Cutting Corners

by Yoon Ha Lee

Genres: Military Sci-Fi; Space Exploration

Synopsis

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

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: March 18, 2026

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 32

Sample

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. ...