Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  “That’s no surprise,” Valencia said, with subtle irony. “Falcone, as a fellow captain, had left Ghenseti unprotected in order to chase after his own idea of vengeance on the striviirc-na. Many captains were doubly offended by his piratical actions later on.”

  “And now we get to it.” Pompeo smiled slightly. “Who did he attack in those first years of piracy? Now that his early files have finally been declassified, we know that in late 2163 EHSD Falcone attacked a colony near Meridia— the general coordinates put him near Meridia, even though the actual name has been conveniently deleted. Meridia’s colony manifests have always been classified by Hub Command, which cited that they were there under a military industrial initiative and both the military and the corporation refused to release details of the colony’s demise or of its workers and their families. But one might find it interesting to note that it is Admiral Ashrafi who signed the order to seal those files.”

  “Implying what?”

  “Pointing to the fact that he only had them sealed after he returned from his deep-space run, in 2169 EHSD. Six months later Cairo Azarcon’s adoption files surfaced and were presented to the Navy Space Corps Academy for perusal prior to admission, stating that he came from an orphanage in some far-flung Rimstation, one that had been attacked by strits and their records, again, conveniently destroyed.”

  “I’m afraid I still don’t follow you.”

  Pompeo sighed. “Cairo Azarcon did not come from any long-forgotten Rimstation. It’s my belief he was born on the Meridia Moon, in that colony, and when Falcone attacked Meridia, Cairo Azarcon was taken by the pirate and lived aboard that pirate ship. Six years later he was rescued by Ashrafi in a documented battle in early 2169 EHSD, out in deep space—a battle, I may add, that crew from the replenishment ship The Nile confirm did include an exchange of fire between Falcone and Ashrafi. It is not incredible to believe that Ashrafi’s soljets boarded the pirate and arrested crew, as soljets are wont to do—in fact they did, because pirate prisoners were soon deposited at the nearest military outpost in that region: Argos Station. I have checked the station files and confirmed it to be so.”

  He sat back as if he had just discovered the cure for a deadly disease.

  In that brief pause Ryan remembered to breathe, though what he really wanted to do was pelt something at the screen.

  “Mr. Pompeo,” Valencia said. “If Ashrafi had attacked Falcone, even to board Genghis Khan, why wasn’t Falcone arrested at that time? How was the Khan allowed to escape?”

  Pompeo waved two fingers, as if dismissing the question.

  “According to reports submitted by The Nile, two pirates came to the Khan’s defense. Trinity was forced to retreat with what prisoners they could get. Unfortunately, Falcone had not been among them.”

  “But still, Mr. Pompeo… you must realize these claims about where Captain Azarcon was, and when, are circumstantial at best. We are talking about a decorated officer in the EarthHub Armed Forces.”

  “Who has no past and has never come forward with one. What is he, an amnesiac? Why is the man so stubbornly private over the smallest details, such as where he was born? All of my evidence points to one thing in my mind, and I have only begun to scratch the surface of it: Cairo Azarcon spent time on a pirate ship in his years as a teenager, became an adult on said ship, and perhaps even fully participated in that life. It makes sense in light of his reputation for accepting criminals and fugitives into his crew. I’m also quite sure that this comes as no surprise to those in the military and citizenry of the Hub who are familiar with his rogue tactics in the past years of this war.”

  The screen segued back to the meedee, who Ryan now realized was standing outside of the Chaos military dock-side. The label flashed at the bottom of the screen.

  “Mr. Pompeo further asserted that he will continue his investigations and any new information would certainly be included in his forthcoming biography. So far neither Captain Azarcon nor Admiral Ashrafi offered to make a statement with regard to these claims. If they prove true, this can greatly bolster the position of noted Centralists like presidential candidate First Minister Judy Damiani, who is right now aboard Macedon to discuss the process of these peace talks—the details of which have been, to this point, also kept secret.”

  Unbiased meedee reports, his ass.

  “Screw it,” Dorr said. “They ain’t seen rogue yet. We oughtta go rogue on Mr. Pompous and his cartoon claims.”

  Ryan couldn’t move for a long second until he heard Musey reclamp his seat to the deck. He looked up and Musey was heading out the door. He got up before Sid or anybody could stop him and ran after.

  “Where are they, Jos?”

  “Go to quarters, Ryan.”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? That old fart is actually telling the truth, isn’t he?”

  The mess hall was on maindeck, and so were the conference rooms, which he realized was Musey’s target. But Musey only went so far before turning on him and putting a hand on his chest Full stop.

  “Ryan. Go to quarters.”

  “Where are you going? You can’t just barge in—”

  “I’m not going there. Niko’s hearing this too. This affects everything. Right now the captain’s getting the news and he’s in the same room as First Minister Damiani, who’s also probably getting the news, and the last thing he needs is his kid bursting in with emotion. But I need to get to Turundrlar—”

  A hatch opened up down the hall, behind Musey.

  The captain stepped out and started off in the opposite direction, toward the lev. Purposeful. Trailed by an armed jet and a tall silk-suited woman who had to double-time it to keep up.

  “I want answers, Azarcon!” she said, unmindful of anybody else who might be within earshot. “I won’t allow these talks to go forward until you provide me with—”

  Admiral Ashrafi came out from the room. “Lower your voice, Judy.”

  “I will not lower my voice. I will not stand here and accept his silence or your agenda. Not anymore, Admiral.”

  “There is no agenda, besides a desire to reach a peaceful resolution. You seem unable to grasp that, Minister.”

  “Maybe because the government is tired of being lied to or run roughshod by your deep spacers. And why haven’t I met the strits yet?”

  The admiral said, “You won’t with that attitude.”

  Ryan tried to get around Musey but the symp pulled him back, half around the corner. Kept him rooted with a hard grip. He tried to break from it and couldn’t, tried to move Musey and couldn’t. It was like shoving against a rock, despite the symp’s slender stature. So he just stopped fighting and watched, feeling his blood boil.

  Damiani said, “Captain, this won’t be resolved with your jet between us. We need to sit down and discuss—”

  “What?” his father said, stopping to look at her. “Would you like to use my so-called dangerous history to drag these talks into oblivion? I won’t allow it.”

  “This is exactly the issue. You won’t listen to reason.”

  “I’ll listen to reason, Minister, not gossip and excuses. Your government, most of whom couldn’t identify deep space on a starmap much less set foot here, would like us all to keep fighting the aliens because it fits into your ideals and prejudices. Out here is reality, which you seem determined to disprove even though we’ve spent hours discussing the fact that space is black. Yet you insist on calling it blue. I feel no need to waste more time on it. These talks will go forward with or without your support. If you’d like that to change then you had better consider dragging your friends off their little planet and into my territory.”

  Her voice was stony. “Space is not your territory, Captain.”

  “It is when I’m in it. Or else why did you send me here?”

  The lev opened up as if he’d commanded it and he walked in without a backward glance.

  The jet got in after and stopped Damiani from following, standing right in the way. Admiral Ashrafi set a hand on her sh
oulder. “Let’s you and I go back to the room for a few minutes. We have more to discuss with Minister Taylor.”

  “You won’t succeed in bullying me,” she said. “Or double-teaming me.”

  The lev doors shut, swallowing his father. The admiral steered Damiani back to the conference room and only then did Musey let Ryan go.

  He moved toward the lev. Musey caught his arm again, not as hard but it still made him turn.

  “Be careful,” Musey said. “Let him explain before you say anything.”

  Ryan didn’t have a reply. He tugged out of the symp’s grasp and went for the lev. His mind rattled with a dozen different worries, cycling like a whirlwind.

  His father spent years with a pirate. The pirate.

  Did Mom know?

  Was this why they always fought?

  The Hub was never going to get behind him now…

  And—

  How could he let us find out from the Send?

  Your father isn’t a pirate, he told himself on the interminably long lev ride up to the command crew deck. He leaned against the wall and measured his breaths, got himself together because what that old man had said couldn’t be the entire truth. Like everything else on the Send, there were other truths.

  His father hadn’t kidnapped children, raped women, destroyed ships. Maybe it had been like Evan said—skin, but not blood. They could tattoo you but they couldn’t make you believe it.

  His father and his damn silence.

  His father’s reputation was undisputed. Stories like that didn’t spring from a well of nothingness. His crew was hard, he had to be hard to lead them. He had to be hard to hunt strits down and kill them. He didn’t care that most of the Hub considered him a relentless rogue. He hated pirates too, and why shouldn’t he, if he’d been victimized himself? But people who were abused had a higher risk of abusing others, wasn’t that the statistic? Weren’t you always the most bitter to those you resembled?

  But his father was an orphan. Like Musey, like Evan. Like probably half his crew, because he did recruit the criminals and the fugitives, the people everybody else had dismissed. That had been no lie. But he didn’t compel them to be slaves and murderers as pirates did. Pompeo twisted it, but now that he’d seen it, what was so wrong with taking kids nobody else wanted? Everybody needed the same basic things—food, shelter, and community. Affection.

  Family.

  And he was stuck with his, you couldn’t pick it, you couldn’t leave it, and if he had to be honest with himself, he’d fight for it too. His family. His father, who the Hub was going to hate if they didn’t already, just because some nosey old coot of a tabloid journalist wanted a swan song before he croaked.

  Screw them all.

  His father could be a bastard, but he was a good bastard and he wasn’t a pirate… even if he had been a pirate a bazillion years ago.

  Pirates didn’t make breakfasts for their son. Or restrain themselves from putting their mouthy son in the brig.

  Pirates didn’t hold back from murdering people who stood in their way. Maybe Judy Damiani needed to consider that.

  He almost missed his stop, leaning against the wall, looking at the ceiling, thinking. Thinking. The doors opened up, he didn’t notice until the last minute and almost got his arm stuck as he made a mad dash out to the corridor before the lev shut again.

  He opened the hatch with his tagkey. Music blasted out at him, his own selection that he hadn’t removed from the unit earlier this shift.

  His father was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with his arms folded and eyes to the floor, and the music was so loud he didn’t even look up when Ryan shut the hatch.

  But he looked up when Ryan shut off the song.

  “I think they can hear that back on Earth,” Ryan said, when the captain said nothing. And when the silence persisted, “Are you avoiding comms again?”

  Normal conversation, almost. He didn’t know how he did it.

  “What?” The captain stared at him.

  Ryan couldn’t think of a thing, under that look.

  The captain turned his back, faced the sink.

  Ryan said, “So it’s true.”

  His father shrugged. “As far as that goes.”

  “Are you going to do something about it?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to now.” He unclamped a glass from the shelf.

  Frustration leaped up at an alarming rate. Provoked by his father’s false nonchalance, or just… maybe he expected a more violent reaction from the captain. Something that would strongly deny everything that meedee had said.

  Like: I never did those things, Ryan.

  It was skin, not blood.

  “You have to do something. The man’s essentially saying you’re a pirate.”

  “Yes, and he’d like me to get on the Send and address it so he can rebut. He’s playing gunslinger.”

  “So address it. Isn’t this one of those battles you have to fight?”

  “I haven’t yet decided.” He spun around the vodka and juice, dislodged it, and poured. Sipped, then took a longer drink.

  “This is affecting the negotiations, you know you have to deal with—”

  “You don’t have to tell me what it’s affecting. I’m well aware.”

  The cold space between them seemed farther than the span of the quarters. It wasn’t all his doing. So he took a step closer. Forced his voice calm. “It’s affecting me too. Are you aware of that? Or is it that you just don’t care? You let me find out from the Send.”

  The captain went by him with his glass and sat on the couch. He drank the vodka and Ryan saw then, in the precise way he refused to look up, that it had been an act of will alone that got him from that conference room to the privacy of his quarters without breaking expression.

  Because it was breaking now.

  Ryan didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  “Your grandfather,” the captain said, rather carefully. Well enunciated. Not quite looking his way. “Your grandfather and I knew at some point it was all going to blow wide. We’d just hoped it was after I was dead.”

  “You were on that ship with Falcone.”

  The captain nodded.

  “But you were a kid. Like Evan. How can they blame you?”

  “You do. Don’t you? You should see your face.”

  “I… those things. That they do to people. You did those things?” He couldn’t help it; the thought disgusted him and there his father sat, like a stranger.

  “Depends on what things you’re talking about. But you got your answer now, right? Mr. Pompeo’s fed your curiosity and the curiosity of billions of people who have nothing better to be concerned about even when it’s staring them in the face.”

  “You have to let them know you’re not like that.”

  “Ryan, I could be sainted tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. They want the smut. I refuse to play into it. Plus, in a real way, I am like that.”

  “You’re not.”

  “How do you know? Your biggest gripe is that you don’t know me.”

  He couldn’t argue with that, but he couldn’t class his father in with people like Falcone, who had taken Musey as a child and sold Evan to another ship. Not when he saw both of them on his father’s ship, by choice, when they had no right to be here.

  “I am like that,” the captain repeated, his eyes on the table and the glass in his hand, turning slowly. “Those things Damiani accused me of, the things on the Send reports; those are pirate traits. Where do you think I learned them? I do run roughshod over people I think are fools. I’ll blow a ship instead of negotiating with it if I think the point would be better taken with a missile, and I have tortured people to get information. I’ve done it personally, before I ever met your grandfather, and I’ve ordered it as a captain on this ship.”

  “But it’s still different,” Ryan said. Wasn’t it?

  His father didn’t hear him. Not quite. “I’ll go ahead and deal with a pirate if
it’ll serve a mission I’m running, without consulting anybody, and I’ll damn well talk to a strit on peaceful terms without the government’s by-your-leave. I’ve murdered people on my own deck for disobeying me too many times and I killed plenty for Falcone. I learned from him that you’re alone out here and you lead as you see fit. The Hub doesn’t see it that way; they’d rather lead from the ground. And I hate them for it, almost as much as Falcone did. Is all of this what you’d like me to tell the Send? Is this what you want to know about me, Ryan?” The eyes lifted and speared him through.

  “I don’t apologize for my behavior. I don’t regret the things I do, and maybe that’s a pirate trait too. Falcone used to say that a lot—never regret and never second-guess. And I haven’t. I don’t. I don’t regret marrying your mother, but at the same time I don’t regret leaving her on that station for years at a time. She knew I was on the command track when she met me and she knew I was a ruthless son of a bitch. Should I apologize? Should I apologize to the lemmings of the Hub or those ignorant bastards back on Earth? I won’t.” He drank, a fast gulp that made him blink.

  Ryan didn’t know what to say to put a coat of reassurance on anything. He wasn’t even sure that it was needed. Truth was more important at this point.

  His father didn’t seem to mind that Ryan was mute. Maybe because he didn’t want to hear what he thought his son might say. So he said himself, “I can’t even bring myself to truly apologize to you and you’re perhaps the one I’ve hurt the most. Maybe you’re my only regret, but even then… I never told you. And I never would, if I wasn’t forced.”

  His father set the glass aside on the table. In the thick quiet it made a ringing sound. He didn’t raise his eyes, just rolled up his right sleeve and exposed two tattoos. His Macedon service tat, the profile of Alexander the Great backed by a sixteen-point black star.

  But above that, near the inside of his elbow, was a different image. A stout black horse with a flowing mane and flaring red hooves. Like the emblem on that hidden gun and knife in his father’s bedside drawer. The worn weapons of steel and leather.