Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

“But you were nice to Yiso,” Kyr said, and then, realizing, “and you’re never nice to anyone.” “Not unless there’s something in it for me,” Avi agreed, mouth twisted at the corner.

“I know what you meant,” Avi said. “That’s the answer. The Wisdom runs on shadowspace. Subrealities, miniaturized universes. Which is what the agoge scenarios are too.” “I thought they were virtual realities,” said Kyr. “Pretend.” “Nope,” Avi said. “The agoge’s the real thing. Fourteen billion people die every time someone fails Doomsday.”

“Leru said,” said Yiso, “with the human question, the Wisdom took months working through it. The longest they’d ever seen.”

“Hurt?” said Avi, distant and delicate, as if he were picking up the word with a pair of tweezers to examine it.

“Why doesn’t it matter!” she yelled. The noise stopped. Avi smiled through his mask of blood. “Because it’s already over,” he said. The Wisdom groaned one last time, and the universe in miniature that surrounded them blurred and flared in curtains of discolored light as thousands of worlds died together.

“Valkyr,” they said, softly. “At last.” “That’s not my name,” said Val. Valkyr sounded like one of the names the really creepy Earth-first types gave their kids, the kind of people who were so unpleasant about aliens that it was uncomfortable to talk to them at parties. “I’m sorry, Valkyr,” said the alien, “but whatever you believe just now is simply not true. I need you to know.”

Ursa had slept in Jole’s rooms since she was five years old. And Jole had also watched Kyr grow up. Kyr hated thinking of things.

Afterward Kyr could never remember it without feeling again the bright bleak awe of watching the dreadnought come alive. The painted ship had no defense but speed and movement, and against it was arrayed the might of Earth victorious. It was a strange double feeling, to be watching the merciless trajectories of the slugs, the wild unexpected meshes of the dimensional traps, the magnificent and deadly lances of shadow distortion, and thinking at once please no and fuck yes.

A peace brought about with the threat of violence is only a war in waiting.

“That really doesn’t frighten you at all, does it?” Avi said. “Et tu, Magnus? God, you fucking warbreeds, I swear they bred out the self-preservation chunk of your prefrontal cortex.

She’d once been proud of being fearless. She missed it sharply. Fearlessness had been so simple. It had been so easy.

“Yiso’s not an it,” said Kyr sharply. “They’re a bit confused, that’s all.”

What a change from the beginning

Kyr felt suddenly and forcefully the weight of legacy. She wasn’t Earth’s child. She was Elora Marston’s, and Yingli Lin’s, and Ursa’s, and she owed her duty not to some abstract unknown planet but to the women who’d come before her.

Zen had said that the first time round too, Kyr remembered. It had been a shock then. Now it felt more like an honor, to be trusted with Zen’s real opinion. So few people could afford to tell the truth on Gaea Station. If people can be honest with each other, Avi had said, it all falls apart.

What a waste it was, what a terrible waste, to take a person who dreamed cities and gardens and enormous shining skies and teach him that the only answer to an unanswerable suffering was slaughter.

Kyr had spent her whole life angry. It was deep inside her, the seed that Gaea had planted and nourished till it twined through everything she was: a righteous rage that said I am the hand of vengeance. She had been born into a universe gone wrong. She had waited her whole life to come face-to-face with something she could blame. And here he was.