Starchild

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

Chapter Ten: A Pair of Human Hands

When Eirika and Ephraim entered the Human Spaceflight Programme, the pilot corps had been segmented, voluntarily segregated by "class," based on who entered the corps at the same time, who served together on missions, who came from the same region of the globe. Months of intensive training had welded those fragments into a unit, even a family, as veteran pilots who'd flown simple missions worked alongside the newcomers who'd flown lengthy, complex missions. Now, the assignments for the mission dubbed "Peace" sent a wedge right through the corps.

The senior pilots took the attitude that Marth's selection as commander was right, proper, and decidedly foreordained: "Well, of course he's going to be the first. He was always first in line for assignment."

It was the junior pilots, Eirika thought, from the Aureola crew on down, that seemed knocked off-balance by the news. The feeling there ran more along the lines of, "Why him? He's already going to be famous the rest of his life. Why didn't one of us get the chance?"

Eliwood was perhaps the most charitable of the "newcomers."

"Those early missions might have been an honor, but they did have a downside. No pilot wants to be a passenger in a capsule with the controls locked down. If any of us had been on Starlight, we'd want another chance in space to prove ourselves."

And that made sense, up to a point- give Pilot 001 another chance to fly, but why give him that mission, the Peace mission, the Luna landing? Why allow him another bite of the sweet apple of immortality when he'd already tasted it?

So Eirika had another worry besides the heavy responsibility of being the other moonwalker for Peace. She had to worry that her mission, her impressive new assignment, would be the one to stir the pilot corps into revolt.

-x-

Then again, Duessel and Mycen gave Eirika a workload that left her with little time to worry. Now that she was officially designated a moonwalker, the scope of her training narrowed but its intensity increased threefold. More helicopter practice, more lunar-gravity exercises, more geology lessons. She had private lessons now with Professor Saleh as he showed her how to tell an impact breccia from a welded ashflow tuff. The professor had seemed a dry and distant man at first, though he'd shown some flashes of good humor in dealing with his thirteen charges during their outings to Hamill Canyon. Interacting with her one-on-one, he proved both encouraging and remarkably patient, treating all of her mistakes as an opportunity for a new lesson. Eirika wasn't used to that mode of teaching; when dealing with experimental aircraft, one couldn't treat errors as a learning opportunity.

"You know the scientific community is divided on the value of sending humans to the moon at all," he said to her one afternoon as they walked through the high desert around Star City. "Especially the value of sending test pilots rather than scientists."

"I hope to not disappoint them too greatly," said Eirika as she rolled a quartz pebble between her fingers. She had to admit that the desert looked far more interesting to her now that she knew the names of the rocks and why each had the color it did.

"You won't disappoint us," said the professor, and an oddly gentle smile softened his austere features. His eyes, keen as any falcon's when looking over a piece of plagioclase feldspar, seemed to soften as well. "We could send robotic probes to Luna more easily than we could send any human beings. If that were the focus of the Spaceflight Programme, I've no doubt we'd already have."

"Sending robots alone wouldn't inspire people," Eirika said. She felt quite sure of that; the first satellites launched by the UFN had evoked pride through Magvel Union, and presumably all the free nations, but it was nothing compared to the mass celebrations during and after the Starlight mission. To hear the radio transmissions coming down from beyond the blue sky, to hear a human boy's voice greeting the peoples of the world- from space!- meant something profound. It had meant enough to Ephraim that he'd given up on his beloved jets and taken a chance with rocketeers and tin-can spacecraft, and it had meant enough to Eirika that she'd followed her brother into the Programme.

"No. The robots would not tell us everything we need to know," Saleh agreed. "To have a pair of human eyes, of human hands, explore a new world will give us more than a little container of soil. Human eyes and human hands will give us Luna's story, and a human voice will share that story to those of us left on Terra."

The wind had picked up, ruffling Saleh's dark curls and sending Eirika's own hair out like a pale streamer. Saleh stopped short, turning toward Eirika that she might better hear him.

"Become the voice of Luna, Eirika. Tell her story to the peoples of Terra, that we might better understand ourselves."

He'd never talked to the pilot corps as a whole like this, not that Eirika could remember. For the first time since her assignment to Peace, Eirika felt the purpose of her mission. Perhaps she didn't necessarily deserve to be on the first Luna landing, but she might be able to earn that place.

"Thank you, Professor. I want to do well for you... for all of you."

She dropped the pebble; it fell to the gravel, white upon white, and was lost.

-x-

Eirika found a scrap of paper in the dormitory atrium. Out of curiosity she picked it up; the cleaning staff usually kept Star City's central palace spotless. The paper's front was an old calculus assignment, while the back contained two hand-written lines that seemed, she thought, to be poetry.

then turn us all to stardust

and blind the world with light

She was not certain of the handwriting.

To Be Continued...

Author's note: Any implications of Saleh/Eirika are completely intentional.