Story Excerpts

To Fight the Colossus
by Adam-Troy Castro

The aftermath of the great war deposited me on a breathtaking port city called Aeskir, on a dazzling world called Aevii.

This was about as fine a place to end up as I could have hoped. Many thousands of worlds across human space had been scoured of life by the savage conflict that would forever be remembered as Cort’s War, but Aevii had survived intact in large part because all the worst fighting had taken place systems away. It resolved itself, or rather the woman the war was named for found some way to resolve it, long before any of the fires got to Aevii. It made the world much more important, politically, than it had been, and there was already talk after the destruction of New London that this should become the seat of the new alliance that would take over after the fall of the Confederacy. READ MORE

 

The Jangler
by Wil McCarthy

“I’m going to switch it on now,” the Witch Doctor said. “Are you ready?”

Tobey nodded.

“I need you to affirmatively consent, out loud,” the Witch Doctor said. “For the camera.”

Which was dumb, because Tobey had, over the past five days, signed or initialed or thumb-printed close to a hundred screens worth of forms. His consent was about as affirmative as it could possibly be. He felt his anger rising. READ MORE