The Vela: The Complete Season 1

by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang

Asala had never been in a prison that felt like this. No whistles. No smack talk.

  “Teak?” she tried, her steps quiet and steady. She only had about ten minutes. “Teak av Fintus?” she asked again, more confidently this time. “I need to speak with Teak av Fintus now.”

  “What?”

  She made her way to cell 104. Teak was already standing up and facing her.

  “We don’t have much time. I need answers. No bullshit. No stalling. If you don’t give me what I want, I suspect you’ll be the one to suffer for my being here. I can get out. You’re trapped behind a door,” said Asala.

  “Not for much longer,” Teak sneered. He was gruffer than Asala expected. No tattoos. No doubt this jail wasn’t a kind place. Even after a few weeks, it already had taken its toll on him.

  “Do you want to try me?” Remember the mission. Niko said she only had a little bit of time. She had to be out of here by the morning bioscan sweeps. “I suspect you know what I’m here about. Do you have anything to lose by cutting through the shit and telling me what I need to know?”

  The volume in the cell wing rose as prisoners began to chatter and mill around their cells. “Can you get me out of here?” Teak asked.

  She didn’t necessarily want to, but they’d known all along their leverage was poor and escape would have to be on the table. Besides, the guy was locked up in this shithole just for selling stolen fuel? Her conscience would be clear. “We can talk about that if you tell me what went down on the Vela. What happened after you touched down here for repairs? Did you go to the Yard? Where’s the Vela now?”

  “Look,” said Teak. “Me and a couple of other escorts were pretty suspicious when the captain noted the ship needed repairs. I mean, the Vela had been all kitted out and double-checked. Our journey had been smooth. I notice a couple of the refugees are acting a bit squirrely. One in particular, and I know from the manifest she’s some famous physicist.”

  He was talking about Uzochi. Asala had heard of her through her mother, but more recently, she remembered her from the refugee profiles she’d watched back on the Altair.

  What stupid thing had Uzochi Ryouta done, and what had it cost the refugees?

  “She was a real smarty type,” said Teak. “She could’ve easily manufactured the damage to the ship’s systems and drives on purpose, right? I don’t know, she acted funny since she first got on the ship, like she thought something was wrong. I mean, we were overcrowded, for sure. No doubt Ekrem underestimated the sheer number of them there’d be. But the ship was in no danger. It was built to carry loads way bigger than that. Anyway, so I confront her when we’re about to dock into the in-orbit shuttleport on Hypatia. I don’t know, I’m not even thinking it’s a big deal. But bam, full-on fucking mutiny. Every single refugee. There were only a few of us escorts, you know? We weren’t expecting to need hard security. My team got overpowered quick.” His face folded in harder. “They let me out with the rest of the team, a little worse for wear—or kicked us out, depending on how you look at it. This crap-ass planet’s government is in shambles; they knew no one here would care. Before they shoved off again, I decided to do a little something nice for myself and got the fuel. Figured if I was stuck here, I’d need a way to get money to book my passage back home.”

  Asala shook her head. “Fuck.”

  These refugees had been on their way to a cushy life on Khayyam. Politics had been playing in their favor for once. So there was no reason they would have mutinied against their escorts unless they had another goal in mind. A violent one.

  She needed to get out of here, and she needed to call the president right away.

  “Alpha, you clear?”

  “Shit,” said Asala.

  “Don’t tell me you’re still in the cell block!”

  “How bad is this?”

  “You’re going to get caught in the auto bioscan and it’s going to trigger an alarm. Nothing I can do to stop it. I’m going to cause a distraction. But, Alpha? You need to run. Go. Run.”

  At least Asala had what she needed. She ran for her life, alarms blaring at high pitch overhead. She wasn’t the only one sprinting. Thanks to Niko, every gate and door in Kleidaria had opened.

  As she ran, she used her comm to call President Ekrem. She didn’t know how much time they had. She needed to get word to him quickly what was going on.

  He didn’t answer. She left a message. “You need to get people out here. I think the refugees from the Vela are planning a terrorist attack.”

  • • •

  “Alpha?”

  “Copy,” said Asala. “I’m approaching the utility door now. Head to the train station as fast as you can. I’ll meet you there. Got guards on my tail. No doubt they have personal vehicles. If you can buy us any time—”

  “I’ve been looking for an excuse to use an EMP,” they said, tone unsettlingly cheerful.

  “You can’t cut out the train. That’s our exit strategy,” gritted Asala, barely able to get the words out as she sprinted.

  “A baby EMP,” Niko protested. “Fetus, really.”

  Asala rolled her eyes and kept running at breakneck speeds. “Call Simya’s sister. Let her know we’re proceeding more quickly than planned. If I don’t see you at the train, meet me at the Yard. We’re not going to be able to get back to our ship. We don’t have the time. But that mechanic at the Yard said she’d refurbished a couple of vessels. We’re going to be requisitioning one.”

  Adrenaline rushed Asala as she made the journey back to the city, anxious when she didn’t see Niko on the train. The EMP had cut off her radio before she’d cleared the prison. She had no way of getting in touch. She tried her comm. The stored and downloaded functions worked but she couldn’t get a call out.

  She did have a return message from Ekrem that he’d left while she’d been busy not getting caught. “Asala, get back to me as soon as you can. I need specifics. Times. Locations. Asala, what the hell is going on?”

  Asala tried to call him again but it was no use. At least the train trip went by fast.

  Once she got to the rendezvous point, there was still no Niko. She waited for them for fifteen minutes at the Yard, where there was no sign of Simya, either. An alarm blaring back at Kleidaria reached them faintly even here, putting everyone on high alert. Asala pretended to be tinkering on a scrapped ship when authorities ran by.

  Finally, she saw Niko. Running.

  “Go!” they shouted.

  She followed after them. “We need to find a working ship—”

  “We don’t have time. Look.” Niko pointed behind them, up outside the Yard. Their face was plastered in holograph in the center of the city with the word Wanted above. “According to one of my people here, there’s a junker with a boatload of refugees leaving in three minutes in the east section of the Yard. We need to be on it. I told Simya’s sister. She’s on her way.”

  Asala ran as fast as she could. The ship’s doors were already closing when they spotted it. “Go!” shouted Niko again.

  “You got a ticket?” someone asked.

  “We can pay,” said Asala.

  The man took a look at her and decided she looked monied enough to believe it. “All right. Get on.”

  He pushed the button to resume shutting the door. “Wait!” Asala grabbed his arm. “We’re waiting for one more person.”

  Asala frantically scanned the anxious crowd, comparing their faces to the image capture of Simya’s sister she’d seen. “She’ll be here any minute.”

  “No can do,” the man said, and he shoved her off. Over Asala’s shout and Niko’s outraged cry, he pressed the button to close the door.

  And they were off and away, Simya’s sister left behind.

  Episode 4

  Camp Ghala

  SL Huang

  “Pull the manual seal!” someone had screamed, and then the ship wrenched around them, the sound vibrating through every atom of their bodies. Upward and downward canted as the artificial gravity went, and Asala twiste
d in the air, detritus and grasping human bodies and pieces of the fucking ship levitating around her in the darkness. Asala scrabbled for a bulkhead, but that wouldn’t help; this whole damn ship was about to go—if you could call it a ship, if you could call any of these scrap heaps “ships” that the refugees cobbled together and flung into space with a wish and a prayer—

  She could have sworn she saw the far wall perforate in slow motion, the leaks starting that would suck everything out with them, Asala and Niko and their mission and the unlucky Hypatians they’d crammed themselves in with on this death trap to get off Hypatia, and all Asala could think of was Dayo’s face. Had she gone this way too? Watched death coming to suck her and everyone she was with into the cold nothing of space?

  None of Asala’s training meant a damn here. No one could fight vacuum.

  With a grind that jarred her teeth where she clung, the far wall bowed outward and then gave entirely. Screams turned to blood and dust as people pinwheeled past her, Hypatians she’d gotten to know by necessity during the crossing—Jagdish Drorit, with whom she’d crawled from bulkhead to bulkhead caulking weaknesses and stress points before they turned to leaks, seam after seam until the caulk ran out; Gulnaz Nevenka, who’d been the closest thing the ship had to a navigator and who’d sworn she’d pointed them right at Gan-De and told everyone firmly every day that they’d make it; little Eirene, who’d had her tenth name day right after they broke atmo—

  The girl’s ragdoll body being sucked out into vacuum was going to be the last thing Asala saw, because that’s when her own grip tore free and she lost any semblance of control.

  • • •

  “Breathe.” The scraggly aid worker crouching next to Asala looked too young to be away from her parents, let alone working an underfunded charity vessel sent to pull dying refugees out of the black. The girl took Asala’s pulse and blood pressure with a ribbon and her fingers, as if they were in the damn Sand Ages, and Asala did as she was told, just as she had when she’d first been brought aboard and come to herself with an oxygen plate clamped over her nose and mouth.

  She wasn’t sure if she remembered crashing bodily into the emergency force field, or if she’d lost consciousness and reconstructed the memory later. Every part of her was bruised—her ribs, her skull, every fucking joint. It felt like the insides of her flesh had been mashed up and squeezed back in.

  These sorts of rescue ships could barely save the number of lives they did—there was no med tech to spare for treating mere bruises.

  The aid worker at Asala’s side finished her check and moved on to Niko beside her.

  Asala had been dully surprised by the spike of emotion when she’d found Niko among those who’d been pulled out of the collapsing scrap ship. That didn’t mean she had any capacity for taking on their shell-shocked glassiness as her own problem. She had enough of her own shit to deal with—the face of Simya’s sister twined guiltily with memories of Dayo, now staring with the eyes of too many unremitting dead.

  You’ve seen people die a thousand times before, in much more gruesome ways. And you’re going to let this get to you? Buck up, Asala Sikou.

  “How many?” Niko whispered.

  “What?” The aid worker readjusted her fingers on their wrist with a frown. The interruption had probably made her lose count.

  “How many of us did you manage to pull out?” Niko said. Their voice was hoarse, as if they’d been screaming for the entire seventy hours since the two of them had been brought aboard. “How many of the refugees died?”

  The girl’s face folded in. “Your ship, we got seventy-three of you. Six more died after, so that’s sixty-seven.”

  Niko’s head fell back against the bulkhead the two of them sat propped against. “Over three hundred. That ship had over three hundred people . . .”

  Asala tried to tell her gnawing guilt that they’d done Simya a favor by forsaking her. Abandoning her sister, going back on their promise—ironically, it might have saved the woman’s life.

  Asala knew that didn’t absolve them.

  “We’ll reach Camp Ghala in two hours,” the aid worker said, as if she hadn’t heard Niko. She clicked something on her handheld and then moved on to the next huddle of survivors. Asala wondered just how much death she’d seen.

  “I used to dream . . .” Niko had started shivering. “I had this stupid dream, I thought maybe after my apprenticeship I might get Father’s approval to come out here and do something like this. Really help people, you know? I thought it’d be . . . I don’t know . . . romantic somehow . . .”

  The words twisted themselves over in Niko’s mouth, bitter and self-hating.

  Well, Asala couldn’t help thinking. Now you know.

  She managed not to say it out loud. They had to get back to the mission. The terrorists—led by would-be scientist Uzochi Ryouta, of all people—what the hell were they planning?

  “We have to make a plan for when we hit Camp Ghala.” Asala forced her voice firm. “I think we’re clear to use our real identities. Hypatian authorities won’t have jurisdiction or personnel to pursue us, even if they got a clean ID, and cross-planetary cooperation is even more junked out here than in the Inner Ring. We might also want to think about pulling out your connection to your father. He’ll still have plausible deniability.” A possible terror threat escalated everything. “What do you know about the refugee camp?”

  “Other than that it’s an overcrowded death trap of failing life support because Gan-De won’t allow the presence of refugees to sully their pristine Gandesian soil? Gods, Asala, the ship we were on didn’t even make it across. If that kind of scrap metal is what Camp Ghala is using to cobble together orbital living quarters when the planet right below them is ninety percent uninhabited—”

  “Yes, other than that,” Asala said sharply. “The terrorists’ end goal couldn’t have been just taking the Vela, not the least because they kept it so quiet. That sabotage was a means to something bigger. I promise you, migration politics will be the last of anyone’s worries if war breaks out again on Gan-De.”

  Niko snorted in a way that didn’t sound like agreement.

  Asala chose to ignore it. “Tell me what connections you have in the camp who could help us.”

  “Soraya’s our best bet. She’s not one of the official administrators, but most of them are useless anyway, or are working for the Gandesian government, or both. If the Vela came through Camp Ghala, Soraya would know about it, or she’d know who would.” Niko imparted the information almost mechanically, as if the Vela didn’t even matter anymore.

  “Good. You can contact her?”

  Niko dug in a pocket and held up their handheld. Its screen was black. “I’ve been out of power since before we lost the ship. I asked the rescue workers and they said there’s nothing to spare. I could jack in somewhere, but . . .”

  Asala swallowed. The only thing this ship had above the one they’d been pulled off of was its spaceworthiness. It wouldn’t take much to recharge a handheld, but . . .

  Since coming on board, she’d already seen the aid workers forced to scrub a rescue because all their EV suits’ power packs had run down. The urgency of pending terrorist attack tried to press at her, but with their arrival at Camp Ghala only two hours away . . .

  “We can track down Soraya once we get to the camp,” Asala decided.

  She tried not to think about her own handheld. She’d lost it along with her sidearm when the ship imploded. Spinning in the void of space somewhere, no doubt, cold and cracked. Like she should be.

  Asala had her knees pulled up in front of her; she dropped her head to lean against them and closed her eyes. The dying Hypatians flashed in front of her again. This time they all had Dayo’s face.

  • • •

  Niko felt like they were being smothered.

  Humanity pressed in from all sides, hot and overripe and unwell. Niko and Asala shuffled off the rescue ship amid a moving mass of people so densely packed Niko couldn’t
have stopped moving if they’d wanted to.

  They tasted bile again and were suddenly back on the scrap ship, the g-changes flinging them into free fall in complete darkness, screaming and screaming and then vomiting and then black. Even that hadn’t compared to the feeling afterward, though, there on the rescue ship, huddled under a med blanket, eyes flicking through the others, searching for missing faces—all those people Niko had met and talked to and started to become friends with on the long weeks over, even after they and Asala had executed such a selfishly hollow escape from Hypatia. Amarante and Jagdish and Hamish . . . Eirene, and her parents, and her seven clan mothers and two clan fathers . . .

  And now they were gone. Niko didn’t even know how. They’d died when the ship came apart, probably alone and panicked and knowing it was the end. All any of them had wanted was a tiny corner of the universe where they could live their lives.

  The universe had decided that was too much to ask.

  Yet Niko had survived. Niko, the privileged child of a living planet, who could turn around after this and go back to that planet and have not just a corner of it but as much of it as they wanted. Niko, who’d already taken more in life than any of these people had ever asked for. Niko, who’d only been on that ship in the first place because they’d left behind the one person on Hypatia they’d promised to save.

  Niko’s father’s voice echoed in their head, Ekrem clapping a solid hand on Niko’s shoulder when he granted them the commission—“You’ll find the Vela, kiddo; I know I can count on you”—and the surge of unwanted emotion that brought, that Niko would live up to those words or die trying even though what their dad thought of them was less important than literally everything else going on in the universe right now. And when Niko had tried to assure Father that, yes, they would find the passengers of the Vela and bring them back safe, Father had laughed his charming laugh and said, “Not just the people, remember, we need the ship safe and shiny too!” like it was a joke but not a joke.