness. An ancient wound, remember? The thought came unbidden out of nowhere. She lunged, aiming for the bulging tendon that connected the G’rat’ch’s leg to its torso.

  Her own tendons failed her. Her knee collapsed with a second, more violent, crack. Her knife skittered across the floor. The G’rat’ch towered over her, its crest extended in a killing rage. She screamed—a howl of frustration that barely sounded human.

  Two fortress guards burst through the chamber door, their weapons holstered. The G’rat’ch, deep in the frenzy of battle, reached and slashed. The boys were dead before they hit the floor. The G’rat’ch fled, the achingly familiar pattern of its clan tattoo writhing across its naked back.

  Someone was babbling, a queer mixture of words, growls and clicks. The pain in her leg had subsided but it refused to bend at her command.

  “Easy,” said a different voice. “We’ve immobilized your legs and back until the doctor can ensure your injuries aren’t severe.” Envoy Chirac’s face swam into view. “Do you understand?”

  More babbling. Hers. She pushed the voices to the background until only Marion was left. “Yes. Where am I?” A lie was needed now, ‘necessary’ until she knew where things stood.

  “You’re in the Ambassador’s—the G’rat’ch Ambassador’s—quarters. How did you get here?”

  A man in a Colonel’s uniform—his face rejuvenation smooth under steel grey hair—was talking to Charlie, but he was watching her. He had her knife in his hand. A surge of anxiety threatened to crush her chest.

  “Those boys,” Marion said. What about the boys? The voices—one voice—clamoured: Let me handle this. The voice that lied. “Those boys—I was talking to them. When they started running, I followed.” Stupid, she thought, a stupid lie so easy to check. Trust me, said The Liar.

  Chirac looked away, embarrassed. The Colonel said something to Charlie, who looked grim and moved away through the still open door. The officer loomed above her, his eyes hooded.

  The Colonel held out her knife. “Do you recognize this?”

  Marion shook her head.

  “It’s G’rat’ch in origin—though I haven’t seen one like it in forty years,” said the Colonel.

  “Should you be handling it?” asked Chirac.

  “We’ll find nothing useful on it,” said the Colonel. “It’s an assassin’s tool, designed to shed organics.”

  Marion stilled, despite the screaming voice—Coward—begging her to run. If they knew it was her knife, it wouldn’t matter that the G’rat’ch had had his own. The negotiations mattered more than who was to blame.

  Charlie was back, leading half a dozen medics with gurneys. They loaded the body bags, then they loaded her.

  The Colonel—Nemetsov, she remembered—leaned into Chirac. The Envoy shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. She’s an old woman. And . . .” He looked at her with pity. “Not a well one.”

  The doctor had injected her knee with Curaid and fitted it with a brace. She had told her to take three days off—her, who needed to work. At least she had given her good meds.

  A green icon on her room screen warned Marion that a worm had been inserted into her browser. She logged onto an entertainment channel; her history would show it was her favorite romance. What it wouldn’t show was that it was a gateway, not to the dark net but to the even murkier systems that ran behind it. Systems even Nemetsov might have trouble finding.

  Surveillance cut both ways; the cameras used to watch the public could also watch the watchers. And the watcher’s watchers. Sometimes she thought it was watchers all the way down.

  She scanned through program files until she found what she was looking for—a network that dated back to the days when the fortress actually was one, not a home to diplomats and spies. Most of it had been written over but enough remained for her purposes. She had to find the G’rat’ch ambassador before anyone else did.

  Like a movie projected on gauze, the writhing clan tattoo clouded her vision without obscuring it. It had meant something once; now it was a needle scratching bone. The tumbling voices were talking again but she refused to listen. When they persisted, she tapped the med-patch until they quieted.

  There. The cameras in the conference room off Chirac’s quarters were still functioning. The Envoy, the ever present Charlie, and Nemetsov: the angle wouldn’t show if others were present. The sound was worse than the video but it was clear they were arguing, voices raised and hands gesticulating. She adjusted the gain, trying to filter out the static of forty years of decay. In the end she wasn’t sure if she really heard their voices or only her own projections.

  “Marion Dwyer was involved in this,” said Nemetsov. “She knows more than she’s telling. You saw what she was wearing.”

  “An old uniform jacket?” asked Charlie. �
�She can wear what she likes when she’s not working.”

  “I want her questioned.”

  “I can’t . . .” said Chirac. “She’s a sick old woman.”

  “Have you seen her records? She was in special forces. Inserted into regular militia for security purposes.” Nemetsov was pacing, passing in and out of the range of the camera like a ship moving through fog.

  Chirac waved his hand dismissively. “That was forty years ago.”

  Nemetsov looked like he wanted to say more. Say it, thought Marion, tell them what they did to me.

  “Dwyer was . . .” He paused. “That kind of . . . programming never really fades.”

  “She’s crazy,” said Charlie. He kept looking down at the screen in his hand as if seeking confirmation of his own conclusions. “And a cripple. She’s nearly seventy, for God’s sake.”

  “Seventy’s not old, Charlie,” said Chirac.

  “Not to you sir, no. But you didn’t spend a decade in a G’rat’ch concentration camp. You didn’t have those kind of wounds.” Charlie, his shoulders squared and his back straight, glared at Nemetsov. “I have seen her records.”

  “This is a waste of time,” said Chirac. “We need to recover the G’rat’ch. We need to press our advantage before this all goes to hell.”

  “He’s gone into the hills,” said Nemetsov. “But I agree. We need to control the ambassador.”

  Back to the camps, thought Marion. Where my comrades still wait. Ghosts and memories, whispered Coward, before she was shouted down.

  “Why in hell would he do that?” asked Chirac. The Envoy wiped his hand through his thinning blond hair. “There’s nothing there but wilderness and unexploded ordinance. The G’rat’ch moved everything off planet before negotiations started.”

  Marion remembered the debates on the official feeds. The G’rat’ch claimed the prisoners had all been released. Or had died. The G’rat’ch claimed a lot of things.

  “Do you think humans are the only ones who spy on each other?” asked Charlie. He was looking at his screen again. He knows, Marion thought, that the G’rat’ch would never leave one of their own untended. Unwatched.