“Fairy Tale”
By Sylux

Planet Demeter. You’ve heard of it as Wotan VII. Don’t remember? Think, I‘ve got time. Last holdout against the new age. Bloodthirsty dictator. Federation embargoes. Eventually, the good guys went in and saved the day. Heroes like Ghor, Leeman, Nada. If it wasn’t Demeter, it would’ve been somewhere else. The Galactic Federation had just gotten its united military put together, and the suits in office were aching to show that they could use it. 

Of course, this was a couple decades ago, and more important things have happened since then. People are too busy being worried about the space pirates these days for those old conflicts to be worth talking about. Even the Wotanians are trying to forget. I wonder if the GF would have held together this long, had the pirates not shown up when they did. Interstellar trade is like an addictive drug; almost none of the colonies need it to survive, but just about all of them think they do. And to get their next fix, they’ll pay the pusher anything he asks for. Ironically, 90% of all space pirate attacks take place in the interstellar vacuum. As for the remaining ten percent, I think each planet would be better able to defend itself if it weren’t for the GF navy sucking up their militaries (if Aliehs had had a quarter of its own ships in orbit at the time, the pirates would have never gotten close enough to drop those warheads). But I guess that’s just me. In any case, the GF got really popular really fast once the locusts arrived.

…

Last time I saw Wotan VII was two years ago. The Gippos run the show there now. No one’s really sure where the Gippos came from, except that they absorbed the Gypsies from the homeworld. My father said that the rest was Hispanic and Martian, but my uncle Sagi thought they were more African. Looking at pictures in the history books, I think my father had the right idea. He usually did. The Gippos were thirty percent of Demeter’s population back in the day. On modern Wotan VII, they’re something like fifty percent. Reminds me of the whites who settled the western hemisphere on the homeworld. Give them a centimeter, and in a century or two they’ll own the place. Since the war, a lot of the natives have moved away, explaining part of the racial shift. The other part of it is from Gippos breeding like nematodes.

“Good day, ma’am,” said a native kid who ran the café I ate at, “say, you don’t look like a tourist.”

“I am, and I’m not,” I said, “I was born here, but its been a long time.”

“Ah,” he said, “well, the planet’s always glad to see a familiar face.”

I wonder about that sometimes.

As he took my order, I noticed the manager walking through the restaurant. Big, fatass Gippo, old enough to remember the war but too young to know what came before. The kid looked nervous as his boss passed through. I can’t blame him. Gippos aren’t known for patience, or kindness. The idea of a native boy having his salary dependent on one sickened me. I asked the boy about his family.

“My dad used to work for the Big Bank,” he used the nickname for the old planetary banking system, “my parents say we used to have the biggest house in the neighborhood. They had to sell it the year I was born.”

“I see,” I said, “working here to pay for college?”

He shook his head. “Haha, I wish.”

I noticed his clothes under the apron uniform. They weren’t expensive.

“Hey…” he said, “…wh…why are you giving me money?”

“Its for you,” I said, handing him a five credit chip, “I‘ll buy my lunch somewhere else.”

The Gippo manager scowled at me as I walked out.

…

The first colonists of Demeter were from the planet Nartola. Their lineage zigzags, but if you follow it long enough it’ll take you to Japan, with some Slavic and Central Asian mixed in. Not that race is important. Culture is everything. The colonists named Demeter after an ancient god of fertility. A good choice. Demeter’s main continent was perfect for agriculture. Under the sea was enough metal for an ecumenopolis. Native culture stressed hard work, devotion, and loyalty. Values they never lost, until after the war.

Others came, but not too many. Demeter stayed ninety percent native until the Gippos showed up. Overpopulated wherever they came from before. The natives hired them at first. Then they started bringing their families, and pumping out children like a factory. Dragged the economy down. Filled the cities with slums. It took a civil war before the natives could put them back in their place. My grandparents died in it. I never met them. My father was a young man when he took over after them.

…

I lived with my family until I was seven Earth years old. My older brother, Tomo, was father’s favorite. That’s probably why I was a tomboy. Trying to be like him. My friends teased me about being a princess. For a while, this bothered me. When I was little, my mother read me stories about princesses. Being a tomboy, I didn’t like most of them. When I was six, she read me a new story. This one was about a prince who had to kill a dragon and rescue a princess, like the rest. I protested, but she made me finish it. At the end of the story, it turned out the dragon really was the princess. She’d been under a magician’s spell. I liked being a princess after that.

Tomo was heir to the throne, but I was Princess Siena. In my last year as princess, I bullied my friends into being my courtiers. The kingdom I ruled in our games wasn’t like my father’s. It was forested, with fairies behind every tree and dragons on every mountaintop. The fairies were the bad guys. I’d send the dragons to burn them. The boys liked pretending to be the dragons.

Until the magician came.

I listened behind the door when my father talked to the Federation. Everyone had been anxious for months. The Free Systems War had been over since I was too young to remember. I heard the stories about how my father refused to bow to Sol System tyranny, supporting the Free Systems until the bitter end. Demeter was one of two former Free worlds that hadn’t joined the new “Galactic Federation.” I didn’t understand most of what they said. Phrases like “diplomatic crisis,” “trade embargoes,” and “ethnic solidarity” stayed with me, but the context didn’t. I was only six.

…

Starting on my eighth birthday, I learned to fight. I had three brownbelts by the time I reached puberty. I lived with Garen, our old butler. He was the only adult I knew from before the invasion that was still alive. Everyone was told he was my uncle. I wouldn't have been safe otherwise.

“Siena,” he said, “why do you never leave that punching bag?”

“I want to kill them!”

“I know, darling. So do I. So does everyone. But it's too late for that now.”

I knew he was lying. He cared about me. Was afraid to see me get hurt. I understood the boxes of GAUSS rifles that ran in and out of his basement better than he thought. I had figured out who the men he talked to in hushed voices at midnight were. Garen wasn’t a revolutionary, but he was willing to deal to them. I recognized the names of the other men, even if I hadn’t met them. Most of them were from my father’s secret police.

Every time my fist hit the punching bag, I smelled the smoke from our burning house. Whenever I learned a new kick, I saw the Federation marines marching up the street. Almost every night, I dreamed of my brother, Tomo. I don’t know if I saw him die under the rubble of our house, or if I imagined it after hearing the story. I always woke up crying.

…

I went to the Museum of Xenology a few months ago. People everywhere, goggling at the chozo and bryyon relics. They’d never met a bryyon. I have. Race isn’t important, but species is. Even in the vilest human cultures, there are those who know their people’s ways are wrong. Ever heard of a peacenik locust?

The Federation is chewing up xenos now too. Storm spawn, jovians. My informants say they have their eyes on the Horus Cluster. As if enslaving humanity wasn’t enough. Elyssians have better status in the Galactic Federation than I do, and they’re not even alive.

…

Garen’s friends didn’t agree with him about me. When I was thirteen, the police crashed our arms sale. I shot my first man that day. That night, instead of Tomo’s dying scream, I heard his. The more feds I killed, the more I dreamed of them instead of my brother. I slept better.

The riots started a few months later. The Gippos were just as much a handful for the GF as they had been for my father. According to the propoganda, the War of Liberation of Wotan VII had been fought for them, but gratitude isn’t a Gippo value. It's all about culture. After years of “liberation,” most Gippos still lived in the slums.

I was at a restaurant with Garen and his partners when the riot came. No one thought they would leave the ghettos, but they came to our neighborhood, looking for natives. They surrounded our hovercar as Garen tried to fly us away. The windows broke. Some of the adults drew their pistols, but it didn‘t help.

Garen and I ran out the front door. Two men grabbed me. I broke one of their arms and crushed the others’ testicles. But there were more. I saw Garen, my foster father, disappear under dozens of barbarian, GF-liberated Gippos. I later found out he had been beaten to death.

I was beaten, but not to death. At times, I almost wish I had. I was still a tomboy at thirteen. I thought about war and fighting a lot. I was expecting to be killed, or at least badly hurt. It didn’t even occur to me what else happened to girls. As I swung my fists, breaking noses and cracking ribs, I taunted them. Told them I wasn’t afraid to die. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

I don’t remember it. I don’t want to remember it. But, from the moment I opened my eyes in the hospital the next day, I knew what had happened. I still have nightmares about jeering crowds and masses of hairy, filthy bodies. I wake up choking. Sometimes I run to the bathroom and puke. Its gotten better, over the years. Kill enough people, and you get enough good dreams of dying faces-fed faces-to drown out the nightmares.

…

I was a member of the syndicate after that. I loved Garen, but in some ways he had held me back. I got my first blackbelt at fourteen. Spent a lot of time at the shooting range too. At sixteen, we had to leave the planet. The police were catching on to us. I wasn’t bothered. Demeter had been dead for almost nine years. Wotan VII had nothing for me. We moved between planets a lot. Drugs, weapons, xenotech, we smuggled everything that sold. I hated smuggling. I wanted to kill.

I’m a good assassin. No point in humility. My first hit at nineteen, a black market rival of one of our sellers. By twenty-two, I had a reputation. Nobody knew who I was. Even my foster “family” still thought I was Garen’s niece. They might have been my father’s men, but they had never seen me in person before the war. The only person who knew had been Garen.

…

A lot of criminals are politicians. Governments are the biggest customers, and dealers. Corporations too. The Galactic Federation turned humanity into a cauldron of crime and discontent, if it wasn‘t that way before. Not everyone fell for the space pirate razzle-dazzle. My career made me friends with smart people. People who understood what was wrong. I never took command. Just encouraged. A crime lord here, a frustrated political party there. I’m the go between for the federation’s malcontents. We’re getting more organized. Slow but sure. I created another identity, based on a unique suit of armor I liberated from a Federation laboratory on the planet Cylosis. Only a dozen people know who I was before the Cylosis raid, or even that I'm a woman. No one knows who I was originally. No one has called me Siena in over a decade. 

In the story my mother read me, the dragon’s name was Sylux.