Operation Arcana Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  John Joseph Adams

  RULES OF ENCHANTMENT

  David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell

  THE DAMNED ONE HUNDRED

  Jonathan Maberry

  BLOOD, ASH, BRAIDS

  Genevieve Valentine

  MERCENARY’S HONOR

  Elizabeth Moon

  THE GUNS OF THE WASTES

  Django Wexler

  THE GRAPHOLOGY OF HEMORRHAGE

  Yoon Ha Lee

  AMERICAN GOLEM

  Weston Ochse

  WEAPONS IN THE EARTH

  Myke Cole

  HEAVY SULFUR

  Ari Marmell

  STEEL SHIPS

  Tanya Huff

  SEALSKIN

  Carrie Vaughn

  PATHFINDER

  T. C. McCarthy

  Bone Eaters

  Glen Cook

  BOMBER’S MOON

  Simon R. Green

  IN SKELETON LEAVES

  Seanan McGuire

  THE WAY HOME

  Linda Nagata

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Operation Arcana

  edited by John Joseph Adams

  In the realms of fantasy, the battlefield is where heroism comes alive, magic is unleashed, and legends are made and unmade. From the War of the Ring, Tolkien’s epic battle of good versus evil, to The Battle of the Blackwater, George R.R. Martin’s grim portrait of the horror and futility of war, these fantastical conflicts reflect our highest hopes and darkest fears, bringing us mesmerizing visions of silver spears shining in the sun and vast hordes of savage beasts who threaten to destroy all that we hold dear. Now acclaimed editor John Joseph Adams is sounding the battle cry and sixteen of today’s top authors are reporting for duty, spinning never-before-published, spellbinding tales of military fantasy, including a Black Company story from Glen Cook, a Paksenarrion story from Elizabeth Moon, and a Shadow Ops story by Myke Cole. Within these pages you’ll also find World War I trenches cloaked in poison gas and sorcery, modern day elite special forces battling hosts of the damned, and steampunk soldiers fighting for their lives in a world torn apart by powers that defy imagination. Featuring both grizzled veterans and fresh young recruits alike, including Tanya Huff, Simon R. Green, Carrie Vaughn, Jonathan Maberry, and Seanan McGuire, Operation Arcana is a must for any military buff or fantasy fan. You’ll never look at war the same way again.

  EDITED BY JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS

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  The Way Of The Wizard

  OPERATION ARCANA

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by John Joseph Adams

  Copyrights of Stories

  Introduction © 2015 by John Joseph Adams.

  Rules of Enchantment © 2015 by David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell.

  The Damned One Hundred © 2015 by Jonathan Maberry Productions, LLC.

  Blood, Ash, Braids © 2015 by Genevieve Valentine.

  Mercenary’s Honor © 2015 by Elizabeth Moon.

  The Guns of the Wastes © 2015 by Django Wexler.

  The Graphology of Hemorrhage © 2015 by Yoon Ha Lee.

  American Golem © 2015 by Weston Ochse.

  Weapons in the Earth © 2015 by Myke Cole.

  Heavy Sulfur © 2015 by Ari Marmell.

  Steel Ships © 2015 by Tanya Huff.

  Sealskin © 2015 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC.

  Pathfinder © 2015 by T.C. McCarthy.

  Bone Eaters © 2015 by Glen Cook.

  Bomber’s Moon © 2015 by Simon R. Green.

  In Skeleton Leaves © 2015 by Seanan McGuire.

  The Way Home © 2015 by Linda Nagata.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4767-8036-8

  Cover art by Dominic Harman

  First printing, March 2015

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: t/k

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-360-7

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Arrows thick as the rain came whistling over the battlements, and fell clinking and glancing on the stones. Some found a mark. The assault on Helm’s Deep had begun, but no sound or challenge was heard within; no answering arrows came.

  The assailing hosts halted, foiled by the silent menace of rock and wall. Ever and again the lightning tore aside the darkness. Then the Orcs screamed, waving spear and sword, and shooting a cloud of arrows at any that stood revealed upon the battlements; and the men of the Mark amazed looked out as it seemed to them, upon a great field of dark corn, tossed by a tempest of war, and every ear glinted with barbed light.

  —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

  INTRODUCTION

  John Joseph Adams

  Soldiers are trained so that when they are faced with danger—so that when they must initiate danger—they don’t have to think; they simply react. And though their superiors do what they can to prepare them for what the enemy is capable of, their training must essentially prepare them to deal with anything—the unknown. So who among us would be better prepared to suddenly come face to face with what we thought was impossible?

  When I conceived of this anthology, the only guidelines I gave the authors were that I wanted stories with an equal emphasis placed on both of the words military and fantasy, and I turned them loose. As a result, the anthology ended up with a wide variety of approaches to the idea of military fantasy.

  When you think of that term, you might initially picture big epic fantasy battles like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Battle of Helm’s Deep or George R. R. Martin’s Battle of Blackwater. And indeed this anthology contains plenty of that: There’s “Bone Eaters,” a new story from one of military fantasy’s masters, Glen Cook, set in his Black Company milieu; there’s Elizabeth Moon’s “Mercenary’s Honor” (a Paksenarrion story), which pits two mercenary forces against each other with the fate of a town hanging in the balance; there’s Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Graphology of Hemorrhage,” in which the pen—or in this case, the brush—is truly mightier than the sword; and then there’s Jonathan Maberry’s tale of “The Damned One Hundred,” who must make a questionable alliance if they are to save their people from the rampaging horde of invaders at the gates.

  But there are also stories where fantasy and the real world collide; in some, the
real world has infiltrated fantasy: in Linda Nagata’s “The Way Home,” a squad of modern army soldiers suddenly finds themselves in a strange otherworld where they are beset by an unrelenting, demonic enemy unlike one they’ve ever faced before; or Tobias S. Buckell and David Klecha’s story “Rules of Enchantment,” in which a band of modern-day soldiers finds themselves in an epic fantasy world with an epic quest to fulfill.

  In others, it’s fantasy that infiltrates the real world (instead of the other way around): “Heavy Sulfur,” by Ari Marmell, which takes us to WWI, where wizards are in the trenches and on the front lines; or Genevieve Valentine’s “Blood, Ash, Braids,” about the female Russian pilots in WWII known as “The Night Witches”; or Simon R. Green’s “Bomber’s Moon,” in which angels side with the Allies and demons are with the Axis powers; or T. C. McCarthy’s Korean War-era, elegiac “Pathfinder.”

  But not all of the fantasy-invades-reality stories are historical; there are contemporary works as well, such as Weston Ochse’s “American Golem,” which takes us to the current war in Afghanistan (which the author actually began writing during a recent tour there), and tells a fantastical revenge story against the backdrop of that conflict.

  Although battles are obviously at the forefront of many military fantasy stories—and indeed many of the stories in this volume do portray some epic engagements—I didn’t make battles a requirement because I think there are a lot of interesting stories to tell surrounding the battles, stories about the struggles of military personnel not only on the battlefield but off of it as well. So some of the stories do focus on other aspects of the military life: such as Myke Cole’s “Weapons in the Earth” (a Shadow Ops story), which deals with prisoners of war; while Carrie Vaughn’s “Sealskin” is about a soldier who finds himself lost after his service is over.

  Other stories in the book don’t quite fit into the above-mentioned categories but are still military fantasy stories to the core: there’s Seanan McGuire’s “In Skeleton Leaves,” which tells the tale of neverending war in Neverland; there’s Tanya Huff’s story, in which a team of special forces soldiers—extra special you might say—lead an assault against the enemy’s “Steel Ships”; and then there’s Django Wexler’s action-packed apocalyptic-fantasy-steampunk-epic, “The Guns of the Wastes.”

  All told that’s sixteen tales of soldiers living in impossible worlds, dealing with impossible situations, or fighting impossible foes.

  Though many of the contributors to this anthology are (or were) soldiers, I am not and never have been. But as the editor of this anthology you could say I’m the commander of an elite unit of professionals—and our primary objective with Operation Arcana is to entertain readers with tales of military fantasy.

  To conclude, I’ll just leave you with these words of wisdom that I passed along to the authors before we launched Operation Arcana, in which I paraphrased the legendary general of Gondor, Dwight D. Isengard, as he spoke to his troops on D-Day prior to launching Operation Dark Lord:

  You are about to embark upon a great crusade. I have full confidence in your courage in creating fantastical plots, devotion to evocative prose, and skill in creating fictional battles. We will accept nothing less than full manuscripts! Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of the Valar upon this great and noble undertaking.

  RULES OF ENCHANTMENT

  David Klecha & Tobias S. Buckell

  You’d think arrows are pretty silent compared to gunfire, but there’s no mistaking that bristly whistle as it whips through the air just past your head before it thwacks into someone’s Kevlar. Everyone eats dirt, and you’re checking your ammo with your back against a tree trunk wondering how the wood elves flanked you when you realize how stupid a question that is: this is their territory.

  You’re new to the squad, so you’re still nervous. Every crack in the brush and shaken leaf has you jumpy. We’ve all been teasing you. Rookie this and rookie that.

  I’m about fifteen feet away. I can see that your face is pale and shaken, but you have your rifle cradled and ready, looking for orders. The rest of the squad is spread out. Diaz is pulling an arrow out from his body armor and looking a bit chagrined. Orley is slowly crawling through dirt; he’s got a bead on the shooter. “Sergeant: got eyes on the woodie,” he reports.

  “Hold,” I order.

  This is the rendezvous point. But we’re dressed in robes that make us look like peasant travelers. I can feel Orley objecting already to the suspicion in my head, but even though our minds are all linked up into one single group mind via the Spell of Tactician’s Weave, only one of us is still in charge.

  Me.

  “Ditch the robes,” I order.

  “Sergeant Cale . . .” Orley really doesn’t want to do this. He wants to engage.

  Diaz forms up a memory. A story he was told about a couple of African-American special forces who stumbled in out of the night with bows and arrows. Scouts setting out to blend into the local land. They ended up getting shot by jumpy sentries on the way back in who thought they were orcs.

  Diaz is half-black. The realization that some people see black skin, bows, and right away think orc and go straight to trigger-pulling leaves a bad taste in all our mouths.

  Teachable moment about making assumptions aside—and believe me, Diaz has laid plenty of those thanks to the intimacy of the Tactician’s Weave—Orley gets Diaz’s point and eases up. Now everyone’s on board with my line of thought: that the elves are looking at us and seeing the Enemy, not US Marines.

  We all shrug off the cloaks, displaying our standard Marine Corps digi-cammies and gear. My staff sergeant insignia is quite visible, making me the high-ranking target. I narrow my eyes at the shadows.

  A bird whistle from the tree canopy pierces the air. They’d had us marked from the get go.

  Shit.

  If it wasn’t for body armor, Diaz would have been a bloody piñata. And you, rookie, would have gotten a nasty surprise from up above.

  Yeah, look above your head, rookie. That grinning visage looking down the bark of the tree is a wood elf. Remember what they taught you about high ground? That includes firs. You need to be better about your situational awareness; clear up and down, not just the two dimensional plane.

  But I have to smile, because the challenge-and-answer is rolling through your mind like a mantra. At least you kept calm and didn’t forget that.

  “Cheshire!” I shout.

  “Alice,” comes the reply, in purring tones, from the wood elf above you. Good to go.

  “Hello the shooters!” I shout. “First Battalion, Ninth Marines.” You should know by now I always say something different. You should look up 1/9 and the stand at the Low Gorge Keep when we get back to the world. “You’re expecting us? We’re here for the Lady Wíela.”

  The new silence stretches on for a bit. You fidget, glancing away from the wood elf crouched on the tree above you into the foliage. More of the elves’ small, childlike humanoid forms melt out from the shadows, their small bows slung on their backs, their hands resting on the hilts of knives. They are skeletal and lean, chiseled teeth glinting as they look us over with cold eyes.

  “I’m Achur. I have protected the Lady this far. Do you have the writ?” The elf above you speaks again, dropping nimbly from the tree.

  I hold up the papyrus, and the symbols on it glitter, then blaze as the elf’s eyes pass over them. Achur swallows, then nods. “The Lady is in your care.”

  And just like that, they melt back away. All that remains is a young woman in a cloak as black as the shadows, her green eyes peeking out from under the hood.

  Lady Wíela.

  Diaz and Orley bow deeply toward her, as they’ve been taught by battalion S-3 and the cultural liaison gurus. I’m about to do so when your radio crackles. It’s First Squad—Stormcrow—laid out two miles farther into enemy territory. “You’ve got three trolls, Longshanks,” they report. “Headed your way like they know something’s up.”

  None of us
had heard anything, but we’d been focused on the attacking wood elves and could have missed the distant popcorn sound of gunfire. “Engage and slow them down, we have the package,” I say into the handset, then strain to hear their reply.

  “They’re already past us, Longshanks,” First Squad reports. “Two dead. I’ve already called for a med-evac, and we might be pinned down. I’d be calling you for help if—”

  A brief burst of static.

  “Stormcrow?”

  Nothing. Dead or moving, but it doesn’t matter to us just now.

  Orley thinks he can hear the sound of wood cracking. Diaz is sure he can feel a distant thudding. I’m half convinced I can as well.

  “It’s dusk,” says Lady Wíela, speaking up. “We’d better start running, unless any of your machines can hurt a troll.”

  “Trolls,” you say, trying to remember your all-too-brief training before suiting up and coming through the breach.

  “They’ll be weak in the daylight. We just have to make it through the night,” Lady Wíela says, as if reassuring us. Or maybe it’s herself she’s trying to convince. It’s hard to say: her face is buried deep in the shadows of her cowl. None of us find it easy to get a good look at her features.

  “Right,” I say. “Get them to daylight.” But the whole squad, linked to your mind, can tell exactly what you’re thinking: that it’ll be a miracle if we all make it through the night.

  Antoine taps you with a Wand of Night Seeing and we’re off, rolling through the woods at double-time. You’re on point, like a good little newbie, your rifle half raised as you scan the woods in front of us. You’ll never be a night elf—none of us can ever be that good—but the bottled spell gives you a good look at the terrain as we bust through it.