Burndive

by Karin Lowachee

  “So you’ll be my au pair?”

  “Your what?”

  “Never mind.” He looked up at the ceiling and leaned on his hands against the wall. Evan had been a refreshing change, after all, ex-pirate or no. His association was at least voluntary.

  Musey spoke as if it were being pried from his cold dead lips. “I understand you have some interest in comps.”

  “I guess.”

  “We can start there. If you want.”

  Ryan looked at him. “You’ll teach me to burndive? Like, high-end stuff?”

  Musey said, “No. That’s illegal.”

  “Oh. Well then, I don’t have an interest in comps.”

  “Look, Azarcon, the captain ordered me to train you. Hand-to-hand stuff, gun handling, just basic, as well as tech. To understand it.”

  “Why?”

  He breathed out impatiently. “Because you can’t walk around anymore without a clue how to defend yourself. It helps if you’re decent in a fight. Do you get it?”

  “And the tech?”

  “Communication. Basic stuff.”

  “I know basic comm tech. I can even burndive a little. What I want to know is how to burndive a lot. Like, how can I send messages while disguising their origins?”

  Musey stared at him.

  “You said you’re going to help me and that’s what will help me.”

  “How will that help you?”

  “Because I don’t want to be cooped up on this boat! I can’t go on stations, I don’t know for how long, but if I can’t talk to people other than my screwed-up family and jets on orders, I’m going to kill something.”

  “You have someone specific you want to talk to?”

  The lev saved him, opened up, and he walked out.

  Musey said to the lev, “Hold,” and followed him into the corridor. “You have someone specific. Who?”

  “Don’t work your spy voodoo on me.”

  “Do you want to stay alive? Don’t do stupid things.”

  He rounded on the symp. Musey didn’t even blink. Ryan leaned into his face. “You have no right. You of all people, with your killer Warboy buddy. I know how to stay alive, I’ve been through”—Stop. Now—“enough… so I don’t need advice from a strit!”

  “Sympathizer,” Musey said. “Get it right if you want to categorize. Your father’s a rogue. You’re a brat. I’m a sympathizer. Does that sum it up in your world?”

  “Go blow.”

  “I have orders. They’ll try my patience but I’ll do them because I respect your father. I respect the fact he’s got enough foresight to talk civil with the striviirc-na, so I’ll respect that he knows what he’s doing with you. But if you push me too far I will hit you. And we’ll see which one of us gets the reprimand.”

  He couldn’t find anything to say. Too many angry sparks went off in his mind, and he couldn’t grasp any of them.

  “What’s your problem anyway?” Musey said. “So you saw a building blow up. So someone shot at you. Do you have any idea what people really see in this war? And yet you bitch and moan over your little traumas.”

  He grabbed at the front of Musey’s shirt and aimed for the symp’s face with his other fist.

  The next things he saw were the corridor lights overhead.

  His ass and shoulders smarted and the bottle had skittered across the deck and spilled.

  Musey stood just out of arm’s reach, looking down at Ryan as if he’d never moved.

  “If you don’t want me to do that again,” the symp said, “then shut up and do what your father says.”

  “Screw you. And screw the captain.” He pulled himself up, furiously red. He felt it worse because he knew he’d deserved it.

  “My parents are dead, thanks to Falcone,” Musey said out of nowhere, his eyes too steady and too clear. “Yours are still alive and they love you for some reason. Get some perspective.”

  He walked by Ryan into the lev, which had stayed open, barely touching shoulders when Ryan didn’t move.

  Ryan couldn’t move, not for a long minute. He heard the lev doors clang shut, then turned to them.

  His little traumas, the symp had said.

  I didn’t grow up in the middle of this war, Ryan wanted to say. Wanted to shout

  The war had come to him. Like a stampeding herd of hungry meedees.

  He picked up the empty bottle and stood outside the hatch, composing himself because he didn’t want his father to see the look that was probably on his face. There would be questions and bothersome comments, and he remembered Sid’s voice from months ago, when they were out on a ranch in the middle of nowhere in Texas America, after Hong Kong. Ryan found himself sitting on the back of a rather tall animal called a horse, which smelled and felt a lot different from anything vid could tell you, and Sid said to him, For better or for worse, everyone knows your name and your face because of your parents.

  He looked out at the flat brown landscape, some alien world he had to remind himself was actually human, and felt like he was standing at the edge of this planet, one step from falling off. One step outside of anything familiar or safe. And what he really wanted to do was shred himself into little pieces, scatter them to the wind and come out of it with a different face.

  Not the face that was all over the Send, from outside that embassy, when he’d thought his grandfather was dead. With the ashes and dust on his skin and his eyelashes, and every time he saw it he remembered how it had smelled.

  Cremation, he thought. Ritual burning.

  In his ancient history studies he’d read that some of those old Earth civilizations hadn’t burned their dead down to the ash, but just so the skin and muscles and juices melted away. The bones remained. Parts of people that they’d gather and bury with jewels and gold.

  Parts of people, amid stone dust and steel.

  Earth was pure dust. It was in the name, full of the remnants of people who had died, more often than not, violently, across time.

  For days after he couldn’t shower long or often enough.

  For weeks after everywhere he went some meedee eventually found him until it got so invasive and constant even Sid had lost his temper, in a restaurant in London, and decked the man and broke his cam-orb. The EarthHub embassy in Britain had to get involved in that one.

  Even the sun burned and he couldn’t take it anymore. He’d wanted off the planet before it all came down. Before something else blew up. Before the corpses he saw in his head came to life in the faces of the people around him.

  Shiri didn’t know. She said, I’m so sorry. And, Let me help. As if it were something that could actually be helped. And when she couldn’t help him she said, You have to do something, I can’t be around you anymore. You’ve changed. Maybe she regretted it later but she meant it then, and he yelled right into her face, How can you not?

  Lots of people, his mother said on one of her few comms, saw horrible events like that and just drove on. Look at when that bomb blew on dockside. The station just went on. That was what he had to do—go back to school, date his girlfriend, play games with Sid, and sit with his grandparents at official events where people could say, It must have been horrible for you (as if it could be pleasant?). The older people said, If it weren’t for your eyes you’d remind me so much of your father when he was your age.

  Most of the time he didn’t think they meant it as a compliment. He asked Admiral Grandpa why, and Admiral Grandpa just said, They don’t know your father.

  I don’t know him, he thought. Do you?

  His father sent long-distance condolences, but Earth was, in the end, too far for him to do anything. People on Earth didn’t like him anyway. Certainly the people who had blown up the embassy didn’t like him. Stop the war, they’d cried to the cams. The Hub is full of butchers!

  He walked the chaotic countries of this planet and nothing felt the same.

  And Sid took him out to Texas for the quiet and the peace from meedees and the Send. He sat beside Ryan on his own tall
horse and squinted at the dry land and the broad unflinching sky. He said, I couldn’t take it either, that’s why I went to space.

  Sid had fought in deserts.

  He knew what it was to burn.

  Inside quarters his father had laid the coffee table with plates and utensils and food in small porcelain dishes.

  Expensive and fragrant. Ryan kept going toward the half-open screen. “I need to wash up.”

  “All right,” his father said, behind him, with a question in his voice.

  Ryan shut the screen, went in the bathroom and shut the door, ditched the beer bottle in the trash and just sat on the toilet lid. His luck was going to run out. You didn’t survive a bomb attack and an assassination attempt and think your life would always be blissful. You didn’t front confidence and nonchalance to the public and your family (though whether anybody believed you was another matter) and not crack once in a while, in private. That was the give-and-take. Control was an illusion.

  He didn’t want to die.

  Even though all his life he’d always found the concept of growing old to be a foreign one. And not just because his parents looked barely older than him. The face was just a mask. Inside, he didn’t see himself with family and children, living somewhere normal and doing normal things.

  He saw himself alone. Dying young.

  And there was his father in the living room with some kind of quiche for lunch that he’d made himself, because for some reason the dread captain of Macedon liked to cook— as if there wasn’t a strit on board or a strit ship in dock or pirates behind every shadow.

  Cold. He tucked his hands into his sleeves and rubbed them. Sat there until a knock came on the door, like he knew it would.

  “Ryan? Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m—coming.” He got up, lifted the lid, and stepped away from the toilet so it flushed and his father wouldn’t think he’d just been in there looking at the wall. He washed his hands and splashed his face to clear his eyes. Make himself normal. Go out there and just accept that this was where he was now and it wasn’t so bad, really… nobody was shooting at him. Not with physical weapons anyway.

  Evan and Musey and Dorr were another matter.

  And Sid was out of reach.

  But so were pirates like that Yuri, right?

  He took a breath and opened the door. Voices spoke in the outer quarters. As he inched to the sliding screen, he recognized his mother’s voice on the other end of the comm.

  “… go this shift?” she was saying.

  The captain sighed. “Damiani arrived and we had to break.”

  “That woman’s there now?”

  “Yes. ‘Reaching out to the far-flung stations,’ she says. Really, the Council sent her out here because she bitched about Annexationists making deals with strits. It’s going to be fun.”

  “Centralists have a voice too, Cairo. She’s got a right.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “She’s in the running—”

  “—and she doesn’t want a treaty. How do you think it’ll go now? I’m not putting her in a room with Captain S’tlian and the striviirc-na Caste Master. I can barely stomach having her on my ship. It would be disastrous. But that’s exactly what she wants.”

  “Respect her opinion, Cairo. She speaks for a good deal of the Hub, people you can’t just ignore.”

  “If a good deal of the Hub knew what the hell they were doing, this war wouldn’t have gone on for so long.”

  The frustration in his mother’s voice went unchecked. “So it’s up to you to make the decision for them? We live in an elective society.”

  “Without fair representation. The seat of this government is still on Earth, a dozen leaps away from stations like Chaos.”

  “Who have representatives on the Hub Council.”

  “And we see how effective that is. Hubcentral views deep spacers as either threats or enigmas, it’s perpetuated by the Send, and we can’t seem to hold our own very well against alien attacks, so we’re also costing them cred. It’s a ridiculous opinion and Hubcentral solutions don’t work, Song. Shutting out the aliens isn’t working. While we’re engaging old hatreds, the pirates are—”

  “Stop about the pirates, Cairo. Your mad hunt for them resulted in our son being shot at.”

  Hard silence. His father’s voice was stone. “I see. So we ought to let them kill other people because it’s safer that way for us.”

  “Stop twisting my words!”

  Ryan shoved the screen aside and stepped out.

  The captain turned around from where he sat on the couch, his comp in front of him with Mom Lau’s face on the screen. The thrum in the air was a familiar tension, a wire pulled taut between his parents, on the verge of snapping.

  And he, as always, would get the recoil.

  “Don’t let me stop you two,” he said, and sat on the chair in front of his set plate. The quiche was still warm and he picked up his fork and cut into it, releasing steam.

  “Ryan,” he heard his mother say, even though he couldn’t see her face, “did you tell your father what I said about the symp?”

  “No,” he said, loud enough so she could hear. “I was too busy talking with an ex-pirate.”

  His father stared at him and his mother was silent

  “What ex-pirate?” the captain said.

  “A kid named Evan. He told me about Falcone’s protégé, Yuri, and how he probably has his own ship and that’s why you can’t catch him. He thinks Yuri was the one who shot at me. Do you think that? And do you know where he is?”

  “Who’s this?” his mother said. “Cairo?”

  “We don’t have anything positive,” the captain said, giving him a long look before addressing his mother. “But I suspect this protégé too… I’ve heard of him and he knows I hated Falcone.”

  Mom Lau was quiet again. Maybe thinking she was right, too right, about what provoked the hit in the Dojo.

  “So what are you doing about it?” she asked finally.

  “We were in contact with him a year or so ago, but he hasn’t answered any comms in a long time.”

  “You were in contact with him? This pirate?” she said.

  That would be a nightmare if it got out to the public.

  Ryan set down his fork.

  “Yes,” the captain said, calm. “He’d contacted Otter and Otter told Jos, who told me, that this protégé—Yuri Kirov— offered to turn over Falcone’s operation in exchange for complete exoneration of his crimes.”

  “You’re not serious,” Mom Lau said. “And you believed him?”

  Ryan was thinking the same thing, and stared at his father.

  “Yes,” his father said, without apology.

  “How could you possibly believe a pirate? When you rant about them like—It didn’t occur to you that he might be setting you up?”

  “Of course it did, but after we tried to set up some sort of meeting to discuss the deal he went incommunicado. If he wanted to take me for a ride he would’ve followed through. I don’t know what happened but—”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Ryan asked. “He balked. And now he’s pissed that you killed his leader.”

  Absolute loyalty, Evan had said. Absolute ruthlessness.

  “If that’s so, we’ll find out sooner or later,” the captain said.

  “If that’s so,” Mom Lau echoed. “You ought to be hunting him instead of sitting dinners with strits. He shot at our son!”

  “If so, he missed. And people Falcone trained tend not to miss. Anything.”

  “How would you know?” Ryan asked. “Because of Musey? He’s a symp, so how reliable is he?”

  The captain picked up his glass of water and sipped. “Please don’t talk to me about things you know nothing about.”

  “Cairo,” his mother said.

  “Our son lacks a certain amount of respect, Songlian.”

  “Well,” Ryan said, looking at his father who looked at the comp screen, and the undisguised an
noyance on his father’s face. “I wonder why.”

  The captain looked at him. It wasn’t a fatherly expression. “I’m going to comm off, Song. We’ll talk later.”

  “All right,” she said, with an implicit sigh. “Cairo—”

  “Yes?”

  A long pause. The captain peered at the screen, questioning.

  She said finally, in a clear unwavering voice. “I expect you to bring yourselves safely home.”

  Ryan watched the tension and a bit of the habitual wall melt from the captain’s expression. For a second he almost believed his father was indeed in love with his mother.

  But the wall went back up, as smooth as the raising of a voice.

  “Ryan will be safe,” he said, “and when it’s time I’ll bring him back. But you know my home is Macedon and always will be.”

  He had compassion enough to sit with strits, but there wasn’t even enough compassion in the man to lie to his wife.

  Ryan thought about asking the captain if Sid could return to Austro. He could do that for his mother, if he wanted.

  But in the end maybe he didn’t have enough love for his mother either. He was too selfish, like she accused the captain of being. He needed Sid on this ship. He wanted Sid here if he had to deal with his father. And when it came down to it, Sid had been his in the first place. Sid had been his friend first.

  Like Macedon was the captain’s duty, first.

  And he hated himself for thinking that because his mother was alone on Austro, going about her job with LO Lau in the background saying, I told you so, you never should’ve married that man or had his child—and with nobody in her apartment but security men who didn’t like to talk.

  After the captain commed off and they sat for a moment, caught in a guarded, mutual stare, it sank in Ryan’s heart how much he did miss her, and how much she probably missed him, even though she didn’t say so. Because that was how Laus and Azarcons communicated—in silences, if not in shouts.

  After lunch the captain had to go to meetings with “that Damiani woman” so he and Admiral Grandpa could try to convince her to leave well enough alone—the captain said it was good Ryan had plans for dinner with Sid, because he didn’t think he would make it. He made it sound like he was going into battle, and maybe he was in a way. Ryan wanted to tell his father that he didn’t need to be baby-sat, he could occupy himself just fine with school, but he kept that behind his teeth.