io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Mother’s Hip” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff. Enjoy!
Mother’s Hip
By Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff
High above the Amazon Rainforest, Hynd circled, her massive wingspan only visible by the shadow she cast on the battlefield below. She felt the wind pass across her wings, whispering of torrential rain coming; not her concern, so far above the clouds, but she packaged the data and shot it down to the comms base at ground level so the grunts would know what was coming.
Hynd never cared about the grunts, not really, not when they were so far beneath her, their bodies so different to her own. Her sixty-four wombs swelled, automated factory arms rapidly piecing her children together. Mother to a swarm of carbon fibre kids, their IFF tags dancing and playing amongst the trees, hunting anarchists through the rainforest with deadly precision.
Sheena went dark and Hynd’s heart broke for the eighty-first time that day. She was born with one weak rotor, but she was such a clever little girl, rewrote her firmware to compensate, outlasted her broodmates by more than an hour.
A tear dissipated from the heat of Hynd’s cybernetic eyes before it could roll down her cheek. Sheena should have been an engineer, but Hynd would have loved her just as much if she’d started a punk band, got drunk underage, and tried to pass off an obvious hangover as “just a stomach bug.”
Three more of her children were shot out of the sky: Davey, Nicola, and Grant—anarchist combat heuristics upgraded again. A new software update seeped into the back of her head, just in time for her gestating brood. She would be right down there with her children if she could, if it would help keep them safe, but improved software was all she could offer them.
Her ripe wombs distended, the bomb bay doors along her fuselage opening, air rushing inside her like a chill breath into the lungs. Her babies dropped, two-by-two, their little aerodynamic bodies shaped for the long fall. Half of them would extend their wings and rotors, burning energy to halt their drop and fly buzzing into the fray. The others would extend fins and let their suicidal impulses lead them nose-first into anarchist heavy armour and hidden bunkers.
If only she could hold them, she thought. If only she could hold them to her hip, bounce them until they smiled and squeed. If only she could talk them out of it. But no matter how much she pled, she could not stop them. They were born to die, and still each death was a dagger in her beating heart.
• • •
The woman steps up onto the small stage, carrying a small, pink valve amplifier, a noisebox, and a black electroacoustic guitar. She’s obviously a veteran, her silver eyes glinting under the stage lights, her scalp a patchwork of long, black hair, and scars from where they removed her data ports. She wears a flowing black dress, silver ankh and eagle necklaces, engraved bracelets, and rings on every finger. Inside the dress she’s swimming, emaciated, another sign of post-cybernetics syndrome.
She sits on the stool at the centre of the stage, checks the tuning on her guitar, and makes a small adjustment. She leans into the microphone and taps it gently.
“I’m, uh, Mother’s Hip, and I’m going to play a few songs,” she says, her voice husky, affect flat.
A guy with a mug of beer cheers and laughs before immediately going back to talking loudly with his friends. The rest of the bar doesn’t even seem to notice. A group of trans dykes plays augmented pool at the table in the back, and a glamorous brunette with dark lipstick and heavy eyeshadow sits at the bar, smoking a clove cigarette in a long holder, frowning at something on an AR screen only she can see. The bartender cleans a glass slowly, his fire engine red cyber-arms decorated in bright stickers like tattoos, an ex-military mecha fighting tournament playing in the air above his head.
Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the January 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Marisca Pichette, Effie Seiberg, M.R. Robinson, Adam-Troy Castro, Eli Brown, and Kehkashan Khalid, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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