Chapter 220: The Arithmetic of Fear (2)

Chapter 220: Chapter 220: The Arithmetic of Fear (2)

Chapter 220: The Arithmetic of Fear (2)

Forty miles from the Bastion 7 stood the Border Observation Post Vell. And you don’t have to be a genius to know what happens here.

Watchman Erran Doss was stationed. He had a big, long scope he used to watch the fog. After eleven years of holding that post, staying sane is hard.

The job itself was not hard and you just didn’t have to be blind to qualify for it. Sit in a steel box on a damn rock, looking north through the scope at gray fog. Log whatever you see and at the end of the shift you write NO CHANGE and go to sleep.

Guess how many times he had written NO CHANGE. Four thousand times. Nothing changed after all this time. What a great job! No life whatsoever.

At nine minutes past six in the morning, the fog stopped moving.

This was a minute change in the pace. Eleven years of fog watching does things to you and this was actually going to be useful.

The fog usually drifted when there was no wind and when there was wind, it just went the wrong way. It was the only interesting thing about this job. Calling it interesting was charity. That fog watching did a number on him.

Now it sat perfectly still.

Then it started to go.

Not blowing away. Coming apart. Thinning from the middle out, and behind it there was ground, and the ground kept appearing, and it did not stop appearing.

Erran Doss watched fifty miles of Miasma vanish in under an hour and did not move from the scope once.

At the end of it, standing alone on a plain that no living person had ever seen the shape of, there was a tower.

He filed the report at eight. He wrote it plainly, because he had no idea how else to write it.

Then he sat back in his chair and said, out loud, to nobody:

"They are not going to believe a word of that."

---

General Hadrian Kest read it four times.

A heavy, slow-spoken man of age 60. He had experienced two wars and had earnede himself a reputation of caution. An honest man, who never took a bribe and never lied to the Senate.

He genuinely, entirely, believed that everything he did was for the survival of the human species.

There was a thing coiled at the base of his skull that had been there for two years. He did not know it. Nobody had ever thought to scan him either.

That thing did not order him around. It’s working mechanism was much more complex.

It simply made certain conclusions feel like his own.

He set the report down and looked at the wall map of the continent for a long time.

’A tower,’ he thought. ’Everyone in that chamber is going to hear tower and think weapon.’

’It is not a weapon. It is worse.’

He walked to the map and put two fingers on Bastion Seven, and then spread them.

Fifty miles of breathable air that came with the soil underneath. A combined package for which anyone would wage Wars. The General had read about the agriculture methods used to grow crops before the Fall of Humanity.

Seasonal grains, timber, herds, clean drinkable water were never seen before by this generation.

He worked it forward.

Year one, Bastion Seven stops importing grain. Year two, Bastion Seven starts exporting it.

Year three, Bastion Nine looks at its ration books and its import tariffs and asks Helion Goldmane for a tower of its own. Then Eleven. Then Six, which was already halfway gone.

And on the day the last of them stopped needing the Capital’s grain ships, the Capital would have nothing left. No lever. No claim. No reason for thirteen Bastions to answer a single Senate at all.

A hundred years of unity, and it had never once been built on loyalty. It had been built on food.

’They will call me a monster for this,’ Hadrian Kest thought, with real sorrow.

’They will not understand that I am the only man in this building looking past next month.’

’If humanity splits into thirteen pieces out here, the Beasts will eat us one piece at a time.’

He believed every word of it.

It felt exactly like his own idea.

He felt like a savior who was chosen to save the pitiful blinded sheep and guide them to the right path.

---

It was midnight. In any normal circumstances, the Senate is sleeping, but not today! They were up for voting. Voting for war or peace!

And surprise they did not vote for an all-out war!

General Kest talked them out of it.

If a country invades another country, it causes conflict between them, which is known as War. If they planned an invasion, they would need a fleet, a fleet meant war and a war meant that the thirteen Bastions will choose sides in public.

He explained this logic in a way so that the dumb folks sitting at the high positions would understand this message. The Senate listened due to his reputation.

"Then what?" Vast asked, pleasantly.

"Nothing that can be photographed," Kest said.

He walked to the chamber map.

"The tower itself is steel. Steel takes days to bring down and leaves a crater with our name in it. Strike it and we have committed an unambiguous act of war in front of every neutral Bastion on this continent. I will not recommend it."

He tapped a point eleven kilometers north of the Great Wall.

"But there are two hundred civilians standing next to it."

The chamber was very quiet.

"Masons. Riggers. Cooks. Unranked, unarmed, camped in the open in the Wildlands." He turned around. "Nobody is stationed out there because nobody has ever been able to be stationed out there. It is dangerous ground. It has always been dangerous ground."

"Beasts wander," Vast said helpfully.

"Beasts wander," Kest agreed. "Every man in this room knows it. There is no court on this continent that would call it anything else."

He looked around at ninety seated Senators.

"It is not an atrocity. It is an accident. And afterward, no worker in Bastion Seven will step outside that wall again for a generation, and the second tower will never be built."

The vote passed forty-one to nineteen.

Isolde Renwick voted against it. So did Corwyn, from the visitor’s bench, where he had no vote at all and raised his hand anyway.

Nobody looked at him.

---

Afterward, Corwyn caught her in the corridor.

"You knew," he said. "Before I testified. You knew what Vast would do with it."

"I suspected."

"And you still let me stand up there."

"You had already decided to tell the truth," Isolde said. "I was not going to be the one who talked you out of it. You are one of the last four people in this building who would have refused anyway."

Corwyn laughed. There was nothing in it.

"They broke my hands," he said. "And then they fixed them, so that I could come here and hand a war to a man in good tailoring. Both of them used me."

His voice was not steady.

"Which one am I supposed to be angry at, Isolde?"

She did not have an answer for him.

He walked away down the corridor, and she watched him go.

Elder Isolde Renwick sat alone in a cold room.

It was decided. They had passed the vote and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

There was one thing left on the table.

A small, flawlessly smooth black crystal, bought in a slum in Sector Four with an envoy’s personal fortune, routed through three dead satellites.

She looked at it for a long time.

’If I use that,’ she thought, ’I will stop being a Senator who obstructed a vote. I will become a woman who warned a foreign power about a military operation. There is a word for that. There is only one word for that.’

Forty years of service. Two wars. Four Pontiffs’ worth of heresy. One husband buried.

Two hundred masons and riggers and cooks standing in the open, eleven kilometers past a wall, waiting for an accident.

Isolde Renwick reached across the table and picked up the crystal.