Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  Sid looked at Jo. “I left plainclothes units on site while Ryan and I were at the residence. They were also there when the shots started.”

  “I need Mr. Azarcon to make a statement for the record,” Plodovic said.

  “I’d like a word before,” Jo said. “In private.”

  That didn’t make Plodovic any happier. But she wasn’t going to win against Songlian Lau’s lawyer. She got up and left them alone, shutting the door.

  Ryan knew his mother must have applied pressure somewhere. Otherwise they’d all be in an interro room without the pretense of politeness.

  He wanted to be home, in bed, with a single light on and his door shut and locked. Music turned up. He wanted to be in different clothes.

  Maybe in a different skin.

  The silver embroidered dragon on his leg was coming undone. He tugged at a thread and wound it around his index finger until the skin puffed purple and then white. He let go of the thread, looked beyond his knee. The corners of the polly’s desk were edged raw, as if it had taken too many hits over the years. Hits of what? The front panel was scuffed, perhaps by boots kicking in rebellion. The floor around the legs of the desk was layered with dust and grime.

  He tried to pay attention but with the polly gone his mind sank, giving blurred flashes of memory. Lights, the feel of the girl under his hands, then the feel of her blood. He blinked. The heaviness in his stomach spread to his limbs, his eyelids, and sleep oblivion sang in his ear. If only. Just to wipe it all out.

  Facts slid across his lap in two directions.

  Ryan, are you listening?

  Sid had talked to his CO on the station, briefed him on events, while Ryan had been in lockup. His CO had talked to Plodovic. Sid wasn’t going to answer rumors. The pollies were just fishing for motive, but now with the captain’s transcast they had plenty, and it had nothing to do with Songlian. Still, this lieutenant didn’t like the Azarcons or Songlian Lau.

  Sid was already running checks on Plodovic’s political affiliations. Could be she just didn’t like rich people. Could be she’d crossed words with Songlian at some point in the past. Who knew.

  Ryan, are you listening?

  Sid had seen glimpses of suspicious-moving, dark-clad forms on the catwalks. His other units had reported the same. Two, maybe three.

  Shots fired? Jo asked.

  Sid said, Our side used paralysis only and it was tricky with all the people running. Whoever died in there was the sniper’s doing. It had to be a damn good sniper to get off a shot like that under those conditions—varied lights, moving bodies, some smoke. Most snipers would never take a shot like that.

  Ryan thought, That’s why the girl’s dead and not me. They missed.

  He felt sick.

  Great, Jo said. So whoever did it was either real desperate or real pressured to do the job.

  Sid agreed. Pollies said the girl Ryan was dancing with took a laser bolt to the back of the head—

  Ryan wanted to shut them out, but he couldn’t.

  Sid said: My number two, Proctor, stayed behind to talk to Miyasake’s people. I don’t think they got off any shots.

  The other patrons who died? Jo asked.

  Preliminary checks landed all but one on the legal side.

  Jo sat forward. And that one?

  Underdeck kid, prior arrests for assault and theft. Nobody knew how he’d got into the flash. No weapon on the body.

  So it wasn’t confirmed that kid was the sniper.

  No, but if it quacked like a duck…

  What about Miyasake?

  Sid said, The captain knows him. He’s a friend.

  “Ryan,” Jo said, and waited until he looked at her. Waited until he seemed to pay attention. “When Plodovic comes back in I want you just to tell her what happened as the shots started. Anything else she might ask you let me handle. All right?”

  She meant if Plodovic asked more questions about his mother’s bedmates or his mother’s reaction to events.

  Jo looked out for his mother, first. He was a necessary by-product. Of course, no message came from his mother either. Nothing that she might’ve thought to transmit through her lawyer, any show of concern or a small word of comfort. She might as well have been in deep space too.

  He shut his eyes for just a second and the dead girl’s face materialized amid dots of red. Echoes of music pulsed in his heart. He opened his eyes and it all shrank back from the here and now.

  But he knew that would change as soon as he tried to sleep.

  Sid went to the door and opened it. In a few seconds Ryan heard footsteps and then Plodovic sat back behind her desk, looking at them.

  “How are you now, Mr. Azarcon?” Plodovic asked, as if she cared.

  He put his hands in his lap. “Fine,” he muttered, the kind of answer you gave meedees because anything more was an invitation. “Except I’d like to go home and change.”

  She poked a recorder bud on her desk. “Tell me what happened in the flash house.”

  He had to; it would help. Even though, after that transcast, Plodovic might have more motive to target him. Because targeting him might mess up the captain.

  It was an old thought. He’d just never paid it any attention until now.

  Would a polly really do that?

  He knew. Not even pollies were always that clean. Not even his father.

  He was so tired he couldn’t hold a thought. He wanted to dive under something and never come up.

  He wanted to cry—out of exhaustion or remembrance or plain, cowardly weakness, but all of his urges simply shored up against the dull edges of his emotions.

  Like the dregs of a long sail.

  “Mr. Azarcon,” Plodovic said.

  All that about Sid and Silver was a mask. They all knew it. Out there in the Dragons a hated captain and a hated terrorist symp were sitting down to shake hands.

  He had blood on his shirt and a polly with an agenda.

  So he relived it.

  The polly wanted Sid to be available for further questioning. She also promised to update Sid on their progress but she didn’t even try to hide the insincerity of her words. It didn’t matter. Ryan knew Sid would keep on her arse. And conduct his own investigation.

  Finally, after a half hour of detail confirmation, she let them go. Sid, the two Marine escorts, and Ryan. While Jo Martin distracted the meedees in front of the polly precinct with a few answers-not-answers, they went through the back. A pod waited in the executive terminal, called by Marine McGregor. It was a robotic passage of time as they darted along the podway. Sid accessed the Send in the pod’s unit and they watched repetitious scrolls of info—repetitious because the captain wasn’t giving any press conferences yet.

  It said, A pirate named Vincenzo Falcone was murdered by a symp from the Warboy’s ship, and now the symp was aboard Macedon. Under Macedon’s protection.

  Sid told the volume to increase. It filled the pod’s cabin.

  A symp. Aboard Macedon.

  Macedon had captured Falcone after the scuffle out by Meridia, had in fact leaped after Falcone’s ship Genghis Khan, right into the DMZ. So the captain had got his pirate prey. The government had intended to extradite Falcone to Earth because he’d been a Hub carrier captain a bazillion years ago. A corner of the screen ran data on the man, this dead pirate leader, and the fact not all of his senior crew were accounted for. A source aboard the battleship Arabia said some pirates were captured, most were killed when Macedon shot the Khan, but Falcone’s lieutenant as well as his protégé had been on a planet on the strit side of the DMZ called Slavepoint doing black-market deals. When Mac’s jets landed, the place was empty of overseers.

  Helped by symps, perhaps?

  And yet a symp had killed Falcone.

  Ryan slumped back in his seat, forced to listen, but paid most of his attention to the central square where the meedee woman stood just outside the main dock on Chaos Station.

  “Captain Azarcon won’t release the name of the
sympathizer who murdered Falcone, and all cams and citizens have been banned from the conference rooms and walk-routes that Azarcon and the Warboy have taken to begin their negotiations. So far the entire process has been kept under wraps, leading many to wonder if these overtures of peace are indeed sanctioned by EarthHub Command.”

  The screen split again. His father stood outside Macedon’s main airlock, an archived transcast at this point.

  “Safety is the primary issue,” he said. “Safety for Captain S’tlian and his interpreter, and safety for myself so these talks can go forward. We all realize there are fanatics in the Hub who would rather this cease-fire fail. I am not one of them and neither is the president or his Joint Chiefs. I’ll be issuing a statement after I’ve had a chance to speak more in depth with Captain S’tlian, but I’ve been told that Admiral Ashrafi and President James will both be speaking shortly on the matter. That’s all. I have a meeting to prepare for, thank you.”

  He called the Warboy by the symp’s actual name, S’tlian.

  Called him captain. As if they were equals. As if he respected the symp.

  The Hub was going to love that.

  The image rolled full again to the meedee at the dockside doors, where she tried to imply she was in the know about what was going to happen next. But in truth they knew nothing.

  “What does this pirate Falcone have to do with the ceasefire?” McGregor said.

  Sid waved the volume low and frowned. “I don’t know. It said Macedon was delivering him to custody on Chaos. The Hub ships all ended up on the strit side after Mac leaped, so… maybe the Warboy helped the captain capture Falcone?”

  McGregor’s eyebrows went up. “Why would the Warboy do that?”

  Sid shrugged. “Maybe he didn’t like the fact Macedon found the pirate on the strit side of the DMZ. Maybe Falcone likes to kidnap symps too? This other symp that they aren’t talking about—he up and killed Falcone on dockside. All they have are eyewitnesses, no cam proof. It’s all a little strange…”

  Ryan thought, No damn joke.

  McGregor said, “Has the admiral gone on ’cast yet?”

  Sid searched for the report on the Send archive but it didn’t pop up. So that statement from the Hub president hadn’t been issued either.

  Sid said, “I think if they got wind of what happened in the Dojo already, things might be a bit in flux.”

  An understatement. Ryan stared out the window as the tunnel fled by in a blur of gray and black.

  The pod deposited them by the Module 7 executive levs; no common stroll on the return route, meanwhile the party still went on stationwide, galactic politics notwithstanding.

  Sid held his arm all the way back up to their module, to the tower, and into the lev where security from their wing escorted them out to the residency doors. Marine Perry stood guard there. McGregor and his partner faded away, back to their barracks, and suddenly Ryan was inside, home, and his mother rushed up from the living pit in her heels and black evening dress to smother him in her arms.

  “Ryan, sweetie.” Her fingers ran through his hair, down the edges of his face, and her eyes swept over him head to toe. Her hands avoided the blood. “Are you all right?”

  Why did people ask that when it was obvious that you weren’t? Anyway, Sid would have told her. Jo would have told her. She could’ve asked herself a few hours ago. “Yeah. Yeah, just let me change, okay?”

  Then he saw over her shoulder—Grandmother Lau. Typically looking as if she’d been born with a lemon in her mouth. Her black hair was swept back from her face as if she’d caught the ends in a vacuum.

  “What have they learned so far, Ryan?” she asked. “This move from your father, is your mother also a target?”

  Such a show of concern truly overwhelmed him.

  Mom Lau glanced over her shoulder, then turned back to him. She had the same thought. “Go on to your room, Ryan.”

  Food sat on the long table with half-empty glasses of wine and crumbs from expensive hors d’oeuvres. As if someone had pressed a button in the middle of the party and deleted the guests. The vid sprawled mute on the walls, a visual of his father’s face, talking without sound. The recycled transcast.

  Grandmother Lau saw where he looked, and frowned. “We know who to thank,” she said.

  He opened his mouth.

  “Ryan,” his mother said, on a deep breath. “Go and change out of those clothes, sweetie.”

  Before he said something he wouldn’t regret.

  Sid gave him a quick look and a small smile, code for him to just leave it alone, so he went to his room. Before he reached the bathroom he heard them behind in the hall and paused just inside his bedroom door.

  “Why weren’t you guarding him?” his mother asked.

  “I was. My eyes never left him. He went onto the floor to dance and then the shots started.” Sid sounded like he was giving a report.

  “You should’ve been closer to him!”

  “Lower your voice, Song. He can hear you.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m ill. You have a job to do. If you can’t do it I’ll send you back to Earth, I don’t give a damn what the admiral says.”

  “Doesn’t look like he’s saying much,” Grandmother Lau put in. “It’s all just Azarcon.”

  “These peace negotiations—” Sid said.

  “I don’t want to talk about that! You nearly got my son killed! If you want to be useful, Corporal Sidney, go sit outside his room.”

  “Song,” LO Lau said. “In all fairness, it’s the captain you ought to be yelling at.”

  “Mother. I think you should leave now. Thank you.”

  A pause. Then the sound of the front doors opening and closing.

  Ryan shut himself in the bathroom and turned up the lights. Reflections poked at his eyes and he squinted, stared down. Just gripped the edge of his sink and concentrated on the cold ceramic beneath his hands.

  Then came a tap on the door.

  “Do you need anything?”

  His bodyguard’s voice held that flat distance, the kind that masked a deep hurt. But he was here and asking, when Mom Lau wasn’t. Ryan wanted to open the door, except— he couldn’t.

  He took off the bloodstained shirt and held it in his hands, looked at the pattern of red on white like some weird work of art. Like a masochist he looked at it, and into the mirror where smudges of blood marred his cheek and across his nose. It matched the red, sick look in his eyes. His image was a smudge.

  “Ryan?”

  “I’m okay,” he said through the door, and in the tiled room his voice echoed the lie.

  Eventually he heard Sid go away, and eventually he showered, got on clean clothes, and fell into bed.

  Blessed oblivion. He didn’t sleep for long, and when he awoke it felt like he never had.

  Moonlike glow from the lowlights filled the room, with a shadow standing by the side of the bed.

  His heart kick-started, painful.

  “Mom?” His eyes adjusted slowly. It was too large a shape to be his mother. And the hair was short.

  “It’s me,” Sid said. He sat on the unoccupied half of the bed. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “Working. The station’s in an uproar. And the comm won’t stop bleating.”

  The comm was never going to stop now.

  He rolled over and put his face back in the pillow.

  “Ryan,” his bodyguard said. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  “Not really.”

  “I think maybe you should.”

  A hand on his shoulder made him turn back. Sid looked disheveled and weary. His eyes checked Ryan’s face and all over, like Ryan was damaged or something.

  He’d got all the blood off his face, but maybe it still showed—that it felt as if he hadn’t.

  “I don’t have any more Silver in the room.”

  Sid breathed out. “Ryan—”

  “Look, I know it was stupid. I know.” His
voice cracked a little and he sniffed. Stifled it. Looked up at Sid with what he hoped was steady control. “But it doesn’t matter now, right? You got all the names. I won’t be—going anywhere for a while. Just… don’t arrest them, okay?”

  “Don’t arrest them? I’ve got half a mind to hunt them down and shoot them.” His eyes flicked to Ryan’s and his hand twitched, halfway to a thought before forgetting it. “Or maybe I ought to just kick your ass.”

  “Sid. Are they really the priority right now?”

  “No. But if you ever sail again I will personally nail your butt to the wall. And the next time I see Tyler I’ll—”

  “Sid.” It was nice the way he made an issue of it. With that half smile to take the edge off.

  But he meant it. The unblinking stare said so.

  “You can look through my stuff if you don’t trust me,” Ryan offered.

  Sid said, “Don’t worry, I will.”

  He looked past Sid’s shoulder to the wall where his framed Battlemech Bear prints hung, residue from his childhood. Gifts from his father, when his mother refused to shell out cred for it. “Did you have something else to tell me?”

  Sid breathed out, was silent a minute as if trying to gauge his words before he said them. “My unit at the scene’s been talking to the pollies… by the placement of the shots and who got killed, we think there were two shooters on the catwalks. Maybe three. The tunnel kid, we think maybe he was one of the shooters. So that means at least one is running loose.”

  One. On a station of thousands.

  They were never going to let him out of this apartment

  “But how’d they get in the Dojo?” However it was, they must’ve got out the same way. “You had the place secured. You checked in advance.”

  He didn’t mean to sound accusatory.

  Sid stared a bit at the bed’s curving headboard. “We did… we did. We had blueprints of that area from the planning commission and nobody else had accessed them lately. But no matter what we do, no matter what systems are in place, there’s always the chance that somebody—a trained somebody—can get through. It’s actually… not that hard. If you know what you’re doing. We took necessary precautions, Ryan, but—like I had to tell your mother—those maintenance tunnels… they’re meant for people to pass through them. The Dojo isn’t a military base.”