This is a truth long known by all those who study the art of rule: a war of attrition enriches only the crows.
Nathan had never run into the axiom before. He wouldn’t particularly have cared for it, either; he’d have suggested that a war of attrition would also probably enrich the people selling weapons and that whole production chain, at a minimum. And perhaps financiers would have done well, and certainly anyone with a sizable amount of liquid wealth would be able to buy up assets on the cheap and wouldn’t that make them richer?
But all of these are matters of relative wealth. In the days of his life, the true wealth of a nation was in its people and its productive capacity, not in the fertile fields which could be used to sell agricultural produce—or so he felt, though certainly natural resources were a scenario in which so-called “modern” armies would be used to wage wars of conquest and pillage. And so to a large degree, there was no ability to enrich a nation through war and especially not a war of attrition; and if a nation was made poorer, the weapons manufacturers of that nation might well be said to have grown no richer.
Of course, this still does not hold up to scrutiny. In an international economy, we might hypothesize a weapons manufacturer selling weaponry to, for the sake of argument, a Ukraine desperately fighting for its existence in a grinding war of attrition against a revanchist Russian state led by a murderous plutocrat and his pet oligarchs. This hypothetical weapons manufacturer is not run out of Ukraine; it is run out of Paris, specifically the city by that name in the European nation of France. It cares not, by which we should understand that its leadership and ownership cares not, for the nation of Ukraine. It does not count itself as impoverished by the half-million casualties of the war’s first two years, and it certainly counts itself as enriched by the money which, in this hypothetical, flows through its coffers.
A war of attrition enriches only the waiting, circling corvidae? No.
But ah. A war of attrition enriches only the carrion-eaters, the scavengers, the vultures-in-spirit regardless of their religion?
This is a truth well known.
None of this, however, has anything to do with the predicament Nathan found himself in.
“I did not,” he screamed, “sign up to fight a swarm of psychic rats!” He kicked one into the nearest remaining strand of nanowire, not bothering to acknowledge its initially clean and subsequently quite messy separation into multiple parts. “I don’t care that their psychic powers don’t work on me, this is bullshit!”
He backpedaled hastily, which was quite a surprising thing, since a moment beforehand he hadn’t had gravity. The voidwhale’s gravity cycling on slammed the rats who were in mid-air downwards, hundreds of them dying in an instant to everything from spikes to razor-wire to simple force of impact in those areas where the gravity waves were constructively interfering. Nathan braced himself with a hand as one of those waves swept over him, leaving him pinned to the floor as if by a giant hand even through everything that the space suit and Saucer could manage, and then he was free again.
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He caught his breath, hauling himself into a vector away from the nearest line of battle. The rats were faster than he was by a large margin, but they had to navigate the environment and the gravity while maintaining enough of their bizarre formation-shape to project the field that was suppressing almost all of the voidwhale’s powers. “Saucer, what’s your status?”
Emplacements: 39% remaining, 0.3% relevant
Swarm: <0.01% remaining
Reserves: 0.00003%; 91% of prior materials expended.
“Okay,” Nathan said quietly, mind racing. “Okay. Are there any substantial emplacements we can kite the rats through to good effect, or ones we can repurpose or remake into something useful?” He frowned in thought as he slapped another rung, accelerating to buy a little bit more time. His visor started to populate with targets and risk estimations, and he grimaced. “I hate all of those. We need something else… oh hey, can you do anything with Point Nike? The gravity well trap we pulled off?”
There was a moment of silence, if the lack of written information can be understood as a kind of silence. Then a path in dotted yellow established itself on the HUD, skirting around hazards and avoiding likely avenues of attack. Point Nike itself, however, was outlined only in question marks.
“There’s like a million rats compressed into that one little pocket of space,” Nathan pointed out reasonably as he caught himself and winced at the force of the stop. He judged the angles and distances, then bent his knees and launched. “If you can work with organic materials… I mean, you can, right? You got those dyes and textiles.”
Objective Set: Recover compressed rattus corpse-zettaspecimen for raw materials.
“I figured you’d get it!” Eyes on the wall he was approaching at an unsafe speed and in at least approximately the right location, Nathan breathed deep and relaxed his knees as he prepared to hit it feet-first. “What do you think we could make that would work?”
Weapon Recommendation: Shardburst Flechette Feedcannon
“That sounds fucking amazing.” He winced as he slammed into the wall and felt his ankle almost go the wrong way. Recovering, he turned it into a forward leap into a gravity zone that would slingshot him towards the right place. “Let’s do it.”
His world narrowed down to the act of navigation and movement for some time, and the next moment he was truly aware of was when he was holding the perfect spherical pebble of shiny red-gray in one hand. It pulled at his fingers noticeably, as massive as it was from the impossibly large number of rats which had been compressed into it, but the pull fell off rapidly and he still needed to hang on to it in order to not drift away.
And then Saucer got to work.