Table of Contents

- Get the audio

- The Vela

- Episode 1

- Episode 2

- Episode 3

- Episode 4

- Episode 5

- Episode 6

- Episode 7

- Episode 8

- Episode 9

- Episode 10

- Excerpt from The Vela Season 2

- Get the Marvel Season Pass

- More from Serial Box

- Praise for Serial Box

- Copyright Page

Love listening?

Get the full audio of The Vela in bundled ebook and audio for free!

Visit serialbox.com/redeem and enter code THEVELAS1EBOOK

Or get the bundled text and audio of the next two seasons for half off, plus the audio of season 1 for free!

Visit serialbox.com/redeem and enter code THEVELAS1EBOOK.

The Vela

Season 1

Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang, and Rivers Solomon

Why just have this ebook when you could get the audiobook, too? To get the bundled text and audio for free, visit serialbox.com/redeem and use the code THEVELAS1EBOOK.

Episode 1

A Leisurely Extinction

SL Huang

Former Corporal Asala Sikou lay prone on the rooftop of Khayyam’s largest hydrogen-processing factory, the pad of her finger just grazing the trigger of an 18-100B sniper rifle. The spotting stats flickered through her eyepiece, measuring distances and wind speeds, a translucent overlay of her vision that she barely noticed even as she absorbed it all. Her cheek stayed welded against the stock of the rifle as if both woman and weapon were carved from a single chunk of iron, and even her breath didn’t shift the rifle’s sights more than a hair.

Lines from an old, anonymous poem layered themselves gently through her waiting mind: The sands so red, a sky so blue, but not the blue of home. The sky on Khayyam was blue above her now—always blue, always cloudless. And silent, at the moment, as Asala had dialed her hearing implants off. Her military career had taken her hearing before she left the Forces behind, but these days when she watched and waited she used her deafness to add focus.

Below her, President Ekrem’s retinue glided to a stop in front of the Summit building. Ekrem’s entourage preceded him out, peacocked in the flashy colors that were popular on Khayyam right now. Asala registered their presence, but kept her focus across the square. Her protectee would be appearing soon . . .

With a twitch of her eye, the field of Asala’s scope stretched and flattened to show the whole thruway in front of the Summit building. If an attack were to come on the general, now would be the time.

Asala had lain on this rooftop for nine hours, since the moment General Cynwrig had arrived on Khayyam and been ensconced in visitors’ quarters. The seconds had dripped past, and the general had stayed inside. Gaggles of environmental protesters had made a few efforts at approach, but the riot police had easily dispersed them—they’d been tame demonstrators, not like the sensational self-desiccators who’d been plaguing the governors down south, and they’d made no move toward violence. But if Asala had been the one planning an attack on an Outer Planet dignitary instead of having been tasked with preventing it, she would have waited until . . . Yes. Just about now.

The first of General Cynwrig’s people came out on foot and turned in sharp parade format toward the Summit building.

And there. Movement. The checkpoint cordoning off the street at the crest of the hill . . . a gang approaching on individual scooters, small but clear in her scoped vision. Over a dozen people—too many to mean anything harmless.

Asala hovered between breaths, waiting for the confirmation that they weren’t more protesters or misguided tourists. She got it almost instantly, when the first human guard crumpled to the ground. They were here to kill the general, and she was here to stop them.

Asala squeezed her finger back.

The rifle report impacted through her shoulder and chest. She couldn’t hear the chaos in the street below, but her bullet had found its mark—it always did.

Or marks, to be precise. Only an instant later, her homing bullet was followed by others from tripods across and along the square, programmed in patterns she’d preset into the master rifle against her shoulder. Fully half the attackers went down at once, and most of the rest staggered.

By then, the Khayyami riot police were on the scene. The survivors screamed and cowered beneath clouds of nerve gas as bouts of electricity arced over their ranks. Asala took a last glance through her scope—it looked like the general herself had barely made it outside before being quickly ushered back in. Cynwrig was out of danger.

Something caught at Asala’s strategic senses, and she frowned. Could the assassins have made a mistake? Or was she missing something about their plan? She ran the incident back through her head, but it only served to verify her instincts: the best time for the would-be assassins to make their advance would have been when General Cynwrig was halfway across the square, farthest from any shelter. Asala still would have gotten them first, of course, but this attempt maybe even the riot police alone could have foiled.

Why had they gone so early?

She watched through the scope a moment longer, but whether the mistiming had been incompetence or intended as something more calculated, the attack was clearly over. The Khayyami forces could clean up.

Asala snapped her rifle into its transport case with the ease of long practice, dialed her hearing back up, and headed for the outside stairs to street level.

• • •

Asala walked casually down the thruway to the Presidential Palace and scanned herself through two sets of guards to a side entrance. Ekrem would want to see her after an incident like this. The first guards took her weapons, tagged them, and entered them into storage lockers, and the second set passed her off to a butler who politely left her in a smallish audience chamber to wait.

She stayed standing, quickly cataloguing her surroundings from long habit, even here inside the Palace. This room was customarily gaudy, with carved stone and plast cloth all sporting shiny depictions of sunbursts and waterfalls. Everything on Khayyam seemed to celebrate one of the two, although it wasn’t like any native Khayyami had ever seen a waterfall outside image captures. All water here came from either ice imported from the Outer Ring or hydrogen siphoned from the solar harvesters.

Ironic that so much of the Khayyami aesthetic favored sun depictions, when they all knew what their harvesting had done to the sun. Knew, and hadn’t stopped. At least Asala would be dead before the whole system finally killed itself.

A noise at the door.

Asala shifted on the balls of her feet, her hand going to her side holster before she remembered the air pistol she usually wore was with the Palace guards. She registered the people first—they moved with the deadly economy of security personnel, but in drab and utilitarian uniforms that shouted they weren’t from here on Khayyam. They took up posts on either side of the door, and between them skittered a metal-on-stone stream of . . . bugs? Hard black carapaces and far too many legs to be a design requirement, they moved with a slithering speed that made every one of Asala’s instincts stand on end.

She resisted the urge to rock back a step.

“My spiders. To me.”

Asala would have known that voice from the news captures, even before she took in the ruthlessly sharp uniform, the stark white hair, the glittering eyes that seemed to take in everything and reflect nothing. In person, up close, General Cynwrig of Gan-De was a black hole of a person: nothing but sinew and cold.

The robotic bugs scurried back across the floor, up the general’s sleek boot, over the deadly creases of her black uniform, and into a small silver canister that she snapped closed. AIs, then. People always said Gan-De society was in love with their robots. They should use refugees for some of those jobs instead, some Khayyami liked to say, shaking their heads sadly—as if they knew anything about Outer Ring problems, or were doing anything themselves other than sage nods and vague judgments. Asala tried to stay out of those conversations.

“I’m told you’re the person I owe for my life today,” General Cynwrig said, pocketing her robotic bugs. She did not sound grateful.

Asala forced herself to relax under that gaze, to stand straight and let her face go smooth and bland. She was a larger woman than the general, both taller and broader, and she fancied the other woman’s lip curled slightly while taking her in.

And Asala definitely knew the moment Cynwrig saw the clan tattoo. Dark blue, winding around Asala’s right eye, not a stark contrast against her dark brown skin but also not something anyone ever failed to notice here on Khayyam. The double takes, that moment of eyes catching for a split second before people awkwardly hurried toward bland politeness a moment later, weighed down with everything they suddenly “knew” about Asala—Outer Ring, not from here, Hypatian—migrant, refugee, careful what you say . . .

But General Cynwrig’s reaction was different. Her whole face pinched in, and it wasn’t with misplaced pity. “Well,” she said. “I guess there’s a pattie that’s good for something.”

Oddly, her voice had gone admiring, almost as if she hadn’t just used a word Asala thought she’d left behind on the scrap ships.

But Asala barely heard it, because suddenly she was back there, a scared kid, with only her parents’ and uncles’ and aunties’ tearful assurances that this would be a better life, that they were ripping her from everyone she loved and forcing her across the solar system because she was one of the lucky, chosen ones, facing the mocking jeers at her accent and her tattoo, pattie, clannie, the Outties should all just die off already and leave the system to the rest of us . . . Luck and being chosen hadn’t been enough. Asala had pulled herself up without help, starting with three tours of service in multiple conflicts, earning gold stripes as a sniper, then decades of carving out her own business and reputation—she’d made a name and a place for herself here, and for some fucking Gandesian to come in and reduce all that to nothing with a word—

“Now, now, General, I’d rather you didn’t use that type of language while you’re with us.” President Ekrem swept into the room as breezily as if his timing had not just prevented a diplomatic incident. Asala consciously unclenched her hands, but her skin still tingled.

“My mistake,” General Cynwrig said. “I admit I can’t keep up with the latest political sensitivities. I meant to say I didn’t know you were Hypatian.” She inclined her head slightly in Asala’s direction. “You’ve done well for someone in your . . . circumstances.”

Oh, you knew exactly what you were saying, Asala thought. And you know what you’re saying now.

“The general has asked that you be part of her personal security detail for the remainder of her visit to our fine world,” Ekrem said. “I told her you’d be delighted, of course. General, our sincerest apologies, again, for the incident today.”

“No matter. You prevented their success.” Cynwrig’s eyes flicked to Asala again.

“My people will be in touch soon with a revised schedule for our talks,” Ekrem continued. “I’m very optimistic we can strengthen trade relations between our two worlds while working together to address today’s solar concerns. And of course we’ll officially be adding Agent Asala to your detail.”

Agent Sikou, Asala thought. Her own annoyance surprised her—Khayyami didn’t use clan names, only patronymics, and she’d been going by only one name now for decades. She’d thought herself used to it. She flattened her lips together and managed to remain silent and minimally cordial as President Ekrem bowed the general out of the room.

“You,” Ekrem said, the moment the door closed behind Cynwrig and her guards. “You, I owe a bottle of the finest in fermented beverages, something ten or twenty years of water in the brewing. I wish I could give you an official commendation.”

Asala felt herself relaxing, her muscles uncoiling. She moved to one of the sunburst chairs and sat. “Then I’d have to be an official part of this operation. Speaking of which—agent?”

Ekrem huffed a laugh and went to the side of the room, where he began measuring out two small trays of flavored grounds. “General Cynwrig doesn’t have to know you’re working off the books for me. The other security we’ve assigned to her has been read in on you since the beginning, but they’re very discreet. You don’t mind continuing on, do you? Intelligence isn’t convinced this was the only planned attack against the general—six additional credible threats have come in just since this incident.”

“You’re paying me, right?” Asala hoped it sounded as smooth as she wanted. “I hope I never have to have a conversation with the woman again, but you know me. I’m a professional.”

Ekrem chuckled again. “Oh, I love how mercenary you’ve gotten in our old age.”

“I’m surprised you wanted an outside contractor on this in the first place,” Asala said. “Usually the jobs you call me in for are a lot less official.”

“Asala! You make it sound like I’m having you run some secret black ops department. But I promise, I don’t just call you because bureaucratic channels are too . . . ehm, bureaucratic. I call you because you’re a lady who gets things done.”

He handed her one of the refreshment trays. The powder had a faint earthy scent, the richness of well-tended lichens mixed with a mild stimulant—Ekrem didn’t skimp. Asala took a pinch and folded it into her lip. “Do keep going. Flattery will get you everywhere with me.”

“Good, because I have another job for you after this. Something that, as you said, is . . . a lot less official. I need you on this, Asala.” The charm he’d used to such great effect on the campaign trail had turned serious.

She tongued the wad of powder against her gums. “What is it?”

Ekrem began to pace. “Have you heard of the Vela?”

“The ship coming in from Eratos, yes?” She’d heard Ekrem’s PR sound bites on it; everyone had—the rescue ship carrying the last of the inhabitants from their system’s outermost, dying world. A project the president had managed to spin into a banner of munificence even as he shrewdly sidestepped the refugee crisis on the other Outer Ring planets. Eratos wasn’t the only dying world, just the one dying fastest—the tiny colony on Samos had been gone for a decade, and after Eratos would be Hypatia and then Gan-De, and maybe the Inner Ring would finally come to care when it was their turn to freeze to death as the sun collapsed.

A leisurely extinction. One that allowed everyone to push any inconvenience to another place or another generation.

Ekrem waved a hand. “The Vela’s not just any ship. It’s the ship that won me reelection. I promised that saving the last of Eratos would be the first step to saving the whole system. The people need to see the Vela’s triumphant return—they need to see that this can be fixed, that we can save the people of the Outer Ring and then we can work to save everyone.”

He sounded so earnest. “You mean people need to see it before the next election cycle heats up.”

The president gave a half-shrug, acknowledging it. “Without strong leadership, we’d be even more lost than we are. I can read poll numbers; I barely beat the Globalist candidate last time, even with the Vela—I won’t pretend these things aren’t important.”

“So what’s the problem? The Vela sweeps into the Inner Ring, you stage a few parades on Khayyam celebrating that we saved the last of their world. What’s not to love?”

His face twisted. “It’s gone missing.”

“Oh,” Asala said. “I suppose that does make a parade harder.”

“Dammit, Asala. There are thousands of people on that boat, including the entire Eratosi Cabinet of Ministers. And do you remember Vanja?”

“Sure, the gravity queen. She died what, five or seven years ago?” Artificial gravity had existed before Vanja Ryouta, but her team had made it accessible and affordable, pioneering the way into a boom in interplanetary transportation technology.

“Her legacy is very much alive,” Ekrem said. “Her lab was still active out on Eratos, including her family—”

“All right, I get it.” It was always about the celebrities. “But what do you want me to do? If they went missing in space, they could be anywhere. Get an astrophysicist to run some trajectories from their last known reporting location.”

“I already know where they went missing. Their last report was that they had to put in for emergency repairs at Hypatia.”

Asala went cold. “No.”

Ekrem didn’t seem to hear her. “They were going to do a flyby of Hypatia to pick up enough momentum to skip them past Gan-De and all the way to Khayyam. But instead they had to make a stop. Now, I’ve been conferring with orbital piloting experts about this—it’s not a lost cause, not yet. In a couple weeks the seventeen-year dead stretch ends again, and we’ll get our few-month chance when it’s possible to jump orbits from Hypatia and easily hit Gan-De. So if they were able to get their repairs done on the ground, they could potentially make it to Gan-De without it taking years and years, and then from Gan-De, the Inner Ring is a lot more accessible. Maybe not in time for primary run-offs, but they’d still arrive before . . .”

The seventeen-year planetary cycle. Ekrem talked like it was a distant academic truth. To him, it was.

To Asala, it had been the promise of an eternity alone, when almost thirty-four years ago her clan had scraped and bribed to get her a dirty berth on a ship to Gan-De. Curled alone in her bunk, with faceless, desperate masses of humanity crammed in around her, knowing that thanks to the practicalities of orbital mechanics it would be seventeen years before anyone could follow . . . seventeen years. A lifetime. And by then nobody could have followed her anyway, because Gan-De had long decided it had had enough of Hypatian refugees.

As far as Asala knew, everyone in her clan was dead. By the time she could afford to send a message back, the only reply had been echoing silence, and that was an answer all on its own. Hypatia had been a harsh place even before the creeping cold had turned dire, whole towns freezing to death in the night when the weather snapped wrong.

Desperate Hypatians still ran from their withering planet every seventeen years, unwilling to die by staying in place. But with Gan-De closed, for many it meant replacing a cold death on the planet with an even colder one in space, the refugees’ ragtag scrap ships disintegrating while their unlucky passengers begged for a sliver of room in an overcrowded orbital refugee camp. If they got in, they won the right to die more gradually.

And now this upcoming opening would be the last time anyone ever fled Hypatia. The cold reality of the temperature projections spelled that out in black and white. Nobody on Khayyam talked of it—any whisper of Hypatia’s impending demise, and expressions turned uncomfortable, eyes darting away. Ekrem would probably still blithely reassure everyone he could send a souped-up rescue ship until long after there was no one left to rescue. All while Khayyam’s corporations kept cheerfully harvesting the sun’s hydrogen, because the damage was done, so it wasn’t making a difference anymore, was it? Besides, they needed that hydrogen, for water manufacturing, for fusion power . . .

Ekrem was still talking. “. . . And I’m going to send my kid with you. My youngest, do you remember them? Not that I don’t trust you, of course”—he laughed nervously—“but Niko could use some real-world experience. Their apprenticeship’s been with a data analysis team over at Domestic Intelligence, and they’re raring to get some fieldwork.” He stepped over to the wall and tapped an interface panel. “Send Niko in, would you?”

“Ekrem, you’re not hearing me.” Asala tried to keep her voice even. “I said—”

She didn’t get the chance to finish before a twentysomething kid whisked into the room, so eagerly they must’ve been waiting just outside the door. Niko’s round face beamed beneath a haircut that strove for the latest in androgynous layered-shag fashion, and they stood with the ramrod straightness of someone concentrating far too hard on how to make a good impression.

“Niko!” crowed the president. “You remember Asala? I think you met her when you were just crawling, or something like that. Remember, Asala?”

Asala didn’t. Ekrem often talked like this, as if they’d been at each other’s family gatherings every solstice and festival, instead of a grunt and an officer who’d bred some respect long ago in a different life. But she nodded anyway.

“It’s nice to meet you, Asala. Again,” Niko said, breaking into an even broader smile. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to work with—”

“Ekrem.” Asala raised her voice to break in. “Ekrem, listen to me. I said no. I’m not doing it. Find someone else to track down your missing ship.”

Ekrem’s face went long and surprised, like she’d just told him she was planning to vote for his opponent.

“But what about the Vela?” Niko blurted. “You must want to save the refugees; you’re from Hypa—”

“Good day,” Asala said, with an iciness that could have rivaled her homeworld. It might not be strictly polite to walk out on the president of Khayyam and his youngest child, but it was better than strangling said child, which probably would have gotten her in even more trouble than if she’d punched the leader of Gan-De earlier.

She was not going back to Hypatia.

• • •

Niko had never imagined getting anywhere near General Cynwrig during her stay on Khayyam. Other than maybe as part of a protest, if such a thing wouldn’t have spun Father right out of his orbit. Or, well, the occasional fantasy about hacking Cynwrig’s computers into answering every command with dancing pink ponies and statistics about refugees.

How anyone could ignore the situation on the Outer Ring was beyond Niko. And how the general could be so heartless—there was plenty of room on Gan-De! Not like Niko’s own home planet couldn’t do loads better too, but few refugees could make it this far in-system on their own. The distance conveniently allowed educated Khayyami to wash their hands of all those deaths, and all with disgusting gentility. But Gan-De was worse: so many countless Hypatian refugees at their door, stuck in orbit or in transit, in camps, and yet “Gan-De for Gandesians” was still somehow going strong.

It made Niko furious.

Yet here they were, trotting willingly toward the guest quarters of none other than General Cynwrig herself. Because that was where Asala was. Asala, whom Niko had managed to offend the very first time they’d opened their mouth.

You should have known better. She’s diaspora; it’s probably painful! You should have been more sensitive!

The Gandesian and Khayyami guards at the door to the general’s suite took a bloodscan before questioning Niko closely about their purpose and whether Asala was expecting them. Then one guard went inside, presumably to check with Asala, but Niko wasn’t worried. People rarely refused the president’s youngest child a meeting, even if they wanted to.

And Asala’s face when Niko was ushered in showed she’d really, really wanted to.

Oh dear. How to turn this around?

At least General Cynwrig herself wasn’t present—she must be in the inner rooms to the suite, with Asala alone in the anteroom as her bodyguard. Thank heavens.

“I told your father no,” Asala said flatly as soon as the guards had gone back into the hall and the door had shut behind them. “There’s nothing to discuss.”

“I think there is, though,” Niko pressed. “I know you probably feel like someone else can just go instead, but you didn’t hear Father when he was briefing me—he says there’s no one as good as you. You could be the difference between those poor people dying or—”

“That’s not my problem.” Asala turned away.

“If it’s not you, I don’t go either!” Niko accidentally said it too loud, and pressed their lips together, a gate shut too late. It was true, though—even the privilege of being one of Ekrem’s children wouldn’t get Niko an assignment like this. If Asala refused, and Father went through official channels, he’d be forced to dispatch a squad of senior intelligence commandos. And that squad would certainly not include Niko, a green rookie whose only training so far had been data work.

But Father wanted Asala, and he wanted this kept quiet, and he also wanted a hedge against any Hypatian loyalties she might have left, just in case anything went wrong out there, and that meant a rare Niko-shaped chance. For Niko’s part, they’d been privately hoping Asala had Hypatian loyalties left in spades, though that was looking less and less likely.

Asala had turned back, her gaze narrow and calculating. Niko decided to try for some partial honesty. “I care about the Outer Planet refugees, okay? A lot. I think we should be doing so much more. Part of my apprenticeship has been working on the nets, making connections with people out there, but here I am sheltered on Khayyam and I can’t do anything. This is a chance for me to get on the ground and help people in a real way—”

“And what, you want to prove to Daddy that you can pull off a mission?”

That hit a little too uncomfortably close to another truth. Niko winced internally and tried not to show it. “I can. I’ve pretty much finished my training, and I’ve got a lot of contacts on the Outer Ring now. And I have specialties in network accessibility and computer security.”

“You mean you’re a hacker?”

Niko half-smiled. “We don’t call it that when it’s for the government.”

Asala’s expression didn’t change, and Niko was second-guessing whether the joke had been a good idea when a knock came at the door and a pair of Gandesian guards entered, a short dark man and a tall woman with close-cropped hair.

“We’re changing duty shifts,” said the man. “They told us you have a visitor. Just confirming the situation.”

“Confirmed,” Asala acknowledged. “You can leave us.”

The female guard turned as if she were about to exit back into the hallway. But instead she palmed something across the door’s inner lock, spun with a dreadful fluidity—

And stabbed her partner in the neck.

No! Not now!

That was all Niko’s stunned brain had time for before Asala shoved them out of the way. The floor somersaulted into Niko’s cheek—ow—and Asala grunted—was she hurt? The traitor guard had some sort of hand weapon out, brandishing—

Asala launched herself at the guard out of nowhere. The weapon in the guard’s hand pulsed once, and Asala half-folded over, but somehow that didn’t stop her, and she plowed into the woman and took them both into the wall so hard something cracked.

The guard’s pistol skidded across the anteroom floor. Only a few meters from Niko.

Niko’s mind had blanked out, half-coherent thoughts popping like oil on hot metal—She can’t kill Asala! and Would she have killed me too and Blood, there’s so much blood, how is there this much blood. And finally, after far too long: I can be the one to stop her, I can, I can do it, GO.

Asala and the guard were grappling on the other side of the room. The wet, meaty thumps of flesh on flesh, the crack of someone being hurt badly and a yell of pain—no, don’t listen, just get to the pistol, ignore the blood, how is it everywhere? Niko tried to take ahold of the guard’s weapon with tacky, shaking fingers, not at all sure they were holding it right, and raised it toward the other side of the room.

“St-stop!”

Asala did something with one leg then, something vicious that landed a knee in her opponent’s face. The guard toppled off her.

“I said stop!” Niko cried. The pistol wavered in the general direction of the bleeding guard. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

The assassin’s eyes went intense and dark at Niko then, and Niko had a sudden flash of certainty that this was it, they were going to die here. They tried to find the weapon’s trigger but their fingers didn’t seem to be able to move—

The moment of distraction, however, was all Asala needed.

In a sequence Niko wouldn’t be able to reconstruct till afterward, Asala spun up to one knee, clearing her own air pistol that she hadn’t had a moment’s time to draw during the fight. It popped once, a final, deep sound that seemed to suck all the air out of the room, and the guard crumpled to the anteroom floor right at Niko’s feet.

“Hey. Hey, kid.”

Asala was right next to Niko somehow. How long had she been talking?

“Hey, kid, you okay? Give me the pulse pistol, all right?”

Asala’s hands closed over Niko’s bloody ones. Niko tried to unclench from the gun. “It’s over?”

“Yeah, it’s over. Are you hurt?”

“I don’t—” Niko patted their hands over themself as if that would answer the question. “I don’t . . .”

“Take a minute.” Asala went across to the door—she was limping, and hunched over, and she was hurt, hurt saving Niko—and touched the interface panel next to it. Niko became aware of banging outside it, more guards, the ones the assassin had locked out.

“This is Asala,” Asala announced into the interface. “The situation is under control. Tell the president I have Niko in here with me and neither they nor General Cynwrig were injured in this attack. We have one casualty, a Gandesian guard. The assassin is also dead. But I’m not opening this door until we get some additional vetting on everyone outside it.”

She limped to a sofa at the side of the room and sat heavily, one gun in each hand.

A skittering noise came from the inner door to the anteroom, and Niko half-climbed the wall before realizing it was just the Gandesian AI spiders. The AIs. You know about their AIs. They’re just like you studied. But seeing them in person was different.

And of course, right behind the horde of spiders came . . . the general.

Niko felt like vomiting. General Cynwrig. A military dictator who ran Gan-De with the efficiency of a factory, all while blithely killing Hypatians by the shipload, leaving them to die a slow death in space, all because she’d decided Gan-De should only be for certain humans—how Niko’s own father could talk to this woman like it was all okay and make trade deals importing their water in exchange for tech—

Niko couldn’t understand it. Didn’t want to understand it.

“Well,” General Cynwrig said. “It seems I have you to thank once again, Agent Asala.”

Asala grunted. “I suggest you go back into your rooms until we have all this sorted out, General.”

Cynwrig’s eyes crawled over Niko. “Who’s this?”

“President Ekrem sent a messenger to speak to me about something unrelated. Bad timing. They’re not involved.”

“I see.” The general took another moment, studying the two dead bodies on the floor. Then she said, “I’ll be in the back rooms. Don’t mind my spiders. Given the circumstances, I feel I must send them a little farther afield. You understand.”

She turned on her heel with military precision, and the door slid shut behind her. The robots remained, however. A good portion of them skittered over to squeeze out under the door, while the rest tap-tapped around the room, taking in Niko and Asala and the guards. Watching.

That’s what Gandesians do with their spiders. You know that. The reminder didn’t stop Niko from being unnerved.

“Creepy, aren’t they,” muttered Asala. She leaned down to get her face right up close to one of the bugs. “I said you’re creepy. What are you going to do with that?”

“They’re intelligence-gathering robots,” Niko said. The words came out dry and stuttery. “I guess she wants more, um. Intelligence. Because of the—because of all this.” They bit their lip. You’re talking too much. You always do. Just shut up, shut up.

“Hell, I’d like some more intelligence too,” Asala said.

Niko’s mind was starting to unblank, but it was filling with thoughts they didn’t want to have, like how the guard had moved to kill them both without the slightest hesitation and how Niko had completely frozen and Asala had shoved them out of the way . . .

My fault she’s hurt. All my fault.

“Do you need a med team?” Niko asked. “We can call one in . . .”

One of Asala’s shoulders lifted and then lowered. “Eventually. I’ve had worse.”

And you were trying to convince her you were ready to go out in the field. At the first sign of pressure you fell apart, while she sits there shot acting like it’s a stubbed toe.

The adrenaline and panic were receding, leaving shame behind.

Was there any chance of salvaging Asala’s impression of them? Some way to show Niko wasn’t just a data rookie who froze up at the first sign of trouble?

Intelligence, Asala had said. Something useful . . .

The traitorous guard was still lying where she had fallen. Niko tried to figure out how to step over to her without tracking through all the blood, but it was impossible. They gingerly crouched down to start lifting the flaps on her pockets.

There has to be something here. Something worth showing Asala . . .

“Shouldn’t you wait for the forensic team to do that?” Asala said it from over on the couch, not moving.

“You want to wait and take whatever sanitized report they choose to give you?” Niko said, with more bravado than they felt.

The edge of a smile quirked Asala’s tired expression. “You’ve got more guts than I gave you credit for, kid.”

The compliment should have delighted Niko, but instead their heart was banging out of their chest. Was it cheating, to do things this way? It had to be. It felt like it.

And—worst case—what if Niko couldn’t find any evidence at all, even missed something really obvious, and then Father would ream them out for disrupting the scene and Asala would think they were a green know-nothing and—

Oh. There. At the bottom of a back pocket. Niko drew out the thick packet. Across the room, Asala’s eyes widened and she sat up slightly—she knew what it was too.

“That’s concentrated glow,” she said. “Way more than for personal use. That much is an automatic intent-to-deal charge.”

“Which means it’s also enough for a payment,” Niko said. “What’s the going rate for assassinating a head of state?”

And whoever happened to be in the way. Niko felt another wave of nausea and tried not to think about it.

Asala frowned. “There aren’t many people who would use glow as currency. Too hard to unload, unless . . .”

“Unless you’re in the trade. She’s got to be out of Khwarizmi.” That wasn’t too big a leap, was it? Niko didn’t think so. Khwarizmi, the only other Inner Ring world, was warmer even than Khayyam and a haven for pleasure resorts and smuggling cartels alike. Just the shady sorts who might believably have assassination as one of their goals. Asala would agree, wouldn’t she?

“Glow dealers wouldn’t have any beef with Gan-De,” Asala said, as if feeling it out. “But the Khwarizmian syndicates also deal in ice smuggling. Throw Gan-De into chaos, especially now, and the black market for water would go through the roof.”

“What percentage of Khayyam’s water comes from ice mining on Gan-De or Hypatia, instead of pulling it from the sun? It’s a lot, right?” Niko agreed. “And with all the—the environmental crisis—on Hypatia, Gan-De’s where it’s at.”

Asala didn’t look entirely convinced. “Maybe . . .”

Come on! Niko barely bit back from voicing their frustration. This is solid information. You know it is!

Something beeped.

It wasn’t the wall interface. Asala dug out a personal handheld, miraculously undamaged even after the fight.

“Your father’s coming down here,” she said. “He has the interrogation reports from the suspects who survived this morning’s incident. It seems you’re right—they were out of Khwarizmi.”

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 Niko 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 stowed 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.”

Dine on snow and sup of light, laughed Dayo in Asala’s memory. Poetry is the primal juice of life. Remember that, little Asala.

“This is the best I could do from here on Khayyam,” Niko pushed on, relentless. “Come with me to Hypatia. Help me find the Vela. We can find your family, too.”

Asala hadn’t heard from anyone in her clan in over thirty years. But Dayo had been alive ten years ago. Somewhere. Somehow.

A sliding sound behind them. Asala whipped around—some sort of gliding metal rectangular something had come down a track in the bulkhead and stopped directly across the corridor.

“Help me get these people out,” Niko begged Asala. “They deserve a chance. And then together . . .”

Asala was no longer listening. Across from them, a series of snaps and ticks emanated from the rectangle as it reoriented itself.

“. . . the people on the Vela . . .” Niko was prattling on. The robot slanted itself and then stopped, as if it had attained the view it wanted.

The general’s ubiquitous AIs . . . which she took everywhere with her. Which everyone knew she took everywhere with her.

The AI spiders she’d sent farther afield for intelligence reports, specifically because of the escalating attacks on her life.

Whoever had hacked the general’s ship to mask the mass of the refugees must have also been able to hack her AIs. They would have needed to in order to block surveillance of this cargo area.

An indirect method . . .

“We have to get back to Khayyam.” The words spun out even before the answer had fully unraveled in Asala’s head, certainty slicing her to the marrow. “I know where the next attack is going to come from.”

She scrabbled for her handheld. She had to get word to the general, to the president—

The display fizzed and blinked with a connection error. “Dammit!”

Niko was on their handheld too, presumably also trying to contact the surface. They looked up. “Do you have any signal? I—”

Asala grabbed them by the collar and hauled them after her, back down the corridors, past the watching and whirring AIs. The AIs whose siblings on the surface had been programmed to kill. “You’re good with computers, right?” she ground out as they moved. “Get me a signal, get me something!”

“I’m trying—”

The two of them blasted back through the security checkpoints. The first time they caught sight of a human guard, Asala cornered him and snarled a command about the nearest console interface, but the confused guard only stammered something about the system being down.

“Tell the president it’s an emergency!” Asala shouted over her shoulder, at a dead sprint for the elevator.

When they reached the platform, she yanked Niko inside with her as soon as the heavy carriage doors opened.

“If we’re not too late, you’re going to have a chance to show me just how good at computers you really are,” she said to them. “Start thinking about how to counter-hack the general’s spiders. Because I’d bet all the glow you found on that Khwarizmian that they’re going to attack us as soon as we get there.”

• • •

Asala slapped the first interface she came to on the surface, but that was out too—was the whole damn city down?

After that she made only one stop—an arms locker where she grabbed an electric riot gun. Niko sputtered something political and judgmental about Khayyami riot-control tactics when she did, but Asala paid no attention. An electric spread was the best possible way she could think of to combat dozens of tiny metal bugs.

“Are you sure?” Niko gasped out, trying to keep up with Asala’s grip on their arm down the last darkened hallway. “What if—it still could be something else—”

Asala didn’t stop to explain. Long ago, one of her mentors had told her that her best quality as an investigator was her nose for it. Once everything fit together, once it clicked, then she knew. And this fit, this fit perfectly—two attacks in quick succession, designed to fail. Designed to provoke the general into sending her spiders farther afield until someone could capture one and reprogram it, give it a far more thorough hack than the AIs on the ship, a virus that would spread to the others . . . something deadly . . . after all, it didn’t take much to puncture a woman’s jugular in her sleep.

“Get on your handheld,” Asala ordered Niko. “See if you can find whatever wireless signal the bugs are on—oh fuck.”

They’d rounded the last corner. In front of them, between the oblivious human guards, a steady stream of the general’s spiders marched back under the door into the suite.

“Out of the way!” The startled guards had barely even registered her voice by the time Asala was plowing past them, palming her scan into the door and diving through in one move.

Spiders swarmed over every surface of the anteroom. In the center of the floor, they had begun to coalesce, to climb over one another’s backs in a seething, swirling mass, rising to half the height of a human—higher—

Asala didn’t wait. She let loose with the riot weapon.

Arcing blue lightning crackled into the tower of robots, and the column toppled with the buzzing of an angry horde. Some fell inert to the anteroom floor, but only a few, too few. The others began to swarm and regroup . . .

“Get past them!” Asala shouted to Niko, and slammed across to the opposite wall, her boots catching metal legs—or the metal legs catching at her. She blasted again and again, but it seemed to take the robots less and less time to recover. Behind them, slow on the uptake, the human guards had entered, but they didn’t seem to know where or how to point their weapons.

“General!” Asala yelled. “Let us in!” The inner rooms weren’t airtight—the bugs could be coming in anywhere, windows or cracks or—how many of the damn things were there?

They were climbing into a tower again. A black tornado of chittering metal carapaces. It had no face, but somehow it seemed to turn to them.

The general’s door slid open. Asala plunged through, dragging Niko with her before palming it shut. Through it, she heard the guards shouting in the outer room, desperately fighting to contain the robots.

Then screams.

Then silence, save the whispering chitter of metal on metal.

“Barricade any entry points,” ordered an imperious voice. General Cynwrig, taking control as if she’d known all along that her bugs were to betray her. “Here.” She tossed blankets and plast cushions at Niko and Asala. Then she split open a portable med kit and started spraying field sealant over the sides of the windows.

“Niko, stay on trying to hack them,” Asala countermanded, jamming a blanket into the crack under the door. None too soon; something pulled at it from the other side almost immediately. “Are you getting anywhere?”

“Yes—I can’t stop it in time, the sequence is HPM-encrypted, but I got in and I can see how it’s set. It’s—this is so crude. Why is it so crude?” Niko had gone so pale their face was a moon in the dim light, and they sounded genuinely furious, though at the situation or the bad programming Asala had no idea. “There’s no recognition system. They’re programmed to brute-force kill the person with the remote, or, or whoever last had it, and—and anyone within a radius of her. This could have gotten my father, or anyone; they just want to kill everyone in the area—”

“General,” Asala said.

The general didn’t even hesitate. She slipped a silver cylinder out of a pocket, the very pocket that had held some of her trusted bugs the first time they’d met, and tossed it to Asala.

“What are you doing?” cried Niko.

“My job,” Asala answered, and ran.

• • •

The riot gun got her back through the anteroom, but barely. She had to get somewhere unpopulated and stay there, somewhere the bugs wouldn’t catch anyone else in their target net.

She wouldn’t have to outrun them forever. Once the spiders had taken her bait and followed, Niko and the general would be able to get a message to Ekrem even if they had to do it on foot. Someone on the president’s staff had to know how to disable an AI, and Ekrem would send a squad to find her and take down the bugs. She just had to outlast them.

But she wasn’t sure that was going to be possible. The things were fucking fast. Asala pounded down the empty night thruway, darkened government buildings rising on all sides, and even at a sprint the metallic black cloud was gaining. She’d started out with almost ten meters of clearance. Then it was eight. Then five . . . She tried spraying blue lightning behind her again, but in the time it took her to let loose another blast, the bugs had already gained back any additional space she’d stolen. Her breath heaved in her chest, and her injured side had gone from a chafe to a throb to a scream. The pressure headache from their space trip still stabbed from her implants.

It was so hard to think . . .

What could she survive that a robot couldn’t? Water? That was a laugh; there was barely enough water in the whole city to drown the lot of them. Extreme cold? Gan-De was many times colder than Khayyam. But if not extreme cold, what about extreme heat . . .

Asala veered hard without slowing, down the side street that would take her to the hydrogen-processing plant. The same one she’d lain on top of just that morning. The same signs she’d passed on her way in and out reading Danger. Do not enter.

A hydrogen-processing center wouldn’t have liquid water—when the hydrogen came together with oxygen mined from deep below Khayyam’s surface, the result of the massive reaction was steam, which was then piped out to a paying populace. But everyone knew how much energy the process released. How dangerous hydrogen-processing plants were because of it.

They had all sorts of safeguards in place to prevent explosions, but the heat . . . there was no way to siphon away all the heat.

Asala had no idea how hot it actually got inside a hydrogen-processing factory. She’d never been inside one.

Hopefully, the robots hadn’t either.

She hurtled toward the first door she saw, ignoring the signs plastered over it that screamed “danger” and “authorized personnel only.” It was alarmed and scan-locked, but she shot the seam in the doorway with her sidearm and pried the door open into a dark crack. The bugs were on her heels, but she shoved her way in and got off another jet from the riot gun to scatter them back from the opening.

An alarm blared into the night from the broken door, but that was fine—it would tell Ekrem where she was.

Asala’s injured side stabbed, and she doubled over and almost retched.

Keep moving. Keep moving or you’re dead.

It was already hot inside the building, even here near the door. Asala forced her feet to propel her forward and ran. It was almost too dark to see, with only a few dim strips of safety lighting glowing along the floor in places. Pipes laced the space above her head, so low she had to keep ducking, and the first time she brushed up against one of them, it was so hot she yelled aloud.

The spiders had been slowed climbing through the door, but they were catching up. The warmth didn’t seem to be bothering them yet, even as it dragged at Asala and made her feet heavy.

Hotter. I need to make it hotter . . .

She almost ran face-first into a ladder. The metal of the rungs burned to the touch, but she pulled the plast of her jacket over her hands and climbed. Bugs’ll have a harder time with a ladder. Maybe . . . can’t follow . . .

Wishful thinking. She could hear them chittering up after her. Or was that in her head? Her covered hands slipped on the rungs. Sweat sheeted into her eyes.

She rolled out onto a grating and immediately flinched away from the floor, trying to stagger onto the soles of her boots. The acrid scent of burning seared the air. Her clothes, or her skin? She staggered back, away from the ladder.

The first spider clattered over the top of it, and Asala almost despaired.

Then it listed drunkenly to the side, half its legs crumpled, and it fell through the grating.

More spiders made it over. A few more fell. A few kept coming . . .

Asala lurched into a hobble. It’s who falls first . . . them or me . . .

She could hear some of the spiders falling from the ladder, chinks and chunks as they clattered to the floor below. One made it lethargically to only a meter in front of her and then simply stopped. She raised her stinging eyes—between her and the top of the ladder was an increasingly sparse robot graveyard.

I did it, she thought. I outlasted . . .

But tThen something was burning her, and she tried to get away from it, but she was sitting and she couldn’t get up, and then she wasn’t sitting anymore, either .

Her nostrils stung with that same seared, scorched smell, stronger now. She couldn’t breathe. The air cooked her from the inside out.

Everything hurt, everywhere, and she couldn’t move to make it stop. Maybe, she thought, she hadn’t outlasted the robots after all.

Before the heat wavered into darkness, the last thing she was aware of was hallucinating Niko’s face, pouring sweat and panting and calling her name.

• • •

Dayo locked Asala in a hug so tight she couldn’t breathe, their foreheads together. “Don’t forget me, little sister.”

“I don’t want to go,” Asala said.

“You have to. One more person safe means they work on the next person. The Elders will send me after you soon, right? Maybe even before this window closes.”

It was a kind lie. Even Asala knew that, young as she was.

“We’ll be together again on Gan-De,” Dayo whispered. “I’ll write you a poem for every day we’re apart and send them to you whenever we have the power. Remember, ‘my heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.’ Right?”

But somehow the girl then knew with the hindsight of a woman three and a half decades older that the poems would never come. That girl would wait, and wait, and wait, and then, finally, she would force herself to stop waiting and close those memories away.

• • •

Asala jerked awake to the smell of sterilization and medicants. A hospital. She was in a hospital, and Dayo wasn’t here.

Her eyes went to the chair next to the bed. For some reason, for a split second she had expected to see Niko, but the chair was empty.

A medical assistant puttered in and clicked the consciousness monitor at the side of Asala’s bed before glancing down at the readouts. “Ah, we thought you’d wake up soon. You took some nasty damage, but a few more hours should be all it takes to get you back together. Your friend who pulled you out is fine too, by the way. Minor burns only.”

Niko. She hadn’t dreamt it.

“What about the general?” Asala said. The words came out scratched and croaked.

“You mean General Cynwrig?” The assistant frowned. “I’ve heard she’s leaving today to go back to Gan-De, is that what you mean? I think she’s in with the president right now, concluding the trade talks. Anything else would be above the level they tell me, I’m afraid.”

Asala relaxed into the bed. The general was alive, then. That was all she needed to know. She closed her eyes.

My heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.

She snapped back awake.

“Excuse me,” she said to the assistant. “Could you find me my handheld? I need to send a message to the president.”

• • •

President Ekrem stood at the window, staring in pretended abstraction as the magline zinged by on its elevated track. Khayyam had warring regional governors in the canyons, a massive water pipeline collapse in its third-largest city, and now these suicides by desiccation driving the news cycles into a frenzy—as if they expected him to solve the looming environmental crisis with a clap of his hands. Yet he’d spent his entire afternoon mollifying and playing nice, all with a woman who barely acknowledged the concept of human rights.

He turned back to face his visitor. “It’s to our great shame that these attacks happened here on Khayyami soil. I hope, General, that you can accept our gravest apologies, and our assurances that we will do everything in our power to find and apprehend whoever was behind them.”

“I look forward to your updates,” answered Cynwrig.

Ekrem wondered if she practiced that thoroughly perfect balance of threat and bland interest. “Beyond knowing this was not a plot architected by anyone out of Khwarizmi, we can’t yet speculate at a motive, but—”

“No need to play coy. I know what I am most loathed for.”

He tried for a light laugh. “I doubt Hypatian refugees were in much of a position to pull this off, General.”

“They have their own radicalized factions aligned with them. But no doubt you will run down all those lines of inquiry.”

“No doubt,” echoed Ekrem.

“Speaking of the Hypatian criminal element, I’m told Khayyami authorities took custody of the ones found on board my ship.”

Ekrem kept his tone casual. “Would you rather take them back with you instead? We can work out the jurisdiction . . .”

General Cynwrig hesitated. Ekrem let the silence hang. The general would know Khayyam would not abide the sort of punishment she would mete out, not within the borders of its space. She’d have to take the refugees back with her, as prisoners . . .

She flicked a finger. “You can deal with the inconvenience. May I ask what you intend to do with them?”

“I’d thought to give them amnesty,” he answered, still nonchalant. “At the request of the agent who so nobly saved your life—I thought it the least I could do to reward her.”

“Ah,” Cynwrig said. “Yes. Her. I trust this amnesty will only be granted after you detain and question them about the incidents I suffered here on your planet.”

Those poor people are only looking for basic human living conditions; they weren’t the ones plotting ways to kill you. Ekrem didn’t say it out loud. Asala had said nothing to him about the refugees beyond her original message reporting them—as far as he knew, she was still recovering from putting on a fine show of saving his guest’s life. But if Asala hadn’t provided a convenient excuse, he would have found another way. Politics may have hampered him in doing more for Hypatia, but he could save a handful of refugees when they were dropped on his doorstep.

No one would have to know.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing for the system if we’d let whoever was coming after General Cynwrig succeed . . .

The thought gave him a jolt of guilt. No. Heads of state had to have a basic respect for each other, no matter how much they disagreed. Without that, civilization would already be lost.

He finished out the meeting mostly on automatic, his mouth making all the final arrangements of their summit on its own—my-people-will-be-speaking-to-your-people, we’ll hash out the rest of the details, thank you for such cordial discussions. Then, finally, he bowed General Cynwrig out of his office. Her human security still flanked her, but she looked . . . different without her AIs. Not smaller or less dangerous, no—almost more so.

As soon as she was gone, Ekrem let himself slump into a chair. Just for a moment, he let himself be tired.

His main console beeped with a priority communication. Asala. Mustering some energy, he reached over and flicked the message open.

It was short and to the point: I will find the Vela for you.

The president of Khayyam sat up straighter. As evidenced over the past two days, Asala was the most effective person he’d ever met. She would find that ship. He would have the Vela.

As long as she didn’t ask too many questions. And if she did . . .

If Asala began to look too deeply, or if homeworld loyalties turned her head, well, that was why Niko was going. Not the brightest of Ekrem’s children, Niko . . . but to watch and report, that they could handle. That, Ekrem could trust.

After all, family was family.

Episode 2

The Third Passenger

Becky Chambers

Hello. I am Uzochi Ryouta. You probably know my name in other contexts, but for the time being, think of me in my current state: an Eratosi refugee aboard the Vela. We are en route to Khayyam, which has opened their door to us when others would not. In my time here, I have seen many faces, and heard many stories. Depending on where you are in our solar system, you may not have crossed paths with a refugee from the outer worlds. We are abstracts, statistics. In these videos, I hope to give us a face. Our troubles may seem distant to you, but we felt the same on Eratos—until our home could no longer keep us alive. The demise of our sun is inevitable. We will all be refugees soon. It is my hope that by sharing our lives with you, we—as a cooperative system—can prevent these stories from becoming yours, too.

• • •

Owning a ship was a luxury Asala could not afford—but renting a nice one? Yes. In a lot of ways, it was the most logical choice. Given the sensitive nature of her work, booking passage aboard a crowded cruiser was asking for trouble. A high-end small craft charter, on the other hand, would guarantee her privacy, and its staff wouldn’t ask questions about the contents of her luggage. A dock attendant flipping open a case of live ammo in a public boarding line wasn’t ideal.

That was the practical justification. The other side of the coin was that Asala simply liked to travel in comfort. She liked having a ship to herself. She liked being able to send in a rider of what she wanted to have aboard. She liked the automated nav systems that didn’t require her to so much as glance at the pilot’s chair. She could kick up her heels, sit back, and let technology do the work. Being in transit was about as close to a vacation as she ever got.

There had been a time in her life when she’d traveled the way most people did—stiff-legged and miserable, shoved into cramped shared quarters on a one-way journey that took months to complete. Fuel was expensive and physics was free, so the most economical way to get a lot of people from here to there was to depend heavily on gravity assists, which meant waiting years for the planets to align themselves in a way that facilitated a slingshot. Missed your flight? No problem, there’d be another in eight years. Sure, it was possible for high-end craft to zip around in a fraction of the time, choosing whatever launch date they pleased, but who had access to that kind of extravagance?

Asala did. Or, more accurately: her employers did.

Kestrel Interplanetary was her charter of choice, and its proprietor met her at the spaceport. “Kima Asala, always such a pleasure,” he said with a little bow. His mustache was expertly coiffed, as usual.

“Nice to see you, Tibor,” she said. “Thank you for taking care of this on such short notice.”

“For you? Of course.”

“I hope the security squad didn’t give you too much trouble.” There was an aspect to this trip Asala hated already, and it had required a full fine-toothed comb-through of the vessel before she’d been allowed to board, plus a few technical alterations. Overkill, but then, this was a government job, and government people never felt useful unless they invented ways to make everything twice as much bother.

“No trouble,” Tibor said. “A bit on the humorless side, but—well, that’s military for you. No offense, of course.”

“None taken.” She nodded at the coppery quick-shot craft waiting in dock before them. “Is this me?”

“This is you.”

Asala smiled. What a gorgeous machine. The solitary flight wing was teardrop-shaped—the point designed for cutting through clouds, the curve topped with a generous crust of fusion engines. Jutting out from the heart of the teardrop was the passenger sphere, framed within the thin wing like the pit of a perfect fruit. Out in space, the flight wing would swivel around, swinging the engines in whatever direction they were needed without moving the sphere. But in the spaceport, the wing hung vertically, tip to floor, its polished hull gleaming in the light of the overhead lamps. Asala was sure Tibor had angled them before her arrival, for effect. The ship looked like an earring, a pendant, something you might hang in your window to catch the sun.

“New?” Asala said.

“It is,” Tibor said, smiling proudly at his craft. “The Sky Shard Model 6, fresh out of the shipyards. I got three in last week, and I am giving the best of them to you. It’s called the Altair.”

Asala looked at him sideways. “What makes this one the best?”

His eyes twinkled. “It’s the one I’m giving to you.” He gestured forward as Asala laughed. “Come, I believe you’ll be very happy with the interior.”

Down the gangway they went, then through the airlock and into the sphere. Asala felt a bit of the knot in her neck let go as she surveyed the main deck. The style was unmistakably Khayyami, tan and gold and swimming blue, but the decor had been dialed down from its usual level of ostentatiousness. Simplicity was in the spotlight here, simplicity and openness. Modern furniture with graceful curves, their heavy floor bolts cleverly hidden behind twists of leg. Geometric art that inspired solace. Lights too bright to allow for any secret corners, but not so glaring as to be industrial. There was no clutter to be found, be it in object or color, no item that didn’t have a purpose. It was a tasteful space, a just-so space. Exactly the way Asala liked it.

Tibor beamed with the justified smugness of a man who knew his customer. “Four decks. Bedrooms up top, living space and work center in here, kitchen and two rec rooms below—one for exercise, one for entertainment—and then the tech deck, which you won’t need to worry about.”

“And the comm output frequencies?” Asala asked. Anything above thirty-seven made her hearing implants hiss. “Are they—”

“Thirty-six-point-two, precisely,” Tibor said.

Asala gave him a satisfied nod. She looked over her surroundings, and for one fanciful moment, she allowed herself to pretend that this was like any other trip, that this space was solely hers, that everything would stay as she liked it, that she’d have three whole weeks to sit and think in this spacefaring suite. She pretended—

There was a thud from the direction of the airlock. A muffled curse followed, and then: a second thud.

Asala closed her eyes and took a breath. It had been a nice thought while it lasted.

Niko stumbled onto the ship, dragging an absurd amount of luggage with them. Their cheeks had a faint glow of sweat, and their expression was exhaustingly eager. “Am I late? Wow, nice,” they said, looking around. They considered. “A little empty, but nice.”

Asala turned with the politest look she could muster. “Tibor, this is Niko av Ekrem.”

Tibor bowed respectfully, but not before Asala caught him giving the sweaty kid the subtlest of up-and-downs. “It’s an honor to have a member of the president’s family aboard one of my ships,” he said. “If it’s not too impertinent, may I inquire after your mother’s health? I saw in the news—”

Niko rolled their eyes with a smile. “She’s fine,” they said. “Just a cold, honestly. Gossip channels always make things out worse than they are.”

“Ah, that’s a relief,” Tibor said. “It may be gauche to say this, but of your father’s partners, I’ve always very much admired—”

Asala tuned out the obvious buttering-up, and remained fixated on the luggage. “What is all of that?”

Niko shrugged, surveying their varied duffels and sacks. “Clothes, gear—”

“What gear?”

“Computer stuff. I won’t be of much help without the right tools. Don’t worry, I already logged the mass with the nav desk. I promise I haven’t screwed up our trajectory.”

Asala glanced at Tibor, and he checked his handheld. “Yes, all your passengers’ belongings have been logged and adjusted for,” he said. “You’re well within our recommended parameters.”

“See?” Niko said. “I’m—” They paused. “Wait, what other passengers? Who else—”

Asala had registered the approach of footsteps several moments before, but that detail apparently hadn’t landed with Niko. A woman entered the room, clad in the sort of loose-fitting clothes and sun-blocking hood that any Khayyami might wear when stepping offworld at midday. Her luggage was as practical as Asala’s own.

“This is my colleague Chessa,” Asala said. “Our trajectory will be taking her to a rendezvous point on the way to . . . our destination.” Hypatia, her subconscious supplied, kicking and shouting at the idea. She shoved it back down. She’d deal with it later.

Niko looked confused but friendly. “Nice to meet you,” they said.

The third passenger nodded, but said nothing.

“Well then,” Tibor said. “If you’re all assembled, and if you don’t need anything further, the ship is yours. Kima Asala, if you would . . . ?”

Asala pressed her thumb to Tibor’s handheld. Anything that happened to the ship now meant her ass. Well, Ekrem’s ass. He was the one footing the bill.

Tibor said his goodbyes, and the airlock slid shut with a definitive thunk. Assured of their privacy, the third passenger removed her hood. Niko jumped. Actually jumped. For all their overstuffed luggage, this was one eventuality they clearly hadn’t anticipated.

General Cynwrig looked odd out of uniform, like a tiger without her stripes. She was imposing all the same: broad shoulders, scarred jaw, white hair cut practically short. “Agent Asala,” she said. Her voice communicated nothing, but her eyes said everything. She hated this arrangement every bit as much as her protector did.

“General,” Asala said with a nod.

Niko looked as if they’d swallowed a mouthful of nails. Their easy eagerness vanished, and after a second or two of gaping, they blurted out: “But you’re on the Marauder.”

“Am I?” the general said as she removed her gloves. “What a relief.”

Asala waited for the general to provide her own context for joining them, but Cynwrig merely folded her gloves and placed them in her pocket. Fine. “We’re taking her to Gandesian space on our way to Hypatia. A transport will pick her up at their border, and you and I will go from there.”

“But why?” Niko said.

“I have intelligence that the attempts on my life have not ended,” Cynwrig said. She said the words with a matter-of-factness appropriate for talking about the weather, or what she’d had for breakfast. “Considering the egregious breach of security discovered aboard my own vessel, both my advisers and your father”—she said this last like a peeved partner—“thought it best for me to take a more deceptive route home. Under the radar, as it were.”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t tell you in advance,” Asala said to Niko. She wasn’t sorry in the slightest, but it was the thing to say to your employer’s kid, especially when they were still standing there staring like an idiot. “We couldn’t risk word getting out.”

Niko turned their head to her, looking for all the world like someone who’d just found themself in crosshairs. “I wouldn’t have said anything.”

Asala sighed impatiently. Gods below, if the kid was this jumpy before they even left spacedock, she was going to lock them and their precious gear in their room for the rest of the trip. “I’m not saying you would’ve said anything. It was covert. Classified. Need-to-know. You know what these words mean, right?”

Niko glared, but they relaxed a touch. “I’m not stupid. I get it.”

A silence descended among the three, heavy and unpleasant. “Well,” the general said at last. She shouldered her bag and headed for the sleeping deck. “Should be a lovely trip.”

“Where’s the bathroom?” Niko asked.

“You’ll have one in your quarters,” Asala said.

“Are there any . . .” They looked hesitantly toward the lift the general had headed for. “On other decks?”

Asala hadn’t requested any alcohol aboard her ship—some luxuries just made her feel guilty—but in that moment, she deeply, profoundly wanted a drink. “I imagine there’s one down by the kitchen.”

Niko hurried downstairs looking green, leaving their bags in a disastrous heap.

Asala stood alone in a beautiful room on a beautiful spaceship, staring at an ugly pile of useless luggage, listening to the shufflings of other humans existing nearby. She wanted to punch Ekrem right in his stupid, smiling face.

• • •

My people’ve been in sugar since settlement days. Uh, industrial sugar, mind—we outers need cement and resin more than we need cake. We’re all harvesters—me, my partners, our kids, my brothers. My great-grandma right up until she died five years ago—or four? Doesn’t matter. We just took to it, I guess. Sugar’s what we do.

People watching this might not know what we harvest sugar from.

Oh, right. There’s this plant, we call it the sweetblood tree. It’s not really a tree like inners get, with leaves and such. It’s this huge fleshy pillar with a rigid skin. They’re carnivorous—not enough sunlight for much photosynthesis, so they have these long root systems that seek out burrowing things—ice mice, mostly—snare ’em, and suck ‘em dry. Not very nice, but that’s nature. Anyway, sweetblood trees only grow in these valleys off the coast of the Glacial Sea. I used to love going out there on sapping days. It’s the quietest place you’ll ever set foot in. Kincats don’t like anything but tundra for hunting ground, and wollmuls can’t eat anything there, so there’s no big animals at all. You can make camp anywhere you want, no need for guns or hot fencing. Just you and the trees and the stars above. Best place in the world.

You had to stop harvesting when the freeze started?

Well, not at first we didn’t. It was cold, sure, but I mean—it’s Eratos. We’re used to cold. We thought we could just, y’know, throw on an extra woolly and be okay. Bring a few extra heaters. But yeah, every harvest we went on, it got colder and colder. A lot of people quit, but we kept at it. The last one we went on, though . . . I mean, it was cold. Just dead cold. We called it early and got inside our tents—huddled around the heaters, right—and all of a sudden, there’s this sound. This big, loud pop.

Like a gun?

No—well, kind of. Louder. Weirder. Freaked us right out. I figured maybe a tree fell, but about half an hour later, there it was again. Pop. And then another, and another. The trees were exploding, see. It got so cold that night that the sap froze solid, and when it reached a certain point, the plant just bust apart. Just like that—bang. The airships, they’re not meant for sleeping in, but we all got in the flight cabin as quick as we could and spent the night there.

Why?

Sweetblood trees are dense. They’re heavy. And now you’ve got these frozen hunks of them popping off at random. It was like someone throwing rocks at you. We figured we’d be safer under a hull than in a tent. I mean, we had kids with us.

And that was the last time you went out there?

Yeah. I think we were the last ones to stop.

• • •

Niko wondered—they genuinely wondered—if there was a way they could avoid leaving their room until Cynwrig was off the ship. Two weeks to the rendezvous. It was doable? They had a bathroom. They had water. They had . . . no food. They had no food at all in their quarters, and it had been four hours since the Altair had left dock, and their stomach had finally calmed down enough to be hungry. They put it off for as long as they could, trying to concentrate on their work. They’d set up a bunch of gear on the floor—they weren’t about to use the workstation downstairs with her lurking around—and for a while, the soothing logic of code and numbers kept their mind off their ever-insistent stomach. It was after they realized that they hadn’t done anything but think about birthday noodles for an indeterminate amount of time that they surrendered to biology. Fine. They’d have to go eat.

The kitchen—or really, the dining room, because there wasn’t anything you could do real cooking on—was an ovular space, its walls bathed in a warm white glow. There were a few paintings, the kind you’d get in a hotel: pretty, inoffensive, and meaningless. Aside from the meal station set into the wall at the side of the room, there was nothing in there besides a long, rounded table and a generous supply of floor cushions. To their relief, Asala was the only other person present.

The mercenary sat at the table, a full plate of dinner before her, legs crisscrossed on a cushion, posture perfect as she read something on her handheld. Niko wondered if Asala ever slumped, if she ever spent days clad in holey pajamas, complete with snack crumbs and unwashed hair. Somehow, they doubted it.

Asala ate calmly, giving only a slight glance up as Niko entered. “You know how to use a meal station?” she asked, scooping up her next mouthful in a fold of flatbread.

“Of course,” Niko said, a little annoyed at the assumption that they might not, a little more annoyed because they understood where the assumption came from. Growing up in their father’s family, meals were something someone else usually made for you. They approached the appliance set into the wall and accessed the menu panel. The selection was standard Khayyami fare: spicy grain stews and colorful pan-fries, nuts and vegetables and every animal worth domesticating.

“Is it working?” Asala asked.

“Yeah,” Niko said. “Was it not?”

“Bit of lag in the response time, only for a second. I noticed it with the temperature controls in my room, too.”

They shrugged. “Seems to be fine.” Niko scrolled to the end of the menu, then back up, then down again, sure they’d missed something. They looked to Asala. “Is there no dessert?”

“Do you usually have dessert for dinner?”

Again, a spike of annoyance. “No, I just meant—did they forget to give us some?”

Asala swallowed a bite of something green and leafy. “There’s fruit,” she said.

Niko sighed quietly and turned back to the meal station. No, they weren’t planning on having dessert for dinner—they weren’t a fucking infant—but gods, after the day this had been, they really could have gone for a nice milky custard or a bowl of cloud soup with plenty of syrup. Oh well. They selected rednut stew and waited as the meal station got going with a soft whir. Behind the wall, a shelf-stable bag of premade food was being hydrated, heated, unpacked, and attractively plated. “Is there any hot sauce?” they asked.

Asala gestured at an array of condiment packs on the table. “Plenty of bread left too,” she said.

The meal station chimed, and Niko retrieved their plate from the drawer. They sat across from Asala, their heart speeding up a notch. They felt like they were five years old, meeting their much older siblings on family trips, hoping desperately that they’d think Niko was cool. But Niko wasn’t five years old. They were a grown-ass adult, and they were cool, and they could do this. They would make Asala like them. They would—

Niko’s heart sped up faster, and their desire to converse died with it. General Cynwrig had entered the room. She’d changed since boarding the ship, abandoning her nondescript Khayyami clothing for what could only be described as Gandesian military casual—sharp angles and block colors, not a thread wasted on sentiment. The pistol on her hip remained, no cloak to cover it now.

“What did you need belowdecks?” Asala asked. The question was direct, but there was no accusation behind it. A curious inquiry, nothing more. Niko wondered how Asala had known where the general had come from, then remembered the elegant implants resting in her ear canals. Did they reveal more than ears alone would, or was Asala just that dialed into her surroundings?

“I did a sweep of the storage compartments,” Cynwrig said, “as well as the engine room. Then I smelled food.” She began her own skim through the menu panel.

“A security squad went over the ship before any of us came aboard, and it’s been fitted with the signal scramblers you requested,” Asala said. “Everything checked out. Systems, food, water, everything. We’re safe. Nobody can track us, even if they wanted to.”

“Mmm. So said my security team when we boarded my Marauder, and we all know how that turned out.” Cynwrig made a selection, and the meal station got to work. “Not a mistake they’ll be making again.”

“What happened to them?” Niko managed nervously. Gods, were they dead?

Cynwrig threw Niko a look over her shoulder, a silent scoff. “They were demoted,” she said. What else? her tone added. She flicked through the menu. “No dessert?”

Niko caught a twinge of irritation crossing Asala’s face. “There’s fruit,” she said.

“Pity,” Cynwrig said. She retrieved her plate and strode to the head of the table. She took her seat in one economical motion and then looked at Niko. “Would you pass me the bread?”

Niko’s stomach flipped over, and a shaking anxiety filled them. Cynwrig was the embodiment of everything they were against, everything that was wrong with their solar system. How many times had they and their friends railed about her over late-night drinks? How many times had they denounced her, turned away in disgust from her face on the news? And now here she was, just sitting here, asking them to literally break bread together. What the fuck.

“Niko.” Asala was looking right at them. “You okay?”

Niko passed the basket to Cynwrig. “Sorry,” Niko said. “I’m—sorry. Tired.”

Cynwrig gave Niko an understanding look that made them even more nervous. “I have to say,” she said as she tucked into her meal. “I was surprised to see nothing but Khayyami cuisine on the menu. I thought for sure we’d be having salt crab the whole way there.” A Hypatian staple. Or a stereotype, depending.

Asala chewed her food slowly. “I haven’t had that in a long time.”

“No? How long?”

“Thirty-four years.”

“I see,” the general said. “Yes, I can understand how you might prefer the Khayyami palate after that long.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“My mistake. You don’t favor one over the other, then?”

Niko caught the real question laced beneath, and judging by the brief pause Asala made in chewing, she did as well. She looked at Cynwrig for a moment, then returned to her plate and took a sip of water. “I go where I am beckoned. I eat what I am given.”

The general laughed and wagged a finger in Asala’s direction. “Well done,” she said. She turned to Niko, who had no idea what the joke was. “She’s quoting Eyahue. ‘I go where I am beckoned, I eat what I am given, I sing the harmony and am lost no more.’”

Niko, on the other hand, was definitely lost. “Who’s Eyahue?”

“A Gandesian poet,” Asala said.

“One of our most famous,” Cynwrig said. “Much too passive for my taste.” She turned to Niko again. “The salt, please.”

Niko couldn’t do this. They couldn’t sit here chatting about poetry over the dinner table like they were all good pals while people were out there dying. And yet, they passed the fucking salt.

“So what is taking you back to Hypatia after all this time?” Cynwrig asked Asala. “I know you’re not out here just for me.”

“Humanitarian talks,” Asala said smoothly. She nodded at Niko. “They’re representing Khayyami relief efforts on the government’s behalf. I’m along as protective escort.”

Niko thought it would’ve been nice if this cover story had been discussed with them ahead of time, but oh well. “That’s right,” they said.

“Ah,” Cynwrig said. She studied Niko. “A budding diplomat. Your father must be proud.”

Niko forced a smile even as their stomach churned. “I hope so.”

“Tell me,” she said. “What does a diplomat do with all that computer gear?”

“What?” Niko felt the floor drop out from under them.

Cynwrig gestured toward the upper decks. “I saw your luggage when I came aboard. Hardware cases, it seemed. Or am I mistaken?”

The general stared at them from one side. Asala did the same from the other. “It’s a hobby,” Niko said.

“A hobby,” the general repeated.

Niko looked at Asala. Her face was cool as ever, but her stare shouted do not fuck this up loud and clear. “Have to have something to do for three weeks, right?” Niko said.

Cynwrig considered them. “Well, if you’re good with computers, perhaps you could take a look at the communications hub in my quarters. There’s some kind of minor malfunction with it.”

Asala looked up. “You too?”

The general raised her eyebrows. “Is there a problem I should know about?”

Niko shook their head. “Asala experienced a response lag with some of the interface panels. That’s usually due to a combo of faulty wiring and ex-atmo radiation. I can take a look at it.”

Cynwrig nodded, but her eyes had gone a touch harder, the look of a woman used to knives at her back. “And what else do you plan to do while we’re here, aside from your . . . hobby?”

Research for our mission was the answer, but Niko couldn’t . . . well, maybe they could. A rebellious impulse bubbled up, born out of the disgust they’d been trying to smother. Cynwrig had asked the question, after all. Might as well tell the truth. “Do you know who Uzochi Ryouta is?”

What did I say about not fucking this up, Asala’s unblinking glare said.

“Of course,” Cynwrig said. She smirked as she chewed.

“She released this video series on one of the free-public channels,” Niko said. “About the Eratosi refugees.” They glanced at Asala, who had stopped eating. “I thought that since we’re on our way to talk about relief efforts, it might be a good way for me to better understand what they’re going through.”

“You’re going to Hypatia, are you not?”

“Yes.” Niko’s hands felt shaky, but in their head, their friends cheered them on. They looked Cynwrig dead in the eye. “But refugees are refugees. I figure all people suffer in pretty much the same way.”

Cynwrig did something truly disturbing: she smiled at Niko. An acid smile. A mocking smile. She took one more bite and stood. “If you’ll both excuse me,” she said. “I think I’ll finish my meal in my quarters.”

Asala didn’t move. Her eyes watched Cynwrig exit the room, remained on the hallway until the lift took off, then swung hard back to Niko.

“What the hell was that?” she said.

“What the hell is this?” Niko said, gesturing around. “Why is she here?”

“We went over this already.”

“It was rhetorical! This is . . . this is ridiculous. How can you stand being here with her?”

Asala looked at the thick hull shielding them from the vacuum outside. “Where else would I go?”

“But—” Niko closed their eyes and shook their head. “What she’s doing to your people. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand being around her. How can you?”

“It’s my job,” Asala said.

Niko stared at her. So neutral, so poised. When their father had come to them with this job and told them who they’d be accompanying, Niko had been elated. They’d expected danger, yes, and discomfort, sure, but not . . . not this. “What is wrong with you?” they blurted out. “Those people on her Marauder—”

“Keep it down.”

“You shoved them back in the hold. You looked—you looked annoyed by them.”

Asala squinted. “Has this been bothering you since then?”

“Yes! They’re your people. They’re dying. You made the same trip they—”

“Do not.” Asala’s voice was as sharp as the crack of a bullet. “Do not tell me what I did.”

Niko wet their lips. “Why don’t you care about them?”

Asala took the last of her bread and cleaned the sauce from her plate until it shined. “Are you armed, Niko?”

Niko was taken aback. “What?”

“Are you armed?”

“No, of course not. Why would I be armed?”

Asala began to clean up her spot. “You just shared a meal with two people who are.” The general’s pistol had been impossible to miss, but Niko hadn’t noticed a weapon on Asala, and they couldn’t see one now. Asala gathered her dishes and left the table. “In the future, that’s the kind of situation in which it pays not to piss anyone off.”

• • •

Would you say your name and position here for the camera?

My name is Apirka Amin, and I’m the ship’s captain.

Captain Amin, what are some of the biggest challenges you and your crew are dealing with right now?

Well, for starters, this is a ship designed for eight hundred people, not two thousand. The Khayyami government didn’t expect so many when they sent us out here.

You’ve done your best with the space you have.

That was all the Blue Hats. They came in and put up the privacy dividers in the cargo holds, and gave us the sleeping mats and whatnot. And the lavs.

Yes, the pop-up lavatories. We’re all well acquainted with them.

They’re god-awful.

I’d have to agree.

The ship has a sewage system, but again—

It’s built for eight hundred.

Right.

The Blue Hat volunteers provided the rations and basic hygiene items, too, right?

Yeah. They were pretty organized. I wish it had stayed that way.

What’s gone wrong?

The kinds of things you’d expect from people crammed into too little space and no way to shut a door on someone you don’t like. There have been thefts. Fights. The volunteer patrols are on it, but . . . it’s hard. And people are getting sick. Can’t sneeze in the cargo holds without hitting all your neighbors.

But the ship’s systems are stable?

. . . Sure.

That was a long pause you took there.

They’re stable. Nothing for the passengers to worry about. We’re safe.

I understand.

• • •

The Altair had been in transit for almost a week, and given that nobody had killed anyone else yet, Asala was starting to think the trip might go quietly. The general continued to run her daily security checks, and if that made her feel better, fine. Niko alternated between trying to sweep their outburst at dinner under the rug with a profound amount of sucking up, and hiding from the general in their room, where they were busy doing whatever a person did with computers. As for Asala, she was attempting, as best she could with the company, to spend her interplanetary flight the way she always spent interplanetary flights: sitting in her quarters and reading.

She was failing at it, despite the comfortable lounge chair, despite the simulated candles she’d switched on, despite the little plate of pickled fruit and the refreshment tin she had at hand. She tried new books, old books, fresh ideas and familiar friends. Nothing stuck. She couldn’t concentrate, and when she found she’d read the same stanza three times over without properly processing it, she tossed her handheld aside and rubbed her face with her palms. She knew why she couldn’t read, and she was spitting mad over it.

Damn Ekrem, and damn his kid. Damn that photo they’d shoved in her face.

Asala knew why none of her books would stick. She was thinking about one particular set of books, one she desperately wanted and would never see again. The Wonders of Eramen, all six volumes. It was a used set, and had likely been bought cheap, but there was no collection in the galaxy more precious to Asala. She remembered the worn covers, the feel of the mock paper. Most of all, she remembered the inscription inside the first volume: To my little sister, on her birthday, with love from Dayo. The words sister and her were written in slightly different ink on neatly cut rectangles of glued paper, which Dayo had covered the original misnomers with a year or so after the gift had been given, after an important conversation had been had. Dayo hadn’t told Asala she’d altered the inscription. She’d just done it, leaving it for Asala to find on her own. Dayo had been like that, always performing quiet kindnesses without expectation of praise.

And yet Asala had abandoned her, and the books, and everyone else besides. It didn’t matter that she’d been a child, that larger hands and stronger wills had placed her on that ship. There’d been a time when she felt like they’d thrown her away, but no. No, she’d abandoned them. In both body and mind, she had.

She stood up and began to pace. Damn Ekrem, and damn his kid. This was a line of thinking she’d stopped beating herself with long ago, and had worked so hard to bury. And yet here she was, headed to Hypatia in search of ghosts.

She could be alive, a voice in her head whispered. She was alive ten years ago. She could be, still.

She tried to shove the thought aside, but Niko had planted it in fertile ground, and its roots had dug deep. The intensity of it frightened her. There was nothing more dangerous than hope.

If she’s alive, you have to try, the voice said. Even if it’s only a chance. You have to try. For her.

There was no arguing that.

She paced until her feet were tired, and after a few minutes of sitting back down, she realized the rest of her was tired too. She washed up, folded her clothes, and got into bed. She stared into the dark for a long time, indulging in old memories and letting the pain of them sit with her. Hypatia was going to hurt. Might was well get ready for that.

Her mind drifted, then quieted, then let her go altogether.

Her rest began softly, but it ended with a shriek—a metallic shriek pouring out of every speaker and straight into Asala’s brain, erasing the immediately forgotten dream she’d been lost in, preventing any waking thoughts from gaining legs. Both hands shot up to her ears, and she dialed her implants all the way down as quickly as she could. Silence reigned. Her mind regrouped. She took a breath, shook her head, looked around.

What the hell was going on?

She ran across the room to the ship systems panel. The panel was frozen. She tapped and she tapped. She slapped her palm against its frame. A flicker. Then nothing.

She threw on some clothes, and shoved her feet into her boots. Presumably, the sound was still blaring, but she left her implants off. She opened her door and almost ran into the general, who was shouting something. She had her gun drawn.

“I can’t hear you,” Asala said, pointing at her ears. “Speak slowly.”

I said, Cynwrig’s lips read, what the hell is going on?

“I don’t know.” Asala looked around, trying to assess whether they needed to head for an escape pod. Everything else about the ship seemed fine. She didn’t think they’d hit anything. She couldn’t smell anything burning, couldn’t feel any change in air pressure. “Is that sound still—”

Yes! The general looked furious.

Asala hurried to Niko’s quarters and opened the door without a knock. Niko sat on the floor, in the middle of their nest of computers and wires, a blanket wrapped around their head as they typed furiously. They were in a panic, and looked as if they, too, had been ripped out of bed. They said something as the other two entered the room, too harried for Asala to make it out. Sorry and fix were the only words she caught.

“What’s wrong?” Asala shouted. She had no idea how loud her voice needed to be to get over the shriek, so she went full bore. “Is there danger?”

Niko shook their head vigorously, continuing to type and babble. A minute, Asala caught, and later, shit.

After a moment, Niko and the general both sighed and slumped. Asala took that as a cue to turn her implants back on. She did so gingerly, dialing them up just a touch at first. The sound had stopped. She turned them back to full, and looked hard at Niko. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” Cynwrig said.

“I mean—I do, I’m just—I’m not sure—” Niko looked bewildered, and the blanket dropped from around their ears. Their hair was sticking straight up on one side, and they still had pillow lines pressed deep into one round cheek.

Asala sighed and crossed her arms. “Niko. What was that?” She kept her voice calm, hoping the kid would calm down too.

Niko took a breath. “Some kind of malfunction in the comms system,” they said, their professionalism making a show at last. “Like a . . . a feedback loop, I guess. I think it’s related to the response lag, but I don’t know how yet.” That particular glitch hadn’t gone away since they’d left Khayyam, and Niko’s attempts to fix it hadn’t been fruitful. They glanced nervously at the general. “I disabled the whole comms system until I can figure it out. But it’s just a glitch. Some kind of sloppy code. I don’t know. It’s nothing dangerous.”

“How do you know?” the general said. “How can you say that, if you don’t know what it is?”

“General—” Asala started.

Cynwrig stormed back out. “I’m going to run a diagnostic on the scramblers,” she said. She’d already done four of those since Khayyam.

Asala rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What time is it?”

“Um”—Niko fumbled for their handheld—“three-oh-four.”

Gods. She walked over to the systems panel on Niko’s wall and tapped the screen. It leapt into action, just as it was supposed to. “Go back to sleep,” she said. “In the morning, I want you to do a—” She had no idea what the proper terms were, which wasn’t ideal when giving directions. “Can you check everything out, see if you can get to the bottom of it?”

Niko nodded, their mussed hair bobbing absurdly. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Asala said. A comms system malfunction. She could feel the adrenaline bleeding out of her, but a hum of concern remained. “Okay.”

Without another word, she returned to her room, pulled off her boots, and crawled back into bed. Blanket tugged to her chin, she lay in the dark, thinking about the lags, the glitches, the panel freezes. She thought about the general, prowling the corridors again and again. She thought about Dayo, and where she might be.

She did not fall back asleep.

• • •

This is kind of hard to talk about.

That’s all right. Take your time.

Sorry. The camera’s making me self-conscious.

We can point it elsewhere, if you want.

No. People should see, right?

Yes, I think they should.

Okay. Okay.

How did you get frostbite?

I wasn’t the only one. There was this freak blizzard. Our housing block got buried, and everything got knocked out. Heaters, comms, everything.

How long were you there?

Five days. Two for the snow to stop, three more for them to dig us an exit.

And you went without heat for that long.

Real heat, yeah. We started burning stuff. Piled whatever we could find that would burn into old water drums, and kept it going as best we could. The smoke got terrible. I think there was some plast in there. Or some kind of paint, I don’t know. Made everybody’s eyes hurt. Some kids started choking, and then people were passing out, so we had to stop. We . . . Sorry.

Take your time.

I shouldn’t complain about . . . about this. I made it out. Not everybody did. It’s just two legs and a nose. Could be worse, right?

There’s a woman down on deck twelve, she’s been melting down scrap metal and making prosthetic digits out of them. Have you heard of her?

What? No. Where?

Deck twelve. I don’t know if she could do whole limbs, but perhaps a nose?

That would be great. I’m tired of grossing people out.

You don’t gross me out.

Thanks.

• • •

Niko set one foot through the doorway to the rec room and froze. A video was playing on-screen, and one of the six reclining chairs before it was occupied by the general’s unmistakable silhouette. In the ten days since they’d left Khayyam, Niko had become masterful at being wherever Cynwrig wasn’t, and there was a brief, hopeful moment when they thought they might be able to slip right back out of the room. But no, too late—the general had already craned her head their way. Shit.

“Sorry,” Niko managed. “I didn’t know someone was in here.”

They started to leave, but the general spoke. “Join me,” she said easily.

Niko’s brain upended itself. “Um—”

Cynwrig turned back toward the screen. “I’d like to get to know my ally’s progeny better,” she said. “And you’ve been avoiding me.”

Niko stood stupidly in the doorway. On-screen, some sort of caper was unfolding in a lavish room. One of the heavily made-up characters had experienced some misfortune, and was pulling faces in a display so over-the-top it was almost grotesque. The hell was she watching? “I—”

Cynwrig sighed. “First lesson, little diplomat.” There was a smirk in her voice. “When a planetary leader invites you to join them, you join them. Even if you can’t stand their company.”

What else could they do? Niko went in, their insides tying themselves in knots. They took a seat beside Cynwrig, sitting stiffly. They folded their hands, then crossed their arms, then shifted their weight. All their limbs felt wrong. They couldn’t find a place to put them.

Beside them, the martial ruler of Gan-De sat comfortably watching a slapstick comedy, ankle resting on the opposite knee, a box of something edible in her lap. She laughed at the theatrical goings-on—the most subdued of chuckles, but heartfelt all the same.

Niko tried to get their thoughts in order. Surreal didn’t begin to cut it. “What is this?” they said, watching the screen. They didn’t speak whatever Gandesian dialect this was in, but even if they had, they weren’t sure the imagery would make any more sense. A man in an ornate sequined bird suit had entered the scene now, for some reason.

“Two and Six,” Cynwrig said, laughing at the bird man. “It’s a classic morality pageant, very old. See, the two carrying the treasure chest are criminals—you can tell from the branding across their faces. They’re trying to escape with the treasure, but the queen—she’s a witch—has summoned the Six Aspects of Order to thwart them.”

“And the bird is . . . ?”

“An avatar of Wisdom. It’s making them solve riddles or else it’ll peck out their eyes.”

“So . . . the criminals outsmart the Aspects?”

“Of course not. The criminals are clowns. Stock characters. They’re punished for their stupidity, and they die at the end.” She laughed again as the face-pulling criminals gave some bumbling answer to a question.

“And that’s . . . funny.”

“It’s hilarious,” the general said. “Although, I wouldn’t recommend this particular adaptation. It’s not very good.”

“Then why are you watching it?”

“I’ll show you in a minute.” She picked up the box in her lap. The edges were dented from travel. “Vanilla puff?”

Niko stared. No. This was poison. This was a trick. And yet . . . gods damn it, it had been over a week. An awful, stressful week on a ship without so much as a spoonful of empty sugar to be found. They took a vanilla puff. If they were playing diplomat, they’d play diplomat. “Thank you,” they said. They sat back, took a bite, and managed not to moan. Wow, they’d needed that.

“Do you know why she doesn’t eat sweets?” Cynwrig asked.

“No,” Niko said, taking another bite. They let the filling spread across their tongue, not wanting to neglect a single taste bud.

“Strange. But then, I have no idea if patties have a taste for sweet things, do you?”

Niko swallowed. The heavy sugar coated their teeth, something cloying and chemical leaving an odd aftertaste. How dare she. How dare she assume that Niko’d be fine with talk like that when Asala wasn’t in the room. They set the sweet down on a side table, resisting the urge to eat the rest. “I don’t know about Hypatian food, no.”

Cynwrig gave another short chuckle and went back to watching her movie. “Ah, here,” she said, leaning forward. She pointed at the screen. “Watch the background. There’ll be a boy who comes in . . . now.”

Niko looked. “The . . . the one in the white feathers?”

“No, the one in the red.”

Niko saw the boy she meant, baby-faced and floppy-curled. They watched as the feathered boy did leaping somersaults as the bird man spoke, and . . . that was it. The boy was gone, a background dancer without a line.

“My grandson,” Cynwrig explained. “Fifteen, and desperate to be an actor.” She took another puff for herself. “My son’s son. Had him much too young, he and the mother. My daughter waited until she was in her thirties, smart girl. Her boy just turned two—biggest cheeks I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s . . . nice.”

Cynwrig fell back into silence again, watching the movie. “What were you after, before you knew I was in this room?”

“I needed a break,” Niko said. “I still can’t figure out what’s wrong with the comms.” The shriek had returned at random intervals, plus a varied assortment of other problems. The ship’s systems shouldn’t have been that hard to tease out, but the general’s patched-on scramblers had made everything a clusterfuck.

“And what were you going to watch? Your refugee videos?”

“Maybe.” Yes.

“Emotionally flogging yourself isn’t a break.” The general nodded at the screen. “I remember this one night during the Siege of Halien.” That reference, Niko knew—a particularly long and bloody stretch during the Gandesian Civil War. “My regiment had established camp in a former school—bombed out, of course, but it still had part of a roof, and it was the rainy season, so you see the appeal. Everyone’s clothes were wet, and we all smelled like sweat and old blood. We were sick and exhausted. Food was running out. And then, one of the soldiers found a projector and a video drive in what was left of an old classroom. Those of us who couldn’t sleep watched movies all night—kid stuff, but it was fun. We laughed at those puppets like we’d never seen a movie before. It took us away for a while. We all needed that.” She cracked her knuckles. “Granted, half of us died in the morning when the enemy bombed our encampment, but we’d had a laugh beforehand, at least.”

Niko had no idea how to respond to that.

“War,” Cynwrig said, “is math. How many dead, how many miles, how many bullets you have left. We—me, you, our stalwart protector here—we are all at war. Only, our enemy isn’t something we can outgun or outfox. It’s time. Time is our enemy, and resources are the only weapon we have.” She nodded at the screen. “Everyone who made this fluff, they’re Gandesian sons and daughters. They have people who love watching them, even if only for a few seconds. Ours is a beautiful world, full of beautiful people. And yes, it’s going to die, just like the rest. But for now, we have water. We have food. We have a greater distance from the enemy than the rest of you, and that means we will solve this.”

“How?” Niko said. “How are you going to solve it?”

Cynwrig shrugged. “That’s a job for scientists, not me. My job is to make sure there are Gandesians left to see whatever plans are made all the way through. To make sure our people and our culture survives this.” She looked sideways at Niko. “And that means we need to keep what we have.”

“You have more than enough. You have a whole planet.”

“Do you know what a planet is? It’s not as big as you think. When it’s used up, it’s used up. Have you seen our reports? Have you done the math?” She stretched her legs. “I’m going to assume you don’t have children, but pretend for a moment you do. Say that there’s a famine, and you have just enough left to feed your family. Now say another family knocks on your door, and they have children of their own. They say, ‘Please, please give us your food, or we will starve.’ Who do you feed? The strangers at your door or the family in your home?”

“That’s not—”

“And now say,” Cynwrig continued, “that you see those strangers approaching, and you know that people just like them stole your neighbors’ food. Raided their pantry.”

“Bullshit,” Niko said. They didn’t care about playing diplomat anymore. They wanted to throw up the two bites of puff they’d eaten. They couldn’t stomach this one.

Cynwrig laughed. “Is it?” she said indulgently, as if she were speaking to one of her grandkids.

“It is,” Niko said. “You have no evidence that the outer citizens would cause you harm. None at all. They just need help. They’re desperate.”

“Precisely. Do you know what desperate people are capable of? Have you ever seen desperation, Niko av Ekrem? Because I have. I have, and those were my own people. People who were of my own culture, who spoke my own language, who told the same stories. And none of that stopped them—stopped us—from butchering each other.” She sighed. “There has been peace on Gan-De for twelve years. It was hard won, and is hard kept. I will not see that work undone.”

“They’re people,” Niko said. “People like the woman upstairs who saved your life, and is protecting you now. And they’re dying. They’re dying by the shipload on that doorstep you mentioned.”

“Don’t talk about death as if you know what it means,” the general said. “And don’t talk about people as if we’re all the same.” She gestured at the screen. “You don’t even get the jokes. How can I imagine that you and I see the world anything alike?”

Niko had had enough. They left the puff where it lay, and walked toward the door.

“Why are you on this ship?” the general asked, not taking her eyes off the screen.

Niko stopped. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not a fool, child. If you were a diplomat, you’d be on a government-issued cruiser with a staff at your disposal, not an untraceable quick-shot with a sniper and no one else.” She smiled over her shoulder. “What are you two after on Hypatia?”

Niko inhaled. “We are going,” they said, “to discuss humanitarian relief efforts.”

The general laughed and returned to her movie.

Niko nearly ran back to their room, palms sweating. “Fuck,” they whispered. They went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on their face. So much for a break.

They looked at themself in the mirror, drops of water running down their cheeks. Where had that water come from? Bought in blocks from the outer planets? Ripped molecule by molecule from their hemorrhaging sun? Was there still enough water aboard the Vela, wherever it had gone? Was there food? Was there air?

Niko returned to their makeshift workstation, diving in with a fury. If the people of the outer planets didn’t get a break, neither did they.

• • •

I used to sell batteries, both home-sized and industrial. Do you know much about batteries?

I do, yes, but the people watching this might not.

Okay, real simple: batteries discharge their energy faster in the cold than they do in warm temperatures. They’ll hold their charge longer, but that doesn’t matter too much once you start using it. So, you need to get warm, which means you’re cranking up the heater, which means you’re pulling more from your home’s batteries. But the batteries are kicking out juice faster, so if you’re not keeping a constant eye on them—which most people don’t; they’ve got better things to do—they’ll run dry. So you can’t run your heater for as long as you need to, which means you’re getting colder, which means you’re trying to crank up the heater, which means . . . you see?

I do.

Yeah, you know. I bet your batteries were performing like shit too.

The heater in my lab stopped working. We had to evacuate.

That’s the other part of it. The more you run a machine, the faster it’s going to break down. So it wasn’t just that the cold was getting worse. It’s that the cold borked the machines that were supposed to keep us warm. Honestly, that’s the most hilarious thing about this ship.

What is?

There’s so many people crammed in here. Folks are passing out because it’s way too fucking hot.

• • •

Shouting. That was the last thing Asala wanted to hear, but there it was, clear as day, a pair of voices skirmishing down the hall. With a weary sigh, Asala set down her handheld, put on her shoes, and followed the sound of the fight.

She entered Niko’s quarters. Its primary occupant was on their feet, doing their best to hold their own against Cynwrig, who . . . well, had staged and won a bloody coup against a long-standing planetary government. Niko was screwed here.

“I don’t care whose brat you are,” Cynwrig spat. “This is an act of aggression, and as soon as I am off this—”

“I didn’t do what you’re saying!” Niko shot back, their voice trembling and angry. “I’m trying to fix it.”

“Oh, I’m sure. I’m sure. Let’s take a look at your precious computers and we’ll see what—”

“Okay,” Asala said. She stepped forward with her palms up. “Everybody needs to—”

“This little shit,” Cynwrig said, “shut down the scramblers—”

“They’re the problem!” Niko cried. “They’re what’s causing all the—”

“—and tried to access my personal files.”

Asala looked right at Niko. “Is that true?”

“No.” The kid looked like they were at their wit’s end. “The scramblers are not compatible with this ship’s core systems. The way they were jury-rigged onto this ship—it wasn’t designed for that. I’ve been trying to patch it, and I had to reboot the scramblers—it only took a sec. At most, we were trackable for three minutes.”

“That’s hardly a sec.” Asala frowned.

Niko threw up their hands. “Nobody even knows we’re out here, and they don’t know what to look for, so even if somebody were scanning this exact spot in space at this exact time, they wouldn’t know who we were or where we were going. It was fine.”

“It was a breach of the security protocol I laid out before setting foot on this ship,” Cynwrig said. “I’ve discharged soldiers far more competent than you for much less than that.”

“Yeah, I bet you have,” Niko said.

“Enough,” Asala said. “Niko. Her files?”

“I didn’t.” Niko sighed. “I wrote a—”

“I got a hacking alert,” Cynwrig said, shaking her handheld in Asala’s direction. “Local origin point.”

“Can I finish? I wrote a program that would seek out the specific problem areas on the ship. Things where devices or concurrently running programs weren’t playing nicely with each other. It must’ve tried to assess your handheld. Yours, too, probably,” they said to Asala.

Asala hadn’t gotten a hacking alert, but then, she doubted her handheld’s security programs were as robust as Cynwrig’s. She was quiet a moment. “They’re your ally’s family,” Asala said lightly.

“That doesn’t excuse them,” Cynwrig said. She had less of a purchase on the situation now, and it looked to only be making her angrier.

“I’m not saying it does. I’m saying this is a kid on their first field trip”—she saw Niko bristle at that—“and from the level of ass-kissing I’ve experienced, they’re just trying to do a good job. If the Khayyami government wanted your files, they would’ve got them on Khayyam. They wouldn’t have waited for you to be on a sealed ship with a grand total of two possible culprits. Especially since you’d be likely to space one of them, and that means a fifty percent chance of spacing the president’s kid. Ekrem is a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot.” She stuck her thumbs in her pockets. “Niko, please apologize to the High General of Gan-De for breaking her security protocols.”

Niko looked betrayed. “I—”

“I know I said please, but it’s not a request.”

Niko sighed. “General, I was just trying to help. I’m sorry. I should have checked with you—”

“And me.”

“—and Agent Asala first.” Their mouth twitched. “I didn’t mean to cause you any offense or distress. I’m sorry.”

The fire was dying in the general’s eyes, but the embers still glowed. She huffed and left the room.

Asala waited until she heard the thunk of Cynwrig’s door. “I think that means we’re not going to war, at least.”

Niko sat down on the edge of their bed, their limbs hanging limp. They looked exhausted. Had they been sleeping? The glitches in the ship were a pain, yes, but hardly worth Niko wrecking themself over. Was this all in an effort to impress?

Asala leaned against the wall. “What were you really trying to do?” she asked. “And don’t bullshit me.”

Niko exhaled. “The scramblers honestly are the problem.” They ran their hand through their floppy hair. “But . . . I did hack her handheld.”

“Why the fuck—” Asala caught herself launching into a shout of her own, and put on the brakes. “Why the fuck would you do that?” she hissed.

“Because she”—Niko pointed hard at the door—“has been on my ass about what we’re actually doing out here, and I don’t know if she’s just being paranoid or if she knows something. If she knows why we’re really here, then she knows about the Vela falling off the map. And she is not the person who should have that particular chip in her pocket.”

Asala said nothing for a few moments. “And?”

“And what?”

“Did you find anything?”

“Are you . . . are you not mad about this?”

“Of course I’m fucking mad about this. But you did it, so . . . ?”

“No,” Niko said sourly. “Her stuff is so encrypted I couldn’t untangle it.” They gestured at their gear. “Not with this. I could’ve done it back home.”

Asala drummed her fingers on her arm and considered. The kid was nervous, and annoying, and was assuredly going to make a roaring mess of something at some point during this job. But hacking the general’s files—even a failed hack—took guts, and their reasoning showed political savvy, if not the wisdom to wield it. “That was both pretty smart and very stupid,” she finally said.

“Those can’t be true at the same time,” Niko said.

“In this line of work, there’s a lot of crossover.” Asala let out a mighty sigh. “We have two more days until we drop her off. Do you think you can avoid causing a diplomatic crisis between now and then? Just read a book, or something? Like a normal person?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” Asala started toward the door, then looked back at Niko, their eyes bloodshot from staring at screens, browbeaten and yelled at and wanting so badly to save the world. She closed her eyes and chose her words carefully. “I care, Niko.”

Niko looked up. “What?”

“I care. Of course I care. About—” She gestured vaguely toward the window, toward everything unfolding on worlds beyond. “You don’t know what it’s like. You think this is all some big heroic quest. Some moral-of-the-story. You need to get over that shit right now. It’s different when you know their faces. When it’s not just people who are dying, it’s your mom and your dad and your friends, it’s everybody on your street, it’s your language teacher who stayed after school to help you pass your quizzes, it’s the lady who used to sell you fireworks whose name you never bothered to learn. It’s everyone you ever met, and there is no hope for any of them. That’s what we’re going up against here. That’s what you are going to find on Hypatia. They’re not looking for a savior. They don’t want a savior, and they don’t want a new home. What they want is the life they had before everything went to hell. They want the people they lost. And they can’t have that, so they deal however best they can.” She met Niko’s gaze. Theirs was wide; hers was steady. “Do you get that?”

Niko nodded. “I think so,” they said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. I don’t need pity.”

“No, I meant sorry for saying that you don’t care. That was . . . that wasn’t okay.”

“It wasn’t.”

“That was an asshole thing to say.”

Asala accepted with a nod. She waved her hand over the computer stuff on the floor. “Clean this shit up. Read a book. Don’t hack any more government officials.”

• • •

Can you tell me what this line is for?

There’s a doctor who’s set up shop in one of the supply closets.

And how long have you been in line?

What time is it?

A little after ten.

Three hours, then. And here I thought if I got here early . . .

You’re not seriously ill, right? Because if you are, I’m sure these people will let you—

No, no, I’ve just been crying. I’m pregnant.

Ah.

And I need to not be.

Would you like me to turn the camera off? I won’t use this if you don’t want me to.

No, it’s fine. It’s just . . . I always wanted to. But not here, not without knowing where I’ll end up or if it’ll be okay there. I can’t do that to a kid.

Would you like some company?

What?

I can wait with you, if you’d like.

Yeah. I’d like that.

• • •

Niko watched out the window of their quarters as the Gandesian transport pulled away from the Altair. Cynwrig was gone, on her way back to her grandkids and her total disregard for human life. Niko hadn’t said goodbye, obviously. They were sure nobody had wanted that.

They flopped back on their bed and closed their eyes. They were relieved, yes, but it didn’t feel good, because they’d failed, too. Asala was below decks switching off the scramblers now—the two of them didn’t warrant that level of defense, and they both were looking forward to carrying out the rest of their journey without random screeches and freezing menus. Not that the glitches would continue, now that Cynwrig was gone. But Asala didn’t know that.

Niko fell asleep, only to be awoken an hour later by an incoming message on their handheld. Ansible line, and encrypted. Niko rubbed their eyes and sighed. So easy with the scramblers off.

Reports received. Please acknowledge when you receive this message.

Acknowledged.

There you are. You okay?

Yeah, no need to worry. Neither of them know anything.

That’s good, but we were worried about you, too. This wasn’t the plan, but that bait-and-switch with her ship happened too fast to get word to you.

I tried to hack a hole in the scrambler net, but it screwed things up all over the ship.

Scramblers will do that.

I knew she’d freak out if they went down. But I should’ve done it sooner. It was just a dicey situation here.

We understand.

She’s gone now. I’m sorry. I didn’t get anything.

That wasn’t your job in the first place. You showed initiative by trying. We’ll get another opportunity.

What should I do next?

Hang tight for a while. We need to re-strategize. Contact us once you’ve reached Hypatia. Keep us informed on your findings.

Will do.

And be careful with your partner there. She’s not stupid.

I know.

There was a knock on Niko’s door. “Come in.”

The door slid open. “You can stop hiding now,” Asala said. “Unless you’re scared of me, too.” She looked them over. “Were you asleep?”

“Yeah—I mean, no. I mean—kind of.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s cool. I was basically awake anyway.”

Asala paused. “I was going to have lunch,” she said. She weighed something. She made a decision. “Do you want to join me?”

Niko smiled and shoved their handheld in a pocket. “I’d love to.”

• • •

What’s your name?

Melis.

And how old are you?

Five.

Melis, why is your family on this ship?

Because our planet . . . our planet is too cold.

Were you cold there?

Yeah.

Me too. Why is our planet too cold?

Our sun is also too cold.

That’s basically right. Our sun is unstable, and it’s not putting out the amount of heat we need to keep our planets habitable. Do you know what “habitable” means?

Yeah.

How do you feel about going to live on another planet?

Mmm . . . I don’t know.

Are you excited? Are you scared?

I’m mad.

You’re mad. Why are you mad?

I didn’t want to leave our house.

Was it a good house?

Not as good as Anan’s house, but I didn’t live there. This ship smells bad and it’s loud.

Who’s Anan?

My friend from skiing class. She has the same boots as me except mine are blue.

I see. Is Anan here as well?

No, she went—she went on another one.

Another ship?

Yeah. She’s gonna meet me at Khaya.

Khayyam.

Yeah.

Where’s Anan now?

Her ship, they’re at Gan-De. Mom says it’s okay, their ship is just taking a break, and—and then we can meet—then we can meet there.

I hope you can.

Episode 3

The Death-Cold

Rivers Solomon

When Asala landed on Gan-De as a child, so newly thirteen that the tattoos on her cheek marking transition to adolescence still glistened wetly, she’d made a decision. There were two roads before her. One: grief—a longing that would never abate because home never left a person. The second road, the better road: life. It meant abandoning the idea of home altogether as a social construct designed to hold people captive to places and traditions long after it was good to do so.

Asala had remembered Dosli Saktal ef Naktal, “The Wind Is Here and Then It Isn’t,” an epic by the ancient Khwarizmian poet and philosopher Ruxandra Esh. It followed the story of a boy of sixteen who, like all Khwarizmians, lived among a nation of nomads, traipsing the planet in search of coolness, moisture. Always one step ahead of the sun.

His nation, the Ceth, had been ruled for a century by one corrupt family. Fearful of change, people were reluctant to oust them. The boy tried to change their minds, but couldn’t, eventually leading to a fight to the death between him and King Bet. The boy won, but his people wanted nothing to do with him anymore, and he lived out the next few years in exile until he stumbled upon them once again by accident; and in the night he attacked their sleeping quarters with fire. Most perished. The children who didn’t, he took in. The adults who didn’t, he slaughtered. Every year, he and the children returned to the spot, and he would remark, “The wind has blown all that was left of them away.”

Asala hadn’t loved it, struggling with the meter and the ancient language, but it had been the last book that one of the clan mothers had assigned her for her tutorship. When her home mother told her to pack a bag, it was the only book that was out and easy to grab quickly.

Asala didn’t believe in signs now as an adult. But at thirteen, she could see no other reason why, out of all the books, this was the one that had made it all the way with her to Gan-De if it didn’t mean something important. Hypatia was no longer home. Gan-De was. For a time. Everything was always and only for a time.

The wind had blown all that was left of her past away. Hypatia was nothing to her anymore, and as the shuttle bringing them from orbit touched down, Asala unlatched her harness, stood, and took a deep breath the same way she had before that first step onto Gan-De decades and decades ago. Hypatia was just another world.

The rucksack she’d packed back on the Altair had fallen out of the storage compartment on the journey from the spaceport to the ground. She picked it up and slung it over her broad shoulders.

“Not exactly Khayyam,” said Niko, whose bag was only still in the compartment because the locking mechanism was stuck. They rammed their shoulder several times hard against the metal hold, and it eventually popped open, dropping their bag onto them. Niko caught it before it could do any damage. At least they’d left most of their gratuitous equipment on the ship. “I’m honestly a little surprised we made it to the ground.”

“As am I,” said Asala, buckling the strap of her rucksack around her waist and tightening it more securely than was comfortable. She’d thank herself later. It was a heavy load, and if the auto-shuttles were any indication, transportation on Hypatia hadn’t improved since she’d left thirty-four years ago. The two of them might have to hoof it from the shuttleport to Almagest. Nine miles if memory served.

“You may now release your harnesses,” said an automated voice as the main doors lifted open on either side of the shuttle. They were in a six-seater, but the other seats were unoccupied.

“You may now stand to retrieve your luggage,” said the voice as Niko and Asala exited. In their wake, thirty seconds later, Asala heard, “You may now exit.”

Niko snorted, and Asala smiled. They were a decent kid. Decent company, too. If they felt any nervousness about touching down on a planet that was pretty hostile to life, they didn’t show it. They led the way, following the various signs, their stride confident with no trace of hesitation.

Aside from a basic glance at their perimeter, Asala kept focus on reaching their destination. The moving sidewalk they were on that didn’t move anymore. The rubber was so worn that the underlying mechanisms were visible in several places, many poking out. Niko’s clunky boots caught multiple times.

“Don’t look so damn smug,” they said, noting Asala’s footwear—lightweight, flexible boots with thin soles. Asala could easily feel every disturbance on the ground.

“Not smug. Right,” she said.

It wasn’t long before they reached border patrol, though “patrol” was a misnomer. It implied a level of vigilance and intensity that was clearly lacking here.

Asala counted twenty stalls, nineteen of which were empty, which meant there were nineteen ways to get around the single guard on duty. Asala was willing to bet any cameras were broken or too greatly dysfunctional to be useful. It was sloppy. Sloppy meant any incident would have a high casualty count.

They didn’t care about that here.

“I half expected there to be flocking droves,” said Niko.

“There are. Just on the other side. Come on. Let’s get this over with,” she said.

Asala and Niko ran their wrists under the scanner at the stall, but the guard didn’t look up to check that the photos on the holograph matched them.

“Reason for your travel?” he asked.

In unison, Niko and Asala answered, one saying “business” and the other “pleasure,” respectively.

“I’m here visiting family,” Asala said without thinking. No Hypatian would ever return to visit family. If they could pay to get here, they’d pay to get their loved ones off this rock instead.

“And I’m joining her. Planning to get some work done if I can. So both. Business and pleasure,” Niko picked up the nonsense lie, their explanation going on a mite too long.

But the guard waved them through. “I don’t actually care. Printers are on the ground floor. You’ll want some more layers.” He sounded mountainish, from the southerly peaks not far from Hypatia’s largest city, but from his accent, Asala couldn’t pick out which language let alone which precise clan. Nor did the tattooed design around his eye or the ancestral markings tell her much more. It was strange how knowledge that used to be a piece of her was now out of her grasp.

Not that any of that mattered. She wasn’t here because she was Hypatian. Asala was the best at what she did, and Ekrem and Niko playing her past against her to get her here didn’t change that.

“How cold are we talking, exactly?” Niko walked up to a dingy printer against a wall in the atrium. They banged their fist several times against the touch screen before a basic menu appeared.

“Colder than humans can survive without help,” Asala said. Almost forty years ago, it had been unbearable. Mass die-off. Four decades wasn’t a lot on the scale of suns and planets, but it was millennia to a world already at the eve of its end. Any food stores there’d been were depleted. Hope had shriveled. Aid organizations and the wealthier planets had helped some, and hard-bitten Hypatians pushed to the ends of their endurance had done more, but they were kicking against the crush of a deadly reality. Improvements in clothing and other technology might be staving off the inevitable end, but Niko shouldn’t get the wrong idea. They’d spend their time on Hypatia miserably uncomfortable.

“Print something light. We’re going to want to move fast,” said Asala. “Texlon or sy-wool are the warmest and thinnest.”

Niko shook their head. “Not available. Will poly-tex do? It says it’s rated for -40℃.”

That would have a balmy summer night on Hypatia a century ago. It hadn’t gotten any warmer in the meantime.

“That’s really all there is?” Asala fought the urge to investigate the machine for herself. It wasn’t like Niko didn’t know their way around a computer. Damn, all their backup gear was on the Altair. Aside from the sy-wool underlayers she and Niko were already wearing, anything Khayyami-made would have screamed their outsider status.

Poly-tex would have to do. They’d each have to wear at least two bulky insulation coats under a windshell. And even then they’d better not get caught out overnight.

“Hour ETA. Fuck,” said Niko. “Can we forego the outer layers for now? Kit up more once we get to where we’re going?”

“If you want to die.”

Niko laughed shortly. “All right then. I guess we wait.”

• • •

Smoke, thick and astringent, saturated the air.

“The hell?” Niko asked, rubbing the sting from their eyes.

“Get back inside,” Asala said. “You’re going to need goggles. There were some on the ready-made racks next to the printers.”

Niko gave her a sideways glance that said they weren’t a fan of the commanding tone. But they nodded curtly and headed back inside. “You want a pair?” they asked, turning back around just before stepping through the automatic door.

Asala shook her head and waited for Niko to turn back away before wiping a few tears from her eyes. She’d get used to the burn, just as she had as a child. Any chance at answers required she blend in. Goggles were for offworlders, and children.

“Is it the factories or something? Ice-mining plants?” Niko came back outside, this time with a full face mask meant to filter out the toxic air.

“Fires to keep away the thalajwan,” Asala said, the word surprising her on her tongue. The Upper Crescent word for “death-cold.” There were seven active languages on Hypatia spoken by eight hundred thousand people scattered about the small planet. There used to be 113. Upper Crescent was the closest they had to a planet-wide lingua franca, being spoken by dwellers of Almagest. It was Hypatia’s largest and warmest city, located on the equator. “Benzene is plentiful here.”

“Holy—people are burning benzene fires?” asked Niko.

Given so much of Hypatia’s plantlife was dryland and brush, it was far from sensible, and years ago a benzene fire ran away and scorched a continent. But the people of Hypatia didn’t need sensible. They needed to be warm.

Asala checked the map on her wristwatch. Like she’d thought, there was nothing for miles. A pub four miles away where they’d be lucky to catch a ride. With Niko looking every bit a citizen of Khayyam despite the Hypatian clothing, their chances of finding someone willing to give them a lift were about nil.

Did Hypatians still call people from the inner planets “innards”?

“We don’t stop,” said Asala. “We can make it to Almagest before dark if we keep it moving. The day is short. We don’t want to be stranded in the wilderness at nightfall, when the temperature will drop even further.”

“Further?” Niko asked. They were already shivering. Asala would be too, if every muscle in her body weren’t tensed to ward it off.

“Let’s get moving. That’ll warm us up. It’s about nine miles.”

“We’re walking nine miles? In these temperatures?”

“If your extremities get numb, let me know. I have chemical heat packs we can crack that’ll fit in your gloves or boots.” Asala took pity on them and added, “When we get there, food is on me.”

Niko hesitated, then straightened out of their hunched shivering as if determined to be game. “Food. Now we’re talking. Something hot. Very hot.”

Asala was looking forward to it too, even though they’d just eaten on the shuttle. She missed the food here. Everything on the inner planets was too spicy or too chewy or too fried, and bulked up with lichen or insect protein. Sometimes succulents or dates. Whatever was the most water-light. Until you started to eat among the wealthy, when everything was grain this, grain that to show off their luxury.

There was no farming on Hypatia, especially not now that the climate had turned colder, icier. Folks lived off hunting, fishing, and shepherding. And dairy.

There was some plant life, mostly wild, ground-hugging tundra mosses and dwarf shrubs. Enough to provide the fragrant herbs and berries that gave Hypatia’s food its distinctive flavor, but sparse compared to land and sea animals.

Asala hoped a rich soup of bone broth, blood, marrow, and heart with spicy herbs still awaited in Almagest for those who could afford it. Which she could. Now she could. Thirty-four years ago, her family had come to survive on thin soups of discarded fish carcasses scavenged from richer lands. She’d come a long way. The second road.

There was no road linking the shuttleport to Hypatia’s largest city. They traipsed through hills of low-growing, frost-crusted grasses and rocks.

It wasn’t long before they saw the Almagest skyline, domed glass buildings meant to catch every bit of light. They didn’t pass other travelers. This land belonged to no clan. Too harsh.

Asala looked over to Niko. They were struggling. They’d had training, but they hadn’t had this much time in the field before. She slapped her hand on their back. “Keep up.”

“I am keeping up,” they said.

“Are you?” Asala asked, and picked up her pace, almost doubling her speed. Icy wind flooded her lungs through her nostrils, which only drove her to push harder.

“I see why you usually work alone,” said Niko. “No fun getting bogged down by us mere mortals.”

For fun, Asala started jogging.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Niko said, but they broke into a jog and shortly caught up.

“Race you to that shrub,” said Asala, goading, breaking into a full sprint.

She didn’t know why she suddenly felt like a girl again, frolicking like a goddamn child in the hills, but she smiled freely despite the load on her back and a few twinges of pain from old battle injuries.

It felt good to be working with someone competent, someone she liked well enough. She had buddies, of course, but it had been a long time since she’d had to spend this much time with someone else.

“If we run the rest of the way, we’ll get there twice, maybe three times as fast. That’s three times as fast you’ll be tucking into herb-roasted marrow and meat cakes.”

“You’ve found my weakness,” said Niko, huffing hard but keeping up.

It wasn’t long till they found their rhythm, matching Asala’s long strides.

The acrid smell of smoke didn’t slow her down. It invigorated her. For a second, it was like she’d never left Hypatia. Like she’d never cut those memories out of herself. Goodness, it was beautiful. Not in a sentimental way. Nothing anyone would write poetry about. But Asala loved the sternness of the landscape, the bleak barren hills.

There was no shine here. No fake shit. It was nothing like Khayyam, and gods, Asala remembered now what it was like to love this place, remembered the child she was before her home mother had sent her away, abandoned her.

“You okay?”

The kid was perceptive, they had that going. Even through a goddamn breathing mask and running out of breath they could tell something had changed. Asala needed to work on keeping her cards to herself.

She kept running, faster and faster, leaving Niko in the dust.

• • •

In Almagest, Niko wanted to rest. They already had booked a reservation under assumed names. But Asala didn’t like how comfortable she’d gotten on the way here from the shuttleport. Feeling free, feeling loose, that would get her killed. Hypatia was dangerous. The people she’d be dealing with were dangerous. Now wasn’t the time for a misplaced sense of homesickness.

“We’ve already lost a lot of time. First at the shuttleport waiting for the printer. Then getting here. You want to impress Daddy, don’t you? We should get a move on. Start working the leads now.”

Asala regretted the dig about their father, but it was out there now and maybe it would spring the kid into action. The leisure part of this mission was over, and they had a job to do.

“Can’t we at least put away our bags?”

“What, you’re tired?” she joked, trying to bring some levity back to the situation.

“You promised me food,” they said.

“We’ll grab some saslik on the way to the Yard. If the Vela touched down to get repairs, that’s where it would’ve stopped. It’s a big space. A square mile, maybe more. We’ll have a lot of ground to cover.”

Niko sighed. “Meat on a stick isn’t a meal.”

“Meat marinated for a day in buttermilk, grilled to smoky perfection on a stick even?”

Groaning, Niko re-clipped the belt of their rucksack around their waist. “You’re paying.”

“I am,” Asala said. “Oh, and do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Think you can ditch the mask now? No matter what, you’ll stand out, but the mask is too much even for an offworlder. We won’t get any answers with that on.”

It wasn’t a long walk to the Yard, but Asala kept her head down anyway. She didn’t have fond memories of Almagest, and things had gotten worse. There weren’t any corpses on the street, but in Asala’s professional estimation, that wasn’t far off. As it was, the streets were littered with lost souls. The exiled. The clanless. People addicted to flash or glow.

At least half the shops were abandoned. Glass broken and doors unhinged.

Niko drew attention. More than Asala liked. Without the proper markings, the proper tattoos—without the right walk—they looked every bit an innard.

“Let me do the talking,” Asala said.

“I do speak Upper Crescent,” said Niko. Of course they did. It was a requirement of the forces to speak at least the main dialects of the system.

“I know,” said Asala.

“And I can do this. I meant it when I said I had connections here.”

Asala nodded. She didn’t doubt they had more contact with people on Hypatia than she did at this point. “You do. But we’ve got to play to our strengths.”

“And your strength is what? Being more Hypatian than me? Last time I checked, you weren’t exactly keen to come back here.”

Yet it was people just like Niko who’d never let her forget this was the place of her birth. She didn’t have to be keen on the place. She didn’t have to consider it her home for it to consider her its subject.

Niko’s expression showed they’d just realized how much their statement of fact had felt like a jab.

“Because I’m starting to like you, I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” Asala said it lightly to dissipate the sudden tension.

Niko huffed several breaths. “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”

“Forget it. Now come on. There’s someone we can talk to right there.” She pointed ahead to a woman playing a card game with herself in a junky booth near the entrance to the Yard.

“Yeah?” came the crackly response through the receiver. The woman never looked up from her cards.

“We’d like to speak with you. Got a couple of questions about a ship that might’ve passed through here,” said Asala, the words mostly fluent but off somehow. A little stilted. A little flat.

The mechanic looked up, giving both Asala and Niko the once-over. “Lot of ships pass through here. It is a shipyard.” She looked back down and returned to her cards.

“Can you open the door?” Asala asked—realizing her mistake right away. She’d used the word for a house door. For something transient or temporary like this booth, there was a different word. It was a mistake a first-year student in Upper Crescent would make, and this planet was her home. Or had been her home.

The mechanic glanced up again, this time turning her gaze hard on Asala. “Those fake?” she asked, pointing to the tattoos on Asala’s face.

“Let us into the booth,” Asala said, her accent seeming to get thicker by the second.

Asala hated how stupid she sounded in front this stranger. How un-Hypatian she must seem. This wasn’t a security booth; this woman would have let anyone in to do business who looked like a customer of the Yard. Apparently Asala now passed for a native almost as little as Niko did.

It shouldn’t matter or upset her. It did, though. Thirty-four years, and this planet still had its teeth in her.

“Let us in,” she repeated.

The mechanic relented, opening the door of the booth a tiny crack to allow Asala and Niko in. She didn’t want to let any of the heat out. Inside, a tiny electric heater kept her warm.

“You’re not going to find any answers here,” said the mechanic.

“Don’t doubt what I’m capable of achieving,” Asala replied.

“What we’re capable of achieving,” Niko corrected.

The mechanic watched Niko for a moment then turned away dismissively, making it clear

that Asala was the only one she was going to speak with.

“Maybe I should go search the Yard while you stay here. We’ll cover more ground that way,” said Niko.

The mechanic laughed bitterly. “You’re not going to have any more luck out there than in here, unless you can somehow give them back all the water Khayyam has stolen from us over centuries. Or, I don’t know, fix the goddamn sun you destroyed at our expense.”

Niko looked so hurt. They needed to learn how not to take those kinds of digs so personally.

“I’m on your side,” they said.

That prompted the mechanic to laugh again. “Get out of my booth. Can’t believe I let you in here. Get out. And I’d tell you to get off my planet, but if you stay, maybe we’ll get lucky and you’ll die here.”

“You know what? Fine,” said Niko.

“Nik—”

“It’s all right. It’s fine. She’s just telling the truth, anyway—I’m not going to get any leeway here. I’m going to reach out to some of my contacts. Maybe lie low at a pub and see what the gossip is. I’ll meet you back at the room tonight once I’ve got some leads.” They’d switched back to High Khayyami. Asala restrained herself from shaking her head—if Niko had thought for a few seconds, they’d have realized the mechanic was almost certain to understand that nearly as well as Upper Crescent. Khayyam’s power had made their dominant language the one of interplanetary trade; other planets didn’t have the luxury not to learn it.

Niko pushed past Asala through the door and stalked off out of the Yard. Asala frowned. What was riling their feathers up? As an inner-worlder, they couldn’t have expected they’d be welcomed on a planet like Hypatia with open arms. And it hadn’t been like them to make the slip about language. Niko was smart, and so far, they had been more or less professional. Maybe they were just tired.

“You really trust that kid?” the mechanic asked.

“More than I trust you,” said Asala. “You haven’t exactly been forthright.”

“Why should I be? Just because you speak local?”

The flush of gratification Asala felt embarrassed her. Despite giving her a hard time, the woman did see her as a clanner. After fighting to get away from that identity her whole life, Asala didn’t know why she suddenly cared. Maybe she just wanted one single space where she wasn’t a foreigner.

But this wasn’t the time. She cleared her throat and dug into her pockets for some local currency.

The mechanic made it disappear and gave a theatrical sigh. “I’m gonna need some more details about the ship you’re looking for. But I’m not a rat. I won’t be able to give you much.”

“A decent ship. Not new, but solid money behind it. Plenty of inner-world modifications and large enough for a few thousand people. Touched down for repairs.”

The mechanic shook her head. “I’d know if a ship like that entered my yard, and it surely didn’t. If it had, half the people in this city would’ve seen it touch down and would’ve stampeded the Yard trying to get onto it.”

Asala examined the woman. Short and slight, but big in other ways. Big spirited. Big eyed. Big mouthed. Reminded Asala of one of her clan mothers.

“Look,” said the mechanic. “These days, this place is little more than a scrap yard. The only ships in working order are the ones I’ve personally rebuilt from scratch, and barely any of those can stay together past low orbit. A ship like the one you’re looking for, what could any of us here have done for it? Repair a broken valve with what? Look around.”

“Then maybe you stripped it to make a ship that can get to Gan-De,” Asala said. “Especially now. Isn’t everyone on the planet scrambling to make the jump while they can?”

The mechanic barked a laugh. “Lady, if I trusted something I built to get across, I’d have been on it. I’d rather the death-cold get me than get vacced. Do you know how many of the scrap ships make it? Less than half. And even if you make it over, no one will have us. Least all those fools keep me busy here.”

Asala didn’t have a response. She’d been one of the ones who’d made it. Doubtless the mechanic had figured that out.

She’d never felt lucky about it. She didn’t now, either, but guilt tingled in the pit of her stomach. What right did she have to be the one who beat the odds?

She forced herself back to the mission. “There are people on that ship who are important to me to find. Anything you might know, no matter how small, might help.”

“This isn’t that ship from Eratos, is it?” the mechanic asked, Asala’s seriousness about the situation finally sinking in. “I haven’t seen anything about it on the wire. No news. According to what I’ve seen, it’s still on course.”

“Is there anywhere else on the planet they might’ve gone for repairs?”

The mechanic bit her lips and scrunched her brow, thinking. “Maybe a hundred years ago when seventy-five percent of the planet wasn’t abandoned. They’re not here.”

Asala’s only lead was already looking like a dead end. “Thank you for your time,” she said. The mechanic grunted.

Asala let herself back out into the endless cold.

• • •

When Niko wasn’t back at the room, nor even checked in according to the computer records, Asala found herself a pub. She couldn’t over-imbibe on the job. But she could have a few. It might relax her and make it easier to blend in, which she was apparently doing a poor job at.

“Hey,” someone said.

Asala turned. A woman, maybe a few years younger than herself, was smiling from the stool next to her.

“Looks like you’ve had a piece-of-shit day,” she said.

Asala smiled easily, ready to let off the burden of her time here on Hypatia so far. “I’d compliment you on your powers of insight, but I’ve got to say, piece-of-shit day seems to be the standard in Almagest.”

The woman shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’m a country girl through and through. Name’s Simya.”

Asala took a sip of her drink, letting it calm her. “Asala. So why Almagest tonight then?”

“Work,” Simya said. “And what about you? What brings you here?”

“Work,” said Asala.

“Here’s to work then,” said Simya, holding up her glass, “which has had the pleasant side effect of bringing us together.”

Unsure what to do with the compliment, Asala took another drink. “I’m sorry, I’m not very good at this.”

“You’re really not from Almagest then.”

“Yeah?” asked Asala.

Nodding, Simya took a sip of her drink. “If you were, my country girl charms would’ve already worked on you and you’d be taking me back to wherever you’re staying.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m a country girl too,” said Asala, only letting herself get partially lost in the conversation. She kept her eyes open. She kept her body faced toward the pub’s windows so she could see out onto the street.

“You don’t strike me that way. I can read your eyes. You’ve seen cities way bigger than Almagest.”

“What you’ve seen doesn’t necessarily say anything about who or what you are,” said Asala. It was an empty statement, didn’t mean anything really, but she still felt surprised that she’d said it to this essential stranger. At least part of it was true, and she didn’t usually say true things to women she met randomly at a bar. She was more tired than she realized. It wasn’t the mission. It was Hypatia, hollowing her out emotionally.

“Okay, so which clan are you from? No, wait. Let me guess.” Simya squinted her eyes, thinking. “Your tattoos aren’t finished, but . . . I’m going to say you grew up in the mountains. Easterly. No, Northeasterly. Najima?”

“Gods.” Asala didn’t usually like being seen through so easily, but it pleased her that there was enough of Hypatia in her that Simya could figure out her clan. “You’re good.”

Simya laughed. “I am. At many things.”

Asala did her best to ignore that and had another sip of her drink. It warmed her from the inside. “And what about you?”

“Kaikias,” said Simya.

“And what kind of work takes a country girl all the way from the deep south to Almagest?”

Simya tilted her head, looking almost girlish for a moment. “I’m a nurse, actually.”

“Really? I didn’t know Hypatia still had nurses.” Aside from shopkeepers, people worked the land or fished. Reaped as much as they could from the dying world.

“A few. We’re in short supply, so we have to move around a lot. Different hospitals. Schools, for the few that are still open. Other institutions. Whenever there’s any kind of outbreak in a village. Different day, different assignment. Mostly based around Almagest but not always.”

“It sounds like you travel a fair bit.” That might mean she knew something. Even when flirting, Asala’s mind was on the job.

Simya nodded.

“As a nurse, if there was a ship that passed through Hypatia with injured persons on it, would you be someone who was called?” asked Asala.

Simya paused, brow scrunched. “I mean, yes, I suppose. But something like that wouldn’t go through official channels. If I heard about it, I’d go, certainly.”

“And have you? Heard of something like that recently?” Asala didn’t bother to hide her intentions, the fact that she was here for information. She sensed Simya wouldn’t mind it, that she liked things to be as direct as possible.

“No. But honestly, ships crash down on Hypatia all the time. We call them Eratosi Meteors. There wouldn’t typically be any survivors,” she said.

“But what about a nicer ship capable of automatic navigation? Something hardy. Something paid for by one of the inner planets, commissioned by the government?”

Signs of recognition appeared on Simya’s face. Maybe it was foolish to give so much away to a stranger, but Asala wouldn’t get anything if she didn’t give a little.

“Not the refugee ship?” asked Simya, concerned. “Is it—what’s happened?”

“Nothing,” Asala assured her. “But I need to find it.”

“It’s lost then? Asala, those were the last Eratosi in the system. It’s a lot of people. Children,” Simya said.

Asala did a quick calculation and gently put her hand over Simya’s. “And I’m going to find them. Is there anything you could tell me that would help?”

Simya pulled away and turned to press a few buttons on the service computer, closing out her drink tab. Asala could tell she was stalling. She had medium brown skin but her tattoos were white. Simya had an easy way about her that the innards might have been surprised by, as it didn’t suggest she’d lived her whole life on a planet as cold and unforgiving as Hypatia. Yet her charm and confidence reminded Asala so much of so many women she had known on Hypatia, in her own clan.

“Asala!”

She turned. Niko was here. Asala straightened herself up then stood.

“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you,” they said.

“I waited for you. You didn’t come. So I moved on with my evening,” said Asala.

Simya stood up from her barstool and zipped on her coat. “I’m going to let you two work this out. Asala, it was great to meet you. Here’s my code. I can’t help you with the ship, but if there’s any other reason you might want to get together, get in touch,” she said, handing Asala a number scrawled on a napkin.

“I’ll do that,” said Asala, watching her as she left. “Wipe that sloppy grin off your face,” she told Niko.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to cockblock. Just had a lead and I’ve been all over Almagest trying to find you when you weren’t back at the inn.”

Asala should’ve waited for Niko back in the room. Going to the bar had been a waste of time and she hadn’t really learned anything. More dead ends.

She’d let herself get distracted. This place really was getting to her. Making her less sharp.

“Let’s get back to the room,” she said to Niko. “I want to hear what you’ve found.”

• • •

It was far from a smoking gun, but it was better than anything Asala had gotten. One of Niko’s contacts had come through. A couple of days ago a man had been arrested for selling high-quality rocket fuel, something that could’ve only come from an inner planet.

“Only problem is he’s been arrested for the crime. He’s at Kleidaria.”

Asala slumped in the chair. “Fuck.”

“Tell me about it. I did some preliminary investigations. It’s not exactly a place we can just walk into for visiting hours. I’ve been able to track down blueprints, including sublevels, to see if there’s access via the plumbing. In many ways it’s more secure than anything on Khayyam. Super-sophisticated computer security.”

It was the only thing Gan-De had ever given Hypatia in the form of aid—tools to keep Hypatians in. And Hypatia accepted it. In these times of desperation, violent crime was at a record high.

“Shouldn’t you be able to, I don’t know, virtually pick the locks?” Asala asked.

“It’s tough. I maybe could if I had time, and that’s still a big maybe.”

“How much time?”

“I don’t know. Weeks? A month? More maybe. And I’d need a lot of help. This isn’t going to be easy. If I was on-site, and I mean on-site, in the facility, I could access the local network and pull it off. Maybe sweet-talk a couple of people and get access codes, administrator passwords. But even something like that would take at least days to set up,” Niko said, collapsing onto the mattress.

Asala laced her fingers together and crossed one leg over the other. “There’s got to be another way in.”

“You must still have family here. Connections. Do you know anyone who could have access? Or someone there, even?”

Asala shook her head. “It’s been almost forty years. I don’t—I’ve had no contact with anyone.”

Niko sat back up and flushed. Asala had the grace not to remind them how thoughtless the question about family had been. After all, they knew all about her family. In looking up Dayo, they must have dug into every corner of her past without permission.

The silence stretched. Asala let it, leaning into the discomfort.

Niko finally got up and went to unwrap a foil packet with some warm food inside. They had the heater on maximum but it was struggling, and even layered in all their gear, it was still painful. “Got one for you, too,” Niko said, gesturing to their messenger bag.

Asala accepted the peace offering and relented in return. “We might be able to use Simya.”

“Simya? What’s that?” asked Niko.

“It’s a who. The woman from the pub. She’s a nurse, and she works at different sites. She

mentioned hospitals and schools, other institutions. Couldn’t one of those institutions be a prison? They must need nurses, but they likely wouldn’t have any on-site, or if they did, they’d rotate based on need.”

Niko took a bite of their saslik. “Okay, so we have a possible in, but is she up for it? I mean, you just met.”

Asala had gotten the distinct impression Simya was up for anything. “I think she cares a lot about the fate of the people on the Vela. That might be motivation enough.”

“Her potential connection to the prison is pretty tangential. I’m not sure we could even legitimately get her in.” Niko made a face. “But what other option do we have?”

It was a stretch, but a stretch was a start, which was more than they had without Simya. “I’ll call her,” said Asala.

Asala fished out the napkin with the call code on it and dialed. Simya picked up almost immediately.

“Yeah?”

“Is this Simya?” asked Asala.

“Yeah? Who’s this?”

“Asala. We met a few hours ago?”

Simya’s voice warmed. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon, but I’m glad I have. Would you like to meet up? The night’s still young.”

“I do want to meet up, though unfortunately not for what I’d hoped to be calling you for,” said Asala. Niko had that goofy grin back on their face.

“More questions about the ship? I told you. I can’t help you. I don’t know anything.”

“Can you meet me in the lobby of the Dusad? It’s only a block from the pub we were at. I know you don’t know anything, but there’s another way that you can help. You could be a part of saving the people on that refugee ship.”

Asala heard laughing and other noises in the background. Simya must be at another bar. “Don’t try to manipulate me like that. You don’t know me.”

“If I had other options, I wouldn’t be,” Asala said.

The line was silent for several seconds. “I’ll meet you. I can’t guarantee I can do more for you than that.”

• • •

Simya was already there waiting for them when they got downstairs. She didn’t feel comfortable going back up to the room, so they sat in the deserted lobby, pulling chairs and a coffee table off to the side for some privacy. It was colder down here, and the three of them huddled together around a rattling heater for warmth.

“I really did tell you all I know about the ship. I have no doubt that it may have landed here, but if it did, it did so quickly. It’s not here anymore, and you’re unlikely to find any traces of it,” said Simya, dressed more conservatively than she’d been at the bar. She had a thick jumper on now and her hair was concealed underneath a knit hat pulled down to her ears. She had glasses on now too. Something told Asala she’d been getting toward the end of her night when Asala called and dressing down for her journey home. It didn’t make her any less attractive.

“We have a lead about the ship touching down here, but the guy we need to get to is inaccessible,” Asala explained.

“What does that have to do with me?” Simya asked, impatient now.

“We think it’s someplace you might be able to get into,” said Niko.

Simya looked confused. “A hospital?” she asked. “Government building? Shuttleport detainee facility? Am I getting warmer?”

“Kleidaria,” said Asala.

Snorting, Simya nodded. “This is what I get for talking to strangers in bars,” she said. “I can only blame myself. I said I wanted more adventure in my life. As is your will, so may it be,” she added.

Asala’s home mother used to say that. She hadn’t realized it must’ve been a saying quite common across Hypatia.

“I’ve never been assigned to Kleidaria before. Why would that change just because it’s convenient for you?” Simya shifted nervously in her seat, her confidence from earlier beginning to waver.

“I can handle that with a little bit of help from you, if you’d be willing to give me some details,” said Niko.

Simya looked skeptical. “I could get in trouble?”

“I’ll protect you,” said Asala. She meant it too. These missions carried risk no matter what, but she didn’t abide innocent casualties.

“I can’t do this,” Simya said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” She was clutching her coat.

“I wouldn’t have called if I had literally anyone else,” said Asala.

“Goodbye,” said Simya, and she got up and left.

• • •

Niko sent out a call to their contacts for anyone who might have a connection to Kleidaria, but for days, there was nothing. Asala tried to press her memories for anyone who might be able to help, but that well was dry.

Niko had managed to access the arrest report. But like all bureaucracy on Hypatia, it was little more than a scribble in a file. Asala had applied for a formal permit to visit the prison, but it had been ignored, which was more or less what she’d expected. Criminals went to Kleidaria to rot, and Hypatian authorities cared little about what visitors might want with them.

They might have cared more if they’d known it was an official request from the president of Khayyam. But if Ekrem had wanted that to be common knowledge, he wouldn’t have sent Asala.

“I’ve got a few people working with me on trying to access Kleidaria’s internal network, but we haven’t made any headway,” Niko said.

Neither had Asala. She’d interviewed almost everyone in Almagest, and the only crumbs of information she’d gained pointed right back at their fuel scalper. She discovered his name was Teak av Fintus, someone from Khayyam who’d been an escort to the refugees on the Vela. Their lead had gone from promising to definite. But nobody could tell Asala anything more than that.

At least she’d managed to get her and Niko warmer outerwear. The deadly cold wasn’t as biting through a better coat. Or maybe she was just getting used to it.

If they didn’t make progress soon, they were going to run out of time. The orbital window to leave the planet for Gan-De had begun to crack open, but it wouldn’t be open long. The true scramble would be a few weeks from now, when the journey was shortest. But a few weeks after that, it would begin stretching to impossible for any but the fastest and richest of ships. Even the Altair wasn’t a match for what the distance would become.

Orbital mechanics was asymmetrical and worked in four dimensions. Getting to Hypatia from the Inner Ring was almost always easy, but if Asala and Niko didn’t solve this within the next few weeks, they would have to leave. Asala had no intention of winding up stranded. Especially not here.

She and Niko were holed up in the room considering their next moves when Asala’s comm alerted her to a call.

“Hello?” she answered.

“I’ll do it,” said the voice on the line. It was Simya. “But there’s a price.”

Whatever it was, Asala would pay. She didn’t fail missions.

She and Niko met with Simya at a hole-in-the-wall café, where they didn’t bother to exchange pleasantries. “I’ll do what you need me to do, but only if you do something for me,” she said. “You’ve got a ship, right?”

Niko nodded, and Asala rolled her eyes. She’d have preferred to keep their hand secret. “Then you can get someone off the planet in it, right?” the nurse asked.

It wouldn’t be easy. The shuttleport would be a nightmare, reentering Khayyam space even worse so.

“We can get you out,” said Niko.

Niko’s bleeding heart was all overconfidence when it came to saving people. “We can try to get you off-planet,” Asala amended.

Simya shook her head. “No, no, no. It’s not for me. I need to stay here. There aren’t many people left with medical training. It’s for my sister.”

My sister. Dayo’s face crashed unbidden through Asala’s mind. “What?”

“My sister,” said Simya.

Asala inhaled deeply to calm herself, then took a sip of tea, letting the heat fill her body. Her fingers were numb, and the heat from the mug burnt against them pleasantly.

Simya leaned forward, her body tense. “Can you do it?”

“We can,” said Niko.

Asala wasn’t sure how she felt about having another sister on her conscience, especially someone else’s. But they didn’t have any other option.

• • •

After Simya gave Niko all they needed, she was instructed to return to her normal routine. Aside from the occasional message to Asala, she did.

For her part, Asala studied. Niko had given her precisely annotated blueprints to go over. When it was time for her to infiltrate, there wouldn’t be time for her to second-guess or stumble over which way to go. And the only time in the upcoming weeks Niko could get Simya through was five days later, when the staff rotated.

Asala wouldn’t know what block or specific cell their lead was in until Niko was able to access the prison’s computer system, which they wouldn’t be able to do until they executed the plan. She memorized information quickly, but she couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. She pored over the blueprints over and over and over, using lines from poems, from novels, from sayings, from essays to build mnemonics to better commit the hallways, doors, gates, and passageways to instant recall.

It was now just one day before the planned prison break-in. “Would I be too much of an ass nugget if I asked you to get me some caffeine?” said Niko as they typed away at multiple computers. They had several programs running, each machine running different protocols and routines.

Simya had given them the name of the private medical company she worked for and information about its security. It wasn’t enough for a full-on assault, but Niko believed they could get what they needed in time.

“Of course.” Asala hadn’t got much sleep herself, but at this juncture, her role was much less intellectually demanding than theirs.

She left their room and went out onto the street, layered to the hilt, her hat pulled down over her ears. The cold air burned her lungs. The smell of smoke was pleasant and familiar. Already after a short time her eyes had grown used to the sting of it.

Walking down Orestes Street was almost nice. The smell of breakfast cooking: meat stewing, fish frying. Bustling people. She smelled teas and root coffees. Herbs. Spices. There was a little bit of stink in the air, but few of the more foul smells lingered with the cold and the wind.

Asala had rarely ventured here as a child. Like she’d told Simya, she was a country girl from a clan of mountain hags. But she still remembered it from the few times, maybe three in total, she’d passed through. It hadn’t changed that much in thirty-four years. A few more abandoned shops. More Hypatians addicted to flash. More beggars. Lots more beggars.

But the feel was the same. Asala expected her home mother to come out of a shop carrying a bag before rushing Asala along back to a train station, a now defunct line.

Almagest, as bad as it was, wasn’t a place Asala necessarily had the urge to flee. It was just a city, a city under siege by the cold. Like all of Hypatia, it was people’s home. Beloved.

Asala bought Niko a couple of energy drinks from a machine and picked them up some breakfast, too, a large container of meatball soup, egg pancakes, yogurt, cheese. They’d both need to load up if they were going to survive today without crashing.

No one smiled at Asala as she made her way back to the inn. It was a refreshing change from Khayyam, with all its fake pleasantness, where people thought you were some kind of demon incarnate if you didn’t look up to exchange a hello.

Asala walked up the short flight of stairs back to the room. She tossed a can of Six-Shot energy drink to Niko and they caught it without looking up from their work.

“Made some breakthroughs,” Niko said. “Was able to get past most of Simya’s company’s firewalls. The password system isn’t that secure because they’re made to change it every month. You’d think that’d make things more difficult to hack, but it just means people are more likely to have variations on the same password over and over again. Dog1234 one month, for example; then the next, Dog2345; then Dog3456; and so on. It also means people tend to write their passwords down or store them electronically in messages, computer notepads, etc. Those things are on people’s personal devices, less secure, and easy for me to hack almost instantly. I’ve got a program running through emails people sent to themselves looking for specific sorts of combinations of numbers, symbols, and letters. Got some hits, but none for administrators yet. It’ll come though. Another couple of hours, tops.”

Asala nodded and patted them on the back. They’d done good work. She thought back to the mechanic’s words at the Yard, insinuating Niko wasn’t someone Asala could trust. But Niko was working diligently. They were clearly committed to this mission as much as or more than Asala herself.

“Come on. Take a break. You need to eat and so do I. Don’t feel like having breakfast alone,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah, just let me finish this one thing,” said Niko.

They ate together then took turns in the tiny shower. Tomorrow would be go time, but they still had lots of work for today. Simya was currently at a shift at a triage site for an ice-mining accident, an hour outside of Almagest. Tomorrow, she’d be at Kleidaria, a tomb in the outskirts, deep in the tundra.

• • •

HealthPlus did supply the medical personnel for Kleidaria—one on-call physician and three on-site nurses for a population of 2,400 inmates. It was a massive facility, a hexagon built into a mountain basin with a domed courtyard in the middle where prisoners had leisure time. Each side of the hex was a cell block, guarded from one another heavily, further subdivided into a maze of twenty wings. Their lead, Teak av Fintus, was somewhere in the labyrinth of it all.

Asala hadn’t decided whether it was lucky or unlucky that very little of the security was actual human staff. It was fewer people to evade, but it made for an increased artificial intelligence presence. More bioscanners. More cameras. An automated system.

“Ready?” Asala asked Simya. They had met in the room at the inn, but for Simya’s safety would be parting ways after this point, traveling a few minutes apart, taking different routes. It wasn’t much of a precaution—if someone were trying, they’d easily be able to connect the two of them, but no one was trying.

“I’m ready. I mean, I don’t actually have to do anything, do I? Just carry in the transmitter. Plug it into a hardline. Go about my nursing duties with no one the wiser, right? I’m just pretending to charge my cellular device. No big deal. No reason to arouse anyone’s suspicions.” She looked up at them then, her brown eyes wide. “And then you get my sister out? Right? You promise? She’s ready to go. She’s already in Almagest. She traveled far to get here, and you can’t let her down.”

Asala grabbed each of Simya’s shoulders. “It’s going to be fine.”

Simya looked away. “You can’t know that, Asala.”

“I can. After thirty years of doing what I’ve been doing, I absolutely can,” she said.

“Right,” said Simya. “How do I look?”

Asala took in her loose-fitting white scrubs, her braided hair pulled up into a tight bun.

“Good. You look like a nurse. You look reasonably calm. It’s your first day at Kleidaria, so that’ll explain any anxiousness when they do a bioscan of you to check your identity,” said Asala. “You need to get your train. It’s a three-mile walk. I’ll be getting on at a different stop, five miles in the other direction. I’ll be arriving about ten or fifteen minutes after you. Niko’s already there on the ground, setting up at a location not far from the perimeter of the prison. All our comm lines are open, and we’ll have eyes on you. You’ve got your bugs set up?”

“Check,” Simya said, patting herself, as if to confirm the near-microscopic devices by feel.

“They’ll give us eyes and ears. Don’t activate them until after you’ve passed through all the scanners. One or two at a time at the most. Remember, almost every gate or entryway between wings and sections have scanners that will pick up your bugs if they’re on, so deactivate before you approach any one of those. Hopefully you’ll just be stationed in the infirmary and won’t have to go anywhere else on the site,” said Asala, zipping on a tight, thick black hoodie insulated with kinetilon. It would keep her warm in temperatures below -40℃. She put on another one over it, then put on a coat over that. Gloves. Hat. Truthfully, she didn’t know what would happen after they got to Teak, or how long she and Niko would be out in the cold tonight. They’d make contact with Simya’s sister when they were clear of the authorities, then rendezvous before heading back to the Altair.

She strapped on her sidearm and checked the backups at her ankle and in her coat. “Let’s go.”

The skyrail link connecting Almagest to Kleidaria and a few other major centers was one of the few lines that was still maintained and something like functional. Delays were frequent, but that was why they were getting such an early start.

The skyrail was suspended on thick wires in the sky with a little less than a hundred meters altitude. Asala could see everything. Mountains, endless mountains, and sloping hills that beckoned. Deep valleys. Snow-streaked plains. Despite all that had befallen Hypatia since this crisis had begun, the planet entranced, and captivated. Asala had spent more time off this planet than on it, but there was no doubt as she looked at the harsh landscape that it had made her.

The train rattled, a wrenching, high-pitched whistle emanating from above. They were traveling at decently high speeds—if this kept up, they would complete the thirty-five mile journey in about twenty minutes.

She sat with her head bowed down, hoodie drawn over to obscure her face. Niko said they would disable all the cameras that they could, but Asala was old-school and liked to make sure her bases were covered.

Today she was thankful for the tattoos she’d had such an uneasy relationship with all her life. If anyone saw her, they wouldn’t recognize her as someone sent from Khayyam.

After the train pulled in, Asala got into position in one of the blind spots she and Niko had identified from the blueprints, plans, and topographical maps. Her radio was on. Her guns, all three, were holstered. If everything was going according to plan, Simya was already in, probably just about through the security checks. Once inside, she would plug in the device Niko had given her to connect to the prison’s hardline, so Niko could hack into their network and open the passages that needed opening for Asala to infiltrate.

“Gamma, you copy?” asked Asala, making sure she was tuned to the right frequency.

“Aye, copy, Alpha,” Niko said. “Just got eyes and ears on our girl. All is a go. I’ll let you know once we’re ready for phase two. Beta is now headed to where the package will be delivered.”

The vague codes they used were far from indecipherable, but sometimes all that was needed was a small layer of concealment to blur reality and buy time. Not that anyone would be able to hear them. Niko promised to take care of that.

“All right. Package is in. Let me work my magic. First order of business, smash out their eyes.”

This was Asala’s time to go. The cameras surrounding the perimeter would only be disabled for a short amount of time. Two minutes. Enough for her to get to a utility door at a side entrance but hopefully not long enough that the prison’s AI would recognize the looped video Niko was feeding it in the live feed’s stead.

“And . . . go,” said Niko.

“Copy.”

Asala sprinted. In many ways, Kleidaria was as deserted as the shuttleport had been. She didn’t have to attempt to blend in. Any guards were inside. Most of the security was computer-based.

“Cameras are going to go back on in ten, nine, eight,” Niko began to count down. Several meters from the door, Asala pumped it up a notch, pushing herself to move harder and faster. “Four, three, two.”

Asala was at the thick, heavy utility door, but she knew it wouldn’t be open yet. Niko could only enter one system at a time. “Your girl is good, by the way,” said Niko. “Going about her business, hasn’t raised any suspicions. Doing a check of the systems now and it looks like the AI did notice the camera anomalies with the looped feed and are sending two guards to do a sweep of the perimeter.”

“Tell me you’ll have that door open for me before that.”

“I’m trying.” Niko’s voice was tight. Asala could imagine them typing away furiously. “Each door has a separate set of protocols; it’s taking longer than I thought,” they said. “One second, let me try something . . . Okay. Got the password. Just a couple more . . . and okay. Open.”

Asala heard the magnetic latches give and slid into the doorway just as she heard guards approaching on their patrol from the main entrance.

“You in?” asked Niko.

“In.”

Asala heard Niko lock the door behind her. Even though it took more time, they had to cover up their tracks as instantly as possible, as the AI did regular sweeps of the system to check for breaks in pattern. A door quickly unlocked and relocked meant a guard or maintenance member was accessing a side door. A door left unlocked meant trouble.

Asala followed the route she’d memorized from the blueprint, trusting that Niko was disabling the bioscanners and cameras one by one as she followed the complicated maze through the basement level to access the main levels where Teak would be.

Niko’s voice came over her earpiece. “All right. He’s in F Block. Cell 104. There’s still a half an hour before they’ll be let out for breakfast, at which time their cell doors will automatically open and a bioscan sweep will log them in for the day. I don’t think I’m going to be able to override that system because there’s zero manual access, so you need to be out before then. Period.”

Asala was in A Block. She was going to have to run, hard, if she was going to make that window. “I’m going to be moving fast. You got all the security checks covered?”

“Going to turn all the scanners and camera off at once. That’s the only way I can keep up. Go,” said Niko.

Asala ran as fast as she could, sprinting down corridors, making the turns she knew she needed to make. It wasn’t easy to translate the lines and squares from the blueprints to real life on the move, but it also wasn’t Asala’s first break-in. She didn’t make wrong turns.

F Block was quiet and dark, but Asala could feel that most of the inmates were already awake. Their breaths weren’t long, slow, and even, like sleepers would be. There were no husky snores. Eyes scanned here from the cells, but no one spoke.

Asala had never been in a prison that felt like this. No whistles. No smack talk.

“Teak?” she tried, her steps quiet and steady. She only had about ten minutes. “Teak av Fintus?” she asked again, more confidently this time. “I need to speak with Teak av Fintus now.”

“What?”

She made her way to cell 104. Teak was already standing up and facing her.

“We don’t have much time. I need answers. No bullshit. No stalling. If you don’t give me what I want, I suspect you’ll be the one to suffer for my being here. I can get out. You’re trapped behind a door,” said Asala.

“Not for much longer,” Teak sneered. He was gruffer than Asala expected. No tattoos. No doubt this jail wasn’t a kind place. Even after a few weeks, it already had taken its toll on him.

“Do you want to try me?” Remember the mission. Niko said she only had a little bit of time. She had to be out of here by the morning bioscan sweeps. “I suspect you know what I’m here about. Do you have anything to lose by cutting through the shit and telling me what I need to know?”

The volume in the cell wing rose as prisoners began to chatter and mill around their cells. “Can you get me out of here?” Teak asked.

She didn’t necessarily want to, but they’d known all along their leverage was poor and escape would have to be on the table. Besides, the guy was locked up in this shithole just for selling stolen fuel? Her conscience would be clear. “We can talk about that if you tell me what went down on the Vela. What happened after you touched down here for repairs? Did you go to the Yard? Where’s the Vela now?”

“Look,” said Teak. “Me and a couple of other escorts were pretty suspicious when the captain noted the ship needed repairs. I mean, the Vela had been all kitted out and double-checked. Our journey had been smooth. I notice a couple of the refugees are acting a bit squirrely. One in particular, and I know from the manifest she’s some famous physicist.”

He was talking about Uzochi. Asala had heard of her through her mother, but more recently, she remembered her from the refugee profiles she’d watched back on the Altair.

What stupid thing had Uzochi Ryouta done, and what had it cost the refugees?

“She was a real smarty type,” said Teak. “She could’ve easily manufactured the damage to the ship’s systems and drives on purpose, right? I don’t know, she acted funny since she first got on the ship, like she thought something was wrong. I mean, we were overcrowded, for sure. No doubt Ekrem underestimated the sheer number of them there’d be. But the ship was in no danger. It was built to carry loads way bigger than that. Anyway, so I confront her when we’re about to dock into the in-orbit shuttleport on Hypatia. I don’t know, I’m not even thinking it’s a big deal. But bam, full-on fucking mutiny. Every single refugee. There were only a few of us escorts, you know? We weren’t expecting to need hard security. My team got overpowered quick.” His face folded in harder. “They let me out with the rest of the team, a little worse for wear—or kicked us out, depending on how you look at it. This crap-ass planet’s government is in shambles; they knew no one here would care. Before they shoved off again, I decided to do a little something nice for myself and got the fuel. Figured if I was stuck here, I’d need a way to get money to book my passage back home.”

Asala shook her head. “Fuck.”

These refugees had been on their way to a cushy life on Khayyam. Politics had been playing in their favor for once. So there was no reason they would have mutinied against their escorts unless they had another goal in mind. A violent one.

She needed to get out of here, and she needed to call the president right away.

“Alpha, you clear?”

“Shit,” said Asala.

“Don’t tell me you’re still in the cell block!”

“How bad is this?”

“You’re going to get caught in the auto bioscan and it’s going to trigger an alarm. Nothing I can do to stop it. I’m going to cause a distraction. But, Alpha? You need to run. Go. Run.”

At least Asala had what she needed. She ran for her life, alarms blaring at high pitch overhead. She wasn’t the only one sprinting. Thanks to Niko, every gate and door in Kleidaria had opened.

As she ran, she used her comm to call President Ekrem. She didn’t know how much time they had. She needed to get word to him quickly what was going on.

He didn’t answer. She left a message. “You need to get people out here. I think the refugees from the Vela are planning a terrorist attack.”

• • •

“Alpha?”

“Copy,” said Asala. “I’m approaching the utility door now. Head to the train station as fast as you can. I’ll meet you there. Got guards on my tail. No doubt they have personal vehicles. If you can buy us any time—”

“I’ve been looking for an excuse to use an EMP,” they said, tone unsettlingly cheerful.

“You can’t cut out the train. That’s our exit strategy,” gritted Asala, barely able to get the words out as she sprinted.

“A baby EMP,” Niko protested. “Fetus, really.”

Asala rolled her eyes and kept running at breakneck speeds. “Call Simya’s sister. Let her know we’re proceeding more quickly than planned. If I don’t see you at the train, meet me at the Yard. We’re not going to be able to get back to our ship. We don’t have the time. But that mechanic at the Yard said she’d refurbished a couple of vessels. We’re going to be requisitioning one.”

Adrenaline rushed Asala as she made the journey back to the city, anxious when she didn’t see Niko on the train. The EMP had cut off her radio before she’d cleared the prison. She had no way of getting in touch. She tried her comm. The stored and downloaded functions worked but she couldn’t get a call out.

She did have a return message from Ekrem that he’d left while she’d been busy not getting caught. “Asala, get back to me as soon as you can. I need specifics. Times. Locations. Asala, what the hell is going on?”

Asala tried to call him again but it was no use. At least the train trip went by fast.

Once she got to the rendezvous point, there was still no Niko. She waited for them for fifteen minutes at the Yard, where there was no sign of Simya, either. An alarm blaring back at Kleidaria reached them faintly even here, putting everyone on high alert. Asala pretended to be tinkering on a scrapped ship when authorities ran by.

Finally, she saw Niko. Running.

“Go!” they shouted.

She followed after them. “We need to find a working ship—”

“We don’t have time. Look.” Niko pointed behind them, up outside the Yard. Their face was plastered in holograph in the center of the city with the word Wanted above. “According to one of my people here, there’s a junker with a boatload of refugees leaving in three minutes in the east section of the Yard. We need to be on it. I told Simya’s sister. She’s on her way.”

Asala ran as fast as she could. The ship’s doors were already closing when they spotted it. “Go!” shouted Niko again.

“You got a ticket?” someone asked.

“We can pay,” said Asala.

The man took a look at her and decided she looked monied enough to believe it. “All right. Get on.”

He pushed the button to resume shutting the door. “Wait!” Asala grabbed his arm. “We’re waiting for one more person.”

Asala frantically scanned the anxious crowd, comparing their faces to the image capture of Simya’s sister she’d seen. “She’ll be here any minute.”

“No can do,” the man said, and he shoved her off. Over Asala’s shout and Niko’s outraged cry, he pressed the button to close the door.

And they were off and away, Simya’s sister left behind.

Episode 4

Camp Ghala

SL Huang

“Pull the manual seal!” someone had screamed, and then the ship wrenched around them, the sound vibrating through every atom of their bodies. Upward and downward canted as the artificial gravity went, and Asala twisted in the air, detritus and grasping human bodies and pieces of the fucking ship levitating around her in the darkness. Asala scrabbled for a bulkhead, but that wouldn’t help; this whole damn ship was about to go—if you could call it a ship, if you could call any of these scrap heaps “ships” that the refugees cobbled together and flung into space with a wish and a prayer—

She could have sworn she saw the far wall perforate in slow motion, the leaks starting that would suck everything out with them, Asala and Niko and their mission and the unlucky Hypatians they’d crammed themselves in with on this death trap to get off Hypatia, and all Asala could think of was Dayo’s face. Had she gone this way too? Watched death coming to suck her and everyone she was with into the cold nothing of space?

None of Asala’s training meant a damn here. No one could fight vacuum.

With a grind that jarred her teeth where she clung, the far wall bowed outward and then gave entirely. Screams turned to blood and dust as people pinwheeled past her, Hypatians she’d gotten to know by necessity during the crossing—Jagdish Drorit, with whom she’d crawled from bulkhead to bulkhead caulking weaknesses and stress points before they turned to leaks, seam after seam until the caulk ran out; Gulnaz Nevenka, who’d been the closest thing the ship had to a navigator and who’d sworn she’d pointed them right at Gan-De and told everyone firmly every day that they’d make it; little Eirene, who’d had her tenth name day right after they broke atmo—

The girl’s ragdoll body being sucked out into vacuum was going to be the last thing Asala saw, because that’s when her own grip tore free and she lost any semblance of control.

• • •

“Breathe.” The scraggly aid worker crouching next to Asala looked too young to be away from her parents, let alone working an underfunded charity vessel sent to pull dying refugees out of the black. The girl took Asala’s pulse and blood pressure with a ribbon and her fingers, as if they were in the damn Sand Ages, and Asala did as she was told, just as she had when she’d first been brought aboard and come to herself with an oxygen plate clamped over her nose and mouth.

She wasn’t sure if she remembered crashing bodily into the emergency force field, or if she’d lost consciousness and reconstructed the memory later. Every part of her was bruised—her ribs, her skull, every fucking joint. It felt like the insides of her flesh had been mashed up and squeezed back in.

These sorts of rescue ships could barely save the number of lives they did—there was no med tech to spare for treating mere bruises.

The aid worker at Asala’s side finished her check and moved on to Niko beside her.

Asala had been dully surprised by the spike of emotion when she’d found Niko among those who’d been pulled out of the collapsing scrap ship. That didn’t mean she had any capacity for taking on their shell-shocked glassiness as her own problem. She had enough of her own shit to deal with—the face of Simya’s sister twined guiltily with memories of Dayo, now staring with the eyes of too many unremitting dead.

You’ve seen people die a thousand times before, in much more gruesome ways. And you’re going to let this get to you? Buck up, Asala Sikou.

“How many?” Niko whispered.

“What?” The aid worker readjusted her fingers on their wrist with a frown. The interruption had probably made her lose count.

“How many of us did you manage to pull out?” Niko said. Their voice was hoarse, as if they’d been screaming for the entire seventy hours since the two of them had been brought aboard. “How many of the refugees died?”

The girl’s face folded in. “Your ship, we got seventy-three of you. Six more died after, so that’s sixty-seven.”

Niko’s head fell back against the bulkhead the two of them sat propped against. “Over three hundred. That ship had over three hundred people . . .”

Asala tried to tell her gnawing guilt that they’d done Simya a favor by forsaking her. Abandoning her sister, going back on their promise—ironically, it might have saved the woman’s life.

Asala knew that didn’t absolve them.

“We’ll reach Camp Ghala in two hours,” the aid worker said, as if she hadn’t heard Niko. She clicked something on her handheld and then moved on to the next huddle of survivors. Asala wondered just how much death she’d seen.

“I used to dream . . .” Niko had started shivering. “I had this stupid dream, I thought maybe after my apprenticeship I might get Father’s approval to come out here and do something like this. Really help people, you know? I thought it’d be . . . I don’t know . . . romantic somehow . . .”

The words twisted themselves over in Niko’s mouth, bitter and self-hating.

Well, Asala couldn’t help thinking. Now you know.

She managed not to say it out loud. They had to get back to the mission. The terrorists—led by would-be scientist Uzochi Ryouta, of all people—what the hell were they planning?

“We have to make a plan for when we hit Camp Ghala.” Asala forced her voice firm. “I think we’re clear to use our real identities. Hypatian authorities won’t have jurisdiction or personnel to pursue us, even if they got a clean ID, and cross-planetary cooperation is even more junked out here than in the Inner Ring. We might also want to think about pulling out your connection to your father. He’ll still have plausible deniability.” A possible terror threat escalated everything. “What do you know about the refugee camp?”

“Other than that it’s an overcrowded death trap of failing life support because Gan-De won’t allow the presence of refugees to sully their pristine Gandesian soil? Gods, Asala, the ship we were on didn’t even make it across. If that kind of scrap metal is what Camp Ghala is using to cobble together orbital living quarters when the planet right below them is ninety percent uninhabited—”

“Yes, other than that,” Asala said sharply. “The terrorists’ end goal couldn’t have been just taking the Vela, not the least because they kept it so quiet. That sabotage was a means to something bigger. I promise you, migration politics will be the last of anyone’s worries if war breaks out again on Gan-De.”

Niko snorted in a way that didn’t sound like agreement.

Asala chose to ignore it. “Tell me what connections you have in the camp who could help us.”

“Soraya’s our best bet. She’s not one of the official administrators, but most of them are useless anyway, or are working for the Gandesian government, or both. If the Vela came through Camp Ghala, Soraya would know about it, or she’d know who would.” Niko imparted the information almost mechanically, as if the Vela didn’t even matter anymore.

“Good. You can contact her?”

Niko dug in a pocket and held up their handheld. Its screen was black. “I’ve been out of power since before we lost the ship. I asked the rescue workers and they said there’s nothing to spare. I could jack in somewhere, but . . .”

Asala swallowed. The only thing this ship had above the one they’d been pulled off of was its spaceworthiness. It wouldn’t take much to recharge a handheld, but . . .

Since coming on board, she’d already seen the aid workers forced to scrub a rescue because all their EV suits’ power packs had run down. The urgency of pending terrorist attack tried to press at her, but with their arrival at Camp Ghala only two hours away . . .

“We can track down Soraya once we get to the camp,” Asala decided.

She tried not to think about her own handheld. She’d lost it along with her sidearm when the ship imploded. Spinning in the void of space somewhere, no doubt, cold and cracked. Like she should be.

Asala had her knees pulled up in front of her; she dropped her head to lean against them and closed her eyes. The dying Hypatians flashed in front of her again. This time they all had Dayo’s face.

• • •

Niko felt like they were being smothered.

Humanity pressed in from all sides, hot and overripe and unwell. Niko and Asala shuffled off the rescue ship amid a moving mass of people so densely packed Niko couldn’t have stopped moving if they’d wanted to.

They tasted bile again and were suddenly back on the scrap ship, the g-changes flinging them into free fall in complete darkness, screaming and screaming and then vomiting and then black. Even that hadn’t compared to the feeling afterward, though, there on the rescue ship, huddled under a med blanket, eyes flicking through the others, searching for missing faces—all those people Niko had met and talked to and started to become friends with on the long weeks over, even after they and Asala had executed such a selfishly hollow escape from Hypatia. Amarante and Jagdish and Hamish . . . Eirene, and her parents, and her seven clan mothers and two clan fathers . . .

And now they were gone. Niko didn’t even know how. They’d died when the ship came apart, probably alone and panicked and knowing it was the end. All any of them had wanted was a tiny corner of the universe where they could live their lives.

The universe had decided that was too much to ask.

Yet Niko had survived. Niko, the privileged child of a living planet, who could turn around after this and go back to that planet and have not just a corner of it but as much of it as they wanted. Niko, who’d already taken more in life than any of these people had ever asked for. Niko, who’d only been on that ship in the first place because they’d left behind the one person on Hypatia they’d promised to save.

Niko’s father’s voice echoed in their head, Ekrem clapping a solid hand on Niko’s shoulder when he granted them the commission—“You’ll find the Vela, kiddo; I know I can count on you”—and the surge of unwanted emotion that brought, that Niko would live up to those words or die trying even though what their dad thought of them was less important than literally everything else going on in the universe right now. And when Niko had tried to assure Father that, yes, they would find the passengers of the Vela and bring them back safe, Father had laughed his charming laugh and said, “Not just the people, remember, we need the ship safe and shiny too!” like it was a joke but not a joke.

The disgust Niko had felt in that moment rippled forward to now, the starkest of contrasts. Father only wanted his vid bites and image captures for the news, the gleaming spectacle of the Vela bright and whole. That the ship could be what mattered to him, the gods-damned ship, when out here people were dying every second like their lives were nothing—Niko’s brain was breaking over it like it represented every gods-damned thing out here no one from Khayyam understood.

Everything Niko had never understood before either.

They kept shuffling along with the crowd, trying to stay close to Asala. She doesn’t have to feel guilty, Niko thought wretchedly. She clawed her way through this whole fucked-up journey already. I’m the one who doesn’t deserve to be alive.

Niko couldn’t have said when they stepped from the ship to the space bridge or from the bridge into Camp Ghala; it was all a blur of wan lighting and dingy metal. What really counted as part of the camp anyway? The new scrap ships just kept getting welded on in an increasingly unstable pile of space junk. An unstable pile that more and more people kept cramming into, heaping against every resource, oxygen and food and medicine and water, unsustainable and endless.

Gan-De and General Cynwrig probably hoped the camp would eventually break apart in their sky. That would conveniently solve their refugee problem. Meanwhile, they kept their orbital defenses bristling with AI missiles, just in case some refugee dared to try for a life beyond digging their fingernails into the edges of a scrap heap.

The clump of humans pressing around Niko and Asala unfolded into a wide bay. It had probably been for cargo initially, or maybe shuttles, on whatever unlucky ship it had originated from. Now it was an unwelcoming atrium, refugees slumped in clumps together across the whole expanse of the wide floor, their possessions gathered around them.

The thin drone of an automated voice echoed above the bay.

“Please visit a kiosk to receive a number. Entrants will be processed in the order they arrive. The current wait time is five hundred and sixty-seven hours. If you lose your temporary ration card . . .”

“We need to find someone to talk to,” Asala said, craning her neck. The other people from their ship were dispersing, filtering to the screens lining the walls.

“Excuse me, kima,” Asala said to one of the groups sitting on the floor. An old woman looked up, one of her eyes filmed over with white. She squinted the other up at Asala.

“Yes?”

Asala switched to speaking Upper Crescent. “We need to speak to someone in charge. Where can we do that?”

The woman chuckled softly.

“Kima? Where can I talk to someone?”

“You gotta take a number,” the person next to the woman called over. “They don’t talk to you until you take a number.”

“. . . in the order they arrive. The current wait time is five hundred and sixty-eight hours. If . . .”

“I need to see someone in authority,” Asala tried to insist. “There has to be someone . . .” She gazed around the bay and its sea of hunched bodies.

Almost six hundred hours. The number started to sink in. Niko multiplied—that was over three Khayyami weeks.

Niko crouched down next to the woman and her partner. “Are you telling me you have to wait almost six hundred hours just to enter the camp? Just to get in?”

The woman’s partner peeled open an emergency nutrient pack and licked the lid. “You mean we hafta wait almost six hundred hours, my friend. You’re one of us. Come now, pull up a bit of floor.” They rolled their hand in a welcoming gesture.

Niko didn’t answer, instead straightening back up next to Asala. The number of people here . . . people curled on the floor sleeping, playing simple games, rocking children, and just waiting, waiting, for three weeks . . . And they weren’t even inside yet.

After clawing their way across an abyss that tried to kill them in ships that were literally falling apart, these people reached their destination and were told to wait. To get into a refugee camp where they would also wait. And wait. For years. Maybe forever.

The utter hopelessness of it sandbagged into Niko in a way it never had before. They wanted to scream at everyone here, how, how can you do it, how can you keep going when there’s no end, when you’re just being told over and over to take a number, wait, another week, another year, another seventeen years—

“The aid workers might know,” Asala said, turning back. “The whole system can’t be automated. There has to be someone we can—”

Niko followed her gaze. The bulkhead doors had closed behind them.

“The current wait time is five hundred and seventy hours . . .”

“New plan,” Asala declared. “We’ve got to get you some power so you can reach your contact. What do you need in order to jack in somewhere here?”

“. . . wait time is five hundred and seventy-three hours . . .”

“Niko.”

“Power. Right. Uh, let’s go over and see.”

People from their own rescue ship still queued at every kiosk. Niko and Asala filed in behind one of the lines. Asala kept shifting from foot to foot, her eyes darting around, the picture of impatience.

“The current wait time is five hundred and seventy-seven hours.”

“It doesn’t feel right, us trying to jump the line,” Niko said.

Asala gave them the look they had hoped they’d earned their way out of somewhere between dragging her limp body from the hydrogen-processing plant and breaking into a prison in the frigid cold of Hypatia. Why did they always feel they couldn’t gain an ounce of respect with her before it all dripped away?

“Do I have to remind you why we’re here?” she hissed.

Right. They were on a mission. Niko’s feelings were a selfish luxury.

“We’re here to help some refugees,” Niko growled. They weren’t sure whether they said it to Asala or to remind themselves. They still weren’t sure how much they believed the sabotage story, but the people from the Vela had been fleeing Eratos, all those people from the videos—they all deserved to make it back to the Inner Ring and live. No matter what.

But so did these people.

Niko was starting to feel like their mission didn’t mean shit.

“The current wait time is five hundred and ninety-nine hours. If you lose your temporary ration card . . .”

• • •

Soraya added up the columns one more time.

Fuck.

They weren’t going to have enough oxygen.

Food could be stretched—they could cut down people’s rations yet again, trimming back and turning away parents whose children were already malnourished. Vaccines they could skip and then close their eyes and hope. But oxygen they had no way around. They’d already thinned the air as much as they dared.

Everyone at Camp Ghala had known they’d have to prepare for the orbital window opening from Hypatia, the alignment that meant even underpowered scrap heaps could make the hop. Over this month, more and more and more ships would be swarming to their already over-strapped walls, more and more desperate people, people who needed food and water and fucking oxygen. Everyone here had known the ships would start coming and keep coming; they’d known years in advance and yet here they were just meeting the edge of the first wave and already breaking. Soraya had begged and bartered and bargained with everyone she could to try to prevent this—every charity organization, no matter how much money it was pocketing on the side; every connection she had in the Gandesian government; every contact she had on Khayyam or Khwarizmi or between worlds. Even fucking Hafiz, and bargaining with someone like them was like juggling knives, for all they supposedly shared Soraya’s same goals. Self-styled leader of the so-called Order of Boreas, touting themself as the true voice of the refugees, when all they did was make Soraya’s job three thousand times harder every day . . .

Still, thinking of Hafiz and the Order made a sharp blade of impossible hope slice through Soraya’s chest—along with a fury that nearly suctioned it away. No. Don’t think about Hafiz and what they claim is possible. It’s not going to solve what’s in front of you, and they’re blocking you every step of the way right now, just as they always have.

Besides, it was partially thanks to Hafiz that Ghala was toppling off the point of no return—Hafiz’s grand schemes while they dealt shady deals behind Soraya’s back, Hafiz stealing from them all while claiming to be the would-be savior of everybody, Hafiz clamoring after delusional fantasies while shoveling the problem of keeping actual people alive off on Soraya, expecting her to overextend the camp again and again forever as long as Hafiz and the Order could strip out power for themselves.

Nobody wanted the practical reality of the camp to be their problem. And nobody else was going to take the blame when Soraya had to start turning away shiploads of human beings. Parents and children and infants who’d already almost died every day just to get here, and now Soraya was going to let them die waiting in space because she didn’t have enough oxygen for them. Everyone who’d turned her down, Hafiz included—none of them would have to be the people saying, No, you can’t dock, I know you’re dying a slow death over there but if you dock we’ll all die too, sorry bye. Though knowing Hafiz, they’d probably be willing to say it just like that.

Great Mother, all Soraya wanted to do was put on a vid, turn off her brain, and sleep for a week. She rubbed her eyes, and her gaze caught on the bright finger paintings and wax drawings she’d pasted in careful rows above her interface desk. She’d kept every gift she’d ever been given—the more jerry-built or homemade, the more it meant. But the children’s drawings she’d all placed here, because she needed to see them every day as much as those young migrants had needed her.

Soraya leaned her forehead against the heels of her hands. Think. Squeeze blood from this stone. She’d done it before.

She could only think of two choices, one impossible and one more impossible. She could get the new barracks block up and running by luck and sheer force of will, or convince Gan-De to finally permit expanding the camp to the surface. The second one was a nonstarter. But the barracks block—it was there, they’d built the space, maybe not enough, but it would cover the next few weeks of refugees at least . . .

“Soraya?” Mangatjay pulled back the plast curtain over her work alcove. “Block J is saying they have fungus mites in the lichen protein. They’re wondering if they should give it out anyway.”

Shit.

“And Siriporn just issued a report she had to seal off Zeta Section in Block K again. They were getting stress leak warnings. But she wanted to remind you that the stress meters are broken in sections Eta and up, so she’s wondering if she should seal them off too, preemptively.”

Soraya pressed a thumb against the bridge of her nose. “How many people do we have living there?”

“Um, I don’t know. I’ll get you that number.”

“Hey, Soraya,” called the voice of her fourteen-year-old assistant, Ifa, from behind Mangatjay. “You’ve got an incoming from the fleece. You want it?”

“In here,” Soraya called back. Dammit. What did they want? The Gandesian troop detachment stationed here was supposed to be Camp Ghala’s official law enforcement, but in practice, Soraya’s people played an exhausting game trying to protect the residents from them. The ones who gave her the least trouble were the lazy ones.

But she also couldn’t refuse a call from them.

She waved Mangatjay away for the moment and took a deep breath of precious fucking oxygen, trying to forget for a moment the overwhelming crush of work that wasn’t even her job, work that wasn’t going to get done if she didn’t do it. Then she tapped the blinking hold cursor on her screen.

“Hey, Soraya.” The Gandesian guard leaned in close to the camera. “You’re looking well.”

“Get to it, Enlil. What do you want?”

“We caught a couple of clannies trying to jack into the power grid out front. We were gonna deal with them ourselves, right, but one of ’em claims they know you.” He leered.

You mean one of them paid you off to make this call, Soraya thought. She sighed. “Put them on.”

Enlil moved out of the way to reveal two people behind him—a tall, dark woman with a hard face who in fact did have a Hypatian clan tattoo, and beside her . . .

Oh. Niko. The child of President bloody Ekrem of bloody Khayyam.

Soraya resisted the urge to turn away and laugh hysterically. Or start weeping. She knew exactly what Niko was here for, and she did not fucking have time for this today. But she also wasn’t in a position to turn away anyone connected to the Khayyami government, not when she had at least thirty petitions in to them for help.

“Let them in,” she said to Enlil. “I’ll send someone down to meet them.”

This was going to fuck her whole day.

• • •

“Hi! Hi. I’ll take them from here.” A Hypatian teenager pushed past the shifty Gandesian guard and grinned up at Asala and Niko with crooked teeth. Gangly arms poked out of clothes at least three sizes too big for him.

“And you are?” Asala said.

“I’m Ifa. I’m here to take you to Soraya. Yer—!”

The last word punctuated the arrival of a blur of little girl, who cannonballed past Ifa and threw her arms around Asala’s legs. “Hello,” Asala heard muffled against her knees. “I’m Yer. I’m your new friend!”

“Don’t mind her,” said Ifa, trying to pry the girl off Asala. “She’s my sister, sorry—I look after her, you know. Come on, Yer, let the nice lady go.”

Asala had to bite back an urge to snap at them. But after a moment of Ifa’s attempts to break his sister’s increasingly tight grasp, the alarming sorrow of the girl’s clinginess eclipsed any irritation. Yer was still too young to have the full clan tattoo, but the color and style of the ring around her eye matched Ifa’s more complicated markers, and Asala didn’t have to ask what had happened to their parents or other clan elders.

Ifa finally managed to peel Yer’s grip off Asala and transfer it to himself. She clutched at her big brother’s arm like she was glued to it. Ifa waved Asala and Niko after him with his other hand, and the two children led the way around a corner, out of the processing areas filled with the dead-eyed refugees who’d waited six hundred hours to be given a space here.

Asala glanced around her as they walked, cataloguing details as usual. What she saw made her more than a little nervous. They kept stepping up or down between defunct ships, their airlocks jammed open permanently, metal caulk shoved into welded seams and joints that looked rubbed to breaking. Asala had spent a lot of time on ships, and this place—

She flashed again to the wall of the refugee ship giving way, everything spiraling out into the black . . .

It was on her tongue to ask if there was any evacuation plan for this floating death trap of a city, but the question was too ridiculous to ask. These people simply lived their lives one bad leak away from oblivion.

They turned into a long hall that looked like it had once been part of a habitat ship, loud with the buzz of the crowds moving through it.

“This is the Thoroughfare,” Ifa said, trotting along with Yer in front of them as if he were a tour guide. “It’s not that busy today, but on market days you can find most anything here. Blocks A through J are that way. For Blocks K and up you have to go over one section and up a level to connect.”

Asala roused herself to look around with more than a tactician’s sense. The Thoroughfare was lined on both sides by countless people with clan tattoos, noisily chatting or bargaining with each other—Hypatians who’d set up booths trading clothes, household goods, electronics. Asala caught snatches of at least three different Hypatian dialects. More kids chased each other through the crowds, shrieking, and one group off to the side looked like a makeshift class, held between the home mothers’ and clan mothers’ work at their booths. Even in this far too crowded place of limbo, people laughed, hugged each other . . . she saw a thousand small kindnesses as these people sacrificed resources they didn’t have for their family and neighbors, and together were able to live another day.

The scent of jinma wafted across Asala’s senses, sharp and earthy.

“Spices! Spices from home. Even Ghala glop can be made palatable with this!” called the vendor.

Asala’s hand twitched. She wanted to reach up and turn off her hearing implants. She also wanted to go over and inhale the woman’s entire booth. Jinma—it was a mountain spice, heavy in the region of her clan, but never exported in the dishes the rest of the system saw as Hypatian cuisine. The aroma seemed to fill her whole throat, like she could feel the cloying, medicinal aftertaste that came if it was too concentrated, and it tasted of longing.

She hadn’t smelled jinma in over thirty years.

“Okay, just a bit longer, up here!” Ifa called back to them. “This way. Watch your step, it’s narrow.”

Asala shook herself and followed. They left the Thoroughfare behind and climbed a winding staircase that somehow seemed to be on the seams of three ships mashed together and stapled there as if it made sense. Stepping through the final bulkhead led into a space at the top that was small but surprisingly private given the camp’s space limitations.

Inside, a short brown-skinned woman with her hair bound back into a messy knot was speaking rapidly into a headset and pacing as much as the room allowed. The office surrounding her was as cramped as anywhere else in Camp Ghala, and though the woman was currently the only occupant, it had workstations for at least three other people plus a curtained-off work alcove in the back. Off to one side, a bunk covered in homemade quilts with another curtain half-closed across it made a sleeping area the size of a closet—these must be Soraya’s living quarters as well. Somehow the place was both ruthlessly organized and filled to the brim with the mementos of years.

“I know we’re receiving expired stock here, and we appreciate it,” Soraya was saying as they entered. “But we can’t feed people fungus mites . . . Well, we don’t want to feed people grain worms, either, but they’re harmless protein! Fungus mites will burrow into a person’s intestine and cause intense diarrhea unless the person is given dyphoxin . . . I hope you’re kidding. That’s not a solution, even if we did have enough dyphoxin for everyone.” She held up a finger to Asala and Niko. “I appreciate that you don’t feel like this is your problem, but we were counting on—no, stop. Edible food. Look, can I speak to your supervisor? . . . All right. Please inform her I’ll call her back then.”

She pushed a button on her headset and turned to face Asala and Niko.

“Thank you, Ifa—go ahead and take off for the day, okay? Niko, it’s wonderful to meet you in person.” She smiled in a way that didn’t quite make it up to her tired eyes.

“You too,” Niko said. “Did you get my message from a few weeks ago, that I’d be coming out this way?”

“I did.” Soraya folded her hands over each other and gave Niko the polite type of attention that screamed politics to Asala. “You probably didn’t see my reply; the networks can be so spotty out here. We truly appreciate all the contributions you’ve made on behalf of Camp Ghala and how you’ve advocated some of our most pressing issues straight to your father. I can’t tell you how much it means to have someone on our side with the ear of the president of Khayyam.”

“Not enough,” Niko said ruefully. “But, Soraya—that’s not why we’re here, unfortunately.”

“We think Camp Ghala may be under an immediate threat,” Asala said.

Soraya blinked up at her several times in rapid succession. “Oh, I thought—why?”

An alarm bell rang in the back of Asala’s head at her response. Something . . . she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She waited just long enough for the silence to become uncomfortable, then said, “I assume we have your complete discretion?”

“Soraya, this is Asala. She’s my partner on this,” Niko put in, over Soraya’s rapid nods. “We’re on a mission for my father . . .”

They glanced up at Asala before saying more, as if asking how much to reveal. Good.

“We’re looking for the Vela,” Asala said. She studied Soraya carefully, gauging her reaction. “I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The last survivors of Eratos. It was supposed to be headed for Khayyam, but we tracked it here instead.”

“Oh,” Soraya said.

“It was sabotaged,” Asala said flatly. “By terrorists. We think those same terrorists may mean harm here on Camp Ghala.”

Soraya’s eyes widened—just a touch too wide, just a hair too late. “Oh,” she said again. “I doubt that. People here are only trying to survive. Refugees aren’t violent people.”

“Some of them are,” Asala said.

Color rose in Soraya’s cheeks. “Look, every bin has got its bad buds, but it sounds to me like you’re jumping to conclusions. Everyone wants to think migrants are the problem. Well, you know what? They’re mostly just people. Nobody calls the Gandesian government ‘terrorists,’ and they kill more people by—”

“Hey, Soraya, hey, I’m with you,” Niko jumped in. “Asala’s a government agent; she’s trained to think that way. But all we want to do is find the Eratosi refugees and give them safe passage to Khayyam. I swear. Can you help us check if any ship matching the Vela’s description has docked at Camp Ghala?”

“No,” Soraya said. Too quickly—Asala was sure of it now. “I mean no, no ship out of Eratos has docked here. I can tell you that without even checking.” She paused for a beat. “Sorry for getting short there. It’s been a . . . a day. And I’m sorry not to be of more help.”

“Well then, can you tell us—” Niko started, but Soraya’s headset beeped, and she looked down at the readout with a frown.

“Excuse me, I have to take this. Do you mind stepping outside for just one minute? I’m so sorry.”

She ushered Asala and Niko out through the doorway, not impolitely, and pulled an accordion partition closed.

“She’s right, you know, about refugees,” Niko said. “How do we know it was terrorists? All we have is the word of one guy in prison who only gave his side of the story; we don’t know what really happened—”

“She’s lying,” Asala interrupted.

“She—what?”

“Soraya knows something about the Vela. She’s lying to us. We need to get into her records. Can you hack them?”

“Not without—yes, but it’s going to have to be less ‘hack’ and more ‘get access.’ But that seems—why don’t we just ask her? Soraya’s one of the good guys; without her this place would break apart in space—”

That thought wasn’t discomfiting at all. “And how desperate for resources is she? What kinds of trades does she have to make, Niko? What kind of sacrifices? Think about it.”

Niko hesitated. “But Soraya would want to save the people on the Vela, same as us. She wouldn’t be working with terrorists.”

“Maybe not side by side, but maybe she bargained with them by agreeing to look the other way on something. If a few people get hurt or killed, but if it’s what she needs to keep this place from ‘breaking apart into space,’ as you so eloquently put it—what then? Who knows what factions are in play here? Maybe someone’s willing to kill off Eratosi refugees in favor of Hypatian ones.”

Niko pressed their lips together.

Asala knew she’d almost made her point, but suddenly she was too tired and achy to press it. Did no one else feel the danger of an impending terrorist attack? Was Asala on some fucking opposite world where that didn’t rate as a significant threat? “Fine. You don’t want to complete our mission? The one you begged me to take because it was so damn important? Forget it. I’ll break back in on my own later.”

“No. No. You’re right. I’ll—I just—” Niko’s face wrenched. “Everyone here, and Soraya, and—they’re not our enemies. Or they shouldn’t be . . .”

The accordion panel slid back again. “Sorry about that,” said Soraya. “Now, is there anything else I can help you with? If you’re still looking for the Vela, I can get one of my assistants to hook you up with temporary ID chips and then transport off Camp Ghala—you need strict documentation to do anything official here. But if you let me know where you want to head off to, I can make sure you get on your way.”

Not so fast, Asala thought, but before she could say anything, Niko swooped in.

“There is one thing. Um, it’s personal, but . . . we think Asala’s sister came through here. She might have arrived during the last window seventeen years ago.”

What? Asala opened her mouth to stop them and then realized what Niko was doing and shut it so hard her teeth clacked in her ears. But how dare they use that to get access—how dare—

Niko prattled on, asking Soraya’s permission to dock their handheld at her charging station. They brought up a picture of Dayo. Asala’s hands curled, and she tried to keep her rage from burning off the skin of her face.

“I’ve tried helping Asala track her down, but working remotely I could only find traces. Is there any way you could look through the camp’s resident records for us? Or give us a chance to look; I know how busy you must be. We’re just trying to figure out where she went next.”

Soraya stared down at the picture for a moment as if not truly seeing it. “Asala. Niko said you’re a—government agent of some kind?”

Ah. Here came the quid pro quo. Soraya’s loyalties might be one big question mark, but even if she wasn’t on the saboteurs’ side herself, Asala had been dead-on about how she operated.

Soraya squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “I have a situation here. Thousands of people are going to die if I don’t get the new barracks section up and running. The part that’s really screwed up is, we managed to get it built—we had to shove it through and make a damn hell of a lot of compromises, but we got enough space for at least the first wave of migrants who are docking now.”

Asala heard what she wasn’t saying—probably bribes, greased permitting, favors for every minor government official. See, Niko? This is the way the galaxy works.

Soraya gusted out a frustrated sigh. “But Gan-De . . . The politics here are a sinkhole. Gan-De has once again refused to permit expansion to the surface, and they also technically have jurisdiction over the camp. They very reluctantly permitted the barracks expansion, but long story short, politics ground to a halt, and meanwhile, the life support kitting got stuck in a warehouse section, and while I was trying to beat the local bureaucrats around the head, all the kitting got stolen right out from under us. Oxygen conversion racks, CO_2 scrubbers, everything.”

“And you want us to track it down for you?” Niko said.

“Oh. No.” Soraya gave a hollow laugh. “I know who took it all. I suspected, and I just got it confirmed. But I’ve got—the Gandesian troops here are, let’s say, not people I can ask for help getting it back, especially as Gan-De is now officially blocking expansion into the barracks we’ve already built. But if I only have the supplies, I can smash through that needle. Er. Easier to ask forgiveness than get a politician to say yes, right? If they shut down barracks that already have people living in them, it’ll be a bloody PR disaster—much messier than telling those same people they can’t come in and killing them that way. If I can get the supplies back, I will make the rest work.”

She’d finished the speech talking through clenched teeth, her hands in fists at her sides, and despite herself, for a brief moment Asala felt a kinship with this woman. As much as she was sure Soraya was doing her damnedest to cover up clues to a terrorist plot.

“Who stole it all from you?” Niko asked.

“Smugglers,” Soraya said, without missing a beat. “CO_2 scrubbers will fetch a pretty price on the black market. Look, you’re my only possible shot here. My people don’t have the skills for this. But I’ll tell you where all the supplies are, and if you can get them back for me, I’ll give you access to those records for as long as you want.” Her eyes softened. “I hope you find your sister, Agent Asala.”

• • •

Ifa sat on a cargo crate, swinging his feet so his new boots thumped gently against it. Soraya had gotten them for him. He liked the way they bumped around on his feet, tough-looking and powerful.

“Kid, what the f—what are you doing here?”

It was the tall woman—Asala, with her partner Niko. Ifa had already decided he liked Niko better.

He hopped off the cargo crate. “Finally. Soraya said you’d need a transport crew once you get us our supplies back. I’m your lee-ay-zon. We’ll be waiting to scramble as soon as you give me the word.” He picked up a headset and waggled it at them. “We’ll be ready to run in and rack everything up to take it to the new barracks. Soraya’s swinging in contractors on the sly so we’ll have this done before boo.”

“Are they all twelve years old too?” Asala was checking all the settings on a rifle that she definitely hadn’t come onto the station with earlier.

“I’m fourteen,” Ifa said, affronted. “And that’s in our years.” He glanced at Niko. “Which means I’m even older on your planet. And Soraya knows she can trust all of us.”

“At least tell me you didn’t bring the baby sister,” Asala said.

Ifa’s fingernails dug into his palms, and his toes curled in his new boots.

“I can get Yer some medicine,” the man had whispered, so soft and wonderful. “We’ll get her well, how about that?”

Ifa’s eyes had blurred—here was someone, someone kind, someone who would help them when everything else was wrong and no one else gave a damn. He’d get Yer better and her skin would stop burning Ifa in the night and her face would stop swelling up until he didn’t know her anymore and until the tears leaked out and she begged her big brother to make it all stop.

The last thing his last auntie had said to him before she was gone was to take care of his little sister. He hadn’t needed to hear it. They were children of Ghala, and children of Ghala protected their families.

“You’re a good boy,” the man said, soothingly. “A good brother.” His hand slipped down and settled on Ifa’s thigh.

Ifa froze.

Afterward, the only coherent thought he would remember having was that he couldn’t make any noise, because he’d wake Yer up.

“No,” he said to Asala. “I didn’t bring my sister. She’s at home. Safe.”

Asala’s eyes flicked up and down, and her hands paused on the rifle. “Okay,” she said, but the scorn had slipped away. “How many people do you have?”

And that was how Ifa ended up crouched in the dark, heart racing, knowing he shouldn’t try to watch but peering around the corner anyway. He’d never seen anyone like Asala. The only people with weapons in his reality were the Gandesian guards with their guns and their shifting eyes, or the rioters when they grasped for chains or knives or lengths of rusted pipe. Soraya had warned him about Hafiz, too, Hafiz and their scary, shadowy Order of Boreas, but Ifa had never met any of them. Soraya had warned him anyway—“Don’t believe anyone who promises you something too good to be true.”

Like he needed to be told that. Sometimes he thought Soraya was telling it to herself as much as him.

But Asala—she moved like—like one of those heroes they got on the story captures, when they were able to download any to the camp. Ifa loved hero stories, but he’d never thought they could happen in real life. Until he watched, mesmerized, as Asala flowed through the shadows with her borrowed rifle (and since when did Soraya have rifles, Ifa thought to wonder), flashes lighting up the dark, silhouettes shouting and falling and running at Asala and always missing her. Niko was a less-graceful shape popping up and down at her heels, but together they rented through the human guards like the troops were rotted metal.

In the abrupt stillness, a white rectangle of a handheld screen lit up the dark.

Ifa knew he wasn’t supposed to come up to them yet, not until they signaled, but he couldn’t help it. He crept closer, fascinated.

“How long?” Asala was saying.

“One minute. Maybe two,” came Niko’s voice. “The lock isn’t that sophisticated.”

“Any chance one of them contacted someone before we got through?”

“No, it looks like the jamming field held, and Soraya’s codes worked to knock out the surveillance. But she was right; there wasn’t much surveillance on this area to begin with.”

“I wondered,” Asala said shortly.

“What do you mean?” asked Niko.

“These weren’t smugglers.”

“They weren’t—wait, what? But Soraya said—”

“Yes,” Asala answered. “She did.”

Ifa tried to puzzle through that, but before he could, Asala started talking again.

“I think we’ve found out who our terrorists are trying to hook up with here. Something’s about to blow, on either Camp Ghala or Gan-De.” She paused for a beat. “We’re going to stop this, whatever it is. Don’t trust Soraya.”

Don’t trust Soraya . . . ? Ifa felt a sudden flush of anger.

The bright handheld beeped.

“Got it,” Niko said, and they sounded relieved. “We’re in.”

Ifa slunk back into the shadows. Thirty seconds later, the all clear came, and Ifa didn’t have time to think, as he and everyone else furiously ratcheted the machinery that would be saving their lives onto magnetic pallets and then hauled them away into the night.

But the words kept echoing in Ifa’s head. Don’t trust Soraya.

Ifa had known Soraya for a lot longer than he’d known either Asala or Niko, and Soraya took care of her people. Took care of the camp. And didn’t take anything in return.

If Asala and Niko were working against Soraya, he had to warn her.

• • •

“Hurry up,” hissed Asala, peeking out past the curtain. They were crammed into Soraya’s work alcove with their promised computer access. Ifa and the rest of Soraya’s people had immediately taken over the vital supplies for installation, leaving Asala and Niko to find their way back. Soraya herself paced in the outer room, on her headset again.

“I’m hurrying,” Niko whispered in reply. “Just so you know, I don’t see anything on your sister just doing a standard search—”

Asala glared daggers at them.

“All right! All right. It was quick to check, is all. We only have access to the resident records; it’ll take me a minute to get into anything else from here.”

“But you can, right?”

“Yeah.” Niko talked as they worked, half on their now-recharged handheld and half on the interface screen. “Soraya’s access codes get us past the primary lockout, so now all I need to do is backtrack logins until I find someone who’s used the same passcode for both sections.”

“People are that careless?”

“You’d be surprised. Okay, I’m into the docking records. Looking for anything that’s a match for the Vela.”

Asala’s hands twitched. Soraya had taken back the weapons she had loaned them, politely but very firmly turning down Asala’s request to keep them, and Asala hadn’t felt able to press. Not when they were about to hack into Soraya’s records while she paced only a few meters away . . .

“Nothing,” Niko whispered.

“Are you sure—”

“I’m sure. Maybe she wasn’t lying.”

Asala rolled her lips between her teeth. Something else . . . there had to be something. She thought back to the specs on the Vela Ekrem had given her. The ship had struck her as odd, the shell of an old freighter with pieces tacked on to it in a way Asala had never seen before. She hadn’t been able to guess at the function of them. But if someone stripped them . . . and made it look just like a generic old freighter . . . the saboteurs or—

Wait.

“The people,” she said. People were unique, and from what they’d seen, Camp Ghala was an absolute morass of bureaucracy. “Search for the people instead. You have the Vela manifest, right?”

“Sure, I have it—oh. Oh.” Niko’s voice sounded funny. “Oh dear.”

“What?”

“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 quite 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 stretch 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.

Soraya reached for one. The coordinator’s hand stopped her. “No. She’s had her water ration already.”

The woman’s face began to tremble. “Please. My niece cut herself and I had to wash it . . . my children haven’t had water in two days now. Please, I have another ration due in twelve hours—”

“You get only what’s on the ration card,” the coordinator said. She didn’t even sound sorry about it.

But she must have seen Soraya’s face, because as the woman shuffled off crying, she added, “You’ll learn. Everyone will ask. If you give out more, we run out. That’s the cold facts.”

The cold facts. Soraya lived with them every day now. The cold facts, and the cold choices, here with the cold of space pressing in on every side to devour them all.

Episode 5

The Heart of the Web

Yoon Ha Lee

Asala, like most people who had served in the military, had a simple philosophy about complications. They sucked. Complications never worked in your favor. And the cube that they had just discovered on the Vela was exactly that: a complication, one that she suspected was liable to get them killed.

The immense, nearly empty containment chamber of the Vela had, with this one discovery, become a trap. Asala was mortally certain that President Ekrem, who had sent her and Niko all this way to find the ship in the first place, had hidden information from her. She couldn’t imagine that it was a coincidence that what was supposed to be a refugee ship contained a mysterious prototype.

The question was, how much had Ekrem told Niko, and was Niko hiding anything from her?

Asala had no intention of dying over a piece of tech, no matter how mysterious. Her eyes were drawn once again to the shining crystalline cube with its uncanny contents, the way the light-sucking black material within kept seething and writhing as if with a mind of its own. What was so important about the cube that he had felt the need to lie to her about the Vela, after all the missions she’d carried out for him? Need-to-know or not, it rankled.

Asala forced herself to breathe calmly, despite the stink of her own nervous sweat. The Ghalan suit filters weren’t very good. But they were better than nothing, and she was suddenly glad for even this pittance of protection.

Niko was experimentally waving a hand in front of the cube, and the substance within kept moving in a way that turned Asala’s stomach for reasons she couldn’t articulate.

“Niko,” she said in a sharp undertone. “Niko!”

Niko turned to her. Even through the helmet their face looked strained. “I’ve never seen an artificial gravity component that looks like that. Asala, we’ve got to find out what this is and what it does. It makes no sense that a refugee ship is hiding some weird prototype.”

If Niko knew more about the cube, they were doing a good job hiding it. And there would be ample time to question them about it after they hightailed it out of here. Asala nodded, in agreement with them for once.

“Help me extract it,” Asala said. The two of them were lucky that the cube was so small, no larger than a handspan in all dimensions. Still, she didn’t want the ship to implode around them if they tampered with the wrong piece of engineering.

In tense silence, while the black material continued its spooky dance, Asala and Niko studied the hardware. Despite her best efforts, Asala found that the substance kept snagging her attention, and she cursed herself for not focusing on the task at hand. Too bad she couldn’t selectively edit her vision the way she could turn off her hearing.

“Someone designed this specifically to plug into and supplement the standard artificial grav,” Niko said, pointing to the connectors that held the cube in place. “But if the Vela already has regular artigrav, why does it need an additional . . . thing? Whatever it is?”

“Unplug it first, figure it out later,” Asala said. She hated feeling out of her depth. Sure, when it came to artigrav, she could handle the basic maintenance tasks that anyone with starship piloting credentials needed to know. That didn’t mean she had the expertise to decipher experimental physics shit.

“Here goes nothing,” Niko said, and uncoupled the first of the shining metal connectors, more pristine than anything else on the entire ship, before Asala could warn them to be careful.

The black substance squirmed toward Niko’s grasp, not away, as they jostled the cube. Memory pricked at Asala as she helped with the next connector. Where had she seen that counterintuitive behavior before? As she racked her brain, she began working on another connector, careful not to damage the delicate wiring.

The two of them had gotten through half the connectors when the alarm went off. It screeched in long blasts, echoing through the passageways of the Vela. Asala had no doubt that it could be heard loud and clear the next ship over as well.

“Shit!” Niko said under their breath. “I could have sworn I—”

“Save it,” Asala snapped. The fact that Niko had managed to fool the security system this long was a small miracle. In retrospect, considering the cube’s presence, she was a little surprised that the place wasn’t crawling with guards. But only a little. After all, extraordinary precautions would have alerted Camp Ghala’s populace that a likewise extraordinary secret was being guarded here. And given the desperation of many refugees, she would have expected thieves and scavengers to follow; all the Sorayas in the world couldn’t keep petty crime in check.

No more time for delicacy. They had to leave. Asala grabbed the cube with both hands and yanked it free over Niko’s stifled yelp of protest. A good thing for them that the Vela’s regular artificial gravity seemed unaffected. Asala had plenty of experience navigating zero-grav maneuvers, but Niko didn’t have that kind of background.

Asala stuffed the cube into a pouch in her utility belt, then flicked off her suit’s headlamp. Niko did the same without being told. Now that Asala had an idea of the ship’s layout, there was no sense in guiding adversaries to them by leaving the lamps on. They weren’t completely devoid of illumination; the suits had much dimmer light-strips in clan patterns, both for safety and ornamentation, which would keep her and Niko from banging into bulkheads.

The Vela’s deck vibrated. Voices filtered to them through the passageways, distorted by echoes. The alarm continued to shrill. Security was coming for them.

Asala led the way. Fortunately, the Vela had a straightforward layout, and its passageways were not blocked by detritus, shops, or huddled sleepers like the rest of Camp Ghala. She breathed slow and deep again, working to keep her heart rate from hammering up. A glance back at Niko revealed that their hands were shaking, but they weren’t slowing her down, either. Good.

She heard footsteps, stopped. More footsteps. She and Niko squeezed into a side passageway at security’s approach and flattened themselves against the bulkheads. Unfortunately, the ship’s emptiness worked against them. A flashlight glared into her eyes. She knew better than to curse, but it was too late anyway. They’d been spotted.

“Halt right there!” a sharp soprano called.

A quick glimpse told her that there were at least four people in this particular squad, and that they wore flimsier skintight EV suits, not combat armorsuits; she hadn’t seen any of the latter in Camp Ghala. Two against four—not insurmountable odds, except she still didn’t trust Niko to be of use in a fistfight. To her relief, no one in the squad had firearms or laser rifles; they were rare in the camp, but she hadn’t known if Soraya would have equipped them with weapons, or if someone else had a cache of arms elsewhere.

Asala shoved Niko ahead of her. The two of them sprinted back into the depths of the Vela. The clanging of their boots made her wince, but she left her hearing on. In this situation, the extra information would help her. A temporary setback, because sooner or later they needed to get off the Vela. But getting killed would be a permanent setback.

Where are we? Niko mouthed at her, which she ignored. Niko might have lost track of where they were in the Vela’s depths, but Asala hadn’t.

She gestured for Niko to hide themself in the lee of a crate, which they did after a scowl in her direction. Then she climbed a ladder halfway and swung herself up to the hand- and footholds on what was, under artificial gravity, the ceiling. But as with any decent starship, the Vela’s designers had also made provisions for any sudden loss of gravity. Any surface might be up—or down.

Asala was counting on their pursuers, who lived in permanent gravity here on Camp Ghala, to have forgotten about this feature, to have a fixed sense of up and down.

A squad of four guards slunk down the passageway, assiduously checking their port and starboard.

Asala had been right. They weren’t looking up. Silently, she drew out her utility knife.

One of the guards was lagging behind the others. Asala dropped and drove her knife in past the clinging skin of the suit, severing the spine at the base of the skull. They never saw her coming, collapsed with a thud.

She had already swung down and onto the next. They struggled, but she had them between herself and their comrades, which bought her the necessary several seconds it took for her to dispatch the second victim. She lost no time thrusting them forward to impede the remaining two guards and making a break for it. After a panicked second’s pause, Niko pelted after her.

Retreating to set up more ambushes for their pursuers might have worked except Niko tripped over a warped deck plate. By instinct, Asala flung herself down to cover them, cursing her lack of sniper rifle, though of course bullets and starships didn’t mix.

Footsteps approached from the other direction. Asala eased up on Niko in case both of them needed maneuverability, fast. Niko mouthed to her, We’re pinned, as if she didn’t know.

The same soprano voice, presumably belonging to their leader, rang out. “We’ve been instructed to bring you in alive, but there are limits to my patience.”

The question was, who did these people answer to? Was it Soraya? Asala wasn’t under any illusions that Soraya was soft, but she didn’t think Soraya would order their deaths, either; she wasn’t that kind of person. Soraya had initially sicced the guards on them in response to some warning from that kid Ifa. If some other authority had gotten involved, on the other hand, all bets were off.

Asala didn’t have any guarantee that surrendering wouldn’t result in a quick execution, either. There were too many unknowns, and she’d never believed in taking unnecessary risks. Peace and order in Camp Ghala didn’t do Asala the least bit of good if she wound up corpsed far from home.

Khayyam was never really home, a small voice whispered in the back of her head. Asala shoved the thought away. This wasn’t the time for useless sentimentality.

There was the crackle of a radio, and Asala nudged her head up just enough to see the leader tilt her head. Too bad Asala couldn’t hear the exchange that followed, although she assumed that it included a call for backup. Still, she didn’t have to linger in suspense for long.

“You have something we want,” the leader went on. “Either I can flush you out from where you’re cowering, or you can come out and I will take you to Hafiz, who will explain what you’ve gotten yourselves involved in.”

Asala was no negotiator, but this didn’t incline her to stick her neck out. Still, any breath of information could be useful. Hafiz, and not Soraya? What was going on?

Unfortunately, Niko took matters out of her hands by scrambling to their feet. “D-don’t shoot!” they called out, their voice wavering. “We’ll come.”

“Brilliant, Niko,” Asala rasped. As much as she was tempted to let the hostiles strangle Niko, she couldn’t abandon Ekrem’s kid. She stood as well and slowly raised her hands to show that she wasn’t armed, a state that she was never going to tolerate again.

“Trust me,” Niko hissed back. “I know what I’m doing.”

Asala wished that “trust me” didn’t involve “let’s stand right in between two groups of hostiles, with more probably on the way.”

On the other hand, there was something to Niko’s philosophy that talking your way out of a fight was easier than fighting your way out.

Asala thought furiously as she and Niko stepped forward, taking care to move slowly and unthreateningly, in response to the guard’s brusque gestures. Was Hafiz another of Niko’s contacts? She had a vague memory of the name, but not specifics about Hafiz’s importance or influence. Why hadn’t Niko gotten in touch with them earlier, especially if they had the authority to order squads of guards around the camp? She couldn’t ask now; there was no way they wouldn’t be overheard. Frustrating as it was, all she could do was follow Niko’s lead and trust that they knew what they were doing.

At least the guards hadn’t killed either of them out of hand. She was again grateful that they didn’t carry guns. Asala allowed herself a thread of hope that the two of them would survive.

“Handcuff them,” the leader said. “For your safety as well as ours,” she added.

Asala rolled her eyes. Spare me, she thought.

The guards didn’t waste any time confiscating Asala’s knife and Niko’s. The woman who located the pouch containing the mysterious cube took that as well, but her face twisted with unease. Asala wondered if her captor knew what it did, or if her reaction was as visceral as Asala’s own.

The guards had come prepared with restraints designed for use with suits. Asala recognized the type and didn’t kick up a fuss. She was sure she’d be able to work her way free, given enough time.

Two guards took up positions to either side, one of them just half a pace ahead so they could lead the way. Everyone else, including the leader, fell in behind Asala and Niko. The back of Asala’s neck prickled the entire march out of the Vela. She couldn’t help but stare at the woman currently in possession of the cube, whose stiff gait betrayed continuing discomfort.

Although Asala knew it was her imagination, the ship seemed to awaken around them. The way their footfalls reverberated through the passageways, the way light emphasized the corrosion and graffiti on the bulkheads. It reminded her of her own escape from Hypatia, people scratching the names of those they’d left behind into every available surface so that some record would remain of lovers or children, fellow clanners they never expected to see again. That, or poetry and songs native to the cold lands. Asala had memorized the verses and whispered them to herself, never sharing them with another soul even in her thirty-four years on Khayyam. No one would have understood.

At last they reached the egress. The Vela clung like a barnacle to a decrepit old freighter. Asala didn’t enjoy the thought of making the crossing between the airlock and the old ship’s loading bays again, this time with her hands bound. The stress marks she’d spotted in the rickety metal seemed even more prominent this time around, and EV suits or no, she’d spent enough time on starships that the sight of an airlock permanently open when they were in space made her cringe inside.

The guards didn’t give the stress marks or crystallization a second glance. Given the state of the rest of Camp Ghala, they probably didn’t think twice about it. Asala conceded that the fact that the camp hadn’t fallen apart or had its orbit destabilized suggested that something was working, as precarious as the whole endeavor seemed. In all fairness, it wasn’t as if the refugees who made this their home had much choice, given Gan-De’s refusal to welcome them.

Once they emerged on the other side, Niko attempted to make conversation. “You should get your security systems looked into,” they said in that cheerful, casual tone that Asala was so unfond of. “We didn’t realize that entire area was off-limits.”

“Save it for Hafiz,” the guard leader said, unimpressed.

Asala would have been happier if someone shoved Niko, not because she wished her companion ill, but because it would have spoken to a certain reassuring brute unprofessionalism on the guards’ part. Their supposedly ragtag captors had been a bit too disciplined for her comfort.

They marched through unfamiliar corridors—it wasn’t as though Asala or Niko had had a chance to search the entirety of the freighter—and crossed over to another ship. She recognized this one as a Jaguar-class merchanter, popular a few decades back because they were easy to refit with some of the nastier weapons available to civilians. Her unease grew.

Not every ship at Camp Ghala was a heap of junk. But the camp did, in general, have an air of decrepitude. This ship was one of the few exceptions she’d seen—or, she corrected herself, been allowed to see. Its deck gleamed; she could see her reflection in the shining metal. No graffiti, no stains, no detritus. Someone cared about this ship, and had the pull to maintain it to a higher standard than the rest of the camp.

They passed people of all ages, from hunched maintenance workers to children, some very young, carrying small bundles. None of them appeared to find the strange procession remarkable, and none of them challenged the guards. Asala couldn’t blame them; who wanted trouble?

At last they arrived at the command deck of the merchanter. Four sentries stood at attention. Asala noticed straight off that all of them looked well-fed compared to the Camp Ghala norm, even if they didn’t sport uniforms, which would have been difficult to manage here anyway. Definitely an elite of some sort.

Niko glanced at Asala for reassurance.

It’s a little late to have reservations, Asala thought, and offered them a tight smile.

“Two guests to see Hafiz,” said the woman who had taken her and Niko captive. Her voice dipped sarcastically on “guests.”

“Found the rat in the nest, did you?” responded one of the sentries, a stout woman with clan tattoos that an inner-worlder would have called similar to Asala’s own. To Asala’s eye, the style was clearly different—more angular, with flower-like marks accenting the lines. The sentry’s brow furrowed as she considered Asala’s own incomplete tattoo, and Asala restrained herself from bristling. “They’ll need to be searched.”

Niko offered a wry smile. “That’s not a problem. They already took away my utility knife.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” the sentry snapped.

The tattooed sentry was rougher with Niko than with Asala. Asala couldn’t tell whether this was because Niko had annoyed her or due to some kind of misguided “clanners have to stick together” courtesy. If the latter, Asala might be able to take advantage of the sentiment, assuming an opening offered itself.

“Clear,” the tattooed sentry said at last, sounding disappointed. “Take them in.”

“I’ll make it up to you later,” the leader said, and winked. That took Asala by surprise, although it shouldn’t have. Presumably these people all knew each other and had developed relationships, especially in the confines of the camp. Just because Asala had preferred to keep to herself when she’d served as a soldier didn’t mean everyone else did the same.

The command deck brought another surprise: luxury. Or the Camp Ghala version of it, anyway. Soraya’s cramped quarters had been rich with handicrafts and gifts: stoles knitted from recycled clothes, rugs made of knotted rags, artwork improvised from shorted-out computer chips and frayed wires. Tribute to the work Soraya did, and the people who relied on her.

This—this was different. Asala saw Niko’s eyes narrow as they took in the carefully aligned paintings on the walls, treasures that refugees must have smuggled out even though they’d been warned, warned, that every ounce of weight made a difference, that the ships could only afford to bring people and food and the barest essentials. Asala’s own gaze was drawn unwillingly to a table that looked as though it was carved from Samosi ice-wood, and gilded besides, an unspeakable treasure considering that Samos, the outermost planet in the system, had died decades ago.

Besides that, there were shelves of more utilitarian material, sturdy plastics and metal, containing printed books, a rarity. Asala had sometimes woken from dreams in which she bent over a handwritten volume of her sister’s verses. But no such thing existed. Asala herself had never committed those words to paper. And the six volumes her sister had given her for her birthday—those were long gone.

More sentries guarded the passageways. How many people were in Hafiz’s private army? The fact that they didn’t wear any kind of uniform suggested that they must all recognize each other by sight, or else there was some identifying mark that Asala hadn’t yet been able to pick out. She’d compare notes with Niko later, if they survived this.

Finally, they reached what would have been the captain’s quarters. This room, too, displayed that extravagant taste for luxury. Plaques engraved with verses in a language Asala couldn’t read were hung over the door.

The crown of the collection had pride of place to the left of the door, a magnificent ink painting on Samosi silk, no longer produced since the planet’s death. Flowing brushstrokes depicted a wolf accompanied by the spirits of the winter winds. Several strategically placed lights illuminated the painting, more evidence of the regard in which it was held, given power rationing in Camp Ghala.

The procession of luxuries bothered Asala to the point of offense, especially after she’d witnessed the privations suffered by the other refugees at Camp Ghala. Certainly it brought back unwelcome memories of the lean years she’d endured during her own escape, not to mention her early adulthood on Khayyam, when she’d scraped by on her soldier’s stipend. She told herself it was none of her business.

The leader of the guards accompanying them knocked on the door in a complex rhythm. Asala’s ears pricked at the code, and she did her best to memorize it.

A mellow voice responded: “Bring them in.”

“I advise your best behavior around Hafiz,” the lead guard hissed to Asala and Niko. “At least if you want them to take you seriously.”

Asala suppressed a scoff. Niko bobbed their head. Well, good that one of them could be diplomatic. And what did she mean, “take you seriously”? Getting caught breaking into what ought to be a high-security area didn’t count as “serious” enough?

The door opened from within. Asala took in the surroundings.

A woman stood to the side of the door, no better and no worse dressed than any of the guards on the freighter. Asala guessed she was an attendant. She carried no obvious weapons, which made Asala scowl. An open threat would have made her feel better. Oddly, the woman sported a cybernetic eye, unusual not just because such mods were uncommon but also because the eye lacked a power source; the golden lens had no inner light. A curious anomaly, considering Hafiz’s resources.

The room itself displayed surprisingly spartan decor, given the luxury of the rest of the command deck. A tidy bed rested against the far wall, along with a small industrial-style desk of metal and two small cabinets, equally utilitarian in appearance. Again, no weapons in sight, although Asala couldn’t discount the possibility that some nasty security system was hidden by the ordinary furniture, or lurking in the walls. Given the ingenuity she’d seen in the camp, she wouldn’t put it past Hafiz, or their hangers-on, to have made some modifications to the ship.

At its center, like a jewel spider at the heart of a web, sat Hafiz. They had a luxuriant head of hair, only partly tamed by braids, and alert, wide-set dark eyes above a beaky nose, not atypical for certain strains of outerworlders; an older-model dataslate rested in their hands. Asala’s instincts prickled in response to Hafiz’s gaze, though they were smiling with every sign of great good humor. Hafiz might be sitting in a wheelchair, with clothing that exposed a right leg that ended just below the knee, but given their accomplishments, Asala couldn’t afford to underestimate her opponent even in a physical confrontation. Asala had known injured veterans who’d adapted well to wheelchair life and who she would be very cautious around in a fight, especially on their home ground.

The guard who’d brought them in signed to Hafiz with one hand. Hafiz replied in kind, and the guard let herself out. The attendant remained by the door, watching both Asala and Niko narrowly.

“You have something of mine,” Hafiz said, still smiling. “I’m going to tell you a story, and then you’ll want to work with me.”

Niko’s face was so expressively open that if Asala hadn’t known better, she would have believed their innocence. “You haven’t asked who we are.”

Hafiz shrugged. “You’re welcome to introduce yourself if it would make you feel better, but I know your names, and you know mine. Certainly I know a great deal about you, Niko, through your contacts with people throughout the camp, not least Soraya, as well as various aid organizations. We can either spend time on social niceties, or we can get down to business. Which would you prefer?”

Niko’s mouth compressed. The motion was subtle, but by now Asala had spent enough time with them to recognize their sudden caution. Given Niko’s usual self-confidence when talking to complete strangers, that was . . . concerning.

“We’ll do it your way,” Asala said. “But I need answers.” Best to counterattack, take control of the conversation if Niko wasn’t going to. “Not just about the Vela, but about what we found there.” Her gaze flicked to the woman with the cube.

Hafiz’s smile didn’t fade; if anything, they seemed even more amused by the whole affair. “I’m happy to tell you what you want to know. I’ll start with what you’ve already no doubt figured out: that the Vela was sabotaged not because of infighting among the refugees it carried, but because it carried a secret—one that its people didn’t want reaching Khayyam. That secret, of course, is the cube you located.”

“The cube?” Niko repeated, wide-eyed and encouraging, a trick that Asala had also become familiar with. For her part, she disliked the fact that Hafiz was so willing to divulge information when they had her and Niko at a disadvantage. She couldn’t imagine that the reason was stupidity. What did Hafiz stand to gain?

I’m going to tell you a story, and then you’ll want to work with me, Hafiz had said, with the ease of assurance. Must be one hell of a story.

“You had a good chance to look at it, didn’t you? Black matter that won’t stop moving?”

Asala nodded, if only to keep them talking. “I need to know what it is.”

Hafiz’s smile broadened as though Asala had sprung a trap.

What the hell did I say wrong? Asala tensed in spite of herself. Should she have let Niko continue to do the talking after all? Her demand hadn’t been unreasonable, or even particularly unusual. So then what—

Hafiz had noted her confusion and paused to allow her to process it. She didn’t like that, either. When Asala had smoothed her expression, Hafiz went on, “The device you liberated”—their voice lifted conspiratorially on the word—“is a working stardrive prototype.”

“Can’t be much of a prototype,” Niko quipped, “if it works exactly the same as existing stardrives.”

“What, you were fooled by the footage that Khayyam aired of the Vela’s progress?” Hafiz brought up the slate and flicked on a video clip. A tinny voice described the Vela’s ostensible path toward Khayyam as the camera panned over a diagram showing its trajectory, followed by a convincingly staticky image of the Vela’s hull. “You disappoint me.”

“I’m not talking about the faked vids,” Niko said, refusing to rise to the bait. “It wasn’t hard to backtrace the time and location stamps in Uzochi’s communiqués. She may be a brilliant scientist, but security isn’t her specialty. She didn’t think to scrub location data out of her transmissions. Even if the Vela got diverted, it didn’t get here any faster than it should have.”

“Of course not. It would have given away the game to your father’s rivals. Do you think he’d want to broadcast possession of the prototype? No, he needed everything to appear normal. It would have worked if the refugees hadn’t figured out his true intent, which had nothing to do with their salvation.”

Niko frowned. “I know he cares about his ratings in the polls, but that isn’t any reason to—”

Hafiz’s genial air evaporated; the next words came out like a whip-crack. “Your father’s purpose in sending your little ‘rescue mission’ in the first place wasn’t concern for the refugees. Or if it was, that wasn’t his primary motive. Certainly he sent a pitiably small ship for the task. But then, you’d know that your father is more . . . complicated than he likes to tell people, wouldn’t you?”

The hit failed to land, or at least, Niko gave no sign that it bothered them; of course, Asala reflected, they’d been fending off jibes about the benefits of Ekrem’s benevolent nepotism all their life. “You’re accusing President Ekrem of what, exactly?” Asala asked.

“He wanted control of the stardrive,” Hafiz said bluntly. “I have some idea of who betrayed Uzochi and Vanja Ryouta to him. One of Vanja’s lab assistants, who hoped to live out the rest of their days in luxury in exchange for the secret. Of course the Vela didn’t dare use the stardrive prototype to show up at Khayyam. That would have been too much of a giveaway.”

“All right,” Asala said, unable to contain herself. “What exactly does this stardrive do, if it’s so wonderful? What’s the big deal?”

“Our system is doomed,” Hafiz said. “The wolf will eat the sun, just like in the old stories.” Asala was reminded of the ink painting of the wolf and the winter spirits. “The only survivors a century hence will be the ones who left entirely. Fleeing for the inner worlds”—their mouth twisted—“just delays the inevitable.”

The inevitable. The sacrifices her clan-mates had made to send her to safety on Khayyam, the loneliness and suffering she had endured, waved away as just so much nothing. Asala took long, deep breaths, reminding herself that they were on Hafiz’s turf, and she couldn’t afford to alienate them until she found out more. From the anxious glance that Niko was slanting in her direction, they weren’t entirely confident in her self-control.

Hafiz’s smile returned, but this time it had a predatory air. “You want to know what it does, little soldier? The prototype works by opening a wormhole. It will let you jump directly to another star system.”

“That’s impos—” The color drained from Niko’s face. “Of course. Vanja and Uzochi specialized in handling exotic matter. If anyone could have found a way to refine and contain enough of it for this, it would be them.”

In academy, Asala had learned the practical physics and engineering that you needed to handle a starship. While she was no scientist, she’d heard of wormholes. Heard of them, and dismissed them as irrelevant to her. Wormholes were what you found in kids’ adventure comics, where they allowed people to zap themselves into strange alternate dimensions, possibly with bonus superpowers. They weren’t real, not in any useful sense of the word. Oh, laboratories sometimes attempted to work with them, and occasionally a scientist would give a talk about how they could open up interstellar travel in heretofore unknown ways, but that didn’t have anything to do with Asala’s existence.

Except. Vanja and Uzochi could have pulled it off. Even Asala knew of their lab’s reputation. And she couldn’t deny the physical evidence of the prototype wriggling in the pouch at her hip. True, she didn’t know that it did what Hafiz said it did—but neither did she have any assurance that it didn’t. The claim was plausible. And then, too, there was the circumstantial evidence—the cover-up when the Vela didn’t arrive, President Ekrem’s strange urgency about their mission. Sure, he cared a lot about his political career. But it wasn’t just his career on the line, was it? It was his personal survival, and that of the people closest to him.

A wormhole. A way to travel out-system in an instant, and find new worlds, healthy new suns. Such technology would allow humanity to explore the stars with ease. There would be plenty of space for everyone. No one would ever have to freeze, or die in a camp for want of somewhere to go.

“You see,” Hafiz said, drawing Asala’s attention again. “Once President Ekrem learned of the prototype’s existence, he decided that the soft, comfortable elites on Khayyam would escape and leave the rest of us behind. But the reason Uzochi didn’t employ it to flee earlier is that she understood, as Ekrem does not, that one refugee ship is not much of a basis with which to rebuild civilization on another world. We need an entire fleet of ships, all equipped with their own wormhole generators.”

Hafiz’s use of “we” didn’t escape Asala.

“But you know what happened next, don’t you?” Hafiz gestured toward them both. “Uzochi discovered what President Ekrem truly intended. The fact that he sent his strongmen to secure the tech tipped her off and drove her to sabotage. Now that we know the Vela’s secret, and the blueprints for the prototype, Camp Ghala will be able to work toward escape—a real escape, not the second-class lifestyle that Gan-De deigns to offer anyone who actually makes it onto the surface. Assuming, of course, the fortress world and its robots don’t simply shoot us down like vermin.”

“It’s plausible,” Niko said, surprisingly calm. “But what are you getting out of telling us this?”

Hafiz turned then to Asala and fixed her with their stare. “You have some questions to ask yourself, Asala. Your president has lied to you. You should be wondering why he insisted on sending his own child to accompany you—skilled enough in their field, granted”—and Hafiz nodded with curious, old-fashioned courtesy at Niko—“but inexperienced nonetheless. Why not send one of his veteran—”

Hafiz’s needling had finally gotten under Niko’s skin. “I’m perfectly aware that my father is a politician and makes a politician’s compromises,” they said, speaking too rapidly, “but if you think that I’m somehow implicated in—”

Asala yanked on Niko’s shoulder. “Niko, stop.”

“Implicated in what?” Hafiz cut in.

Niko looked at Asala. “Whatever my father has cooked up, I’m not involved in it, I swear.”

They’d traveled together, learned to work as partners. She wanted to believe them.

As much as the thought of being betrayed by Niko made her gut hurt—not just because of Niko themself, but because of their father, whom she’d trusted—Asala also knew the importance of showing a united front before an adversary. Make no mistake, Hafiz was exactly that. She wasn’t under any illusions that Hafiz was feeding them this information for anything but self-interested reasons.

“I have an alternative to President Ekrem’s scheme,” Hafiz said. “I plan to use this stardrive to allow Camp Ghala’s inhabitants to find a new beginning elsewhere. Uzochi has been busy identifying systems with planets that look conducive to human settlement. It’s the chance we need.”

Hafiz leaned back, self-confident. “I’m sorry to cast a shadow on you, Niko, but you don’t deserve to be held back by your father’s crimes. I would value your assistance in guaranteeing a future for Camp Ghala.”

Niko’s gaze flickered to Asala, then back to Hafiz. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” they said, not yet mollified.

“The inner planets don’t deserve this escape,” Hafiz said, still in that quiet voice.

Belatedly, Asala recognized that Hafiz was angry. In her clan they’d said that some people burned hot when they got mad, and others burned cold. Hafiz must be one of the latter.

“To my knowledge,” Hafiz continued, “President Ekrem had no intention of bringing the denizens of Khayyam with him, let alone the inhabitants of the outer worlds or the refugees of Camp Ghala. He and his cronies were going to fly the coop alone.” Hafiz pointed with rude directness at Asala’s clan tattoos. She stiffened in spite of herself. “Do you have any guarantee that he’d take you with him, Asala? You may be useful to him, but you’ll always be a pattie.”

The deliberate slur didn’t shock her, but she couldn’t help the cold stab of fear. Ekrem wouldn’t do that, she told herself. But that reflexive objection lacked conviction, and the fear—the fear would remain with her for a long time. Especially knowing what she did now—if she knew it. Because she certainly wasn’t going to take a stranger’s word for this, no matter how plausible it sounded, and no matter how convinced Niko might be.

Hafiz smiled wryly. “We will only do to them what they were going to do to us.”

Cold of Hafiz to say this to the face of Ekrem’s child. But it was Niko who surprised her when they said, their face drawn, “I don’t disagree with you.”

Asala turned to Niko, eyes widening. “You couldn’t leave the blueprints behind for—” She realized the problem with doing so as she spoke, and stopped, cursing herself. Normally she was better at thinking through the implications. But this conversation had shaken her in more ways than one.

Niko’s face had gone haggard. “Right,” they said, their voice hollow. “If there’s any way to track wormhole jumps, the refugees wouldn’t be safe from pursuit. Hell, even a brute-force search with scout ships might do the trick. It depends on how well the stardrive works. If you wanted to start over somewhere new, with a fresh sun that isn’t being eaten hollow, and without looking over your shoulder for people from the inner worlds who don’t think you deserve that fresh start—especially anyone from Gan-De . . .” They squared their shoulders. “You’re right,” they said to Hafiz. “It’s the only way.”

Asala had weapons-grade reservations about Niko’s ready agreement. She hoped it was just for show. Even assuming all this was true, this decision was too momentous to rest in the hands of one person. She had to get out of here and confirm some of it, any of it, before figuring out her next step.

The question was, would Niko follow her lead? Or throw in with Hafiz? It sounded like they were halfway on their side already. Only one way to find out for sure.

Asala didn’t want to kill anyone on the way out if she didn’t have to, but she didn’t see any alternatives that would allow her to recapture the prototype. At the same time, she didn’t think taking Hafiz hostage would help their situation. While it might get them off this specific ship, there was no way that she and Niko could survive if the whole of Camp Ghala rose up against them. She didn’t want to run odds that long.

Leverage was the key. What could she use that wouldn’t also get them killed? Especially given that they were outnumbered?

Then she had it. The answer had been staring her in the face ever since they’d been escorted to Hafiz’s lair. (It was hard to think of it any other way, as though Hafiz were a hermit-beast out of legend.) The luxuries, lovingly displayed for Hafiz’s followers and carefully preserved for future generations. The evidence that artifacts from the dead outer worlds were as cherished, if not more, than human lives.

Asala didn’t signal Niko. Instead, she whirled and slammed the control to open the door before anyone could react. She hoped Niko would follow her lead. She hated that flicker-moment of uncertainty when she didn’t know how the people around her would react.

Hafiz’s attendant yelped a curse in a cant Asala didn’t recognize. “Stop her!” Hafiz snapped half a beat after that.

By then Asala had already lunged through the narrow opening provided by the door starting to whisk open and pivoted on one heel, her momentum carrying her past the astounded guards. They’d gotten soft; she couldn’t imagine that they dealt with determined professionals very often. Drill was one thing—and certainly she couldn’t fault the polish of the escort who’d brought her and Niko here—but it seemed that the elites who had the privilege of guarding Hafiz simply couldn’t fathom anyone defying their employer.

The guards rushed her. Asala had already wrenched the ink painting by the door from its place. She sidestepped them with ease and, as momentum carried them past her, she called out, “You can fight me. But I’d rather come to an understanding. I have the feeling that art restoration is tough in Camp Ghala.”

“Stop,” Hafiz’s voice came from within the room.

Both guards stumbled to a halt. Asala’s spirits lifted. They would obey Hafiz; that was all she needed.

Asala spotted Hafiz slantwise through the door, which the attendant had allowed to open fully: part of Hafiz’s face, the blazing glare of a single eye. Hafiz continued speaking, their voice glassy cold. “Asala. That painting is the last surviving masterpiece of the Samosi warrior-artist Dmitar, from nine centuries ago. People gave up their lives so that it could accompany our people to safety.”

“Don’t you think I know?” Asala said. She held the painting up. Light shone through the silk; she could see the brushstrokes in ghostly silhouette through the back. “My clan had to leave everything behind, on Hypatia. We called it ‘feeding the wolf.’” Lightly, she caressed the edge of the painting. “I know what this is worth, even if the inner-worlders will never understand.”

Hafiz’s silence was chilly.

“Give me the cube,” Asala said, “and your guarantee of safe passage for Niko and myself in Camp Ghala. I’ll return the painting to your care.” Time for a little flattery. “If my clan had had a leader like you, perhaps we would have been able to salvage some of our heritage. We don’t have to be enemies. But I can’t make a decision this important without checking things out for myself, and for that, I need the cube.”

Take the opening, Asala thought at Niko. For a long moment she wasn’t sure they would. But after a moment Niko slipped through the doorway, their eyes hooded, and nodded to her.

Hafiz’s brief silence was considering. “The prototype—”

“If you have blueprints,” Asala said, “you can build yourself more. You said it yourself: it’s going to take a whole fleet with these things to save us. You can spare me one.” It was a risk, pushing Hafiz like this. But she didn’t have a copy of the blueprints, and was unlikely at this juncture to convince Hafiz to hand them over. If Hafiz had lied about the cube’s purpose, she’d have to unlock its secrets another way, and for that she’d need possession of it. If Hafiz refused her, in fact, that would suggest that the whole story was a scam.

Abruptly, Hafiz laughed. “Very well,” they said. “You will learn the truth of my words soon enough. I will forgive your insolence this once, Asala, but don’t test me a second time.”

Hafiz inclined their head to their attendant and said, “Give her the proof she seeks.” The attendant retrieved the cube and brought it forward. Asala reverently handed the painting back to the guards, who scowled at her. Then she replaced the cube in her belt pouch.

Niko shook their head but did not speak. Together, the two of them walked swiftly out of the Jaguar merchanter. Asala could feel the portraits staring after her in approbation. They would haunt her dreams, later, wrecked paintings with ghosts rising out of their frames to curse her.

“We could have gotten it back from her,” the attendant noted after the two had left.

Hafiz shook their head. “Best to see where she goes with it,” they said. “That will tell us whether she’s one of them—or one of us.”

Hafiz kept their side of the bargain. No one troubled Asala and Niko on their way back to Soraya’s office, even if people gave them speculative looks because they were going around suited. Both she and Niko had their helmets clipped to their belts so they could see more easily; she’d always hated having her field of view restricted. Asala didn’t want to take the time to unsuit further, though. Even imperfect armor was better than nothing, and she worried that they’d be jumped again.

Niko’s silence had a moody air, as if they were still working out what to tell her, and Asala didn’t press them. By the time the two of them arrived, it was late. While the camp never slept, it did recognize a cursory day-night cycle, and even someone as busy as Soraya needed to recharge.

PLEASE COME BACK LATER, said the sign on her door, in uneven block letters. It was further embellished with painted . . . butterflies? Bowties? Having seen Soraya’s neat handwriting, Asala guessed someone else had made it for her. She pounded on the door anyway.

No response.

More pounding. “It’s an emergency!” Asala shouted. “It’s about Hafiz.” Besides, Soraya had sent Hafiz’s goons after them. Maybe guilt would make her more cooperative.

That fetched Soraya. After a few seconds, the door slid open. Soraya was wrapped in a crocheted shawl, a mug of broth in her hand. She looked startled to see them. “What’s so important that it can’t wait?" she snapped.

In answer, Asala shouldered past her and into the office. She didn’t bother sitting. Niko murmured something apologetic to Soraya as they entered.

The office remained as neatly organized as ever, although Asala spotted one notable, if amusing, difference: Soraya’s slate rested on the table with a video paused of . . . a gladiatorial drama? She wouldn’t have guessed that Soraya’s taste ran to improbable choreographed combat between brawny individuals, complete with spangled costumes, but there was a lot Asala didn’t know about the woman. Everyone needed some way to relax, she supposed, even if with junk vids.

“I can explain,” Soraya said, her voice exhausted.

“We survived Hafiz,” Niko said. “No thanks to you.”

Soraya winced.

“But you’re the one who keeps Camp Ghala running, and there’s something you need to hear,” Niko went on. They nodded at Asala.

Tersely, Asala described their confrontation with Hafiz, carefully edited. She didn’t mention her doubts about President Ekrem; that would be something for Asala to work out on her own time. And she certainly didn’t mention that she had possession of the Vela’s prototype stardrive.

“You keep a finger on the pulse of Camp Ghala,” Asala said, not adding, And I trust you to be honest about the Vela. More honest than Hafiz, anyway. “Tell me this is true, or that it isn’t. Whatever it is, we need to know.”

Soraya huffed. “It’s true,” she said, her tone clipped. “The Vela’s importance is its wormhole device. Hafiz and I have been keeping a lid on the secret. You can’t let General Cynwrig find out about it.”

So easy, an answer for the plucking, like a ripe fruit. But Asala needed more to go on. “Is there anyone who can corroborate the truth about this—this prototype?”

Soraya sipped her broth and didn’t answer.

Niko had caught some nuance of body language that had escaped Asala. “What has Hafiz done?”

Soraya shook her head, but she didn’t deny her ambivalence toward Hafiz. “We have different priorities, that’s all,” she said.

“I think you owe us answers,” Niko said. “All things considered. Did you expect us to come back from that expedition?”

Soraya looked away. “Fine,” she said. “Ask your questions.”

“Is it true that Hafiz is planning to leave the inner worlds without the tech to escape?”

Soraya blanched. “They what? That can’t be—”

“That’s what they told us.”

“No,” Soraya whispered. “We were going to leave the blueprints for the inner-worlders, not leave them to die too. That wasn’t the agreement.”

Asala and Niko exchanged worried glances. Grudging respect welled up in Asala’s heart for this woman, working to the edges of her sanity to save the outer worlds’ unwanted, ready to stretch her hand out even to people who had treated her people poorly. Respect, and weariness. She wouldn’t have wanted Soraya’s job for an entire world of water.

“There isn’t much alternative,” Niko said, their voice unnaturally calm. “Hafiz is right. If General Cynwrig gets her hands on this tech, it’ll endanger all the refugees. The rest of the inner-worlders won’t be much better. Not if it comes to a fight for survival.”

“Yes,” Soraya said in a hollow voice. “Of course you’re right.” She didn’t sound convinced at all.

Niko frowned slightly and finally asked the question that Asala really cared about. “Soraya, I know there’s a lot to take in, but is there anyone who can corroborate Hafiz’s account of what the prototype does? Especially since we don’t know if it’s actually been tested? I personally wouldn’t want to entrust the refugees’ safety to a prototype . . .”

Good thinking, and a tack that Asala wouldn’t have thought to take. Of course appealing to Soraya’s concern for the refugees’ safety would get better results.

“Oh, it works,” Soraya said, grimly certain. “Uzochi assured me of it.”

That was news. “I’d rather hear it from Uzochi herself,” Asala said.

Soraya barked a laugh. “You’re welcome to talk to her if you can find her,” she said.

“Why?” Niko said. “If she’s not in the camp—”

“She’s on Gan-De.”

Asala sucked in a breath.

“On Gan-De where?” Niko asked, focused on extracting information, like a true agent.

Soraya’s expression went wry. “It was only going to be a matter of time before you found out. She’s at a clandestine base, building more ships and wormhole generators. Refining exotic matter, constructing containment devices to keep the stuff from evaporating or whatever it does. We didn’t have the resources in Camp Ghala for her to set up shop here. Gan-De, on the other hand—well, it’s a manufacturing center for a reason, robots and all. It was the only way.”

I’ll just bet, Asala thought. “We need to meet with her,” she said. That way she and Niko could find out more about the existing cube and how it worked. Too bad they couldn’t just call Uzochi, but she didn’t have any confidence that Gan-De’s spooks wouldn’t intercept anything they sent over ansible. Besides, in Asala’s experience, it was easier to pressure people to speak in person.

Soraya scoffed. “Now that’s clearly impossible.”

“You’ve been very generous to us,” Niko said, which was their way of insisting that the two of them were going whether Soraya liked it or not. “Listen, getting past the fortress world’s defenses is our problem. But anything you have on the orbital platforms, anything at all—this could be an opportunity for you as well, you know. Because we might be able to get word down to the refugee community on Gan-De, and bring more aid packages from sympathizers on the way back.”

“Not a horrible idea,” Soraya said slowly. Her gaze cut sideways, toward Asala and her tattoos. “I don’t imagine you have any sympathy for Cynwrig and her goons.”

Asala didn’t like General Cynwrig, true. On the other hand, she was tired of people making assumptions about her politics based on the fact that she was a clanner. This wasn’t the time to raise a stink about it, though.

Niko honed in on Soraya’s weakness and kept talking. “Besides, when’s the last time Uzochi sent you an update on her operations?”

The guess found its target. Soraya didn’t suppress her wince quite fast enough.

“Fine,” Soraya said. “But if you get into trouble down there—”

“We won’t,” Niko said.

She shook her head. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. In an emergency, you’ll need a way to contact me—”

Niko rolled their hand palm up. “I’ll get word to you. There are ways.”

“You and your friends,” Soraya said, but she seemed satisfied. “Fine. Meanwhile, you two are going to get the fuck out of my office so I can watch this season finale—do you know how hard it is to stay unspoiled in this community?—and get some sleep.”

Hafiz might have promised Asala and Niko safety, but neither of them trusted the truce—if you wanted to call it that—to last. Hafiz’s soldiers weren’t marked by any conventional uniform, but Asala was willing to bet that the squad of four tough-looking women and men waiting down the hall once they exited Soraya’s office were among them. Asala cursed herself for not wearing some kind of disguise, although it would have been a lost cause—her height and bulk made her unmistakable here anyway. Even Niko, despite their slenderness, had such clear skin and good teeth that they didn’t fit in here.

Asala grabbed Niko’s arm and dove. Starships were not, by and large, places where one ordinarily found much cover, with the possible exception of badly organized cargo holds, but this had not been a functional ship in years, and Camp Ghala was full of clutter. For example, Soraya stored stacks of empty crates outside her office door for reuse by anyone who needed them. Asala dropped into a crouch behind the nearest stack, ignoring Niko’s startled yip, just as the soldiers shouted for civilians to clear the area.

She and Niko couldn’t linger here, of course. The crates wouldn’t protect them forever. Asala grunted as she shoved the stack over to block the hallway. They made an unholy clattering as they tumbled over like a child’s blocks. She scrambled to her feet, bent over to present less of a target, and sprinted, trusting Niko to follow.

There’d been that one ship in Block K, the one with possible stress leaks. Concerning, but the ship was ideal as a getaway vehicle because it had been cleared out in preparation for permanent welding onto Camp Ghala . . . someday. Even better, it was temporarily attached to the pressurized sections of Ghala.

Asala heard shouts behind them, and then Soraya’s raised voice upbraiding the soldiers. She could only hope that Soraya’s high standing in the refugee community would keep her from coming to further harm. At this point it was out of Asala’s hands.

She didn’t like going back to Section Zeta, where the Vela was hidden. Among other things, she didn’t know if Hafiz had stepped up security. She had to trust that Hafiz’s desire to keep the Vela’s secrets would keep them from drastic measures.

The corridors were eerily quiet. The people she and Niko passed shied away from them. Asala was sure that her own murderous expression was part of it, but given that she didn’t want interruptions, it suited her fine.

Asala and Niko didn’t stop until they reached the ship that was their destination. With luck, it remained functional as, well, a ship. Asala panted for breath, both winded and exhilarated. Niko just sounded winded, period. Niko hacked the makeshift lock, which was fortunately not difficult, and they scrambled into the airlock.

The airlock didn’t close fast enough for her, and the lights’ flickering didn’t reassure her. Asala kept imagining she heard pursuing footsteps, but it was only the rapid thudding of her heartbeat. “You make sure it seals properly,” Asala croaked to Niko. “I’m going to start the preflight checks.”

Once in the pilot’s seat, with the familiar routine to calm her, her heartbeat began to slow down. Halfway through, Niko slid into the copilot’s seat. “It’s done,” they said, still breathless.

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 blinked 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.

Body weary, she limped out of the hovel that had once been the control room of a decent-enough ship. At least she’d been able to land them near their intended destination. They were only a mile or two away from the small town where they hoped to find information on how to proceed. Known for being sympathetic to refugees, Shi Shen was a village on the edge of Gan-De civilization, its economy less industrialized than the larger city centers. Importantly, there were people there who spoke Atlan, the language most of the Eratosi aboard the Vela had been speaking in their videos. It would’ve made sense as a port of call for Uzochi and her followers.

“Still!” Asala said to Niko in a sharp whisper as they coughed and stumbled. Above them, drones. More fucking drones. They were endless.

Asala counted eight of them, high in the sky, shaped like flying insects. There wasn’t much information about them in the reference files she’d checked, but she’d heard scuttlebutt that in the less built-up parts of the planet, they were only motion-based.

“Fuck,” said Niko, looking up.

“It looks like they’re flying away from us.” Asala let out her breath. “At least there’s that.”

“Yeah, but how many more of them are there going to be? I don’t have a computer. Any gear. Nothing. How are we going to subvert them?”

“First we need to get that head wound seen to. Then we’ll figure out the rest later,” Asala said as Niko stumbled again. “Come on. Best get moving.”

Both of them moved slowly. Asala allowed it. There was time for pushing, and there was time for letting good enough lie.

Still, night was soon approaching, and with it, a fierce cold. It was nothing, nothing, like Hypatia, of course, not even in the same realm, but it nipped at the senses just the same.

Shi Shen shone like a bright moon in the distance, all the villagers burning their fires, streetlights aglow. As they got closer, they could hear the chatter of the people. Some sang songs. Already, the smell of street food drifted on the air. Fried sweet desserts, meat being roasted and smoked. It wasn’t much like the Gan-De Asala remembered, but then this was thousands of miles away from where she’d first made port all those years ago.

They walked into the village, trying to draw as little attention to themselves as they could, but even under the waning light of day, it was clear they were not from around here. Niko’s visible injury didn’t help.

There were drones here, too, the faintest sound of buzzing. It got under your skin. Whatever the drones were searching for, neither Asala nor Niko seemed to invite any unwanted attention from them.

An older woman draped in shawls and scarves from head to toe gestured to Niko. “You’ll be wanting to get to Dyfed’s,” she said in heavily accented Upper Crescent Hypatian.

It was a kind show of faith, speaking to Asala in what the woman assumed was Asala’s mother tongue. Why was it Asala felt most Hypatian away from Hypatia?

“Where’s Dyfed’s?” Asala asked in Cyril, the local Gandesian tongue. She was rusty, but it would come back.

Niko leaned most of their weight against Asala. Their steps had recently grown slack and wobbly.

“I can show you,” the stranger said, “but first, I need to know your names. So I can call ahead and make an appointment. You understand.”

Asala was about to answer, but Niko squeezed her shoulder hard, interrupting. “Suliza and Shulem,” Niko said. Asala recognized the names as belonging to a sibling pair from a quite famous Gandesian poem.

“Of course,” said the stranger. “We’ve been expecting you, then.” The cautious tone was gone, and they began to lead them along what looked like the village’s single main street.

The names had obviously been code words, and not for the first time Asala couldn’t figure out how the hell Niko knew all this stuff.

Asala scoped the place out, doing her best to get a sense of it. Four hundred people at most, she guessed—a mix of fishers, subsistence farmers, and crafts folk. This region of Gan-De was known for textile making. Under the smell of street food, she got a whiff of the urine used to process haxen, the tawny weed that could be made into a clothing fiber that was exported throughout most of the solar system.

It was a difficult craft, not easily mastered. General Cynwrig knew Gan-De’s economy depended on the haxen market. Perhaps Shi Shen’s relative freedom came from her awareness that the people here had realized the one truth that could disrupt martial law. She needed them more than they needed her.

“Don’t worry about those things,” said the woman, pointing to one of the drones. “They don’t see the world as it is.” She wore a sly smile on her wrinkled face.

Asala frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“They’re hacked?” Niko sounded impressed.

“It’s not so difficult to send false inputs into their sensors when you’re familiar with the technology. My name is Soren, by the way. Any questions you have, you can ask me or my brother, Uriel. We’ll arrange anything you need, but times are lean, and it may take a few days to get everything in order. In the meantime, you’ll stay with Uriel and me.”

Asala hadn’t been expecting such a welcome, least of all in Gan-De. She took in her surroundings. Shi Shen seemed to be the only thing for miles and miles. It was the kind of place where the wild could still get in, nothing like Almagest or the cities back on Khayyam, where there was a sense of separation between the human life inside and the animal life far beyond its borders.

Animals hooted, called, chirped, howled in the distance as night fell. Children were rushed into their small apartments by worried parents, so as not to be gobbled by any number of hungry beasts brave enough to enter the village. Beyond Shi Shen, the world was all tall red-needled trees, piney and dense. Blood conifers. Farther away, there were snowcapped mountains. Just over those mountains was where most of Gan-De’s cities lay.

“They’re called the Sinowen-ku,” said Soren, noticing that Asala had been looking toward the mountains. “It means—”

“Seven days,” Asala answered.

“Yes. For that’s how long the journey is through them.”

No wonder the people had found a refuge here. Asala felt hopeful they’d find Uzochi. This was most definitely the region the Eratosi would have gone to.

“You like it?” asked Soren.

“Hm?”

“Here,” said Soren.

Asala nodded. It was a magnificent, wild place, much like Hypatia had once been.

She tried to imagine what it might be like to love this place as much as General Cynwrig did. Could Asala ever stoop to such cruelty and exclusionism to protect something so clearly worth protecting?

She didn’t think she could, not that any of it mattered. Gan-De, Hypatia, all the great beauties of this solar system—soon they would be gone, barely a trace of them left in the cosmos.

“How much—how much longer?” asked Niko, dragging their feet. Their words slurred too.

“Not far now. Come on,” said Soren, grabbing their arm so both she and Asala were supporting them from either side.

It was only a few more strides before they’d arrived. Soren helped Asala take Niko up a short flight of stairs, then politely bid them farewell after the briefest of introductions to Dyfed. “I’ll fetch you in a couple of hours and we can see what needs doing,” she said.

Asala had been expecting a doctor, but it would’ve been a stretch to call Dyfed that. She was . . . well, on Khayyam they might’ve called her a witch.

Her place was a tiny apartment in a small two-story complex. Every surface was covered in dried plant matter. Hanging flowers and weeds and herbs. There were shelves of amber bottles filled with tinctures and so on. There was a pot bubbling on the stove, and Asala couldn’t be sure whether it was supposed to be food or medicine.

“Sit down there, honey,” Dyfed told Niko, pointing to a little cot that was half-covered in stacks of old books. Physical books! Asala made a note to herself to look at them when things settled down and she’d have a chance. “And drink this.” She handed Niko a small vial of something black.

“There’s no sedative in that, right?” Asala asked. If Niko had a concussion, a soporific was the last thing they needed.

The witch scoffed. “No, busybody. Just some mild anti-inflammatory and blood thinner for the pain.”

Dyfed didn’t have skin-sealing technology, and she had to stitch Niko’s gash back together by hand after cleaning and treating it. Asala hadn’t seen such a procedure performed before, and she watched in awe as the woman worked on the anesthetized skin.

“Get me some more gauze, busybody,” said Dyfed.

Asala obeyed, not letting her desire to continue watching get the better of her. Curiosity had its place, and its place wasn’t here.

“Feel free to eat some of that grub too,” Dyfed offered.

So whatever was bubbling on the small two-burner stove was food. “Don’t hog it all,” Niko called, their voice wobbly.

But Asala was starving, and she scooped up a healthy serving of the stuff in the pot, which turned out to be some sort of savory grain-based porridge with rehydrated dry mushrooms, boiled egg, spices, and slivers of slow-cooked meat.

“There’s pickled roots in the fridge,” Dyfed added.

Asala helped herself to some as the witch continued seeing to Niko, letting herself take it easy. Tomorrow, after Niko had rested, they’d decide on their next move.

Niko and Asala pored over maps of the terrain. Soren had helpfully marked the safe and unsafe routes. Most of them were unsafe. Those marked safe still came with heavy dangers. “‘Safe’ is kind of a misnomer. More like, ‘slightly lower chance of fatality,’” said Soren.

Asala let Niko take the lead. They clearly knew more about talking to people here than Asala did. They lied easily and swiftly, knowing just what to say.

“We’re looking for some people who probably passed through here on their way looking for, I don’t know, an abandoned factory? Something like that?”

Soren nodded. “I might know who you mean.”

No names were exchanged. Soren still didn’t know that Niko was Niko and Asala was Asala. Probably part of their general safety procedures. Asala wondered if Soren was her real name, or if Dyfed’s was Dyfed’s. She scanned her memory for literary references, like the code names Niko had provided in that first meeting, but none immediately came to mind.

“We don’t keep records of people’s comings and goings. People don’t tell us where they’re going, and we don’t ask,” said Soren.

“But don’t you have a way of getting in contact with them?” Asala interjected.

“No. Of course not. This little village might be more or less a safe zone, but the general has eyes and ears everywhere. We’re more likely to communicate by messenger birds than by hardlines or networks if we don’t want our messages intercepted. People in the know know where to go.”

“Thank you, Soren,” said Niko. “We can take it from here.”

They could? That was news to Asala.

“We’ll have a transport ready for you in a couple of hours loaded up with supplies, including food, water, and weapons. You’re going to need them,” said Soren. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

After Soren left, Niko circled a few areas on the maps. “So I’ve been looking into it. Turns out near the Seven Day Mountains, there’s a cave network by the coast. There used to be manufacturing facilities here and here,” they said, placing their finger on two different points.

“Mm. I remember something like that,” said Asala. “Back when Cynwrig was trying to expand into this region.”

“Right,” said Niko. “I learned a bit about it in some of my computer security courses. The caves were originally thought to be a good location for storing servers because they maintain a low temperature and controlled climate. Then later, because there was so much infrastructure already in place to house the servers, General Cynwrig decided to expand it into a factory.”

“But the whole thing went bust when the servers were compromised,” Asala said, remembering the fiasco. Rebels launched one of the most successful hacks on Gan-De, almost toppling Cynwrig’s regime when they destroyed all of the servers in the cave system.

Most of the city’s workers, whether they had any connection to the attack or not, were interrogated and imprisoned, some executed. The manufacturing plants were shut down, abandoned for nearly three decades.

“So you think that’s where they’d go?” Asala asked.

“It’s the only place that makes sense,” said Niko, rubbing a bit at the gauze bandage over their head. “It’s got the necessary computing equipment and machinery to make more of the cubes.”

“But it’s so old. Surely everything must be in a state of disrepair. Could it really be functional?”

“If you had Uzochi’s engineering skills? If you had a crew of people and a month to get everything in order? Absolutely.”

Asala nodded and took a sip of the tea Dyfed had made her. “Okay, so that’s where we’re headed.”

“The only problem is the cave network expands over about forty miles, all with abandoned manufacturing plants inside. It’s a lot of territory to cover to see where they are exactly,” said Niko.

Asala traced her finger over the various routes they could take on the map to the caves. It was a two-day journey, assuming the personal vehicle they got was new enough to travel at one hundred miles per hour.

This was going to be far from easy. There were roads, but barely. The terrain looked rough. According to Dyfed and Soren, there would be AI presence throughout the journey, not to mention locals less friendly to folks off-planet. Soren suggested Asala wear a mask or otherwise cover up the tattoos on her face and neck, but she wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t do that.

She shook her head. The only thing on Asala’s mind should be figuring this out. Nothing else. Hadn’t everything she’d learned so far confirmed that? Finding Uzochi was priority number one.

Asala broke the silence. “Still in a lot of pain?”

“Hm?” Niko murmured, distracted.

Miles and miles of hilly red forest stretched before and around them. The truck they’d been gifted bumped along noisily and uncomfortably in the dark.

“You still in a lot of pain?” Asala repeated.

“I’m all right,” they said.

Asala shrugged. “You’re just quieter than usual.”

“Just tired. Maybe this is finally starting to weigh on me,” said Niko, feet up on the dash as they leaned back in their seat. Positioned so casually, they looked younger than usual, the image bringing to mind an insolent teenager, angst and all.

“I hear you,” said Asala.

“Do you? Or are you happy to be hunting down Uzochi just because my dad says so?” Niko asked. Asala swallowed, licking her bottom lip as she pulled forward through the winding, pitted dirt road. “Sorry, Asala, but I just don’t get you sometimes. I really don’t. It’s not about you being Hypatian. It’s not. It’s about you being a person. Do you even care whether or not we’re doing the right thing? What are we even doing here, Asala? Have you thought about that? Just tell me one thing—do you trust my dad?”

Asala didn’t know how she felt about Ekrem. She’d known him for years, though, and he’d never shown himself as anything but earnest. A little full of himself, but earnest. He’d always been an excellent commanding officer, but as the years had passed and as he began to pursue politics, he’d grown more calculating, more cunning. Or perhaps the tendency had been there all along, and she hadn’t noticed it before. She had to mean something to him after all this time, didn’t she?

“Think about it. Why did he send us?” Niko said. “Why did he send his top mercenary contact if it was just some missing refugees? Why is it all off the books? Why not go through official channels? Yeah, there’s whatever bullshit excuse he gave, but you know there’s more to it than that. There has to be.” They’d spoken to her more in the last few minutes than they had since leaving Camp Ghala. Maybe this was the first time they’d had a chance.

“I don’t know,” Asala answered honestly. What she did know was the mission. She’d see the mission through to the bitter end; she always did. “I admit to not having all the answers, but you can’t really agree with Hafiz, can you? That the inner planets should be left behind?”

Niko shook their head. “No. I don’t know. Khayyam destroyed the outer planets. It’s genocide. Literally. Millions of people are dead because of their greed and selfishness. Doesn’t that fucking make you angry? Because it makes me wanna—”

“Makes you want to what? Commit another genocide? Condemn millions to death who are in no way responsible for what’s happening to the system?” Asala countered, with more heat than she’d intended.

“How do you define responsible for? Khayyami citizens benefited from what they were doing for centuries. Did they fight it? Did they demand change? Or did they live their lives complacent while the government and the corporations scooped the sun out?”

Asala shook her head. “Murder is murder.”

“Yet you’re more keen to condemn the people who are suffering than those who caused the suffering,” Niko noted bitterly.

Asala sighed. “What the hell do you want me to say, kid?”

“I don’t know. Something beyond trite expressions like ‘murder is murder.’”

“It’s all fucked to fucking pieces. That’s what I’ve got to say about it. You satisfied?” she asked.

Niko was silent for several moments. “Kind of.”

Despite herself, Asala laughed. They both did.

“It’s just, how can you ever know what to do when you’re just a small piece in a small maze, one tiny subsection of a labyrinth that stretches back centuries?” asked Asala. These weren’t real choices. She was unable to undo anything that had been done. Her only option was focusing on the task at hand, and she couldn’t figure out why Niko didn't see that.

“Fuck, look,” said Niko, pointing up ahead.

Asala peered into the darkness. There was a figure moving to the side of the road, just out of range of her headlights.

“Think it means trouble?” asked Niko.

“Might. Might not. But sit up. Get your seat belt on right.”

Asala kept moving forward, but the figure started waving their hand. “Fuck. Should we stop?”

Usually it wouldn’t even be a question. She’d keep moving. But this mission had led to one crisis of conscience after another. She didn’t know what to believe or what to do. She could trust her judgment no better than she could trust Ekrem’s or Niko’s or Hafiz’s or Soraya’s. She was, after everything, still the woman who’d left her own sister behind. The woman who’d proven she was no different now, leaving behind someone else’s little sister when she had the chance to do it all over again.

Focus on the mission.

“They could be in danger,” said Niko, but they didn’t sound that excited to stop either.

Asala pressed the brake button and let the truck drift to a stop. The figure moved toward the car, and Niko opened the window.

“Need a ride to Gwyyfier,” they said, squinting. After a moment, they got a good look at Asala. “What the hell are you doing here, clannie?”

“We’ll be on our way,” said Niko, closing the window briskly, but several other figures emerged from the surrounding red wood and came out onto the road.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Asala said, banging the heels of her palms against the steering wheel.

“What even is this?” asked Niko.

Asala inhaled deeply. “Lots of folks try to make the crossing from Shi Shen through the Seven Day Mountains to get to more central Gan-De, where you can arrange transport to Khayyam. Some Gandesian militias make it their mission to prevent that.”

“So? What’s our play?” asked Niko. “Are they armed?”

It became quickly apparent that it didn’t matter whether they were or weren’t. As Asala went to turn the fusion engine back on, nothing happened. Lights on the flashboard started blinking sporadically, and the radio blared on, then off, then on. Somebody was hacking the car.

Asala and Niko reflexively moved to lock their doors, but a second later, the locks unlatched.

“All right. You ready?” Asala murmured, touching one of the handheld weapons Dyfed had given her. She dialed it to a setting that would incapacitate anyone who got in her way, instead of killing them outright. Niko took out theirs as well.

“Let’s go,” Niko said.

They both stepped out of the car, weapons drawn. Asala’s specialty might be long-range kills, but she still knew her way around a hand weapon.

“Step the fuck back, or I end you,” she said, sizing their captors up.

There were a lot of them, and they were armed too. It wasn’t the most tactically ideal situation, but she’d handled worse.

“Shut up, clannie.”

She shot the mouthy one in each knee. The energy blast didn’t break skin, but the rush of pressure to his knees would hurt for weeks. He fell over.

The mob panicked at the crack of the energy shots, and she took that split second to do more damage, diving and rolling forward into a crouch to target a few of Mouthy’s companions. Niko did their part, covering Asala when she went forward to attack hand to hand, disarming who she could.

The moons were bright, but it was still nighttime, and visibility was far from high.

More and more Gandesians kept coming, emerging from the surrounding woods. This was going to get ugly.

“Niko, see what you can do about the car!” Asala yelled.

The Gandesians were trained, but nowhere near her level. Asala doubted any of them were even ex-military. They were easy to take out, and the red pines provided good ground for evasion. She climbed a tree with ease, palms on the sticky bark. This was the closest she was going to get to higher ground.

“Where’d that clannie go?” she heard them call.

She sent a few more targeted blasts toward them. Niko was still in the thick of it, trying to figure out who had the device that was hacking into their car. Whoever it was had to be within a pretty close range to manage what they were pulling off.

Asala watched from her perch in the tree, covering them, shooting at anyone who got near Niko. She took her time. Patient, well-thought-out shots, refusing to miss her mark by even a hair. Whoever this group was, come tomorrow, quite a few of their cohort wouldn’t be able to walk for a long time.

Niko finally found the source of the hack—a young woman just off the edge of the road with a tiny handheld of some sort. With Niko in the way, Asala couldn’t get a clear shot. They’d have to handle this on their own. Asala believed they could.

Their hand-to-hand combat skills weren’t bad, and they’d grown vitally more confident over the course of the mission. They were cautious but not too cautious, their arms up to guard their face, their legs widened in a nice sturdy base, springy on the balls of their feet. They side-kicked twice, knocking the woman off her balance. She still held tight to the device until Niko held their weapon to her neck. Between the dark and the distance, Asala couldn’t make out what Niko said, but she assumed it was something close to drop it or else. Then—

Fuck. Four of the goons popped out of the fray and pointed their weapons at Niko’s head. “Come out, clannie, or we’ll blow your little pet’s brains out.”

They had Niko surrounded. Asala didn’t have a choice. She leapt out of the tree.

Asala inhaled, smoothing out any ruffles she might’ve had in her calm exterior. Composure was key. Fearlessness was the difference between life and death. “I wonder how General Cynwrig would feel about some random boonies in the outermost regions of the planet causing a fucking diplomatic incident over two people on official business by the president of Khayyam,” she said. No differently than she might’ve said it to a lover in a bar, easy and calm.

“You’re bluffing,” sneered one of them.

“Oh, am I also bluffing about that being President Ekrem’s kid?” asked Asala, pointing to Niko.

One of them pressed their gun against Niko’s temple. “You’re a fucking liar, clannie. All of you are.”

“No, she’s not,” Niko said. “Check my ID.”

These seemed like the types who’d carry blood scanners for moments just like this, to discern who was really Gandesian and who was just faking it after years of assimilation. Purity required constant vigilance.

Niko held out their wrist, and one of the attackers grabbed it roughly. He waved the scanner over it.

“Tumal!” he swore as the scan revealed Asala had been telling the truth.

“What does it matter? They’d never be able to prove it was us,” someone said.

Asala held up her comm device in her left hand, weapon still poised and ready in her right. “I have photos of all of you. I hear Gan-De’s facial recognition is some of the best in the system, is it not? A file with your faces and crimes have already been sent to Ekrem himself,” she said. All of this was a lie, of course. She hadn’t even had interplanetary access to call him since that brief contact just before leaving Hypatia, when she’d left the message about the suspected terrorist plot.

Besides, even in night-vision mode, the photos would be grainy. Top-of-the-line facial recognition or not, their attackers would remain virtually anonymous.

To top off the ruse, she pretended to call him, though she was only calling her voice messages. At just the right moment, timing it perfectly, she put her last message from Ekrem on speaker: “What the hell is going on, Asala?” Anyone in the solar system would recognize that distinctive voice.

She pretended to hang up the phone then stared down the attackers. “Let us back into our car so we can be on our way.”

Around her, men and women moaned, clutching various body parts she or Niko had hit. These were hacks of the highest order. She didn’t need their goddamn white flag. She should shoot every single one of them. Gandesian militias were all the same. Sloppy. Bad technique. They learned a few guerrilla techniques from military vets, some formations here and there, but they were too hotheaded and hungry for the kill to have the patience and precision required to be effective soldiers.

“It’s not worth it,” one of them groaned. “Let ’em go.”

Niko wriggled free from the person clutching them and stumbled back to the vehicle. Asala walked very, very slowly to the driver’s side, weapon still out.

“Get the fuck out of here, clannie. Don’t let us find you here again or I’ll turn your tattoos into scars,” one of the retreating boonies spat. It took everything not to change the mode on her weapon and make his brain combust.

Back inside the car, she blew out a long breath as the engine powered up.

“Gods, weren’t those lovely people?” said Niko.

Asala smiled. “Makes you appreciate Shi Shen, doesn’t it?”

Neither Niko nor Asala talked much during the rest of the journey. Energy, will, and motivation had abandoned them days ago. Who could say what made them carry on? Habit, more than anything.

“Wake up,” Niko said.

They wanted to let Asala sleep more—she’d done most of the driving thanks to Niko’s injury—but now they were less than a mile away from the coast, where the cave network began near the Seven Day Mountains. The increasing altitude as they wound through the outlying mountains had taken its toll on them both.

Asala didn’t react.

Niko tried again. “Get up.”

“I’m up,” Asala said. Niko wondered if she’d even really been sleeping in the first place. She had a superhuman way about her. But even superheroes crash.

“All right, so the scanners we got at the safe house should theoretically track heat output. All we have to do is turn them on and set them scanning. They have a range of a few miles and they’ll beep when they check a heat anomaly.”

“What do you mean?” Asala rubbed her eyes and took a measured sip of water.

“Well, it’ll take averages of the heat radiating from a certain area, and then when something is higher than normal, it will beep. That way we don’t have to search all the factory ruins on foot.”

Niko pulled the vehicle up onto a rocky beach. Hopefully, any drones or passersby would think them military due to the scramblers they had running.

“Is it on?” asked Asala.

Niko shrugged. They were familiar with similar tech but not these particular devices. If they put a little effort into it, they’d figure it out, but they were all out of effort. Niko was holding so much in, the internal pressure threatened to expand inside of them until their rib cage cracked open. Shit.

Asala fiddled with the heat-detection device, and finally, the tiny monitor lit up. This wasn’t exactly state-of-the-art technology, but at least it seemed to be on now.

“Well?” she asked.

“It’s scanning. You hold it and I’ll drive slowly along.”

The road didn’t go as far as the caves, and the terrain had grown rough. The heat detector continued to show activity on the screen, so they could only assume it was working.

“I wonder what exactly we’ll find in there,” Niko asked, less out of curiosity and more out of a desperate attempt to stay alert.

“Yep,” said Asala. “Last I heard, it used to be full of squatters, but it’s pretty dangerous, all that old industrial scrap and equipment around. They’re here. I know it. We’ll find them.”

They had been driving for half an hour before the device beeped. “Yes!” said Niko. “Fucking finally.”

“Tell me about it. Does it show where the heat signature is exactly?” Asala asked.

“Yes.” Niko held up the device. The landscape was represented as a series of black curvy lines on the screen. The area that was supposedly generating more heat was circled in a dotted line.

They hopped out of the truck with the scanning device and followed it, climbing uphill over large boulders and rocks, across a patchy bit of dry grassland, and into the narrow crevice that was the entrance to the cave. They had to turn their bodies to the side to enter, squeezing through a tight passageway.

“Do you hear anything?” Niko asked. Maybe the machine was broken. If Uzochi and her team were here and operating the old manufacturing equipment, surely they’d hear noises.

“Shhh,” said Asala, and kept working her way through the crevice until she was on an open, short ledge. She hopped down onto the cave floor and Niko followed suit. She was fearless, and they aimed to be the same. Even if they didn’t agree with everything she did or the way she thought about refugees—they wanted to be like her.

They walked over a rocky stream. “This way,” said Asala. She seemed to hear something Niko didn’t.

Niko checked the scanner. They were going in the right direction. “So, like, what’s our game plan, exactly?” The two of them probably should’ve discussed this before.

“We go in,” said Asala, voice just above a whisper.

“That’s—is that the extent of the plan?”

“Yes.”

Niko stopped. “But what if they’re armed?”

“What do you mean what if they’re armed?” asked Asala.

“Do we shoot them? Because I don’t know if I can do that,” said Niko. “In fact, I do know. I won’t do it. If that’s a problem for you, I’m not going in.”

Asala rolled her eyes. Gods, Niko hated that. Yeah, maybe Niko was a fucking neophyte, but Asala didn’t have to be so condescending all the time. It was Niko’s contacts that had gotten them to this point. Not hers.

Niko inhaled. They had a feeling this wasn’t going to end well, and Niko wasn’t even sure what this was.

“You’re the one who dragged my ass out here. Not the other way around. Just remember that, kid,” Asala said. “Wait!” she called, holding her hand out. “You hear that?”

Niko nodded. Finally, some sign they were on the right track. There was the sound of light chatter just over the moving water. Clicking. Machinery whirring.

They crept slowly through the cave. There were only a few signs that it was anything more than just a tunnel of rocks. More trash than you’d expect to see. An abandoned jacket. The occasional steel beam support.

The two walked through a narrow passageway, and on the other side of it was something like Niko had never seen before. It was a cavern, perhaps two hundred or three hundred feet high, filled with technology they’d never dreamed of. It was beautiful. Symmetrical. It was the first time since landing on Gan-De that Niko knew what people meant by “Fortress Planet.” What incredible architecture built into the structure of the cave, elaborate arabesques, each as functional as it was beautiful.

There were six people in various states of disorganization. Someone was up in what looked like a control room full of computers. The others were working with various parts of a machine and conveyor belt. They were covered in grease, grime, and dust. They’d been here for some time. Judging by the remains of a fire and the smell of beans, they were eating and sleeping here too. Was this really it? Just these six?

“Hey!” someone called out, speaking in Atlan. It was the person in the control room.

They emerged out of the shadow and Niko saw right away that it was Uzochi.

She looked—somewhat like Niko expected her to look. Brilliant. A little scattered. Since the video they’d seen, her hair had grown and was shaggier in appearance, layers of different lengths and bangs long enough to disrupt her vision. She’d grown paler. Lost a small amount of weight. “Who the hell are you? Get out! Now!” she shouted. She picked up a gun, but it was clear she had no idea what she was doing with it.

Still, she got her message across. In many ways, someone who didn’t know how to use a gun was worse than someone who did know what they were doing.

Asala put her hands up, though she still held her weapon in her right hand. Niko knew her well enough by now to know she wouldn’t be relinquishing it.

“Uzochi, you need to put that down,” Asala said. “We don’t mean you any harm.”

She stepped farther into the light, revealing her tattoos. She’d probably done that intentionally to win Uzochi’s sympathies, Niko realized. Clever.

“How do you know my name?” said Uzochi. “Who are you? I swear on my life I will shoot you. I will. Don’t think I’m weak.”

Niko thought no such thing. Asala probably didn’t either. Uzochi’s voice trembled with nerves as she spoke, but she was a woman of purpose, and there was a confidence there.

Niko looked over to Asala. Didn’t she see now that none of this had happened for the reasons she’d assumed? That Uzochi was just doing what she could to protect the most vulnerable people in the system? To protect her work from Niko’s leech of a father?

“We know who you are because we’ve been searching for you for quite some time,” said Asala. The others with Uzochi were frozen in fear, watching the altercation unfold. “We were sent looking for you when the Vela went missing. To save you.”

Uzochi snorted. “The last thing we need is saving,” she said. “And sent by whom? Was it Ekrem? He’s a liar and a thief and a manipulator. Whatever he said about us, it’s wrong.”

“Hafiz told us everything,” said Niko.

Uzochi turned to face them, squinting, hands shaking as she held the gun. “You’re—aren’t you Niko?” Niko startled a bit at her casual use of their name, like they were old friends, and glanced at Asala. If it had registered with her, Niko couldn’t see it. “Ekrem’s your father! Are you part of this?”

Niko shook their head vehemently. “I’m nothing like him. He deceived us just like he deceived you. We only want to figure out what’s going on so we can save as many people as possible.”

“Well, we’ve already got a handle on that, so thanks but no thanks,” Uzochi sneered. “Get out. Get out.”

“We will get out,” said Asala. “But I want you to know that I have this—see if that changes your mind,” she said. She moved her left hand very slowly toward the waist bag she wore and carefully pulled out the cube.

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.

“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.”

Asala stared at them for a moment. “Okay,” she said.

Niko opened their mouth to keep yelling, then stopped, thrown off. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Asala shouldered her pack and headed back toward the path. “You're right. One farmstead and a sketchy channel? We can deal with that. It's a decent plan.” She meant it. Getting word to Soraya first and foremost was smart, and besides, if getting a win helped Niko deal with whatever stick had broken off in their ass, it was well worth a detour. The two of them probably were going to get themselves killed. Better it be due to overwhelming odds or spectacular heroics than a stupid mistake made by a stressed-out kid.

• • •

It was nearly dark by the time they reached the bottom of the mountain, and the bushes they crouched in were wet from the evening damp. The foliage was thick, the leaves irritating. Clouds of insects congregated. Niko watched the bugs weave and sway, unsettlingly reminded of the general's spiders. What a weird thing, having nature remind you of its mimic rather than the other way around.

“Ow,” Niko hissed.

“Quiet,” Asala said, her words barely rustling the air. She had a pair of pocket binos in hand, produced from the sack of gear she'd received in Shi Shen.

“Something bit me.” Niko rubbed the stinging spot on the back of their neck and looked warily at the flying things. “Are any of these poisonous?”

“Venomous.”

“What?”

“Poison's passive. You have to eat it or touch it. Venom's something that something else injects into you. Insects are venomous.”

Niko rolled their eyes. “Whatever. Are there any Gandesian bugs I need to worry about?”

Asala lowered her binos and thought. “You're probably fine,” she said finally, resuming her search.

“Thanks.” That was hardly a help, but Niko had bigger concerns, all of them neatly coiled around their chest and squeezing tight.

Beyond the bushes lay a small compound of five modest houses, and under any other circumstances, they might've seemed inviting. The thick, wild scrub was trimmed in an orderly radius around them, and the glow from the windows looked warm and safe. It was nothing fancy, this place. Even in the dying light, Niko could make out roofs that had weathered, edges in need of repair, garden patches struggling despite evident tending. A place that could be best described as adequate. But it wasn't a shambles. This was home to some, and whoever lived here clearly cared about that.

Those people were the big question right now, the reason Niko was still in the wet bushes with Asala, legs full of pins and needles, slivers of uncovered skin getting bit by who knew what. In those same warm windows, there were silhouettes, undefined yet unmistakable. The ambiguity—the complete unknown—was maddening. How could you judge a stranger by their home, their shadow? The smells of airy spice and fresh dinner, the sound of kids playing—none of that meant these people were friendly . . . or did it? The heavy hunting racks hanging off their vehicles, the hefty shape of an axe resting in a tree stump—none of that meant their owners were dangerous . . . or did it? It was a dice roll, a coin flip. It had also been Niko's idea, and they'd yet to think up a better one.

Dammit.

Asala sighed and lowered the binoculars once more. “I count fourteen, maybe fifteen,” she said, “and that's not factoring in anybody who hasn't been kind enough to walk past a window or out a door.” She offered the binos to Niko. “Tell me there's something here we can use.”

Niko took the binos and peered through. The lenses within scanned their eyes with soft green light, automatically adjusting focus to suit their viewer and raising night-vision intensity to fit the environment. Clear image attained, Niko left the windows and doors behind, and looked instead to the roofs and outer walls.

“Anything?” Asala said.

“Gimme a bit,” Niko said. They looked, and muttered, and looked some more, and—“Hmm.” They sat back on their aching legs. “Hmm.”

“Good hmm or bad hmm?”

Niko scratched a fresh bite behind their ear. “Promising hmm. Maybe.” They handed the binos back over and pointed. “Do you see that barn over there? Or workshop, whatever it is?”

Asala aimed the binos as directed. “Yes.”

“Go up to the roof. Do you see that receiver?”

Asala scanned, and—“Yes.”

“That's a basic satellite link. They're probably using it for weather data. But . . . ” They squinted. “Yeah, I could probably get that to work. Maybe not to Camp Ghala, but . . .” They considered. “Yeah, it'll work.”

“Can you do it from here?” Asala asked, nodding at their hiding spot.

Niko shook their head. “Not with this gear,” they said, angling their head toward their pack. “From the look of it, I'd need to patch straight in.”

Asala swung the binos downward. “There're no windows on that barn,” she said. “I can't see what's going on inside.”

“I know,” Niko said.

“Shit.” Asala sighed again. “Okay, give me a minute to think this through.”

Niko looked upward as Asala studied the compound. A few stars peeked through the patchy clouds. Another night, and Niko might have found it pretty. They slapped a bug trying to stick its face into their neck.

“All right,” Asala said, pocketing the binos and retrieving a light pair of night-vision goggles from her bag. She shifted her weight, still crouched but ready to move.

“We going for it?” Niko said. They put on their own goggles as well.

“Yep.” Asala gestured forward with a flat hand. “We're going to hit the left side of that storage container, make sure nobody's looking out the window, and then continue to the second house. Do everything exactly like I do, and nobody will know we're here.”

“Okay.” Niko got onto their feet, like Asala now had. “You're going to have to give me a minute though.”

“Why?”

Niko grit their teeth. “My calves are asleep,” they said, wincing as their waking nerves made themselves known.

Asala shook her head, but there was a laugh in there, an almost fond sort of scoff. “Your timing is amazing, kid,” she said. “Let me know when you're good to go.”

Niko processed that. The familiarity. The hint of friendly banter. They'd been hoping for a dynamic like that, ever since they'd met Asala in their father's office a million years ago. That sort of easiness was here now. It made Niko feel so much worse.

• • •

Asala waited for Niko's legs to remember how to function. At last, the kid gave her a nod.

“Okay,” Asala said. “Keep it low, and keep it light.” She hoped, as she said the words, that they might beat the odds here. Nimble wasn't the first descriptor that sprang to mind for Niko.

Asala darted forward, whisper-soft on her feet, aiming for the large storage container near the first house. Whatever was in it didn't matter. It was broad, opaque, and taller than she was in a crouch. Everything she needed. Niko slid in beside her, having shadowed her every step to the letter. Asala felt an unexpected twinge of approval. The kid was learning. The field was beginning to suit them, and if Asala had a hand in that . . . well, that was all right.

Laughter drifted out of the house nearby. Muffled voices. The rattle of dishes. Dark as it was outdoors, it was hard to say how much of the light from inside would bleed over their path to the barn. Asala craned her head around the container and looked to the windows. Finally, a bit of luck: someone had closed the curtains. “Hug the wall once we get there,” she said. “Keep down below the windows on the other side.”

She went and Niko followed, skirting past a heap of weatherworn toys and a recently forgotten jacket. They slunk along the house, grass barely crunching beneath their feet. This isn't so bad, Asala thought. She was reminded three seconds later why that was always an immensely stupid thing to think. She peeked around the corner of the house, looked ahead to the next building, and quickly pulled back.

“What?” Niko whispered.

Asala looked skyward, cursing her luck and her own hand in jinxing it. “Take a look. Carefully.”

With trepidation, Niko tiptoed around her, craned their head, and froze. “What is that?” they breathed over their shoulder.

Asala yanked them back. “Don't let it see you.”

Niko looked alarmed. “What is that?” they said again.

“A mobuck.” Asala sighed. She remembered them from her time on Gan-De. A half-ton of crazy on six hooves. The females were fairly common meat-and-leather stock, but the males—if you had the chops to socialize them toward you and yours—were a favored guard animal for folks with more than just a city yard to think about. Asala had been dumbfounded at the idea when she first heard about the animals—surely a carnivore would be a much better choice for home defense? That opinion changed the moment she saw a half-trained mobuck, drunk on hormones and territorial fuckery, run some poor bastard up a tree, then ram against the tree—bloodying itself in the process—until said poor bastard fell out. The mobuck had trampled its victim like the goddamn world was ending until its panicked owner had called it off. Asala very much doubted the human mess she'd seen in the dirt had ever been all right again, if he'd lived at all. She'd never forgotten the mobuck's fur, matted with blood and its own frothy spit. She remembered the whites of its blank herd-animal eyes flashing.

And now there was one about half again that size, twenty feet away, chained to a post that Asala wasn't confident would hold if the stone-brained beast got it in its head to charge.

The horror on Niko's face indicated they knew of the animals. “They're . . . bigger than I thought. What do we do?”

“I'm thinking.” Asala peeked around the corner again. The mobuck was drinking from a trough, unaware of or uncaring about anything else. She had no idea how sensitive they were. Could it see in the dark? Could they sneak behind it? Or would it know they were there the second they moved into its bubble? She thought again of the animal she'd seen in her youth, calming the moment its flared nostrils took in the smell of its owner. “Wait here.”

She ignored Niko's half-formed protest as she scurried back the way they'd came and retrieved the abandoned jacket from the play area. “Here,” she said when she got back. “Put this on.”

Niko took the dewy jacket with a reluctant hand. “This is a kid's jacket.”

“You're smaller than me.”

“I'm shorter than you. I don't think I can get it to fit.”

“Well, it's definitely not going to fit me.”

“Why do I have to—”

Someone entered the room they were closest to in the house behind them. Asala heard a door open and floorboards creak. “Now is not the time to argue,” she hissed.

Niko put on the jacket, grimacing as they did so. “Ugh, gods, there's something sticky on it.” They squeezed their arms into it, undoubtedly busting a few threads. The fabric stretched around their torso awkwardly, seams straining, buttons without any hope of reaching the distant other side. “Now what?” they said.

Asala pointed to the house beyond the mobuck. “Keep your distance, head for there. I'll be right behind you.”

“What?” Niko leaned in indignantly. “Why do I have to go first?”

Asala tugged at the jacket as if she were adjusting finery. “Because now you smell kind of like a friend.”

“Will that even work?”

Asala paused. “I don't know,” she said honestly.

Niko glared. “If it doesn't?”

An excellent question. “We have guns,” Asala said.

“Kind of defeats the purpose of the whole sneaking-around—”

“If you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears.”

Niko scrunched up their face, inhaled through their teeth, and let it all go. They tiptoed out past the house. At first, nothing changed. Asala followed close behind, nearly touching Niko, putting them directly between her and the animal. Best she keep her own scent in the background. Unless this idea didn't hold water at all. If that were the case, they were pretty much screwed.

They took a few steps. A few more. A few more.

In a ripple of fur and muscle, the mobuck turned its head. It looked dead at them, darkness be damned.

The intruders froze. Asala could hear Niko's breath catch and quicken.

The mobuck raised its nose, nostrils widening in the night air. White steam drifted from them as it pulled in their scent. It made a strange whinny, an alien wheeze. The animal seemed confused.

“Keep moving,” Asala said, nudging her companion forward. “Don't give it something to think about.” Her voice was calm. She felt anything but.

The mobuck took a step toward them, continuing to make questioning sounds.

“Fuck,” Niko whispered. “Aw, fuck.”

“Don't run,” Asala said. “You're doing fine.”

A door opened on the side of the house and a woman called out in a common Gandesian dialect. “Bombom? What's got you all riled up?”

“Never mind, run.”

The two dashed the last short way to the back of the house. Asala could hear the rattle of a chain, the stomp of hooves on hard-packed ground, the introductory crescendo of a cervid scream. Then—“Whoa, whoa, boy, hold now. Hold.” There were human footsteps now, and the sweep of a flashlight lit the place where Niko and Asala had moved through just moments before. “Hold, hold,” the woman said as hooves fell impatiently. Her voice was steady, but the same question present in the mobuck's whimper was present in her words. Asala pressed flat against the back of the house, holding her breath. She watched the light arc this way and that, heard the woman walk out into the grass, closer, closer. The light crept toward Asala's boot. Closer. Closer.

The light switched off. “Probably just a grain rat again,” the woman said. There was the sound of patting, palm against flank. “It's okay now, Bombom. It's okay.”

Asala made a sharp hand gesture, pointing them onward and taking the lead. Niko did not need to be told to be quiet.

They continued their shadowed dance to the barn without trouble. Finally, they arrived, greeted by a bit more good luck—the barn was unlit from the outside, and the entrance was unlocked. They slipped inside, barring the door behind them.

“Can I ask a question?” Niko said, wasting no time in wriggling their way out of the too-small jacket.

“Shoot,” Asala said as she took in their surroundings.

“My Gandesian is admittedly garbage, but . . . its name was Bombom, right?”

“So it would seem.”

“Okay.” Niko paused to let that sink in. “Not, like, Killer, or . . .”

“Crusher.”

“Psycho.”

“Hammer.”

“Bloodfeast.”

Asala snorted. “Do we have any alarms to worry about?”

Niko pulled out their handheld and launched a scanning program. “Gimme a sec.” They shook their head as they entered commands. “Bombom. Ridiculous.”

While Niko consulted their tech, Asala used her eyes to search her surroundings. The barn was empty—of people, specifically. As was the case with barns in general, empty wasn't really the word to use here. The lower floor was bursting with workbenches, storage boxes, projects briefly loved and long deserted. Some kind of small vehicle—an autoplow, maybe—rested under a dusty cover, a contrast to the tool cage that stood to one side, whose messiness and clutter suggested it was in constant use.

“No alarms,” Niko said. They looked from wall to wall. “And no wiring box down here.” They nodded at a simple metal staircase. “We'll need to go up.”

Up they went, Asala leading the way. She assessed, then waved Niko forward. “See what you need?” Her question was answered by Niko hurrying straight for a large white box fixed to the wall. Cables ran to it through the ceiling, and a smaller wire trailed from it to some kind of terminal nearby. Asala followed, and examined the terminal desk as Niko unpacked their gear. A live feed of weather data glowed on a monitor. Crop tables and old disc manuals rested around it. She pawed lightly through the titles. Engine repair. Plumbing maintenance. A guide to foraging wild food. A stark contrast to the big cities of Gan-De, with their warehouses of resources and rock-solid infrastructure and people who wouldn't know a weed from a prize melon. The cities had all the stuff, but housed dangerously specialized citizens; small communities like this one knew much and had little. It was hard to say which group would fare better when the cold properly hit. Not that that argument mattered outside of academics. The cold would take them all, eventually. It didn't care about ethos.

“What can I do?” Asala asked.

Niko was already in work mode, eyes fixed on the wires in hand. “Just . . .” They gestured vaguely elsewhere, away from them.

“I got it,” Asala said. She stuck her thumbs under her belt and looked around. Weather desk and wiring box aside, the barn loft seemed to be used for storage only. Must and age filled her nose, but the air was dry, at least, filtered through a dehumidifier in the corner. There wasn't any sort of animal funk. She wandered as Niko worked, idly reading labels on the boxes. She hadn't used Gandesian pictographs in a while—dialect didn't matter; the whole planet used the same symbols—but the words were simple enough. Clothes. Dishes. Clothes. Tent. Batteries. An ordinary attic full of ordinary things. She wondered what these people would make of their uninvited guests with their military tech and guns and otherworldly voices. She wondered what they made of any of it. Camp Ghala was just a concept to them, just as their glorious general was a concept, just as Khayyam and the sun and a galaxy beyond. Why should they care about such things, when there were crop pests to deal with and mushrooms to gather? How could they care?

And how, more important, could Hafiz's people plan to leave people like this behind? The Outers hated the Inners, and vice versa, but what they hated were the few that were visible to them on a day-to-day basis. The faces on the news, the policy makers. The heads wearing crowns. Neither side thought about the places she stood in now, places identical in essence no matter where you went. People like this didn't care about war or politics, not really. They cared about their crops, their tools, their clothes. They cared about cooking dinner and letting their kids play. And that's who the solar system was home to, in aggregate. That's who they were really talking about when they talked about who to save and who to forget. She understood—oh yes, she understood—why the Outers wanted to leave the Inners behind. She wanted to leave Cynwrig, definitely, and Ekrem, probably, and a host of other stuck-up bastards besides. But she didn't want to leave the owners of this barn, whoever they were. They didn't deserve it. None of them deserved it, these planets full of bystanders who could only react to a carefully curated window into someone else's game.

“Ha,” Niko said in a triumphant whisper. They looked up toward the ceiling and sighed with genuine relief. It was the first time since they'd left Uzochi that they didn't look like someone had just shot their dog.

“We through?” Asala asked.

“We're through,” Niko confirmed. “It's a rough connection, but it's secure.”

“You sure?” Asala didn't want to bring a squad of Gan-De's best down on their unsuspecting hosts' heads if they traced a signal back.

“It'll just look like somebody's calling the cops,” Niko said. “Because that's exactly what I'm doing.”

“Sorry, you're what?”

“Last-ditch save,” Niko said. “A local contact I was given in the Gandesian police, in case shit went sideways. One favor only.”

Asala frowned. “You have a contact in the Gandesian police?”

“Contact of a contact, but yes.”

“And you trust this person. This Gandesian cop.”

“I trust my contact.”

Their contact. Always a contact with Niko, always a magical friend in the middle of nowhere. Asala knew governments had people stashed everywhere, but the sheer number of Khayyami sympathizers Niko kept turning up itched in a way she didn't like. She opened her mouth, but she wasn't sure what the question was. She watched Niko hammer away at their keyboard. The look of relief they'd had moments before was starting to dissolve. Asala closed her mouth, and let the itch lie.

• • •

Soraya dropped a cube of soup mix into a mug, waiting for her kettle to boil. She contemplated the faded soup mix box as the water started its quiet roar. Real grasshen flavor! the text proclaimed. Her eyes shifted to the speckled orange cube in the bottom of her chipped mug, looking like sedimentary rock more than anything that had ever spent a life hopping through a farmer's field. It was the third-cousin ghost of a grasshen, so far removed that it barely counted as eating something from an animal at all. Soup mix was a misnomer, anyway. It didn't make soup; it made the starting ground for a soup. Did that still count as soup, if you had nothing to put in it? Soraya thought about reading the ingredients, then thought better of it. Real grasshen flavor, the box assured her. No need to spoil the illusion, flimsy as it was.

The kettle made an odd snap, and the roar died before its time. “What—” she began, but the answer arose in the form of a sharp smell, the acrid sting of wiring gone wrong. “Oh, come on.” She shut her eyes, then wearily disconnected the now-useless appliance from its battery. “Fuck.” This was the last thing she needed. Boiling was the only surefire way up here to make sure everything that lingered in the overtaxed water reclamation system wouldn't get inside you.

With a sigh, she pressed her palm against the kettle. It was warm, at least . . . but warm enough for soup mix? She hesitated, then filled her mug with the almost-hot water. She retrieved a small blue bottle and added a splash of treatment drops as well. The aftertaste they left behind was about as pleasant as sucking chalk, but she'd take that over a microbial war in her gut. Getting sick was not something she had any sort of time for.

The cube disintegrated, sort of. She tried stirring it. Blobs of oil formed on the surface of the liquid. The detritus of real grasshen flavor swirled like silt. She stirred and stirred, and finally gave up, taking a tentative sip. The partially dissolved soup mix did not play nicely with the treatment drops, and the body-temperature water repulsed rather than soothed. But she wasn't about to waste water, or battery power, or even soup mix. There had to be some vitamins or something in it. No way was she pouring those down the drain.

Soraya sat at her desk with her unfortunate drink and began to braid her unwashed hair. It was her turn on the chemshower schedule tomorrow, thank whichever gods were still listening. She'd have to steal time to do laundry as well. The threshold had finally been reached where the stink of laundry dip was preferable to the stink of her own body. She'd feel differently after a few days of dip residue singeing her nostrils, but so it always went, back and forth, back and forth, trading one evil for another.

She shut her eyes for a moment. She thought about tea so hot you had to wait an hour to drink it, hair falling soft and playful between a lover's fingers, laundry dried by the sway of planetary air. She thought about the real flavor of an actual grasshen, roasted in a brick oven and covered with so much rough-ground rub you could barely see the bird beneath. You still knew it was a bird, though, and only a bird. One ingredient, one animal. Healthy and whole.

Soraya listened to the sounds coming in through the walls around her, of movement and voices, the songs of weary parents trying to make their nervous children sleep. They longed for real air and real food too, she knew. And so she drank her piss-warm soup grit, tied off her crusty hair, and worked her way through the stack of requests Ifa had left on her desk before he'd gone home for the night. Licking wounds was a natural instinct, she knew, but it wouldn't solve anything. It wouldn't make anything better.

The idea of bed was starting to appeal when her handheld flashed with an incoming message. She picked it up and studied the alert. No name given, but a secure channel from a source on the ground. Finally. The doubt Asala had cast on Uzochi's work before heading down there was something Soraya was eager to be rid of. She picked up her mug and accepted the call.

The drink had been a mistake, because Soraya nearly choked when she saw the face that had been summoned into her space. General Cynwrig smiled back, hands folded on an immaculate desk of polished wood. Her uniform was pressed, her hair clean, her smile effortless and hungry. “Soraya,” she said. “We haven't spoken before.”

Soraya wasn't sure she'd ever spoken to anyone, ever, because she'd completely forgotten how. “I—”

The general held up her hand. “I am told you are a busy woman, so let me be direct. I assume you've met my friends, Agent Asala and Niko av Ekrem? I know they're down here. I know what they're looking for. I know that you have the ear of everyone up there, and vice versa. And I know about the Vela.”

The room vanished along with Soraya's words, the room and every scrap of hope she'd kept from drifting away. She wet her lips. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

The general laughed. “Come now, I said I don't want to waste your time. Why are you wasting mine?”

Soraya said nothing.

“Very well. You can listen, at least. Given the Khayyami insistence on butting in where they don't belong, perhaps our interests are in alignment. Yours and mine, I mean. Their efforts here aren't good for me, and I doubt they're good for you. Perhaps we can . . . help each other.” Cynwrig looked as if the words pained her, but the smile held steady. “I will allow one ship—just one—carrying you—and only you—to the surface of Gan-De, so that we might discuss this further. Properly.”

Soraya opened her mouth, closed it, shook her head, and leaned forward with a frown. “If you have whatever information it is you're after, what do you need me for? What good am I to you?”

The general gestured at her own screen. “Surely you understand that this is not the best method for discussing delicate matters.”

“And surely you understand that this sounds like a shit-stupid thing for me to do.” Soraya didn't know if her words were born out of anger or hunger or pure confusion, but she let them ride all the same.

The general drummed her fingers. “I understand,” she said after a moment. She pressed a button elsewhere on her desk. “Tell them they're go for launch,” Cynwrig said to someone else.

Soraya swallowed. “What did you do?”

The general laughed again. “Relax, Soraya. I can appreciate your caution around me. I respect caution. I'd do the same in your position. So, as a token of that appreciation, I'm sending up a cargo ship of ration packs. Not the most appetizing of meals, but I assume you can put them to use.”

Soraya could feel her cramping stomach trying to grab on to something of substance in the ingested soup mix, and knew she was surrounded by thousands of others feeling the same thing. She wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth where food was concerned, even if the horse did smell of brimstone. What else could she do here? Who was she, in the face of someone like General fucking Cynwrig? If the general knew about the Vela, if she'd found out about all of that and hadn't blown the entire camp out of the sky, then something else was up. What that something was, Soraya had no idea. But as she saw it, she didn't have much of a choice.

“Food first,” Soraya said. “If it's not poison, I'll come down.”

“I look forward to it,” Cynwrig said.

The call was ended.

Soraya sat staring for several minutes, trying to make sense of whatever the hell had just happened. She hated everything about this. She hated Cynwrig. She hated Asala for apparently getting sloppy. She hated—hated—the fact that the first response that shot knee-jerk through her brain when faced with the bewildering reality of heading down to Gan-De for a chat with its suddenly chummy dictator was maybe they'll feed you down there.

• • •

“I don't like this.” It wasn't the first time Asala had said it, and she doubted it would be the last. They'd left the shelter of the barn for the chill of a grassy roadside, about two miles from where they'd made the call.

“It'll be fine,” Niko assured her. Asala couldn't see their expression, but their foggy breath glowed faintly with moonlight. “Please, trust me.”

They were hidden away behind an unmanned fuel station along the main road leading away from the mountain. Floodlights haloed the vehicle chargers, but Asala and Niko kept to the scrub and shadows, awaiting the cops.

A patrol vehicle approached, pulling into the light. The Gandesian seal emblazoned on the side was unnecessary. No civilian alive had ever owned a ride with that much armored plating. The engine came to rest, and four officers exited the cabin. They faced the fuel station, expecting their contacts to be somewhere behind the chargers—not, as they were, watching from the side.

The officers stood in formation, clad in protective vests and too heavily armed for Asala's liking. Friends or no, this wasn't doing much to ease her concern.

One of them stepped forward toward the chargers, hands on his belt. “The air is dry, but I bet it'll rain tomorrow,” he said.

Niko opened their mouth to reply, then stopped. Even without touching them, Asala could feel them tense.

“What's wrong?” Asala whispered.

The officer looked around, waiting for a reply. “The air is dry, but I bet it'll rain tomorrow,” he repeated.

“What's he look like?” Niko breathed.

Asala got the best look she could through the night-vision goggles. “Gray hair, bald spot, a nose that didn't heal right.”

Niko shook their head hard. “That's not my contact,” they said. “And that's an old passphrase. That's not the one currently in use.”

“Shit.” Asala drew her gun as quietly as she could. “You sure? Absolutely sure?”

The kid nodded grimly.

Asala's thoughts raced. Four of them, one of her. Not the best odds, but not the worst she'd had, either. She took a deep breath, the kind she took before taking the shot. She let herself parse the given data, the numbers, the surroundings, the—

Ah. Yes, that could work. It was a terrible idea, but . . . still. Could work.

She dialed her weapon to a lethal setting. “Do you remember what I told you, about brave and stupid going together?”

Niko frowned. “Yeah.”

“I'm about to do one of those,” Asala said. “Stay back.” She looked around. “Way back.”

Niko didn't need to be told twice. They pulled back, way back into the grass.

Asala began to move back herself, one foot behind the other. She needed distance, if she was going to pull this off. She needed—

A branch snapped beneath her boot.

The officers turned toward the scrub, drawing their weapons.

Amateurish, she chided herself. Nothing for it now. She popped up out of the scrub. A quartet of gun barrels converged in her direction, but she was faster, she had the advantage, and her aim was elsewhere. It was the lesson she'd learned way back when, back during her training. There was a time and a place for an out-and-out barrage—but sometimes, the most effective thing in the world was just one good shot.

She pulled the trigger. A sparking bundle of energy let loose, traveling through the air, past the cops . . . and right into the containment block for the charging stations.

Boom.

The containment block exploded in a blossom of blue-tinged light. The officers didn't have much time to scream. Not that Asala saw the fusion burst when it hit them. A half-second later, and she wouldn't remember any of it.

She'd only been out for . . . not long, she gathered, but it was enough for everything to have changed. She was on her back, for one, and it felt like she'd broken a bush with her body (or maybe the other way around). And there was Niko, right up in her face. Whatever had happened, they were way closer to her than was necessary.

“Asala!” Niko was yelling, shaking her by the shoulders.

“Fuck, get off,” she said, weakly shoving the kid back. “Okay. Important lesson.” She rolled herself into a sitting position, and took a moment to assess the metallic taste in her mouth. She tentatively pressed various spots on her torso, and was relieved to feel nothing wrong beyond the surface. There was blood in her mouth, yes, but not deep blood. She'd just bitten her tongue. She spat, and continued. “If someone gets knocked out, that means something fucked up their head. And if something fucked up their head”—and boy, that little stunt really had, given the throb that had already set up shop—“shaking them is a bad call.” She paused. “I'm assuming they're dead and that you're not doing this when there are people behind you about to shoot us.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then.” Asala reached out, asking for a hand up. Niko obliged, and she got to her feet. She groaned. She was okay. She felt like shit, but she was okay. Pain would pass, like it always did.

Part of the fuel station had caught fire, but that was the least of her concerns. She eyed what was left of the ambush squad. “You said your contact was good,” she said. “Quick ride to the spaceport.”

“They must've traced my contact,” Niko said bitterly.

“It's not your fault,” Asala said, heading for their vehicle. “It happens.” She opened the door and began to dig around the cabin.

Niko hurried after her, gingerly sidestepping the charred bodies. “Is stealing a cop car a good idea?”

“No,” Asala said. She climbed into the driver's seat and looked around for the go button. “Can you see if any of the chargers are still working?”

Niko slowly looked over their shoulder, then back to Asala. “You—you do know you blew the containment hub?”

“I know,” Asala said, irritated at Niko in lieu of herself. “But I don't know how long it will take us to get there, and we are sure as hell not stopping to fuel up. So, if there's anything here I didn't break, that would be helpful.”

The car booted up as Niko started timidly searching through the smoking wreckage. A comm screen lit up on the center console, its piercing light making Asala wince. She fumbled to dial down the brightness, and as she did so, she noticed that the driver—she assumed the former Officer Broken Nose—had left their handheld synced to the vehicle. A message was still glowing on-screen.

Contact made between mole and possible insurgent on surface. Mole has been sentenced to interrogation and execution, effective immediately. Given communication methods used and message content, target is allied with Ghalan terrorists. Apprehend target alive and return to base for interrogation and possible custody. Target will expect a passphrase. Use attached intelligence report for further details.

Asala accessed the intelligence report. There was the apparently out-of-date passphrase, yes, but there was also plenty of dirt on Officer Busa, the aforementioned mole and, presumably, Niko's contact. They'd been watching her for a long time—almost a year. Gandesians were nothing if not patient when war was on the line. Asala kept reading, looking for the evidence of the officer's ties to Khayyam. But it wasn't there. Khayyam wasn't there, not in name or in suggestion. Asala's frown deepened. They didn't suspect Busa of passing information to Ekrem's underlings. No, they suspected her of working a lot closer to home than that.

They suspected her of working with Hafiz's people in Camp Ghala.

Asala sat all the way back into the seat. She looked out the window at Niko. Clumsy, floppy-haired, eager-to-please Niko. The kid who wanted to save the world. The kid who'd barely blinked when Hafiz had dropped their coldblooded plan at their feet, who'd been nearly apoplectic when Asala hadn't let them stay to help Uzochi with her one-way trip, who had all their contacts and passphrases and never, ever wanted Asala looking over their shoulder, because—they'd say, with those big, innocent eyes—they just needed to focus.

How could she have been so stupid?

And just as important: How could Niko?

Niko was saying something to her as she got back out of the car. Something about one of the chargers being salvageable, but it would take a bit. They sounded pleased about it. They looked proud. Asala didn't hear the words, though. Her implants were on and undamaged. Her head still hurt, but was improving. Even so, all she heard was static as she walked straight for Niko. As Niko's smile faded. As Niko asked a question. As Niko looked confused. As Niko took a step back. As Asala hit Niko hard over the head with the butt of her gun.

• • •

Cynwrig didn't need to pace now. She stood at her window, hands clasped behind her back. The people outside couldn't see her, but she could see them behind the shielded glass, milling about the city square with everyday industry. She watched a fruit vendor guiding her robotic cart through the crowd, an imperfect line through a busy throng. Then, from nowhere, another person appeared, their trajectory unnoticed until they stopped the cart. A conversation was had. Goods were exchanged. Two random figures in a crowd, their respective intentions unknown until their paths crossed at last.

The general imagined her puzzle pieces moving in a similar fashion. They were out there, all beginning their drift toward one another. At that very moment, or one quite close to it, a transport was carrying the clannies' champion down from her junk heap perch in low orbit—and from there, to Cynwrig.

She'd been bluffing, of course. An old conceit, and dead easy. Throw out a few key words you suspect will make a person squirm—Vela, in this case, and Ekrem's lackeys—say nothing of substance, and let them fill in the blanks for you. She didn't know this Soraya beyond name and reputation, so it was impossible to say how quickly answers would come. Cynwrig had no real appetite for interrogation, but neither was she squeamish about it. One way or another, she'd arrive at an answer.

There was another possibility, too, some potential icing on the cake. If her hunch about Asala being on the surface was correct, and if the Hypatian mercenary got wind of Soraya coming down . . . well, if Cynwrig were in those shoes, that'd be bait worth chasing. After weeks of fruitless efforts, Cynwrig's job was suddenly laughably simple. If she wanted to solve the puzzle, all she had to do was sit back and wait to see what the pieces did.

• • •

Pain was the first thing Niko registered. Pain, and movement. Their head throbbed, the world spun, and their empty stomach lurched. They moved to touch their head, but found they could not. They pushed through the throbbing, forcing their vision to clear. Handcuffs. Someone had cuffed them. They looked past that. Upholstery. Metal. A vehicle.

Shit.

They sat up quickly—too quickly, their inner ears informed them—and while yes, they were in the back of the police car, there weren't any officers to be found. There was only Asala, in the driver's seat, her eyes flicking toward Niko in the mirror and brimming with silent fury.

Shit.

“Asala,” Niko said. The skin of their lips crunched oddly as they spoke, and they cautiously ran their tongue out. Blood, dry now, crusted from . . . down their nose, it felt like. They must've hit their face when they fell down. Gods, but they'd never had a headache like this. “Asala, what's going on?” They shook their cuffed wrists. “What the hell is this?”

Asala's answer came smooth as ice and every bit as dangerous. “Do you work for your father's government?”

There wasn't a good word for the sound that came out of Niko's throat. A laugh, in part, but a choke, too, and a scream that lay waiting in the background. “Of course I do. You—is your head okay?”

Wrong move. Asala's jaw tightened. “Don't,” she said. “Don't insult my intelligence any more than you already have. I'm going to ask you again. Do you work for your father's government? And I'm not asking which office you go to in the mornings, or which cafeteria you spend your meal breaks in. I'm asking about your actual work, your agenda. Your contacts.” She swerved slightly to avoid some roadkill.

“I don't know—”

“Last chance.” The look on Asala's face made Niko want to run. Asala had always been intimidating to them. She'd never been frightening.

Niko considered the cuffs around their wrists, the lump on their head. The gun at Asala's side. Niko suddenly realized Asala had stripped them of everything but their clothes. No weapon, no tools, no handheld.

They were screwed.

With a deep breath, Niko jumped off the cliff. “I'm working with the Order of Boreas.”

Asala nodded once. She said nothing further.

Niko waited for shouting, indignation, something. They waited a long time. Asala drove on in silence. “I can explain,” they said.

Asala stared ahead, hands on the wheel.

“I was going to tell you,” Niko said. “That was the whole plan. Get off Khayyam, tell you who I was really working with, find the Vela armed with that knowledge. We thought—we thought you'd understand. You're Hypatian, you're a refugee. If anyone was going to be sympathetic, it'd be you.” The pain flared, and they winced. “But you were . . . you were hard to read. I couldn't figure out how you'd feel about it. You were focused on the job, so we did the job. I thought, soon as we met Hafiz, you'd be on board with it. You'd remember how things are out there, you'd understand that this is the only way.” The words were pouring out of Niko now, relieved to be set loose. “But you . . .” They shook their head. “I don't understand. After all we've done to you. After all we're still doing. We don't deserve to be saved, Asala. My father—my father is guilty. My planet is guilty. We ruined this system, and the people who got hit by that mess first, we don't care about them. We sit there in our painted halls, sipping water by the gallon and not caring if it spills, debating whether or not we should take in the people left homeless. Left homeless by our hand.” They raised their head despite the pain, echoing the conviction that had won them over from the start. “The Inner planets made this mess. We should have to sit there, first-row seats, and feel the hurt we spread to others. If we get a second chance, if we have the technology to bounce out whenever we want, we'll just do it again, and again, using up every star like the galaxy's a fucking buffet. So, save the innocents. Leave the guilty behind.”

Asala drove on.

Niko was unnerved by her silence, and felt their words push out with more urgency, more fear. “I understand that you're pissed. But if we can talk this out—”

Asala laughed to herself—a dry, spiteful sound.

It was Niko's turn to be quiet. “Where are we going?” they asked after a while.

“To get Soraya. It'll be a long drive.”

The break in silence was jarring, as was Asala's answer. Niko blinked. “Soraya?” That didn't make sense. “She's down here?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

Asala nodded at the message console on the dashboard. “Lots to read here,” she said with a pointed glare. “And the nice thing about Gandesian military vehicles is, they let you track other friendlies.”

Niko frowned. “Why is she here? How is she here?”

Asala laughed again. “Like I'd tell you even if I knew.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I'm going to get her, and get back to Camp Ghala.”

Niko swallowed. “And me?”

A shrug. A casual expression. “I haven't decided yet,” Asala said. “But you made one good suggestion in all that bullshit.” Her eyes met Niko's in the mirror. “Leave the guilty behind.”

• • •

They hadn't fed her since she'd come down planetside, but for once, that was the least of her worries. Something didn't feel right.

Soraya shifted uncomfortably in the backseat of the transport. It was a military vehicle, of course, exterior stamped liberally with the seal of the general's party. She didn't know what she was worried about. She wasn't in a prisoner wagon. She wasn't cuffed. The driver was armed, but that was hardly a surprise. Perhaps that was the problem. Nothing about this was surprising, in the context of what Cynwrig had said in that weird-ass call. Maybe the general genuinely wanted to negotiate after all. Maybe this was the political shift they'd all been waiting for.

Or maybe, Soraya thought, she was going to get shot the moment this car got to wherever it was going. Couldn't rule the possibility out.

She looked out the window. Muted moon cut through waifish cloud. It had been a long time since she'd seen the sky from this way around.

“Can we pull over for a minute?” she asked the driver. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

The driver, who looked like he enjoyed this assignment about as much as dental surgery, said nothing.

“Please,” Soraya said. “It's been hours since the spaceport.”

The driver's mouth shifted, as if he were sucking something from between his teeth. “I have to clear it,” he said, and began tapping text into the console screen.

Bureaucrats. Couldn't even pee without jumping through hoops.

Time passed, and a reply arrived. “Ten minutes,” the driver said with a grudging look. “They've authorized a stop at a place up ahead.”

The place in question was an abandoned rest stop beside an equally abandoned vehicle service center, presumably meant for farmers and the like on drives such as this. The paint was dilapidated, the lights long dead. Soraya had assumed their hard-won stop would feature a bathroom maintained by humans instead of nested in by rodents, but apparently not. She doubted it was worth holding out hope for running water. Another time in her life, she would've been disgusted, but life in Camp Ghala had a way of tempering expectations. “I'll just be a minute,” she said. She opened the transport door, and nearly moaned.

Fresh air.

A strong breeze whipped her hair, and she stepped out slowly, reverently, into the open night. The wind rushed over her eyelashes, her nostrils, a hard caress that made her breathe clean. She could practically feel her blood rush with the influx of oxygen born pure from the surrounding trees, a respite from the recycled molecules that had traversed a thousand lungs. It was better than sleep, better than sex. She closed her eyes, transported by the thrill of an atmosphere.

The moment shattered with a sound from the driver. Soraya's eyes shot open. Another vehicle had pulled through the fog, coming to a stop in an aggressive angle across the road.

Soraya's driver stepped out of the car and unholstered his gun. “Hey,” he called. He sounded confused, and Soraya felt the same. The headlights of their vehicle illuminated a police sigil on the car ahead. The driver called out again, holding his gun at his side. “You need any help?”

Soraya wasn't entirely sure what happened next. She hit the dry ground the moment an energy blast lit up the night. Other shots followed in deafening disagreement, and Soraya felt her body curl instinctively.

There was a candy wrapper caught in the grass, right by her face. She stared at it as shots flashed and echoed. It seemed out of place, out of sync. A bright remnant from a vanished moment, its joy long since departed.

Then: silence. Silence was worse, almost. Silence meant someone had won. Soraya tried to steady her breath, but it had quickened past her control.

“Soraya!” someone called. Not just someone—a woman, Hypatian. She spoke in a low voice to someone else, the edges of her words sharp. “Get out of the car. Do not try anything.”

Soraya slowly got up and peeked over the edge of the car. She exhaled deeply as her suspicion was confirmed. “What the fuck,” she snapped. She stood up and raised her hands in indignant query. Her driver was dead on the ground, blood already pooling. She stepped over his body, continuing toward her . . . her what? Her savior? Her saboteur? “What are you doing here?” She noticed Asala's tagalong lurking in the background, and her questions doubled. “Why are they cuffed? What's going on?”

“You're welcome,” Asala said irritably.

“For what? I came here freely; I'm not a prisoner. Cynwrig wants to negotiate.”

Asala laughed short and loud. “And you believe that?”

Soraya prickled. She was in no mood for some smug soldier's shit. “Of course not,” she said. “But the alternative was to wait in the dark to see what she'd do. She knows about the Vela.”

“Oh fuck,” Niko said.

“Don't be stupid,” Asala shot at them, far more angrily than the situation warranted. “She doesn't know a goddamn thing. She's fishing.”

Niko looked away bitterly but gave no reply. What had happened here?

Soraya shook her head, trying to choose one question at a time. “How do you know?” she asked.

“Because if she knew what we know, she'd be combing the planet, not wasting her time inviting you to tea.” Asala put up her hands. “No offense.”

Soraya shrugged tersely. “All right,” she said. “But whatever it is you've got in your pocket—and I assume you're going to tell me—it's only half your problem.”

Asala turned her head slowly toward Soraya, looking as tired as any person could. “What's the other half?”

Soraya shifted her gaze to Niko. “Your father,” she said.

Niko's eyes widened. “What about him?”

“I overheard it in the spaceport. Gandesian pilots being dispatched, a threat found on long-range scans.” Soraya arched her head back and drew in a deep breath. She was going to breathe as much as she could in the short time they had. “I don't know what ant nests you two have been kicking in recent weeks, but somewhere along the way, you got the Inners' attention.”

A shadow crossed Asala's face. “How much attention?”

“All of it.” Soraya let the good air inside her lungs go. “The Khayyami fleet's inbound.” She laughed. “Funny how everybody suddenly gives a shit about us now that we've got something worth taking.”

Episode 8

Gravity

SL Huang

The news that the Khayyami fleet was coming should have made Asala feel something. Betrayal, fear, anger, something. Instead, her brain swallowed it into numbness, drawing conclusions detached from emotion.

Ekrem was coming for the cubes. He’d have the wormhole generators from Uzochi and Hafiz, or he’d blast them and their people into craters. Gan-De wouldn’t stand by while their space was violated either. This battle was about to rain blood out of the skies.

The whole system had thus far been blithely willing to ignore the pending apocalypse, but now that a single, shining chance at a future dangled before them, they were going to slaughter each other in order to snatch it.

It should have awoken something in Asala, the inescapable conclusion bearing down on her that this was about to become a massacre, that a system-wide war would decimate the population before anyone had a chance to escape. But maybe it was all too big. Or maybe she’d used up all her feeling on Niko.

Niko. Fuck. She hadn’t thought it was still possible for something to gut punch her that way. How had she allowed an inexpert child to get under her armor? She should never have permitted it. She should have remembered: People inevitably betray, disappoint, fail.

This was her fault. She’d allowed Niko to get close. She’d failed to rip out the grudging fondness that had been growing in her like a fungus.

“Asala?” Soraya said. “What’s going on with—with you two? Why is Niko . . . ?”

“They’re a traitor.” Oh, and that was all coming together in Asala’s head like a riddle that made her want to vomit. From the very beginning, back on Khayyam—Niko scrambling on their handheld, and every interface in their vicinity suddenly going dark. Niko conveniently finding glow on the assassin and conveniently pointing the finger toward cartels out of Khwarizmi. Niko knowing how to hack General Cynwrig’s spiders in less than no time at all.

Because they’d already hacked them, and sent the hack to the rebels.

They’d sounded so personally injured at how inexpertly the hack had been used. Now she knew why. And then all the “malfunctions” on the Altair, and mysterious contacts crawling out of every crack in Shi Shen—how had Asala not realized?

“They’re a toady for Hafiz,” she said to Soraya. Her voice sounded as cracked and cold as the night air. “They have been all along.”

“I’m not a toady,” Niko objected. “I only wanted—I want justice. My planet has been killing yours for centuries. We’re all guilty, and so are Khwarizmi and Gan-De. The people we’ve been stomping all over deserve to build a civilization without us strangling them. If my dad gets his hands on even one of those cubes, I guarantee you he’s going to try to re-create Khayyam on the other side, a clone of the same old power structures—”

Asala drew her gun, thumb going to the dial that was still set to maximum. Niko stopped talking and flinched away, stumbling back in the light of the police car’s headlamps, their cuffed hands coming up reflexively in front of them. Fury clawed up Asala’s throat. How dare they question her ethics, that she would stoop to murder when they were no threat? Murder was what Niko had tried to do.

Beside Asala, Soraya’s eyes had gone as wide as moons.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Asala said. “I don’t have time to babysit you. Or to arrest you.” Besides, what authorities would she hand them over to? Gan-De, whose law enforcement would be all too happy to whip Asala behind bars too? Ekrem, who had also lied to her, who was bearing down on them all to wage world-ending war, and who would probably give his wayward progeny no more than a gentle bureaucratic slap anyway? Asala was no stranger to the politics of family.

“I’m going to uncuff you,” Asala continued to Niko. “Then I’m going to take Soraya in one of these vehicles and make sure she gets dropped off on Camp Ghala safely, with the intelligence we gathered here. And you’re going to take the other and get out of my sight, and I am never going to lay eyes on you again.”

Instead of the relief Asala had expected, Niko’s face crumpled. Her anger sparked again. They should be fucking grateful.

“Wait,” Soraya said, sounding panicked. “What do you mean, drop me off? Great Mother, Asala, you have to help us!”

“I am helping you. I’m giving you our intelligence,” Asala said. “What else do you expect me to do? Take on the whole fucking Khayyami fleet?” One person couldn’t make a difference anyway. She was giving Soraya what she needed to evacuate as many of her people as possible before the bloodbath. What else was there?

Soraya flung a hand toward Niko, her eyes brimming with pain and loss. “It’s not right, what Uzochi and Hafiz are doing—no, Niko, it’s not. Yes, there’s been oppression and complacency, but that doesn’t justify genociding hundreds of thousands of people. I don’t know how you can think—” She swiped a thick coat sleeve across her face and turned back to Asala. “Help me steal one of the cubes. Just one. We’ll offer it to Khayyam in exchange for them calling off their attack. Their scientists can reverse engineer it and figure out a way to build their own in enough time to evacuate.”

“They’ll come after you—” started Niko.

“So you and Hafiz and Uzochi, your solution is to kill everybody?” Soraya cried. “What, we murder everyone on three planets, because we’re afraid they’ll come after and destroy us? That can’t be the humanity we choose. I won’t. I have to—we have to have faith. Asala, please, you have to help me try.”

Asala’s gloved hand clenched against the grip of her gun. The whole planetary system in jeopardy, and now Soraya was putting it all on her? Her whole life, she’d known enough to let go of what was happening in the Outer Ring, because what could she do? Not a damn thing. She had to draw her boundaries, turn her back to protect her own sanity.

And now Soraya wanted to dump the fate of the entire fucking solar system on her.

This isn’t my job, she wanted to scream. Not my responsibility. Not my problem.

“Please,” Soraya said. “Please. Uzochi and Hafiz and the camp can go first, right now, but they can’t be allowed to kill the people who stay behind—and Great Mother permitting, maybe we can even stop a war.”

Asala couldn’t answer. This was all too big, an impossibility that couldn’t fit in her head, and she didn’t know who she was working for anymore, or where her loyalties should lie, or whether she even had a choice in any of it.

The military vehicle Soraya had arrived in exploded.

The air bludgeoned into Asala, ratcheting her back against the boards of the building behind her. Shrapnel sliced at her skin and dust spit into her eyes. She tried to reverse momentum and flip back forward toward the enemy—her enemy—where was her enemy? Her fingers scrambled to clench her gun, to raise it and fire back.

Out of nowhere, the stinging whip of a cable lashed out, knocking the weapon from Asala’s hand. Three of her fingers went instantly numb, and pain shot up to her elbow. Out of the grass, out of the dust, from around the siding of the cheap roadside rest stop rose snaking silhouettes—metallic, cable-like tentacles that climbed into monstrous shapes, surrounding them all in a writhing mass, crisscrossed in the darkness by slashing searchlights.

Gandesian battle AIs. Asala had never seen this type before. They’d slithered close while she was wasting time talking, while she’d been distracted by a swamp of overwhelm and anger.

And beyond the robots—Asala touched her implants, edging her hearing up a notch—the rumble of more military vehicles rolling in out of the night. A lot more. The whole scene blazed in white artificial light now, flashing painfully against Asala’s retinas, their enemies’ need for stealth gone.

“No sudden moves,” said a vibrating alto. Asala blinked her vision clearer. The sharp-edged black creases of Gandesian military uniforms solidified from among the AIs, carrying the Mark 2 military-issue rifles of Gandesian soldiers. One stepped forward to loom over her.

Asala sought out Soraya and Niko through the crisscrossing shadows—Soraya seemed all right, Niko dazed. Niko had hit the ground with their hands still cuffed, and the cut on their head that had been stitched over in Shi Shen had split open, sending blood sheeting down their face. They were trying to push themself up, but had barely made it to a seated lean against the building. Asala hardened herself against sympathy.

“This is why I was called down here, isn’t it?” Soraya said. She fumbled to sit up too, her hands raised and shaking. “You were watching. You knew Asala would find me . . .”

“An astute observation.” The new voice floated through the dust and smoke and flame—flat, hard, oblivion crushed into a steel point. The tall form of General Cynwrig strode slowly out of the debris, manifesting from the shadow and relief of her troops like white-haired death. “I knew I could get you to lead me to something, and I suspected that something might be . . . her. Though I admit I didn’t expect it to happen quite so quickly or conveniently.”

She drew her sidearm and pointed it at Soraya.

Soraya’s breath hitched, and she flinched away.

Fishing, Asala reminded herself. She called Soraya down here fishing. “If it’s the Vela you want, we don’t have it,” she called out.

“Oh, I’m far beyond the Vela. I’ve since received a far more interesting intelligence report.” She looked back down her nose at where Soraya hunched on the ground. “Wormholes. What marvelous technology. Did you really think you and Hafiz could hide this from us? And now Gan-De will have these ships . . . and this future.”

Asala’s gut went leaden. Not just fishing, then, at least not anymore. Cynwrig knew.

And that made one more player who would go into the upcoming slaughter beyond reason, convinced no level of human life lost would be too high a cost. Not when weighed against the magnitude of what Uzochi possessed.

Cynwrig abruptly flipped up her weapon and retrained it on Asala, her eyes glittering black. “I know one of you can tell me where these remarkable ships are on my world. Which shall it be? Who wants to say?” She snapped her aim back to Soraya, then to Asala again, and her speech became a singsong. “Hana, mana, mona, mye—who shall speak, and who will die?”

The gun landed on Niko.

Cynwrig’s smile slashed her face cruelly. “Or maybe I’ll just kill this extra one now, to show you how serious I am.”

“Stop!” The word tore out of Asala before she’d decided to speak. She tried to order her thoughts, to plan a way out of this—but how could she, when the stakes for Cynwrig were so high that she’d care about nothing else? “You know Niko’s father is President Ekrem,” she tried. “The Khayyami fleet is almost here. If you kill them, you lose a, a vital bargaining chip . . .”

Cynwrig took one step closer to Niko, drew back her hand, and pistol-whipped them across the face. Niko yelped and fell, their chin hitting the dust. Cynwrig crouched and drove the muzzle of her weapon hard up against their temple.

“This is a new world, Agent Asala,” she said calmly. “One in which Khayyam will shortly become irrelevant. I will say this only one time. Take me. To. The ships.”

Keeping her hands raised, Asala got slowly to her feet.

She wasn’t equipped to make these decisions. If Uzochi had the technology or Cynwrig had it, what the hell difference did it make? Both were going to leave 90 percent of the solar system to die. She was being asked to choose between one genocide and another—taking a stand in either direction was a moral illusion.

And she sure wasn’t going to sacrifice their own lives for it.

Niko whimpered against the ground.

“Please,” whispered Soraya next to her, and Asala knew what she meant.

• • •

Niko stumbled to keep up, blinking away tears and blood and dust, the cold stinging against their swollen face. The soldiers had zealously taken to the task of keeping the business ends of their weapons on Cynwrig’s designated hostage, and the twisting, whip-like appendages of the battle AIs with them somehow also seemed to orient on Niko as though hungry. Death itself seemed to lean in from all sides, ravenous, just waiting for Niko to step wrong or breathe wrong, and shattering their concentration every time they tried to form a coherent thought.

Or maybe that was the head injury. When Cynwrig had hit them, they hadn’t blacked out again, but their head throbbed so hard they felt it in their teeth and eyes, even worse than back in Shi Shen. The world felt woozier too, as if Niko were seeing it through frosted glass, or as if this were some sort of dream that wasn’t connecting to itself.

Not a dream. A nightmare.

General Cynwrig’s threat seemed to cycle again and again through Niko’s stuttering mind like a broken vid. She’d raised her weapon and their eyes had fastened on her face, its planes carved in remorseless cruelty, and all Niko could see was that fucking vanilla puff from the Altair and Cynwrig talking about her grandson and all they could think was and now she’s going to shoot me, she’s going to shoot me without even a thought.

But she hadn’t. Because Asala had spoken up and multiplied the nightmare by a thousand.

Just like that, Asala had coolly agreed to lead General Cynwrig to the caves where Uzochi had been building her ships. Truthfully, as far as Niko could tell. At first, Niko hadn’t even been able to register what was happening, and when they caught up, they’d clung to the hope that Asala’s subterfuge had always been good. But when she’d pointed Cynwrig toward the right direction and told her accurately how long it would take them to go by vehicle, Niko’s hopes had crusted up and crumbled to nothing.

Cynwrig’s people had dragged Niko up then, leaving their wrists secured in front of them in Asala’s handcuffs—Niko was pretty sure the troops had been snickering about that—and trussing Asala and Soraya similarly, strapping their hands palm to palm to escort them all toward the vehicles.

Asala was leading Cynwrig to Uzochi. Giving Cynwrig the ships. The wormholes. The way out.

Everything the general wanted. And all because of Niko.

Niko had never felt so helpless. So turned around. They’d only ever wanted to help, to do what was right . . . Had they ever truly known what that was? Guilt gnawed at them, even though when they tried to claw past the pounding and unsteadiness in their brain and think, logically and ethically, they couldn’t trace back to any place they thought they’d gone exactly wrong.

Except Asala. The hurt and betrayal in her eyes when she looked at Niko . . .

They tried to tell themself they hadn’t had any choice. They’d made the right call at every turn, protecting the cause. And then they remembered the look in Asala’s eyes again, and everything twisted in on itself, stabbing ugly and acrid from their aching head down to their stumbling feet, until Niko didn’t know the right answer anymore.

Now everyone outside Gan-De might die, all because Asala couldn’t condemn Niko to execution at General Cynwrig’s hands. The general would capture or kill Uzochi, take the cubes, wipe out Hafiz and the Order if they got in her way, and then she’d take her own people and hers alone through the wormhole toward the possibility of future generations. Gan-De had only ever been for Gandesians—Cynwrig would put her planet first and only.

Could Asala really do that? Sacrifice the potential of Hypatia’s grandchildren because she couldn’t bear to see Niko shot in the head? Niko, the well-meaning traitor who’d inadvertently tried to kill her? I’m not worth it.

The idea unfurled in Niko’s head in a terrifying pronouncement of power: They could change this future. Change it by not being a liability.

By not needing protection, or pity.

Be the sacrifice instead of requiring it.

The plan took over their brain in an unholy mix of fear and righteousness. It was like staring into a black hole. For a few moments Niko could ignore the pain in their head and wrists, burning only with the knowledge that this would, for the first time, unequivocally be the right path.

Cynwrig’s people shuffled them onto some sort of caterpillar-wheeled armored vehicle, the first in a convoy of tanks that were all much bigger than the transport the AIs had blown up to ambush them. The air inside was stale and close, and very dry, but at least lacked the biting cold of outside.

Niko would have to go at Cynwrig herself. They’d been glancing around at the soldiers and scraping back into their apprenticeship memories, trying to catalogue the weapons the rest of the troops were carrying, and the general’s sidearm was the only one they could be pretty certain would be lethal on first blast. Some model of sear weapon, if Niko was remembering right—utterly painful and flesh-chewing, and massively effective even if it didn’t hit dead-on.

They tried not to think about that.

Voices drifted back to Niko—Soraya talking to Asala. It sounded like all she was saying was, “Please.”

Niko would give them that opportunity.

Cynwrig was near the front of the space, nearer Asala and Soraya. She wasn’t paying attention to Niko anymore, leaving them to her soldiers. Niko shifted slightly to clear the angle. Their muscles were liquid, their mouth dry. This was it. This was—gods, they were about to die, would their father even know or—

Don’t think. Just do it.

Niko planted one foot back against the bench they were seated on, took one more hitching breath, and rocketed forward. A battle scream tore from their throat. Cynwrig’s silhouette filled their vision—blade-sharp with shorn white hair—turning impossibly quickly, her weapon coming up. Niko couldn’t turn back now if they wanted to. The muzzle filled their vision, a chasm to fall into, and then the world flashed bright and slammed into their back. Agony blossomed across their chest and shoulder, and they were still screaming, screaming and couldn’t stop.

The world was upside down and inside out, with soldiers looming everywhere in Niko’s vision, towering huge against the ceiling above them.

Then the butt of one of the soldier’s rifles came at Niko’s face, and all they could think was, I’m alive. I’m still alive.

I’ve failed.

• • •

“Stop it!” cried Soraya. “Stop it, please, stop—”

“We’re taking you to the ships!” Asala yelled over her. She was no stranger to violence, but this—beating the shit out of a cuffed prisoner, out of Niko—

Niko. What did you do?

They must have known they couldn’t hurt Cynwrig, not cuffed as they were, not with only a thimbleful of training compared to the general and trapped in a tank full of her soldiers.

They hadn’t been trying to assassinate her.

They’d been trying to die.

“Stop,” Cynwrig said, with no particular volume to it, and the soldiers abruptly stilled and straightened, withdrawing to the sides of the vehicle.

Niko’s still form lay sprawled on the floor, their face a bloody mess. Cynwrig’s sear gun had flayed their shoulder and left arm into a raw, pulverized mass, like meat crushed to grounds by a butcher.

“Let me try to stop the bleeding,” begged Soraya.

Cynwrig gave an indifferent jerk of her head and turned away. Soraya crouched and awkwardly tried to fold Niko’s shredded coat over the worst of the injuries with her strapped hands.

Niko wasn’t moving. Asala watched for a few long moments, guilty bile stirring in her stomach, to verify they were still breathing.

“How much farther?” Cynwrig said blandly.

Asala swallowed back her reaction and glanced down at the navigation panel. “Not far. Steer east about three degrees.”

And maybe once there, she and Soraya would find their opportunity for escape. Asala had been watching and looking for that window since they’d been taken. She’d only need a moment. Cynwrig could take whatever Uzochi had, as long as Asala and Soraya could save one small piece of it—and, preferably, get themselves out unharmed.

Of course, now it would be damnably hard to try to get Niko out with them.

Asala’s eyes crept back to the floor. Soraya was stanching the worst of the bleeding, but Niko was almost unrecognizable, their features swamped with blood and eyes almost swelled shut. Their eyelids fluttered slightly.

She tried to be angry at them, for almost dying, for making it that much harder to escape when they all needed to—hell, she tried to stoke her fury from only an hour ago, when she’d wanted to pound Niko’s face into a wall herself for what they’d done to her. But where her anger had been, she now felt only a void.

Niko, stupid, good, idealistic Niko, had just tried to get themself killed for her and Soraya. They’d halfway managed it.

She turned away.

“Ah. The old factories in the Seven Day Mountains,” Cynwrig said. “Clever. I take it we’re arriving.”

Asala glanced down at the readouts. “Yes. We did as you asked.”

The armored convoy strained up the slopes, tree branches scraping the sides of the vehicle. Finally, they shuddered to a halt. The soldiers poked at Asala with their rifles, and she stood to climb out.

Cynwrig pointed her weapon at Soraya. “You. Take the kid.”

“Wait! Don’t,” Soraya pleaded. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere—if you move Niko now, it could—”

“Kill them?” The general raised her eyebrows. “What do you think I’m going to do if you haven’t brought me to the right place?”

Asala’s hands tightened into fists, straining against the binding straps. The guards prodded at her again, this time jabbing hard enough to bruise, and she forced herself to climb up through the hatch and then down the sharp grating of the steep trap steps.

The sun had crept over the horizon while they drove, and the red pine forest rose around them, jagged rust-colored spikes stabbing up against the lightening sky. Asala’s boots crunched against cones. Across a needle-carpeted clearing, the same yawning opening she and Niko had found fissured the mountainside.

She tried to steady her breathing. Watch. Wait. Find a window . . .

Behind her, the soldiers had cut Soraya’s bonds so she could help a barely conscious Niko down, with soldiers shoving at them none too patiently from behind. Asala wasn’t even sure if Soraya was helping Niko or mostly carrying them. Other armored vehicles from the caravan rolled up behind and around, and more soldiers and robots poured out with faceless precision. The huge, octopus-like AIs that had burst out of the grass had accompanied them from where they’d been ambushed, an unstoppable force all by themselves, and the air vibrated with the arrival of quadcopter bombers and hover drones in the sky overhead. Asala cast her eyes forward and back—Cynwrig must know the layout here, and the air support was amassing to cover the whole cave network, blanketing the sky across the mountains. Asala had no idea where Uzochi had planned to launch from, but at this rate, anywhere she tried to burst from the ground, she would hit an armored wall.

General Cynwrig was not taking any chances at losing this technology. Of course she wasn’t. She’d brought an army.

Just do what you planned, Asala tried to direct herself, fighting off a swell of helplessness. What you always do. Look for the opportunity, and take it.

“Well, hello there,” called an amplified voice.

Around Asala, the soldiers immediately stiffened to attention, rifles socking up against shoulders. The AIs seemed to do something equivalent at the same time, whipping around toward the threat, prepped and menacing.

A hidden opening was rolling back in the mountainside. Much larger than the crack Asala and Niko had squeezed in through. And the woman striding toward them from the depths did not seem the least bit perturbed by the crosshairs of death amassed across the mountains. Her long coat swirled around her and her feet made almost no sound on the springy needles, and she held something aloft in one hand—something that, even at this distance, made Asala physically sick to look at. A box of writhing, endless matter, like the cubes but not, some sort of inside-out device that made every instinct of Asala’s stand on end.

Uzochi.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she called. She had some of the same agitated air as before, but now it felt cracked, bent to the edge of what any person could withstand. “I’m glad you’re smart enough to put a pause on your killing machines, General. My ships aren’t here anymore. We’re well ahead of you.”

She stopped. Raised the thing she held in both hands above her head. Her hands shook, but somehow it didn’t look like fear—more like exhilaration.

Cynwrig held up a fist to her troops and stepped forward. “I’ve heard you’re worth as much as your ships all by yourself. You made a mistake staying behind, no matter what that is you have.”

No, Asala thought. This is no mistake . . .

“Oh, this?” Uzochi’s face bent in a humorless smile, the smile of someone who has broken too many times to ever be properly afraid again. She twisted her nauseating box in the air, and she stood against the whole Gandesian army like a hornet facing down giants. “Do you like it? It’s my own little homemade gravity bomb. You know how our wormhole drives are made—that much energy, it’s so very easy to make it destructive.”

Asala was close enough to see Cynwrig tense.

“As for staying behind,” Uzochi continued, “I don’t know if I know how to have fun with my science anymore, General. But this, I think might be something to see. Maybe it will help me remember.”

Everyone moved at once.

Cynwrig saw the jaws of the trap just as it closed, and whirled to give an order to her troops, but Uzochi was faster, bringing the sickening gravity bomb in her hand straight down as if to smash it into the forest floor. At the same time, Asala launched herself at Cynwrig, because they might all die this second, but if they didn’t, this was her chance, maybe her only chance—

Uzochi’s bomb hit the ground, and up became down, and the mountain went sideways.

Asala’s precise tackle somehow missed Cynwrig by more than a meter and rolled her out onto dirt and pine needles, her bound hands making it impossible to catch herself. Everything was falling in the wrong direction. Around her, soldiers hit rocks or earth or tree trunks, their weapons flying, and AIs nosedived into the loam. The shock wave seemed to swell as it blasted from the epicenter, crumpling and rolling the tanks, tearing colossal robots in two as half of them fell one way and half another. Trees splintered down the middle as if they’d been hit by lighting, crashing through the chaos and bleeding showers of scarlet needles.

Above them, quadcopters yawed and fell out of the sky, or fell up, up and then down down down until they smashed into fire and the ground shook. The mountain rumbled as if an avalanche were choking up from the depths. Boulders tore free and crashed—some into each other, others flattening frail human flesh or flailing robots, and still others tumbling up and off the tops of cliffs into the sky, as if they were plummeting off the edge of the world.

Asala pushed against the dirt, trying to get up against the feel of a giant hand pressing her to the surface. Her mouth choked on soil and pinesap. A rifle had landed near her; she heaved and forced herself into a roll along with the way the world was tilting until her scrabbling hands found the grip.

The only people still moving were the ones who had been closest to Uzochi: Asala, Soraya, a handful of soldiers, and Cynwrig. Asala managed to roll halfway up, though it felt like she was fighting at least six gees hauling her sideways, and pulled the trigger on the few staggering Gandesian troops. Even with the ground going off its axis, she managed to take out three with her first five shots.

Niko was down, their prone form unmoving in the shadow of the crumpled tanks, with Soraya on her hands and knees beside them. Asala tried to maneuver her aim line around them to find the other three soldiers, but hit her knee hard on the dirt again. Two shots went wild, but the third found a mark.

A screech sounded behind her. Some sort of impossibly fast, blade-like scooter zoomed out of the caves, riding the crosswinds of the gravity waves straight to the epicenter, where Uzochi stood, calm and unaffected. She swung a leg over and threw a grim smile at the Gandesian army she’d just single-handedly destroyed.

Cynwrig snarled and lurched after her, but Uzochi wheeled the scooter around and darted away. The residual effects of her bomb caught at her, too, but she rode into them like a windsailer, undulating down the mountain until she disappeared.

Asala was finding it easier to stand. She twisted to take in the remaining threats—behind her, two soldiers left, Soraya now on her feet and tackling one of them. And in front of her, face gnarled into a rictus of hate, Cynwrig swept around and bore down, sear gun in hand.

Asala’s center of mass was too far off-kilter to aim, and she still felt like she had to lean into the shifting g-forces. But she dove to close the distance and whirled the butt of the rifle to slam into Cynwrig’s sidearm. Both of their weapons pinwheeled away.

Cynwrig’s palm came up in a sharp uppercut, and Asala tried to duck and block, but withher hands still strapped palm to palm she only managed to make it a glancing blow. She reeled back. Cynwrig swarmed her.

Asala couldn’t think, couldn’t plan, only react.

Clumsily protecting her face with one elbow, she brought her knee up and snapped out a kick, catching Cynwrig in the midsection and taking the woman to the ground. Asala threw herself bodily on top of her, driving down with knees and boots, clubbing with both fists where she could. Cynwrig clawed back and rolled them both, socking Asala in her eye, sternum, throat.

They fell apart. Asala fought for breath, but she didn’t have time, Cynwrig was about to fly at her—

Except she didn’t. She rolled to the side and grabbed for her sear gun.

General and gun came up in one move, snapping into place to aim directly at Asala.

Asala felt her body start to dive. She felt herself try. But she was too late, she knew it in that moment, her fate crystallizing before her with the dead certainty of long experience.

One of the smaller troop transports thundered out of nowhere and slammed into Cynwrig, sending her flying. The general sprawled flat in the dirt meters away, fingers twitching.

“Come on!” yelled Soraya from inside.

Asala cast around quickly, but didn’t clock any dropped weapons near enough to grab on her way in. She staggered to the transport and half-fell inside. Niko was draped in a seat, unconscious, their wounds reopened and oozing.

“Cynwrig,” Asala managed to spit out. “She’s not dead . . .”

Out the windshield of the transport, Cynwrig started to drag herself up. Reached for her weapon.

Soraya’s face flattened into a thin line, and she punched a command into the interface. The transport lurched forward.

Faster than Asala would have thought possible for someone who’d just been leveled by two metric tons of moving metal, the general dove out of the way, rolling out to track them with the weapon she’d managed to scoop up again. Asala ducked instinctively, but the transport was armored like the larger carriers, and lethal fire flashed uselessly against the back of it.

“There are reinforcements coming in now,” Soraya said, fast and urgent. “This wasn’t the whole Gandesian military, just a good chunk of it. Uzochi must have known they’d be going after the ships. Great Mother, she was probably the one who leaked the intel! Then destroy them all before they come after her ships in space, win the first battle just like that—”

“Later,” Asala said. “Where are we going?”

“Into the caves. I don’t think we can make it anywhere else before they get here. Uzochi was working on ships here—there has to be something left, right? Can you—what can you fly?”

“Anything,” Asala said shortly. Over the years she’d piloted everything from bare-framed solo scooters up through a commercial cruise liner—it wasn’t likely they’d stumble across something she couldn’t figure out.

“This is bigger than just the cubes now,” Soraya went on, and Asala thought she wasn’t understanding right, because how could anything be bigger? But Soraya was continuing. “What Uzochi did to Gan-De here is barely going to make a difference, not with the orbital defense platforms and the drones Gan-De has up in space. Uzochi and Hafiz—they had started locking me out of things, but the plan was always to take Camp Ghala through the wormhole with us first. Uzochi’s rescue ships must be headed there, and that means . . . that means . . .”

Her voice sawed into silence. The transport sped them into the black chasm of the mountain, the light cutting out as if a switch had flipped. Running lights sprang to life automatically, just in time for Asala to see the transport tilt drastically away from crashing into a rock formation. Soraya had set the speed parameters higher than was safe.

Asala didn’t need her to finish what she’d been saying. The conclusion hung heavy and obvious in the silence. Everyone in Camp Ghala was about to die.

“Do you have any defenses?” Asala asked.

“Are you kidding?” Soraya’s voice climbed like it was a joke. “You saw what we’re dealing with up there!”

“Ships, then?”

This time Soraya hesitated. “I could scrounge maybe two or three dozen spaceworthy ships that have some type of weapons capability, but to fly them . . . We have cargo pilots? They know how, at least . . .”

Three dozen ships, flown by green pilots. Against the entire Gandesian orbital defense on one side and all the force Khayyam could bring to bear on the other. Camp Ghala wouldn’t just die. It would barely whimper as it was crushed.

How had Uzochi and Hafiz ever thought this would work? They must have always been banking on their 1 percent chance of getting through, otherwise content with going out in a blaze of glory.

Asala had known others like them. Most of them were dead. And they’d taken a whole hell of a lot of people with them.

But never this many at once.

“I’ve spent my whole life protecting refugees.” Soraya’s voice broke. “This can’t be the—we can’t end like this. Uzochi wants to save Camp Ghala. Let her. We’ll still try to grab a cube to keep behind. I’ll find a way, and I’ll stay, and then someday everyone else can go too. Khayyam and Gan-De can find a way to work together, I’ll make them, if only—”

Whatever stupidly idealistic thing she was about to say, it was cut off when the transport lurched, wheeling around a corner and into a huge open cavern.

No. Not a cavern. A hangar.

“Slow down,” Asala said. “Can you turn up the running lights? This looks like what we want.”

The cavern was still half-natural rock with the floor smoothed into a stone pavement. The shapes of older-model ships—some in pieces—cluttered the edges of the wide space.

Asala frowned. “This place looks like it hasn’t been touched in decades. I thought Uzochi was building her ships here.”

“Who knows how extensive these caves are?” Soraya said. “There are probably a dozen shipbuilding facilities in here. Are any of these flyable, or not?”

“There,” Asala said. “That one. It’s a racing dart. If anything will get us a chance to punch through the orbital defenses, that’s it.” More important, it looked mostly intact.

Soraya tapped the transport’s interface, and they sped forward so fast Asala briefly wondered if Soraya had just sent them into a flaming crash with the tiny aerodynamic ship before they jolted to a stop right next to it. Asala turned, dreading trying to move Niko, but Soraya caught her arm so hard it hurt. “We need you. Lead the defense force for us. Save Camp Ghala.”

Nothing can save Camp Ghala.

“I was ground trained and deployed,” Asala said instead. “I’m not who you want for orbital warfare.”

Soraya’s grip tightened. “You’re all we have. Even if you can hold them off for a few minutes—in those few minutes, maybe a few more people get out. Innocent people, Asala.”

Dayo’s face sliced at Asala’s memory again, unbidden.

Dayo, who still might be somewhere on Camp Ghala, lost between the bureaucratic cracks. But even if she wasn’t . . . the clanners of the Thoroughfare laughed and hugged and bartered in her mind’s eye again, the smell of jinma, the shouts of Hypatian slang.

Maybe this was the one small way Asala’s planet could live on, light-years away, in another solar system, far from the people who had left them to die.

She’d never wanted to be part of this fight. But if she turned away now . . .

What was the point of making a decision that would leave her empty the rest of her life? Even if it was the smart one?

There was only one answer she could give.

“Fine,” she said to Soraya, shaking her off. “I’ll lead your suicidal defense. Now go find the hangar door—there must be one. I’m going to see if this rust bucket still has enough juice to run the starter sequence.”

• • •

Strapped in one of the cramped seats of the ancient Gandesian racing dart, Soraya concentrated on a cracked interface panel and tried not to watch Asala’s piloting. Instead, she got on the nets with Ifa and Mangatjay, fighting to boost the old ship’s comm speeds while she frantically tried to sort out everything they would need. Ships. All the ships they could get. Pilots. Anyone who had ever held a stick in their life . . .

And an organized evacuation plan, because Hafiz sure wasn’t going to have one. Docking ports cleared or jerry-rigged for Uzochi’s ships, disaster preparation that should have taken years torn through in less than forty minutes as they shot up from the surface. Asala hadn’t been kidding that the dart was fast, even as old as it was. The acceleration changes as they dipped through low orbit made Soraya want to vomit, but somehow they managed to twist through Gan-De’s orbital defenses with barely a singe across their bow.

Soraya figured it didn’t hurt that the Gandesian military—not to mention its leader—was probably still in mild disarray down on the surface.

Ifa met them at the gangway, wearing a headset and juggling two handhelds. “Soraya! We’re trying to scramble everything you said. I’ve got a zillion things for you. How long before the ships get here?”

“Last tracking I pulled said we’d beat them by at least an hour,” Asala grunted behind her. She’d lifted a still-unconscious Niko in her arms and carried them down the ramp behind Soraya, her face an expressionless mask. Niko’s face was slack, their chest barely moving, and their pallor had gone gray beneath the blackly crusting blood.

Ifa’s eyes lingered on Asala and Niko a little nervously.

“They’re on our side, I promise,” Soraya said. Too much to explain; Ifa would have to trust her. “And we need a med bay for Niko right now. Tag in Jadyn and tell her any med tech we have, use it. I’m authorizing everything, understand?” She hated to admit the order had a calculation behind it, but . . . whatever Niko’s true loyalties were, Soraya was going to be smarter about it than Cynwrig, and Asala had been right that Niko offered useful leverage against Khayyam.

But for once it was the decision she wanted to make anyway. At least she could justify it. She’d had to make too many calls to preserve resources; just this once, she could save a life without being weighed down by careful consideration.

“Okay, got it. Um—you two—Jadyn says she’s headed up to meet you now,” Ifa said to Asala, pointing down a hallway. “Head toward the Thoroughfare and she’ll grab you into the med center.”

Soraya nodded them away, her mind already dashing to the next thing. “Ifa, walk with me. What have you found for the defense force?”

“Twenty-eight ships we’ve scrounged so far that have some kind of weapons, but none of us know anything about how good they can stand up to the Gandy robots out there. Like, I can’t find anyone who’s an expert on it at all—it could be we only have five ships that’ll work, or none.”

Soraya wouldn’t be able to tell either. “Agent Asala is going to lead our people. She can cut ships from the team if she feels they can’t stand up to enemy forces.”

Ifa cast a quick glance back the way they had come. “And you’re sure she’s, you know, okay and stuff?”

“I’m sure. We can trust her.”

Whatever lingering suspicions Ifa had, Soraya’s firm confirmation was enough for him. His expression cleared, and he turned back to his handhelds, keying in information double-time.

Soraya didn’t add that in all likelihood the defense force would fail anyway and none of this would matter, but the only other option was not to try. She didn’t have what Khayyam or Gan-De wanted, so she had no power to negotiate, even if Cynwrig or Ekrem would have wanted to. Uzochi and Hafiz were taking them screaming into the abyss, and she could only try to mitigate the damage on the way down.

This war was coming no matter what she did. All she could do was push at the scales with one tiny finger and hope she could make a difference.

She turned her stride toward her office, moving so fast Ifa had to trot to keep up. “I want real-time updates on Uzochi’s ships piped to me,” she instructed to Ifa’s rapid nods. “Our equipment here should be able to pick them up by now. We’ve got to have people queued and ready. If this devolves into a riot, we’ll lose everyone. And I need information on where Hafiz is at all times. They cannot be allowed to run this show—what?”

Ifa had stopped. He stared at the handheld in his right hand, his brown eyes wide, for a few seconds looking every bit the young child he was.

“Ifa, talk to me!” Soraya barked.

“It looks like—it looks like it’s only one ship,” Ifa said, strangled. “And it’s not coming here.”

“What?” Soraya couldn’t connect what that might mean. Uzochi had been down on Gan-De building ships—Soraya and Asala had been in the factories, and Uzochi had said she’d launched the ships. This didn’t make any sense. If Uzochi was only out for herself, why not just escape on the Vela? She and Hafiz had always proclaimed they’d be taking the camp. They’d promised Camp Ghala’s freedom.

Even among all the other lies, Soraya couldn’t wrap her brain around the possibility that they would leave the refugees to die too.

“I’m not sure . . .” Ifa’s forehead wrinkled as his fingers zigzagged on the screen, trying to find information.

“Give me one of those.” Soraya grabbed the other handheld and did the same. Ifa was right. The real-time tracking they were getting of Uzochi’s ships—or ship; she must have been sending out false transponder signals to make it look like a fleet—showed clear on the handheld. Now that the signal was closer, they could detect it as only one ship after all. And Soraya wasn’t an expert on orbital mechanics, but she knew the lanes from Gan-De’s surface to Camp Ghala, and Uzochi . . . Uzochi was pointed well away from the camp, toward an empty region of space.

What in all the blazes? Uzochi must be saving herself and her people, and fuck the camp, she’d let them all go to hell in the sights of Khayyam and Gan-De.

Soraya hadn’t thought her despair could mount any further.

The handheld flickered in her grip.

“The nets—” Ifa said, smacking the side of his handheld, and then both their screens lit up to show none other than Hafiz. Their eyes sparked with wild abandon, and their mouth was contorted in a ravenous smile.

“Greetings, Camp Ghala,” they boomed, and the sound came from every interface panel, every screen. “I have marvelous news for you all. We are about to escape this doomed system and build our own new world! Suited to us, made great in the image of Hypatia, Eratos, and poor, extinct Samos. I have procured technology that will rescue us from our dying sun.”

They reached down below screen level and came up with cupped hands, cradling none other than one of Uzochi’s vomit-inducing cubes, its insides swirling into everything and nothing. Hafiz stroked the top of it like they held a small furry creature instead of something capable of tearing open the fabric of space.

“Gentlefolk, this strange device has been created by Uzochi Ryouta, daughter of the exalted Vanja Ryouta herself, and it is our salvation. With these, we shall open a tunnel through space and time to a promised land, one not ruled by fear or ice or the cruel grip of planets who would leave us to die while they wallow in their riches. My people in the Order of Boreas are distributing these cubes all over Camp Ghala, to every ship that can fly free and traverse space, so that all of you may follow. Come with me to found a new land, a land of hope, a future for your children and grandchildren. Come with me and claim our destiny!”

The image winked out.

“Fuck,” Soraya spat.

Uzochi hadn’t been building ships with the cubes inside them. She’d been building the cubes alone, and she’d already smuggled them here. Through Hafiz.

Who now had control of them. Uzochi and Hafiz had been three steps ahead the whole way.

Fuck, fuck, fuck—Camp Ghala didn’t have more than a handful of spaceworthy ships, even counting paltry weaponless cargo boats. Not unless you included the camp itself. The rooms and halls they’d painstakingly kept bulwarked against deadly breaches every day, with blood and sweat and bullheaded desperation.

Hafiz had known exactly what they were saying. Ghala’s own residents would slash it to pieces from the inside, and heaven help anyone left among the shards.

The air had begun to vibrate around her and Ifa, shouts and pounding feet and exclamations. All Soraya’s hopes of preserving order shriveled and fled. Camp Ghala was about to become a stampede—a stampede to break itself apart and race after a power-hungry leader’s nebulous promise.

• • •

Niko woke disoriented.

They were in some sort of med bay—where? What had happened? All they remembered was diving at Cynwrig, and then the certainty that they had failed . . .

They pawed at the medicated wraps across their chest and shoulder, wincing when they tried to bend their left arm. Everything was stiff and achy, but the tickling itch was familiar. Someone had given Niko nanite shots.

Niko nodded to themself, satisfied by matching sensation to expectation. A full thirty seconds later they started guiltily. They were in the Outer Ring. The health care that was available on any corner in Khayyam . . . they knew it often couldn’t be come by out here, for blood or money. Which meant someone had used precious resources to heal Niko ahead of anyone else.

A few months ago, they might not even have realized.

Memory flooded back, and they scrambled for an interface panel, desperate to orient themself. It only took a few minutes of scrolling network traffic for Niko’s eyes to widen, their breath quickening in their still-twinging chest.

Hafiz. Uzochi. Father and the Khayyami fleet. General Cynwrig, swooping up from the planet. Soraya, commanding into the void, frantically trying to set up a paper-thin line of defense for the very people who had betrayed her, because her only focus was on saving innocent lives to the end.

A flashing notification popped up on the screen.

Niko stared at it for far too long before realizing it was their notification. From a spider search they’d set up ages ago on one of their accounts, before even leaving Khayyam. The search had finally untangled something.

They sat up so fast their whole body throbbed in protest. They had to go find Asala.

• • •

Soraya’s office had devolved into chaos.

She shouted into three different screens, trying to track everything on three more and failing miserably. Hafiz’s people were apparently installing the cubes on ships for their own loyalists, but also tossing them out to random followers with no rhyme or rule. Fighting had already broken out across the camp. Reports poured in of Hypatians getting stabbed or shot by the Gandesian security forces. Reports came in of riots, dead bodies—dead Gandesian guards, dead Boreas rebels, dead refugees.

“Ifa! I need a team to cut Hafiz’s people off from where the defense ships are prepping. Mangatjay, do we have more exact intelligence on where Hafiz is smuggling the cubes in from? Dammit, I want to speak camp-wide five minutes from now. If Hafiz can . . .”

Hafiz had appealed to the people’s thirst for survival. Maybe Soraya could appeal to their better natures, convince the people to police their own violence, to reach out and help their neighboring clans evacuate so that the maximum number of people could try for space and Uzochi’s future before the camp broke apart in orbit.

“Soraya?”

“Not now—Niko?” Soraya hitched in the midst of seven different trains of thought. “You’re looking better.”

“Sorry to bother you, but I’ve been trying to reach Asala, and the nets are pretty jammed up. I can’t seem to raise her.”

“She’s probably on the defense-force comms. We put them on their own communications grid; it’s more encrypted—or not much more, but anyway, it’s the best we could do. She’s going to come back through here any minute now on the way to launching; you can catch her in person.” Soraya turned back to her screens. “Niko, I’m sorry, I need to—”

“I think I can help.” Niko limped in without asking and began tapping at one of the screens. The display inverted itself into a stream of code. “Is this—never mind, I got it. I can improve the encryption net, but signal speed is going to be the higher priority. Where’s the defense force’s IFF protocol?” At Soraya’s blank look, they smiled slightly. “Identify-Friend-Foe beacons. Right now the defense force is going to shoot itself out of the sky accidentally. I’ll slot something in fast. How long before they launch?”

“Twelve minutes,” Soraya said. She knew she was staring—she didn’t have time to stare—but she couldn’t help it.

Niko gave her another quick, lopsided smile, their fingers still moving. “I just finished an apprenticeship with Khayyami intelligence, remember? I know some things.”

More than anyone else, it sounded like—including Asala, for all her skill in the pilot’s seat. Soraya recovered herself, thinking fast. “Go down one level and find Mangatjay. Tell her you’re replacing her as the point person for the fleet, on my instruction. You don’t need to wait for my authorization; do whatever you can—everything.” An impossible hope burst in the back of Soraya’s brain. “Niko, do you think you can hack the Gan-De orbital weapons platforms? Interfere with their signals or something?”

“Um.” Niko stalled like a surprised groundmouse. “I can try? Can your people get me some equipment?”

“You’ll have everything we can give you. Niko, this—it could save us.”

Niko blinked a few times. Then they nodded so decisively it was almost a salute and grabbed one of the handhelds, working as they hurried toward the door.

But then, suddenly, they turned back. “Soraya, the thing I need to tell Asala—can you?—it’s important. Just give her this file.” They swiped a directory folder from the handheld they held over to one of Soraya’s. “It’s—I found her sister. I haven’t looked through it all yet, other than to see that yes, she’s alive, but Asala—she should know before she goes out there, that she’s got family to live for. I . . . It’s probably better coming from you anyway. I don’t think she wants to talk to me right now.”

“I’ll tell her,” Soraya said. “I promise. Now go. And, Niko? Thank you.”

Niko gave her another shy smile—as far as she could tell, the most genuine one she’d seen from them—and was gone.

“Soraya?” Mangatjay popped up on one of her screens. “I have camp-wide for you anytime you want it. Everything’s haywire right now, so we’re going to have to hold the signal strength. Tell us you’re going before you do.”

“Give me a sec.”

She muted her screens and tried to order her thoughts. She’d never had Hafiz’s charisma, but holding this camp together had always required her to be half-diplomat. She could do this. Hold them all together at the very end, with words, and drag them across the finish line into the chance at a new life . . .

A shadow leaned in at the door. “Soraya? Anything last-minute for me?”

It was Asala, on her way to launch.

“Oh—yes. Niko found—” She pawed at her screens, locating the file.

And froze.

Dayo Sikou, contracted Hana avett Medeina, read the filename.

Niko wouldn’t have known what that meant, but Soraya did. And in an instant, in a heartbeat, all her last wild hopes for the inhabitants of Camp Ghala teetered on the point of a needle. The only time a person’s name was ever listed that way was when they had entered the Gandesian military via an indentured visa.

Indentured visas to Gan-De hadn’t been offered in years, and even when they had, they’d been few and rarely available—and, as far as Soraya was concerned, pure poison. They’d offered little more than a life of slavery as cannon fodder in the Gandesian armed forces, and ruthlessly required stripping the entrant of all their prior humanity, including their name. For all that the visas had been a toxic human rights violation on paper, the slots had been highly coveted and rapidly snatched up, with excessive bribes changing hands to get first in line . . . and Great Mother, but Soraya understood. She could never judge someone for that shred of hope for something better.

Dayo had risked that hope. She’d been renamed Hana, Hana avett Medeina, the Gandesian matronymic for one who is a ward of the state—an ancient word for the mother planet serving as label for bastard, orphan, other. And now Soraya was asking Asala to go out and fight in a battle where she might end up shooting down her own lost sister.

She should know. Soraya should tell her, now, so she knew what it would mean to take up leadership of their defense force. But if Asala knew . . .

Camp Ghala already only had the barest chance at survival. If Asala changed her mind, said no . . .

If Asala said no, they would have no chance at all.

Soraya quietly put a hand over the corner of her screen, hiding the file from view. “Never mind. It can wait. I’ll see you on comms.”

“We’ll blaze out in strength, that our clans become safe,” Asala quoted with calm confidence, and was gone.

Soraya hunched like she had just been socked in the stomach. She knew the line—everyone did; it was from one of the most famous plays written in the Outer Ring, a classic historical told in verse and chorus. And it was about fighting and dying, not for patriotism or ideals or duty, but for family.

Asala thought she was protecting the only thin proxy of family she might reach for, the refugees of Hypatia. Instead, Soraya was sending her against her own.

Maybe someday a poet would write a tragedy about this day. In it, Soraya was sure, she would be a villain.

She took a shaking breath and keyed Mangatjay to take her camp-wide.

“Attention, Camp Ghala. This is Soraya. Many of you know me and have learned to trust me. I’m asking you to trust me one more time, to take you through this day so we can all find a future, together. Think of your neighbors. Think of . . .” Her tongue twisted in on itself. “Think of your families. We will rebuild this community as one, but only if we do not tear each other apart today, this last day.”

She glanced at the small inset picture of her face that was being broadcast all across the camp, her tired eyes and skin sagging in fatigue, and wondered if anyone else could see the lie of her.

She only had to live it one more time.

She cleared her throat. “I’m asking the following of all residents of Camp Ghala . . .”

Episode 9

The Battle of Gan-De, Part 1

Yoon Ha Lee

As a sniper, Asala had grown accustomed to relying on herself. She'd spent hours, sometimes days, in Khayyam's petty internecine battles, lying prone while insects crawled over her and bit or stung any exposed flesh, miserable beneath the unrelenting sun and praying the dust wouldn't foul her equipment. In her head, she kept a tally of every person she'd ever assassinated, alone or as part of a team. As a Gandesian poet had said, The stars may be numberless, but we number our dead.

Even so, as a sniper, she hadn't been completely alone. At first, the rest of her unit had made remarks on how the stuck-up clannie was keeping to herself. Then she'd been reassigned to Captain Ekrem's company. She hadn't trusted him, exactly; she'd learned the hard way as a refugee that kindness or consideration often carried the bite of condescension. But Ekrem had made a point of treating her as a competent member of his company—he'd been quick to grasp how good she was with a rifle—and she still remembered how he'd brought her an approximation of a Hypatian sweetcake to congratulate her when she made corporal. The cake had tasted too sweet, and crumbled too readily, without the characteristic delicate fragrance of the flowers used to flavor the genuine article. But in all her years on Khayyam, only Ekrem had thought of such a gesture. And gradually, because of his leadership, Asala had learned that she could trust her comrades.

Here, she had no such surety. After all the years she'd relied upon Ekrem, he'd betrayed her faith in him. She did not know what she would do if she had to face him in combat. It wouldn't be the first time a Khayyami president had taken to the field; most of them came from the military for a reason. With any luck it wouldn't come to that, but she knew that there was no such thing as good luck in a battle. Not the kind you could rely on, anyway.

The silence of the racing dart's cockpit was a dangerous deception. For all her skills as a pilot, Asala had never fully adapted to combat in space. The ships' walls and the dark distance between you and death made it too easy to believe in the illusion of your own safety, to forget your soft and bloody body in that bloodless expanse. As a sniper, Asala knew that just because you couldn't see danger didn't mean it wasn't about to shoot you in the head.

She started the preflight checks, forcing herself to pay attention to every guttering light on the displays. That wasn't reassuring, but since this was the ship she had, this was the ship she had. No sense wasting energy cursing the situation. Better to take reasonable precautions and move on.

Time to see if the comms channel worked. In theory it should be encrypted, but whether the protocols would keep Gandesian forces from listening in was an open question. “This is Agent Asala, in command of Camp Ghala defense forces,” she said. “All pilots, check in by roster number.”

She began reading off the numbers. The gabbling chaos that followed didn't surprise her but did made her appreciate the work of people like Soraya—or Ekrem, back in her army days—all the more. She had to raise her voice more than once over the scrum. Pilot Two's proposed trajectory was going to take him right into the path of Pilot Twenty-Three, which she hadn't thought possible. Standard operating procedure required they at least file their initial launch paths with Station Control, but Station Control was distracted by the coming dissolution of Camp Ghala.

Soraya had promised her thirty-eight spaceworthy starships and volunteer pilots. Asala had her suspicions about just how “volunteer” they were, but no matter. Either they would survive the battle to come, or they wouldn't. All she had to do was hold off the Gandesians long enough for Uzochi's ships and their wormhole-generating cubes to arrive from planetside.

Asala didn't have experience with space command beyond what she'd picked up from other mercenaries or, less reliably, the space pirate shows that people on Khayyam were so fond of. But she did remember a few essentials: the sheer terrifying emptiness of space, and the fact that motion happened in three dimensions. Terrain wasn't a matter of ridges or mountains, but gravity wells and libration points and, in this case, the constant reminder that Gan-De's orbital defenses stood ready to shoot them all down.

“Agent Asala to Station Control,” she said. “Requesting permission for the defense force to launch.” She didn't have a better name for it, had never been good at naming things—that had been Dayo's gift.

At first there was no response, and Asala kept from biting the inside of her mouth in impatience. Surely Station Control had been briefed about the plan? Except she knew from experience that you couldn't count on even simple plans to be conveyed intact, especially under circumstances like these.

Station Control responded. “Commander Asala,” said a woman's harsh voice. Ah yes: They'd given Asala a promotion for appearance's sake. “I've transmitted data on Gan-De's defense patterns and the rescue ships' proposed approach. May the sun watch you and the stars hold you safe.”

In the outer planets they'd stopped praying by the sun as Eratos perished, as more and more people turned to glow for a moment's illusion of warmth. But Asala didn't see any point in quarreling about that with Station Control. “Acknowledged,” Asala said. “Defense force, prepare to launch on my order.”

Asala's racing dart was not outfitted for space command. Niko had helped Camp Ghala jerry-rig an Identification-Friend-or-Foe system to minimize friendly fire, but they had also warned that the system was fragile. Asala had ambivalent feelings about having to rely on Niko, though the Khayyami's ability to wrangle tech was unquestionably solid. The IFF system was also tied in to the ship's sensor system so that she had running updates on—

Shit.

The display showed Camp Ghala and Gan-De's nearest defenses, a great many of the latter in geosynchronous orbit so as to always bare their teeth in the camp's direction. According to the sensors, those orbital platforms had just launched a fleet of drone fighters. The camp's ability to maneuver was limited, at least until it had disassembled itself—which it couldn't do, pragmatically speaking, until Uzochi arrived, and their ships could be retrofitted with the wormhole generators she was bringing.

Which meant it was up to Asala and the defense fleet to protect the camp.

The problem was that the drones were coordinated, using emergent algorithms that caused them to behave like flocks of birds—or swarms of insects. Asala and her pilots were merely human. They didn't have the advantage of a hive mind.

Of course, that meant they didn't have the disadvantages of one either.

Asala toggled the comm to address the entire defense force. “This is Commander Asala”—might as well embrace the unasked-for promotion—“to the Camp Ghala defense fleet.” Shit, was she supposed to give a speech? She'd always hated speeches. Too bad Niko couldn't come up with one for her—she shied away from that thought. “Tell me, how many of you remember the ‘Song of the Woman Who Brought Stars to Her Lover'?”

It was an old song, a beloved one on Hypatia; variants had existed on Eratos and Samos as well. She'd once even seen a Khwarizmian stage interpretation, although it had been distorted beyond recognition. (The original had not included any tusked hunting-cats, let alone ones that talked in verse.) It would have been easier to explain what she wanted of her pilots outright, but she was mindful of Niko's warning that the machine-minds of Gan-De, or their masters, could break the crypto and listen in. She doubted that the drones' AIs were metaphor-savvy enough to interpret a poem from cultures that their programmers despised. The Gandesians themselves, given their hatred of the Outer Planets' denizens, might even be slow to recognize the reference.

Asala held her breath, waiting for someone, anyone, to answer. The drones continued to accelerate toward Camp Ghala.

The silence broke. “C-commander Asala,” a man's voice came over the channel. “This is Pilot Three.” They'd agreed to use numerical designations; we number our dead, Asala couldn't help thinking, and made a warding symbol in case she'd jinxed the man. “If you mean the part where the suitor carries the stars in her hands—”

She'd opened her mouth to snap, That's enough, stop, but she was taken aback when he did so without having to be warned that the enemy was listening. Rather, he hummed the key verses, his voice rough but steady. Asala knew the words that accompanied the music. Dayo had sung them with her, once upon a time.

“Catch me the stars in your hands,” the queen of spiders said,

“and you will taste my honey kisses, carry my smile with you like a jewel.”

And Jibrill swallowed her despair like dark wine, and said it would be done;

and in the quiet hours of the night, when the moons formed a diadem, she saw a way.

In the song, Jibrill had brought back a cobweb glittering with dew, which reflected the stars in the last dregs of dawn. And the queen of spiders had accepted the cobweb, crowning herself with it, before setting stubborn, faithful Jibrill another task.

“I don't see what this has to do with anything,” the man went on, sounding querulous.

You can catch anything in its own nature, was the lesson. He would understand when the time came.

“Commander,” said another voice—this one was Pilot Fifteen, the comm interface informed her. “Children's songs and courtship stories are all very well, but how—”

“You're here because you trust me to defend the camp,” Asala said. She didn't leave Fifteen time to argue with the statement. Time was running short. “Well, trust me now. We're going to skim close to the orbital platforms. Every piloting trick you learned running the gauntlet getting supplies to Camp Ghala, now's the time to use them.”

“Roger that,” one of the pilots said, followed by the others.

So far, so good. Everything else would be up to Niko.

• • •

General Cynwrig had seen a lot of war in her lifetime. But she was not experienced in orbital battles, and said so to anyone who asked. This usually occasioned raised eyebrows and murmurs of disbelief, but Cynwrig was being sincere.

A battle implied combat against an enemy force with some modicum of discipline and leadership. A hunt, on the other hand—you could hunt tufted boars and they would fight, but it wasn't a battle. You were gunning down an animal, however cunning, rather than pitting yourself against a thinking foe.

The refugees who continually battered themselves against Gan-De's defenses behaved more like swarms of glitter locusts or flocks of graybirds than thinking human foes. The proof was in the countermeasures that defeated them so readily. As formidable as Gan-De's drones and robotic hunter squads were, they didn't possess true sentience the way humans did. Yet they sufficed to gun down those desperate refugees who attempted, despite every insistence that they weren't welcome, to find succor on Gan-De.

This time, however, was different.

This time Cynwrig faced a true battle in space. Not a hunt. Both battles and hunts might end in slaughters. The difference was how you got there.

Cynwrig had taken to the skies herself in the carrier Thorn, one of the elite Gandesian warships that had a life-support system to accommodate human passengers. The Thorn had point defenses and missile arrays, railguns and mines—it would have been stupid not to—but what made it truly dangerous was the sheer horde of drone ships that it could launch. Drones who knew only the cold imperative of the hunt, and who could carry out maneuvers impossible for human-piloted ships because of the accelerations involved.

Cynwrig herself oversaw operations on the bridge. She sipped a glass of bittersweet cordial, the one luxury she permitted herself in time of war, while Captain Amyntas and the executive officer, sober in the black Gandesian military uniform, discussed deployment patterns. Cynwrig's console showed her an overview of the battle unfolding before them: clusters of rapidly moving triangles of yellow light representing the drones and their vectors, with the slower, less agile red flecks representing hostiles.

The refugees' forces were putting up a surprisingly good fight. She could already tell what their strategy was, had known it from the moment she saw their launch trajectories. Unsurprisingly, the refugees were trying to hack into the orbital defenses. They hadn't managed it yet, but Cynwrig remembered the incidents on the return trip to Gan-De, and Ekrem's irritating offspring, Niko. Niko might be able to manage the feat, if they'd survived.

“Any luck cracking the refugees' IFF?” Cynwrig asked during a lull in the clipped discussions on the bridge.

Captain Amyntas shrugged expressively. “Not yet, ma'am. Whatever they're using, it must be new.” She didn't say what they all knew: that the Gandesian authorities on Camp Ghala had infiltrated the refugees' computer systems for intelligence, for back doors, for any advantage that could be scraped together. The only way to defeat truly desperate people, after all, was to outthink them at every turn. Amyntas frowned. “It's a pity that—”

An alert flared red, reflecting in the captain's glasses. She swore. Cynwrig took another sip of her cordial.

Captain Amyntas said, “On my command, launch drone squadrons one through—”

Cynwrig interrupted: “No. Countermand.”

Ordinarily, Cynwrig allowed her subordinates a certain amount of autonomy. There was no point in having a military that couldn't function if its head was cut off. Nevertheless, she hadn't risen to her position because she was reluctant to exercise her authority when it became necessary.

Her people trusted her. Captain Amyntas trusted her; she wouldn't command the flagship otherwise. Amyntas repeated the countermand, then turned to Cynwrig, her chin tipped up, her eyes narrowed in thought.

“Launch the drone squadrons as planned,” Cynwrig said, her voice impassive, “but they will be spearheaded by Lieutenant Hana and Red Squadron.” Cynwrig had often reflected on the irony of the lieutenant's name, which meant “joy.” It certainly hadn't been lost on the lieutenant herself.

The captain blinked in surprise. “As you command.” She was clearly wondering why the reliable, hardy drones were being hampered by the inclusion of a human-piloted squadron. They were a throwback in the Gandesian space forces, which preferred to leave the guidance of the smaller fighter ships to AIs. Cynwrig was no stranger to electronic warfare, however; she'd pushed for the retention of human pilots as a fail-safe for situations just like this, when hackers made the drones less reliable.

Captain Amyntas broadcast the corrected orders. Cynwrig set down her cordial, admiring the way water condensed on the glass and formed distended jewels. Oh, she could have left matters to the drones, but that fucking hacker Niko was too much of a wild card. Cynwrig knew better than to trust luck. Soldiers' luck, as they said on Gan-De, couldn't be trusted.

“Open communications to Lieutenant Hana,” Cynwrig said, and it was done. The lieutenant's face appeared on the screen before her, eyes dark and alert. Beneath her pilot's helmet, her head was shaved, Cynwrig knew. The helmet obscured a great deal of her face, which eerily resembled that of her sister, Asala, down to the subtle marks where she'd had her clannie tattoos removed once she accepted her Gandesian name.

“General,” Hana said. For a soldier, she had an incongruously beautiful voice, made for poetry, but then, she had not originally been a soldier at all. “What is your pleasure?”

“Your wife is receiving the best of care,” Cynwrig said. “All I require is that you honor your oath as a soldier.” She meant it. Half-threat, half-promise, and a kind of honor, in its way—Gan-De's military took good care of both its dependents and any soldiers who chose pregnancy—although her opponents both on the battlefield and off it had never seen it that way.

“Of course, General,” Hana said. “Do you have any particular instructions?” Her eyes flickered; Cynwrig could see the developing battle inscribed in her eyes in traceries of light.

“Take your helmet off for the fight,” Cynwrig said. She smiled, as merciful as a blade newly sharpened. “You don't need it. This is the last battle that matters.”

It wasn't Hana's death she was concerned with. Hana's face was a weapon. Cynwrig intended to use it—against Asala.

Hana reached up. Her hand trembled.

“Fly well,” Cynwrig purred, and cut the connection.

• • •

“Camp Ghala Control to Commander Asala,” said the now-familiar voice. “Uzochi's ship has reached the transfer point.” That much Asala's sensors confirmed. “From here on out it's up to you to keep us covered.”

She'd figure out the situation as it developed. In the meantime, Asala needed to attend to the remnants of her fleet. “Well done, everyone,” she said. “But it's not over.”

Now came the hard part, which sounded absurd only to people who had never gone to war: the waiting. Asala was good at it, thanks to her years of experience as a sniper. That didn't mean that she enjoyed it. But she and the ships under her command were responsible for protecting Camp Ghala until Uzochi's fleet, and rescue, arrived.

• • •

Niko sipped lukewarm tea, painfully aware that it was a luxury here on Camp Ghala, closed their eyes, and tried not to hyperventilate. Breathing too heavily still made their ribs ache, although it wasn't as bad as it had been earlier. Guiltily, they thanked the gods for the efficacy of the nanite shots.

The room where they'd set up stank of sweat and protein powder and the spices the camp's inhabitants added to their food in an attempt to make it palatable or disguise the flavors of provisions that had started to go off. By now Niko had gotten used to the stench. Some of it was their own.

“The general's forces won't expect us to be going toward them,” Asala had explained to Niko when they'd last spoken over the comms. “That's where you come in.”

That was where Niko came in, indeed. All they had to do was hack Gan-De's planetary defenses. No sweat. Anyone could do it in an afternoon.

Niko had just started up a number of toolkits hastily downloaded from more or less reliable sources when someone began pounding on the door. They ignored it and initiated a link with one of the platforms' onboard computers by spoofing the address of a sensor array. It wouldn't give them much access, but any access was better than none at all; Niko could use that to piggyback into other subsystems until they encountered the accesses they needed. They hoped for more time than a handful of minutes, but hell, that was what the toolkits were for, right?

The pounding continued. Niko gritted their teeth. They'd survived interruptions before, given the absurd number of half-siblings they'd grown up with, even if not all of the brood had lived in the same residence at the same time. Ekrem wasn't the only Khayyami who practiced political polyamory by choosing influential bed partners; he just took it to its natural logical conclusion.

The door screeched as someone dragged it open.

Niko scrambled to their feet as a heavyset woman burst into their room. “Excuse me,” they said, hating the way their voice went high and clipped, “you can't be in here. I'm—”

“Haven't you been listening to the bulletins?” the woman said, her voice thick with an accent that even Niko, with their facility with language, had difficulty parsing. “We're evacuating D block.”

No, no, no, no, no. “That's not possible,” Niko said, forcing themself to smile.

Always smile, the agent they'd apprenticed to had said to them over and over. You're your father's child; it ought to come easy. He does it for a reason, after all. As if Niko didn't know from a lifetime of having that same dazzling smile directed at them. It had taken them an embarrassing number of years to realize that Ekrem smiled the same way at strangers as at family. But here Niko was, following the advice as if it could make a difference so far away from Khayyam. People were people everywhere; wasn't that a universal truth?

Universal truth couldn't save them from the exigencies of life on a haphazard space station. “Soraya sent me when you weren't responding to the bulletins,” the woman said breathlessly. “I'm supposed to help you get set up elsewhere. My name's Zella and—”

Shit. Niko was going to have to run off batteries while transferring the hardware, a dicey proposition. “Couldn't someone have warned me before I got set up here?” they demanded, even as they put nonessential systems on standby and began packing their equipment to the sound of the woman's life story and how she used to be a computer technician on Hypatia and wasn't it such a shame that they couldn't all go back to dealing with people who couldn't find the power button instead of a life-threatening situation like this and what was the general of Gan-De thinking doing this to upstanding people who just wanted to contribute to society the way anyone did.

Niko's mentor had forced them to assemble and disassemble computers in the freezing dark while playing loud Khwarizmian drum-chants interspersed with agonizing static. I've done this before, Niko told themself. This should be easy. No one was shouting. They had light. It wasn't dark, at least in the literal sense. Niko only had to deal with one woman's babbling.

Yet Niko's hands trembled, and they almost disconnected some of the machines in the wrong order. And every moment mattered to the people who were flying in their rickety starships trying to save Uzochi's fleet and, by extension, Camp Ghala.

“I'll help,” Zella said.

Niko bit their tongue as she helpfully yanked out some of the power cables. They could see where one of the cables' casings had cracked open. “One second,” they said, digging in their utility pouch for a roll of tape. Niko didn't have much chance of saving Asala if they were electrocuted.

Niko and Zella loaded the computers onto a cart that she had brought, then covered them with a dingy brown quilt so it wouldn't be so obvious that they were transporting electronics.        “What happened to Block D anyway?”

Fortunately, Niko kept their irritation out of their tone. Or if Zella noticed it, she didn't let on. “There's a problem with the power-distribution system,” the woman said. “Some people refuse to evacuate, which is their problem. But for folks who need power for the medical assists that keep them alive, or who are in sections with shitty ventilation, it's an issue. To say nothing of people like you who have a priority-one need to draw on the camp's power grid.”

Niko suppressed a groan. “It wasn't sabotage, was it?”

Zella's mouth flattened. “Don't say that so loud.”

“If I can guess it, anyone can,” Niko returned, but they lowered their voice.

The two of them approached a junction where a crowd jostled, voices raised in discontent. Niko wished that Asala were still here. She had a way of simplifying problems, even if the solutions sometimes involved violence. They couldn't imagine that clambering onto the cart and shouting at people would clear the way. At times like this, they envied their father his height and presence.

Then they saw her: Soraya. She wore a hideous poncho woven of colorful recycled fibers, no doubt another gift from the people she'd helped.

“Soraya!” Niko shouted at the top of their lungs, waving to get her attention. “Soraya!” She'd be able to clear the crowd for them.

At first she didn't hear Niko; she was arguing with a stout man with a knife at his waist. Probably one of Hafiz's people.

Niko's feelings toward Hafiz and their private army could best be described as wariness with a side of grudging admiration. On the one hand, good for Hafiz for wielding power in the face of Gandesian obstructionism. On the other hand, that army had its own goals, and those goals didn't always align with those of Soraya, who was more likely to help Niko out.

At last Soraya said something that made the guard jerk back, his expression shuttering, and stomp away. Niko would have given a lot to overhear it. Too bad, though; they'd have to settle for the removal of the obstacle.

By then Soraya had spotted Niko and Zella frantically waving across the packed hallway. Her eyes narrowed when she regarded the cart; she'd know what it was. She grasped the situation and said a few sharp words. The crowd reluctantly formed a corridor so that Niko, Zella, and the cart could pass through. As Niko approached Soraya, they said breathlessly, “Thank you—”

“Save your thanks,” Soraya returned, not without a certain grim humor, “and get to work. Camp Ghala needs you.” She nodded cordially to Zella, addressing her by name and murmuring a word of thanks.

Niko smiled back at Soraya, and was gratified by the way her eyes warmed. Just a few short weeks ago, they would have basked in being accepted as part of the team, especially by someone as accomplished as Soraya. Niko had yearned for that kind of recognition, even if it didn't come from their father. But now—now that seemed a childish distraction. All that mattered was getting the job done.

The walls of the camp seemed to close around Niko as they hurried through the passage to the next ship in Block E. They heard people grumbling behind them, anxious voices demanding to know: Why was the evacuation happening now of all times? Was everyone going to be able to escape? Would there be enough rations to go around? Niko was too preoccupied to gather more than a scattershot collage of faces and bodies as they passed by, their entire attention focused on keeping the wobbly cart from toppling and spilling its precious contents.

One of the computers beeped just as they crossed the threshold. Niko held their breath: Had anyone noticed? And then they were through the barrier, the crowd closing up behind them.

Niko and Zella chivvied the cart along the rough connecting stretch between blocks. The warped deck plating didn't exactly inspire confidence in the structural integrity of the rest of the passage. Niko had caught Asala eyeing the stress marks and crazing in the metal during their previous outings, and they wished they hadn't noticed her doing so. Especially when the metal creaked and groaned in response to their footsteps—hardly reassuring.

Niko couldn't track the combat going on in the black skies beyond Camp Ghala's walls. The world could be chaos out there and they would have no idea, which Niko hated. They wiped one of their palms on their trousers before they lost their grip on the cart. Their body ached, not because the exertion was bad but because of tension in their shoulders, the back of their neck, all the way down through their toes, to say nothing of the injuries they'd sustained recently.

“Where are we going?” Niko whispered to Zella, even though they'd left the crowd behind and the only people in E block were functionaries who brushed the air in the universal gesture of hurry up, keep moving.

“Three more doors,” Zella said, “and—here we are.” She keyed the door open.

The room had space, and it had been cleaned recently, with scrub marks still visible on the floor and tables. Those were the only good things Niko could say about it. Even with the familiar reek of disinfectant, they could still detect the smell of piss and unwashed bodies and vomit.

One thing did speak in the room's favor: It had numerous power outlets. “Help me test the current,” Niko said curtly. They couldn't risk the whole operation just because a faulty outlet fried their equipment.

Zella knew how to use the testing equipment. Niko started warming to her. When she wasn't talking their ear off, she was competent. Besides, how much of her garrulity could be attributed to nerves? It wasn't as if Niko were doing any better in that department, only that traveling with Asala had taught them the valuable skill of shutting up.

All the sockets except one tested clear. Niko breathed a sigh of relief and began hooking everything up again, arranging the machines on the tables with the ease of long practice. Fortunately, Zella didn't insist on helping them with this part. Niko had a system that helped them remember the network topology they'd set up, and they appreciated not having to explain it to her; it would just have slowed them down.

Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, Niko chanted inwardly. Asala was counting on them. Uzochi was counting on them. All of Camp Ghala was counting on them. Ekrem had never—quite—taken Niko's choice of profession seriously; he would have preferred for Niko to serve as an officer in the Khayyami military, just as he had. But even the best of soldiers relied on intelligence—and on the support of hackers like Niko themself.

As the computers reconnected and reconfigured, as the toolkits came back up, chimes sounded. Niko didn't have perfect pitch, but they'd booted everything in audio-on mode so that they could keep track of progress by the particular sounds that each program made. It was a useful way to double-check against the visual indicators, since they didn't have to worry about hostiles overhearing the cacophony.

“Cluster Five doesn't seem like it's booting correctly,” Zella said, voice dripping concern. “Are you sure it's supposed to do that?”

Her too-casual tone of voice set alarm bells ringing in the back of their head. The woman was fishing for information.

Niko's moment of hesitation had lasted a vital few seconds too long. Alerted that she'd been caught out, Zella cast aside subterfuge and launched herself at them. Niko just had time to snatch up a screwdriver as a makeshift weapon.

Zella was prepared for that. She batted the screwdriver out of Niko's hand, and it clattered against a far wall, landing too far away for Niko to scrabble after it. What made me think this mission was a good idea? Niko thought with a distant sense of hilarity. Niko sidestepped the woman's next swipe, mostly by virtue of stumbling—pure luck. She wasn't as large or as terrifying in combat as Asala, which was the only reason Niko wasn't already dead.

Niko didn't dodge the blow after that in time. Wonderful—they'd been patched up by nanites just in time to get beaten up again. They retched at the sudden blossom of pain in their stomach. It was shocking how fast the punches came. If Zella landed any more hits, they would be in real trouble.

Niko's eyes fell on the damaged power cord. With an instinctive viciousness that they were shocked to find in themself, Niko grabbed the cord, clawed off the protective tape, and jammed the exposed wires against the flesh of Zella's arm when she reached for them.

For a second Niko thought it hadn't worked—that nothing would work, that they were going to die in this foul-smelling room and no one would find them or mourn them.

Then Zella screamed, except it wasn't a scream. Her throat locked up as she began to convulse, and blood dripped out from the side of her mouth when she bit through her tongue. Niko scrambled away, heart jackhammering in their chest, unable to look away.

Great, Niko thought absurdly, unwilling hysteria bubbling up inside their chest until they gasped with the force of it. Now it's going to smell like roast corpse in here.

No time to lose. When they were sure that Zella was dead, Niko gingerly toed the power cable aside and taped it up again. Asala would have slit Zella's throat too, just to be safe, but Niko didn't have the stomach for it.

The corpse stared accusingly at Niko as they got back to work. As their fingers flew over the commands that would, with luck, unlock the Gandesian defense system, Niko considered what had happened. It was terrifying how easily their defenses had been breached. Niko could see so many ways for Zella to have fooled Soraya, especially during the current chaos. Soraya would have been grateful for a volunteer, one less thing to worry about. It wasn't her fault. How could any of them know who to trust?

Further musings evaporated when a toolkit informed them that it had wormed its way into an orbital platform's telemetry software. “Good, good,” Niko crooned to the computer, since there was no one—well, except Zella's corpse—to hear them. They would have preferred to gradually establish a presence, then move slowly and cautiously lest any watchdog programs catch the intruder, but time was exactly what they didn't have.

A discrete query revealed what Niko feared. While the telemetry software hadn't cracked Camp Ghala's IFF signals, it made full use of Gandesian IFF. In an ideal world, Niko would have been able to break the crypto, but that wasn't going to happen in the space of minutes. Instead, they would need to trick the station.

Niko's worm spread to other platforms. Niko was sweating heavily, and their shirt clung damply to their back as they coaxed the worm into position. The more platforms they could subvert, the better.

34% . . . 38% . . .41% . . .The worm gained momentum. 68% . . .87% . . .And then it stalled. It would have to be good enough, because Niko could glean from the telemetry that Asala's ragtag forces were outnumbered and doing poorly, with a third of the fighting force down already.

Niko refused to think about the possibility that one of the doomed ships belonged to Asala. Not after everything the two of them had been through together.

88% . . .No more delays.

Niko activated the second phase of the worm. First it had multiplied and spread; now it reprogrammed the orbital platforms. Niko had studied the proprietary software that the Gandesian platforms' computers ran, based on intel that their contacts had smuggled to them. They only had one chance to get this right.

Niko held their breath. All they could hear was their heartbeat, too loud, like a drum at the world's shattering. Had it worked? Or had they screwed it up?

Several of Niko's systems chimed again, noisily. Their vision swam. I did it, Niko thought. The worm had worked. The Gandesian stations had stopped firing on Camp Ghala's ships. Instead, they had locked onto everything that transmitted a Gandesian IFF signal, compiling a target database and placing the Ghalan ships on a “safe” list. Inevitably, someone would figure the trick out and order the drones to stop transmitting. But for now, the database, intended as a backup system, would prove their undoing.

Silently, in the depths of space, the platforms' guns began to speak in the language of fire and ash.

• • •

Asala knew the moment Niko hacked the platforms. It could be no one else. She and the other pilots had barely survived the drones' assault. Now the drones scattered in response to the sudden activation of the platforms' lasers. She couldn't see it except in glimpses, couldn't appreciate the immense distances involved, but the night was crisscrossed with fire.

The drones that she and the other Ghalan pilots had so painfully lured closer to the platforms were rendered into molten slag. She didn't have further opportunity to admire the spectacle unfolding before her. “Commander Asala to all units,” she said. “Get the fuck out of here. Get clear of the lasers!”

She veered below the platforms, closer to the planet. Asala put in another call, this time to Uzochi. She'd received word of Uzochi's maneuvers earlier from Station Control, could see the ship on her scanner. But why was there only one? Hadn't Uzochi spoken of a fleet? Had the others been shot down already?

Uzochi answered almost immediately.“What an excellent trick,” Uzochi said. “It's going to be a wild ride.” Her face flickered in and out, in and out, like a tree-haunt in one of the old Hypatian stories. Tree-haunts were tricksters, neither wholly benevolent nor malicious. The comparison seemed apt; Asala remembered the stunt Uzochi had pulled with the gravity bomb.

“What happened to the rest of the fleet?” Asala demanded.

“Change in plans,” Uzochi said. “It's just this one ship. The wormholes will save Camp Ghala, never fear.” There was a strange hesitation before “wormholes.”

Asala started to ask for details, but was interrupted by an incoming piece of shrapnel that almost clipped her ship. At these velocities, even a small particle could destroy a ship that had any faults in its shielding. Given the amount of debris that ringed Gan-De, her surviving fleet now faced an entirely new threat.

“I'll talk to you later,” Asala said hurriedly. “May the sky hold you safe.”

“And you too, Commander,” Uzochi said with the brilliant smile that had dazzled so many viewers way back when. With that, she cut the connection; her afterimage lingered even as Asala wrenched her attention back to the heart-stopping necessity of flight.

Asala had been afraid that the conflagration in the skies would make it difficult for Uzochi's ship to reach Camp Ghala, even if the orbital platforms were targeting the enemy's drones—for now. But the Gandesians had other ships in orbit, and she flinched when their lasers inexplicably winked out, giving the Ghalans a further respite. Had she imagined it?

A light began blinking amber on her panel: someone wanted to talk to her. Asala toggled the channel open. “Yes?”

“This is Camp Ghala Control,” a tremulous voice came from the other end. “We have—we have a call from General Cynwrig. She offers cease-fire while she—she wants to talk to you.”

As much as Asala wanted to tell the general to eat glow, she owed it to Uzochi—to Soraya and Niko and everyone on Camp Ghala—to hear Cynwrig out. Even if the odds that Cynwrig was going to surrender were low. And even if Asala suspected that Cynwrig was entirely capable of treachery, even—especially—during a parley.

Asala gave the order for all Ghalan units to hold their fire, then said, “Connect us.” There were a few lingering stray shots—these were volunteer troops, not AIs or trained soldiers like Gan-De's disciplined black-clad battalions. Asala couldn't bring herself to feel sorry for the Gandesian drones that suffered the last potshots.

Cynwrig's face was a sharpened axe, made all the more severe by that crisp Gandesian black. Battle was the general's element; it was logical that she was at home in this conflict. The one incongruous element was the beverage glass that she held in one hand.

Rage boiled up in the pit of Asala's belly. Her people had been fighting, dying, to give the refugees a way out—and this infuriating woman had been drinking in celebration. She clenched her hands where Cynwrig couldn't see them, reminding herself that she needed to keep a level head.

“I demand your immediate surrender,” Cynwrig said.

So much for staying calm. “In case you weren't paying attention,” Asala snapped, “we're winning.” Was the general stalling so her hackers could wrest back control of the orbital platforms?

“You misapprehend your situation,” Cynwrig said. She was relaxed. Asala could see it in the set of her shoulders, the way her fingers curled loosely around the glass. Asala's rage began to curdle into dread. Cynwrig made a curt gesture, and a holo blazed up on the screen.

It took several moments for Asala to recognize what she was seeing. A Gandesian pilot, her hair shaved, her eyes dark and wide, easily visible because she was, against all protocol, failing to wear a helmet—no. Not a native Gandesian pilot, not with those faint traces of vine-like tattoos. Hypatian tattoos.

“Dayo,” Asala whispered. She didn't realize that she had spoken aloud until Cynwrig answered her.

“That isn't her name anymore,” the general said. If there had been gloating in her voice, Asala would have lunged from her seat and punched the screen. Instead, she said it matter-of-factly, as if explaining to a stubborn child that the sun would rise every morning. “We require that all Gandesian recruits of offworld origin take on new names.”

“Dayo,” Asala said again, but Dayo didn't answer.

“Lieutenant Hana, who you knew in another life,” Cynwrig went on, “has a wife and family on Gan-De. Our military provides handsomely for its dependents. We care about our families, Agent. Something that I imagine you never bothered to find out. It also”—and she let the silence fill with her triumph and Asala's helpless rage—“provides handsomely for the bereaved, in case a soldier falls.”

Asala's world narrowed to a singularity of rage. On the vanishingly rare occasions that she had allowed herself to hope that she might be reunited with her sister, she'd never imagined it would go like this. In her subterranean daydreams, Dayo had been the smiling girl who'd nourished Asala with kindness and poetry, who'd been the first to accept her as her without making a fuss of it.

Strange how Dayo had, in her head, existed as though frozen in time, without aging or forming other ties of her own. Cynwrig had alluded to family. Did Dayo have children? After all those years alone, was it possible Asala now found herself with a hidden wealth of clan-mates? Questions she wanted to ask, but couldn't, not with Cynwrig right there.

And Asala had never imagined that her sister would accept a life with the Gandesians—had always envisioned her trapped on Camp Ghala like most refugees, or else making her way to Khayyam as Asala had herself. Yet she knew it was true that some of the early refugees had been desperate enough to accept the Gandesians' insistence on assimilation, before Gan-De had closed that path.

“Is everything she said true?” Asala asked Dayo. Hana. She remembered, bitterly, that Dayo meant “joy” in the lore of their clan, just as Hana did as a Gandesian name.

“It's true,” Dayo said, her voice like ash and sand. “I am oath-bound to obey, and blood-bound to protect my family.”

Asala's heart clenched within her. Even Dayo's accent had changed, in the common language that they all spoke. Asala's accent retained some of the old rhythms of their clan, with occasional touches of the dominant Khayyami dialect, picked up from her comrades in Ekrem's company. Dayo now spoke with crisp inflections not dissimilar to those of Cynwrig herself. This final betrayal, like the imperfectly removed tattoos, hurt Asala like a knife to the belly.

There was a strange fire in Dayo's eyes, though; Cynwrig did not see it, but Asala did. Dayo kept speaking, more rapidly, as if she only had seconds—and she spoke in the primary language of their childhood, which Cynwrig was unlikely to understand. “Ice to ice, water to water, heart to heart—never forget me—”

It was a line from the Hypatian poet Anahita, a song of family sundered in some old clan conflict.

“Lieutenant,” Cynwrig snapped, and Asala felt a rush of absurd pride that her sister was an officer, even if she was an officer in the Gandesian military. How fucked up was that? But there was no arguing with the heart. “Actions have consequences. I will not belabor the obvious.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Dayo said. “You have always been clear about that. I accept the penalty.”

The signal fizzed out.

“Commander,” Camp Ghala Control cut in, “I've located the source of, er, the lieutenant's signal—” Control forwarded her the information.

Dayo had her own Hawkmoth-class starfighter, designed for a human pilot and drone escorts, flown by the elite. Asala was under no illusions that this indicated any favor on Cynwrig's part. There was a story behind Dayo's service, and she wanted to hear it, wanted to know it all, however much the words cut her.

Except Dayo's starfighter was arrowing straight toward the general's carrier, like a falcon falling out of the sun as the old poet Makani would have said, a collision course that Cynwrig could not ignore.

Asala hailed her own units to scream something, to order them to protect Dayo from what was coming somehow. She couldn't fail to try to save her own sister—

She'd scarcely had time to say her own name, to hear the slight crackling that indicated the comm link was open, when her sensors informed her that Cynwrig's carrier had opened fire on Dayo's ship. Evasive maneuvers, Asala cried in the depths of her own mind.

Instead, the sensors caught a tiny flash of motion, light reflecting off a mote—Dayo had ejected. The question was whether she would survive long enough for anyone to pick her up before her oxygen ran out.

Pilot Twenty-Six was nearest. “Pick up the survivor,” Asala said, her voice hoarse as though she'd been screaming. “That's an order.”

A burst of static, then: “I'm not rescuing a Gandesian pilot,” Twenty-Six spat back.

Twenty-Six didn't know; none of them did. None of them cared.

In the meantime, railgun projectiles swept forward, metal slugs accelerated to punishing velocities, and both punched through Dayo's ship, reducing it to so much debris.

Her heart split down the middle as she said, “Commander Asala to all units. You will escort Uzochi's ship to Camp Ghala. Don't come after me.”

She hoped that the pilots could clear a path for Uzochi without further loss of life, but she knew that it was unlikely to be clean and easy.

“What are you going to do, Commander?” one of the pilots asked as their ships swooped toward Uzochi's vessel.

But Asala was no longer listening. Dayo, wait for me.

Gan-De's far-reaching scout drones had detected the incoming Khayyami fleet and reported it to Cynwrig. The infected systems, in turn, alerted Niko. Niko passed along the approach vector to Camp Ghala Control, even though everyone had already been expecting the arrival of the Khayyami. Control responded with a curt acknowledgment.

What Niko hadn't anticipated was getting a call. One they couldn't ignore—and from an unexpected source, at that. If it had been their allies, they could have signaled that this wasn't the best of times.

But no. The call came from a specific channel. President Ekrem.

Niko took a deep breath, aware that they were shaking. All the words that they'd never been able to say to their father, all the accusations and disagreements, stuck in their throat. If they could somehow persuade the Khayyami forces to take sides on the refugees' behalf—to abandon the cruel, selfish plan to seize Uzochi's wormhole generators for Khayyam's elites and leave everyone else behind to die—

Ekrem's face smiled at Niko from the screen before them. He looked as handsome and assured as ever, even through the faceplate of the helmet. His knack for projecting confidence never changed.

Wait a second. Helmet? Niko's eyes narrowed as they took in Ekrem's surroundings, gleaning what they could from the visuals. Ekrem wasn't on the bridge of a luxury ship or cruiser. He was in the cockpit of a starfighter distantly related to the one that Niko and Asala had flown from Khayyam in an eternity ago, except it was sleeker, better armed, more advanced. Niko could see it in the small details, the gleaming chrome panels, the polished displays, the up-to-date controls. Only the best for President Ekrem, as ever.

“You weren't expecting me, I take it,” he said. Still smiling, the way he always did. “Did you think I'd be voted out so easily?”

“I have a favor to ask, President,” Niko said. They had to keep this professional, and never mind that they ached, even now, for Ekrem to crush them close in a hug as if they were still a child, to say, You've done a good job. Ekrem wouldn't take them seriously if they asked him child to father. As family.

“Do you, now?” Ekrem's smile didn't fade. He was indulging Niko, and Niko hated that.

I can't afford to let my feelings get in the way, Niko reminded themself. “The refugees need your help, President,” they said at their most formal. “Just think—beyond saving the Vela, you could save the whole of Camp Ghala. Share the wormhole devices with the refugees. All those people, those grateful parents and smiling babies? It would be a tremendous public relations coup.”

“Is that what you think of me?” Ekrem said, and now there was a hint of sadness in his voice.

“I'm merely thinking of the practicalities of the situation.” Niko was proud of their level tone.

Ekrem didn't sound proud at all when he responded, only tired. “Publicity stunts are how one stays in office, yes,” he said. “The scientists tell me—hell, your mother tells me—that our sun only has about a hundred years left, even if we reduce the rate at which we mine it and institute population controls the way the alarmists have been insisting. It would take someone with dictatorial powers, someone like General Cynwrig, to pull that off. And the people of Khayyam wouldn't stand for it.”

“Spare me your excuses,” Niko started to say, but Ekrem kept talking.

“You do computers,” Ekrem said. “So you do numbers. Believe it or not”—and his mouth twisted to one side—“politicians do numbers too. The Vela's technology, which you now know about, can save us.”

In another time and place, Niko would have erupted, railing at how the Vela's secret had been kept from them even as they were sent to guarantee Asala would bring it back. But now was not the time. They held their tongue.

“It can save us,” Ekrem continued, “but it can't save all of us. Even if we shared the cube technology, there are only so many ships to go around, and so many resources. There's no way to evacuate the entire population of the system, no matter how many habitable worlds are out there in the great void.”

“That doesn't give you the right to choose who gets saved!” Dimly, they were aware that they had shouted—at their father, at the president of Khayyam.

“Someone has to choose,” Ekrem countered. “Any colonies founded around undamaged suns will require resources. Healthy settlers. The best and brightest minds to deal with any problems that arise—and let's be honest, Niko, there will be problems. There always are. Shouldn't we give those colonies the very best chance of success, instead of populating them with the dregs of the system?”

Niko stared at their father. “It sounds so reasonable when you put it that way.” They were not being complimentary.

Ekrem sighed. “Your compassion does you credit, Niko. It's numbers,” he said again, as if that made things better. “If we can only save a finite number of people, then we owe it to ourselves—to everyone—to take the best people possible. Just as in the military, you don't pick your squad out of pity.”

There was no use talking to him. He didn't get it, was too locked into his vision of a future for his handpicked chosen few, the idea that only Khayyam had anything to offer.

But Ekrem's next words startled Niko. “It was you behind the Gandesian orbital platforms going berserk, wasn't it?” Ekrem said. “Remarkable work. I bet it gave General Cynwrig fits.”

“I don't see what this—” Niko began to say.

“There's a place for you too,” Ekrem said. “You doubted it—no, don't say anything. Parents always know. I may not have been the best of fathers, but I do keep track. You could be one of the guiding voices in the new regime. There's a place for you by my side.”

Niko was tempted, and hated themself for it. Giving in, however, would require surrendering everything they'd worked for. Even if Niko never told their father about their connections with the rebels, they'd always know. And they would never be able to forget the people they'd left behind—people like Asala.

One of the computers chimed. Rotten timing—was there any other kind? The Gandesian hackers on the other side were attempting to regain control of the corrupted orbital platforms.

“You could be remembered as someone truly special,” Niko said. A last attempt to turn things around, not just for the refugees, but for their relationship with Ekrem. “You could be the man who had the vision to rescue not only his own people, but the destitute and desperate.”

Ekrem's smile returned, that beam he turned on supporters and detractors alike, and Niko knew they'd failed to convince him. “Then we'll have to do this the hard way,” Ekrem said. “Stay safe. I'll send someone for you when all this blows over.”

“You can't just kidnap me!” Niko shouted, but the screen had gone dark.

• • •

Asala was starting to despair. While the Gandesians were stymied for the moment, thanks to the turncoat orbital platforms, she'd lost sensor lock on Dayo's escape pod for the second time. She couldn't count on the drones being neutralized for much longer; she had to get her sister to safety.

Just as she wrestled with the scan suite, another call came in. She was tempted to tell Control to fuck off, but she couldn't do so in good conscience, even for her sister's sake.

“Commander,” Control said, low and rapid. “Please come back. We need you.”

“Did Uzochi—”

“Uzochi's ship safely landed on Camp Ghala,” Control said, “but—”

“But what?”

“It's Hafiz,” a new voice broke in, one that Asala recognized all too well: Soraya, and more specifically, Soraya suppressing fury at this latest development. “Hafiz ordered three blocks—the ones under their control—to detach.”

“Hafiz has done what?” Asala said. She could see it on scan, the ships breaking off from Camp Ghala and streaking away into the night. “What do they think they're going to accomplish by hanging everyone else out to dry? We're all going to the same destination.”

“It's chaos here,” Soraya said, fighting to make herself heard above the babble of noise in the background. “Hafiz already had a supply of cubes for their own ships. Turns out Uzochi has been smuggling them up to the camp in some of the aid packages. So naturally they're first to leave.”

“Uzochi let them do that?” Asala demanded. Interesting: Hafiz's fleet was forming up away from the battle, but she didn't see anything resembling wormholes, either. What were they waiting for?

Soraya laughed bitterly. “Remember, Uzochi's been working with Hafiz from the start. She knows Hafiz is a leader. Just because she's a scientist doesn't mean she's naive. Meanwhile, Hafiz's people have been taking Uzochi's final load of cubes and offering them up willy-nilly to the mob. It's a madhouse up here. You might as well make your escape, Asala.”

Dayo. “Hold on,” Asala said as another amber light came on. “Make it fast,” she told whoever was on the channel.

It was Niko. “Asala,” they said. “Thank the gods.” Their eyes were shadowed. “President Ekrem has finally arrived—and he wants Uzochi's tech. He'll take it at gunpoint if necessary. You have to stop him.”

Dayo, Asala thought again. She would just have to multitask. “The rest of you get out of here,” she said recklessly. “Niko, he's your father.” Niko had to be hurting.

“I know,” Niko said through gritted teeth. “I know.” Their eyes were dry. Somehow that made it worse.

“Then it's settled,” Asala said. Niko would hate her for it, after. She already welcomed the wedge it would drive between them, the telltale bitter draught of anticipatory guilt.

Niko provided Asala the IFF signature of Ekrem's ship, which her targeting system accepted readily. It was hard not to think of the system as an eager predator. Niko was saying something else when the sensors picked up on Dayo's escape pod again—distant from the Khayyami fleet, drifting in the darkness.

I'm coming, Dayo, Asala whispered to herself, and swerved like a hunting falcon toward Ekrem.

• • •

Meanwhile, beyond the remnants of Camp Ghala and the firestorm of the battle, Hafiz's fleet activated their cubes, and a hole sizzled open in the sky, gaping wider, wider, widest, like a winter maw.

Episode 10

The Battle of Gan-De, Part 2

Becky Chambers

There was an eerie moment of stillness. Gunfire stopped. Chases slowed. Only the drones didn’t realize that the game had changed, and continued their dance toward now-distracted targets. Every ship with a human behind the helm seemed to stumble, and the comms filled with the emptiness of a battleground holding its breath.

And then, just as quickly: chaos.

Asala couldn’t make out who was saying what. Everyone was speaking at once now, and the ships leapt into action with them. The noise in her ears was a tumult of swearing, shouting, demands of how, how, how?! It shouldn’t have been possible, not with what they knew. The cubes would take each ship that held one to safety, they’d been told. They’d assumed—assumed, like idiots—that the cubes were keys, and each key had a door, and every ship that held one would slip through their own private exit. But the cubes didn’t behave that way at all. That much was plain now. They were a cluster, a network. Dozens of small parts that linked their efforts together to open not many small doors, but one big one.

Just one.

Dread filled Asala’s stomach the second before the inevitable happened. A ship—one of her stalwart volunteers—peeled off from the battle and barreled in the direction of the wormhole. Gandesian and Khayyami colors followed suit, patriotism abandoned in a blink for a chance at a living future. Did they even know what awaited them on the other side? Did they have any food, any supplies? Clearly, it didn’t matter. But the desertion was not universal, and reactions to it were frantic. Formations fragmented, strategies fell apart, and those for whom decorum mattered most still tried to play the game. Gandesian ships fired on Khayyami, Khayyami on Gandesian, Ghalan on everyone, drones on the enemies of whichever hackers had grabbed the reins for now. She watched as two small craft collided in their rush for the exit. A mangled wing sheared off and crippled a third. The comms filled with the desperate noise of captains and commanders scrambling to regain order, trying to count how many pieces they were still playing with.

This wasn’t a battle any longer. This was a stampede.

• • •

Cynwrig stood amid the ruckus on the bridge. “Quiet,” she said, piercing the din. Heads turned nearly in unison. She stared at them as if they were unruly children. “Unless you have anything useful to offer, I will have quiet.”

“General, Red Squad has encountered Khayyami fighters. They—”

Cynwrig glared. “Lieutenant Sung, yes?”

“Yes, General.”

“Lieutenant, what is your assessment of our current situation?”

The young man swallowed. “Kima?”

“What would you say our immediate strategic priority is?” Her words snapped like bullets. “The status of Red Squad, who have not called for assistance? Or the wormhole our enemy has opened?”

“I—the—”

“You’re demoted.” She looked around the bridge. “I will say this again. Does anyone have anything useful—anything useful—to offer?”

The bridge fell as silent as the void outside.

“Signal to surface command,” Cynwrig directed. “I need to speak with my science advisers.”

The comms officer attempted to obey, but shook their head at the console with frustration. “General, comms to the surface are down. Orbital relays are not responding.”

“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 couldn’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.”

Because you started this, she almost said. But this was no time for a playground spat. “Think this through. The tech’s already been deployed. Why run these people down now?”

There was a pause. “We can’t go back with nothing,” he said. We, as in, the people. A semantic washing of his hands.

“No,” Asala agreed, trying to play to his favor. “But how is it going to look back home when word gets out that you fired on civilian refugees in order to take their tech?”

His ship slithered, and his words did the same. “We haven’t fired on anyone except in defense—”

“For fuck’s sake, look around. You’re not giving a campaign speech; you’re trying to take somebody else’s toys because they wouldn't share.” She swung hard to keep on his tail. Her targeting computer trilled as her weapons lost lock. Dammit, but he was good at this.

The president’s voice was impatient. “You're hardly in a position to negotiate. You have sixteen ships with you, by my count, and as much as I don’t want to do this, I—shit.”

The patterns in the sky changed. Drones descended, an angry swarm bent on a single directive: taking out anyone who got too close to the Ghalan ships. Well done, Niko, she thought reflexively, and then felt the sinking of her heart. Ekrem had to know too.

Asala’s thoughts scrambled along with the Khayyami fleet. She’d told Niko their mission hadn’t changed, but what was her mission? What was she actually fighting for here? Every flag on this field wanted the tech for themselves and only themselves, and none of those causes had ever been hers. The Khayyami should have access to this technology too, just as the Gandesians should. The best thing that could happen at this point was if everyone went home with a party favor in their pocket so they might all try again. But not at the cost of killing innocents. Not this death match.

The solution burst forth from her lips. “Defend the refugees,” she said. “They’re not all spaceworthy enough to reach the wormhole. You deny them escape and take the tech at gunpoint, you’re no better than Cynwrig. If Gan-De wins here, these people are all dead. But if the fleet protects those who don’t get out, they might share willingly if you both survive this.” That’d only be good for two sides out of three, she thought, but it was an improvement, at least. “Which story would play better back home?”

Ekrem was quiet for a long time—a few seconds, in reality, but in battle, an eternity. “You’re asking me to engage the Gandesian fighters directly to protect a third party. Not out of our own defense.”

“Yes.”

“They’d read that as a declaration of war.”

Asala looked from one side of her cockpit shield to the other, and took in a cluttered tapestry of mangled ships, limp bodies, blazes of combustion. “This isn’t?”

Another silence. The comms switched off.

Three horribly pregnant seconds ticked by—and then, to Asala’s profound relief, the picture on her monitor shifted.

The Khayyami fleet was standing guard.

• • •

Cynwrig thought of her grandson, the dancer. On one of his visits when he’d been a very little boy—he was still a little boy, would always be a little boy—he’d reported proudly to her that he’d learned all the planets at school, and also some stars. He’d insisted on taking her out to the terrace after dessert, where he’d pointed at the night sky and explained the universe to her as if she were unaware of the concept. She’d listened and mmm’d, in that simultaneously charmed and bored way that went hand in hand with parenting. That’s the Hearth, he’d said, pointing at the boxy constellation. And you can’t see Khayyam right now, but it’s there. He’d been so pleased with himself, so empowered by being able to name the constants of the world.

For what was more constant than your place in the stars?

When she’d put on her uniform before boarding the Thorn, she had thought through, as she always did before battle, what the stakes were that day. Securing the technology, that had been the short-term goal. If she secured the tech, she’d be giving Gan-De a better chance at a brighter future. If they lost, her enemies would have a significant advantage, and she’d have to weather the political shame of the destitute clannies having been one step ahead of the Gandesian military. Those were the parameters, and she’d accepted them, set her mind to them.

Nowhere in those parameters had there been any small print that read also, there’s a slight chance you could lose the planet today. How could there be? It was madness, pure madness. This couldn’t be right.

The same struggle was taking place on the faces of the bridge crew, the contemplation of a disaster the mind was not meant for, the need to process and react to this impossible information now.

Cynwrig had a flash of her children and her grandchildren at holidays. She remembered the smiles on her friends’ faces over glasses of wine, flush with good-natured argument. She saw the grand arches of the Shenset Library, the colored tiles of the Hundred-Year Promenade, the gardens and plazas where people ate and gossiped and played. All now lost, thanks to nothing more than a cosmic nudge.

The clannies had done this on purpose. They had to have. A final stab at the heart of her world. This was their hatred for Gandesian life made plain. The engineer had no numbers to work with, but Uzochi did. She was a scientist. She would have calculated. She would have known.

A fire set within Cynwrig’s heart. It shot through her veins, scorching muscle and bone. “Engage the Ghalan ships,” she said. She set her shoulders and showed her teeth. “We take them all.”

• • •

Asala braced herself as Red Squad descended. The Khayyami were ready, but it was the remaining Ghalan fighters who responded first. One was blown apart almost immediately; two more retaliated. These sixteen—fifteen, now—were the bravest of their number. They had to know there was no escape for themselves, yet they flew steady. Asala hoped that no matter whose side got the privilege of writing the history of that day, someone would remember her volunteers.

Ekrem, ever the golden boy, flew his ship as if he were a fish and the sky was water. He hit two Gandesians in rapid succession, then took up position beside Asala. She was sure his fighters already had their orders as to who was friendly now, but the symbolism of one squad leader flying alongside another could not be missed. He was nothing if not a politician.

For a moment, though, Asala felt the politics slide away, and instead reveled in fighting alongside a friend. “Thank you,” she said over the comms. “I really didn’t want to kill you.”

“I have no idea how to respond to that,” he said.

They gunned forward in a measured frenzy, two seasoned soldiers weaving helices against the stars, unburdened by dimensions or drag. Their respective fleets did the same in the space around them, amid the lace of drones. Red Squad was every bit as fierce as their reputation suggested, and Ekrem’s skill in flight had found its match at last. He and Asala both spun through a curtain of gunshot, trying to gain the upper hand. Asala maimed one ship, her weapons slicing through its tail. Ekrem took care of the rest, then took out another in its wake. A ship gave chase to Ekrem; he took light damage, but quickly reversed the score. On her monitor, she could see the obliteration of her squad—fourteen, thirteen, ten—but the little parade of civilian ships remained unbroken. It was working. Red Squad was growing thin.

Another Gandesian fighter threw itself at Ekrem, and whoever was its pilot was born for combat. Asala joined the fray, and all three wrestled at high speed. Despite the frenzy, her weapons fired true, and a burst of gunfire tore into the Gandesian craft. Part of the wing was destroyed, but that didn’t matter outside of atmosphere. If you had guns and an engine, you were still in the fight, and though she knew the ship itself wasn’t alive, Asala found herself thinking that she’d only managed to make it mad. It stopped, though, pausing in the chase while its pilot took stock. Its guns fired a scattered burst of defiance.

She made a mistake. Or maybe Ekrem did; it was impossible to say at these speeds. Someone turned, someone anticipated, someone misjudged—whatever the sequence of events had been, her craft scraped against his. The impact outside was silent, but the air she breathed vibrated with it, a hideous metallic yowl. Alarm klaxons blared. She swore as she was thrown a safe distance away, her adrenaline spiking as she tried to make sense of the web of red lights demanding her attention. Damage to the outer shielding, straight down the main fuselage. No breach, though. She exhaled. No breach.

She did not need to look at her monitor to see what had happened to Ekrem. Her heavy hull had hit his cockpit, rending the more fragile frame inward and splintering the viewshield. A thin mist of oxygen rose up through the fracture, unmistakable in the blackness. She could see him in there. His helmet was on, and he was undoubtedly wearing a pressurized suit. But his craft was lost.

“Ekrem!” she shouted. “Eject.”

Her heart sunk at the delay in reply, then further still at the voice that followed. “I can’t,” he said with distant resignation. She’d heard that tone dozens of times before, from soldiers who knew their wounds wouldn’t heal. “The pod’s jammed.”

Fuck. “Okay, sit tight, I’ll keep them off you until we can—”

“Asala,” he said. “My helmet’s cracked.”

She closed her eyes.

He continued, as if searching for understanding. “I hit it on the frame when you—we—it’s not your fault.”

Asala knew what this meant. The damage to his helmet had to be minor, if he was still speaking. But it would grow, and it wouldn’t take long. If he was lucky, it’d happen fast, and he’d die from rapid decompression. Slow decompression, she didn’t want to picture. Otherwise, he’d suffocate before the battle was over. Either way, there was nothing left for him to do but sit and wait. Could be seconds. Could be minutes. He’d be trapped there, helpless, a little more strangled with every moment that slipped by. His voice was calm, but staring down the barrel of you might die in two seconds, or in two minutes, or in ten was a quiet torment she didn’t wish on anyone.

Especially not him.

A proximity warning pulled her eyes back open. The damaged Gandesian craft had steadied itself and was coming in full bore. She locked and fired. The fighter shattered. Whatever spark of victory Asala felt, it was smothered beneath preemptive regret. She knew what the right thing was to do.

“Asala,” Ekrem said again. His voice shook a little now. “Can you tell me why Niko . . . what happened, with them?”

She took a breath. “They think they’re doing the right thing,” she said. “It’s not about you. It was never about you. They love you.”

The comms crackled with static as he took that in. His voice came back, and it, too, cracked. “Please tell them I—”

She locked onto him with her weapons and pulled the trigger. Her guns did their work, freezing whatever bittersweet thought Ekrem had of his family as his last. It was the kindest someone in her profession could be.

• • •

A combat monitor wasn’t a very exciting thing to look at. All you saw was a rendered cube, filled with little round lights of different colors. Niko knew every dot was a person, and that every time one of them winked out, something explosive was happening elsewhere. Something violent and terrible. But all they could see were little dots that moved and sometimes vanished. A bloodless, passionless way to track business that was anything but.

Niko had sat watching the lights ever since they’d gotten the drones back. They knew the Gandesian hackers on the planet below were fighting to undo Niko’s efforts. They could hear it on one of their other monitors, a simple ping every time Niko’s firewall slapped the intruders back. There would be an alarm if there was trouble. There hadn’t been one yet, and so Niko watched the combat monitor, seeing what their hard work had wrought.

The Ghalan Defense Force wasn’t going to last this fight, but they had held on, and would to the end. It was the drones that were giving everyone around them trouble. Red Squad appeared overwhelmed, or at least confused, trying to find a strategy that worked equally well against deadly machines with algorithmic precision and haphazard freedom fighters with no training and nothing to lose. Nobody was going to win this, Niko thought. It would end when it ended.

They watched two particular dots, chased by another. They both had numbers, those dots, and Niko recognized them. They watched in horror as the familiar dots collided, and paused. Niko held their breath. One moment, there were three dots. In a blink, two, the two they knew. Niko breathed easier.

But then one dot fired on the other. “No!” Niko cried, but by the time the word had left their mouth, it was already done. A light, then an absence. Bloodless, passionless.

Niko tried to breathe, but their throat was shut and their tongue was thick. They tried to scream, but their voice was dead. They realized, stupidly, that they were staring at the place on the monitor where Ekrem’s dot had been, waiting for it to turn back on. It was a mistake, an equipment error. A trick Asala was pulling for one of her genius strategic reasons. Their father’s ship was damaged, sure, but it was there. They were working together now. They were on the same side. Asala had no reason to . . . to . . . No. No, Ekrem’s light would come back. He’d come back and tell Niko he was sorry, he was so sorry, he’d fix this, he’d put a bandage on it and make it all right.

But Ekrem’s light did not come back. Neither did the lights of the Khayyami fleet that strayed too close to the drones. They did not come back, because Niko had done their job.

They’d had no choice, Niko told themself. And Asala must not have either—after all, they’d asked this of her. Niko had asked for this, and, and, and—and something had changed, she’d had a reason, she always had a good reason—no. Why, why, whywhywhy, it didn’t make any—look, see, they thought frantically, forcing their attention to the dots that belonged to the former pieces of Camp Ghala. You helped them. They’re getting out. We saved them. You saved them. Not all of the Ghalan ships had reached the wormhole yet, but some had, and their dots had disappeared too, gone now to someplace better.

Was the same true of their father?

Leave the guilty behind, Asala had said on Gan-De. Niko’s words, echoed back to them.

Niko av Ekrem lay down on the floor. Whatever happened to them now could happen. They no longer cared.

• • •

The clannies had fight; Cynwrig gave them that much. This pack the Thorn was engaged with now—the ones who had thrown the wormhole open—were armed and better prepared than she’d expected. And the degree to which they were armed, that had raised an eyebrow and boiled the blood. She was already making a list of everyone on her intel teams who would be demoted for this—no, not demoted. Imprisoned. This was criminal negligence, letting this kind of firepower sit undetected in orbit above the heads of her citizens. They’d all rot for this.

Imprisoned where? a small voice in her mind asked. A life sentence doesn’t mean much if there’s no planet to build prisons on.

“Target that cruiser,” she roared. “They’re all following that one’s lead.”

She wasn’t going to give the clannies too much credit. Weapons and fight they had, but not like her. She was merely surprised that they had weapons. That was where her praise ended. They were well armed for rabble, that was all. She was the leader of the free people of Gan-De, the liberator, the closed fist of the law. She had the finest ships in the system, the finest artillery. These Ghalans had teeth, but you could say the same of a lapdog.

And what was a lapdog against a lion?

The Thorn rained hell upon its enemies, its railguns relentless. There was a report of damage to the engines. Fine. There was a malfunction in the tertiary firing chamber. Fine. Bruises and scrapes, nothing more. It was nothing compared to the righteous slaughter her warship had brought forth.

“General, the lead ship is contacting us,” the comms officer said.

Cynwrig nodded.

An arrogant voice echoed over the comms. “I am Hafiz of the Order of Boreas,” they said. “We are more than these ships. We are on every world and we speak every tongue. You have already lost. You will have no surrender from us.”

“No matter,” Cynwrig said. “I wouldn’t have accepted it anyway.”

She silenced the comms and gave the order. Her fury still squalled, but there was room for satisfaction as she watched the rebel ship consume itself in a flash of ruptured fuel and burning air.

• • •

Somehow, her situation seemed fitting. Soraya was in a worn-down, last-legs shuttle, crammed into the cargo hold with about two dozen more people than this ship should safely carry. She’d been one of the few in Camp Ghala who hadn’t traveled there in such a manner. Appropriate, in a grim sort of way, that that was how she’d had to leave.

She’d been the last one aboard, and between the crowd in front of her and the airlock hatch behind her, she had little room to move. Some morbid part of her noted that if the hull blew, she’d be the first one sucked out. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, it was out of her hands now.

Everyone around her was scared and uncomfortable. Of course, they had been in Camp Ghala as well, but it felt different in transit. In camp, the question was when are we leaving? In transit, the question was where are we going? Both queries were perfect anxiety fuel, but personally, she felt the latter was worse. She wondered what would happen to her quarters, her things. Not that she cared about the things, really, except as a matter of sentiment. But that had been her place, her home, for over a decade. Now it was gone, and even if the ship she’d lived on had gotten through, it would never be the same as it was. She didn’t even know the name of the ship, or who it’d belonged to before the camp. She’d known it as a block number, and one little corner of it had belonged to her. From here on out, it would be something yet again changed.

She thought that by now she’d know that nothing was permanent. And of course, she’d wanted to leave. But the suddenness of it, the panicked pick-up-and-go . . . it left no room for goodbyes.

A toddler started shrieking somewhere in the throng, apparently sharing her feelings. Soraya closed her eyes and exhaled deeply. A sobering thought hit her: She had no idea how long it would take them to get from the wormhole to . . . to wherever it was they were going.

The ship jerked to the left, and now it wasn’t just the toddler screaming. Her fellow passengers couldn’t hear what was going on out there, and they couldn’t see, either, but oh, they knew. People stumbled and fell into each other as the ship’s pilot (whoever it was) did their best to dodge gunfire (whoever that was too). The refugees began to panic. There was swearing, yelling, desperate prayers, wordless sobs.

I’m gonna die here, she thought. That had always been a possibility, and yet Soraya was chilled by it all the same.

She summoned up the last crumb of stamina she had left. “Everybody, listen!” she called out, pushing the words from the base of her lungs. “This won’t help. We can make it. We have a chance. Hang on to each other. Help people who can’t stand. We can do this.”

The commotion quieted, but did not vanish. Above it, though, an old man’s voice rang out. “Oh winter, winter, please turn around . . .” Soraya recognized him—Ade, from the laundry. Always singing, despite the crushing reek of the chemical dip. He was singing now, too, a fluffy, old-fashioned folksong, one of those that everybody knew every word to without remembering where they’d learned it. “I miss the sunshine, and the green grass ground—”

A few more voices joined in. They weren’t pretty, and they weren’t on key. That wasn’t the point. “Please take your snowfall and fade away . . .”

Some people still sobbed. Some people still prayed. But one by one, the song grew in strength. Someone reached out and held Soraya’s hand. She squeezed back, and sang loud. “Let in the springtime, so we can—”

They were all still singing when a barrage hit and the lights went out.

• • •

Asala was comfortable being a killer. She knew that was a horrible thing, but she’d long come to live with it. There had been deaths that disturbed her, or kept her awake in the days after. That was normal.

It had been a long time, though, since it had brought sorrow.

She stared out at the bedlam beyond her cockpit shield. The Thorn was rampaging through the sky, a wild mobuck charging through Hafiz’s flock. Asala’s Defense Force was gone, no more left to count. The Khayyami fleet as a whole was scattered now, brawling with drones and chasing Red Squad stragglers.

A tightness in her chest let go—the last scrap of pretense that any of this was hers to clean up. She’d done her job. She’d done it. She was done.

She locked onto Dayo’s signal. Still intact. Another knot loosened. She wasn’t too late. Her racing dart leapt toward its new heading, fast as it could fly.

She had caught chatter over the comms—intercepted messages from the Gandesians. It was all scrap and garble, but she caught details of a panic that made sense, one of altered gravity and errant orbits. She nearly called Niko to confirm . . . but no. No, she would ask nothing of Niko now.

Gan-De had been given a death sentence, if the chatter was true. She could see the planet now out her window, a brilliant clouded marble like all the rest. It didn’t look as if it were dying, from out here. But then, Hypatia hadn’t either, and she doubted Eratos appeared anything but beautiful and whole from above. People spoke about the death of planets as if the rock itself would shatter, but the truth was never so dramatic. The entire sphere wasn’t in danger of ceasing to exist. All that mattered was the inner goings-on of that tiny strip of gauze, that onion skin of atmosphere clinging to the rocky surface like morning dew. The narrowest of margins on which everything depended.

Starving the sun hadn’t been enough for these warring worlds. Now they were playing billiards with planets, too. She remembered the people on Gan-De who had helped her and Niko cross the mountains, the farmers and their workshop attic full of boxes saved for another day. They didn’t deserve this.

Did she deserve this, Asala wondered? Did Ekrem? Did Cynwrig? Did Hafiz? The engineers who had first proposed the solar harvest? The politicians who favored whichever cause lined their pockets most? Did the flag-wavers, the finger-pointers, the us-versus-thems—did any of them, for all their greed and hate and folly, deserve punishment on this scale? Punishment in general, they deserved, herself included. A slap in the face, a knife to the throat. But not a whole world. Not every world. Their crimes, even in aggregate, did not warrant extinction. Even if it was their own fault.

Dayo’s pod waited outside. A matte metal oval of government make, utterly unremarkable, but it felt to Asala as if it contained the whole universe. Her hands shook as she angled her ship’s tiny hold toward it. This, she likewise did not deserve. Asala had killed a friend, and for this, she was rewarded with the thing she’d thought she’d lost forever.

But then, this was not about her. This was about Dayo. Dayo, who had loved her. Changed her for the better. Asala didn’t know what Dayo had done in the years between, but she was sure, from what little she’d seen that day, that her sister’s hands were as bloody as her own. Perhaps Dayo didn’t deserve saving either. And perhaps that was why the question of who deserved what was broken to begin with. That was what they’d all been focused on—Niko, Cynwrig, Ekrem, Hafiz, even Soraya, in a more merciful way. Who deserved saving, and why? As if that were a question any of them could answer. As if any of them were gods.

Asala would save Dayo now, not because she herself deserved that joy, and not because of whether or not Dayo had earned it. She would do it because it was what love demanded.

An image flickered through her mind: Niko walking into Ekrem’s office all those months back. The proud father, introducing them. The grown child, blossoming at the attention. There had been love there, too.

She buried the thought as quickly as she could.

The racing dart had only the smallest of holds, intended for light cargo and supplies. Asala almost laughed. Light cargo, she thought, remembering her grandmother, always grabbing Dayo’s trim cheeks fretfully and shoving another cup of sweet cream into her hands. The little joy of remembrance made something within her keen. She’d told herself she would never have that again—the comforting daily nothings of family. And yet here she was, hoping like a fool.

She checked to make sure her suit and helmet were sealed, then began to open the hatch. She heard the steady hiss of controlled depressurization, and she knew she’d be losing a precious amount of air. That didn’t concern her. If Dayo wasn’t breathing at the end of this, she didn’t want to be either.

The few medical supplies and odd tools that had been in the hold floated away. Asala looked around the cockpit panel, and found the controls for the cargo tether. She extended it, and activated the electromagnet on the end. She felt a backward pull, then a thunk. The tether brought the pod in, sliding it into the grated-over space behind her seat. It fit the hold, barely.

Asala hurriedly closed the hatch and began repressurizing. The oxygen tanks groaned as they labored. Finally, the indicator light on her monitor hit green. As it did so, the pod responded, automatically sliding back its outer cover upon detecting breathable surroundings. Asala pulled off her own helmet and turned up her implants as far as they would go. The whine of the engines was almost unbearable, as was the hiss of the air and the previously unheard hum of the control panel. The cacophony made her wince, but she only needed to bear it for a moment, just until she could unearth one small sound buried under all the rest.

And there it was: Dayo, pulling in an even breath.

• • •

The sky was now littered with what was left of the rebel ships and the refuse they’d carried. The Thorn flew triumphant through the flotsam, but there was no gladness in this victory. Save the sound of comms chatter and the distant vibrations of the railguns cooling down, Cynwrig’s bridge was as silent as a funeral.

On the viewscreen, the edges of the wormhole writhed. “Is it collapsing?” she asked of the engineer.

The engineer’s face was empty. “I would assume so, General.”

“But it will make no difference, will it?”

“For the planet? No.” Tears streaked down the woman’s face. “You can’t move a planet back to where it was.”

Cynwrig looked at the woman. “I do not know your name.”

“Nur avett Dana, kima,” the engineer said.

“Do you have family, Nur?”

“No, kima.”

“Friends?”

“Not really, kima.”

“Who do you shed tears for, then?”

Nur turned her head to Cynwrig slowly, confused by the question. “For Gan-De,” she said, her voice choked, her tone implying the answer was plain.

Cynwrig let her weight sink into her chair. She did not shed tears of her own. Nur’s tears were her tears. The frozen tears of every brave Gandesian pilot who floated now in the vacuous wreckage, they were hers as well. The storm rains that would come, the seas flowing under doors and down once-shining streets, those, too, would be Cynwrig’s anguish, washing over her beloved world.

Twenty minutes the wormhole had been open. Six months she had held the line at the Siege of Halien. Fifty-two years she had been a soldier. Her entire life, she had bled and sweat and suffered for Gan-De. And yet, twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was all it took to undo all she had done.

There were always two levels of strategy to consider in war: the immediate needs of the battle, and the long game. The battle here was over. Down on the surface, another was beginning. Her advisers would be compiling their numbers and reports, coming to cleaner conclusions than Nur had. They would get over their shock, then begin planning, evacuating, strategizing. They would find ways to weather the days ahead.

But what of the years? What of the decades? Would Gan-De even stay habitable that long? If their world were gone, who were they, then?

No. She would not accept this. She would not see her proud people made to beg for charity, to leech as the clannies had, to bow before some other planet and lose all remembrance of their heritage. Defeat in battle, that was a bitterness she could weather. But this was annihilation. Utter ruin.

She’d put her own eyes out before she’d let that happen.

“Take us through,” she said to the navigator.

The navigator looked baffled. “General?”

The entire bridge had their eyes on her. She laced her gloved fingers together and nodded. The long game. “We have two futures before us. In one, we secure the technology that has been taken through that door, and we master it for ourselves. We use it to come back, and to take our brethren to a safer home. Or, two, our home is lost. Gan-De is lost, and there is no technology that can save it, no door that can be reopened.” Her children, her grandchildren. The memory of their faces tore at her. “In that future, we are what remains of our culture. We are the standard-bearers. We are the ones who will rebuild.” She met the eyes of her crew. They were bewildered and furious, just as she was within. “And in either future, this I swear to you . . .” She pointed hard at the viewscreen. “We will wipe out the animals that did this. We will have justice for our world.”

A young officer stood and gave her a formal salute. “To my death, General,” he said, echoing the oath he’d taken when he’d been given his uniform.

One by one, the other officers did the same.

“To my death.”

“To my death.”

“To my death.”

The Thorn heaved itself forward, a ship of might and rage, and sailed through the shrinking maw into the unknown.

• • •

Why weren’t they dead?

An unarmed derelict ship wasn’t a high-priority target, to be sure, but Niko should’ve been dead. They’d been hoping for it, hoping for the drones to revert back to their owners, or a trigger-happy Gandesian or Khayyami—at this point, did it matter who?—wiping the playing field clean. They’d been lying on the floor, waiting for it. Begging for it. Explosions were fast, and spacing was quick. Either way would be fine. Or even—even if the ship got boarded, if whoever was winning out there wanted to keep some salvage for themselves, Niko was sure they’d just get shot, no questions. That was fine too, so long as it happened soon.

The comms crackled. “Station Control?”

Niko opened their eyes. They shut them again. That wasn’t meant for them. They could leave it be.

“Station Control? Hello?”

Niko sat up, staring dumbly at their cobbled-together workstation as if they’d never seen it before. Everything felt like they were in a dream, like their body belonged to someone else.

“Hello? Anybody alive out there?”

Slowly, Niko reached for the controls. “Yes, hello, I read you. Who is this?”

“Oh, thank fuck,” the voice on the other end said. “This is Captain Banik, of the Arrow. Uh, formerly Block G.”

Niko had no idea who that was. “Okay?”

“Is this Station Control?”

“This is . . .” Niko looked around the room, currently populated by themself and a corpse. “What’s left of it.”

“Okay, good.” The voice had the sound of someone trying desperately hard to hold it together. “I—I’ve got fifty people on my ship. Our main engines failed, we’re not going to get to the wormhole in time. I don’t—what do we do?”

Niko stared for a moment.

“Hello?”

“Yes—yes, I’m here, hello.” Niko tried to push through the sludge filling their brain. Why couldn’t they be dead?

Those fifty people will be, part of them replied, if you don’t do something.

“Are—are you under fire?” Niko asked.

“No. No, all the shit’s concentrated by the wormhole. We barely got past our moorings.”

“Okay. Okay.” Think. They opened up a shared channel. “This is . . . Station Control to any Ghalan ships remaining. Please ping back if you’re still in the vicinity of the camp.”

Their monitor lit up with a dozen or so lights.

“Okay, great. Um, okay, ping back if you’ve got thrusters, at least. Enough to scoot around your immediate environment.”

Three lights pinged back.

Three ships. All right. Niko ran their hand through their hair and exhaled. Those three ships weren’t properly spaceworthy, but they could get around. They could pick people up, and ferry them to . . . to . . . to their location. Niko’s ship was dead in the water, but it had air and it was big. It was something. It would help.

“All right, every ship that can move, listen up,” Niko said. “We’re going to find everybody who got left behind, and we’ll . . . we’ll take it from there.” They looked at the little lights on their monitor, still looking for the one that wasn’t there. Niko should’ve died. But they hadn’t, and there was work to do.

• • •

“Dayo?” Asala said, kicking the ship back into flight. Burned out though the battle was, she wasn’t stupid enough to sit still. “Dayo, can you hear me?”

Dayo was breathing, but did not respond. Unconscious, Asala reasoned. A lack of oxygen. An injury while ejecting. She was alive, that was the important part. Asala could see to her once they’d . . . once they . . .

Where were they going now?

Asala laughed at her own lack of foresight. She had no plan for this. She’d expected to die. Where would she go? Who would take them in? Where would they be safe?

A family, Cynwrig had said of her pawned soldier. A wife on Gan-De.

Gan-De was in trouble, the comms said.

Dayo would want to go back regardless of trouble, Asala was sure. That was what she herself would want, if family was involved. The pod in her hold was proof enough of that.

But could she even get to Gan-De? Hacked platforms or no, Asala saw no chance of getting to the surface after this. Even if it were possible to land safely, there was no way the both of them wouldn’t get shot the moment they stepped out of their craft.

Her fuel gauge slunk a little lower by the moment. Her oxygen did the same.

There was no one left on this side who would help her. What remained of Camp Ghala was dead or dying. She didn’t know if Soraya had survived. She could ask nothing of Niko, if they lived. And the Thorn hadn’t been defeated, though where it had gone? She’d have to pocket that question.

The wormhole flickered. Stars began to shine normally through where its edges had blacked them out a short time ago.

“Please forgive me, Dayo,” she said. “When you wake up—please understand.”

She shot the racing dart toward the wormhole, gritting teeth and burning fuel. Faster, faster her ship went, until suddenly, something stronger took over. She could feel an inescapable pull grab hold of her craft as she crossed a final, invisible border. On an impulse, she slammed the engines off, unsure how they would operate within this uncanny space. She’d been right; she didn’t need them. The ship coasted smoothly through a constructed path. She could not say how fast. There was motion, but that was all she could say. Everything about this was beyond her grasp. There was no color, no shape, merely darkness in its purest form. The universe beyond the soft glow of her cockpit had disappeared, and it terrified her. She wanted to leave, but there was no possibility of that now. She could not go back. Only through.

On the other end, there was light.

Want to keep reading?

Get the bundled text and audio of the next season for half off!

Visit serialbox.com/redeem and enter code VelaebookVelaS2.

Keep reading for an excerpt of The Vela: Salvation:

Episode 1

The Guilty

Ashley Poston

Leave the guilty behind.

That was the initiative Niko had believed in. Their rallying cry, their purpose for all the shit they pulled themself through to find the stardrive. To get to the other side of that wormhole. To find a new life.

But then the guilty were left behind.

Niko—and everyone else in this galaxy—were left behind.

And as the wormholes closed, they looked on with the certain resignation of someone staring into the vast, black void and seeing nothingness staring back. Hope was gone.

The Vela was gone.

As was their solar system’s last chance at survival. The sun was dying and its planets slowly freezing over, succumbing to that ineffable darkness. And soon, all of the people that called Hypatia and Gan-De and Khayyam and Khwarizmi and even Camp Ghala, suspended in a forever rotation around Gan-De, home would succumb to that darkness, too.

It had been six months since the Evac—since the wormhole closed and all hope was lost. Six months since the guilty were left behind.

Niko hadn’t understood why Asala didn’t get their reasoning, but now they knew all too well. Because only fools judge someone else’s worthiness. Who were they to decide who deserved to live and who deserved to die?

Niko wanted to die.

Back pressed against a cold and rigid crate of warm sy-wool coats and blankets bound for Gan-De, the sound of pulse pistols echoing in the cargo hull, Niko wanted to die. The marauder-class freighter—the Marooned, as it was ironically named—had been safe for three weeks, two days, and nineteen hours.

Six. Six shots.

There were six shots in a pulse rifle before the clip had to reload. Six shots bore into the other side of the crate. Niko held tight to the pistol, squeezed their eyes shut, and dove out from behind the crate.

A Gan-De soldier shouted, “There they are!”

“Capture them! We’ve orders not to kill,” another reminded.

Niko ducked behind another crate and cursed. Orders not to kill—their ass. If these soldiers didn’t want to kill them, then they should’ve used sleep darts or a tranq gun or anything besides live ammunition. Nanosplints could heal wounds, not gaping holes in someone’s chest.

Niko checked the ship’s blueprints on their personal datapad. The engine room should be down the corridor to their left, and that meant . . . the lab was straight ahead. Niko had spent the better part of two months looking for this damned ship, two months scouring through data trails and docking manifests, to find something—anything—that the scientist Uzochi Ryouta left behind. Blueprints for the stardrive. Anything.

Literally anything would do.

Niko prayed to the gods and darted for the door just ahead of the soldiers. A bullet whizzed past their ear, so close they felt the burn scorch their cheek. Ten feet. Five—

“Stop them! Don’t let them get aw—”

Niko slammed their hand against the panel to close the door, and it slid shut with a hiss. They then ripped the panel off the wall, hoping that stalled the Gan-De soldiers for at least a few minutes. They doubled over to catch their breath, and finally turned into the room.

It was a lab, dust-covered and derelict, but a lab nonetheless. Tears almost came to Niko’s eyes; their information had been right. They had tracked the ship to a port in the Gan-De region of Zaroa in the southern hemisphere. The scientist Uzochi had taken up residence here when she first came to Gan-De, and only stayed for a few weeks—long enough to set up a small lab and do some work, before relocating. Niko had been to almost every forsaken Inner Ring planet looking for this very ship.

Most of the lab equipment seemed to have been packed up in a hurry, and any computer left had been scrubbed. But they took out a small thumb drive from their inner pocket and pressed it into one of the ports. A data worm spread through the scrubbed computer, digging into every hole, every module, every program, searching for any trace of history or backlogs—though with every second Niko’s heart felt heavier and heavier.

What if the only blueprints were with Uzochi? On the other side of the wormhole? What if there weren’t any traces? What if everyone here was stuck, fated to starve to death or freeze or—

A window popped up on the screen, and Niko couldn’t enter the command to open the files quick enough.

Please, please, please, they prayed to whatever gods were out there. If the gods were listening. If the gods were real. They weren’t going to just surrender now.

A bloom of data flowered across the screen.

Coordinates.

Coordinates to a distant star. A distant solar system. Not what Niko was looking for, but for the first time in six dark months, since they stared out into the nothingness, they felt . . . a spark.

It wasn’t quite hope—it tasted bitter. But it was there, and it was growing.

They were quickly queuing up the program to download every last code and scrap of data the worm could find when a laser-cutter punctured the door. They whirled around, startled. No—they couldn’t download the coordinates. If they did, then the Gan-De soldiers would capture them, find it, and do . . . who knew what.

No, this information was best left lost—to everyone else.

Niko turned back toward the screen and, with renewed concentration, committed the coordinates to memory. They weren’t very good at fighting. They were shit at mechanics. But code—numbers and signs, all neatly filed in a row—they knew those quite well. So they stored the information in the back part of their brain where they usually shoved the grief for their dead father, and then deleted the coordinates. Wiped the entire memory. And then—for good measure—they took the pulse pistol out of its holster and shot the hard drive dead.

The soldiers had cut through the door by then, and kicked it in. The door fell with a heavy thump, and the sound of footsteps rushed in, the click of fingers on the triggers of pistols, the heavy breaths of drones who had chased Niko across the stars.

All the way here.

And they had finally caught up.

“Surrender!” one of the soldiers, the one in charge, Niko presumed, commanded. “Surrender and we’ll let you live.”

“Aren’t your orders to bring me in alive?” Niko asked, quite unable to stop themself. They turned around and, as they did, the butt of a rifle slammed down against their face, knocking them out cold.

#

There was coldness. In the distance, screaming. The whirl of spaceships. Chatter through their headset. Niko knew this dream, this memory of the Evac. They had it often.

It was home in the same way that loneliness was home now, too.

Watching the wormholes spread wide against the vast darkness, yawning open like giant mouths into the great unknown. They had had a chance to go, they remembered. They had a chance to board a ship and make it through the line of imposing Khayyami starships and Gan-De marauders, into that great unknown.

But people had needed them in the control room on Camp Ghala as the space station fell apart around them. Asala had needed them. And they were foolish enough to want to earn back her trust. So they stayed.

Never mind that it didn’t matter.

In that control room panel they watched the lights of the starships blink, blink, blink––and then one went out.

Their father’s starship.

They had stared at the screen, waiting for the light to come back, for the ship to just have lost contact for a moment. For—for something else beside the inevitable. But there was only Asala’s light swirling away from where their father’s ship had been, and they knew.

Asala had killed their father.

And then she left into the closing wormhole. Without a word. Without a reason. Without Niko.

Leaving Niko without anyone at all.

#

Niko woke with a start.

Their head was spinning. The smell of the command station in Camp Ghala, acidic steel and rust, filled their nose––the ghost of a smell, the memory of a refugee camp that was no longer there. It had been disbanded a few days after the Evac. Gan-De forces stormed what was left of the camp, took the refugees prisoner, and brought everyone planet-side. The refugees were branded criminals for having housed Uzochi Ryouta, who had escaped into the wormhole with countless people. No one had an accurate record. A hundred people could have gone through the wormhole, or a hundred thousand, and there was no telling.

They shook their head and sat up on the hard bed, getting their bearings. It wasn’t a prison cell, at least, but it wasn’t exactly a five-star resort, either. The bed was bare, and there was a bathroom and sink––but that was all. It must have been a room on one of Gan-De’s larger warships. The only one they had seen was the Thorn, General Cynwrig’s own gargantuan warship, but the last Niko had heard that had gone toward the wormhole as well.

They wondered how many warmongering ships the Gandesians had. Probably hundreds. Enough to take the rest of the star system. They had already set up warships around Khayyam, the planet Niko’s father had been president of, and without a leader the planet had shuttered itself, reeling from the loss. Niko was simply waiting for the news that the Gan-De military had invaded.

It doesn’t matter, they thought. You aren’t a president’s child anymore.

Their father was dead, and his title along with it.

Pushing themself to sit up, their head began to throb, so they slumped back against the wall their bed was pushed up against. They could feel the nanosplints working on the gash on the side of their face, slowly knitting the skin back together. The nanosplints hurt more than they normally did—whoever had clocked them on the jaw really did a number. Then again, it was probably the same soldier who had followed them across the stars for the last three months, so Niko couldn’t really fault them.

Niko knew what the Gandesian Empire wanted. As the child of the late President Ekrem of Khayyam, Niko might have just been the only one who could negotiate peace between Khayyam and Gan-De. They had two brothers, but they highly doubted either Lukas or Ante would even consider negotiations. Neither of their brothers had ever been the sit-and-listen type. Niko had taken the reins on that one.

So it only made sense that Gan-De wanted to deal with Niko and not their act-first, listen-later brothers. Besides, Niko was at the Evac when it happened. If Khayyam had to choose which of President Ekrem’s children to listen to, it would be the one who was there. Who saw what happened.

Who watched Asala, assassin and friend, kill their father—

Don’t think about it, Niko told themself.

Instead, they summoned up the memory of the coordinates, repeating the numbers like a mantra, a story––a prayer. They kept the coordinates fresh in their head because, while it wasn’t blueprints to another stardrive, it was something.

It was more than what Niko had found in three months of searching.

And they wouldn’t, under any circumstances, let it pass them by.

A few hours later, a Gandesian soldier brought them what looked like dinner, and expressed surprise that they were awake already. Apparently, the doctor who looked at Niko had thought they would be out for a few more hours at least.

If nothing else, Niko surprised people.

“The general will be pleased to know you’re alive,” the soldier said with a distinct accent—Hypatian? Upper Crescent. Niko knew that tongue. Asala’s voice was tinged with it, too. Niko knew that after the Evac, most of the refugees left at Camp Ghala were conscripted into the military, but Niko hadn’t really paid much attention until now.

It had all been facts they had heard but never seen. It was different seeing it for themself.

Something in what the soldier said caught their attention. “General? Who’s the new acting commander now that Cynwrig is gone?”

“There isn’t one,” said a cold, crisp voice from the doorway.

Niko stared up at the shadowy figure in the entrance. Their skin prickled. At first, they tried to convince themself that their eyes deceived them. It couldn’t be. But then the woman stepped into the brightly lit room, her silvery-white hair pulled back into a tight bun, cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, in a simple black uniform and boots. But her eyes—her eyes Niko remembered the best. Dark, cold, and emotionless, like the nothingness that stared back from the emptiness of space.

It couldn’t be.

Niko had seen her warship—the Thorn—heading toward the gaping maw of the wormhole. They had seen it go.

But there was no denying that General Cynwrig stood in their room, very much real, and very much a problem. And that only meant one thing—the Thorn hadn’t been fast enough. The general’s warship hadn’t made it in time. And now this cruel woman and her military might were stuck here, on the back side of the rift, with every other guilty party.

Niko found themself smiling despite themself. “Well, this is a surprise.”

The general raised a single thin eyebrow. “What is?”

“You, here. Last I saw you, you were fleeing into the wormhole—” The general backhanded Niko so hard across the face, they felt the sting in their teeth. Blood came to their tongue. “Guess it’s a sore subject.”

“You should hold your tongue before you spit lies, child.”

Child. Niko was far from that. At twenty-six, they felt thirty years older than when they first left their home on Khayyam, bound for some greater purpose with the Order of Boreas. How laughable that was. They’d been through too much. They didn’t want to go through anything else. A small voice in their head said, Maybe if you push her, she’ll kill you.

The thought surprised Niko.

They’d never thought about suicide, but they felt numb to it now. The word had been a sharp knife in their mind before; now it was just a dull scratch. They wondered what their father would say about that. Probably condemn it. No, they knew he would condemn it.

But their father wasn’t here anymore.

Their father had no more words left to give Niko. Their last conversation with their father had been a confrontation.

Niko had replayed the scene over and over in their head, what they said, what they could’ve said differently, what they could’ve changed to—to—to save him. Could they have saved him? If they had, maybe General Cynwrig wouldn’t have them held captive in an undisclosed location on some begotten fleet ship, left to her machinations.

The general took a chair from the desk on the other side of the room, pulled it up to the bed, and sat down. “Now, are we going to talk like civilized adults?”

“You just called me a child, so I don’t have a lot of hope.”

The old woman frowned. “Perhaps if you quit acting like one, I wouldn’t refer to you as such.”

“Sorry if I don’t believe y—”

Again, the general backhanded Niko across the face. The taste of blood flooded their mouth. The nanosplint that had been working on the gash on the back of their head was slowly but surely making its way to their tongue and bloody lip. “Now, what were you doing on that derelict ship?”

Niko ran their tongue across their bloodied lip. It stung. “Looking,” they ground out.

“For what?”

“Things.”

General Cynwrig raised her hand again and, despite themself, Niko winced, bracing for the slap. But the general stopped herself and leaned back in the chair. “I’m a patient sort. If you won’t tell me now, you will soon. I always get what I want.”

“You didn’t get through that wormhole, did you?”

Niko knew they shouldn’t have said it. They knew they were walking on thin ice. Six months ago, they would’ve held their tongue. Been polite—political. But what did it matter now? They’d been left behind to die.

The general grabbed them by their hair—it had grown out in the six months that they had been on the run, long and unkempt—and forced their head back so they had to look up into her wrinkled, pale face. It startled Niko to realize that she didn’t look angry, but petrified.

“We will find a way,” she said sharply. “And you will help us. Willingly or not, that will be your choice. What allegiance do you have to the rot on the other side of that wormhole? They left you, too. Don’t forget that.”

Then she let go of Niko’s hair and left the room in four quick strides. The metal door clanged closed behind them, leaving Niko alone in the room once again, with a cold congealed plate of some sort of Gan-De porridge and a lot to think about.

#

For the next few days, no one came to visit Niko. They existed in the small, unassuming room, repeating the coordinates again and again. The only human contact they had was with the soldier who brought their food every morning, afternoon, and evening, and the soldier must’ve been given orders not to talk to Niko, because she never did.

She looked familiar, but Niko surmised that everyone in the same uniform looked familiar.

The Gandesian army couldn’t torture Niko, because that would go against Article Seven-Thirty-One of the Soldivar Trust, so there was no reason to keep them here. Niko should have been out finding the solar system the Vela disappeared to instead of sitting here in this ten-by-ten-foot room, but no. They were here.

Trapped.

On the fourth day, the door opened halfway into the afternoon, and Niko thought that maybe they were getting dessert, for once, but when they sat up they found it was General Cynwrig, and quickly lay back down again.

“Your brothers have asked for your safe return,” the general began, pulling up a chair again. She sat down, facing Niko’s bed, and crossed one leg over the other.

“So they do care,” Niko commented.

“Of course they do. Family is family, whether Gandesian or Khayyami or Khwarizmian.”

“But not refugees.”

The general didn’t have an answer for that. Of course she didn’t. Niko closed their eyes and waited for her to go. They wanted company, but not her company, and nothing she said was going to change their mind.

Forty-seven thirty-six four three-hundred and seventy-two nine ninety . . . They repeated the coordinates over and over again in their head, so lost in the numbers they didn’t feel the scurrying across their arm until it was almost at their throat. Then they opened their eyes.

A silvery spider sat on their chest.

Niko screamed and brushed away the mechanical spider, scrambling to sit up. They had forgotten about Cynwrig’s spiders. After everything that had happened, they had forgotten one of the worst parts about her.

The general held one in her hand, and it walked across her fingers, back and forth, back and forth. “It’s a pity, really,” she went on. “They even said they wanted to negotiate with us for your release. Isn’t that something?”

“My brothers would never negotiate.”

“Unless it’s for you, apparently,” Cynwrig mused. “But you know I can’t negotiate until I get what I want.”

“Which you won’t get.” Niko eyed the spider on her hand hesitantly. They had to remember that Cynwrig couldn’t torture them. It was against the Trust. This was just a scare tactic. One that wouldn’t work. Besides, what could her little spiders do, anyway?

A lot, the small voice in the back of Niko’s brain replied.

“I don’t have anything, anyway,” Niko went on, just to sell it.

The woman cocked her head. “I think you’re lying. After she subdued you, my lieutenant found that you had destroyed the lab’s hard drive. Now why would you do that if not to cover something up?”

“What would I cover up?”

“I don’t know. The thumb drive you used was empty, and we couldn’t repair the hard drive in the end. So you either found something too precious to copy—”

“Or I found nothing, and I destroyed it because I was angry,” Niko snapped. “I think it’s the second one, General. There’s nothing. Uzochi left nothing. No blueprints, no instructions, no prototypes—nothing. We’re stranded, General, and we’re all going to die.” The last part made Niko’s voice waver because, even with the coordinates, there was still a very good chance of that.

Cynwrig sat back in her chair. She was silent for a long moment, considering Niko’s words. The spider crawled up her arm and perched delicately on her shoulder. Its beady red-lens eyes watched Niko unblinkingly. And very faintly, Niko began to hear a sound—they didn’t understand what it was at first—but then they remembered. The click-click-click of tiny legs scrambling across a metal floor.

They stiffened, ready to bolt out of bed—

But it was too late.

General Cynwrig fixed them with her icy gaze. “I don’t believe you.”

Spiders poured out from the crack between the wall and the bed and rushed up their body, crawling, clicking, digging their sharp feet into their skin. Niko tried to brush them off, but as they did more came, grinding, biting, scratching, until they covered every inch of their skin. Niko fell over onto the bed, paralyzed, until the spiders swarmed over their eyes and blocked out the light, too. The last thing they saw was the general smirking over them, as if she had won.

And that was all there was—the click of metal and the chattering of tiny mandibles and darkness. They couldn’t move. They could barely breathe. And everything was dark, so dark. Dark like the nothingness of space, like the pinpoint of the universe where their father’s ship had been—and suddenly not. The kind of darkness that haunted their nightmares.

The spiders encased Niko in a cocoon of metal bodies, and there Niko existed.

For how long, they didn’t know.

But they felt warm lips press against their ear, and the hot breath of General Cynwrig hushed across their cheek— “You will tell me what you know, but you will understand why you should fear me first.”

Then nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Nothing but the numbers in their head. Breathe. Think. Remember the numbers. In order. Forty-seven thirty-six four three-hundred and seventy-two nine ninety—and the rest, all hundred and twenty-three numbers, over and over again. In the dark.

But the thoughts began to creep into their head.

Why did Asala leave me?

Why did she kill my father?

Why didn’t she kill me, too?

And then—worst of all—Why am I always left behind?

Left behind by Asala, who disappeared through the wormhole, and left by their father, gone to some other place through a rift where they cannot follow. Left by everyone they ever cared about. Everyone they let into their lives. Left by their brothers, who went on to marry or join the Khayyami military.

Leave the guilty behind, Niko had once said to Asala.

And so they were.

The truth was, they had come to terms with dying on a frozen planet. They knew they would—either of the weather, or dehydration, or malnourishment. They would watch the sun blink out, and then that would be that. The cold would come.

The cold came for everyone in the end, anyway.

That wasn’t why Niko searched for the last six months to find some way through the wormhole after the Vela. They searched because they wanted an answer. They wanted to face Asala and ask: “Why did you leave me behind?”

And Niko knew, out of everyone who had left, Asala would be the only one who respected them enough to give them a true answer.

After Niko got their answer, they weren’t sure what they would do—maybe destroy that sun, too. Maybe make it so no one could be left behind again, because there wasn’t another way to go forward. You couldn’t be left behind if there was no future to fight for, after all. That was the cruel, twisting part of Niko they didn’t want to admit was there. It had been festering since their father died, and over the last six months had only grown into a ravenous thing deep inside of them. It wanted to see Asala suffer.

It wanted to make Asala pay.

Which was why they had to survive this darkness. They had to remember the coordinates. They had to face Asala again, and ask that question, and watch the hope bleed from her eyes as they ripped her future away from her.

And in the darkness, that ravenous, deep-pitted monster smiled.

Get the Marvel Season Pass

Get access to your favorite superheroes, vigilantes, and villains with the Marvel Pass. Includes four Marvel series (Thor, Jessica Jones, Black Widow, and coming soon, Black Panther) with over 25 hours of entertainment for one bundled price.

Visit serialbox.com/marvelpass to learn more

More from Serial Box

Knox

Meet Morgan Knox: a private investigator in 1930's New York City with an uncanny ability to experience paranormal phenomena. She tracks down the criminals no one else can see. But while getting to the bottom of a strange and sinister murder, she becomes the target.

Get the full series in audio and text for $8.99: visit serialbox.com/redeem and use the code VelaebookKNOX

Ninth Step Station

It’s 2033. China owns half of Tokyo. First pummeled by a deadly earthquake and then suffering the ruptures of war, the city’s future was bleak. But the uneasy peace brokered by the United States has remained steady, despite underground resistance efforts. That is, until the murders begin. Click the link to learn why Serial Boxers love this series.

Get the full series in audio and text for $8.99: visit serialbox.com/redeem and use the code Velaebook9SS

Praise for Serial Box

Digital content company Serial Box stands out among today’s publishers by giving a time-tested format a modern-day spin. The company produces serial fiction that’s structured like TV seasons and available in both audio and written format—letting audiences switch between reading and listening whenever they want.

Kevin Rowe, Forbes

If you adore podcasts and books, Serial Box is a must-have.

Alex Weiss, Bustle

Here’s an app that tries to differentiate itself from the crowd. Serial Box has a sizeable collection of short and interesting stories. This means rather than having to spend hours listening to a traditional audiobook you could listen to several bite-sized books on Serial Box.

Droid Views

The Vela

Text © 2019 by Serial Box Publishing.

For additional information, write to the publisher at Serial Box Publishing, 115 Broadway, 5th floor, New York, NY, 10006.

Serial Box™ is a trademark of Serial Box Publishing, LLC.

ISBN 9781682107935

This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Written by: Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang, and Rivers Solomon

Cover Illustration by: Hector Mateo Pino

Produced by: Lydia Shamah

Executive Producers: Molly Barton and Julian Yap

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Text

Free audio

Excerpt of The Vela: Salvation