The Future Is Short by Anthology

Author:Anthology [Anthology]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: anthology, fantasy, SF, short-short
Amazon: B00KSY7WBS
Publisher: Lillicat Publishers
Published: 2014-06-29T07:00:00+00:00

Richard Bunning is an author of speculative fiction. He has also published reworked neoclassical plays, a totally daft gift book, and short stories in a mix of genres. His best-known book to date is Another Space in Time. His website, geared towards the support of independent authors across many genres, is http://richardbunningbooksandreviews.weebly.com. [email protected]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

29.

The Horde

Tom Tinney

It was five hundred years ago, when the Horde had arrived. It was an early spring, before the crops had even sprouted. That is how the story goes.

They were here twenty seasons. That is all the time they needed to strip the Earth bare, lay waste to the great cities and scatter the survivors.

They came from the heavens.

They did not speak or announce their intent to the people, nor ask their permission; they just began mining.

They did not attack the nations or announce a conquest; instead, they took no notice of the humans, as if they did not even exist.

The Horde’s machines landed all over the Earth to begin digging and extracting every ounce of metal from the planet. Giant constructs came from the heavens and latched onto the earth like the leeches that lived in the swamps that now covered any low-lying land. They sucked up raw ore, man-made tools, power generators, wire, and vehicles. They found anything that contained metal and took it.

The shamans of the day surmised that they were waging a galactic war and needed more raw materials. The Horde did not interact with the people in any way, treating them as pests that inhabited their latest claim. They processed the metals, precious and basic, out of all previously made products in their orbital smelters and dumped the nonmetal waste materials across the sky, raining down on the Earth for the next five hundred years.

The great chiefs of the day sent messages and demands, then pleas for the Horde to stop. No answers came. Men sent their powerful armies against the Horde, but they were ignored, except when their metal weapons were taken away, with no regard for the men using them.

The cities fell, forcing the tribes to become nomads and scavengers, living on the strips of arable land during the last ten years of the mining and for the subsequent half millennia.

Gunty was riding his juka beast through the canyons. The canyons crisscrossed the entire world, formed when the Horde had stripped away the land to mine deep into the Earth. Juka beasts had been winged passengers on the Horde machines; they had leaped off to scavenge. They resembled ancient reptile-like birds and could carry a small man.

Gunty was excited. At fifteen years old, he was one of the youngest to take to the air, and he had just pulled off his first raid. While the others focused on grabbing food and medicine, he had gone to the Harlum tribal chief’s dwelling and found his prize.

The S’eak S’ell.

The S’eak S’ell was technology. It was powerful and known to help predict important events when used by a powerful shaman. The Horde had consumed most technology, but some items had survived.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.