Sleeping Dogs

By Adam-Troy Castro

Welcome to Greeve. A sun-drenched backwater world, where people earn their keep from the sea. It’s nowhere important, far from any of Mankind’s petty politics and intrigues.

Few of its residents are more familiar than old John, who’s been fishing its waters for decades. He keeps to himself, mostly. Nobody really knows him. No one knows where he came from. But how dangerous can he be?

Then another off-worlder settles in, with no apparent goal other than devoting the rest of his days to local drugs and local women.

Old John is horrified to recognize him at once.

How dangerous can Old John be? As dangerous as any man alive...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781625672896

Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro's fiction has won the Seiun and Philip K. Dick Awards, and received two nominations for the Hugo, three for the Stoker, and eight for the Nebula.

Book preview

Author

Sleeping Dogs

Cutting through the turquoise waters twenty meters below the ocean surface, the old man is not so much an alien to that place as a temporary inhabitant granted full citizenship for the length of his stay.

He is lean, this old man. His body is a sharpened instrument that time and the habits of a lifetime have sculpted to its most basic components. His limbs have been flensed of all fat or weakness. His muscles have been reduced to machinery and the will that drives them. His skin is a lattice of hairline scars, some lighter than the tan left behind by decades of exposure to the tropical sun.

The old man wears no external breathing apparatus, but he has spent a lifetime conditioning his lungs to the peak of human potential, and he thus shows no particular distress as the time since his last visit to the surface passes two minutes and edges toward three. Even so, time runs short and so he does not allow himself to be distracted or delayed by anything he sees around him—not the silvery needlefish, traveling in schools so dense that light cannot be discerned in the spaces between them; not the great gaping Hungrymouth, five times his size, that glides on past, large enough to eat him but intelligent enough to avoid the attempt; not the skeleton of a fishing boat broken in two and impaled on an outcropping of rock during one of this backwater world’s many violent storms.

Nothing moves him until his eyes alight upon a mound in the sandy bottom, one that eyes any less experienced than his own would have mistaken for just another irregularity in an underwater landscape carved by currents ancient before his birth.

The old man circles the mound twice before coming to a halt an arm’s length over it. Drifting, he positions his right hand above the mound’s highest point, points his fingers downward, and tenses.

Most human beings would have trouble discerning just what happens in the next instant, but there is a sudden violent flurry of movement, ending with a clouded sea bottom and the old man paddling toward the surface, grasping a dead eel by the neck.

The creature the old man just caught is twice his length, eyeless, and possessed of teeth like razors. Its jaw is thick and powerful enough to have crushed the old man’s skull, its throat flexible enough to have swallowed his corpse whole. Most Greevian fishermen hunting this creature would have used the tool designed for the purpose: a pole, three times the height of a human being, and so studded with barbs that a captured eel turns itself inside out recoiling after its first instinctive strike. Most of Greeve’s people don’t make the attempt. They seek easier prey. After all, this is Greeve. The oceans teem with life. There are plenty of delicious fish eager to strand themselves in nets. Sure, everybody’s heard the stories of the old-time colonists from a century ago, the ones who drove the deadliest of Greeve’s predators from the shallows and turned a hard world into a paradise. Some of those did what this old man just did: dive down bare-handed, provoke one of these monsters, and survive the lunge by seizing and snapping the fragile vertebrae directly behind its deadly hinged jaw. Today it’s mostly something idiots do to satisfy drunken wagers placed just before they become late idiots. It’s how the old man makes his living.

He kicks his way to the surface in no particular hurry, the dead eel trailing behind him like a banner. He has no trouble supporting its weight. Nor does he gasp when he emerges; he takes a deep, controlled breath, before scanning the horizon and finding his launch, a brown speck bobbing about two hundred meters away. The verdant arc of an island breaks the horizon, some four kilometers behind that. The sky is a warm, cloudless blue, the water peaceful but for the spreading circles where the old man’s appearance has disturbed the surface calm. It is a beautiful day. The old man allows himself less than a heartbeat of appreciation before he begins the swim back to his boat, his pace not at all hampered by the weight of the leviathan he has captured.

The old man does not yet know it, but this will be his last day fishing Greeve’s waters.

* * *

It is twenty minutes later. The old man sits in his tiny launch, cleaning his kill. He uses an energy blade, one that cuts through the eel’s muscular flesh as easily as it cuts through air; the skin falling off the muscle and bone with an ease that suggests eagerness. The few edible organs go into one stasis locker; the narcotic bladder rich in secretions illegal on most civilized worlds but prized here on Greeve, into another. There are eggs, so fragile that only an expert can remove them without causing the kind of damage that would reduce them to as little as one tenth their potential value. The old man destroys three on purpose, and is more generous to the fourth and fifth, which he mars just enough to avoid making too great a fortune at market.

The old man has made a living, and has even managed to put away some money, but has always avoided having too much success.

He is still sectioning his catch when he hears the sound of a skimmer approaching from the west. He does not look up. Routine is the binding force of his life, and he can identify the sound of this particular vehicle. It is old and battered but well-maintained, by an owner who would be hard-pressed to replace it if anything went wrong with it; and it takes the form of a