The Vela: The Complete Season 1

by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang

  No one would have to know.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing for the system if we’d let whoever was coming after General Cynwrig succeed . . .

  The thought gave him a jolt of guilt. No. Heads of state had to have a basic respect for each other, no matter how much they disagreed. Without that, civilization would already be lost.

  He finished out the meeting mostly on automatic, his mouth making all the final arrangements of their summit on its own—my-people-will-be-speaking-to-your-people, we’ll hash out the rest of the details, thank you for such cordial discussions. Then, finally, he bowed General Cynwrig out of his office. Her human security still flanked her, but she looked . . . different without her AIs. Not smaller or less dangerous, no—almost more so.

  As soon as she was gone, Ekrem let himself slump into a chair. Just for a moment, he let himself be tired.

  His main console beeped with a priority communication. Asala. Mustering some energy, he reached over and flicked the message open.

  It was short and to the point: I will find the Vela for you.

  The president of Khayyam sat up straighter. As evidenced over the past two days, Asala was the most effective person he’d ever met. She would find that ship. He would have the Vela.

  As long as she didn’t ask too many questions. And if she did . . .

  If Asala began to look too deeply, or if homeworld loyalties turned her head, well, that was why Niko was going. Not the brightest of Ekrem’s children, Niko . . . but to watch and report, that they could handle. That, Ekrem could trust.

  After all, family was family.

  Episode 2

  The Third Passenger

  Becky Chambers

  Hello. I am Uzochi Ryouta. You probably know my name in other contexts, but for the time being, think of me in my current state: an Eratosi refugee aboard the Vela. We are en route to Khayyam, which has opened their door to us when others would not. In my time here, I have seen many faces, and heard many stories. Depending on where you are in our solar system, you may not have crossed paths with a refugee from the outer worlds. We are abstracts, statistics. In these videos, I hope to give us a face. Our troubles may seem distant to you, but we felt the same on Eratos—until our home could no longer keep us alive. The demise of our sun is inevitable. We will all be refugees soon. It is my hope that by sharing our lives with you, we—as a cooperative system—can prevent these stories from becoming yours, too.

  • • •

  Owning a ship was a luxury Asala could not afford—but renting a nice one? Yes. In a lot of ways, it was the most logical choice. Given the sensitive nature of her work, booking passage aboard a crowded cruiser was asking for trouble. A high-end small craft charter, on the other hand, would guarantee her privacy, and its staff wouldn’t ask questions about the contents of her luggage. A dock attendant flipping open a case of live ammo in a public boarding line wasn’t ideal.

  That was the practical justification. The other side of the coin was that Asala simply liked to travel in comfort. She liked having a ship to herself. She liked being able to send in a rider of what she wanted to have aboard. She liked the automated nav systems that didn’t require her to so much as glance at the pilot’s chair. She could kick up her heels, sit back, and let technology do the work. Being in transit was about as close to a vacation as she ever got.

  There had been a time in her life when she’d traveled the way most people did—stiff-legged and miserable, shoved into cramped shared quarters on a one-way journey that took months to complete. Fuel was expensive and physics was free, so the most economical way to get a lot of people from here to there was to depend heavily on gravity assists, which meant waiting years for the planets to align themselves in a way that facilitated a slingshot. Missed your flight? No problem, there’d be another in eight years. Sure, it was possible for high-end craft to zip around in a fraction of the time, choosing whatever launch date they pleased, but who had access to that kind of extravagance?

  Asala did. Or, more accurately: her employers did.

  Kestrel Interplanetary was her charter of choice, and its proprietor met her at the spaceport. “Kima Asala, always such a pleasure,” he said with a little bow. His mustache was expertly coiffed, as usual.

  “Nice to see you, Tibor,” she said. “Thank you for taking care of this on such short notice.”

  “For you? Of course.”

  “I hope the security squad didn’t give you too much trouble.” There was an aspect to this trip Asala hated already, and it had required a full fine-toothed comb-through of the vessel before she’d been allowed to board, plus a few technical alterations. Overkill, but then, this was a government job, and government people never felt useful unless they invented ways to make everything twice as much bother.

  “No trouble,” Tibor said. “A bit on the humorless side, but—well, that’s military for you. No offense, of course.”

  “None taken.” She nodded at the coppery quick-shot craft waiting in dock before them. “Is this me?”

  “This is you.”

  Asala smiled. What a gorgeous machine. The solitary flight wing was teardrop-shaped—the point designed for cutting through clouds, the curve topped with a generous crust of fusion engines. Jutting out from the heart of the teardrop was the passenger sphere, framed within the thin wing like the pit of a perfect fruit. Out in space, the flight wing would swivel around, swinging the engines in whatever direction they were needed without moving the sphere. But in the spaceport, the wing hung vertically, tip to floor, its polished hull gleaming in the light of the overhead lamps. Asala was sure Tibor had angled them before her arrival, for effect. The ship looked like an earring, a pendant, something you might hang in your window to catch the sun.

  “New?” Asala said.

  “It is,” Tibor said, smiling proudly at his craft. “The Sky Shard Model 6, fresh out of the shipyards. I got three in last week, and I am giving the best of them to you. It’s called the Altair.”

  Asala looked at him sideways. “What makes this one the best?”

  His eyes twinkled. “It’s the one I’m giving to you.” He gestured forward as Asala laughed. “Come, I believe you’ll be very happy with the interior.”

  Down the gangway they went, then through the airlock and into the sphere. Asala felt a bit of the knot in her neck let go as she surveyed the main deck. The style was unmistakably Khayyami, tan and gold and swimming blue, but the decor had been dialed down from its usual level of ostentatiousness. Simplicity was in the spotlight here, simplicity and openness. Modern furniture with graceful curves, their heavy floor bolts cleverly hidden behind twists of leg. Geometric art that inspired solace. Lights too bright to allow for any secret corners, but not so glaring as to be industrial. There was no clutter to be found, be it in object or color, no item that didn’t have a purpose. It was a tasteful space, a just-so space. Exactly the way Asala liked it.

  Tibor beamed with the justified smugness of a man who knew his customer. “Four decks. Bedrooms up top, living space and work center in here, kitchen and two rec rooms below—one for exercise, one for entertainment—and then the tech deck, which you won’t need to worry about.”

  “And the comm output frequencies?” Asala asked. Anything above thirty-seven made her hearing implants hiss. “Are they—”

  “Thirty-six-point-two, precisely,” Tibor said.

  Asala gave him a satisfied nod. She looked over her surroundings, and for one fanciful moment, she allowed herself to pretend that this was like any other trip, that this space was solely hers, that everything would stay as she liked it, that she’d have three whole weeks to sit and think in this spacefaring suite. She pretended—

  There was a thud from the direction of the airlock. A muffled curse followed, and then: a second thud.

  Asala closed her eyes and took a breath. It had been a nice thought while it lasted.

  Niko stumbled onto the ship, dragging an absurd amount of luggage with them. Their
cheeks had a faint glow of sweat, and their expression was exhaustingly eager. “Am I late? Wow, nice,” they said, looking around. They considered. “A little empty, but nice.”

  Asala turned with the politest look she could muster. “Tibor, this is Niko av Ekrem.”

  Tibor bowed respectfully, but not before Asala caught him giving the sweaty kid the subtlest of up-and-downs. “It’s an honor to have a member of the president’s family aboard one of my ships,” he said. “If it’s not too impertinent, may I inquire after your mother’s health? I saw in the news—”

  Niko rolled their eyes with a smile. “She’s fine,” they said. “Just a cold, honestly. Gossip channels always make things out worse than they are.”

  “Ah, that’s a relief,” Tibor said. “It may be gauche to say this, but of your father’s partners, I’ve always very much admired—”

  Asala tuned out the obvious buttering-up, and remained fixated on the luggage. “What is all of that?”

  Niko shrugged, surveying their varied duffels and sacks. “Clothes, gear—”

  “What gear?”

  “Computer stuff. I won’t be of much help without the right tools. Don’t worry, I already logged the mass with the nav desk. I promise I haven’t screwed up our trajectory.”

  Asala glanced at Tibor, and he checked his handheld. “Yes, all your passengers’ belongings have been logged and adjusted for,” he said. “You’re well within our recommended parameters.”

  “See?” Niko said. “I’m—” They paused. “Wait, what other passengers? Who else—”

  Asala had registered the approach of footsteps several moments before, but that detail apparently hadn’t landed with Niko. A woman entered the room, clad in the sort of loose-fitting clothes and sun-blocking hood that any Khayyami might wear when stepping offworld at midday. Her luggage was as practical as Asala’s own.

  “This is my colleague Chessa,” Asala said. “Our trajectory will be taking her to a rendezvous point on the way to . . . our destination.” Hypatia, her subconscious supplied, kicking and shouting at the idea. She shoved it back down. She’d deal with it later.

  Niko looked confused but friendly. “Nice to meet you,” they said.

  The third passenger nodded, but said nothing.

  “Well then,” Tibor said. “If you’re all assembled, and if you don’t need anything further, the ship is yours. Kima Asala, if you would . . . ?”

  Asala pressed her thumb to Tibor’s handheld. Anything that happened to the ship now meant her ass. Well, Ekrem’s ass. He was the one footing the bill.

  Tibor said his goodbyes, and the airlock slid shut with a definitive thunk. Assured of their privacy, the third passenger removed her hood. Niko jumped. Actually jumped. For all their overstuffed luggage, this was one eventuality they clearly hadn’t anticipated.

  General Cynwrig looked odd out of uniform, like a tiger without her stripes. She was imposing all the same: broad shoulders, scarred jaw, white hair cut practically short. “Agent Asala,” she said. Her voice communicated nothing, but her eyes said everything. She hated this arrangement every bit as much as her protector did.

  “General,” Asala said with a nod.

  Niko looked as if they’d swallowed a mouthful of nails. Their easy eagerness vanished, and after a second or two of gaping, they blurted out: “But you’re on the Marauder.”

  “Am I?” the general said as she removed her gloves. “What a relief.”

  Asala waited for the general to provide her own context for joining them, but Cynwrig merely folded her gloves and placed them in her pocket. Fine. “We’re taking her to Gandesian space on our way to Hypatia. A transport will pick her up at their border, and you and I will go from there.”

  “But why?” Niko said.

  “I have intelligence that the attempts on my life have not ended,” Cynwrig said. She said the words with a matter-of-factness appropriate for talking about the weather, or what she’d had for breakfast. “Considering the egregious breach of security discovered aboard my own vessel, both my advisers and your father”—she said this last like a peeved partner—“thought it best for me to take a more deceptive route home. Under the radar, as it were.”

  “I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you in advance,” Asala said to Niko. She wasn’t sorry in the slightest, but it was the thing to say to your employer’s kid, especially when they were still standing there staring like an idiot. “We couldn’t risk word getting out.”

  Niko turned their head to her, looking for all the world like someone who’d just found themself in crosshairs. “I wouldn’t have said anything.”

  Asala sighed impatiently. Gods below, if the kid was this jumpy before they even left spacedock, she was going to lock them and their precious gear in their room for the rest of the trip. “I’m not saying you would’ve said anything. It was covert. Classified. Need-to-know. You know what these words mean, right?”

  Niko glared, but they relaxed a touch. “I’m not stupid. I get it.”

  A silence descended among the three, heavy and unpleasant. “Well,” the general said at last. She shouldered her bag and headed for the sleeping deck. “Should be a lovely trip.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?” Niko asked.

  “You’ll have one in your quarters,” Asala said.

  “Are there any . . .” They looked hesitantly toward the lift the general had headed for. “On other decks?”

  Asala hadn’t requested any alcohol aboard her ship—some luxuries just made her feel guilty—but in that moment, she deeply, profoundly wanted a drink. “I imagine there’s one down by the kitchen.”

  Niko hurried downstairs looking green, leaving their bags in a disastrous heap.

  Asala stood alone in a beautiful room on a beautiful spaceship, staring at an ugly pile of useless luggage, listening to the shufflings of other humans existing nearby. She wanted to punch Ekrem right in his stupid, smiling face.

  • • •

  My people’ve been in sugar since settlement days. Uh, industrial sugar, mind—we outers need cement and resin more than we need cake. We’re all harvesters—me, my partners, our kids, my brothers. My great-grandma right up until she died five years ago—or four? Doesn’t matter. We just took to it, I guess. Sugar’s what we do.

  People watching this might not know what we harvest sugar from.

  Oh, right. There’s this plant, we call it the sweetblood tree. It’s not really a tree like inners get, with leaves and such. It’s this huge fleshy pillar with a rigid skin. They’re carnivorous—not enough sunlight for much photosynthesis, so they have these long root systems that seek out burrowing things—ice mice, mostly—snare ’em, and suck ‘em dry. Not very nice, but that’s nature. Anyway, sweetblood trees only grow in these valleys off the coast of the Glacial Sea. I used to love going out there on sapping days. It’s the quietest place you’ll ever set foot in. Kincats don’t like anything but tundra for hunting ground, and wollmuls can’t eat anything there, so there’s no big animals at all. You can make camp anywhere you want, no need for guns or hot fencing. Just you and the trees and the stars above. Best place in the world.

  You had to stop harvesting when the freeze started?

  Well, not at first we didn’t. It was cold, sure, but I mean—it’s Eratos. We’re used to cold. We thought we could just, y’know, throw on an extra woolly and be okay. Bring a few extra heaters. But yeah, every harvest we went on, it got colder and colder. A lot of people quit, but we kept at it. The last one we went on, though . . . I mean, it was cold. Just dead cold. We called it early and got inside our tents—huddled around the heaters, right—and all of a sudden, there’s this sound. This big, loud pop.

  Like a gun?

  No—well, kind of. Louder. Weirder. Freaked us right out. I figured maybe a tree fell, but about half an hour later, there it was again. Pop. And then another, and another. The trees were exploding, see. It got so cold that night that the sap froze solid, and when it reached a certain point, the plant just bu
st apart. Just like that—bang. The airships, they’re not meant for sleeping in, but we all got in the flight cabin as quick as we could and spent the night there.

  Why?

  Sweetblood trees are dense. They’re heavy. And now you’ve got these frozen hunks of them popping off at random. It was like someone throwing rocks at you. We figured we’d be safer under a hull than in a tent. I mean, we had kids with us.

  And that was the last time you went out there?

  Yeah. I think we were the last ones to stop.

  • • •

  Niko wondered—they genuinely wondered—if there was a way they could avoid leaving their room until Cynwrig was off the ship. Two weeks to the rendezvous. It was doable? They had a bathroom. They had water. They had . . . no food. They had no food at all in their quarters, and it had been four hours since the Altair had left dock, and their stomach had finally calmed down enough to be hungry. They put it off for as long as they could, trying to concentrate on their work. They’d set up a bunch of gear on the floor—they weren’t about to use the workstation downstairs with her lurking around—and for a while, the soothing logic of code and numbers kept their mind off their ever-insistent stomach. It was after they realized that they hadn’t done anything but think about birthday noodles for an indeterminate amount of time that they surrendered to biology. Fine. They’d have to go eat.

  The kitchen—or really, the dining room, because there wasn’t anything you could do real cooking on—was an ovular space, its walls bathed in a warm white glow. There were a few paintings, the kind you’d get in a hotel: pretty, inoffensive, and meaningless. Aside from the meal station set into the wall at the side of the room, there was nothing in there besides a long, rounded table and a generous supply of floor cushions. To their relief, Asala was the only other person present.