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
