STEEP EDGE. ALL PERSONNEL WILL PROCEED AT A SLOW WALK. STRETCHERS WILL BE CARRIED AT A SLOW WALK. 5 MIN PER 100 M. BY ORDER. Under it, in pencil: WE KNOW.
Survey notice board, the foot of Bell Ridge
The story
On the Sallow Flats, time runs as fast as the ground is dry: six times faster on the gravel ridges than on the terraces behind the line, and at a crawl in the flooded meadows between the trenches. Two crowns have fought over the fast ground for four years. Every soldier wears a sealed clock that counts only the days he has actually lived.
Kit, a conscript signaller at Pacer Post Nine, is fifty-four lived days from going home. His job is to read the rate with a stopwatch and a dip tube. Like every post on the front, his section copies the printed figure from their bunks instead. Then Kit does the job properly and writes down 5.2. The river hasn’t risen.
The officer who writes the Rate Tables calls it a fouled tube. He is Kit’s older brother.
The New Year push opens in nine days, planned on those Tables. If Kit is right, the map is wrong. To be believed, he has to admit the section’s log has been a lie for months, with his sergeant’s name on every sheet. And when the colonel asks where the water is coming from, Kit has no answer.
A science fiction war novel of trenches, lamps and stopwatches, told by a signaller who is quick, frightened, funny and exact about the time.
Every universe felt it. No one knows why.Fast Ground is a complete standalone novel and needs no other book to be read.
Fast Ground is a complete, standalone novel. You do not need to have read any other Helios Cascade book to read this one, and this one will not spoil any of them.
The series is built out of standalone science-fiction novels. Each is set in a different world and crossed with a different genre, and they share no plot and no characters. What they share is a single moment: the instant reality began to change, everywhere at once, in more worlds than anyone could count. Every book is one world’s story of living after it.
There is no reading order, with one exception: the first three books are a single continuous story and are read in order. The Pruning is the origin, the book that tells what really happened, and it can be read before this one, after it, or not at all.
Content note
This is a war novel. It contains shellfire and deaths in battle; wounds; men taken ill crossing ground where time changes speed, with nosebleeds and fainting; and a past disaster in which hundreds of soldiers died. There is no sexual content, and the language is mild.
