Excerpt
THE RELICT
The sirens sounded first and black-clad Cheever grandmas made the fist sign to their God as they ran for cover. Seemingly exhausting their energy after a run of three soundings, the sirens died, and then Rune could hear the groan of the Gorst-vaankle engines of the bombers. He walked out onto his terrace and peered up at the sky, seeing nothing until the guns of Foreton lit up the clouds to show the neat array of cruciform gunships dropping their loads on the town. Supposedly he was safe out here in the village of Meeps, because the Grooger were after the warehouse and factory district lying between Foreton and the sea, but the weariness of war had begun to impinge, command structures were breaking down, and many crews now tended to drop their loads anywhere on the mainland here, before reaching the range of Foreton's guns, or while escaping them.
He grimaced. Weariness might well be impinging, but this conflict was set to run and run. Here on mainland Cheever they had taken many factories underground, and many communal dwellings too, and they had the metals, the coal and had maintained wartime production at a peak. All they seemed in danger of was running out of people, though the Church had foreseen that and made all forms of contraception illegal. Meanwhile, a similar situation existed out at the islands: the Grooger had their factory rafts, undersea facilities, and access to raw materials to keep their production up as did the Cheever. This would last for at least another twenty years. Both sides had good defences and the ability to attack the other side, but though the detestation of each for the other ran right down to the roots of religious indoctrination, neither side committed more to the war than they could sustain.
As a particularly ugly relict digger the villages had long ago labelled as mentally subnormal, there were many things Rune should not know. For example, he should not know that it would take the Cheever between ten and fifteen years to finally find the large uranium ore deposit in one of their mountain chains, then maybe five years to develop nuclear weapons which, if used, would drive the Grooger to use the biotech weapons they would be struggling to develop by that time. Based on the viruses here, with their huge genome, and being deployed in a radioactive environment, mutation was inevitable. It would be a perfect storm. Presently the war was killing hundreds of Cheevers and Groogers every day. The future scenario would result in over two billion dead.
The bombing lasted half an hour, by which time the Crudas Moon had lit up green – that same green separating horizon from sky prior to sunrise. The gunships became easily visible as they turned for home in frosted-emerald clouds. Without fear he watched them passing overhead, ready to make a second turn out over the mountains and head out to sea again – their route in to avoid the sea forts off the coast of Foreton. But then a sucking thump seemed to pass right through him, the dusk lit up with a bright orange explosion, and he hurtled back to crash into his wooden door shutters.
