Dark Stranger Read online

  “How long is not good?”

  “Depends on the individual.” He put fingers beneath her chin to tilt it up while he looked into her eyes. “You aren’t going to have a panic attack, are you?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He let her go. “You’re not going to run up the ramp trying to escape while a dozen guards stick stunners in you?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Good. I hate treating stunner burns.”

  “I would hate to make your life more difficult than it already is, Raven.”

  “Call me Doc. Now, say ‘Ah,’ ” he added, holding up a scanner.

  Zoe suddenly remembered their respective positions and jumped to her feet. “Sorry, General. I meant no disres—”

  “Doc.”

  “I meant no respect, Doc?”

  He chuckled, a deep seismic rumble she felt from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. They were definitely standing too close.

  She considered her odd physical reaction to the man while he ran the med sensor over her. It read her ID chip as well.

  “Lieutenant Zoe Pappas,” he read off his sensor screen. “Born on Terra, I see. In New Constanz itself.”

  All this information was true, if not at all accurate. Pappas was a common name and had been used by her family far in the past, before humans spread out from the Terran solar system. The Pappas family was once a merchant family that lived on the asteroids out beyond Mars. Her ancestors went back to Terra at the height of the Restoration Movement to fight for democracy—even if it hadn’t quite turned out that way.

  And, of course, she had been born in the capital of the Byzant Empire, along with hundreds of other babies born on the same day. From what her mother told her, Zoe’s birth had been completely normal and routine.

  “You’re perfectly healthy,” he went on. He lowered the medical sensor while keeping his shrewd dark gaze on her. “But you have more data enhancement implants than I’ve ever seen. Why is that? And how is it that our hosts didn’t notice?”

  She wanted to ask him how he had noticed, but it wasn’t a lieutenant’s place to question a general. She chanced a glance at the sensor in his hand, wondering if it was some sort of advanced model she didn’t know about. It seemed perfectly normal, even a bit battered.

  He chuckled again. “I have my ways, Lieutenant.”

  For a moment she thought he was going to touch her face again. Instead, he pocketed the sensor and stepped back as far as the doorway.

  “What’s up with you, girl? What do you do that needs all that juice?”

  “I’m a diplomat, sir.” Again the truth, if not the whole truth. “I was assigned to attend secret talks with the Asi.” She gave a bleak laugh. “Things were going well until the Hajim attacked.”

  “They found out about these negotiations?”

  He was openly eager for news, and she wished she could tell him everything. Being trapped here without knowing anything—horrible!

  “I suspect so,” she answered. “The anti-Byzant faction of the Asi might have leaked the information. Or—” She shrugged.

  “Or there might be a human traitor?”

  She hated that thought, but how could she deny it? “There are several ways it could have gone, but it could also have been a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How did you get captured?”

  A lieutenant had no right to ask a general questions, but she hoped he’d answer.

  “Do you know about the task force that evacuated the Roge System?”

  She was glad that he didn’t rebuff her, especially when he mentioned a mystery. “I know it disappeared.”

  “I was in command of the hospital ships that went in to take out survivors after the distress call. But I wasn’t in command of the fleet.”

  “That was Admiral Asalle,” she said.

  “Admiral Asshole, as we like to call him around here.”

  “Why?”

  “He surrendered the whole fucking fleet when the Hajim surrounded us. I would have put up a fight, but it wasn’t my call.”

  “Admiral Asalle surrendered?” Zoe couldn’t hide her outrage. “His orders were to—” She caught herself, and finished, “Sorry, sir, but the disappearance of the task force has been all over the media for months. You won’t like hearing this, but there’s been speculation that the admiral went over to the Hajim and took his—”

  “He didn’t put up a fight, that’s all I know,” Doc told her.

  “It’s a relief to know where the missing task force ended up.”

  “At least we weren’t blown to hell,” he agreed. “We’re alive and spread around several prison worlds. Except for the seriously wounded that the Hajim left to die when they scuttled the ships. I’ll never forgive Asalle for that.”

  “Neither will I.”

  The promise of retribution in the lieutenant’s tone was very interesting. “I wouldn’t want to be the admiral when you get hold of him,” he teased.

  The fiery look in her eyes was anything but amused. “Neither will Asalle.” She cleared her throat. “I mean—once the media gets hold of the information about the surrender, they will eat him alive.”

  “I’d do that myself if he was in Camp Five.” literally. They exchanged an understanding look that made Doc chuckle. “We’re a pair of patriots, aren’t we?”

  She laughed as well, but added, “If you’re going to serve the Empire, you should believe in what you’re doing.”

  He’d talked more openly to her than he had to anyone else in the last sixteen months. Even more interesting was their shared opinions. Was the woman some sort of natural empath? That might explain the use of enhanced mental shields.

  He got back to business. “As soon as we get you settled, Lieutenant, I’m going to put your diplomatic training to use. We need to improve relations with our fellow prisoners.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do anything I can to help.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Anything?”

  The heat of her blush warmed him. “Sir! Was that a—”

  “Come-on? Not really, but you’ll be getting plenty of them.” He pulled a patch out of his medical kit. “Pull up your sleeve and put this on. Birth control.”

  Outrage flared in her dark eyes. “I think not.”

  This woman was definitely not used to taking orders.

  So instead of making it an order, he explained. “Men outnumber women about six to one here. You’re likely to hook up with someone, for your own protection if nothing else.”

  A flash of fear replaced her outrage, but was quickly hidden. “Protection?”

  “We try to stay civilized, but things happen in the dark.”

  “Oh …I see.”

  “People get lonely, afraid, they get bored. It doesn’t help that the dimness keeps our pupils dilated, which causes our hormones to react with heightening attraction. You’re going to be prey to all those human needs, and you’re going to hook up with someone. I’m not going to forbid people to act on their natural needs, but this isn’t a fleet ship or base. There’s no nursery here. And I’m not allowing any children to be born into this hellhole.”

  “That’s literally what this is—a hellhole.” She nodded, took the patch, and held it in her palm while she thought about it. When she spoke, he thought it was more to herself than to him. “Ever since the Bottleneck, the human race has made reproduction our top priority. We can never allow the species to come so close to extinction ever again. That’s the purpose of all our colonization. That’s why every ship has a nursery. Having babies is important.”

  “Not here,” Doc said. “Not now.”

  She looked at him and gave a grim nod as she slapped the patch onto her forearm, where it faded quickly into her skin. “I won’t need this—”

  “Trouble, Doc,” Arco said, pulling aside the exam room curtain.

  4

  “This man never has good news for me.” Doc turned from Zoe. “What kind of trouble?”

&nbs
p; “Commandant just brought down a visitor,” Arco answered. “A visitor with big, nasty teeth.”

  “Sounds like most of my family.”

  Doc followed Arco out of the room, aware of Lieutenant Zoe Pappas trailing silently behind him without his leave.

  Nope, the girl wasn’t used to taking orders.

  General Raven was a big man, but Zoe reckoned that the Hajim officer he faced in the center of the plaza towered over him by at least a foot. The Hajim were a bipedal species, more felinoid than humanoid, with a muzzle full of long, intimidating fangs. Not that the general looked particularly intimidated by the alien’s size or incisors.

  This Hajim had light fur of gold and cream stripes over his massively muscled frame. His chest was covered with an intricately woven red leather rank harness. She interpreted the symbolism of the harness to mean that this Hajim soldier was about the equivalent in rank to a Byzant army major. The Hajim called the rank Red.

  A group of Kril guards stood well back from the Hajim they’d escorted into the prison, their attention nervously focused on their alien master. They were a slender race with smooth greenish white features, not exactly insectoid, but they did remind Zoe of crickets. Timid crickets. She felt sorry for this species under the domination of the Hajim.

  What small psychic gifting Zoe had was empathic, not telepathic, so she couldn’t hear the conversation so far away. But both officers’ body language was telling. The alien was threatening; the general showed a proper amount of defiance mixed with respect for the enemy. He was polite but emphatic.

  The Hajim blustered at the general, but he listened to him.

  Zoe inferred that the Hajim was looking for something; General Raven was telling him that it wasn’t here. And making the Hajim believe him.

  Zoe was quite impressed with the camp commander’s powers of persuasion. She was also suspicious of his methods. But since she was probably what the enemy was looking for, she was happy for any help in going undetected.

  While the conversation was short, its intensity radiated nervous energy throughout the area. Prisoners lined the carved stone walkways circling up from the central plaza. Everything here was gray or black—shadowed, mysterious, threatening.

  People stared silently out of the dense shadows as their leader dealt with the enemy. There was seething anger among these men and women, and hatred of those responsible for them being here. But there was also fear and worry. She felt her fellow POWs’ presence smothering her, as heavy as the darkness itself as they lurked like animals.

  Zoe shook her head hard, aware that it was fear of darkness, fear for her own future that colored her images of the prisoners. The tension abruptly broke as the Hajim major turned and marched away, trailed by the Kril. Zoe gave a shuddering sigh as the crisis was resolved.

  But what about the next time? Would there be reprisals? Would there even be a next time?

  The truth was, she was a danger to the POWs, much more than they were to her. They had every right to their dread.

  But what would they do if they knew?

  Doc was very aware of Zoe Pappas, almost more than he was of the Hajim Red. The intensity of her concentration almost broke his. The inadvertent interference made it take longer than it should have to convince the Red to go away, and he didn’t like all the attention that brought from the other prisoners. He preferred his sleight of hand to be less public.

  Sleight of head, really; thoughts he projected in silence. Though he knew there was no one else on the planet telepathic enough to notice, he suspected the observant Lieutenant Pappas might be able to guess.

  And he didn’t like it when tension escalated among the ranks of his people at the sight of the Hajim. It was hard enough to live down here without such overt reminders of the enemy, and the war going on overhead. Being out of the war didn’t make anyone feel safe; quite the opposite. The human prisoners had gone from being warriors to pawns at best, and could easily turn into victims. Or into a mindless, raging mob.

  It wasn’t just the humans he worried about, though they were his responsibility.

  He made a slow turn as the Hajim left, his gaze taking in those gathered on each level of the ramps that circled overhead. Prisoners from the other species were watching, and they must be wondering what sort of trouble the humans were in, and wondering how to take advantage of it.

  He could tell by the Krils’ raised body temperatures that the guards were frightened of bringing the wrath of the Hajim upon them for not properly doing their duty. There was only one Denthera observing the show, for they kept to their own caverns, only sending out scouts for intelligence gathering. But many of the Asi prisoners were in the crowd, antennae and upraised claws quivering like storm-driven wheat in the shadows. The Asi were increasingly restless lately, aggressive toward his people but even more belligerent among themselves. Sometimes the scent of Asi blood spilled out of their caverns, though he thought he was the only human who sensed it. He was going to have to find out what their internal struggle was about.

  With that and a few other questions in mind, he approached the shadows near the wall where Zoe Pappas lurked. “You speak Asi?” he asked her.

  “What did the red want?” she asked in turn.

  She kept forgetting who the junior and senior officers were here. And he kept forgetting it, too, by answering: “He claimed to be looking for a war criminal; someone so vile and evil that we humans would willingly turn this monster over to them.”

  “And you said?” She was smiling at him, in a way that was particularly perceptive.

  “That there was no one like that here. I encouraged him to look somewhere else.”

  “And he believed you.” It was not a question. “I thought so.”

  “I have some small telepathic talent.”

  “More than a little, I think.”

  “Any confirmation or denial of that would be on a need-to-know basis. How about you?”

  “Not a speck of telepathic talent, sir.”

  Doc rubbed his jaw. “A direct answer. I thought I was going to get more evasion from you.”

  She frowned, but didn’t respond.

  “Do you speak Asi?” he repeated. She gave a brisk nod. “Come with me.”

  5

  A war criminal. The nerve of that Red, calling me a war criminal! I’d have more respect about what I called them if I was trying to hunt down and destroy one of them, Zoe thought indignantly as she followed behind Raven’s very wide back. His sheer presence shifted people out of his way. A war criminal! How dare they?

  Then again, the Hajim would believe that claim, wouldn’t they? They would treat her that way if she fell into their hands. There would be a show trial and an execution—if she was lucky.

  She shivered with fear. Not so much for herself, but at the consequences to the Byzant Empire. How much longer would this war go on if she were captured? How much more brutal would it become?

  She simply couldn’t be captured, even if it meant living out her life in this wretched place.

  She didn’t have long to ponder her choices, as they entered a tunnel and she suddenly found herself in the midst of a large group of agitated Asi.

  She put aside her worries to concentrate on General Raven’s needs.

  He took a step back and put a massive arm around her shoulders, making them a human island rising out of a waist-high sea of rounded black bodies and sharp claws. Shining red multifaceted eyes looked up at them.

  Zoe put aside her fear of being caught in those claws, and focused her attention on the Asi that had shoved its way through the mass to stand in front of the general. This male’s carapace was smeared with yellowish dried blood, the pattern indicating high status.

  She was going to bow and make the usual polite greeting to the alien leader, but she had no chance before one of the other Asi began to shout in the aliens’ high-pitched language. The leader shouted back, claws snapped for emphasis, and soon everyone was shouting and clacking. She and Raven stood very s
till in the middle of this near riot. Zoe closed her eyes, trying to listen without distraction.

  Except that putting herself completely in the dark only heightened her awareness of the general’s large, muscled body. She even had to fight the temptation to relax into his protective embrace.

  “I don’t know about you,” Raven said, his lips close to her ear. “But I’m feeling mighty soft at the moment.”

  “So am I,” Zoe responded. Then she realized that he referred to the difference between humans and the hard-shelled Asi. Zoe opened her eyes and concentrated as much on what she could see as what she’d felt and heard.

  “Can you make any sense of what they’re saying?” he asked.

  “They don’t like us very much,” she answered.

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  Zoe was embarrassed at the facetiousness of her comment. “Excuse me, sir. The basics of the argument are that the leadership of these prisoners is being challenged. The challenger wants to go to war with us here and now. He is glaring at you at the moment, sir.”

  “How can you tell? Which one is he?”

  She pointed at a nearby alien. “He’s the one who is slightly bigger than their leader.”

  “Hey, they all look the same in butter sauce, kid.”

  “Sir!”

  “They think the same about us, only they prefer their food raw.”

  Zoe agreed with the general deep down on some primitive level, where one couldn’t be embarrassed by such things, down where the old fears of fangs and claws and tentacles still lurked in the human unconscious. But she had been trained to deal with all sentient beings as equals. Even the ones that wanted to eat her.

  The challenger took a scuttling step closer to them. Doc’s grip on her tightened, and he moved her so that she was slightly behind him. Zoe appreciated his concern, butshe couldn’t do what he needed her to do from this position. She ducked out of his grasp to stand slightly to one side. He frowned, then gave her an understanding nod.