The Water Works
Water became power. This is where it is held.
Recorded history
When the grids failed, the water stopped running. Everything this region became afterwards follows from that sentence.
The Settlers built their doctrine around this site and others like it: survival meant holding ground, and the ground that mattered most was the ground the water came from. Protecting it was not strategy to them. It was the argument for their existence.
They were destroyed, and the water they protected now runs through checkpoints and is taxed.
Strategic assessment
Water is upstream of everything. Drinking, washing, cooking, medicine, crops, and the treatment of wounds that would otherwise turn. A force with clean water stays standing; a force without it comes apart without anyone firing at it.
The archive records without further comment that the site most closely resembling a moral cause is also the one conferring the greatest practical advantage.
Pump Station Nine
The Water Works is a name for several buildings. Pump Station Nine is the one that keeps the pressure up, and therefore the one the holding actually rests on.
It has apparently been worked without interruption since long before the war, and long before the factions, on the evidence of the song that survives about it. Nobody took it. Nobody garrisons it. When the river came over the wall, the people who turned out in the dark to save it were the town: the medic, the baker, the guards, the schoolchildren. No faction appears anywhere in that account, and it is not certain that any of them existed yet.
Whoever holds the Water Works holds the most valuable ground in the region. What keeps the water actually running is a separate matter, and has been handled by separate people.
Archive notes
- Sustains the town and every settlement downstream of it.
- Central to Settler doctrine. The faction did not survive; the principle did not transfer.
- Now operated as taxable infrastructure.
- Depends on Pump Station Nine, which no faction has ever held.