Ensign Liu woke cold and stiff. She needed to pee and had the mother of all hangovers, and gods only knew what she'd been up to last night. She reached up to scrub the sleep from her eyes, but her hand smacked into something hard and unyielding before she could.

Her suit helmet.

Oh. Oh, crap. She opened her eyes and immediately started to panic. She couldn't see. Couldn't see! She began to breathe faster and faster, her heart rate increasing with her growing fear.

To be blind would be the worst fate of all. Liu would give up all the music that ever was or ever would be to be able to see, to read, to paint... to fly. Flying was the best thing in the universe, better than sex, better than chocolate, even. She was a good pilot. Better than good, she was a great pilot. One day she would be the best pilot ever. She would fly everywhere, see everything in the universe and only stop for fuel and maintenance. She didn’t just want to fly, she needed to like a plant needed light, like children needed love, like pancakes needed syrup. And the Navy let her fly… if she wasn't blind. She couldn’t be blind.

On her mother's tiny kitchen refrigerator was a child's drawing of a starship, with colorful blue flames coming out the back. It was carefully made with chubby toddler hands, under the printed words “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.”

“A pilot, that's what you will be my little one.” Her father missed the point. She'd told him that then. Young and stubbornly sure she knew what she wanted. Martina Elizabeth Liu wanted to be the ship itself. To soar free from star to star, from station to planet to colony. Ships went places and did things, they weren’t stuck in smelly, grimy old stations that nobody ever visited unless they had to. Mostly what they got to do was fly.

Her mother understood. She had raced tiny stiletto craft in the rings of Eloo, the gas giant their colony orbited. Mama Liu was a champion six times over before she met the man she would one day marry. Mama knew the draw that flying was to her daughter because she felt it herself. Liu still had the tiny metal ship toy mother gave her on the day she left to join the Navy on a chain around her neck.

A full twelve inches shorter than the next shortest recruit, Liu had fought her way through the navy's most challenging pilot course- small craft school. Three long, painful years of never enough sleep. And other things. It was... bad. Not the classes. The other recruits. She was just an older colony brat from outside the naval families in Class 4157Echo. Not someone who mattered, not at all. But not even the things they did scared her as much as this. She hadn't known what she had to lose back then.

Suits lights. That’s what she needed. Suits had lights on them. Tearfully, with shaking hands she searched for the recessed toggle that would activate them. She’d known that her suit had them, same as everyone else. Liu had simply never needed them before. She'd left the hull with the rest when she had to, of course she had. Did her duty with the rest of the crew and not a speck less. And for this, they let her fly. The switch was somewhere on the chest panel, near where the emergency supplies and suit repair patches were. Somewhere.

There it was. Light.

In the shattered remains of a maintenance closet Ensign Liu wept for joy in wracking, shuddering sobs. They could take her legs. Her ears. Her appearance, her pride, take it all away as long as she could go back to flying, it would all be worth it. She'd fly her way to her own firing squad, as long as they killed her just as she landed and shut off the engines.