Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  Table of Contents

  Does a Bear Shoot in the Woods? by Wen Spencer

  DEI BRITANNICI: A Prologue to Witchy Eye by D.J. Butler

  Preparations and Alliances: A Story of the Arenaverse by Ryk E. Spoor

  Into Gonebeyond by Susan R. Matthews

  Cutting Corners by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

  A Fire on the Hill by Brendan DuBois

  Feldspar by Philip A. Kramer

  Bullet Catch by Stephen Lawson

  Force Multipliers Being What They Are by Travis S. Taylor

  The Powhatan by Tony Daniel

  What We’re Made Of by Frank Chadwick

  Children of the Dust by Catherine Asaro

  The Blue Widow by J.P. Sullivan

  Sufficient Unto the Day by Tim Powers

  On-Site for the Apocalypse by Ryk E. Spoor

  Block Party by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

  Baen Books

  Free Stories 2017

  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.

  Does a Bear Shoot in the Woods © 2017 by Wen Spencer

  Dei Britannici © 2017 by D. J. Butler

  Preparations and Alliances © 2017 by Ryk E. Spoor

  Into Gonebeyond © 2017 by Susan R. Matthews

  Cutting Corners © 2017 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

  A Fire on the Hill © 2017 by Brendan DuBois

  Feldspar © 2017 by Philip A. Kramer

  Bullet Catch © 2017 by Stephen Lawson

  Force Multipliers Being What They Are © 2017 by Travis S. Taylor

  The Powhatan © 2017 by Tony Daniel

  What We're Made Of © 2017 by Frank Chadwick

  Children of the Dust © 2017 by Catherine Asaro

  The Blue Widow © 2017 by J.P. Sullivan

  Sufficient Unto the Day © 2017 by Tim Powers

  On-Site for the Apocalypse © 2017 by Ryk E. Spoor

  Block Party © 2017 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-595-3

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Does a Bear Shoot in the Woods?

  Wen Spencer

  “Wait! I have cookies!" Dugan yelped in fear. Yes, a stupid thing to say, but Dugan was desperate. He was miles from home, deep in the woods, and pinned to the ground by a massive bear. The smell of dead moldering leaves flooded over him like an omen.

  The bear blew out an explosive snort that sounded weirdly like a laugh. It paused, head cocked, a paw the size of dinner plate on Dugan's chest. "What? Stale Oreos?"

  "No!” Dugan said once he got over the shock that the bear actually talked. “Rocky road! Fresh! I just made them last night."

  "You made them?" The bear’s tone was doubtful but nevertheless it took his paw off Dugan's chest. "They're probably not very good."

  Dugan ignored the insult to his baking. It was probably an echo of his grandpa’s belief that men didn’t cook. His grandpa always complained that Dugan’s cooking wasn’t as good as his dead wife’s and then ate the food anyhow. Dugan frantically dug through his ancient ammo pack. He’d abandoned his equally ancient squirrel gun while trying to outrun the bear.

  A small mental voice (and possibly the only sane part of his mind) pointed out that bears didn't talk, so this conversation was probably entirely his imagination. The voice was withholding judgment on the actual bear; it seemed too tangible to be imaginary. Said bear kept sticking its nose into the search, panting hot breath over Dugan's hands, and being terribly real.

  "I've got them in a can.” Dugan pulled the old Danish butter cookie tin out of his ammo bag. “The lid is really tight. You probably couldn't get it open."

  "Please." The bear held up its paw to show off four-inch claws. The bear could easily tear through just about anything. Dugan, for example.

  "Right." Dugan pried off the lid. The scent of cocoa blasted upwards.

  "Ohh." The bear stuck his snout into the tin. "Mhese mare mgood."

  "Thank you." Dugan set the container gingerly on the ground. He edged away from the bear. His muzzleloader lay the dead leaves fifty feet back. He’d have to abandon it for now. "Okay, so, I'll be going."

  "Hold it!" The bear growled.

  Dugan froze in place.

  "Let me see it." The bear licked the last crumbs from the tin and then stalked toward Dugan.

  See what? "Excuse me?"

  "Let me see the picture." The bear sat down in front of Dugan. It held out a paw and did a little "gimme" gesture with its massive claws.

  Even with it sitting down, Dugan had to look up at the bear. It was a seriously big animal. It was too large and too brown and too talkative to be a normal black bear. It looked more like a Kodiak, which was the largest of the brown bears. Of course that didn't explain what it was doing in West Virginia and how it could talk.

  If it was talking; that part was still unproven.

  Dugan’s life was full of things that didn’t actually exist. He saw things that other people didn’t see and didn’t believe existed. The monsters didn’t normally talk but they could still wreak havoc with his kith and kin.

  It had taken him months to track down a good digital camera that he could afford. Even used, it had cost several hundred dollars. He didn’t want to give it to the animal. The bear's paws looked strong but not particularly nimble. Dugan unslung the camera strap from his neck. He turned the screen toward the bear and started to thumb through the pictures he'd taken.

  "Okay, you're a good baker, but you’re horrible at taking pictures." The bear said after the tenth photo. "You have a good eye. Your subjects are interesting and in focus, but your composition sucks. Also you're not paying attention to amount of light. Everything is either over exposed or under exposed."

  "I'm just learning."

  "Learn smarter. Get a book out of the library on photography."

  "I Googled—"

  "Google schmoogle. The Internet tries to compress everything to the attention span of gnats. Most things in life are too complicated for a bulleted list. Get a freaking book. Stop. Delete that one."

  It was the first picture Dugan had taken of the bear. It was blurry because of his excitement at seeing such an exotic animal. He’d crouched down, carefully laid his muzzleloader in the dead leaves, and lifted his camera to snap a quick picture.

  "You get any more?" the bear said asked.

  Dugan had another two dozen photos. The first was the bear's head snapping around at the sound of the shutter. (Why did cameras still make that noise anyhow? It’s all digital now.) The next two pictures were of the bear charging. The rest were smears of the ground as Dugan took off running for his life, his finger still on the button.

  The bear snorted with what sounded like giggles and had him delete the four photos that showed the animal. "You can keep the rest. Don't take any more of me. I'll know. I won't like it."

  It stood, shook and lumbered off into the woods. Just before it disappeared from view, it turned and called back. "You've got a good instinct for what makes a great picture. Keep it up."

  Tracking down the bear a week later was a calculated risk.

  The few minutes of photography tips had jumped Dugan forward in ability. There was no question that his pictures improved. It could simply be that he’d found a useful book and studied it closely. He’d hit a wall, though, with some of the finer points. It was possible the bear could help him.

  There was a good chance t
hat the bear had been all his imagination, thus he was in no danger whatsoever. Certainly that made the most sense; brown bears were not native of West Virginia or even the East Coast. If it was a real bear, then it had escaped from a zoo or a circus. Such an animal could be considered somewhat tame.

  As usual, he could find no proof that he saw something real. He lived deep within a mountainous two-million-acre national forest. A slew of bears could be roaming the woods without being spotted. Certainly there were no news stories about odd bear sightings in the area.

  “Bear” and “talking” search terms pulled up fairytales (once he eliminated storytelling teddy bears). It was interesting to note that unlike wolves, bears were more like cats in such stories. They were usually good and noble and protected little girls and such. Of course, Dugan wasn’t a little girl, but then it was doubtful that the bear was a cursed prince.

  All this considered, the risk in tracking down the possibly imaginary bear seemed minimal. Just to be on the safe side, Dugan made his best pastry.

  He followed the big bear tracks for an hour. His loud footsteps on the dead leaves and occasional scolding from chipmunks were the only sounds in the thick woods. This deep into the national forest, there wasn’t even distant traffic noise. Dugan scrambled up and down the steep hillsides of the two hollows until he found the bear beside one of Deer Creek’s many smaller branches.

  "I have macarons!" Dugan called as the bear grunted and started to turn away.

  "Seriously?" The bear paused. "Macarons? You do know this is West Virginia?"

  "Yes." Dugan wasn't sure what that had to do with anything.

  "Macarons?" The bear ambled up to Dugan, snorting with disbelief.

  "They're good."

  "I'll be the judge of that."

  He'd carefully packed the pastries in his tin, separated with wax paper. He used the lid as a plate, laying them out for the bear.

  The bear grunted as if hit upon eating the first one. "You made these?"

  "They're fussy, but not that hard to make well. Baking is just chemistry. The trick is to start with a good recipe and then follow it exactly."

  "The rocky road cookies I understand, but macarons?"

  "You don't like them?"

  "They're amazing, but this is the freaking middle of nowhere. Why macarons? Where did you even have one in the first place?"

  "I saw this video on YouTube. The girl made them sound so good. It was a little tricky figuring out what they're supposed to be like when they were done. I like being good at something to make up for being so bad at—other things."

  "What other things?"

  Dugan hesitated and then realized that if he was sitting in the woods, talking to himself, there was no shame in admitting the truth. "I'm bad at telling what's real. I'm schizo. I see things that aren't really there."

  "Like what?"

  "Like talking brown bears."

  The bear hit Dugan on the shoulder, sending him tumbling through the dead leaves.

  "Ow!” Dugan said. “What was that for?"

  "Just proving that I'm real."

  Dugan groaned. "Oh, no, it doesn't work that way. My delusions are all self-referential. The logic loops around. I throw myself on the ground and then say that I fell because I was hit from behind. See." He held up his left arm to show off the scars. "I hurt myself while thinking I was fighting a monster in Brice’s cornfield."

  Even now, eight years later, the memory of running through tall corn with Jenny Brice stayed vivid. The bright moonlight. The smell of damp earth. The sound of rustling leaves growing louder, as if it was the wind that chased them through the darkness.

  The bear wrinkled its snout as it peered at the scar. There was cream filling on the tip of his black nose. "It looks like claw marks to me."

  "No one else saw anything. No one ever sees them." By “them” Dugan meant all the weird things that haunted his life. Most of them weren’t as dangerous as whatever had been in the field. If there had been anything chasing them through the corn. When he was little, he had been oh so sure. Lately he started to question all his memories. Some of the “monsters” might have been simply a byproduct of his mother telling him scary stories and insisting that they were true. The others? Maybe he had always been insane.

  "There are things in the world that most people can't see,” the bear said. “It means you're special."

  “The talking bear tells me that only ‘special’ people see weird things. That’s the very definition of self-referential!"

  The bear sent Dugan flying through the dead leaves again. "Why are you here other than to drive me nuts?"

  "I want you to look at more pictures. I want . . . ” Need was more correct but he didn’t want to admit it, not even to the bear. “ . . . to get better at taking photos. What you told me last time really helped.”

  "Did you get a book?"

  "Three." He didn't add that two of the books had been for children and fairly worthless to him. He already knew "How all those little buttons on your digital camera work." He didn't want to know "How to make your pictures wacky."

  After those two failures, picked totally at random, he’d tracked down a book by the man who started him thinking of a career in photography. He was a photographer with the unpronounceable name of Cerek Niedzwiedz. Dugan had seen his photos at the Fralin Museum of Art in Charlottesville during a school field trip. The docent explained that the photographer traveled to desolate, isolated places to take his world famous pictures. It seemed like a perfect job to Dugan. It didn’t require him going to college, got him out of West Virginia and yet limited the amount of time he needed to interact with other human beings.

  It was a career path paved with its own difficulties. He didn’t initially own a camera. He had no idea how to take award-winning photos. He wasn’t sure how to make money once he did. He was tackling life one problem at a time, as quickly as possible. The clock was ticking. He had only another fourteen months before his world crumbled.

  Cerek used his own photos, taken around the world, to explain various points. Between the exotic subjects of the pictures and the fact Cerek would only give one sample picture to explain a complex point like "leading lines," Dugan was left scratching his head as to how to apply it to the photos he was taking.

  It took him a minute to find Cerek’s book. He kept everything personal in his old canvas ammo bag. His grandpa raided his room whenever he wasn’t home, stealing whatever he could find.

  The bear snorted when he saw the book. "Yeah, right, not special at all. So they only had three books?"

  Dugan opened the book to its index to find the page he wanted. “I got out two books for kids; I thought I should start simple. They were too basic. They just covered how to operate the camera. The books for adults all seemed to be about taking pictures of little kids and weddings.”

  "Pandering to the masses." The bear covered the index page with his paw.

  Dugan eyed the five huge claws resting lightly on the page. “I ordered this one through the inter-library loan system. It explains the things I wanted to learn but there are parts that I don’t understand.”

  "Forget the book. Show me your pictures."

  "Okay." Dugan waited until the bear moved his paw. He put the library book back into his ammo bag where it would be safe. "Well, I decided to take pictures like the ones Cerek uses as samples. When you're baking, you're basically trying to match someone else's results. What made the macarons tricky was I didn't have anything to compare them to see if I was doing them right."

  The book safe, Dugan began to flip through his photos, trying to ignore the massive head leaning over his camera.

  "Art is not cookies,” the bear rumbled. “A thousand little elements go into the makeup of a photo. The angle of the sun. If the sky is clear or overcast. The green of the vegetation or yellow."

  This was because Dugan had stopped on the first picture of the tombstone.

  The bear shook its head. "The weeping angel statue is ver
y similar, but the original photo was taken earlier in the autumn. The yellow foliage was what made that photo striking. You took the picture about two weeks too late; the leaves have all fallen. You did well with the exposure. The bare branches clutter up the frame without adding to it. Whenever you can, you should simplify the photo. You can do that by blurring the background by playing with the aperture and focal length of the lens. Let's see the rest."

  The bear was definitely not real, Dugan decided as he scrolled through the pictures. A black bear in their woods could be real, but a huge brown bear was so unlikely that in itself was suspect. Add in the fact it talked and knew about focal length of digital cameras, and Dugan obviously was sitting in the woods, talking to himself. Should he really be courting his insanity? Did he have a choice? He had to do something to earn money when he turned eighteen.

  "Who's this?" The bear asked when they hit a picture of Gin Belle posing beside the weeping angel.

  "My friend, Gin. Her real name is Virginia but she hates it. She has her own car; she gave me a lift into Marlinton so I could take these photos.”

  "You tell her about me?"

  "No!" He said louder than he intended. "I don't want her thinking I'm even crazier than everyone says. I don't tell her spit.”

  “People say you’re crazy?”

  “Crazy runs in my family. When I was little, I didn’t know to keep my mouth shut. I kept telling people about the crazy things I saw. The stuff that wasn’t really there, or at least, I couldn’t prove was there.”

  The bear considered for a long silent moment and then asked, “Like me?”