The ship thrummed to life. Asala punched in their initial trajectory based on the coordinates Soraya had given her. Detaching from the camp wasn’t going to be fun, especially since Asala had no way to guarantee that any debris wouldn’t hit the other ships that had been welded onto the refugee camp, but she didn’t have many options. She would just have to trust that the debris would be too low velocity to cause Camp Ghala a hull breach.
Sure enough, a thunk reverberated through the deck as they set out. “I’m not looking forward to braving Gan-De’s defenses in this junk heap,” Asala said dryly. “It’s up to you to hack us a way through.”
Niko’s grin was strained. “Have I ever failed you? Don’t answer that.” Nevertheless, their fingers were already flickering expertly over the controls as they began running homebrew code kits on the ship’s computer. If the computer had worked before, there was a chance it might work again.
Meanwhile, Asala had one last matter to take care of before they braved the fortress world. She fired up the ansible and put in a call to Khayyam—specifically, to President Ekrem. It was the ass-crack of dawn where he lived, by her calculation, but she needed to talk to him.
Come on, she thought. Pick up, damn you.
But though the seconds burned past and the ship’s acceleration picked up, pushing her back into her cushioned seat, no answer came.
It could be nothing. Ansibles had always been notoriously finicky. It might be an ordinary communications outage. Or it might be that Ekrem was sleeping in after a hard night’s work or a scorching tryst with the latest lover he’d selected for their political connections, or that he was closeted in a meeting that couldn’t be put off. There were many reasons he might not be returning her call.
None of the possibilities she’d cooked up did anything to ease the bite of fear in her heart that said, He’s been using you all along. You’re not Khayyami, after all; you’re never going to fit in . . .
“Asala,” Niko was saying. “Asala! We have a problem.”
Niko didn’t have to repeat themself again. She saw it on the sensors. Gan-De’s defenses had activated.
“I tried to jam the telemetry,” Niko said rapidly, telling her what she’d already figured out, “but we still have five missiles locked onto us. And there’re more coming.” They continued to jab their console. “I’ll keep hacking, but—oh hell—they’re waking up so fast.”
The cube from the Vela wriggled and danced at Asala’s hip. It might be the salvation of the system, as President Ekrem had claimed. But it wouldn’t do her, or anyone, a damn bit of good if they couldn’t make it to Gan-De’s surface intact.
“Hang on tight,” Asala said to Niko. What she would have given for a ship armed with chaff dispensers and antimissile defenses. Instead, she was going to have to rely on her own piloting ability to keep them safe until Niko could shut down the orbital platforms. “Here goes—”
Niko bit down on their response as the first of the missiles hurtled toward them and the proximity alerts began to scream.
Episode 6
Fortress World
Rivers Solomon
Chances of making it planetside alive seemed about as close to zero as they could get without actually being zero, and so what? Refugees from the outer planets had suffered under Gan-De’s siege for decades. Whole families—whole lines, unbroken for how many millennia?—eradicated with a single missile. Niko didn’t deserve sparing because of where they’d been born in the system. Quite the opposite. If this was how they died, this was how they died. Gods be with them, here, in the thick of it, where shit actually mattered.
Niko inhaled, letting the last traces of fear wash over them, then dissipate. It had been over a month since this journey had begun, and it had been a crash course in bucking the fuck up. How many consecutive nights had they had fewer than four hours of sleep? How many days of being underfed on the most basic of ration packages? None of that mattered.
Niko booted up one of the offline console computers in charge of sub-auxiliary systems. It was one of three computers they’d need to work on to begin to handle the assault from the Gandesian drones.
They couldn’t flex and move properly while stuck in a chair, so despite the rockiness of the ship as Asala evaded attacks, they undid their harness to work standing up, one foot braced against a control panel wall.
Niko patently refused to look at the various monitors showing the assault, instead trusting Asala to take care of the navigation. She piloted the ship manually, not trusting the ship’s automatic defensive and predictive protocols to plot an effective escape. But for the subtle sheen of sweat over her face, she gave no hint she was fazed by the onslaught of defense drones. She sat with her back straight, shoulders tense enough to stabilize her but not so tight she wasn’t flexible enough to switch between the four joysticks in front of her. She bounced between them with ease.
“How much do you know about algorithmic maneuvering?” Asala asked.
Niko hesitated. They’d taken a few classes on the topic during their apprenticeship, but nothing beyond the required coursework. Hopefully they could manage it.
“Well, Niko?”
“Yes,” they said. “I got you.”
Niko tapped into the ship’s sensors, built to detect incoming fire and self-navigate to avoid contact. Asala’d been right to take over. That kind of defense didn’t make sense when there were that many attack vessels. Jumping out of the course of one missile meant jumping into the line of another. Sophisticated computers could do those calculations instantly, but this was a fairly basic ship and couldn’t handle such frequent bounces. Besides, they didn’t have enough fuel to do the series of mini jumps an algorithm like that would require.
Asala could move swiftly left, right, forward, and backward without jumping, which used less energy. Her instincts told her where to move, dodging each missile expertly.
But that didn’t mean algorithmic maneuvering didn’t have its place. If Niko could lock onto the signals of the various assault vessels (big if), they could maybe set up a program to predict their firing pattern (big maybe). It wasn’t something that would typically work, but this was definitely a time when General Cynwrig’s insistence on using AI for all her defenses came in handy. “Random” number generators were by no means random, and Niko could theoretically crack the system behind it.
Niko had to predict the missiles’ movement patterns so Asala could program an efficient attack that would obliterate the enemy with no misses. Given the limited amount of weaponry they had, a correct prediction was probably the only chance they’d make it.
“How’s it going?” asked Asala.
“It’s going,” said Niko. Like anything, this would need time. Niko was going as fast as they could.
Gods, Asala was good. Niko caught a glimpse of the monitors. There were at least twenty drones, all the size of their dinky-ass ship or bigger. They hadn’t been hit yet. Thankfully, the missiles hadn’t been able to lock onto their radiation signature because of the scramblers Niko already had working.
Back to work. Not a time for distraction.
General Cynwrig’s firewalls were good. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. She’d devoted a lot to her AI. She no doubt had the best programmers on Gan-De working for her, and the usual scripts weren’t going to work to break through her protocols. The one thing giving Niko a leg up was previous experience with Cynwrig’s security.
“Brace for impact,” Asala said suddenly, voice heated. Niko clutched the edges of the console.
The ship took heavy fire on their left, knocking the whole ship off-kilter.
Asala held on to a bar welded to the navigation panel designed for just this reason and otherwise remained secure in her harness. Niko fell leftward, body crashing into the seat they’d been in before. Their head smashed against an edge, and the world split into fragments, the control room into blurred pieces. Ringing in their ears blocked the series of commands Asala was barking out.
Niko b
linked open their eyes slowly, trying to see through the bruised throbbing in their head. If they didn’t pull it together, Asala would have to handle this alone, and she needed Niko.
Niko stumbled up. “Get on it!” Asala shouted.
Niko climbed back into their seat, pulling the harness down. It was time to sacrifice flexibility of movement.
They squinted in an attempt to sharpen their waning vision. The scripts were all running properly and Niko began to type again, only there was something slick against the keyboard.
It was blood.
Niko felt their forehead. There was a bleeding gash above their left eyebrow. They swiped the back of their hand against it and kept typing. All security procedures had weaknesses because of the very fact that they were procedures. They were systematized. Even Cynwrig wasn’t so paranoid that she would have had the drones programmed individually. It wouldn’t have been efficient. That meant the drones were networked, and all Niko had to do was breach one. There had to be some sort of communication line between the drones and the command base. That was where the vulnerable point would be. There was only so much you could do to secure a connection like that. Cynwrig’s programmers were probably counting on the fact that the drones would be quick and efficient enough to avoid anyone having time to exploit that weakness.
“We’re going to get battered. I can’t keep them off much longer,” Asala said, biting down on every word.
“Just—I need more time.” They were getting so close. Sweat and blood mingled on their face. The ship rocked back and forth with the incoming blasts. A heavy layer of physical shields kept internal systems safe, but those would give out soon.
Not meaning to, Niko glanced again at the monitors. There were even more drones now.
“Tell me we’re going to make it,” they said, not so ready to die after all. They ran script after script, fingers slick and numb, head pulsing at a blurring intensity.
Leaving it here, like this, the mission not complete—who was that going to help?
“Brace!” Asala yelled as they were hit with another round of fire. It was wearing through the merlidium alloy shields.
Niko’s head swung back and forth on the soft cushion of the headrest, though it didn’t feel particularly soft given the pulsing ache that had taken over their head.
“I need an ETA on infiltrating their system,” snapped Asala, but it didn’t really work like that. Niko could be close or they could be miles away. It was impossible to tell.
“I can’t give you that!"
“Then what the hell can you give me?” The strain was finally wearing her down.
There was one thing—something a little less ambitious. If Niko ported into the ship’s hardware, they could mess with the sensors in such a way that might confuse the drones.
Niko got to work, and in short order was able to disrupt the technical output readings. Snatching a look at the monitors, they saw it had the intended effect, the drones taking longer between launched attacks.
“Can you buy us any more time?” asked Asala. “At all?”
Niko’s gaze steadied on her, attuned to the desperation in her voice. They weren’t used to Asala sounding anything but resolute. Niko didn’t know how to tell her that they were at the limit of what could be pulled off with the resources they had, but Asala seemed to understand when Niko’s answer didn’t come right away.
“Right. Okay,” she said. “I need you to seal off every section of the ship.”
“What?”
“Do it!” Asala shouted.
It wasn’t technically impossible. Scrap ships like this were usually built modularly. It was a cost-saving mechanism. When systems or parts started failing, it was easy to slot in a new section. Less structural stability than a traditional build, but it usually did the job.
But modular or not, all the parts were meant to work together. Systems depended on one another. Sealing them off completely was something done only in the case of an emergency, such as a fire or an airlock leak.
“I said do it!” Asala repeated. The ship jerked in every direction and Niko’s head resented the rush of movement.
Niko was already jacked into the ship’s system, but there wasn’t exactly a button for what Asala wanted them to do. Sealing off parts of the ship from each other was usually done by hand. The process could be done remotely by computer, but it wasn’t as easy as shutting the hatches from the control room.
“Did you do it?” Asala yelled, hands switching quickly between controls. The ship was still under heavy fire but it wasn’t going down yet. “The shields have taken all they can. In a few rounds we’ll be dead.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m in,” said Niko, jabbing at the controls to seal off the fourteen separate sections of the ships into discrete pieces, connected only by an invisible supermagnetic hinge. It was just a matter of finding the connection points in the blueprint.
“Okay, now I need you to make sure each section is at full energy output,” said Asala. That would suck their limited fuel dry. “You need to do it now.”
Niko immediately did as they were told, despite their reservations. They funneled every bit of power into the outer sections’ electricals, blasting the heating to maximum values, activating their solar panels. Alarms, radio outreach, sensors—all of it was set to max.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”
“It’s a little something I like to call the Split and Scatter,” Asala said as she shut down various systems in the ship’s navigation center, all but the steering controls. She turned off the monitors as well, falling back to evasive maneuvers based solely on what she could see through the glass. There was nothing to tell her the angles of incoming attacks, no screen displaying calculations of trajectories.
Next, off went the lights, the heat. Niko had an idea about what she was doing but they couldn’t put all the pieces together.
“Each section of the ship has a discrete operating system you should be able to boot into and navigate independently,” Asala said. Theoretically, sure, yes. “I need you disjoin each part of the ship into its own independent apparatus, then fly them each in different directions.”
Split and Scatter. She wanted Niko to sabotage the ship, to destroy it.
“Asala . . .” It was beyond risky. A ship needed backups, chiefly backup stores of fuel and electricity, emergency generators. The control center of the ship also needed the protection the other sections could offer as shields.
“I’ve done it before,” Asala tried to reassure them. “In a simulation.”
“Gods!” Niko cried, but they were running out of time, and death was imminent either way, wasn’t it? Either die under fire of Gan-De’s drones, or worse, die from lack of oxygen, abandoned in the vacuum without proper resources. Death in battle was one thing, but being smothered by the hungry black sky—Niko had already faced that once and couldn’t bear the thought of going through it again.
One by one, Niko disjoined the discrete sections of the ship, each modular chunk detaching with a reverberation that thrummed through the deck. Niko was able to set a basic navigation course for each one through their respective operating systems. They didn’t have time to do anything more than something extraordinarily basic.
The control room shuddered and shook as each part of the ship separated itself and went off. “Is it working?” Niko asked, unable to look, all their energy focused on setting the ship-chunks on their individualcourses.
The drones were programmed to pursue any suspicious incoming objects. With the energy of the outer segments on high output and with Asala having turned off all the systems in the control section of the ship, the confused drones would chase the empty sections, believing Niko and Asala’s part of the ship dead in the water.
“Almost. I have to plot a course to our landing point on Gan-De and get us launched in that direction. We’ll need to turn off the thrusters and engines so we can conserve enough energy for landing,” said Asala. “Just a few seconds . . .
okay.”
With one final push, the ship thrust forward toward Gan-De before Asala cut off all power. Hopefully, as far as the drones could tell, their assaults on the ship had done enough to fatally damage the control room.
The ship was broken into pieces. Useless pieces of debris floating through space.
“It’s working.” Asala sighed, relieved. “Now let’s just hope we make it to the ground.”
Each of them checked their suits for any faults, then put on their helmets. There was a greater than zero chance they’d need the oxygen and the warmth those suits would provide.
Behind them, all fourteen sections of the separated ship scattered in different directions, then exploded, each hit with multiple missiles.
Asala and Niko drifted toward Gan-De, where the next phase of their mission lay. Soon they would land—preferably alive.
* * *
Asala hadn’t been that close to death in a long while, and she didn’t relish the feeling. Once upon a time, she might’ve appreciated the rush of adrenaline that life on the edge brought, but with the last few weeks—it was all too much. Questions weighed her down, heavy and burdensome. She’d never had a simple life, but she longed for it now. Longed for the days before she’d discovered the existence of this fucking stardrive-prototype-wormhole-cube-whatever-the-fuck. She reached for the device, tucked in the bag at her waist. It was still safe.
She needed to get to Uzochi. First to verify that the cubes were, in fact, what Hafiz had claimed: new interstellar drives that could open wormholes. Then to find out if there were more, and what Uzochi’s plans were for them. Asala felt uneasy about the prospect of people like Hafiz deciding the fate of the inner system. But before she could act—if she was going to act—she needed more information. Even if the cube was everything Hafiz claimed, the one Asala had with her wouldn’t do them any good. If Hafiz’s people abandoned the system, all Asala had was a prototype. Without the blueprints, it would take years, at least, for scientists in the inner planets to reverse engineer the work.
The Vela: The Complete Season 1 Page 19