Metal Fatigue by Sean Williams Read Free Book Online

been both vicious and sudden — yet many forecasters had been predicting it for decades. Prolonged environmental disturbances early in the twenty-first century had led to crop failures and water shortages, exacerbated by pollution of what little resources there were available. As new diseases and old reappeared in countries barely able to feed their many millions, let alone heal them, many regimes had turned to violence in order to quell uprisings of people educated to expect better by the World-Wide Web. Internal distraction had become civil war, or encouraged invasion from without, while affluent countries had continued to pay lip-service to the United Nations. An already inequitable distribution of resources and justice had worsened — until finally the pressure became too much.
    The first atomic bombs exploded in anger for almost one hundred years burst a symbolic dam. Fighting erupted overnight in South Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, Indonesia and China — the countries most in need of resources. United Nations peace-keepers were fired upon and executed in defiance of one last effort to restore order. Mediation was seen as intervention, and prompted violent backlashes. Fighting spread to the Middle East and Europe.
    Soon, no continent was free from conflict. Refugees — and invaders — poured into the United States of America, Western Europe and Australia. The border between the United States and Mexico was pelted by missiles launched from the Alpha-2 Space Station — the first time war had ever been conducted from space — but sophisticated weaponry had little effect against sheer numbers. When Alpha-2 was finally shot down by a ground-based laser in Argentina, the southern defences of the United States began to crumble.
    Around that time, five years after the beginning of the War, the Dissolution began. In the United States, it coincided with the recall of the Armed Forces to halt widespread looting in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and a dozen other major cities. Whole battalions refused orders to fire on civilians, or simply rebelled against their superiors. Simultaneously, the internal revolt which had been building for a century reached flashpoint. Armed demonstrators stormed the Pentagon, and the new President disappeared in the process of evacuating — or, as some believed, retreating to a more secure stronghold to leave the fringes to battle it out among themselves.
    The fighting lasted a further five years, in which time the army itself disintegrated. Local governments formed and fell in violent clashes that tore the Union to tatters. Gangs of predatory nomads spread from town to town, pillaging for food rather than working for it themselves. In the anarchic chaos that enveloped North America, anyone with even the slightest advantage was either a beloved ally or a feared enemy.
    Kennedy had survived the Dissolution purely because it was designed to be as self-sufficient as possible. The city had remained able to feed, house and heal its million-odd citizens when crops failed or were left to rot unharvested outside, or when threatened by the many diseases that rocked the collapsing United States. At first the Mayoralty had welcomed refugees with open arms; later, with a population inflated to five million people and several million more storming its walls, it had been forced to adopt a harder policy. It had closed its doors, physically and metaphorically, purely to remain a viable enclave of civilisation.
    Isolation had saved it from the worst of the Dissolution. Reversing that policy was not just a matter of writing a new clause in the Mayoralty's Constitution, but rewriting the entire city's psyche.
    Roads himself felt it. Even though he agreed with the Reassimilationists — who believed that the arrival of an envoy from the Reunited States, six weeks ago, couldn't have come at a better time — the thought of living without walls around the city bothered him. He had become used to isolation,