Quoted By:
====
But she preferred to stay where she was. Villanelle already saw from you the difficulty with acting as sergeant to a mere squad of four, with all the paperworks, auditing, and human lives cupped between the hands. What sort of idiot wanted a charge of a thousand? Besides, she didn’t enlist with the mind to become an officer… She scoffed.
Villanelle looked to her side, at the human girl whom she thought of as a half-idiot planter named Carla, numbered SS-6971. Carla’s mug was half-full of ration cream, and she was cheerfully scraping out a tune from her instrument again. It was a clumsy tune that got onto Villanelle’s nerves, but she would never tell Carla to stop playing. If Carla had any idea that there were 6,970 dead soldiers before her, SS-6971, maybe she wouldn’t be so cheerful right now.
But naive ones like her were healthy for the group, this Villanelle understood - Carla’s music and her optimism eased everyone’s spirits and offered a distraction from the fact that nothing awaited them here in the depths of space except a nameless grave on a dark moon where no one would visit. Carla would fight and play until eventually, a blaster bolt sliced her and her damn guitar in half.
Villanelle sighed, then looked at Henry now. SS-1980. He was smiling, his face buried in a fighter-pilot’s field manual. Henry had picked up the lost book a while back during the evacuation of planet Ilium, and he kept it as if it’s his prized possession from home. Naturally, Henry and Carla got along well to the point Villanelle made a sly bet that the two would become mates. Villanelle decided that Henry was smarter than the Eredyne girl, but this was offset by his egregious sense of humour, which the Chiss couldn’t stand, and his obsession with becoming a TIE pilot. Every now and then, Villanelle would catch Henry looking out at the air cavalry’s bivouac, his eyes fixated on the powerful space-superiority fighters that were commandeered by brave pilots.
Brave, yes, but obnoxious, foolish, blind - even more so. Villanelle, and plenty of the infantrymen despised the air cavalry corps. Villanelle thought of pilots as mountebanks who acted as if they were better than the rest of the army, and imbeciles who would throw themselves in the line of fire for a few seconds of personal glory. The half-Chiss had a more pragmatic mindset: she believed in surviving for as long as possible, and living to fight another day. Despite this, Villanelle was the one who always helped Henry write carefully-composed applications to the Air Cavalry regiments. But somehow Henry had never been lucky, and all of Villanelle’s handwritten letters went lost or ignored.
