Future Artifacts: Stories

Brutal. Devastating. Dangerous. Join an investigation into a cruel and heartless leader... Crawl through filth and mud to escape biological warfare... Team up with time-traveling soldiers faced with potentially life-altering instructions. Kameron Hurley, an award-winning author and expert in the future of war and resistance movements, has created eighteen exhilarating tales giving glimpses into the warfare of tomorrow. A bleak future, yet there is hope for us. With Hurley’s characteristic grim optimism, her characters fight for what they believe is right. They exhibit degrees of humanity only possible in the worst of circumstances. These characters, driven by a murky sense of honor and written with sincere, deep empathy, make Future Artifacts: Stories a powerful collection you won’t soon forget. Table of Contents "Sky Boys" "Overdark" "The Judgement of Gods and Monsters" "Broker of Souls" "The One We Feed" "Corpse Soldier" "Leviathan" "Unblooded" "The Skulls of Our Fathers" "Body Politic" "We Burn" "Antibodies" "The Traitor Lords" "Wonder Maul Doll" "Our Prisoners, the Stars" "The Body Remembers" "Moontide" "Citizens of Elsewhen" About the Author Kameron Hurley is the author of The Stars are Legion, The Light Brigade, and The Geek Feminist Revolution, as well as the God’s War Trilogy and the Worldbreaker Saga. Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, BSFA Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. Visit her at kameronhurley.com. Excerpt From: "Sky Boys" Dead boys kept falling from the sky. Inspector Abijah Olivia picked her way through the detritus of the latest crash. Chunk of torso here. A webbed swatch of heat shielding there. She kept her hands stuffed in her pockets as she toed at the wreckage, idly guessing which bits of !esh had come from which part of which boy. G-forces tended to obliterate bodies. Turned them back into meat. It made incidents like this difficult to process, even when they were local. “Not you again,” said Garda Katya Sobrija. On the hill behind her, the yellow lights of a single garda ambulatory unit blinked lazily in the morning haze. This far south, they only had three or four hours of daylight this time of year, and the garda would want to make the most of it. Even lazy ones like Katya. It wasn’t often they beat Abijah to a scene that interested her. Three other gardai moved methodically through the wreckage in the "eld, jabbing at the remains with long canes; to what end, Abijah had no idea. Morbid curiosity, maybe. She saw no medical or forensic crash specialists on site. “Got sent to do a retrieval,” Abijah said. “Boy on this barge had a package for a client.” “Wasted day for you, then,” Katya said. “There’s at least a dozen dead boys here, all horked up into hunks of meat. Good luck sorting through this shit.” “Maybe so. He has some identifiers.” Abijah flicked her wrist, offering up the relevant paperwork, which bloomed from the interface written into her skin. Katya grimaced but accepted the link between their interfaces and downloaded the information packet. “You fucking cunt.” Abijah shrugged and let Katya digest the official order releasing the boy’s remains and personal articles, if any, into Abijah’s care. “Off-world cases are garda cases,” Katya said. “Can’t believe somebody is fucking with this one, again.” “Again?” “Yeah, this is the third transport that didn’t make it planet‐side in as many months.” Abijah had heard reports of it but hadn’t kept up on the final count. “Somebody shooting them down? Malfunctions?” “The investigation is ongoing.” “I see. So, you have no idea.” “Fuck you.” “I never fuck,” Abijah said, halting a few steps from a charred bit of flesh still clinging to a jagged yellowish bone. A wrist? Elbow? Who could say? “Not without permission.” She crouched in the churned mud, peering at the "esh. She took a stylus from her coat pocket and poked at the flesh, turning it over to see if there was any marked skin on the other side.  “Another order from a rich dip,” Katya said, eyelids flickering as she reviewed the data cloud privately streamed onto her retinas. She snorted, blinked away the data. “Why is it you’re always doing business with fallen capitalists?” “They’re the only ones willing to pay my fee,” Abijah said. No telltale marking on the flesh. She straightened and frowned at the mess of churned mud, flesh, and scrap metals littering the crushed turf of the "eld. The air smelled of burnt meat and seared grass.  “I have money on a dumb kid doing it,” Katya said. “There’s some kind of civil war up there, the boys say. Maybe this was payback from one side to another.” “I don’t like them bringing their conflicts down here,” Abijah said. “Nobody does. But here we are. You done? I have a team coming to catalog these pieces.” “Bill the medical examiner to my account. Save the public a few notes.” Katya snorted and trudged back through the mud to the ambulatory unit. Read More from Kameron Hurley "Tumbledown" - Issue 100 of Apex Magazine "Sky Boys" - Issue 132 of Apex Magazine