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The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary

By Arden Baker

Boot

Rookie pilot. See also – nugget.

You called us ‘boots’ when we turned up to the flight deck that first morning I laid eyes on you.

The halogen lighting shone down onto the makeshift parade ground with a harsh insistence matched only by your loud drill calls.

You looked the part. Milspec features matched with an impeccably pressed grey uniform. Hair shorn close to the scalp to fit the Z94-OptiGuard Quiklok Aerospace Aviation Helmet that you wore in combat. Broad shoulders and piercing eyes. Tall and built like a true Martian. Rust in your blood.

 

Chaff

Radar countermeasures. Thin dipoles of aluminium ejected into space to fool radar-guided ordinance.

You tried to dodge the question after that first sortie.

I caught you coming out of the head with your towel around your waist and hair damp from the twenty second spray of water that passed for a ‘shower’ on the carrier Cardinal Spear.

“Boss, do you want to grab a drink?”

You mumbled something about getting too comfortable around superiors and strode off, but even I couldn’t miss the way your cheeks lit up redder than a hostile on radar.

Successful disengage.

 

DNI

Direct Neural Interface. Cutting-edge pilot-machine control technology.

It took us a while to get used to having that chip in our heads.

The techs kept the tactile controls in the cockpit though—something about our evolutionary need to use our hands to manipulate things. The result was the same: you pulled up on the stick and your Remora would jet up along a Z-axis climb, only the DNI made it happen so much faster.

It was disconcerting at first. Lots of training focused on keeping our minds in gear during air combat manoeuvres. Panic, think the wrong thing, and you’d end up a red smear against the cockpit.

You were always a natural, though. That’s why you were an instructor, I guess.

The first time I watched you gracefully soar out of the hangar, then dive down into the target drones with your barrels blazing, I knew why they called you Peregrine.

The first time I watched you step back out of the cockpit, sweat soaking your black hair and red flushing your cheeks, I knew you were special.

 

Dance, The

Air combat manoeuvres. See also— furball.

You took your whisky with a splash of glacial meltwater, settled into your favourite chair in the ready room, and told me about the dance.

Your eyes lit up when you told me about the way you felt behind the sticks. It wasn’t a machine to you. It was so much more.

“Wings! That’s what it feels like!” You slammed your fist on the table to emphasise your point. “You know when you’re a kid, and you get those dreams about flying? That’s what it’s like, except sometimes I feel like this is the dream, y’know? Like out there, out in the dance, that’s real. That’s all that matters.”

“What about family? Anyone back home?”

“Nah, came out here on rotation and never left. Someone has to teach you nuggets how to not get killed,” you said.

“My family’s all gone. Bombing. That’s why I signed up.”

You were silent for a moment.

You look younger when you’re out of your flight suit. The squadron jacket suits you.

I put my hand on yours and smile.

“I’m glad you’re out here with me, boss.”

 

E-WAR

Electronic warfare. Includes electronic countermeasures (jammers), remote power dampening, weapon disruption modules.

The reactor spike put the Cardinal Spear onto emergency power for three days while we drifted in the orbit of Io.

You told me this was the second time it had happened to a carrier you were serving on. Microwave power disruption from a cloaked corvette. Everything was down, from maglev launch tubes to atmospheric control, so we carried portable batteries with us and huddled together for warmth under big, insulated blankets.

I wasn’t complaining.

“Don’t worry about it,” you told me as we lay together in your quarters. “If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead by now.”

“Comforting.”

“Sometimes it’s better to leave your enemy wounded instead of finishing the job. It’ll take two support ships and a tug three days to clear us from the field of engagement—that’s four boats out of action.”

“Smart. Then why don’t you shoot at their engines instead of their reactor when you’re out in a dogfight?”

You looked at me with haunted eyes. “You don’t ever want to leave someone adrift or crippled out here. Friend or foe. Shoot them, make it clean.”

I snuggled up closer to you, pulling your strong arms around me.

 

Fox

Missile away.

Say it fast enough that it becomes an impulse. Say it quickly and clearly. Say it three times to make it real.

Fox-two, firing, firing, firing.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

 

G-LOC

Gravity-induced loss of consciousness. Pilots faint during high-g turns as blood is squeezed away from brain.

We’d been tailing an enemy hunter-killer group, playing cat-and-mouse in the Jovian system, when your voice came through the loudspeaker. Scramble. Action stations. All pilots to flight deck.

It was a frigate escort that took us by surprise, coming out of our radar shadow like a hungry shark. The first volley of torpedoes was on its way, and our point defence cannons whirred to life with a dull roar.

I was one of the first out of the tubes. All that downtime spent in your quarters meant I was already close to the flight deck when the call came through.

I kicked in the burn and felt my Remora rocket forward and out of the Cardinal Spear, flipping end over end and racing towards the enemy fighter formation.

Fangs out.

I remember my vision blurring slightly as the g-force slammed me into my seat.

“Wake up, pilot!” you barked over the comm channel.

Nice to know you’re watching.

 

Holy water

Stimulant drugs administered orally or intravenously.

I had vague memories of Communion as a kid, and the pilots all agreed that this was basically the same idea.

We arrived at the ready room to receive our dose of holy water, imbued with the divine power to keep us awake and functional for long periods without adequate sleep.

This was our fifth day in a row without sleep. Our fifth day taking the amphetamine boosters.

Much like its religious namesake, imbibing too much could make you speak in tongues. We’d already lost Jaeger to delirium, and you stood stoically at the front of the room as the meditechs dragged him away, screaming about nothing and gnashing his teeth.

 

IFF

Indication of friend or foe. See also: transponder.

The best part about being deployed to the front was that we avoided the ‘what are we’ conversation for most of a year.

There was no time for our future, or lack thereof. There was only the present, the imminent, the spectre of death that hung over our every move. We saw it in the empty seats in the ready room, the filling morgue, the callsigns scratched from the flight roster.

We felt it most keenly in the downtime between sorties. It was the brutal reality of space combat, but the world outside the bulkheads seemed so much more distant than the ten inches of quad-bonded metaplas armour between us and the void.

I asked you once when you had started drinking early, and hard. It was after the Saturn engagement where we lost Finch and Walkabout, and you had barely said a word since limping back to the Spear with one engine and half a ship.

You fixed me with those hooded eyes and gave me one of your famous stares that felt like it was going to bore through my skull.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, where does this go? After the war. Us.”

You cocked your head—you really did look like a peregrine falcon sometimes. “It’s never a good thing to focus on what comes next. One mistake and we’re gone. Just…enjoy what we have, yeah?”

“Yeah, got it, boss.” I tried, in vain, to hide my disappointment.

IFF signature still unclear.

 

Jink

A short, fast manoeuvre to avoid a threat.

I thought you were looking for a way out of it, but then you surprised me.

Flowers, hydroponically grown, and a real sirloin steak that you liberated from the officers’ galley.

Apology accepted.

Later, in the comfort of your rack, you talked about flying again.

“It’s not good to say this, but before the war, before you—I felt like I wasn’t really living. I just sat there going place to place, waiting for something to happen. Now it’s like I’m alive—really, truly alive—and I can’t imagine going back to how things were.”

“How things were?”

“Peacetime. No wings. No dance. Just endless monotony and training exercises.”

I laughed at that. “I know fighter jocks are dumb, but that’s really pushing it. You’d rather be at war than relaxing on an island somewhere with me?”

“I told you, I know it’s wrong to say that,” he continued, “But I also don’t want to lose you. That’s what scares me. I don’t want to scrub your name off the flight roster.”

“That’s alright,” I said. “I was trained by the best.”

 

Merge

The point in space where two craft meet in an A/A engagement.

“Fangs out, going for the merge,” you said. Calm. Collected. Clipped back like your hair, high and tight. I could picture you as you clenched your jaw unconsciously, thumb pressing down on the gun control release and bracing as you emptied the pin-mounted masers into the target. A blossom of red and orange as the fuel ignited, then extinguished in an instant. Splash one.

I smiled to myself as I watched you dance the ballet of death with the enemy. Your craft pirouetted in a beautiful arc, thrusters blazing a second sun in the dark of deep space as you rotated to face your next target. The masers fired. The enemy craft shattered into pieces.

 

NSP

Neural shift patterning. Prolonged use of DNI allowing for collection of long-term personality, memory, identity data.

“Do you ever feel like you’re losing yourself to this thing?” you asked me as you towelled yourself off.

“What thing?”

You pointed to the base of your skull. “This. DNI.”

“I haven’t really thought about it for a while. It does the job, hey?”

You grunt. “Yeah. I just mean…actually, I don’t know what I mean. Ignore me.”

I pressed. “No, go on—what’s up?”

“You know when we lost Finch? Back at Saturn while we were chasing the Seventh Battlegroup all over the ring?”

“Yeah. Poor fucker.”

“The meditechs were talking about his DNI before. You know everything we do is traced by them, loaded, catalogued, archived? Well, they were saying there’s enough of Finch left in the system to send back to his family.”

I remember feeling an odd twist in my gut. “Enough of what?”

“That’s what I said. They call it ‘neural shift patterning’—doc speak for ‘everything your brain does’. Apparently after DNI sits around long enough it can create a reasonable approximation of a person by extrapolating the data it gathers.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

 

Paint

To scan something with long-range radar and tag as a potential threat. See also: painted, marked.

The Alexandria found us.

We were hiding in the belt, but we knew it was only a matter of time before one of the active scans would detect our drive signature among the cosmic background noise.

We’d hoped it wasn’t the Alexandria. That beast had been crash-jumping all over the outer system, hunting down our carrier groups one by one. One hundred thousand tonnes of pure destructive might. Spinal magnetic accelerator cannons, Lucifer-class ship-to-ship torpedoes, a complete e-war package, and a fighter complement to boot.

Our early pickets matched the incoming drive flare to the Alexandria’s projected deceleration burn. They were coming.

You could have at least tried to hide the excitement in your voice when you told me that you were going to fly my wing on this sortie.

 

Spike

Radar-lock warning. See also: spiked.

“Vampire, vampire, vampire!”

The panic edged into your voice. It’s unnatural. It was the stims and nerves coming back, even if you’d never admit it.

I watched on my display as your Remora rapidly burns out into space, out of the furball.

“Firewalling.” You grunt through the g-force as ten atmospheres’ worth of pressure threw you into your acceleration couch. The red blip followed you close behind. It weaved between your countermeasures like a serpent.

I watched in slow motion as the missile started terminal manoeuvres, corkscrewing and firing the final stage booster rocket.

I saw the radar contact a full second before you did. I screamed through the mic. “Tally, new bandit, high six!”

You moved but he moved faster.

The laser ripped through your fuselage.

I couldn’t feel the recoil as I unleashed my own barrage and painted the sky with the colour of victory.

 

T-ZR 2A

Tetradezine Z-Radiation Variant 2A. Anti-radiation medication, usually provided intravenously following exposure to neutron flare.

Laying in the hospital cot, you reminded me of a broken bird I saw once, back on Earth. Wings folded up and legs splayed.

The meditechs bustled around the infirmary with their chrome instruments and medical charts, adjusting the bio-bed and increasing the anti-rad dose.

“He would have had more luck taking a stroll through a supernova,” said the chief ‘tech. “Those rounds they fired at him were iridium cored. They didn’t need a reactor hit—they just needed to burn him.”

I nodded him away and reached for your hand again. The tissue was cracked and broken, pus seeping through wounds that would never heal.

You were drowning in your own blood, and all I could do was watch.

You never trained me for this.

 

Vitals

Clinical measurements, specifically pulse rate, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure, that indicate the state of a patient’s essential body functions.

On the day we finally turned the tables on the Alexandria, you took your last shuddering breath.

We caught them off guard, slinking away in close orbit of the sun. Our heat shields were raised to maximum, screens polarised, and ablative armour deployed as we sallied forth like knights of old, going to slay the dragon.

I felt the cold fury pour over me as I punched through the enemy warship’s fighter screen, gunning for their hydrazine tanks. The flak field did little to slow my Remora. I was a streak of silver lightning, an instrument of divine vengeance, come to right the universe’s wrongs with cannon and missile and hellfire.

My avionics were fried. Solar radiation screamed a constellation of errors and warnings that I promptly ignored. I hotload the reactor and prepare to deliver my fury.

The Alexandria’s fighters were wheeling to chase me down, so I flipped and zeroed them on my targeting reticule, specks of black against Sol’s blinding corona.

This was instinct. This was kill geometry, a perfect equation written in blood and sweat and carbon isotopes.

I saw your face as I squeezed the trigger.

Splash one.

I saw you laying on the surgical bed with your organs eating themselves from the inside.

I fired again.

Splash two.

The gunmetal pylon of the Alexandria was far above me, two kilometres of destructive brilliance. The savage blue flame of its main drive engine pales in comparison to the sun’s awesome light.

We danced in the orbit of God.

I felt your arms around me, that loving embrace. My fighter rattled with the fury of its final burn.

I kept firing.

 

Wings

Flight certification; see also— flight clearance.

We’d left the Alexandria an eviscerated mess, tumbling into the crushing depths and incinerating heat of our sun.

The ‘techs came and spoke to me afterwards, as I sat on my recovery couch.

They brought with them a host of pills (take one with each meal), injections (anti-rad; you shouldn’t be alive), and a question.

They wanted to send you back home. Or rather, your DNI.

They asked me where your family were, and who would get the most benefit from having you back.

But I know you don’t want to sit in a box to tell your nephews about the Great War, and the Enemy that they cannot suffer to live.

You’d be bored shitless.

I told the ‘techs this. You can’t stay cooped up in a box forever.

They had a solution.

 

You

My love. My Peregrine.

I see you differently now.

You’re faster, sleeker, and no less handsome.

You sit in the hangar next to my ship, itching to get back out into the vast emptiness of it all.

Your body, now, is something more than it once was. You have your own wings, and there’s no need to clumsily pull on the sticks and worry about fragile human needs.

You have the fastest drive engine we had in the machine shop, and the maser cannons of a ship twice your size.

When we go back out into the stars, back to the front, you’ll be by my side again. And we will carve a home for ourselves in the midst of it all, in the dance.

My love.

My Peregrine.

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Host Commentary

By Mur Lafferty

And that was The Combat Pilot’s Dictionary, by Arden Baker.

About this story, the author said, “I wrote this piece after one too many episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I wanted to try something experimental – I’m not a romance writer, but I wanted to explore the impact that frontline trauma has on relationships, with people only moments from death. I also am fascinated with the preservation of the mind after death, and my inner optimist likes the idea of love outlasting mortal constraints. I’ve left the protagonist ambiguously ungendered, because I want the reader to be able to take something out of it regardless of their background.”

This was better than Battlestar Galactica. I have so many opinions on Battlestar Galactica; no show has made me so angry. So much potential to end in a wet raspberry. So I love that this story was inspired by BSG, but had a story arc that made sense and characters that were consistent.

Being in love with a ship is not a new concept, but when I look back, all the stories I can think of are some of my favorites. A Long Way To a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is one very significant example, and the story in clipping.’s Splendor and Misery hip hop concept album is another one that comes to mind. A love that requires only a mind and nothing physical puts one in mind of relationships that began online (the ones that don’t try to catfish you and steal your money, I mean.) The thing that stands between you is also what unites you, the hardware and software.

I was thinking that I wouldn’t want to be in love with a ship, but then I turned it around and wondered, if I lost my husband, would I take the option?

Further thinking brought me around to the issue of consent, like in Escape Pod 1004 “The Girl Who Came Before” by David von Allmen. What if your loved one doesn’t want to become a ship? Is that the kind of thing you put in your will? If you’re writing your will in 2025, will you remember to update it when this technology becomes real?

If the dawn of LLMs tells us anything, it’s that technology must move forward with consent and ethics in mind.

Also, please write your will. It doesn’t jinx you or call death to you. If that were true, then everyone with a will would already be dead. And it makes your loved ones’ lives much, much easier after you’re gone. There’s your public service announcement for the week.

I know it’s been some weeks for you, but WorldCon is much more recent for me, and I wanted to say thanks to all the awesome people I got to meet while there—including new associate editors and finally meeting our co-assistant editor Kevin in person. If you came to the magazines in the modern age panel, thanks for being there, and if you voted for us in the Hugos, thanks for that too! Just a bunch of thanks. We appreciate you.

One thing we covered on the panel was staff payment, and I was very proud to say that we pay everyone involved with Escape Artists, including narrators, associate editors, twitch moderators, and more. But we can’t do it without you. We will always be a free publication, but it does cost some money to compensate folks for their valuable time. There are several ways to support us, but the best way is via a subscription either at Patreon or Paypal. Supporting us monthly helps us stay funded and be able to plan for the future. We will of course accept any one time donation, or any Twitch subscription, too. There are several ways to support us, and if you can’t do it with money, we’d love a podcast review to spread the word!

Find all the donation links in our show notes at Escapepod.org or contact donations@escapeartists.net.

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That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from James Dean. “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.”