Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  Mom Lau was a person too. At least, that was what Sid would like him to think. A woman fed up with an absentee husband.

  And Ryan couldn’t help it. Sometimes he saw it despite himself.

  Damn them.

  Ryan dreamed he was back in Hong Kong, before the embassy attack, when he and Sid had gone to the district of Tsuen Wan to visit the Yuen Yuen Institute. It was a monastery complex unlike anything on Austro Station or anywhere in space, he’d bet. It was rooted into the earth, old like the religions here were old, born long before humans had ever set foot off their planet and started to debate whether aliens were also creations of God. In the Great Temple hand-carved statues stood in representation of the three historic philosophies of the city: Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. He didn’t really know anything about any of them, but the statues overpowered him, made him feel small, fragile, and ephemeral. He would never outlast the ages like these man-made creations; he’d never stand for anything that profound. Incense weighted the air, the pungent smell of this land. He wondered if he could get high off it.

  In his dream he saw ancient marching armies in the lines of rising smoke.

  He and Sid held slender, fragrant sticks and waved them around like they later would with chopsticks on a market street. Ribbon tails of incense trailed in their wake, drifting for the ancient generals that lined the walls in the temple to step on. Images of deified men, old war heroes with severe faces and funny outfits, and he thought of his father up on that wall, smelling all this incense. He wondered if his father would step down from the wall and follow him and Sid around the city, begging for offerings.

  But no, the captain never begged, and he would never follow his son anywhere.

  Not even when the temple blew up and the ashes and incense stifled him, pushed him to the ground and onto his back as if a demon sat on his chest. He tried to take a full breath and couldn’t, tried to move or open his eyes or call out to Sid, but he couldn’t do anything except let that demon dig through his shirt and his body and clamp a fist around his heart.

  It felt like some stone force was crashing his world beneath an unrelenting pestle of accusation.

  Ryan, what did you do to yourself?

  He thought he felt tiles under his back and heard tap water running. Smelled the sharp perfume of hotel soap. Dim slits of light bled into his eyes.

  He needed to wake up.

  Pounding drove him into the double layer of his mattress.

  Eyes opened on his familiar blue ceiling, high and blurry, clouded by round white lights. His fists twisted his clothing and slowly, slowly he began to feel the fabric beneath his fingers. The worn T-shirt. The damp skin of his stomach grazing his knuckles. The hard length of the injet stuck beneath his left leg.

  That hadn’t been a smooth sail at all. It had started so sweet, like all the times before, dripping bliss through his limbs and down his pants.

  But then he’d dreamed.

  It took several deep breaths to slow his heart, but the pounding didn’t stop.

  It was at his door.

  It was New Year’s Eve again and he was going to a flash.

  “Ryan! I need you out here!”

  His mother.

  “Yeah,” he said, hoarse, and then louder, “okay!”

  “I want you to clean up before the guests arrive!” she harped. “I want you to help me this shift, Ryan.”

  “I’m going to the flash!” he shouted back, through the door because he couldn’t move yet, his brain felt wrapped in dirty sheets.

  “You’re going to help me while Sid checks with Miyasake. Now get your ass out here, it’s already oh-nine-thirty.”

  In his goldshift. He’d eaten breakfast at 0800 because Mom Lau insisted, and then gone right back to bed. To sail.

  He rolled over and pushed his nose into the pillow. It didn’t smell like anything but his own shampoo.

  He missed Shiri’s flowery scent, of a sudden.

  “Ryan!”

  Sid this time. Sid who had the keycode and wasn’t afraid to use it.

  “All right! You bunch of slavers.”

  He hauled himself up and went to the door, stumbling on the edge of the rug. He managed to get it open and confronted Sid’s spic-and-span appearance.

  “I was asleep,” he said. “Or trying to.”

  Sid stared at him. A long second.

  Damn.

  Sid said quietly, “Go wash your face, then come out here and help your mother.”

  He didn’t have the strength to argue even if he wanted to.

  So he went to his bathroom and told the lights emphatically to stay at a comfortable forty percent, and bent over his sink while the tap ran. The water slid off his nose in pale silver drops.

  After, he went out to the hallway and shuffled down to the lit foyer to meet Mom Lau. She stood waiting for him while Marine Perry kept watch by the ceiling-high hibiscus plant, not looking at anything in particular.

  The guards stayed out of domestic arguments.

  Mom Lau looked at him in the way only mothers could. I gave birth to you and I’ll remind you of it when it’s convenient.

  She had a whole work ethic mania. The privileged should still participate. Hard labor and all that so nobody felt guilty about those poor people in the belt mines.

  “Start in the kitchen,” she said. “Lars is in there, he’ll tell you what needs to be done. The caterers are due any minute and I need to tend to that.”

  She had a slate propped against her hip, so she took it and her annoyance to the living room where she was finalizing dining details over comm. Just left him there in the foyer with Marine Perry and the plant. She didn’t understand why he was wasting away his life.

  He hadn’t told her about his dreams. Maybe Sid had. Not that it would’ve made a difference.

  “Sid’s gone to the flash house?” he asked Marine Perry.

  “Yes, sir,” Perry said.

  “He didn’t take you?”

  Perry said, “He went plainclothes with other Marines from the barracks.”

  Better that than putting barracks Marines in the residence. Perry and Finlay, Sid’s direct subordinates, were used to the household’s dynamic.

  They weren’t going to help set up for the party, that was for sure. That was his job. So he spent a couple hours walking domed trays, silver cutlery, and linen napkins back and forth from the kitchen to the dining corner, where a long glossy table of food sat waiting for the devouring mouths of Austro’s rich elite. Carved duck, roast pork. Quack and oink. Appropriate.

  Most of the apartment scheme wasn’t quite battleship gray, but it was close. It all went with the Zen silver in the kitchen. Color 11905 in Austro’s Beautifix Design Interiors shop. Nice young men who went to Austro Academy as a kid knew these things, especially when they lived with mothers who liked to scroll catalogues over breakfast tea.

  The apartment shone like bleached teeth, frenzily cleaned to sweep away ill fortune this shift. Chinese tradition.

  The Send scrolled on the long gold-lit wall above the faux fireplace, for background visual ambience. It was linked to the Dharma music ’cast and had a lot of calm imagery of rotating planets, fields of green, slowmo twirling children. Everything that had nothing to do with a station in the Rim, or a war going on in the Dragons. Or anything in life that Ryan was aware of.

  Eventually his Silver-soaked dislocation went away, leaving only an airy buzz reverberating through his system. When he was done with the drone-help routine he ran and slid on sock feet to the end of the hall, skidding to the middle of the bedroom until he shored up against the rug. Apartment surfing. (Quickest way to get shot? Wear shoes on his mother’s marble floors.) The overheads automatically popped up, on eighty percent, glowy white.

  Just like heaven.

  “Music, track five. Eighty-five volume.”

  The kind his mother hated.

  Chinese New Year’s Eve. Kung hei fat choy. Everyone was going glittered out and glossed. Some e
ven costumed. All the rich stitches would get the best new clothes and haircuts and parade on the decks like the flash whores they were. He got invited places, of course, but nobody expected him to orbit them all. Not when Sid orbited him for more than just show. Vid stars had designer bodyguards and wore them like high fashion, but his was for real because Admiral Grandpa thought something might actually happen to him, Captain Azarcon’s son. Nothing had, of course, except nosey meedees and frivolity on the TrendSend, but nobody found that invasive enough for military action.

  Meanwhile, his father was still out there making enemies.

  Sometimes he asked Sid to demonstrate how to work that bodyguard sidearm, but Sid never agreed. Too much glass and marble in the apartment, maybe.

  For the flash he dressed in white, with a silver dragon writhing up one leg to mirror the elaborate dancers on the main concourse this time of year. Sid couldn’t miss him in a crowd if he was blind, but it wasn’t so glitter that it would stand out. Ryan knew that would be a consideration. It was always a consideration.

  He zipped himself up just as Sid walked in the room as if he had conjugal rights, not even knocking on the door. His was the only door in the apartment, a condition he insisted upon when he returned from Earth. Everywhere else was partitions, the chic open concept he hated, with funhouse mirror-grid that tossed his distorted image back at him everywhere he went. As if he needed the reminder.

  The maid had a mantra, a proverb from her Spokes colony culture, which she always made a point of telling him, especially when he locked her out of his room: Privacy is what you shut your mouth about. Denial is what you shut your eyes against.

  The help saw everything. He was sure his old nanny, long released except from a confidentiality agreement, could make multimillions if she dared.

  Who knew what the guards thought

  Well, he could guess what Sid thought. And knew.

  Sid looked him up and down and gestured to his head. “What’d you do now?”

  His hair. He liked to experiment. Right now it was bright blond and shaped at a sharp angle so it fell over one side of his face. He’d decided on it in the bathroom, even cut it himself. Nobody would recognize him at first glance.

  “Thought you’d like it, Timmy. I did it just for you.”

  Sid pursed his lips and chose not to answer.

  Down the hall, tinkly party music dripped from the walls, all air and ice. Like his mother. Sid folded his arms, leaned on the wall as Ryan put on his shoes, and half yawned. “I cleared the flash house for Your Highness, and cleared it with Her Majesty. Actually I cleared about five flashes, so I hope you didn’t blab to anyone where you were going to be.”

  “Of course I didn’t. I don’t talk to anyone besides you, don’t you know?”

  Which was depressingly close to the truth.

  Sid handed him a silver panic ring, just in case, with a tiny white contact pad where a gem might’ve been, if the ring weren’t designed to alert Sid and his security if Ryan hit it in distress. A nice reminder that they were not just two guys going out to celebrate like the rest of the station.

  They made it to the front doors before his mother emerged from the kitchen to bid them farewell. She kissed his cheek (and thankfully didn’t kiss Sid). “Enjoy your party. Come back by oh-one-hundred, okay?”

  “I’ll take that as a joke,” Ryan said.

  At least she didn’t say anything about the shoes and her marble floors. Or his hair. But she was used to the things he did to his hair.

  An exodus of partyers from neighboring residences walked the plush green and gold corridors of the executive level res ring in Module 3, where they lived, heading out to their own dates and clubs. Festive red decorations plastered the walls and doors. Security guard Sam greeted them at the bank of mirrored levs in their wing and said hello to Ryan, to Sid. Hello to the crowd of twenty people, in their jewelry and silk.

  Ryan ignored them and they got the message.

  They waited for the lev.

  And waited.

  It was a tall tower.

  A transparent plexpane wall separated this outer ring from the module’s core towers, separated them from the ped and podway ramparts that connected the residency rings to the commercial center. The view was nice enough through the panes, with a suicidal drop. The three core towers were lit around the windows in all colors, blinking. If the lights spoke they’d say, Xin Nien Kuai Le. Happy New Year. They really should’ve said, Get drunk and laid. Because that was the plan.

  The flash was at the Dojo, a Module 7 club down by one of the primary dockrings and in Austro’s main concourse, easy access for ships. It was kind of a walk to get there.

  The lev finally arrived and everyone jostled in. It was so secure they didn’t feel the drop.

  “We could’ve taken your mother’s pod,” Sid said when they eventually exited the lev into the echoing public pod terminal.

  “I’d rather walk.”

  It gave Sid (and his plainclothes coterie of fellow guards) more work to do but at this time of year, out for the blueshift, Ryan liked to see the performers in their martial-moving, serpentine dragon and lion costumes, with their rich embroidery and snapping jaws. Some free-floating holo images of the same animals sank and soared over the heads of everyone. Lions brought good luck and warded off evil. It was a quaint thought, a familiar sight from consecutive years of celebrations. An explosion of people on deck, like festive confetti, made him just another partyer. He could be normal here, despite bodyguard attachments, and just walking was more normal than being whisked in private pods here and there at odd unexpected times.

  A parade of peacocked citizens and visitors streamed by, some of them trailing lit streamers behind them like children. They were loud, a constant rumble in Ryan’s ears to match the twin public pods that riproared through the tunnels. The pods swallowed up the crowd and disgorged them in a steady rhythm of lights and noise. All the chrome and steel of the terminal reflected the energy and rainbow festivity, a sea of mangled faces in mirrors.

  “You’re not into anything you shouldn’t be, are you?” Sid asked, just under the racket of the pods and people.

  “What?”

  Sid liked to blindside him. He said, while his gaze roamed around for enemies: “Ryan, you aren’t doing anything stupid, are you?”

  “You mean out for the shift with you instead of a pretty girl?”

  Sid looked at him for a flat moment, his Marine face, not his co-conspirator face. “Don’t screw with me in this, all right?”

  He had a retort behind his teeth about screwing and with whom. But he didn’t say it.

  “I’m good, Sid. Okay?”

  Sid locked his glance and made it a stare. “You are.”

  “I am. Really. Stop worrying.”

  Sid touched his back briefly. “I do worry, you know.”

  He meant above and beyond his job. Ryan knew it. In quiet moments it made him both pleased and depressed, because Sid was supposed to be there for him like he had been when Ryan was twelve, when the only thing between them had been Sid’s duty.

  He was fourteen when he heard the noises for the first time, in that open-door chic apartment, the soft voices from behind his mother’s partition. He went to the kitchen for some water, which meant going by Sid’s bedroom, which was next to his, and when he looked in Sid’s bed was empty. Then he passed his mother’s room and recognized the low voices. The next morning there were empty wineglasses in the sink—two.

  It became this ugly thing between them, a squatting spider nobody wanted to kill.

  Yet Sid still worried, maybe out of guilt, maybe out of true affection, Ryan didn’t count on anything anymore, and Sid made it a point to spend off-duty time with him after Spring Break, had even taught him how to ride horses, and there had been some respite in that.

  But reality and the Send had a way of intruding. And ultimately nobody was reliable, not for the important things.

  Sid’s concern gnawed at him. F
atigued him. He didn’t feel like going to the flash anymore, thanks to Sid’s sudden need for honesty, even though Fara might be there and Fara could jack him in. Surely Tyler could, even though he got tired of dealing with Tyler, that was why he went straight to Fara now.

  But that last sail had been bad. Maybe he needed to lay off for a while. Maybe the Silver contributed to his inertia. He didn’t want to end up like some strung-out tunnel kid, like the ones who dotted the podways like specks of dirt. You saw them everywhere if you looked.

  “Gotta eat,” one kid said, hunched down by the wall looking up at Ryan as he passed. The kid’s eyes were blue, his face curiously cherubic. A little homeless angel, like in the charity ads that sometimes mugged him on the concourse.

  “Sorry,” Ryan said. “I—”

  Sid propelled him into the pod. “Don’t talk to them.”

  “Or what?” Ryan tugged out of his hold and sat. Sid held one of the vertical bars and sank down beside him as the pod racketed forward.

  “Let me do my job,” he said. The commstud in his ear linked him back to the home Marines. Maybe they had the music on, otherwise what was he listening to all the time?

  Eventually they changed from pod to lev and dropped down the station core. Then they walked some more, through wide corridors flanked by darkened offices, then shops and restaurants littered with holo-ads and the mosh scents of people and food. The concourse in Module 7 was even more crowded for Chinese New Year’s Eve than normal, with all of the ship crews and Austro citizens mingled together in general revelry. Sid kept close, one hand hovering at Ryan’s back as if someone was going to snatch him out of midair. Things got more crowded the closer they got to the multilevel den district.

  Citizens called this district the Red River. It sat at the bottom of a spiraling ramp, a descent into sin. Stark fluorescence from the main level disappeared into seductive shadow. The doors were opaque glass, lit by signs and symbols, the names and stamps of the individual clubs and dens. Marks of the Beast, all the religiosos said. People flowed in and out, hopping the blueshift, releasing a blur of music into the corridors. Heavy bass. Echoing voices. The complicated dance rhythms of wild drums. Ryan’s gut shivered as half-naked women brushed by, smelling of cigret smoke and citric perfume. Some of them smiled at him but Sid moved him along. They weren’t going to cruise, even though he was hardly recognizable in the skittering darkness.