The Vela: The Complete Season 1. Yoon Ha Lee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ sighed and crossed her arms. “Niko. What was that?” She kept her voice calm, hoping the kid would calm down too.

      Niko took a breath. “Some kind of malfunction in the comms system,” they said, their professionalism making a show at last. “Like a . . . a feedback loop, I guess. I think it’s related to the response lag, but I don’t know how yet.” That particular glitch hadn’t gone away since they’d left Khayyam, and Niko’s attempts to fix it hadn’t been fruitful. They glanced nervously at the general. “I disabled the whole comms system until I can figure it out. But it’s just a glitch. Some kind of sloppy code. I don’t know. It’s nothing dangerous.”

      “How do you know?” the general said. “How can you say that, if you don’t know what it is?”

      “General—” Asala started.

      Cynwrig stormed back out. “I’m going to run a diagnostic on the scramblers,” she said. She’d already done four of those since Khayyam.

      Asala rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What time is it?”

      “Um”—Niko fumbled for their handheld—“three-oh-four.”

      Gods. She walked over to the systems panel on Niko’s wall and tapped the screen. It leapt into action, just as it was supposed to. “Go back to sleep,” she said. “In the morning, I want you to do a—” She had no idea what the proper terms were, which wasn’t ideal when giving directions. “Can you check everything out, see if you can get to the bottom of it?”

      Niko nodded, their mussed hair bobbing absurdly. “Yeah.”

      “Okay,” Asala said. A comms system malfunction. She could feel the adrenaline bleeding out of her, but a hum of concern remained. “Okay.”

      Without another word, she returned to her room, pulled off her boots, and crawled back into bed. Blanket tugged to her chin, she lay in the dark, thinking about the lags, the glitches, the panel freezes. She thought about the general, prowling the corridors again and again. She thought about Dayo, and where she might be.

       She did not fall back asleep.

      • • •

       This is kind of hard to talk about.

      

       That’s all right. Take your time.

      

       Sorry. The camera’s making me self-conscious.

      

       We can point it elsewhere, if you want.

      

       No. People should see, right?

      

       Yes, I think they should.

      

       Okay. Okay.

      

       How did you get frostbite?

      

       I wasn’t the only one. There was this freak blizzard. Our housing block got buried, and everything got knocked out. Heaters, comms, everything.

      

       How long were you there?

      

       Five days. Two for the snow to stop, three more for them to dig us an exit.

      

       And you went without heat for that long.

      

       Real heat, yeah. We started burning stuff. Piled whatever we could find that would burn into old water drums, and kept it going as best we could. The smoke got terrible. I think there was some plast in there. Or some kind of paint, I don’t know. Made everybody’s eyes hurt. Some kids started choking, and then people were passing out, so we had to stop. We . . . Sorry.

      

       Take your time.

      

       I shouldn’t complain about . . . about this. I made it out. Not everybody did. It’s just two legs and a nose. Could be worse, right?

      

       There’s a woman down on deck twelve, she’s been melting down scrap metal and making prosthetic digits out of them. Have you heard of her?

      

       What? No. Where?

      

       Deck twelve. I don’t know if she could do whole limbs, but perhaps a nose?

      

       That would be great. I’m tired of grossing people out.

      

       You don’t gross me out.

      

       Thanks.

      • • •

      Niko set one foot through the doorway to the rec room and froze. A video was playing on-screen, and one of the six reclining chairs before it was occupied by the general’s unmistakable silhouette. In the ten days since they’d left Khayyam, Niko had become masterful at being wherever Cynwrig wasn’t, and there was a brief, hopeful moment when they thought they might be able to slip right back out of the room. But no, too late—the general had already craned her head their way. Shit.

      “Sorry,” Niko managed. “I didn’t know someone was in here.”

      They started to leave, but the general spoke. “Join me,” she said easily.

      Niko’s brain upended itself. “Um—”

      Cynwrig turned back toward the screen. “I’d like to get to know my ally’s progeny better,” she said. “And you’ve been avoiding me.”

      Niko stood stupidly in the doorway. On-screen, some sort of caper was unfolding in a lavish room. One of the heavily made-up characters had experienced some misfortune, and was pulling faces in a display so over-the-top it was almost grotesque. The hell was she watching? “I—”

      Cynwrig sighed. “First lesson, СКАЧАТЬ