Excerpt
As Peter Reidinger was teleporting in gestalt with the huge Jerhattan Power
Station to bring the kinetics down from Padrugoi Space Station to Dhaka, an
exhausted group of men and women were trying to reach the shelter of the nearest
shomiti. With the bundles they had snatched from their homes before
escaping the breached levees, they staggered to higher ground along the muddy
banks of the Jamuna River. They had to scramble to bridge the gaps in the levee
mounds that, in places, were sliding into the Jamuna's torrent. Despite
Herculean efforts by the government and the local administrators in the Rajshahi
Division, the levees had not supplied the longed-for protection to those living
along its banks.
Anger at the "authorities" consumed Zahid Idris Miah and sustained him as he
slogged at the head of the group from his bari, flashing the long-life
light ahead of him. In the gloom of this monsoon, the tool at least kept them
from slithering into places where the Jamuna had chewed ravines into the levee
bank in its rush to the sea. He devoutly mumbled prayers to Iswah that this tool
was truly a "long-life" torch. He half expected it to fade out now, when it was
most needed, like so many other items that came to his sma ... read full excerpt from Pegasus in Space ebook
