The girls awoke the next day to hangovers in Urtiga’s apartment. With a couple of days to kill before they had to report to their new units, they took a day off, gorging themselves on food and alcohol while they watched Mixed Martial Arts tournaments.

Kayla signed into the personal tablet she had been issued with her orders. She was pleasantly surprised to see that her old email account was filled with messages from Weslan.

Hi Kayla! I was hoping to catch up with you, but I bet you probably have the same restrictions I do. No outside personal communication until I earned their trust. Hope I’ll hear from you at some point! - Weslan

She wrote back.

Hi Weslan, sorry I missed your emails, but you’re right, we didn’t even have internet access for a long period. Nothing but hard work. How about you?

When Urtiga returned from her unit training in the evening, Kayla took the opportunity to harass her with questions.

“No, Kayla, I don’t know how old they are,” Urtiga sighed wearily as she grabbed a beer and flopped down on her couch.

For an uncomfortable moment, Kayla was struck with the realization that she had never seen Urtiga relaxing without a drink in her hand. Of course, it wasn’t any of her business what a well-respected soldier did in her free time.

“Well… um…” she began.

Urtiga rubbed her temples and sighed again. “I am one hundred and forty-six years old.”

“Good lord,” Christie covered her mouth in shock. “That’s incredible!”

Urtiga shrugged. “It’s okay—the universe is a fun place to explore, and I have some awesome friends.”

“But you’re still only a master sergeant?” Christie asked, then frowned as she took in the scowls around her. “What?”

“Still only a mast—you were actually born to be an officer, weren’t you?” Urtiga said in exasperation.

Christie arched her eyebrows. “I’m afraid I don’t see why knowledge and experience wouldn’t be rewarded with authority.”

“My rank,” Urtiga explained, “is the highest level of professional soldiering you can reach and stay in the field. Going higher means going behind a desk or becoming an officer and taking over a Ranger platoon—which does not suit me at all. I love my job, and I am not interested in the opinion of people who think that a special badge means they can tell me how to do it.”

“Christie is going to be so insufferable as an officer,” Thandi said as she shook her head.

“Well,” Christie bristled, “I’m sure that individual expertise will always be taken into consideration. Appropriately measured against intellectual ability, of course.”

“When you go to officer school,” Urtiga explained, “you are going to have your preconceptions about ‘authority’ aggressively revised.”

“Urtiga, will you ever leave the organization?” Kayla asked.

Urtiga took a slow swig of her beer. “I have no idea. It’s not something I care to think about, yet.”

“Does anyone leave?” Kayla continued as she picked at a piece of lint.

“Of course. The average service time is twenty years. Most women want to get back to reality at some point—start families, and so on. It’s only the crazies like me that keep going.”

“Do they… do well? The ones that leave?” Christie asked nervously.

“Mostly,” Urtiga said. “It’s a struggle though. Some can’t handle it and they come back to Valkyrie. Others…” She sighed and shook her head. “A couple of friends have killed themselves. It’s an acknowledged problem, but nobody has any solutions.”

Christie glanced at Kayla with a look of shock on her face. “I feel like they might have mentioned that at some point during the introduction.”

Urtiga made a gesture towards the horizon. “You know where the door is.”

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Kayla thought for a moment. “Who’s the eldest Valkyrie you know of?”

“My old mentor—Hadasa Efrat. She admitted to me she was over five hundred years old. I think she had lost count of the exact number.”

“Five centuries at war?” Kayla shook her head, unable to imagine what kind of woman she would have been.

“Not really—there’s a lot of downtime where not much happens. That’s dangerous, because it breeds complacency, and people will get killed making stupid mistakes, or being reckless in training. Anyway, she told me that our time—the last couple of hundred years—have been relatively low intensity. When she was starting out, things were much crazier. They had a serious war going, with an organized enemy—a fleet of ships, and divisions of mechanized soldiers.”

“Five hundred years—before the Martian colony,” said Christie. She sighed. “An interstellar war was taking place right over our heads, but we thought we knew everything.”

The girls waited as Urtiga downed her bottle and picked up another one.

She popped the top off and took a long gulp. “One time we got into a bad situation and… Hadasa got hit. We thought she was going to die. While she was lying there, she started to talk. I think she didn’t want the memories to be lost. She told me that when she started Valkyrie would meet new recruits in empty fields on Earth, with stealthy dropships. They would do crazy things—like when they were figuring out how to stealthily re-enter a planet’s atmosphere. Girls would just screw ceramic plates onto a steel rig with boosters, and just go for it—with no idea what they were doing.” Urtiga waved her bottle. “Oh yeah, don’t ever forget that all the knowledge and experience you have absorbed was learned in blood. Someone died to bring it to you.”

Kayla felt a heavy darkness behind her eyes. She was becoming more sure that she wouldn’t survive her time in the organization, but did she really care?

Urtiga paused as she drank again. “Then, she told me what her mentor had told her when she opened up. She said there had been these great and terrible wars, lasting for decades, spanning hundreds of star systems. She said Valkyrie had included millions of soldiers, and men too. They were led by a woman they all worshipped—an actual goddess some said.”

“A Jotnar?” Christie asked.

“No idea. But that’s what she told me before she passed out.”

“Did she make it?” Kayla asked quietly.

“That time, yeah.” Urtiga took a swig of her beer. “Some of the rumors say the Chieftains in the governing council are thousands of years old. They still go out in the field by the way, leading from the front. Not often, but they do. That’s why we respect them so much.”

“Isn’t there a Chieftain named Smyrna?” Christie asked.

Urtiga nodded. “Sim.”

“Smyrna was an Amazon attested to have existed before the Trojan war, around 1200 BC.”

Urtiga shrugged. “What am I supposed to do with that information?”

“Well,” Christie said, “given the legends, it would suggest that humans and Jotnar co-existed and at least shared technology. The Amazons were said to be the daughters of Ares, the Greek God of war, and one can easily imagine aliens and their servants being seen as ‘god-like’. Together with the evident reality of a genocide against the Jotnar, one has to wonder what exactly our leadership is capable of.”

Urtiga sat in deep consideration for some time. “Girls,” she said eventually, “I’ve seen a lot of bad shit in this galaxy. I’ve seen some Valkyrie do some bad things too—we aren’t angels by any means. I don’t know much about ancient history, but I do know what the Jotnar created—on that you can consider me an expert. I can tell you that they are contemptuous of the value of life, and some of their devices—what they can do to people—shakes me to the core. I am one hundred percent certain that I would not have wanted to share the galaxy with them.”

Cowed by the strength of Urtiga’s conviction, Kayla absorbed her words in silence. She knew so little about what she had gotten involved in, but she had to keep going no matter what truths would be uncovered.

She turned to Christie. “Hey, why don’t we pick up after Plato?”

Christie nodded, and the girls explained to Urtiga what they had learned about Earth’s history and the philosophers recruited by the Jotnar to enslave humanity.

“What Jotnar?” Urtiga demanded. “They all died out, as far as anyone knows.”

“But what if some survived,” Kayla suggested, “working from the shadows?”

“Well,” Urtiga said, as she sank her head back into her couch. “Since you bring it up, there is a school of thought, amongst a lot of operators, that there is a faction of humans out there who know all about the Jotnar. The odds of finding something in deep space you don’t even know about are millions to one. But somehow, pirates, smugglers, and other scumbags keep showing up at unsecured sites at a very alarming rate. Hell, my unit was created just to deal with that problem.”

“Maybe it’s not just humans?” Kayla pushed.

“All I can tell you, is that it’s not Valkyrie,” Urtiga said, and there wasn’t a trace of doubt her in voice.

“But who watches the watchers?” Christie asked.

In the silence that followed, she tried to maintain eye contact with Urtiga, until her cheeks turned pink and she looked away in embarrassment.

“I know a lot of girls get all starry eyed,” Urtiga said at last in a bored voice, “once they get that nice, clean beret in their hands. They like to go on about how incredible it is to be working with other women who aren’t bitches behind their back, who don’t care about anything other than supporting each other.”

She turned away to stare out of the window at the city outside. “But they’re wrong. We can be just as vicious. You’re still under a microscope, and your reputation travels faster than light. Anyone who wants to start cultivating dark ambitions will get an unforgiving reaction, and if they ignore it, well… There’s nowhere they can run to that we won’t find them.”

In the silence that followed, Kayla felt herself growing hot with anger. “If that’s true,” she said bluntly, “then the organization’s been asleep at the wheel. Or else why the hell is someone like Rayker still on the loose?”

Urtiga said nothing.