“Uh,” Kay murmured, cupping her chin in her right hand as she pondered how to explain the magnitude of the power of the Eighfour-nuke. Obviously a number was pointless without a unit, and “kiloton” was a unit of weight, which was probably confusing in and by itself if one was not too familiar with the jargon commonly used on the subject... and to be honest, even she – though she understood all of those things – had a hard time actually comprehending it.
	“You know TNT, right? The explosive?” she asked hopefully, counting on the fact that TNT was sufficiently low-tech and common that almost anyone from any faction – especially a soldier from a relatively advanced faction like Enn – would be familiar with it one way or another. “Eighty-four kilotons is the amount of TNT it would take to produce the same yield as the nuke. It...” She hesitated, pondering a little more, trying to imagine what she had tried to avoid imagining her entire life: what would actually happen if the Eighfour-nuke was detonated. “I think it would probably straightforwardly annihilate almost everything within twelve kilometers, just with the initial blast. Add to that the heat... I think it’d probably set everything flammable within twenty-five kilometers ablaze, to be honest.”
	Of course she did not [I]know[/I] this, since she had obviously never detonated, nor witnessed the detonation of, a nuke before, or any kind of weapon of that magnitude. There were a lot of things she did not know concerning how effective it would actually be, but however big a chunk of the forest the nuke eventually took with it when it went, she was fairly confident that all there would be left of Eighfour would be a very large crater in the ground.

	She listened to Enn’s prediction of what would happen if Eighfour actually put its age-old defensive strategy into action with downcast eyes and a wistful smile on her lips. What he said made perfect sense, of course... unlike the idea of detonating a nuclear device in one’s own home in order to ensure that they would at least end in a spectacular way. [I]That’s what happens when an entire population gets taught not to think about something,[I] she thought with grim humor. [I]When no one wants to think about it, no one realizes just how bad an idea it is.[/I]
	Granted that the nuke might have worked as a deterrent once, back when the factions were formed and Eighfour founded, there was no arguing with Enn’s logic that telling people they had the nuke now, in this day and age, would be an incredibly bad move. Of course it would ultimately be of no consequence to Eighfour – it sounded as though the Trenians and Anderekians were not going to leave survivors any way, and the idea had always been to only detonate the nuke if there was no way around it – but obviously it would only make it easier to wipe them out, which was exactly the opposite of the original purpose of the nuke.
	[I]Supersonic bombers, toweringly huge artillery cannons, unmanned drones with explosive payloads... there are plenty of ways they could target our nuke without even putting a single soldier in danger.[/I] She raised her gaze and looked at Enn regretfully. [I]And even beyond that... These people sound like they don’t care if their soldiers die either way. They’ll leave them to fight rather than call a retreat, even if there’s no hope of victory. Even if they attacked with infantry, would it really bother them all that much if a couple of hundreds of their own soldiers were evaporated?[/I]
	She sighed. “We’ve been raised with the idea that the nuke would keep us safe for generations... I doubt anyone in Eighfour has even questioned it.”
	For a faction whose sworn purpose was the pursuit of ingenuity, the accumulation and adaptation of as much different technology as possible and just generally being clever, it struck her as odd that not a single person had spoken up against the use of the nuke... They had so many inventors and tinkerers, several of which worked mainly with the nuke itself, [I]someone[/I] had to have thought –
	But that was the thing: they had not thought about it. It was unpleasant, so they had ignored it. It was almost enough to get her genuinely angry with Eighfour; it was that kind of thinking that had lead to her losing her right eye! That they were taught not to do, lest they blow themselves up or something. [I]All while that was specifically what the faction planned to do.[/I]

	“Hell-lasers?” Kay muttered when Enn started thinking out loud, taking a second to remember the blinding rays of destructive light she had seen last night. “Oh yeah, those were awesome! I’ve never seen anything like that before. I’d love to examine one of them...”
	He kept talking, though, and Kay listened with her head cocked to the left. Leaving was an option? Maybe the people of Eighfour could be convinced to relocate... but they would want to take all of their “treasures” with them, which they did not have the ability to do... not to mention, they [I]still[/I] did not have any vehicle suitable for moving the nuke itself. If they fled their settlement and left the nuke behind for their pursuers to discover, would that not just make the situation even worse? At least it sounded like they would have a little time before they were targeted, at least by the Anderekians...
	Kay stiffened uncomfortably at the mention of “machine-humans”, her right hand going reflexively to cover the right side of her face. The way she positioned her hand, the tips of her middle- and ring-finger were actually on the eyeball itself, though touching her artificial eye was obviously not as painful as touching a real eye. Not only was the eyeball itself made of metal and plastic, it was also grafted directly into her skull on some kind of suspension, so there was minimal contact between the unfeeling robot-eye and her sensitive biological body. She barely even realized that she was touching the eye directly.
	[I]He must be talking about the people to the west the others warned me about,[/I] she thought, recalling how she had been cautioned against computers getting into her head. [I]Or someone else entirely, someone Eighfour doesn’t even know about.[/I]

	Finally, though, Enn suggested that they went somewhere else for various reasons. “I have some food with me,” Kay offered, gesturing vaguely at the sun-powered cart in front of her. “I was supposed to be out scavenging for another couple of days, so there should be enough for a proper meal, even if it’s just dried meat and crispbread. Can’t do anything about the clothes, though.”
	Despite saying that much, she did not move to retrieve the food from the cart, though; not without his explicit permission to do so. He did still have a rifle in his hands, after all, which he had aimed at her just minutes earlier and could easily aim at her again.
	She looked up towards the canopy above, which was obviously more of a symbolic gesture rather than based on an actual expectation of spotting one of the birds; realistically, she figured that she was probably more likely to see debris falling from space than a spotter bird.
	“Yeah, I guess the birds are displeased that we aren’t killing each other... or specifically that I’m not killing you. Hopefully they won’t go crazy as they did before, but you’re probably right that we’d better move either way.”