Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  “I didn’t let him. He just did it. And I’m not going to punish him for it. He had reason.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I’m not living in it to the extent he is… at least, I wasn’t… and I felt no immediate need. I had the man in custody and he knew what I’d become despite… or because of… his—work.” A surprising burst of laughter. “That last conversation was worth it to let him live. He tried to goad me and take credit for my success as a captain, you know, because he trained me. That’s partially true but I know not all true. So I told him that if it were true then he only had himself to blame for being in my brig. That got quite the expression on the old bastard’s face. He never liked my humor.”

  “You actually find that funny?”

  He sounded like his normal self now. “But it is, Song. I looked in his face finally and laughed. He wanted to murder me. It was perfect. It was over. I don’t need meedees exhuming all of that, or the government pawing through it because they don’t want anyone’s attention on forging a treaty.”

  “You think that’s what they’re doing, that they don’t have real concerns on the matter—or how you’re handling it?”

  Humor still infiltrated his voice. “That is what they’re doing, Song. I’ve been talking to them for the past couple months. And after being trained by a pirate, I can see easily enough when people are lying. That’s one of the reasons they don’t like me. They can’t lie to me.”

  She sighed. “How is Ryan?”

  “I think he’s finished his shower and might be eavesdropping on us.”

  I took a step back. Looked at the ceiling. My father said, “Ryan, come in here and say hello to your mother.”

  I considered going back to the bathroom just to prove him wrong. But not after that conversation. I went out and my father turned slightly in his seat to look up at me. My mother’s face showed on his comp screen on the table. She saw me too as I came up behind the captain.

  “I’m glad you two haven’t killed each other,” she said, her own demeanor fallen back to a familiar place.

  “No, he lets his crew do the dirty work.” I smiled and tried not to see him as he looked at me, knowing that I’d heard every word between him and my mother.

  After a moment he turned back to her. “Why don’t you speak to your smart-ass kid? I have to get on bridge.”

  Smooth. He didn’t have to talk to me if Mom Lau had dibs.

  “I wonder where he gets it from,” my mother said.

  I sat next to him on the couch. “Let’s have lunch, Dad. Even if the strits give an unconditional surrender in the next hour. Okay?”

  The captain said, “If they did, we wouldn’t. But since they won’t, I will.” He got to his feet and picked up his slate from the table. “See you later.” He didn’t quite smile at me as he went out the hatch.

  That was probably the fastest retreat the captain had ever executed. It was like he had a time limit or volume capacity for intimate discussion, and then he had to discard it and start over from a comfortable place of controlled distance.

  I wasn’t surprised that I recognized it.

  Maybe that was just the way it was, like Evan said about Musey. You just got so far with him and then you had to stop, because there wasn’t a person or a tool in the universe that could get past that wall, that defense.

  Those memories.

  If you didn’t want artillery to fall around your head you just had to sit outside in silent siege and wait for the bridge to come down.

  My mother must’ve known that too well. She was silent, watching me. Her hair was swept up and stuck through with silver pins, but tendrils flew free. I could imagine the flurry in her offices. It was always flurried. “Ryan. How are you?”

  What she actually asked was how exactly were the captain and I getting along? She always wanted updates.

  “Are you going to have to do damage control for the rest of our lives? Maybe he has a point, Mom. Just don’t address it.”

  “I have to address it, Ryan. Even if it means divulging just a little in order to deflect the rest from attention. Did you hear what he said?”

  “Yeah.” Had heard it a lot earlier than her and still didn’t quite know what to think of it. It had sounded like my father was talking about someone else’s life.

  “Falcone trained him. He was a pirate, Ryan. Full-fledged for those years he was in their custody, if I heard right. It doesn’t matter if he wasn’t willing in the beginning. People won’t like that a man with countless loads of arsenal at his disposal—”

  I waved my hand. “I get it, but why does that cancel out all of the documented good he’s done?”

  “In a perfect universe it doesn’t. But perception is what counts. You know that. A pirate association discredits him, to say the least. And therefore the peace process.”

  “I want to do something about it.”

  Her gaze flickered. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. But people should know him—” Like I do, I almost said. What I did know of him. When he wasn’t being a stubborn despot.

  “It’s best if you stay out of it.”

  “Mom… I don’t know why you and Dad don’t get it. But I can’t stay out of it. I’m in it already. He said as much to me, way back when, and I think it applies across the board, not just when it’s convenient for you.”

  She looked surprised.

  “I’m Austro’s hot number one bachelor”—a twist of a smile—“and Cairo Azarcon’s son. But to the Send and the galaxy at large I’m hiding like a little girl in my room. I’d rather be useful. If people are so interested in me, the least I could do is say something worthwhile.”

  “What would you say exactly?” she asked slowly.

  I chewed my lip. At least she was listening. I said, “I don’t know. Yet. Exactly.” If I could even handle the pointed spotlights. Because they wouldn’t stop at my father. They’d ask about my own experiences—you didn’t volunteer yourself to the public without expecting that. I’d have to have an answer for them that still somehow protected me.

  “I suggest you think more about it,” she said. “But I can already tell you what your father would say.”

  “I know.” Therein lay the rub.

  Her eyes slid sideways to something on her desk. “I have to go now, sweetie. Okay?”

  I smiled at her. “Okay. I miss you.” It came out as something you say to people over long distances, but as I said it I realized it was true. I wasn’t sure what exactly about her I missed, since she’d never been much for affection or confidence; maybe it was just because she was my mother.

  She cleared her throat, touched the screen lightly. “I see your hair’s growing out finally. And your father says you’re back in school. I’m pleased, Ryan. Try to finish this time.”

  “Comm me later, okay?”

  She smiled. “All right.” I knew she meant it this time. “I do have to go.”

  It didn’t take long for her to disconnect. She wouldn’t get maudlin over comm. That was one thing we had in common, all three of us.

  My father came to see me spar with Musey. Not that it was much of a contest; mostly it was humiliating, but oddly fun once I stopped caring how much people laughed. We were in the ring, which was actually square, in the sparsely occupied gym. It was a sizable area with a multitude of different torture implements, designed to stretch, enhance, or tear muscles. I wasn’t one for working out. The exercise bags attacked me, the track around the rim was too monotonous, and the people who used it all regularly were far too fit. I supposed it was important for upkeep on jets and to divert an overabundance of energy, especially when they weren’t fighting battles every other shift, or preparing to fight one.

  Sid and Evan stood off to one side of the ring, their backs to the hatch, shouting encouragement to me (Evan, the traitor, alternated between me and the symp). As soon as I saw my father walk through the gym entrance Musey clipped me across the cheek and I fell sideways
against the rope barrier. I was wearing headgear but it still made my brain reverb.

  I groaned and staggered up, adjusting the padded section on my face.

  Musey approached, somewhat concerned. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Helps to pay attention,” he said.

  I tried a sucker swipe at his head, but he saw it coming somehow and dodged, grabbing my passing arm to fling me to the mat.

  “Damn!”

  “You’re improving,” he said.

  I got up, slower this time, and stretched my aching back. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not. It took less than a distraction to get you down a month ago.”

  “Like a strong wind,” Sid chimed in, as if anybody had asked him.

  Evan laughed, then went quiet and moved aside as my father approached.

  I glared at both of them.

  No help from the familial quarter either. He was smiling. “Shower and let’s get some lunch. I’ve got time.”

  “Okay.” I leaned my arms on the ropes and made faces at Sid, then held out my gloved hands. “Here, do something useful.”

  “Yes, Your Highness.” He mock scowled. But he tugged the straps open for me so I wouldn’t have to use my teeth.

  Musey crouched down by the ropes to talk quietly to my father, too quiet; I couldn’t hear anything. Evan kept a polite distance, but he watched Jos. I wondered if he could read lips. Sid pulled off my gloves, then reached up to undo the cheek guards.

  Someone’s tags beeped. I looked down inside my T-shirt but it wasn’t mine. We all checked and it turned out to be my father’s. He tapped it.

  “Azarcon.”

  “Sir,” the woman’s voice came through, sounding oddly strained. “Check the Send. Now.”

  “Their timing is impeccable,” he muttered. “As usual.” He looked over to the vidscreen up in the corner of the room and called it on.

  A male meedee stood in front of a polly barricade, on some deck that didn’t look like the one outside the dockside on Chaos, where most of the latest reports had come from in preparation for the upcoming reconvention of the peace talks.

  Words scrolled across the screen, even as my father snapped at it to increase the volume.

  But he didn’t need to. The headline burned into my eyes.

  AUSTRO’S SENIOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS OFFICER AND WIFE OF CAPTAIN CAIRO AZARCON, SONGLIAN LAU, KILLED BY A SUICIDE BOMBER ON HER WAY TO A ROUTINE PRESS CONFERENCE IN MODULE 7.

  The room was a tiny space, and everything in me narrowed to a dark, blistering point.

  The first night after the attack on the embassy, I didn’t sleep for long. I remembered hearing Sid and my grandfather talk in the outer room of the hotel suite we’d secured since our apartments in the embassy were destroyed, while I sat up in the bedroom watching the Send. The students they’d arrested shouted into the cams about “the butchering EarthHub” and “their butchering captains.” The meedees called it a symp terrorist act, but these kids didn’t look like symps, they were my age.

  That night I dreamed I met my father, after seven years, and when he hugged me I blew up and killed us both. I knew you weren’t supposed to die in your dreams, but I died a lot at night after that day in Hong Kong. Little bits of me went out hour after hour until I’d developed such an acute insomnia that Sid couldn’t even stay up with me anymore.

  It was stressful to sleep. It was painful to be awake. We traveled back from Hong Kong through Asia and Europe and Sid found me in the hotel bathroom in London with a bloodstream full of street drugs. No high-end Silver distillations, this was my first and last taste of Earth’s alternative. It hadn’t been intentional. I didn’t remember any of the immediate event, except convincing the room server to buy me whatever was on the corner and slip it in my hand the next time I ordered food service.

  I remembered waking up in a private hospital room with Sid beside the bed, his head by my arm, asleep. I never worked up the courage to ask him how he’d found me, but I didn’t really need to; I saw it on his face for weeks when he looked at me.

  I always thought I’d die young.

  Stupid, he told me, with tears in his eyes. You selfish, stupid kid.

  My grandparents put me in therapy and when I refused to cooperate with that, Sid took me to the middle of nowhere. Pretty soon the memories didn’t burn as much, but I needed off the planet. And I made them promise never to tell my parents.

  Never. Not in any official reports, or unofficial ones.

  Surprisingly, both my grandparents and Sid agreed. Maybe because they knew how serious I could be now.

  No, Sid had said. I think you should tell your parents yourself.

  Never, I thought. I could never hurt them that way.

  But there was another way to hurt somebody. I knew it now.

  In silence.

  “Ryan, come down.”

  Sid looked up at me from the gym floor, up through the blue ropes of the ring where I leaned, sitting on the mat with my cheek against them. It was hard to breathe and I shook. About five meters away my father paced, talking on his tag-comm to somebody, a hand resting at the back of his neck.

  Sid reached through the ropes and took my elbow. “Come on, get up. Come down here.”

  His eyes were glassy and dazed, fighting to stay focused. I pulled away and hauled myself up, nearly fell right over to his feet trying to negotiate the ropes, but Musey came up quickly and seized my arm and guided me down as if I would break.

  As soon as my feet hit the floor Sid grabbed me with both arms and held on. Over his shoulder I saw the transcast and its repetitive shots of the exploded hallway where it had happened. He held me so tightly with my cheek against his shoulder that I couldn’t breathe. My heart hammered, struggling. I heard his tiny gasps, raking for his own breath, and felt how he shook. Eventually I put my arms around his back and tried to say something that would make him feel better, but nothing came out. Not even tears.

  I just stood there.

  And I heard the ship’s drives as it moved through space, heard it so loud when for the past few weeks I’d learned to ignore it, I’d gotten used to it like I’d gotten used to being safe. The craziness was Out There, in all the rest of the galaxy, not here where it could touch me.

  And I’d been right. It hadn’t touched me at all this time.

  Musey and Evan hovered, wordless.

  Then my father stopped talking on comm and came up as if to cut in to a dance. His expression was tight, pale, and expectant. But he stopped because I looked away, I didn’t know why I did it, but I did, and Sid’s grip was so hard around my ribs I knew there would be bruises.

  Maybe Sid heard my father, or felt his presence, but he didn’t move and I didn’t want him to move, my body had become a dull ache, felt too warm as if all of me was going to slip away and run down like rain to an open gutter. Sid started to whisper something against my hair that sounded like, “I’m sorry.”

  Hong Kong. London. The Dojo. Now this?

  But I was still alive. I was so alive it hurt.

  I went to quarters alone, sending Sid away because I couldn’t look at him either after a while, and the captain wasn’t in there. I shut myself in the bedroom and stood looking around at its now familiar gray walls, the expensive blue sheets on the bed, some of my clothes strewn haphazardly across it.

  Illusion. Nowhere was safe.

  I paced, sat, ended up on the bed with my hands up in my sleeves and my leg twitching, feeling sick but not in any way that could be relieved. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, they turned cold, and I didn’t know if it was the air in this ship or my own dried sweat or both.

  My heart was a mausoleum, and it was crumbling.

  I didn’t know how long it took the captain to come in. I paced—five or six strides from one end of the bedroom to another, repeated. I occupied my mind with failed attempts to think of nothing but blank walls. I splashed my face with water, went out and paced again, finally turned
up the music and sat on the couch and listened to its harsh beats and vocal screams, loud and mangled mirrors to my own emotions.

  He came in and ordered it off, but I ordered it back on. He sat next to me and pulled me to his chest, but—no.

  He yelled the music off and grabbed my face in his hands, forced me to look at him even as I dug my fingers into his wrists.

  “Ryan.”

  That was all he said, and stopped. Not a bit of emotion sloughed off him.

  “Shouldn’t have happened,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You should’ve protected her!”

  He didn’t say anything to that. Maybe he felt guilty. I still couldn’t read his expression. He wouldn’t allow himself to crack.

  Well, damn him for it.

  I shoved his hands away and stood. He got in my way, gripped my arms.

  “Let go of me!”

  “Listen—Ryan—I want you to listen.”

  “What for? What the hell is left? My safety? It’s a fucking joke!”

  His eyes searched mine as his hand went into my hair, smoothing it back.

  “Don’t.” I tried to avoid his gaze but he moved my head up with his fingers in my hair and I couldn’t help it, everything welled up and started to spill. “That was meant for me.”

  “No,” he said, shiny fissures in the blacks of his eyes. They opened to little rivers of light. “No, Ryan… it was meant for me.”

  He didn’t want to, but we were going back to Austro. I got my wish to go home again. It was probably the reaction the killers had expected—a suspension of the peace negotiations and two Azarcons in their sights. My father said he’d been in contact with the pollies on station, and what was left of my mother’s security (two had died with her, in the explosion), and demanded to know what the hell had happened.

  He told me while I was still quiet.

  She’d been on her way to the press room from home, to make a routine statement in answer to a number of meedee questions about the upcoming talks and whether she’d spoken to the captain recently. Security had mapped the route (different each time), with all the safe locations along the way predetermined, and a minimum of traffic to contend with from outsiders.