They said war was never tidy. They were right. They also said it was never poetic. That was a lie—only the poets lied more elegantly.
Devon had never liked metaphors. Metaphors were for poets and diplomats and Primes impersonating philosophers. Devon preferred things that moved and shot and exploded in a useful, explanatory manner. His fleet was exactly the sort of thing he preferred: ugly, efficient, and full of people who owed him favors and grudges in precisely equal measure.
They were running a simulation on the Void—again—because the Ark thought practice was cheaper than dying in real time. The Void, for those who’d not seen it, was a training arena designed by Trovi engineers who liked having complete control over death and then made sure the simulations were dramatic enough to be sold later as cautionary tales. Today’s scenario: intercepting a Nol supply convoy escorted by a bond-led frigate. Simple, predictable, and exactly the sort of thing that made Devon grin in that small, dangerous way he’d cultivated.
“Remember,” he told his pilots, “we smash their comms, we muddy the hive-link, and we let their fighters do what they do best—panic in excellent formation.”
“Heartfelt,” muttered Jora, who could fly anything with a cockpit and a stubborn streak. “You sure you didn’t steal that line from training manual number seventeen: ‘How to be a decent sociopath’?”
“You’re one to talk. You exhibit sociopathy at brunch,” Devon returned. Glances. Smiles with teeth. The Void obeyed their commands and their sarcasm alike.
Outside the deck bay, screens bloomed with the pulse-lattice of the Hive. Memories swam through the data like fish through water—old battles, the names of suns no ship would ever see again, the small domestic details of a world that took pride in the size of its nests. The Boid were collection and memory and adaptation. The Nol were collection and pretense and impressive chairs carved with victories they mostly liked to talk about. Where the two met and ground teeth, the Ark sailed.
On the bridge, Devon noticed something he’d never learned to ignore: the way a Bonded’s voice softened when transmitting hive-memory. It was a human tic under alien overlay—like watching a soldier read a bedtime story. Nostalgia was a weapon. It could heal, and it could kill.
They engaged.
The Nol escort moved with precision, piloted by someone with the entertaining habit of thinking the universe was a problem to be solved by administrative decree. They were very proud of their frigate. The frigate was not so proud when Devon’s bomber squadrons drew one-third of its fighters off to chase a glittering, utterly disposable bait that exploded prettily at the right moment.
Devon’s plan was industrial in its simplicity. Draw, isolate, hammer the comms until the hive’s coherence hiccupped. The hive doesn’t die when the comms are interrupted; it stumbles, like a drunk trying to remember a face. Hit hard at that moment and you won the day, or at least you got to tell a decent story afterwards.
Only the universe has a sense of humor.
A Boid shell, a small scouting vessel, detached from the Nol formation and did something unexpected: it sang.
Not literally, because “singing” implies melodic intent and the Boid sang like a machine that had read too many lullabies and was deeply unsettled. It emitted a cascade of memory-tremors—an old hunting sequence, a child colony’s first successful share of spore knowledge, the precise angle at which a Nol Prime’s chair was carved to hide an old scratch. The comms bandwidth flooded with other things: laughter, a recipe for fungus paste, a paean to a particular tree’s bark. The frigate tried to process it and started to laugh as if something absurd were happening in its circuits.
“Weird,” said Jora. “That was… cultural. Did anyone program the scout to do karaoke?”
“No,” Devon said. “But our problem just got existential.” He had meant it as a joke. The Void did not appreciate his humor and crashed the frigate’s simulated comm arrays with an error marked: ‘Too much humanity.’ The Void also corrected itself and resumed. Simulations were attentive like that; they were jealous, too.
On the ground—if there was a ground in space, and there wasn’t, but the metaphors persisted—the Nol were to be congratulated for their confidence. Hybra, somewhere in the Capital with his carved chair and his clean hands, had always had opinions about the Boid. They were, to Hybra, a fungal problem that required pruning. That hadn’t changed with the Bridge. It had only been dressed in new words: efficiency, integration, workforce optimization. Hybra’s favorite word besides ‘assurance’ and ‘legacy’ was ‘compliance.’
Cador had once told him, before he was dead and before his name was something to be invoked like a myth and as frustrating as a tax code, that knowledge without humility was a sharp stone you drop on your own foot. Hybra had polished his shoes that morning and kept going.
The Ark—Devon’s ark—had not forgotten Cador. They remembered him the way a people remember a burn mark on their kitchen table: with a story, lots of swearing, and a small, enduring pride. Cador’s Bridge had given insight and disaster in near-equal measure. You could ask the Trovi; they’d say that the Bridge was a miracle. You could ask a Bonded whose nest was taken and they’d say that the Bridge was a leash. Both would, depending on the hour and the wine, be telling the truth.
Devon cut through the lull and ordered the focused-strike. Bombers staged, fighters funneled, and the hive’s link hiccuped like a dream interrupted. Their plan worked—well enough. The Nol formation staggered. The Hive screamed (narratively) and then reorganized into something mean and brilliant.
And then a cluster of tiny, suicidal craft—hyphid shells shaped like angry pebbles—diverted towards the Ark’s vulnerable flanks. They were small, stupid, and the sort of hazard that made engineers swear oaths the universe did not approve of.
“Weapons hot,” Jora announced. “Thrusters complaining. My coffee is cold. I have three good reasons to be annoyed, and they are all valid.”
“Make it four,” said Devon. “Where’s Kliastar?”
Kliastar appeared on the comm a beat later, his face a map of sleeplessness and stubborn optimism. He had been Cador’s assistant once and had never entirely stopped being useful in awkward, miraculous ways. “I’m here,” he said. “And I am delighted to report I have a mischievous little algorithm that might—might—convince those pebbles they are actually pretty rocks and should stay where they are. If not, we fen-know them nicely into scrap.”
“Your formal tone is unsettling,” Jora said.
“It’s how I apologize in advance for failure,” Kliastar replied.
The pebbles—by some fluke of hive-memory and the Ark’s equally fallible sensors—decided to follow the rock instruction. Whether they thought they were rocks or someone in the Void had a good laugh at everyone’s expense, the pebbles stalled. Devon’s fighters rolled in, and the thing that saved them wasn’t tactics or luck—it was dignity and a bad pun.
When the smoke cleared, they had more survivors than practice had suggested they would. They also had a Nol frigate drifting, its comms half-dead and its captain furiously arguing with his chair about culpability. The Void sent a polite message: simulation success—less casualties than predicted.
Devon’s grin was small and private. “We get to call it a creative victory,” he said.
“You get to call it whatever’s on your paperwork,” Jora replied. “Just don’t sing about it.”
They returned to the Ark where the real politics ever simmered. Hybra was angry, as Hybra tended to be, which is to say he was actively practicing for major seizures of decorum. The Nolic council would have words: precise syllables matched to bar graphs and the occasional cutting anecdote about ancient wars and proper governance.
Cador’s name drifted through the halls like incense. For those who’d known him, it had weight. For those who sought power, it was a lesson in how the world sometimes rewarded curiosity with inconvenience. For Devon and his people it was, mostly, a reminder that the Boid were neither simple nor wholly dangerous. They were complicated, and that was to their advantage.
It’s funny how history loves to be tidy. It also likes to surprise you by being funny in a small, bitter way that makes you spit when you tell it. Cador had built the Bridge to understand. He had done it because he believed that a shared mind might create something new. He did not mean for his discovery to be an assembly line.
Devon, returning to the mess where the pilots wrote marginal notes on their menus, thought about Cador and about Hybra and about the Boid that had sung and the pebbles that had frozen mid-flight. He thought, briefly and inappropriately, about the Ark’s cook and her soup that always tasted like victory and saltwater.
“Do you think,” he asked Jora, “that Hybra ever tasted a Boid forest?”
“Probably not in Hybra’s culinary sense,” she said. “He wouldn’t know a Boid forest unless it came with a signed affidavit.”
“You could always feed him the soup,” Devon said. “See if a chair-on-fire can be placated with broth.”
“And probably get reprimanded for culinary aggression,” Jora mused. “No. Better to let him sit on his carved chair and talk until the chair eats him.”
They both laughed. It was the kind of laugh that meant they’d live to tell the tale and the tale would be slightly worse for the company it kept, and therefore better.
Night aboard the Ark was a private thing. The deck lights dimmed, and the Bonded stuck close to their consoles, listening to the slow memory-drip of the Hive. Devon wandered to the observation window and watched the distant planet they’d left a better place to hate each other from. The Boid, as always, were busy doing what they always did: remembering, gathering, making small improvements no one thought to measure.
From somewhere in the vessel, someone sang the leftovers of an old hunting call. It was a little out of tune and entirely sincere. The Boid answers floated through the lattice like moths around a lamp—curious, dissonant, patient.
Devon thought of Cador and of bridges—of how they could span chasms, or they could be traps. In the end, he supposed, it depended on who was building them and who held the hammer.
“You ever think,” he asked the empty corridor, “that history will call you heroic for something that felt mostly like getting home?”
The corridor didn’t answer, which was polite. The Boid did. It hummed. Whether it hummed in agreement or amusement, Devon could not tell. He liked not knowing. It let him make decisions without reading footnotes later.
And somewhere below, the Hive learned a new note—one it would keep, because Boid kept things. It would be useful later, in some war no one wanted to fight, or in a quiet moment when someone needed a story about how a fleet of ugly ships and better pilots and the odd stubborn trick had saved everyone’s bacon for a week. That is the sort of thing the Boid saved: stories, recipes, a good pun, and occasionally, memory for a man who once bridged a world and paid the price for being curious.
Which, as Hybra would say later in a council that smelled of wax and indignation, was inefficient. And as Devon would add privately, punctually, and with a grin—some things worth having are never efficient.