The Redlanders flooded down the Escarpment toward the forts at the choke point of the River. The donts they rode upon were Valley stock sold to them by the very villagers they were now attacking. It didn’t matter. The Redlanders cut through the villagers like a scythe.
The principle street of Orash in a not-distant future. Observe:
Screaming people were running past him. Babies were crying. Children were yelling for their parents, for their brothers and sisters.
Nobody knew where to go or what to do.
Because there wasn’t anywhere to go.
The rumble of massed riding donts in the distance. Men on dontback. Abel recognized the sound well enough without Center’s data planting.
Screams that were screams of pain.
A single villager charging down the street straight at Abel, a wild look on his face and insanity in his eyes.
It was the eyes that frightened Abel the most.
Their eyes locked, and the man headed directly toward Abel at a quick pace, as if tugged by a lanyard.
Abel flinched. The man with the crazy eyes was going to run right over him. There was no time to dodge, no time to jump away.
But then the man stumbled. Slowed.
Still his eyes remained locked with Abel’s.
And then he keeled over and fell on his face at Abel’s feet.
The man’s back was pierced with arrows as if he were a human pincushion. And there was a gunshot to the left shoulder blade. Meat and muscle hung loose, and the ball had wreaked terrible damage to the bone.
Abel was back in the storehouse in Hestinga. He stumbled back from the upended flyer he’d been touching. He gasped for air.
“That man-” Abel managed to wheeze.
The Redlanders will sweep down Valley. The Second Cataract forts were designed as bases for forays into the surrounding desert, not north-south defense bastions. Their rear works are practically nonexistent. Most of them are unwalled and back up to the River. The Central Granary on Montag Island will burn. Rotten Bruneberg will crumble. Lindron will fall. The priesthood will flee to Mims. Mims will burn along with the priests. Thousands more will die from famine.
I am a fifth-generation artificial intelligence running on a one hundred gigacubit quantum superimposition engine. I complete more calculations per one of your eyeblinks than all the computers of the first millennium of the Information Age could produce together if all of them ran at full power for each of those one thousand years.
Trust me, Abel. I know.
There is a tactical purity to the scheme, said Center. If one’s time horizon does not extend beyond a century or two.
Merely tactical,
Abel pulled himself upright. He started to back away, to back out of the room, but something stopped him. He had another question. More to learn. Even after all this, after seeing the crazy-eyed man and his ripped apart back, Abel still felt-
Curious.
“H-how?” he said aloud.
Abel experimented with keeping his thoughts to himself.
No. No, they weren’t.
“How is Stasis wrong?” Abel asked.
For many reasons. On a mere physical level, consider: Duisberg has three moons. The gravitational tides created by their interactions have created an enormous debris field in a nearby orbit. The very rotation of the planet, opposite that of the rotational momentum of the system as a whole, speaks to this fact, as well. There have been cataclysmic strikes in the past, and a future meteor strike is a virtual certainty, geologically speaking.
Each unfamiliar word lit up with a definition as Center spoke it. Didn’t help. This was the way all adults were, explaining things that had no earthly use right now.
I don’t understand your response.
Rephrase, please.
Unlikely that you yourself will be hit.
Again, unlikely.
Human cognitive integration error. Due to your limited experience, you will require time to process.
Raj laughed heartily. It was not a pleasant laugh, either.
Not fair.
It was one thing to fight, even to get beaten up. He was tough, and, even if he cried, he knew he didn’t really care. But to have a presence in your head that knew the places that