Book Promo
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Threads of Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Ten
“Return with coin or not at all!”
Dagnija Modrisdatter brought nothing but bad fortune to her family, or so they believed. When a merchant offered to hire her as spinster and weaver, her father sent her off.
Adrians Eckelbert searched for the master weaver who made ornate belts. He found her on a remote land-tongue, and brought her back to Rhonari.
Dagnija discovers a different world, one filled with possibilities she had never dared to even dream of. But she must learn to navigate the shoals of Rhonari, seat of the trade lords of the Northern Empire. Spinning comes easily to her hand. Speaking for herself and balancing trade law and family duty? Far harder.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: In Plain Sight (Chronicles of the Fall)
A short story taking place after the Fall
Bryanne Volkov is sixteen and moving from a small town to the capital of the Alliance, as her Grandfather is about to become the head of the entire Volkov Family. And her new home is not much like what she expected . . . the servants, odd, and an Executioner much too interested in the family.
FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: Saving the Spring: A short fantasy (Seasons Book 1)
Jack Randall knew immediately something was off when he pulled up to the old roadhouse. Little did he know that crossing paths that night with the establishment’s beautiful bartender and her handsomely-rugged boyfriend/cook would lead to him recalling his former life as a god – or fighting a rematch with the god who had stolen his memories.
FROM MICHAEL MORGAN: Signs Of Venus & Of Mars: Ladies of Los Cristobol Book 2 (Ladies of Los Cristobal)
“A knight has his armor, as do we women. Our battlefields and methods may be different, but both require the appropriate costume.” A month after Ana Lezama de Urinza spoke those words the truce that kept the peace in Los Cristobal lies in ruins, and every hand is turned against every other. Sometimes, a knight’s armor is the only way for a young lady to stay alive.
Romance, magic, and swashbuckling adventure combine in this action-packed sequel to Ladies, Fish, & Gentlemen
FROM TIM SEIBEL: Freedom Voyages Volume 4: Christmastime in Texas: Road Trips throughout the United States
Embark on a captivating adventure with the fourth installment of the Freedom Voyages series! Freedom Voyages Volume 4: Christmastime in Texas is a visual feast brimming with over 400 breathtaking photographs that capture the heart and spirit of America. These pictures showcase the landscapes, cityscapes, and vibrant cultural events that make Texas unique. It’s a visual record of a December road trip through Texas that will leave you in awe.
This 2000-mile road trip commences in the rugged beauty of Colorado’s Front Range, then continues through the otherworldly lava fields of northeastern New Mexico and into North Texas. Along the way, you’ll make captivating stops at the Capulin Volcano, small Texas ranching towns, and Dallas and McKinney’s dazzling Texas-sized Christmas light scenes. From North Texas, the journey continues south through the county seats of East Texas to experience its Christmas celebrations in quintessential towns such as Paris, Sulphur Springs, Longview, Nacogdoches, San Augustine, Jasper, Woodville, and others before concluding with a side trip to see Galveston fully decorated for the yuletide season.
Freedom Voyages is not just a book — it’s a thrilling invitation to embark on an adventure. For those who yearn to experience America’s roadways vicariously through pictures, thoughts, and experiences, these pages are a gateway to your own Freedom Voyage. Get ready to be inspired!
FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: A Reluctant Sovereign (Family Law Book 7)
When North America attacked the space habitats beyond the Moon they had no plan B if they failed. The Earth Claims Commission was already suffering a credibility crisis and North America’s disastrous failure and defeat left them with no muscle. Far flung worlds and stations were abandoned with no banking, no supply, and no news. The explorers who were owed royalties were cut off too. Lee and her father Gordon weren’t about to sit still for that. If you can repossess a ground car, why not a planet? Lee had standing to be sovereign of Providence but wasn’t all that fond of planets. She didn’t want to be bogged down with the day to day drudgery of sovereignty like her friend Heather on the Moon. Was there any reason she couldn’t have her cake and eat it too? None that she could see.
FROM DAN MELSON: Measure Of Adulthood (The Politics of Empire Book 4)
Kusaan del. It means ‘divine finger’
The Empire of Humanity is locked in a war for survival with the Fractal Demons. Years on, the dice are still tumbling. Billions have died and planets have been destroyed. Meanwhile, an old loose end has resurfaced and forced Grace to confront a mistake from her teenage years – her son by a long-dead lover has lost his adulthood, and only Grace can save him from exile.
But the Fractal Demons initiate a new strategy, and are starting to turn the tide in their favor. Grace is unlucky enough to be assigned to deal with one of their first strikes under the new strategy, and she’s unable to prevent several million deaths.
But she’s learned enough to master her problems, both as the new mother of a two hundred year old son, and as one of those defending the masses of the Empire from assault by the demons. She has grown from her origins, and just because she seems to have a knack for attracting trouble doesn’t mean she can’t handle it. When the divine finger points at her, she steps up to deal with it.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Entanglement
In the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.
Tom Beadle only volunteered for NASA’s neighborhood watch program when his department said it would maybe help him get tenure.None of them counted on the Neighborhood Watch becoming a mortifying political liability when a malfunctioning probe accidently reveals an asteroid hiding behind the larger outer planets, setting off impact alarms– and politicians looking for blame. When their answer is to defund the Watch program and fire all involved, Tom’s only chance to save the earth is to lie through his teeth and try to deflect the asteroid under cover of harvesting rare not-of-this-earth elements. And even that may not work.
FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance (The Hartington Series Book 1)
Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.
Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.
FROM DECLAN FINN: The Neck Romancer (Honeymoon from Hell Book 1)
They’re going to make it to the Church on time. And God help anyone who gets in their way.
Marco Catalano and Amanda Colt have survived vampire legions, unkillable demons, supernatural assassins and a full on army of darkness. With their allies, they have taken down the paranormal Illuminati called simply “The Council.”Now they have to deal with their next threat: marriage.
Can Marco and Amanda survive the preparations for their own wedding? And if they manage that, can they fight their way through their honeymoon?
But the biggest question of all: Who invited the zombies to the ceremony?
FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Martha’s Sons Books One and Two Plus a Novelette: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure (Box Set)
Your parents thought they were emigrating to a terraformed planet. That didn’t happen.
Now you’re second generation on a lost colony world.
You’re one of Martha’s Sons.
Will Peter Dawe’s perilous mission with a brother he despises end in death?A lost starship’s settlers, isolated on an uncharted alien world, manage to terraform a mountain-ringed valley into a rich replica of Earth. Despite their success reproducing the environment they need to survive and thrive, only tenuous forces hold together the human colony on the world of Not What We Were Looking For. The governor’s appropriation of the western settlers’ weapons for the city strains those bonds to breaking point—and then beyond when Peter Dawe’s father sends him to get the weapons back.Twenty-year-old Peter Dawe’s restless nature easily endures the lost colony world’s rigors. His genetic modifications make it even easier. So when Peter retrieves the family weapon, he also brings back a motorbike, a piece of technology no longer available to everyone.
It would be a fine prize to keep to himself. He won it. He earned it. He quickly learns that his brother Simon lies in wait to take what isn’t his. Simon wants more than just the motorbike. He wants Peter’s glory.
But when Peter’s father forces him to take his hated older brother on Peter’s next mission, the pair must not only navigate the city’s perils and politics but learn to work together—when neither thinks the other should be in charge. Their success—and their very lives—depend on it. Or will Peter be proven right that he should have faced this task alone?
This box set contains the first three titles in the immersive Martha’s Sons science fiction adventure series: Simple Service, Long in the Land, and Relief Afar. If you like gripping action, insurmountable odds, and alien worlds, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s tale of a man determined not to let family ties sabotage mission success.Get the box set to start a new adventure today!
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Darkship Thieves
Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space.
Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: DIRECTION
According To Hoyt 
“HAL, what direction are we going?”
“Frank, I’m not sure but I think it’s the wrong direction.”
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Herding the children took effort, after they had slept for that long, but once inside, they sat and listen.
She recounted the tale. Giovanni, and Nino, agreed that he had woken when she had taken the necklace from Princess Lucinda.
He had not even felt her putting it on herself.
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We are going in the right direction, I asked ATHENA, looking around the staircase.
Watch your step, she pointed out as I stepped around a fallen piece of concrete. Yes, as long as the records are accurate.
For the person thinking about building their own secret underground lair, how do you find the first base of your dreams? The answer is simple-check the fire department and city engineer records of locations that you would have to send your crews into because some idiot decided to play urban explorer.
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“Alright, mount up and follow me.” I said.
I’d been taught in courses that leaders were defined as people who could pick a direction and get others to follow them. I was keenly aware that the difference between a good leader, and a successful one, was picking the right direction.
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Great selection of promos today! Thanks!
Thomas looked around at the swamp surrounding the group and sighed. “Not a single trail in sight. Anybody got any ideas?”
Arlene spoke softly, “I remember something about moss on the…north side of the trees, I think.”
Thomas grumped, “Well, that is not the direction we need to get home.”
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She had to obey their direction for that.
Which was not so disconcerting as having to arrange filthy and smelly boots for a spell. She wondered how often archmages had to do something as unpleasant.
Certainly more often than the tales told, she told herself. It was better than war.
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She might also wonder “who discovered these unpleasant spells”. 😉
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The spell is not unpleasant in itself. It’s that the only way to find something is to find where these boots have been.
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I was thinking more of “how did they think up those spells”?
IE What sort of “logic” told the wizards that those items would work together to “do something”.
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It’s merely a matter of backtracking.
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In this case, that’s correct (as I saw after rereading your statement).
But in other fictional spells, there doesn’t appear to be rime-or-reason about the elements of the spells.
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Tut, tut, tut — assumptions, assumptions
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True.
And an extremely sneaky wizard could add stuff (and omit stuff) from his *published* spells so that nobody could steal his work. [Very Big Evil Grin]
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Of course, Chris Nuttall has stated (in his Schooled In Magic series) that once somebody has created a new spell, there will be plenty of wizards who would attempt to figure out how the spell actually works.
IE Once the other wizards knows that something is possible, then it will be easier to figure out how to do it.
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Just add my “like” to this whole subthread.
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I have been looking for an author who has a ‘theory of magic’.
For a counter example, Harry Potter: there’s some implication that magic use is governed by a recessive gene (Hermione, from two non-magical muggles), but where does magic (magical power) come from? Again in the Potterverse, use of magic does seem to exhaust the user physically, at some point. At least the kids seem to wear out. Fanfic HPMOR tries a bit, but I don’t think it succeeds in explaining magic. And clearly Rowling is quite successful without that technicality.
Some concepts rely on ‘ley lines’ (Dresden files uses that, for human magic), but that’s just a one-step indirection. OK, someone can tap a ley line, but what powers the line?
And Fey? They seem to be from some ‘other dimension’ or such – all these creatures ‘naturally magical’ – but again, that seems like hand-waving to me.
I’d argue that Superman is magical, gaining power from the radiation of our ‘yellow’ sun. Can’t explain how that power is harnessed, but no question a lot of energy is out there. Baron’s Dragon Mage series (the one I deleted from my Kindle) does something similar.
Star Wars and midichlorians. Feh. What is the Force? Phlogiston?
I can read books that use magic, and suspend disbelief to enjoy them. But later consideration raises this nagging issue. I can more easily accept deities and divine power, used directly or distributed to favored worshippers. Katherine Kurtz’s Camber stuff runs that line. (I won’t go to ‘where do deities get their power?’)
Any recommendations on what to read that addresses the basis of magic?
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“Use the Phlogiston, Luke!”
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In Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, the demon X(A/N)TH is the source of magic. Any demon radiates magic, it’s just that X(A/N)TH has been in a ‘time-out’ for millennia.
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Well, my book from last week A Diabolical Bargain does some of the theory. So does Spells in Secret.
But while Nick can tell you that incantations work by the Principle of Similarity — it works like giving orders — and Kenneth can tell you that wizardry dissevers the properties of objects so you could get a stone’s resistance to damage without its immobility, if you asked either one why that works, they would probably look at you like a physicist being asked why electromagnetism works.
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In this setting, magic is occult stuff that bad guys use, and what the good guys use against them is a combination of religious ritual and archaeotech: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CR7ZL3S7
I try not to be one for overly lengthy explanations, and the good guys are still figuring out the empirical underpinnings of what works,(1) so don’t expect Brandon Sanderson level discourses on the mechanics.
(1) Typical hero quote from the first book: “The haze of green light surrounding the body contracted to a point, then sunk through the ground. Tradition said this meant that the evil spirit lured here by the necromancer had returned to the underworld, and I personally saw no reason to contradict Tradition on this point.”
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It meant the cold air reached him more easily. He grimaced. At least he did not have to worry about direction. He strode on, along the path. Cold breezes drew off any warmth from the effort.
He came around a bend, and a wolf stood ahead. Enormous, black as night.
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The hallways felt as intricate as a goblin lair, but without goblin logic. It was simple enough to go back and find the servants bowing them into the room where Carolus and Aurelie already waited.
It was easier to pass unnoticed in the great hall. Here Gormain and Florio did not distract.
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“It is too late to change your career,” they said. “You stopped coding in now long-obsolete languages over 30 years ago. No way you can pick up modern DevOps and SRE in the time you have left before either you quit or are forced out.”
“We’ll see about that,” I thought. But now I need more than an AI assistant… And there are no officially-sanctioned shortcuts.
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I’m not a programmer (the last program I wrote was in FORTRAN), but as my sixtieth birthday recedes behind me, I kind of understand your narrator’s worry.
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Yep.
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As we worked our way through the calculations, hoping that we’d correctly identified all the stars in that ancient “map,” more on the order of a database of stars by various spectroscopic characteristics, I kept thinking about the book I’d read as a kid, back before First Contact. It had already been old when I found it in my grandparents’ attic, its pages brittle and its binding fragile — for all I knew, it might’ve been older than humanity’s actual space programs.
It was set in the far distant future, and told the story of a young man who’d discovered an ancient artifact, a bowl set with an intricate pattern of jewels that proved to be a star map leading back to the ultimate source of the mysterious black stones he’d been pursuing throughout the book, and apparently a previous book that I never did find. At the age of twelve, I hadn’t thought much about the idea of an ancient star map put in a durable form like that. Sure, I’d read enough the Apollo moon landings and the various robotic probes to know about needing to aim your spacecraft at where your target will be, not where it is in the sky now, but the wider implications never really sunk in, so I happily swallowed the Space Is An Ocean trope and enjoyed the protagonist’s triumph of finding that ancient world-city, long abandoned by its builders.
Now I understand that the galaxy doesn’t rotate like a giant solid disk. Instead, each star and its family of planets and moons follows an orbit around the giant black hole at the galactic core. As a result, stars aren’t going to maintain the same positions relative to one another over centuries, let alone hundreds of millions of years, any more than planets and moons do within a system. Which means that our treasure hunt is going to be a lot more difficult than the quest of the protagonist of that old book.
But if we succeed, we’ll find treasure more precious than any gem: knowledge about the mysterious ancient civilization that spread across this part of the galaxy back when Dimetrodon and its fellow proto-mammals wandered Earth’s continents. And if we’re lucky, maybe even information about what brought that civilization down, and whether it had anything to do with the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, which led to the long eclipse of mammals by the dinosaurs.
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“We may be lost, we don’t know where we are going, but we are making good time”.
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Not a vignette, but you’ll recall some years back, there was a popular British boy band called One Direction. Not surprisingly, my youngest daughter was a fan. No problem there — they were a boy band, and they did what boy bands do: sing romantic songs in a non-threatening way. But I asked my daughter, “Tell me the truth, is it their accents?”
Their accents, she admitted, were a large part of their appeal!
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“Look,” said the detective, “as long as you can follow directions, everything will be cool, and we’ll get this thing straightened out.” He pointed to the door. “You’re even free to go outside. Just stay in the marked area.”
Kevin thought, “These are the politest cops who’ve ever arrested anyone.”
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Kevin wandered out of the police station into a landscaped patio, complete with benches and shade. Mindlessly, he pulled out a cigarette. A cop whistled shrilly and pointed, saying, “No, it’s okay, just make sure you use the butt can.”
“This is no random encounter,” Keven thought. “He’s watching me.”
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As hours passed, Kevin wondered what the police were doing. They hadn’t called him back inside, and they hadn’t turned him loose. He didn’t know where to go. While the detective told him to remain in the “marked area,” he couldn’t actually identify the marks. So he stayed put, miserably.
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”The path to enlightenment can only be found within.”
I stared at the old monk sitting on the boulder. I’d become separated from my exploration group and the stones showed no footprints.
”No, I asked which way the others went.”
He smiled. “In both cases, my child, you lack direction.”
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Bastian led us through the gateway into the Beast Garden, onto a wide cobblestone path, angled downhill. “People must get pretty tired hiking up the slope when they want to leave,” Chloe said.
“They had better,” Bastian replied. “The head-keeper has been known to tell people that we release the bear promptly after the closing of the gates,” Bastian said. “It’s all nonsense, because I’m in charge of closing the gates, and I wouldn’t do such a thing. And old Imre the bear wouldn’t hurt anyone, even if I did.”
“I’m sure it motivates people to leave when they’re supposed to,” I told him.
I had been to the Beast Garden before, even at night, but the gas lamps had been burning then. Lit by stars and a gibbous moon, and the backwash from the street lamps of Haupstadt, the Beast Garden seemed less…tame than usual. The path curved past a waist-high hedge backed by an eight-foot fence with slats just wide enough to see through.
Bastian gestured towards it. “That’s where Imre lives,” he said. Through the slats, we could just see the dark opening of the bear’s cave with a pond just large enough for him to cool himself off on a summer’s day.
The path continued deeper into the Beast Garden. A doe wandered across the cobblestone path in front of us, too used to humans to startle or dash off. It paused and turned large dark eyes toward us, glittering in the dim light. We waited for the deer to pass, and then Bastian led us to the wolves’ enclosure.
This was laid out similarly to the bear’s, except that the walls were not quite so tall. Bastian walked around to the side and opened the gate. “I fed them just before I headed for the front gate,” he said. “They may not like you very much, but I don’t think they’ll cause trouble either.”
He tried to leave Chloe outside the gate, but of course, she would have none of it.
“Where Maxim goes, I go,” she said firmly. “And if your pets put so much as a scratch on him, I’m going to stick a knife in them.” Chloe was firmly convinced that I was incapable of looking after myself. This may or may not have had anything to do with a certain early adventure of ours, where she had found me unconscious and wedged under a couple of large stones.
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He did not like the direction of their thoughts, but he could hardly say they were ill-founded. “Always the problem. Even if I came here wearing one, no doubt Walkelin could have forged it so that it harmed you and not me.” He thought for a moment. “To track you, which I would not fear. That would be a danger.”
He glanced between them. “How many would you need?”
Even the brown-haired girl glared.
“I mean, would fifty suffice? I do not think I could get more. I might not even get that many.” His heart hammered out the moments.
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It began in the shop.
At least, at the shop, the direction became clear. Before that many different ways were open.
Lady Violetta eyed the bears in all their shades of brown.
“Ah those bears, I remember those,” her father said heartily. “They’re useful for magical studies.”
She eyed him.
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A clear look at the forest did not encourage her. It was dark, and showed no signs of other clearings in it.
It was a road, she reminded herself. And a well-built one. She would go down it, because if there were a castle higher up, it would be visible.
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Off Topic
23 and Me declares bankruptcy. Selling assets.
Might be prudent to clean up or delete anything in an account, while one still can.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/23/dna-testing-company-23andme-files-for-bankruptcy-protection-ceo-resigns/
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download, maybe.
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“So, then, are you ready for a five-minute introduction to IFS? A taste before the meal?” Carlsson was getting right down to it; but, Gordon was finding, that was quite the Redside thing.
“Well, first you can show and tell me what IFS actually is.” And then we can move on to what it’s good for, besides vague and foggy hope or hype. He had not come the millions of miles here, with a Federation expeditionary fleet on his civilian ship’s heels no less, to fart around.
“IFS is a unique Martian original; they could’a done it on the Moon, but didn’t bother in the old days, and no way the Glo-Fed would let ’em do it there now.
“Indirect Fire Sport shooting. Possible because, as the old saying goes, small arms here shoot like artillery back on Earth. What’s the biggest force on a bullet in flight, there?”
“Air drag. Of course it’s very nearly in the direction of motion, so cross winds and gravity pull you off target far more readily.”
Carlsson grinned. “So many wetfeet miss that. So you know our air pressure here is, round numbers, a hundredth of Earth’s? The cold and the CO2 air make it denser, but still, it’s almost true ‘a 30 caliber here flies like a 30 inch shell there’ — magical effects on achievable range. So aimed indirect small arms fire is often about as good as your fire direction. Here.” He walked to a wooden counter, flipped part of it back longways like a lid. Revealing a velvet-padded table underneath with… hardware.
“This is a near-stock Level Zero .30-06 IFS machine rest model. Prepped for surface conditions, which is why the servostopper on the muzzle and the enclosed brassbox — they keep the dust out of the mechanism and let you pressurize the action space with purge/coolant gas. Mated to a classic 24″ active length barrel, giving you a nominal 3000 feet per second at the muzzle easily. Care to guess how far this can shoot?”
“You mean, period? Maximum possible range? Just doing vacuum range, I get the usual crazy answer… um, a hundred and forty miles or so.” (Pure vee-squared over g wasn’t hard, though Gordon was a tad relieved he’d used 12 feet per second squared for g, not 32.)
Carlsson gave him a slow-dawning, sunny smile. “Take half of it, in vyorst not statue miles, and it can be done and this little baby has done, going all-out for range as tracked by endpoint radar or clidar.
“And, since you looked puzzled there, versts. Martian nautical miles, from our krasny-Russian contingent updating their old pre-Commie units for a new world. If you set a fut, new Russian foot to 1.1 English feet not the old exact 1 of Peter the Great, a new sazhen is 7.7 of the feet you’d be used to; a statute mile is 4800 Russian feet, by the way.” (He’d said fut to rhyme with cute.)
“Take 420 new sazhen, or 462 of Peter’s old sazhen, instead of the classic 500, as the size of your new verst — you get a match to the minute of arc on the mean circumference of Mars good to several inches: 3234 old feet of 0.3048 meters exactly.”
Andrews must’ve been looking bemused. “This gun really does shoot bullets forty-two statue miles; it’s not as insane as it sounds, roughly 0.42 miles or 740 yards through sea-level air on Earth. Not even stretch range for a classic .30-06.”
Gordon said, slowly, “So then a second of arc here is seven… sazhen, or 49 new Russian feet or 53.9 American feet. Cool. And, yes, an old .30-06 might keep 1600 out of 3000 fps at 750-ish — only a quarter the energy, but enough to… get things done.” He found he was smiling, reminiscently; and resolved to damp that down till he’d got to know Carlsson better. “But throwing a bullet is one thing, and throwing it to hit another.”
And the other smiled knowingly also. “Thus the sport part of indirect fire sport; but I mentioned machine rest, we’re talking here of telescope mount levels of precision even to start. And consider, if you can manage even a three-inch group at 300 yards, you could shoot 25-foot groups at 30,000 yards — 17-odd statute miles or a hair short of 28 vyorst — horizontal direction at least. And we’re, ah, aiming for far better than hand-held.”
“You’re talking about being able to target groups of people, I might just as well say clumps of Fedtroops in p-suits on the surface, decently well enough to hit them, ah, statistically. Just plug away, bang bang bang.”
“Hypothetically, Mr. Andrews; hypothetically so far, may it so remain.” It took a tiny but visible effort for him to continue. “Average rate of fire of something like this, maybe 1 per second if you’re not going slower. The gun ejects, returns to battery, cools with the breech open to the action space, chambers another round in that time, easily enough under adaptive automatic control. And I should emphasize, this is an entry-level gun from a popular sport not demanding unusual levels of… outlay.”
He bent down behind the counter, picked up a heavy-looking doughnut about the width of a watermelon. “That’s also quite without this sort of thing, called rather misleadingly but near-universally a boost coil. Ups your category to Modified Alternate Level 2 at least; but given time to set it up about ten feet past the muzzle along your flight path, it improves your at-target accuracy greatly.”
“That looks like it weighs twenty or thirty pounds.”
“Masses seventy, and this is a base model. Essentially it reaches out with magnetic fields, grabs the bullet using eddy currents it induces, and tugs the bullet this way or that. It can increase initial velocity a bit, yes, but its main work is precision adjustment of speed and direction. The gun provides the brute force, the boost coil trims the velocity. Here we get maybe 5 or 10 times better velocity control, more if we use two or more of them. You do have to have a fairly consistent point of aim, obviously, or mount this on a far beefier motion stage than your gun itself.”
“And these guns are common? Hundreds of them, across Mars?”
“Tens of thousands, Mr. Andrews. Hundreds of, if we’re talking about the sort of near-handheld .30-06 gun I showed you. If you step up only a bit,” and he returned to the earlier display, “you get something like this. 48 inch active length barrel, slower-burning powder in a stretched cartridge, 4000-plus feet per second initial; or else a longer, denser bullet with less velocity loss. Again, this is more for the longer ranges and the more difficult software and ballistics challenges. All of them made to sit out in the sand for hours to weeks, waiting; these are not, I ought emphasize again, crew-served or hand-fired weapons. Optical fiber interface. More surveyed sites for these, across our deserts and highlands, than you could ever easily count. Many of them occupied right now.”
Gordon smiled, slowly. “Indirect Fire Sport Shooting. Never’d’ve credited it beforehand, but… that’s wonderful to hear, Mr. Carlsson. Of course, like they say, any gun is worthless if you won’t fire it for effect.” He knew his expression was measuring, even a bit challenging. “Good only for some bad guy to take it and shoot you with it, or maybe your wife or your friends or your kids.”
Anders Carlsson smiled, similarly. “I’m reluctant to see that Fed fleet about to be up in orbit do much of anything but play tourist, Mr. Andrews, and I know why. But if they ever do come down here and start shooting at us — don’t think to see many here playing soft pacifist targets. This planet is always trying to kill us, one way or fifty, all the time; and finally being able to just shoot back at our mortal enemy… why, it might be something of a relief. Scratching an itch we never could, before.
“Mars is the Planet of War, after all. If they think they have something to teach us of it… well, they can try.” And the pupils of his eyes, just the right size for gun muzzles, faced Gordon as if they were.
That’s the most heartwarming thing I’ve seen since my boots first hit the red dust here, thought Gordon Andrews, merrily.
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