No Man's Land Read online

  Praise for Breach The Hull

  Winner of the 2007 Dream Realm Award

  "There is more than enough great SF in Breach the Hull for any true fan of the genre, military or not."

  — Will McDermott, author of Lasgun Wedding

  "[Breach the Hull] kicks down the doors in a way that allows anyone access to the genre[ . . . ]it read like a bunch of soldiers sitting around swapping stories of the wars. Fun, fast-paced, and packed with action. I give it a thumbs up."

  —Jonathan Maberry, Bram Stoker Award-winning author

  "[Breach the Hull] is worth the purchase. I normally don’t partake of anthologies as a general rule . . . but Mike McPhail has done a great job in making me rethink this position."

  —Peter Hodges, Reviewer

  Praise for So It Begins

  Two-Time Finalist for the 2009 Indy Book Award

  Fantastic, captivating and stimulating reading from cover to cover… The key to the success of this anthology is its flawless writing and exceptional characterization…So It Begins has a bit of everything for everyone. Highly recommended.”

  —5 Moons, Sarah Gentili, Mystique Books Reviews

  [So It Begins] features contributions from some of the best writers of military science fiction at the top of their form.

  —Sam Tomaino, Space and Time Magazine

  "An interesting collection of interconnected stories by a variety of writers. The action is in your face and the military aspects seem to be spot on... a fast read due to the nearly non-stop action."

  — 4 Star Review, Kat Thompson, reviewer

  Praise for By Other Means

  “Reading By Other Means, it’s easy to imagine yourself at the off-base bar on a deep-space transfer station, overhearing the tales of passing space marines, naval officers, and assorted other soldiers. If you enjoy a well-told story in the military SF genre, this is the book for you.”

  —Don Sakers, Analog

  Other Books in the Series

  Breach the Hull

  So It Begins

  BY OTHER MEANS

  (Forthcoming)

  Best Laid Plans

  Dogs of War

  Special thanks to “DAN·E”

  . . . Fix it!

  PUBLISHED BY

  DTF Publications

  A division of

  Dark Quest, LLC

  Neal Levin, Publisher

  23 Alec Drive, Howell, New Jersey 07731

  www.darkquestbooks.com

  Copyright ©2011, Dark Quest Books, LLC.

  Individual stories ©2011 by their respective authors.

  Interior art ©2011 by Mike McPhail.

  Front Cover art “Blue Jungle, Walking Point.” and

  Back Cover art “Blue Jungle, What’s That?” ©2011 by Mike McPhail

  Author-provided icons for their respective stories ©2011 by David Weber, Deborah Teramis Christian, and Judi Fleming

  ISBN (trade paper): 978-1-937051-02-0

  All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  All persons, places, and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Series Website: www.defendingthefuture.com

  Design: Mike and Danielle McPhail

  Cover Art: Mike McPhail, McP Concepts

  www.mcp-concepts.com

  www.milscifi.com

  Copy Editing: Danielle McPhail

  www.sidhenadaire.com

  Contents

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION: On Looking and Leaping, by David Weber

  CRACKING THE SKY Brenda Cooper

  GAMBIT Nancy Jane Moore

  GODZILLA WARFARE Maria V. Snyder

  GHOSTS ON THE BATTLEFIELD Danielle Ackley-McPhail

  COME LIKE A TAILOR Kimberley Long-Ewing

  IMMUNITY PROJECT Ann Wilkes

  IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE Laurie Gailunas

  FALLING TO ETERNITY S. A. Bolich

  UNDER PRESSURE Lee C. Hillman

  LIVE FIRE Deborah Teramis Christian

  VALKYRIES Lisanne Norman

  ENDINGS Judi Fleming

  M.O.V.E. Jennifer Brozek

  TRASHING Phoebe Wray

  AUTHOR BIOS

  BONUS CONTENT

  UPCOMING RELEASES

  USO ENDORSEMENT

  This book is dedicated to:

  The Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) of World War II

  1943 - 1944

  And to all those who followed their example to “Answer The Call.”

  On looking and leaping

  David Weber

  My mom frequently told me I could be impetuous. She usually followed that up with her own pithy variant on the adage to “look before you leap.” Well, I didn’t do that in this case. I agreed to write the foreword to this collection of stories before I’d ever had a chance to look at any of them—one of those leaping before you look moments. And, with all due respect to my very beloved mother, I’m glad I did.

  This collection has a lot going for it. First, and most importantly, the stories in it are all good stories. Some are stronger than others, and different readers are going to pick different favorites, which is as it should be, but there’s not a single piece here that isn’t well worth reading. From Brenda Cooper’s “Cracking the Sky” all the way through Lisanne Norman’s “Valkyries,” and everything in between, they all do what good fiction is supposed to do: they make you care.

  Another thing it has going for it, if you like military science fiction, is that that’s precisely what it focuses on. From Nancy Jane Moore’s tired, cynical, and ultimately very human “peacekeeper,“ to Kimberly Long-Ewing‘s genetically modified female warriors, to S. A. Bolich’s chilling commentary on just what a long, desperate war can do to its warriors, these stories and their characters cast a wide net over what war—and those horribly grinding, not-quite-a-war conflicts with which we’ve become only too familiar—cost and demand of the people caught in them. The technology and the gee-whiz gadgets are here, as well as the thorny moral quandaries and the moral and ethical issues advancing technology throws up, but what’s also here (going back to that first good thing about the collection) are human beings. Human beings doing their best, doing their duty, making moral decisions, and paying the price for being responsible members of their species in situations where extraordinary responsibilities become the norm.

  And the third thing it has going for it is that every author is a woman. As a matter of fact, I’m the only male writer who’s managed to get a word into this book edgewise. (I know my wife Sharon is so going to hit me for that one!) It’s true though that every author in this collection is female, and every one of them is writing in what was long considered a traditionally “male” domain. Well, actually, the brazen hussies are intruding into several male domains at once. There was a time when women simply didn’t write at all. Not properly behaved ones, anyway. Heck, we hardly even let them read! And then there was a time when even the uppity ones who insisted on writing didn’t write certain types of fiction, like, oh, science fiction. And even once we started letting them wear shoes and write science fiction, they still weren’t supposed to write military science fiction! But these ladies don’t seem aware of that. Have they no shame? No decency? Is nothing sacred?!

  Actually, I’ve always been rather fond of uppity women. I write about them a lot, and I’m married to one, and that mother who occasionally cautioned me to look before leaping is one, and I’m hopeful that my twin daughters will grow up to be two more of them, because as a general rule, I don’t think you can ever hav
e too many of them.

  I’m tempted to wade into some very dangerous waters here and suggest that the female perspective on military fiction is uniquely different from the male perspective. Generalities like that are a sure way to get into trouble, however, and it would probably be more accurate to argue that every writer has his—or her—unique perspective on whatever he or she writes. (I was tempted to fudge and go ahead and use that insipid but politically safe “they” instead of “he or she,” yet I courageously resisted the temptation. But I digress. Sort of. Really, I don’t, but I’ll get back to that in a minute.)

  I do think that the women who have written in this collection, though, have all avoided the sort of superficial fascination with big explosions and impressive hardware that tends to homogenize most of Hollywood and all too much of written military fiction into something that appeals to thirteen-year-old males and never gets more than skin deep. To me, one of the essential aspects of military fiction, whether it be science fiction, or contemporary, or historical fiction, is that war costs. It costs treasure, it costs lives, it costs innocence, and it can and often does cost souls. Military fiction that concentrates on the marvels of technology or the brilliance of tactics and strategy, or suggests there’s such a thing as a war with no “collateral damage” to the non-warriors, or in which only the “bad guys” die, is pornography. Military fiction doesn’t have to be dystopian, and it doesn’t have to be a grim indictment of humanity’s catalogue of crimes, but it has to recognize that no matter how just the cause, no matter how noble the warrior’s motivation, no matter how desperate the struggle, war is an ugly, bloody, horrible business that claims the lives of far too many and destroys the lives even of many who survive. The concept of the field of honor is important to many who choose military service as their profession, and its ideals have a central place in attempting to mitigate the horrors of war, but it cannot eliminate them, and one of the functions of fiction is to explore and illuminate the human experience. So good military fiction cannot turn its back on the ugly side of war, the “expenses” side of the ledger sheet, and none of the women writing in this collection have avoided their responsibility in that respect. To the extent that fascination with weapons and technology and glittering strategy is “masculine” and looking below the surface for emotional relationships and connections and consequences is “feminine,” then they have brought a very feminine perspective to their work, and thank God for it.

  They offer technology that ranges from multinational corporations fighting for world dominion with nanotech armies to “death star” world-killing bombs, to the genetic modification of “super soldiers,” to human-cybernetic interfaces, to peacekeeping operations which could be happening anywhere on the face of this planet today. They aren’t afraid to venture into supersonic aircraft and unmanned aerial drones, or to examine the possibilities of war against an alien species in which even the dead can be collected to fight again, but the enemy recognizes only female “choosers of the slain.” In short, they show just as much proficiency with the hardware of war as any of us “traditional” male writers, but they do it all from a perspective which concentrates unflinchingly on the software of war: the human beings caught up in it.

  As such, I think, they offer a resounding answer to a question I personally think should never have been asked—should women write military science fiction? Of course they should! They constitute roughly fifty percent of the human race, the last time I looked. That suggests to me—but feel free to check my math on this, if you want—that they possess roughly fifty percent of the intelligence, ability, sensitivity, imagination, etc., of that same human race, as well. It seems a bit stupid to me to not avail ourselves of all that ability and talent any way we can, and downright silly to try to define the “proper venues” for their exercise. I mean, come on, people!

  And that brings me back to my earlier digression. English is a marvelous language, one that grows and changes year by year. We’re absolutely shameless at stealing from other languages—one of my favorite T-shirts says “English doesn’t borrow from other languages. It follows them down alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.” A sad commentary, perhaps, yet true. So true. But it also evolves in response to changes in thought or changes in prejudice, and we tend to exact a high price from anyone who offends, intentionally or inadvertently, against the current political or social pressures. And so we come to that interesting question of what we do instead of using the traditional male version of the third person singular pronoun. The current practice is to wuss out and use the third person plural—“they” instead of “he” or “their” instead of “his.“ Personally, I think we should go ahead and use the feminine form if we’re going to talk about female human beings, the male form when we’re going to talk about male human beings, and figure out something better than “they” when it could be either. But that’s just me.

  The reason for that no doubt fascinating (well, it was fascinating to me) grammatical diversion, is that one of the things which makes this collection of stories unique shouldn’t. It has a completely female authorship, and it shouldn’t be necessary for there to be a collection of female-authored military fiction any more than it should be necessary for there to be a male-authored collection, a Hispanic-authored collection, an Anglo-Irish-authored collection, or a Tibetan-authored collection. What should matter is how good the stories are, not how the people who wrote them happened to be plumbed.

  At this moment, a female-authored collection makes a lot of sense, because there’s still that silly notion that women can’t write good military science fiction. A platform to demonstrate that they can, and to give them an opportunity to write and to be published in this genre as much as in any other, comes under the heading of A Very Good Thing. But I hope it’s a transitory good thing. I hope we’ll have the good sense to get beyond needing a specialized platform. I tell people at science fiction conventions that if we’re on the right track in seeking gender equality (which I trust it’s evident I think we are), then by the time we get a few hundred years or a millennium down the road, the entire issue is going to have all the burning significance for the people of that time that Pharaoh’s policy towards the Hittites has for us in the early twenty-first century. I think we are headed in that direction. I think this collection is part of the steps we’re taking in that direction today, and I’m looking forward to a time when we won’t need to take any more steps along this particular journey because we’ll have gotten there.

  For now, though, the fact remains that I am the only man writing a single word in this collection. That being said, however, I modestly—but confidently — predict that I will be very far from the only man who’s very, very glad he’s read this collection.

  Oh, and it’s okay for you women to read it, too.

  Cracking the Sky

  Brenda Cooper

  The memory of smoke clung to my hair and inhabited the back of my throat. My boots cracked through a heat-dried veneer of ash that coated low hills. I walked where fire had been three days ago, before it was storm-killed by soaked clouds sent over the Cascades by NorAM command. It would be sweet if NorAM decided to follow the deluge up with some mist or a bit of drizzle, but they’d probably burned their whole weekly weathering credit with the one act. Not that I wasn’t grateful. NorAM’d probably saved our sorry lives. Almost surely. But I was still so sticky with sweat it was hard to watch our thin column wind up the ravine in front of us, much less watch for enemies.

  Nothing moved but us, at least as far as I could see. Not even the air. There had been wind the day the fire had raced toward us (I thought it was set against us, and a few others did, too, but no one in command agreed). The wind screamed through us again the day NorAM created the storm and set it loose on the fire. Everything felt hot, barren, and still.

  It had been pretty here. The ground had been dotted with scrub and yellow flowers. Now it lay grey and hot and still. At least the heat must ha
ve scoured it free of nano-mines. I still half expected a pile of dangers to be headed our way, some scary franken-science thrown out from the illicit labs we were advancing on.

  Alongside all of us, the dogs marched in lock-step, their metal feet occasionally sliding on bits of rock.

  In front of me, Mario and Joe marched side by side, looking way too un-bothered by the sun.

  Kris looked as melted as I felt. Bitch was a bit more cheerful than me, though. “Still no sign of life. We’re going to make it.”

  “They could have sent UAV’s.”

  She had the bad grace to laugh at me. “And ruined your fun?”

  “UAV’s don’t die.”

  “They cost as much as we do.”

  “More.” But people were still good for a lot of things that unmanned aircraft just weren’t so good at. Opening doors, assessing, reading the fear in an enemy combatant’s eyes.

  The first few of our line had all reached a shadowed cleft between two low hills. I trudged up a scant incline near the end, next to Kris, exposed as hell.

  As if they knew we’d been talking about them, the steady echoing thrum of copter blades came up from behind us.

  I tensed.

  “Safe!” Louis called from five people ahead of us. He meant it had told him it was ours, sharing the right codes in the right sequence. The dogs trusted it, too, clanking along without missing a beat. So maybe NorAM had decided to give us more help. Maybe they’d learned something. The UAV’s body was the size of my head, the rotors a stack, the whole thing flying canted a bit forward so the tail seemed to reach for the sky. The sound of its flight made my shoulder blades itch. I squinted, the sun making the silver blades into diamonds too bright to stare at. Why now, instead of after we were closer to the lab?