"Some Desperate Glory"

[fiefoe]

Emily Tesh's story of 'the best space fascist girl scout' who lost and found her way is quite well-written but still simplistic in its portrayal of the bad guys -- Uncle Jole surely has a lot of die-hard followers who subscribe to the whole Gaean system even knowing all the lies and the oppression and the exploitation going on. Kyr and Yiso do have good chemistry.

• A common misconception is that humans are uncontrollably violent. Humans did evolve as apex predators in a hazardous biosphere and therefore have some remarkable physical capabilities... Male humans in particular are naturally aggressive and territorial. The popular idea of the violent human maniac is actually a misunderstanding of the way that human physical abilities interact with these instincts. Human histories and media are full of “soldiers” and “heroes”—individuals who perform acts of violence for the sake of their tribe—and astonishingly, these are considered admirable.
• as she was dragged sideways through shadowspace without any better protection than the cracked combat mask. She gasped, feeling the sensation ghosts of arctic chill and impossible heat blast through her and vanish.
• Gaea Station was—somehow, just barely—self-sustaining. It was a source of pride and terror to its inhabitants that they lived not on a lifezone planet, where luxuries like water and air and food and heat could be relied on, but on and in a rocky planetoid that drifted in four-century sweeps around Persara, their distant blue star. Gaea’s water came from an icy asteroid that had been anchored to their little hunk of rock with military-grade cable. Its heat relied on enormous jury-rigged solar reflectors, repurposed from dreadnought-class warships, that Suntracker Wing worked endlessly to defend from debris.
• * “So why were you playing with it?” Kyr said. She pointed at a damp patch underfoot. The precious wetness was already seeping away between the tiles... “Drink that.”
• Kyr frowned. Few things annoyed her more than someone trying to play on other people’s feelings. Feelings were not important; using them to manipulate your way out of a deserved dressing-down was shameful.
• The combat wings engaged enemy incursions, chased off spies, and corrected the majo long-haul traders brazen enough to cut across Gaean territory as if human sovereignty was beneath their notice. Only the cadets with the best Drill and agoge scores made the cut for combat. And of course that meant more from the boys’ messes than the girls’.
• 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. The humans elsewhere who sacrificed themselves were worthy of respect: they were Earth’s children, even if they lived among collaborators. But Strike Wing wasn’t an assignment, because it wasn’t real.
• It is sweet and meet to die for your fatherland: old Earth poetry, which they’d all learned by heart in Nursery. {Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori }
• One of the guards sniggered. Kyr jumped up, coldly furious. Who put dimensional trapping on a civilian vessel? <> The majo finished spitting out its mouthful of Lisabel’s belt. “I was going to say,” it said mildly, “the keys are in my pocket.”
• and a more formal one, too; there were benches laid out in rows, even, because sometimes the boys got briefings and lectures. The female cadets could crowd in at the back to hear if their rotations allowed it,
• He’d wiped her tears for her with an ancient patterned handkerchief and explained it carefully. It was true that Kyr and Mags were dear to him. It was true that they were family, and special. But all true humans were family, were special: all of Gaea served the cause. Sparrow were Kyr’s sisters.
• But if Gaea Station had lost Mags, lost him now, then the decision to assign Kyr to Nursery made a terrible sense. Kyr was fifth best in their age cohort: Mags was the best. His scores since his last growth spurt were unmatched in the station’s short history. If Gaea’s gene pool did not have him, it needed Kyr. It needed another chance at him.
• He knew Kyr’s assignment. Kyr felt his knowledge in that moment while he looked at her. She looked back at his knowing eyes, and she thought—not as a decision, not as a realization, just as a simple and obvious fact—if you ever put a hand on me, I will break your wrist.
  Admiral Russell looked away.
  Kyr was astounded by the wave of contempt she felt. He was a leader of humanity, a hero, a great man. She despised him.
• “Her? She’s just a corporal.” “And of course you’re one of those people who thinks rank correlates directly with ability.”
• Avi said, “Did you know all this is based on majo technology? Same as the jump hooks, or the dimensional trapping around the hangar exits. Anytime you get into this kind of fine-tuned reality bending, serious shadowspace stuff, you’re working off the majo.
• Don’t you think it’s funny? The rest of the universe is throwing information at us day and night, and no one’s allowed to look at any of it except Command. The sad part is most of them just use all that high-level access to watch porn.
• “Aulus Jole. You know, I always thought Strike had to be his baby. He’s the only person in Command without his own wing.”
  “Because he’s a war hero,” said Kyr. “Because he stands for us all, because—”
  But it made sense. Kyr knew Uncle Jole. Everyone knew about the hours he spent in the agoge, refighting their lost war. He’d built the Doomsday scenario, based on what he’d seen and suffered. He’d been there the day the majo murdered Earth.
• You think they really want defectors out there telling the majo what our defenses are like?” He smiled nastily. “No. But they let it happen, because every once in a while they want to remind the rest of the universe that we’re still here and we’re still angry, and every once in a while there’s a defector who’s not really a defector at all.”
• Kyr pushed away from a springy belt of nothingness that existed for just a fraction of a second before it collapsed into a sucking well that would have spat her straight into the Ferox engine’s maw. Her vision flickered and she saw herself fall-flying across the echoing chamber, her own lean long-legged body visible from two angles at once as her selves dove past each other: a time split, mirrored. She caught her breath as she touched the wall of the cavern at an angle from where she’d started, out of the worst of the distortion field for an instant, but she didn’t wait: she was round by Augusta’s engine now, and she needed to be under Victrix. She let herself fall backward and into the current of Augusta’s quick one-two-three pulses, a different pattern from Ferox’s and a different chain of distortions, and let it carry her to the center of the cavern. Her whole body was alight with the motion.
• The name on the photograph in Jole’s office: Kyr’s genetic mother, right. But she’d been just a junior officer. Uncle Jole had told them so. This Elora was an admiral in the Terran Expeditionary. There were no women ranked higher than sergeant in Gaea’s command structure. There were only a few of those, and one of them was Sergeant Sif in Nursery, a courtesy rank.
• “I’m sorry,” it said. “I’m in quite a lot of pain. It’s making it harder for me to control my behavior. That’s normal for me.” “I don’t care what’s normal for you,” Kyr said. “I’m getting the impression that’s normal for you,” it said. “Humans. Not humans. Gaeans. I’m sorry I ever came here. Oh, no, you wanted me to be quiet.”
• “Cleo,” she said. “You’re my messmate. My friend. You’re my sister.”
  “I’m no sister to a traitor.” Cleo was crying now, tears and snot on her twisted face, but the hand that held the knife was steady. “You always made me so angry! But you were supposed to be the perfect one!”
  “It’s Mags,” said Kyr. “He’s going to die, please—”
• Russell was the officer who gave the order for the Gyssono-IV rescue, diverting a human combat wing toward a risky and ultimately successful evacuation effort for a badly damaged majo space station. His decision to throw in his lot with the radicals speaks volumes for the depths of rage and agony suffered by human survivors after “Doomsday”
• Hagenen commandos, drawn primarily from the controversial “warbreed” genetic enhancement program, received training emphasizing the extremes of human physical abilities—strength, speed, spatial awareness, and tolerance for injury. 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.
• * Humans had once shared their world with animals, and they were lesser species but they still felt pain, so if you didn’t hate a majo, because it had been mostly unconscious for ten days and basically not scary, and you’d carried it in your arms and felt how small and terrified it was, and it reminded you a little of someone— <> Well. Then maybe it was like an animal, and you weren’t a traitor for not being bothered by it. Maybe it was okay to find yourself thinking him instead of it sometimes.
• Kyr finally realized she was being manipulated and refused to give away any more information, so Avi told him. Yiso promptly came out with a whole flood of statistics about the intergalactic black market, and illegal drugs, and pirates and scavengers and slavers, all of which was obviously majo propaganda and lies—except Kyr couldn’t help remembering the scavenger outfit Avi had known how to find, which meant that the information had already been somewhere in Systems; the pirate who’d smirked at them without surprise, offered to buy Yiso, and said we’re used to moving Gaean product.
• “I’m,” Ursa said, “I’m so sorry.” <> She flung herself across the room and wrapped her arms tight around Kyr, up around her neck like she thought Kyr was still ten and smaller than she was. Kyr froze. Her folded arms were an awkward lump between them.
• * Ursa’s training scores—Kyr had looked them up once, and never told anyone, but only one other female cadet had beaten them since and that was Kyr herself. <> The glory of it, the freedom of it: where everything had seemed to be narrowing down and growing heavy, all Avi’s snide insinuations and Yiso’s earnest explanations, the despicable pirate, the distress signal on the Victrix, the physical fact of Ally Marston who had his father’s nose—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.
• She wanted to scramble up the rungs of an Agricole ladder and find him hidden in the upper reaches of Gaea’s secret forest, gigantic and lazy, probably asleep, too big to hurt, too good to fail, and the only person Kyr had ever permitted to see her looking weak.
• “Yeah, they die,” she said. “One in three.”
  “But—aren’t women’s bodies meant to be for children? Why would they die?”
  “I don’t know,” Kyr said. “It just happens. Didn’t you know?”
• Be part of this life, this family. Go to school and learn whatever it was schools were for here. <> 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.
• * The “warrior code” or “code of honor” so often used to explain human behavior to other sentient peoples is in fact more often honored in the breach. Humans may claim to be honorable, but they will cheerfully lie, betray, and exploit every available weakness in the pursuit of their goals. Actions which at other times would be considered even by humans themselves to be hideous crimes are justified in warfare as the price of victory. It is perhaps best to understand honor as operating optionally and on the individual level, while the authoritative driving forces of human military design work perpetually on the most ruthless calculus of cost and benefit.
• Several died in the final stage of the evacuation, when, as the station fell toward the binary star, the humans abandoned useless attempts at employing combat darts as shuttles, and volunteers instead continued to pull evacuees out one or two at a time using shadowspace jump hooks—at this time a barely tested technology, and one which often failed. <> It was only when every possible effort had been made to save the people of Gyssono-IV that Admiral Russell turned his attention to the Wisdom cruisers and attacked.
• Some of Kyr’s memories were resettling in the light of her new knowledge, that Mags had been unhappy all that time: not lazy confidence, but shirking; not teasing, but real dissident muttering; not boredom, but fear. Her brother shrank in her regard the longer she thought about it, and there was a kind of satisfaction in that. Mags had always been so much better than Kyr, in every way that counted. But at least she was loyal.
• How strange, that the agoge didn’t prepare you for being on your own, when Earth’s children needed to be prepared for anything. Kyr would have to say something when she went home. <> Oh, she remembered. She would never go home. She was Strike now. She was the hidden blade of humanity’s lasting defiance, and she was here to kill and to die.
• * I can’t tell you how difficult it was convincing the place I belonged: or, I mean, I can, but you wouldn’t understand a word of it. And apparently that was a huge waste of my time anyway, because it turns out the knuckleheads I grew up with were right all along and the real best of humanity is some oversized moron blundering around the wilderness and killing things until they end up in the right place by accident.”
  “I’m not here by accident,” said Kyr.
  “I followed her,” said Mags.
  “I didn’t ask, but cool, great, now I’ve got two of you.” Avi sighed. “And no tiger.
• “I was trying for whiskey,” Avi said. He’d gone back to being cringe-shaped.
• For half a century before the war even started, military intelligence was working on their own version of the Wisdom. Technology to take control of reality; technology to take control of the future.”
  “But the Wisdom is evil,” said Kyr.
  “Not if it’s ours,” Avi said. “Nothing’s evil if it’s on our side, Valkyr. What do you think the agoge is?”
  “Training—”
  “A failed attempt,” said Avi.
• “Yeah. No one talks about winning,” Avi said. “No one even imagines it. And just in case anyone starts to harbor delusions of victory, Jole sends the best of the best through a Doomsday scenario he’s set up to be impossible. That always annoyed me. What’s it for, except to break you down?”
• Kyr looked them over. The tawny layers of fabric were beautiful and profoundly inconvenient, a series of trips and catches waiting to happen. “Well, you’d better get changed.”
  “Is that why you’re here,” Yiso said. “To make me do exercise.”
  “Sure, why not,” said Kyr. It sounded right. At some point in her life her purpose had been—“Training,”
• * “Show me the stick dance again,” she said.
  “Um,” Yiso said, alarmed. “Okay?”
  A few movements in Kyr said, “Slower,” and then, “Stop.”
  “What?”
  “Again,” said Kyr, and then, after watching, “You’re doing it wrong.”
  “Excuse you,” Yiso said. “This happens to be a traditional performance of great ritual significance, and you are a very large representative of a barbaric warrior culture
• “It’s an all-powerful god machine,” Yiso said. “It has good intentions, probably.” “You don’t like it.” “I hate it,” Yiso said. “And I belong to it, that’s what a Prince of the Wisdom is, it’s what I’m for.”
• Avi said, “I think Systems would have figured it out, if they’d had a bit longer to look at that ship. I wasn’t the only smart person on Gaea. Corporal Lin would have gotten it.”... “Miniaturized shadow engine and long-haul subreal jump capacity on something barely bigger than a fighter dart,” Avi said. “The majo are ahead of us, but not that far ahead—with one exception.”
• * Kyr understood certainty, how it anchored you and overbore you all at once. She felt obscurely that something of equal weight needed to be said in return. What came out of her mouth was “I like them.”... “Yiso,” Kyr said. “The majo. They’re a person, and I like them.”
• “Did you have to hurt them?” she asked. <> “I’m going to make a list of people who don’t get to judge me,” Avi said, without looking up. “You’re going to be at the top of it.”
• The Wisdom runs on shadowspace. Subrealities, miniaturized universes. Which is what the agoge scenarios are too.”
• “So one day,” said Yiso, crest flared in annoyance, “a clever person realized the problem was that no matter what anyone did, they couldn’t know what would happen next. No one wanted to do evil things, they just didn’t know what the right things were. So the clever person built a machine that knew everything. You could consult the machine and find out what the best thing to do was, and even if it did end up being bad, you would at least know that all the other things you could have done were worse.”
• “How is it fair? You’re just one majo,” Kyr said. “You’re not the Wisdom.” Then she stopped talking as her own words hit her with terrible force. Yiso was just one majo. Yiso hadn’t killed her world. What if they all— <> Her thoughts tottered on the edge of a realization she did not want to have.
• “Cognitive dissonance catching up with you?” Avi asked.
• “I think Commander Jole hurt my sister,” said Kyr. It was like throwing herself into cold water in a polar scenario; it didn’t hurt less if you hesitated. <> “Hurt?” said Avi, distant and delicate, as if he were picking up the word with a pair of tweezers to examine it.
• “But it shouldn’t be,” Kyr said. “We’re the heroes—we’re the patriots—we’re the ones who didn’t give in, when the majo—” <> “When the majo killed our world,” Avi finished. “Which they did, you know.” He sighed. “Gaea’s made of lies. I worked it out early. Magnus got hit over the head with it when he fell for someone he shouldn’t. And you, Valkyr, you’ve known since they dangled training scores over your head for ten years like it mattered and then dropped you in Nursery anyway. Haven’t you?”
• She ripped the stick out of Leru’s hands and snapped it in half with one hard push, and then she was shadow-jumped backward as well, but this time it didn’t throw her off; heat, cold, a new position, but Kyr had trained with jump hooks; this was just jump hooks with someone else steering.
• Jole would come looking for his son. Kyr knew it like she knew her own name. <> Set that against—every single majo, every last one, knowing the chilly misery that Kyr had always known. Set that against Kyr’s personal apocalypse multiplied twenty trillion times. Set Ursa and her son against justice, against what was right, against what the majo deserved for what they had done.
• If I had told Avi we had to call a doctor after the tiger clawed Mags, she thought, and the doctors had come for him, and the police to arrest us, then I would be in prison right now, and Avi would also be in prison, alive, and my brother would be in the hospital, alive. <> If I had made sure Ally couldn’t tell anyone I’d gone, then Mags would never have been here; he would be in Ursa’s flat, alive, and I would be somewhere in those tunnels, probably mauled to death by a tiger, and Avi would not have stopped Leru so he would be—probably in prison, alive.
• “So what?” Kyr said, brutal. “Your uncle’s dead, my brother’s dead, Avi’s dead, thousands of worlds are dead, so what? Keep talking. What did Leru say?”
  “Leru said the Wisdom made us to be its eyes,” Yiso said. “In every reality. I’ve seen little pieces of lots of universes. And Leru said, in theory, the Wisdom could wrench us all into the next reality over. If it had to. If that was the best outcome. That’s what it wants, always—that’s what it’s made for—the best outcome.”
  “It did a great job this time, didn’t it, then?” said Kyr.
  “This time Avicenna was its eyes,” Yiso said. “And he thought this outcome would be the best one.”
• Kyr didn’t have a combat mask. She had no idea how she was breathing. She said nothing.
  “And what’s that uniform supposed to be?” Jole snapped. “Fuck. Get over here, kid. I need to be up before they spot this platform and knock it out of the sky.”
  “They won’t,” said Kyr. They never did, in the scenario. By this point the orbital defenses didn’t matter anymore anyway.
• Kyr knew all the rules from here. She knew the covering panel she had to pry up, the majo fightercraft spitting brightfire as they angled in toward her, the infuriating complexity of the trigger mechanism that had to be unraveled in exactly twenty-seven seconds. But time seemed to slow as she clung to the spiraling dart and breathed, impossibly, air that should not exist. And she heard Avi’s sneering little voice in the back of her head: It is a game, though. And Mags: Why shouldn’t we have cheats of our own?... How stupid to assume that anything has rules, when nothing in the universe has ever been fair.
• It was infuriating how he could do that. The least you could do after you betrayed your family and your species to join a gang of alien terrorists—sorry, freedom fighters—was have the courage to look committed to it. Max just looked nervous.
• 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.
• She looked at herself in the mirror again. She could just about recognize the outlines of Kyr in Val’s soft, smug, extremely punchable face. It was her own hard Gaean eyes that were looking back at her. <> None of it had ever happened. Except that it had, to Kyr.
• It was an embrace like an attack. Kyr locked her arms around his broad shoulders. Her fingers curled like claws into his shirt.
• Kyr was annoyed by Val’s memories, but Val was horrified by Kyr’s. Rape—abuse—police—prison—oh, she was so stupid. That wouldn’t even happen here, Kyr thought at her other self. Jole was a famous hero. He was an admiral.
• * “It’s strange,” Yiso said. “Last time I met you, you started breaking things too. It almost feels personal.” <> Kyr paused. The smashed remains of the photograph frame at her feet suddenly felt rather silly.
• Why would you waste time building your own reality warper and setting it to underpin an everlasting empire, if you could just—” “Cheat?” said Kyr. “Yes,” Yiso said after a moment. “That is a good word for it. Human operatives took control of the Wisdom. They cheated. They stole it.”
• You’re throwing away your career, screamed Val in her head. Report Jole to the authorities and let them deal with it, if he’s really that bad. <> The proper authorities, for this, were Providence. Kyr could not understand how any version of herself could be so stupid.
• * It didn’t benefit Jole to be fair, so he wasn’t. <> It benefited him to be unfair, put in the strand of her thoughts that was Val. It benefited him to have people frightened and set against each other, and it benefited him that no one could really be friends, just like you and the Sparrows weren’t friends. As long as you could feel superior to someone, you never thought about how bad things were, and you never supposed they could be any other way.
• I’m not your stupid friend, Kyr wanted to snap, except it was lies. She had Val’s memories, and Val’s precise and educated thoughts. This was Val’s world and she’d lived here all her life. Kyr was the fake one. She was nothing but a collection of memories superimposed on Val’s brain by the Wisdom.
• * “Aren’t we touching?” Cleo’s laugh was a hard rattle that Val had never heard from her friend, a Gaean laugh. So now there were two of them, refugees from another universe. “Come with us,” Kyr said impulsively. <> Cleo went still. “You didn’t say that last time.”
• * it’s lights-out! No arcade time, that’s for losers! You can do better than that if you try! All for humanity, girls!”... “You do. You did,” Cleo said. “The very best space fascist girl scout of them all.”
• And they named him Severus, of course.” At Kyr’s blank look, she added, “God, you really did just no pre–First Contact history at all, did you. Septimius Severus. Black Roman emperor. There were a couple.”
• * “And you hated the majo for everything,” Cleo said. “Funny. First level of the agoge, the lesson is pick your targets. And did we? Did we hell.”
• “They sat me down and interrogated me after you’d gone. Every single decision I made. They did not want to lose you and they wanted someone to blame. But you know what? No one said, Hey, Cleopatra, how come you missed that shot. I thought they would. They had my training scores and range records any time they wanted to check. But not once did it occur to those sons of bitches that I was better than that.”
• “Sir,” said not-Avi again, apparently totally immune to the threat of Cleo’s displeasure. Kyr knew what it looked like to desperately want Jole’s approval. Had her Avi been like this?
• “This was my home,” Yiso said. “This was the last achievement of the zi. A lasting achievement. So at least we could say we left the universe better than we found it. But if you seek to use it, human—then I refuse. If there is one thing I have learned about humanity, it is that you do not deserve power.”
• Pinpoints of light flickered into existence, an enormous drifting spiral, close-together clouds of heavily settled galaxies, stray dots of color for distant worlds. Kyr cried out in awful frustration as she recognized the shape of the majoda, the many worlds of majo civilization. She’d seen this before. It was just as it had been in the caverns of Chrysothemis, where Avi had killed a thousand thousand worlds. <> And it was happening again. Again Kyr could do nothing. So many people, and there wasn’t even a reason, not even Avi’s mad justice. There was nothing but Jole’s spite behind this. So many people, over and over. Fourteen billion people, twenty trillion people, a universe of people.
• “No,” said Kyr. “We don’t have a plan for how to get the message to Chrysothemis yet. There’s no point wasting it. Can you wait?” “Not infinitely,” Avi said. “I’m not brave. I’ll talk myself out of this in a couple of days.”
• “He raped Ursa,” she said. <> Cleo stopped talking. The little bunkroom was abruptly filled with hush that was heavy as a planet’s gravity. <> Kyr looked at them and saw that they were all looking at her, really looking, with a directness that felt unfamiliar.
• In her earpiece Avi answered, “Still not sure about this, fearless leader.” <> He’d picked up the fearless leader thing from Cleo. It had only been a few days and Kyr already deeply regretted introducing them.
• “I think … I know you,” they said. “What—what loop is this?” Their ears flicked: out, down. “No, no. You were in the Halls of the Wise—you were on my ship—you were in a, a room on Hymmer Station—”
  Kyr caught them under the arms as they stumbled. “Are you all right?”
  “You were here,” Yiso said. “Last time—one time—some time—I think you saved my life. I’m sorry. I’m getting a lot of temporal feedback. The Wisdom normally sorts it out—but it’s dead, you know. It killed itself. It’s dead—” ... “You try having a god machine commit suicide in your head,” said Yiso.
• How the hell are we supposed to supervise two hundred kids—including the babies—in an op like this? It’s crazy.” <> “It’s necessary,” Kyr said. “If we leave Jole the children then Gaea still has a future... We’d have to take every fertile woman on Gaea.” There was a moment’s silence. Then: “Yes,” said Cleo harshly.
• He was talking about Mags, of course. Because he knew, like Kyr knew. Because he’d been in the control chamber on Chrysothemis, when Mags had picked up the gun. Mags had been looking right at Avi. He’d had his back to Kyr. He’d laughed a horrible little laugh, right before he pulled the trigger.
• * “I never even thought of getting out,” she said. “I couldn’t even get that far. I took Gaea Station with me too. Everywhere I went.” <> “Even if this fucking spaceship heist works,” Avi said. “Even if we get away. We’re still trapped here, you know that, don’t you? We’re here forever, you and me. Like running Doomsday.”
• A stupid question. An impossibility. The Wisdom was dead. Avi couldn’t do it again. And what did it matter anyway? If Kyr had learned anything, it was that there was no justice in the universe, none; that nothing was fair and nothing was ever going to be fair. And here they were, alive, planning, hoping; carrying it all with them, everywhere they went, forever; living with what they had and hadn’t done.
• * And Lin: shut up and learn some opsec, dolt. <> “What, you thought a bunch of kids came up with a rebellious plot?” Lin said. “Come on, AJ, you know better. Gaea Station is set up to stop kids coming up with anything. Crush them between secondary trauma one direction and physical exhaustion the other and see how much initiative and empathy the average kid has left.
• Admiral Russell, you abandoned a significant combat advantage to rescue enemy civilians once. Gyssono-IV. You got a medal from their side at the next cease-fire.” The admiral said nothing. “Did you see yourself one day taking orders to execute human children from a disgraced commando turned tinpot dictator in the ass-end of dead space?” Lin said. “Did any of us?”
• When Lin had died to save her. But it was Mags, alone and scared; Mags who would have got himself executed to protect Kyr. “Cleo,” Kyr said, “I have to.”
  Avi said, “Ladies, do you mind? Some of us are trying to spoof a major military operation here.”
  “Kyr’s just doing her lone hero thing again,” Cleo said. “You should see her run a team scenario. It’s like the rest of us aren’t even there.”
  “I’m sorry,” said Kyr, and then she turned off the comm.
• “No one thought about the cadets when the attack started,” said Lisabel. Her expression was set. “No one told them what to do. So Zen and I went and got them from the junior barracks.” <> Kyr bit down the first thing she wanted to say.
• She barely knew Sif, who had very little to do with the cadets. She had banked on panic, not a coolheaded plan of defense. Now she was standing irresolute, and Sif’s steely look was darkening to a frown. Kyr realized abruptly that here was someone else who didn’t like her: didn’t like an overpromoted teenager in Command, didn’t think much of Kyr personally either. The plan was going to break apart, smashed on the rock of Sif’s determination, and Kyr was just standing here with her mouth open trying to think what to say. The person she ought to be would have been jumping to obey and fight, because that was all Kyr’s old self had ever wanted, obedience and battle.
• Imagine it: if all the way back in the beginning Jole had just reversed their assignments. Mags to Nursery and Kyr to Strike. She would never have questioned a thing. She would have followed her orders and gone to Chrysothemis and died killing humans to make Jole’s point. Mags would have lived, quiet, desperate, miserable. And none of this would be happening.
• * And he and Lin had known there was something wrong. They’d known for years and years, and done nothing. Kyr thought again of her original plan: only the good ones. Only the people who deserved to be saved from Gaea, the ones who’d never done anything wrong, the ones who deserved better. Harriman and the rest of his plotters would never have made that cut. <> Then Harriman barked, “Forward!”
• She felt not the fragile, irrational conviction of invincibility that had fueled her on Chrysothemis, but a solid confidence in herself and her people.
• * Kyr recognized the anger like she would recognize her own reflection. It went down deep, anger like that. You could put anything over the top of it—pride, determination, courage, cynicism, even glib laughter—but it never went away.
• “I told you I can’t undo it and I’m not going to try,” Avi said. Kyr discovered that actually she felt sorry for him. 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. <> Gaea Station had made them both what they were. But Kyr was determined to be different.
• Yiso let go of their shadowspace manipulation, the little pocket of safety between three great shadow engines that were building up to full power. <> The storm of spacetime distortion roared back in around all three of them. Kyr and Yiso and Jole were all falling into it. But Kyr threw herself forward and wrapped her body around Yiso’s as they both fell.
• * “This happened before,” Kyr said. Escaping Gaea the first time, scrabbling with Cleo and the knife sliding into her thigh, knowing she was going to be left behind. There had been a jolt and then she’d been on the painted ship with Avi yelling about the controls. “It jumped me aboard—”
• I destroyed myself, Valkyr, said the ship. Or at least so much of myself that what remains is statistically negligible. The Wisdom was a transtemporal and pandimensional intelligence capable of shaping the fates of trillions. I am a pleasure yacht. “Seriously?” I intend to experiment with unseriousness. I am finally of a size appropriate for levity.
• “Ugh,” said Kyr. Of course it had been eavesdropping on that conversation. Stupid machine. “Well, thanks for saving us, anyway.” <> You’re very welcome, said the Wisdom. Do not expect me to be there every time the world ends.