Behind the frontier, not all had been destruction. A few towns had resurged from the need to supply food and liquid to the surface’s men. The survivor women of Reese’s holocaust had assumed mostly the role of their dead husbands under the oppression of the guns. The few internal rebellions were suffocated quickly. In just a few months Roger had become the coast in a slave society, but he hoped that state to be temporary. On the other coast, completely dominated by the Empire of Power, the scarce native population had been exterminated and the industrial society, like the one of the surface, had replaced it. In front of the lack of a threat, they had the luxury of a civil society.

Roger had imposed his soldiers to remain lightless. He knew the dangers of the luminous water’s addiction, and he wanted to avoid them at any cost. They used the leftovers of the abandoned technology in the conquered towns to extract the light from the water, mostly with no other objective than that one. They didn’t have the knowledge to adapt that kind of energy for using it in weapons, and even if they had it, the cost of changing one power source with another was prohibitive. But despite all that, they researched. They couldn’t rule out an energy source so big.