Free Storm Breakers by James Axler

hooves through the thin crust of ice overlying the previous night’s snowfall, the swish of their tails, their frequent blatting farts.
    “Mebbe so,” Ryan said without looking back. “No way to tell.”
    He had little use for knowledge for its own sake, but as a baron’s son, he’d been well-educated by the standards of the time. Extremely well, given that in most places “well-educated” meant “able to read.”
    “But there is,” Alysa said.
    Ryan raised a brow in surprise. Their guide didn’t speak much. As he’d pointed out that morning at the ambush site, she didn’t speak enough, sometimes. She’d spent their brief acquaintance mostly white-lipped, as if holding in anger just short of nuke red.
    “We had among us people very wise in the ways of nature, and green growing things,” she said. Her stilted manner of speech—almost suggesting she spoke English as a second language, although her accent was as American as Ryan’s—made him think she felt uncomfortable talking. Except in clipped, informative phrases.
    “Throughout skydark, our ancestors regularly emerged into the world to forage and hunt. After all, the conditions weren’t terribly different from what we experienced during our long winters. As we do now. Much vegetation died back, starved of sunlight. Foraging was hard, and became harder until the sky cleared.
    “Once it did, various conifers had moved in to replace dead deciduous trees. Where before the war had stood great hardwood forests, they grew back mixed. As they are today.”
    Doc nodded sagely. “Indeed,” he said. “Not an uncommon situation.”
    “Usually the fruits of skydark were more bitter,” Krysty said.
    The young woman shrugged. “What we endured, and what we inherited, is bitter enough.”
    “How do you know so much about growing food in winter?” Mildred demanded. “I mean, yeah, your people were used to long, cold winters. From both sides, mostly. But most places I know, it gets cold, growing season crashes to a screeching halt.”
    She actually turned a smile over her shoulder. A brief, tight-lipped one. But a smile.
    “Before the war some people in Maine began experimenting with various forms of greenhouses for cold-weather growing,” she said. “Also, some of the Kostroma’ s complement of Spetsnaz troops had returned to service after a spell at the Valaam Monastery near Leningrad.”
    “Spetsnaz?” Mildred asked. “Soviet Special Forces?”
    “Special Purpose Forces,” Alysa said, translating spetsialnogo naznacheniya literally. “Yes. The monastery was a popular shelter among those who served there, especially on active combat duty in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”
    “And what were these Spetsnaz commandos supposed to do aboard a nuclear-missile submarine, exactly?” Mildred asked darkly.
    “They were meant to be landed to perform acts of sabotage and assassination in the wake of the thermonuclear exchange,” the blonde woman said matter-of-factly.
    “Those sons-of-bitches!” Mildred said. “They were coming here to commit acts of full-on terrorism against my people and my country?”
    “Back away from the trigger, Mildred,” Ryan said. “Those bullets left the blaster more than a century ago. Everybody concerned’s dead. Except, well, you.”
    Alysa glanced at him with a V of puzzled frown creasing the pale skin between even paler brows. Ryan ignored her. He was a bit angry at himself for mentioning Mildred’s past as a freezie.
    “Obviously,” Alysa said, “they decided to change their objectives when the submarine was forced aground. Their original mission seemed to them as futile as their allegiance.”
    “I thought Spetsnaz types were all supposed to be super-fanatical Party members,” Mildred said.
    Alysa actually uttered a sort of faint coyote-yip of a laugh. “The stories say that some were,” she said. “Some were very good at fooling the zampolit, the military commissars. We tell stories of how they did