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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross




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a novelette by Charles Stross
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Analyst

Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.
He's a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid
from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved
white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He
works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.

The file he is reading frightens him.

Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at
Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from
the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-
lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The
brightly coloured streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a
strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares:
once awakened, nobody -- except the flight crew -- could come within a
mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.

Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons,
Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid
terror that echoed the siren wail of the air raid warnings. He'd sucked
nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father's hand tightly while the
band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear
when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car
windows for miles around.

He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence
assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear powered bombers

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A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross