A worldwide nuclear war is launched by accident! A handful of survivors hope for a miracle. But they think they are doomed. How does a person live when he knows he is going to die? Some carry on as usual – a few destroy themselves in a last mad fling at life.
News from home was getting increasingly more scarce, and Bill Hearne didn’t like it. Even all his work up here couldn’t keep his mind sufficiently busy to fend off his concerns about Fred and the rest of the family dirtside.
All the same, he didn’t want to deluge them with e-mails. If things were getting worse, all that would accomplish would be to increase their own anxiety levels.
And that assumed the e-mails would even go through. From some things he was hearing through the pilots’ grapevine, it sounded like even the backbone providers were starting to have trouble keeping their facilities running.
He had just gotten back to the apartment for the evening and was mulling over the question of whether to e-mail Frank when the door opened and in walked Alice. She was looking tired, although he wasn’t aware of any new problems down at Food and Nutrition.
Before he could ask her how her day had gone, she took the chair beside him and started working on his knotted shoulder muscles. “How are things going?”
“Average.” No, he didn’t want to talk about the autolathe that had broken down, or the problems they were having with the guidance on one of the older landers. There was a thin line between decompressing and going on a tear, especially when you were frustrated by an intractable problem.
“In other words, the usual supply of crap that comes with that line of work.” Alice paused for a moment, suggesting she was speaking from experience. “But it’s not work that’s really bothering you.” She looked at the laptop in front of him, the e-mail application opened on it. “I know, it’s hard not to worry about the people we left back on Earth. I try to tell myself that they’ve got their own worries and they’re probably spending most of their time and energy trying to keep things going.”
She didn’t exactly let the words trail off, but her tone suggested she was leaving the matter open-ended, even uncertain whether she wanted to put her thoughts into words. Of course she was getting all the USDA farm reports, so she’d have a lot better idea of just how bad things were getting on the agricultural front down there, quite possibly more information than either of their families still on the farm.
Might as well open the subject. “So how bad are the big brains in Washington saying the farm situation is?”
“Not good. There’s a lot of places that aren’t even reporting, which bothers me almost more than the ones they do have data on. Is it just communications breaking down, so field agents and farmers aren’t able to get the information in, or are we actually losing these people? Or at least enough of them that the ones who are left are too busy keeping things running to deal with reports.”
“Know about that kind of situation.” Bill didn’t like thinking back to those first few months after the Expulsions started in earnest, especially after the destruction of the old Luna Station and the Kitty Hawk Massacre. There were a lot of reports that got a lick and a promise, or just plain didn’t get done at all — and Flight Ops was still paying the price for the loss of data.
NEW YORK CITY, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of a cavernous office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming.
As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe—ecological collapse, global war, natural disasters—he becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine. Then, just as Mitchell’s predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realizes he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost?
At once an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow poses the ultimate questions of imagination and civilization. The future is not quite what it used to be.
One of the things Ursula Doorne really liked about her peculiar status was how it got her out of a lot of the administrative foofaw that plagued academic departments. With her background in electrical engineering, she was far too valuable dealing with equipment that needed repaired to have her serving on this or that committee, sitting through meetings, filling out documents, and the like.
Except there were always some meetings that one simply couldn’t duck out of, no matter how valuable one was in other areas. Like today, when the head of Science had ordered her to deliver a report on the peculiar behavior of the Sun.
Which meant that she had to pull together all the figures on almost no notice, when she still had very incomplete data. But from the sound of Dr. Iwe’s request, someone higher up wanted to see answers.
Which raised the question of just who was doing the asking. From everything she’d heard, including what Tanner had told her, she was under the impression that NASA was operating on a skeleton crew, just enough to keep essential operations going.
But any anomalies in the behavior of the Sun are essential information, she reminded herself as she completed the last slide for her A/V presentation. Of course NASA is going to want to know about it.
The door to her office opened. Surprised, she looked up at Spruance Del Curtin. “You’re early today.”
“Thought I’d get an early start on the latest data sets.”
“Right now I don’t have any ready.” She explained about the sudden call to make a presentation at the Science Division committee meeting.
Yes, Sprue actually did look disappointed. Could that cocky young smartass actually be discovering actual pride in work that essential but not showy?
Maybe she ought to bring him under her wing a little more, mentor some of that talent that was so often hidden under that I’m-too-cool-for-this exterior. “However, you can help me with the presentation, and get to see a little more of how science gets done.”
In the final book of the blistering trilogy The Hot War, old hatreds and new chances for revenge are unleashed on an already devastated world—as the Cold War becomes a roaring inferno.
In 1952 American cities lie in ruins. President Harry Truman, in office since 1945, presides over a makeshift government in Philadelphia, suffering his own personal loss and fearing for the future of democracy. In the wake of Hitler’s reign, Germany and America have become allies, and Stalin’s vise hold on power in the USSR persists. Unwilling to trust the Soviet tyrant, Truman launches a long-planned nuclear strike on the city of Omsk—killing Stalin and plunging the Red Army into leaderless, destructive anarchy. Meanwhile, the Baltic states careen toward rebellion, and Poland is seized by rebels bred on war. In a world awash with victims turned victors, refugees, and killers, has Truman struck a blow for peace or fueled more chaos?
As these staggering events unfold, the lives of men and women across battle lines, ethnicities, and religions play out around the globe. In Los Angeles, an extended Jewish family builds a future, while the foul smell of a refugee camp in Santa Monica blows in on the ocean breeze. In Korea, a U.S. fighter struggles to bring his Korean interpreter stateside as a full American. In Siberia, two German women fight for their survival in a gulag—and begin a strange, harrowing journey home.
From the terrifying global chess match between superpowers to the strength of individual human conscience, Armistice captures a world that’s been split to its core by the violence only mankind can create. Through the thunder of battle, the clashes of armies, and the whispers of lovers, how humanity will be rebuilt, and who will do it, are the questions that resound in this marvelous work of imagination and history.
Spruance Del Curtin had almost given up on helping Cindy Margrave with her question about the beginning of the Flannigan Administration and how it led to the Sharp Wars. It would’ve been easier if he could’ve gone directly to some of the people he knew would have the answers, but he didn’t have the right connections to just walk up and ask.
And then he was heading out of the station offices after his air shift and a familiar voice called his name. He turned to find Zach, one of the guys he’d been teamed with off and on when he was still working in Engineering.
“I hear you’ve been asking around for someone who was old enough to have clear memories of the start of the Sharp Wars.”
“Yeah, I was trying to help a colleague who’s been really curious about why her teacher is sort of avoiding that subject. We’re both thinking it has something to do with military personnel not speaking badly of the Commander-in-Chief, but especially with so much of the stuff you can find online being suspect, I wanted to hear what someone who had actual memories of the time had to say.”
“In that case, I’m not sure how much help I’d be. I mean, I was still in middle school then. A very precocious middle school kid who was already following the news and becoming aware of national and world events, which a couple of my teachers seemed to find threatening for some reason, but still seeing it through a kid’s-eye-view.”
Sprue kept his pose non-chalant. “No problem. But even those recollections may give us something to go on.”
Zach cast a significant glance at the clock. “Right now I’m a little tight on time. But text me this evening and we can work out some time to reminisce.”
Not what he’d hoped for, but it was still better than nothing at all.
Betty Margrave listened with increasing displeasure to the account of the incident in front of the dining commons entrance. As if things weren’t bad enough already, now she had to deal with some kind of adolescent squabble, with no understanding of why it should even be going on.
When both of her security people had given their accounts of the incident, she looked directly at each of them in turn. “This puts me in something of a pickle. Since I’m married into the Shepard lineage, I have to be very careful to avoid any appearance of favoritism, but equally I don’t want to appear to be excessively harsh simply because of that. It may be best if I handle it as little as possible, and allow someone else to take disciplinary authority. In the meantime, I need both of you to keep a close eye on the situation in case we have another flare-up of whatever’s going on.”
They both promised they would, and she had good reason to expect they’d give a heads-up to the rest of the security team. But as she watched them leave, she realized just what a sour taste the whole thing left in her mouth.
Strictly speaking, nothing about the incident merited a formal investigation. Even trying to treat the Chaffee’s words as a threat would be stretching things, and Betty had a good reason to think that she’d get some strong push-back from the departments he was associated with. Overreacting to a little tough-guy talk would probably be the least of it, like as not accompanied by a little eye-rolling.
Guys go for the direct confrontation, she reminded herself. And often as not it doesn’t even come to blows. They size each other up, talk smack to each other, and then something clicks and one of them backs down. Make a formal Issue out of it, and all you end up doing is disrupting a social process that works, and creating a hell of a lot of resentment.
All the same, it bothered her that she had no idea what had happened to lead to the incident. This sort of thing didn’t come out of nowhere, and she had good reason to believe there was something a lot deeper than she was seeing.
The novels of Harry Turtledove show history balancing on single moments: One act of folly. One poor decision. One moment of rage. In this astounding new series, the unthinkable has come to pass. The Cold War turns hot—and the United States and the Soviet Union unleash their nuclear arsenals upon each other. Millions die. Millions more are displaced. Germans battle side by side with Americans, Polish freedom fighters next to Russian fascists. The genie is out of the bottle. And there’s no telling what fresh hell will come next.
At the heart of Fallout are Harry Truman and Josef Stalin. Even as Joe McCarthy rises in power, the U.S. president is focused elsewhere, planning to cut off the head of the Soviet threat by taking out Stalin. It’s a daring gambit, but the Soviets have one of their own. Meanwhile, Europe’s weak sisters, France and Italy, seem poised to choose the winning side, while China threatens to overrun Korea. With Great Britain ravaged and swaths of America in ruins, leaders are running out of options. When the United States drops another series of bombs to slow the Russian advance in Europe, Stalin strikes back—with horrifying results.
These staggering events unfold through the eyes of a sprawling cast of characters: a Holocaust survivor in a displaced persons camp in Washington; the wife of a bomber pilot and her five-year-old daughter starting a new existence; a savage Soviet fighter waging war by his own rules; a British pub owner falling in love with an American pilot. In the masterly hands of Harry Turtledove, this epic chronicle of war becomes a story of human struggle. As the armies of the world implode, the next chapter will be written by the survivors—those willing to rise up for an uncertain future.
Cather Hargreaves wasn’t sure whether he was glad to be getting home for the evening. On one hand, he was glad that he’d been assigned to the main Safety and Security station here in Grissom City proper, which meant he was able to go home every night. On the other hand, he was all too aware that several other members of the department were stationed out at the Roosa Barracks, monitoring flight operations (such as they were these days), although they lived here in the city. Because of the effort to prevent possible contagion from being brought from the spaceport to the city, they were stuck living in temporary quarters out there, seeing their families only via FaceTime or teleconferencing software.
And how would it benefit anyone if you were to join them, just to lessen your feelings of guilt about their situation?
Those had been Toni’s words when he’d mentioned it to her. And he had to agree that, looking at it from a perspective of efficiency, she was absolutely correct. It was just when you looked at it from a perspective of human social cohesion that he really didn’t like being able to go home every night when some of his people couldn’t.
And it’s more important that you be at your best and able to do your job to the best of your ability.
That too had been a strong argument. Or as Toni was wont to point out, sacrifices aren’t magic and don’t have any supernatural power. But she was a deist, and didn’t view the Creator as the sort of entity to be moved by sacrifices.
As usual, she was already home when he got in. She looked a little weary, but that was hardly surprising when one considered that she was one of the people trying to hold the Internet together while things were falling apart on Earth. Just last night she’d been talking about how many of the really big websites were having momentary outages as one set of servers would drop offline and the routers had to reconnect users to a mirror site somewhere else. Now IT’s big project was trying to make sure everything critical was mirrored up here on the Moon, which meant she was lucky to even get to come home.
When her eyes met his, she pushed the weariness away to look excited for him. “Hi, sweetheart. How did it go, or do I ask?”
“The usual.” Cather hoped he didn’t sound too downhearted. “No major problems, but a heck of a lot of little stuff that sure sounds like people stressing out and not quite having the level of self-control they usually would.’
“Not surprising. We’ve pretty well identified all the critical websites we need to have mirrored up here, in case all their dirtside mirrors go down. Now our biggest problem is figuring out how to expand our server capacity to accommodate that much data. Oh, and I just got an e-mail from one of your clone-brothers over at Shepardsport. Seems he’s trying to track down some rumors about the situation down at Schirrasburg.”
Cather’s guts clenched at the mention. “All I know is that they’ve had someone sick, and they’re worried enough that they stopped all flights in and out until they’re certain it’s not the diablovirus. They should have sufficient supplies to get by for at least another three weeks, although things could get pretty tight by the end of that period.”
“OK.” Toni sounded dubious. “According to what he said, he was hearing two contradictory rumors, one that the guy recovered and the other that he died but someone’s covering it up to prevent panic. And before you tell me about not passing rumors, it looks like he’s involved in trying to quash them with facts, and running short on those. I was just about to see what I could find out when you showed up.”
Cather recalled his wife’s skills as a hacker, that she’d gotten into some measure of trouble when she was younger and not so careful. Of course now she had a lot broader authorization as one of the senior members of Grissom City’s IT team, but there still were limits.
“If you’re going to take a look around, be careful. Not just because of health privacy laws, but because if they’re trying to keep a lid on something serious, they’re going to take information security as seriously as physical and biological security. And considering my own position, they could very well take it as an official action on the part of Grissom City.”
“Got it. Now that you’re home, let’s have supper first.”
“Sounds good. I think there’s some leftover chicken from last night that I can turn into something.”
n his acclaimed novels of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has scrutinized the twisted soul of the twentieth century, from the forces that set World War I in motion to the rise of fascism in the decades that followed. Now, this masterly storyteller turns his eyes to the aftermath of World War II and asks: In an era of nuclear posturing, what if the Cold War had suddenly turned hot?
Bombs Away begins with President Harry Truman in desperate consultation with General Douglas MacArthur, whose control of the ground war in Korea has slipped disastrously away. MacArthur recognizes a stark reality: The U.S. military has been cut to the bone after victory over the Nazis—while China and the USSR have built up their forces. The only way to stop the Communist surge into the Korean Peninsula and save thousands of American lives is through a nuclear attack. MacArthur advocates a strike on Chinese targets in Manchuria. In actual history, Truman rejected his general’s advice; here, he does not. The miscalculation turns into a disaster when Truman fails to foresee Russia’s reaction.
Almost instantly, Stalin strikes U.S. allies in Europe and Great Britain. As the shock waves settle, the two superpowers are caught in a horrifying face-off. Will they attack each other directly with nuclear weapons? What countries will be caught in between?
The fateful global drama plays out through the experiences of ordinary people—from a British barmaid to a Ukrainian war veteran to a desperate American soldier alone behind enemy lines in Korea. For them, as well as Truman, Mao, and Stalin, the whole world has become a battleground. Strategic strikes lead to massive movements of ground troops. Cities are destroyed, economies ravaged. And on a planet under siege, the sounds and sights of nuclear bombs become a grim harbinger of a new reality: the struggle to survive man’s greatest madness.