The War That Came to Houston

By Leigh Kimmel

In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can't afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.

Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer -- and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.

Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don't hold together.

Two people, one deadly secret -- and an enemy from beyond time and space.

A novel of the Grissom timeline.

Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Apr 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215186879

Book preview

ONE – ECHOES OF THE PAST

An oppressive miasma hung in the early morning light. Leland Andersen told himself it was just the blanket of humid air that had settled over Houston, making any outdoor activity miserable, even at the break of dawn.

However, he couldn't shake the sensation that his explanation was the mental equivalent of whistling past the graveyard. Why else would he be having the same nightmare three nights in a row?

By the time he finished his morning workout, Leland was as sweaty as he'd been when he awoke, heart pounding, gasping for breath, the image still burning in his mind. And no, he wasn't having any luck telling himself it was just a stress dream from everybody's worries about the latest bulletin from President Dole's new Department of Security, pointing at a threat to the Space Shuttle American Eagle on the launch pad over at Kennedy.

Not when the dream, the one he'd had for three nights running, was the exact same nightmare that had tormented his childhood. Night after night it had returned to his younger self, of sheets of fire racing his field of vision, of a man's face wreathed in flame. Each time, eight-year-old Leland had awakened soaked in sweat, gasping for breath.

After a few iterations he'd discovered one good thing – by the time he recovered his wind enough to cry out, he would be awake enough to know he'd had another bad dream, that he was safe in his own bed. And to a child of eight, very proud to be a big kid and in real school, not blubbering or crying for his parents had been an important thing indeed.

After a few repetitions, Leland realized that the flames looked so strange because he was seeing them twice, one image a reflection of the other. Once he understood the glass on which they reflected was curved, he knew that it was the visor of a space helmet.

So this man was an astronaut. Determined to know who he was and what was happening to him, Leland read every book he could find on the space program.

When he had exhausted the sources in his school's library, he asked the librarian. She'd smiled and answered that such a harrowing event wouldn't be included in books for children. Wouldn't want to give them nightmares, after all.

Leland had to bite his tongue. Pointing out that he was asking because he was already having nightmares would only get him in trouble for disrespecting an adult. So he thanked the nice lady for her help and considered how to get his hands on books that told the whole story of the American space program, even the scary parts.

The sheer persistence of Leland's efforts drew his parents' attention, and they tried to redirect his attention to more pleasant things. When he refused to be dissuaded, his father, a theoretical physicist at the University of Minnesota, took him to the university library. In the big reference room they looked through a volume of astronaut biographies in search of the face that haunted Leland's nights.

As each page brought them closer to the back of the book with no sign of the face he had come to know so well, Leland wondered if this search would end like all the others, in failure. His father turned the page, and Leland had to quick suppress a yelp of astonished delight. Yes, there could be no mistaking that long, angular face, albeit grinning rather than scowling in grim determination. Now at last Leland's mystery astronaut had a name: Edward Higgens White II.

Together Leland and his father had read the brief biography – White's Air Force career, his history-making spacewalk, and the routine training exercise gone awry. Yes, he'd busted himself and his crewmates out in the very nick of time, but the image of them piling out with flames licking across their spacesuits might well give some kids nightmares.

But he wasn't escaping. The words came blurting out even as Leland realized they'd make no sense. At his father's frown, Leland realized he must sound like he were contradicting an adult and appended, Not in the dream, I mean.

There was no doubt in his mind, not after having the dream keep replaying itself before his helpless eyes night after night for the last three months. Leland knew it would not end in heroic escape. Although sometimes Leland would wrench himself awake before it reached its inevitable conclusion, several times he'd seen that brave man slumping forward, overcome by the foul vapors swirling around him.

Struggling to reconcile the images seared into his memory with the authoritative text on the page before him, Leland recalled a day the previous winter. His school had cancelled classes because of the weather, but the university hadn't. His mother couldn't take him to her job in the administrative offices with her, so his father had taken him to class. Leland had sat in a corner of the lecture hall reading about jet planes and fire engines while Dr. Andersen had lectured about quantum physics. Most of it had bored Leland to tears, but the cat that was both alive and dead had sounded really cool.

Except there'd been more. Why did the boring stuff always turn out to be important, and the important stuff have to be so boring?

Something about the cat splitting...

No, not the cat, the world splitting into one where the cat lived, and one where it died. What if there's a world next door that looks a lot like ours, except in it, they didn't get out? Leland wrestled with half-grasped concepts in an effort to apply them to the images that had made bedtime something to dread. If they couldn't get out, wouldn't it look like my dreams?

Leland's father smiled, lips quirking upward, but eyes remaining solemn. Well, Leland, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics does predict that such a world could exist. But it's a theoretical concept, and there's no known way to transfer information between worlds. He shook his head. That's the sort of foolishness you hear out of places like the Institute of Noetic Science.

His father's tone had been so final that Leland had nodded and forced out some appropriate-sounding words. Although it came as a relief to discover that the astronaut hadn't met the fiery doom Leland had witnessed night after night, there was still a certain letdown to discovering that such a profound experience was just an ordinary dream, if somewhat more persistent than the usual sort.

However disappointed he might have been at such a prosaic explanation, the nightmares had ended the day he positively identified his astronaut, and they didn't return. Even a decade and change later, when two men from NASA had visited the airbase where new-minted Second Lieutenant Leland Andersen of the US Air Force was stationed, informing him of his place in the secret US cloning project and his relationship to Colonel White, now a US Senator, his dreams had remained unremarkable.

To be sure, he'd wondered whether the genetic connection with Ed White might have anything to do with that childhood nightmare. After his father's pronouncement on the impossibility of information passing between worlds, he wasn't about to air those speculations. Not to the guys from NASA, and not to anyone in his unit, because a man in his line of work couldn't afford even a whiff of mental instability.

So why should that old nightmare be returning now, after almost three decades? Had he made a mistake last Saturday, going to the party over at Trent Dahlquist's place? Trent and his wife owned the old Armstrong lace, right beside Ed White's home Had the sight reopened the emotional wound of the Senator's plane crash, the memories of the ugly speculations about terrorism even after the National Traffic Safety Board had ruled it the result of metal fatigue in the airframe?

Except Leland had gone past his ur-brother's house multiple times since the accident without any evidence of disturbance to his sleep. Even when he'd gone up to West Point to stand with his fellow astronauts for the burial, then returned to attend the memorial service at Johnson Space Center, no nightmares had disturbed his sleep.

Not to mention that he would expected a dream spurred by that grief to be about Ed's desperate struggle to maintain enough altitude that he could set his plane down in the Houston Ship Channel. Leland didn't give a whole lot of credence to the stories from the fall of the Soviet Union of the various Stalin clones having access to the old Tyrant's memories. However, it wouldn't need any of that other-memory stuff, just his professional knowledge as a pilot and an aeronautical engineer that his subconscious could spin into a plausible vision of his ur-brother's final moments.

Which only made the return of Leland's childhood nightmare all the more disturbing. He was a rational man, and he preferred to keep the supernatural firmly in his faith.

TWO—YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST ASTRONAUT

The front door opened with an ominous creak that made Nora McKinzie recall too many unpleasant welfare check calls. Her husband kept promising he'd get it oiled, but somehow it never quite happened, never mind that tax season had been over for almost three months now.

When she and Jack had been dating, she'd thought it sensible to marry an accountant, someone with a nice, safe office job, who'd make good money. That way no children of hers would risk losing both parents in the line of duty, as they would if she'd married a fellow police officer. Now that she had become more acquainted with her husband's tendency to fall down a rabbit hole of numbers, especially the interesting sort, she no longer had that serene confidence.

These days even an office job isn't so safe. There'd been a time when bombings of workplaces and restaurants were something that happened back in the Old Country, mostly during the Troubles. Since the Great Outrage in New York City last year, there'd been so many terrorist attacks on US soil that the news outlets were only reporting the major ones, like the destruction of the Federal building in Indianapolis back in January.

Was it her dad or her uncle who'd always said All safety is temporary, here in this vale of tears? It had been a warning against fretting about things over which you had no control, but now that she was a Houston police officer, it was just as applicable as a warning not to bring your work home with you.

Which was why right now she just wanted to shower and change. Wash off all the dirt and ugliness of a long shift. Maybe crime here in Houston wasn't as bad as New York or Chicago—the old Texas tradition of some people just need killing went a long way to keeping the career criminal population down – but even the endless stream of petty thievery and impulse-control issues could grind down the best.

As Nora headed back to the bedroom, a flash of red light caught her eye—the answering machine. Better check, just in case.

The first message was some company trying to sell permanent hurricane shutters. Although she and Jack had discussed the relative advantage of permanent shutters vs. plywood, they'd both agreed that they'd never buy from some random telemarketer. So she just nodded along to the spiel and looked up at the pictures on the walls.

There was the faded sepia of her grandmother's First Communion. The lace mantilla with its ornate comb was more typically Spanish than Irish, but Grandma's family would've been trying very hard to emphasize that they were now Texans—even in Nora's own childhood, the majority of Catholics in Hidalgo County were still Hispanic.

That heirloom mantilla now lay neatly folded in a box in a dresser drawer. Lovely as it was, there really wasn't much opportunity to wear it unless she were to visit some of her Traditionalist cousins—something that wasn't exactly likely to happen any time soon, thanks to her aunt's harsh remarks last year at Easter about women forgetting their places and usurping the authority of men. On the surface Aunt Maddy had been talking about the Inauguration, which had given Uncle Pat an excuse to end the conversation on the grounds that politics should be kept out of holiday conversation. However, everyone knew that Nora's police work was as much the target as Elizabeth Dole's ascension to the Oval Office.

The next message didn't help her frame of mind. When those automated messages had first become available, the department had touted them as a way to keep updated on raidly changing situations while off-duty. However, she'd found the sheer number of generalized state-wide and even nation-wide alerts tended to drown out the ones that actually were relevant. Yes, she was glad to hear that American Eagle had lifted off without a hitch and everyone aboard was A-OK, but a continued alert for America's space program just raised anxieties. NASA had ten space centers acrosss the country, not just Kennedy and Johnson, plus the NASA Administrator's HQ in Washington DC.

Her gaze went to the signed photo of Ed White on his history-making spacewalk. Years ago she'd mounted it in a shadowbox, alongside the faded ditto copy of the assignment that had led to their meeting.

Nora had been in third grade, just finishing a unit on government in social studies. The teacher had offered extra credit for anyone who visited a government official, probably expecting the more ambitious students to go visit the mayor's office, or maybe the town constable or a township selectman. But Nora already had the space bug, so when she heard that Senator White would becoming to the county seat to meet with his constituents, she'd bugged her parents until they agreed to take her.

Even after so many years, she could still remember her mixture of excitement and trepidation as they headed over to Edinburg. She'd already read enough space history to know about his narrow escape from a fiery death, that the resultant scars were airbrushed out of his official portraits. How bad would they be? She didn't want to disgrace herself by flinching away from him in revulsion.

She'd been happily surprised to discover that, while no one could