More stories from the latest issue:

• Bella’s Heart
  Bella had no idea how long she had been unconscious. A few hours maybe. She looked out the porthole, but there was nothing to see—no stars, asteroids, other debris, nothing but the total black of space. She was alone. She went to sit up but quickly fell back into her seat with a whimper, her head throbbing so hard the skin on her face rippled with it. She winced, breathing deeply. The engine burn had only been half thrust, but coupled with the slingshot maneuver around Great Folly, and without a flight suit’s inertial dampeners, her body had taken the
• Neomergence
  Through his rifle scope, Jimenez glasses the throngs of Chits crowding outside the security wall surrounding the spaceport. They peer through the gaps in the gates and watch the evacuation shuttles ascend every hour, knowing that soon the last one will leave, pressing against the bars in that universal posture of desperation; arms extending through openings, fingers outstretched, reaching for something they know they cannot secure. From the tempo and pitch of their clicks and hisses, Jimenez knows they are pleading with the soldiers to take them from the hellscape their planet has become. The air in the watchtower is
• Preggo Bomb
  Mechanized Unit Scorched Axe X-92 is nine months pregnant, and that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that approximately two milliseconds ago, while liberating the secessionist capital of Kallas Nine, it exploded. Or at least it should’ve. Because exploding is what usually happens when a depleted-uranium tipped missile slices straight through five inches of a Behemoth class’s carbide plating. What doesn’t happen? Waking up two milliseconds after on a couch in maternity pants, its digitrade bipedals swapped for swollen ankles, its frontal plating resheathed to a soft, rotund belly—the one with the tiny pilot inside that keeps
• Bright Points on the Quiet Sun
  It’s the longest day of the year, and it’s happening again. Her name is Edith but she goes by Caroline. The first boy she ever kissed was her brother’s best friend, wearing tie-dye and fringed rawhide in 1966, somewhere back east in the late autumn with scarlet leaves and the vert, humid smell of dirt, smoke, and cold air. She never told her brother; he’d been sent off to Vietnam and shipped back in a box draped with an American flag. She’d broken a bone at thirteen falling from a stubborn horse at summer camp, so she started ninth grade
• Wee Man
  The Gillespies are pieces o’ work, man. Fergus is a gobshite wi’ too much tae say for hi’self and no much going on upstairs, and Mari, she’s about as trustworthy as my Uncle Rabbie, no’ that he’s my real uncle, and he’s spent half his life inside a prison rock on the other side of the Belt, the stupid arse. Mari wis forever getting people intae bother at the school, but come time for a reckoning she wis naewhere tae be seen. Crafty, her. It’s been a nightmare being stuck in this can wi’ the pair o’ them for six
• The Daughter
  Testimony of Science Liaison to Reserve World 84, “ New Stadaco na” I touched down at a pad on the edge of what they were calling the New Deccan Range, a ridge of mountains so steep they looked like a line of daggers. I had seen satellite imagery, but it was nothing compared to the view from the surface. There were half a dozen System geology teams petitioning for clearance to study the Range, all of whom the provisional government had denied. The settlers wanted, they told us, time to get their surface legs again and catch up on what
• Career Considerations for Starship Burglars
  I sailed through space and thought about secrets. The micro-asteroid I’d ridden into the system had imparted me with slight forward momentum. Now, spider-legs tucked into my chassis, my only responsibility was to make the occasional course correction and watch the black shape of the target grow bigger in front of me. It was peaceful out here, coasting between the glimmering stars. It gave a robot time to think. My secret was: I wasn’t doing my best. And for once, I couldn’t blame it on hardware issues. Looking like an old-Earth crustacean and being able to squeeze myself into a
• Septo’s Taj
  I wake to the measured ping of the proximity alarm. Groaning and struggling, I sit up, force my scratchy eyelids to flutter. A mug of hot coffee sits beside my coldsleep locker, just where it belongs. I reach for it and take a sip, then swing my legs out of the locker and onto the deck. Gah. I hobble over to the pilot’s chair and punch a stud to change “Crew Status” from “Cold” to “Warm.” The elapsed time display says I’ve been out for two hundred forty-six days and a couple of hours. I swear. Waking up is like
• Astounding and von Braun
  There are some historical claims regarding science fiction that seem to be a bit suspicious. One is the claim that during his World War II efforts to develop the V-2 rocket, Wernher von Braun was receiving copies of Astounding Science-Fiction. I will begin with the Introduction to Volume 1 of The Astounding-Analog Reader, which appeared in 1973 and was edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss. Their discussion refers to Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline,” which described an atomic bomb employing 235U. This resulted in visits to John W. Campbell and Cartmill from security personnel from the Manhattan Project. Although it was
• Upcoast
  Piper is getting married. I remember when their grandparents were born. It doesn’t seem so very long ago. I bring a wedding gift, of course. A thick purple sea cucumber, almost too big for the happy couple to eat. The two of them exclaim in delight, because sea cucumbers bring many fine children, and because I’d come early enough that they could still talk. They were slowing down, of course. Piper and their mate—if I ever knew their name, I couldn’t remember it, I think they came from down the coast—were tenderly entwined, lounging together in their half-built house, gorging