Worldwired Read Free

if you stare at it. I'll take you to meet Ellie if you promise not to tell her the thing about the bomb.”
    He falls into step beside me. I don't have to shorten my strides to let him keep up. “She lose somebody in the—in that?”
    “We all lost somebody.” I shake my head.
    “What is it, then?”
    “It would give her nightmares. Come on.”
     
    Toronto Evacuation Zone
Ontario, Canada

Thursday 27 September 2063

1300 hours
     
    Richard habitually took refuge in numbers, so it troubled him that with regard to the Impact all he had was approximations. The number of dead had never been counted. Their names had never been accurately listed. Their families would never be notified; in many cases, their bodies would never be found.
    The population of Niagara and Rochester, New York, had been just under three million people, although the New York coastline of Lake Ontario was mostly rural, vineyards and cow pasture. The northern rim of the lake, however, had been the most populated place in Canada: Ontario's “Golden Horseshoe,” the urban corridor anchored by Toronto and Hamilton, which had still been home to some seven million despite the midcentury population dip. Deaths from the Impact and its aftermath had been confirmed as far away as Buffalo, Cleveland, Albany. A woman in Ottawa had died when a stained-glass window shattered from the shock and fell on her head; a child in Kitchener survived in a basement, along with his dog. Recovery teams dragging the poisoned waters of Lake Ontario had been forced to cease operations as the lake surface iced over, a phenomenon that once would have been a twice-in-a-century occurrence but had become common with the advent of Shifted winters. It would become more common still until the greenhouse effect triggered by the Impact began to cancel out the nuclear winter.
    An icebreaker could have been brought in and the work continued, but things keep in cold water. And someone raised the specter of breaking ice with bodies frozen into it, and it was decided to wait until spring.
    The ice didn't melt until halfway through May, and the lake locked solid again in mid-September. The coming winter promised to be even colder, a savage global drop in temperatures that might persist another eighteen to twenty-four months, and Richard couldn't say whether the eventual worldwide toll would be measured in the mere tens of millions or in the hundreds of millions. Preliminary estimates had placed Impact casualties at thirty million; Richard was inclined to a more conservative estimate of under twenty million, unevenly divided between Canada and the United States.
    In practical terms, the casualty rate by January 1, 2063, was something like one in every twenty-five Americans and one in every three Canadians.
    The fallout cloud from the thirteen nuclear reactors damaged or destroyed in the Impact was pushed northeast by prevailing wind currents, largely affecting New York, Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Newfoundland, the Grand Banks, Prince Edward Island, Iceland, and points between. The emergency teams and medical staff attending the disaster victims were supplied with iodine tablets and given aggressive prophylaxis against radiation exposure. Only seventeen became seriously ill. Only six died.
    It was too soon to tell what the long-term effect on cancer rates would be, but Richard expected New England's dairy industry to fail completely, along with what bare scraps had remained of the once-vast North Atlantic fisheries.
    And then, after the famines and the winter, would come a summer without end.
     

     
    Colonel Valens's hands hurt, but his eyes hurt more. He leaned forward on both elbows over his improvised desk, his holistic communications unit propped up on a pair of inflatable splints and the unergonomic portable interface plate unrolled across a plywood surface that was three centimeters too high for comfort. “Yes,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, “I'll hold. Please