Cutting Corners - Reactor (original) (raw)

A team of pilots is trained to fly ships in a war where it’s become cheaper to send humans instead of machines.

Novelette | 8,370 words

Ten nameless ships and their nameless carrier. Not much of a fleet, but as the captain said, they were all we had.

In other Hausser bases, newly reassigned personnel must have been staring at their own ships, suppressing their qualms about the idea that a human might pilot them.

I wasn’t used to thinking of her as a captain. They’d reconstituted old military ranks along with the ships, like ice cream rehydrated by someone who’d only read a description of it but never seen the real thing. Diadra seemed none too comfortable with the rank herself, nor the other pilots, all of us selected thanks to extravagant tests and tessellations of expendability.

“Do the ships have names, C-captain?” asked the youngest one. Must have volunteered. The draft didn’t take them that callow. I saw it in the way his eyes caressed the ships’ hyperboloid curves. The ships hurt my eye, but they’d never been designed for atmospheric flight, and aesthetics weren’t anyone’s concern before or after they were scorched.

The captain turned, looked like she was going to snap, reconsidered at the sight of the kid’s earnest face. “They used to have alphanumeric IDs,” she said, almost kindly. My gaze followed hers to the ships’ gull-curved hulls, the bright scoured patches where those IDs had once been. “Nicknames sometimes . . . before they turned up brain-burnt. That’s why we’re here.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am.” I recognized the man who spoke, tall despite the stooped shoulders. We must have been the only ones in this group who knew what the hell ma’am meant. “I don’t see how this can be done. They’re ships. They fly themselves. We don’t have the reflexes. The reaction time. We can’t run tensors in our head or neo-Lorentzian correction factors or—”

The captain’s ill temper returned, like a shadow over beaches baked dry. She stalked over to the carrier, sharp and sour, and kicked one of its struts. The clang reverberated like a bullet on a bell. Idly, I wondered if the captain had scared up the only pair of steel-toed boots on the whole damn planet for the purpose. It would be like her.

We cringed in unison. As the captain turned back to face us, I caught the tail edge of a smile before she scoured it clean. “Gather around, all of you,” she said—hard and sharp, but no harder and sharper than she needed to be.

We weren’t marines. The captain wasn’t either, although perhaps no one else realized that. The marines were the only Haussers left who had the mental equipment for this, and we didn’t have enough of them to go around. We were human though. We knew hierarchy and command.

We formed a ragged semicircle around the captain, facing the nameless ships. The Lyons would have found us laughably unthreatening at that moment. The expressionless man from the marines, two from intelligence, the tall one I’d met in a history program before we were both shunted into other programs of study, the one with laughing golden eyes yanked out of fashion design—enough. Who we’d been didn’t matter, not in time of war.

The captain and I came from data operations. It was how we knew each other. An innocuous field, until it wasn’t.

“As I said,” Diadra resumed, “they’re brain-burnt. Killed in the line of duty. Deuces—ship brains—take orders too. That’s what we program them to do.”

She half turned and offered the carrier a vague facsimile of a salute. The marine’s hands twitched as though he wanted to correct her, or maybe he was exercising his version of tact.

“Juan wasn’t entirely wrong.” Diadra nodded at the stoop-shouldered historian. “We’re human. Combat in space doesn’t allow for errors in timing. You have to hit hard, hit first, don’t get hit back. Humans are slower, error prone, erratic.”

“Are those always a problem?” asked a mild voice. I learned her name later: Blanche, an odd name for someone with such vivid coloration. Learned the story behind that too.

“Then why—?” The youngest.

Diadra huffed. “The cost.” Some of the others nodded. “The cost of training a ship’s deuce is almost as much as the cost of the ship itself. You can’t cookie cutter your way into military superiority. If we sent out identical minds, or those wretched raw neural spawns, the Lyons would blow them away in nanos flat. They have to be individuals like you and me.”

Nobody contested the point. We’d all dealt with military ships in one capacity or another. Hausse’s survival revolved around them. The marine was the only one who’d served aboard one, a rarity; few of them were equipped for human crew. Despite advances in warfare, we sometimes needed humans to carry out operations where waldoes and drones couldn’t cope.

Diadra looked us in the eye, person by person, targets acquired. “It’s one thing when a ship’s hurt bad and we have to do repairs. It’s another when it’s hurt so bad it nulls out. Replacing the deuce is spendy, but it’s a crying shame to let the ships go to waste when we’re at war.

“HQ is cutting corners, you see. They ran the numbers.” She’d run the numbers, once upon a time, although no one else knew. “It’s cheaper to refit for life-support and human operation than to train and integrate new deuces. Remote control won’t work thanks to comms lag. If it means we can field a few more units against the Lyons, it’s worth it.”

In other words, we were expendable. I wasn’t the only one thinking it . . . or the only one not saying it. My spirits lifted, absurdly: We all knew our duty.

“Do we have a chance?” One of the men, sounding bored rather than disaffected. Death wish visible from outer space, so to speak.

Diadra didn’t hesitate. “Yes. There was war before deuces became good enough, reliable enough, to trust with ships worth their weight in guilders. There was war before humankind set foot off Terra. It’s been done before. We can do it again.

“Which is why we’re here, and not drop-kicked toward the front. We’re here to train, not throw our lives away.” Her mouth quirked. “If we’re going to cut corners, we’ll do it right.”

None of us believed her, not the kid, not the marine. Certainly not me. But we wouldn’t say that either.

The marine assured us, when he could be persuaded to speak in that scathing voice of his, that our training had nothing on boot camp. We were minimally fit. The brass—I caught myself slipping into old-time terminology—didn’t expect us to go into, let alone survive, hand-to-hand.

We had the skeleton of command and hierarchy and discipline. The problem was putting on the sinew. Juan was apt to shoot off his mouth. I resented him for it at first. But he asked the questions none of us thought of, and as an academic, he was used to demanding autonomy. It took a while for me to understand why Diadra didn’t stomp on him.

She put us through flight sims, hour after ouroboros hour. I’d wake in my bunk, hands trembling, wondering why I couldn’t feel the control boards. Looking at the stars’ unwavering light gave me panic attacks, an intimation of ambush, and the meds only helped so much. Becker stopped writing bad poetry about the local rosette nebula and started wondering how badly the dust would affect our sensors. Still, we gathered at the viewports off shift, wishing for a faraway glimpse of peace.

People on Base Flamberge steered clear of us while repairing the brain-dead ships. They knew who we were and what we were to do. There was a betting pool regarding the survival rate. I placed a few against myself, for fun.

We came from a society that had abandoned human pilots and human captains. We relied on computer support, standard-issue neural clusters to handle astrogation, gunnery, damage control, life support. Now we had to learn tactics and coordination at a higher level than recreational sports, and tell the computers what to do.

Drill developed an instinct for momentum and inertia and thrust, our three-headed god: how many g’s we could pull without blacking out, when to dodge incoming fire or launch our own missiles. The world outside the station receded into mist and memory: atmospheric perspective without atmosphere, a neat trick.

The sims were all that mattered. At first, Diadra pitted us against each other so we’d learn each other’s fighting styles the hard way. “Nothing like getting nulled to teach you a lesson,” she said.

Latkiewicz, the marine, was terrifyingly good to begin with. I never did learn his given name, if he had one. No matter how outnumbered he was, he had a gift for tangling his opponents up with each other. Soft-spoken Candace liked to drift ghost-fashion at the edge of a skirmish until you forgot she was there—and then she’d strike. She always knew when we’d lost track of her. We could count on the youngest, Harikawa, to be spectacular, either in victory or in disaster, nothing in between.

One time Harikawa took it too far. I sat out that scenario, which was three on four according to a training schedule I’d never figured out, in an asteroid field. Ferrine, Blanche, Diadra, and I watched. The captain usually joined us in her own simship, fucked up alongside us, never denied it. She was the first to deconstruct her own mistakes, and equally ruthless with us.

Candace had taken out Juan with a well-timed dodge around an asteroid, even with klaxons and fail-safes screaming. He crashed. Harikawa’s other teammates, Chinua and Peter, also from intelligence, flirted dragon-and-knight among the rocks. Which left Harikawa to handle Candace, Latkiewicz, and Becker.

Give Harikawa credit for creativity. Whatever he did with the thrusters must have confused the simship’s rudimentary sense of self-preservation. Next to me, Ferrine exclaimed, “How did he override the—?”

“We’ll ask him during the post mortem,” the captain said grimly. “When he gets out of this. If he can. I wouldn’t want him risking this on a real ship. The simships are good but not quite, never quite, the real thing.”

How did she know so much about everything? The display snagged my attention just then, and I let it go. I wasn’t sure the answer would improve my mood.

As he juggled the thrusters like a drunken acrobat, Harikawa got himself hemmed in by his three opponents. I felt badly for him. Maybe overenthusiastic, but no one denied that he worked hard—

The display again: a sphere of red light, a flash faster than heartbreak. Four ships gone: Harikawa, Candace, Latkiewicz, Becker. I rubbed my eyes, trying futilely to blink away the afterimages.

“He blew his ship up.” Diadra’s mouth compressed into a blade-line, then: “That’s what I was afraid he was leading up to.”

I hadn’t figured it out; kicked myself over it. I hadn’t been thinking about Hausser kamikazes—fireships, they were called too, obscure historical references—and all deuces, all deuce simships too, came programmed with a self-preservation imperative.

“It worked,” Blanche said consideringly.

“It worked,” Diadra echoed. “Three ships for one. Fine. He came out ahead—except he didn’t come out of it at all.”

“It’s only a sim,” Ferrine said.

I winced, although I was thinking that Harikawa was going to catch an earful.

“It’s only a sim now,” Diadra said, “but what happens when we go up against the Lyons? Do we trade life for life?”

Blanche shrugged. “Are you ruling out kamikazes forever?”

Diadra’s lip curled. “No. You can’t rule anything out forever. Not when it’s life or death. The Lyons’ ships have their orders too.” For a moment, I heard a note of anguish and slow-boiled uncertainty in her voice, a rare slip. “You can’t go into a fight hoping to lose.”

Diadra chewed Harikawa out something fierce, judging by the way he emerged from her office. His shoulders were drawn back, head bowed as he choked down bile and hurt pride. I made a show of examining one of the terrariums. Neither of us was fooled, but it saved face.

Late into the shift, when the others had dispersed, I heard the captain questioning herself. She couldn’t admit that I was close at hand, listening and feeling equally helpless. I’d learned that much about differences in rank.

This was becoming more than a sim. Maybe it had been real for Diadra all along. I’d shoveled awareness of the war into a midden corner of my brain. She couldn’t afford to do the same. I wish now I’d been able to make things easier for her—for everyone.

Once upon a world there was a war. The soldiers of one nation were told they’d win handily, they’d return in time for Christmas pudding—a type of salad, I gather. It didn’t happen that way. They ended up squatting in trenches firing at each other in a perversion of lex talionis: bullet for bullet, blood for blood, life for life.

I’m sure some of the details are wrong. Records blur with age. I never had the heart to quiz Juan about it, especially after he reminded me that the world had a lot of history and no one scholar could be familiar with all of it. But the story is always the same. Like the rest of humanity, we thought we’d grown past the offertory ritual slaughter of millions, and like the rest of humanity, we were wrong.

We weren’t the only ones training on Base Flamberge. It took me weeks to comprehend what it meant, if I did, that the Lyons had taken Base Dadao. Diadra and I had been stationed there. In my head it still existed the way we’d left it, complete with turtle pond.

I wasn’t the only one taken by surprise when the captain said one weary evening, “You’re probably tired of the sims.”

“Never,” Harikawa said gallantly.

Diadra’s sneer was good-natured. “We’re up against another of our squadrons tomorrow, al-Wazi commanding. Still a sim, but new faces.”

I wasn’t complaining. As long as we stuck to exercises, I could pretend the war didn’t exist. There were training exercises in peacetime, after all.

“This means,” Diadra added in a casual tone no one trusted, “you will be in communication with each other. I expect you to coordinate.” Diadra looked hard at Harikawa. “If you’re going to do shenanigans, warn your comrades.” To Chinua and Peter: “Join the ensemble. No more duets.” To Juan: “You’re apt to bitch about orders. Fine. But save it for after.” And to me: “Vaughn, you’ve got to learn to take initiative. I don’t care if you haven’t quadruple-checked everything. You can’t always afford the time.”

Chinua coughed. “Will they be jamming us?”

She smiled thinly. “Yes. You need to learn to deal with it.” The smile evaporated. “I’ll be there, likewise al-Wazi.”

I hadn’t met al-Wazi that I recalled, but apparently Latkiewicz and Blanche had. The former restricted himself to a raised eyebrow. Blanche actually frowned.

“I feel sorry for the sim programmers,” Juan said, attempting to lighten the mood.

“Don’t,” Ferrine retorted. “It’s their fault we’re doing this.”

It came down to eleven against eleven, if you counted the carriers. The simships’ neurals handled the comms or we’d have been floundering with protocols instead of focusing on the exercise. In another life I would have been amused by the notion of two anonymous squadrons—I doubted even Diadra remembered the deuces’ original alphanumeric designations—cavorting in a simulated system under human guidance, but my sense of humor was vacationing in another universe.

We launched from the carrier in varying trajectories, seeking to swarm around al-Wazi’s fleet. Latkiewicz began a complex spin-and-swerve. Even in sim, the g’s would have flattened anyone else. For my part, I was busy reading scan and becoming heartily discouraged because the enemy moved in sync, something we’d never mastered.

Diadra had ordered us to focus on taking out al-Wazi’s carrier. Without the carrier, the squadron couldn’t retreat or resupply. And the carrier cost more by an order of magnitude: economic injury in a world of cutting corners.

Candace and Harikawa went after al-Wazi’s communication arrays, which included the jammer. We didn’t have a jammer, which was unfair, but so was war. Our ships were supposed to hop frequencies in an attempt to regain contact, but we were all flying Hausser simships with standard configurations, so that was no good.

Here our knowledge of each other served as our sole advantage. Diadra must have counted on that. Having gone up against each other countless times, in various permutations, we knew how to work together. It was just a matter of figuring out how.

At the moment, I could have measured the distance between theory and practice in light-years. The litany It’s only a sim, it’s only a sim ran through my head . . . rushed out of my head. I couldn’t treat this as anything less than real, no matter how preposterous the idea that Haussers would fight each other in earnest when there were Lyons out there.

Scan told me Juan and Blanche defended our carrier, which was fine by me. For all Juan’s obstreperous questions, he and Blanche worked well together, steady and down to business. In the meantime, the enemy had attained an attack wedge. “Wedge” in a vague sense of the word, since formations in space don’t work the way they do on land or water or even in air.

No luck defeating jamming. Had al-Wazi’s bunch worked with this before? Perhaps they had different specs on their simships, and on their ships as well. Chinua and Peter, true to form, led the advance toward the wedge. I would have preferred a flank attack, but I wasn’t sure my reflexes were up for the course corrections.

The hell with my reflexes. Initiative, the captain had said, and I meant to deliver. I didn’t have James’s or Blanche’s icy calm, or Harikawa’s gift for juggling thrust, but I knew how to move and keep from getting hit. Ferrine danced away from an enemy missile, jinking to baffle its sensors, and followed my lead. Becker and Juan disengaged, although the latter took a scorch I hoped hadn’t hit anything crucial.

We knew the enemy liked pretty formations. It was a fair bet they’d spent all their time drilling that. We could rattle them by messing up the formations, skewing the patterns. We headed into their midst, firing in directions that encouraged them to scatter, dodging their ripostes. Scan informed me that Juan had gone down after all, or was faking it. If the latter, al-Wazi’s squadron didn’t fall for it. They were rewarded for their trouble with a screamingly large explosion. He must have primed his drive and remaining ammo in anticipation.

I swallowed, licked dry lips. The silence of explosions grated on my nerves. I wanted thunder with my lightning, but the laws of physics never oblige.

Our opponents had orders to do what it took to maintain their formations instead of splitting up like we had. A matter of style, and their balletic movements were intimidating. But we’d skewed their positions. No one will sit tight when someone fires down their throat.

Diadra, in the carrier, was staying out of the way in a decidedly Candace-like manner. She controlled the biggest guns, but she was easier to hit. Extra armor or no, she correctly minimized risk to herself.

As it turned out, Diadra was right that first time. Hit hard, hit fast, don’t get hit back. I was shot down covering Becker’s singed tail, all the while thinking of Becker’s rosette nebula poem (“Twinkle, twinkle, little rose . . .” then a rhyme with “grows” and it grew saucier from there). She’d gotten too fancy too fast, and her trajectory slipped, and she couldn’t dodge in time.

Momentum and inertia and thrust have no appreciation for gymnastics in the airless dark. Chinua and Peter, taking advantage of our diversion, scorched three. The jammer was blown but I was gone by then, so I didn’t hear Diadra’s terse congratulations over comms until the simsuite released me.

We’d moved first and moved fast. It cost us, but we took out al-Wazi’s carrier. The next time, we’d have to move faster, until we got it right. It was that or die in the first real engagement.

We progressed through squadron-vs.-squadron to groups of squadrons battling each other. We started flying the ships themselves. For the first time, I understood the worship in Harikawa’s eyes when he first saw the ships. It doesn’t matter how ugly a ship is when you’re aboard and in control. There’s something about knowing you can fly to greet the stars . . . or could, if it weren’t for the war.

I had no idea why we were at war. It was an axiom of our existence, like geodesics and gravity, not to be questioned, only obeyed.

We never named the ships except the carrier, which we dubbed Whiplash in honor of Diadra’s tongue. The captain laughed when she heard. The rest of us took to calling each other by aliases. It kept us sane, knowing we could resume our old names and lives once—if—the war ended.

Chinua was Gallant Fox, and Peter, who was his partner in all the ways that mattered, was Omaha. The rest of us had nothing to do with those aliases, and they never explained the joke. Something about crowns, but I must have misunderstood.

Blanche remarked on Harikawa’s esprit de corps, so he became Esprit. Blanche was Snowbird: Diadra relied on her to stay cool no matter how bad the situation got. In a later scenario, based on the Battle of Tarnished Silver, she pursued a fleeing Lyon simfleet and nailed three even as her damaged engines threatened to explode in her face.

Ferrine wasn’t given to labyrinthine maneuvers, but we called her Helix because she’d been a geneticist. I never understood her specialty, although when the hours grew late she remarked, with a quiet bitterness, that it was so obscure they hadn’t hesitated to pull her from her research. One time Diadra asked if she regretted it, more gently than I’d ever heard her. Ferrine only shook her head and said she didn’t know anymore.

Becker specialized in what she called “vamp tactics.” Like a lapwing, she set herself up as a target too good to miss—until she exploded in your face. It worked most of the time, although Diadra reminded her not to cut the timing so fine. And so Becker was dubbed Lorelei.

Juan never did stop arguing. Diadra had to goad him to move, at times, instead of analyzing everything to death, including his own. Once he committed to a course of action, however, it was impossible to pin him down or get through his defenses, a boxer perpetually on guard. Juan, our Turtle.

Candace came from a family that had played wei-chi for generations, hence Wei-Chi. She showed us the game, a physical set in her possession that had eaten up most of the mass limit for her personal allowance. In battle and in the game, she was patient, painstaking, the ghost at the edge of scan.

Nobody was surprised that Latkiewicz learned the game, even beat Candace a few times. I don’t think she minded. Latkiewicz remained taciturn, and when he did speak, it was calmly and precisely. For all that we called him Scalpel, he hewed to a stately old-fashioned courtesy. If anything went on between him and Candace, it didn’t concern us unless it interfered with training—with those two, it never did. What Diadra thought of it I never knew.

Me? It went like this: Lana from al-Wazi’s squadron took me out once by sheer doggedness. I got her back the next match by shucking my engines’ reactor mass and playing tricks with momentum, counting on Diadra to come by for pickup at the battle’s end. When Lana complained, I said, “Well, it’s quid pro quo.” She gave me a blank look. “Tit for tat.”

Diadra and al-Wazi exchanged glances. Diadra said, “You studying Latin again?”

I shrugged. “It was a common phrase once.”

“It’s only one in a hundred these days remembers that Latin was a language,” Diadra said. And so I became Centurion.

We were gathered in the garden, a grandiloquent name for a nook decorated with origami flowers and wire sculptures of vines and a few strategically placed tea lights. Eleven of us made for a crowd. By tacit agreement, we left the space open for people to meet in some semblance of privacy; the bunkrooms had thin walls.

“What are they thinking to do with us?” Becker asked, tossing her head. “They can afford to spare ships and more time for this?” Like the rest of us, she was starting to wonder what battle was like when it wasn’t a sim. Eager for it, even.

“It’s an investment,” Chinua said. “The better trained we are, the more likely we are to survive.”

I snorted.

“—besides, who knows? Maybe the deuces will find it good practice.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Diadra cut in.

We shut up. Waited.

“Orders are orders. You should have learned from Turtle”—Juan’s mouth snapped shut—“that sometimes it’s not worth the arguing.” She offered us a chimera smile, part grin, part grimace. “Pick your battles carefully, always.”

Starting on the morrow, the captain had said, we’d be engaging in a training flight—against a deuce fleet. Base Flamberge was far enough from the bloodiest fronts and salients that we didn’t have to fret about being smeared into radiation by Lyon picket fleets. All the Flamberge squadrons would join into one fleet, working together. A hard idea to acclimate to, after sparring against each other. That must be why, really.

Leaving the base was less of a shock than I anticipated. I hadn’t realized how much my locus of home had become the squadron. Locations themselves were peripheral. Quarters aboard the Whiplash resembled the barracks we’d lived in on Base Flamberge. Sometimes I woke on the Whiplash thinking I was back on the base.

With us came the other carriers, all brain-burnt like ours: Imperator, captained by al-Wazi. Yeh Ching, the largest of them, from an older class. The ruthless Tarnkappe. The brash Tenochtitlan and my favorite, because of the beautiful abstract calligraphy on her hull, the Mecca. The Neumann János Lajos, the Horangi, the grandiosely named Doom of Ahura Mazda, the absurdly named Sic’n with her berserker tactics. The Hartford and her never-take-us-seriously squadron (they lied).

The brass generously gave us several sessions to figure out how to coordinate the squadrons. It didn’t help.

We tried our best against the deuces. Because of what Diadra had said about deuces as individuals long ago, our squadron tried to differentiate between them. A few carriers had already acquired nicknames: Qubit, Licorne, Spike, Alchemist. The rest had only alphamumerics prefaced by DAS, Deuce Artificial Sentience. Permute an identifier in the third place and it may be distinct to neurals, but human memory requires more to work with.

They gave us our first battles round robin, to let us get used to fighting the deuces with even odds. Unlike deuces, humans get tired. It shouldn’t have mattered because space battles end fast. In transit, even simulated transit, we’re trapped in a noosphere of dread. The coup de grâce comes as a relief.

Coup de grâce was right. The deuces finished us, all of us, and didn’t raise the machine equivalent of a sweat.

We had moments. Harikawa spun brilliant shenanigans. Jenora from the Hartford coordinated a holding action that kept some deuces from returning to their carriers. Tarnkappe escaped: the captains had designated a border shell beyond which any fleeing ship was “safe.” Yeh Ching surprised the deuces again and again with her twists and turns.

None of it was enough.

Afterward, Juan said, “It’s hopeless.” He kicked the deck of the Whiplash, swore as he stubbed his toe. An apt summary, if not the one he’d intended to make. “I told you.”

“You never stopped,” Latkiewicz said.

I tensed in anticipation of the captain’s tongue-lashing.

It didn’t come. She crossed her arms and looked us over. “We were beaten,” Diadra said. “Fine. Beaten many times. Fine. It’s training. We’ve gotten too used to human reflexes and human mindsets.”

“But what about the sims?” Ferrine protested.

“They’re not on the same level as deuces, or they’d be deuces and we wouldn’t be here.” Diadra glanced to the side, an unusual hesitation. “The point of the sims was to ease us in, not blow us away before we had a chance to adapt. We need more work, more macros.”

Macros was the term we used: preprogrammed maneuvers, chained together in rapid succession. The ships came with libraries of them, which we’d customized. We were already using them.

Diadra’s chin tipped up. “We’ve been using them one way. Now look for others. Randomized selections. Delegating some of the timing to the neurals. But only some. We can do it.”

It was her tactical use of we, instead of the critical you, that brought us back together.

I’m not the squadron’s historian, but I do know the joke behind the name of the prototype deuce, DAS-1867. Marx would laugh, if he were the kind of person who laughed. Perhaps the early cyberneticists should have stuck with the term AI.

You’d think that people who reached the stars would have known better than to resurrect the old feuds and wars, and forget what called them skyward in the first place. Lyonesse and Hausse aren’t the only ones at war, although a few of the independents have stayed clear of the conflicts.

Maybe our ancestors thought they’d leave their troubles behind them. An old delusion, or an old hope. I keep hoping we can find a way.

They called it a training flight. We used other names for it.

We were wound to snapping. Diadra’s eyes became shadowed with worry, which she no longer bothered masking from us. We were rarely an equal match for our deuce opponents, but we learned to rattle them, to snipe from unexpected vectors, the guerrilla’s arcane arts.

The deuces caught on quick, but we liked to think we were teaching them something. Possibly even something useful against the Lyons.

We learned to work with the deuces. We were all Haussers, after all. Whiplash earned her name again and again: we specialized in speed. Samera from Tarnkappe called us the cavalry. Becker muttered “Half a league” under her breath and wouldn’t elaborate.

After a time, we returned to Base Flamberge. They gave us a couple of days to rest. Latkiewicz and Candace organized a wei-chi tournament. By the night’s end, we were arranging the stones into graffiti patterns.

By and by, people gravitated toward the viewports that showed the rosette nebula to best advantage. I slipped away, only to find Diadra at a different neglected viewport. Nothing to see but stars, or nothing to obstruct your view of stars.

She sat with her hands tucked into her pockets. hair tucked behind her ears. I shuffled my boots and cleared my throat as I approached, for courtesy’s sake.

She looked up. “Hello there, Vaughn.”

“Hello yourself.” I came up beside her, waited.

“You’re wondering what’s next.”

No sense in denying it. I nodded.

“It’s the same as always. Some of us will live. Some of us will die.”

“Reassuring,” I said.

“You think I’m here to be reassuring?” Diadra caught my expression and relented. “Think about it, Vaughn. We’ve gone as far as we can go playing among ourselves. You know what’s next.”

I searched her face as though she were an oracle. “I guess so.”

“Sometimes I wonder what this is for.” Diadra’s mouth twisted. “Not what you wanted to hear either.”

“It’s us or the Lyons,” I said by rote, caught myself. “They must say the same of us.” If the war was a Gordian knot, where was the fellow with the sword? “We have to see it through. That’s the choice we have.”

“We have orders,” she said, agreeing without really agreeing. “That’ll do for now.”

Nominally, Captain Alejandro of the Tarnkappe commanded the combined fleet. We hadn’t learned to adhere to a strict hierarchy before and we didn’t start now. The deuces adapted easily enough, since they were used to working things out for themselves.

Some of us couldn’t help regarding our first assignment as a lark. I would have joined them, except for Diadra’s brooding. She didn’t often clam up, and that concerned me.

We took to talking in dreamy words: what if, when the war’s over, can you imagine, wouldn’t it be nice. We thought of home, or a new home in the nebulous somewhere. In the old days, when we’d had enough guilder in the budget, people sent out probes. We all had: Hausse, Lyonesse, New Everest.

They’d declassified the records because no one cared anymore. We found copies buried in the _Whiplash_’s archives, because no one had bothered deleting them either. We idled our free hours by comparing prospective planets, plotting courses, planning journeys and settlements.

A bare-bones version of the simsuites had been added to the carriers. We practiced larger-scale scenarios. We’d ditch the modules at Base Katar for the use of future squadrons.

I made some spreadsheets. Did the money poured into our training and supply and life support still not add up to a deuce’s price tag? I jiggered the numbers this way and that, to no satisfactory conclusion.

I wasn’t the only one who wondered.

“Centurion!”

I had long ago passed the stage where I looked around to see who was being addressed so oddly. “Lorelei. Something on your mind?”

“No,” Becker—Lorelei—said, facing me squarely in the corridor. A spacer’s habit she’d learned and I still hadn’t, when one might need to read lips or sign. “Is something on yours? Half of us are acting like kids in zero g for the first time. The other half are moping.”

“Nerves,” I said, too glibly. “First time for us all. We won’t have time to coddle ourselves once we reach the front. It’s good for us to get this out of our systems.”

She didn’t believe me, which was fine because I didn’t believe me either.

Becker sidled over to me. We resumed walking, her leading since I had no particular destination. “It’s strange,” she said. “I feel more alive than I have in years. Now that the real deal is coming up, I don’t want this to end. It’s better than going out there to get shot. Selfish, right?”

“Orders are orders,” I said, the blandest imaginable response, and she sighed. “Our opinions don’t matter.”

“They should. We’re the ones scattering our carbon into space.” Becker shook her head. “That’s why they started using deuces. Program ’em right and they don’t grouse about it.”

People can be programmed too, I thought. Wasn’t that the point of training? “Pity we can’t program this war to an end.”

“We’ll have to go the blood-and-fire route. Good for the qubits.”

“There are worse ways to go.”

“What, kamikaze?” Her grin had a topsy-turvy cast to it I didn’t trust. “I’ll vamp a few on my way out. How’s that?”

I caught her hand. Her skin was cool and dry, too dry. “It’s not funny, Becker.” I’d slipped. Used her real name. But she didn’t draw away, so maybe she wasn’t offended. “We’ll make it through.”

Becker shrugged and squeezed my hand. “When this is over, do you think they’ll go back to using deuces? Or will they be too busy rebuilding to bother? Will they decide they like this way better?”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, “at the other end of history.”

They have a lot of names for it. Some of them obscene as in taboo, others obscene in what they conceal.

Charred. Dusted. The wrong side of the statistics. Gone exploring. Making amends for your grandchildren. Feeding the roses. Traveling into winter. I once heard a foreign mercenary call it saluting the night.

I missed a few, I’m sure. Euphemisms come and go. Death stays.

Shall I tell you how it went, in the stretch of shadow we call the front? Don’t ask me for the blow-by-blow analysis. That’s for the historians, after everything’s decided. Sometimes, in the annals, you think you see cause and effect, attack and counterattack, unfolding like an heirloom tapestry.

That’s from the outside, after time has rinsed away the adrenaline and ash. From the inside, yanked this way and that by orders, by instincts that evolution never discarded, it’s another story.

You spend forever heading to the front in the company of other squadrons, some familiar and some yet strangers, until you’re ready to spit eternity in the eye. Your daydreams turn to all the things you should have done three days ago: flouting reveille to sleep in one last time, an extra helping of hoisin sauce. Maybe you talk about these ideas with your comrades, and maybe you don’t. I did. Not Diadra, not ever.

Once you’re there? Once they brief you and give you your orders and, if they’re charitable, a breadcrumb of explanation? Once they send you to seek your bubble reputation? You’re an outcast by the nature of your orders, a flesh-and-blood soldier superficially melded with your ship in an age of deuce-directed war machines. No glory, just hope and pain. They’re not the same.

You have options once you arrive. Once scan barrages you with the enemy everywhere, moving even as your brain adjusts to their positions, accelerating even as your brain adjusts to their velocities. Once you realize that you’re here and it’s real.

It comes to you: The lasers are more than flashlights that don’t scatter photons like a kick me sign. The missiles aren’t conscientious duds. If you’re hit and your engines flash critical, if you lose hull integrity and the emergency seals fail, you’re gone. There’s no guarantee that you’ll emerge safely on the other side.

You fire, dodge. Don’t bother praying. No one’s watching. There’s only the nightmare carousel of ship against ship, deuces maneuvering so quickly any humans would be smeared to slime. You delegate to the poor neural trapped in the ship with you. You know you can’t eject, and even if you contrived it, no one would retrieve you. There are more in training where you came from. If the ship survives, someone can replace you.

Cheering thoughts. You don’t have time to think them, which is a small grace. They lurk in the back of your brain, slow poison for later. As Diadra said, hit first, hit hard, don’t get hit back.

If you can.

So much turns on an eye blink. Less, where deuces are involved. The Lyons have a job to do too, and are more worried about doing it than anything else.

You daren’t take your time to make sure you’re going to nail the Lyons with your fire. Even if this is your first time and you’re one of the first real soldiers in an era. Even if your friends disappear from scan and you want to scream out to them, pierce the soundless vacuum.

Maybe war was different back when you had to ride into the enemy’s path knowing they were people too: living, breathing, bleeding, dying.

Half a parsec, half a parsec more, and you’ve arced away from the front. Others take your place. Here there are no castles with their ponderous ramparts and machicolations, no trenches, no landscape fixtures to contain the battle. You have stars and asteroids and debris. Colonies and outposts. The front changes daily, hourly, as the fortunes of war spin out their course.

Once you’ve run the gauntlet, there’s a temporary reprieve. Deuces can go on with but short stops for refueling, long stops for repairs. Humans can’t. We rotate out to recuperate while other squadrons take their turn, always ready . . . never ready.

Our captain came through it grimmer than ever. There were new lines around her eyes. Chinua and Peter tried to chivvy her into telling us more. Either they backed off, or she made them back off, or interrogation techniques foundered against the Diadras of this world.

The rest of us didn’t break. The rest of us minus one, I should say. We lost Ferrine. Helix.

You can’t believe a person’s gone like that. No corpse, no adieu, not even the hulk of her ship. It was like she’d never existed. Sometimes I wonder what’s worse: the hacked and bloody remains of what used to be a person, or not finding anything at all. Deuces don’t retrieve the dead. They never had a need for it, before.

This once, because we were shaken, Diadra’s tongue had none of its usual sting. She was as badly off as the rest of us.

There was a funeral for those who didn’t come back. I don’t remember much of it. Just a blur of faces and indistinct voices, an ache sharper than longing, darker than black.

We knew it wasn’t the end. That was the worst part. Not by a damn long sight. Another month, another skirmish, rotated back into the war’s gluttonous maw. Ferrine was the first we lost, but not our last.

There are questions we never think to ask. We say deuce and never think about the etymology. An older word for them was hal, but that dropped out of usage when none of the DAS series went rogue.

Deus ex machina. Someone’s pun. God from the machine.

We never worshipped them in a conventional sense. But there are ways and ways of propitiation. We ceded war to the deuces. They became gods of the battlefield.

I never forget though—like any idol, they’re made in our image.

The second and third times should have felt just as bad, but you can only assimilate so much before you go numb. It saves your sanity. Ships are assets, not people. Even ships who are deuces, whose core programming compels them to fight loyally. None of us ever met a deuce that expressed second thoughts, but that was the programming too.

The Lyons went easy on us those times. Fewer deaths, none of them the _Whiplash_’s. Maybe someone pulled strings to send us to a less hectic part of the front. Maybe it was mercy.

Third time’s a charm, they say.

Third time we learned why hell is still in the language.

It’s amazing how much you learn from an accumulated combat experience of no more than an hour. The threat of death brings you clarity. You see, through the lens of your mortality, what you missed the first time around, when you were too busy reacting.

The others came to their own epiphanies, I’m sure. I didn’t share mine because I didn’t know what good it would do to me, or us. I would have asked for advice, except who did I know who wasn’t embedded as badly in the situation as I was?

There were so many of us. I can still recite the list. Whiplash, Tenochtitlan, Tarnkappe, Horangi, Sic’n, Hartford, Dazzler, Powodzenia, Fuoco, Hanging Gardens. Those were the ones that survived. And the deuces: Alchemist, Licorne, Black Rose, Tangle, Eskrima Duel, Akuma. More and more and more, and I know the ones who didn’t come back too.

Too many Lyons, far too many, even allowing for screwups in reconnaissance. Where they’d pulled the reinforcements from, I couldn’t guess. It wasn’t my job to guess. In retrospect, those who were supposed to guess—the data analysts—should have anticipated it.

Coordination between human and deuce, coordinated fire, coordinated defense. We fought together and died together, laid down our lives like grave goods.

The deuces haggled among themselves and passed us the crumbs. Under other circumstances, it would have rankled, but you don’t quibble when your tail’s on the line. We did our part against the multitude of Lyons.

Then came the moment when Whiplash was caught with nowhere to turn, unless she wanted to collapse our defensive line. Maybe we could have regrouped afterward and built it back, but there’s little time for maneuver in space, where an extra half second of thrust can hurtle you into doom. None of us was in position to save her.

Blanche had asked, Are you ruling out kamikazes forever?

The captain had answered, You can’t rule anything out forever.

Diadra wasn’t one to rule anything out when it came to a solution.

I’ve thought about how things would have turned out if it’d been another ship in that trap, with Lyons, Lyons everywhere, nor any time to think. It’s easy to make mistakes under pressure, even when you’re a captain who’s forged a motley group of individuals into a fighting unit. A deuce wouldn’t have had any trouble. But we had too few deuces for this war: That was why we were there.

I saw everything. How the Whiplash was trapped. How she reacted as fast as human meat allowed. How she accelerated into an ever-shifting spin and bombarded the Lyons, taking them by surprise. Taking some of them down. How she cut spin and performed a half roll while keeping her cannon trained on the nearest Lyon: a salute. Which no ship had made since the deuces took over our wars, because a salute is a human gesture. How she continued moving defensively, relying on the rest of us to cover her now that the immediate threat had passed.

No: I saw almost everything. I didn’t see Diadra die. The g’s involved might have taxed a deuce. She wouldn’t have wanted a witness to her final moments, anyway. She saluted us goodbye. That would have been enough—for her.

Kamikaze? No. The Whiplash survived, but half her soul was gone. It was a neural piloting the ship now. One with Diadra’s macros and tactics, but not Diadra herself. We don’t know what the Lyons would have done with that knowledge.

Sometimes grief burns your brains out, and at other times, it snaps everything into acute clarity. I was wired. Even then, I couldn’t stop Chinua and Peter from going down together, duet in the midst of an ensemble. I couldn’t save Candace when she abandoned her habitual stealth and sacrificed herself to hold the front. I couldn’t keep James Latkiewicz from going after her. Worse, I didn’t need to, because he didn’t, no matter how much it hurt him to let the night take her.

So many gone, and Diadra among them.

More names for the casualty lists. Other names would never make it onto the lists: Gallant Fox, Omaha, Wei-Chi. Neither would ours, if we stayed.

So we didn’t. We’d sacrificed enough. We had wounds to bind and dreams to pursue and plans to follow. We found a capsule of files on the _Whiplash_’s computers: Diadra’s legacy. Which she’d told none of us about. Perhaps she’d never meant to. We don’t know.

We grabbed what repairs we could and cut loose, heading out for stars far away. Heading past Hausse and Lyonesse and toward a future we should have grasped years ago. We weren’t the only ones. A fleet of ships and their squadrons, and those who stayed behind also chose not to give us away when it mattered.

Following Diadra’s maps and routes and lists of contacts, we stopped by neutral starports for further repairs and refitting. We didn’t intend to return, although we left word for anyone who wanted to join us. Harikawa worried about pursuit, but Latkiewicz assured him that the government had better things to do. I couldn’t help aching when I looked closer at those two. Harikawa wasn’t a kid anymore. The shadows behind Latkiewicz’s eyes—where once, I’m sure, Candace saw her own shy smile reflected—haven’t faded, and never will.

How did we get away, past the murderous front? The others didn’t believe it could be done, except staying was suicide. I told them chances were good that the Haussers and Lyons would both let us through. They figured it was worth a try. All we had left to lose was each other.

I haven’t told them yet why I thought so. I think Becker figured it out before I did, although she’s keeping quiet herself. Sometimes, when I’m watching her, she looks up and the knowledge shines out of her face. Sometimes I find something else in her smile, but that’s another story.

You see, as we sped toward the front on our way out, I sent out a message. Telling the combatants we were leaving and weren’t any threat to them. That they were welcome to come with us if they ever wanted out. Haussers and Lyons, humans and deuces, on both sides.

Because there were far too many Lyons that third battle. Not all of them were deuces. Lyonesse too was cutting corners. It was in the data.

One thing I learned from Diadra, although she never said it in these words, is that you don’t cut corners when it comes to lives, any lives. All those times we pored over old reports and daydreamed about colonies, she’d been listening. Listening, and angling for a way to make it work, as always, angling to find an escape from the slaughter.

I was certain—am certain—that the Lyons heard and thought about it. They let us through, holding their fire, a hiatus in the battle. Nobody harked after us then, but they’ll come. If the future is kind, they’ll even tell us that the war, a war whose origins no one remembers, is over.

As we passed from the battle—heading out, heading away, heading to the stars and peace—the Hausser deuces saluted us. All of them, together. We’ll be waiting for them.

“Cutting Corners” copyright © 2026 by Yoon Ha Lee Art copyright © 2026 by Ben Zweifel

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Cutting Corners

Yoon Ha Lee