The Vela: The Complete Season 1. Yoon Ha Lee
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