Alternate Military

It’s the spring of 1947, and Canada, as part of the British Commonwealth, has been at war with the German Third Reich for seven and a half years. A lot has changed in that time, not the least of which a whole bunch of technological changes brought about by the rifts that were opened by the America’s atomic bombs. Now, Sergeant Alexandra "Alex" Mackenzie and the crew of the walker Winnie face their greatest challenge so far: breaking in a new British lieutenant as their commanding officer.

In a transformed mid-19th-century America dominated by plantation owners and kept in line by Southern military forces, a mild-mannered academic from Maine, Professor Joshua Chamberlain, stands accused of crimes against the nation. In court alongside him is Abraham Lincoln, whose fiery rhetoric brands him a "threat to the security of the United States of America". Convicted, Chamberlain is sentenced to 40 years hard labor, while Lincoln's fate is indefinite detention at Fortress Monroe.

Frank Rusk has not been sleeping well lately. Each night for the past two weeks, indescribable scenes of horror have awakened him. He is on an exploding ship in WWII, which is sinking fast. Men are burning alive all around him. He hears sailors cry out that a Japanese torpedo hit the bomb bay! Frank decides this horrifying scene must be what his father, Joe Rusk, experienced in his last moments alive before perishing on an aircraft carrier in November 1943. Unbeknownst to Frank, his father did not die in 1943 but entered a parallel dimension when his ship sank.

Samantha's regular life is suddenly turned around when her existence is somehow erased from the world. Nobody seems to remember her, and her own apartment is occupied by the uninvited tenants. Even her sister, the only family Samantha has, is unable to recognize her. Lost and confused, Samantha accepts help from a stranger, a charismatic man named Archie, whom she accidentally encounters and unwillingly joins him in his fight against the silent invasion of the planet.

In the 158 years after Hitler's death (AH158), Germany has become the utopian state that he had originally envisioned. The Aryan Dynasty has conquered the free world at the cost of billions of lives. Hitler has become the patriarch of a new religious fervor, one that even he did not see coming. The wastelands that surround Germany are the only threat awaiting the German citizens. That is at least what everyone is taught.

The war is now a storm long past, but the scars still linger, and they are deep. Sophia Trotsky has arrived to give an interview for a documentary on The Great War, where the memories hit as hard as the battles. However, the courage to face the memories once more comes from a chance encounter with a reflection of the tattered soul within.

Amelia Earhart was used to all the death. For 20 years, she served the empire in the Human Soldiers of Earth. After the mushroom clouds destroyed Tehran, she grew tired of killing humans for the empire. Now she kill humans for the Rough Riders. She received a mission from the Rough Rider commander, Escort Albert Einstein, pride of the upper caste and tool of the empire, from Paris to the South Pacific. All she had to do was avoid the combined might of the Human Soldiers of Earth searching for the loudest fugitive in existence.

It is a fact of history that when Neil Armstrong set Apollo 11 down on the moon he was running dangerously low on fuel. This Pushcart Prize-nominated story recounts an alternate history in which the lunar module crashed and man's journey to the moon ended not in triumph - but tragedy. A decade later, a pair of astronauts finally return to the moon. And what they'll find is something no one expects.