Daybreak Zero

^{ABOVE THE FORMER I-84, ALONG THE IDAHO — OREGON BORDER. 5:51 PM PST. WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2025.}

A black flag, grayed by the blowing desert dust, snapped and yanked at the pole at the Ontario, Oregon, airfield. From the rear cockpit of her Stearman biplane, barely five feet behind the roaring engine, Bambi Castro couldn’t hear the cracking and booming of the flag in the wind, but even a quarter mile above, she could see the way the flag bent the pole. It would have been a scary landing, but now she wouldn’t be landing.

The black flag meant CONTAMINATED FUEL HERE, DO NOT LAND. The biotes that had spoiled the aviation fuel on the ground at Ontario were as contagious to avgas as refrigerator mold was to cucumbers. The most common strains of biote could turn the fuel in the Stearman’s tank to yellow-orange vinegar, lumpy green goo that resembled baby diarrhea, or brown sludge that reeked of cheese, but there were thousands of one-off biote strains that might do something equally bad. If any biote contaminated the Stearman, the whole fuel system and engine would have to be pulled out, boiled, and reinstalled, taking one of the last dozen working airplanes in the United States out of service for weeks.

Bambi banked right and pulled the stick back, putting the Stearman into a circling climb. Coming around to the west, the propeller and engine roared even louder at the hard work against the wind. Didn’t even get a chance to warm up, she thought; even in July, she needed a couple of sweaters, gloves, helmet, and scarf at cruising altitude, a mile and a half above the high desert and with the plane’s propeller and motion putting a hundred-mile-an-hour wind always in her face. Well, nothing to be done for it; she couldn’t land here and she needed to get above and upwind as quickly as she could. I’ll need to drain and check at Baker City. Gah. One more thing between me and dinner and bed.

Holding the stick with her knees to keep the Stearman spiraling upward, Bambi dragged the Ontario mailbag from the front cockpit and rested it on her lap, tearing it out of its paper grocery bag.

Mostly Athens bureaucrats bashing antlers with Olympia bureaucrats, but the mail must go through.

She pointed the nose north to cross west, to the windward, of the field. With the stick between her knees and her feet steady on the rudder pedals, she gripped the eyebolt that protruded from the concrete-filled tin can in her right hand, and balanced the mailbag and streamer on her left. She whipped the weight downward in a seated slam dunk and tossed the mailbag and streamer across her body over the side.

The mailbag rig cleared the stabilizer; the weight pulled the rope to the mailbag taut, and the red streamer unfolded behind, fluttering down onto the former golf course by the airfield.

Ontario was screwed. All the fuel on the ground would have to be burned, and the tanks, pipes, and hoses scoured with boiling water and disinfectant, and then there would be a three-month quarantine to confirm that exposed fuel was no longer becoming infected. Their mail would have to wait for a train that had a decontamination car—perhaps twice a month, because there just weren’t enough steam locomotives.

Actually, I could give a shit about the nice folks in Ontario. I’m about up to my own ass in trouble.

Bambi had pushed hard to reach Ontario today—taken off from Pueblo as early as she could get the ground crew to forgive her for, and then flown all the way to Ogden, Utah, on the first hop; on the way she’d dropped mail to Rangely, Vernal, and Provo, but she’d elected not to land because that exposed the Stearman to the dangers of biotes and nanoswarm. She had planned to land only at Ontario, with Baker City as her only Plan B.

Oh shit. If Ontario’s infected, what about Baker City? Baker was even more exposed to the wind off the desert; from here to the coast there were dozens of gas stations whose abandoned tanks seeped foul-smelling goo, thousands of houses where vinyl siding had decayed into slime, and tens of thousands of abandoned cars and trucks sitting on their rotted tires, their fuel tanks reeking of vinegar, refrigerator mold, or spoiled milk. A single spore from any of those could bring ruin, as one probably had for Ontario.

Well, I can’t fix yesterday’s poor planning now. At eight thousand feet she leveled off and throttled up; the little plane shook with the effort of flying into the wind. Below her, the brown scrub and dirt of midsummer late afternoon sent up unpredictable thermals, and swirled with thin gold and gray dust; to her right, big piles of cumulonimbus roiled above the mountains. Late-summer afternoons out here were a nightmare for a tiny powered kite like the Stearman.

She rechecked instruments. Oil pressure, temp, tach, airspeed all fine, altimeter and compass as they should be. The little tank of lye solution that sprayed the alternator and spark coil, preventing nanoswarm from taking hold, was low.

The fuel gauge said Make Baker soon.

Half an hour later, ten miles out of Baker City, she dared go no closer; the storm squatted over the little desert town like a Rottweiler guarding his bowl. She turned ninety degrees right, heading northeast. If some clear sky opened to her left, soon, maybe she could get around the north edge of the storm and follow it in to land behind it.

The little Stearman shuddered and jerked in the gusts; Bambi thought too much, uselessly, about shear and stress on a canvas biplane wing. She climbed as high as she could, opening the throttle wide, burning more fuel but it was a race she had to win.

Half an hour later she had lost. In her fight with the storm, she had been hoping to beat it with a quick right cross; but it turned out the storm packed a mighty left haymaker. Off to her left, more thunderheads sailed toward her like God’s own galleons.

She might barely make it back to Ontario, but that would sacrifice the precious plane.

She could land on a road, but to sit through a storm on the ground the Stearman needed shelter—a high school gym or a good-sized auto repair shop—because the wind could slam the little fabric-and-wood biplane around like an empty cardboard box. Besides, even if she had known where there was a suitable building with a landable field or road, everywhere outside the towns in this country there were biotes and nanos on the ground, wrecks on the highway, bandits and tribals in the burned-out buildings.

Running as fast and high as she could, Bambi followed the road to the Snake River, and the river into Hells Canyon, toward the last friendly sunlight, hoping to see a place to land.

In the depths of the pine-lined canyon, the Snake River was already in darkness; the road beside it occasionally looped up into the light. Can’t land where I am, and dead in a short while is better than dead in a really short while.

Still running from the storm, Bambi turned due east out of the canyon, over even wilder country, crossing the low range of mountains.

There.

Where a low saddle in the mountains to the west allowed daylight through, she found a long almost-straight stretch of highway, and a few buildings surrounding a dirt parking lot. She came down quickly in a big semicircle; no wires or poles, either, and the pines weren’t moving; the storm winds had not yet come this far.

To give herself as much road as possible, Bambi came in about twenty feet above the treetops, descended into the shadowy tree-surrounded meadow enclosed by a curve in the road, and touched down in the long, straight uphill stretch she was aiming for.

The wood-spoked tail wheel bottomed on its springs, the Stearman slammed down like a brick, and the greased-linen tires made a heavy whump! on the road. The tail wheel lifted momentarily, sending her heart into her mouth, but the plane settled onto its wheels, and she rolled smoothly up the hill in the mountain twilight, idling the engine to keep some forward way with the propeller; the tops of the Douglas firs were still in sunlight but the road was dim.

She passed a shield sign for US 95, and mile marker 178 as she taxied over the top of the rise. She throttled back further but the engine gasped like a dying fish and the prop stopped cold; out of fuel. Well, it got me to the ground.

With no brakes on the wheels, rolling down the gentle slope, she used the flaps to hold the plane down against the hill and keep it from taking off like a hang-glider. At the open gate in the chain-link fence to her right, she turned in an awkward pivot into the parking lot. No cars, just a couple jeeps and horse and canoe trailers by the building. Must’ve been a summer resort only, with almost no one here on Daybreak day.

She bumped along the central aisle, slowing to a stop as the saggy, soft linen tires dragged on the gravel.

The chain on the door of the big steel storage building yielded to the bolt cutters from her emergency kit. Grinding through rotted plastic fittings and glides, the metal of the tracks and wheels shrieked as the big door rolled up on its counterweights. The last gleams of daylight revealed nothing scary like bears or dangerous like people. The room smelled musty and unpleasant, like a furniture store that had been closed up too long, reeking of rodents and decay.

The wood-and-fabric Stearman was so light that with effort, Bambi could drag it into the big building by its tail. She tied off the wing and tail eyebolts to pillars. She couldn’t force the door down manually, but the Stearman was at least secure against the wind; it could stand a little rain. She grabbed her gear from the forward cockpit.

In the last shimmering gray glow of twilight, the sign on the little house said VISITOR CENTER. Oh, good, I’m a visitor. The door was unlocked.

Her candle lantern revealed racks of brochures, a toilet whose seat had crumbled into dust, a steel shelving unit with piles of paper-covered clay-like goop that had probably once been office work trays. The leather sofa and desk chair must have been well-enough sealed to keep biotes out of their foam lining. Unlike some places she’d slept on some missions, there was no wildlife to chase away or mummified corpses to drag out and bury.

Bambi set the candle lantern on the desk and unpacked her emergency radio. The glass jars had clean, unbroken seals with no trace of nanoswarm’s white-gray crusts around the edges, and the transmitter went together easily. She cranked the little magneto to charge the capacitors, pausing every few minutes to wipe all the contacts with a lye-soaked rag; no visible nanoswarm was forming. Inside the little electroscope made from a baby-food jar, the aluminum-foil leaves did not sink perceptibly while she counted off twenty seconds orally; the capacitors were holding charge. Time for the less-fun part.

Night and storm had arrived while she worked on her radio; it was full dark and pouring. In flashes of lightning she made out a wooden post at about the right distance. Rather than get her clothes wet, she stripped, put her boots back on, and ran to the post, trailing the modified 100-foot extension cord behind her. She clipped the booster-cable clamp on and dashed back. If she hadn’t gotten too turned around in the dark, her antenna probably ran east-west, so the mountainside should reflect it in the right direction easily.

To avoid getting water near the radio transmitter, she toweled off with her dirty shirt, put on her spare, and made sure no drips lurked anywhere. When she checked the radio, the electroscope’s leaves hadn’t descended discernibly; that was very good.

She’d practiced her Morse religiously, and now she made that key clatter, sending her message three times before the electroscope’s leaves collapsed together, indicating the energy in the capacitors was gone. She cranked it up again and sent five times before the charge again dissipated; repeated the process a few more times.

No immediate response clicked in the earphones of her crystal rig. She sent CL (dah-dit-dah-dit, dit-dah-diddit, the code for going off the air), and left her phones on while she dug into her pack and fixed herself a cheese and jerky sandwich. When she blew out the candle, her watch showed only 9:30. She put her gun and ax within reach of her sleeping bag on the big leather couch, and positioned the headphones by the chair cushion that was her pillow, so that, in the forest silence, any signal might wake her.

Days like this could make you wish the great majority of the human race hadn’t died in the past year, and there was still Internet, cold beer in the summertime, and cybercrime.

Heather O’Grainne is gonna freak when she hears a plane is down. I sure hope that radio message got through somewhere, or it’s gonna be hell for everyone else till they find me. The thought that Heather would be on top of this, and meanwhile she had food in her stomach and a warm dry place to sleep, put things in perspective. As Bambi drifted off, the last distant lightning flickered, and the rain settled to a soft patter. The radio will wake me up, and it’ll be Heather.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. MOTA ELLIPTICA, TEXAS (WEST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER). 11:30 PM CST. WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2025.}

The planning room looked like a parlor commandeered by a Civil War general, the night before a battle. Golden light flickered from oil lamps, and the men and women stood around the big tables covered with maps and charts, or traced lines with yardsticks and string on the carefully hand-drawn charts on the walls.

Arnie Yang rested his eyes on the tacked-together sheets of graph paper covering much of the north wall, no longer really seeing the huge graph. He could have drawn it in his sleep; the horizontal axis was Transmission dates, the vertical Events, both axes marked in six-hour intervals from December 18, 2024, to June 15, 2025. Squares, triangles, circles, and diamonds represented phases of the moon, changes in transmissions, sightings of bright flashes on the moon, and EMPs; yarn linked one point to another.

The scientists and analysts at Mota Elliptica knew, now, that the fourteen EMPs which had struck since Daybreak were caused by helium-3 pure fusion bombs, wrapped in glass made from melted moonrock, exploding at between sixty and thirty miles above the antenna of any powerful radio transmitter. Because the helium-3 fusion reaction produces an ideal mix of relativistic protons and soft gamma to induce an EMP, even though the bombs were not big by nuclear standards, for about a hundred miles around the point directly under the burst the induced electric currents were strong enough to heat wire fences, power lines, and water pipes red-hot, and sometimes weld railroad tracks or cause arcs in the steel frames of skyscrapers. Hundreds of miles beyond that, the induced current was still strong enough to blow every fuse, throw every circuit breaker, make fire-starting sparks, build up electric charge on metal objects, and cook any chips or transistors that nanoswarm had not already destroyed.

Tonight they were going to try to provoke another one.

As usual on a fire-up night, tempers flared. Arnie turned around to see Ruth Odawa, his chief for math and computation, shouting at Malcolm Cornwall, his meteorologist. “Hey—,” Arnie began, but then his deputy, Trish Eliot, waded in like a den mother separating two angry Cub Scouts.

“All right,” Eliot said. “What’s this about?”

Odawa’s arms were folded. “He keeps calling the EMP device the enemy weapon, and I know it’s because he wants his Army buddies to take over—”

“It’s a nuclear bomb exploding over our country—,” Malcolm said, in a correcting tone suitable for an unruly puppy or a recalcitrant undergrad.

“Does this have anything to do with doing fire-up in twenty-one minutes?” Trish asked. After a moment Odawa and Cornwall both admitted it didn’t, and got back to work.

Once again, Arnie was glad he had promoted Trish to his deputy. Over her strange, goggle-like glasses—her plastic frames had decayed and Trish had made a contraption of coat-hanger wire and leather straps to hold the lenses—she glanced at Arnie and winked.

He winked back. Almost half his scientists were Tempers, loyal to the Temporary National Government at what used to be Athens, Georgia, and the other half were Provis, loyal to the Provisional Constitutional Government at Olympia, Washington. Arnie had played a role in establishing both governments, and so was trusted by neither; but while the country was breaking into Provis and Tempers, Trish had been taking a long, dangerous hike all the way from Riverton, Wyoming, to Pueblo. When she had finally heard about the split, she had simply refused to take a side.

Plus she’d been a Little League coach, which made her perfect for dealing with Arnie’s tech people, who sometimes resembled confused and frustrated children, and often resembled entitled parents.

“Checklist?” she asked Arnie.

“Yeah, it’s time.”

The checklist was an inventory of about three hundred pieces of mail and radiograms that should have been received before running the next experiment. The scribbled notes were pinned to a large bulletin board next to the main analysis chart as they came in. In quick order, Arnie read off the list, and Trish pulled the corresponding note from the board, dropping it into the file. It was how Goddard might have cleared a rocket launch in 1938, but it was the best they could do to ensure that in the still-functioning parts of North America, rails, pipes, and long wires had been grounded; planes would land and drain their tanks within twenty-four hours; precious surviving tech of all kinds would be inside some kind of Faraday cage within seventy-two hours; phones, hams, and telegraphs (in the few places where they still existed) would be unplugged; volunteers would watch the moon; and fire watches were standing by for the inevitable spark-ignited surprises.

They finished the checklist with ten minutes to spare. Meanwhile Cornwall had reviewed weather to make sure the moon observers would mostly have clear skies, Odawa had re-run the predicted outcomes matrix, and Daniels, the Army intelligence officer, had once more reviewed her “unusual activity reports”—the euphemism for “as much as we can find out about where the tribals are and what they are up to.”

The control bunker had begun as a storm shelter; sometime in the twentieth century it had become a fallout shelter. It was about two hundred yards from the house, with a broad firebreak between, because the irreplaceable electrical gear did not belong near irreplaceable paper on the biggest EMP bull’s-eye on the continent.

Trish fell into step beside him. “Do we have a full set of programming for this run?”

“Yeah, all the regular stuff and more so. We have five hours of documentaries and news, fifteen hours of music, twenty new Tech Tips episodes, but those are short, of course, and a thing called Obso-Leet! that was Abel Marx’s idea.”

“Obsolete?”

“‘Obso’ as in obsolete, ‘Leet’ as in L-three-three-T. Promoting the coolness of identifying old-time machines and putting them back in service; people don’t necessarily recognize a mechanical adding machine, a grain auger, or a cow pump, let alone know what they’re good for. We also have President Weisbrod and the Natcon Nguyen-Peters each blathering on about what good things the Provis and the Tempers are doing, and why everyone should come to Olympia or Athens. And we have more than a hundred anti-Daybreak messages scattered all through.”

“You know perfectly well,” she said, affecting to be frustrated by his obtuseness, “that what I want to know is—”

“There are also two full episodes each of A Hundred Circling Camps, Orphans Preferred, and Rosie on the Home Front.”

“No spoilers! Don’t tell me what happens in Orphans Preferred!”

“Same thing that happens every time. We reinforce national unity and provoke Daybreak hard enough so they decide to hit us.”

“You sound like you’re sure there’s a ‘they,’ and they think and plan. Have you gone all the way over to the Tempers?”

Arnie kicked at the ground. “Lots of people are asking me that, these days.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who has to get other people to do what you want. Come on, Arn, as my boss and my friend, what are you thinking? Why are we even putting WTRC on the air, and taking the damage from that, at all anymore? I thought we had established everything we could.”

“Not quite everything. Look, we’ve only got a few minutes till fire-up. Once it’s running, we can talk.”

“Deal, but I’m holding you to it.” She was smiling, and he wasn’t sure whether it was his imagination but she seemed to be walking closer to him than usual.

The electric lights in the control center made the arrays of equipment seem too vivid to be real. Pahludin, the chief engineer, looked up as they came in. “Power’s up everywhere, all running clean and true, so we’re ready to fire up as scheduled.”

Arnie glanced at the clock, showing just a couple of minutes to midnight. “All right, let’er rip on time.”

Mota Elliptica had become the home of West Texas Research Center by a series of locational accidents. The mota itself, an undistinguished patch of Texas plains two miles across and barely a hundred feet above the surrounding emptiness, would have been Oval Bluff or Egg Butte if Anglos had been there first. It looked like nothing much, but it lay in the middle of a powerful, reliable wind stream and offered tough, solid rock to anchor to, so more than a decade before Daybreak, the Department of Energy had built an experimental wind farm there to test a new blade design.

The new blades were not any better as blades, but their sharp, narrow tips drew frequent lightning strikes, so Mota Elliptica was re-purposed for research into an innovative passive charge-dispersal and conductor system (PCDCS) for surge protection. PCDCS was a real success—it had preserved Mota Elliptica’s windmills through countless thunderstorms, and now through five dead-overhead EMPs.

Unfortunately, while the special materials from the surge control project—primarily a fine violet powder that seemed to be a room-temperature superconductor—had worked perfectly, and seemed to be biote-proof, all records had been either electronic or blown up in Washington DC. Chemists using decades-old methods were analyzing the violet powder now, and perhaps in a decade or two they’d be able to make some.

Till then, Mota Elliptica supplied enough power to WTRC to produce freak effects nearby—they broadcast using old-fashioned AM because it was easier for people around the world to make receivers for it, and AM notoriously could be received, if powerful enough and close enough, on drainpipes, lightning rods, and even weathercocks, but at least they knew it was getting through. QSLs had come back to them from Perth, Tierra del Fuego, Diego Garcia, Tashkent, and Kamchatka. WTRC reached the world.

The clock counted down to midnight. The tape whirred to life inside its positive-pressurized argon-and-ammonia chamber, the most nanoswarm-and biote-proof containment they had been able to devise so far. The monitor speaker came alive with the voice of Chris Manckiewicz: “People of Earth, this is WTRC, the radio voice of the Reconstruction Research Center, broadcasting from West Texas Research Center at Mota Elliptica—”

Manckiewicz introduced short messages from Graham Weisbrod, the President of the United States if you thought the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia, Washington, was legitimate. Then Cameron Nguyen-Peters, the Natcon of the Temporary National Government in Athens, Georgia, the man in charge of restoring true Constitutional government if you leaned that way, delivered a message exactly as long. The order had been settled by coin flip and would be reversed on the next cycle through the programming.

If everything worked, a flash in Mare Fecunditatis on the moon sometime in the next four days should be followed, 73 to 85 hours later, by an EMP directly over Mota Elliptica. By then the complete loop of programming would have played at least eleven times.

“How’s signal strength?” Arnie asked.

Pahludin grinned. “Daybreakers in Panama are picking us up on their dental fillings. Our planet is hearing us, Arnie; if there was anyone to listen on Mars, they’d hear us too.” The men fist-bumped, and Arnie and Trish handed out chilled pre-Daybreak beers for a toast before the first-shift running crew took over.

As they walked back to the house, Arnie decided that Trish Eliot was definitely walking close to him. Have to think what to do about that, but maybe not tonight. Kind of built funny, big butt and small top, a little frog-faced. Arnie knew that was unfair. It wasn’t Trish’s fault that his last girlfriend had been Allison Sok Banh, who pretty much defined “head-turner,” was far out of his league, and dumped him to become the First Lady in Olympia.

But if it weren’t for Trish, I’d be so lonely here—

The farmhouse had probably been the spiffiest thing in the county when the newspaper landing on its porch said GARFIELD ASSASSINATED. In the century and a half since then it had been a successful farmhouse, then a failed hotel, then a boarded-up derelict advertised as a “fixer-upper Victorian.” Probably no previous owner would recognize it now, with its steel shutters, faced with mirrors, covering every window; mirror-covered roof; silver-painted walls; and carefully rounded-off corners and edges. In the gray-blue moonlight it looked like a just-beginning-to-melt tin model of Auntie Em’s house.

Trish had begun as his senior electrostatics engineer because she had a mostly completed doctorate in physics and a willingness to try, and he had a desperate need and a minuscule applicant pool. Her great gift for dealing with people—a gift Arnie felt he totally lacked—had proved more important than her adequate talent for explaining weird electric effects.

The warmth of her body close beside him in the cool summer night was distracting. “Pahludin was a great choice for your radio chief,” she said, quietly. “One of the few of them that doesn’t resent you.”

“Are the techies still saying a real scientist should be in charge?”

“All except Odawa. She says a real mathematician should be.” Trish shrugged. “You know, before the next experiment, I wish you’d take three days or so, and spend some blackboard time, and just let the technical people know what you do and why you’re in charge. Half of them think it’s nepotism because you were Heather’s protégé, and the other half think it’s because Heather can’t tell one guy who works with numbers from another.”

“What do you think?” Arnie asked.

“I think you’re a pretty good boss. And a statistical semiotician is probably the closest thing Heather has to a cryptographer. I’m guessing you’re part of Heather trying to keep the PCG and TNG from going to war, by settling one of the big questions between them. The Provis want it all to be a big accident that’s over now except for the moon gun, so they can reconstruct after Daybreak. The Tempers want it to be Fu Manchu or Doctor No sitting on a mountain someplace giving orders so they can have a war with Daybreak. The Provis would be more comfortable in a reconstruction, and the Tempers would be more comfortable in a war. Like the guy with a hammer sees a nail, and the guy with the wrench sees a bolt.”

“What do you see?”

“That you’re the only guy who doesn’t know what it is and wants to find that out before he reaches into the toolbox.” Her hand slipped around his biceps, light as a toilet-paper noose, and he didn’t shake it off. “And I want to be on your side. Can you tell me what this experiment is about?”

“Well, kind of. Remember I don’t have the tools to do what I used to do. No web to crawl, no bots to crawl it with if there was one, no ESCARR to analyze the data with if I had that, no big blazing fast supercomputers that could run ESCARR if a copy of it survived. So I did what you do when you have no way to analyze the data you don’t have. I just took a pretty good stab at setting things up to maximally offend Daybreak.”

“And the point of that is—”

“Well, it’s putting together several likely guesses into a complete SWAG. The analysis team thinks the moon gun was built by robots or nanos smuggled onto the Iranian-Chinese expedition of 2019. We’ve confirmed Daybreak existed long ago enough to do that, and we know it infiltrated thousands of organizations and movements well before 2020. The moon gun is less than eighty miles from where the lunar manufacturing experimental module landed, after all.

“We’ve established experimentally that the moon gun shoots at every big stationary radio source eventually, but if there are symbols for Daybreak sucks woven into it with enough frequency, it shoots sooner and uses a more intense EMP. So in the experiment before the last one we sent Daybreak sucks as the common interpretant of all the hundreds of different representema—”

“Uh, slow down, Doctor Yang. All I ever got through was quantum physics and relativity. Explain it so my tiny mind can grasp it.”

He laughed. “Do you have any idea how good it feels to be talking to someone who wants to know? Instead of just demanding ‘Have you proven the liberals in Olympia are all sissies yet, and what should we blow up?’ or ‘Have you proven the nuts in Athens are warmongers yet, and how soon can we start rebuilding the interstates?’”

“Let me see if I do understand, Arnie, without getting into the vocabulary, okay? So two shots ago you broadcast pure news and entertainment, hardly mentioning Daybreak, and the moon gun didn’t fire for almost four days, as if it were conserving its resources—whatever those might be. Last shot you had a shitload of little bitty ‘Hey Daybreak, eat shit’ messages—almost that obvious—and it hit us earlier than it ever had before, like it was scrambling to nail us no matter what the cost. So you’ve proved that whatever controls the moon gun can tell the difference between one message and another, which means it’s either a real smart AI on the moon, or a bunch of smart guys in a cave on Earth with the remote for the moon gun. Right so far?”

“Perfect. So the material we’re broadcasting in tonight’s experiment will look much more anti-Daybreak to a human being, because we aimed much more elaborate versions of Daybreak sucks at known human hot buttons. But an AI will interpret it as much less hostile, because it contains a tiny fraction of the gross count of keywords and triggers that I used last time.”

“For example? If I know you, and I’m starting to, you have an analogy.”

He shrugged. “Sort of. Suppose you were trying to find out if it was me or a clever AI reacting to a racist rant, by how much effort we put into killing you for it. The AI would count every time the words ‘slant’ or ‘slope’ occurred—even if it was slanted news or a ski slope. I’d react to references to laundry, buck teeth, bad driving, and ‘Yankee got five dollars for good time?’ even if they were less numerous and didn’t use the common vulgar terms. And if you checked to see how fast we punched your bigoted nose, that would be different between a racism-detecting AI and a real-life Asian.

“So these last two experiments were calibrations of Daybreak’s response: how does it respond to Daybreak-neutral versus Daybreak-sucks messages? This experiment is to see which response a phrased-for-humans version of Daybreak sucks triggers. If it shoots back hard and fast and damn the expense, probably there are people holding the remote on the moon gun. If it shoots back at its convenience, just normal radio suppression, the moon gun is a robot.”

“And… Heather and the RRC want to know this because…?”

“Well, fighting a smart machine that follows complicated rules, like the Provis think Daybreak is, is different from fighting human leadership, which the Tempers think Daybreak has. Which in turn is different from fighting what I’m afraid Daybreak really is.” He sighed, hoping she’d pick up the hint.

“Sometime soon, I want you to tell me what you’re afraid Daybreak is, and why it frightens a smart, tough guy like you so much. But at least now I know what you’re up to.”

Several images of the moon danced in the mirrored exterior of the old farmhouse. The gray plains around them, a mixture of scrub and grass waving in the stiff wind, glowed dim gray-green. They stopped short of the porch to finish their conversation, away from the others.

Trish was standing very close now. “So I don’t screw things up by accident—how much does Heather know of what you’re up to?”

“Well, every time I try to talk to Heather about it, she freaks out and tells me not to waste resources on a question that doesn’t matter. So, this time… as far as she knows, it’s to help settle the Provi/Temper argument.”

“So she doesn’t know.”

“Not really.” He felt embarrassed to admit this was all behind the back of his friend, mentor, and leader. “Sooner or later I’ll have enough to make her listen and see why this is important. But I won’t get the chance if I tell her what I’m doing right now.”

“Thanks for trusting me,” Trish said quietly. “Let’s talk more tomorrow—after I’ve heard the new Orphans Preferred. Don’t tell me if Lewis makes it back alive!”

“I haven’t listened to the whole thing myself,” he admitted. “I gave them text to insert, but I didn’t want to know any spoilers. Are we a pair of geeks or what?”

She giggled and fist-bumped him. “Hey, geeks rule. Let’s try to have lunch, just us, soon, so you can tell me about the rest.” She went inside with a little wave; he stopped briefly to talk to the security guard and make sure everyone was locked in for the night.

His bedroom on the second floor, at the opposite end of the hall from the men’s and women’s common bunkrooms, didn’t seem as lonely tonight. I really can’t keep pretending I don’t know Trish likes me. Quite probably That Way. This stuff is always so confusing. Maybe I should call Heather and talk it over—

He laughed at himself. Whenever something got really scary, whether it was the end of civilization, atom bombs from the moon, or girls that liked him, he wanted to talk to Heather O’Grainne.

^{5 HOURS LATER. NEAR PINEHURST, IDAHO, ON US ROUTE 95. 4:15 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.}

Bambi woke at dawn, pulled on her pants and boots, and transmitted again. While she listened on the headphones, she ate another cheese and jerky sandwich; she heard nothing. After this meal she had material for about four more sandwiches.

She washed up in a steel bucket of icy water from the pump behind the building, used the toilet, and flushed by pouring her washwater in. Can’t say much else for the place but there’s mostly-indoor plumbing.

A pile of outgoing mail bore the letterhead:

She was glad she’d been warned. In her improvised hangar, the Stearman was fine, just damp around the forward edges—an hour of morning sun would fix it.

But last night’s mystery odor was mummified horses. They lay with heads propped against the automatic watering troughs, which would have failed whenever the electricity did. The barn had protected them from larger scavengers who might have torn the bodies apart. Rats and mice had tunneled them, and insects had eaten the soft parts of the faces, leaving skull or patches of skin. For the most part hide still covered the bones and the remaining desiccated flesh.

She could smell that with the big door open, water had blown in to moisten the dry flesh and start the rot afresh. Later today the barn would reek.

Bambi had grown up a horse-crazy rich girl with an indulgent father, and the sight of the horses, stretched toward their troughs, mouths open, touched her more than the unburied millions of radiation victims in Los Angeles, the three-storey-high pile of charred bodies in St. Paul, or the frozen drift of the drowned, an island of protruding hands and feet, in the river downstream from Sioux Falls.

October 28, the day Daybreak hit, would have been in mud season here, when tourist businesses shut down because it was too cold for hikers and riders but there wasn’t enough snow yet for skiers. It looked like the caretakers had never come back; the horses had died helplessly penned up.

I want out of here, soon. Bambi turned to go back to her radio.

The wide doorway framed a dozen men and women, all armed, dressed in old coats, decorated hats, immense amounts of handmade jewelry—tribals. All had weapons drawn, mostly spears and axes, but a couple of them were holding drawn wooden bows, the arrows pointed at Bambi, and one was whirling what could only be a real, honest-to-God little-David style sling.

The stout woman in the center, who wore what had probably been a homecoming tiara before it had been decorated with small machine parts and colored stones, said, “In the name of the Blue Morning People, I declare you our captive. Raise your hands over your head.”

Bambi put her hands up. The bows relaxed, the sling stopped spinning up to speed, but the spears stayed leveled. You guys’ll be in so much trouble when Heather hears about this.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PALE BLUFF, NEW STATE OF WABASH (PCG) OR ILLINOIS (TNG). 6:30 AM CST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.}

Chris Manckiewicz was coming back from putting together a series of articles about life in the Temper capital at Athens, Georgia, and had caught a ride on the Gooney Express with Quattro Larsen; as always, heading back for Pueblo, Quattro had chosen to land in Pale Bluff. The main reason for choosing that route was to visit Carol May Kloster.

Carol May’s pancakes with apple butter (supposedly the orchards that surrounded Pale Bluff had been planted by Johnny Appleseed himself) would have been justification enough, even if Carol May hadn’t been one of the Reconstruction Research Center’s most important agents, and Chris’s best stringer. She handed Chris her pieces for the Pueblo Post-Times. “Got my pieces for you on the table, Chris. It’ll save the telegraph man’s finger if you just take them along.”

He speed-read as he ate; they were “the usual fine work,” he said, amused at how that made her blush.

To most people, Carol May probably looked like any other small, plump lady in a hand-sewn dress, but Chris suspected she was one of those invisible people who drives history—not that she would ever admit it.

As the Secretary of the Pale Bluff Town Meeting, she’d taken down and transcribed Graham Weisbrod’s brief speech to the Pale Bluff city council when his plane had been forced down here during his escape from the TNG’s prison. Chris had obtained a copy from her a few days later, and immediately seen that if now-Acting President Weisbrod kept his word—and if Cameron Nguyen-Peters, who ran the TNG, could see it—Weisbrod’s “Pale Bluff Address” was the basis for reunification. Chris figured it would probably enter American history alongside The Crisis, the Gettysburg Address, and “we choose to go to the moon.” And now that he had been editing her work for a while, he couldn’t help noticing that though the ideas in the Pale Bluff Address were Graham Weisbrod’s, the stirring phrases and ringing cadences were pure Carol May Kloster.

Chris turned the last page of her last article and read,

“That last piece,” he said, “really has an impact, but I can see why they don’t want word to get out.”

“Exactly,” Carol May said.

Quattro, who rarely read anything, kept his attention on his pancakes.

Carol May said, “Excuse me here, but I’m going to have to talk your ears right off, because I think we’ve got big trouble here, and it’s going to take some time to explain it. Lieutenant Marprelate, the representative from the TNG, doesn’t say much out in public, but he spends a lot of time with the town militia, and Freddie Pranger says he’s always reading the Constable’s Log. He scares the hell out of the gun-and-war kind of conservatives, and draws a lot of maps. My guess is, the TNG has this place in mind for a fort.

“And the Provi guy here is no better. Congressman Tornwell, our rep for the New State of Wabash in the PCG Congress, at least has to be away at Olympia, but his idiot nephew here treats Marprelate like he’s an army of occupation, and I know he’s hiring kids to put up anti-Temper graffiti.

“So if anything the Provi-Temper tension is getting worse. Definitely not what we had in mind when Heather made them make peace back in April. Tell Heather I said it’s serious.”

Chris nodded. “We will.”

“Okay, second big thing, which might just be personal. My niece Pauline, a few weeks ago, decided to go off with a tribal boy, up to the northeast of here, and there hasn’t been a word heard from her, or any of the other kids that went with that band of tribals, in six weeks now, and on their way out of the territory they trashed a little town just north of here, Wynoose.”

“Trashed how?”

“Smashed everything, killed some people, took others with them—the survivors, and there weren’t many, all moved down here. I don’t suppose the Army has any plans to do anything about the tribes?”

“It’ll be in the next Post-Times,” Chris said. “Tribals were threatening to wipe out some of the Old Amish families in Pennsylvania. That Temper general, Grayson, basically fought his way down the Yough Valley and brought the Amish out—with all that farming knowledge we’ll need. The Amish told Grayson that the tribals had been talking like Daybreakers, telling them to quit killing Mother Gaia with their plows, ordering them to liberate their poor oppressed horses, that kind of thing, and had been threatening and intimidating them.”

“Well, good on Grayson, then. When that tribe camped here, supposedly it was for peaceful trade, but we had a good number of brawls here in town because so many tribals wouldn’t shut up about how nice the world is since Daybreak, and our people who lost relatives and friends in Daybreak weren’t going to take that. Anyway, I’m worried about Pauline, and more worried that nobody comes over the border anymore, and Freddie Pranger admits he’s scared to scout in that direction—he still does, but he’s scared, and you know Freddie, that’s not natural.”

Quattro nodded. “We’ve got some things in the works, and some of our people are pushing to make the tribes a bigger priority. They don’t look as much like harmless bad cases of PTSD as they did three months ago.”

“Just so Heather knows and she’s thinking about doing something; if she’s on the job I don’t worry. I’m sure right now she’s distracted—having a baby will distract you, every time. Can I get more food into you before you go? Flying that plane looks like hard work to me.”

“Any excuse for more of the apple butter,” Quattro said.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 6:30 AM MST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.}

Heather O’Grainne always ignored her alarm; she was too large and heavy, this far into the pregnancy, to go downstairs to her living quarters, the antique wind-up alarm clock would run down in a couple of minutes, there was no one else in the building at this hour, and she had just climbed up here to her office anyway. It had only been this last month when she’d gotten really big, with this great whacking thing in front of her; a lifelong athlete and only reluctantly a bureaucrat, she felt as if this were some terrible prank of nature. She rested a hand on her belly and thought, Get big and healthy before you come out, kid, but don’t waste any time.

She slid out the map table from under the big desk; what was on it was not a map, but her version of a critical path chart, almost three feet by six feet across. No one saw the whole chart except herself, and only half a dozen trusted senior agents and analysts even knew it existed.

At the bottom was the word DONE, dated January 20, 2027; that and a few other Constitutionally fixed dates were the only things written directly on the chart itself. The rest was a tangle of pinned-on index cards, colored with stripes of watercolor and heavily scribbled and rescribbled in India ink, with the stripes linked by strands of cotton yarn of the same color. The software of 1950 melded with the hardware of 1850, she thought, in hopes of getting us to 2050.

Paths where bad things were developing were in yellow; paths where necessary good things had to happen were in green; the places where they crossed were underlaid with pieces of red construction paper, and the red construction paper sheets were sometimes linked in red thread. The branching paths spread upward from DONE like a messy, branching tree until the tips of the branches—representing today—were a tangle of yarn and cards, a few green, more red, most yellow.

She studied the chart and reminded herself of a few issues for today: whether to promote the tribes from minor to major nuisance (but General Grayson’s expedition against them, down the Youghiogheny, seemed to show that they could be overcome with some effort); whether the rapidly expanding Post Raptural Church was a force for stability, a force for chaos, or just a force; whether the peace she’d brokered between the Provisional Constitutional Government in Olympia, Washington, and the Temporary National Government in Athens, Georgia, was deepening and taking root, or tearing and weakening as the Provis and Tempers alike enacted mostly symbolic policies that seemed mainly intended to irritate each other.

The green strip that said EMERGENCE OF A UNIONIST, MODERATE CENTRALIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT still did not reach back to the present day. Every reasonable candidate was needed elsewhere, like Quattro Larsen, or politically tainted to some important faction, like President Weisbrod of the Provis or Natcon Nguyen-Peters of the Tempers. There were some unknowns she could push her propaganda people to promote, but no very promising ones. Her best-qualified candidate, General Lyndon Phat, had pissed off the Provis almost as much as the Tempers who now held him under house arrest in Athens.

Well. Gloomy picture established, time to see how it changed. She reached for her inbox.

Arnie had fired up the EMP-trap again—new green card for the DEFEAT MOON GUN pathway. That was good, but better still it meant WTRC was back on the air, and she could have something to listen to this morning.

She pulled her headphones down from the peg and flipped on the grounding and antenna switches. Nothing.

The old LED Christmas tree bulb, which acted as the crystal, looked fine through the clear glass of the protecting Coke bottle, but inside the coil enclosure the capacitor contacts were crusted white. The signal from WTRC, twenty times the power of the big old Mexican “outlaw” stations, had induced enough current in the coil to grow nanoswarm overnight. Wrapping her hand in a dry towel, she laid the metal of a wooden-handled barbecue spatula across the contacts, discharging the capacitor with a bang like a pistol shot, then cleaned the poles and contacts with sandpaper and lye.

Back in her chair—If I get any bigger I’ll either need a full-time assistant or a tugboat—she tuned in WTRC immediately. She smiled to hear Elwood Debourrie, who played easy-on-older-ears coustajam with lyrics that were militantly anti-Daybreak. If putting that message in their kind of music doesn’t provoke them, I guess we’ll have to put on a game show called “Who Wants to Electrocute a Bunny?”

The music so improved her mood that she took the next note off the top of her inbox with near optimism, till she saw:

Shit, TCAR—Transcontinental Air Route. Flight NW 9, the one that left Pueblo headed northwest on the 9th of the month.

Bambi Castro.

And pilots only radioed if there was trouble, such as:

“Request instructions,” Heather said aloud. “How about, come home safe with the plane?”

As if to mirror her mood, the radio program changed from Elwood Debourrie to A Hundred Circling Camps, a Civil War divided-family drama which Arnie had packed so full of symbols of national unity that sometimes after listening, Heather felt John Wilkes Booth had been unfairly maligned.

At least Bambi said she and the plane were okay. Maybe Larry Mensche was somewhere nearby and could be put on the job? Last she’d known, her most effective and least obedient agent had been near Ontario, Oregon, still looking for his daughter Debbie, who had escaped from the Oregon women’s prison at Coffee Creek the day after Daybreak hit, headed into what had quickly become tribal territory. I wish Larry would check in more often.

At the Main Street messenger stand, half a dozen teenagers surrounded a pot of hot soup on a hibachi. “Ration coupon, four meals, at the main kitchen, to get this to Outgoing Crypto,” Heather told Patrick, her personal bolt of lightning.

He was deep-brown skinned, all bony legs, gangly arms, appetite, and energy—the delight of some high school track coach, pre-Daybreak. His father had been on occupation duty in Tehran when Daybreak hit, and his mother had started out for her job in Colorado Springs on October 29, and never returned; that thirty-five miles of I-25 was now a litter of abandoned cars and decaying bodies.

She handed the teenager the folded message, which he dropped into the pouch around his neck, and the ration coupon, which he tucked into a leather wallet and dropped into his pocket. Whooping “The mail must go through!” (Orphans Preferred, Arnie’s Pony Express radio drama to make national unity cool for kids, had seemingly taught every kid in the United States that phrase) Patrick shot off, ragged shirt tail flapping over his baggy shorts, hard-soled moccasins slapping pavement.

Man, I wish I could still run. Heather’s next stop was Dr. MaryBeth Abrams, half a mile away; yet another reminder of how different her body was now. Oh, well, forward waddle.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ONTARIO, OREGON. 6:15 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.}

Larry Mensche got a radiogram at the first real breakfast he’d had in three weeks, which followed the first real hot bath and the first real night sleeping in clean sheets. It canceled his first chance to do laundry and his first full day of meals eaten at a table.

He was grateful that the radio staff in Ontario had not checked to see if he was in the Reconstructed Radisson Ontario, as the place styled itself, last night when the message from Bambi came in; he couldn’t have done anything effective till this morning anyway.

He was not displeased. He hadn’t been up US 95 yet, so he’d be covering new territory in his private search for his daughter, Debbie, missing since Daybreak day. He knew she was somewhere among the tribes—not good, but at least she hadn’t starved in a locked cell at Coffee Creek Women’s Penitentiary, where her habitual bad checks, petty theft, and impaired driving had landed her. He’d been lucky to reach Coffee Creek only nine weeks after Daybreak, and picked up her trail from there; he knew now that Debbie and a dozen other women had reached this general area, bent on joining a tribe, though he didn’t know which one they’d found.

The hotel owner accepted an RRC purchase order for Larry’s bill, conserving his cash and trade goods. “I guess the RRC is more stable than any bank we have. I still don’t get it, is the RRC Provi or Temper?”

“Yes.” Larry was trying not to fuel gossip. The owner looked annoyed—accepting that p.o. had been a big favor. Larry softened it a little: “The Provis and the Tempers in Athens are both trying to bring the country back together under the Constitution. Mostly they disagree about mechanics and details. We’re trying to help them in the areas where they agree. What we’re not is against either of them.”

“I guess that’s the answer you have to give.”

“Well, that, and it’s true.”

“For an outfit that calls itself the Reconstruction Research Center, you don’t seem to have much information.”

“Hey, we’re a research center. If we knew anything it wouldn’t be research, would it?”

The owner shrugged. “I guess government hasn’t changed that much since Daybreak. It’s still hard to see what we get for our taxes.”

If you’re paying taxes, Larry thought, you’re the only one. I guess habits of speech die hard. “I do need to research one subject. I’ve got to outfit an expedition up into the wild country north of here in a hurry. Do you know anyone that can rent me some mules, help me handle them, and doesn’t mind carrying a gun on the job?”

The owner grinned. “Is it okay if it’s my brother-in-law?”

“You’re right, things haven’t changed that much.”

Ryan and his son Micah lived on the far side of town, but this wasn’t much of a problem; Larry had only what would fit into his backpack, and anyway he needed to check at the biofuel plant to see if they had any avgas they were reasonably sure was sterile.

As he walked he saw that Ontario, Oregon, was in better shape than most towns: Fortifications mostly finished. Militia drilled and ready. Salvage crews working through ruins in an orderly way. Community mess hall reliably open. The blacktop on the streets was falling apart, of course, as the volatiles in the asphalt spoiled, and there were still flooded spots, packs of feral dogs, and abundant cars and electric wires yet to be hauled away, but you could feel the town coming back together.

The biofuel plant had clean avgas, and Ryan and his son Micah were indeed open to the idea of an expedition north into the mountains. “To make good time,” Ryan said, “you want to under-load the mules and use more of them. Mile Marker 178 is 108 miles away, a week’s trip nowadays. To fill up your friend’s tank, I make that three mules hauling four jerry cans each, with not much else, plus two more mules for supplies for the three of us, so’s we’ve got hands free to fight when the tribals turn up.”

“You’re sure they will?”

“I don’t go up there unless the money’s awful good. Tribals are why.”

“Then I won’t haggle about money,” Larry said. “So five mules will do it?”

“Unless you want to ride, or pay for me and Micah to ride.”

“Nah. People ought to be self-propelled.”

Detailing Ryan and Micah to acquire supplies, fill jerry cans, and load mules, Mensche went to the post office to radio Heather and then to the town square to trade for ammunition.

At the biofuel plant, Larry found Ryan and Micah almost ready to go, and paid for the fuel with another RRC p.o. Larry sprang for a quick brunch at a stew-and-bread stand in the square, and they set off at about 10:30 in the morning, not bad for a job he’d been unaware of at 7:00.

Like Larry himself, Ryan and Micah wore a mix of camo, denim, and deerskin, and carried black-powder guns, crossbows, axes, and big belt knives. Together, they looked like three old-time mountain men who had walked through a time machine for a ten-minute shopping spree at Wal-Mart.

The mules’ hooves clopped over the high truss bridge, loud in a town with no automobiles or electricity, but soft and lonesome against the roar of the river below. One down, and one hundred seven to go.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 8 AM MST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.}

“Given that everything I know to do came out of a 1942 Merck Manual,” Dr. Abrams said, “I think we’re doing real well to tell you that you’re going to have a baby. Other than that, all I can really say is that nothing I can find is wrong.”

Heather sighed. “I understand. Really I do. But I’m having my first kid as a widow right after my fortieth birthday. Look, the main thing I wanted to ask—is it true that a mother’s stress can affect her baby?”

Abrams laughed. “The manual here tells me to assure you your kid won’t get a birthmark.”

“Uh, I guess I was worried about the more modern superstitions.”

“Why? You might as well have a quaint old-fashioned superstition to go with our quaint old-fashioned way of life. At least don’t add the stress of worrying about the stress. Eat well, sleep as much as you can, stay active as long as you can without overdoing it, and do your best to remember that you’re a strong healthy woman and everything about the pregnancy is textbook normal—even if the textbook is eighty years old and came out of a dusty library basement.”

“What the hell, that’s no worse than half the congressmen I used to work with.” Heather left with the same comfortable feeling Dr. MaryBeth Abrams always gave her. I suppose it’s one more way we’re back to the old days. Reassure the patient and let nature do its thing. Not unlike what I’m trying to do with the United States.

She was most of the way back to the old Pueblo County Courthouse when Patrick charged around the corner, holding out a message. “I checked at Room F to see if there was anything for you, Ms. O’Grainne, so you wouldn’t have to wait for their regular delivery.”

Room F was Incoming Crypto.

“And I bet they gave you one lousy coupon.”

“Well, it’s a pretty good coupon, actually,” he said, smiling. “I hear it’s gonna be hamburgers at the Riverwalk Kitchen tonight, a train hit a cow over by Goodnight.”

“Well,” Heather said, “since it’s hamburgers, you and Ntale will both want seconds and one of you might even need thirds.” She scribbled out a coupon for five entrees; he pocketed it and handed her the folded message. “Gotta run, Ms. O’Grainne. The mail must go through.”

It was a note from Larry Mensche:

“Plz stdXjic” was Larry’s personal abbreviation for Please stand by just in case. Plz stdXjic had turned out to mean he’d needed a troop of cavalry, two doctors, three kegs of beer—not all on the same mission. It took her a moment to realize that “Tell Q 2” meant “tell Quattro too”—in other words, that Quattro wasn’t supposed to worry either.

She felt a kick and looked down. “All right,” she said. “Larry’s in Ontario, Oregon, and he’s on the job. None of us is supposed to worry.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (FORMERLY IN WASHINGTON STATE). 10 AM PST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.}

Allie Sok Banh’s first thought was that she’d have to speak sternly to Brianna about who was allowed to make appointments with her, or at least cut Allie in on any bribes. Other than a kickback, there was no possible reason Brianna had given a half-hour in Allie’s already-impossible schedule to a delegation from the tribes, and no way that the First Lady/Chief of Staff could properly meet with the tribals at all. After all, she thought, since I run the White House for President Hubbo-baby, that makes me the second most powerful person in the second most functional government in the former number one, currently about number twenty, nation on Earth. I’m at least five steps too important to be talking to… She looked down at the list and winced. From Sunflower Hammerhand of the Sunhawks down through reps for the Sunrisers and Morningstars, on to George Madisonsson of the Blue Morning People, and at the end: COALITION REPRESENTATIVE : MR. DARCAGE.

All of them would be people who used to be named something normal like Bill Smith or Ashley Gonzalez, who had absorbed some goofy Daybreaker ideas about the end of the world and gone off to be inept tree-worshipping bush hippies and make-believe Indians. The only real issue she should have with them was whether to assign them to the Justice Department for arrest or HHS for mental health evaluation.

But here they were, in her outer office. And the architects of the former Governor’s Mansion of Washington State had neglected to provide her office with a back door.

Well. She’d now used up three minutes of the allotted half hour. If she stretched out introductions and small talk, she might run out of time before Crystal Earthmommy, Shining Woowoofeather, and Barks at the Moon could voice their silly demands. I just pray I won’t have to accept any gift with beads or feathers or any other Camp Forest Fruitcake shit.

They looked like the chorus of a community theatre production of Hair: braids, dreads, Stetsons and cloches decorated with machine parts, one hat that appeared to be a mummified turkey. Most were in multiple shirts, baggy pirate pants or granny skirts, and some kind of knee boots or leggings. All of them were white—tribals were New Age hippie wannabes whose mythology derived not-too-remotely from Conan, Xena, Tolkien, heavy-metal Nazism, and The Da Vinci Code, and the First Nations very sensibly despised them.

Mr. Darcage was easily the winner of the Best Dressed Fruit Loop award. He had dreads, but neat ones; wore a hat with a feather, but it was a bowler with just one feather; and was dressed in a tuxedo coat over a baggy white shirt with neckerchief, and black pants tucked into knee-high deer-hide boots. He bowed and began the introductions.

As she watched, she realized that Darcage is the only real one; if there’s any deal to be done, it’ll be with him.

When all the handshakes and bows had been exchanged, Darcage said, “The group has chosen George Madisonsson of the Blue Morning People to present their petition.”

It began with a long, flowery prelude from the United Tribes of the Et Cetera and the And So Forth, in which each tribe named its founding values and claimed a history that had nothing to do with the events of the last eight months, when they had actually come into being. Darcage was appointed to be their representative to Olympia, and if the Federal government had any problem with any member of any tribe, he would—

Allie shook her head. “You’re American citizens. If one of you breaks an American law, you’re individually responsible to the city, county, state, or Federal government. If the guy next to you breaks a law, and you try to get between him and the arresting officer, that’s assaulting an officer, breach of peace, or obstructing justice, maybe all of those, and you will be arrested and tried for it. The Federal government does not give a shit about your little hippie-Indian or elven-Nazi clubs. The constable of the tiniest township has full authority to bust your silly asses if you break any law.”

The long silence was not awkward for Allie.

After looking around, George Madisonsson tried to go on. “Due recognition of the tribes under the new constitution—”

“There’s not going to be a new constitution,” Allie said. “And you won’t be recognized under the existing one, either, unless you put together a lot more votes than I think you have. We have states, counties, municipalities, and some more unusual categories like commonwealths, trust territories, overseas bases, interstate compacts, and Native American reservations. We don’t have tribes, autonomous republics, satrapies, or—”

“Or Castles?” Darcage did not raise his voice or look up.

“The so-called Castles are large, fortified private homes. Legally they’re no different at all from a big hotel or dude ranch with an extra-large security service.”

Darcage gestured for George to go on. “The territorial rights claimed by each tribe in the league are—”

“Irrelevant,” Allie said. “Absolutely irrelevant because all of that land is under some combination of the sovereignty of the national government, the jurisdiction of state and local governments, and the control of its legal owners. Daybreak, and the bombs, and the EMPs, did not abolish the Federal government. It sits here. They did not abolish the states—”

Darcage said, “Superior, Wabash, Allegheny, New England, and Chesapeake.”

Allie froze.

The vast area from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to the tip of Maine, and from Norfolk, Virginia, to Milwaukee, was a devastated wasteland, the Lost Quarter, far worse off than any other region of the country. Within the Lost Quarter, only about twenty-five struggling settlements here and there along its edge still called in to report famines, disease outbreaks, and tribal marauding. Seventeen contiguous states were functionally gone, with some bordering counties in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina also in ruins and not communicating. Just weeks before, General Grayson, acting on the orders of the Temporary National Government in Athens, had taken six battalions north along the Youghiogheny Valley in Pennsylvania to evacuate a few hundred Amish families with desperately needed skills. They had been attacked by and fought tribes literally every day, carrying out more than three hundred of their own wounded and taking more than fifty deaths. Everyone said that if it had been anyone other than Grayson, it might have been much worse.

It had forced the Temporary National Government at Athens to admit that there was no hope of restoring a state government quickly in Pennsylvania, let alone in other states in worse straits. The Tempers had declared all those states “suspended” and given the state governments of both Illinois and Michigan “observer status” since neither had any meaningful control over its own territory. There was no provision, of course, for suspending a state, or granting it observer status, in the Constitution.

Here at Olympia, Graham Weisbrod’s Provisional Constitutional Government had decreed the existence of five New States, temporary agglomerations of existing counties with portions of the Lost Quarter. Superior, with its state capital in Green Bay, was functioning; Wabash, with a nominal government at Quincy, Illinois, was going through the motions; Allegheny’s legislature, if they could manage to hold an election, would meet at Steubenville, Ohio, and about a dozen PCG agents were there, trying to raise a militia and begin pacifying the area. New England and Chesapeake were still completely unorganized.

The five New States had been created because Allie and Graham had believed they’d be able to control the appointment of their senators and representatives, creating a solidly dependable majority in the Provisional Congress; this would allow them to enact the programs Weisbrod had advocated for decades before Daybreak. By sending Grayson and the Army into what was supposed to be Allegheny, Cameron Nguyen-Peters, the Natcon of the Temporary National Government, had made the New States look like a sham, and the Provisional Constitutional Government like a hapless pretender. He had also revealed, by the public admiration for Grayson, that the American public did not want a relief area named Allegheny; they wanted a state named Pennsylvania. And Darcage had just thrown this into her face. More importantly, he had known that that was what he was doing.

As if he had somehow perceived Allie’s last thought, Darcage said, “These are the positions that the United Tribes intend to press, which I will be advocating here in every forum. You reject them now, but since they are matters of simple justice, eventually someone, sitting in that chair, will say ‘Of course.’ In the vicissitudes of politics, it may even be you.” He turned to the other tribals and said, “As we discussed, I should like to confer privately with Ms. Sok Banh—”

“My last name is Banh,” Allie said, evenly, “and I won’t be saying anything privately that I wouldn’t say publicly.”

“Matters have been tense, I believe, and a short private chat to establish a cordial relationship—”

“Won’t have any effect at all,” Allie said. “If I want to consult with the tribes as such”—or, say, get the ski report from hell—“I know where to find you.”

As the delegation filed out, Darcage stopped at the door and closed it, remaining inside with her.

She yanked the cord under her desk to bring in a guard.

Darcage said, “I am in a position to mobilize appropriate activities by the tribes to influence the 2026 special election, and frankly, you and President Weisbrod cannot afford to pass up any possible source of help. The election will very likely turn on the question of whether Provis or Tempers look like the people who can run a good reconstruction, and reconstruction will be impossible without our—”

The door opened and a muscular young sergeant of the President’s Own Rangers pushed in and pinned Darcage to the wall. “Mister Darcage,” she said, “I told you to leave.”

After Darcage was removed, Allie canceled her next two appointments, pleading a headache. She stood at the window. More than usually, Olympia’s mall looked like a dank, dirty miniature of lost and cratered Washington.

The thing is, Darcage’s right. Everything about the 2026 election will be a squeaker, and we need all the help we can get, including his, if he has any to give. Of course, there’s no reason to believe he can deliver, but then, I won’t know unless we talk, will I?

Graham would make a hopeless mess of this; President Hubby was sometimes such a big Goody Two-Shoes, and this was a matter for a subtle mind that didn’t shock easily. Such as mine.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11 AM MST. THURSDAY, JULY 10, 2025.}

Heather set down the pile of papers, reports on tribal activities in the Lost Quarter, the Rio Grande Valley, the Columbia Basin, and the many smaller tribal areas. All right, she thought, Larry Mensche wins the argument. We can’t treat the tribes as a minor problem anymore.

She spent about twenty minutes changing things around on the chart. Many of her previous bosses might have thought this was busywork; to Heather, it was a way of thinking hard about an issue, because to decide how to represent it, she had to decide what it really was. The more she thought about the tribes, the more she realized that she didn’t know, and needed to know—and that they were important.

Her next area was no more comforting: the peculiar tangle of politics in the Temporary National Government, especially the balance of power after Collum Duquesne’s death. You could defeat the tribals; you had to win over the TNG, and one of the best voices in the RRC’s chorus was now suddenly, terribly still.

Poor Cam must feel so alone, she thought. Her old friend had had no gift for making friends even when he hadn’t been squarely in the way of so many powerful people.

She found a new report just in from Red Dog, brought in by Quattro and Chris on the Gooney earlier that day, and plunged into it to see if she could form a picture, in her mind, of what was happening in Athens; she was sure that she’d be moving some cards and strings, because she’s always had to for every Red Dog report before. Fighting her drowsiness—she was off coffee until Leo or Riley was born—she bent to her best-placed agent’s report.