Just in time for Christmas, here are two new entrants in the Watershed Tales line of short fiction from author Dan Meadows.
Journalistic Integrity
Reporters and war correspondents regularly put themselves in harm’s way all in the name of journalism, ratings and informing the people. Most times, things work out; sometimes they go horribly wrong. When a military madman rises to power in a former Russian province after the collapse of the Soviet Union, threatening Moscow and London with some old Soviet nukes he’d managed to get his hands on, it looks like the story of the century.
A bevy of reporters from all the major news agencies in the world make their way through the war-torn countryside in pursuit of an exclusive. But when they find what they’re looking for, these newsmen discover that instead of covering the story, they are about to become it.
The Garden
Isolation can do strange things to a person, and there can be no place more alone than the depths of space. Duane’s an astronaut on a 20-year mission to test technology for mankind’s greatest exploration ever. His ship, being fully automated, leaves him with lots of time to fill. The large garden that provides his food, water and oxygen for the journey is his only distraction from the tedium.
But several years into his mission, he loses contact with Earth. The constant loneliness begins to dredge up memories of his unhappy past, and the garden that provides not only the elements for his survival but also his sanity, is threatened. Will Duane find within himself what it takes to survive and make it back home or will he be lost forever?
This edition of Watershed Tales also includes a short bonus tale, Travis Walton Never Had It So Bad, a story of planetary exploration and how very wrong things can go.
