The Vela: The Complete Season 1

by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang

  The disgust Niko had felt in that moment rippled forward to now, the starkest of contrasts. Father only wanted his vid bites and image captures for the news, the gleaming spectacle of the Vela bright and whole. That the ship could be what mattered to him, the gods-damned ship, when out here people were dying every second like their lives were nothing—Niko’s brain was breaking over it like it represented every gods-damned thing out here no one from Khayyam understood.

  Everything Niko had never understood before either.

  They kept shuffling along with the crowd, trying to stay close to Asala. She doesn’t have to feel guilty, Niko thought wretchedly. She clawed her way through this whole fucked-up journey already. I’m the one who doesn’t deserve to be alive.

  Niko couldn’t have said when they stepped from the ship to the space bridge or from the bridge into Camp Ghala; it was all a blur of wan lighting and dingy metal. What really counted as part of the camp anyway? The new scrap ships just kept getting welded on in an increasingly unstable pile of space junk. An unstable pile that more and more people kept cramming into, heaping against every resource, oxygen and food and medicine and water, unsustainable and endless.

  Gan-De and General Cynwrig probably hoped the camp would eventually break apart in their sky. That would conveniently solve their refugee problem. Meanwhile, they kept their orbital defenses bristling with AI missiles, just in case some refugee dared to try for a life beyond digging their fingernails into the edges of a scrap heap.

  The clump of humans pressing around Niko and Asala unfolded into a wide bay. It had probably been for cargo initially, or maybe shuttles, on whatever unlucky ship it had originated from. Now it was an unwelcoming atrium, refugees slumped in clumps together across the whole expanse of the wide floor, their possessions gathered around them.

  The thin drone of an automated voice echoed above the bay.

  “Please visit a kiosk to receive a number. Entrants will be processed in the order they arrive. The current wait time is five hundred and sixty-seven hours. If you lose your temporary ration card . . .”

  “We need to find someone to talk to,” Asala said, craning her neck. The other people from their ship were dispersing, filtering to the screens lining the walls.

  “Excuse me, kima,” Asala said to one of the groups sitting on the floor. An old woman looked up, one of her eyes filmed over with white. She squinted the other up at Asala.

  “Yes?”

  Asala switched to speaking Upper Crescent. “We need to speak to someone in charge. Where can we do that?”

  The woman chuckled softly.

  “Kima? Where can I talk to someone?”

  “You gotta take a number,” the person next to the woman called over. “They don’t talk to you until you take a number.”

  “. . . in the order they arrive. The current wait time is five hundred and sixty-eight hours. If . . .”

  “I need to see someone in authority,” Asala tried to insist. “There has to be someone . . .” She gazed around the bay and its sea of hunched bodies.

  Almost six hundred hours. The number started to sink in. Niko multiplied—that was over three Khayyami weeks.

  Niko crouched down next to the woman and her partner. “Are you telling me you have to wait almost six hundred hours just to enter the camp? Just to get in?”

  The woman’s partner peeled open an emergency nutrient pack and licked the lid. “You mean we hafta wait almost six hundred hours, my friend. You’re one of us. Come now, pull up a bit of floor.” They rolled their hand in a welcoming gesture.

  Niko didn’t answer, instead straightening back up next to Asala. The number of people here . . . people curled on the floor sleeping, playing simple games, rocking children, and just waiting, waiting, for three weeks . . . And they weren’t even inside yet.

  After clawing their way across an abyss that tried to kill them in ships that were literally falling apart, these people reached their destination and were told to wait. To get into a refugee camp where they would also wait. And wait. For years. Maybe forever.

  The utter hopelessness of it sandbagged into Niko in a way it never had before. They wanted to scream at everyone here, how, how can you do it, how can you keep going when there’s no end, when you’re just being told over and over to take a number, wait, another week, another year, another seventeen years—

  “The aid workers might know,” Asala said, turning back. “The whole system can’t be automated. There has to be someone we can—”

  Niko followed her gaze. The bulkhead doors had closed behind them.

  “The current wait time is five hundred and seventy hours . . .”

  “New plan,” Asala declared. “We’ve got to get you some power so you can reach your contact. What do you need in order to jack in somewhere here?”

  “. . . wait time is five hundred and seventy-three hours . . .”

  “Niko.”

  “Power. Right. Uh, let’s go over and see.”

  People from their own rescue ship still queued at every kiosk. Niko and Asala filed in behind one of the lines. Asala kept shifting from foot to foot, her eyes darting around, the picture of impatience.

  “The current wait time is five hundred and seventy-seven hours.”

  “It doesn’t feel right, us trying to jump the line,” Niko said.

  Asala gave them the look they had hoped they’d earned their way out of somewhere between dragging her limp body from the hydrogen-processing plant and breaking into a prison in the frigid cold of Hypatia. Why did they always feel they couldn’t gain an ounce of respect with her before it all dripped away?

  “Do I have to remind you why we’re here?” she hissed.

  Right. They were on a mission. Niko’s feelings were a selfish luxury.

  “We’re here to help some refugees,” Niko growled. They weren’t sure whether they said it to Asala or to remind themselves. They still weren’t sure how much they believed the sabotage story, but the people from the Vela had been fleeing Eratos, all those people from the videos—they all deserved to make it back to the Inner Ring and live. No matter what.

  But so did these people.

  Niko was starting to feel like their mission didn’t mean shit.

  “The current wait time is five hundred and ninety-nine hours. If you lose your temporary ration card . . .”

  • • •

  Soraya added up the columns one more time.

  Fuck.

  They weren’t going to have enough oxygen.

  Food could be stretched—they could cut down people’s rations yet again, trimming back and turning away parents whose children were already malnourished. Vaccines they could skip and then close their eyes and hope. But oxygen they had no way around. They’d already thinned the air as much as they dared.

  Everyone at Camp Ghala had known they’d have to prepare for the orbital window opening from Hypatia, the alignment that meant even underpowered scrap heaps could make the hop. Over this month, more and more and more ships would be swarming to their already over-strapped walls, more and more desperate people, people who needed food and water and fucking oxygen. Everyone here had known the ships would start coming and keep coming; they’d known years in advance and yet here they were just meeting the edge of the first wave and already breaking. Soraya had begged and bartered and bargained with everyone she could to try to prevent this—every charity organization, no matter how much money it was pocketing on the side; every connection she had in the Gandesian government; every contact she had on Khayyam or Khwarizmi or between worlds. Even fucking Hafiz, and bargaining with someone like them was like juggling knives, for all they supposedly shared Soraya’s same goals. Self-styled leader of the so-called Order of Boreas, touting themself as the true voice of the refugees, when all they did was make Soraya’s job three thousand times harder every day . . .

  Still, thinking of Hafiz and the Order made a sharp blade of impossible hope slice through Soraya’s chest—along with a fury that nea
rly suctioned it away. No. Don’t think about Hafiz and what they claim is possible. It’s not going to solve what’s in front of you, and they’re blocking you every step of the way right now, just as they always have.

  Besides, it was partially thanks to Hafiz that Ghala was toppling off the point of no return—Hafiz’s grand schemes while they dealt shady deals behind Soraya’s back, Hafiz stealing from them all while claiming to be the would-be savior of everybody, Hafiz clamoring after delusional fantasies while shoveling the problem of keeping actual people alive off on Soraya, expecting her to overextend the camp again and again forever as long as Hafiz and the Order could strip out power for themselves.

  Nobody wanted the practical reality of the camp to be their problem. And nobody else was going to take the blame when Soraya had to start turning away shiploads of human beings. Parents and children and infants who’d already almost died every day just to get here, and now Soraya was going to let them die waiting in space because she didn’t have enough oxygen for them. Everyone who’d turned her down, Hafiz included—none of them would have to be the people saying, No, you can’t dock, I know you’re dying a slow death over there but if you dock we’ll all die too, sorry bye. Though knowing Hafiz, they’d probably be willing to say it just like that.

  Great Mother, all Soraya wanted to do was put on a vid, turn off her brain, and sleep for a week. She rubbed her eyes, and her gaze caught on the bright finger paintings and wax drawings she’d pasted in careful rows above her interface desk. She’d kept every gift she’d ever been given—the more jerry-built or homemade, the more it meant. But the children’s drawings she’d all placed here, because she needed to see them every day as much as those young migrants had needed her.

  Soraya leaned her forehead against the heels of her hands. Think. Squeeze blood from this stone. She’d done it before.

  She could only think of two choices, one impossible and one more impossible. She could get the new barracks block up and running by luck and sheer force of will, or convince Gan-De to finally permit expanding the camp to the surface. The second one was a nonstarter. But the barracks block—it was there, they’d built the space, maybe not enough, but it would cover the next few weeks of refugees at least . . .

  “Soraya?” Mangatjay pulled back the plast curtain over her work alcove. “Block J is saying they have fungus mites in the lichen protein. They’re wondering if they should give it out anyway.”

  Shit.

  “And Siriporn just issued a report she had to seal off Zeta Section in Block K again. They were getting stress leak warnings. But she wanted to remind you that the stress meters are broken in sections Eta and up, so she’s wondering if she should seal them off too, preemptively.”

  Soraya pressed a thumb against the bridge of her nose. “How many people do we have living there?”

  “Um, I don’t know. I’ll get you that number.”

  “Hey, Soraya,” called the voice of her fourteen-year-old assistant, Ifa, from behind Mangatjay. “You’ve got an incoming from the fleece. You want it?”

  “In here,” Soraya called back. Dammit. What did they want? The Gandesian troop detachment stationed here was supposed to be Camp Ghala’s official law enforcement, but in practice, Soraya’s people played an exhausting game trying to protect the residents from them. The ones who gave her the least trouble were the lazy ones.

  But she also couldn’t refuse a call from them.

  She waved Mangatjay away for the moment and took a deep breath of precious fucking oxygen, trying to forget for a moment the overwhelming crush of work that wasn’t even her job, work that wasn’t going to get done if she didn’t do it. Then she tapped the blinking hold cursor on her screen.

  “Hey, Soraya.” The Gandesian guard leaned in close to the camera. “You’re looking well.”

  “Get to it, Enlil. What do you want?”

  “We caught a couple of clannies trying to jack into the power grid out front. We were gonna deal with them ourselves, right, but one of ’em claims they know you.” He leered.

  You mean one of them paid you off to make this call, Soraya thought. She sighed. “Put them on.”

  Enlil moved out of the way to reveal two people behind him—a tall, dark woman with a hard face who in fact did have a Hypatian clan tattoo, and beside her . . .

  Oh. Niko. The child of President bloody Ekrem of bloody Khayyam.

  Soraya resisted the urge to turn away and laugh hysterically. Or start weeping. She knew exactly what Niko was here for, and she did not fucking have time for this today. But she also wasn’t in a position to turn away anyone connected to the Khayyami government, not when she had at least thirty petitions in to them for help.

  “Let them in,” she said to Enlil. “I’ll send someone down to meet them.”

  This was going to fuck her whole day.

  • • •

  “Hi! Hi. I’ll take them from here.” A Hypatian teenager pushed past the shifty Gandesian guard and grinned up at Asala and Niko with crooked teeth. Gangly arms poked out of clothes at least three sizes too big for him.

  “And you are?” Asala said.

  “I’m Ifa. I’m here to take you to Soraya. Yer—!”

  The last word punctuated the arrival of a blur of little girl, who cannonballed past Ifa and threw her arms around Asala’s legs. “Hello,” Asala heard muffled against her knees. “I’m Yer. I’m your new friend!”

  “Don’t mind her,” said Ifa, trying to pry the girl off Asala. “She’s my sister, sorry—I look after her, you know. Come on, Yer, let the nice lady go.”

  Asala had to bite back an urge to snap at them. But after a moment of Ifa’s attempts to break his sister’s increasingly tight grasp, the alarming sorrow of the girl’s clinginess eclipsed any irritation. Yer was still too young to have the full clan tattoo, but the color and style of the ring around her eye matched Ifa’s more complicated markers, and Asala didn’t have to ask what had happened to their parents or other clan elders.

  Ifa finally managed to peel Yer’s grip off Asala and transfer it to himself. She clutched at her big brother’s arm like she was glued to it. Ifa waved Asala and Niko after him with his other hand, and the two children led the way around a corner, out of the processing areas filled with the dead-eyed refugees who’d waited six hundred hours to be given a space here.

  Asala glanced around her as they walked, cataloguing details as usual. What she saw made her more than a little nervous. They kept stepping up or down between defunct ships, their airlocks jammed open permanently, metal caulk shoved into welded seams and joints that looked rubbed to breaking. Asala had spent a lot of time on ships, and this place—

  She flashed again to the wall of the refugee ship giving way, everything spiraling out into the black . . .

  It was on her tongue to ask if there was any evacuation plan for this floating death trap of a city, but the question was too ridiculous to ask. These people simply lived their lives one bad leak away from oblivion.

  They turned into a long hall that looked like it had once been part of a habitat ship, loud with the buzz of the crowds moving through it.

  “This is the Thoroughfare,” Ifa said, trotting along with Yer in front of them as if he were a tour guide. “It’s not that busy today, but on market days you can find most anything here. Blocks A through J are that way. For Blocks K and up you have to go over one section and up a level to connect.”

  Asala roused herself to look around with more than a tactician’s sense. The Thoroughfare was lined on both sides by countless people with clan tattoos, noisily chatting or bargaining with each other—Hypatians who’d set up booths trading clothes, household goods, electronics. Asala caught snatches of at least three different Hypatian dialects. More kids chased each other through the crowds, shrieking, and one group off to the side looked like a makeshift class, held between the home mothers’ and clan mothers’ work at their booths. Even in this far too crowded place of limbo, people laughed, hugged each other . . . s
he saw a thousand small kindnesses as these people sacrificed resources they didn’t have for their family and neighbors, and together were able to live another day.

  The scent of jinma wafted across Asala’s senses, sharp and earthy.

  “Spices! Spices from home. Even Ghala glop can be made palatable with this!” called the vendor.

  Asala’s hand twitched. She wanted to reach up and turn off her hearing implants. She also wanted to go over and inhale the woman’s entire booth. Jinma—it was a mountain spice, heavy in the region of her clan, but never exported in the dishes the rest of the system saw as Hypatian cuisine. The aroma seemed to fill her whole throat, like she could feel the cloying, medicinal aftertaste that came if it was too concentrated, and it tasted of longing.

  She hadn’t smelled jinma in over thirty years.

  “Okay, just a bit longer, up here!” Ifa called back to them. “This way. Watch your step, it’s narrow.”

  Asala shook herself and followed. They left the Thoroughfare behind and climbed a winding staircase that somehow seemed to be on the seams of three ships mashed together and stapled there as if it made sense. Stepping through the final bulkhead led into a space at the top that was small but surprisingly private given the camp’s space limitations.

  Inside, a short brown-skinned woman with her hair bound back into a messy knot was speaking rapidly into a headset and pacing as much as the room allowed. The office surrounding her was as cramped as anywhere else in Camp Ghala, and though the woman was currently the only occupant, it had workstations for at least three other people plus a curtained-off work alcove in the back. Off to one side, a bunk covered in homemade quilts with another curtain half-closed across it made a sleeping area the size of a closet—these must be Soraya’s living quarters as well. Somehow the place was both ruthlessly organized and filled to the brim with the mementos of years.

  “I know we’re receiving expired stock here, and we appreciate it,” Soraya was saying as they entered. “But we can’t feed people fungus mites . . . Well, we don’t want to feed people grain worms, either, but they’re harmless protein! Fungus mites will burrow into a person’s intestine and cause intense diarrhea unless the person is given dyphoxin . . . I hope you’re kidding. That’s not a solution, even if we did have enough dyphoxin for everyone.” She held up a finger to Asala and Niko. “I appreciate that you don’t feel like this is your problem, but we were counting on—no, stop. Edible food. Look, can I speak to your supervisor? . . . All right. Please inform her I’ll call her back then.”