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  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 younges t, 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.

 

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