Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

ὡς τρὶς ἂν παρ᾽ ἀσπίδα στῆναι θέλοιμ᾽ ἂν μᾶλλον ἢ τεκεῖν ἅπαξ. I would rather stand three times in the battle line than give birth to one child. —Euripides, Medea

She had two charges of her jump hook left, but using it would set off the majo ship’s alarms. Her mask was fractured after the last melee skirmish and held together only by rep gel and hope. If it cracked again, here above the clouds where the battle raged in Earth’s outer atmosphere, she would asphyxiate.

While Earth’s children live, the enemy shall fear us.

The panel was etched in alien script with a word Kyr knew: ma-jo. It was their name for themselves, for their civilization, for their language, and for the source of their power. It meant “wisdom.”

Recreation was a waste of time, a luxury that belonged to people who had a planet of their own. For the soldiers of Gaea Station, the last true children of Earth, there was no such thing as rest.

In among the crammed order of the omnidirectional garden soared great dark shapes that held it all together: the massive trunks of Gaea’s private forest, carefully modified trees that processed the station’s atmosphere and kept them all from choking to death out here in the depths of dark space.

“Everyone loses at something, Vallie.” Kyr, who didn’t, gave him a narrow look. Mags was only gazing peacefully up at the tangled plants.

There were seven of them in Sparrow: Cleo and Jeanne, Zenobia and Victoria and Artemisia, Lisabel—whose proper name was Isabella, after a warrior queen from history—and Kyr. They were the only girls’ mess in their age cohort.

The best were the four combat wings: Ferox, Scythica, Augusta, Victrix.

Next after the four combat wings came the ones that kept the station alive: Systems, Suntracker, Agricole.

Then the last two official wings were Nursery and Oikos: both necessary. Without Oikos, none of the dull work of maintenance and repair and shift organization would get done. Without the women of Nursery Wing, humanity had no future.

conversation had gone from excited to circular.

“Rec time,” Cleo said at last, with enormous scorn. “Sure. I went and did a volunteer Nursery shift. Taught a dozen brats their times tables and gave a blow job to every admiral in quick succession. I felt so uplifted!”

“There’s no such thing as Strike,” said Kyr. Strike was enemy propaganda: as if Gaea had nothing better to do with its precious people than send them out to die in showy bombings and assassinations.

It is sweet and meet to die for your fatherland: old Earth poetry, which they’d all learned by heart in Nursery.

insouciance,

She became aware of the majo looking at them. The majo probably thought that they lived lives of dreary misery on Gaea Station. It had its shipful of luxuries, its easy life, its precious fabrics made from the plundered remains of Earth’s biological glories. But it did not have, and could never have, the things Kyr had: her mess and her cause.

She gave him his flask back, and paused for a moment, looking at the majo. “Very valuable, you said?” It blinked large silvery eyes. “That’s right. Also of some sentimental value, if you care.” “Oh, well, in that case,” said Kyr. She drained the last gulp of liquor, held up the little shining glass so it caught the light and its silver traceries sent strange shadow-patterns spiraling across the floor. Then she tossed it into the air, caught it, and smashed it against the pleasure ship’s painted hull. “Cleo!”

Kyr is wild and true to the cause

Zen took her assignment back out of Kyr’s hand. She looked from Kyr to Cleo, expressionless. Finally she said, “I never liked either of you. But I’m sorry.” And she left.

The women of Nursery Wing bore the children: one every two years, in carefully planned crosses that preserved as much as possible of the genetically enhanced military lineages of Earth’s warbreed bloodlines. They also reared them, up to the age of seven. To avoid unfair favoritism, no one in Nursery had responsibility for a child she had carried.

“I can fight,” said Kyr. “You can,” said Jole. “And you can train others to do so, which you proved through your work with your mess. And you are in outstanding physical condition. And your sons, Valkyr, will be everything you are and more. You might become a great soldier, but you would only be one. We need many more. Gaea is asking you to be the mother of Earth’s children. Are you afraid?”

Ooooooof

But Kyr’s body was the thing she understood best, and she could not bear for it to be misbehaving like this.

“I have something I’ve always wanted to say to you,” she said. “And I might not get another chance.” “Go on, then,” said Kyr. The corner of Cleo’s mouth lifted. “All right. So,” she said. “You’re a horrible bitch, Valkyr, and everyone hates you. I hope they give you Strike and you die.”

Lisabel’s expression was sympathetic, which was only another way to say pity. Impossible to bear the thought of being pitied by Lisabel. Lisabel was lovely, she was sweet and softhearted, Kyr was glad they’d been cadets together even if it had dragged their mess’s collective training scores down, but she could not be pitied by someone like her.

The rooftop shimmered and dissolved around her. Kyr was left standing in the middle of the grey plasteel floor in an empty room. She felt a sudden sharp tug of loss—for that primitive stone city, where the steps and doorways were all the right size for a person, and the sky blazed blue.

Kyr was starting to think the person was a woman after all, but her perception kept shifting back and forth again. The journalist stayed good-looking whichever gender Kyr’s brain settled on. It made her uncomfortable, and it was hard to concentrate on what the professor was talking about.

She was made for war, but so were they: she had realized early in adolescence that the absolute limits of her body’s abilities would still never beat the boys. She’d had to succeed a different way. Mags had needed Avi to talk him through beating Doomsday. But Kyr had nearly beaten it alone less than a week ago—after Jole had made it harder. She was good at thinking her way through an impossible fight. It was the one thing she was better at than Mags.

There were rumors about a cadet who’d misjudged a jump and died smeared across fifteen dimensions.

Kyr fell into the engine’s pull and let it drag her sideways. It flickered in and out of reality in a pulse pattern like a heartbeat, and Kyr felt the pulses rush over her with pinpoints of ghost sensation, green light and prickling temperature changes and finally a ring of soundless noise. The human body couldn’t really process what was happening during a pass through shadowspace, but it tried. Beat. Beat. Beat. There.

suborned.

Kyr couldn’t be Mags. She wasn’t nice. She never had been.

They both had field knives that neither of them had reached for yet. Kyr wasn’t going to be the first if she didn’t have to. Cleo was Sparrow. Cleo was hers.

You’re worse than anyone. No one said service would be easy, but even Lisabel didn’t—try—to run!” Three wild slashes, only the last of which touched Kyr, leaving a long jagged tear through her sleeve and a shallow cut in her off arm.

It perhaps says enough that the patently insane “jump hook” technology—permitting a single soldier to travel alone and nearly unprotected through subreal space over short distances—was a standard part of Hagenen kit.

Avi’s look had stayed ironically amused, and he’d gone off and fucked the pirate, and then they’d had entry papers and identity chips and money to pay rent, which was another thing Kyr hadn’t known about. She had the feeling she was an interruption into a scenario Avi had been over in his head hundreds of times, all the variables accounted for except the critical one of getting off Gaea Station in the first place.

The planet’s atmosphere was thick with precipitation, not quite resolved into rain. Sunlight from its cheerful little star penetrated in angled rays that were filled with brilliantly gleaming dewdrops. It wasn’t cold, but it was very damp. There was a bell ringing somewhere, not the familiar shrilling command of the shift-change bells but a slow echoing resonance that was singing out into the morning air from some faraway tower. It seemed to have no purpose at all.

“I’m fine,” Kyr said. “Go away. Go and—” She swallowed get back to work. What did children even do here? She plumped for “—play.”

Kyr had started to feel like all the thoughts she was trying not to think were tearing a hole through the fabric of the universe by their sheer weight.

But having a superior you trusted took all the weight away. You only had to obey.

“But while we live—” “—the enemy shall fear us?” Ursa shook her head. “Or maybe, while we live, we’re alive, and that’s all.”

All it would cost her was her war. All it would cost was the memory of the dead, and the service she’d been born for, and the knowledge that out in deep space, clinging to a cold rock orbiting an unfriendly star, the last soldiers of humanity were still refusing to surrender, and Kyr was not among them. Cleo and Jeanne and Arti, Vic and Zen and Lisabel: Kyr’s mess, her sisters, the Sparrows. Earth’s children. Kyr bowed her head. Never.

The kaleidoscope of violent possibility in Kyr’s thoughts coalesced into simplicity and motion.

Kyr had no doubt she would die. She felt light as air. She had spent nearly two weeks on Chrysothemis, and between Yiso and Avi, between Ursa and Ally and Mags, something had almost shaken loose in the foundation of her world. But Kyr was stronger than that. Let others preach and smile and argue and lie; she was still a soldier of humanity. Her family was her station. Her family was her cause. Her family was fourteen billion dead, and her mother was a murdered world.

Since language and identity are closely intertwined in human culture, a society seeking to eradicate individual cultural identities and histories in favor of a fictitious pan-Terran “cause” must begin by robbing its people of their languages.

Some of the glimmer of the pale walls was water, reflecting as well; an endless gossamer waterfall, and the soft whisper of its sound as it fell.

“He’ll be fine,” said Kyr: forcing herself to believe it, ordering the universe to comply.

bower

quiescent

Lucky for me you had that attack of principles, huh. They were scared of you.” “They were?” “Valkyr,” Avi said, “everyone who meets you is scared of you.”

This place belonged to a world whose atmosphere had been peeled from it like the shell from an egg long ago.