Counting Casualties

Counting Casualties by Yoon Ha Lee Yoon Ha Lee | 26 April 2023 Commander Niaja vrau Erezeng is up against an enemy that doesn’t just destroy all the beings, ships, and planets in its path, but also consumes their greatest arts, somehow scratching them from existence everywhere… The Coalition highship’s face changed its name from grace under gunfire to counting casualties when our fleet heard that Bekket-​of-​the-​Spires had fallen to the deadships. Let me tell you about Bekket. I never trod the pale shores or walked beneath the veiled shadows of its silver-​tangled trees. I never climbed the almost-​forever stairs of the spindle cities, never counted the fever-​constellations they made of their stars, never combed the quaint stores for statues lathed out of starship hulls. I never thought of Bekket as a place I might visit among all the thousand thousand worlds. But I knew of Bekket’s poetry. Not all of its people were poets, but enough of them were. Not all of its poetry was beautiful, but enough of it was. The Coalition demagogues especially liked the line about—it had something to do with eyes and ideals and things we don’t see. It’s gone now. When the deadships destroyed Bekket with razor-​fire and erasure-​choirs, all of Bekket’s poetry was scratched out forever from every place it had ever lived. I have a volume of Bekketer poetry bound in old, old paper. It’s hash now, glitched-​out garbage that no one will ever be able to read again. I would have disposed of it, but I couldn’t bear to. So I honor the dead. It was an open question why the deadships weren’t using this ability to destroy our technology base; why they erased our symphonies and soap operas but not our stardrives. Our scientists debated the question, but short of being able to ask the deaders themselves, there was no way of knowing. The going theory was that they were demoralizing us before swooping in for the kill. The deaders, for their part, weren’t taking inquiries. Communication with them was as improbable as hoping that your pistol would wake up and learn the alphabet. We had sent words-​of-​greeting and entreaties in verse, videos, everything we could think of, only to be met with obdurate silence. They seemed bent on burning their way through our worlds. Perhaps we were only obstacles on the way to somewhere else, but we had sent out scouts and all we found was more silence. Buy it Now In any case, the bad news wasn’t just the poetry. I always felt a moment’s guilty gratitude that they hadn’t done away with our computers or communications before remembering that we were still dealing with the death of a world. The people of that world, the animals slow and swift and sweet. The bad news was that Bekket-​of-​the-​Spires was located on the Rose Curve of the Sieve, and no one had realized that the deadships had penetrated so far into the Sector. My name is Niaja vrau Erezeng—vrau because I am neither man nor woman. As far as I know, the only other Erezeng left in the Coalition, or anywhere, is my cousin Damariev var Erezeng, who commands the one-​way run. I did not want to be the fleet highship’s commander any more than I wanted my life to be a crazed patchwork of bullets, angles, the carcasses of ships and the people inside them. But my homeworld died in the razor-fires—the deadships took our calligraphy from us, which hurt me even though I didn’t care about it—and it only seemed right that I serve against them. It was simpler for Damariev. He was indifferent to the joy of shooting things, although he was good at it. But he was also good at loyalty, and he went where I did. The Coalition’s council sent us our instructions not long after the news of Bekket’s fall came. Fleet 18 was to intercept the deadfleet in the Sieve and prevent them from advancing toward the Coalition’s heartworlds, for values of “prevent” that meant “you will probably die in the attempt.” It was terrible work and there was no one else close enough to do it. We were spread thin, and furthermore the void-​storms made it difficult for them to promise us any assistance. I could tell you about the heartworlds, but there would be no point. We would only know about each one’s particular art, the jewel that defined it, when the deadships’ erasure-​choirs sang them out of memory. I remember in the case of Jai-​binai it was political caricature. I hadn’t thought I cared for caricature—so coarse, so savage—until Jai-​binai was dust and bonedrift. Better not to think about the vast possibilities for loss. Fleet 18 had fifty-four ships in it plus the highship. I knew the names of the people who served on those ships, had them written into the secret crevices of my heart, and I knew their friends and follies and fears. The highship’s face remembered them for me, too, but I made a point of remembering for myself. Like most ship’s faces, it had a certain black sense of humor after over a century of service. It had nicknames for everyone, which I refused to divulge in the interests of preserving morale, and it liked to refer to me as “the latest unfortunate” when it bothered talking to anyone else. It also went very quiet after every battle, once the guns sputtered to a stop, when it reckoned the dead. In case the numbers had changed, in case it had made a mistake, in case someone on the list had survived after all. It was never wrong; ship’s faces never were. But it checked anyway. We had been en route for twenty-​nine days when we got the first indication that the battle ahead would be even worse than we had anticipated. I had a scout-​web extended around the volume of space the fleet occupied, but it had holes; they always did. We were lucky to