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 HOLLY LEROY: You Kill Me – A Lt. Eve Sharpe Thriller (Lt. Eve Sharpe Thrillers Book 1)
One of the techs held up a driver’s license. “Her name is Rebecca Ann Walsh,” he said.
A shrill alarm went off in my mind, screaming for attention.
The M.E. looked down at the dead girl and then up at me, his face chalky white. “That’s. . . the mayor’s daughter.”
My heart slammed into my throat. In that instant, I knew that everything in my life hadn’t just changed—it was obliterated. Irrevocably. Forever.
LIEUTENANT EVE SHARPE should have seen the avalanche of trouble headed her way, but events had dulled her edge and crumbled her foundation of toughness. With the press and politicians all coming for her, Eve begins to question whether she is really a cold-blooded murderer or simply losing her mind. Was it an officer-involved shooting gone wrong? An honest mistake? Or something much, much worse? There’s one thing for sure: it has turned the Chicago Police Department upside down, and Lieutenant Eve Sharpe’s life along with it.
Perfect for fans of J.A. Konrath’s Lt. Jack Daniels, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Ann Voss Peterson’s Val Ryker, and Harlan Coben’s Tell No One.
FROM DALE COZORT: Snapshot: Book 1 of the Snapshot Universe
Alternate realities you can fly to.
For eighty million years, the Tourists have taken Snapshots of Earth, creating living replicas of continents. Life in the Snapshots quickly diverges from the real world, creating a universe where humans and animals from Earth’s history fly between Snapshots, exploring, fighting, and sometimes meeting themselves.
In 2014, the Tourists’ newest Snapshot catches Middle East Analyst Greg Dunne rushing toward Hawaii to join his wife, who just went into labor. The new Snapshot doesn’t include Hawaii, cutting Greg off from everyone he loves.
Greg is thrust into the aftermath of a hidden, decades-old massacre, where Germans from a pre-World War II European Snapshot battle ranchers from a Korean War-era U.S. Snapshot,a fun house mirror version of the US cut off from the world since 1953.No Beatles. No Internet. No Personal Computers. No cell phones. No Vietnam War.But an endless new frontier.
The prize in this struggle: an ancient, wild Madagascar Snapshot. Whoever controls it can fly to Snapshots where dinosaurs still roam, Indians rule the New World or Nazis or Soviets control Europe.
Caught between powerful opponents, and joined by a woman nearly driven mad by her past, Greg struggles to survive in this cutthroat new reality, to remain faithful to a family he may never see again, and to find a way back to his original Earth.
Set in a unique universe and played out in the shadows of larger social and technological issues, Snapshot is a fast-paced story of power and revenge, and an intriguing speculation of what we might have become.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: One Last Homecoming
Sherry had planned a quick trip to her home town for her forty-year class reunion, to see the current classes’ Homecoming game. Instead, she arrives to find the high school just as she remembers it, complete with long-demolished buildings and long-retired teachers. It’s Homecoming, all right — her senior year.
For someone with happy memories, revisiting one’s younger days might be pleasant nostalgia. Sherry dreads the thought of being stranded in the past, forced to reassume the old roles after decades of independence.
How can she return to her own time when she has no idea how she got here? Worse, a hostile entity is making its presence known — and it may not want to let her go back. And the Homecoming game isn’t the one she remembers from four decades ago.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Certified Public Assassin
Molly McGuire: murder for hire…
Working as a Certified Public Assassin was, after all, the fastest way to pay down millions of dollars of medical debt. Between that payment and the student loans from getting her associates’ degree, she’s barely making enough to keep body and soul together, but the debt’s almost gone.
Except…she’s paid her student loans. Many times over. There’s something going on, and her handler can’t figure out what. Hiring a hacker to track whatever’s glitching in the student loans database and programming seemed to be a logical next step; however, it isn’t just a glitch. Somebody’s got it in for Molly…and for everyone that has a license to kill.
This has barreled from circumstance through happenstance, and straight into enemy action. But who’s the enemy?
FROM BLAKE SMITH: A Kingdom of Glass: A Novel of The Garia Cycle
Zara hasn’t seen her family in eleven years, but she doesn’t mind. They sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom when she was small, and she’s adopted her foster parents in their place. She lives the life of an aristocratic Garian girl- riding her horse, shooting her bow, exploring the castle with her friends- and she has nothing to wish for.
Until she’s summoned home, to a prospective marriage she doesn’t want, family she doesn’t remember, and a poisonous royal court that threatens everything she’s ever known. The East Morlans are nothing like Garia, and Zara struggles to find her place among the scheming Morlander aristocrats. Along the way, she makes new friends, meets enemies, and falls in love. But secrets abound in the glittering palace, and Zara must discover who she can trust as she fights for her life and freedom in a fragile, beautiful, kingdom of glass.
FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Neither Here nor There
This is a stand alone story unrelated to any of my other books or shorts.
So many scientific discoveries have been serendipity rather than a goal to which someone worked as a logical progression. Instead, it was a spill or a misplaced item.
An ingredient measured out in error or from the wrong bottle. Often, a mistake over which someone was bright enough or curious enough to say: “Oops, but that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Uranium ore left next to photo plates, adhesive that wasn’t as permanent as hoped for, but still usefully tacky, or foreign growths in a Petri dish acting strangely…
A major revelation could be a blessing indeed, or if it was big enough to be a life changing development, one might have a tiger by the tail. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: A Few Good Men (Darkship Thieves)
Ladies and Gentlemen, we declare the revolution!
He spent 14 years in solitary. Now he’ll ignite a revolt.
Born a prince among Earth’s fifty tyrants, Lucius Keeva emerges from imprisonment with a fractured mind and a deadly purpose. When assassins hunt him, fate delivers him to the USAians—secret keepers of America’s forgotten beliefs.
For 500 years, this underground faith has preserved the Constitution while awaiting their prophesied leader. In Luce’s madness, they recognize their messiah.
Now the son of tyranny becomes liberty’s champion. As the USAians rise from the shadows, their weapons of war finally unleashed, a broken mind and a fallen prince prove the perfect weapon against an unbreakable regime.
One madman. One ancient faith. One last chance to restore the republic from legend.
A FEW GOOD MEN —where belief becomes the ultimate revolutionary tactic.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY BAEN BOOKS.
FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: Same as the Old Hope
Coverage of current events leading up to the 2024 election. I was very surprised by the election results so that isn’t really seen in this book, so in a sense this is showing how impactful the results were, because I wasn’t the only one out there thinking this. But it turns out that we’re not the overwhelmed minority.
The B-side of this book covers popular culture. Haven’t had much to say about that for a while but here’s a few things about comics, music, movies and so on.
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: INSIDIOUS.
According To Hoyt 
The two-person scout-ship quietly entered the remote star-system said to hide a base of the Shadows.
“Hey Fred, what did High Command say about these Shadows?”
“Not much George. Only that the Elders said that the Shadows are dangerous and always enjoy surprise attacks”.
A third voice said “Very insidious of us. Isn’t it.”
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Emperor Palpatine needed a brain break, so he submerged his consciousness in Sidious.
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He laughed, a little. “As if rumors would not spread whatever you or I, or she, or he, did.”
“That’s between the gossip-mongers and their consciences. And God.” She glanced out the windows. The sky gleamed in oranges and scarlets, more colorful than the ballroom. The first stars gleamed above.
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Remember, o readers, that your role can also be Force Multiplier!
Do not only read books. Rate books! Review books!
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The best way I could describe my relationship with Kristen was insidous-she was sexy and beautiful, like a classic 1940’s femme fatale with the dangerous black-silk curves and the cigarette in an elegant ivory holder as long as her arm. But the longer you knew her, the more you realized that her curves were sharper than a razor, her tongue was even sharper, what was between her legs was even more God-forsaken than the very depths of Hell, and you were probably going to get cancer sooner than later.
Unlike most of the men she “knew,” I realized that early and got out of there as quickly as I could. And I knew I should have told her to get off my porch…but there was something wrong here. Her makeup was far too well-done and I realized…yes, that was a forming bruise on her left cheek and eye, hidden under her foundation.
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She tried to keep them from blurring together.
She could note the saint statues erected in each one, but the furnishings of the hospitals were much alike.
She watched the landscapes as they flew her in. Fields, forest, rivers, and ports, fish by the seashore and eggs inland, sheep bleating in pasture. Cottages clumped into villages, not spread across the land in farms. She thought the villages medieval, but she did not have time to think.
She could not know that they kept her from talking to anyone as she had to Jill and Ned, but she did not talk.
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I’d known when I accepted this assignment that I was going to a cold world. However, I hadn’t really comprehended just what it meant to work on a world where temperature was measured in single digits of Kelvin.
Even with Chongu technology to protect us, the cold crept in everywhere. Everyone else was going around with fur fluffed up, and all I could do was bundle up and try to believe that it was really 35 degrees Celsius in here, just like the thermostat said.
But this base was just as vital to the war effort as the ones that supported the Imperial Fleet’s fighting forces. This world was inhabited, and while the indigenous people’s biochemistry was cryogenic like the Tchiador, their social structure was like ours, with every individual a potential reproductive. To the Tchiador, with their termite-like hive structure, sapient individuals were an abomination, an infestation to be exterminated.
The purpose of this base was to bring the locals up to speed on science and technology to the point they could meaningfully consent to being part of a settlement program that would spread them to a number of plutids in other systems, including Sol’s own Pluto.
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This writing thing is insidious. It was just supposed to be s short story about a mummy’s tomb. It was never supposed to grow like that…
Contents
Prologue: The Shadow of the Titanic
Chapter 1: The Haunted Cairns of Skye
Chapter 2: The Lantern Below Saint Michel
Chapter 3: The Phantom of the Alps
Chapter 4: The Wailing Cliffs of Cornwall
Chapter 5: The Widow of the Orient Express
Chapter 6: The Library of Salt
Chapter 7: The Pharaoh’s Whisper
Chapter 8: The Ghost of the Sphinx
Chapter 9: The Tiger Pagoda
Chapter 10: The Yeti’s Shadow
Chapter 11: The Djinn’s Whisper
Chapter 12: The Serpent’s Hiss
Chapter 13: The Naga’s Curse
Chapter 14: The Spectral Light
Chapter 15: The Ghost in the Granary
Chapter 16: The Demon of the Trans-Siberian
Epilogue: Ghosts of War
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Tell me about it. You just want to see where the story goes, and it grabs you and sets off running like it’s a marathon!
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speaking of. Puts paws at the edge of the table and looks pleadingly up at Dan: Fuzzies report?
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I’ve got a small one. I let the cats into a room they’re not usually in today. Last week the little plastic button/latch that holds the dirt canister on the vacuum cleaner popped off. I found the spring by stepping on it (OW!) but could not find the damn button. It’s been missing ever since.
Within a couple of minutes I heard the fluffy (mostly) Berman cat batting something around the floor. That’s right, he found the button. Goood kitty! Many skritches.
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Situation evolving. Proper report after action stabilizes. Thank you for your consideration in this matter.
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<3
Don’t nuke teh fuzzies!
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It started as a short story, something different before I went back to a main series. Twelve books later … (11 of which have been published). It’s almost as bad as pharmaceuticals, but not quite as incurable as an addiction to flying. :P
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It’s insidious how women dress as dementors will wave their babies in front of cameras, proudly calling them as martyrs against the infidels, then cry and wave their dead babies in front of cameras, blame infidel bombs and demand sympathy.
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i would probably suggest that is not insidious. Rather, it’s an extreme of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Those raised without hearing the word “No!” are often selfish; but lately they have turned homicidally so.
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Woo hoo! More good promos! Thanks!
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Bought and read CPA.
Lovely wish-fulfillment! Antagonists FA and got a nice FO.
Well done, Ms Chism.
But I’m wracking my brain for a prior location of the ‘take or refuse contracts based on research on the target’. A little bit of the old Equalizer TV show, a whiff of Person of Interest, but neither seems quite what I think I remember.
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(Part 1/5, again because 8K was moderation-bait)
The door opened, another someone-new walked in. Medium height, powerfully built, moving with what the two others saw as a “military bearing” though he wore a casual suit with no tie.
It was a bit of a jolt to them both, after assorted hours of “hurry up and wait” and especially the last forty-odd minutes, mostly spent wondering if they ought to be talking to pass the time here by themselves, or not.
“So, you’d be Caroline Kane and Richard de Beynac — did I get that last bit right? — who’ve been vetted and interviewed and NDA-signed enough for about a decade of normal life, I’m reliably told. And I’m George Kasimir, that’s with a K, still readjusting to life without a commission but still very much in a chain of command. So, you two, welcome to Project Delphic! At least for the moment, you’ll both be reporting to me.
“Right now, I’m going to be giving you a rather non-military briefing; and before you ask, you should both interrupt to ask pertinent and/or helpful questions or make useful comments. Delphic is a very new project inspired by, let’s say, the appearance of the Inanna objects ten days ago.” He bent to the midget laptop already on the front table.
“So, that would be Inanna-ud and Inanna-sig for the Morning and Evening New Stars, right? Since those were old Mesopotamian names for Venus, as a morning and evening star. But I have to wonder where Inanna-nun, princely Inanna, fits into your scheme.” Caroline’s voice wasn’t really quavery or assertive, but more simply soft; as if she half-expected to be ignored or steamrollered by a person with such an obvious, palpable presence as he.
“Exactly, Miss Kane, to be a bit British public-school formal. And to your question, Inanna-nun is Earth herself. Because of course, bodies like our three co-orbital ‘Inanna objects’ do interact gravitationally. Rather like the ‘Trojan configuration’ of Lagrange and others, sixty degrees ahead or behind; except that’s for only two satellites and one primary, or else one or two near-massless objects on either side of a larger moon or planet. An approximation which is already beginning to fail badly.”
“But it’s stable, right? Having the, ah, New Wanderers in Trojan positions is pretty much guranteed to be stable, until and unless they somehow got really, really massive — much more so than Earth.” Richard’s voice held a decided Kentucky flavor. “Wait, maybe not with three.”
“That factor of 25 thing is only for a simple Lagrange triangle, but, yes and almost surely, the configuration started stable and is remaining so. The ‘kicker’ here is that those angles are reducing with time, slightly so far, exactly as they should for stability. If they ever got to be the same mass as Earth, the leading/trailing angles of the stable points would be about 47 degrees of separation instead of 60.”
“Right, see Salo and Yoder,” said Richard.
“Um, um, the same mass as the Earth? Is that uh, likely?” She put her hand over her mouth, as if to shut the barn after the horses left. “Sorry.”
“No harm, no foul, Miss Kane — or, Caroline. The best answer we have, and it’s based partly on some rumor I will shortly be sharing with you, is we expect the growth to continue until these two ‘friends of Earth’ are about 3/4 of an Earth mass, each. Already, they’re more massive than our Moon, a bit smaller and far denser.” Kasimir put an image on the big screen behind him, that had been doing its screen-saver thing of tiny rabbits and foxes, in what they’d both recognized as a huge ‘Game of Life’ simulation.
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(Part 2/5)
“The Inanna companions started out as bright-blue ‘new stars’ but not at all novae; parallax almost instantly put them well within the Solar System and indeed in Earth’s solar orbit. Balls of light the exact color of an iron arc that showed spectroscopically as partially-ionized iron vapor, indeed pure iron-56 vapor; each about half the size of the Moon. Soon that changed to a yellowish continuous spectrum — evidently from liquid iron with an iron vapor ‘atmosphere’ above it. Stopping sharply, at a radius around 90% of Earth. As if enclosed in a transparent ‘bubble’ that might be some sort of artificial gravity field.” Against a slide-show of high resolution images of assorted views of the ‘objects’ — some had been all over the Internet, but the best looked completely new.
“Maybe this is a silly question, as in unanswerable; but where is all the mass of these new objects actually coming from??” Richard wasn’t quite as incredulous-sounding as Caroline.
“That’s actually something we know, and haven’t been telling. Mass and the gravitational constant are hard to measure precisely; but the product of them — GM — can be found very accurately. The ‘new’ mass is coming from the Sun; the sum of the three masses is very near constant. We managed, by using nuclear-thermal rocket boost followed by microwave-electric and solar-electric braking, to get a probe or five near the Inannas, so we can measure their masses decently well. At least, apparent masses.”
On the screen was a near-featureless yellow ball, the color of molten iron being poured into a mold. “This is one of our satellite images from orbit around Inanna-sig. Our bird’s Hall thrusters have to keep running, to keep a static orbit, since the mass keeps increasing; orbit period tells us the mass. That iron-vapor ‘atmosphere’ still shows as pure iron 56.”
“So there’s no rain of asteroids, no visible source for the iron, nothing but a big drop of molten iron that gets still bigger anyway. But, somehow, at the expense of the Sun.” Caroline’s voice was only a little awed. “So is there a wormhole in the middle of that thing? With its other end busily sucking iron out of the Sun? Is there even enough iron there, for that?”
“The answer is, yes, there are multiple Earth masses of iron-56 in all of the Sun, according to our best measurements. But now we get to the rumor I mentioned. Which is almost certainly not what you’d think.” The picture flipped to a fairly-familiar shot of flat(-ish) Mars countryside. “This is from a ‘house’ in a village, a ‘satellite town’ of the ‘downtown’ with its main reactors and heavy-industrial complex, northern Isidis Planitia. The village is called Maatsburg, the house-and-compound belongs to Susan and Larry Somerville. Now this” — the picture changed substantially with the ‘flip’ though it was clearly the same landscape — “was taken two minutes later, as part of a time-lapse movie of the countryside. You’ll see that dome, that wasn’t there, until it was. A thousand feet or so across. Made of what looks like steel or some iron alloy; that’s X-ray-spec verified by the Somervilles later when they went, ah, visiting.”
Kasimir smiled. “You’ve heard of TANSTAAFL, right? There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, courtesy of Robert Heinlein? Well, around here it’s more likely ASATIIFM” — he pronounced it A-Sat-If’M — “from Arthur C. Clarke. Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology is Indistinguishable From Magic.” They’d almost said that last in 3-way unison.
“If it’s not enough yet, to be sucking iron out of the whole Sun to make two fat drops of it in Earth’s solar orbit…” Caroline ended on a sigh.
“And there’s the rumor part. What the Somervilles, usually one at a time after their, I have to say it, First Contact, heard first-hand. Sometimes even were allowed to record, for later playback to all and sundry here.”
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(Part 3/5)
“More specifically, once they radio-hailed their new neighbors, they got an answer; then soon enough, this one also appeared.” A similar image, a little differently framed, of the same scene; then another, with a new smaller dome, made of what might be glass hexagons in a metal frame, like a many-faceted geodesic dome. “Again — now you don’t see it, now you do. Only this one appeared as an iron dome (pardon the pun), then ‘cleared’ to reveal that quartz-glass Crystal Palace inside five minutes later.” There was a sequence of a few shots, again. Just as dazzlingly, stunning quick.
Just as ASATIIFM.
“So, our local rumormonger’s name turns out to be William Steinmetz, who grew up in Brooklyn. As records verify. No, I only wish I were making that up.” Kasimir hit the laptop a few strokes. The stills turned to movie.
“So, I really did grow up in Brooklyn, with my mother after my dad died. Way too late to ever see the Dodgers play, of course; and once I’d got my degree we… left. Like a lot of people, just couldn’t stand to watch 4-M wreck what was still left of the place, after Cutemo and Hochfool and all the sorry rotten rest.” There was a ‘sky’ of hexagons (mostly) behind him, and through those the butterscotch haze of the Martian sky. He was sitting in a chair, with what looked like a half-gone mug of beer in front of him.
“Four-M? Don’t think I know that one. And… wouldn’t that make you, let’s see, eighty-something?” It turned out Larry Somerville had a fair bit of a Texas drawl, not so uncommon Redside.
“The Mad Marxist Mullah Mayor, of course. Nicest or at least most polite name for the — boil on the body politic — I can come up with, Larry. So after that, we just scrammed. My mother had been talked-to before, like a very secularized version of the visitation of Mary, so we… left. Got a lift to… places that German Expatriate Grifter and his cult will surely never reach.” Bill took a little swig of his beer, then launched into a bit of song. “‘We thought that they were angels, but much to my surprise, we climbed aboard their starship, and headed for the skies!’ Not. Really and truly not like that, much; except, you know, time dilation is real.”
The image froze. “That’s what I mean by rumor. Which is, of course, a bit of a state secret here on Earth, and kept very, very quiet by the Council of Governments on Mars.” George Kasimir smiled, and shook his head just a tiny bit. “When you can get all of them, unanimously to agree to anything at all there, an unopposed vote by all fifty-odd sovereignties, it’s a big anything. And so, we have an Ambassador Plenipotentiary, a pair of ’em at least. Bill’s made it clear he’ll visit with one or both of his very new neighbors, the Somervilles, in his new Crystal Palace. No others welcome. We and everyone else are very sure we don’t want to try to push it, right now. Especially with our sole contact, for ‘them’.”
Kasimir breathed in and out. “Just going to play this next, bear with me for a few minutes.” The image glitched and unfroze; different time, same basic channel. Steinmetz, sitting at a table in his almost-instant dome.
“What you’re watching is a double pour of iron. To make, eventually, the iron and nickel and so-on cores of… well, two new planets; just a bit smaller than Earth, in a Lagrange arc so they’re all naturally stable in orbit here. Now, we have this old custom, policy, maybe even a bit of an obsession-compulsion on bigger things, not to take other people’s stuff; or when we do, to take the least valuable we can use. Like the old books I read growing up, about making giant sentient battle tanks out of garbage in a dump, using ‘nanotechnology’ to do it.” He took a big-ish swig of his beer, swished it around in his mouth, as if trying to banish an off-taste.
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(Part 4/5)
“It’s… amusing, and a tad-bit scary, but mostly sad, to read through the ‘futurism’ on self-replicating nanotechnology. Especially the ‘man will go on to merge with computers / upload himself / transcend biology’ kind. It gave me pause, even back when I was growing up; now I know how much a ripe crock of night-soil it all is. That’s 1700s-speak for…”
“I know what a crock is, Bill. Your consideration is well received, but it does not signify.” (In reply, on-camera, Bill winked.)
“What we’d think of as ‘creating wild graylife’ — that’s your old ‘gray goo’ nightmare, with lesser variations — is just plain, insidious evil. Nobody with any sane consideration messes with that stuff; and if you did it much at all, we might just have to quarantine Sol System. But that’s a bad-enough thing you probably wouldn’t do it, except maybe carelessly.
“And, the sheer materialistic hubris, assuming the brain is some bio-machine running you as software… sorry, wrong answer. I’d say you guys ought to try it and see what happens; only I have too much regard for those who’d end up, well, far worse’n’dead for guinea pigs, to tell you to FA and FO.
“‘Let’s go turn the whole universe to computronium!’ — sure. Double insidious.
“Great fun story, in a good book. Bloody-ugly nasty evil, In Real Life.”
He took another swig. Blinked. And a flying tray, made of what looked like sterling silver, swooped into frame from the shadowed recesses of the dome. With a fresh beer on it, level and calm as if sitting placidly on a table.
“Controlled gravity. Only not your familiar kind of gravity; turns out one can ‘insert’ one’s favorite designer physics, if only temporarily and only on small scales, like, say, planetary-ish and smaller. To be sure, this is not follow-the-recipe grunt work.” He took the beer; the tray flew away.
“We do pretty well for ourselves, Larry. The iron for those two pours is ultimately from waste helium in the Sun’s fusing core; a waste product so troublesome your Sun will brighten and bloat from it, a few short billion years from now. Likely the Earth’s climate really will warm too much from it, in maybe a half-billion. So, a pernicious waste, that we can separate and stuff in little mirrored pus-balls to heat and ‘burn’ to carbon, then to oxygen… then to neon and so forth, right there in the solar core. If we want nitrogen, we’d let carbon ‘burn’ with hydrogen; most of the C-N-O in the core right now is nitrogen, all basic thermonuclear physics you’ve known for decades.”
“Wait, you’re actually engineering the Sun, already??”
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(Part 5/5)
“Why not? There’s all that fine waste helium, lots of heat (not enough to do much, but some), lots of pressure to keep things compact (you knew the Sun’s core is 100 times denser than water, right?); what’s not to be happy about, with that? And if you can use the same reactions already ongoing to do your stuff, no exhibitionist radiated-neutrino signatures to betray you to ‘hey, stop, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s goin’ down’ or anything.
“Of course, once you get to the middle elements below iron, fusion gets a bit complicated, multiple products and photodisintegration and all; later, up around about iron, you’ve got to make nuclear statistical equilibrium work for you not against you. Easier just to do alchemy; and by alchemy I mean femtocatalytic transmutation. Non-thermo nuclear fusion, simply shove nuclei together to make a product nucleus. Like petrochemical reforming or cat-cracking, only nuclear.” He waved at the dome and its atmosphere. “The nitrogen in this air we’re breathing got ‘cracked’ out of silicon in rock; the oxygen simply came along for free. To be sure, it’s an energy hog, and I mean a nuclear-grade energy hog, just look at those atomic masses; still it’s not insurmountable, only clumsy. Plain basalt is — dirt cheap here.”
The image froze again. “So, that’s why we named this Project Delphic; it sure-‘nough truly is. And our authority goes all the way back to 2025 and the days of 4-M over NYC; the executive order is still classified but its subtitle isn’t, much: Planetary Security is National Security.
“One of our Working Groups is Delphic Anabasis; we’re actually hoping to get someone invited to the Plains of Isis to talk with Brooklyn Bill, at least for a while on a few things. So, do keep that option in mind, as we continue through my rough outline of The Universe According to Bill. Yes, we have gotten further assorted ‘show me’ ah, demonstrations and miracles. Including factoring some billion-digit numbers we made up by multiplying ‘large’ known primes. And FTL comms that suposedly work off of quantum teleportation using pre-positioned e-bits.”
Richard and Caroline just looked at each other, wordlessly. Then she said, at last, “I’m beginning, maybe just barely beginning, to see what you mean by ASATIIFM — George.”
(Yes, the SF series mentioned in Part 3 — “making giant sentient battle tanks out of garbage in a dump” — actually exists, as “The Troubles of George Macintyre” by our very own The Phantom. “Like Robert Heinlein got together with Thorne Smith and banged out a few novels.” Unsolicited testimonial.
And it might also be obvious I’ve recently been reading a lot, or maybe a little too much, so-called ‘Singularitarianism’ from one Ray Kurzweil.)
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