The Keth design schematics had been flawless.
On paper.
The artillery pieces sat in their revetments like grounded spacecraft—long-barreled, low-slung, wrapped in layered alien alloys that drank heat and dispersed stress through elegant internal lattices. No visible recoil pistons. No brutal hydraulic braces. The Keth had replaced all of it with field-distributed load dissipation and predictive harmonics.
A gun that understood itself.
That was the theory.
Gunnery Sergeant Caleb Raines stood with his hands on his hips, staring up at Gun One — Anvil — like it had personally offended him.
"Alright," he said calmly, voice carrying just enough to cut through the background hum. "Run it again."
The crew didn't argue.
Sergeant Moreno raised a fist. "Gun One ready."
Rounds slid into the breach with a smoothness no human loader would have trusted if they hadn't already watched it happen a hundred times. Lance Corporal Imani stepped back, eyes on the indicators, jaw tight.
"Charge nominal," Pierce called from Fire Direction. "Target grid uploaded. Fire when ready."
Moreno didn't hesitate. "Fire."
The gun didn't kick.
It flowed.
Energy rippled down the barrel in a visible distortion, the round leaving with a sound that was less thunder and more pressure tearing loose. The recoil field absorbed the force, spreading it evenly through the platform.
For half a second, everything looked perfect.
Then the warning tones started.
Not alarms—disagreements.
Stress readings climbed where they shouldn't have. Harmonic compensators began chasing oscillations that didn't exist in the Keth models. The gun wasn't failing catastrophically.
It was arguing with itself.
"Hold," Raines snapped. "Cease fire."
Moreno threw the safeties without question.
The gun settled, field shimmer fading slowly.
Pierce frowned at his display. "That shouldn't have happened."
"No," Raines agreed. "It shouldn't have. But it did."
The Keth liaison—an engineer embedded with the battery—stood frozen, manipulators twitching in tight, uncertain motions.
"This firing profile exceeds expected parameters," the Keth said. "You are operating outside—"
"—combat reality?" Raines finished for him, still calm. "Yeah. That's the point."
Pierce stepped closer, pulling up the data. "We're cycling faster than your recovery curves allow."
"That is unsafe," the Keth replied immediately.
Raines finally looked at him.
"No," he said. "It's artillery."
They ran it again.
Gun Two — Maul — this time. Sustained fire. Reduced cooldown. Human crews shaving seconds because seconds mattered when people were screaming on the other end of the grid.
The Keth system adapted.
Then it adapted again.
Then it began to over-adapt.
Internal compensators started stacking corrections on top of corrections, chasing human aggression like a mathematician trying to keep up with instinct. Heat sinks filled faster than predicted—not because of raw output, but because humans refused to let the gun rest when the numbers said it should.
"Stop chasing perfect," Pierce muttered. "You're oscillating."
The Keth engineer's luminescence flickered—a sign of genuine distress.
"These weapons were not designed to be driven this way," the alien said.
Raines nodded slowly. "None of ours ever are."
Gun Three — Sledge — finally showed the real problem.
Under rapid fire-for-effect, the alien recoil distribution system began feeding micro-stresses back into the barrel lattice. Not enough to shatter it.
Enough to remember.
Hairline patterning formed—stress memory accumulating where the Keth designs assumed none would exist.
"Gun's learning bad habits," Corporal Park said quietly, eyes glued to the readouts.
Raines exhaled through his nose.
"Yeah," he said. "So are we."
He turned to the Keth engineer.
"Your people build guns that never get pushed like this," Raines said. "We build guns knowing someone's going to ignore the manual the first time it matters."
The Keth hesitated.
"In Keth doctrine," the engineer said, "a system pushed beyond tolerance is a failure of discipline."
Raines looked back at the guns—silent now, cooling, alien metal ticking softly.
"In human doctrine," he said, "it's a Tuesday."
Pierce closed his display and looked up. "We can make this work," he said. "But you're going to have to let the guns get ugly."
The Keth engineer absorbed that, slowly.
"You will damage them," the alien said.
Raines nodded. "We will."
"And continue firing?"
"Yes."
A long pause.
Then the Keth straightened.
"Then we must redesign," the engineer said. "Not for efficiency. For endurance."
Raines allowed himself a thin smile.
"Welcome to the battery," he said.
Behind them, the guns cooled—scarred already by hands that refused to fight politely.
And somewhere far downrange, no one would ever know how close the artillery came to failing.
Only that it didn't.
And that was enough.
They didn't stop for a redesign conference.
They stopped to mark where the metal had learned something new.
Gun Two's barrel cooled in uneven bands, faint discoloration tracing stress paths that the Keth schematics had never accounted for. Sergeant Halevi ran a gloved hand along the housing, not touching—listening the way artillerymen did.
"She's holding," he said. "But she's not forgetting."
Staff Sergeant Pierce overlaid the last fire mission with the thermal map. The curves didn't line up anymore. They remembered the abuse.
"That's hysteresis," Pierce said. "We're leaving fingerprints."
The Keth engineer—still standing too straight, still too careful—watched the data accumulate with growing unease.
"These weapons were tuned to avoid memory," the alien said. "Stress should disperse, not accumulate."
Raines nodded once. "That's because your wars don't ask guns to lie."
Pierce looked up. "Say again?"
"You fire when it's correct," Raines said. "We fire when it's necessary."
They ran a controlled drill next. Not maximum rate—irregular rate. Humans were good at that. Start. Stop. Surge. Pause. A pattern designed to mimic panic upstream without warning the gun.
Gun Three answered poorly at first. The compensators overshot. The recoil fields fought themselves. Then—slowly—the oscillations damped.
"She's settling," Corporal Navarro said. "Not back to baseline. Different."
"Good," Raines replied. "Baseline gets you killed."
The Keth engineer's luminescence dimmed, then steadied. "You are teaching the system through harm."
"Yes," Raines said. "And it's teaching us what it can survive."
A new problem surfaced before the hour was out.
Ammunition variance.
Human shells—swarm-optimized, ugly, packed with fragmentation logic the Keth found distasteful—didn't present uniform impulse profiles. The alien fire-control expected obedience. It received improvisation.
Gun One threw a fault.
Not a failure. A refusal.
The breech locked, field shimmer spiking as if the gun itself had decided no more.
Moreno swore once, then stepped back. "Gun One safe."
Raines was already moving. "Diagnostics."
Pierce frowned. "The gun thinks it's protecting itself."
"From us," Raines said.
The Keth engineer stared at the locked breech. "This safeguard prevents catastrophic self-damage."
Raines leaned close to the housing, voice low and even. "Then it's protecting the wrong thing."
He straightened and looked at Pierce. "Can we bypass?"
Pierce hesitated—just a fraction. "Yes. But then it'll let us kill it."
Raines nodded. "That's honest."
The Keth engineer's manipulators twitched. "This violates—"
"—survivability," Raines said. "No. It violates aesthetic preference."
Silence stretched.
Then the Keth spoke again, slower. "If we permit this, the weapon may not last as designed."
Raines met the alien's gaze. "If we don't, the people depending on it won't last at all."
Pierce brought the bypass up, fingers steady. "Once we do this, there's no pretending anymore."
"Good," Raines said. "Pretending's expensive."
The safeguard fell away.
Gun One unlocked.
The next fire mission was ugly. Louder. The recoil fields bit harder, the barrel sang a deeper note. Stress patterns bloomed—then stabilized along new paths, like scar tissue forming where flesh had torn.
Moreno watched the readouts, eyes hard. "She's hurting."
Raines nodded. "So are they."
Rounds went downrange. Grid squares disappeared. The fire mission ended without ceremony.
When it was over, no one cheered.
The Keth engineer finally spoke, voice altered—quieter, stripped of certainty.
"We must report this," the alien said. "Our builders will resist."
Raines wiped his hands on a rag that had once been clean. "Good. Means they're listening."
Pierce closed his display. "What do we call this configuration?"
Raines looked at the guns—scarred now, altered, no longer pristine.
"Field-true," he said. "Because it only exists after someone tries to break it."
The guns cooled in the dusk, alien metal carrying human fingerprints it could no longer forget.
And for the first time since they'd arrived, the Keth engineer understood something the schematics never showed:
Human artillery didn't ask if a weapon would last.
It asked who needed it to last longer than them.
That was the difference.
And it would change everything that followed.
The Keth engineer had no word for the sound the gun made.
It was not recoil.
It was not vibration.
It was memory forming.
Within the lattice of the barrel, stress did not disperse cleanly as theory demanded. It settled. Microfracture analogues aligned themselves along new vectors—inelegant, asymmetrical, persistent.
The system should have rejected it.
Instead, it adapted.
From the Keth perspective, this was deeply wrong.
Keth weapons were designed to avoid harm to themselves. They distributed force so perfectly that no single component was ever asked to suffer. Wear was an accounting error, not an expectation.
What the humans had done—what they were still doing—was teaching the weapon where it was allowed to hurt.
The engineer watched the human gunnery chief stand near the breech, unconcerned with the elevated risk bands now glowing in muted warning hues. The human did not look at the gun as an extension of design.
He looked at it as a companion that would fail eventually.
And planned around that.
They do not expect endurance from perfection, the engineer realized.
They expect endurance from forgiveness.
The Keth safety subroutines—once proud, once absolute—had been bypassed with disturbing ease. Not out of malice. Not out of ignorance.
Out of priority.
The humans had not asked, "Will the gun survive this?"
They had asked, "Who will not survive if it doesn't?"
That distinction did not exist in Keth doctrine.
It should have.
The engineer replayed the firing sequence from a different frame—one that measured intent rather than outcome. The humans did not fire faster because they were reckless. They fired faster because upstream signals told them there was no time.
Lives were being traded for seconds.
Seconds were being traded for fire.
The gun had been asked to choose.
And once freed of its restraints, it had.
The recoil fields no longer chased ideal equilibrium. They damped toward a new stable state—less efficient, more tolerant. Heat bled unevenly now, favoring survivable degradation over uniform elegance.
Ugly.
Functional.
The engineer felt something akin to shame—not personal, but cultural.
We built weapons that refuse pain, the thought surfaced.
They build weapons that understand it.
A Keth weapon failing was a sign of misuse.
A human weapon failing was a data point.
The engineer opened a secure channel—one that would log automatically, permanently.
OBSERVATION: Human artillery doctrine assumes operator desperation as a constant variable.
CONSEQUENCE: Systems must be allowed to degrade predictably rather than resist absolutely.
RECOMMENDATION: Redesign recoil harmonics to permit controlled self-injury under sustained overload.
The words felt heavy. Heretical.
Necessary.
Another firing sequence rolled. The guns roared again—louder now, less graceful. The lattice held. Not because it was flawless.
Because it had learned where it was allowed to break.
The engineer watched the human loaders move—tired, precise, trusting the gun not to betray them even as they betrayed its original intent.
And for the first time since joining the delegation, the Keth understood why the Aurelians were uneasy.
Humans did not adapt by preserving ideals.
They adapted by deciding what they were willing to lose first.
The engineer closed the channel and stood quietly as the guns cooled.
This knowledge would not be welcomed at home.
But it would save lives.
And that, the engineer was beginning to understand, was the only currency humans recognized as real.