For Gus
Today is Gus Grissom's birthday, so in commemoration, here are my stories in which he appears:
The Grissom Timeline
The War That Came to Houston
In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can't afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.
Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer -- and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.
Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don't hold together.
Two people, one deadly secret -- and an enemy from beyond time and space.
A novel of the Grissom timeline.
Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.
Available from a variety of online bookstores
The Day the War Struck Home
Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She's to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts -- but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF's. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.
It's the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it's the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
However, the intelligence proves incomplete -- the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.
It's a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Available from a variety of online bookstores
The Moon Mirror
Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America's priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been -- until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn't known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.
Love in the Time of Campaigning
As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.
Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can't promise a nomination until he's won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother's chance of re-election, and with it Frank's slot at an Academy appointment?
Always Free at Gus on the Moon
Crisis of Vision
The experiment was supposed to enable Catherine Sullivan to look into nearby timelines, but they kept being bad ones. She did not enjoy watching one after another Mercury space mission go horribly wrong, including one that never even flew in her own world.
How she wanted to see one that went right. Except she forgot the old saying: be careful what you wish for; you might get it.
Mirrored Lives
A visit to Spring Mill State Park by an embittered software engineer. A visit to the Moon's premier settlement by the Shepardsport chief of IT. One woman, two worlds.
The Space Race Trilogy
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
The Secret of Pad 34
Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?
That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.
His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Beach House on the Moon
The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.
But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?
She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mindbending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.
Her life will never be the same.
All three books of the Space Race Trilogy are available in a single omnibus volume, along with two bonus essays.
The Grissom Timeline
The War That Came to Houston
In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can't afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.
Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer -- and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.
Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don't hold together.
Two people, one deadly secret -- and an enemy from beyond time and space.
A novel of the Grissom timeline.
Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.
Available from a variety of online bookstores
The Day the War Struck Home
Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She's to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts -- but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF's. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.
It's the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it's the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
However, the intelligence proves incomplete -- the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.
It's a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Available from a variety of online bookstores
The Moon Mirror
Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America's priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been -- until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn't known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.
Love in the Time of Campaigning
As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.
Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can't promise a nomination until he's won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother's chance of re-election, and with it Frank's slot at an Academy appointment?
Always Free at Gus on the Moon
Crisis of Vision
The experiment was supposed to enable Catherine Sullivan to look into nearby timelines, but they kept being bad ones. She did not enjoy watching one after another Mercury space mission go horribly wrong, including one that never even flew in her own world.
How she wanted to see one that went right. Except she forgot the old saying: be careful what you wish for; you might get it.
Mirrored Lives
A visit to Spring Mill State Park by an embittered software engineer. A visit to the Moon's premier settlement by the Shepardsport chief of IT. One woman, two worlds.
The Space Race Trilogy
Time Slips
What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?
To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America's first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?
Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.
What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?
The Secret of Pad 34
Who would put a ceiling on humanity's expansion into space?
That's what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.
His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.
HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.
Beach House on the Moon
The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.
But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?
She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mindbending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.
Her life will never be the same.
All three books of the Space Race Trilogy are available in a single omnibus volume, along with two bonus essays.