Military Fiction Short Stories

Winter's Branches

By Eva Suluk

The air in the common tent was thick with the scent of recycled oxygen and something vaguely metallic, a scent familiar and unavoidable. Outside, the vast, unbroken white of the northern reaches stretched towards a horizon obscured by a perpetual, iron-grey sky. Inside, however, a fragile, almost defiant warmth clung to the periphery of the inadequate heaters, coalescing around a small, skeletal fir tree that stood awkwardly in a corner, its branches thin and uneven, yet somehow still holding the promise of a distant, more tender reality.

Tide of December

By Leaf Richards

The December air hung heavy, biting at exposed skin. A thousand tiny bulbs, strung across every conceivable surface, fought back against the encroaching darkness, their colours bleeding into the damp streets. There was a hum, not of traffic, but of the collective city, a murmur of life reasserting itself after years of quiet. People moved, bundled in thick coats, their faces upturned, tracing the luminous outlines of the season. Everything felt… new, yet overlaid with a thin, almost invisible film of the past.

Where the Bearings Seize

By Jamie F. Bell

The rain didn’t fall so much as it moved in horizontal sheets, slamming against the control room's single pane of reinforced glass with the sound of thrown gravel. Inside, the air was a stale cocktail of hot vacuum tubes, damp wool, and the faint, coppery scent of failing electronics. It was a smell Kenny was coming to associate with his new life: the smell of decay held barely at bay.