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.
