It wasn’t the impenetrable cocoon that he had to live in now.
“Proctor checked out the maintenance accesses. They’ve got laser triggers, but if you’re connected you might be able to find ways to disable them. It’s not unheard of.”
“Connected?”
“To some of the more… willful… underdeck activity. The second sniper, and if there was a third… they both could’ve escaped through there too. The problem is none of the accesses looked like they were breached. So they’re either really well trained or…”
“Or?”
“It was an inside job. But I highly doubt that. Miyasake’s people are good. I know them. The captain knows them. But we’re still checking out the station’s maintenance crew in charge of that sector… if I was planning a hit on somebody I’d—co-opt an existing asset and use them.”
Interrogate some poor sot of a tunnel worker? Kill them even?
Sid would think of that. Sid had to think that way, that such a thing was possible and perhaps even easy.
Sometimes he forgot Sid had a job, and training, above and beyond just following him around the station.
“But who ultimately? Like, who shot at me? And how did they know I would be at that flash?” He didn’t want to ask it, but had to: “How come they missed? All of them missed.”
Sid looked chagrined. “I hate to say it, but they could’ve followed us. If they just assumed you’d be out for the parties, they could’ve tailed us from this tower and we just didn’t catch them. As for who… the dead kid certainly wasn’t working alone, he must’ve been hired. We don’t know by whom, yet. But… with this news just now— about your father—anything’s possible. Terrorists like the Family of Humanity don’t usually target just one person but… this thing with the pirates. I don’t know. One of their leaders is dead.”
And pirates could infiltrate underdeck a lot easier than any legit organization. Refugees, criminals, homeless, and poor… Austro liked to pretend their unaccounted citizens weren’t as big a problem as they were. Occasional sweeps of those tunnels only scattered the wily ones further into the shadows. As soon as the light receded, they skittered back out to their business.
Business like assassinations, maybe.
Pirates held grudges, the Send reported. And everybody knew Cairo Azarcon hated them. Hunted them.
Sid said, “The flash was crowded. It was a difficult shot. Or maybe it was just a warning and that’s why they missed.”
He couldn’t talk about it anymore. But his mind refused to let it go.
Tunnel kids trained in high-security infiltration? This wasn’t a local thing, or even a drug thing. If not pirates, then maybe govies. Maybe even people his grandfather worked with. Maybe some Centralist fanatics with access to terrorist resources.
Too many maybes.
He pulled himself to sit up.
Sid’s back straightened, instantly aware. “You all right?”
“Just feeling a little sick.”
He was a blister. Sore and ready to burst.
“You might want to stay off the Send for a while,” Sid said, looking across the bedroom to the prints on the wall.
“That bad?”
“Just take some time. I’ll get you a glass of water and something for the nausea.” He stood.
“Sid.”
“Yeah?”
Pressure built up in his sinuses, with a spike beating behind his left eye.
“Do you know her name?” The girl he’d danced with. “Did you find out?”
Sid paused by the door, arms at his sides. “You sure you want to know?”
Ryan didn’t say anything. Maybe he was a coward, but he let his bodyguard walk out without an answer.
Sid was as good as his word. He brought some foul-tasting medicine to help Ryan’s upset stomach, a glass of water, and upturned the bedroom and bathroom for Silver. He found none, just the empty injet, so he took that and shut the door. Ryan sat on his bed trying not to throw up the meds, holding the empty glass, suctioned together in his bubble of silence.
He tried not to think of the dead girl.
Or dead people. On the ground. Under a planet-blue sky.
He couldn’t sail.
So he cleaned his room. He unpacked the cases that had sat for three months full of some of his clothes and junk that he’d taken to or bought on Earth. Little bits of memory. Stickers from concerts in the city, souvenirs from countries he’d visited—one or two hand-carved Buddha statuettes from China—image cubes of him and Shiri… he thought he’d left those behind, but maybe Sid had thrown them in during the hurried stages of packing three years of his life.
His cases looked like they’d disgorged themselves all over his floor and bed when the door opened and his mother came in.
She stopped before her manicured feet hit a tumble of shoes. Her eyes took it all in with a determination not to comment.
“I’m cleaning,” Ryan told her, holding one of the Union Jack shirts he’d bought in England that he could’ve sworn he’d lost.
“I see.” She stepped over the land mines and stopped in front of him, putting a hand flat on his chest. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around the past couple hours… Tim told me you were feeling ill?”
“I’m okay.” He folded the shirt, even though it probably needed a wash, and stuffed it into one of his dresser drawers.
“Ryan, I know I haven’t exactly been attentive—”
“Mom.” The last thing he wanted was a heart-to-heart, all because he’d been shot at. He looked at her, not inviting it.
“I just want you to understand… please, can you sit down?”
She wanted to act like his mother now, full of concern for his well-being and emotions, when at the end of the shift she was going straight into Sid’s bed. Or he into hers. Whichever. She had to talk to her son to make herself feel better, or because there was a lull in her work, or maybe it finally hit her that he didn’t have a bodyguard just for her own personal enjoyment.
She’d never slept with her security. Just the one who guarded her son.
He thought he’d dealt with the idea, but here it jumped back on him and the anger still felt new. As if he didn’t have better things to think about.
“This isn’t a good time, Mom.”
“Ryan, just sit.” She stood in front of him. “Please.”
So he sat. He picked up his guitar, ran his fingers along the red and black hieroglyphs on the body. It gave his hands something to do.
“I’m worried about you, Ryan.”
His hand stopped moving.
“I know I haven’t exactly been the model of motherhood, especially about Tim…”
He played an open note, high on the neck. His light E string was too loose.
“We’ve never talked about it,” she said. Soft.
She wondered why? But now they should, right, because now he might be killed tomorrow. And this was what he wanted to talk about, naturally.
“We’ve never really discussed what happened on Earth,” she said. “I guess that’s my fault.”
He chewed his lip and stared down at the instrument, his one real indulgence. He couldn’t play in front of her, so he just plucked a note here and there. He couldn’t speak.
Words were too open and heavy.
“Maybe I should’ve explained,” she said, “about Tim and me.”
She kept pausing as if she waited for him to jump in with a maudlin confession or a strong assurance that everything was going to be okay. She wanted to trade. Her explanation for his, except he had none that he cared to let fly.
She said, “We didn’t plan for it to happen, you know.”
Now he began to imagine stock characters moving around a basic digiset, spinning complicated tales of betrayal and lust. Even her heart to heart talks couldn’t sound genuine. Maybe she’d written it all beforehand, memorized it, practiced it in front of the mirror.
He could hate her for doing this to him, coming here now and wan
ting some kind of intimacy when all he wanted was to be left alone. Didn’t she see that? He couldn’t even look up. He didn’t want to feel this way, any which way; he didn’t want to feel. And yet she still pushed.
She went on about how lonely she was, how his father had little sympathy for their situation on the station, how she had always thought, after they were married, that the captain would take a little more interest. And why had they gotten married in the first place? Perhaps they were young and dreamy, perhaps she’d convinced him of it, or he had honestly thought it could be worked out even though they came from, and lived in, two completely different worlds.
This and that and a few more tears.
Sid was a sweet distraction, but she’d never wanted to get in the way of his job. Now she was afraid she had, that it was somehow her fault that Sid had allowed someone to shoot at him, that through her power and her beauty she had somehow lured the young Marine from his place of honor—
It was too much. She wanted to share, she wanted him to spill his soul and she tried to touch his hair and stroke it like he was eight years old again and it wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t going to sit here and cry in front of her.
The words fell out of his mouth and before he knew it they were in the air and flying. “Mom, why’re you blaming him?” He put his palm against the guitar strings. “Or the captain, for that matter? Or yourself? You think short of locking me in this room for the rest of my life that any sort of protection is total and absolute? It’s not like anyone tried before, either. So just—stop it. I swear. I know why you and Sid sleep together.”
“Ryan,” she said, as if she didn’t want to hear it from his mouth.
But he waved her silent. “It’s a good bang, I understand that. Maybe you’re both lonely. Maybe you really love each other, I don’t know. But unless you plan on divorcing the captain and marrying Sid, he’ll just go back to Earth eventually when I don’t need him anymore and that’ll be it. That’s all. Have you thought of that? So I don’t know why you’re going on about it. Screw him if you want, I don’t care.”
Her expression was stark, as if she had ice cubes in her mouth.
He knew how good he was at shutting people out, and shutting them down. He had plenty of practice with meedees.
He strummed a few hollow chords.
“Your father,” she said finally, “is on comm for you.”
He looked up, but she left the room.
A black knot tightened in his stomach. She hadn’t deserved that, maybe. And maybe she’d just had an earful from the captain. Maybe he should’ve opened his door and called her back and apologized, and let her hug him if that was what she wanted.
But his father waited on comm, and it was too late anyway. From down the hall he heard her tell Sid she was going to her office.
It was too tiring to deal with parents. When he wanted them they weren’t around, and when he wanted to be alone, they showed up.
Before Sid came in with an order he set the guitar on the bed and reached to his bedside table for his mobile. He slipped it on, linked to the designated, highly secured private comm, and leaned back as his father’s real-time face bloomed in his vision.
“What took you so long?” the captain asked, with that odd spacer accent, tendrils of which Ryan had heard in England. It gave a clue to where his father’s family might have come from, ancestrally… not that they ever discussed it.
Ryan said, “Mom was talking to me.”
The man on the other end of the comm studied him, silent in the way teachers and parents could be when they knew the weight of the conversation rested on their shoulders. Somewhere near Chaos Station the satellite leapfrogged the captain’s signal in quantum acrobatics, traveling light coded with imagery and words until it was netted by Austro’s node and sent down a direct link to Ryan’s safe unit. It had a couple seconds of drag, hardly noticeable.
His face was the same unreadable expression Ryan remembered since—forever. Young and a bit jarring at first, even though he knew to expect it because the captain was a born deep spacer. Except for a few short years on Earth with Grandpa Ashrafi he’d lived his entire life in the Rim or farther, near strit territory, constantly on the move.
That was about all Ryan knew. His father’s past was as much of a mystery to him, and to his mother, as it was to the Send. The admiral had adopted the captain for some reason when the captain was eighteen years old and already an adult. For all appearances he looked maybe ten years older than that, like a brother, not a parent. His features were almost pretty in their regularity and fineness, though his chin was a bit too strong and his nose too long to carry that impression. His eyes were the kind of deep dark that gave nothing and saw everything. It wasn’t a face Ryan equated with his own, despite their shared genetics. He remembered that face mostly from pictures and comms.
“I’m going to be there in a couple weeks,” the captain said, after some mutual scrutiny.
Ryan ran it through his mind a few times. “What?”
“It’s a hard push in leaps but that doesn’t matter. In the meantime I don’t want you leaving the residence. Is that clear?”
“Yeah. Yes.” Something about that tone always made him snap to, even when he was determined not to be another of his father’s soljets. “How can you afford to come here? Aren’t you, like, kibbitzing with strits?”
Don’t you have any idea how this is playing to the public?
His father said, without any sort of shame, “I’m the one conducting these negotiations, so I can take a leave of absence to see my son if I damn well please. Besides, when I commed your grandfather about the talks he got on the first flight out to the deep. He’ll be here soon.”
“So you did actually comm Hubcentral.”
“I commed your grandfather. Long before anything hit the Send, which is the way it ought to be.”
Ryan stared into his father’s eyes but couldn’t see a single private thought. “Don’t you think you should’ve asked? Before you went ahead—?”
The man didn’t even blink. “Why?”
“Because…” He couldn’t believe his father didn’t see it. Or chose not to see it. “The govies on Earth kind of run the Hub. You don’t.”
“Not from where I sit. I don’t see President James out here getting his ass shot off. Govies need to be told what to do or they’d never get anything done. Nothing worthwhile, anyway.”
He couldn’t get into this with the captain. There would be no point. It was like arguing with a wall and he’d rather leave that up to his mother.
Instead he said, “I’m doing okay, too, thanks for asking.”
“I could see for myself. And your mother briefed me. But since you mention it, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
One eyebrow arched. “Like after Hong Kong?”
Trust his father to bring that up out of nowhere. He said what everyone wanted to hear. “I was fine then too.”
“Don’t lie to me, Ryan, or worse yet to yourself.”
He had no reply to that, even though the captain waited for one. He didn’t say a thing. He wondered how the hell the captain saw anything in his answers when the captain barely saw him, period.
Eventually his father said, ‘That boy who was killed in the Dojo, the tunnel kid. One of my crew has a contact in Austro’s underdeck that’s looking into his activities. I’m going to let the corporal know what I find out.”
“Okay.” He stared at a blinking happy face icon at the corner of his field of vision. An incoming message.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Don’t you want to talk to Sid?”
The captain leaned forward slightly. He was in his office. Ryan recognized the span of gray bulkhead behind his shoulders and head. “I want to talk to you, Ryan. This concerns you. You shouldn’t be in the dark about it.”
“So what’re you doing with a symp on your ship? And what does the Warboy look like up close?”
“The
symp on my ship happens to be helping in this investigation. It’s his underdeck contact. And if you meet Captain S’tlian I would appreciate it if you didn’t call him the Warboy. That’s a Hub label and it’s quite insulting to him.”
“You’re not serious. The man’s a terrorist.” He took a long look at the captain’s face. “Never mind.”
“He’s not a terrorist, he’s a war leader, and despite what the Send says, there is a difference. You’d do well to learn it. But we’ll talk more when I get there, I don’t want to be on comm too long. Just pay attention to what Corporal Sidney says and… be careful.”
Don’t be stupid, he meant. Maybe Sid had told him about the Silver.
“I’ll live,” he said, a lame joke.
The captain reached for the disconnect on his console. “You’d better. I love you, despite the atrocity you did to your hair. See you in a couple weeks.”
He’d seen his father three times in person, when he was four, eight, and twelve. He would’ve seen him when he was sixteen but he’d left for Earth before Macedon’s scheduled visit.
He remembered, at twelve, how the captain never stayed in the same room with Mom Lau for more than a few minutes, and instead spent most of his time taking Ryan around Austro. His ship was in dock for a major resupply, repairs, and recruitment, which meant he was on station for about a week at least. Every hour or so he got a comm and talked to people on Macedon. He took Ryan to dinner once. Ryan sat across from him in Siam Star, the posh Thai restaurant on the third level concourse in Module 7. Ryan resisted tossing a chopstick at his father’s head and that bloody comm.
Ryan said, What’s with you and Mom anyway?
Oh, the question. The one that his mother never quite answered except to imply it was his father’s fault. They sat with their green coconut curry and sticky rice, quiet sounds of cutlery hitting plates all around their little private corner, which was shaded by plants and soft lighting and a considerable payment to keep the waiter away until called for, all so civilized and rich. Except Ryan wanted to go to a game restaurant where it wouldn’t be out of place to drop sauce all over himself and laugh out loud.
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