Dine on snow and sup of light, laughed Dayo in Asala’s memory. Poetry is the primal juice of life. Remember that, little Asala.
“This is the best I could do from here on Khayyam,” Niko pushed on, relentless. “Come with me to Hypatia. Help me find the Vela. We can find your family, too.”
Asala hadn’t heard from anyone in her clan in over thirty years. But Dayo had been alive ten years ago. Somewhere. Somehow.
A sliding sound behind them. Asala whipped around—some sort of gliding metal rectangular something had come down a track in the bulkhead and stopped directly across the corridor.
“Help me get these people out,” Niko begged Asala. “They deserve a chance. And then together . . .”
Asala was no longer listening. Across from them, a series of snaps and ticks emanated from the rectangle as it reoriented itself.
“. . . the people on the Vela . . .” Niko was prattling on. The robot slanted itself and then stopped, as if it had attained the view it wanted.
The general’s ubiquitous AIs . . . which she took everywhere with her. Which everyone knew she took everywhere with her.
The AI spiders she’d sent farther afield for intelligence reports, specifically because of the escalating attacks on her life.
Whoever had hacked the general’s ship to mask the mass of the refugees must have also been able to hack her AIs. They would have needed to in order to block surveillance of this cargo area.
An indirect method . . .
“We have to get back to Khayyam.” The words spun out even before the answer had fully unraveled in Asala’s head, certainty slicing her to the marrow. “I know where the next attack is going to come from.”
She scrabbled for her handheld. She had to get word to the general, to the president—
The display fizzed and blinked with a connection error. “Dammit!”
Niko was on their handheld too, presumably also trying to contact the surface. They looked up. “Do you have any signal? I—”
Asala grabbed them by the collar and hauled them after her, back down the corridors, past the watching and whirring AIs. The AIs whose siblings on the surface had been programmed to kill. “You’re good with computers, right?” she ground out as they moved. “Get me a signal, get me something!”
“I’m trying—”
The two of them blasted back through the security checkpoints. The first time they caught sight of a human guard, Asala cornered him and snarled a command about the nearest console interface, but the confused guard only stammered something about the system being down.
“Tell the president it’s an emergency!” Asala shouted over her shoulder, at a dead sprint for the elevator.
When they reached the platform, she yanked Niko inside with her as soon as the heavy carriage doors opened.
“If we’re not too late, you’re going to have a chance to show me just how good at computers you really are,” she said to them. “Start thinking about how to counter-hack the general’s spiders. Because I’d bet all the glow you found on that Khwarizmian that they’re going to attack us as soon as we get there.”
• • •
Asala slapped the first interface she came to on the surface, but that was out too—was the whole damn city down?
After that she made only one stop—an arms locker where she grabbed an electric riot gun. Niko sputtered something political and judgmental about Khayyami riot-control tactics when she did, but Asala paid no attention. An electric spread was the best possible way she could think of to combat dozens of tiny metal bugs.
“Are you sure?” Niko gasped out, trying to keep up with Asala’s grip on their arm down the last darkened hallway. “What if—it still could be something else—”
Asala didn’t stop to explain. Long ago, one of her mentors had told her that her best quality as an investigator was her nose for it. Once everything fit together, once it clicked, then she knew. And this fit, this fit perfectly—two attacks in quick succession, designed to fail. Designed to provoke the general into sending her spiders farther afield until someone could capture one and reprogram it, give it a far more thorough hack than the AIs on the ship, a virus that would spread to the others . . . something deadly . . . after all, it didn’t take much to puncture a woman’s jugular in her sleep.
“Get on your handheld,” Asala ordered Niko. “See if you can find whatever wireless signal the bugs are on—oh fuck.”
They’d rounded the last corner. In front of them, between the oblivious human guards, a steady stream of the general’s spiders marched back under the door into the suite.
“Out of the way!” The startled guards had barely even registered her voice by the time Asala was plowing past them, palming her scan into the door and diving through in one move.
Spiders swarmed over every surface of the anteroom. In the center of the floor, they had begun to coalesce, to climb over one another’s backs in a seething, swirling mass, rising to half the height of a human—higher—
Asala didn’t wait. She let loose with the riot weapon.
Arcing blue lightning crackled into the tower of robots, and the column toppled with the buzzing of an angry horde. Some fell inert to the anteroom floor, but only a few, too few. The others began to swarm and regroup . . .
“Get past them!” Asala shouted to Niko, and slammed across to the opposite wall, her boots catching metal legs—or the metal legs catching at her. She blasted again and again, but it seemed to take the robots less and less time to recover. Behind them, slow on the uptake, the human guards had entered, but they didn’t seem to know where or how to point their weapons.
“General!” Asala yelled. “Let us in!” The inner rooms weren’t airtight—the bugs could be coming in anywhere, windows or cracks or—how many of the damn things were there?
They were climbing into a tower again. A black tornado of chittering metal carapaces. It had no face, but somehow it seemed to turn to them.
The general’s door slid open. Asala plunged through, dragging Niko with her before palming it shut. Through it, she heard the guards shouting in the outer room, desperately fighting to contain the robots.
Then screams.
Then silence, save the whispering chitter of metal on metal.
“Barricade any entry points,” ordered an imperious voice. General Cynwrig, taking control as if she’d known all along that her bugs were to betray her. “Here.” She tossed blankets and plast cushions at Niko and Asala. Then she split open a portable med kit and started spraying field sealant over the sides of the windows.
“Niko, stay on trying to hack them,” Asala countermanded, jamming a blanket into the crack under the door. None too soon; something pulled at it from the other side almost immediately. “Are you getting anywhere?”
“Yes—I can’t stop it in time, the sequence is HPM-encrypted, but I got in and I can see how it’s set. It’s—this is so crude. Why is it so crude?” Niko had gone so pale their face was a moon in the dim light, and they sounded genuinely furious, though at the situation or the bad programming Asala had no idea. “There’s no recognition system. They’re programmed to brute-force kill the person with the remote, or, or whoever last had it, and—and anyone within a radius of her. This could have gotten my father, or anyone; they just want to kill everyone in the area—”
“General,” Asala said.
The general didn’t even hesitate. She slipped a silver cylinder out of a pocket, the very pocket that had held some of her trusted bugs the first time they’d met, and tossed it to Asala.
“What are you doing?” cried Niko.
“My job,” Asala answered, and ran.
• • •
The riot gun got her back through the anteroom, but barely. She had to get somewhere unpopulated and stay there, somewhere the bugs wouldn’t catch anyone else in their target net.
She wouldn’t have to outrun them forever. Once the spiders had taken her bait and followed, Niko and the general would be able to get a mess
age to Ekrem even if they had to do it on foot. Someone on the president’s staff had to know how to disable an AI, and Ekrem would send a squad to find her and take down the bugs. She just had to outlast them.
But she wasn’t sure that was going to be possible. The things were fucking fast. Asala pounded down the empty night thruway, darkened government buildings rising on all sides, and even at a sprint the metallic black cloud was gaining. She’d started out with almost ten meters of clearance. Then it was eight. Then five . . . She tried spraying blue lightning behind her again, but in the time it took her to let loose another blast, the bugs had already gained back any additional space she’d stolen. Her breath heaved in her chest, and her injured side had gone from a chafe to a throb to a scream. The pressure headache from their space trip still stabbed from her implants.
It was so hard to think . . .
What could she survive that a robot couldn’t? Water? That was a laugh; there was barely enough water in the whole city to drown the lot of them. Extreme cold? Gan-De was many times colder than Khayyam. But if not extreme cold, what about extreme heat . . .
Asala veered hard without slowing, down the side street that would take her to the hydrogen-processing plant. The same one she’d lain on top of just that morning. The same signs she’d passed on her way in and out reading Danger. Do not enter.
A hydrogen-processing center wouldn’t have liquid water—when the hydrogen came together with oxygen mined from deep below Khayyam’s surface, the result of the massive reaction was steam, which was then piped out to a paying populace. But everyone knew how much energy the process released. How dangerous hydrogen-processing plants were because of it.
They had all sorts of safeguards in place to prevent explosions, but the heat . . . there was no way to siphon away all the heat.
Asala had no idea how hot it actually got inside a hydrogen-processing factory. She’d never been inside one.
Hopefully, the robots hadn’t either.
She hurtled toward the first door she saw, ignoring the signs plastered over it that screamed “danger” and “authorized personnel only.” It was alarmed and scan-locked, but she shot the seam in the doorway with her sidearm and pried the door open into a dark crack. The bugs were on her heels, but she shoved her way in and got off another jet from the riot gun to scatter them back from the opening.
An alarm blared into the night from the broken door, but that was fine—it would tell Ekrem where she was.
Asala’s injured side stabbed, and she doubled over and almost retched.
Keep moving. Keep moving or you’re dead.
It was already hot inside the building, even here near the door. Asala forced her feet to propel her forward and ran. It was almost too dark to see, with only a few dim strips of safety lighting glowing along the floor in places. Pipes laced the space above her head, so low she had to keep ducking, and the first time she brushed up against one of them, it was so hot she yelled aloud.
The spiders had been slowed climbing through the door, but they were catching up. The warmth didn’t seem to be bothering them yet, even as it dragged at Asala and made her feet heavy.
Hotter. I need to make it hotter . . .
She almost ran face-first into a ladder. The metal of the rungs burned to the touch, but she pulled the plast of her jacket over her hands and climbed. Bugs’ll have a harder time with a ladder. Maybe . . . can’t follow . . .
Wishful thinking. She could hear them chittering up after her. Or was that in her head? Her covered hands slipped on the rungs. Sweat sheeted into her eyes.
She rolled out onto a grating and immediately flinched away from the floor, trying to stagger onto the soles of her boots. The acrid scent of burning seared the air. Her clothes, or her skin? She staggered back, away from the ladder.
The first spider clattered over the top of it, and Asala almost despaired.
Then it listed drunkenly to the side, half its legs crumpled, and it fell through the grating.
More spiders made it over. A few more fell. A few kept coming . . .
Asala lurched into a hobble. It’s who falls first . . . them or me . . .
She could hear some of the spiders falling from the ladder, chinks and chunks as they clattered to the floor below. One made it lethargically to only a meter in front of her and then simply stopped. She raised her stinging eyes—between her and the top of the ladder was an increasingly sparse robot graveyard.
I did it, she thought. I outlasted . . .
But tThen something was burning her, and she tried to get away from it, but she was sitting and she couldn’t get up, and then she wasn’t sitting anymore, either .
Her nostrils stung with that same seared, scorched smell, stronger now. She couldn’t breathe. The air cooked her from the inside out.
Everything hurt, everywhere, and she couldn’t move to make it stop. Maybe, she thought, she hadn’t outlasted the robots after all.
Before the heat wavered into darkness, the last thing she was aware of was hallucinating Niko’s face, pouring sweat and panting and calling her name.
• • •
Dayo locked Asala in a hug so tight she couldn’t breathe, their foreheads together. “Don’t forget me, little sister.”
“I don’t want to go,” Asala said.
“You have to. One more person safe means they work on the next person. The Elders will send me after you soon, right? Maybe even before this window closes.”
It was a kind lie. Even Asala knew that, young as she was.
“We’ll be together again on Gan-De,” Dayo whispered. “I’ll write you a poem for every day we’re apart and send them to you whenever we have the power. Remember, ‘my heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.’ Right?”
But somehow the girl then knew with the hindsight of a woman three and a half decades older that the poems would never come. That girl would wait, and wait, and wait, and then, finally, she would force herself to stop waiting and close those memories away.
• • •
Asala jerked awake to the smell of sterilization and medicants. A hospital. She was in a hospital, and Dayo wasn’t here.
Her eyes went to the chair next to the bed. For some reason, for a split second she had expected to see Niko, but the chair was empty.
A medical assistant puttered in and clicked the consciousness monitor at the side of Asala’s bed before glancing down at the readouts. “Ah, we thought you’d wake up soon. You took some nasty damage, but a few more hours should be all it takes to get you back together. Your friend who pulled you out is fine too, by the way. Minor burns only.”
Niko. She hadn’t dreamt it.
“What about the general?” Asala said. The words came out scratched and croaked.
“You mean General Cynwrig?” The assistant frowned. “I’ve heard she’s leaving today to go back to Gan-De, is that what you mean? I think she’s in with the president right now, concluding the trade talks. Anything else would be above the level they tell me, I’m afraid.”
Asala relaxed into the bed. The general was alive, then. That was all she needed to know. She closed her eyes.
My heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.
She snapped back awake.
“Excuse me,” she said to the assistant. “Could you find me my handheld? I need to send a message to the president.”
• • •
President Ekrem stood at the window, staring in pretended abstraction as the magline zinged by on its elevated track. Khayyam had warring regional governors in the canyons, a massive water pipeline collapse in its third-largest city, and now these suicides by desiccation driving the news cycles into a frenzy—as if they expected him to solve the looming environmental crisis with a clap of his hands. Yet he’d spent his entire afternoon mollifying and playing nice, all with a woman who barely acknowledged the concept of human rights.
He turned back to face his visitor. “It’s to our great shame
that these attacks happened here on Khayyami soil. I hope, General, that you can accept our gravest apologies, and our assurances that we will do everything in our power to find and apprehend whoever was behind them.”
“I look forward to your updates,” answered Cynwrig.
Ekrem wondered if she practiced that thoroughly perfect balance of threat and bland interest. “Beyond knowing this was not a plot architected by anyone out of Khwarizmi, we can’t yet speculate at a motive, but—”
“No need to play coy. I know what I am most loathed for.”
He tried for a light laugh. “I doubt Hypatian refugees were in much of a position to pull this off, General.”
“They have their own radicalized factions aligned with them. But no doubt you will run down all those lines of inquiry.”
“No doubt,” echoed Ekrem.
“Speaking of the Hypatian criminal element, I’m told Khayyami authorities took custody of the ones found on board my ship.”
Ekrem kept his tone casual. “Would you rather take them back with you instead? We can work out the jurisdiction . . .”
General Cynwrig hesitated. Ekrem let the silence hang. The general would know Khayyam would not abide the sort of punishment she would mete out, not within the borders of its space. She’d have to take the refugees back with her, as prisoners . . .
She flicked a finger. “You can deal with the inconvenience. May I ask what you intend to do with them?”
“I’d thought to give them amnesty,” he answered, still nonchalant. “At the request of the agent who so nobly saved your life—I thought it the least I could do to reward her.”
“Ah,” Cynwrig said. “Yes. Her. I trust this amnesty will only be granted after you detain and question them about the incidents I suffered here on your planet.”
Those poor people are only looking for basic human living conditions; they weren’t the ones plotting ways to kill you. Ekrem didn’t say it out loud. Asala had said nothing to him about the refugees beyond her original message reporting them—as far as he knew, she was still recovering from putting on a fine show of saving his guest’s life. But if Asala hadn’t provided a convenient excuse, he would have found another way. Politics may have hampered him in doing more for Hypatia, but he could save a handful of refugees when they were dropped on his doorstep.
The Vela: The Complete Season 1 Page 4