This story is set in the world of Depression-era historical fantasy novel The Cunning Man by D.J. Butler and Aaron Michael Ritchey, out in November. Aaron Michael Ritchey is the author of twenty-one novels and numerous pieces of short fiction. He was born on a cold and snowy September day in Denver, Colorado, and while he’s lived and traveled all over the world, he’s a child of the American West. Sagebrush makes him homesick. While he pines for the road, he still lives in Colorado with his cactus flower of a wife and two stormy daughters.

Hiram Woolley didn’t need his bloodstone or his Saturn ring or any sort of help to know that he didn’t want to answer the door. That knock sounded angry. It was only a matter of time before the neighbors, especially one neighbor, came calling. He’d hoped to get away with his bit of charity unnoticed. That wasn’t meant to be.

He swung open the door. Mavis Keaner stood on his front porch, hands clenched. Mrs. Keaner liked her rose water and cold cream. She’d missed a line of white under her left eye, a glaring eye, nearly closed with an infected stye. Her mouth was small, tight, and wrinkled. Her blue dress was as faded as it was loose on her slim, spare frame. The lace was nice, though.

“Mr. Woolley, I know your property is your property, and I know living with your wild, troubled son must not be easy, and I know that in these trying times, it is our Christian duty to give comfort, but . . . ” A blush rose in her cheeks.

Michael, his son, was out at the creek with some of his friends. However, Mrs. Keaner hadn’t come to his beet farm to talk about Hiram’s questionable parenting. She had to include the remark in preparation for future tirades.

“You know a lot,” Hiram said quietly.

Kerry Hensley is a native of West Virginia and currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at Boston University. She is a writer for the award-winning research news website AAS Nova as well as Astrobites, a graduate-student-run research blog. Her essay recounting her time at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, "Quiet Zone," received awards for both Nonfiction and Emerging Writers Prose in the West Virginia Writers Annual Writing Contest. After graduating from Williams College in 2014 with a BA in Astrophysics and Chinese, she was a planetary science intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Nan’ao, Taiwan, where she attempted to convince 200 indignant elementary schoolers that Pluto is not a planet.

After centuries of watching the night sky with increasingly sophisticated tools, there’s still plenty we don’t know about the universe. Part of the challenge is that we’re stuck on a planet that’s surrounded by an atmosphere that blocks certain types of radiation from reaching the ground. It’s hard to complain too much, since if X-rays could make it to Earth’s surface humans would either be dead or a very different kind of organism, but it has certainly slowed our progress. We’ve managed to launch telescopes into orbit around Earth to observe most wavelengths of light, but there’s a huge chunk of extraterrestrial radiation that we currently have no means to observe. The culprit? A layer of plasma in Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere.

Over 170 titles from Baen Books to be published as audiobooks over the next three years

Baen Ebooks is proud to announce an agreement to distribute the English translation of Judgment in Moscow by Vladimir Bukovsky on its retail ebook site, as well as offering a selection of other ebooks from Judgment in Moscow publisher, Ninth of November Press.

J. J. Cragun takes home the top prize for his short story “Treason Properly.”

Matt McHugh of New Jersey has won the grand prize in the 2019 Jim Baen Memorial Award competition for his short story "Burners."

Baen Begins Selling Challenge Coins Through Baen.com