The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera Read Free Page B

of the pointless brutality of war. Nowadays everybody knows that, but at the time Analog ’s reviewer called me a pornographer of violence (to my face as well as in print), and I heard Jerry called worse things. I suspect the same happened to Joe when he was in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but I wasn’t there to hear it.
    Joe, Jerry and I changed the field so completely that most people today don’t realize there was a change. (When I took Introduction to Geology in 1966, Continental Drift was a hypothesis; a decade earlier it had been an absurd hypothesis invented by a meteorologist.) Now you don’t have to be a combat veteran to describe the pointless brutality of war, any more than you have to experience combat to describe its horror or to show cynical contempt for politicians and war aims.
    It’s unusual for people who haven’t seen combat to understand what that brutality does to the soldier, however. A few Military SF writers did describe this in their fiction without having been there themselves. Paul Carter, whom I’ve mentioned above, was one. Two other exceptions are Richard C. Meredith and Barry Malzberg. Barry wrote the novella Final War and as editor bought Meredith’s We All Died at Breakaway Station . Though all three had seen military service, nobody had been shooting at them at the time.

    10.

    YOU DON’T HAVE TO be a swashbuckling adventurer to write exciting space opera. You don’t need to be a combat veteran (or even a veteran) to write excellent Military SF. (I haven’t written a better story than Clash by Night .)
    As a reader, all you can demand of either genre is that it tell a good story, the same thing you would ask of any other type of fiction. Every once in a while, though, you may stumble over a real truth here, one that you wouldn’t have found in other genres.
    I hope that you find that to be case in this anthology, or perhaps in some of the stories and authors I’ve mentioned above.
    —Dave Drake
    david-drake.com

CODENAME: DELPHI

    by Linda Nagata
    Karin Larsen is a handler. For eight hours a day, she sits in front of a bank of monitors, overseeing battlefield activity remotely with a series of drones, and directs military personnel half a world away. At times, it feels like a video game. Only when she makes a mistake, people die—and there’s no reset button on reality.

    “ VALDEZ, you need to slow down,” Karin Larsen warned, each syllable crisply pronounced into a mic. “Stay behind the seekers. If you overrun them, you’re going to walk into a booby trap.”
    Five thousand miles away from Karin’s control station, Second Lieutenant Valdez was jacked up on adrenaline and in a defiant mood.  “Negative!”  she said, her voice arriving over Karin’s headphones.  “Delphi, we’ve got personnel down and need to move fast. This route scans clear. I am not waiting for the seekers to clear it again.”
    The battleground was an ancient desert city. Beginning at sunset, firefights had flared up all across its tangled neighborhoods and Valdez was right that her squad needed to advance—but not so fast that they ran into a trap.
    “The route is  not  clear,” Karin insisted. “The last overflight to scan this alley was forty minutes ago. Anything could have happened since then.”
    Karin’s worksite was an elevated chair within a little room inside a secure building. She faced a curved monitor a meter-and-a-half high, set an easy reach away. Windows checkered its screen, grouped by color-codes representing different clients. The windows could slide, change sequence, and overlap, but they could never completely hide one another; the system wouldn’t allow it. This was Karin’s interface to the war.
    Presently centered onscreen were two gold-rimmed windows, each displaying a video feed captured by an aerial seeker: palm-sized drones equipped with camera eyes, audio pickups, and chemical sensors. The seekers flew ahead of Valdez and her urban infantry squad, one