Chapter Text
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that.
I wish he had been right.
The setting sun peeks though the door-flap of my makeshift tent at the edge of town. It tints everything I own a warm, lovely orange, but I still go and pull the rough canvas more securely closed. Then, I put on my sleep-jacket and night-hood. It will be getting cold soon. I don't need beauty - I do need warmth. I touch the anchor of the nuclear collector panel set I've put over the side, making sure it's secure. The polysteel rope snakes under one side of my little shelter - and the guy-ring it's bolted to sits right at the foot of my bedroll. If it comes loose, chances are the recoil will whip around before taking me, my tent, and all my meagre belongings with it. I'm too close to the edge of the City to survive that - our Safnet force shields are far from the best in the Fleet, and at the speed I'd be going, it's more than likely they wouldn't turn on before I'd be plummeting over 100 meters into the radioactive contaminant-laden ocean. And if the fall doesn't kill me instantly, or the RADs overwhelm me, survival time in north-Atlantic waters this time of year is less than four minutes - if you're lucky. And that's if the centimeter-thick wire rope whipping around happens to leave me alive in the first place. Which it wouldn't. My fingers brush the solid lock-knot, and grasp the heavy u-bolt holding it in place. They're both as secure as things get around here. After eight years of war, nothing feels all that secure, actually, but there's nothing I can do about that. The winds will be rising soon, but there's nothing I can do about them, either. The anchor-rope is as steady as I can make it. Tonight, we'll be drifting over some of the most radioactive algal mats this sector of the Atlantic has to offer, and I don't want to miss out on the energy boost. I only have two collector panel sets left, after the fire eight months ago. . .
It had been a night raid - from Rogue City 5, that had been New Tallahassee, they said - and the shrieking Blueblasts woke every person aboard New Oxford. The tiny nuclear bombs were ear-splittingly loud, and they burned hot enough to melt titanium plating. But there were only four bombers, and their fighter-support was laughably sparse. They didn't end up getting much - my house and a half-dozen others, two farm plots, and a waste filter station is all. New Boston sent us backup even faster than expected. Three squadrons of Silverwings roared over from Skycity 28, and rescued us in fifteen minutes flat. Minimal losses overall.
Except for me and my neighbors, of course.
It had been the last raid of the war. At least as far as we in Skycity 15 were concerned. Two months later, the Coalition of Rogue Cities surrendered. And two weeks after that, there was a beautiful peace ceremony and everything, broadcast live from Skycity 2 - New Mumbai. There were doves involved, and lots of confetti. Or so everyone told me. I was too drunk at the time to move from my tent, and I had lost my personal info-screen in the fire. I hardly cared, then or now.
The casualties of war, you know.
Survival is all I care about these days. It has been for so long I barely know what security means anymore.
When it comes to that - survival - I suppose it's a good thing I live on New Oxford. We're one of the oldest Cities, and our power grids aren't the greatest, but, by sheer luck, our filter systems are top-notch. Somehow, we got special treatment in that regard back when first fifty Skycities were built. I doubt even their creators knew just how vital they'd be, but what it essentially means is this - New Oxford has the cleanest water this side of the African archipelago. We can take in twenty complete rafts of our big pod-tanks full of the worst contaminated seawater a day, and in fifteen hours, not only is it potable, it's clear as a bell, cold, delicious, and doesn't even register on the RAD meter. Most Cities can only take in five full rafts of pods every week - and it takes them at least twenty four hours to process it, and their end product isn't nearly as good. Our water is so perfect, we can use it as currency. It means we can support a population nearly three times the size of most other comparably sized Cities. It means we can decontaminate five times the usual amount of Hot Island salvage. It means we can grow ten times the food. It also means that while we were a prime target during the war, it was as a target for capture, not destruction. A little massive damage, of course, but not outright destruction.
All of those things tilted the balance in my favour for survival during the war.
But most importantly - and this was true before the war, and during it, and it is still true now - our water means that most of our people can avoid the more damaging radeformities for much longer.
Mostly. Usually. If you get lucky.
I sigh a little bit, and settle into my bedroll, spreading a few extra scraps of canvas over my feet before wrapping myself tightly in the wadded Wolyn blanket.
Frank hadn't gotten lucky, of course. And Little Frank certainly hadn't. My husband had insisted on naming our tiny, pitifully malformed fetus, even though all he could see was a small patch on the sonogram. Just looking at it was never going to tell him what sex it had been. Even our geneticist hadn't been entirely sure. Some of the samples she'd taken had shown Y chromosomes, and some hadn't, she said. After I'd recovered from the removal, we went back to her for details, and she told us, so very gently, of course, that there had been a problem at the spermatic level, but that my eggs were fine. Frank had said nothing then, but two weeks later, he had suggested that I find a donor, or even a lover, if I wanted - that me, and whatever child I chose to bear, would be enough for him. I'd blown up at him at the time, because I knew, even without asking the doctor, that it was the bombing raids that had caused it. He was foreman of Decon Team Seven, the most decorated DC team in our township. He'd volunteered at the start of the war, and hadn't been off duty more than three days at a time ever since. Even with the best AR gel-padded suits available, his RAD exposure had skyrocketed. He knew it, I knew it, and our geneticist must have known it too. There simply was - and is - no other way a citizen of New Oxford would have encountered levels of radiation sufficient to cause such catastrophic birth defects. . .
An unexploded bomb on his next cleanup assignment vaporized Frank, three of his teammates, and seventeen centimeters of the nearby solid steel bulkhead wall.
I never got to apologize for yelling at him.
Oh well. Deaths from Blueblast bombs are nearly instantaneous, and almost certainly painless. At least he got to go quickly.
Unlike me. My heart has been dying by millimeters ever since then.
Of course, I would have the luck to fall in love with a City sanitation technician. My parents hadn't approved. A daughter of the House of Beauchamp should aim higher than that, they said. Try to marry a Township official, maybe. Perhaps even the Mayor's son. But I had always gone my own way. I'd studied Historical Botany in school - one of the most useless degrees I could have taken, just short of Liberal Arts, or, worst of all, Marine Biology. Despite that, I'd managed to get a job in one of the lower Township's hydroponics laboratories, testing crops for root integrity. It was a dull job, but it paid the bills I refused to let my parents pay. I met Frank on one of my tea breaks, when I'd gone outside to get some fresh air. Back behind the lab, a young man was sweeping debris off the rusty alleyway floor. He gave me a look, and a half smile, and asked me out for a drink. A year and a half later, we were married. Three months after that, the CRC declared war on the Planetary Fleet of Sky Cities. I still wasn't clear on why - something to do with a feud between politicians on New Paris and traders on New Beijing, I think. Or maybe it was vice-versa.
It doesn't much matter. It's eight years later, and neither City exists anymore. The same can be said for fourteen other PF Cities, and to nine Rogue ones too.
That it also can be said about my life, hopes, family, and almost my sanity, is a completely predictable and totally inconsequential side effect of war. Or so I tell myself.
My parents only had about two years to hate Frank. Early on in the war New Oxford was blockaded for close to a month. There were at least two bombing raids a day - always hitting the residential areas, always avoiding the farming plots and water distribution stations. Several sheltering and evacuation schemes were tried, but cramming people into the farming buildings was ineffectual at best, and shifting half of our large population to the lower levels ended up taking twice as long as any single bombing raid, and was soon abandoned as a strategy. Eventually, whenever raid sirens went off, a lot of people chose to stay where they were, as an act of defiance.
Stupid? Maybe. But it seemed incredibly inspiring at the time.
My parents lived in Central Township, in the Spire itself, just two levels down from the Mayor's mansion.
By the end of the blockade, the entirety of Central Township had been reduced to twisted scrap metal. They even hit the main power distributor once - thirty levels into Core Township, right below Central.
My parents died two days after the blockade began.
All of us who stood to inherit by the damage - Central Township had been home to all of our richest families, after all - were asked to name the City itself as prime inheritor instead, and put all the resources into rebuilding.
At the time I was proud - no, I'm still proud - that the ridiculous amount of money my parents had went to rebuilding our city. After all, I had Frank at the time, a job, and our house, and the hope of children. Nowadays, on nights this cold, with the jobs so scarce now all the soldiers are back, my home an ash pile, my family dead, and no hope for anything beyond my next meal, well. . . I wish I'd kept enough of my parents' ridiculous wealth to at least keep me from freezing to death while I sleep. . .
A slow, agonizing warmth spreads reluctantly around me, the synthetic wool of my bedroll holding in what little body heat I produce.
A bluish-green glow shimmers off the lowering clouds, and reflects through my small plastic window, brightening one side of my shelter with a sickly, eerie light.
We've reached the algal mats. I reach with a toe to reassure myself the anchor-rope for my energy collector is still secure. I can feel the vibration of the wind through the taut, twisted wire - keening, groaning gusts that threaten rain, or maybe even sleet.
The sharp, mournful sound of it sparks a note of sympathy from my heart, and it is this, for better or for worse, that lets me drift off to sleep.