CHAPTER ONEAGOGE
The sky lit up with green subreal flashes as a Wisdom cruiser dropped out of shadowspace. Kyr took a deep breath, narrowed her eyes to see past the hyperspatial feedback, and watched for the tiny dart coming through in the cruiser’s wake, nearly hidden behind its mass and shine. Her battered combat suit wouldn’t pick it up yet, but in the visible-light spectrum human eyes were a long-range sensor that the majo always underestimated.
There.
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.
A cruiser that size held some seven thousand majo soldiers and countless deadly drones, but it was a distraction. The dart was the real threat. The fist-sized antimatter bomb it carried would go off with enough force to crack the heart of the planet below. The secondary payload would start the crust and core unraveling. If Kyr did not reach the dart first and deactivate it, the living blue curve of the planet below would soon be nothing but a long trail of ice settling into a glittering ring somewhere between Mars and Mercury.
Kyr hesitated, thinking. She had six minutes before the dart’s course was irretrievable and the planet was doomed. She could use her jump hook to reach it, alerting the cruiser in the process and leaving herself with majo fightercraft to fend off while she tried to disable the bomb. Or she could attempt stealth. The defense platform she was standing on was littered with the shells of shot-down enemy fighters. Kyr could try to jury-rig one to get it flying again, and sneak past the cruiser toward the deadly sting in its tail. The rest of her unit was gone. The defense platform itself was disabled. If the majo even knew there was still a human soldier here, they would not be paying her the attention due to a threat.
That was their mistake.
While Earth’s children live, the enemy shall fear us.
Kyr used her jump hook.
Her suit’s built-in alarms screamed at her and the feed in the corner of her vision informed her she was risking permanent neurological damage 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. Washes of green light flickered around her as she landed on the narrow nose of the dart. She threw herself flat, clinging with her thighs, and started bashing at its covering panel with the hilt of her field knife.
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.”
Dark pits opened in the cruiser’s underside, and rows of majo fighters buzzed into life in the gloom. The unmanned dart swayed wildly from side to side. Kyr swore triumphantly as the panel came loose and fell away—fifty thousand feet to the ocean below—and used the gun in her free hand to shoot two fighters out of the sky without looking around.
The planet-killing bomb was a coppery sphere. Her breath caught as she stared at it. She didn’t have the skills to even open it, let alone disarm it; but the triggering mechanism tucked into its side looked like the diagrams she’d seen. Kyr thought calm, calm, and went to work slowly, using everything she’d been taught about majo engineering.
She almost had it, with forty seconds to spare: and then abruptly a secondary cover panel slammed down over the whole thing, glittering with the greenish light of a shadowspace extrusion, and a voice said, “You act in opposition to the Wisdom. Desist.”
“Fuck you,” said Kyr, getting her knife out again.
“Your actions are unwise,” said the dart. “Your actions are unwise. The Wisdom acts for the greater good. Your actions are unwise.”
“There’s fourteen billion people down there, fuck you,” panted Kyr, who had never got this far before, as she bashed at the panel.
But a stabbing pain in her thigh was a shot from a majo fighter that had come up on the blind side of her damaged suit. She lost her grip on the dart and fell and fell and fell, and falling she saw the cruiser pop back out of existence as quickly as it had appeared. The dart aimed itself down toward the blue.
The last thing Kyr saw was the antimatter explosion beginning; the death of her world, just as she had seen it happen hundreds of times before.
The simulation cut out. Kyr sat up slowly on the grey plasteel floor and put her head in her hands. She’d run Doomsday four times today, and now she had the dull headache that happened when you spent too long in the agoge. She worked her jaw a few times as if she could shove the pain out that way, and slowly got to her feet.
“Well done, Valkyr,” said Uncle Jole.
He took a halting step toward her. Even with his old war injury slowing him down, Commander Aulus Jole was an impressive-looking man. Like most soldiers of his generation he towered over civilians—he had half a foot on Kyr, who was not short—and was broadly built along with it: evidence of warbreed genetics, of military-grade nanite implants, and of having always had enough to eat as a child. He looked enough like Kyr that he might really have been her uncle. They shared the space-pale skin that was the commonest complexion on Gaea Station, and they both had grey eyes and fair hair—though his was cropped short, while Kyr of course kept hers in a regulation ponytail. On Commander Jole’s collar shone twin wing badges: the etched circle of the Earth, for Command, and the lily pin of Hagenen Wing, the elite of the Terran Expeditionary, his old unit.
“Still training in rec hour?” he said. “You’re worse than me.”
This was a joke: no one was worse than Aulus Jole for spending hours in agoge simulations. Most of these upper-level ones were based on his own experiences from his Hagenen Wing days, when he had been one of the Terran Federation’s most successful operatives: infiltrating majo bases, defending civilian installations, commanding troops in open firefights in the final days of the war. And the scenario Kyr had just run, of course. It was Aulus Jole who had stood on a disabled defense platform and watched death come for his world. It was Aulus Jole, newly crippled by majo brightfire, who’d been only a handful of instants too late.
Kyr knew he had tried to kill himself once, because her older sister, Ursa, had been the one who found him. She thought it was probably more than once. She saw the blue planet unraveling in her dreams, and felt it as the void pulling shards of new-forged ice out of her own heart; and she hadn’t been there. She hadn’t even been born.
“I still failed,” Kyr said. “I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry.”
“We have all failed. But Earth’s children endure. And while we live—”
“The enemy shall fear us,” finished Kyr along with him.
Jole put his hand on her shoulder, making her startle and look up at him. “I’m proud of you, Kyr,” he said. “I don’t say that enough. Go find your mess and relax. It’s your rec rotation.”
Rec rotation was a joke. Kyr knew where the other girls from Sparrow mess were: hand-to-hand practice mats, shooting range, volunteer rotations in Systems or Nursery. 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.
Kyr went anyway, reluctantly. Her head still ached from hours of the agoge. As the chamber closed behind her she saw a glitter in the air as the defense platform reappeared. Jole was running the scenario again.
Copyright © 2023 by Emily Tesh
