Caution. Always caution.
The Dojo was near the end of the lower district arm. After a walk through the security arch (Sid beeped with his gun, but he’d arranged to get passed through) they entered on the heels of a group of kids dressed all in black and white. In the brighter entrance light Ryan recognized some faces—kid celebrities famous across the Hub and older socialites that liked them young. Tyler Coe, leaning against a fish tank post with two women on either side of him, jerked his chin when their eyes met. Ryan knew he was jacked for the party, if only he could dodge Sid long enough. One small push of Silver shouldn’t be so bad.
Images blinked from the walls, actors in ancient Earth battle scenes, melding and shifting in real time on a fabricated digiset. Lights lanced down, moving all around the dancers on both tiers. Silver and gold. Blue and purple. Red. He caught glimpses of costumes among the regular flash-wear: animals from Earth, bizarre robots, exaggerated uniforms, opposite genders, and a couple brave souls dressed as strits with white faces and coiled clothing like those dead Egyptians he’d read about in primary school. If they were lucky some drunk patron wouldn’t mistake them for the real aliens and try to kill them.
But the war was far from this flash house, and far from him.
Scoping the crowd, feeling the music start to animate his limbs, he caught the unnaturally green eyes of a cat. Lenses or implants, who knew, but he couldn’t mistake which way she looked. She smiled at him, tongue between her teeth. Her costume was skintight black, with a diamond choker and a tail like a whip. Tiger stripes of black paint flared on her forehead and teased the delicate lines of her exposed collarbone.
“Mee-yow,” he said, elbowing Sid. “No way she’s hiding anything in that, huh.” There wasn’t anywhere to hide a thought in that outfit, much less a weapon.
Sid laughed just under the music and bent to his ear. “Stay near the edges so I can see you.” Then Sid gave his back a little push toward the girl and Ryan went, grinning.
She met him halfway and hooked a long, gold-tipped finger into the backwaist of his pants, reaching around him all familiar. Pretty soon he was up against her breasts and the firm plane of her stomach, dancing the way you did when you knew how the song would end. The sweet smoke of her perfume wrapped around his head and made him thirsty. So he kissed her openmouthed and she tasted like her scent.
Who needed Silver when you had women?
It was all perfect with potential.
She leaned hard against his chest. Her breasts urged him through the thin layer of his sweat-dampened shirt, and he laughed. This was trouble—the good kind.
Then her head lolled back and he zoomed on the wide, fixed points of her green eyes.
He wasn’t holding her anymore; he was holding her up.
They weren’t dancing now.
Colors ranged across her dark skin like a station in distress. Energetic bodies moved in and out of shadow at the edges of his sight. He touched her hair. Wet. He pulled his fingers away. Under the flashing lights they were covered in iridescent purple.
They felt red.
The music gave one long, eternal beat.
His arms gave way.
He looked down where she’d slid from his body to the floor.
One moment to the next, a blink or a breath, and a small part of him disappeared up into the lights and smoke.
Again.
And again.
A slow fall.
A crumbled building. A tumbled body.
Blood spread from beneath her head, reaching to him like claws. Pointing in accusation.
This should be him.
He knew it like he knew his own name.
Blood on his hands. Lights in his eyes. A dead girl lay at his feet but he was the one who was supposed to be there, like that.
Nobody noticed yet in the high and happy air of celebration. Arms above their heads, hair swinging, hips grinding in a mirror of sexual abandonment—the flash crowd just kept dancing.
He tapped his panic ring. Twice. Five times.
The music thrummed like the blood beneath his skin, drumming away from him. And she was on the floor, arms cast to the side as if she waited. For something. Somebody knocked him in the back and he pitched forward, slipped, went down with one knee on the girl, his hand by her head where it was wet
He recoiled, wiped at his shirt. Fast. Just a drink he spilled, maybe. Just a drink. He rubbed his cheek to swipe the sweat but felt it get stickier. So then he rubbed with the back of his hand, smudging what was there. Tears. He knew they weren’t tears but he told himself they were tears.
“Sid,” he said aloud. But not loud enough.
This music.
This music wouldn’t stop.
If someone was shooting at him, nobody would hear it.
“Sid—”
The lights cut down in wild patterns. Somebody stepped on his hand. He yelped and shoved, staggered up and turned. Looking.
“Sid!”
Sid had watched him dance with the cat. Ryan had seen him leaning at the bar, smiling. He’d watched with a gun under his jacket and Ryan was safe in the way you were safe when you took your life for granted.
He twisted in the crowd, looked up at the second level. Nothing but shadows and wild lights. Some people stared down in his direction, or not, it was impossible to see clearly. Tubes of drink could’ve been guns, he didn’t know. The music pounded out of sync with his heartbeat. A frenzied dancer brushed his shoulder, eyes blown wide by Silver and alcohol. Ryan backed up, hit someone else, and turned full around in defense. The dancer saw the woman on the floor, even through the drugs. He looked at Ryan as if it were his fault.
Ryan twisted and pushed against the gyrating bodies. Hot, slick arms. Bare shoulders and muscled backs, moving him away from his direction. Shouts rose up but it was lost in the music. Or it was the music. He couldn’t see Sid; his bodyguard was nowhere in this hell. It was loud and long and he was alone in it.
For seconds. Minutes. Hours.
Heartbeats.
Then Sid materialized, clawing forward through a writhing flow of people. Stupid oblivious people.
A light exploded above Ryan. It was louder than the music. It punctured the beat.
And he was down.
Down with his arms over his head and breath shooting out so fast he felt deflated, on the verge of darting about the room.
Everyone ran now, stepping over one another like colorful insects in an upended colony.
Someone yelled, “Shots fired! Shots fired!”
It might’ve been Sid. He couldn’t tell.
The music stopped midbeat, sudden death. Screams and steps of panic rose up like balloons. On the verge of bursting.
Bombs on this station. It had happened before.
“Ryan!”
His sight flickered in and out as another light exploded in shards of red glass, falling around in a glittering blood storm.
Someonewithagun went through his head, chased by the face of the girl and the feel of her hair—
Sticky.
Wet.
If he shut his eyes maybe he’d disappear.
“Ryan!”
Feet cleared from around him. His eyes locked with the girl’s green stare.
That was how dead people looked.
They looked at you. They looked like you.
Sound melted through his ears, ran down his skin, and pooled at his feet.
“Ryan, dammit!”
He couldn’t move. His insides shook. His fear was a gasp that couldn’t get out.
He smelled charred bodies. Saw fallen concrete and marble. Smoke licked his eyes. Ashes. Sirens went off in his head.
A hand yanked him up. He collided against a chest, struggling, but it was Sid in extreme close up, smelling of cigrets and sweat. His fingers dug through Ryan’s shirt, straight to the bone. Ryan saw the smooth length of a gun and a sear of red light reflected on the barrel. It looked hot to touch.
Sid’s gun. That was
okay. One to protect
Sid was yelling at somebody. The exits, he said. And a jumble of words, codes Ryan couldn’t decipher.
Sharp pops ricocheted overhead. He flinched, unsteady as Sid dragged him—somewhere. He didn’t know. Out. Over people fallen on the dance floor.
Dead people.
He just wanted to be blind.
“Ryan, c’mon—”
A crowd milled outside the flash house in sudden bright light, packed all the way up the ramp, blocking the doors of the other clubs on the River strip. Dull gray uniforms eeled through the bombardment of party colors, using riot sticks to clear the way, pushing against the press. One of the grays stopped Sid with a hand on his shoulder. They recognized him. Another uniform, as tall as Sid, shored up at Ryan’s side and took his arm. They recognized him.
“Let me go!”
He tried to move but he was crushed. Pinned. The crowd surged like they were blown in a planetary wind. Sid didn’t let go of his arm and the pollies shouted, telling everyone to be orderly in this clogged throat of corridor.
“Get your hand off of him,” Sid said, distinct, hard, a tone Ryan had never heard before.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the polly asked.
“I’m taking him home. Get your hand off him.”
Sid reached across. The thwap of a fist meeting flesh poked the air by Ryan’s ear. He shrank down, felt Sid’s jacket zipper digging into his cheek.
The polly let go.
They jostled him. Now three pollies held Sid in that crush with another one by Ryan’s side, cloned. They moved fast when it was one of their own threatened. Sid’s voice talked above his head, trying to convince the pollies he had authority to remove Ryan from a crime scene. But they didn’t care. Everybody—everybody, they said, was going to security until this got sorted out.
“So settle down!” the lead polly yelled, at the top of the spiraling ramp.
They couldn’t even sort the snipers from this crowd and they wanted to sort everything else?
“Get out of our way,” Sid said to the nearest polly, “before I shoot you.”
And he would. As if seven years of shadowing had only been a dress rehearsal.
But they seized Sid’s arms and his gun, another grabbed Ryan and shoved both of them out from the crowd, up the lit red-edged ramp, past the openmouthed entrance of the multilevel den district where pollies propagated like bot-knitters on a gaping wound. Uniforms everywhere.
Uniforms.
Riot sticks.
Guns.
“Sid, I don’t feel so good.”
In the brighter lights he saw blood on the front of his white shirt, large swaths of it, blurry fingers of it.
Cool air swept down and sank its teeth through his skin. He couldn’t stop shaking.
“Are you all right? Ryan?” Sid wrenched from the pollies and grabbed him, checking for wounds. Sid’s eyes were wide, pale brown, right up close. “Ryan?”
“It’s not mine. That girl—”
The relief blared from Sid’s face, so intense that for a moment Ryan couldn’t speak.
A polly said, “We want to ask you some questions, Corporal, just standard procedure.”
The news traveled already. People in holiday costumes milled around on the main concourse, lion and dragon dancers with their masters exposed, craning their necks for a glimpse of tragedy downramp. Meedee lights winked.
They wanted his face on a holoboard. Again.
Even in this mess. Especially in this mess. He tried to get behind Sid’s shoulder.
The pollies caved in and began to steer them to the levs.
“Ow!” Damn polly with a grip like teeth. Ryan kicked.
“Quit it, kid!” The polly dug fingers where his shoulder met his neck. Pain, right there, making his knees curl.
Sid: “Get off him now!”
A hand caught his collar and pulled him back. Polly fell on the deck—hard—and winced, holding his elbow. Sid was a barrier, with his gun back in his hand, however he’d got it, aimed at a polly. Aimed at the polly who talked, a woman with hooded eyes. The rank on her collar meant lieutenant.
“Corporal, we don’t want trouble. You can comm who you need to comm but you’re both coming with us. Now.”
“Damn Marine dog,” one of them muttered from behind.
Sid said, in that calm voice Ryan had never heard him use in this way: “You all keep your distance. You’re manhandling Ms. Lau’s son.”
“Bring Ms. Lau’s son peaceably to the offices and we won’t have to manhandle him. Or you.”
Sid tugged him behind a structural column and commed home, alerted Marine Perry and told his mother to stay put with the guards because the situation wasn’t stable. He had to tell her or she’d barrel down and attract more attention. Then Sid commed the Marine barracks commander and requested a Marine escort to the polly precinct, since his own unit was still back at the flash. The pollies didn’t like that. No matter what the lieutenant said, they didn’t like waiting while Sid made his comms. Sid watched all around—the pollies, the festival-garbed concourse, the people held back and away by a fence of security, out of sight line. Sid’s eyes ranged to the upper levels. Sometimes he spoke into his wire, code to his unit, getting updates.
Ryan stayed behind Sid and told himself to keep standing. Even though all he wanted was to find a wall and meld to it
They waited, and damn the pollies anyway.
Two Marines promptly showed up in full dark blue battle dress, holding rifles, and the pollies looked ill-clad and clawless beside them. Everyone walked in a herd. The two Marines flanked him and Sid all the way to the precinct and past a writhing, living body of uniforms separated haphazardly by desks and tinted plexwalls. Busy, noisy, bright lights.
Eyes.
The first thing the lieutenant polly said was, Put him in a cell.
Him.
“No,” Sid said.
They couldn’t. He wasn’t a criminal.
Maybe that was why they didn’t care. Maybe they wouldn’t suggest it if he was anybody else, but here they made a point of treating him like he was common.
But he wasn’t common.
Sid had a gun, people were dead in the middle of a New Year’s flash and the pollies didn’t care that Sid was an EarthHub Marine on special assignment from Commandant Gutierrez and Admiral Ashrafi of the EarthHub Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Those names were back on Earth, not here in the Rim.
Ryan didn’t like to drop names but he yelled it in their faces. “Ashrafi’s my grandfather!”
Polly said, “He can be Allah for all I care. You’re going in holding like everybody else until we sort this.”
“Listen to me,” Sid said. But they didn’t.
The lieutenant said, You had a gun, Corporal, in a club that screens its patrons.
Sid shouted, “I’m his bodyguard! Miyasake, the owner, he cleared me. Ask him!”
The polly said, Regardless.
The polly said, He’ll be safe in the cell and you can leave one of your men with him if you wish.
Sid said, “Damn right I won’t leave him alone with you people.”
This polly lieutenant with hooded eyes and a blank, practiced face. This polly didn’t like him. Ryan had never seen her before in his life, but the polly didn’t like him.
Maybe because he was rich, or famous, or protected. Or maybe the polly was just a bitch.
Sid looked at the Marines. “Make sure he’s all right while I deal with these idiots.”
One of the idiots escorted Ryan, with the two Marines in tow. He looked back, and Sid looked at him.
Sid didn’t say it, but his hand signed: You’re okay.
Liar.
They put him in a cell. Maybe they got a clue because he was alone, but adjacent to another cell in the row of cells, with only steel double-mesh to separate them. The two Marines stood outside, one looking down the blue-gray concrete hall toward the bright main room, the other lo
oking into the other cells filled by people from the flash house. More suspects.
The wall was cold against his back, the floor etched with scars made by boots and pulse shots. Rebellion management protocol, maybe even aimed at soljets on leave from his father’s ship, once upon a time.
His father might as well have been on Earth.
He sat in the corner, trying to forget his name.
Since he was a child he’d always been vaguely aware that the fact his father was a captain of a deep-space carrier—the captain of the deep-space carrier—brought trouble to their home.
He met his father in person for the first time when he was four years old. Macedon only came insystem once every four or five stationyears, and that was usually how the arguments began. You’re not here, his mother would say. Don’t dictate to me.
His father would say, You knew what you were getting into.
Ryan understood when he was older. They were talking about marriage.
He was four and he’d talk to his father over comm about the silly things children found so important—the latest toys and games, who was beating up on whom in school, and a lot of “Mommy makes me eat those yucky vegetables.” He had no idea about the war, sheltered in his executive tower with his school, playgroup, screened entertainment facilities, and security-infested shops.
The war. Aliens were bad. Humans who sided with aliens were bad. Everybody else was good. Except pirates. But none of those things really touched Austro Station, which was three colors removed from Earth on the galactic map that glowed in the corner of his room like a big transparent ball. Earth, the tiny blue marble; Hubcentral, Earth’s yellow solar system; the Spoke worlds and colonies, random white points on his chart; the red Rim, where Austro was; and the green Dragons, where his father lived most of the time. Where the war raged, the war that he kept hearing about when his mother interrupted his vid cartoons so she could watch the news. Austro wasn’t anywhere near that, or at least not the Austro Ryan knew.
Austro was a lot of parties that his mother went to on late blueshifts, dressed up and sparkly. Austro was meedees. That first meeting with his father had been a prearranged transcast op that his mother okayed without his father’s knowledge. She held Ryan’s hand and walked him from the residence with a guard of station security gray, down levs and through back corridors of all the modules between them and the main one until they got to the military docksides in Module 7, which were restricted. Except for the authorized few meedees who stood offside to capture some images to be later ’casted on the Send.
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