The Vela: The Complete Season 1

by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang

  What the hell was going on?

  She ran across the room to the ship systems panel. The panel was frozen. She tapped and she tapped. She slapped her palm against its frame. A flicker. Then nothing.

  She threw on some clothes, and shoved her feet into her boots. Presumably, the sound was still blaring, but she left her implants off. She opened her door and almost ran into the general, who was shouting something. She had her gun drawn.

  “I can’t hear you,” Asala said, pointing at her ears. “Speak slowly.”

  I said, Cynwrig’s lips read, what the hell is going on?

  “I don’t know.” Asala looked around, trying to assess whether they needed to head for an escape pod. Everything else about the ship seemed fine. She didn’t think they’d hit anything. She couldn’t smell anything burning, couldn’t feel any change in air pressure. “Is that sound still—”

  Yes! The general looked furious.

  Asala hurried to Niko’s quarters and opened the door without a knock. Niko sat on the floor, in the middle of their nest of computers and wires, a blanket wrapped around their head as they typed furiously. They were in a panic, and looked as if they, too, had been ripped out of bed. They said something as the other two entered the room, too harried for Asala to make it out. Sorry and fix were the only words she caught.

  “What’s wrong?” Asala shouted. She had no idea how loud her voice needed to be to get over the shriek, so she went full bore. “Is there danger?”

  Niko shook their head vigorously, continuing to type and babble. A minute, Asala caught, and later, shit.

  After a moment, Niko and the general both sighed and slumped. Asala took that as a cue to turn her implants back on. She did so gingerly, dialing them up just a touch at first. The sound had stopped. She turned them back to full, and looked hard at Niko. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” Cynwrig said.

  “I mean—I do, I’m just—I’m not sure—” Niko looked bewildered, and the blanket dropped from around their ears. Their hair was sticking straight up on one side, and they still had pillow lines pressed deep into one round cheek.

  Asala sighed and crossed her arms. “Niko. What was that?” She kept her voice calm, hoping the kid would calm down too.

  Niko took a breath. “Some kind of malfunction in the comms system,” they said, their professionalism making a show at last. “Like a . . . a feedback loop, I guess. I think it’s related to the response lag, but I don’t know how yet.” That particular glitch hadn’t gone away since they’d left Khayyam, and Niko’s attempts to fix it hadn’t been fruitful. They glanced nervously at the general. “I disabled the whole comms system until I can figure it out. But it’s just a glitch. Some kind of sloppy code. I don’t know. It’s nothing dangerous.”

  “How do you know?” the general said. “How can you say that, if you don’t know what it is?”

  “General—” Asala started.

  Cynwrig stormed back out. “I’m going to run a diagnostic on the scramblers,” she said. She’d already done four of those since Khayyam.

  Asala rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What time is it?”

  “Um”—Niko fumbled for their handheld—“three-oh-four.”

  Gods. She walked over to the systems panel on Niko’s wall and tapped the screen. It leapt into action, just as it was supposed to. “Go back to sleep,” she said. “In the morning, I want you to do a—” She had no idea what the proper terms were, which wasn’t ideal when giving directions. “Can you check everything out, see if you can get to the bottom of it?”

  Niko nodded, their mussed hair bobbing absurdly. “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Asala said. A comms system malfunction. She could feel the adrenaline bleeding out of her, but a hum of concern remained. “Okay.”

  Without another word, she returned to her room, pulled off her boots, and crawled back into bed. Blanket tugged to her chin, she lay in the dark, thinking about the lags, the glitches, the panel freezes. She thought about the general, prowling the corridors again and again. She thought about Dayo, and where she might be.

  She did not fall back asleep.

  • • •

  This is kind of hard to talk about.

  That’s all right. Take your time.

  Sorry. The camera’s making me self-conscious.

  We can point it elsewhere, if you want.

  No. People should see, right?

  Yes, I think they should.

  Okay. Okay.

  How did you get frostbite?

  I wasn’t the only one. There was this freak blizzard. Our housing block got buried, and everything got knocked out. Heaters, comms, everything.

  How long were you there?

  Five days. Two for the snow to stop, three more for them to dig us an exit.

  And you went without heat for that long.

  Real heat, yeah. We started burning stuff. Piled whatever we could find that would burn into old water drums, and kept it going as best we could. The smoke got terrible. I think there was some plast in there. Or some kind of paint, I don’t know. Made everybody’s eyes hurt. Some kids started choking, and then people were passing out, so we had to stop. We . . . Sorry.

  Take your time.

  I shouldn’t complain about . . . about this. I made it out. Not everybody did. It’s just two legs and a nose. Could be worse, right?

  There’s a woman down on deck twelve, she’s been melting down scrap metal and making prosthetic digits out of them. Have you heard of her?

  What? No. Where?

  Deck twelve. I don’t know if she could do whole limbs, but perhaps a nose?

  That would be great. I’m tired of grossing people out.

  You don’t gross me out.

  Thanks.

  • • •

  Niko set one foot through the doorway to the rec room and froze. A video was playing on-screen, and one of the six reclining chairs before it was occupied by the general’s unmistakable silhouette. In the ten days since they’d left Khayyam, Niko had become masterful at being wherever Cynwrig wasn’t, and there was a brief, hopeful moment when they thought they might be able to slip right back out of the room. But no, too late—the general had already craned her head their way. Shit.

  “Sorry,” Niko managed. “I didn’t know someone was in here.”

  They started to leave, but the general spoke. “Join me,” she said easily.

  Niko’s brain upended itself. “Um—”

  Cynwrig turned back toward the screen. “I’d like to get to know my ally’s progeny better,” she said. “And you’ve been avoiding me.”

  Niko stood stupidly in the doorway. On-screen, some sort of caper was unfolding in a lavish room. One of the heavily made-up characters had experienced some misfortune, and was pulling faces in a display so over-the-top it was almost grotesque. The hell was she watching? “I—”

  Cynwrig sighed. “First lesson, little diplomat.” There was a smirk in her voice. “When a planetary leader invites you to join them, you join them. Even if you can’t stand their company.”

  What else could they do? Niko went in, their insides tying themselves in knots. They took a seat beside Cynwrig, sitting stiffly. They folded their hands, then crossed their arms, then shifted their weight. All their limbs felt wrong. They couldn’t find a place to put them.

  Beside them, the martial ruler of Gan-De sat comfortably watching a slapstick comedy, ankle resting on the opposite knee, a box of something edible in her lap. She laughed at the theatrical goings-on—the most subdued of chuckles, but heartfelt all the same.

  Niko tried to get their thoughts in order. Surreal didn’t begin to cut it. “What is this?” they said, watching the screen. They didn’t speak whatever Gandesian dialect this was in, but even if they had, they weren’t sure the imagery would make any more sense. A man in an ornate sequined bird suit had entered the scene now, for some reason.

  “Two and Six,” Cynwrig said, lau
ghing at the bird man. “It’s a classic morality pageant, very old. See, the two carrying the treasure chest are criminals—you can tell from the branding across their faces. They’re trying to escape with the treasure, but the queen—she’s a witch—has summoned the Six Aspects of Order to thwart them.”

  “And the bird is . . . ?”

  “An avatar of Wisdom. It’s making them solve riddles or else it’ll peck out their eyes.”

  “So . . . the criminals outsmart the Aspects?”

  “Of course not. The criminals are clowns. Stock characters. They’re punished for their stupidity, and they die at the end.” She laughed again as the face-pulling criminals gave some bumbling answer to a question.

  “And that’s . . . funny.”

  “It’s hilarious,” the general said. “Although, I wouldn’t recommend this particular adaptation. It’s not very good.”

  “Then why are you watching it?”

  “I’ll show you in a minute.” She picked up the box in her lap. The edges were dented from travel. “Vanilla puff?”

  Niko stared. No. This was poison. This was a trick. And yet . . . gods damn it, it had been over a week. An awful, stressful week on a ship without so much as a spoonful of empty sugar to be found. They took a vanilla puff. If they were playing diplomat, they’d play diplomat. “Thank you,” they said. They sat back, took a bite, and managed not to moan. Wow, they’d needed that.

  “Do you know why she doesn’t eat sweets?” Cynwrig asked.

  “No,” Niko said, taking another bite. They let the filling spread across their tongue, not wanting to neglect a single taste bud.

  “Strange. But then, I have no idea if patties have a taste for sweet things, do you?”

  Niko swallowed. The heavy sugar coated their teeth, something cloying and chemical leaving an odd aftertaste. How dare she. How dare she assume that Niko’d be fine with talk like that when Asala wasn’t in the room. They set the sweet down on a side table, resisting the urge to eat the rest. “I don’t know about Hypatian food, no.”

  Cynwrig gave another short chuckle and went back to watching her movie. “Ah, here,” she said, leaning forward. She pointed at the screen. “Watch the background. There’ll be a boy who comes in . . . now.”

  Niko looked. “The . . . the one in the white feathers?”

  “No, the one in the red.”

  Niko saw the boy she meant, baby-faced and floppy-curled. They watched as the feathered boy did leaping somersaults as the bird man spoke, and . . . that was it. The boy was gone, a background dancer without a line.

  “My grandson,” Cynwrig explained. “Fifteen, and desperate to be an actor.” She took another puff for herself. “My son’s son. Had him much too young, he and the mother. My daughter waited until she was in her thirties, smart girl. Her boy just turned two—biggest cheeks I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s . . . nice.”

  Cynwrig fell back into silence again, watching the movie. “What were you after, before you knew I was in this room?”

  “I needed a break,” Niko said. “I still can’t figure out what’s wrong with the comms.” The shriek had returned at random intervals, plus a varied assortment of other problems. The ship’s systems shouldn’t have been that hard to tease out, but the general’s patched-on scramblers had made everything a clusterfuck.

  “And what were you going to watch? Your refugee videos?”

  “Maybe.” Yes.

  “Emotionally flogging yourself isn’t a break.” The general nodded at the screen. “I remember this one night during the Siege of Halien.” That reference, Niko knew—a particularly long and bloody stretch during the Gandesian Civil War. “My regiment had established camp in a former school—bombed out, of course, but it still had part of a roof, and it was the rainy season, so you see the appeal. Everyone’s clothes were wet, and we all smelled like sweat and old blood. We were sick and exhausted. Food was running out. And then, one of the soldiers found a projector and a video drive in what was left of an old classroom. Those of us who couldn’t sleep watched movies all night—kid stuff, but it was fun. We laughed at those puppets like we’d never seen a movie before. It took us away for a while. We all needed that.” She cracked her knuckles. “Granted, half of us died in the morning when the enemy bombed our encampment, but we’d had a laugh beforehand, at least.”

  Niko had no idea how to respond to that.

  “War,” Cynwrig said, “is math. How many dead, how many miles, how many bullets you have left. We—me, you, our stalwart protector here—we are all at war. Only, our enemy isn’t something we can outgun or outfox. It’s time. Time is our enemy, and resources are the only weapon we have.” She nodded at the screen. “Everyone who made this fluff, they’re Gandesian sons and daughters. They have people who love watching them, even if only for a few seconds. Ours is a beautiful world, full of beautiful people. And yes, it’s going to die, just like the rest. But for now, we have water. We have food. We have a greater distance from the enemy than the rest of you, and that means we will solve this.”

  “How?” Niko said. “How are you going to solve it?”

  Cynwrig shrugged. “That’s a job for scientists, not me. My job is to make sure there are Gandesians left to see whatever plans are made all the way through. To make sure our people and our culture survives this.” She looked sideways at Niko. “And that means we need to keep what we have.”

  “You have more than enough. You have a whole planet.”

  “Do you know what a planet is? It’s not as big as you think. When it’s used up, it’s used up. Have you seen our reports? Have you done the math?” She stretched her legs. “I’m going to assume you don’t have children, but pretend for a moment you do. Say that there’s a famine, and you have just enough left to feed your family. Now say another family knocks on your door, and they have children of their own. They say, ‘Please, please give us your food, or we will starve.’ Who do you feed? The strangers at your door or the family in your home?”

  “That’s not—”

  “And now say,” Cynwrig continued, “that you see those strangers approaching, and you know that people just like them stole your neighbors’ food. Raided their pantry.”

  “Bullshit,” Niko said. They didn’t care about playing diplomat anymore. They wanted to throw up the two bites of puff they’d eaten. They couldn’t stomach this one.

  Cynwrig laughed. “Is it?” she said indulgently, as if she were speaking to one of her grandkids.

  “It is,” Niko said. “You have no evidence that the outer citizens would cause you harm. None at all. They just need help. They’re desperate.”

  “Precisely. Do you know what desperate people are capable of? Have you ever seen desperation, Niko av Ekrem? Because I have. I have, and those were my own people. People who were of my own culture, who spoke my own language, who told the same stories. And none of that stopped them—stopped us—from butchering each other.” She sighed. “There has been peace on Gan-De for twelve years. It was hard won, and is hard kept. I will not see that work undone.”

  “They’re people,” Niko said. “People like the woman upstairs who saved your life, and is protecting you now. And they’re dying. They’re dying by the shipload on that doorstep you mentioned.”

  “Don’t talk about death as if you know what it means,” the general said. “And don’t talk about people as if we’re all the same.” She gestured at the screen. “You don’t even get the jokes. How can I imagine that you and I see the world anything alike?”

  Niko had had enough. They left the puff where it lay, and walked toward the door.

  “Why are you on this ship?” the general asked, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  Niko stopped. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not a fool, child. If you were a diplomat, you’d be on a government-issued cruiser with a staff at your disposal, not an untraceable quick-shot with a sniper and no one else.” She smiled over her shoulder. “What are you two after
on Hypatia?”

  Niko inhaled. “We are going,” they said, “to discuss humanitarian relief efforts.”

  The general laughed and returned to her movie.

  Niko nearly ran back to their room, palms sweating. “Fuck,” they whispered. They went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on their face. So much for a break.

  They looked at themself in the mirror, drops of water running down their cheeks. Where had that water come from? Bought in blocks from the outer planets? Ripped molecule by molecule from their hemorrhaging sun? Was there still enough water aboard the Vela, wherever it had gone? Was there food? Was there air?

  Niko returned to their makeshift workstation, diving in with a fury. If the people of the outer planets didn’t get a break, neither did they.

  • • •

  I used to sell batteries, both home-sized and industrial. Do you know much about batteries?

  I do, yes, but the people watching this might not.

  Okay, real simple: batteries discharge their energy faster in the cold than they do in warm temperatures. They’ll hold their charge longer, but that doesn’t matter too much once you start using it. So, you need to get warm, which means you’re cranking up the heater, which means you’re pulling more from your home’s batteries. But the batteries are kicking out juice faster, so if you’re not keeping a constant eye on them—which most people don’t; they’ve got better things to do—they’ll run dry. So you can’t run your heater for as long as you need to, which means you’re getting colder, which means you’re trying to crank up the heater, which means . . . you see?

  I do.

  Yeah, you know. I bet your batteries were performing like shit too.

  The heater in my lab stopped working. We had to evacuate.