New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird Part 51

The colonel pa.s.ses him a slim manila folder. Without wanting to, Roger slides out the single sheet of paper within.

"So it was them."

"Yeah." A moment's silence. "For what it's worth, we haven't lost yet. We may yet pull your wife and son out alive. Or be able to go back home."

"Your family too, I suppose." Roger's touched by the colonel's consideration, the pious hope that Andrea and Jason will be all right, even through his sh.e.l.l of misery. He realizes his gla.s.s is empty. Instead of refilling it he puts it down on the carpet beside his feet. "Why?"

The colonel removes the sheet of paper from his numb fingers. "Probably someone spotted you in the King David and traced you back to us. The Mukhabarat had agents everywhere, and if they were in league with the KGB . . . " he shrugs. "Things escalated rapidly. Then the president cracked that joke over a hot mike that was supposed to be switched off . . . Have you been checking in with the desk summaries this week?"

Roger looks at him blankly. "Should I?"

"Oh, things are still happening." The colonel leans back and stretches his feet out. "From what we can tell of the situation on the other side, not everyone's dead yet. Ligachev's screaming blue murder over the hotline, accusing us of genocide: but he's still talking. Europe is a mess and n.o.body knows what's going on in the Middle East-even the Blackbirds aren't making it back out again."

"The thing at Takrit."

"Yeah. It's bad news, Roger. We need you back."

"Bad news?"

"The worst." The colonel jams his hands between his knees, stares at the floor like a bashful child. "Saddam Hussein al-Takriti spent years trying to get his hands on Elder technology. It looks like he finally succeeded in stabilizing the gate into Sothoth. Whole villages disappeared, Marsh Arabs, wiped out in the swamps of Eastern Iraq. Reports of yellow rain, people's skin melting right off their bones. The Iranians got itchy and finally went nuclear. Trouble is, they did so two hours before that speech. Some a.s.shole in Plotsk launched half the Uralskoye SS-20 grid-they went to launch on warning eight months ago-burning south, praise Jesus. Scratch the Middle East, period-everything from the Nile to the Khyber Pa.s.s is toast. We're still waiting for the callback on Moscow, but SAC has put the whole Peacemaker force on airborne alert. So far we've lost the eastern seaboard as far south as North Virginia and they've lost the Donba.s.s basin and Vladivostok. Things are a mess; n.o.body can even agree whether we're fighting the commies or something else. But the box at Chern.o.byl-Project Koschei-the doors are open, Roger. We orbited a Keyhole-eleven over it and there are tracks, leading west. The PLUTO strike didn't stop it-and n.o.body knows what the f.u.c.k is going on in WarPac country. Or France, or Germany, or j.a.pan, or England."

The colonel makes a grab for Roger's Wild Turkey, rubs the neck clean and swallows from the bottle. He looks at Roger with a wild expression on his face. "Koschei is loose, Roger. They f.u.c.king woke the thing. And now they can't control it. Can you believe that?"

"I can believe that."

"I want you back behind a desk tomorrow morning, Roger. We need to know what this Thulu creature is capable of. We need to know what to do to stop it. Forget Iraq; Iraq is a smoking hole in the map. But K-Thulu is heading towards the Atlantic Coast. What are we going to do if it doesn't stop?"

Masada The city of XK-Masada sprouts like a vast mushroom, a mile-wide dome emerging from the top of a cold plateau on a dry planet that orbits a dying star. The jagged black shapes of F-117s howl across the empty skies outside it at dusk and dawn, patrolling the threatening emptiness that stretches as far as the mind can imagine.

Shadows move in the streets of the city, hollowed out human sh.e.l.ls in uniform. They rustle around the feet of the towering concrete blocks like the dry leaves of autumn, obsessively focused on the tasks that lend structure to their remaining days. Above them tower masts of steel, propping up the huge geodesic dome that arches across the sky: blocking out the hostile, alien constellations, protecting frail humanity from the dust storms that periodically scour the bones of the ancient world. The gravity here is a little lighter, the night sky whorled and marbled by the diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off the dying star that lights their days. During the long winter nights, a flurry of carbon dioxide snow dusts the surface of the dome: but the air is bone-dry, the city slaking its thirst on subterranean aquifers.

This planet was once alive-there is still a sc.u.mmy sea of algae near the equator that feeds oxygen into the atmosphere, and there is a range of volcanoes near the North Pole that speaks of plate tectonics in motion-but it is visibly dying. There is a lot of history here, but no future.

Sometimes, in the early hours when he cannot sleep, Roger walks outside the city, along the edge of the dry plateau. Machines labor on behind him, keeping the city tenuously intact: he pays them little attention. There is talk of mounting an expedition to Earth one of these years, to salvage whatever is left before the searing winds of time erase them forever. Roger doesn't like to think about that. He tries to avoid thinking about Earth as much as possible: except when he cannot sleep but walks along the cliff top, prodding at memories of Andrea and Jason and his parents and sister and relatives and friends, each of them as painful as the socket of a missing tooth. He has a mouthful of emptiness, bitter and aching, out here on the edge of the plateau.

Sometimes Roger thinks he's the last human being alive. He works in an office, feverishly trying to sort out what went wrong: and bodies move around him, talking, eating in the canteen, sometimes talking to him and waiting as if they expect a dialogue. There are bodies here, men and some women chatting, civilian and some military-but no people. One of the bodies, an army surgeon, told him he's suffering from a common stress disorder, survivor's guilt. This may be so, Roger admits, but it doesn't change anything. Soulless days follow sleepless nights into oblivion, dust trickling over the side of the cliff like sand into the un-dug graves of his family.

A narrow path runs along the side of the plateau, just downhill from the foundations of the city power plant where huge apertures belch air warmed by the radiators of the nuclear reactor. Roger follows the path, gravel and sandy rock crunching under his worn shoes. Foreign stars twinkle overhead, forming unrecognizable patterns that tell him he's far from home. The trail drops away from the top of the plateau, until the city is an unseen shadow looming above and behind his shoulder. To his right is a dizzying panorama, the huge rift valley with its ancient city of the dead stretched out before him. Beyond it rise alien mountains, their peaks as high and airless as the dead volcanoes of Mars.

About half a mile away from the dome, the trail circles an outcrop of rock and takes a downhill switchback turn. Roger stops at the bend and looks out across the desert at his feet. He sits down, leans against the rough cliff face and stretches his legs out across the path, so that his feet dangle over nothingness. Far below him, the dead valley is furrowed with rectangular depressions; once, millions of years ago, they might have been fields, but nothing like that survives to this date. They're just dead, like everyone else on this world. Like Roger.

In his shirt pocket, a crumpled, precious pack of cigarettes. He pulls a white cylinder out with shaking fingers, sniffs at it, then flicks his lighter under it. Scarcity has forced him to cut back: he coughs at the first lungful of stale smoke, a harsh, racking croak. The irony of being saved from lung cancer by a world war is not lost on him.

He blows smoke out, a tenuous trail streaming across the cliff. "Why me?" he asks quietly.

The emptiness takes its time answering. When it does, it speaks with the colonel's voice. "You know the reason."

"I didn't want to do it," he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to leave them behind."

The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. "You had no choice."

"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here." He pauses. "I didn't have to do anything," he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. "It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable."

"-Evitable," echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F117 hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. "Your family could still be alive, you know."

He looks up. "They could?" Andrea? Jason? "Alive?"

The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. n.o.body is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation s.p.a.ces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know."

Roger looks at his cigarette disbelievingly: throws it far out into the night sky above the plain. He watches it fall until its ember is no longer visible. Then he gets up. For a long moment he stands poised on the edge of the cliff nerving himself, and thinking. Then he takes a step back, turns, and slowly makes his way back up the trail towards the redoubt on the plateau. If his a.n.a.lysis of the situation is wrong, at least he is still alive. And if he is right, dying would be no escape.

He wonders why h.e.l.l is so cold at this time of year.

* ABOUT THE AUTHORS *

Dale Bailey lives in North Carolina with his family and has published three novels, The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.). A fourth novel, The Clearing, is in the works. His short fiction, available in The Resurrection Man's Legacy and Other Stories, won the International Horror Guild Award, and has been twice nominated for the Nebula Award.

Nathan Ballingrud lives with his daughter in Asheville, NC. His stories have appeared in several places, including Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and a number of year's best anthologies. He won the Shirley Jackson Award for his short story "The Monsters of Heaven."

Laird Barron's most recent story collection, Occultation, and novella Mysterium Tremendum both received Shirley Jackson Awards in 2011. An earlier collection, The Imago Sequence, was also a Jackson award winner. His fiction has appeared in Sci Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies and is frequently reprinted in various "year's best" anthologies. He is now at work on his first novel, The Croning.

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo and Sturgeon Award-winning author of over a dozen novels and fifty short stories. She lives in Connecticut with a ridiculous dog and a cat who is an internet celebrity.

Steve Duffy's third collection of short supernatural fiction, Tragic Life Stories, was published in 2010. A fourth collection, The Moment of Panic, is due out soon, and will include the International Horror Guild award-winning short story, "The Rag-and-Bone Men." Duffy lives in North Wales.

Neil Gaiman is the New York Times bestselling author of novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American G.o.ds, Coraline, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and (with Terry Pratchett) Good Omens; the Sandman series of graphic novels; and the story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. He has won numerous literary awards including the Hugo, the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Stoker Awards, as well as the Newbery medal.

Cody Goodfellow is the author of the Lovecraftian novels Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk, as well as novel Perfect Union. He co-wrote novels Jake's Wake and The Day Before with John Skipp. His best short fiction is collected in Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.

Caitlin R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds, and The Red Tree, which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Her next novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, will be released in 2012. Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in several volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Sh.o.r.es; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. A retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) will be published in 2012. She lives in H.P. Lovecraft's beloved Providence, RI, with her partner Kathryn.

David Barr Kirtley's short fiction appears in books such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Living Dead; in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Lightspeed; and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He's also the co-host, along with John Joseph Adams, of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast on io9.com, an interview and talk show devoted to science fiction and related topics.

Marc Laidlaw is the author of six novels, including the International Horror Guild Award winner, The 37th Mandala. His short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies since the 1970s. In 1997, he joined Valve Software as a writer and creator of Half-Life, which has become one of the most popular videogame series of all time. He lives in Washington State with his wife and two daughters, and continues to writes occasional short fiction between playing too many videogames.

John Langan is the author of a novel, House of Windows, and a collection of stories, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. He recently co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters with Paul Tremblay. Langan lives in upstate New York with his wife, son, dog, and a trio of mutually-suspicious cats.

Before becoming a full-time writer, Paul McAuley earned a Ph.D. in botany, worked as a researcher in biology in various universities (including Oxford and UCLA) and as a lecturer in botany at St. Andrews University. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. d.i.c.k Memorial Award; Fairyland won Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards. Novel Pasquale's Angel was honored with the Sidewise Award, and short story "The Temptation of Dr Stein" earned the British Fantasy Award. He lives in London most of the time.

Nick Mamatas is the author of a few Lovecraftian pieces, including the novels Move Under Ground and, with Brian Keene, The d.a.m.ned Highway. His Lovecraftian short pieces have appeared in Lovecraft Unbound, Dark Wings II, and Shotguns vs Cthulhu. With Ellen Datlow, Nick co-edited an anthology of "true" regional ghost stories, Haunted Legends, and currently he edits an imprint of j.a.panese science fiction and fantasy in translation, Haikasoru. His fiction and editorial work have been nominated for the Bram Stoker award four times, the Hugo award twice, and the World Fantasy, International Horror Guild, and Shirley Jackson awards.

China Mieville is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus and British Fantasy Awards; Iron Council, winner of the Locus and Arthur C. Clarke Awards; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; Un Lun Dun, his New York Times bestselling book for younger readers; The City & The City, winner of Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, BSFA, and World Fantasy Awards; his most recent novel is Kraken. Railsea, another novel for younger readers, is slated for 2012. He lives and works in London. He wrote the introduction to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition.

Sarah Monette lives in a 105-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, two cats, and one husband. Her Ph.D. diploma in English Literature hangs in the kitchen. Her first four novels const.i.tuted The Doctrine of Labyrinths series. Themed short story collection The Bone Key, first published in 2007, was recently republished in a new edition. The newly published Somewhere Beneath Those Waves collects other short fiction. She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves and The Tempering of Men) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear. Her novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at sarahmonette.com.

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life's Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man From the Diogenes Club under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His nonfiction books include Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies, and BFI Cla.s.sics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who. Newman's current publications are expanded reissues of the Anno Dracula series and The Hound of the d'Urbervilles and a much-expanded edition of Nightmare Movies. His website is johnnyalucard.com.

Norman Partridge's fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic- "sometimes all in one story" according to Joe Lansdale. Partridge's novel Dark Harvest was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006, and two short story collections were published in 2010-Lesser Demons and Johnny Halloween. Other work includes the Jack Baddalach mysteries Saguaro Riptide and The Ten-Ounce Siesta, plus The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which was adapted for film. Partridge's work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards. He can be found online at NormanPartridge.com and americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com.

Holly Phillips lives in a small city on a large island off the west coast of Canada. She is the author of the award-winning collection In the Palace of Repose and novels The Burning Girl and The Engine's Child. You can visit her website site at hollyphillips.com.

Lon Prater is a retired Navy officer by day, writer of odd little tales by night. His short fiction has appeared in the Stoker-winning anthology Borderlands 5, Writers of the Future XXI, and Origins Award finalist Frontier Cthulhu. Prater has written two novels. He is an avid Texas Hold'em player, occasional stunt kite flyer, and connoisseur of history, theme parks and haunted hayrides. To find out more, see lonprater.com.

Tim Pratt's fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and other nice places. His most recent collection is Hart & Boot & Other Stories. His work has won a Hugo Award and been nominated for World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards. He blogs intermittently at timpratt.org, where you can also find links to many of his stories. Pratt is a senior editor at Locus, the magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, and he lives in Berkeley CA with his wife-writer Heather Shaw-and their son.

Cherie Priest is the author of ten novels including Ganymeade, Dreadnought, and Boneshaker-which was nominated for a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award, and won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel-plus Bloodshot, the Eden Moore series, Clementine, and Fathom.

W.H. Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since the 1970s, striving to write tales that echo the golden age of Weird Tales, yet also revealing his neoteric decadence as outrageous punk rock queer. His books include The Tangled Muse, Some Unknown Gulf of Night, The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep, and Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts. He is the Queen of Eldritch Horror.

Michael Shea learned to love the "genres" from the great Jack Vance's Eyes of the Overworld, chance-discovered in a flophouse in Juneau when Shea was twenty-one. He tilled the field of sword-and-sorcery for more than a decade (Quest for Simbilis, In Yana the Touch of Undyine, Nifft the Lean). Concurrently he wallowed in the delights of supernatural/extraterrestrial horror, primarily in the novella form, and this remains his genre of choice (as can be seen in the collections Polyphemus and The Autopsy and Other Tales). In the last decade or so he has added hommages to H.P. Lovecraft to his novella work (as in collection Copping Squid.) Currently he is writing a trilogy of near-future thrillers. The first, The Extra was published last year; its sequel, a.s.sault on Sunrise is slated for 2012.

John Shirley's influential novel Wetbones blended Lovecraftian supernatural horror with razor-sharp, outlaw street savvy; novel City Come A-Walkin' and the A Song Called Youth trilogy (Eclipse, Eclipse Corona, Eclipse Penumbra) were seminal to cyberpunk. Among his many novels are Demons, Bleak History, and the forthcoming Everything Is Broken. His numerous short stories have been collected in eight volumes including the Stoker and International Horror Guild Award-winning Black b.u.t.terflies and In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley. He was co-screenwriter of the film The Crow, and has written lyrics for Blue oyster Cult. His website is john-shirley.com.

Smith is a novelist and screenwriter. As Michael Marshall Smith he has published over seventy short stories and three novels-Only Forward, Spares, and One of Us-winning the Philip K. d.i.c.k, International Horror Guild, and August Derleth Awards as well as France's Prix Bob Morane. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author. Writing as Michael Marshall, he has published six best-selling thrillers, including The Straw Men, The Intruders, and Bad Things. The Servants was published under the name M.M. Smith. His latest Michael Marshall novel is Killer Move. He lives in North London with his wife, son, and two cats. His website is michaelmarshallsmith.com William Browning Spencer is the author of novel Resume with Monsters-which blends soul-destroying Lovecraftian horrors with soul-destroying lousy jobs-as well as the novels Maybe I'll Call Anna, Zod Wallop, and Irrational Fears. His two short story collections are The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories and The Ocean and All Its Devices.

Charles Stross is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The winner of two Locus Reader Awards and two Hugo Awards, Stross has written eighteen novels and two short story collections. His works have been translated into over twelve languages. His Laundry Files novels and novellas have been termed "Lovecraftian near-future techno-SF thrillers."

Don Webb is the author of fifteen novels including The Double, Essential Saltes, and Endless Honeymoon. He has written over three hundred short stories that have been published in Year's Best Science Fiction, Year's Best Horror, and Year's Best Fantasy, among others. His story "The Great White Bed" earned an International Horror Guild Award nomination and his "anti-novel," Uncle Ovid's Exercise Book, won the Fiction Collective Award. Webb has been writing Lovecraftian fiction for twenty-five years.

ABOUT THE EDITOR.

Paula Guran is Senior Editor for Prime Books and edits the annual Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror series. She edited the Juno fantasy imprint for six years both in its small press incarnation as well as for Pocket Books. Guran has received two Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Award Awards, and two World Fantasy Award nominations. She lives in Akron, Ohio.

Other Books Edited by Paula Guran Embraces Best New Paranormal Romance Best New Romantic Fantasy Zombies: The Recent Dead The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2010 Vampires: The Recent Undead The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2011 Halloween Brave New Love

* ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS *

"The Creva.s.se" 2009 by Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud. First Publication: Lovecraft Unbound, ed. Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse).

"Old Virginia" 2003 by Laird Barron. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2003.

"Shoggoths in Bloom" 2008 by Elizabeth Bear. First publication: Asimov's, March 2008.

"Mongoose" 2009 by Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette. First Publication: Lovecraft Unbound, ed. Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse).

"The Oram County Whoosit" 2008 by Steve Duffy. First publication: Shades of Darkness, eds. Barbara & Christopher Roden (Ash-Tree Press).

"Study in Emerald" 2003 by Neil Gaiman. First publication: Shadows Over Baker Street, ed. Michael Reaves (Del Rey).

"Grinding Rock" 2003 by Cody Goodfellow. First publication: Book of Dark Wisdom #5 (January 2005).

"Pickman's Other Model (1929)" 2008 by Caitlin R. Kiernan. First publication: Sirenia Digest #28, March 2008.

"The Disciple" 2002 by David Barr Kirtley. First publication: Weird Tales #328 (Summer 2002).

"The Vicar of R'lyeh" 2007 by Marc Laidlaw. First publication: Flurb #4, Fall 2007.

"Mr. Gaunt" 2002 by John Langan. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2002.

"Take Me to the River" 2005 by Paul McAuley. First publication: Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, ed. Stephen Jones (Fedogan & Bremer).

"The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft" 2008 by Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt. First Publication: ChiZine, April 2008.

"Details" 2002 by China Mieville. First publication: The Children of Cthulhu, eds.John Pekan & Bejamin Adams (Del Rey).

"Bringing Helena Back" 2004 by Sarah Monette. First publication: All Hallows 35, February 2004.

"Another Fish Story" 2005 by Kim Newman. First publication: Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, ed. Stephen Jones (Fedogan & Bremer) "Lesser Demons" 2010 by Norman Partridge. First published: Black Wings, ed. S.T. Joshi (PS Publishing)/Lesser Demons (Subterranean).

"Cold Water Survival" 2009 by Holly Phillips. First Publication: Lovecraft Unbound, ed. Ellen Datlow (Dark Horse).

"Head Music" 2003 by Lon Prater. First publication: Borderlands 5, eds. Elizabeth E. and Thomas F. Monteleone (Borderlands Press).

"Bad Sushi" 2007 by Cherie Priest. First publication: Apex Digest #10 (August 2007).

"The Fungal Stain" 2006 by W.H. Pugmire. First publication: The Fungal Stain and Other Dreams (Hippocampus Press).

"Tsathoggua" 2008 by Michael Shea. First publication: The Autopsy and Other Tales (Perilous Press).

"Buried in the Sky" 2003 by John Shirley. First publication: Weird Tales #342 (Oct/Nov 2006).

"Fair Exchange" 2005 by Michael Marshall Smith. First publication: Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, ed. Stephen Jones (Fedogan & Bremer).

"The Essayist in the Wilderness" 2002 by William Browning Spencer. First publication: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2002.

"A Colder War" 2000, 2002 by Charles Stross. First publication: Spectrum SF #3, July 2000.