Daybreak Zero

^{3 DAYS LATER. NEAR 33 S 95 W, IN THE INDIAN OCEAN, WEST OF AUSTRALIA. 8 AM LOCAL TIME. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2025.}

There was no hope of keeping it secret in the relaxed discipline of an extremely prolonged voyage. CVN-77, George HW Bush, the last remaining nuclear carrier in the Navy and on Earth, had always been like a floating small town, and now it was a floating small town with nanoswarm. Everyone knew that at least a day before it was official.

Yet until the captain made the announcement, in the crew’s hearts the great ship was not really walking dead, even though everyone knew that all the carriers which had come down with nanoswarm, no matter how hard their crews had worked to save them, had been dead in less than a month.

When he emerged and stood on the dais before the assembled crew, many were already crying. He braced himself and said the key word first, afraid he might not be able to say any more before breaking down himself: “Savannah. We’re going home to Savannah.”

But then his heart returned enough to say, “Most of you are from the continental USA, so at least we’ll be getting you where you can walk home. Savannah has decent rail service to Athens, which is connected to all the TNG-controlled part of the country, with links to the central states, the PCG area, and California.

“With less need to conserve our remaining fuel and aircraft parts, as we pass within range of Africa, South America, and eventually our homes, we’ll be flying off reconnaissance missions, preserving as much data as we can about the changing world. So we’ll be busy with an important scientific and geographic mission right to the end, and I want to remind you all that until we put you ashore at Savannah, you’re still in the Navy or the Marines, and I—and the people of the United States—expect you to do your duty to the utmost.”

Minutes later, her great turbines thundering, Bush pointed her prow west, toward the Cape of Good Hope, and drove across the placid Indian Sea. In the next few days, everyone seemed to spend as much time as they could on deck, enjoying the spring weather, and just saying good-bye.

^{2 DAYS LATER. RUINS OF WATERFORD, NEW YORK. 12:15 PM EST. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2025.}

The passage down the Mohawk had been no worse than unpleasant and tiring, with some long portages around wrecked locks and dams, and a couple of fireless nights, but they had only seen three signs of Daybreak since the hanged bodies on the bridge: two bridges surrounded by trampled mud and snow where large bands must have passed, and one fortified farmhouse where the condition of the bodies piled outside suggested it had been sacked just before the big snowstorm.

From Buffalo, past Oneida, and for most of the way down the Mohawk, the biggest living animals had been spiders, and grass and moss were the only green; the radiation-killed trees and bushes had put out no leaves last spring.

But the previous day, they had seen traces of living things reclaiming the empty, dead land. The Chicago superbomb had been pure fusion, so the radioactive isotopes in the fallout were nearly all light-metal salts produced by neutron irradiation of the vaporized city. The ferocious, life-erasing energy of those isotopes also gave them short half-lives; the fallout had been far more deadly in the short run than the fission-fragment fallout from an “old school” atom bomb, but there had been less of it and it had decayed to harmlessness much faster.

Today, nearing Albany, the river contained more junk, but it had also broken through flood control in so many places that even its central channel was broad and comparatively sluggish; they found the Lock 6 dams still standing.

“We could walk to the Hudson in less than an hour from where we are,” Chris pointed out.

Larry shrugged. “But then we’d have to keep walking. There’s a perfectly good river over that way, and perfectly good canoes here, so I figure we’ll paddle up to Lock 6, portage around that chain of locks, and canoe down to Peebles Island. We’ve been seeing living trees all morning, and that squirrel came from somewhere and has been eating something. So we’re out of the worst of the fallout belt. If there are non-tribal people up here, they’re trading, because that’s what civilized people do, and if they’re trading anywhere it’ll be at Peebles Island, because it sits between the Mohawk, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson.” Larry shrugged and stretched. “And whether we make contact with anyone there or not, I’d rather ride than walk for the rest of the trip.”

Chris stood, rotated his trunk, and swung his arms in circles. “Well, I guess it won’t get any easier for waiting.”

A canal-side exercise trail with long flights of stairs made it easy to descend the four locks by lowering first the canoes, then their packs, on ropes alongside the closed lock gate.

They paddled past the empty warehouses and little houses, with yards full of junk, that had been run down long before Daybreak, and on across the slow-moving outlet of the Erie Canal, catching their first sight of the broad Hudson beyond the tip of Peebles Island.

Down here, many trees had some leaves clinging to them, which probably meant they had been green in the summer and were not dead, and as the early fall evening crept over the Hudson, they saw splashes of fish jumping.

On Peebles Island, they beached just upstream of a trestle bridge and carried the canoes up the bank. Rabbits broke from the snow-patched, thick brown grass. After weeks of seeing so little life, the long back legs kicking away, and the bouncing powder-puff tails were more miraculous than unicorns.

“I still wouldn’t eat one,” Jason said, “but at least they’re here and alive.”

Chris said, “It looks like the grass was growing all summer; I don’t think your trade fair has—”

“Sail!”

They looked where Jason was pointing.

The boat coming round the point of Peebles Island was about three times the size of Kelleys Dancer, with a much taller mast. Jason ran forward onto the beach, waving and yelling; someone in the crow’s nest waved back, and presently the boat took down its sails, dropped anchor, and lowered a small rowboat.

They walked down to meet it. The man who sat in the bow, hollering at the imperturbable rowers, had deep brown skin, close-cropped white hair, and a little white goatee hanging from his upper lip like a cocoon. He wore big wire-rimmed glasses, a billed cap tied closed with twine to replace its lost plastic strap, several layers of sweaters, and bell-bottomed canvas pants; he seemed to be on the brink of laughing out loud.

The rowboat drew near. The big man threw Jason a painter; he tied it off to a small tree, and in the gathering dusk, they all shook hands. “Jamayu Rollings,” the big man said. “Captain and owner of the schooner Ferengi, and these are my sons, Geordie Rollings and Whorf Rollings. We’ve been on a trading and salvage expedition up to Troy, and we were going to put in for the night here.”

“Larry Mensche, Chris Manckiewicz, and Jason Nemarec, Reconstruction Research Center. We’re a scientific expedition, overland traverse of the Erie Canal route.”

“Hunh. Well, that’ll cause some conversation in Manbrookstat. You guys wouldn’t be looking for anything to trade, or maybe for a ride, would you?”

Larry nodded. “We could be. We’re right where we were ordered to be; from here on, how we get home is up to us. You mean you have room somewhere for three passengers?”

“Room and then some for three paying passengers.”

“Is the credit of the U.S. government good enough for you?”

“Can you prove you have it?”

“I have letters from the RRC in Pueblo, the TNG at Athens, and the PCG in Olympia.”

“Hunh. I don’t have any way to confirm any of those, do I?”

“You could trust our honest demeanor and smiling faces.”

“I’ve been trading for a while now. I wouldn’t trust my mother if she offered me a free Thanksgiving dinner.”

Larry noted that both boys were rolling their eyes.

“Well, then, perhaps we’re stuck.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You wouldn’t happen to have any trade goods?”

“How do you define those? All we’ve got is our gear, which we need to keep if we’re going to travel, plus our two canoes and a couple big bags of canned goods.” Larry saw the flicker of attention from the two boys, and said, “How about passage for the three of us if we let you have the canoes? We won’t need them any longer, and good aluminum canoes can’t be all that common in New York Harbor just yet.”

“What’s in the cans?”

“We’ve got baked beans, sweet potatoes, peas, salmon—”

Both the boys looked like they’d been poisoned.

“You won’t be able to give the salmon away. Manbrookstat eats fish three meals a day. But how many of those beans and yams you got?”

They settled on both canoes, and five cans each of baked beans, peas, and sweet potatoes. For his part, Jamayu threw in full meals while on board, and oil for a stove and a lamp in their cabin. “You’ll probably only be on board two nights, anyway,” he assured them. “Tonight, and then one farther downstream somewhere.”

An hour after coming ashore to contemplate a cold, uncomfortable camp, they found themselves sitting down to fresh grilled fish at the captain’s table of the Ferengi, and in celebration of having someone to drink with, he even gave everyone a small, free shot of pre-Daybreak brandy.

After dinner, that night, Jason went up on deck for some air; he could tell that the closet-sized cabin was going to be stuffy, not to mention that I’m in there with two old guys who’ve been eating a couple cans of baked beans a day for more than a week; I don’t think I ever really grasped the expression “old fart” before now.

As he sat in the bow, Whorf Rollings joined him; the two sat together quietly for a while. Finally Whorf said, “You’re from Pueblo? Where they broadcast from? The people that ran WTRC?”

“Yep. I’ve got a wife there with a kid on the way.”

“Suppose a guy was pretty smart and wanted to work hard, but kind of showed up with nothing. Would there be a place for him there?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure there would.”

“Just thinking.” Whorf leaned back and sighed. “Here I am crew on Pop’s big stupid boat that he worked all his life to buy and that we all made fun of.”

“Yeah, what is it about old poops and boats? My family sailed all the freakin’ time. Snob appeal, you know? I mean, we were from Connecticut—oh, God, were we ever from Connecticut—and my dad was just a sales manager for a medium-sized electronics firm, but he wanted me and my brother to be full-bore—and I do mean bore—preppies.”

Whorf was laughing. “Tell me about it. Pop was a dentist. Our older sister Deanna wanted him to call this boat either the Root Canal or the Gold Crown.” They sat silently for a long while; then Whorf asked, “You okay?”

“Just remembering I used to avoid trips to New York because the folks were always reminding me they could take the train down from Connecticut and meet me. And now… well, they’re probably not even alive. And they’ve got a grandchild on the way, and I’d give anything to see them and talk to them.”

“Hunh. In two days I’m going to be in Mom’s kitchen, listening to Pop tell lies about this trip and… well. Some of us don’t know when we’re lucky.”

“If you come on out, ever, it’s lucky to be in Pueblo too. There’s always a spare bed for anyone who will work. And there’s definitely always work. Just don’t come the way I did; there’s got to be an easier path, even if you have to take the boat to Morgan City.”

They chatted idly till the night river chill set in. Jason went below. The tiny cabin was dry and warm from the oil stove, and his two companions were stretched out on their bunks, reading by the overhead oil lamp. Chris said, “We eat breakfast with the second shift, so we’re getting at least ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. Soapy water bucket on the left side of the oil stove, and warm rinse water in the other one, and we left you a clean dry towel.”

As Jason cleaned up, trying, in the narrow space, not to cast shadows on their reading or burn his buttocks on the stove, he thought to ask Larry, “How did you know to do all that bargaining with Captain Rollings to get a good deal?”

“Because his sloop is named Ferengi, his sons have the names they do, and…” He sighed. “One of those things where you had to be there. Went off the air when I was ten.”

Jason was too sleepy, and not curious enough, to pursue the question further. As soon as he was dry, he snuffed the oil lamp, climbed into his bunk, and was barely conscious long enough to relish the feel of clean sheets on bare skin.

^{DURING THE SAME DAY. CASTLE CASTRO (SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA). 10 AM PST. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2025.}

The waste of it all seemed obscene to Bambi; they had used precious electricity in one of the few places that had it reliably to run an even more precious freezer, just to keep her father’s body in condition for this memorial. Then Bambi and Quattro had taken one of the few precious airplanes the United States had to fly here for this memorial, in part so that she could claim her father’s inheritance and declare herself Freeholder of Castle Castro, Earl of San Diego, and Leader of the League of South Coast Castles. And Daddy was right, damn him, there is now every likelihood that Quattro and I will be having the future Duke of California. Or Duchess. Have to tell Quattro that there’s not going to be any stupid rules about boys first in my absolute monarchy.

More waste as she threw the big feast to feed all of Daddy’s vassals and their households (at least there weren’t quite so many of those, since everyone left big forces back at their Castles, with so much recent tribal activity). Even more in the salutes and flourishes, speeches and pomp, as a few thousand people didn’t do any useful work for a couple of days. Daddy, if you had to set up your own little world to run, why couldn’t you have been a Stalinist? We’ d’ve been done in ten minutes and everybody’d be happy with their black bread and potato soup.

Then the long meetings with the vassals, being applauded for changing their conditions of fealty to the same generous ones that Quattro used for the North Coast Castles. Then the endless meetings with stewards in which she told them to keep things running well and she’d be back as often as she could, and that she was sure that anyone who had her father’s confidence would do a fine job. And have the patience of a saint, and be somewhere near perfect, because you were pretty damned hard on help that wasn’t, eh, Daddy? But at least I’m safe assuming these people know their jobs and will do them.

And after that, the long meeting with Carlucci and Bolton in which her old, trusted friends apologized over and over for not preventing what no one could have foreseen, and discussed their efforts to find the holes in Castle Castro’s security and the confederates in her father’s murder. Any other time it would be so soothing to just talk cop talk with these guys; now I have to put all this energy into assuring them I trust them to do the right thing and don’t blame them for what happened, and make myself pay attention because later on I’ll want to remember all this. And not keep thinking Daddy when they say the victim. I wonder how long there is to go?

It was past midnight when Bambi Castro could finally curl up next to her husband, put her face on his chest, and just let herself cry because Daddy was dead, and she was going to miss him forever, and she hadn’t been ready to say good-bye. It was much later than that when she finally fell asleep.

^{2 DAYS LATER. MANBROOKSTAT HEADQUARTERS (IN THE FORMER BATTERY GARDENS, NEW YORK CITY). 12:20 PM EST. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2025.}

“If there’d been any natives here to bargain with,” the Commandant was saying, “I probably could have gotten it for twenty-four dollars, though not in beads. Canned hams, that would’ve been a deal in a second. But almost everyone was dead by the time we got here; we have six thousand people now, but only maybe four hundred were from Brooklyn before Daybreak, five hundred from Staten Island, and less than fifty from Manhattan. And the ones we have didn’t ride it out here in the city. Most of them sheltered over on Long Island or New Jersey someplace, but they were just such compulsive New Yorkers that they came back as soon as the city stopped burning and the Hudson stopped running radioactive. I’m real glad to have them, though—they had to be tough and clever to do what they did, and what would New York be without New Yorkers?”

“Aren’t you calling it Manbrookstat now?” Jason asked.

“It’ll be New York ten generations after I’m dead. And the inhabitants will still be known for talking too fast, hustling too hard, and telling everyone else what to do in an accent that sounds like a duck using nasal floss.” The Commandant himself had a soft Maryland accent; he was younger than Jason, with movie-actor good looks, and dressed beautifully in what Jason thought of as Latin American Fascist Rococo.

He seemed immensely proud of the settlement surrounding the Upper Bay. But then ensuring food and shelter for everyone in Manbrookstat is bragging material, Jason reminded himself. And by all accounts it was the Commandant’s iron determination that had put everyone who could do it last spring to fishing; to digging up golf courses to plant potatoes; to going overland to the west to trade for living pigs, sheep, and goats and turning them loose in Central Park; and to building greenhouses and coldframes in every open space.

Manbrookstat was a composite of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island; the name was already unfair, because the settled area was really a sliver of Bayonne, extreme lower Manhattan, Brooklyn facing the bay, and the shore side of Staten Island.

“I know Pueblo had no idea you had anything like this here, and I’m sure Olympia didn’t either.”

The Commandant didn’t so much shrug as twitch a shoulder impatiently. “The TNG knows we exist because we trade loot south to them, but I doubt they know much about us. Right now, most ships come in from Argentina.”

“What do they trade?”

“They bring in canned beef, and you can’t imagine how much people here want that. In their spare time, our people dig out copper pipe, aluminum siding, and heavy-gauge wire from all those empty buildings, and mostly it goes for canned beef. The Argies cheat us but nobody cares. At Savannah or Charleston, they offload all the junk we sell them, because the factories around Castle Newberry are screaming for raw materials, and will pay for metal with corn whiskey and tobacco. Liquor and tobacco trade for coffee in Colombia, and the Argies go back rich as kings.”

“They’re canning beef in Kansas right now,” Jason pointed out.

“Find a way to get it to us. Long before the Dead Belt runs out of minable junk, we’ll be making stuff good enough to sell—a bunch of the artisans have already got some good-sized looms running, and we have a couple old chem professors, a sculptor, and two blacksmiths working on making iron and steel.”

The Commandant had been a senior at West Point; after the Chicago and Washington superbombs, he had led the cadets who chose to stay at the Academy through that terrible winter, with nearly half of them surviving. In early April they had come downstream to claim the best harbor in the world.

When Captain Rollings had introduced them, the Commandant and Jason had hit it off, and since Larry had some particular business with the TNG trading agent in town, as well as arranging passage, and Chris wanted to put together a long piece for the Post-Times, that left Jason to socialize with the Commandant, who seemed to be eager to show off his city.

“One reason you didn’t know we were here,” he said, “is that we’re going very, very slowly with radio—we have so many wires and pipes still out there, an EMP would still cause fires everywhere, which would burn inward from the abandoned part of the city and get us here. That’s why I limited your boss Larry to sending 150 words, and to one acknowledgment for one message back. Besides, even if the moon gun doesn’t take an interest in us, it’s better not to have any extra attention from the rival governments. We don’t want to become a prize for the Provis and the Tempers to fight over.” He gestured north toward the fire-gutted skyscrapers, then around them to the shantytown in what had been Battery Park. “If we’re lucky, by 2050, we’ll have grown back to Canal Street, maybe even to Houston. The last thing we want to do is get into a war between Georgia and Washington State, about anything, on either side. Right now, whether or not the quarrel between Olympia and Athens is America’s business, it’s just not Manbrookstat’s.”

Larry booked passage on an Argentine trader, the Martin Fierro, sailing the next morning. If there was anything suspicious about the quickness of the arrangement, or the early sailing time, Jason figured that the Commandant was entitled to his paranoia.

Martin Fierro was a rusty old bucket whose engineer had installed a restored coal-fired steam engine from a museum; to save coal, she traveled under sail whenever possible.

Dawn the next morning found them passing Miss Liberty, webbed with scars from the EMPs that had caused currents in her copper skin; some streaks had re-smelted in place, creating new-penny copper bands on her; some had blackened as the old corrosion oxidized. “Something between camo and a leopard print,” Chris said. “The white trash version of Miss Liberty—”

“You can shut up now,” Larry said, walking away.

Jason, sensing that it would be a great time to be invisible, went up near the bow to read Nostromo and watch for dolphins; the Commandant had said the harbor was full of them.

The sun was full up as they passed through the Narrows. The crew banked the fires and hoisted the sails, and Martin Fierro made a wide, slow turn, heading south.

Chris is irritating sometimes, Jason thought, but Larry’s usually easygoing. And this was the first chance he got to communicate with the RRC since Put-in-Bay. I wonder if I want to know what’s eating him.

Then he looked up to see dolphins playing in front of the ship, pulled out pen and paper, and added another couple paragraphs to his long letter to Beth. He’d mail it in Savannah, and he might get home before it did, but so what? The half dozen leaping, splashing dolphins were the kind of thing a man shares with his wife and his kid, and this was the only way to do it right now.