Counting Casualties by Yoon Ha Lee

Author:Yoon Ha Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

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The first and last thing I will always remember about the battle is the pain.

The symbiosis between captain and face, or for that matter, between the crew of a ship and the ship’s face, was not limited to strategizing. The faces monitored us more intimately than any doctor, especially when we were strapped in for maneuvers. They knew that we were human, with human limitations, and that excessive pain distracted most of us.

Most of the battle comes back to me in a haze of red and black. Red was pain. Black was more pain. And that was after counting casualties filtered out the worst of it.

I had made the plan. Now it was my job to survive while the faces handled the maneuvers. Humans don’t have reaction times fast enough to do it themselves. Maybe the deadfleet uses a similar arrangement.

It’s unclear what the deaders really want. That being said, they understand fear. We know this because they use it against us. In the Battle of Atrophus, they pierced Fleet 3 again and again, targeting Captain Ior var Valle’s detachment. Var Valle was known for brave rhetoric, words of fire-splash and splendor, but worms chewed his heart. Every time the deaders so much as grazed one of his ships, he faltered. And finally he broke and ordered a retreat toward the main body of the fleet, which allowed the deaders to gain the initiative.

Atrophus’s art was that of the mortuary circus. For a long while after, people made cutting remarks about how the battle had been its own circus. But if that had been the case, we wouldn’t be able to remember it.

So. We couldn’t scare the deaders into the strait. But we could let them think they had scared us, and let them exploit the apparent weakness.

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