Laika's Ghost Stories by Karl Schroeder

Ukrainian nuclear engineer Gennady Malianov would rather camp in the ruins of Chornobyl or explore abandoned anthrax factories than talk to another human being. Painfully shy as he is, he finds it soothing dismantling the abandoned genocide-machines of the Cold War, but he inevitably encounters others who have come to the same remote places with more sinister aims. In these widely acclaimed stories, collected here for the first time, Gennady encounters: ¿ An Azerbaijani beer company that may or may not have stolen two hydrogen bombs ¿ A young American being chased by the CIA, Google, and a band of elderly ex-Soviet spies because he claims to have spotted a pyramid on Mars ¿ A woman who is hunting for her missing son, who has disappeared into an alternate universe of Steampunk computer games ¿ A killer robot in Vancouver that refuses to kill ¿ A towering carbon-capture facility somehow connected to the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history. And meanwhile, in the deadly caldera of the Chornobyl reactor, something is stirring... All Gennady's adventures, previously published and successful on their own, are brought together for the first time in Laika's Ghost. New and old fans of this slightly offbeat hero will find the tales connected by a larger, chronological framework that showcases Gennady's life and career, as he struggles not to buckle beneath the weight of an ever-growing responsibility to the world ... and to himself.