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Episode 1

A Leisurely Extinction SL Huang

Former Corporal Asala Sikou lay prone on the rooftop of Khayyam’s largest hydrogen-processing factory, the pad of her finger just grazing the trigger of an 18-100B sniper rifle. The spotting stats flickered through her eyepiece, measuring distances and wind speeds, a translucent overlay of her vision that she barely noticed even as she absorbed it all. Her cheek stayed welded against the stock of the rifle as if both woman and weapon were carved from a single chunk of iron, and even her breath didn’t shift the rifle’s sights more than a hair.

Lines from an old, anonymous poem layered themselves gently through her waiting mind: The sands so red, a sky so blue, but not the blue of home. The sky on Khayyam was blue above her now—always blue, always cloudless. And silent, at the moment, as Asala had dialed her hearing implants off. Her military career had taken her hearing before she left the Forces behind, but these days when she watched and waited she used her deafness to add focus.

Below her, President Ekrem’s retinue glided to a stop in front of the Summit building. Ekrem’s entourage preceded him out, peacocked in the flashy colors that were popular on Khayyam right now. Asala registered their presence, but kept her focus across the square. Her protectee would be appearing soon . . .

With a twitch of her eye, the field of Asala’s scope stretched and flattened to show the whole thruway in front of the Summit building. If an attack were to come on the general, now would be the time.

Asala had lain on this rooftop for nine hours, since the moment General Cynwrig had arrived on Khayyam and been ensconced in visitors’ quarters. The seconds had dripped past, and the general had stayed inside. Gaggles of environmental protesters had made a few efforts at approach, but the riot police had easily dispersed them—they’d been tame demonstrators, not like the sensational self-desiccators who’d been plaguing the governors down south, and they’d made no move toward violence. But if Asala had been the one planning an attack on an Outer Planet dignitary instead of having been tasked with preventing it, she would have waited until . . . Yes. Just about now.

The first of General Cynwrig’s people came out on foot and turned in sharp parade format toward the Summit building.

And there. Movement. The checkpoint cordoning off the street at the crest of the hill . . . a gang approaching on individual scooters, small but clear in her scoped vision. Over a dozen people—too many to mean anything harmless.

Asala hovered between breaths, waiting for the confirmation that they weren’t more protesters or misguided tourists. She got it almost instantly, when the first human guard crumpled to the ground. They were here to kill the general, and she was here to stop them.

Asala squeezed her finger back.

The rifle report impacted through her shoulder and chest. She couldn’t hear the chaos in the street below, but her bullet had found its mark—it always did.

Or marks, to be precise. Only an instant later, her homing bullet was followed by others from tripods across and along the square, programmed in patterns she’d preset into the master rifle against her shoulder. Fully half the attackers went down at once, and most of the rest staggered.

By then, the Khayyami riot police were on the scene. The survivors screamed and cowered beneath clouds of nerve gas as bouts of electricity arced over their ranks. Asala took a last glance through her scope—it looked like the general herself had barely made it outside before being quickly ushered back in. Cynwrig was out of danger.

Something caught at Asala’s strategic senses, and she frowned. Could the assassins have made a mistake? Or was she missing something about their plan? She ran the incident back through her head, but it only served to verify her instincts: the best time for the would-be assassins to make their advance would have been when General Cynwrig was halfway across the square, farthest from any shelter. Asala still would have gotten them first, of course, but this attempt maybe even the riot police alone could have foiled.

Why had they gone so early?

She watched through the scope a moment longer, but whether the mistiming had been incompetence or intended as something more calculated, the attack was clearly over. The Khayyami forces could clean up.

Asala snapped her rifle into its transport case with the ease of long practice, dialed her hearing back up, and headed for the outside stairs to street level.

• • •

Asala walked casually down the thruway to the Presidential Palace and scanned herself through two sets of guards to a side entrance. Ekrem would want to see her after an incident like this. The first guards took her weapons, tagged them, and entered them into storage lockers, and the second set passed her off to a butler who politely left her in a smallish audience chamber to wait.

She stayed standing, quickly cataloguing her surroundings from long habit, even here inside the Palace. This room was customarily gaudy, with carved stone and plast cloth all sporting shiny depictions of sunbursts and waterfalls. Everything on Khayyam seemed to celebrate one of the two, although it wasn’t like any native Khayyami had ever seen a waterfall outside image captures. All water here came from either ice imported from the Outer Ring or hydrogen siphoned from the solar harvesters.

Ironic that so much of the Khayyami aesthetic favored sun depictions, when they all knew what their harvesting had done to the sun. Knew, and hadn’t stopped. At least Asala would be dead before the whole system finally killed itself.

A noise at the door.

Asala shifted on the balls of her feet, her hand going to her side holster before she remembered the air pistol she usually wore was with the Palace guards. She registered the people first—they moved with the deadly economy of security personnel, but in drab and utilitarian uniforms that shouted they weren’t from here on Khayyam. They took up posts on either side of the door, and between them skittered a metal-on-stone stream of . . . bugs? Hard black carapaces and far too many legs to be a design requirement, they moved with a slithering speed that made every one of Asala’s instincts stand on end.

She resisted the urge to rock back a step.

“My spiders. To me.”

Asala would have known that voice from the news captures, even before she took in the ruthlessly sharp uniform, the stark white hair, the glittering eyes that seemed to take in everything and reflect nothing. In person, up close, General Cynwrig of Gan-De was a black hole of a person: nothing but sinew and cold.

The robotic bugs scurried back across the floor, up the general’s sleek boot, over the deadly creases of her black uniform, and into a small silver canister that she snapped closed. AIs, then. People always said Gan-De society was in love with their robots. They should use refugees for some of those jobs instead, some Khayyami liked to say, shaking their heads sadly—as if they knew anything about Outer Ring problems, or were doing anything themselves other than sage nods and vague judgments. Asala tried to stay out of those conversations.

“I’m told you’re the person I owe for my life today,” General Cynwrig said, pocketing her robotic bugs. She did not sound grateful.

Asala forced herself to relax under that gaze, to stand straight and let her face go smooth and bland. She was a larger woman than the general, both taller and broader, and she fancied the other woman’s lip curled slightly while taking her in.

And Asala definitely knew the moment Cynwrig saw the clan tattoo. Dark blue, winding around Asala’s right eye, not a stark contrast against her dark brown skin but also not something anyone ever failed to notice here on Khayyam. The double takes, that moment of eyes catching for a split second before people awkwardly hurried toward bland politeness a moment later, weighed down with everything they suddenly “knew” about Asala—Outer Ring, not from here, Hypatian—migrant, refugee, careful what you say . . .

But General Cynwrig’s reaction was different. Her whole face pinched in, and it wasn’t with misplaced pity. “Well,” she said. “I guess there’s a pattie that’s good for something.”

Oddly, her voice had gone admiring, almost as if she hadn’t just used a word Asala thought she’d left behind on the scrap ships.

But Asala barely heard it, because suddenly she was back there, a scared kid, with only her parents’ and uncles’ and aunties’ tearful assurances that this would be a better life, that they were ripping her from everyone she loved and forcing her across the solar system because she was one of the lucky, chosen ones, facing the mocking jeers at her accent and her tattoo, pattie, clannie, the Outties should all just die off already and leave the system to the rest of us . . . Luck and being chosen hadn’t been enough. Asala had pulled herself up without help, starting with three tours of service in multiple conflicts, earning gold stripes as a sniper, then decades of carving out her own business and reputation—she’d made a name and a place for herself here, and for some fucking Gandesian to come in and reduce all that to nothing with a word—

“Now, now, General, I’d rather you didn’t use that type of language while you’re with us.” President Ekrem swept into the room as breezily as if his timing had not just prevented a diplomatic incident. Asala consciously unclenched her hands, but her skin still tingled.

“My mistake,” General Cynwrig said. “I admit I can’t keep up with the latest political sensitivities. I meant to say I didn’t know you were Hypatian.” She inclined her head slightly in Asala’s direction. “You’ve done well for someone in your . . . circumstances.”

Oh, you knew exactly what you were saying, Asala thought. And you know what you’re saying now.

“The general has asked that you be part of her personal security detail for the remainder of her visit to our fine world,” Ekrem said. “I told her you’d be delighted, of course. General, our sincerest apologies, again, for the incident today.”

“No matter. You prevented their success.” Cynwrig’s eyes flicked to Asala again.

“My people will be in touch soon with a revised schedule for our talks,” Ekrem continued. “I’m very optimistic we can strengthen trade relations between our two worlds while working together to address today’s solar concerns. And of course we’ll officially be adding Agent Asala to your detail.”

Agent Sikou, Asala thought. Her own annoyance surprised her—Khayyami didn’t use clan names, only patronymics, and she’d been going by only one name now for decades. She’d thought herself used to it. She flattened her lips together and managed to remain silent and minimally cordial as President Ekrem bowed the general out of the room.

“You,” Ekrem said, the moment the door closed behind Cynwrig and her guards. “You, I owe a bottle of the finest in fermented beverages, something ten or twenty years of water in the brewing. I wish I could give you an official commendation.”

Asala felt herself relaxing, her muscles uncoiling. She moved to one of the sunburst chairs and sat. “Then I’d have to be an official part of this operation. Speaking of which—agent?”

Ekrem huffed a laugh and went to the side of the room, where he began measuring out two small trays of flavored grounds. “General Cynwrig doesn’t have to know you’re working off the books for me. The other security we’ve assigned to her has been read in on you since the beginning, but they’re very discreet. You don’t mind continuing on, do you? Intelligence isn’t convinced this was the only planned attack against the general—six additional credible threats have come in just since this incident.”

“You’re paying me, right?” Asala hoped it sounded as smooth as she wanted. “I hope I never have to have a conversation with the woman again, but you know me. I’m a professional.”

Ekrem chuckled again. “Oh, I love how mercenary you’ve gotten in our old age.”

“I’m surprised you wanted an outside contractor on this in the first place,” Asala said. “Usually the jobs you call me in for are a lot less official.”

“Asala! You make it sound like I’m having you run some secret black ops department. But I promise, I don’t just call you because bureaucratic channels are too . . . ehm, bureaucratic. I call you because you’re a lady who gets things done.”

He handed her one of the refreshment trays. The powder had a faint earthy scent, the richness of well-tended lichens mixed with a mild stimulant—Ekrem didn’t skimp. Asala took a pinch and folded it into her lip. “Do keep going. Flattery will get you everywhere with me.”

“Good, because I have another job for you after this. Something that, as you said, is . . . a lot less official. I need you on this, Asala.” The charm he’d used to such great effect on the campaign trail had turned serious.

She tongued the wad of powder against her gums. “What is it?”

Ekrem began to pace. “Have you heard of the Vela?”

“The ship coming in from Eratos, yes?” She’d heard Ekrem’s PR sound bites on it; everyone had—the rescue ship carrying the last of the inhabitants from their system’s outermost, dying world. A project the president had managed to spin into a banner of munificence even as he shrewdly sidestepped the refugee crisis on the other Outer Ring planets. Eratos wasn’t the only dying world, just the one dying fastest—the tiny colony on Samos had been gone for a decade, and after Eratos would be Hypatia and then Gan-De, and maybe the Inner Ring would finally come to care when it was their turn to freeze to death as the sun collapsed.

A leisurely extinction. One that allowed everyone to push any inconvenience to another place or another generation.

Ekrem waved a hand. “The Vela’s not just any ship. It’s the ship that won me reelection. I promised that saving the last of Eratos would be the first step to saving the whole system. The people need to see the Vela’s triumphant return—they need to see that this can be fixed, that we can save the people of the Outer Ring and then we can work to save everyone.”

He sounded so earnest. “You mean people need to see it before the next election cycle heats up.”

The president gave a half-shrug, acknowledging it. “Without strong leadership, we’d be even more lost than we are. I can read poll numbers; I barely beat the Globalist candidate last time, even with the Vela—I won’t pretend these things aren’t important.”

“So what’s the problem? The Vela sweeps into the Inner Ring, you stage a few parades on Khayyam celebrating that we saved the last of their world. What’s not to love?”

His face twisted. “It’s gone missing.”

“Oh,” Asala said. “I suppose that does make a parade harder.”

“Dammit, Asala. There are thousands of people on that boat, including the entire Eratosi Cabinet of Ministers. And do you remember Vanja?”

“Sure, the gravity queen. She died what, five or seven years ago?” Artificial gravity had existed before Vanja Ryouta, but her team had made it accessible and affordable, pioneering the way into a boom in interplanetary transportation technology.

“Her legacy is very much alive,” Ekrem said. “Her lab was still active out on Eratos, including her family—”

“All right, I get it.” It was always about the celebrities. “But what do you want me to do? If they went missing in space, they could be anywhere. Get an astrophysicist to run some trajectories from their last known reporting location.”

“I already know where they went missing. Their last report was that they had to put in for emergency repairs at Hypatia.”

Asala went cold. “No.”

Ekrem didn’t seem to hear her. “They were going to do a flyby of Hypatia to pick up enough momentum to skip them past Gan-De and all the way to Khayyam. But instead they had to make a stop. Now, I’ve been conferring with orbital piloting experts about this—it’s not a lost cause, not yet. In a couple weeks the seventeen-year dead stretch ends again, and we’ll get our few-month chance when it’s possible to jump orbits from Hypatia and easily hit Gan-De. So if they were able to get their repairs done on the ground, they could potentially make it to Gan-De without it taking years and years, and then from Gan-De, the Inner Ring is a lot more accessible. Maybe not in time for primary run-offs, but they’d still arrive before . . .”

The seventeen-year planetary cycle. Ekrem talked like it was a distant academic truth. To him, it was.

To Asala, it had been the promise of an eternity alone, when almost thirty-four years ago her clan had scraped and bribed to get her a dirty berth on a ship to Gan-De. Curled alone in her bunk, with faceless, desperate masses of humanity crammed in around her, knowing that thanks to the practicalities of orbital mechanics it would be seventeen years before anyone could follow . . . seventeen years. A lifetime. And by then nobody could have followed her anyway, because Gan-De had long decided it had had enough of Hypatian refugees.

As far as Asala knew, everyone in her clan was dead. By the time she could afford to send a message back, the only reply had been echoing silence, and that was an answer all on its own. Hypatia had been a harsh place even before the creeping cold had turned dire, whole towns freezing to death in the night when the weather snapped wrong.

Desperate Hypatians still ran from their withering planet every seventeen years, unwilling to die by staying in place. But with Gan-De closed, for many it meant replacing a cold death on the planet with an even colder one in space, the refugees’ ragtag scrap ships disintegrating while their unlucky passengers begged for a sliver of room in an overcrowded orbital refugee camp. If they got in, they won the right to die more gradually.

And now this upcoming opening would be the last time anyone ever fled Hypatia. The cold reality of the temperature projections spelled that out in black and white. Nobody on Khayyam talked of it—any whisper of Hypatia’s impending demise, and expressions turned uncomfortable, eyes darting away. Ekrem would probably still blithely reassure everyone he could send a souped-up rescue ship until long after there was no one left to rescue. All while Khayyam’s corporations kept cheerfully harvesting the sun’s hydrogen, because the damage was done, so it wasn’t making a difference anymore, was it? Besides, they needed that hydrogen, for water manufacturing, for fusion power . . .

Ekrem was still talking. “. . . And I’m going to send my kid with you. My youngest, do you remember them? Not that I don’t trust you, of course”—he laughed nervously—“but Niko could use some real-world experience. Their apprenticeship’s been with a data analysis team over at Domestic Intelligence, and they’re raring to get some fieldwork.” He stepped over to the wall and tapped an interface panel. “Send Niko in, would you?”

“Ekrem, you’re not hearing me.” Asala tried to keep her voice even. “I said—”

She didn’t get the chance to finish before a twentysomething kid whisked into the room, so eagerly they must’ve been waiting just outside the door. Niko’s round face beamed beneath a haircut that strove for the latest in androgynous layered-shag fashion, and they stood with the ramrod straightness of someone concentrating far too hard on how to make a good impression.

“Niko!” crowed the president. “You remember Asala? I think you met her when you were just crawling, or something like that. Remember, Asala?”

Asala didn’t. Ekrem often talked like this, as if they’d been at each other’s family gatherings every solstice and festival, instead of a grunt and an officer who’d bred some respect long ago in a different life. But she nodded anyway.

“It’s nice to meet you, Asala. Again,” Niko said, breaking into an even broader smile. “I can’t tell you how excited I am to work with—”

“Ekrem.” Asala raised her voice to break in. “Ekrem, listen to me. I said no. I’m not doing it. Find someone else to track down your missing ship.”

Ekrem’s face went long and surprised, like she’d just told him she was planning to vote for his opponent.

“But what about the Vela?” Niko blurted. “You must want to save the refugees; you’re from Hypa—”

“Good day,” Asala said, with an iciness that could have rivaled her homeworld. It might not be strictly polite to walk out on the president of Khayyam and his youngest child, but it was better than strangling said child, which probably would have gotten her in even more trouble than if she’d punched the leader of Gan-De earlier.

She was not going back to Hypatia.

• • •

Niko had never imagined getting anywhere near General Cynwrig during her stay on Khayyam. Other than maybe as part of a protest, if such a thing wouldn’t have spun Father right out of his orbit. Or, well, the occasional fantasy about hacking Cynwrig’s computers into answering every command with dancing pink ponies and statistics about refugees.

How anyone could ignore the situation on the Outer Ring was beyond Niko. And how the general could be so heartless—there was plenty of room on Gan-De! Not like Niko’s own home planet couldn’t do loads better too, but few refugees could make it this far in-system on their own. The distance conveniently allowed educated Khayyami to wash their hands of all those deaths, and all with disgusting gentility. But Gan-De was worse: so many countless Hypatian refugees at their door, stuck in orbit or in transit, in camps, and yet “Gan-De for Gandesians” was still somehow going strong.

It made Niko furious.

Yet here they were, trotting willingly toward the guest quarters of none other than General Cynwrig herself. Because that was where Asala was. Asala, whom Niko had managed to offend the very first time they’d opened their mouth.

You should have known better. She’s diaspora; it’s probably painful! You should have been more sensitive!

The Gandesian and Khayyami guards at the door to the general’s suite took a bloodscan before questioning Niko closely about their purpose and whether Asala was expecting them. Then one guard went inside, presumably to check with Asala, but Niko wasn’t worried. People rarely refused the president’s youngest child a meeting, even if they wanted to.

And Asala’s face when Niko was ushered in showed she’d really, really wanted to.

Oh dear. How to turn this around?

At least General Cynwrig herself wasn’t present—she must be in the inner rooms to the suite, with Asala alone in the anteroom as her bodyguard. Thank heavens.

“I told your father no,” Asala said flatly as soon as the guards had gone back into the hall and the door had shut behind them. “There’s nothing to discuss.”

“I think there is, though,” Niko pressed. “I know you probably feel like someone else can just go instead, but you didn’t hear Father when he was briefing me—he says there’s no one as good as you. You could be the difference between those poor people dying or—”

“That’s not my problem.” Asala turned away.

“If it’s not you, I don’t go either!” Niko accidentally said it too loud, and pressed their lips together, a gate shut too late. It was true, though—even the privilege of being one of Ekrem’s children wouldn’t get Niko an assignment like this. If Asala refused, and Father went through official channels, he’d be forced to dispatch a squad of senior intelligence commandos. And that squad would certainly not include Niko, a green rookie whose only training so far had been data work.

But Father wanted Asala, and he wanted this kept quiet, and he also wanted a hedge against any Hypatian loyalties she might have left, just in case anything went wrong out there, and that meant a rare Niko-shaped chance. For Niko’s part, they’d been privately hoping Asala had Hypatian loyalties left in spades, though that was looking less and less likely.

Asala had turned back, her gaze narrow and calculating. Niko decided to try for some partial honesty. “I care about the Outer Planet refugees, okay? A lot. I think we should be doing so much more. Part of my apprenticeship has been working on the nets, making connections with people out there, but here I am sheltered on Khayyam and I can’t do anything. This is a chance for me to get on the ground and help people in a real way—”

“And what, you want to prove to Daddy that you can pull off a mission?”

That hit a little too uncomfortably close to another truth. Niko winced internally and tried not to show it. “I can. I’ve pretty much finished my training, and I’ve got a lot of contacts on the Outer Ring now. And I have specialties in network accessibility and computer security.”

“You mean you’re a hacker?”

Niko half-smiled. “We don’t call it that when it’s for the government.”

Asala’s expression didn’t change, and Niko was second-guessing whether the joke had been a good idea when a knock came at the door and a pair of Gandesian guards entered, a short dark man and a tall woman with close-cropped hair.

“We’re changing duty shifts,” said the man. “They told us you have a visitor. Just confirming the situation.”

“Confirmed,” Asala acknowledged. “You can leave us.”

The female guard turned as if she were about to exit back into the hallway. But instead she palmed something across the door’s inner lock, spun with a dreadful fluidity—

And stabbed her partner in the neck.

No! Not now!

That was all Niko’s stunned brain had time for before Asala shoved them out of the way. The floor somersaulted into Niko’s cheek—ow—and Asala grunted—was she hurt? The traitor guard had some sort of hand weapon out, brandishing—

Asala launched herself at the guard out of nowhere. The weapon in the guard’s hand pulsed once, and Asala half-folded over, but somehow that didn’t stop her, and she plowed into the woman and took them both into the wall so hard something cracked.

The guard’s pistol skidded across the anteroom floor. Only a few meters from Niko.

Niko’s mind had blanked out, half-coherent thoughts popping like oil on hot metal—She can’t kill Asala! and Would she have killed me too and Blood, there’s so much blood, how is there this much blood. And finally, after far too long: I can be the one to stop her, I can, I can do it, GO.

Asala and the guard were grappling on the other side of the room. The wet, meaty thumps of flesh on flesh, the crack of someone being hurt badly and a yell of pain—no, don’t listen, just get to the pistol, ignore the blood, how is it everywhere? Niko tried to take ahold of the guard’s weapon with tacky, shaking fingers, not at all sure they were holding it right, and raised it toward the other side of the room.

“St-stop!”

Asala did something with one leg then, something vicious that landed a knee in her opponent’s face. The guard toppled off her.

“I said stop!” Niko cried. The pistol wavered in the general direction of the bleeding guard. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

The assassin’s eyes went intense and dark at Niko then, and Niko had a sudden flash of certainty that this was it, they were going to die here. They tried to find the weapon’s trigger but their fingers didn’t seem to be able to move—

The moment of distraction, however, was all Asala needed.

In a sequence Niko wouldn’t be able to reconstruct till afterward, Asala spun up to one knee, clearing her own air pistol that she hadn’t had a moment’s time to draw during the fight. It popped once, a final, deep sound that seemed to suck all the air out of the room, and the guard crumpled to the anteroom floor right at Niko’s feet.

“Hey. Hey, kid.”

Asala was right next to Niko somehow. How long had she been talking?

“Hey, kid, you okay? Give me the pulse pistol, all right?”

Asala’s hands closed over Niko’s bloody ones. Niko tried to unclench from the gun. “It’s over?”

“Yeah, it’s over. Are you hurt?”

“I don’t—” Niko patted their hands over themself as if that would answer the question. “I don’t . . .”

“Take a minute.” Asala went across to the door—she was limping, and hunched over, and she was hurt, hurt saving Niko—and touched the interface panel next to it. Niko became aware of banging outside it, more guards, the ones the assassin had locked out.

“This is Asala,” Asala announced into the interface. “The situation is under control. Tell the president I have Niko in here with me and neither they nor General Cynwrig were injured in this attack. We have one casualty, a Gandesian guard. The assassin is also dead. But I’m not opening this door until we get some additional vetting on everyone outside it.”

She limped to a sofa at the side of the room and sat heavily, one gun in each hand.

A skittering noise came from the inner door to the anteroom, and Niko half-climbed the wall before realizing it was just the Gandesian AI spiders. The AIs. You know about their AIs. They’re just like you studied. But seeing them in person was different.

And of course, right behind the horde of spiders came . . . the general.

Niko felt like vomiting. General Cynwrig. A military dictator who ran Gan-De with the efficiency of a factory, all while blithely killing Hypatians by the shipload, leaving them to die a slow death in space, all because she’d decided Gan-De should only be for certain humans—how Niko’s own father could talk to this woman like it was all okay and make trade deals importing their water in exchange for tech—

Niko couldn’t understand it. Didn’t want to understand it.

“Well,” General Cynwrig said. “It seems I have you to thank once again, Agent Asala.”

Asala grunted. “I suggest you go back into your rooms until we have all this sorted out, General.”

Cynwrig’s eyes crawled over Niko. “Who’s this?”

“President Ekrem sent a messenger to speak to me about something unrelated. Bad timing. They’re not involved.”

“I see.” The general took another moment, studying the two dead bodies on the floor. Then she said, “I’ll be in the back rooms. Don’t mind my spiders. Given the circumstances, I feel I must send them a little farther afield. You understand.”

She turned on her heel with military precision, and the door slid shut behind her. The robots remained, however. A good portion of them skittered over to squeeze out under the door, while the rest tap-tapped around the room, taking in Niko and Asala and the guards. Watching.

That’s what Gandesians do with their spiders. You know that. The reminder didn’t stop Niko from being unnerved.

“Creepy, aren’t they,” muttered Asala. She leaned down to get her face right up close to one of the bugs. “I said you’re creepy. What are you going to do with that?”

“They’re intelligence-gathering robots,” Niko said. The words came out dry and stuttery. “I guess she wants more, um. Intelligence. Because of the—because of all this.” They bit their lip. You’re talking too much. You always do. Just shut up, shut up.

“Hell, I’d like some more intelligence too,” Asala said.

Niko’s mind was starting to unblank, but it was filling with thoughts they didn’t want to have, like how the guard had moved to kill them both without the slightest hesitation and how Niko had completely frozen and Asala had shoved them out of the way . . .

My fault she’s hurt. All my fault.

“Do you need a med team?” Niko asked. “We can call one in . . .”

One of Asala’s shoulders lifted and then lowered. “Eventually. I’ve had worse.”

And you were trying to convince her you were ready to go out in the field. At the first sign of pressure you fell apart, while she sits there shot acting like it’s a stubbed toe.

The adrenaline and panic were receding, leaving shame behind.

Was there any chance of salvaging Asala’s impression of them? Some way to show Niko wasn’t just a data rookie who froze up at the first sign of trouble?

Intelligence, Asala had said. Something useful . . .

The traitorous guard was still lying where she had fallen. Niko tried to figure out how to step over to her without tracking through all the blood, but it was impossible. They gingerly crouched down to start lifting the flaps on her pockets.

There has to be something here. Something worth showing Asala . . .

“Shouldn’t you wait for the forensic team to do that?” Asala said it from over on the couch, not moving.

“You want to wait and take whatever sanitized report they choose to give you?” Niko said, with more bravado than they felt.

The edge of a smile quirked Asala’s tired expression. “You’ve got more guts than I gave you credit for, kid.”

The compliment should have delighted Niko, but instead their heart was banging out of their chest. Was it cheating, to do things this way? It had to be. It felt like it.

And—worst case—what if Niko couldn’t find any evidence at all, even missed something really obvious, and then Father would ream them out for disrupting the scene and Asala would think they were a green know-nothing and—

Oh. There. At the bottom of a back pocket. Niko drew out the thick packet. Across the room, Asala’s eyes widened and she sat up slightly—she knew what it was too.

“That’s concentrated glow,” she said. “Way more than for personal use. That much is an automatic intent-to-deal charge.”

“Which means it’s also enough for a payment,” Niko said. “What’s the going rate for assassinating a head of state?”

And whoever happened to be in the way. Niko felt another wave of nausea and tried not to think about it.

Asala frowned. “There aren’t many people who would use glow as currency. Too hard to unload, unless . . .”

“Unless you’re in the trade. She’s got to be out of Khwarizmi.” That wasn’t too big a leap, was it? Niko didn’t think so. Khwarizmi, the only other Inner Ring world, was warmer even than Khayyam and a haven for pleasure resorts and smuggling cartels alike. Just the shady sorts who might believably have assassination as one of their goals. Asala would agree, wouldn’t she?

“Glow dealers wouldn’t have any beef with Gan-De,” Asala said, as if feeling it out. “But the Khwarizmian syndicates also deal in ice smuggling. Throw Gan-De into chaos, especially now, and the black market for water would go through the roof.”

“What percentage of Khayyam’s water comes from ice mining on Gan-De or Hypatia, instead of pulling it from the sun? It’s a lot, right?” Niko agreed. “And with all the—the environmental crisis—on Hypatia, Gan-De’s where it’s at.”

Asala didn’t look entirely convinced. “Maybe . . .”

Come on! Niko barely bit back from voicing their frustration. This is solid information. You know it is!

Something beeped.

It wasn’t the wall interface. Asala dug out a personal handheld, miraculously undamaged even after the fight.

“Your father’s coming down here,” she said. “He has the interrogation reports from the suspects who survived this morning’s incident. It seems you’re right—they were out of Khwarizmi.”

Niko took a breath and tried to look the part of a confident intelligence expert who’d expected nothing less.

They weren’t at all sure they managed.

• • •

I hope I never have to have a conversation with the woman again, Asala had told President Ekrem. And now here she was, ringing through to the general’s personal quarters at an hour well too late for polite calling of any variety. She hadn’t slept in a full day, and the nanosplints tingled painfully where her ribs were knitting back together, but she was on the scent of something. Everything was fitting together so well . . . and yet somehow just slightly not well enough.

She cradled one hand over her injured side while she waited at General Cynwrig’s inner door. The med team had told her not to exert herself, that she’d damaged internal organs and “healed” didn’t mean it all couldn’t be jarred out of place, but Asala had never been good at listening to instructions when it didn’t suit her.

It was a long, long time before Cynwrig answered. In the meantime, Asala ignored the spider chittering behind her. At least the woman will know who’s calling, she thought sourly.

When General Cynwrig finally did open the door, she was dressed in full uniform.

“Am I mistaken,” she asked, with a curled lip, “or is it not a very late hour here in Khayyam’s capital?”

Asala quickly said a canto of Our Mortal Stars in her head, one of the verses she used to relax herself while she waited with a rifle. She took a breath. “I need to examine your ship.”

“Out of the question.”

I could just go to sleep and let you die. But that—that would have stung her professional pride. “The intelligence about Khwarizmi is wrong.”

“Explain.”

“I think both assassination attempts were distractions,” Asala said. “The attack in your chambers came immediately on the heels of this morning’s show in the plaza, almost as if they expected the first attempt to fail—and I think they did. This morning’s incident was timed to be stopped, and this afternoon, the guard should have known she wouldn’t be able to get past the inner doors before real security caught up to her. Even if I hadn’t been here to stop her—the intelligence needed to get this far should have told her she couldn’t succeed in the time frame she had. I think someone paid these people and then didn’t tell them they were being set up.”

“Their true purpose being?”

“To throw you off your routine.” As she said it, it felt right, deep in her gut, where she’d learned to trust her instincts. If the general would just cooperate, dammit, Asala would solve this and save her sorry Gandesian hide for a third time, and the mighty General Cynwrig would always and forever owe her life to someone with a clan tattoo. Wouldn’t that be sweet justice.

“Ekrem already told me you’ve moved up your departure timeline, and that dominoes in a host of changes all on its own,” she continued. “I’ve been combing through the interrogation reports, and one bit might have some truth to it—one of them said something about an indirect attack before going silent. But both the attacks we’ve seen were more than direct. ‘Indirect’ suggests something like coming at you in transit, or poisoning your food. Or your water supply.”

“I bring my own sustenance for that reason,” Cynwrig said. “It is secure at all times.”

“I know you do. But I checked your ship’s logs. There were some mass variations recorded.”

The ship was the weak link. On the ground, Cynwrig had security twenty-five hours per day, but a ship was a tin can in space that cradled people’s lives in a fragile 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 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 . . . 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 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.

“Tell the president it’s an emergency!” Asala shouted over her shoulder, at a dead sprint for the elevator.

When they reached the platform, she yanked Niko inside with her as soon as the heavy carriage doors opened.

“If we’re not too late, you’re going to have a chance to show me just how good at computers you really are,” she said to them. “Start thinking about how to counter-hack the general’s spiders. Because I’d bet all the glow you found on that Khwarizmian that they’re going to attack us as soon as we get there.”

• • •

Asala slapped the first interface she came to on the surface, but that was out too—was the whole damn city down?

After that she made only one stop—an arms locker where she grabbed an electric riot gun. Niko sputtered something political and judgmental about Khayyami riot-control tactics when she did, but Asala paid no attention. An electric spread was the best possible way she could think of to combat dozens of tiny metal bugs.

“Are you sure?” Niko gasped out, trying to keep up with Asala’s grip on their arm down the last darkened hallway. “What if—it still could be something else—”

Asala didn’t stop to explain. Long ago, one of her mentors had told her that her best quality as an investigator was her nose for it. Once everything fit together, once it clicked, then she knew. And this fit, this fit perfectly—two attacks in quick succession, designed to fail. Designed to provoke the general into sending her spiders farther afield until someone could capture one and reprogram it, give it a far more thorough hack than the AIs on the ship, a virus that would spread to the others . . . something deadly . . . after all, it didn’t take much to puncture a woman’s jugular in her sleep.

“Get on your handheld,” Asala ordered Niko. “See if you can find whatever wireless signal the bugs are on—oh fuck.”

They’d rounded the last corner. In front of them, between the oblivious human guards, a steady stream of the general’s spiders marched back under the door into the suite.

“Out of the way!” The startled guards had barely even registered her voice by the time Asala was plowing past them, palming her scan into the door and diving through in one move.

Spiders swarmed over every surface of the anteroom. In the center of the floor, they had begun to coalesce, to climb over one another’s backs in a seething, swirling mass, rising to half the height of a human—higher—

Asala didn’t wait. She let loose with the riot weapon.

Arcing blue lightning crackled into the tower of robots, and the column toppled with the buzzing of an angry horde. Some fell inert to the anteroom floor, but only a few, too few. The others began to swarm and regroup . . .

“Get past them!” Asala shouted to Niko, and slammed across to the opposite wall, her boots catching metal legs—or the metal legs catching at her. She blasted again and again, but it seemed to take the robots less and less time to recover. Behind them, slow on the uptake, the human guards had entered, but they didn’t seem to know where or how to point their weapons.

“General!” Asala yelled. “Let us in!” The inner rooms weren’t airtight—the bugs could be coming in anywhere, windows or cracks or—how many of the damn things were there?

They were climbing into a tower again. A black tornado of chittering metal carapaces. It had no face, but somehow it seemed to turn to them.

The general’s door slid open. Asala plunged through, dragging Niko with her before palming it shut. Through it, she heard the guards shouting in the outer room, desperately fighting to contain the robots.

Then screams.

Then silence, save the whispering chitter of metal on metal.

“Barricade any entry points,” ordered an imperious voice. General Cynwrig, taking control as if she’d known all along that her bugs were to betray her. “Here.” She tossed blankets and plast cushions at Niko and Asala. Then she split open a portable med kit and started spraying field sealant over the sides of the windows.

“Niko, stay on trying to hack them,” Asala countermanded, jamming a blanket into the crack under the door. None too soon; something pulled at it from the other side almost immediately. “Are you getting anywhere?”

“Yes—I can’t stop it in time, the sequence is HPM-encrypted, but I got in and I can see how it’s set. It’s—this is so crude. Why is it so crude?” Niko had gone so pale their face was a moon in the dim light, and they sounded genuinely furious, though at the situation or the bad programming Asala had no idea. “There’s no recognition system. They’re programmed to brute-force kill the person with the remote, or, or whoever last had it, and—and anyone within a radius of her. This could have gotten my father, or anyone; they just want to kill everyone in the area—”

“General,” Asala said.

The general didn’t even hesitate. She slipped a silver cylinder out of a pocket, the very pocket that had held some of her trusted bugs the first time they’d met, and tossed it to Asala.

“What are you doing?” cried Niko.

“My job,” Asala answered, and ran.

• • •

The riot gun got her back through the anteroom, but barely. She had to get somewhere unpopulated and stay there, somewhere the bugs wouldn’t catch anyone else in their target net.

She wouldn’t have to outrun them forever. Once the spiders had taken her bait and followed, Niko and the general would be able to get a message to Ekrem even if they had to do it on foot. Someone on the president’s staff had to know how to disable an AI, and Ekrem would send a squad to find her and take down the bugs. She just had to outlast them.

But she wasn’t sure that was going to be possible. The things were fucking fast. Asala pounded down the empty night thruway, darkened government buildings rising on all sides, and even at a sprint the metallic black cloud was gaining. She’d started out with almost ten meters of clearance. Then it was eight. Then five . . . She tried spraying blue lightning behind her again, but in the time it took her to let loose another blast, the bugs had already gained back any additional space she’d stolen. Her breath heaved in her chest, and her injured side had gone from a chafe to a throb to a scream. The pressure headache from their space trip still stabbed from her implants.

It was so hard to think . . .

What could she survive that a robot couldn’t? Water? That was a laugh; there was barely enough water in the whole city to drown the lot of them. Extreme cold? Gan-De was many times colder than Khayyam. But if not extreme cold, what about extreme heat . . .

Asala veered hard without slowing, down the side street that would take her to the hydrogen-processing plant. The same one she’d lain on top of just that morning. The same signs she’d passed on her way in and out reading Danger. Do not enter.

A hydrogen-processing center wouldn’t have liquid water—when the hydrogen came together with oxygen mined from deep below Khayyam’s surface, the result of the massive reaction was steam, which was then piped out to a paying populace. But everyone knew how much energy the process released. How dangerous hydrogen-processing plants were because of it.

They had all sorts of safeguards in place to prevent explosions, but the heat . . . there was no way to siphon away all the heat.

Asala had no idea how hot it actually got inside a hydrogen-processing factory. She’d never been inside one.

Hopefully, the robots hadn’t either.

She hurtled toward the first door she saw, ignoring the signs plastered over it that screamed “danger” and “authorized personnel only.” It was alarmed and scan-locked, but she shot the seam in the doorway with her sidearm and pried the door open into a dark crack. The bugs were on her heels, but she shoved her way in and got off another jet from the riot gun to scatter them back from the opening.

An alarm blared into the night from the broken door, but that was fine—it would tell Ekrem where she was.

Asala’s injured side stabbed, and she doubled over and almost retched.

Keep moving. Keep moving or you’re dead.

It was already hot inside the building, even here near the door. Asala forced her feet to propel her forward and ran. It was almost too dark to see, with only a few dim strips of safety lighting glowing along the floor in places. Pipes laced the space above her head, so low she had to keep ducking, and the first time she brushed up against one of them, it was so hot she yelled aloud.

The spiders had been slowed climbing through the door, but they were catching up. The warmth didn’t seem to be bothering them yet, even as it dragged at Asala and made her feet heavy.

Hotter. I need to make it hotter . . .

She almost ran face-first into a ladder. The metal of the rungs burned to the touch, but she pulled the plast of her jacket over her hands and climbed. Bugs’ll have a harder time with a ladder. Maybe . . . can’t follow . . .

Wishful thinking. She could hear them chittering up after her. Or was that in her head? Her covered hands slipped on the rungs. Sweat sheeted into her eyes.

She rolled out onto a grating and immediately flinched away from the floor, trying to stagger onto the soles of her boots. The acrid scent of burning seared the air. Her clothes, or her skin? She staggered back, away from the ladder.

The first spider clattered over the top of it, and Asala almost despaired.

Then it listed drunkenly to the side, half its legs crumpled, and it fell through the grating.

More spiders made it over. A few more fell. A few kept coming . . .

Asala lurched into a hobble. It’s who falls first . . . them or me . . .

She could hear some of the spiders falling from the ladder, chinks and chunks as they clattered to the floor below. One made it lethargically to only a meter in front of her and then simply stopped. She raised her stinging eyes—between her and the top of the ladder was an increasingly sparse robot graveyard.

I did it, she thought. I outlasted . . .

But tThen something was burning her, and she tried to get away from it, but she was sitting and she couldn’t get up, and then she wasn’t sitting anymore, either .

Her nostrils stung with that same seared, scorched smell, stronger now. She couldn’t breathe. The air cooked her from the inside out.

Everything hurt, everywhere, and she couldn’t move to make it stop. Maybe, she thought, she hadn’t outlasted the robots after all.

Before the heat wavered into darkness, the last thing she was aware of was hallucinating Niko’s face, pouring sweat and panting and calling her name.

• • •

Dayo locked Asala in a hug so tight she couldn’t breathe, their foreheads together. “Don’t forget me, little sister.”

“I don’t want to go,” Asala said.

“You have to. One more person safe means they work on the next person. The Elders will send me after you soon, right? Maybe even before this window closes.”

It was a kind lie. Even Asala knew that, young as she was.

“We’ll be together again on Gan-De,” Dayo whispered. “I’ll write you a poem for every day we’re apart and send them to you whenever we have the power. Remember, ‘my heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.’ Right?”

But somehow the girl then knew with the hindsight of a woman three and a half decades older that the poems would never come. That girl would wait, and wait, and wait, and then, finally, she would force herself to stop waiting and close those memories away.

• • •

Asala jerked awake to the smell of sterilization and medicants. A hospital. She was in a hospital, and Dayo wasn’t here.

Her eyes went to the chair next to the bed. For some reason, for a split second she had expected to see Niko, but the chair was empty.

A medical assistant puttered in and clicked the consciousness monitor at the side of Asala’s bed before glancing down at the readouts. “Ah, we thought you’d wake up soon. You took some nasty damage, but a few more hours should be all it takes to get you back together. Your friend who pulled you out is fine too, by the way. Minor burns only.”

Niko. She hadn’t dreamt it.

“What about the general?” Asala said. The words came out scratched and croaked.

“You mean General Cynwrig?” The assistant frowned. “I’ve heard she’s leaving today to go back to Gan-De, is that what you mean? I think she’s in with the president right now, concluding the trade talks. Anything else would be above the level they tell me, I’m afraid.”

Asala relaxed into the bed. The general was alive, then. That was all she needed to know. She closed her eyes.

My heart collects the ice of years, stored to melt when next we meet.

She snapped back awake.

“Excuse me,” she said to the assistant. “Could you find me my handheld? I need to send a message to the president.”

• • •

President Ekrem stood at the window, staring in pretended abstraction as the magline zinged by on its elevated track. Khayyam had warring regional governors in the canyons, a massive water pipeline collapse in its third-largest city, and now these suicides by desiccation driving the news cycles into a frenzy—as if they expected him to solve the looming environmental crisis with a clap of his hands. Yet he’d spent his entire afternoon mollifying and playing nice, all with a woman who barely acknowledged the concept of human rights.

He turned back to face his visitor. “It’s to our great shame that these attacks happened here on Khayyami soil. I hope, General, that you can accept our gravest apologies, and our assurances that we will do everything in our power to find and apprehend whoever was behind them.”

“I look forward to your updates,” answered Cynwrig.

Ekrem wondered if she practiced that thoroughly perfect balance of threat and bland interest. “Beyond knowing this was not a plot architected by anyone out of Khwarizmi, we can’t yet speculate at a motive, but—”

“No need to play coy. I know what I am most loathed for.”

He tried for a light laugh. “I doubt Hypatian refugees were in much of a position to pull this off, General.”

“They have their own radicalized factions aligned with them. But no doubt you will run down all those lines of inquiry.”

“No doubt,” echoed Ekrem.

“Speaking of the Hypatian criminal element, I’m told Khayyami authorities took custody of the ones found on board my ship.”

Ekrem kept his tone casual. “Would you rather take them back with you instead? We can work out the jurisdiction . . .”

General Cynwrig hesitated. Ekrem let the silence hang. The general would know Khayyam would not abide the sort of punishment she would mete out, not within the borders of its space. She’d have to take the refugees back with her, as prisoners . . .

She flicked a finger. “You can deal with the inconvenience. May I ask what you intend to do with them?”

“I’d thought to give them amnesty,” he answered, still nonchalant. “At the request of the agent who so nobly saved your life—I thought it the least I could do to reward her.”

“Ah,” Cynwrig said. “Yes. Her. I trust this amnesty will only be granted after you detain and question them about the incidents I suffered here on your planet.”

Those poor people are only looking for basic human living conditions; they weren’t the ones plotting ways to kill you. Ekrem didn’t say it out loud. Asala had said nothing to him about the refugees beyond her original message reporting them—as far as he knew, she was still recovering from putting on a fine show of saving his guest’s life. But if Asala hadn’t provided a convenient excuse, he would have found another way. Politics may have hampered him in doing more for Hypatia, but he could save a handful of refugees when they were dropped on his doorstep.

No one would have to know.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing for the system if we’d let whoever was coming after General Cynwrig succeed . . .

The thought gave him a jolt of guilt. No. Heads of state had to have a basic respect for each other, no matter how much they disagreed. Without that, civilization would already be lost.

He finished out the meeting mostly on automatic, his mouth making all the final arrangements of their summit on its own—my-people-will-be-speaking-to-your-people, we’ll hash out the rest of the details, thank you for such cordial discussions. Then, finally, he bowed General Cynwrig out of his office. Her human security still flanked her, but she looked . . . different without her AIs. Not smaller or less dangerous, no—almost more so.

As soon as she was gone, Ekrem let himself slump into a chair. Just for a moment, he let himself be tired.

His main console beeped with a priority communication. Asala. Mustering some energy, he reached over and flicked the message open.

It was short and to the point: I will find the Vela for you.

The president of Khayyam sat up straighter. As evidenced over the past two days, Asala was the most effective person he’d ever met. She would find that ship. He would have the Vela.

As long as she didn’t ask too many questions. And if she did . . .

If Asala began to look too deeply, or if homeworld loyalties turned her head, well, that was why Niko was going. Not the brightest of Ekrem’s children, Niko . . . but to watch and report, that they could handle. That, Ekrem could trust.

After all, family was family.