Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  Oh. Just that?

  But it was his fault.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Ryan. You don’t control what pirates do.”

  “So I’m a victim. That’s fantastic. I want to go on the Send and declare to all the galaxy what a victim I am.”

  She frowned. Her eyes tightened and wrinkles appeared around her mouth. It made her look her forty-plus years.

  “You won’t have to leave the apartment. I’ve arranged for a crew to come here. Tim will check them out. You only have to make a short statement, Ryan. Two minutes, five at the most.” She watched his face. “Look, things are far more public now because of the cease-fire.” And your father’s involvement. She didn’t say it but he read it easily enough. “It’s not acceptable to hide behind silence. It doesn’t help him.”

  Oh, so now they were doing the captain a favor? “He never wants me on the Send.”

  “He doesn’t live on station,” his mother said, and stood. “I’ll show you the statement by the end of the shift. The crew’s scheduled to ’cast at twenty-hundred hours. All right?”

  “It’s going to be live?”

  “Everything is live at this point. Please, just do this one thing. It’s not like you’ve never been in front of cams before. Okay, Ryan?”

  No, it wasn’t okay. He wasn’t okay. He wanted to kill something.

  But putting on a face for the public was his unofficial job. Putting on a face for his family was old habit. He’d been born into both.

  So he smiled at his mother to reassure her that after two weeks he didn’t still have nightmares of that flash—and Hong Kong, his arms covered in sweat and ash, revisited like some garish fashion, some apocalyptic, interactive vid.

  Two weeks was enough for dragging around the apartment, she implied. Just because he was confined here didn’t mean he couldn’t do some work, make some statements, be actively involved in his own well-being. She was up and running, after all, full power. Life went on. Politics propelled action.

  The Warboy was talking to Admiral Ashrafi and strits from Hubcentral. It was painstaking but promising. Every cycle of the Send showed shots of the Chaos military dock-side doors (because cams weren’t allowed in) and interviewed citizens or visitors who might’ve caught a glimpse of the famous Warboy, since nobody had ever captured his image. Eyewitnesses were unreliable and it became glaringly obvious. He was tall, he wasn’t so tall. He was strit-looking, he seemed human enough. Austro ran all those reports side by side with updates on Captain Azarcon’s progress through the leap points.

  They said, Ryan Azarcon hasn’t been seen in public since the incident at the flash house.

  Because he was a victim in all of this.

  He got dressed in a black suit with white cuffs and a high collar, muted style his mother approved. He combed his hair down, a bright blond sheen that the carefully angled key light softened to a golden glow. With the new hair he didn’t overtly resemble his father. He sat on the couch with his hands in his lap, but they shot him from the chest up, anyway.

  His mother stood by the crew, with Sid, her arms folded and her eyes intent. She practically mouthed the words of the script she’d written. He told the galaxy how—

  He will never forget the shock of that late shift.

  He is deeply sorry for the lives lost.

  He is grateful for the support and concern expressed, the cards and gifts that were sent (but were confiscated by security, which he didn’t mention. Most of the concern was from infatuated teenagers anyway.)

  He was appalled at the hyperbole that implied he was to blame for the murders, as if he could ever want something so tragic to happen. (His eyes watered here. He didn’t have to fake it, even though they came down without the accompanying tightness in his chest. Even his tears felt far away.) Who can think him such a monster?

  He supported his father and looked forward to seeing him, and hoped that all of the Hub would seek a peaceful resolution to the years of violence. He said there was enough death. Surely one generation of children should grow without knowing war.

  The cams held on his face even after the script had run out, but he couldn’t face the red live eye like usual. He looked down at his hands, saw them clenched tightly together, and wondered even then how that would play to the audience.

  He sat there until the segment director called it clear.

  The crew packed up and left, thanking him and his mother for how smooth it went. He ignored them. His mother linked to the Send, there on the sprawling wall screen, where he saw the cycle of his face and his big blue eyes, heard his soft voice. His mother turned to him and said, as he still sat on the couch, You did good, Ryan.

  Sympathy index for the Azarcons shot up, like a hit of Silver straight to the vein.

  Poor Ryan Azarcon. Innocent victim Ryan Azarcon. And look how his father rushes to his side.

  Sid said, Do you want anything, Ryan?

  Solitude, he thought. A shower.

  He got up and stepped around the coffee table and went up the steps from the living pit, onto the lit marble floor that glowed from end to end like a stage. He headed back to his bedroom where he shut the door and locked it, for what good it did against Sid’s key, and locked his bathroom door, and turned up the lights so he could see his face in the broad, unflinching mirror. He wiped his eyes just under the lashes. Took a breath. Washed his face of the non-gloss powder. Then he undressed.

  He got down to his suit pants, barefoot, no shirt, and sat on the lid of the toilet seat with his arms against his stomach, suddenly shaky, suddenly so angry it made his muscles curl.

  His blurry gaze fell on the floor. The overheads reflected sun puddles on the black tiles at his feet, like spotlights.

  BURN

  Sid shook him awake in the middle of his blueshift. Get up, Ryan, your father’s here. He rolled over. Sid stood over him in old green fatigues and a black T-shirt. He wore his serious face like a uniform, but his hair was all askew.

  The captain had arrived on station during Ryan’s sleepshift. Typical. Maybe he’d hustled the ship after seeing that transcast. I never want his face on the Send, the captain had said on every visit, on numerous comms to Mom Lau.

  So much for that.

  “Ryan,” Sid said, shaking him again.

  “I’m up. I know. He’s here.”

  “No,” Sid said. “He’s here. In the living room with your mother.”

  What, and no breaking furniture?

  “Get dressed.” Sid left.

  Now Ryan vaguely remembered an earlier knocking on his door. Sid calling through it that Macedon had docked. Was he up? And Ryan yelled in his sleep, I’m up, okay, I’m up. And then rolled back over.

  He looked at the glowing time stamp on his wall. 0200.

  He rubbed his eyes and lay squinting up at the cotton-white haze of the lights.

  His father was here. Get up.

  He dressed in worn pants and a pro powerball logo T-shirt, not the neat turnout his father might expect, but he was half asleep, so bugger it. He scratched his arm with the feeling that he was forgetting something, and on a whim checked the local Send report on his mobile. Furious items shot by his vision, all talking about Macedon’s arrival and how the captain had not yet disembarked though some of his crew seemed to be taking brief liberty.

  A clandestine approach, then, to avoid the hubbub. He wasn’t surprised.

  He dumped the mobile and opened his door. Marine Finlay stood by the main entrance, voluntarily deaf and expressionless as Ryan approached. Voices talked from the living pit. Reasonable, low voices discussing how the Rim Guard wouldn’t listen to logic, they had orders to regulate traffic because of the pirate backlash of attacks on merchants—and the conversation immediately ceased as soon as he stepped in view.

  His parents sat on opposite sides of the long burgundy couch, a cushion between them. Sid stood by the arm of one chair, and against the wall behind the couch leaned a man and a woman, casually turned out. The captain’s jet
escort, probably.

  The captain himself wore a gray, threadbare hooded sweater and faded black pants. Ryan would have passed him in a corridor and not looked twice, which was the point. He seemed thinner and paler than the comm images, than Ryan’s memories of his last live visit. He sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, and looked up at Ryan with eyes made darker by the shadows beneath them.

  Then he stood and it all poured from his shoulders, an unthinking authority that bent every eye in the room to his stature. Except the jets. The jets watched Ryan, watched everything, he saw their eyes shift from one corner to another in the apartment and he felt unsafe in his own home. Felt the atmosphere change as soon as he appeared, as if he’d walked in on a secret meeting.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” the captain said, sounding genuine about it. He didn’t approach.

  Ryan stepped down to the floor of the living pit, feeling the soft warmth of the rug under his feet. He tried to read their faces to know what to expect, but they were all reserved. Sid was a mask. And his mother was silent, unusual in itself.

  The captain motioned him forward with a flick of fingers, so he went, suddenly wooden. Just don’t touch me. He got close enough he smelled the ship off the captain’s clothes, a scent completely non-Austroan, something steel and cold and deep that penetrated past outerwear. It came off the captain’s skin, underscored by the contradictory fragrance of raw tea leaves that Ryan remembered from the first time they’d met, when his father had picked him up in his arms.

  He still felt small beside the man, as if he hadn’t grown since their last meeting when he was twelve. But of course he had.

  The captain put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, peering into his face as if he expected to find a map there. For a stressful second Ryan thought he was going to get embraced right in front of everybody, but the captain didn’t do it. Just held his shoulder and looked into him for such a long second he had to shift his gaze. He saw his mother, still sitting on the couch, dressed immaculately in a cream shirt and brown silk pants, as if her sleep hadn’t been interrupted. Maybe it hadn’t. But he knew her expressions. Beneath the reservation boiled an old anger.

  Sid was still a mask. In the presence of the captain, he wasn’t going to be anything but a Marine.

  The captain turned away, looked at Mom Lau, and said in that soft, accented voice, “I want to take him aboard Macedon.”

  The antique clock in the corner tick-ticked, loud.

  Ryan blinked. I’m sorry to wake you up and I want to take you on my ship?

  He stared at the side of the captain’s face, thinking he must have lost the ability to understand language, because none of that had made any sense.

  “What?” Mom Lau said, neither soft nor accented. It came through in clear Austroan, a voice so familiar to Ryan he felt his back straighten just hearing her tone.

  The captain still spoke to her, not to Ryan, “We have to return to Chaos Station. And he’s coming with me.”

  This was someone else’s bad dream.

  “What are you talking about?” his mother said. “Ryan can’t go on your ship.”

  “It’s the only place where I can guarantee his safety.”

  “Ryan’s not going on your ship, Cairo!” She stood now, and the rage was plain.

  The jets shifted, straightened from their seemingly relaxed poses and walked around the couch, closer. Sid moved to stand beside Mom Lau, to give her support or maybe haul her back if she decided to physically attack the captain. Her eyes blazed wide and her face slammed shut.

  “Calm down,” the captain said. “And listen to me.”

  “No,” she said. “You bastard.”

  “Corporal Sidney,” the captain said. “Help Ryan pack some things.”

  “Stay where you are, Tim,” his mother said.

  His father’s gaze became fixed.

  “Wait.” Ryan snagged the captain’s arm, made him look. “You can’t be serious. I’m not leaving Austro.”

  The female jet stepped forward as if Ryan intended to assault the captain, but stopped at the captain’s glance.

  “Don’t argue with me,” he said to Ryan. “It won’t help you.”

  “I’m nineteen. You can’t order me around!”

  “Ryan, you’re coming on my ship one way or another. That sniper is still at large and I’m not leaving you on this station.”

  “I’ve been on this station!”

  His mother said, “Cairo, I’m telling you. Leave Ryan out of your games.”

  “You think I’m playing games, Songlian?”

  “Don’t stand there and tell me our son will be safer aboard a warship with a strit spy—out there in the Dragons with all the pirates, no less!”

  “I don’t have any spies or pirates on my ship, despite what the Send says.”

  “That you know of.”

  “Song, he’s going. I think he needs to go.”

  Ryan said, “How do you know what I need?”

  The captain turned to him, a slow regard. “Obviously you don’t know what you need, so I think you ought to be told.”

  That ignited such a rage in him that he couldn’t form a response.

  The captain faced Mom Lau again. Unblinking. “Ryan’s been out of control since returning from Earth. He’s sailing Silver, which you seem to do nothing about. So I’m taking him with me. Corporal Sidney, I gave you an order. Why aren’t you on it?”

  Sid gripped his arm. Ryan jerked.

  “I said stay where you are, Tim!” his mother said.

  But Sid ignored her. He was an EarthHub Marine and there stood a captain of an EarthHub carrier, so he propelled Ryan up the steps to the foyer.

  Ryan heard his own voice as if through a long tunnel. “I’m not going. You can let go of me.”

  “You can’t guarantee his safety here,” the captain was saying to Mom Lau, even as Sid took him down the hall to his bedroom.

  “He’s safer here than on a warship!”

  “My ship is the safest in the Hub. And away from snipers. Sidney,” he called, “pack your own gear. You’ll be accompanying him.”

  The grip on Ryan’s arm got painful.

  “No,” his mother said.

  “Song,” the captain said. “I’m not here to ask.”

  Sid shut the bedroom door.

  Ryan yanked his arm free. “You go ahead and pack but I’m staying right here. He can order his jets to put me in a barrel.”

  “Don’t think he won’t,” Sid said.

  “This is ridiculous!”

  “Is it? You were shot at.”

  “His ship gets shot at too! Wasn’t it just attacked by pirates? How am I safer there?”

  “You’d be under his eye. And he was right about the Silver.”

  The Silver. “Did you tell him that?”

  Sid started to gather his cases, annoyingly calm. “No, but he isn’t stupid. He could’ve talked to Tyler for all I know. Or Miyasake, he’s seen you two enough in the flash circuit. I have no idea what your father does.”

  “Evidently.”

  “We have no choice. Open your dresser.”

  “I have a choice! I’m not one of his jets!”

  “No, you’re his son.”

  Which was worse? He didn’t move. The voices rose from outside his door. He was no longer a child, no matter what they had in mind, and they couldn’t carry on arguments above his head anymore. He opened the door and headed down the hall, shoved off Sid when he followed, and went right back to stand at the top of the steps.

  “Why aren’t you packing?” the captain said. Some of his cool exterior showed hairline fractures, especially in the brittle dark of his eyes.

  “I’m not your slave. I don’t want to live on your ship. Austro is my home. Do you get that?”

  “I do. But that hasn’t changed my mind.”

  His mother said, quieter, “Don’t take him away from me, Cairo.”

  A simple request. A final entreaty.

 
But the captain said, “Do you want our son alive?”

  “You are a low-blow son of a bitch,” she said.

  It was going to descend into gutter drama. Ryan waved a hand at them. “Talk to me, dammit. I’m the one you’re arguing about!”

  The captain swept them both in with a look. “Unless you plan on never leaving this residence, there is nowhere safer but on my ship. Get it through your skull—these pirates don’t play around and they won’t miss twice. I’m not going to let you put your life in danger just because you’re bloody stubborn! Now pack your gear!”

  The shout echoed from the floor to the high ceiling. It sent silent ripples through the air and struck Ryan through. He tried not to feel it but his fingers clenched to stop the shaking. The jets had their hands inside their jackets, primed to react.

  His mother didn’t say a word, in that silence.

  “Take my son to his room,” the captain said in a normal voice. “Quickly.”

  The two jets peeled away like separate wings of the same raptor, and came up to flank him.

  “Let’s go,” the woman said. Up close her eyes were wide blue, uncompromising.

  He went.

  He didn’t think. His head felt feverish as he tossed one thing and another into the cases he’d recently unpacked, while the jets looked on and Sid went to pack his own life. The captain was dragging Sid off this station too and Ryan knew only one reason the man would do that.

  Not for his son’s comfort, although that might have been the conscious reasoning.

  He’d drawn a line, finally, and who was Mom Lau to argue? She was guilty after all.

  Ryan got halfway through the third case, silence buzzing in his ears and an odd disconnection between his sight and his movements, when the door behind him opened and he heard his mother say, “Leave us alone.”

  He turned around. The jets left, surprisingly without argument.

  His mother came over and sat a bit heavily at the foot of the bed, crossing her legs.

  “There’s no sense disagreeing with him,” she said, and lit a cigret.

  He’d never seen her smoke. But she pulled a thin gold case and a finger lighter from her pocket, and snapped the end of the cig until it lit.