Ash-Iku’s crypto gets Labbatu into the cargo bay: PETA BABKAMA LURUBA ANAKU, open the gate for me so that I may enter here. She comes in guns out already, firing suppression, blood and smoke, but she doesn’t need to use them on a single living creature—not one shot fired that hit a body. Sam keeps most of the crew away from her, but he lets Daddy An through every door he wants to open, like usual.
There’s that bit of tape.
And then there’s the scorpion.
A scorpion isn’t like a shipmind. It’s more like a parasite, a dweller under the metal skins of ships. A smart captain can tame one, or at least gentle one. It’s a scuttle of claws, a gun-stinger and a rattle of repurposed ship bits, grown all together with a thing that might have grown up to be a shipmind in it, squatting in the metal. They grow three times the size of a man. Maybe bigger. Scorpion doesn’t stop growing till it dies. A tame one will defend its territory. A non-tame one too, but tame ones are more discriminating about who’s an enemy and who isn’t.
No barstool to throw this time. Labbatu’s lioness-maw gun blows a couple holes in the scorpion, but that hardly slows it down. It leaks oil and hydraulic fluid and spits acid at her. The acid gets the gun, because she’s willing to drop it, willing to watch those lion-teeth melt to nothing.
It takes half an army to kill a full-grown scorpion. Labbatu’s the greatest captain and the greatest thief in the House of An, but half an army she is not.
Turns out she doesn’t need to be. Greatest thief and greatest captain is enough, when being so means having a suite of AI-killing hacker tricks that Labbatu got off Ash-Iku along with the spoof codes to the cargo bay and the personnel lists. Labbatu didn’t want to use them. She knew what they’d do to the shipmind in Heaven: same thing they did to the scorpion.
She says, “INA ETUTI ASBU.”
Dwell in darkness. All that crypto goes to carving knives, and the scorpion’s a pile of scrap on the floor at Labbatu’s feet.
“Oh, lady,” says the old man. “You pile up heads like dust.”
And somewhere the last of Utu-Samesh goes into the dark like a stone skipped on a lake—far, and far, and farther still, and sinking.
* * *
“And what then, Sarge?”
“Well.”
“Well, what.”
“Well, then she won.”
“Obviously she won, she’s our captain now, but how? Scorpion’s dead, she’s killed her kid brother in the blast, and then what?”
“Scorpion’s dead, shipmind’s crippled and might as well be dead, yeah.”
“Yeah. But the old man—”
“The old man was like, Fuck this for a loss, keep the ship as your inheritance and I’m done with you—”
“Which is why we’re done with him!”
“Labbatu’s the greatest of all the mercenary captains that ever came out of the House of An!”
“—pretty much—”
“She kill him, Sarge?”
“Oh, fuck no, she stuck him on her gunship and spat him out in the nebula to suck up enough helium to buy a ticket somewhere civilized. Old man’s somewhere on some rich soft planet now, minding his own business. Last I heard.”
“I don’t believe it. Our Labbatu? After what Daddy An did to her first crew, she just lets him slide?”
“He was the only blood family she got left, after what happened to Utu-Samesh. After she happened to Utu-Samesh. I think—and I never asked her about it, seems really impolite—she didn’t want to bathe in kin-blood ’less she had to. Robbing him of his power and this flagship was enough.”
“Huh. Maybe. . . . And Ash-Iku? What happened to him?”
“Oh, him. Him, he hears from his thug, the one who has a mouth that still talks, and he’s like, Fuuuuuck me, Labbatu, I guess you won this one.”
“More like, Oh, please, fuck me, Labbatu, your genitals, look how amazing they are, I admit I’ve been overmatched, girl, dang—”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Anyway he’s like, Your greatness is unparalleled—”
“And so is your cunt!”
“It is the captain. No one could compete with our captain anyway, in genitals or in anything else. . . .”
* * *
against those who are disobedient to her
she stirs confusion and chaos
she speeds carnage and incites the floods
she is clothed in terrifying radiance, a furious storm, a whirlwind,
she is clothed in the garments of ladyship.
She cuts to pieces those who show her no respect.
A south wind, an unharnessed lion, a leopard of the hills
a pitfall for the rebellious, a trap for the hostile.
My lady, let me proclaim your magnificence.
Who can compare with you?
Rest upon the lapis lazuli of your dais
let your divine dwelling place say to you:
Be seated.
Anonymous praise poem, adapted from the Sumerian
(Old Earth, approximately 4300 years before planetbreak)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
“Inanna Takes Command of Heaven” and “Inanna and Enki”—the two Sumerian myths (well, the two fragments of epic poetry) this story is constructed out of—are not the usual, expected Inanna myth, the one where the Queen of Heaven descends to the underworld and confronts her dark sister Ereshkigal. These two are older and more fragmentary. They’re origin stories: the first being an explanation of how Inanna became Queen of Heaven in the first place, and the second being about how Inanna stole all of human knowledge (in the form of me¯s, specific cultural aspects like “victory” or “weaving” or “prostitution” or “beer brewing”) from Enki, the god of knowing-things, and kept them to disperse as she liked. Inanna in these stories is a wild thing, sexually voracious, vicious and proud, sneaky, arrogant, unashamed. She is all these things and also a woman, though a woman who possesses masculine characteristics without difficulty. She is a kinslayer and a lover at once. I wanted to write that woman, before questions of underworlds and dead husbands to retrieve. That woman is the sort of woman who captains starships. It was simple to imagine a space opera version of these stories, especially when I wove them together. And since they come to us in fragments of poetry, distorted over time and through retelling, this version too is distorted, fragmentary, and retold.
* * *
ARKADY MARTINE
WILD TO COVET
BY
* * *
SARAH GAILEY
THET IS WAS A WILD thing washed up out of the wheat. Not the strangest gift to walk out of the field—no white bull was she—but strange enough. It was Cor Ellison’s field she wandered out of at dusk, looking all of five years old but with eyes that stared right through you like she’d been to war, and Cor took her in. He always took ownership of what came out of his wheat, whether what he took wanted to be an owned thing or not, and the girl was no exception.
Young Thetis was a barefooted, tangle-haired creature, howling at the moon and curling her lip up at mittens in the winter. She’d look out the window at the hills one morning and that night be gone, back a week later with mud in her eyebrows and a cape’s worth of rabbit pelts slung over one shoulder. When her baby teeth started falling out, she took to yanking the loose ones herself and tossing them into the hearth before they could fall out. She nearly cut her thumb off trying to free a wolf from a trap just off the edge of Cor’s property. Not a soul doubted her when she said it was the trap that got her and not the wolf. No one had ever heard of a wolf brave enough to bite Thetis.
Thetis wasn’t a domesticated creature, but she was curious about tameness, a fox nosing around a dog’s kennel. She watched close when people’s noses turned red and sniffly, and her eyes got catlike tracking the way folks stepped to avoid puddles. She felt fabric between the pads of her fingers and tasted anything anyone would offer her, and it was as if she’d never lived before, which it’s fair enough to say she hadn’t. For al
l that she tossed her neck at shoes and hairbrushes and handkerchiefs, she was fascinated, too, and folks said that Cor kept her knee-deep in pocket watches and pepper grinders just to keep her from running off back into the wheat for good. So long as she had something new and small and human to study, Thetis stuck close. She wandered plenty, but she always came back.
The problems started right on time. Thetis started to go from creature to girl, and it was a small town, and nearly everyone in it had eyes. She was never quite pretty, but she was something to notice even when she wasn’t walking into church with a fresh-trapped pheasant in her fist. There were cornfield whispers in the way she talked, and the tilt of her head was hawk-sharp. Once her legs sprouted up coltish, looking turned to staring and staring turned to talking, and people understood without having to say so that she was going to be a woman to watch out for sooner than later.
Uncle, who lived on the farm with Cor and Thetis, got her a dress to replace her poor abused overalls. It only took him a day and a half of shouting and door-slamming to convince her to wear it to church, which per Thetis’s usual habits was a formality of a fight. She was softened by the beauty of the thing, by the ribbons and layers of floating linen. She walked into the service in that dress looking almost like she’d taken to the bridle—but the prettiness of it was scarred by the leaves stuck to her feet, and by the barn owl that perched on her shoulder, his wicked talons drawing blood. She didn’t flinch at the owl’s grip.
Anyone who stared at Thetis that morning got watched right back by her and that owl just the same, and which pair of eyes was wilder no one could say.
* * *
The day came, as days come, when Thetis needed help Cor and Uncle couldn’t give. It was a long time coming by most standards, twelve years to the day since she’d walked out of the wheat. She knew well enough what was happening to her. She put her knuckles to Doc Martha’s front door, and handed over a bucket of good ripe figs in exchange for a conversation about the blood and the pain and what to do about it.
Thetis didn’t so much as flinch when Doc Martha fetched a basket of fresh eggs. She just lay down on the floor with her loose hair fanned out behind her shoulders, pulled her dress up over her ribs, and waited. Her bare toes curled on the floorboards as Doc Martha cracked the egg over her flat belly.
The yolk was double.
“You’re going to birth a boy someday,” Doc Martha said in a voice that didn’t have congratulations anywhere in it. “Tougher’n saddle leather, a fighter and a bruiser.” She pointed to a speck of blood on one of the yolks. “And a lover. That boy of yours’ll live long or he’ll live hard. You’ll be birthin’ a squaller, no two ways about it.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Thetis said, the whites of the egg running off her sides and dripping onto the floor. “No sons nor husband neither, thank you very kindly.” She said “thank you” like it was a new kind of fruit she was tasting, one she wasn’t sure was quite ripe.
“If you had a choice in the matter, I’d’ve said as much.” Doc Martha handed Thetis a rag to clean the egg off her belly and watched the way the yolks held strong for a long time before bursting under the linen. “He’ll be greater than his daddy, even. Stronger too, he’ll need to be stronger. And you’ll belong to that son until one of you is through,” she said.
“Won’t be a daddy to be greater than,” Thetis told her, and her eyes blazed as cold as the river. She walked out the door as if the conversation was through, and she spent half the afternoon in the woods, slapping branches out of her face and growling at rabbits. Her fury grew as the light on the horizon died, and by the time she got home, she was a thing made of pine sap and wrath—but by then, Cor and Uncle Ellison had gotten word from Doc Martha. They lived on the outskirts of town, but it was a small-enough town that even outskirts still heard rumors before the telling was finished. They were ready for her.
They fought like thunder, them saying she had best decide what kind of man she’d marry, her shouting back that she’d sooner walk into the corn without a ball of string to find her way back than do something as stupid and small and human as get married to a man. Every ear in town was turned to the sound of that fight—even the crickets held their legs apart to listen. It was a still-enough night that it was hard not to hear the way Thetis started losing ground.
They told her she was too old to keep running barefoot through the woods and swimming in the river the day the ice cracked. They told her she’d eaten enough of their food and spent enough nights under their roof that she was a woman now, bound by that prophecy just as much as she was bound by the humanity she’d grown into. Even as she slammed her way through that little house screaming that she wasn’t a woman and never would be, they told her it was time to grow up. Her voice began to soften with defeat as it became clear to her that they were right—for all her slamming, she couldn’t outright leave.
They said it was time to start braiding her hair and wearing shoes and thinking about who she’d aim to marry. Good Christians, were Cor and Uncle, but even so they couldn’t ignore Doc Martha’s prophecy, and they weren’t about to let Thetis ignore it either. They loved her, in their way, and so they told her to find some fellow who could manage her, someone good enough that her son being greater than him would be a boon instead of a burden. The only way out, they said, was through.
It was past midnight before the fight quieted, Thetis having shouted something about wearing the damn shoes just to shut those fool men up. The whole town heard it coming as clear as a hailstorm pounding across a fallow field, and they hunkered in to wait for the rooftops to start shaking.
Whether anyone liked it or not, Thetis was about to start courting.
* * *
By the time the sun came up, Moss Hetley was waiting on Cor Ellison’s porch with a fistful of thistles.
Moss was everything that a town like that one wanted a man to be. He had bull-broad shoulders, and his hands were mostly knuckle. He wasn’t mean enough to beat his dogs, but he wasn’t kind enough to bring them inside when it snowed, either. He was more civilized than Cor and Uncle; he wrote poetry, most of it about chopping wood, and at the start of every summer he bought new shoes for the children at church. He liked being the only one who could do an impossible thing, and he liked to feel like a hero to the town, and he was as stubborn as a headache—so of course he had his hard-set black eyes fixed on Thetis to wife.
When she went out to pump water in the morning, she didn’t notice him at first. Her hair was in a clumsy, half-knotted braid. She was trying to figure out how to walk in shoes, now that Cor and Uncle had made wearing them a condition of staying in their home. The way she tugged at the braid and stumbled in the shoes spoke to a choice she’d been outraged to have to make at all—she wanted to stay, so she was bending to the new rules, but she didn’t have it in her to pretend to be happy about it.
She stumbled over the doorframe and nearly toppled right into Moss. When she looked up at the great wall of a man standing on her porch with his thistles in his hand, her eyes caught on the shining chain of his pocket watch. She froze, hypnotized by the links of delicate silver. He reached out and touched her chin as sweetly as if she were made of crystal, and when his finger met her skin, fury swept over her like wind through tall grass. She walked past him with her nose pointing east and her hips pointing north, and when she came back lugging the bucket of water, he was right where she’d left him.
“What are you after?” she snapped, though she surely knew.
“I’d like to speak to Cor Ellison,” he rumbled. “Or Uncle, if Cor’s not in.”
Thetis slammed the door behind her and didn’t bother telling Cor or Uncle that Moss was waiting on them. When she came back out an hour later with a hatchet over her shoulder to check the traps, the thistles were lined up in a row on the porch rail. She knocked them off with the hatchet handle, then reached down and tore her new shoes off with a snarl. She threw them after the thistles and jumped down the porch steps, and s
he didn’t come back until the frogs by the river were singing down the dusk.
When she got home, the thistles were in a jar on the windowsill, and her shoes were waiting by the door. She picked them up with ginger fingers like they were foul things instead of fresh leather, and she walked inside on silent feet. Cor was whittling by the fire with long, thoughtful strokes of his good knife. Thetis dropped the shoes with a clatter, slapped the three fat quail she’d trapped onto the kitchen table. She glared at Cor, but he didn’t say a word until after she’d scalded the first of the birds.
“Uncle wanted to know if you need anything from the city,” he said to the hunk of wood in his hand. “He’s going into town to see about a suit and thought you might like a new dress for the harvest festival. Some dancing shoes.”
Normally, her eyes would have lit up. Whenever Uncle went to the city, Thetis asked for small soft things, scraps of silk and rag dolls. But the fight from the night before was still in her, too fresh for her to play the old game of gifts. “Don’t need a new dress. This one’s fine,” Thetis said in a level voice as she yanked feathers from the first quail, pulling hard enough to spatter blood across her apron. The cotton of her old dress was soft and stained; the skirt hem had been let out twice, and the sleeves ended at the elbows. It was well past a rag, but knowing Thetis, she’d patch it until it was more stitch than scrap. “And I don’t need shoes.”
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