So It Begins
Authors: Mike McPhail (Ed)
SO IT BEGINS
Praise for
Breach the Hull
,Book One in the Defending the Future series 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
"I enjoyed this book and heartily recommend it."
—Sam Tomaino,
Space and Time Magazine
"Pick up Breach the Hull. You're sure to find stories that you like."
—David Sherman, author of the
DemonTech
series and co-author of the
Starfist
series
"[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
"Breach the Hull is full of excellent stories, no two of which are the same. While similar themes crop up throughout, each writer has managed to take the subgenre and make it his own."
—John Ottinger III, Grasping for the Wind Reviews
"A collection of military science fiction from a well mixed group of authors, both new and established. Found it a good source for some new authors to investigate."
—Tony Finan, Philly Geeks
The Defending the Future series
Breach the Hull
So It Begins
By Other Means
No Man’s Land
(Pending)
Best Laid Plans
Dogs of War
SO IT BEGINS
Book Two in the Defending the Future series
Edited by Mike McPhail
Dark Quest, LLC
Howell, NJ
Special thanks to “DAN
·
E” . . . Fix it!
PUBLISHED BY
Dark Quest, LLC
Neal Levin, Publisher
23 Alec Drive,
Howell, New Jersey 07731
Copyright ©2009, Dark Quest Books, LLC.
Individual stories ©2009 by their respective authors.
All interior art ©2009 by Mike McPhail.
Radiation Angel icon ©2008 by James Daniel Ross.
ISBN (trade paper): 978-0-9796901-5-0
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.
Design: Mike and Danielle McPhail
Cover Art: Mike McPhail, McP Concepts
Copy Editing: Mike and Danielle McPhail
www.milscifi.com
Contents
RECIDIVISM
Charles E. Gannon
THE LAST REPORT ON UNIT TWENTY-TWO
John C. Wright
THE NATURE OF MERCY
James Daniel Ross
CLEAN SWEEPS
Jonathan Maberry
WAR MOVIES
James Chambers
THE BATTLE FOR KNOB LICK
Patrick Thomas
JUNKED
Andy Remic
FIRST LINE
Danielle Ackley-McPhail
TO SPEC
Charles E. Gannon
GUNNERY SERGEANT
Jeffrey Lyman
GRENDEL
Jack Campbell
CLING PEACHES
Mike McPhail
THE GLASS BOX
Bud Sparhawk
LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME
Tony Ruggiero
EVERYTHING’S BETTER WITH MONKEYS
C.J. Henderson
AUTHOR BIOS
DEMONTECH TRIBUTE: SURRENDER OR DIE
David Sherman
eBOOK BONUS CONTENT
CONFRONTATION
Charles G. Weekes
This book is dedicated to the memory of:
The DemonTech Series,
2002 – 2008
Authored by David Sherman
Onslaught (January 2002)
Rally Point (Febuary 2003)
Gulf Run (December 2003)
Recidivism
Charles E. Gannon
Dan stared out across the rolling green fields, over two vaporous snippets of cloud and up to the faint, ghostly disk that hovered high in the vault of the deep blue sky. He held his breath and then sighed it out very slowly. A daytime moon always made Dan think of traveling in space. At night, the white disk was solid, not spectral, its bold materiality inviting an exacting consideration of the starkly detailed craters. Dan craved a telescope at those times, felt an amateur astronomer’s call draw him from the moon to the stars. He imagined swiveling the telescope and adjusting the lenses until those distant suns no longer twinkled, but shone fully and frankly at him.
But a moon in the daytime sky was an object of haunting fancy; it seemed to beckon rather than reveal. And so he always daydreamed of travel up, up into the seamless skies that began as cerulean, deepened to sapphire, fell through to blackness—adorned only by the stars that out there, as in the telescope, would have shone rather than winked at him. But that was all a dream—at least for one such as himself. Had he been allowed to study for the doctorate—well, his life might have gone differently. Indeed, everything might have gone differently.