Valh?ll. Grendel was killed in combat, and has also gone ahead of me to revered Aasgare. When this is over, I shall be reunited with my love and my dearest son. What this world never gave me, the next will. I am at peace. Perhaps the All Father will even grant the spirit of my infant daughter to us.
I will close this now. There are no more words to write. The rest must be action.
I have no illusions about how this will end. Beowulf is a professional warrior, and I am only the mother of a monster. I was lucky once, and now half-maimed.
But if they will sing of him for a thousand years, they must also sing of me.
BONDS OF LOVE AND DUTY
MONALISA FOSTER
Calyce Dobromil leaned forward, her hands planted solidly on her workstation lest her knees give out. The gleaming pearl-white walls of the gestation lab seemed to spin around her like a veil or, more fittingly, a shroud. It spun and spun, tightening, as she gasped for air. Her mind grabbed at the possibility that she might be asleep and would wake at any moment. But the universe showed her no such mercy. It was perfectly clear in its ruthlessness, in the fact that she was indeed awake.
A message floated above her workstation like a cloud, all bright and golden and deceptive. It should have been a thunderhead, dark and malevolent.
Destruction and termination orders shouldn’t be so antiseptic, so mundane, so much like every other communiqué that came down once a day from the Ryhman Council. She closed her eyes and took three deep breaths. When she opened them, the order was still there: destroy everything related to creating the donai. And floating underneath it, a scrolling list of the designations of each child under her care.
The oldest such child was twelve, a genetically engineered soldier whose nanites had just started turning him into his final donai form. Designated NT527, he was from one of their slow-growing—but most successful—batches and only two days shy of being sent off for formal military training.
The youngest were fertilized ova. Two hundred and forty of them—among them, twenty females. And then there were the five gestation tanks in her lab, the youngest still a blastocyst, the oldest just a few days past twelve months’ gestation.
Calyce had given the last fifty years of her life to creating and raising the donai. And now the council expected her to “terminate” them as if they were condemned prisoners. Even lab animals were “sacrificed.”
She pushed away from the workstation and dragged her hand across each gestation tank, blinking back against the pressure building up between her eyes. There had been a few unfortunate donai that hadn’t developed properly. She’d mourned every one of them but taken solace in the ones that had survived and thrived, the ones she’d nurtured. And then she’d proudly sent them off to defend humankind, her duty done, her desire to nurture serving a higher purpose.
The twelve-month-old floated in the amniotic fluid, sucking on his thumb. Dark, curly hair covered his scalp, framing the nubs at the tops of his ears, the vestigial points that would become more prominent as he reached adulthood.
The tank had reported a case of the hiccups that had lasted twelve minutes, and a surge in heart rate from a dream that had lasted twenty. No anomalies. His nanites were keeping pace with his growth. Six more months and she’d decant a healthy boy, and they would bond as if they were mother and child. Bonding the donai to humans was essential. It made them want to defend their creators. It was as necessary as air, water, and food. It made donai loyal. It kept them sane.
Calyce blinked back tears as she returned to her workstation, waved the termination order out of existence, and stuck her hands in her lab coat’s pockets.
Every morning, whether on duty or not, she was always the first in the lab, checking on her children. But soon the others would trickle in, and once they did, her moment of opportunity would be lost. She’d been here the longest and had seniority, but she didn’t dare count on the others. If she was wrong about any one of