The Vela: The Complete Season 1. Yoon Ha Lee

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