Nightshade/PR

If you're a Sci-Fi military Fiction fan, I must suggest the Portal Wars series, by Jay Allan. It's a 3-book set that consists of: #1 Gehenna Dawn / #2 The Ten Thousand / #3 Homefront. Here's a synopsis: Erastus. An unimaginable nightmare. A searing hot world, covered with cracked, burning deserts and sweltering jungles. A hostile planet far from Earth, it was the most hellish place men have ever tried to survive. Called Gehenna by the condemned men sent to fight there, it forged the few who survived its murderous battles into the strongest soldiers in history. Jake Taylor was a New Hampshire farm boy who wanted nothing more than to marry his girlfriend, work on the farm, and maybe one day write a great novel. But mankind was fighting the alien Tegeri and their bio-mechanical cyborg soldiers, and UN Central needed men…men to go to war on hostile worlds like Erastus. Jake wasn’t given a choice, not a real one. He found himself torn from home and family, conscripted for life and shipped to Erastus to take his place in the battle lines, never to return. In this alien hell, Taylor and his cybernetically-enhanced comrades fight their never-ending war against the servants of the Tegeri, the manufactured soldiers they call simply, the Machines. Jake survives battle after battle, rising steadily through the ranks, giving all to the desperate fight to save Earth. But endless combat in hell carries a cost, and Taylor can feel himself losing what little is left of his spirit, his humanity. When he finally discovers a terrible secret…that everything he’d believed, all he’d fought for his entire life, was nothing but a monstrous lie, he must decide who is the real enemy, and how far he is willing to go to right a horrific wrong.

Well, if you're like me, and are fascinated by the things nature and the cosmos can throw at you, try this one for size. "A minor seismic disturbance in a remote section of the Pacific causes barely a ripple of concern for Kai Tanaka, acting director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu. But when an airliner en route from L.A. to Sydney vanishes in the same location, Kai is the first to realize that a mysterious explosion has unleashed a series of massive waves destined to obliterate Hawaii. In just one hour, Kai will lose all he has ever known—including his wife and daughter— unless he can save them from nature’s most destructive force"

And all these years I had 7 pegged as it. Silly me, I obviously should have paid more attention in math class. Try this on for size. There's no hidden meaning behind it, and no point made other than the author's. The Fallen Angel At 8:32 PM on June 16, 2024, Gerhardt Skarda conjured up Lucifuge Rofocale, one of the major demons of the Infernal Realm, and offered his soul in exchange for three wishes. He was granted, and received within 48 hours, irresistibility to beautiful women, the Chancellorship of Germany, and life everlasting. At 11:54 PM on June 16, 2024, Mohammet Achmed ensnared, within a carefully-drawn pentagram, a youthful son of the demon Baal. They flipped a coin - Achmed’s soul against unlimited credit anywhere in the world - and Achmed won. At 1:02 AM on June 17, 2024, Robert Taft Ellington, a world-class Grandmaster at chess, played for his soul against Lucifer himself. He applied the Indian defense and announced mate on the 27th move. Lucifer, who had foolishly accepted a bishop sacrifice without properly protecting his queen, agreed to make him the most popular singer of the decade, with groupies to match. And in Hell, where there is no time or date, and where even location is subject to the whim of its Dark Master, the princes and generals of the pits perched in conclave on a flat outcropping of rock, high above their sullen ruler. “Why does he do it?” asked one, the newest member of the elite group. “Surely he could win a chess game against anyone who ever lived!” “Just as I could win a coin flip,” agreed the son of Baal, “or step beyond the boundaries of a pentagram at will.” “And just as I could have made all women ugly, destroyed Germany, and allowed Skarda life everlasting while toiling in the pits beneath us,” added Lucifuge Rofocale. “Then why?” persisted the questioner. “Hell is teeming with the suffering and the damned. Why even pretend to seek for more? The Dark Master avoids the ones we have now.” “Of course he does,” said Lucifuge Rofocale. “For he himself is damned beyond the suffering the others shall ever undergo. They, like you, have never known Paradise.” “I don’t understand.” “Do you think he enjoys the suffering of the damned?” asked the son of Baal. “Why not? I do.” “But you were born a demon, and he an angel.” The newcomer shook his horned head. “I still don’t see what difference that makes.” “You have all Eternity before you,” said Lucifuge Rofocale. “There will come a time when you comprehend your master.” And as they spoke, Lord Lucifer strode through the lava streams of Hell. Finally, he stopped and, as he had done a billion times before and as he would do a trillion times in the future, he raised his gaze to Heaven. The brilliance of the light seemed to grow in intensity as he stared at it, and an instant later, tears of pain streaming down his face, the Dark Master let his consciousness float upward and outward, joining for the merest flickering of an instant the triumphant and pleasure-filled bodies and souls of Skarda and Achmed and Ellington and a million others, as he grasped futilely for a tiny taste of the Paradise he had relinquished so long ago.

I'm a David Drake fan; I got hooked on his style of writing years ago, the 1st time I read his signature work: Hammer's Slammers. I've been a fan since. This is one of his best(in my opinion), if lesser known works. Something Had to Be Done There's a mistake in this story which a fan who'd been a unit clerk called to my attention. I haven't corrected it for this appearance, but I want to point it out. A character is described as wearing "a Silver Star (medal) with V for Valor." The clerk explained that the Silver Star was by definition an award for valor; there was no additional V endorsement as there might be with the (lower-status) Bronze Star or Army Commendation Medal. I made the mistake because I based the description on a real soldier whom I knew with 2nd Squadron and whom I'd been told had been awarded a Silver Star with V for his courage at Fort Defiance. Obviously I was told wrong. My bet now is that the guy got a Bronze Star with V because he was a Spec 4 and, quite frankly, medals were more a matter of rank than of merit in Viet Nam. (I know of a lieutenant colonel who got a Silver Star for being so detested by his men that they shot down his helicopter when he flew over them on a road march. The loss was attributed to enemy action, of course.) But that brings up the question of truth, which is one I wrestle with a lot. I wrote these stories very close to the period of their setting, and they're as true as I could make them—but what the people on the ground "knew" isn't necessarily the truth. For example, there was a widely hated form of 90-mm ammunition, a shrapnel round called Green Ball (from the nose color) or Dial-A-Dink (from the fact that you rotated the fuse to detonate the round at a chosen distance from the gun; ideally just short of the dink, the Vietnamese, you were trying to kill). It was a complex and not particularly reliable round. We got a lot of it, and it was always the first thing tank commanders burned up during Mad Minutes when they were firing as many rounds as possible into the darkness for sixty seconds. The 90-mm gun of our M48 tanks had a T-shaped muzzle brake. I was told that Green Ball had a tendency to blow off the front half of the brake, and it was certainly true that many of the tanks had damaged muzzle brakes. Actually, the damage (I now know) had nothing to do with the type of ammunition. It was simply a result of guns firing thousands of rounds in jungle anti-guerrilla operations, when they'd been designed to fire hundreds of rounds (at most) during armored battles in Europe. Because we disliked Green Ball, we blamed the failures on the ammunition. So you can't depend on my fiction to tell you the truth . . . but as for how it felt and what we thought, that's real and I stand by it today. Writing short stories and writing novels are two different things—as different as writing prose fiction and scripting for television. There are people who do both superbly well (Arthur C. Clarke above all), but the ability to do one doesn't say much about the likelihood that the same person will be able to do the other. The marketplace today is geared to novels. That's fine, and it's by writing novels that I earn my living. But I came up through short stories, which necessitated me developing skill in writing tight prose. "Something Had to Be Done" is the best I've ever done at packing a story effectively in a brief compass. I'm very proud of it. *********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************** "He was out in the hall just a minute ago, sir," the pinched-faced WAC said, looking up from her typewriter in irritation. "You can't mistake his face." Capt. Richmond shrugged and walked out of the busy office. Blinking in the dim marble were a dozen confused civilians, bussed in for their pre-induction physicals. No one else was in the hallway. The thick-waisted officer frowned, then thought to open the door of the men's room. "Sergeant Morzek?" he called. Glass clinked within one of the closed stalls and a deep voice with a catch in it grumbled, "Yeah, be right with you." Richmond thought he smelled gin. "You the other ghoul?"the voice questioned as the stall swung open. Any retort Richmond might have made withered when his eyes took in the cadaverous figure in ill-tailored greens. Platoon sergeant's chevrons on the sleeves, and below them a longer row of service stripes than the captain remembered having seen before. God, this walking corpse might have served in World War II! Most of the ribbons ranked above the sergeant's breast pockets were unfamiliar, but Richmond caught the little V for valor winking in the center of a silver star. Even in these medal-happy days in Southeast Asia they didn't toss many of those around. The sergeant's cheeks were hollow, his fingers grotesquely thin where they rested on top of the door or clutched the handles of his zippered AWOL bag. Where no moles squatted, his skin was as white as a convict's; but the moles were almost everywhere, hands and face, dozens and scores of them, crowding together in welted obscenity. The sergeant laughed starkly. "Pretty, aren't I? The docs tell me I got too much sun over there and it gave me runaway warts. Hell, four years is enough time for it to." "Umm," Richmond grunted in embarrassment, edging back into the hall to have something to do. "Well, the car's in back . . . if you're ready, we can see the Lunkowskis." "Yeah, Christ," the sergeant said, "that's what I came for, to see the Lunkowskis." He shifted his bag as he followed the captain and it clinked again. Always before, the other man on the notification team had been a stateside officer like Richmond himself. He had heard that a few low-casualty outfits made a habit of letting whoever knew the dead man best accompany the body home, but this was his first actual experience with the practice. He hoped it would be his last. Threading the green Ford through the heavy traffic of the city center, Richmond said, "I take it Pfc Lunkowski was one of your men?" "Yeah, Stevie-boy was in my platoon for about three weeks," Morzek agreed with a chuckle."Lost six men in that time and he was the last. Six out of twenty-nine, not very damn good, was it?" "You were under heavy attack?" "Hell, no, mostly the dinks were letting us alone for a change. We were out in the middle of War Zone C, you know, most Christ-bitten stretch of country you ever saw. No dinks, no trees—they'd all been defoliated. Not a damn thing but dust and each other's company." "Well, what did happen?"Richmond prompted impatiently. Traffic had thinned somewhat among the blocks of old buildings and he began to look for house numbers. "Oh, mostly they just died," Morzek said. He yawned alcoholically. "Stevie, now, he got blown to hell by a grenade." Richmond had learned when he was first assigned to notification duty not to dwell on the ways his . . . missions had died. The possibilities varied from unpleasant to ghastly. He studiously avoided saying anything more to the sergeant beside him until he found the number he wanted. "One-sixteen. This must be the Lunkowskis'." Morzek got out on the curb side, looking more skeletal than before in the dappled sunlight. He still held his AWOL bag. "You can leave that in the car," Richmond suggested. "I'll lock up." "Naw, I'll take it in," the sergeant said as he waited for Richmond to walk around the car."You know, this is every damn thing I brought from Nam? They didn't bother to open it at Travis, just asked me what I had in it. 'A quart of gin,' I told 'em, 'but I won't have it long,' and they waved me through to make my connections. One advantage to this kind of trip." A bell chimed far within the house when Richmond pressed the button. It was cooler than he had expected on the pine-shaded porch. Miserable as these high, dark old houses were to heat, the design made a world of sense in the summer. A light came on inside. The stained-glass window left of the door darkened and a latch snicked open."Please to come in," invited a soft-voiced figure hidden by the dark oak panel. Morzek grinned inappropriately and led the way into the hall, brightly lighted by an electric chandelier. "Mr. Lunkowski?"Richmond began to the wispy-little man who had admitted them. "We are—" "But yes, you are here to tell us when Stefan shall come back, are you not?" Lunkowski broke in."Come into the sitting room, please, Anna and my daughter Rose are there." "Ah, Mr. Lunkowski," Richmond tried to explain as he followed, all too conscious of the sardonic grin on Morzek's face, "you have been informed by telegram that Pfc. Lunkowski was—" "Was killed, yes," said the younger of the two red-haired women as she got up from the sofa. "But his body will come back to us soon, will he not? The man on the telephone said . . . ?" She was gorgeous, Richmond thought, cool and assured, half-smiling as her hair cascaded over her left shoulder like a thick copper conduit. Disconcerted as he was by the whole situation, it was a moment before he realized that Sgt. Morzek was saying, "Oh, the coffin's probably at the airport now, but there's nothing in it but a hundred and fifty pounds of gravel. Did the telegram tell you what happened to Stevie?" "Sergeant!" Richmond shouted. "You drunken—" "Oh, calm down, Captain," Morzek interrupted bleakly."The Lunkowskis, they understand. They want to hear the whole story, don't they?" "Yes."There was a touch too much sibilance in the word as it crawled from the older woman, Stefan Lunkowski's mother. Her hair was too grizzled now to have more than a touch of red in it, enough to rust the tight ringlets clinging to her skull like a helmet of mail. Without quite appreciating its importance, Richmond noticed that Mr. Lunkowski was standing in front of the room's only door. With perfect nonchalance, Sgt. Morzek sat down on an overstuffed chair, laying his bag across his knees. "Well," he said, "there was quite a report on that one. We told them how Stevie was trying to booby-trap a white phosphorous grenade—fix it to go off as soon as some dink pulled the pin instead of four seconds later. And he goofed." Mrs. Lunkowski's breath whistled out very softly. She said nothing. Morzek waited for further reaction before he smiled horribly and added, "He burned. A couple pounds of Willie Pete going blooie, well . . . it keeps burning all the way through you. Like I said, the coffin's full of gravel." "My god, Morzek," the captain whispered. It was not the sergeant's savage grin that froze him but the icy-eyed silence of the three Lunkowskis. "The grenade, that was real," Morzek concluded. "The rest of the report was a lie." Rose Lunkowski reseated herself gracefully on a chair in front of the heavily draped windows."Why don't you start at the beginning, Sergeant?"she said with a thin smile that did not show her teeth. "There is much we would like to know before you are gone." "Sure," Morzek agreed, tracing a mottled forefinger across the pigmented callosities on his face. "Not much to tell. The night after Stevie got assigned to my platoon, the dinks hit us. No big thing. Had one fellow dusted off with brass in his ankle from his machine gun blowing up, that was all. But a burst of AK fire knocked Stevie off his tank right at the start." "What's all this about?" Richmond complained. "If he was killed by rifle fire, why say a grenade—" "Silence!" The command crackled like heel plates on concrete. Sgt. Morzek nodded. "Why, thank you, Mr. Lunkowski. You see, the captain there doesn't know the bullets didn't hurt Stevie. He told us his flak jacket had stopped them. It couldn't have and it didn't. I saw it that night, before he burned it—five holes to stick your fingers through, right over the breast pocket. But Stevie was fine, not a mark on him. Well, Christ, maybe he'd had a bandolier of ammo under the jacket. I had other things to think about." Morzek paused to glance around his audience. "All this talk, I could sure use a drink. I killed my bottle back at the Federal Building." "You won't be long," the girl hissed in reply. Morzek grinned."They broke up the squadron, then," he rasped on, "gave each platoon a sector of War Zone C to cover to stir up the dinks. There's more life on the moon than there was on the stretch we patrolled. Third night out, one of the gunners died. They flew him back to Saigon for an autopsy but damned if I know what they found. Galloping malaria, we figured. "Three nights later another guy died. Dawson on three-six . . . Christ, the names don't matter. Some time after midnight his track commander woke up, heard him moaning. We got him back to Quan Loi to a hospital, but he never came out of it. The lieutenant thought he got wasp stung on the neck—here, you know?" Morzek touched two fingers to his jugular. "Like he was allergic. Well, it happens." "But what about Stefan?" Mrs. Lunkowski asked. "The others do not matter." "Yes, finish it quickly, Sergeant," the younger woman said, and this time Richmond did catch the flash of her teeth. "We had a third death," Morzek said agreeably, stroking the zipper of his AWOL bag back and forth. "We were all jumpy by then. I doubled the guard, two men awake on every track. Three nights later, and nobody in the platoon remembered anything from twenty-four hundred hours till Riggs' partner blinked at ten of one and found him dead. "In the morning, one of the boys came to me. He'd seen Stevie slip over to Riggs, he said; but he was zonked out on grass and didn't think it really had happened until he woke up in the morning and saw Riggs under a poncho. By then, he was scared enough to tell the whole story. Well, we were all jumpy." "You killed Stefan." It was not a question but a flat statement. "Oh, hell, Lunkowski," Morzek said absently, "what does it matter who rolled the grenade into his bunk? The story got around and . . . something had to be done." "Knowing what you know, you came here?" Mrs. Lunkowski murmured liquidly. "You must be mad." "Naw, I'm not crazy, I'm just sick." The sergeant brushed his left hand over his forehead. "Malignant melanoma, the docs told me. Twenty-six years in the goddam army and in another week or two I'd be warted to death. "Captain," he added, turning his cancerous face toward Richmond, "you better leave through the window." "Neither of you will leave!" snarled Rose Lunkowski as she stepped toward the men. Morzek lifted a fat gray cylinder from his bag."Know what this is, honey?"he asked conversationally. Richmond screamed and leaped for the window. Rose ignored him, slashing her hand out for the phosphorous grenade. Drapery wrapping the captain's body shielded him from glass and splintered window frame as he pitched out into the yard. He was still screaming there when the blast of white fire bulged the walls of the house.

Here's a sample to get your mind working on the Science Fiction trail. The name of the story is "Answer" and the author is Frederic Brown. What you see below is all there is, but it's GREAT!!! ***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************** Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the sub-ether bore through the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing. He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies. Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, "Now, Dwar Ev." Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel. Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn." "Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer." He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?" The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. "Yes, now there is a God." Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

I was reading this past weekend, and remembered another book. It won't take a lot of time to read. You may remember it as the poorly done movie "Screamers", with Peter Weller. The actual story is titled "Second Variety", written by Philip Kindred Dick. ( Yes, the same one of Blade Runner fame, even if the book is actually titled something else) Anyway, here it is; free of charge. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32032/32032-h/32032-h.htm

I cannot believe I forgot one of my all-time favorites...

Here's my short list, for starters. TV Shows / Series Terra Nova Firefly Outcasts Penny Dreadful Salem's Lot National Geographic - How to Survive the end of the World (series) Catastrophe (Documentary Series) Movies In Harms Way The Killing Fields Vampire Nation Forbidden Planet Krakatoa - The Last Days Books The Berserker Series - Fred Saberhagen A Prayer for the Ship - Douglas Reeman Into The Out Of - Alan Dean Foster Armor - John Steakley Robopocalypse - Daniel H Wilson The Meg Series, The Loch, and Vostok - Steve Alten And for just laugh your a$$ off pure foolishness - Big Trouble in Little China. Trailer Here -

Not having all the details before now, didn't stop the rush to judgment, did it?

Dude......................that was beautiful. Well done.

These are absolutely fantastic!!!!

Right now i use a 37" TV as my monitor, and I love it. I too can be further from the screen and still see everything I need to. I scaled back from 46" due to it eating up too much space on my desk.

2 Megatons oughta do it quite nicely, and rather quickly.

Catapult my Aunt Fanny!!! Who needs em? Let's just crank it up and brute force it off the deck. Great video.

I think it's been a trying year for most of us, and it's caused a lot of us to have to reevaluate a LOT of things with a new level of seriousness. At least, that's my answer. I'm at a decision crossroads for a great many things now, as I suspect are a LOT of us. I haven't given up on up the hobby that splits being my favorite (tied with reading), but for the present, R/L holds sway, and we'll have to see where things go from here.