of world opinion would soon stop the war.
The occasional shell that was targeted
toward the city caused great commotion,
people screaming and diving under tables
even for a bird that hit many blocks away.
Later, when civilians had become targets,
we all learned to tell the caliber and the
trajectory of a shell by the sound of the
song it made as it fell.
After an explosion, there is silence for
an instant, then a hubbub of crashing
glass and debris as shattered walls
collapse, and people gingerly touch each
other, just to verify that they are alive.
The dust would hang in the air for hours.
Toward September, when it became obvious
that the world powers were stalemated, and
would not intervene, the shelling of the
city began in earnest. Tanks, even modern
ones with electrostatic hover and thin
coilguns instead of heavy cannons, could
not maneuver into the narrow alleys of the
old city and were stymied by the
steep-sided mountain valleys. But the
outer suburbs and the hilltops were
invaded, crushed flat, and left abandoned.
I did not realize it at the time, for a
child sees little, but with antiquated
equipment and patched-together artillery,
my besieged city clumsily and painfully
fought back. For every fifty shells that
came in, one was fired back at the
attackers.
There was an international blockade
against selling weapons to the Resurgence,
but that seemed to make no difference.
Their weapons may not have had the most
modern of technology, but they were far
better than ours. They had superconducting
coilguns for artillery, weapons that fired
aerodynamically-shaped slugsЎwe called
them birdsЎthat maneuvered on twisted arcs
as they moved. The birds were small,
barely larger than my hand, but the
metastable atomic hydrogen that filled
them held an incredible amount of
