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