Read Theirs Not to Reason Why 5: Damnation for Free Online Page A

before clasping her hand. She flipped them both onto the timeplains, pulling him quickly out of his own life-waters before the overlapping images could confuse him.
    “You already know that I need you to go to Sanctuary to protect the lives of the Director and other key government members of the Free World Colony,”
Ia stated, guiding him along the grassy banks, heading downstream into the future.
“I do not doubt your willingness to teach others how to fight, how to defend themselves, and how to treat the people around them, and placed under them, with respect and courtesy.
    “I could remind you of how I bartered alliance in perpetuity between the people of Scadia and the eventual Third Human Empire, in exchange for your presence on our mutual birthworld. I could speak for hours on how the leaders of the Church of the One True God intend to use treachery and deception, sabotage and even assassination to clear out all rivals against their power, the foremost of which will be the FWC.
    “But you know all of this, or you will as soon as you see the situation on Sanctuary for yourself,”
Ia dismissed. She strolled along the stream banks, shrinking them down to rivulets they could easily step over as she searched for just the right one to make him understand.
“What you haven’t seen is what the pressures of two hundred years of vicious, cold, implacable, carefully paced civil war will do to the people of the Free World Colony.”
    “Two hundred years of war? Another blockade?”
Alexus asked her.
    “Sort of. Sanctuary must remain isolated for two hundred years, and that means not only enduring being lost behind the shifting of the Grey border in the next few years, they must endure an ongoing civil war for roughly two hundred years before it can be allowed to end. Generations of maintaining their independence and uniqueness in the face of harsh adversity.
    “Because of this, they must not only learn the patience of a shield wall as each generation takes on the burden of holding their ground for the day their descendants can break free, they must also have an
outlet
for their frustrations. Exiled underground, with each community under constant threat of attack, they must one and all learn to fight . . . but they must learn to fight with
honor
amongst themselves, or they will rip each other apart while they wait.
    “An armed society is a polite society . . . but only once they have established their rules of conduct.”
    Stopping in front of one particular stream, Ia stepped down into the waters. When Kardos hesitated, she tugged him down even as she shifted the bank out from under him, landing him in the life-waters of a certain male 137 years into the future. Immersing him in a solution to that problem.
    They were a youngish man with two names. A private name which only his immediate family knew, Nicolo Kardos—one of several great-plus descendants of the first Duello Prime, Alexus Kardos—and a world-name, Bladespire, by which he plied his trade. Today, that trade involved listening to the frustrated tears of an older man. Fingers gnarled by old age and limbs weakened by a touch of gravity sickness, he was unable to lift a blade long enough to fight. Yet he wanted to, needed to, in order to answer the insults flung at him by a much younger business rival. Insults that were disparaging his goods as well as his honor, and which were beginning to drive away trade from his shop.
    The elderly man’s only daughter was pregnant, or she’d have done something about it herself. She had no siblings, and her husband had died during an attack, so there were no siblings or son-in-law to fight for him, either. So he had come to Bladespire, one of the Duelle, to hire the man to fight for him. The younger man insulted the elder because he thought he could get away with it; old age had rendered his target personally unable to fight, and the younger was becoming a bully because of it.
    Impassive though he seemed on the