Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Emily Tesh’s debut novel, Some Desperate Glory. A queer space opera about the wreckage of war, the family you find, and who you must become when every choice is stripped from you, Some Desperate Glory arrives April 11th from Tordotcom Publishing. Read chapter three below, or head back to the beginning.
While we live, the enemy shall fear us.
Since she was born, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the murder of planet Earth. Raised in the bowels of Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she readies herself to face the Wisdom, the powerful, reality-shaping weapon that gave the majoda their victory over humanity.
They are what’s left. They are what must survive. Kyr is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet. When Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to Nursery to bear sons until she dies trying, she knows must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands.
Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr escapes from everything she’s known into a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could have imagined.
CHAPTER THREE
FAMILY
Two more of Kyr’s messmates were assigned in the next three days: first Arti to Augusta and then Vic to her heart’s desire in Suntracker. Arti got scramble orders at the same time as her assignment: majo drones in the Mousa system, which in galactic terms was next door. Kyr felt unworthy envy squeezing at her chest as she watched her run for the Augusta hangar.
Vic called Arti’s name after her, but she didn’t look back.
Kyr took Vic down to Level Seven in the agoge that day after watching her stumble and make a fool of herself in her usual Eight. She had never understood why anyone would let a sex thing distract them so much. It worried her a little that Vic was being so visibly stupid about it. She was already so jumpy and fluttery so much of the time. It would be embarrassing for all of them if she got herself gossiped about.
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There was news later that Augusta had been victorious but would remain on patrol in Mousa until they were sure it was clear—four or five weeks. Kyr was relieved when Vic got her Suntracker assignment that same evening, because she’d looked like she was going to cry herself to sleep. Without Lisabel in their narrow cadet dormitory it was probably on Kyr to say things to crying people, and she didn’t have the patience.
Three unassigned Sparrows were left: Cleo, Kyr, Zenobia. They were given Oikos rotations, cooking and cleaning and reorganizing storerooms. They spent the third day after Augusta went out in Textiles, a long dim chamber tucked away near the back of Oikos, the opposite end from the stairs up to Drill. They took over from the mess before them—Starling, which was seven fifteen-year-old girls—and sat on folding metal chairs among repurposed plasteel shelving heaped with fabric, carefully sewing up bloodstained tears in old uniforms and putting reinforced patches on knees and elbows. Kyr recognized the fabric they were using, soft and hard to rip, dyed slightly the wrong shade of navy blue. It came from the wardrobe of the captured majo. Kyr wondered if they’d executed it yet.
Cleo took Textiles badly. “If they’re just hemming and hawing about assigning us, they might as well give us rec rotations while we wait,” she said. “Since we’re not going to have any for months once we’re in wing training. Ugh!” She’d stabbed herself with a needle. “Do you think majo use the Wisdom for this? O mighty and beneficial master of reality, turn these rags back into clothes!”
“Cleo,” said Kyr. Cleo rolled her eyes but subsided.
Zen said nothing. She was always quiet. Now that there were only three of them it stood out more.
Kyr wouldn’t have minded a rec rotation. She hadn’t seen Mags since that day in Agricole. She wanted to know if her brother had been assigned. She wanted to know where.
Maybe it was Augusta, and he was out on patrol with Arti. Kyr felt her shoulders tighten at the thought. If Mags was already in combat, and she was stuck here in Oikos sewing—
She never finished the thought. A runner darted in with a flimsy for Zen. Zen waited for him to leave before she opened it, very slowly. Kyr and Cleo watched in strange, tense silence. Oikos or Nursery, Kyr thought. Predictable either way. Why do we feel so frightened?
“Oh,” said Zen finally.
“What?” said Kyr.
Zen paused. Then she held the flimsy out in Kyr’s direction. Kyr took it from her hand. Sparrow / Zenobia: OIKOS, she read. The signature was a J and a squiggle for Jole. Cleo crowded in at Kyr’s shoulder, read it too, and let out a harsh breath.
“What?” said Kyr.
Zen looked at her, frowned, kept looking, and finally said, “The population targets.”
“What about them?”
Then for the first time Kyr felt the cold burn of uncertainty. One of them had to go to Nursery. And there were only two left: two warbreed girls, with the best training scores in their mess. She’d even thought of it, that maybe it would be Arti, because her sons would be good soldiers. But Command didn’t want just good, did they. They wanted—Cleo’s sons, surely. It had to be Cleo. It couldn’t be Kyr. But the cold and logical part of Kyr’s mind said: Cleo never got her full height and strength, so if they want the best—
No.
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.
Kyr and Cleo sat on the rickety metal chairs with a new space between them. The room felt very empty with five Sparrows missing. They both still had sewing on their laps. For the sake of breaking the awful silence Kyr said at last, “What did she mean, she never liked us?”
“Pretty unambiguous, Kyr,” said Cleo. “At least, I thought so.” She picked up a needle and drove it through some cloth, apparently at random. Then she dropped the whole navy-blue mess of fabric on the floor and looked at Kyr and said, “You know Commander Jole. He’s your uncle. You must know. Is it going to be you or me?”
“What?”
“Nursery,” Cleo said. “You or me, Valkyr? Or both of us, ha, wouldn’t that be a surprise. Ten years fighting you to be the best and as a reward we both get to spend the next two decades pregnant. Well? Don’t you know?” Her expression did something complicated and unfamiliar. Kyr would have said she knew all the Sparrows like she knew herself, but she’d never seen Cleo like this. In a small hard voice she said, “Only I’d rather know now. I’d rather just know. I don’t know why they spin it out. Maybe there’s someone in Command who likes knowing we’ll squirm.”
“No,” Kyr said, on firmer ground. Command were humanity’s leaders and its servants. They weren’t like that. Her uncle Jole wasn’t like that.
“You really believe that,” Cleo said. “I wish I was you. I wish I could just not notice things like you do.” Her eyes were on Kyr’s, deep brown and strikingly luminous. Kyr was oddly reminded of Lisabel, holding up the shining glass next to the majo ship. “So you don’t know.”
“No,” Kyr said again. She swallowed around a sudden inexplicable lump in her throat. “Nursery’s not a bad assignment,” she said. “It’s… a sacrifice. A noble sacrifice. And you get things. Luxuries. Chocolate. You could grow your hair.”
Cleo leaned back in the metal chair—it creaked alarmingly— and closed her eyes. She ran her hand over the close-knit curls of her cropped scalp. “Wouldn’t that be nice,” she said, without expression. “And as much sex as you want.”
“Yes?” said Kyr, who had never really thought about this, but it was also true.
“What fun,” Cleo said. She opened her eyes and scooped up her sewing from the floor. “We’ve got work to do, Valkyr. Come on.”
Kyr and Cleo were alone in the Sparrow dormitory that night. Kyr slept poorly. She was surrounded by empty bunks that no longer had even the single blanket cadets got given on them. Heating was saved for important parts of the station. Without five other human bodies in here, it was very cold.
It had to be Cleo. They couldn’t give Kyr Nursery. They couldn’t.
Nursery was for girls like Lisabel. After all, someone had to do it, and Lisabel would never have made a warrior. Kyr had tried and failed to teach her, and if she couldn’t do it, no one could.
It wasn’t that Nursery was hard. Kyr wasn’t afraid of hard, she wasn’t afraid of work, she wasn’t afraid to serve. Nursery was a necessary service. Before the war people had just had children, or not had children, whichever way they wanted: with fourteen billion humans on Earth and another eight billion scattered across the colony worlds, it hadn’t mattered. Now it did. With such a tiny gene pool, and no genetic tailoring available, everything had to be planned. No one could afford to take years away from real work to raise one or two random offspring in whatever stupid way occurred to them. Earth’s children were Earth’s future and Earth’s only hope of vengeance.
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. Kyr had been drilled in hand-eye coordination, taught to read, beaten for misbehavior, and tucked into bed by Corporal Ekker, who had died a couple of years ago. She had not recognized the face of the figure in the recyclable coffin at the funeral. Ekker had gone skinny, flesh sloughing off her bones, hair grey and thin.
Mags had cried a little.
Kyr knew her actual lineage, of course. Commander Jole had explained: why he had an interest in her and Mags, why there were two of them, why they were allowed to call him uncle. Their father had served with Jole in Hagenen Wing. Their mother had been a junior officer of the dreadnought Victrix. Ursa had been produced the old-fashioned way, before the end of the world. But Kyr and Mags were born after both their genetic parents were dead, an attempt to preserve a valuable cross.
She’d had nothing but respect for Corporal Ekker. She even respected Lisabel, sort of. Lisabel would do well at tucking children into bunks, teaching them to read and write, keeping them healthy until they were old enough for their real lives, the mess and the agoge. But Kyr herself—
Her thoughts went in circles. She fell asleep at last counting Cleo’s even breaths. Her shoulders and spine were stiff with cold and tension. They couldn’t give her Nursery. She was a warrior, a soldier of humanity. It would be a waste.
There was no assignment for Kyr or Cleo in the morning, and there was no rotation for Sparrow on the noticeboard in the hall outside the female cadet barracks. There was nothing. The two of them stood there as the younger girls’ messes moved around them. Finch, the sixteen-year-olds, were the senior mess on the board now. Starling below them. None of them said anything to Kyr. She’d never bothered learning the names of younger girls. A Finch paused like she was about to speak to Cleo, but Cleo gave her a withering glare—Kyr felt the force of it even standing to one side—and the girl changed her mind.
“Well,” said Cleo at last, when the hall was empty, everyone showered and scattered to their rotations. “Are we supposed to just guess?”
“It’s rec,” said Kyr. “We’ve got a rec rotation.”
There was a little pause.
“All right, why not,” said Cleo. “Rec time. Possibly our last rec for months. Or years, depending. You don’t get time off from—”
“Stop it,” said Kyr.
“Do you still believe it’s not about making us squirm?” Cleo said. “What else would it be about?”
“We’re not that important,” Kyr said. “Command have better things to do. They just didn’t get to us yet.”
“Wonder if the boys are all assigned too,” Cleo said.
Without exactly discussing it, the two of them made their way through the technically off-limits fault in the rock of the station walls which led to the hallway outside the male cadet barracks. This was a much bigger space—there were almost twice as many male cadets—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, which they usually did.
The rotation noticeboard here was bigger as well, because there were two male cadet messes for every age cohort. Coyote and Cat were missing from the board just like Sparrow.
Cleo said, “You don’t have to worry about Mags, at least. He’ll be combat for sure.” When Kyr said nothing she went on, with the air of someone making a peace offering, “We could go and look for him?”
“No,” said Kyr. Newly assigned adults went straight into wing training. Mags would be busy. “We should do something useful.”
Cleo laughed. “Like what?”
They went to Drill. There were no free agoge rooms—all of them were full of rotations from the combat wings or cadets working on their training—so they couldn’t run Doomsday, or another scenario. They went to the mats instead.
Kyr had learned to fight in the dim and cavernous main hall of Drill. She had fought countless legions of majo in the agoge, she had fought Mags when their rec time overlapped, and other Coyotes too when they’d seen her against Mags, because no sensible cadet wasted a chance to work on themselves. But more than any of them she had fought the Sparrows: with them, against them. She knew their bodies intimately, their strengths and weaknesses, their injuries—the broken fingers, the permanent aches, the ankle that Jeanne had twisted when they were twelve and that still bothered her if she hadn’t warmed up properly.
And above all she knew Cleo, because Cleo had always been the messmate Kyr measured herself against. At seven Kyr had not been able to beat her. At twelve, as Cleo’s childhood advantage in height began to disintegrate, it had been an even contest. At seventeen, Kyr won two rounds out of three when they sparred— but even now she could not relax when it was Cleo on the mats against her. Cleo knew Kyr’s habits and weaknesses just as well as Kyr knew hers, and Cleo in combat was aggressive, merciless, and warbreed fast.
They fought. Kyr won. Again; Kyr won again, but only just. Cleo took the third bout. Quietly the instructor on duty led his current charges—the seven-year-old warbreed boys of Tiger mess— across the hall to watch. Kyr tuned out the background staccato of his comments and criticisms; they were not for her. She and Cleo only watched each other, attacked, defended, struck again, fell back, circled, breathing hard—and oh, it was good. Cleo took another win off Kyr. Kyr took her down hard in retaliation in the following bout, pinning her facedown on the mat, arm twisted up behind her back. “Fuck you,” Cleo said when Kyr let her up. Her teeth were bared in a glittering grin.
We might never do this again, Kyr heard herself think. She pushed the thought away as hard as she could.
Shift-change bells came and went. The Tigers ran off to their next rotation, and were replaced as an audience by a squadron of Scythica Wing, adult men in navy-blue uniforms with the silver horse badge of Scythica on their collars. Kyr still did not pay attention to them, but she caught a glimpse of a familiar, young-looking face. Last time she’d seen him he’d been a Coyote, one of Mags’s messmates, and he was probably the one telling the others their names—Cleopatra, Valkyr—because Kyr heard the men calling them aloud, cheering whenever one of them landed a hit. She ignored them like she’d ignored the Tigers, even when they got louder, more insistent. Only this exchange of blows mattered, and the next one, and the next—
Cleo slammed Kyr down hard. There was a burst of cheering and, strangely, a shout of laughter. Kyr looked up. Cleo held out her hand. Her expression had gone cold and flat again, but it didn’t seem to be aimed at Kyr. “We’re done,” she said, and pulled Kyr onto her feet. “Let’s go.”
She said nothing else until they were out of Drill. They were both covered in sweat, but Cleo marched past the showers like they weren’t there. Kyr discovered her ponytail had fallen apart, and fixed it. “Fuckers, fuckers, fuckers,” Cleo said. “I’m going back to barracks to wash up. Come on.”
Kyr sat showered and shivering in the cold of the unheated bunkroom with her ponytail dripping cold water down the back of her neck. Cleo said, “Still no assignments.”
Kyr said nothing.
“Did you hear them?” Cleo said. “Did you hear what they were saying?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Kyr. “It wasn’t important. Just soldiers being soldiers. It’s hard service. They’re allowed to—”
She stopped, because she still wasn’t sure what, exactly, the soldiers watching them had been doing; or why it felt so crawlingly unpleasant to think about it.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
Cleo sat on her bunk, and put her face in her hands, and said, “I wish I was dead.”
Kyr didn’t understand the words at first. Then she said, “You don’t mean that.”
“You don’t know what I mean, Kyr, you don’t know anything,” snapped Cleo. “What! Are they! Waiting for! Just tell me, just do it already.” She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “It’s going to be me. It’s going to be me in Nursery, isn’t it. Me and Lisabel.”
“I don’t know,” said Kyr.
“It wouldn’t be you,” said Cleo. “You’re the best of us. Our fearless leader. Jole’s favorite. It wouldn’t be you, so it’s going to be me.” She rolled over and lay flat on her back. “I just want it over with. I can’t take this.”
Kyr stood up.
“What?”
“I’ll ask,” Kyr said. “He’s my uncle, like you said.” She swallowed. “I’ll go and ask Commander Jole.”
Excerpted from Some Desperate Glory, copyright © 2022 by Emily Tesh.
