Search Worlds Without End

Like Valhalla, this collection of short fiction resurrects fallen soldiers to fight another day on supernatural and often otherworldly battlefields...

Contents:

• 1 - Introduction: Skeletons at the Feast (Phantom Regiments) - essay by David Drake
• 5 - The Lost Legion - (1892) - short story by Rudyard Kipling
• 19 - The Spell of the Sword - (1898) - short story by Frank Atkins [as by Frank Aubrey]
• 34 - Larroes Catch Meddlers - (1951) - short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• 47 - Phantom Regiment - (1981) - novelette by James Grant (variant of The Phantom Regiment 1847)
• 80 - The Spirit of Sergeant Davies - (1966) - short story by Michael Hardwick and Mollie Hardwick
• 87 - Death Holds the Post - (1936) - short story by August Derleth and Mark Schorer [as by August Derleth]
• 106 - The Solid Muldoon - (1888) - short story by Rudyard Kipling
• 116 - Night on Mispec Moor - [State / Leshy Circuit] - (1974) - short story by Larry Niven
• 129 - Governor Manco and the Soldier - (1832) - short story by Washington Irving
• 146 - The Spectre General - (1952) - novella by Theodore R. Cogswell (variant of The Specter General) [as by Theodore Cogswell]
• 208 - The Bells of Shoredan - [Dilvish] - (1966) - short story by Roger Zelazny
• 227 - Ghosts of the Mutiny - (1966) - short story by Michael Hardwick and Mollie Hardwick
• 237 - The Roll-Call of the Reef - (1931) - short story by Arthur Quiller-Couch [as by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch]
• 255 - Commander in the Mist - [Brigadier Ffellowes] - (1982) - short story by Sterling E. Lanier [as by Sterling Lanier]

Beneath the Earth's shattered crust... does the Black Army still wait?

After a thousand years of defeat... is the Black Army still fit?

Inside their lost underground stronghold... is the Black Army drilling?

Archeologists considered the legend superstition and poked about among the surface ruins. Tourists regarded the tales as tourism ads to glamorize a burned-out world. Robots believed only what they saw and none had ever seen such an army. But when a combination of all three tripped the alarm by accident, they found reality turned suddenly into nightmare... as the Black Army awoke to march against the universe!

Table of Contents:

• Lost Legion - [Bethany Martins 1] - novelette by S. M. Stirling
• Camelot - novelette by Shariann Lewitt
• The Legacy of Leonidas - novella by Andrew Keith
• Ploughshare - novella by Todd McCaffrey
• Ghosts - short story by Barry N. Malzberg and Mike Resnick
• The Ghost of Resartus - novelette by Christopher Stasheff
• Operation Desert Fox - novelette by Larry Dixon and Mercedes Lackey
• As Our Strength Lessens - short story by David Drake

War has come to Discworld... again.

And, to no one's great surprise, the conflict centers on the small, insufferably arrogant, strictly fundamentalist duchy of Borogravia, which has long prided itself on it's ability to beat up on its neighbors for even the tiniest imagined slight. This time, however, it's Borogravia that's getting its long overdue comeuppance, which has left the country severely drained of young men.

Ever since her brother Paul marched off to battle a year ago, Polly Perks has been running The Duchess,her family's inn -- even though the revered national deity Nuggan has decreed that female ownership of a business is an Abomination (with, among others, oysters, rocks, and the color blue). To keep The Duchess in the family, Polly must find her missing sibling. So she cuts off her hair, dons masculine garb, and sets out to join him in this man's army.

Despite her rapid mastery of belching, scratching, and other macho habits (and aided by a well-placed pair of socks), Polly is afraid that someone will immediately see through her disguise a fear that proves groundless when the recruiting officer, the legendary and seemingly ageless Sergeant Jackrum, accepts her without question. Or perhaps the sergeant is simply too desperate for fresh cannon fodder to discriminate -- which would explain why a vampire, a troll, a zombie, a religious fanatic, and two uncommonly close "friends" are also eagerly welcomed into the fighting fold. But marching off with little (read: no) training, Polly (now called "Oliver") finds herself wondering about the myriad peculiarities of her new brothers-in-arms. It would appear that Polly "Ozzer" Perks is not the only grunt with a secret. There is no time to dwell on such matters, however.Duty calls. The battlefield beckons. There's a tide to be turned.

And sometimes -- in war as in everything else -- the best man for the job is a woman.

War can get a fellow killed.

The fearless draconians of the War of the Lance have retired from the field of battle to a pleasant valley in the Kharolis Mountains. Well, it would be pleasant, if it weren't for some dwarves, whose irritating feuding prevents the draconians from realizing their greatest hope -- the ability to continue their doomed race.

When the dwarves discover a map leading to a fortune buried in the dwarven kingdom of Thorbardin, the draconians are swept up in a feverish race for treasure. Little do both sides realize that they are part of the strange and terrible destiny descending upon Krynn during the Summer of Flame.

A desinty that includes the children of Chaos... the fire dragons!

The regiment of draconian engineers featured in The Doom Brigade seek a safe haven for their precious cargo of young draconians. All they have to do is stay alive. Surely that shouldn't be too hard.

But Commander Kang puzzles over a sinister mystery. Why are some of his men vanishing? Kang will have to use draconian measures to defeat his foes and save his race. They'd better be enough -- the fate of his entire race hangs in the balance.

The planet Tyss has only one resource: soldiers. But they are very good soldiers. And once a regiment is formed, it never recruits again; as its members fall in battle, it simply grows smaller to become a battalion, a company, a platoon, a squad... and then there are none. But before the last man of this regiment has flung himself into battle, the Federation of Worlds will never be the same.

This long awaited companion novel to The Regiment finds those legendary warriors training the first test regiment of teenagers--the first ever White Regiment. But teenagers who make the perfect warriors are about as easy to train and control as wildcats. And there's little time to whip them into shape before the horrendous Klestronu unleash their massive firepower on the inexperienced regiment.

The White Regiment had driven back the soldiers of the Karghanik Empire, but the Kalif was certain he could succeed in bringing the true faith of the Prophet of Kargh to the Confederation--even if he had to bombard the infidels' planets with nuclear weapons to do it!

His plan began with the construction of a huge invasion fleet of spaceships. But before he could invade other worlds, he would have to thwart a conspiracy in his own ranks that was planning to replace him with a more tractable figurehead...

Ordered to defend one planetary nation from invasion by another, the Iralyans who make up the White Regiment find themselves up against a hired regiment from Tyss, the people who trained them in the first place.

For millennia after the collapse of the great galactic empire in a war that destroyed hundreds of whole planets, the surviving worlds of the Confederation had permitted no new scientific research. The resultant stagnation was considered an acceptable price, since it meant no new weapons of war would be developed, and wars could be confined to disputes between nations on a single planet. But when one of their colony planets was discovered by warships from the Caliphate, another surviving group of planets with technology far superior to anything the Confederation possessed, the Confederation discovered that they had made a fatal mistake. Only the nearly superhuman abilities of the Tyss-trained White Regiment had driven off the attackers. But now the Caliphate is returning in force, with a vast fleet warships, determined to conquer the Confederation.

And there is a third player. Between the regions of the galaxy separating the two forces is a third empire of reptilian beings who were attacked without provocation by an earlier Caliphate incursion--and who make no distinction between one group of humans and another. They are determined to eliminate this dangerous ape species from the galaxy once and for all.

The Caliphate thinks it has the element of complete surprise, as do the lizardlike aliens. But the mystic warriors of Tyss have made mental contact with both fleets, and they have a plan which is the only hope to avert a second galaxy-wide war, a war that could shatter the worlds of all three sides.

When Union Colonel Andrew Keane led his blue-coated soldiers aboard the transport ship, he could not have foreseen that their next port of call would be neither in the North nor the South, but on an alternate world where no human was free. Storm-swept through a space-time warp, Keane's regiment was shipwrecked in an alien land, a land where all that stood between them and destruction was the power of rifles over swords, spears, and crossbows.

Into this serfdom ruled by nobles and the Church, Keane and his men brought the radical ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy, and a technology centuries ahead of the world they must now call home. Yet all their knowledge and training might not save them from the true rulers there, creatures to whom all humans were mere cattle, bred for sacrifice!

Colonel Andrew Keane and his blue-coated soldiers were not the first humans time-space-warped to a world so familiar yet so foreign. Humans abounded on the perverse planet-humans treated like cattle by the alien warrior overlords. Keane's Civil War weaponry defeated the swords, spears and crossbows of his monstrous adversaries. And part of the human population was freed, but the other part became puppets of the overlords in a vast counterattack. Now it was human vs. human, gun vs. gun, ironclad against ironclad, as the empires of Roum and Cartha clashed in gut-wrenching, soul-stirring struggle for the future of a world beyond time.

Stranded on a distant world ruled by alien creatures, Union Colonel Andrew Keane and his regiment must rely on a brute force when a human traitor among them gives the aliens the secret to air power.

Can a desperate force led by Civil War soldiers survive a campaign of annihilation by a deadly alien foe?

Lost in another world and time, a regiment of Union soldiers find themselves part of a tactical retreat from the onslaught of the mysterious Merki hordes, reenacting the classic Russian retreats from the French and Germans.

The veterans of the 35th Maine are back in action against their deadliest foe yet.

A regiment of American Civil War soldiers is swept from the battlefields of Earth to a distant alien world, where they face a wave of terror with only their ideals to save a fledgling human republic.

It has been 10 years since a group of American Civil War soldiers was swept away from the battlefields of Earth to a distant world - where the only place for a human is as a slave to an alien race. But even though they are far from home, the members of the Union 35th Main regiment still embody the radical ideas of democracy and freedom - and they're willing to lay down their lives rather than sound retreat!

In the 10 years since his regiment was transported to an alien world, Commander Andrew Keane has bravely fought time and time again for humanity's freedom. But after he is injured in battle, his confidence is shaken, and his ability to lead is damaged. Seeing their leader struck down also takes its toll on Keane's men, who have followed him to hell and back. Now, with the Human Republic weakened, their sinister enemies - the Bantags - offer a truce to the two halves of the Republic - one that would guarantee safety for one nation, and seal the doom of the other! Now, Keane must face his demons, or the dream of freedom will be lost forever.

It has been over a decade since Andrew Keane's Union regiment was mysteriously pulled away from the Civil War and marooned in time on a hostile alien planet. But now it appears as if everything the Lost Regiment has fought and died for has been in vain.

The unrelenting war against the hordes has taken its toll on the fatigued humans, and the Bantag horde's latest siege has broken the Republic's will to fight. Keane resigns his position in the Republic's government when a peace parley is declared. Gathering the remaining veterans of the 35th Maine to his side, he plans a campaign that will take the Lost Regiment into the heart of the Bantag Empire to annihilate their ability to wage war once and for all. The outcome of this suicide mission will decide the fate of the human race on a world far from Earth.

In the aftermath of Gettysburg, the 35th Regiment of the Union Army were pulled through a time warp, leaving them stranded in a strange alien world. Now it's time for exploration - and to discover a way to survive.