An afternoon off sounded like a good deal.
He should’ve known it wouldn’t happen. Just as he finished cleaning up the dishes from lunch, the comm bleeped again and it was his father—again. Saying, “Captain S’tlian and the Caste Master want to meet you. Since we’re wrangling with these govies they’ve returned to Turundrlar. Jos will be taking you there.”
Ryan was glad he wasn’t holding anything fragile, standing there by the coffee table with unsteadiness in his gut. “You’re not ser—”
“It’s going to be all right, I trust them. I trust Jos.”
“Does it matter that I don’t trust them?”
“I have to go, Ryan. Just be polite. Please. Damiani’s already trying to mess this up; don’t contribute.”
“Captain—”
But the comm disconnected. He hated his father for this. Oh, he hated the man for dumping it like that, like he was just going to walk across the deck to a flower shop or something. He paced to the chair and sat, then got up again with arms against his chest, and decided he was going to refuse. He could refuse, right? What would they do—gag him and cart him over in cuffs?
He wouldn’t put it past his father. Or that symp.
People didn’t just walk on the Warboy’s ship. What if Musey was lying? What if the Warboy had other plans? What a coup it would be to kidnap the son of Captain Azarcon, the Warboy’s most dogged enemy…
The hatch buzzed and Musey was on the other side of it.
“They want to meet you,” Musey said, “and the captain authorized it.”
“I know,” he said. “But I don’t want to go.”
Musey still stood there. After a moment he said, “I’ll wait while you change clothes.”
“I said no.”
“Your father authorized it, Azarcon. Comm him if you want, though I wouldn’t recommend it. He’s never in a good mood when he has to deal with govies.”
“Why would the Warboy want to meet me?”
The symp didn’t crack a smile. “Maybe he needs the target practice.”
Ryan turned around and went to the kitchen, leaving the hatch open. “That’s not funny.”
“Go change. I’ll wait.”
He wasn’t going to win this one. “What’s wrong with what I got on?” He dislodged a glass and poured the vodka and drank, and it did no good.
“You’re going to meet the captain of the striviirc-na fleet, and the Caste Master of one of the most powerful countries on Aaian-na.”
Ryan faced him setting down the glass. He’d said the name of the strit homeworld with a pronunciation not even Minister Taylor of Alien Affairs ever got right. Certainly the Send butchered any and all strit words, with a deviant amount of pride.
“How long were you… with them?”
Musey shut the hatch and folded his arms. “About five years. Go and change, I don’t want to keep them waiting.”
“You speak fluent strit?”
Musey stared at him. “Say striviirc-na, not strit. And say Captain S’tlian, or sir, not Warboy. Then you won’t get shot.”
“I’m just asking. Are all you symps so touchy?”
“Sympathizer. Sheez, Azarcon.”
“Well, are you fluent? Because I don’t speak a word of their—” Babble, he almost said. “Language.”
“I make do,” Musey said, with a bare touch of sarcasm. “Since I’m currently working as the interpreter and translator in these negotiations.”
Oh, yeah.
It was easy to forget with the symp that he would actually want to help anybody.
Ryan ran out of excuses. Musey was not going to go away.
“Hurry up,” he told Ryan, leaning his shoulders against the hatch as if it were built for his permanent use.
Ryan went into the bedroom and picked what he hoped was acceptable attire—a pale blue shirt and tan pants just rough enough in material that he didn’t quite look like he was heading for a dinner party. It was also easy to run in, should this meeting come to that.
Musey gave him the once-over and didn’t comment, so he supposed it was all right. Not that he cared what the symp thought.
At least he got to walk off the ship.
“Your father will probably be dealing with Damiani for a few shifts,” Musey said as they rode the lev down to main-deck. “So we can start your lessons next goldshift.”
“My burndiving.”
“No,” Musey said. “Your combat. You don’t need to learn how to burndive. But you need to learn how to fight.”
Arrogant SOB.
“So do you think this peace will actually work?”
Musey walked him out the lev and they headed to the main airlock. He didn’t say anything for a couple minutes.
“If nearsighted people on both sides just shut up, then yeah. Your father’s willing, and so is Niko.”
“Niko?”
“Captain S’tlian.”
Ryan looked at Musey sidelong. “You call him Niko.”
“That’s his first name. Nikolas.”
“Are you close?”
How close? Ryan wondered. Close enough to betray my father?
Musey seemed uncomfortable, maybe only because they were within earshot of the crew working on the deck. Once they reached the airlock and the jets on guard nodded them down the ramp, he said, “He trained me.”
In what, Ryan thought. To be a spy aboard Macedon? Musey didn’t say anything else. His eyes cased the dock, even though nobody was around except for a squad of Marines on guard about a hundred meters away at the entrance to the main station. The Warboy’s ship was moored beside Macedon and in twenty strides they landed up at the bottom of the beaten ramp.
Ryan’s gut pinched and his hands sweated, clammy. The dock air went down into his lungs like tiny icicles. He should’ve worn a jacket. Brought a weapon, maybe.
Talked to his father and told him, Not in a bazillion years will I meet a strit…
“I don’t know, Musey.” He stared up at the round, closed airlock. It was bloodred, battle-scarred, and the point of no return. The Send talked about how prisoners of war on this ship had never made it back.
But Evan said he had.
Musey started to walk up the ramp, no hesitation. “Come on, Ryan.”
The use of his first name surprised him. Musey paused at the top of the ramp and looked back.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you. I promise.” Then he added, “They aren’t pirates.”
“Says the symp,” Ryan muttered. But he walked up to stand beside Musey. “I don’t know why they’d want to meet me anyway.”
“Because you’re his son,” Musey said. “And they’re curious to know what kind of person he would raise.”
For some reason that scared him more than the thought of the Warboy wanting to take potshots at his head.
He was representing what might be good about his father.
Maybe the strits held childrearing to a sacred extreme; maybe they thought if the captain couldn’t teach his son manners, then how could he set an example to a government?
He didn’t want this responsibility. He didn’t want Musey to talk into a commstud and, moments later, have the lock cycle open with a gust of alien air and scents.
Sharp spices, like he’d smelled in Delhi, India—but not. Something deeper penetrated through it; a touch of earth and body that wasn’t human, fresh but dark, like the soil beneath the sprawling roots of aged trees.
They went through the inner lock and the scent encompassed him.
Then he stood on the deck of an alien ship, the lock rolled shut behind them with an automated thud and clang, and it was nothing like Macedon except in skeletal shape. Strit ships were built off stolen EarthHub specs, so the layouts were similar, but here on Turundrlar the walls were calming ivory with red alien designs, like twining thorns and ivy, leading your eye straight from end to end. Corridors were brightly lit as Musey escorted him through one and then the other. They didn’t bump into any random strit
crew and Ryan wondered if that was purposeful—out of courtesy for him.
He was grateful, at any rate. He didn’t think he could keep his composure if a parade of aliens streamed by him on both sides.
Musey stopped him outside a hatch and palmed the call pad. In seconds the little light on the panel blinked white and Musey opened the hatch, pushing it wide with his shoulder. Then the symp turned to him with an expectant stare.
You go first, it said.
Right.
Ryan stretched his fingers at his sides and stepped in, over the short threshold and into a wide lounge.
He saw the strit and the Warboy first, looking exactly the same as his sneak preview in the corridor on his father’s ship. They both stood in front of a low table encircled by silken cushions. The light was dimmer here than in the corridor, but still bright without being harsh, a pale bronze glow. It reflected off the strit’s silver-white hair and silver facial tattoos.
And its gloss-black eyes.
Ryan heard his own breaths. He hoped he didn’t look too panicked as the Warboy stepped forward, soundlessly, and said something to Musey in their own dialect.
He hoped it wasn’t a kill order.
Musey answered back, standing just behind Ryan’s shoulder, and gave it a small push forward.
Ryan twitched, went until he was within arm’s reach of the Warboy. The strit stayed by the table, marblelike face unreadable, skin pigmentation an almost blinding white. The transparent wings, folded elegantly against its sides like a fall of pale silk, were indeed lined by spidery veins.
Or what looked like veins, even up close. But what did he know?
It looked as if it had stepped down from a pedestal, some ancient stone sculptor’s work come to life. And yet, when it walked to Musey to greet him with a word that sounded more like a song note, its movements were the opposite of wooden or ponderous.
Ryan tried to stifle a shiver, and looked at the other human in this room besides him and Musey.
Human as it applied to the Warboy was a broad generalization.
The Warboy’s tattoo was almost as intricate as the strit’s, a curving design around the outer part of his right eye, like script written over script in precise position. Though his skin tone was human warm, his expression was as implacable as the strit’s and his irises just as black, dominating the white corners within a fringe of long lashes.
Ryan wished Sid were with him but tried not to let that show. To let anything show. He probably failed. The Warboy stared into his face as if he were reading a Send scroll in Ryan’s eyes. He spoke, halting and heavily accented, and Ryan was surprised he understood. Surprised the symp attempted a human language at all.
“Your name, Ry-yanna,” the Warboy said.
Ryan had to swallow, and glanced at Musey, then back at the Warboy. “Um, just Ryan.” He didn’t explain that Ryanna was a girl’s name, for fear of embarrassing the symp. “And yours?” His most polite tone.
“Nikolas-dan,” the Warboy answered, pronouncing it just as Musey had: Nee-ko-las.
“Nice to meet you—sir.” It took no effort now to be respectful. Faced with the man and the alien, and their brazen scrutiny, he couldn’t imagine putting his life in danger with the least offense.
He hoped nobody noticed how his hands shook. He put them behind his back.
“Sit,” the Warboy said, and went to the low table.
Musey gestured him forward so he went, and sat down on one of the large, soft cushions on an empty side of the table. Musey and the suit filled up the other two. The strit ended up on Ryan’s left side so he saw it out of the corners of his eye. The Warboy knelt across from him and he couldn’t avoid the stare.
Musey poured what smelled like tea into four round, handleless white cups clustered at the center of the table, then set one in front of each of them. Almost like a ritual.
Then they all looked at him.
“Take a sip,” Musey whispered.
If it poisoned him, he hoped his father would be happy. Sending him on this alien ship.
He tried not to smile at the thought, more out of nervousness than anything else, and took a hesitant first sip.
It was a tart tea and made him cough, but a second sip went down smoother and a third one smoother still. A sweet aftertaste rubbed the back of his throat as he set down the cup and smiled at them, his small, standard expression when he didn’t want to let on that he was tense as hell.
He didn’t think he fooled anybody. The strit hadn’t taken his gaze away since they sat down.
The Warboy spoke in his own language, a kind of multi-tonal song, and Musey interpreted after the entire phrase, with an iron concentration and a clear, steady voice.
“Your father’s government doesn’t agree with him,” the Warboy said, without any preamble and after a single sip from his own teacup.
“No,” Ryan said, then fixed the ambiguity, “I mean, yes, you’re right. Sir. If you’re talking about the treaty proposal. Some of them don’t agree.”
“Yes,” the Warboy said. “You are on the Send a lot.”
“Yes,” Ryan agreed, wondering that the Warboy watched the news, and it made sense, come to think of it, to monitor what the enemy said about you and what was going on.
He did it too.
Maybe the Warboy watched Tyler Coe vids after all.
“Most recently,” the Warboy said, “about pirates in a…”
Musey interpreted and provided the last word: “Flash house.”
“Yes,” Ryan said. Thinking, Yeah? Why do you want to talk about this?
“And they say things about you,” the Warboy continued, “that you are… popular?”
Ryan shrugged. “I guess.”
“Because of your father?” the Warboy asked. “You are popular?”
“I…” It was such an odd thing to discuss with this man, he lost his thought for a second. “I guess. Yeah. Sir. And because of my mom, she’s kind of important on Austro.”
“Do you agree with your father?” the Warboy said.
He was feeling the strit’s stare on the side of his face and didn’t know how to tell it to please stop doing that. He hated people looking at him like that, like when he just wanted to shop in the market with Sid and some damn rich tourists thought it was newsworthy that Ryan Azarcon walked about like a normal person and had to follow him and stare at him, and some even had the audacity to ask for a picture. Or not even ask for a picture, he’d just hear the whir of a cam-orb following behind his head.
And he’d never done anything to warrant that kind of attention, but people gave it because his mother was always in the public eye and his father never was, and they thought their son was good-looking enough to obsess over. Even when he did nothing to dress himself up or make himself presentable, the damn Send still found something fashionable to say about him.
“Ryan,” Musey prompted.
He had to look at the strit, since it still stared, but didn’t see anything that comforted him in the least, just that alien stillness like those wild animals in nature reserves that didn’t seem to know or care that they were circled on all sides by humans. They were still wild and roamed where they wanted, and the rangers kept you far and away, just in case, as you drove by those animals as they sunned near rocks or sat under trees, watching you pass with the easy confidence of predators.
Even the animals that had been born on the reserves for generations past… something in them was still inherently feral. And you knew if you were stupid and went up to them, they’d swipe a paw across your chest, knock you down, and eat you.
The stories they told on the Send about aliens and their penchant for human meat…
… was obviously rubbish. Humans lived with them.
But his skin still crawled.
He looked at Musey. He hoped Musey could read signals and maybe Musey could tell the strit to stop staring.
“I’m sorry… what was the question?”
The alien spoke this time, in
a lilting birdlike whistle, except his tongue rolled over consonants, and gradients of sound seemed to reach out from deep in his throat even when his lips didn’t move.
It was the full effect of what the Warboy and Musey only approximated with their human mouths.
It was unexpectedly beautiful, and Ryan stared.
“He wants to know,” Musey said, “if you hate them as much as you fear them.”
So it was a he. And it got to the point too.
Ryan dragged his gaze from the alien back to Musey.
“I’m not—” Afraid of them, he almost said. An automatic defense. Then he bit his lip for a second, pulling on it with teeth. “I mean… I don’t hate them. I’ve never met—anyone like them before.”
The alien spoke again.
“Maybe if we talked longer,” Musey interpreted, “you would truly believe that. But for now we’ll have to be patient.”
Ryan looked at the Warboy. Nikolas. “The Send says a lot of bad things about you.”
“I know,” Nikolas said, through Musey. “About your father too. They aren’t correct all of the time, are they?”
“No,” Ryan said. And quieter, “No.”
“He will correct them,” the Warboy said. “Do you agree with him?”
“About the war?”
“About the peace,” the Warboy said.
“What does it matter what I think?” They were forthright; he figured he could be. “Why do you care what I think?”
He saw the human eyes of this symp, dark to Musey’s blue, but while Musey must have still thought in the language of his birth, a language of the Hub, Ryan was sure the Warboy thought only in alien. He held Ryan’s stare for a long minute and nobody else spoke.
“You are his son,” the Warboy said, so Ryan could understand and Musey didn’t have to translate, and poured more tea.
What did that mean? It was an obvious observation.
“Does it matter to you what I am?” he asked, half-wishing that it wouldn’t.
“You don’t seem to like being his son,” the Warboy said, through Musey this time. And Musey watched Ryan with a blatant, curious stare.
Burndive Page 26
