Tyger Burning Read online

  “You have to learn this,” Nang said. “Otherwise, you’re dead already.”

  It was the next “day,” although Maung had no sense of time and had not been able to sleep in zero g, so his eyes squinted and haze filled his head. They floated in the corridor outside Maung’s cube. Somewhere in his mind was a memory of zero-g combat training; he had already learned it. But no matter how hard he tried to recall the details, it remained locked away in the structure of the semi-aware along with all the things that transformed him from a village idiot into a humanlike thing.

  “I’m still hurt,” he said. “My head.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you’re hurt; every soldier knows this, what’s wrong with you? It won’t matter to your enemies on Karin, and you need to get used to the likelihood that you will always have some kind of injury. The first thing about zero g: have a good grip on something or brace yourself in a doorway, or between walls, before you strike.”

  “Look,” said Maung. “I’m tired. I—”

  He didn’t get to finish. Nang launched herself by yanking on the railing and twisted so that her feet rocketed forward, impacting against his stomach. All of her momentum transferred. While he tried to catch his breath, Maung sailed down the corridor, finally stopping himself by grabbing a rail.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  She laughed but then got serious. “Those two men were going to kill you Maung. One of them had a knife. I barely stopped him from slitting your throat and we’re not even to the prison yet!”

  Maung shook his head clear and asked, “What did you do to them? Someone was hurt worse than me?”

  “I took the knife from one of them and liberated him of a finger. He can grow a new one back on Earth.”

  The joke made him laugh. He felt warmth in his stomach and decided that this was the path; for a split second Maung thought he’d heard his ancestors’ agreement: Nang was good and there was a smiling nod of approval from his wife which made him smile. Nang means well.

  “Thank you,” he said again.

  She launched herself before he was ready and this time her fists slammed into his solar plexus, one after another, knocking the wind from him, and then Nang hooked her feet under the wall railings, bracing herself before grabbing his shoulders and yanking downward. Maung spun in the air, somersaulting.

  “Stop being so nice; this is combat!”

  Maung sat across from her and gagged on his paste. Nang had a squeeze bottle of spicy fish sauce and she loaned it to him, watching as he squirt some on. It helped. At least now the paste had more flavor and Maung waved his hand across his mouth, smiling at her while his tongue burned.

  “Hot,” he said.

  Nang looked away. “Did the Tatmawdaw soldiers train the same way we did in America—direct cortex loading?”

  Maung stopped smiling. Unconsciously he reached up and traced the thick scars, four of them on the back of his head, and he nodded slowly, scared of where she might take the conversation. He had never been good at lying. And now, without the ability to merge, he was certain that he’d forget how to describe things in a believable way.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Isn’t zero-g combat part of the training package? I know it was for the Chinese and assume you used the same or similar package.”

  Maung thought as quickly as he could. Nang must suspect something, he figured, and she stared at him so intently that Maung looked down at the table.

  “Well?” she asked.

  Maung picked up his bowl and stuck it into the recycling chute, and then kicked toward the hatch. He waited for it to open. “You’re right, Nang. I am too stupid to be a soldier. If I were to sign up today, the best I could hope for is assistant ass-wiper, and you’re much more intelligent than me—a better soldier. But in war people make decisions and then things happen and some people wind up defective. Subnormal. That’s all I’m going to say; I can’t remember my training.”

  Maung guided himself into the corridor and almost collided with two crewmen, who knocked him out of the way, sending him out of control and into an overhead pipe gallery; he noticed that one of them was missing a finger. Maung hooked a foot under a railing, seized on the closest one and wrenched the man’s head straight down, jerking a knee upward at the same time so that the crewman’s nose cracked on contact. Maung let go; the man spun backward and an arc of blood spread outward from his face.

  The other looked about to throw himself forward but Maung said, “I’ll kill you. Now it’s just you against me. You’re all alone.”

  Maung heard someone move in the hatchway behind him; he thought it must be Nang. She had come to see what was going on but Maung wanted nothing to do with her right now; he was ashamed of how stupid he looked to all of them.

  The other man grabbed his shipmate, who was holding his face; he nodded toward Maung and said, “I think you broke his nose and he needs the doc; can I get by?”

  “Sure.”

  The man pushed his friend down the hall. Blood had already splashed against Maung’s jumpsuit and he felt sick, so he waited until the crewmen disappeared before heading back to his cube, ignoring a call from Nang to wait for her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Maung spent his time in the entertainment and exercise rooms to avoid running into Nang, but boredom threatened to split his mind into fragments. There was nothing green here. The walls were either sterile gray plates, scrubbed clean and polished by microbots, or galleries of white pipes, red pipes, blue conduits—all of it man made and perfect, the temperature constant. There was no balance. He knew they were still close to Earth but were about to begin the acceleration phase where, as soon as the window opened for a safe path to Karin 2, the ship would activate its main engines and all of them would be confined to their quarters until they reached target velocity. He wanted to taste his mother’s soup again; Maung remembered what it was like to hold his son and to smell the boy’s hair, a scent which reminded him of springtime.

  Maung now doubted he could handle running from his family and a sense of solitude crushed his chest.

  Instead of knocking, someone used the button outside his cube; the bell chimed. Maung shouted “come in” and the hatch slid up. When Nang entered, the sadness left because here was something that made sense, which was strange because during the war she was the enemy and there was a time he would have gladly slipped a knife across her throat. Nang was a symbol. She represented a part of his past that he hadn’t recalled in years, and wasn’t like the American crew; she had a round, gentle face and her skin reminded him of home—of dead friends and his wife.

  “You fought all right,” she said. Nang grasped the wall strap farthest from him, but this was only a meter away; she smelled clean and new. “The other day when you ran into those two crewmen who knocked you out. I haven’t seen you since then.”

  “I wanted to kill them.”

  “Maybe you’re ready for Karin after all,” she said and then laughed. “I’m sorry I pried, Maung. Into your past.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “No it’s not. I was there the same as you and the war got ugly. My unit forced the Chinese out of Laos and across the mountains, through the villages like the one my father was from. I saw what the Chinese did to civilians. I guess when I look at you I see them and the Tatmawdaw, and maybe it’s not fair; maybe that’s not who you are. But it’s hard to forget what happened.”

  Maung couldn’t remember much from the war. He tried, but instead of memories a swarm of guilt and sadness overtook him, because he suspected the truth but couldn’t picture it, as if trying to watch a movie through smoked glass.

  “I don’t remember much,” he said. “but you have to know, Nang: I think I was guilty of doing things that would make you sick and perhaps it would have been better had I died. I just don’t remember.”

  He thought she would leave. The expression on her face broke a barrier in his mind and Maung remembered something small: the horrified look of m
others and fathers when they watched as his drones and bots swept into their village and extracted DNA samples and organs from their children. As far as his superiors were concerned, the war was one of resources—mineral and human—and little went to waste. But instead of looking disgusted, Nang’s face softened.

  “I figured you had done awful things. They used to prosecute people like you and the Chinese, Maung; war criminals.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “But when we were training I noticed scars under your hair, the ones you try to hide, and I think you’ve been punished already. I don’t hate you, OK?”

  Maung looked away, embarrassed, but for some reason there was no fear. He’d told the truth about what he’d done, without revealing the scars’ real meaning, that the Chinese replaced a part of him he could never recover, and she’d assigned a meaning of her own. For now his secret was safe.

  “I was not wounded. But yes, they operated on me and I think the Chinese removed parts of my brain—without making me a vegetable. This is why I am so slow, why I can’t remember.”

  Nang nodded. She slammed her fist against the hatch button and waited for it to open. “I won’t ask again. I promise. You aren’t the only one with secrets, Maung; let’s agree to just leave them alone.”

  Maung nodded and before she left Nang said, “I’ll come back for training tomorrow; you still have a lot to learn. Maybe to relearn.”

  “Why are you helping me?” he asked. “Someone who might be a war criminal?”

  Nang said, “Part of me doesn’t want to help you, the part that hopes you die on Karin. But I’m done acting like a soldier—a murderer—and if I can help you gain at least a fighting chance, I’ll feel like for the first time I tried to save a life instead of take one. Plus, you’re just like how I imagine my dad was, when he was young.”

  Maung couldn’t breathe. Their training session had ended and Nang had tried to pull her kicks but on the last one her foot connected with his solar plexus, hard, so that it knocked the wind out. Finally he caught his breath and smiled.

  “You did that on purpose—didn’t try to pull your kick.”

  “You almost beat me,” she said.

  Maung nodded. “That must really make you mad.”

  Nang laughed and plucked a towel from one of the room’s wall loops, then used it to wipe the sweat from her face. Maung watched while floating in midair; he was grateful. Time spent in the training room made him forget Earth, and for an hour or two he could stop worrying about his mother and son, and stop guessing what the Old Man would want once he reached Karin.

  “How did you get sent out here?” he asked.

  Nang wrapped the towel around her neck. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we both arrived secretly, in shipping containers and I think I’ve figured out why the Old Man sent me here; I was running from the police and he sent me away until he could figure out what to do. To buy time. You’re going back for a second tour because you have debts; I get that. But you were in a box too. So if you went to the Old Man, why? Why not just sign up for guard duty directly?”

  “First, that’s not why he sent you,” said Nang. She stretched, and the movement sent her into a slow spin, which to Maung seemed graceful. “I was in a similar spot. The debt I couldn’t repay was a debt to him and the Old Man wanted me in one of his brothels; I told him I’d been to Karin before and would prefer a posting there. He agreed.”

  “What does that have to do with why he sent me?”

  Nang laughed again. “You’re not being sent here just so he can figure out what to do; he already figured out what to do. The Old Man gets a finder’s fee and three quarters of your salary; the rest you can try to send home since there’s nothing to spend it on out there, but he’ll likely intercept that too. And all that time you’re risking your life. So sending us here was a no-brainer, Maung; easy money for the Old Man, impossible for us. They pay an arm and a leg for guards to serve at Karin because nobody will take the job.”

  Maung thought for a few seconds. All he wanted was to reach out and grab her, to pull her in close and shove his nose into her hair, to smell the mountains again and be connected to home—to her. Maung perceived a kind of beauty in Nang that even his wife never had, and he must have been staring for a long time because she finally said, “Stop it, Maung.”

  “What?”

  “Looking at me like that.”

  “Sorry, but I was just wondering about what you said; how long were you on Karin the first time you went?”

  Nang finished her stretching. “I went there straight out of the army when the war ended. I did six months as a guard, which, I later found out, was a record for volunteers.” She gestured for him to follow her out the hatch and back into the corridor. “We have one more day before they light the main engines. Let’s train some more. We’ll do it in the main corridor so you can get more practice in tight spaces; there won’t be much room to maneuver in Karin.”

  “I don’t hate you. At all.” Even Maung was surprised he said the words; they came from nowhere and he wondered if the semi-aware somehow activated itself—but it hadn’t. He went cold with embarrassment when she giggled and punched his arm, sending him against the bulkhead.

  “You will when I kick your ass again.”

  As soon as he was through the hatch, Nang landed a punch to his ribs but Maung managed to push down from the overhead pipes and stop himself from flying away. He grinned and readied a counterattack.

  “My turn.”

  By the time he climbed into bed, Maung’s muscles ached and he imagined one or two might have been torn; at least one of his ribs was bruised. The ship thrummed around him and its walls vibrated at a frequency that translated into a warning of impending doom, and with every second the vessel brought them thousands of meters closer to a frozen asteroid. Soon they’d be hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth and sun, at a place where he was sure the spirits of unrest waited. None of his ancestors died on Karin; how would they know the way if he needed help? Maung said a prayer, asking for them to join him on the trip and to show Nang’s people—especially her father—the path too, so neither were alone. He repeated it, over and over, until sleep fought its way in.

  Eight hours until ignition. Maung didn’t know what to expect and he couldn’t concentrate on training, waving Nang quiet so he could watch the news reports from Earth; soon these would be hard to get. Nang had begun telling him more about what to expect, and the captain had laid out the trip, which from here on out required them to stay strapped in.

  “It’s not that you can’t, in theory, get the news on Karin,” she continued, crammed into a corner of his living space, “it’s just that they control it and keep a lot from people, including the guards.”

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “The chief guard, the guy who runs Karin.”

  “What about the warden?”

  Nang shrugged and stabbed at a bowl of food paste, not really eating it. “The warden never showed up while I was there. Not once. He or she is a Carson Corp rep on Earth who manages remotely unless there’s something really important to attend to. And the chief guard usually makes sure those kinds of things—if they happen and they’re bad—don’t get out. The higher-ups are such cowards they have an emergency ship stashed in a hidden dock in case there’s a prison revolt and they happen to be there for some inspection.”

  “So how do I survive?” asked Maung.

  “You survive,” Nang said, “by not being noticed.”

  “I can do that.”

  Nang laughed into her bowl and looked up at him. “Somehow I doubt it; by now they’ll already know that a Tatmaw is on his way, and most of these guys will be survivors of the war. Americans and their Asian allies.”

  Four hours until ignition. Maung did his best to flatten himself against the corridor bulkhead while an engineering team pulled their way past, too busy to even notice he was there. They seemed concerned about something. Maung was shaking by the time he reached
the doctor’s cube and he pressed the door chime. A moment later he was inside, grabbing a wall loop and terrified to the point he forgot what he came for.

  “Is something wrong with the ship?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Maung told him about the engineering team and the doctor laughed. “That’s standard procedure. Before lighting the main engines these guys have to reinspect them one last time and it was a process that took at least an hour, even with the help of bots. They’re under pressure, that’s all.”

  Maung nodded but didn’t say anything and the doctor squinted at him, then leaned forward against his sleeping restraints so Maung suddenly understood he’d woken him; it was too late to go back now, he decided.

  “Sorry I woke you.”

  “Maung,” the doctor said. “There is nothing to worry about. The ship is basically a massive cylinder that consists of three layers. In the outer layer we carry slush hydrogen in baffled tanks that surround us on almost all sides. Inside that is a thin layer. We fill that with a self-sealing material and dormant bots so that if small ruptures occur, bots are immediately activated to fill the break with a metallic patch. Bots are also dispatched outside to patch external damage, and these are all designed to work at super-high g-forces. Maung, a micrometeoroid struck us a few days ago; the system worked and everything is patched, and it’s such a routine procedure that you never even noticed.”

  “Where are we?” asked Maung.

  “In the inner core. We’re in a small capillary in the center of the ship, and our engines and fuel tanks fill up the entire rear. We’re completely safe—encased in layer upon layer of metal.”

  Maung nodded and apologized again for waking him up, twisted himself through the hatch, and made sure to thank the doctor one last time before the door closed. He began to shake again. If they’d already been hit once, what was to stop something from hitting them again, something so large that the entire ship was destroyed, or an object just large enough to penetrate and vaporize his head? Maung turned back to the doctor’s hatch, but the do not disturb lamp blinked on.