Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory takes the time-honored tradition of space rebels and turns teenage horribleness on its head. In Tesh’s own words, this novel is “about being the very worst person imaginable, and then trying to be better. It’s a book about the end of the world, and what happens after. It’s a book about survival, and hope, and change. And it’s a book about how sometimes your queer found family is your fellow cult survivors who hate you, a horrible gremlin boy who won’t stop doing crimes, the cutest alien you’ve ever met, and your literal brother.”
Here’s a brief synopsis of Some Desperate Glory:
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 she 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.
Here’s the full cover, followed by an excerpt from Some Desperate Glory.
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Kyr tried Systems first. Systems and Suntracker were the two top levels of the station, with power feeding down into Systems from Suntracker’s solar sails to supplement the trickle that came up from the shadow engines at the station core. The main workspace of the wing was a maze of consoles arrayed on several levels in one of the planetoid’s natural rocky caverns. Kyr did not know it well. She had no talent for Systems work. When Sparrow had a rotation in the wing she usually found herself shunted off to try out test agoge simulations for scenario designers. She hesitated just inside the entrance. She could not exactly go wandering through the wing asking if anyone knew Mags’s queer friend.
While she was hovering a woman with iron-grey hair and a corporal’s patch on her sleeve looked up from behind her array of consoles. “Need something, cadet?”
Kyr found herself tongue-tied. “Corporal,” she said, to buy time.
The woman raised her eyebrows, and after a long pause finished, “. . . Lin. Corporal Lin, Valkyr. Your mess has rotated through here once a week since you were ten. After Victoria? She’ll be up in Suntracker.”
“No,” said Kyr.
“Spit it out,” said Lin. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” said Kyr quickly.
Lin gave her a long look. Kyr pressed her lips tightly together. Once again she had a horrible suspicion she was being pitied.
“Avi,” she snapped. “I’m looking for Avi.”
Lin’s eyebrows went up. “Avicenna, really?” she said.
Kyr didn’t say what, because that would have been speaking out of order to someone who was technically her superior.
Corporal Lin said, “Try the arcade.”
Once each of the four dreadnoughts that had been stripped to build Gaea Station had had an arcade of its own. Now, there was proof of how rich humanity had been: even active-service warships had spared space for entertainment. The consoles and media libraries from all four had been combined into one entertainment space for Gaea. It was a long low room with booths and chairs set out around game stations and flickering displays. The lights were kept dim. Old music played on a loop. Kyr winced as she walked in. It wasn’t loud, but it was constant, and she disliked the wastefulness of it: power that Suntracker risked their lives for, thrown away on meaningless noise.
There was almost no one in the long dim room apart from a junior mess on rec. Kyr glanced at them as she walked past. It was just Blackbird. They were playing a game where you had to dance to the music—tinny from the machine speakers, clashing with the background hum—and catch at lights as they flashed in the air. Kyr saw one of them spot her and falter, missing her jump for a darting yellow sparkle that appeared and disappeared in time with the thumping beat.
But her gaze slid past and kept going.
She missed the young man at first. He was slumped alone in a booth at the far end of the room, his shoulders almost horizontal, his feet propped against the edge of the seat opposite. From that angle it was hard to get a sense of him except that he was undersized.
Kyr hadn’t expected him to be alone. The way Mags had talked about Avi had made him sound like someone who could be impressive. She’d supposed there would be a ring of similar types, the worst of Systems and Oikos: not friends, but weaklings clustering together for safety.
Avi was ostentatiously by himself. He was watching some media or other loaded up on the screen. It wasn’t even a game. If you had to be in the arcade, the least you could do was laze around with something worthwhile. The Blackbirds were working on their group bond and improving their coordination while they jumped around grabbing at sparkles.
Kyr tried to relax, told herself it would be stupid to start by antagonizing him, and marched over to the booth.
“Avi?” she said.
The young man said nothing.
“Excuse me,” snapped Kyr.
“Shh,” he said. The flicker of the screen illuminated his face in unpleasant flashes. He had squinting eyes under an untidy mess of red hair. “I’m watching this.” He waved a dismissive hand in her direction without looking round.
Kyr’s patience ran out.
She reached over the back of the booth, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and dragged him upright. He let out a squawk of surprise. He really was scrawny. Lifting him was practically effortless.
“Turn that off,” she said.
He didn’t. Kyr reached over to the controls and did it for him. The screen went dark.
Avi stood up. He only came up to Kyr’s chin. He stepped further back into the newly dimmed booth and folded his arms. Kyr didn’t miss how he’d kept the back of the booth between them like a shield. He looked her over, and his face did a fair impression of boredom, but she could tell he was afraid.
“What do you want?” he said.
Kyr made herself breathe out. This was not how she’d meant to do this. “You’re Avi,” she said. “You’re friends with my brother.”
“I wonder who?” Avi said. “I don’t have many friends built like tanks. Let me guess, you must be Vallie.”
“Valkyr,” Kyr corrected.
Avi smiled unpleasantly. “Then it’s Avicenna,” he said. “Lovely to meet you. What do you want?”
“I want to know where Mags is,” Kyr said.
“So?”
“So,” said Kyr, “you’re going to find out for me.”
Avi was Systems, so he had access to information. Avi was supposedly the smartest person Mags had ever met. And Avi was already a cheat. That had to mean something.
“Or what?” he said.
Kyr narrowed her eyes.
Avi sneered. “Yes, I know, there’s a huge range of or what you could do to me, Valkyr. I’m just wondering which part exactly of the no-doubt-merciless bruising you’re offering would be worse than getting exiled or executed for digging into files I’m not supposed to touch.”
Kyr shifted her weight, and had the satisfaction of watching him flinch away even though the back of the booth was still between them.
“I have been beaten up before, you know,” he said, but the tight stillness of his body didn’t match his bored voice.
“Do you care if you’re exiled?” said Kyr. “People like you leave anyway.”
“Let’s ignore people like you for now because, actually, it was the executed part that concerned me,” Avi said. “Crazy, I know, but I want to keep living.”
With honest confusion Kyr said, “Why does he like you?”
“Must be my winning personality,” said Avi. But he unfolded his arms and sighed. Kyr didn’t understand what had changed his mind, but she didn’t care, because he stepped out of the booth—still giving her a wide berth—and said, “Damn. All right, all right,” in a defeated way. “Come on.”
Avi took Kyr down to Drill. “What are we doing here?” said Kyr. “I want—”
“I know what you want,” said Avi. “Go on.” He swiped the key for an agoge room. “In you go. Take this.” He passed her an earpiece.
“What?” said Kyr.
“Do you want my help or not?” Avi said.
Kyr stumbled into the agoge. The plasteel floor gleamed green with shadowspace sublight as the room hummed, warming up. Kyr put the earpiece in. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Well, I’m going to use the agoge as a jumping-off point to get myself into some places I’m not supposed to be,” said Avi. “Which happens to be one of my hobbies anyway, luckily for you. And you’re going to pretend to be testing some simulations.”
“Why can’t you just do it in Systems?”
“One, boring. Two, the odds of getting anything past Yin Source: Gizmodo