Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  But they had to wait at the levs, like you always had to wait on Austro, even if you were the son of Songlian Lau and had a bodyguard who never let you walk the same route twice. Sixty thousand people on this station and some things no amount of cred could buy.

  Ten other people stood by the levs, a couple talking to each other, but most everyone gazed over at the holosphere that dropped from the ceiling, hanging over the open quad. Rotating the Send news. Not that anything was particularly new. The Centralist party was up in arms again (as if they ever lowered them) because the Annexationist majority in EarthHub wasn’t moving hard or fast enough against the strits. The aliens and their human sympathizers were still (like they ever weren’t!) blowing up ships both merchant and military, not to mention stations scattered all through the Dragons and even some in the Rim, though Austro never got hit—it was too far in and too well defended by the Rim Guard.

  Lucky for the commerce.

  Amazing what people believed. Flak grew like fungus, and nobody was better at blue-cheese headlines than the Centralists. He knew from dinner-table conversation with EarthHub Joint Chief Admiral Grandpa that the strit attacks had actually decreased over the last few months and pirate activity had increased. But the Send never concentrated too closely on pirates. They were bad for business. Merchants from the Spokes to the Rim who took the safe, longer leap routes to get to ports delayed the exchange of goods and cred.

  Plus aliens and their human symps made better enemies.

  Not that regular humans didn’t already corner the market on craziness. Extremists were everywhere, not only in the government or across the Demilitarized Zone.

  Put them all on a moon, he’d told Admiral Grandpa one night during his first month on Earth. Away from any leap points, with no weapons or ships, and let them fend for themselves. Strit, symp, and sulking govie alike.

  Would that it was so easy, Grandpa said.

  No, it was never so easy.

  The war dragged on and malcontents flourished, from Hubcentral to the Dragons, a spinning galactic gyroscope of violent offenders too wily to be caught.

  Your father’s at the top of that list, some student politico at his university had shouted, pointing a finger.

  Screw you, symp, he’d said back, before knocking the kid on his arse. That had gone over well with the dean.

  January 30, 2197 EHSD flashed on the holosphere in red and Ryan stared for a second. He would be into his last semester if he’d stayed in school. Weird that it was three months already since he’d left Earth and tried to reintegrate himself back into the rhythm of his homestation. Unlike Earth’s days and nights, all it felt like here was one long, lethargic shift, a sleepless hour that didn’t advance or retreat. A static army of time, coated in Silver.

  He rubbed his eyes; they burned from fatigue even though it wasn’t yet midshift. A young woman was staring at the side of his face, in his peripheral vision. He turned to glare at her. She said, in that tactless way people had when they thought they knew you just because your face was on the Send: “You look terrible, Ryan.”

  Using his given name, no less. He said, “I have insomnia. What’s your excuse?”

  Sid murmured, “Ryan.”

  The lev crowd all looked at him now, most of them affronted, minding his business.

  The woman turned away and he slid his stare up to Sid, unapologetic. If people took liberties with him, why should he be polite? Of course Ms. Mom Lau would bleat if a little item appeared on the SendTertain tomorrow about Rude Ryan Azarcon or some such shit. She always wanted the proper face in public, but bugger it—this damn lev was never going to get here and his Silver bullet was getting too warm in his pocket.

  More people joined them at the bank of levs, a few of them children holding reflective ribbons of color left over from the New Year celebration. Sid waved fingers at them and smiled and Ryan stared across the balcony to the other side of the promenade. The lev doors opened eventually and they piled in, rode up in silence. He tried to ignore everyone else, but the people who hadn’t witnessed his snark at the woman insisted on engaging him now that he couldn’t run. Nice to see you back, Ryan. How’s your mother, Ryan? We saw your father on the Send last week, Ryan.

  His father must’ve liked that, he was sure. The pug producer of the unauthorized bio segment had even tried to dig some dirt from Ryan himself, but Mom Lau screened those comms. Not that he would’ve said anything anyway. Left with no familial sources, they’d gussied up the captain’s life by focusing on his wife and kid. Captain Cairo Azarcon of the deep-space carrier Macedon didn’t do publicity. He just did Austro’s Senior Public Affairs Officer Songlian Lau (all caps, baby), then left her on station with a child. That was the gist of the segment.

  It was all bob. Bunch of bullshit.

  Ryan didn’t let himself get pulled in to any conversations. Especially not about his father. Maybe they thought he was sulking but he didn’t care and didn’t say good-bye when the lev opened on his floor.

  He ignored Marine guard Perry outside the apartment door and went inside, while Sid lingered to talk to his opposite number.

  Freedom.

  Of a sort. Mom Lau came through the butterfly kitchen doors, a targeted missile. She was shorter than him, beautiful even off-cam and to the eyes of a son, with a heart-shaped face and “sweet button nose”—coined by the TrendSend—which she’d unwittingly passed to him (no gene-tampering involved in that bit of nightmare). Long dark hair and confident dark eyes. She looked younger than her forty-some Standard years, thanks to suspended aging treatments.

  He knew from her face that he’d forgotten to do something.

  “I asked you to organize your room,” she said. “It’s been months since you’ve come back and it’s still a mess.”

  The eons-old complaint of every mother from the Stone Age onward.

  “Nobody goes into my room but me,” he said, a threat more than an observation, and headed that way across her translucent marble foyer. It was lit from beneath and cast a white glow from wall to wall, like a stage.

  “Ryan, your shoes! I just had the floors cleaned!”

  “Sheez, Mom, go lie down or something.” He didn’t stop. The Silver capsule in his pocket was a smooth comfort at the tip of his finger.

  “Tim…” he heard her say to Sid, exasperated, then he shut the door on both of them and locked it.

  He knew he was being childish and unfair. He shouldn’t treat her that way. But inertia was a funny thing.

  He put his back against the door and slid down, dug into his pocket and pulled out the capsule. The air vent in the wall was magnetic, so it took just a little prying before he could snake in an arm and feel around the dusty metal recess. He’d put the injet there after Sid’s routine inspection of the premises earlier, and thankfully it was where he’d left it.

  He thumbed open the loading tube, cracked the capsule with a bite, and shook out one 9mm round of transparent cylinder, enough to last two pushes. The liquid drug inside was the color of molten silver, like its tunnel name. A pretty shade, almost like the color of the walls in his kitchen. Zen silver, according to the Beautifix Design Interiors shop when his mother hired them to consult on the apartment. Zen Silver. That had a nice ring to it. In the cylinder it resembled a bullet. Dealers packaged them that way on purpose. Some dealers colored the tapered ends in bronze, red, or gold, depending. Marks of quality.

  Fara didn’t do any of that. Her Silver was a notoriously high quality. Pure. It was guaranteed to run through the cleanest labs. Fara had a reputation among Austro’s elite, if you knew who to ask.

  So Ryan Azarcon loaded the round into the injet and flattened the tube shut, priming it at the same time. Then he put the narrow point against the vein in his arm and pressed the trigger.

  He’d never tried Earth street

  drugs again, but his first time sailing spacer-brand Silver had been Tyler Coe’s fault. Tyler hooked an arm around his neck at the vid premiere after-party a month ago
, smiled for the cam—there’s one for rhe Send! he said—then whisked Ryan away to the bar with Sid trailing them like a loose leash. Tyler leaned down close to Ryan’s cheek and Ryan smelled his sweet cocktail breath and felt it shoot into his ear to his brain like a spy bug. Tyler said, You look like shit, Azarcon, what you been doing on that dirtball? Which was Tyler’s way of saying hello. Everybody had to look worse than Tyler in Tyler’s world. Tyler was all about image. He had a nice image on the SendTertain but Ryan knew better. He’d known Tyler since Austro Academy; Tyler was a couple years older than he, and Tyler had been the same hypocritical flash whore then as he was now. But now he got paid big cred for it and he lived as large as Jupiter off the link sales.

  Ryan had months of dark Hong Kong memories steeping in his system and no way to strain them out. From Delhi to D.C. he’d gone looking for an exorcism or an excuse, but nothing. London had been a disaster. Sid was too close, his grandparents too concerned, and school too all-consuming. He got on academic probation, then dropped out before they kicked him out—came home in shame, despite counseling initiated by Admiral Grandpa, and faced his mother’s disappointment, his father’s long-distance reproach. Not that they didn’t understand what he was going through. No, everybody understood, they said. Sid understood, Sid who’d fought in conflicts from Tibet to Tel Aviv when he was younger than Ryan was now. Seeing bodies blown up was not normal by any standard, and even when you were trained for it you were never prepared.

  Ryan didn’t tell Tyler this, but Tyler was paid to be observant of human behavior and whispered in his ear, Let’s lose the pole-ass and go somewhere. Which made Ryan think, with his five-drinks-later logic, that Tyler was hitting on him. Sid stood behind them frowning but Ryan kind of waved an arm and beckoned Sid to the private room Tyler’s studio had rented along with the rest of the bijou club. Private rooms like this came equipped with expensive drinks and food and people, if you only asked. Tyler had asked, at least for the first two. Sid did a look-through to make sure it wasn’t planted with bombs or tripwires or whatever, and then Ryan shut the door, shut him out, and sank down on the big pink couch for a breath of freedom.

  He’d only been back on Austro for two months. It felt like a decade because it was back to routine—his mother harping, Sid shadowing, the looks and the meedees and the reports on the Send: Ryan Azarcon drops out of Earth’s George Washington University, a year from graduating with honors from their Media and Public Affairs program… Not only that, but his girlfriend had dumped him.

  What would the captain think?

  Tyler fiddled with the wall display and it shifted from its static black to an underwater Earthscape, swimming fishes and floating plankton. Very soothing. Tyler turned up the music, grinding guitar and a heartbeat thrum from every wall that Ryan felt down into his crotch. Ahh, nice? Tyler asked. Nice, he replied, with a buzzed smile. Tyler dislodged a champagne bottle from the cold rack above the couch and poured them both glasses. It went down sweet and filled Ryan’s mouth with bubbly happiness.

  It wasn’t like he got drunk a lot. Sid didn’t let him. But maybe Sid saw he needed something, because he and Mom Lau both encouraged him to come out this night and deal with Tyler, even though they all knew Tyler wasn’t necessarily an outstanding good influence. But Tyler had a reputation for being benignly social and Mom Lau and Sid both worried when Ryan spent all his time locked behind his bedroom door. What deviant private acts were going on there? Not even Sid knew, even though he knew Sid checked his room and his comps on a regular basis. Mostly he spent time on his mobile comp playing games or practicing the antique guitar that he’d got on Earth. Sid knew he wasn’t, at least, sailing Silver. Where would he get it anyway, locked in his room?

  Nobody knew Tyler sailed, which was the point, Tyler said. Austro’s dealers didn’t like famous clientele, and if you were famous you had better keep your mouth extra shut.

  I can keep my mouth shut, Ryan said, as he downed that champagne like it was ambrosia of the gods.

  Tyler didn’t go further with it though. Tyler wanted to know about Songlian Lau, because, he said, their mothers were friends and it would’ve been nice to see Songlian this shift. What Tyler really wanted was a good downlink through the PR machine that would give him some rah-rah galaxy-wide ’casting about his new vid. Hell, Tyler would even love some words spread to the strits. Wouldn’t that be funny? he said. My vids in a strit home or on a symp ship. Most of his vids were all about the superiority of EarthHub over less cultured cultures. The big symp Warboy would love that.

  Mom was busy, Ryan said. Some press release to the Merchants Protection Commission. It wasn’t like he paid attention. It was routine by now, what she did, and her absences. Besides, he said, I’m not your pimp.

  Hey, Tyler said, since when did you become such a thorn?

  Since I’m like telling the truth, he said. You want good cast on your vid you go work the SendTertain like all the other actor whores.

  Tyler said, You sure know how to blow a boy’s mood. And he smoked his cigret and refused to give Ryan a hit of it.

  Well, my smart mouth, Ryan said. Sorry. Okay. I’ll talk to my mom. It wasn’t a bad vid, actually. You really dating that gam, whatshername? Your costar?

  No. Tyler laughed. That’s just gossip.

  Yeah, gossip.

  Tyler said, Hey, Raz, you know you’re wound tighter than a virgin’s panties.

  Ryan said, I wouldn’t know about any virgins.

  They laughed and rolled on the big couch, kicking each other like kids in a sandbox and the music drilled some more, right down Ryan’s pants so he splayed back on the cushions and looked at the hot pink lightning patterns on the ceiling, glowing from the room’s ambient.

  So Tyler said, What was it like? That deal in Hong Kong, at EarthHub’s embassy, wasn’t it? Your poor face, they put it all over the Send.

  Yeah, Ryan said. All over the damn Send. He didn’t want to talk about it. Tyler and his lemon lollipop face came close and peered at him.

  You need some bliss, Tyler said.

  Ryan hauled himself forward so he could take some of the sushi rolls and cracker-caviar combos on the table. He stuffed his mouth, eyes watering from a sinus hit of wasabi. He licked his fingers and pushed his hair from his eyes, looked up as Tyler swayed to the low table-box in the corner and went to his knees as if in prayer.

  What’re you doing, boy?

  Ssshhh, Tyler said. Before your Maureen barges in.

  Ah, he won’t. He thinks we’re in here making out.

  Tyler laughed so hard he lost his balance and had to grab the edge of the table. Ryan giggled and sipped his champagne.

  Tyler dug into the drawers and came back with an injet and two bullets in the palm of his hand.

  Hey, Ryan said. No, man, I better not. I don’t want to get addicted or anything.

  Or in trouble. Sid would kill him.

  Addicted. Tyler laughed and hit his arm. I’ve been sailing for two years and I’m not addicted. This stuff doesn’t addict you, he said, it just makes you feel. Like real.

  I feel real, Ryan said.

  No you don’t, Tyler said, with all the authoritative logic of the drunken. You feel like a Send report, stamped and dated different every shift.

  Maybe Tyler did know. Meedees tried to sneak optics into his bedrooms, no matter where he went. No matter what security he had. No matter how many times he complained to the public. Actors were fair game too, as well as famous sons.

  So? Ryan said. And drank some more.

  Tyler said, This isn’t any different from alcohol.

  It’s illegal, Ryan said.

  A small technicality, Tyler said. You want to keep seeing that embassy in your dreams? I’ll make you a switch. You just try this and if you like it, drop a nice word to your mother for me. Tell her about the premiere. All the good stuff. She doesn’t want you to be a hermit. I can help.

  Help yourself, Ryan said.

  Tyler said, Okay, whatever. You de
cide. And Tyler sat back and loaded a round into the injet, then rolled up his sleeve and shot himself in the arm. The injet went whoosh. Tyler’s lemon lollipop face seemed to melt into something golden and his eyes fluttered a bit and he sank more into that pink couch like he was making love to a world of cotton candy. His knees widened and his tongue slipped out between his teeth. The galaxy is galactic, he said.

  Ryan stared. Mr. Boy, you are so lost. But he laughed because Tyler laughed and Tyler started moving to the music except it was only his upper body and his neck bobbing up-and-down and up-and-down like someone’s ass in a bed of sin, and it was the funniest damn thing Ryan had ever seen. He laughed and couldn’t stop. And it had been a long time since he’d laughed like that, about anything or with anybody.

  It’s a damn good screw, Tyler said, with wisdom. He curved to the music like an eel in the ocean. He said, One push, an hour of bliss, then it’s back to the dire shit. And again: One push, an hour of bliss, then it’s back to the dire shit.

  It was a rhythm. It was music. It was a single bullet on the table between the sushi and the caviar, and the injet was between him and Tyler, a small silver gun used for medicine and madness.

  You could suck it in candy form.

  Push it with an injet.

  Or inhale it like dust.

  Like ashes.

  Behind his eyes were exploded people, a terrorist act to protest the Hub’s “bigoted and murdering” policy against the alien strits. That kind of logic possessed believers and fanatics, like the student group across the street on the second floor of a noodle restaurant.

  He’d gone walking that morning with Sid to Tai Po market and they’d bought dumplings and rice from a little stall and sparred with chopsticks. It was a hot March day and he was on Spring Break with his grandfather and his bodyguard in a foreign land, on a foreign planet more exotic than any wildlife segment he’d seen on a vid. Grandpa was there to stroke the pelts of the Chinese ministers in the Hub government, because they were always bitching about something like every other country on Earth was always bitching. One side didn’t like how another side ran things, and Grandpa Admiral of the EarthHub Joint Chiefs had to do his diplomatic duty once a year to these powers. It was going to be a great vacation because Ryan had nothing to do with any of it.