The Vela: The Complete Season 1 Read online

  Niko took a breath and tried to look the part of a confident intelligence expert who’d expected nothing less.

  They weren’t at all sure they managed.

  • • •

  I hope I never have to have a conversation with the woman again, Asala had told President Ekrem. And now here she was, ringing through to the general’s personal quarters at an hour well too late for polite calling of any variety. She hadn’t slept in a full day, and the nanosplints tingled painfully where her ribs were knitting back together, but she was on the scent of something. Everything was fitting together so well . . . and yet somehow just slightly not well enough.

  She cradled one hand over her injured side while she waited at General Cynwrig’s inner door. The med team had told her not to exert herself, that she’d damaged internal organs and “healed” didn’t mean it all couldn’t be jarred out of place, but Asala had never been good at listening to instructions when it didn’t suit her.

  It was a long, long time before Cynwrig answered. In the meantime, Asala ignored the spider chittering behind her. At least the woman will know who’s calling, she thought sourly.

  When General Cynwrig finally did open the door, she was dressed in full uniform.

  “Am I mistaken,” she asked, with a curled lip, “or is it not a very late hour here in Khayyam’s capital?”

  Asala quickly said a canto of Our Mortal Stars in her head, one of the verses she used to relax herself while she waited with a rifle. She took a breath. “I need to examine your ship.”

  “Out of the question.”

  I could just go to sleep and let you die. But that—that would have stung her professional pride. “The intelligence about Khwarizmi is wrong.”

  “Explain.”

  “I think both assassination attempts were distractions,” Asala said. “The attack in your chambers came immediately on the heels of this morning’s show in the plaza, almost as if they expected the first attempt to fail—and I think they did. This morning’s incident was timed to be stopped, and this afternoon, the guard should have known she wouldn’t be able to get past the inner doors before real security caught up to her. Even if I hadn’t been here to stop her—the intelligence needed to get this far should have told her she couldn’t succeed in the time frame she had. I think someone paid these people and then didn’t tell them they were being set up.”

  “Their true purpose being?”

  “To throw you off your routine.” As she said it, it felt right, deep in her gut, where she’d learned to trust her instincts. If the general would just cooperate, dammit, Asala would solve this and save her sorry Gandesian hide for a third time, and the mighty General Cynwrig would always and forever owe her life to someone with a clan tattoo. Wouldn’t that be sweet justice.

  “Ekrem already told me you’ve moved up your departure timeline, and that dominoes in a host of changes all on its own,” she continued. “I’ve been combing through the interrogation reports, and one bit might have some truth to it—one of them said something about an indirect attack before going silent. But both the attacks we’ve seen were more than direct. ‘Indirect’ suggests something like coming at you in transit, or poisoning your food. Or your water supply.”

  “I bring my own sustenance for that reason,” Cynwrig said. “It is secure at all times.”

  “I know you do. But I checked your ship’s logs. There were some mass variations recorded.”

  The ship was the weak link. On the ground, Cynwrig had security twenty-five hours per day, but a ship was a tin can in space that cradled people’s lives in a fragile hull—plenty to go wrong. Asala’s instincts were screaming. Those mass variations meant something.

  “All ships have mass variation.” The general’s voice dripped scorn. “That’s how artificial gravity works.”

  Forget the sun dying, this woman could give the whole system frostbite. “I’m telling you, I’ve been doing this a long time,” Asala argued. “This isn’t over. If you want to go back to bed, fine. I’ll send Ekrem a message that I’m quitting your detail, and walk away. But if you want to live, you will let me examine your ship.”

  General Cynwrig’s eyes flicked up and down, taking in Asala’s full height. “You’re quite the renegade . . . Agent.” She leaned on the title as if testing it in her mouth. “You come and make demands of a visiting head of state? Far more appropriate channels exist for such requests.”

  “You want me to put in the paperwork to Ekrem to access your ship? Sure,” Asala said. “It’ll still have to be approved by you, but by that time you’ll probably be dead. Don’t expect me to mourn.”

  “Most of your kind wouldn’t.”

  Asala tried not to let any reaction show on her face.

  Damn, she was going to hear it from Ekrem. But that conversation would go a lot easier if she had a living protectee to flaunt.

  Cynwrig held Asala’s eyes for a long minute, but if she was trying to out-wait a sniper, she failed. She finally broke the gaze and folded back her sleeve to tap some commands into an armband.

  “The codes to access my ship,” she said, holding out her arm.

  Asala touched her handheld to it.

  “We have a saying on Gan-De,” said General Cynwrig. “The worm that raises its head from the hole is right, or it is dead.”

  “Good thing I’m not a worm,” Asala said.

  • • •

  Armed with the general’s codes, Asala exited the outer suite—and ran right into Niko.

  “What the—what in cosmic hell are you doing here?”

  Niko straightened and brushed themself off. “I wasn’t sure whether it was too late to come call, but I have something to show you. And I wanted to see if you were all right . . .”

  “I don’t have time for this.” Asala accidentally muttered it aloud. She pushed past Niko and down the hall.

  Niko dogged her like a dust bat who’d smelled food in her pockets. “Can I come back tomorrow? I found something and I know you’ll want to see—”

  “Maybe I’ll go on vacation tomorrow,” Asala said. “Wouldn’t that be nice? I’ll take a cruiser to Khwarizmi and relax in some real hot sun. Maybe try some glow. I hear it’s an experience.”

  “Then let me show you after you come back tonight,” Niko pressed. Asala’s well-crafted sarcasm was apparently lost on them. “Where are you going this late, anyway?”

  Asala didn’t slow and didn’t answer.

  “Maybe I can help,” Niko kept on. “I really am good at data analysis, maybe—”

  “I’m going to General Cynwrig’s ship,” Asala overrode them. “And I’m not interested in help.”

  Niko stopped for a moment and then ran again to catch up. “Wait, you can’t!”

  “Can’t I?”

  Her tone must have been even more dangerous than she’d intended, because Niko flushed, and for a brief moment their expression rearranged itself like they’d been caught guilty at a crime scene.

  “I—I just mean, you can’t go alone,” they stammered. “It’s too dangerous! And you’re injured—”

  Asala almost lost her temper then. This kid. Needed to learn. When to stop. “Yes, an empty ship will be a match for me, I’m sure. Oh, look, we’re at a security checkpoint. Don’t wait up.”

  Asala scanned herself through the checkpoint, blithely assuming her problem solved. But of course, Niko being the president’s fucking kid, they scanned through right behind her without a question asked.

  She had three options. One, call security on Niko, which would be a pain in the ass, hold her up, and might not work anyway. Two, get aggressive with the kid until she scared them away, which might get her in trouble with Ekrem, but might be worth it. Three, let them tag along, ignore them, and assume that if they could scan through all the checkpoints, any security risk they posed wouldn’t be on her head so who cared.

  Option three felt like the path of least resistance. Her ribs twinged in agreement.

  She successfully tuned out N
iko for the short magline ride and then the longer walk until the elevator access point. Khayyam’s infrastructure was complex enough to have surface-to-orbit options other than shuttles, and the general’s ship was docked to a military-run government platform accessible by space elevator.

  “Wow.” Niko sounded awed. “I’ve never been up before.”

  “It’s not glamorous,” Asala said shortly. She hated space elevators. Her hearing implants always got finicky at the stratospheric pressure differences, and it took hours of achy fiddling afterward to tune her hearing back in properly again.

  Come to think of it, that might be a prime excuse to turn them off for the trip up. Niko tried to talk to her only a few times before giving up.

  She’d told the truth—it wasn’t glamorous. This was an older elevator, and the utilitarian cars were fully enclosed rather than the glittering glass bubbles designed for tourist access. The journey to the platform was like sitting in a magline car with no windows and trying not to throw up while one’s body went heavy and the air got squiggly.

  The one saving grace was that the orbital platform had artificial gravity, and it kicked in early enough to counter the deceleration and keep them on the floor—albeit with a mashed-up tingling in every part of Asala’s body before the artigrav fought and won. But at least they didn’t have to deal with weightlessness. Small favors. Asala hated weightlessness.

  When they got out, Niko tried to crane their neck in all directions at once, as if there was anything to see here other than the metal struts of the hangar. They said something.

  Oh, right. Asala adjusted her implants, wincing at the familiar throb of the pressure difference. “What did you say?”

  “We’re actually in space!”

  No shit, Asala thought.

  The general’s ship was easy enough to find, if nested behind multiple additional security checkpoints. Niko followed her straight in here, too, dammit—Asala was starting to suspect they might have some way of greasing ID authorizations, given their sales pitch about being good at computer security. Or maybe their pointed tendency to announce their name with full patronymic—“Yes, Niko av Ekrem, yes, that Ekrem”—kept any of the human guards from voicing a question.

  “Let me help,” Niko begged Asala as they made their way through the final security gate. “I can sort through the logs. I’ve done that sort of thing millions of times. What are you searching for?”

  Asala sighed. Her implants were giving her a very predictable pressure headache. “I think the true assassination attempt is going to come from something, or someone, that Cynwrig trusts. The two false attacks would make her more paranoid—paranoid people lean harder on the things they think they know. She’s already changed her schedule to leave earlier, because what she trusts is her ship and what she brought with her.”

  They’d reached the gangway to the ship itself now. It was Marauder-class—a large, lumbering thing, a tank in space. Far more mass than was needed to transport a single head of state to a trade conference, because Cynwrig was an ass. But all they could see from here was the mundane interior of the air bridge, a flexible tunnel that led straight up to the clamped-in hatch.

  The more commercial platforms sported starfield views at every opportunity. Niko should take a vacation if they wanted to see anything.

  Asala pulled out her handheld and brought up the codes, and the hatch of the Gandesian ship slid open with a clank.

  The corridors lit themselves the moment Asala and Niko stepped inside. At the first whirr and click behind her, Asala spun and her hand went to her side, but it was just another one of the Gan-De AIs, this one a gawky, caterpillar-wheeled thing with a hell of a lot of pincher-arms.

  “We don’t need any help,” Asala said warily.

  The robot clicked and whirred back a touch. Behind it, a black globe that was probably a surveillance device seemed to swivel within itself and focus on them.

  “I’m feeling very watched right now.” Niko’s voice had taken on the tight pitch of someone speaking only to fill the silence.

  Asala couldn’t blame them. She imagined the general tracking their progress on a screen from the comfort of her quarters on Khayyam. This explained why Cynwrig had not insisted on a chaperone—Asala had wondered. The whole damn ship was chaperoning them.

  She tried to ignore the AIs and synced her handheld to the ship’s internal network. “I want to run scans on these mass variations. They’re two standard deviations off normal.”

  “Doesn’t that just happen in, like, five percent of cases?” Niko said.

  “And it doesn’t ‘just happen’ in the other ninety-five percent.” Asala frowned at her screen, scrolling through log reports. She hadn’t been on a Marauder-class before, but it was basically the same as a Pounder, and she’d lived on one of those for years. “The quick way to figure out if this is just an artifact of the artificial gravity or not would be to release the exotic matter containment and see if the numbers still line up. But that would leave the general floating all the way back to Gan-De.” Tempting, now that she’d thought of it. “But there’s another way.”

  “Look, I think you’re sniffing down the wrong track,” Niko said. “How would mass variations affect her food or water supply? We should run the AI surveillance of those. Or check which humans have been on board. The biggest part of hacking is good social engineering; if someone got access to the ship’s navigational plan, they could direct her right into a—”

  “Got something,” Asala said. She wasn’t sure why she’d started talking out loud—maybe it was all the creepy AI eyes around her, or maybe she’d finally given up on Niko going away. “If I create an inverted model out of the negative mass on the ship . . . yup, we’ve got a thing that doesn’t belong. That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  Asala didn’t answer. She’d expected backtracking the mass variations to give her something, but she’d thought the glitch was more likely a mask for some other environmental-control fluctuation. She hadn’t expected actual . . . mass.

  A good-sized portion of this ship was significantly heavier than it was supposed to be.

  Asala took off down the corridor, ignoring collections of wheels or arms or camera faces that woke and whirred at her passage, and also Niko behind her, who was going on about how was this really safe, and wasn’t Asala still injured, and shouldn’t she contact the president and get a security team out on this instead and was the ship really their jurisdiction anyway—

  With all the distractions, it took a good bit of pacing and tracking on her handheld to find the camouflaged door in the bulkhead.

  “Wait!” Niko yelped. “Don’t—”

  Asala hauled the door back.

  An arm came out of nowhere—not a mechanical arm, but a human one—Asala grabbed for her air pistol—

  “Oh my heavens!” cried a creaky voice. “You must be our contact. Thank you. Thank you!”

  And an old man collapsed against her, weeping.

  An old man with a clan tattoo.

  Asala looked over his head. Deep into the bowels of the ship, this entire sealed-off cargo area was filled with . . . Hypatian refugees.

  Old people. Children. Families huddled together sharing one thin blanket to five of them. Some curled on the floor, unmoving, sick or dead. They’d risked boarding the most unfathomably dangerous ship possible, their foolishness almost unbelievable if not for their equally stunning desperation. The stench of unrecycled humanity rolled over Asala in a heavy layer.

  Her throat constricted, and her brain shriveled to nothing.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. We’ll help you. Right, Asala?” Niko had flipped from panicked to instantly solicitous, patting the old man on the back and calling out to the rest of the vacant, staring eyes beyond. “We’ll help you. Just hang on.” Then Niko turned to Asala and spoke more quietly. “The general’s AIs will be on this soon, if they haven’t picked up on it already. She would execute these people if she knew they’d stow
ed away. We have to help them.”

  Asala detached the old man’s hands from her clothes and maneuvered him back inside. This was not her job, not her pay grade, not her fucking problem to solve.

  She shoved the door back shut over the man’s anguished plea and turned to her handheld.

  “Wait! What are you doing?” cried Niko. “We have to let them out. We have to let them go. You saw—”

  “If you want them to get amnesty, take it up with your father.” She keyed in the message to the president’s priority channel. Ekrem could do whatever the hell he wanted with this mess. “His people can figure out how many laws they broke getting here. And whether any Khayyami helped them.”

  “Wha—how many laws?” Niko’s voice climbed. “How about the laws of human decency? Whoever got them on that ship deserves a medal, not a prison sentence!”

  “I said to take it up with Ekrem. Now, tell me if you can backtrack whoever hacked the general’s ship. If they’re part of a group that’s taking over official state vessels to smuggle out refugees, they could also be connected to the attempts on her life.”

  Niko’s face cycled through about five shades of scarlet. “What kind of person are you?” they finally sputtered. “That was you once. That was your family—or it could have been—”

  Asala’s arm moved on its own before she’d made the decision. She slammed Niko up against the bulkhead, and when she spoke, she barely recognized her own voice.

  “You know nothing about my family.”

  “I know this.” With sudden, shocking calm, Niko brought up their own handheld and put it in front of Asala’s face.

  An image capture. One that was a mirror to her own face—the same dark brown skin, the same full lips, the same clan tattoo. Only a little thinner, and a little sadder, and with hair worn long instead of shorn on the sides like Asala had always kept hers . . .

  Where did you get that, she wanted to ask, to demand. But her vocal cords wouldn’t work.

  “It’s your sister,” Niko said, unnecessarily. “I told you, I know people. I made some inquiries, hacked some—um—some systems—the point is, I found her. At least, as of about ten years ago. It’s what I came to show you tonight.”