Niko snorted, and Asala smiled. They were a decent kid. Decent company, too. If they felt any nervousness about touching down on a planet that was pretty hostile to life, they didn’t show it. They led the way, following the various signs, their stride confident with no trace of hesitation.
Aside from a basic glance at their perimeter, Asala kept focus on reaching their destination. The moving sidewalk they were on that didn’t move anymore. The rubber was so worn that the underlying mechanisms were visible in several places, many poking out. Niko’s clunky boots caught multiple times.
“Don’t look so damn smug,” they said, noting Asala’s footwear—lightweight, flexible boots with thin soles. Asala could easily feel every disturbance on the ground.
“Not smug. Right,” she said.
It wasn’t long before they reached border patrol, though “patrol” was a misnomer. It implied a level of vigilance and intensity that was clearly lacking here.
Asala counted twenty stalls, nineteen of which were empty, which meant there were nineteen ways to get around the single guard on duty. Asala was willing to bet any cameras were broken or too greatly dysfunctional to be useful. It was sloppy. Sloppy meant any incident would have a high casualty count.
They didn’t care about that here.
“I half expected there to be flocking droves,” said Niko.
“There are. Just on the other side. Come on. Let’s get this over with,” she said.
Asala and Niko ran their wrists under the scanner at the stall, but the guard didn’t look up to check that the photos on the holograph matched them.
“Reason for your travel?” he asked.
In unison, Niko and Asala answered, one saying “business” and the other “pleasure,” respectively.
“I’m here visiting family,” Asala said without thinking. No Hypatian would ever return to visit family. If they could pay to get here, they’d pay to get their loved ones off this rock instead.
“And I’m joining her. Planning to get some work done if I can. So both. Business and pleasure,” Niko picked up the nonsense lie, their explanation going on a mite too long.
But the guard waved them through. “I don’t actually care. Printers are on the ground floor. You’ll want some more layers.” He sounded mountainish, from the southerly peaks not far from Hypatia’s largest city, but from his accent, Asala couldn’t pick out which language let alone which precise clan. Nor did the tattooed design around his eye or the ancestral markings tell her much more. It was strange how knowledge that used to be a piece of her was now out of her grasp.
Not that any of that mattered. She wasn’t here because she was Hypatian. Asala was the best at what she did, and Ekrem and Niko playing her past against her to get her here didn’t change that.
“How cold are we talking, exactly?” Niko walked up to a dingy printer against a wall in the atrium. They banged their fist several times against the touch screen before a basic menu appeared.
“Colder than humans can survive without help,” Asala said. Almost forty years ago, it had been unbearable. Mass die-off. Four decades wasn’t a lot on the scale of suns and planets, but it was millennia to a world already at the eve of its end. Any food stores there’d been were depleted. Hope had shriveled. Aid organizations and the wealthier planets had helped some, and hard-bitten Hypatians pushed to the ends of their endurance had done more, but they were kicking against the crush of a deadly reality. Improvements in clothing and other technology might be staving off the inevitable end, but Niko shouldn’t get the wrong idea. They’d spend their time on Hypatia miserably uncomfortable.
“Print something light. We’re going to want to move fast,” said Asala. “Texlon or sy-wool are the warmest and thinnest.”
Niko shook their head. “Not available. Will poly-tex do? It says it’s rated for -40℃.”
That would have a balmy summer night on Hypatia a century ago. It hadn’t gotten any warmer in the meantime.
“That’s really all there is?” Asala fought the urge to investigate the machine for herself. It wasn’t like Niko didn’t know their way around a computer. Damn, all their backup gear was on the Altair. Aside from the sy-wool underlayers she and Niko were already wearing, anything Khayyami-made would have screamed their outsider status.
Poly-tex would have to do. They’d each have to wear at least two bulky insulation coats under a windshell. And even then they’d better not get caught out overnight.
“Hour ETA. Fuck,” said Niko. “Can we forego the outer layers for now? Kit up more once we get to where we’re going?”
“If you want to die.”
Niko laughed shortly. “All right then. I guess we wait.”
• • •
Smoke, thick and astringent, saturated the air.
“The hell?” Niko asked, rubbing the sting from their eyes.
“Get back inside,” Asala said. “You’re going to need goggles. There were some on the ready-made racks next to the printers.”
Niko gave her a sideways glance that said they weren’t a fan of the commanding tone. But they nodded curtly and headed back inside. “You want a pair?” they asked, turning back around just before stepping through the automatic door.
Asala shook her head and waited for Niko to turn back away before wiping a few tears from her eyes. She’d get used to the burn, just as she had as a child. Any chance at answers required she blend in. Goggles were for offworlders, and children.
“Is it the factories or something? Ice-mining plants?” Niko came back outside, this time with a full face mask meant to filter out the toxic air.
“Fires to keep away the thalajwan,” Asala said, the word surprising her on her tongue. The Upper Crescent word for “death-cold.” There were seven active languages on Hypatia spoken by eight hundred thousand people scattered about the small planet. There used to be 113. Upper Crescent was the closest they had to a planet-wide lingua franca, being spoken by dwellers of Almagest. It was Hypatia’s largest and warmest city, located on the equator. “Benzene is plentiful here.”
“Holy—people are burning benzene fires?” asked Niko.
Given so much of Hypatia’s plantlife was dryland and brush, it was far from sensible, and years ago a benzene fire ran away and scorched a continent. But the people of Hypatia didn’t need sensible. They needed to be warm.
Asala checked the map on her wristwatch. Like she’d thought, there was nothing for miles. A pub four miles away where they’d be lucky to catch a ride. With Niko looking every bit a citizen of Khayyam despite the Hypatian clothing, their chances of finding someone willing to give them a lift were about nil.
Did Hypatians still call people from the inner planets “innards”?
“We don’t stop,” said Asala. “We can make it to Almagest before dark if we keep it moving. The day is short. We don’t want to be stranded in the wilderness at nightfall, when the temperature will drop even further.”
“Further?” Niko asked. They were already shivering. Asala would be too, if every muscle in her body weren’t tensed to ward it off.
“Let’s get moving. That’ll warm us up. It’s about nine miles.”
“We’re walking nine miles? In these temperatures?”
“If your extremities get numb, let me know. I have chemical heat packs we can crack that’ll fit in your gloves or boots.” Asala took pity on them and added, “When we get there, food is on me.”
Niko hesitated, then straightened out of their hunched shivering as if determined to be game. “Food. Now we’re talking. Something hot. Very hot.”
Asala was looking forward to it too, even though they’d just eaten on the shuttle. She missed the food here. Everything on the inner planets was too spicy or too chewy or too fried, and bulked up with lichen or insect protein. Sometimes succulents or dates. Whatever was the most water-light. Until you started to eat among the wealthy, when everything was grain this, grain that to show off their luxury.
There was no farming on Hypatia,
especially not now that the climate had turned colder, icier. Folks lived off hunting, fishing, and shepherding. And dairy.
There was some plant life, mostly wild, ground-hugging tundra mosses and dwarf shrubs. Enough to provide the fragrant herbs and berries that gave Hypatia’s food its distinctive flavor, but sparse compared to land and sea animals.
Asala hoped a rich soup of bone broth, blood, marrow, and heart with spicy herbs still awaited in Almagest for those who could afford it. Which she could. Now she could. Thirty-four years ago, her family had come to survive on thin soups of discarded fish carcasses scavenged from richer lands. She’d come a long way. The second road.
There was no road linking the shuttleport to Hypatia’s largest city. They traipsed through hills of low-growing, frost-crusted grasses and rocks.
It wasn’t long before they saw the Almagest skyline, domed glass buildings meant to catch every bit of light. They didn’t pass other travelers. This land belonged to no clan. Too harsh.
Asala looked over to Niko. They were struggling. They’d had training, but they hadn’t had this much time in the field before. She slapped her hand on their back. “Keep up.”
“I am keeping up,” they said.
“Are you?” Asala asked, and picked up her pace, almost doubling her speed. Icy wind flooded her lungs through her nostrils, which only drove her to push harder.
“I see why you usually work alone,” said Niko. “No fun getting bogged down by us mere mortals.”
For fun, Asala started jogging.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Niko said, but they broke into a jog and shortly caught up.
“Race you to that shrub,” said Asala, goading, breaking into a full sprint.
She didn’t know why she suddenly felt like a girl again, frolicking like a goddamn child in the hills, but she smiled freely despite the load on her back and a few twinges of pain from old battle injuries.
It felt good to be working with someone competent, someone she liked well enough. She had buddies, of course, but it had been a long time since she’d had to spend this much time with someone else.
“If we run the rest of the way, we’ll get there twice, maybe three times as fast. That’s three times as fast you’ll be tucking into herb-roasted marrow and meat cakes.”
“You’ve found my weakness,” said Niko, huffing hard but keeping up.
It wasn’t long till they found their rhythm, matching Asala’s long strides.
The acrid smell of smoke didn’t slow her down. It invigorated her. For a second, it was like she’d never left Hypatia. Like she’d never cut those memories out of herself. Goodness, it was beautiful. Not in a sentimental way. Nothing anyone would write poetry about. But Asala loved the sternness of the landscape, the bleak barren hills.
There was no shine here. No fake shit. It was nothing like Khayyam, and gods, Asala remembered now what it was like to love this place, remembered the child she was before her home mother had sent her away, abandoned her.
“You okay?”
The kid was perceptive, they had that going. Even through a goddamn breathing mask and running out of breath they could tell something had changed. Asala needed to work on keeping her cards to herself.
She kept running, faster and faster, leaving Niko in the dust.
• • •
In Almagest, Niko wanted to rest. They already had booked a reservation under assumed names. But Asala didn’t like how comfortable she’d gotten on the way here from the shuttleport. Feeling free, feeling loose, that would get her killed. Hypatia was dangerous. The people she’d be dealing with were dangerous. Now wasn’t the time for a misplaced sense of homesickness.
“We’ve already lost a lot of time. First at the shuttleport waiting for the printer. Then getting here. You want to impress Daddy, don’t you? We should get a move on. Start working the leads now.”
Asala regretted the dig about their father, but it was out there now and maybe it would spring the kid into action. The leisure part of this mission was over, and they had a job to do.
“Can’t we at least put away our bags?”
“What, you’re tired?” she joked, trying to bring some levity back to the situation.
“You promised me food,” they said.
“We’ll grab some saslik on the way to the Yard. If the Vela touched down to get repairs, that’s where it would’ve stopped. It’s a big space. A square mile, maybe more. We’ll have a lot of ground to cover.”
Niko sighed. “Meat on a stick isn’t a meal.”
“Meat marinated for a day in buttermilk, grilled to smoky perfection on a stick even?”
Groaning, Niko re-clipped the belt of their rucksack around their waist. “You’re paying.”
“I am,” Asala said. “Oh, and do me a favor?”
“What?”
“Think you can ditch the mask now? No matter what, you’ll stand out, but the mask is too much even for an offworlder. We won’t get any answers with that on.”
It wasn’t a long walk to the Yard, but Asala kept her head down anyway. She didn’t have fond memories of Almagest, and things had gotten worse. There weren’t any corpses on the street, but in Asala’s professional estimation, that wasn’t far off. As it was, the streets were littered with lost souls. The exiled. The clanless. People addicted to flash or glow.
At least half the shops were abandoned. Glass broken and doors unhinged.
Niko drew attention. More than Asala liked. Without the proper markings, the proper tattoos—without the right walk—they looked every bit an innard.
“Let me do the talking,” Asala said.
“I do speak Upper Crescent,” said Niko. Of course they did. It was a requirement of the forces to speak at least the main dialects of the system.
“I know,” said Asala.
“And I can do this. I meant it when I said I had connections here.”
Asala nodded. She didn’t doubt they had more contact with people on Hypatia than she did at this point. “You do. But we’ve got to play to our strengths.”
“And your strength is what? Being more Hypatian than me? Last time I checked, you weren’t exactly keen to come back here.”
Yet it was people just like Niko who’d never let her forget this was the place of her birth. She didn’t have to be keen on the place. She didn’t have to consider it her home for it to consider her its subject.
Niko’s expression showed they’d just realized how much their statement of fact had felt like a jab.
“Because I’m starting to like you, I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” Asala said it lightly to dissipate the sudden tension.
Niko huffed several breaths. “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“Forget it. Now come on. There’s someone we can talk to right there.” She pointed ahead to a woman playing a card game with herself in a junky booth near the entrance to the Yard.
“Yeah?” came the crackly response through the receiver. The woman never looked up from her cards.
“We’d like to speak with you. Got a couple of questions about a ship that might’ve passed through here,” said Asala, the words mostly fluent but off somehow. A little stilted. A little flat.
The mechanic looked up, giving both Asala and Niko the once-over. “Lot of ships pass through here. It is a shipyard.” She looked back down and returned to her cards.
“Can you open the door?” Asala asked—realizing her mistake right away. She’d used the word for a house door. For something transient or temporary like this booth, there was a different word. It was a mistake a first-year student in Upper Crescent would make, and this planet was her home. Or had been her home.
The mechanic glanced up again, this time turning her gaze hard on Asala. “Those fake?” she asked, pointing to the tattoos on Asala’s face.
“Let us into the booth,” Asala said, her accent seeming to get thicker by the second.
Asala hated how stupid she sounded in front this stranger. How un-Hy
patian she must seem. This wasn’t a security booth; this woman would have let anyone in to do business who looked like a customer of the Yard. Apparently Asala now passed for a native almost as little as Niko did.
It shouldn’t matter or upset her. It did, though. Thirty-four years, and this planet still had its teeth in her.
“Let us in,” she repeated.
The mechanic relented, opening the door of the booth a tiny crack to allow Asala and Niko in. She didn’t want to let any of the heat out. Inside, a tiny electric heater kept her warm.
“You’re not going to find any answers here,” said the mechanic.
“Don’t doubt what I’m capable of achieving,” Asala replied.
“What we’re capable of achieving,” Niko corrected.
The mechanic watched Niko for a moment then turned away dismissively, making it clear
that Asala was the only one she was going to speak with.
“Maybe I should go search the Yard while you stay here. We’ll cover more ground that way,” said Niko.
The mechanic laughed bitterly. “You’re not going to have any more luck out there than in here, unless you can somehow give them back all the water Khayyam has stolen from us over centuries. Or, I don’t know, fix the goddamn sun you destroyed at our expense.”
Niko looked so hurt. They needed to learn how not to take those kinds of digs so personally.
“I’m on your side,” they said.
That prompted the mechanic to laugh again. “Get out of my booth. Can’t believe I let you in here. Get out. And I’d tell you to get off my planet, but if you stay, maybe we’ll get lucky and you’ll die here.”
“You know what? Fine,” said Niko.
“Nik—”
“It’s all right. It’s fine. She’s just telling the truth, anyway—I’m not going to get any leeway here. I’m going to reach out to some of my contacts. Maybe lie low at a pub and see what the gossip is. I’ll meet you back at the room tonight once I’ve got some leads.” They’d switched back to High Khayyami. Asala restrained herself from shaking her head—if Niko had thought for a few seconds, they’d have realized the mechanic was almost certain to understand that nearly as well as Upper Crescent. Khayyam’s power had made their dominant language the one of interplanetary trade; other planets didn’t have the luxury not to learn it.
The Vela: The Complete Season 1 Page 9