The Vela: The Complete Season 1

by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang

  “They’re here. They’re all here! Or they were. This place has such strict documentation requirements, and I’m finding matches to—to almost everybody, their bloodscans and fingerprints and facial rec—only—only—”

  “Niko!” Asala struggled to keep her voice low.

  “They’re all under different names. All of them. And every one of them was processed in by the same person—Soraya.”

  “Copy over everything you can. Hurry.”

  Asala kept the corner of her vision on the gap edging the curtain. Outside the alcove, Soraya hung up from her call. Her face sagged in exhausted lines, but she looked triumphant somehow. “How’s it going in there?” she called.

  “No matches yet.” Asala struggled to keep her voice level. “Your new life support getting set up okay?”

  “Sounds like they’re almost finished installing it. I’ve got some smart people here—folks who were hydroengineers or terraforming experts back on Hypatia. And now they’re stuck here working with me and not seeing a cent off it.” Her voice turned bitter. “Gan-De is downright idiotic not to take people like them, although I suppose we’d be in trouble if Cynwrig ever did try to snatch them away. I don’t know if I’d be able to keep this place habitable.”

  “I don’t envy you,” Asala said. It was even the truth. “The people here are lucky to have you.”

  “I’m the one who got lucky. I’m from Samos—or my family was. I don’t remember it. They smuggled me out in the belly of a cargo ship. And that was before Gan-De had closed its borders. I’m a Khayyami citizen now, but . . . once you see what’s going on here, you can’t look away, right?”

  Ifa stumbled through the doorway, panting.

  “Ifa?” Soraya looked between the boy and the headset in her hand. “Mangatjay just told me everything was going well. Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Um. Mangatjay said—I heard—” His eyes flickered up to Asala’s in the crack behind the curtain, and something tingled up the back of her neck.

  “Can we—can we talk alone for a minute?” Ifa asked Soraya.

  “We were just about done anyway,” Asala called from the alcove. She thwacked Niko with the back of her hand, and they rapidly started closing out, records blinking into nonexistence until the screen blanked to asking for a passcode. Asala edged out of the alcove. “Hi, kid. You did good out there.”

  Ifa flushed. But it didn’t look like it was from pride.

  Asala took Niko by the elbow and steered them around Ifa and a frowning Soraya. As soon as they had turned into the narrow, twisty hall, she sped up to a fast walk.

  Niko matched her pace. “What’s going on?”

  “The kid made us somehow. He must have heard we were back with Soraya and run here to . . . I don’t know.” Rescue her? Warn her? Make sure they weren’t holding her hostage? Who knew how teenagers’ minds worked. “Start killing any surveillance you can. And tell me you got something off those records.”

  “I did! I did, actually. None of the Vela refugees were processed through the regular channels—they’re all logged as going through a backup administrative center out past Block K. They were given living quarters in Zeta Section and then—all of a sudden—that section gets structural integrity issues and has to be sealed off. The computer records say they were moved, but . . .”

  Asala saw it immediately. “The people from the Vela are hiding in that section.” She broke into a jog. “Come on. We’ve got to get there before Soraya can hide them again.”

  Niko’s fingers swished over their handheld, bringing up a map of the camp.

  Together they swung through the bowels of old barges and along the bulkheads of decrepit cruise liners. Asala slowed their pace enough to try not to draw attention to themselves. It wasn’t like the camp wasn’t crowded; there were people everywhere, clanners hanging sharp-smelling chemical-dipped laundry across old ship struts or streaming to and from the ration windows. As Asala and Niko wound up to the Block K level, however, the traffic slowed.

  “Zeta Section. This way,” Niko said.

  This corridor had some airlocks off of it that were actually closed and sealed. Scan codes were pasted up by most of them, probably giving the proper work orders—though some also had hand-lettered signs that gave lie to the functionality of the official bureaucracy. Asala glanced at them as she and Niko hurried by—it looked like this was a section where new ships, or chunks of ships, were being made ready to weld on. Although more than a few airlocks had a newer note scrawled next to them marking danger and possible stress leaks . . .

  Because Soraya had reported fake stress leaks in Zeta Section to hide the refugees? Or because of real danger?

  Asala kept pace right on Niko’s heels. They were staring at their handheld so hard they almost walked right into the next sealed-off airlock. Asala stumbled to a stop next to them.

  EV suits and a rack of repair tools sat next to the airlock, with another hand-scrawled note about danger. The word was repeated underneath in several local Hypatian languages as well.

  “Shit,” Asala said, her breath quickened by the jog. “Maybe this section really is vacced.”

  Niko glanced around nervously. “Suit up just to be safe?”

  “Definitely.” No one with any off-ground experience would cycle an unknown airlock bare-skinned.

  Niko hesitated a few times with the EV suit, but they didn’t ask for help. Probably their first time suiting up for real, Asala realized, noting with approval how the prospect of actual vacuum didn’t seem to have frozen out their prior apprenticeship training.

  Niko had been pulling their weight on computer security and networking contacts, too, just as they’d promised. Asala resolved to try to remind herself of that the next time she got annoyed.

  She clicked on her headlamp and opened the suit radio. “Ready?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  With one more glance behind them, Asala punched the airlock cycler.

  They stepped together into dimness, the only light what little filtered in from the hallway behind them and their suit lamps. Asala waited for the inner door to cycle, her breathing loud in her ears.

  “My suit’s not reading total vacuum, but close enough,” she said.

  “Mine too,” Niko answered. “If it’s actually vacced, do you think it’s a dead end?”

  Asala considered for a moment. Her intuition was telling her this still felt off. Too many coincidences. Something about this section . . .

  “Only one way to find out.”

  They stepped forward into the darkness.

  Zeta Section was just as badly fit together as the rest of Camp Ghala. Maybe worse.

  “I think this was some old freighter,” Asala said. Her voice felt cavernous, reverberating in the radio. “A long time ago. A very long time ago.”

  “This is the end of the mapped section,” Niko said. “Maybe . . . maybe there’s nothing to see here after all.”

  “Wait.” Asala tromped toward the far end of whatever old bay they were crossing. Right at the end, sort of hacked into the metal—an airlock had been there, but it had been jammed open—and through it—

  Another space bridge.

  “There. Niko. Is that on the map?”

  “No, but I don’t know how often they update these.”

  “What about surveillance in this area?”

  “There’s some sort of security system, but not much. I doubt this place can stretch to much anywhere, honestly. I’m spoofing it.”

  Asala’s pulse quickened. EV suits were bulky to move in, but she managed to hurry.

  Crystallization had started on the joints of the bridge, and stress marks shone where the metal had been rubbed raw. This had been a rush job.

  Or maybe someone had only wanted whatever was on the other side of this bridge to look like part of the camp. Maybe whoever it was wasn’t planning to stay very long at all.

  Asala peered down the narrow passage, letting her headlamp limn the corners. She couldn’t q
uite see what was on the other end, but the canting gangway that branched immediately into corridors . . . the swooping lip of the design above the doorway . . .

  “We didn’t find the passengers of the Vela.” Her voice came out hushed. “We found the Vela.”

  “Oh. Oh. Shit,” Niko said.

  Asala hadn’t wanted to be the one to say it.

  She didn’t overly relish the idea of treading down the hash job of a leaking space bridge, but at least they were suited. Trusting Niko to follow, she carefully placed one foot in front of the other, alert for the metal to give below her boots or the joints to begin shifting against themselves. But she and Niko made it to the other end without incident.

  And they stepped onto the ship they had been chasing since before they left Khayyam.

  “Hello there,” Asala murmured to the empty darkness. “Now, who is hiding you? And why?”

  “And where are the passengers?” added Niko. “It’s them we have to bring back.”

  “Right . . .” Asala said, scanning her headlamp back and forth. But was it the passengers everyone was so interested in?

  She thought back again to the specs they’d been given. The Vela was a smaller, older ship, not even big enough for all the refugees it had carried and a far cry from a prize anyone from Khayyam would want. But those unlabeled additions on the specs that Asala hadn’t recognized . . . maybe the ship itself did have something to do with everything that had happened here.

  She couldn’t imagine Ekrem would send her all this way for a bit of shiny; he just wanted his political payday. But the terrorists . . . or Soraya . . .

  What about Uzochi, the physicist-terrorist—could she have been planning a major attack from before the Vela left Eratos? What if the whole ship was a mobile bomb, a trap, coming to dock here as part of their terrorism plan?

  All these people were after something . . .

  Or someone. Was Uzochi herself a scientific asset worth stealing? Soraya had admitted the value of her team of highly educated Hypatian experts, people who’d been reduced to scraping at the station to save their own lives—maybe Soraya wanted to add to that collection. Asala recalled Ekrem’s sales pitch: Uzochi wasn’t even the only scientist on the Vela. Her mother Vanja Ryouta’s whole lab had been out on Eratos.

  “This is weird,” Niko said.

  Asala turned.

  Niko’s helmet was bent toward their handheld. “I’m getting the most bizarre readings off the artificial gravity.”

  “I don’t feel any difference.” Asala tapped a boot against the metal panels of the flooring. “It’s clearly working, right?”

  “It is, but . . . according to these readings, it shouldn’t be. Or it’s—I don’t know, compensating for something that—I don’t know.”

  “Mass variations?” Asala came to look over their shoulder.

  “No. The whole artigrav strength reading is jacking up and down. Like, one gee, one point three gees, point three gees—we should definitely be feeling that, right? But I don’t feel anything at all.”

  “Maybe the readings are flaking.”

  “We should take a look at the artigrav chamber. I’m not sure I’d know what to look for, but—this is too weird. There might at least be engineering logs or something.”

  Asala wasn’t sure she’d know what to look for either, but she’d been in the exotic matter chambers of enough ships at least to know her way around them. Her scientific knowledge of artificial gravity ended at a layman’s limits—that it was run off something called exotic matter, which had to be contained in a special field so it didn’t interact with real matter. The whole thing wasn’t much to look at, usually a bowed-in containment chamber that supposedly had some little particles inside that physicists and engineers knew what to do with, and that Vanja Ryouta had managed to commodify and scale up so it could be slotted into ships easily and everyone else could work on top of it. If something went wrong with artificial gravity on a ship, it usually had to do with the software side, not the exotic matter unit itself.

  But she’d never seen readings like the ones on Niko’s handheld.

  Niko had a partial layout of the Vela pulled up, and the two of them crept through utilitarian hallways and clumsily converted living areas. The detritus of the Vela’s too-crowded manifest were everywhere—empty water cans, dirty scraps of cloth, a broken homemade toy. Asala and Niko took two wrong turns, but eventually made it into the control rooms.

  Asala picked her way through the cramped space over to an interface and brought up the logs. “If we can find what Uzochi and her cronies sabotaged, maybe that could give us a clue to—”

  Whatever she had been about to say dropped clear out of her head. The logs were blank.

  “Shit,” she said. “Any chance they had backups?”

  “I’m looking, but I’m not seeing anything obvious. If I had time to sit down with the system . . .”

  But Soraya might already know they were here.

  “We’ll do an engineering walkthrough and the artigrav chamber first,” Asala declared. “See if there’s anything we can pull. If not, we’ll circle back around.”

  “Okay. I think through here is engineering, and just below that should be the exotic matter containment—whoa.”

  “What?”

  “The artigrav readings just jumped wildly. We should’ve been feeling seven gees just now, and then gone almost weightless and now—now it’s bopping back and forth between four and ten.”

  What the hell? “Let’s get down there.”

  They edged through the engine sections. The flooring here had become even more scuffed than elsewhere, the panels worn and used. Asala wasn’t sure, but some of this equipment looked older than the ship itself.

  A ladder led down to where Niko thought the exotic matter chamber might be, and Asala followed them down hand over hand. It went a lot deeper than Asala had expected, dumping them a good three stories below engineering.

  And the door was sealed and coded.

  “Why the hell would someone seal up exotic matter?” Asala wondered aloud. “It’s not like it’s dangerous. If someone breaks the containment, it just goes poof, and everyone loses their gravity, right?”

  “As far as I know.” Niko sounded disturbed. “And I think it’s really hard to break those containment chambers, too.”

  It wasn’t even like someone could steal exotic matter without stealing a whole room-sized containment unit with it. Which was more than impractical, especially in the middle of fucking space. So why had someone taken such care to seal up this door?

  “Can you get in?” Asala asked.

  “I’m working on it. I think so. It’ll be a minute, though.”

  Asala crouched against the bulkhead and waited. Something was tickling the edge of her brain, something that would make all of this fit together . . .

  The wall shivered against her. It wasn’t a noise, exactly—the ship was too close to vacuum for noise. But something had banged hard enough up above for her to feel it.

  She straightened, keeping one glove against the wall. “Niko?”

  “Almost—got it!”

  The door slid open.

  They stared.

  Asala wasn’t even sure what she was seeing. The chamber was huge—and almost entirely empty, just space upon space stretching up toward the ceiling.

  And there, right near the door, nestled among panels and switchboards that might have looked standard in any artigrav chamber . . . instead of a clunky exotic matter containment chamber taking up half the room . . .

  “It’s a cube,” Niko said. “It’s a—what is it?”

  Asala had no more idea than they did. But the cube was, quite clearly, something. It was small enough she could have lifted it in both hands, its crystalline edges gleaming in their suits’ headlamps. But inside . . .

  The insides of the cube moved. And not just moved, they . . . writhed, folding in on themselves and then inverting, tunneling to a point that somehow seemed to str
etch forever into a dimension Asala couldn’t see.

  Her stomach roiled watching it, and yet somehow she couldn’t look away.

  “It looks like it’s plugged into the artigrav system,” Niko said. “Instead of an exotic matter unit, I guess? But . . .”

  What. The. Hell.

  And suddenly everything clicked together in Asala’s head. Ekrem, Soraya, Uzochi, terrorist saboteurs, everyone being after this fucking ship—it wasn’t about the refugees, even the scientist ones, and it wasn’t about the ship itself.

  This was a war over a piece of technology. And Asala had been played.

  • • •

  Soraya clicked off the call and took a precious minute to sit with her head in her hands.

  You had to make this choice, she reminded herself. You had to. It doesn’t matter how much you hate Hafiz and the Order. This is too big. This could mean everything.

  She had no illusions about what she’d just done. Hafiz was not a moderate or reasonable person. By making that call, Soraya had signed Asala’s and Niko’s death warrants, as surely as if she’d murdered them with her own hands.

  But they had to be stopped. Not for her, but for everybody—for any chance anyone here would have for survival.

  Telling herself that wouldn’t ever make it better, she knew.

  It seemed like every day Soraya had to make another choice that chipped away at her soul. Someday she’d have nothing left. Maybe she hadn’t had anything left for a long time . . .

  “Are you our new volunteer?” the coordinator had asked on Soraya’s first day at Camp Ghala.

  Soraya nodded. “I want to help. My parents were from Samos—”

  “Lovely story. Watch what I do and then do the same thing. Most of these will be either one or two protein packs, then plus a water. A lizard could do it.”

  The first refugee stepped up from the line, clan tattoo spiraling maroon across her skin, two young children in tow. They clung to the sides of her trousers with wide eyes.

  Too wide. Too sunken.

  The woman passed over her ration card to be scanned.

  “Two protein packs,” the coordinator read.

  “And I need a can of water, please,” the Hypatian woman said softly.