The Vela: The Complete Season 1

by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang

  Uzochi and the others gasped.

  “Thieves!” someone called out. Niko recognized their face from the refugee vids but couldn’t put a name to it.

  “You give that to us and you go. You don’t understand what you’re holding,” said Uzochi. Keeping the gun pointed at Asala and Niko, Uzochi inched backward toward the staircase that would bring her down from the balcony control room to the main floor. “Please. That’s everything to me—us. How dare you? How fucking dare you spend lifetimes stealing our livelihoods, destroying our homes with your insatiable greed, then come here to steal the one solution we’ve come up with to get out of this genocide you wrought?” she asked, choking up now. “You disgust me.”

  Asala visibly winced.

  “I’m sorry, Uzochi.” It was the last thing Niko expected Asala to say. “I’ve come down to this black hole of planet I’d rather die than be on just to see you. To understand you. I have to make sense of it.”

  Was she faltering under the immense pressure of this entire journey? It seemed Asala was in the midst of a reckoning—with herself, with her past, with Ekrem, even if he wasn’t here. It was alarming to watch, and Niko’s heart beat uncontrollably fast. Their palms sweated profusely too.

  “There is no making sense of a world treating entire planets of people as expendable,” said Uzochi. “Maybe that’s why I fell for it, why we all fell for it. Why we really thought he was coming to save us.” Uzochi was shaking so hard now, the tears rolling down her face. “We couldn’t believe that Ekrem would want anything but to help. To make amends. How could he have even known about what my mother and I made together? What she spent her lifetime developing, perfecting, all so that we could live? That’s all she wanted. For us to live. But Ekrem was going to take that away too. He was going to take away her legacy and turn it into another tool for bolstering the lives of the rich and powerful and discarding the people on the outer planets like we’re trash. I suspected it as soon as I saw the ship. Then the number of security personnel. I won’t let him steal what my mother devoted her life to creating. I won’t.”

  She was near sobbing now, and Niko felt their own tears coming. They bit their lip to keep them from falling.

  “You really want to know what makes sense?” asked Uzochi, steeling herself against further tears. “Leaving here. Letting us carry on with the ships we’re building. And giving me that prototype. Because you know if you leave it here they’ll find us. They won’t stop until they find us wherever we end up and kill us.”

  “How am I supposed to let you do that? Look me in the eye, and tell me how I’m supposed to let you leave millions upon millions to a dying solar system?” Asala pleaded. Her voice was strained, and Niko wondered if she, too, was holding back tears. Seeing Uzochi in person was nothing like seeing her on the video. She was small and scrappy, but an incredible presence.

  “The same way Khayyam did it to us,” said Uzochi.

  The same way Asala did it to her sister.

  Niko didn’t really believe that. Of course they didn’t. But they knew, knew, that was what

  Asala was thinking. There were things Niko understood about her now that made the pieces of her personality click into place. Asala had had no choice but to move on, to move on from Hypatia and her whole past. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have survived.

  Asala paused for a long time, face scrunched. For a second, Niko really thought tears were about to fall until—

  “Ships?” she asked.

  “What?” said Uzochi.

  Asala stepped closer, hands dropping down from their position of surrender. Her body stiffened. “We don’t want to stop you,” she said. “But we need to keep this cube. You can’t singlehandedly decide to abandon everyone in the system.”

  That was when Uzochi fired her gun—her old-school gun with actual bullets. Niko jumped, and the sound of the blast echoed all over the cave.

  Niko didn’t see where the bullet went, but it didn’t look like anyone was hit.

  Asala’s finger tensed, although she didn’t yet put it on the trigger. A tiny motion, but Niko saw it clearly. “Tell me about the ships,” she said.

  Uzochi shot again, still hitting nothing, and it was unclear if she was aiming for Asala or not.

  “Fuck this,” Asala said, and bolted.

  Asala weaved through the rows of manufacturing equipment. Uzochi and some of the others were chasing her and Niko both, shouting after them. At the back of this cave, there was a passage to another. Asala and Niko went through it and—

  Niko couldn’t breathe. The scale and grandeur of the room seemed the stuff of gods. And there it was. A vast ship that filled the entirety of the space. They weren’t just building cubes. If they’d built one ship, surely there were others hidden in the caverns. The scale of this wasn’t something Asala could prevent. It was one thing to stop the transport of cubes to Camp Ghala, but a whole fleet of ships?

  The ship was massive. And being built by Gan-De’s AIs. Uzochi or someone else from the Vela had reprogrammed Cynwrig’s own drones to build a vessel that would take them to freedom. There weren’t many drones. Maybe eight in total, and they were old and outdated. But they were perfectly efficient, and had had plenty of time to build their masterpiece as directed by Uzochi.

  “Stars above,” said Asala in awe. She was frozen in place, weapon slack at her side.

  “They’ll do whatever I tell them to, including hurt you,” said Uzochi, though she stumbled over the word hurt. “Now get out and give me my prototype.”

  Asala didn’t budge.

  “Give it to me,” Uzochi said.

  This time, when Asala didn’t obey the command, Uzochi pressed some buttons on a device in her hands, and the AIs stopped their work on the machines and began to approach Asala and Niko.

  Asala took a shot at one but the drone repelled the blast and fired on Asala. She had already ducked behind cover, though, and it missed her narrowly.

  The drones kept on coming.

  “Come on, Asala. We’ve got to go,” said Niko, grabbing her arm and pulling her up.

  Asala stared at them, dazed, for just a moment. Then, they ran.

  “After them!” called Uzochi.

  Niko scrambled after Asala, who rapidly outpaced them. She didn’t slow, and Niko lengthened their stride only to slam into a cavern wall. The passages narrowed again, and they squeezed through, heart pounding so hard that they were afraid that it would fall out of their rib cage.

  Every time Niko was forced to slow to navigate the treacherous, labyrinthine passages, they imagined they heard the AIs skittering closer. Imagined they heard gunfire. After a while, it all blurred into a haze of adrenaline and panic. When Niko emerged into the light outside, they almost collapsed in gratitude.

  “Don’t,” Asala barked at them. “It’s not safe yet.”

  They kept running, huffing hard until they reached their transport.

  Asala drove, and neither of them looked back.

  Episode 7

  The Traitor

  Becky Chambers

  Cynwrig's office wasn't an office at all, by design. Once, it had been yet another lounge in the Capitol Palace, full of cushions and tea trays and plenty of space for the upper crust to sit around being useless. She'd taken the room as her own after the coup, after she'd executed the ruling party and claimed the palace for loyal citizens of Gan-De. She could've taken the high regent's office, that ancestral seat that jutted from the front of the building, encased in bulletproof glass. The intent behind such a display had been that all could easily see their ruler working on their behalf, but the effect felt more to Cynwrig like making a pageant out of governance. As was the case with so many things, meaning was a matter of perspective.

  Architectural subtext aside, the regent's office hadn't fit Cynwrig's needs. The room was too small. Nobody could think properly when sitting still, with slow blood and idle bones. If Cynwrig were to strategize, if she were to do the work her rank required, she needed to
move. She needed to pace.

  Hence the former lounge, with its hard dance floors and easily customizable space. She had few furnishings in there. A desk, tables for map projections, chairs where her advisers sat. The closest thing the room had to decor was the frame of display cases arranged against the walls, each containing military garb and armor from a different era. But that display was intended for the room's visitors, who needed to be reminded whose space they'd entered. All Cynwrig needed for herself was a clear, uncluttered path.

  She walked the room now, boots falling softly, hands clasped behind her back, morning sky dawning as her mind raced. There was a puzzle at hand, and the pieces she'd collected tugged at each other, so close to connection. But try as she might, she could not see the shape they'd form. She was missing something vital, she knew, and the puzzle nagged at her relentlessly, demanding she turn the pieces again and again. With a sigh, she walked the room, retracing her path in two respects.

  She focused back on Asala, and Ekrem's brat. Cynwrig was no fool, and they were no diplomats. So then what, she'd wondered as she'd left the Altair, had sent them to Hypatia?

  That answer had landed in her lap a few weeks later, in the form of an intelligence report. The Vela had gone missing. Her chief propagandists had urged her to make the information public, in order to shake the system's faith in Khayyami policy. But Cynwrig had insisted they keep their knowledge to themselves. No point in tipping their hand to the Inners. They'd conduct their own search. They'd watch Khayyami movement carefully, to see what their delicate allies did while believing themselves to be safe in the dark.

  So Gan-De watched. And found nothing.

  Intelligence from Hypatia came back empty. Scout ships combing the fastest void routes traveled alone. Every spy stayed silent. True, it was possible that the Vela had simply suffered some disaster of mechanical make, but both the lack of debris and Cynwrig's gut said otherwise. She trusted the latter as much as any report. A hunch could be the difference between life and death. She'd seen that play out more times than she could count.

  Then, finally, after weeks of waiting: something.

  A report had been delivered to her the night before—an ordinary, everyday briefing. A depressing array of agricultural woes. The latest public health statistics compiled by regional clinics. Some rabble from the Lace Islands protesting for the release of political prisoners, again, and being dealt with, again. The usual ins and outs of running a nation planet. But one security entry in particular caught her eye—the attempted landing of an unauthorized craft originating from Camp Ghala, status unknown. This on its own was not unheard of. Every few weeks, some desperate clannie got it in their head to make a run for the surface. Cynwrig understood that. She'd seen it in war—a soldier who'd snap under pressure, whose fight began to scream louder than flight, who'd run, gun blazing, straight into certain death. Fear and foolishness were close cousins. Thus, an unauthorized craft was not much cause for a pique in interest, were it not for that status unknown. This report had been the first time she'd seen anything other than threat neutralized. Every wall had a weakness, and she wasn't about to dispatch her troops over one suicidal idiot, but she was curious to see where her border had momentarily failed.

  The ship had come apart, the report read, in a manner that made the pieces impossible to track. The bafflement of the officer who'd written the report was easy to read between the formal lines, but where their author had found confusion, Cynwrig found purchase.

  Split and scatter.

  She knew that move—a Khayyami move. Her planetary forces were best versed in terrestrial strategy, their experience gained from decades of civil war on the ground. Young blood in uniform didn't have memory of threats from above. But she did. She had the years, the knowledge. So the question became: What was someone with Khayyami military training doing in a camp full of outer-planet riffraff, and why had they come down here?

  Cynwrig didn't know the why, but she had little question as to who.

  She faced her window and shut her eyes, letting the light of the risen sun bathe her mind in a red glow. Think, she told herself. What was she missing?

  A vanished ship. A looming political disaster for Ekrem. Two Khayyami operatives. A trip that took them to Hypatia, to Camp Ghala, and then . . . here.

  Why here? What was here?

  Cynwrig exhaled in frustration and turned away from the blinding window. She was trying to play four-hand chess with only half the pieces. She needed more.

  She walked to her desk and activated her comm system.

  “Yes, General?” came her assistant's voice.

  “Send me all the reports you have on Camp Ghala,” Cynwrig said. “And ping everyone who's been conducting intelligence inside the camp. I want to know what's been going on there in recent days.”

  “Yes, General. Anything specific you'd like highlighted?”

  “No. Give me a wide spread. Everything we know, no matter how small.”

  Her mind crackled, eager to leave the loop of unfinished pieces in favor of a new path. Whatever had led Asala to Gan-De, she'd found it in Camp Ghala. And if Asala could find it, Cynwrig could find it too.

  • • •

  Even if Asala hadn't spent every waking moment since Khayyam with the kid, she would've known something was up with Niko. They'd been quiet since they'd left the caves, and while Asala might have chalked that up to Niko being pissed about her putting her foot down with Uzochi, this felt different. They seemed agitated, twitchy. Like an animal in a trap.

  Asala didn't have the time or headspace to sort Niko out right then. They both had bigger problems. Like how to get off the planet when their shuttle was in pieces, for example. That seemed like a top priority.

  Their transport had broken down, and after a good hour of mechanical fumbling and liberal swearing, they'd had no choice but to continue on foot. Given the exit they'd had at Uzochi's, Asala didn't think it wise to go back the way they'd come. Too many stories were changing on all sides, too many gaps still needed filling in. The fewer outside parties they needed to rely on to get off this planet, the better.

  Asala left the mountain path and headed off-trail, crunching through undergrowth in search of a place where she could get a clear view of the surrounding area. The plants beneath her boots weren't dead, but they weren't healthy, either. The leaves were pale and brittle, and she could see spiraled shoots of growth that had withered before they unfurled. The confused look of flora that had felt a frost before their internal clocks expected it. It would take time, but for all their pomp and fancy tech, Gan-De, too, would be claimed by the cold, just like Eratos. Just like Hypatia.

  Who would take them in? she wondered. Who would be left?

  She reached a cliff edge and got her bearings. The flatland surrounding the mountains was as forested as the hills themselves. There was the geometric hollow of a homestead here and there, but nothing that spoke salvation. She looked further out, past the thinning blood pines, out into the area where the roads began to multiply like so many roots.

  “There,” she said.

  Niko walked up beside her. “What?” they said, speaking at last.

  Asala pointed to a cluster of indistinct but unmistakable buildings, a little scribble of metallic colors pasted into the natural surroundings. She felt her resolve strengthen as she watched a tiny dot leave the ground, rise in a perfect parabola, and disappear through the clouds. “That's our ride back.”

  “What is it?” Niko said.

  “Could be anything,” Asala said. “But where there's one ship, there're usually more.”

  Niko frowned. “That's going to take us forever to get to.”

  Asala squinted at the landscape. “A day and a half, probably.”

  Niko shook their head anxiously. “We don't have that kind of time.”

  “No shit,” Asala said. “But we're not exactly awash with options here.”

  Niko glanced back the way they'd come, their jaw tensing in thought.
<
br />   “Uzochi's not happening,” Asala said firmly. “We're done talking about that.”

  Niko shut their eyes, pressed their lips, took a breath, and resolved something. They pointed down to one of the homesteads. “We should start there,” they said. “One of them will have a comm system.”

  “You want to go knocking on doors? After the warm welcome their neighbors gave us?”

  Niko pointed to the indistinct launch site. “That could be anything,” they said. “Police. Military. You really think we're going to be able to hitch a ride there?”

  “And you really think that every place we stroll into, you're going to find a friendly face? Especially if we're talking the sort of red-blooded Gandesian who chose to fuck off to the woods? ‘Yes, hello, kima, we're definitely not here in open defiance of your government, would you mind if we made a call?'” Asala shook her head. “We don't have time to chance—”

  “You're right. We don't have time. You want to contact Soraya? We need to do that now, not in a day, not after however long it takes for us to deal with whatever it is that's between us and get a ride out of here. We get our hands on an ansible—or hell, just a radio dish—then I can reach my contacts. I can figure out where we are, what our options are, maybe get us some help—”

  “The military will trace that in a hot second. Those are farms, Niko, not a goddamn ops center. That channel will be about as secure as cupping your hands and yelling out a window. It's too risky.”

  “So?!” Niko cried. Whatever had been rattling around in them was out now, loud and flustered. “What haven't we risked already? You want to go storm that launch site, fine. I'm just trying to go in with some semblance of a plan. Plus, we need to make sure we get word to—to Soraya before we go off and get ourselves killed.” They ran a shaking hand through their hair. “You're the one who wanted to make sure she knew. If that's not priority number one, then all of this is for fucking nothing.”