Some Desperate Glory

by Emily Tesh

She didn’t know what she’d done to deserve a life suddenly full of talkative people;

Ally did not look like his mother: because the woman in the pictures looked like Kyr, and he did not look like Kyr.

Avi had said, hadn’t he, that Ursa had taken a hostage. Kyr hadn’t asked at the time. Now it was all she could think about. She sat silently in her runaway sister’s pleasant light-filled kitchen, eating cookies, thinking about it. And when the child who was plainly Aulus Jole’s son offered her a glass of fruit juice to go with them, she said yes.

Ally gave her a small and forceful lecture about ocean bioclearance for Terran fish stocks, of which she understood mainly that there were fish in Raingold Bay, and people fished for them, and Ally disapproved for some reason.

“And I know, Valkyr, I do know, because I have seen the footage, because I have read the reports, and most of all because I was a child but I was there.

“‘I’d rather stand three times in the battle line than give birth to one child.’ The Nursery toast? You know why, right?” Mags frowned. “Because it’s giving up the glory—look, I know how much combat matters to you, but—” “No, idiot, because it’s dangerous,” said Kyr. “You’re not safe in Nursery. Don’t you know how many of them die?”

Moving accounts exist of the whole affair: it is, as one evacuee remarked, an extraordinary feeling to see the gigantic form of a human soldier rushing toward you and experience relief.