Deadeye

by Jake Kerr

From Nebula, Sturgeon, and StorySouth award nominee Jake Kerr comes the story of "Deadeye" Wolfson. Wolfson is the type of person to make every father proud--respectable, honorable, and a war hero. Yet his father is a scientist and has no time for war heroes. He is creating war machines for the Union in the Civil War, while his young competitor Nicola Tesla is doing the same for the Confederacy. For Deadeye's father, science is the real way to his heart.

When a Union spy hands Deadeye a device from Tesla's lab, he realizes that he has been delivered a way to his father's heart, something that can legitimize his own career path by helping his father destroy Tesla. But this simple act has its own challenges in a civil war featuring travel restrictions and airship battles, and some challenges are more personal than others.

23 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 9, 2011

About the author

After fifteen years as a music industry journalist Jake Kerr's first published story, "The Old Equations," was nominated for the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America and was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon and StorySouth Million Writers awards. His stories have subsequently been published in magazines across the world, broadcast in multiple podcasts, and been published in multiple anthologies and year's best collections.

A graduate of Kenyon College, Kerr studied fiction under Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his family and a menagerie of pets.