Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  I opened my eyes and looked for the comp. He’d left it on the blanket by my feet, shut down. I stretched and dragged it closer with my heel. I couldn’t reach it with hands so I kicked off my shoe, stepped on my right sock and pulled it off too, then toed the comp until the pressure flipped open the screen. “Icon options,” I told it.

  Nothing happened.

  Damn, it was on a voice pattern.

  Frustration threatened to burn my eyes. Think.

  He hadn’t activated it with his voice. Which meant there was an alternative key. A manual one.

  I stared at the screen and the keypad. Common activation sets, I knew, thanks to Musey. Feeling more than a little foolish, but mostly desperate, I toed some combinations on the pad. Gingerly and painfully, my chin against my right arm, which was stretched at an uncomfortable angle now.

  The eleventh try made the screen blink and colorize, then a security message popped up.

  Of course it would be passworded.

  I didn’t need to get the password now. I just needed the holo-option, and that was an icon on the screen that was there as soon as the comp went live. I toed it and brought the comp as far up toward me as I could, stretching to look at the screen and connect my implants to the option. Once the icon lit I blinked the common Morse that sent me from the real world into the comp one.

  Now I saw the password gate, the menacing red cannons that I had to disarm. In my head was a list of codes to break down and select in blinks, piece by piece, from the universal language of letter-and-number items. Put them together in the right order and that would disable it, if I only found the correct one.

  Between Musey’s training and my own criminal curiosity, I tackled it with sweating concentration, trying to keep my ears open for footsteps.

  But I should’ve known better. Pirates like him didn’t make noise and with my sight occupied, it was difficult to truly listen.

  He didn’t warn me, he just ripped the comp away without letting me blink out.

  It felt like a dozen knives stabbed into my eyes.

  I yelled and pressed my forehead to my arm, tears running down now like they were being chased. Kirov shouted above me, then his hand came down. I tilted over but he grasped my hair and wrenched my head up.

  “What did you do?”

  I tried to blink the tears away, but the world was black.

  My eyes were wide open but my world was black.

  I heard him pace, as pain tears tracked down my face in continuous rivers. Forced disconnections in burndives were an absolute no-no, especially if you had implants.

  I was blind.

  I tried not to panic but it wasn’t working. My head reeled from too many fast breaths and my hands started to tingle. From hyperventilation or the cuffs, I wasn’t sure.

  Kirov said, “Shut the hell up with your breathing,” as if that would help.

  I kept my lids tightly shut but the pain didn’t let up. My eyes felt like they were melting from their sockets.

  I concentrated on the hope that any minute now my father would come and get me. Please.

  Kirov muttered a litany of threats until he finally seemed calm enough to deal with me. He grabbed my jaw in his hand and his breath hit me in the face, cigret raw.

  “You are one lucky boy, you didn’t break my password gate. One lucky boy.” His fingers squeezed, almost forcing my mouth open. “You still can’t see nothing?”

  “No,” I said through gritted teeth. “You bastard.”

  He shoved my head with a disgusted growl and moved away, taking the cigret scent of his clothes with him. “You’re gonna do us both in, manito. Your daddy’s gonna kill me for letting you be blind.”

  His voice trailed off in thought. I heard the spark of a fingerband on the end of a cig and the smoke smell got worse.

  “Let me go,” I said. “He’ll go easier if you just let me go”

  I doubted it. Unfortunately so did Kirov.

  “Shut up,” he said.

  “He’s linked with that symp Otter. How long do you think it’ll take him before he finds you down here?”

  From the pirate’s silence I knew he was thinking of it too.

  “Dermo,” Kirov muttered. Footsteps started to track again from one end of the small space to the other. “Do you know what’ll happen to me if your papa doesn’t take my deal?”

  I didn’t answer. He wasn’t looking for one.

  “I’m dead,” he said. “The Family or the pirates or some Centralist agency, they’ll figure it out when I don’t show up for them. I need your papa, dammit. He’s the only one would listen to me—”

  He stopped abruptly. His footsteps went away, then paused. Silence sank deep for a second before softer footsteps padded toward us. From the main tunnel.

  I didn’t hear him approach, just felt the gunpoint against my neck and his lips against my ear. A rough hand clamped over my mouth.

  “Don’t speak.”

  It could be my father’s jets, or Otter, and Kirov was getting desperate. I didn’t think I had a long shelf life in his hands.

  So I bit at his skin and wrenched my head away, yelled, “HELP ME!”

  “Idiot!” Kirov rasped. He let me go and stood, moving away from my side.

  The steps came closer, it was hard to tell how many. A female voice said, “What the hell, Yuri? Where’ve you been?”

  Someone he knew.

  “Is that Azarcon’s kid?” the voice continued, alarmed.

  Another voice, male, said, “You’re supposed to kill him!”

  Oh, shit.

  I started to struggle. It wasn’t brave. I was a strung piece of meat flailing on its last breath as Kirov said, “Change of plans.”

  “Since when?” the girl said, clearly suspicious.

  A gunshot went off. Then another, right after.

  I froze.

  Two dull thuds sounded on the cold deck.

  No more voices.

  Except one. Kirov said, emotionless, “They’re dead and it’s all your fault.”

  They were kids he’d trained in the underdeck, he said. They were destitute, indoctrinated, and pirate loyal, and they’d helped him track me back in February so he could stage the hit at the Dojo. Who looked at homeless kids on deck? Not rich stitches who didn’t want to be reminded of their obligations to humanity. He’d told them and Falcone’s lieutenant that it had gone bad because of my security, not because he’d shot the one of them who’d been his partner in the flash.

  He’d brought me to this hidden nook to avoid them, so he wouldn’t have to explain that all the things he’d taught them about pirates was shit, they weren’t looking out for the best interests of the throwaway kids; in fact he wanted to leave the pirates now. But he couldn’t tell them that.

  But I’d opened my mouth and ruined it. Now he didn’t just leave them. He killed them. And there were bodies.

  So we were moving. And if I said a word he swore to the stars that he would shoot me. He dragged me by the arm with my hands cuffed behind me. My feet, one shoe off and bare, scraped on concrete and splashed in shallow puddles of things I didn’t care to identify. My own sweat permeated my nose, and the scent of an environment where people passed through but nobody cleaned.

  I stumbled for a third time. I was sure my one foot was bleeding by now from scraping the deck. It burned with pain. He yanked at me but I resisted. “Forget it!”

  He shook me hard. “You want to die?”

  My heart pounded, so loudly it seemed to travel through the tunnels like the station was pumping it.

  “Don’t do this, Kirov. Think. He’ll help you if you let me go.” Brave, empty words. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to end up lying dead in these cold tunnels and have my father or Sid find me. No. I saw it behind my eyes and the tears that ran now weren’t all from the physical pain. I couldn’t see him but I faced him, and I knew all he had to do was shoot me and it would be over.

  It wasn’t smart to taunt a person so willing to
kill. But he went to all this trouble because he believed my father could help him. He was that desperate for a second life and who else would listen to him but Cairo Azarcon?

  “He’ll help you,” I said. “But not like this.”

  “You’re blind,” he said. I heard him pace. “He won’t forgive that.”

  I wanted to convince myself when I said, “Docs can fix it. And you might be surprised what he can forgive. Don’t you think he knows what happened to you?” My nose was running now in the cold. I tried to wipe at it with my shoulder. I tried to listen for sounds of him putting his gun away, or brace myself for violence. I said, “I’ll speak for you. I’ll make him listen.”

  “You’re a liar,” he said into my face, suddenly close and intimately soft. “You’re going to get me killed.”

  He must have seen that he was running out of options. Even if my father did what he asked he’d have to deliver me back, damaged. And no amount of dealmaking would make my father see the light in that outcome. Not in Kirov’s pirate mind.

  I felt his hand stroke over my hair, once. Then he moved away.

  His sudden silence sent a tunnel of fear burrowing through my gut. I backed up.

  He let me.

  I’d misjudged him.

  He was too desperate.

  And I didn’t see it coming. I just felt the bolt hit me in the chest and, oh, Mother, Mother, it burned.

  Sound went in and out like distorted echoes through a mike. Shouts rode in the cold air. It was too cold, too dark, and my cheek lay pressed against something rough and unforgiving. I breathed in that darkness and wondered if this was what they’d felt. Those people at the embassy. In the Dojo. The girl I’d held in my arms.

  My mother.

  I breathed and it was their pain I felt, all of them, wrapped around me in a shroud. A hard pain that dug its jagged edges into my chest like it wanted to exhume my soul.

  I breathed and the sound filled my head, struggling.

  A voice from far away in the tunnel said, “Roll him over. Gently.”

  It came from far but hands touched me immediately. Close. Like they knew me.

  They rolled me over.

  The pain unearthed me and flung me to the fire.

  Open your eyes, Ryan, please open your eyes.

  It was a song in my ear, whispered just under the heavy thrum of the ship’s drives. I was used to the ship now, its music was an odd lullaby that said we were moving. Skimming stars and cheating time, deep spacers like Erret Dorr liked to say.

  “Ryan. Open your eyes.”

  My father’s voice. It was an order, but I wasn’t one of his jets. I didn’t have to listen.

  “He’s trying,” Sid said. “At least he better be.”

  Sid would knock me awake if I didn’t do what he said.

  Thin horizons of dusky light bled into the dark. Shadows moved. A little more daylight and the world began to awaken, come alive, and reveal itself.

  It wasn’t daylight, it smelled like medbay, and my immediate world consisted of my father and Sid, one on either side of the bed, looking at me. Their faces were blurred, but not from tears, and everything was more gray than I remembered.

  My lids were heavy. They drifted shut again.

  “Ryan?” My father’s voice, closer. A hand touched my shoulder. “It’s okay, your eyes are healing. If they hurt that’s the residue from the bot-knitters. Doc said it’ll be a while before your sight clears.”

  If it would ever clear. I peeked at them again. Nothing had changed. It was a shadowy picture.

  And I remembered.

  I remembered Mom was dead.

  The tears burned.

  When I was still drugged and groggy my father told me that Doc Mercurio had removed my optical implants in order to try to repair the damage from the interrupted burn-dive. So I’d never be able to dive again. It wasn’t a great loss. But my eyesight might never return one hundred percent. They didn’t know; we had to give it time. Bot-knitters were intricate, industrious little nanoworkers, but the eyes were a complicated biological mechanism.

  Like my heart, which was also healing. Physically.

  Only Sid and my father were allowed to visit but it didn’t much matter. I slept a lot, made up for all those bouts of insomnia I’d taken with me from Earth. The first thing I asked for was the date.

  “You were out for forty-eight hours,” Sid said, when my father was elsewhere.

  “Only forty-eight?”

  My body felt like it hadn’t moved in a month.

  “A long forty-eight,” he said. He sat at the side of the bed and even with my blurred vision I saw his unkempt hair and the way his shoulders slumped as if gravity alone fatigued him.

  My voice croaked. “Where’s my father?”

  “On the bridge. He’ll be back soon.” He poured me some water from the bedside table and held it for me as I sipped the straw.

  It was a private room in medbay and the door was shut. Silence, except for the drives, insulated us.

  “What happened?” I asked, and tried to brace myself for the answer.

  Sid moved the edge of the blanket, dissecting it with fingers. “I got a concussion from that thunderflash, but everyone else made it out okay. Otter and his gang underdeck found you and then helped us track Kirov before he could split the tunnels.”

  “Otter’s in a gang?”

  Sid shook his head, rubbed an eye. I may have slept but he probably hadn’t. “He runs a gang. Musey said the symps on Austro recruited Otter a few years ago to work for the Warboy. But he’s a tunnel rat through and through, and when he isn’t running ops for symps he’s terrorizing the pollies.”

  “He knows comps too.”

  Sid sounded amused. “He’s an enterprising kid.”

  “Maybe I can meet him sometime. To thank him.”

  Sid didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see his face clearly through the damn blur.

  “I don’t think we’ll be going back to Austro anytime soon,” Sid murmured finally.

  “Why not?”

  “I think it’d be best if your father explained. We got that pirate at least, he’s in the brig being interrogated.”

  None of that sounded good.

  “It was my fault,” I said.

  “What was?”

  “What Kirov did. My being blind. I tried to dive a message on his comp and he caught me, and that panicked him when I couldn’t see after, and then he shot these kids because I yelled out—”

  “None of this is your fault, Ryan.”

  “I didn’t help.” I felt like digging out the irritation from my eyes. “I could’ve helped—something.”

  Sid was firm with me. Angry, but not at me. “He’s a pirate and if he shot somebody he’s the one killed them.”

  “He wanted my father to help him. He was telling the truth about the Family of Humanity and Mom, wasn’t he?”

  After a moment, Sid said, “Yes. He knew that Centralist woman’s comm codes. We confiscated her comp and Musey extracted her correspondences.”

  “Don’t let my father kill him.”

  “Why not?” He wanted to kill him. It was plain in his voice.

  “He can help,” I said. “Maybe he’d testify, maybe that’ll screw up Damiani if there’s a solid tie between Centralists and the Family of Humanity.”

  Maybe that would help the negotiations.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be fair for my father to kill Kirov, because at one point they’d been in the exact position, wanting to leave a life, except Grandpa Ashrafi hadn’t turned his back.

  “Look what he did to you,” Sid said, quiet.

  “But I’m alive,” I said. “Aren’t I?”

  I ordered Sid to bed. He didn’t want to go but the sick and infirm hold a curious power over even the most stubborn Marine. If he didn’t want me to distress myself on his account he’d do what I said.

  So he went.

  I slept, and when I woke up again my father was there, in Sid’s spot. A gray
film still lay over everything.

  He leaned down and hugged me, gently, as if we’d always made this sort of contact. It didn’t matter. Right now it felt like we always had. I figured he held on because he thought I needed it, but the seconds stretched and it wasn’t for me.

  Then he straightened up and said in a slightly hoarse voice, “How do things look?”

  I squinted at his expression. “Grim. Are we going back to Chaos?”

  He breathed out and fingered the blanket by my arm. “Not yet… I don’t know when we’ll be able to dock at a Hub station. After Austro, Damiani ordered me recalled to Earth. For a court-martial.”

  “What? Can she do that? Can’t Grandpa—”

  “No. He can’t. She has a right. I took control of the station without authorization. It was just the excuse she needed to rope me in and put the negotiations on permanent hold.”

  “But what about the Rimstations and merchant ships… they’d back you. They already back you, some of them.”

  “They don’t get a vote in Hub Command.”

  His voice was flat. He stared at a point on the pillow by my head for a long moment, but then he looked at me in the eyes, leaning closer so I could see his stare and he could put his hand in my hair, touch me. He said, “I couldn’t risk it when Kirov took you, Ryan. You were gone. I didn’t really care to squabble with govies about protocol. If one ship had left with you on it, you would’ve been lost.”

  On a pirate ship. That was his fear. And his actions made him a pirate in the government’s eyes.

  Or maybe he was just a parent who had the power to protect his child, and used it.

  My father wasn’t going to Earth on Damiani’s order. He was heading to deep space, for now, and Musey said Captain S’tlian would supply Macedon as long as they continued their alliance against the pirates.

  That was more than fair, considering my father wasn’t finished with pirates yet. Or negotiations—corrupt govies notwithstanding. If some stations and merchants, colonies and bases in the deep didn’t want to fight anymore, my father was going to settle something between them and the striviirc-na, and what were Damiani’s allies going to do about it?

  Rogue, the Send said. It was all over the Send. Rogue Captain Cairo Azarcon who had a pirate in his brig that he refused to deliver to justice, and he left a shaken Austro Station in his wake.