Aftermath

3

March 23, 2026.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Saul Steinmetz raised weary eyes from the daily briefing package and stared at the cloth text hanging on his wall. His mother had embroidered it for him when he was nine years old.

There ought to be more, an addition that read: “But sometimes it lands you at a raw sewage outlet.”

Like now.

During the past eight hours he had met with twenty-three senior officials of the executive branch, with six Senators, and with the heads of the nation’s three biggest conglomerates. He had made decisions on how to finance the federal debt; how to pay the military when electronic transfers had ceased to exist and the public was suspicious of paper money; how much to draw down the government grain and dairy stockpiles; and where and how to send food supplies. He had discussed protocol for U.S. embassies overseas and foreign embassies here, approved Army manpower allocation to preserve and in some cases reestablish the inland waterways, and ordered a red-alert status at the Mexican border.

Saul had done all this, yet felt that he had done too little and usually too late. Decisions based on incomplete information were one thing, a fact of political life. Decisions made with no information were another. How could you manage the world’s largest and most complex economy, when everything was interlocked and you had no idea of the status of key components? It was blindfold chess, played with imperfect knowledge of the initial position.

For the thousandth time in the past weeks, he turned toward the holographic projection unit in the corner of the office. For the thousandth time, the volume sat empty. How long before information services got the Persona back in operation? Or would they never do it, given the general collapse of data services?

A movement outside the window caught his eye. He stared, stabbed at the interoffice controller, then realized that he had tried it twice already today. In spite of optimistic promises it too was still not repaired. He raised his voice. “Auden!”

Auden Travis appeared so quickly that Saul wondered if the aide spent his days and nights lying outside the door of the Oval Office, although his elegant clothing denied that.

“Yes, Mr. President? Sir, it is working now, actually.”

“Outside?”

“Just a few lines. But we can patch you to anywhere in the country.”

“Good. That’s not what I need at the moment, though. Is General Mackay in the building?”

He hardly needed Travis’s nod. With external systems down, the only way to get access to the President was by staying close. Auden wasn’t the only one willing to spend his nights and days on the threshold. Did they realize, any of them, how little real power he had now?

“Shall I get her, Mr. President?” Travis was studying and perplexed by the changing expressions on Steinmetz’s face.

“If you please.”

When Auden was gone Saul turned his attention again to the briefing documents — handwritten, most of them, though one or two had been hammered out on an ancient typewriter. Somebody must have been rifling the Smithsonian collections for anything that worked.

Last night he had asked for a summary of the situation around the world. What he had received was patchy, even with the best available sources, but he could see enough to extrapolate a pattern. The places where technology was the newest and most advanced had been hit the worst. Total system breakdown there had caused the loss of food, water, and power. Deaths in the hundreds of millions to billions were reported for the Golden Ring countries, the Sino Consortium, and the Federation of Indian States.

Reported, how? Probably through the ham radio net. Some of the amateurs had held on to their old equipment, and been back on the air within days.

South America and the southern part of Africa had a different problem. They did not have so complex a technological infrastructure to lose, but the vast weather changes produced by Supernova Alpha more than made up for that. They were tottering on the brink of government collapse.

Countries with new technology built on top of an older one had managed the best. Europe and North America still had the skeletons of despised and ignored old communications, power, and transportation systems, sitting underneath the slick and glossy fabric of today’s — or yesterday’s — advances. It was depressing, to sit in the middle of chaos and be told that you were one of the lucky ones.

The report said nothing about Australia, where a recent craze for everything new must have combined with the most severe storm systems; but the absence of news from Australia told its own story.

Of course, the weather patterns in both hemispheres were not based on observation. They were based on computer predictions, and the computer models relied on historical weather data. God knows how good or bad they might be today. Saul turned in irritation to the unit where the global weather was normally updated every half hour from metsat data. The display was dark — and even dusty. Nobody had mentioned it to him, but the cleaning services must be in as much chaos as everything else.

He turned as a perfunctory knock on the door preceded General Grace Mackay, hurrying along ahead of Auden Travis. The Secretary of Defense — intense, dark-haired, and skeleton-thin — had a cadaver’s smile on her tired face.

“I think we have some good news, Mr. President.”

“About time. Tell me something I want to hear.” Steinmetz gestured to dismiss Travis. The young aide went reluctantly.

“We thought we had lost the comsats, the metsats, and the micro-positioning system,” Mackay said. “Now we are convinced that they are still alive and functioning.”

“You could sure as hell have fooled me.” Steinmetz waved to the blank displays. “Where are they, General?”

“The problems are in the receiving stations. We hope to have a couple back on-line in the next forty-eight hours. You’ll have your weather pictures again, and if anyone can do ground-based transmission the comsats will give us global communications.”

“Can anyone?”

“Not for a while yet.”

“Then I won’t hold my breath waiting for incoming calls. Anything else?”

“A confirmation that’s not so good.” Grace Mackay had been in military and government a long time, much longer than Saul. She knew that a boss didn’t like to be told only of problems or setbacks. Saul suspected she would save some good news for the end.

“The former Vice President’s body has finally been located in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We have an updated number for cabinet-level deaths and casualties in Congress.”

Saul made the customary mutterings of regret. He had known that the Vice President was doomed only minutes after that ominous blue sky flash nine days ago, when he had stood at the window in his darkened office and watched planes in approach patterns for National Airport drop from the sky like heavy fruit.

Vice President Janet Kloos had been riding a six-passenger suborbital, in transit from California, where a new trade deal with Sulawesi called for official presence. Saul had intended to go himself until the last few minutes. It could so easily have been him. The selection and swearing-in of the new Vice President, Brewster Callaghan, now on the West Coast, made one thing very clear: no one was irreplaceable. Everyone was expendable. But Janet had been a terrible loss.

Saul wasn’t nearly as sorry to lose thirty-odd people from Congress. Half of them hated his guts, and the rest hated Brewster Callaghan. A thousand friends have less weight than a single enemy.

General Mackay was standing, quietly waiting. He had noticed it in his first few days in office. Other people’s time was his, while his time was his own. If he was late getting to an event, that event wouldn’t start until he arrived. It must be especially hard on someone like Grace Mackay, because a four-star general had her own powers to keep most people waiting.

“That’s not why I told Travis to go look for you.” Saul pointed to the window. “Do you know what I saw out there?”

“No, Mr. President.”

“Well, nor do I. It was an aircraft and it was heading for a landing at Andrews; but it looked like it came out of Noah’s Ark. Fixed wing, fixed engines, and no vertical takeoff boosters.” He waved to an armchair. “Let’s sit down, General, they’re not playing the National Anthem. Was that thing the Air Force One substitute you’ve been promising me for the past few days?”

Grace Mackay sat down very carefully on the edge of the seat. Steinmetz watched her hands. He had seen the reports based on her secret monitors as recently as two weeks ago, just before the EMP hit. Saul was assured by his intelligence office that the cabinet members had no idea they were being observed, but he had his doubts about that. In any case, what did it matter if Saul knew that his Secretary of Defense ground her teeth every night as she slept? That she was married, but had engaged in sex only once in the past four months? She needed doses of powerful prescription drugs just to keep going. Grace Mackay wouldn’t die in office — she wouldn’t be allowed to — but three years after that she could well be a goner.

Yet she would fight like the devil to keep a job that was killing her.

So how much would President Steinmetz endure, to achieve and hold on to his position? And how worn and exhausted did he seem to others? Saul thought he knew, but chances were he put the estimate for himself way too low.

It was the worst time in history to be President. If you had an enemy and started a war, you had a fair chance to make heroic decisions and big speeches and come out looking a hero. But what sort of credit did a man receive for dealing with a natural disaster? None at all. You couldn’t win. People who lost possessions or family would blame you no matter what you did. They’d say you had offered too little and too late. Nobody would remember the good work.

General Mackay was ready and waiting, examining Saul’s face. Sick or well, drunk or dry, she had the instincts and techniques of a great briefer and communicator. She spent as much time establishing what her audience knew and didn’t know as on providing information.

“What you saw was a C-5A,” she said when she was sure that she again had Saul’s attention. “It’s half a century old, and it looks primitive. But it can be flown without computer support or smart sensors or pilot neural meshing. For the time being, that plane, or another like it, is likely to be Air Force One.”

What Grace didn’t add, because Saul already knew it, was what happened when you tried to fly a modern plane without the help of its PIP — Pilot Interaction Package — and other goodies. Five top test pilots, each confident of being able to fly anything that could get off the ground, had died proving they were wrong. Others were still clamoring for their chance when General Mackay ended the effort. Test pilots were a breed unlike any other — but so were politicians and generals.

“Do you have a cutoff date?” Saul asked.

“About 1980. With any big aircraft later than that it’s going to be marginal. We are still looking at the low-cost end of commercial planes, we may be able to use some of them. And it’s not just stability and control. By the end of the last century the microchips were handling fuel injection and stall protection and everything else.”

Everything else. And everything meant every thing.

Grace Mackay was head of a department whose guns and lasers could not fire — the chips in their targeting and range-finding and loading and release circuits had become in an instant brainless dots of fused gallium arsenide. The planes would not fly without the help of superhuman data reduction speeds and reaction times. The ships, bristling with dead weapons for both defense and offense, sat in port or floated out of control on the oceans of the world. The manned platforms in low Earth orbit, so far as anyone could tell without direct communications, had become chilly sarcophagi.

They had been designed, all of these, with the luxury of triple redundancy. If one microchip, by some rare misfortune, were to fail, then two others remained to accept sensory data and provide control commands. As for the idea that all three might fail, at the same moment — that was unthinkable.

Saul reminded himself that as Commander in Chief of the same organization, he had swallowed that official line of logic. How many Titanics did it take before the lesson sank in permanently? Probably, it never did. Every generation had to learn for itself.

Saul knew how tired he was. At fifty-six, he was sure he had less energy than his ninety-two-year-old mother. He pulled himself back with an effort to Mackay, silently waiting and watching.

“I’m sorry, General. I rely on your judgment completely. What you feel is safe for me to fly, I fly.”

“Yes, sir. Give us several more days, if you please. I’m working with the civilian agencies to define a network of suitable landing fields and en route handoffs. Of course, for the time being everything will be on visual flight rules.”

“Fuel?”

“Not a problem. More diesel oil and kerosene than we know what to do with.”

“Unless we have more break-in problems.”

Grace Mackay had finally heard something to put surprise on her drawn gray face. “Seriously? People are stealing aircraft fuel?”

“It looks like it. You can’t really blame them. Diesel fuel and heating oil are the same thing. The power grid is still down, and in the north-central states the emergency distribution system of heating oil isn’t working as it’s supposed to. No, that’s the wrong way to put it. The distribution system isn’t working at all. We’re operating under martial law. Looters are in danger of being shot. But before the blackout North Dakota was reporting fifty below. People are stealing because if they don’t take what they need they’ll freeze to death — and we don’t have a broadcast system to warn them they may be shot.”

Saul paused. He was doing what a good communicator never did. Unless there was a secondary reason, maybe to reassure someone or to drive home a point extra hard, you didn’t tell somebody what they already knew. With the head of civil law enforcement vanished in Florida and presumed dead, Grace Mackay had been a key player in justifying martial law.

“Sorry, General. You know more about most of this than I do.”

With others present, she would have made at least a formal disclaimer. Between the two of them, she just smiled. “Too damn much, Mr. President. May I offer you a piece of better news?”

“I can use all you’ve got.”

“Data bases. We’ve been assuming that all the civilian data bases were wiped clean by the pulse.”

“They were. I’ve had fifty reports coming in from all over the region.”

“But the intelligence data bases were protected. They are in Prospero-rated environments, sitting inside Faraday cages, and the pulse didn’t get to them.”

“So?”

“Well. I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you this, because the Secretary of Defense has final responsibility for what’s stored in the MMCIDB — the Merged Military Central Intelligence Data Base. It turns out that a whole lot of stuff found its way in there that shouldn’t have, and I didn’t know about it. They’ve got FBI files and population demographics and tons of personnel records.”

“My God. And I’ve been telling the House Minority Leader for two years that she’s paranoid about illegally stored and classified records. I owe Sarah an apology.”

“Mander? I thought she was dead. She was on one of the earlier lists.”

“I know. Her version is that she worked late, fell asleep in her office, and missed her ten o’clock flight. I think she missed it because she was shacked up. Either way, she has plenty of luck. What do you think you can do with the MMCIDB records?”

“Too soon to know. But there’s a good deal of computer power locked up in those Prospero environments, and there are probably others in different parts of the country that we haven’t been able to reach yet. I think we have a shot at reconstructing many of the civilian data bases.”

“Good work, Grace. That’s the best news I’ve had all day — not that most of today has been too brilliant.” Saul leaned back and rubbed at his eyes so vigorously that he knew he was making them bloodshot. “But I’m glad I’ve got this job — for a damned silly reason.”

He yawned and she waited. It was the end of a long day, and when he called her Grace she knew he was letting down his hair and indulging himself.

“Three years ago, Grace, I was in the top one hundred people of the country for personal wealth. Can you imagine that?”

“Frankly, sir, I can’t. I can believe it, but I can’t imagine it.”

“That’s a fair answer. But do you know what the other ninety-nine people are probably doing, those that are alive? They’re sitting and wondering if they have anything left to count. The markets are closed, the economy has collapsed, none of the usual measures of wealth mean much anymore. And you know what, Grace? I just don’t give a shit about money, mine or anyone else’s. I’m too busy wondering if we’re going to come out of the other side of this thing as a country, or if I’m the last President of the United States.”

“I feel sure that you are not, sir. We will survive.” She stood up. “Will there be anything else? I would not ask that question, but I have a meeting and eight people waiting for me down the hall.”

“A few more minutes. They’re probably enjoying the chance to relax.” He waved her back to the chair. “I had the Deputy Science Adviser in here this morning. What do you think of Dr. Vronsky?”

“I am told that he has a very fine scientific mind, Mr. President.”

“No need to be so cautious, we’re not being recorded. Hell, if I wanted to record us I doubt if I could do it. My question is, do you understand what Vronsky says?”

“Usually. But he’s not as clear as Dr. Chafets.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. I picked poor Doc Chafets as my Science Adviser because he knew exactly how much to dumb it down for me. Now he’s dead, and Vronsky may be supersmart but he can’t lower himself to my level. Yesterday he was trying to tell me about some big problem coming up in fifty or sixty years’ time. Fifty years! And here I am worried about making it through tomorrow.”

“Sometimes his explanations are beyond me, too, sir.”

“And you have advanced degrees in physics and engineering. Think how he sounds to me, Grace — I know the media say I was a child prodigy who graduated college when I was fifteen, but what they don’t tell you is that after that I went into real estate investment and didn’t even go back for my diploma. I listen to Vronsky, and I don’t understand. So I ask him questions, but his answers make me more confused.”

“Yes, sir. If there’s any way that I can help. . . .”

“That’s what I’m getting to, in my not-so-subtle way. I want you to explain some things about Supernova Alpha.”

“I’ll do my best. What kind of things?”

“Why didn’t people warn me about the pulse? Hell, I had briefings on everything from clouds over the Sahara to supermonsoons to calving of the Antarctic ice cap. It sounded more like a case for humanitarian relief than the collapse of this country. No one said a word about an electrical pulse that would knock everything sideways. I still don’t know why the damn thing happened — or why it didn’t happen at the same time as the supernova.”

“Right.” Grace Mackay sat perfectly still for a few moments. “According to Dr. Vronsky, he did mention the remote possibility of the electrical pulse to you, weeks ago. He says its delay was inevitable. But it was an accident of geometry that it happened at all.”

“That’s exactly what I’m getting at. Accident of geometry? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I don’t get any of this.”

“May I start with basics, sir? You know what a supernova is?”

“If I didn’t know that by now, we might as well give up. It’s the explosion of a star.”

“A very violent explosion. When a star system goes supernova, it can shine a hundred billion times as bright for a month or two.”

“But Vronsky said that according to theory, Alpha Centauri was the wrong type of star. It couldn’t go supernova.”

“Mr. President, can and can’t make sense when you’re talking about the future. We’re talking about the past. It did. Time for a new theory. But here’s what the astronomers tell us happens in a supernova. First, you get a runaway fusion reaction inside the star, and the outer surface blows off into space. That’s what we see. People in New Zealand and Australia noticed it first — it was early evening — and they watched it get brighter and brighter until it was like a second sun. That’s when the climate people started modeling the effects on the weather, and warned us to expect extreme conditions up here in the north as well as down south.”

“You can speed it up, Grace. I’ve heard this much.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll keep it short. When the star’s outer layers blow off, they form a spherical shell. The shell is opaque to short wavelength radiation, so for a few weeks the X rays and gamma rays created in the fusion explosion stay bottled up. You’ve got billions of hydrogen bombs going off in there, but what you see at this point is just the bright outside of the shell.”

“That’s what we had until the middle of March.”

“Yes, sir. But as the shell expanded it became thinner. And it wasn’t of uniform thickness. Finally part of the shell was weak enough for high-energy radiation to get through. There was a huge squirt of X rays and gamma rays, all coming out at the same time. The ’accident of geometry’ that Dr. Vronsky mentioned was that the beam of radiation came in our direction. It hit Earth on March 14.”

“Why didn’t it kill everything in the Southern Hemisphere? X rays and gamma rays are deadly.”

“They are. But our atmosphere is opaque to most of those wavelengths and the radiation that got through hit the open Pacific Ocean and Antarctica. It did no direct damage to heavily populated areas.”

“Keep going. I know this is going to end up bad, but I don’t see how.”

“The radiation absorbed by the upper atmosphere had enough energy to strip electrons from gas atoms. Enormous numbers of them. Electrons are charged particles, so they moved along magnetic field lines and kept building up their energy until finally — all at once — they produced a huge pulse of electromagnetic field. And that’s what wiped out the microchips.”

“All the chips?”

“Every one on the surface of the Earth, or close by in space. The pulse travels as well through vacuum as through air. But there’s an inverse square law effect, so the farther away you are from Earth’s atmosphere, where the pulse originated, the less power the pulse will have. That’s why the manned platforms and the polar metsats are dead, in low Earth orbit, but the geosynchronous metsats and comsats in high orbit are working fine — if only we could receive from them.”

“All the microchips. And it’s hard to find equipment without a microchip somewhere inside it. I assume there’s no way the chips can be repaired?”

“No, sir. They’ll have to be replaced. And it’s going to be a long job, because the production plants that make the microchips depend on their own microcircuits to do it. We face a difficult bootstrapping operation. Until the factories are up and running, we’ll be relying on technology from the last century.”

She paused. Saul Steinmetz had closed his eyes, and sat slowly nodding his head. “Do you have any more questions, Mr. President?”

“Yes. Why me, God? Why did it happen when I was President?” He opened his eyes and smiled at Grace Mackay. “I don’t expect you to answer that. I’ll be seeking answers from a higher authority. Thanks for the explanation.”

“My privilege.” She stood up, turned smartly, and marched toward the door.

“One other thing,” Saul called after her. “You say that distance helps. What do you think the chances are for the Mars expedition?”

She turned in the doorway. “I’ve been afraid you would ask me that. I think they could be alive, and their ship in good working condition.”

“In another few days they’ll be back in Earth orbit. The plans for their visit to the White House were on my calendar before any of this started.”

“Yes, sir. They are scheduled to retrofire and return to an orbit around Earth on March 26. The trouble is, I see no way to bring them down. The members of the Mars expedition are probably still breathing, Mr. President. But they are dead.”