Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  Look out, Thien Bao wanted to say; but the wall nearest to them shuddered and fell apart, dragging down chunks of the ceiling in its wake. Something struck her in the back of the head; and everything disappeared in an excruciating, sickening crunch.

  When she went silent, Vermillion Phoenix had had an officer of the Embroidered Guard as her only crew—not a blood relative, but a sworn oath-sister, who had been with the ship for decades and would never hear of abandoning her post.

  There is no record of what happened to the officer. Being human, without any kind of augmentation, she likely died of old age, while the mindship—as ships did—went on, unburdened.

  Unburdened does not mean free from grief, or solitude. In the centuries that followed, several people claimed to have had visions of the ship; to have heard her voice calling to them; or dreamt of battles—past and present—to which she put a brutal end. There were no connections between them; no common ancestry or closeness in space or time; but perhaps the mindship recognized something else: a soul, torn from its fragile flesh envelope and reincarnated, time and time again, until everything was made right.

  Thien Bao woke up, and all was dust and grit—choking her, bending her to the ground to convulsively cough until her lungs felt wrung dry. When she rose at last, shaking, she saw the ruins of the palanquin, half-buried under rubble; and a few cut wires, feebly waving in the dim light—and the mob, further into the background, still struggling to reach the ships. She’d thought the wall would collapse, but it stood in spite of the massive fissures crossing it from end to end; and for some incongruous reason it reminded her of the fragile celadon cups Father had so treasured, their green surface shot with such a network of cracks it seemed a wonder they still held together.

  Around her, chunks of the ceiling dotted the area—and the other thing, the one she avoided focusing on—people lying still or twitching or moaning, lying half under rubble—with limbs bent at impossible angles, and the stained white of bones laid bare at the heart of bleeding wounds; and spilled guts; and the labored breathing of those in agony . . .

  Those were the days of the dead, and she had to be strong.

  At the edge of her field of vision—as faint as her paused game of Battle for Indigo Mountain, in another lifetime—the red characters of her dream hovered, and a faint sense of a vast presence, watching over her from afar.

  “Lady Oanh? Mother? Second Aunt?” Her location loop was still running; but it didn’t seem to have picked up anything from them—or perhaps it was the spaceport network that was the problem, flickering in and out of existence like a dying heartbeat. It was nonsense anyway; who expected the network to hold, through that kind of attack.

  The sky overhead was dark with the shadow of a ship—not the army ship, it had to be one of the mindships. Its hatches were open, spewing dozens of little shuttles, a ballet slowly descending towards them: rebels, come to finish the work they had started.

  She had to move.

  When she pulled herself upright, pain shot through her neck and arms like a knife-stab; but she forced herself to move on, half-crawling, half-walking, until she found Lady Oanh.

  The old woman lay in the rubble, staring at the torn dome of the spaceport. For a moment, an impossibly long moment, Thien Bao thought she was alive; but no one could be alive with the lower half of their body crushed; and so much fluid and blood leaking from broken tubes. “I’m sorry,” she said, but it wasn’t her fault; it had never been her fault. Overhead, the shuttles were still descending, as slowly as the executioner’s blade. There was no time. There was no safety; not anywhere; there was no justice; no fairness; no end to the war and the fear and the sick feeling in her head and in her belly.

  A deafening sound in her ears, loud enough to cover the distant sounds of panic—she realised that it was her location loop, displaying an arrow and an itinerary to join whatever was left of her family; if they, like Lady Oanh, hadn’t died, if there was still hope . . .

  She managed to pull herself upwards—staggered, following the directions—left right left going around the palanquin around the dead bodies around the wounded who grasped at her with clawed hands—days of the dead, she had to be strong had to be strong . . .

  She found Grandmother, Mother, and Second Aunt standing by the barriers that had kept the queue orderly, once—which were now covered in dust, like everything else around them. There was no greeting, or sign of relief. Mother merely nodded as if nothing were wrong, and said, “We need to move.”

  “It’s past time for that,” Second Aunt said, her gaze turned towards the sky.

  Thien Bao tried to speak; to say something about Lady Oanh, but no words would come out of her mouth.

  Mother’s eyes rolled upwards for a brief moment as she accessed the network. “The Carp that Leapt Over the Stream,” she said. “Its shuttles were parked at the other end of the terminal, and there’ll be fewer people there. Come on.”

  Move move move—Thien Bao felt as though everything had turned to tar; she merely followed as Second Aunt and Mother elbowed their way through the crowd; and onto a corridor that was almost deserted compared to the press of people. “This way,” Mother said.

  Thien Bao turned, briefly, before they limped into the corridor, and saw that the first of the rebel shuttles had landed some way from them, disgorging a flood of yellow-clad troops with featureless helmets.

  It was as if she were back in her dreams, save that her dreams had never been this pressing—and that the red words on the edge of her field of vision kept blinking, no matter how she tried to dismiss them.

  Mother was right; they needed to keep moving—past the corridor, into another, wider concourse that was mostly scattered ruin, following the thin thread of people and hoping that the shuttles would still be there, that the mindship would answer to them with Lady Oanh dead. By then, they had been joined by other people, among whom a wounded woman carried on the shoulder of a soldier—no introductions, no greetings, but a simple acknowledgement that they were all in this together. It wasn’t hope that kept them going; it was sheer stubbornness, one foot in front of the other, one breath and the next and the next; the fear of falling behind the others, of slowing everyone down and ruining everything.

  Ahead, the mass of a shuttle, seen behind glass windows; getting agonizingly, tantalizingly closer. “This way,” Second Aunt said; and then they saw the yellow-clad troops in front of them, deployed to bar the passage across the concourse—and the other troops, too, blocking the passageways, herding people off the shuttle in the eerie silence.

  Mother visibly sagged. “It will be fine,” she said, and her voice was a lie. “They’ll just want to check our identity and process us—”

  But it was the soldier with them who panicked—who turned away, lightning-fast, still carrying his wounded charge—and in the dull silence that followed, Thien Bao heard the click of weapons being armed.

  “No!” Mother said, sharply. As if in a dream Thien Bao saw her move in front of the yellow-clad soldiers, with no more apparent thought than if she’d been strolling through the marketplace—and she wanted to scream but couldn’t, as the weapons found their mark and Mother crumpled, bloodless and wrung dry, her corpse so small it seemed impossible that she had once been alive.

  Second Aunt moved at last, her face creased with anger—not towards Mother or the soldier, but straight at the rebel troops. “How dare you—”

  There was the sound again; of weapons being armed.

  No.

  No. No.

  Everything went red: the characters from her dreams, solidifying once more in front of her; the voice speaking into her mind.

  Little sister.

  And, weeping, Thien Bao reached out, into the void between stars, and called to the ship.

  When the child named Thien Bao was born on the Sixth Planet, there were signs—a room filled with the smell of machine-oil, and iridescent reflections on the walls, tantalizing characters from a long lost language. Had the b
irth-master not been desperately busy trying to staunch the mother’s unexpected bleeding, and calm down the distraught father, she would have noticed them.

  Had she looked, too, into the newborn’s eyes as she took her first, trembling breath, the birth-master would have seen the other sign: the hint of a deep, metallic light in the huge pupils; a light that spread from end to end of the eye like a wash of molten steel, a presage of things to come.

  She was vast, and old, and terrible; her wings stretched around entire planets, as iridescent as pearls fished from the depths; the trail of her engines the color of jade, of delicate celadon—and where she passed, she killed.

  She disintegrated the fleet that waited on the edge of the killing field; scoured clean the surface of the small moon, heedless of the screams of those trapped upon it; descended to the upper limit of the planet’s atmosphere, and incinerated the two mindships in orbit, and the fragile ship that still struggled to defend against them; and the tribunal where the militia still fought the recently landed invasion force; and the magistrate in his chambers, staring at the tactical map of the planet and wondering how to save what he could from the rebels. In the spaceport, where the largest number of people congregated, she dropped ion bombs until no sign of life remained; until every shuttle had exploded or stopped moving.

  Then there was silence, and lack of strife, and then there was peace.

  And then she was merely Thien Bao again, standing in the ruins of the spaceport, in the shadow of the great ship she had called on.

  There was nothing left. Merely dust, and bodies—so many bodies, a sea of them, yellow-clad, black-clad, civilians and soldiers and rebels all mingled together, their blood pooling on the cracked floor; and a circle around her, where Mother lay dead; and the soldier, and the wounded woman; and the rebels who had shot her—and by her side, Second Aunt and Grandmother, bloodless and pale and unmoving. It was unclear whether it was the mindship’s weapons they had died of, or the rebels’, or both; but Thien Bao stood in a circle of the dead, the only one alive as far as she could see.

  The only one—it couldn’t—couldn’t—

  Little sister. The voice of the mindship was as deep as the sea. I have come, and ended it, as you requested.

  That wasn’t what she’d wanted—that—all of it, any of it—

  And then she remembered Lady Oanh’s voice, her wry comment. Be careful, child. Be careful.

  I bring peace, and an end to strife. Is that not what the Empire should desire?

  No. No.

  Come with me, little sister. Let us put an end to this war.

  A great victory, Thien Bao thought, hugging herself; feeling hot and cold at the same time, her bones chilled within their sheaths of flesh, a churning in her gut like the beginning of grief. Everyone had wanted a great victory over the rebels, something that would stop them, once and for all, that would tell them that the Empire still stood, still could make them pay for every planet they took.

  And she’d given them that; she and the ship. Exactly that.

  Come. We only have each other, the ship said, and it was the bitter truth. There was nothing left on the planet—not a living soul—and of the rebel army that had entered the solar system, nothing and no one left either, just the husks of destroyed ships drifting in the emptiness of space.

  Come, little sister.

  And she did—for where else could she go; what else could she do, that would have made any sense?

  In the old days, the phoenix, the vermilion bird, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a virtuous ruler under whom the land would thrive.

  In the days of the war, it is still the case; if one does not inquire how peace is bought, how prosperity is paid for—how a mindship and a child scour the numbered planets, dealing death to rebels and Empire alike, halting battles by bloody massacres; and making anyone who raises arms pay dearly for the privilege of killing.

  Meanwhile, on the inner planets begins the painful work of reconstruction—raising pagodas and tribunals and shops from the ashes of war, and hanging New Year’s Eve garlands along avenues that are still dust and ruins, praying to the ancestors for a better future; for a long life; and good fortune; and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.

  There is no virtuous ruler; but perhaps—perhaps just, there is a manner of peace and prosperity, bought in seas of blood spilled by a child.

  And perhaps—perhaps just—it is all worth it. Perhaps it is all one can hope for, in the days of the war.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Rachael Acks is a writer, geologist, and dapper sir. She’s written for Six to Start and been published in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and more. Acks lives in Houston with her two cats, where she twirls her mustache, watches movies, and bikes. Her website is rachaelacks.com.

  Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell award-winning author of twenty-seven novels (her most recent novels are Karen Memory and—co-authored with Sarah Monette—An Apprentice of Elves) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts.

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories, which garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award. Recent works include The House of Shattered Wings, a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station, Drifting.

  Theodora Goss’ publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting; Interfictions, an anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland, a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom, a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia. Her first novel, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, is forthcoming from Saga Press in 2017. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

  Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, but has lived in Canada for the past thirty-five years. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of six novels (Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine), as well as two short story collections: Skin Folk and the recently published Falling in Love with Hominids. She edited fiction anthologies Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, and Mojo: Conjure Stories, and co-edited So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (with Uppinder Mehan) and Tesseracts Nine (with Geoff Ryman). Hopkinson is a recipient of the John W. Campbell, Locus, World Fantasy, Norton, Aurora, Gaylactic Spectrum, and Sunburst awards.

  On the way to the idyllic rural existence she shares with her wife Fiona Patton, numerous cats, and a chihuahua, Tanya Huff served three years in the Canadian Naval Reserve and acquired a degree in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnic. Since the Blood Ties television series was based on it, Huff is probably best known for her Blood series—Blood Price, Blood Trail, Blood Lines, Blood Pact, Blood Debt—but has authored over fifty fantasy and military SF novels. Her most recent novel is a spin-off her Valor Confederation series of five novels and a few short works: An Ancient Peace: Peacekeeper #1.

  Kameron Hurley is an award-winning author and advertising copywriter with degrees in historical studies from the University of Alaska and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, specializing in the history of South African resistance. Hurley is the author of God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture, a science-fantasy noir series which earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. She is the winner of two Hugo Awards, and has been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke, Nebula, Locus, and BSFA
awards. Her latest subversive epic fantasy novels are The Mirror Empire and its sequel Empire Ascendant. Her first space opera, The Stars are Legion, will be published in 2016.

  Elaine Isaak is the author of The Singer’s Crown, and its sequels, as well as the Tales of Bladesend epic novellas series comprising Joenna’s Axe in full-length, and Winning the Gallows Field. As E. C. Ambrose, she writes The Dark Apostle historical fantasy novels about medieval surgery, which began with Elisha Barber, and continue with Elisha Magus, Elisha Rex, and two forthcoming volumes. A graduate of the Odyssey Speculative Fiction workshop, she has taught there as well. In addition to writing and teaching, Elaine works part time as an adventure guide and rock climbing instructor. Visit TheDarkApostle.com or ElaineIsaak.com to find out why you do not want to be her hero.

  The New York Times recently hailed Caitlín R. Kiernan as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.” Her novels include The Red Tree (nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. and the Bram Stoker awards, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards). In 2014 she was honored with the Locus Award for short fiction (“The Road of Needles”), the World Fantasy Award (“The Prayer of Ninety Cats”), and a second World Fantasy Award for Best Collection (The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories). To date, her short fiction has been collected in fourteen volumes, the most recent of which is Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume Two). Currently, she’s working on the screenplay of The Red Tree.

  Nancy Kress began writing in 1976, but achieved greater notice after the publication of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning 1991 novella “Beggars in Spain,” which was later expanded into a novel with the same title. Kress has also written numerous short stories and has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She teaches regularly at summer conferences such as Clarion West and Taos Toolbox. Her collection, The Best of Nancy Kress, was published in September.