The Vela: The Complete Season 1

by Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang

  “Why not?” Her infosec team on the ground had signaled their success in reclaiming the platforms not minutes before.

  “Undetermined, kima. I assume another hacking attempt.”

  Undetermined. Unexpected. Status unknown. Cynwrig seethed. The clannies had surprised her, fine. Surprises were the heart of war. But Cynwrig was used to surprises on the ground, where dirt and blood and sky followed rules that never changed. She hated space, hated its lack of direction, hated its mad logic, hated that she could not look out the viewscreen now and properly determine on her own what next to do. If she were to lose a battle to this insurgent trash, she would not do so out of ignorance. She turned back toward her seat with fury, and in her distraction, knocked over the cordial glass. The last sips splattered her trouser leg and began to soak stickily in. Even against the black fabric, she could see the blossoming stain. She sat, and glowered, leaving the mess on the floor for someone else. “Get me anyone on this ship with a fucking physics background.”

  • • •

  Every one of those bastards had lied.

  Soraya stood in the control center, bitten nails pressed into her palms. Hafiz lying about what the cubes did—that was hardly a shock. But Uzochi—Uzochi with her brains and her charm and her big words. Uzochi, who had promised them all salvation. Them all. She must’ve known, Soraya thought. She must’ve looked at her reports or her charts or however the fuck things worked in a lab, and she must’ve seen that, no, there was no way to get the whole camp out. Either that, or Hafiz had added a few more lies to the pile, and had opened the wormhole on their own. She wouldn’t put it past them to give their own posse the first shot at the door. But did it matter, in the end? These questions she’d never get answers to? Did the particulars make this any less of a betrayal?

  Everyone in the room was looking at her. She could feel them on her skin, a bunch of wide eyes, afraid and lost, turning to the person who always had answers. She didn’t have any. She was afraid. She was lost. And she was tired, gods, she was so, so tired. She wanted nothing more than to just be done.

  She walked to a console and activated the camp-wide comms. “This is Soraya,” she said. “All spaceworthy ships, break away and head immediately for the coordinates being sent to you now.” She caught the eye of one of her comrades and pointed at the wormhole on the screen. The man nodded and quickly began transmitting to the other ships. “I repeat, you must leave immediately. If you are not yet aboard a spaceworthy ship, run to the nearest. Captains, allow as many as you can carry aboard, regardless if they’re on your evacuee list. Don’t bring cargo that isn’t loaded. Don’t waste time. Leave now.” She tried to work some moisture into her mouth. “The flight path may not be clear yet. We must trust in our defense squad to keep us safe. Head for the wormhole and do not stop.” She could hear the panic happening beyond the door, but she could hear the rumble and roar of engines warming, too. The people out there had been farmers, once, before this. Teachers, artists, doctors, shopkeepers. An assorted collection of the ordinary. She’d told them all to run—full tilt and unarmed—through a war field. And they had listened. They listened because they trusted her.

  She shut off the comms. “Us too,” she said to the room. “Let’s go.”

  She wondered, as she followed the others out the door, if she’d just killed them.

  • • •

  Asala looked to her monitor and assessed, looking for specific markers in the fray.

  Dayo’s pod was still out there, drifting.

  Camp Ghala was coming apart, the pieces in motion heading for the wormhole.

  Cynwrig was still out there too, unsettlingly stationary.

  Ekrem—where was Ekrem headed, now that everything had changed?

  Asala was interrupted by a proximity alert—a drone, headed her way. She dodged, weaved, blasted it apart.

  She returned to her monitor. Ekrem, Ekrem . . . there he was, heading not for Hafiz’s contingent, but still for Camp Ghala. Ekrem wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t a coward. He wouldn’t abandon his fleet, even if some of his fleet had already checked out. He might miss the chance at this wormhole, but he was still thinking about Khayyam, and how, if he returned home with a few cubes in hand, they might be able to replicate the Ghalans’ escape.

  She activated her comms. “Soraya,” she said. Two more drones approached. Dammit, Niko, she thought as she began a hasty dance. “Station Control, come in.”

  Station Control did not come in.

  The output on her navigation monitor jumped. Numbers scrambled. She felt the ship lurch, like a smooth-soled shoe finding a patch of ice. She fired the thrusters, steadying her craft. The nav computer had already kicked back in, recalculating her position in the sky. All was fine now, just a few digits off from where it had been before, as if she and everything else had slid sideways. Odd.

  One signal held her eye above all the rest. Dayo’s signal, aimless and slow.

  Ice to ice, water to water—

  Asala shook her head and tried to think. Where was Uzochi in all of this? If she got through the wormhole, what next? The scientist had told so many lies, it was impossible to guess anything about what she’d do. Would she try to open another door down the road, once she was safe on the other side and could do her work out of hiding? Or would she box up her precious cubes and call it a day? There was no knowing. The only thing clear to Asala was that this bloody farce surrounding her now could not be the system’s lone chance of survival. She wouldn’t accept that.

  She ended one drone and dodged the other. “Niko,” she said. “Niko, come in.”

  “I'm here,” came the shaky reply.

  “Our mission here hasn’t changed.”

  “Um, I’d say there’s a pretty big fucking change—”

  Asala ground her teeth as she maneuvered. “Listen to me,” she said. “We can’t get everybody through the wormhole now, but if the tech survives, we might be able to do this again.” Not like this, ideally, she thought, twisting away from a burst of drone fire. “Do you have any idea where Uzochi is?”

  “No. Last chatter I heard makes me think she got out already.”

  “With Hafiz?”

  “I don’t know. She could be anywhere.”

  So any one of the Ghalan ships making a run for it was ferrying the brain that held the key to everyone’s future. The worst shell game imaginable. “Get the platforms back, set up a . . . a defensive line. Or something. However it works. We have to give every refugee ship a clear path.” The soldiers here could go home and lick their wounded pride, but even if the refugees survived the crossfire, where would they go? Who would give the Ghalans safe harbor, after this? It didn’t matter that they’d done nothing, that they’d only been caught up in Hafiz and Uzochi’s wake. That wasn’t how politics worked. If some enemies were on refugee ships, then all refugee ships were enemies. Simple optics.

  “We stick to the plan,” Asala said. She fired her weapons. “It’s all we’ve got.” She switched off her comms and honed back in on Ekrem’s IFF signal. “Ice to ice,” she whispered. “Water to water . . .”

  • • •

  Beads of sweat trickled down Niko’s face as they wrestled for control of the drones. They’d done drills like this in the academy—adapting your own code on the fly while your opponent did the same. Niko had performed well in those tests. Top marks, fast times, the whole shebang. This was different. It was one thing to have an instructor tell you a scenario like this could determine who lives and who dies. It was another to know it was true.

  They yelled with wordless frustration as another of their attempts got shut down. They couldn’t fail here. They couldn’t.

  Their yell brought someone running down the corridor a few seconds later. “What are you doing?” the man said. He was carrying a half-open rucksack and a jug of water. “Didn’t you hear Soraya?” He looked blankly at the computers, the wires, the toasted corpse.

  “Yes,” Niko snapped, continuing to type. They coul
dn’t lose focus.

  “This ship doesn’t fly,” the man said. “We gotta go, friend, come on.”

  “I can’t,” Niko said. Their hands froze on the keyboard. The words sunk in. The cursor blinked, waiting for input. There was no way they could abandon their task, and no way they could shut down, load the cart, and set back up on a spaceworthy vessel without losing vital minutes. “I . . . I can’t go.”

  The man shrugged helplessly. “Well, I can. Good luck to you.” He disappeared back the way he came, footsteps clanging on metal.

  Niko had thought about this, in the sleepless blur of hours leading to this moment. They knew they might not get out, knew they might have to sacrifice themself for this. But that had been conceptual. A mental drill, just like the tests at the academy. Now it was a given, and the weight of it fell heavier than they were ready for.

  They’d be left behind.

  “Focus,” they hissed. “Come on, Niko.” They talked themself through it, trying to break through the snarl in their head as the latest iteration of their virus did its work. “You have to do this. You have to get those platforms back. You can’t let them get the tech.”

  The tech. That was what this entire clusterfuck was framed around—the tech. But that hadn’t been the mission given to them and Asala. Find the Vela. Find those people. That was the directive, the lie everyone had believed. And yes, Asala had known Ekrem was in it for saving face, and yes, Niko had been reporting to the Boreas, but they’d both still been doing it for those people, right? Or were they? Niko and Asala had barely spoken of the refugees at all after the cubes had come into play. Sure, the cubes were a means to an end, and everybody wanted the cubes for the sake of their people, but was that anything more than a clever screen to hide ambition behind? Ekrem wanted to keep his job, Cynwrig wanted victory, Hafiz wanted revenge. Was anyone actually thinking about the lives of people they didn’t personally know?

  The comms came back on. “There is a hull breach in Block F.” Soraya. She sounded as if she were on a handheld, on the run. “I repeat, a hull breach in Block F. Avoid the area and follow decompression protocols. Be sure, when taking flight, to double-check that your vessel is properly detached from its neighbors. Be safe, people.”

  Soraya cared. She was the only one in this shitshow who truly deserved a win.

  Niko remembered the faces in the videos from the Vela, the stories Uzochi had wanted the whole system to know. Did anyone care about that frostbitten man, and if he’d gotten a new leg? Did anyone care if little Melis had found her friend? Did anyone think of those people as anything more than political set dressing, an exploitable bit of manipulation used in the pursuit of someone else’s legacy? Hafiz and Cynwrig and their father, they were all the same. They just wanted to give themselves the narrative that would grant them the best sleep at night. Nobody gave a shit about a nameless man’s leg or a stranger’s child’s best friend.

  Niko wondered if they themself had ever really cared. They’d always thought they were doing this for a just cause, a greater good, but there they sat, a knot of anger in their gut because they wouldn’t be one of the ones to get out. And it wasn’t the lack of getting out that upset them; it was the step beyond that. The part where someone would clap them on the shoulder and thank them for a job well done. They had wanted, at the end, to be a celebrated part of something good. Instead, they were going to be remembered by the Khayyami as a traitor, by the Gandesians as one of the bad guys, and by the Boreas rebels as a weak link. And that, in the most bitterly honest part of them, was a rawer pain than whether or not a little refugee girl ever found a home.

  Niko was no better than the rest of them.

  Niko threw themself back into their work. They could still help the people of the Vela. Those lost souls were out there now, scattered among Ghalan ships about to make a run past Khayyam’s finest. Maybe for a few minutes—just a few minutes—Niko could be the person they wanted others to see. Even if nobody would.

  • • •

  The engineer with pepper-gray hair who was brought to the bridge was clearly somewhere in the late middle of a comfortable career in which she’d been confined to engine rooms or research labs and never, ever had to talk to command. She wasn’t a scientist, either, not formally, but she had astrophysics training listed in her file. Aboard a warship that had only planned for a bit of standard planetary defense, that would have to do. She stood in front of Cynwrig in grease-smeared coveralls, nervous as a grain rat in daylight.

  “General, you have to understand: I—I don’t understand whatever tech they’re using. I’ve never seen it before.”

  “Nobody’s seen it before, engineer.” Cynwrig stared at her, demanding eye contact. “I am asking for your best guess.”

  The engineer looked as though she enjoyed guesses as much as Cynwrig did. “Wormholes are notoriously unstable. It’s—it’s why nobody’s ever been able to do this before. Open a little one up, and it’s gone in a blink. That’s where the research has always stopped. I don’t know how they’re doing this”—she pointed at the viewscreen—“but my guess is it’s temporary. Very temporary.”

  “How temporary?”

  “Minutes? Seconds? Hours?” She looked panicked. “Kima, I have no idea how it’s stayed open for this long, but timing isn’t the problem here.”

  “What is the problem?”

  The engineer wrung her hands. “General, has anyone checked on Gan-De itself?”

  Cynwrig looked at the woman with concern. “Why?”

  “We are halfway between home and Ryne.” Their nearest moon. “Halfway. Kima, I ask this with all the respect in the world, but—you are aware that a wormhole has gravity, right? It has mass. It’s not an empty door. It’s an object, a big object, and they just dropped it right—”

  Cynwrig followed the logic. She whipped around toward the comms officer. “Anything from the platforms?” she demanded.

  The comms officer scrambled. “It’s scattered, kima. There’s some kind of problem—”

  “That tells me nothing, Ensign.”

  “Try weather satellites,” the engineer quietly offered. “Something that isn’t being hacked.”

  “As she said,” Cynwrig ordered. “And consider why you didn’t think of it yourself.”

  There was a moment of harried typing, and then: “I’m getting an error message from the nearest cluster of weather satellites, General,” the comms officer said. “They’re . . . they’re off track. All of them. Their nav systems are compensating, and should be back in their normal orbit within—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the engineer whispered. She stared into nothing, a thousand miles away. “Oh gods. Oh gods, oh gods.”

  Cynwrig had neither time nor patience for this. “Spit it out.”

  The engineer closed her haunted eyes. “The wormhole’s gravity is affecting Gan-De.”

  “Affecting it how?”

  “Given what’s been hypothesized? Speeding up its rotation, and changing its velocity. Shifting its orbit. That navigation glitch we felt a while ago, that wasn’t a glitch; that was the wormhole pulling our ship, too. But we can move. We can compensate. The planet can’t. And the longer that thing sits out there, the worse it’s going to get.”

  “What will happen?”

  “I—I don’t have numbers, I have no data—”

  “Your best guess.”

  The engineer swallowed. “Even a few minutes would be catastrophic. It wouldn’t take much to make the sea level rise. I doubt anybody down there has noticed yet, but—I mean, hypothetically, massive flooding at the equator, constant rain. Storms, maybe. I’d guess at that within a day or two, given how close that thing is. And—and if there’s a change in rotation speed, that would mean a change in the length of the day, which means disturbing the rhythm of every crop and animal we have. If there’s been a change in orbit, which there almost definitely has—” She looked close to being sick. “Depends on the direction the planet’s been pulled and how much
faster it’s moving, but either way . . .”

  Cynwrig stared at the viewscreen, at the crackling hole swallowing up any ship that threw itself in. Either way, Gan-De was doomed.

  • • •

  Snipers didn’t talk to their targets. That was a pretty basic part of the job description. Get into position, find your target, take the shot, go home. No room for mess or retaliation. That precision had always appealed to Asala. It felt like a kindness, almost, the removal of the gory heat of melee. If you did your job right, the target never saw it coming. Gone, in the snap of two fingers, no time for fear or regret. Killing was ugly business no matter how you sliced it, but all things considered, her way was kind.

  And yet . . . yet she felt hesitant, as her ship shot steadily toward Ekrem. She could see his vessel now, sunlight gleaming off the polished hull. He must have seen her signal on his monitor, but he had no way of knowing it was her. Just another Ghalan ship, drawing a line between themselves and the defenseless.

  Was that right, to keep herself in the shadows here? Was it kind, for him to never know? She was a sniper. He was a friend. What were the rules here? What would he, her captain, have said had she asked this question about an assignment? Would he have answered differently if he knew the target was himself?

  She locked her weapons.

  She took a breath.

  She hit the comms. “Ekrem,” she said. “You need to listen to me.”

  “Asala,” he replied, as if confirming something to himself. “Y’know, I’m beginning to reconsider hiring you for this job.” He delivered the joke with typical congeniality, but there was a tension there behind it. A deserved bitterness.

  “Ekrem, please. Let the Ghalans go. These people are not your enemy.”

  “Maybe not.” His easy tone clashed with the aggressive maneuvers of his ship, which darted in an attempt to shake her. “They’re not acting like friends, either.”