short stories

Between Two Dragons


Yen, you have to come back so I can tell you the beginning of your story. Everything is classified: every soldier unaccounted for, every starsail deployed far from home, every gram of shrapnel…every word that might have passed between us. Word of the last battles will come tomorrow, say the official news services; but we have heard the same thing for the last fistful of days. And what is tomorrow, after all, but a morning after darkness?

Military sf, despite title: Imjin War in space (very loosely speaking). War between two nations, Cho and Yamat; one of the few soldiers with the capability to rally Cho’s forces may already have been damaged beyond repair. Dedication: Prof. Barry S. Strauss and my parents. Published in Clarkesworld Magazine #43, April 2010. Reprinted in War & Space: Recent Combat, ed. Rich Horton & Sean Wallace.