Endings always hurt, but Vitali Grigorenko never expected a nightmare in orbit. Assigned to command the last flight of the orbiter Baikal, Vitali had started the mission in a nostalgic mood. That went out the airlock when he saw the body tumbling through space just beyond the flight deck windows. A body in NASA blue, not Russian tan. Now he's trying to get to the bottom of a murder in space, and his own country's space program as much a hindrance as a help. It's becoming clear that politics is involved, on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and he's going to need to go clear to the top. A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Forty years ago, Toolan composed the words and music of the famous hymn I Am the Bread of Life, performed in 25 languages worldwide. Today, Toolan is one of the most respected writers of religious hymns in the world; the story behind her work sparks creativity in other artists and musicians. (Motivation)
Katya Burinskaya carries a deadly secret. So when she is summoned to the Lubyanka for a personal meeting with the head of Imperial Security, she fears the worst. However, this meeting does not concern her, but her daughter. Tasha has become entangled with a troublesome genomic prince of the Imperial House, and both mother and daughter may suffer if Katya does not assist Security Minister Chalkov in investigating a family affair of his own, which also involves Prince Yevgenny Yakovlevich. Politics makes strange bedfellows in the new Russian Empire born of human cloning and Cold War genetic experiments. Chalkov was once an officer of the old Soviet KGB. And as Katya's husband often warns, once a Chekist, always a Chekist. A short story of the Grissom timeline. Originally published in the anthology Mortis Operandi.
(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Artist Songbook). This songbook includes all 15 songs from the 2006 release, Jackson's first ever gospel album. Songs: Blessed Assurance * How Great Thou Art * I'll Fly Away * In the Garden * The Old Rugged Cross * Softly and Tenderly * What a Friend We Have in Jesus * and more.
Surrounded by a family who were happy with life in their West Virginia mining town, Janeen struggled against the pressure to keep her head down and conform. A dreamer, everyone said, Just like her father. And look what that got him, dead in the Turkish war. But Janeen knew she was meant for a wider world, and one day it came to her in the form of a broken-down steamer and its mysterious owner.
When Liphrel's family fell too far on their debts, he was sold to the priests of the death god. But his family were followers of the birth goddess, which left him in a difficult position.
All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays. 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 mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice. Her life will never be the same. Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era How would H.P. Lovecraft's famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first? Space: Gernsbeck vs. Lovecraft A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsbeck and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.
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. Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.
The war was over, but where was the peace the victors had promised? Geidliv the Tyrant was dead, and the rogue nation of Karmandios now lay in ruins, its people prostrate before the occupying armies of the five allied nations. But now the winners are quarreling among themselves, and where brothers fight, enemies will enter to widen the gap. Merekhet is a man torn between competing loyalties, tormented by guilt over his past failures. Raised the scion of a Karmandi noble family, he discovered upon puberty that he was in fact the son of a senior war commander of the telepathic People of the Hawk. Yet he could not entirely disavow his mother's people, and thus became entangled in Geidliv's regime and his nephew Khuldhar's doomed attempt to fight it. Now Merekhet has evidence that Geidliv used telepathy and the bioscience of the mer-people to create a living weapon from Khuldhar's genetic material and hid it in plain sight. Worse, a former ally now estranged is seeking that weapon, and must not be allowed to capture it, lest all the world of Okeanos fall to far greater tyranny than Geidliv could ever have hoped to create. Merekhet must regain Khuldhar's confidence, and together they must find the five young men who are the keys to Geidliv's final vengeance weapon.
Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human? Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn't find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi's side, he knows he's found a kindred spirit. But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish. A short story of the Grissom timeline.
