Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  Fara liked to say, Always cover your ass, especially with hostile pollies in murder investigations.

  You just never knew what could jump back at you when you weren’t looking. Innocence was no defense unless it came with an attorney.

  Probably the one thing Fara and his mother would agree on.

  He said, “I’ll talk when my lawyer gets here.”

  Sid said, “I’ve commed her.”

  “You’re not under arrest,” Plodovic said. “You’re not accused of anything.”

  Funny how pollies said you weren’t under arrest but then treated you like a criminal.

  Ryan said, “By the time you people get done the sniper will be off station.”

  “Ships have been halted. So I suggest you cooperate quickly,” Plodovic said.

  Ships in dock, burning cred when they needed to be in space, and guess who would get blamed once the story hit the Send? Snipers at the Dojo, shooting at Ryan Azarcon… He saw the scroll in his mind’s eye. The ships waiting to undock and those waiting to port would think his mother or his father’s reputation created the lockdown, because when an Azarcon sneezed the galaxy had to injet the antihistamine.

  That was how it was going to read. Never mind innocent people were killed and any murder, much less a multiple homicide, was enough cause to halt ships until they established that the perp wasn’t headed outbound.

  Perp. Sniper. Maybe more than one.

  Snipers that missed. On purpose?

  For a second he almost smelled the dead girl’s hair. The sweet smoke. As if he weren’t sitting in a polly’s office being benignly interrogated.

  The lieutenant was talking, a flood of words that made sense to surface thoughts.

  “Your bodyguard has to remain here, anyway, until we can clear him. He and his unit were the only patrons in there with guns.”

  “What about their security?”

  “The only patrons,” she said again, with a squint

  “What, so you think he’d shoot at me?” He didn’t quite laugh in her face but he made her think it.

  “You tell me. Would Corporal Sidney have a reason to shoot at you?”

  “Yeah, sure. Because he’s my bodyguard.”

  “Ryan,” Sid said. Shut up. Wait for the lawyer.

  “There have been rumors,” Plodovic said, “with regard to your bodyguard’s relationship with your mother. You might be inconvenient in a scenario like that, Mr. Azarcon.”

  For a second he didn’t believe he’d heard right.

  This was a whole other area of questioning.

  He looked that polly in the eyes and didn’t glance once at Sid. “So this department bases their investigations on gossip? I’ll make sure and let my mother know that.”

  “We examine all possibilities. Is there any truth to it?”

  He kept the stare. “We’re not answering your questions. Especially the stupid ones.”

  “You bring a lawyer in here and it becomes adversarial. We’re all on the same side.”

  “Not at this desk.”

  “Who are your drug contacts, Mr. Azarcon? Tyler Coe?”

  Did she think she was going to kill two crimes with one interrogation? “This isn’t just about the people in that flash, is it.”

  “You were in that flash, Mr. Azarcon. The girl you were dancing with, according to witnesses, was the first to be killed. So this is partly about you. Isn’t it?”

  He said nothing. Sid said nothing. They all looked at one another like mutes.

  Plodovic’s deskcomm buzzed. She lingered a glare on them for a silent moment, then tapped it. Another female voice said, “Lieutenant, I think you better link to the Send.”

  That was all they needed. Fluff about him, Austro’s Hot #1 Bachelor, in the midst of a murder investigation.

  He twisted the bottom of his shirt, tried to warm up his hands. Told himself Plodovic was just doing her job and it had nothing to do with the fact of his parents’ or anybody’s political views. He and Sid were going to walk out of here and go home and—

  Except the fact of his family could be why someone shot at him in the first place, like Admiral Grandpa feared.

  Or maybe it was his Silver habit.

  Maybe the girl had enemies.

  Maybe Fara’s boyfriend finally got jealous.

  Plodovic tapped off from her secretary, then poked her screen a couple times. Ryan leaned to get a view, despite himself. Images popped up—a block of live footage, a scroll of words, a split screen of a meedee woman on a station dockside.

  Not Austro.

  In the livecast block was his father, flanked by black-uniformed soljets.

  The meedee said, “… from Chaos Station in the Dragons, where Captain Cairo Azarcon”—his face appeared in close up on screen—“finally lifted a communications blackout of the Chaos Port Authority. Then in a shocking statement he announced a cease-fire and the commencement of peace negotiations with the aliens and their sympathizers, headed by the Warboy, who we have just learned has been docked at the station for three full shifts—”

  The strits.

  The Warboy.

  And his father.

  Ryan’s whole body froze and his heart gave a heavy thump.

  Austro seemed to flip on its axis.

  He was twelve when Marine Corporal Timothy Carl Sidney arrived on station, a gift from Admiral Grandpa back on Earth. Sid was tall, twenty, tanned, and dark blond, despite a month of space training on Pax Terra Station. He’d been an American Marine since he was seventeen and looked down at Ryan there in the apartment, a single drab-olive duffel at his shiny booted feet, decked head to toe in streamlined dress blues. EarthHub Marine blues. He’d survived numerous interviews and sweet-talked a load of signatures to get himself transferred from a dirtside unit to the space one. He had to be good; a move like that was notoriously difficult to swing, no matter what country you served before.

  He was good. Good-looking, good-humored, and good with guns.

  Sid’s mother was an EarthHub Marine colonel, he told Mom Lau, there in the foyer with all his “yes ma’ams” and “no ma’ams.” He said, Colonel Ann Sidney served with Admiral Ashrafi on Trinity, way back when.

  Ah. So it wasn’t all professional prowess that landed him this sweet assignment.

  How fortuitous for us, Mom Lau said, with a big smile unwarranted by the situation.

  It all started then.

  It didn’t take Ryan long to figure out that his grandfather had sent Sid this far, not only for Ryan’s safety, but for his education. Sid didn’t patronize him or gloss over anything, or tie up the truth in neat bows and ribbons.

  Sid sat him down in the kitchen that first shift and looked at Ryan with all the force of his gold-flecked eyes. Sid fit right in with the kind of people Mom Lau liked to orbit, the pretty kind of people she invited to parties who either fawned over him or ignored him. Except Sid didn’t talk like them and it wasn’t all his Earth accent.

  “Just want to get a couple things straight,” he said, sliding over a cup of milk. Ryan watched him, didn’t touch it, and waited. “First, call me Sid, not sir, and I’ll call you Ryan, not kid. Second, your grandfather trusts me a great deal to send me here and I don’t intend to let him down. The admiral did me a favor because I wanted off Earth.”

  Why?

  “It was too much.”

  Ryan later discovered that Sid was burnt-out from dirt-side conflicts. Burnt-out at twenty. EarthHub might’ve presented a united front to the galaxy, but Earth itself was another matter. Countries squabbled, old hatreds flared up every other year or never really died, and Sid had stepped through more than one massacre in his life, seen more than one atrocity in more than one nation, and a request from his colonel mother to Ryan’s grandfather got him as far away from that as possible. To space. To an important assignment that didn’t require battlefields.

  A twelve-year-old kid.

  He said to Ryan, “So I want you to know that I’ll work to build your tru
st. I know it’s not an overnight thing. I’m here to protect you—and your mom—and I’m not going to bullshit you. So that means I want you to have an understanding of your situation.”

  What situation?

  Sid said, “About your father. And your grandfather. About your mother.”

  Oh. You mean how they hardly talk and practically never see each other?

  Sid paused. And kind of smiled. Not like a baby-sitter, but an ally. As if the behavior of the parental species was a mystery indeed. Ryan didn’t want to, but he started to like Sid then. Even though he didn’t show it, no way. He didn’t expect Sid to really answer his point.

  But Sid said, “Your father’s a deep-space captain facing the brunt of the war, and your grandfather’s colleagues back in Hubcentral don’t like how independent he is. Not to mention the fact your grandfather supports him and that ruffles a lot of feathers… and your mother and her mother are always on the Send talking for Austro and parading you about, and you’re in the middle of it, a target.”

  Me a target?

  “Not everyone likes your family, Ryan. Strits and symps really don’t. Some factions of the goverment don’t. And they might just go through you to make a point, now that you aren’t a kid anymore.”

  That was the first he’d heard of it. Or at least heard of it that bluntly.

  Sid added, “Your dad has it in for pirates too, right? He makes enemies kind of easily.”

  He’d never thought of his father in that light. His father was just—there. Or, really, not there.

  Sid ended up drinking the milk. Then he patted Ryan’s shoulder and said, “I better go scope out your security system. And I’m going to want to talk to you later about your user protocol for the Send.”

  The residence felt different with Sid there. It sounded different with his heavier male footsteps going from one room to the next, and his deep voice issuing orders even to Mom Lau.

  And Ryan sat alone in the kitchen thinking, Everything’s changed.

  Everything changed with that one Send report.

  The lieutenant wasn’t looking at the screen now. She looked at him. He read it on her expression: Azarcons.

  It wasn’t supportive.

  The meedee jabbered on about why wasn’t there anything official coming from EarthHub Command yet, and did that mean the captain was (no surprise) acting independently? What authority did he have to sit down with the strits, to let strits dock at an EarthHub station, to announce to everybody in the Hub that we were now going to talk to those strits and their human traitor sympathizers?

  The meedee didn’t say it in so many words, but it was implicit.

  Ryan bit down, stared right back at the lieutenant, who seemed like she wanted to ask him that question.

  And it was a valid question. The Send transcasted fast reactions from station governors, and while the deep-space citizens seemed almost relieved, the closer the ’casts got to Hubcentral and Earth, the louder the diatribes.

  Governor Ng from Austro said, “As far as I’m concerned we are still at war until EarthHub Command declares otherwise. There will be no strit ships docking at our station, no matter what any deep-space captain says, until that point.”

  Lieutenant Plodovic let it run, but she wasn’t watching the screen. She watched Ryan’s face.

  He and Sid said nothing. Only listened. The office seemed to get warmer with every second, with every new blurb from the Send.

  One moderate meedee talked about the dilation factor, and captains who were used to making crucial decisions on the spot without a lot of hassling, brass channel verifications. Maybe Hub Command hadn’t got the news at exactly the same time that it had happened. Communication was virtually instantaneous but travel wasn’t, even with leap points scattered throughout the Hub. Getting to them still took time, transit inside a leap still took time. And for Chaos Station, way in the Dragons, time certainly moved at a different rate from Earth’s perspective looking out.

  Events in deep space came with drag time and you just got used to it. A father roaming the Dragons commed his son, thinking he had just talked to the kid a week ago (and for him, he had), but for the boy it was a month. So while an eight-hour shift passed on Chaos Station and a simple cease-fire changed somehow to allowing the Warboy docking privilege at a Hub station, three weeks could’ve spun out on Earth before they heard what was happening, and that was assuming the captain had promptly commed them.

  Which was assuming a lot, considering his track record.

  It must’ve been written on Ryan’s face, the same thing he saw on Plodovic’s, even though he didn’t want to show it.

  What was his father thinking?

  The meedee equivocated with, “A belatedly authorized move of this kind may well provide Centralist presidential candidate Judy Damiani with all the firepower she needs to convince a Hub majority that harsher restrictions need to be enforced on the deep-space arm of our military. Forcing the government’s hand with a move this decisive sets a dangerous precedent indeed.”

  Admiral Grandpa was going to have to address that, since he was in charge of the Navy Space Corps.

  The captain was going to have to justify his actions, whatever his intentions or the outcome.

  People weren’t just going to trust it. Not when the strits might’ve been lulling the Hub into a false sense of security.

  Like pollies preferred to do.

  “Well,” Plodovic said finally, “it makes you wonder who else knew about your father’s move before we did.”

  Ryan stared at her. “Excuse me?”

  She looked almost smug. “It’s just now hitting the Send and, apparently, Earth. He had a blackout on Chaos Station’s Port Authority for three full shifts. Seventy-two hours their time. They couldn’t release who was in dock, but they knew. Makes me wonder how airtight that blackout was, and maybe someone not in accordance with your father’s decision decided to… protest. Sent a comm under the wire.”

  His father had many enemies, Sid had said way back when.

  Symps, govies, pirates—any of them could’ve had backdoor contacts to the Dragons, especially on a station the size of Austro, where you could easily lose yourself if you didn’t happen to be famous. A whisper of the peace talks could’ve got ahead of the captain, the meedees, and swept insystem where everybody knew Ryan Azarcon lived—

  You linked on the Send every shift, and for every peace-hawk from the Dragons to Hubcentral that wanted an end to the war, there was a raging political group or a racist paramilitary organization that thought the symps were traitors fit to be executed and strits an abomination to humanity. Or people who’d lost families through the fighting were simply unable to forgive, or forget, and would rather avenge. They devoted time, cred, and weapons to the cause.

  Oh, everybody had a Cause. And they all thought their points were best made with bombs.

  He didn’t feel Sid’s hand right away, only when the fingers clenched on his arm and the pain brought him back.

  To blood on his shirt.

  To the deaths in the Dojo—his fault. His name. His very existence.

  He twisted the hem of his shirt, out of sight of the lieutenant and her accusatory eyes. “I need to get out of these clothes.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere.” She tapped her comp.

  A block on her screen changed. It showed the outside of the precinct; a swarm of meedees descended with blinking lights and cam-orbs. Waiting for him to emerge.

  Vultures. Scavenging cannibals.

  “Get rid of them!” he snapped. Sid touched his back but he twitched it off.

  The lieutenant said, “Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Azarcon, they won’t get in.”

  He turned to Sid, but Sid’s eyes had disconnected. His commstud was talking to him. Then he looked at Ryan.

  “Jo’s caught in a press at the base of your tower.”

  Plodovic called it up on her comp. An image of his mother’s lawyer, Joanne Martin, severely lit by white
meedee lights and surrounded by satellites of floating cams that softly whirred. Recording, transcasting.

  “I don’t know any more than you do,” she said. “Now if you could please get out of my way, I need to attend to Ms. Lau’s son.”

  “Ms. Lau had no knowledge of her husband’s actions before it hit the Send?” a meedee shouted. A faceless voice out of frame.

  “I need to get to the precinct,” Jo said, pushing forward when her aide cleared a cone of space.

  “What does she think of it? Ms. Martin! Has she been in contact with the captain?”

  “Ms. Martin! Have you spoken to Ryan yet? Was he injured in the flash house attack?”

  They continued to ask, despite a lack of answers. They wanted to know if he was dead, if the pollies had confirmed the murders were indeed an assassination attempt on his life, if the captain had commed in, if he knew his son was being held. If, if, if.

  The captain might’ve got this transcast at the same time they were getting his.

  “Sit down, Ryan,” Sid said quietly.

  He didn’t know he was standing.

  The heaviness in the pit of his stomach made him sink back to the chair.

  The lieutenant commed her secretary. “Send some people to ward off the crowd. Ms. Martin will be joining us shortly and I don’t want a melee outside.” She looked back at Ryan as if it were his fault, but didn’t say anything.

  They made her job more stressful. Imagine.

  He was covered in blood but she was stressed.

  They didn’t speak for long minutes.

  Eventually the secretary came on again, a disembodied voice: “Ms. Martin is finally here, Lieutenant.”

  “Send her in.”

  Jo looked displeased and didn’t even bother to nod politely at Plodovic. Some strands of dark hair flew loosely from her upsweep. A slight dampness from overcompensation in the bright lights and cool air ringed her eyes. Her voice was a whip as she took a seat on Ryan’s right.

  “What have you got?”

  Plodovic said, “A flash house with guarded entrances and exits, even the maintenance tunnels are laser-tripped, albeit only enough to dissuade drunk patrons from hiding out and doing illegal things. Miyasake’s security cleared. And then there’s Mr. Azarcon’s bodyguard. He cleared the flash before it opened.”