were more killer storms than ever.
And winter? Winter was still mostly brown in these parts—with the occasional ice storm to provide a day or so of treacherous beauty.
He had to admit that walking under the sky, any planetary sky, made him uneasy now. After years spent mostly in space, it felt a bit dangerous and wrong to be under all those layers of atmosphere.
Space was better. Space would kill you, true. But the planetary atmosphere you had to expose yourself to because you had to breathe it. Space you could protect against in a reasonable way.
Coalbridge glanced upward reflexively at the empty blue sky, checking for a telltale approaching shadow. Stupid. Should have gotten over that behavior years ago. The drop-rods fell at hypersonic speeds. They said you had five seconds from hearing a raid alert until impact. They also said you never heard the one that hit you.
I’m a walking Extry cliché, Coalbridge thought. I’ve lost my landlubber instincts and spend half my time down here feeling that I’m stuck in permanent airlock-failure mode and that the sky is falling.
Of course, on Earth, the sky sometimes did fall. And the effects weren’t pretty.
Take Dallas, for instance. The place was more rubble than city. Much of downtown had been flattened by drop-rod titanium rainfalls and a sceeve silicon-eating churn during the first invasion. Although the churn was mostly turned to curd, it had infected and weakened the city’s infrastructure before being deactivated by ground defenses. What skyscrapers remained were brittle and useless. Business, and humanity along with it, had moved underground. Transportation was too expensive and difficult to bury, so it remained on the surface. Big sporting events and concerts still happened topside, as well (and fans took their lives into their hands to attend them).
Political protests also were a surface-based activity. The sceeve invasion, which had abruptly ended eight years before, was about to resume.
Everyone in the Extry knew it. The Xeno division had confirmed it with its startling communiqué from a sceeve source. Everyone in the government should be well aware by now. And anybody else was an idiot who didn’t suspect what was coming. Bad things had once again begun to fall from the sky.
Yet even before the recent precursors to reinvasion, planet Earth had been a wreck.
Stuck in half-ass gear. That was the way Coalbridge’s great-great-grandfather had once described the old European city of Prague to Coalbridge when Coalbridge was a kid. Half-ass gear was when you were going too fast for first or second but not fast enough to shift to the next higher gear.
Aging in humans—at least in the developed world—had been short-circuited starting in 2025 around the time Coalbridge’s great-great, whom Coalbridge called Paw Paw, was in his sixties. It was ironic that humans had solved the aging problem—well, forestalled it, at least, by a hundred or so years—only to have the unsolvable death problem hit them like a thunderbolt from space when the sceeve attacked.
Paw Paw had lived in Prague for a year in the early 1990s after the twentieth century’s Cold War ended, and he’d described his impressions of the city to young Jimmy on more than one occasion.
He always called it Praha, like the natives, Coalbridge thought, and always made it feminine, like a vessel. Well, Praha or Prague, the place no longer existed, so it was pretty much a worry for historians now.
“Praha got the shit kicked out of her during World War II but escaped the worst of the damage. She didn’t get flattened, like, say, Krakow in Poland. But she was busted up enough. And the commies just left her that way for fifty years. Damnedest thing. They didn’t abandon her. Everyone stilled lived there. But nobody fixed anything. There was nothing to fix anything with . No money. No materials. No tools.”
Coalbridge remembered his great-grandfather going on about the city while sitting at the
And winter? Winter was still mostly brown in these parts—with the occasional ice storm to provide a day or so of treacherous beauty.
He had to admit that walking under the sky, any planetary sky, made him uneasy now. After years spent mostly in space, it felt a bit dangerous and wrong to be under all those layers of atmosphere.
Space was better. Space would kill you, true. But the planetary atmosphere you had to expose yourself to because you had to breathe it. Space you could protect against in a reasonable way.
Coalbridge glanced upward reflexively at the empty blue sky, checking for a telltale approaching shadow. Stupid. Should have gotten over that behavior years ago. The drop-rods fell at hypersonic speeds. They said you had five seconds from hearing a raid alert until impact. They also said you never heard the one that hit you.
I’m a walking Extry cliché, Coalbridge thought. I’ve lost my landlubber instincts and spend half my time down here feeling that I’m stuck in permanent airlock-failure mode and that the sky is falling.
Of course, on Earth, the sky sometimes did fall. And the effects weren’t pretty.
Take Dallas, for instance. The place was more rubble than city. Much of downtown had been flattened by drop-rod titanium rainfalls and a sceeve silicon-eating churn during the first invasion. Although the churn was mostly turned to curd, it had infected and weakened the city’s infrastructure before being deactivated by ground defenses. What skyscrapers remained were brittle and useless. Business, and humanity along with it, had moved underground. Transportation was too expensive and difficult to bury, so it remained on the surface. Big sporting events and concerts still happened topside, as well (and fans took their lives into their hands to attend them).
Political protests also were a surface-based activity. The sceeve invasion, which had abruptly ended eight years before, was about to resume.
Everyone in the Extry knew it. The Xeno division had confirmed it with its startling communiqué from a sceeve source. Everyone in the government should be well aware by now. And anybody else was an idiot who didn’t suspect what was coming. Bad things had once again begun to fall from the sky.
Yet even before the recent precursors to reinvasion, planet Earth had been a wreck.
Stuck in half-ass gear. That was the way Coalbridge’s great-great-grandfather had once described the old European city of Prague to Coalbridge when Coalbridge was a kid. Half-ass gear was when you were going too fast for first or second but not fast enough to shift to the next higher gear.
Aging in humans—at least in the developed world—had been short-circuited starting in 2025 around the time Coalbridge’s great-great, whom Coalbridge called Paw Paw, was in his sixties. It was ironic that humans had solved the aging problem—well, forestalled it, at least, by a hundred or so years—only to have the unsolvable death problem hit them like a thunderbolt from space when the sceeve attacked.
Paw Paw had lived in Prague for a year in the early 1990s after the twentieth century’s Cold War ended, and he’d described his impressions of the city to young Jimmy on more than one occasion.
He always called it Praha, like the natives, Coalbridge thought, and always made it feminine, like a vessel. Well, Praha or Prague, the place no longer existed, so it was pretty much a worry for historians now.
“Praha got the shit kicked out of her during World War II but escaped the worst of the damage. She didn’t get flattened, like, say, Krakow in Poland. But she was busted up enough. And the commies just left her that way for fifty years. Damnedest thing. They didn’t abandon her. Everyone stilled lived there. But nobody fixed anything. There was nothing to fix anything with . No money. No materials. No tools.”
Coalbridge remembered his great-grandfather going on about the city while sitting at the
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