Daybreak Zero

^{2 DAYS LATER. CHRISTIANSTED NAVAL RESEARCH OBSERVATORY, CHRISTIANSTED, ST. CROIX, VIRGIN ISLANDS. 3:04 AM AST. MONDAY, JULY 14, 2025.}

Tarantina Highbotham had a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, an Annapolis ring, and an honorable retirement from the Navy as a captain—equivalent to a colonel in the other services. Her whole life’s experience had been in getting things exactly right.

“That moon is too bright to have so much of it in your scope,” she told Henry, the new observer who was just getting his scope positioned. “Just the northeast corner, less if you can. Make sure you can see Fecunditatis, but don’t blind yourself with any more light than you have to.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked around the darkened platform; the rest were right on the money. All this can’t be easy. At least my first class in celestial nav involved manual instruments. What must it be like, trying to learn this and do it right, if you grew up filling out a screen to tell the telescope where to point?

No matter. Wherever they came from, they were doing it.

Henry had been on his honeymoon on St. Croix; on Daybreak day, his new bride had traded her jewelry for a ride to the mainland, leaving him a note. He’d probably never know whether she had gone off with slavers, pirates, coyotes, or just plain idiots. After that he’d worked odd jobs, begged in the street, and drunk, until Highbotham hired him to dig a latrine, and discovered he had been a math major.

Abby, on St. Croix to work for some alternate-energy foundation, had the best paper-and-pencil math skills of all Highbotham’s team, and drew well—better than well—accurately.

Peggy was a retired high school math teacher who had spent thirty some years with DoDEA. Her husband, a newly retired Marine general, had dropped dead when the Pittsburgh EMP apparently reached just far enough to give him a current surge in the pacemaker. She always showed up in full makeup.

Richard, a beefy old sad sack with a heavy drinker’s face, had been an architect; Gilead, dark-skinned and with a prominent Cuban accent, had been a technical analyst for a brokerage.

Now they were Christiansted Naval Observatory, by the authority of Pueblo and the Second Fleet, and when they weren’t the Observatory, they were the Caribbean Academy of Mathematics—a brilliant idea Abby had had and Peggy had pushed, feeding about fifty orphaned children in order to lure them in for a heavy dose of math and science. Those kids might be our most important work—our descendants will still know the world is a planet, the sky is a vacuum, the sun is a star, and the moon’s a big rock that doesn’t fall down because it falls in a circle. And be able to find their way to the other side of the planet, and come back.

Not for the first time, Captain Highbotham realized she loved her team, and her new work, immoderately. Truth is, retirement was dull and I hated not mattering. The moon, just past full, silvered the still figures bent over their telescopes.

Highbotham looked up at the moon, picking out Fecunditatis—the next dark spot over from Tranquility. Were you trying to tell us something, putting your damned moon gun right next to where the Eagle landed?

They all hit their clocks.

“Where and what?” she asked, quietly.

“Still in the daylight,” Henry said. “But a definite flash. A few of the shadows blinked.” He was scribbling frantically at his drawing. “I’m marking which ones.”

That had been one of his ideas—that as a backup, if the launcher fired while it was still in daylight, and they had pre-drawn the shadows around the suspected launcher location, each observer could check off the briefly vanished shadows. From their checksheets, it might be possible to calculate the location of the launcher.

“Everyone else?” Highbotham asked.

“Confirmed, in the bright area, I’m still marking shadows,” Gilead said.

“Confirmed and marking,” Abby said.

“Confirmed,” Peggy said. “Also marking. I think I saw the flash, marking that too.”

“I was blinking, I guess,” Richard said, disconsolately.

“You’ve seen a couple others, and we have multiple observers so someone can blink.” Highbotham noted times from everyone’s clock. “I have 3:04:16.02, 3:04:15.98, 3:04:15.91, and 3:04:16.17 and that is… 3:04:16.02. Good work, everyone, and back to the scopes. Henry, I’ll want to see how your shadow calculations panned out tomorrow—so take your time, if you need to, to make them good.”

Back in the quiet of her house, she copiedwtrc attn arnie pkg on way 3:04:16.02 fectas agn

onto the top line of the page, translated all the characters to ASCII, wrote a line of digits from her one-time pad, added, and brought the characters back from ASCII. She ran through the usual annoying precautions to make sure her radio had no nanoswarm, and finally began to tap the key, sending the coded message. Hand cryptography. Morse. Wonder how soon I’ ll strap on a cutlass and lead a boarding party.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. MOTA ELLIPTICA, TEXAS (WEST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER). 3:20 AM CST. MONDAY, JULY 14, 2025.}

So that’s it. The EMP will burst over us somewhere between 4 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the 17th. Arnie scribbled a note and had the desk attendants copy it for every relevant officer, department head, and technician at Mota Elliptica, to get preparations under way at WTRC; gave a short note to the radio room to alert Pueblo, Athens, and Olympia; and dropped a note titled URGENT INSERT into the basket for the control bunker, so that once an hour they would stop the rolling tapes and warn the planet of the impending EMP.

With nothing more to do, he headed up the stairs for bed.

“So,” Trish said, behind him. “Five days of delay before the moon gun went off. Longest ever. Does that mean it’s an AI?”

“I hope so,” Arnie said. “Because if it is, our job is much easier. And if it’s not, it’s what I’m scared of. Why are you up so late?”

“Same reason you are. I asked them to wake me if a report of a flash on the moon came in. So was it Christiansted that got the fix?”

“Yeah. As always; best observatory we’ve got and they’re in the right place for a trajectory from the moon that’s coming here.”

“Did they get an exact fix?”

“Exacter than the last time. We’re narrowing in. But the flash happened with Fecunditatis still in daylight, so the launch site is still someplace in a forty-mile circle on our map of the moon. Captain Highbotham will be disappointed.”

Trish shrugged. “Highbotham’s not thinking about how long it will be before we can go to the moon to deal with it, because that’s not her job. Her job was to nail the moon gun’s location, and it slipped away again.” She peered at him through those strange wire-and-strap goggles; her eyes were an interesting shade of sea-green. “Arnie, you look pretty bummed yourself. Do you just need the sleep, or would you like to get a snack in the kitchen and just hang for a while?”

They made grilled cheese sandwiches and chamomile tea. He was surprised at how good it was; how long had it been since he’d sat down to eat warm food with company?

Trish gave him her puckish, crooked smile. “Is this a secure-enough location for you to share rampant speculation?”

“Not so much rampant speculation as a contagious nightmare,” Arnie said, yielding to the warm kitchen and warm food. “Look, it’s really a pretty simple thought. Suppose Daybreak really is a system artifact. No central control, no planners, no directors or generals or chairs or presidents or kings, just an emergent property of the communication systems that existed up till a year ago, and now, somehow, is continuing to run in new media and ways, like rock and roll moving from radio to YouTube, or fundamentalism from camp meetings to TV. We’re more used to the idea that things move from lower to higher tech, but that’s probably just because we had several generations where the tech kept getting higher. So somehow Daybreak is migrating from Internet down to printing press and radio, headed for campfire stories and Gregorian chant, I suppose.

“Now, we know it turns everything it encounters to its own purpose—while it was growing all around us, it took over things like political factions, organized crime gangs, terrorist groups, communes, nonprofits, churches, artistic movements, intelligence services, corporations, maybe even electorates, rather than vice versa. For Daybreak, reproduction and development are one and the same—it makes its ideas by catching on, and it catches on by making new ideas. It can’t do things without thinking or think things without doing them.

“It’s like how biologists describe a shark—a guidance system for a digestive tract—or what some economists said banks had become, a pile of money with a will to accrete. And that’s what scares me. It wants what it wants and goes after it, using whatever it’s got, but it doesn’t sit back and say ‘I want to reduce humans to the Stone Age,’ which would be consciousness, or ‘Destroying the world relentlessly is who I am,’ which would be personality. It gets by without either.”

“Drink some of your tea,” she said quietly. She was looking at him with the kind of concern he remembered his favorite tutor had, back when life was cookies, Star Wars, and test scores. She’s going to be a great mom for someone.

When he had sipped the warm chamomile and taken a few deep breaths, she said, “You sound like Edgar Allan Poe talking about the beating heart, or the black cat. Now chill for just a sec, remember it’s probably not coming for us right this second, and tell me what’s so scary about all this.”

“Something we’re overlooking. People have been the smartest things that people encountered, for at least the last hundred thousand years, right? Individual people have consciousness and personality, and they are smarter than animals, organizations, beliefs, or books. So we’ve learned that consciousness and personality are the indices of intelligence. But what if a really big system artifact—still not conscious, still with no personality—can be smarter than any of us? I mean, Catholicism—the whole system—is smarter than most Popes have been; physics is definitely smarter than any one physicist. Well, suppose Daybreak is smarter than we are. Completely focused in its own purpose, not caring about our suffering, not understanding ninety-nine percent of what it is that makes us worthy of existence—just like a shark eating a human saint or genius—but able to think faster and more deeply using more information than we do?”

She rubbed his hand between hers. “You’re tired,” she said, “and scared. I wish you would go to bed. We need you rested and well, and we need you to explain this idea coherently so people will listen to you.”

“You believe me?”

“I believe in you, and I want to give you a chance to persuade me that you’re right.”

“I just can’t help feeling like Daybreak is always a move ahead of me, like every time I ask it a question, it knows what I’m going to ask and its answer is not the truth, but the thing that will do Daybreak the most good. Like it’s learning who I am by seeing what I ask, like—

Trish finished her sandwich, and pointed at his. “Eat. It’s still warm.”

He did. It was good.

“Arnie, if you’re afraid that Daybreak really is bigger and smarter than all of us, and that it’s just manipulating us into becoming easier to destroy, then if it delayed firing the moon gun to persuade you that it’s a dumb AI, what’s the reason?”

“How would I—”

“You said it’s a game or dialogue. Why does an opponent fake anything?”

“Crap,” he said. “Once we see the flash, we all know nothing is going to happen for three days, so first we all take a long nap, and then we spend the rest of our three days grounding everything and wrapping it up—”

She held her finger up, eyes widening. In the momentary silence they heard bells, whistles, sirens—all the signals the Army used along the defensive perimeter.

The kitchen door flew open. Lieutenant Quentin, normally the night liaison for the Army forces guarding Mota Elliptica, said, “Doctor Yang, Professor Eliot, we need you to get everyone ready to evacuate, downstairs, now. Big tribal raid—”

Arnie and Trish bounded up the stairs; he shoved the door open into the men’s bunkroom. “We’ve got a major tribal raid coming in. Evacuation starts now. No arguments.” The snoring stopped from a couple of bunks, some men began to mutter; only Harper, the chemist, sat up, groping for his bathrobe. Arnie pushed his glasses up his nose and bellowed. “Everyone, now!” The room went dead silent but he could feel that they were all awake. “This is why we ran all those drills. Dress. Put your personal effects in your bug-out bag. Get the books and papers you’re responsible for into the marked boxes, and the boxes where they’re supposed to go. This is not the time to think of better ideas. When everyone is safe, and the records are safe, you may then tell me about all the terrible mistakes we made. Now get moving, do not try to figure out a better way, and if you finish early, come to me and I’ll give you something else to do. No creativity, just get this done.” He turned up the oil lamp, letting it flare, and saw that they were all moving, now.

He ran to his own room, swept his framed photos and treasured books into his pack, thought for an instant, Wish I was the guy who could just toss the three pictures of Allie into a corner and leave them here, and shrugged. He’d try that kind of courage some other time.

Something heavy slammed against the outside wall, cracking plaster inside. Arnie grabbed his bag and went into the hall; the men’s and women’s bunkrooms were pouring people into their jobs. Trish and Arnie brought up the rear, urging people down the stairs. She had a moment to turn and whisper to him, “And now I know you’re right. Soon as we’re back in Pueblo we’ve got to plan what you’re going to say to Heather.”

Something else hit the outside wall, hard enough to be felt through their feet.

“Trebuchet,” Lieutenant Quentin announced loudly. “Like the Mongols used. Just a big lever and fifty tribals yanking a rope to throw a rock the size of a bowling ball.”

They all jumped at the loud clang; that one had hit steel shutters on the ground floor. “Keep moving,” Arnie said. The snipers in the attic began to fire, and he added, “It’s being taken care of. Do your job, and they’ll do theirs.”

Documents virtually flew into boxes, the boxes seemed almost to close and stack themselves. No more rocks arrived; a sniper called from above that the tribals had abandoned their trebuchet. “Okay, do the optional part of the list,” Arnie said.

Engineers and technicians scrambled to put the instruments and other hard-to-replaces into boxes. Trish said, “No response from the control bunker—”

A shutter broke inward through a window, tipping onto the floor inside with a crash; a moment later, an arrow quivered on the floor. The snipers in the attic were firing so fast it sounded like continuous volleys.

Everyone dropped to hands and knees and crawled into the central hallways. Good, they remembered something else from their drills, and this time without being told. At another window, the steel shutters rang, but held; this trebuchet crew must be more competent, closer, maybe both.

As Trish and Arnie took quick roll of the scientific staff in the hallway, Quentin rolled in a rack of rifles. “These are pre-loaded—Newberry Standards, same thing the troops are using. Who’s qualified on them?”

“Everyone,” Arnie said. “I insisted. Some of us don’t like it, though.”

“Some of us do,” Trish said, picking up a Newberry and five four-shot magazines. Arnie stepped forward, and then everyone else was forming a line, the more reluctant taking the rear.

“I’ll have other jobs than shooting for some of you,” Quentin said, “but it’s bad; I think you should all have a gun with you, all right?”

Ruth Odawa sighed. “I hate the things but I hate being clubbed or burned to death even more. I’ll carry it but I’ll be happy to do almost anything else.”

The front door opened and slammed shut in an instant; the sergeant outside said, “In the center hallway.”

Carton, a Ranger from Olympia, came in. “Lieutenant Quentin, the colonel says we’re going to be surrounded, and he’s ordering everyone who can to fall back here. Captain Piersall and Lieutenant Ayache were killed in the first attack. Colonel Streen has direct command of Charlie Company and he’s bringing them in here. He’s also got both platoons of Rangers. If any of the engineering and scientific party can shoot—”

“We just went over that,” Quentin said. “They’re armed and ready.”

“Armed anyway,” Odawa said; Trish shut her up with a glare.

“Where’re the TexICs?” Quentin asked.

“Trying to chase the tribals away from the windmills,” Carton said. “The tribals swarmed up onto the mota, hundreds of them, with grapnels on big pieces of piano wire that tangle around and wreck the hubs, and rocks on poles to smash up the rotors, and God knows what else. I was on a watchtower up there when it started. We’ve lost at least four windmills that I know of. A few guys with black-powder repeaters couldn’t even slow the bastards down; I don’t know how the Texans’ll do with lances, pistols, and sabers, but at least they’re on horseback.” He might have grimaced or laughed; his expression was strange. “Guess we’ll all have to stop making fun of our pony soldiers and their cowboy outfits.”

“Guess we will,” Quentin said. “All right, we don’t want to be—”

Bangs, pops, and roars stuttered above. One of the men above shouted something down the stairs; then the front door opened. “Everyone stay down!” Colonel Streen shouted. “Troops coming in!”

Suddenly the house was full of soldiers—over a hundred Temper infantry, in their “Rorschach jammies,” the gray wool camo-blotched with India ink that had replaced the rotted-away ACUs; around fifty of the President’s Own Rangers, in their black flannel shirts and jeans; a few TexICs, Texas Irregular Cavalry, who looked to Arnie like they’d escaped from a Nashville revue.

Colonel Streen, a tall black man who had never spoken much to Arnie before, came in. “Doctor Yang, if we can all meet in your office, I need to talk quickly with my officers and you.”

Arnie’s “office” was a walk-in closet, with barely room for the five of them to stand around Arnie’s tiny, battered old desk.

“It’s the worst.” Streen looked a thousand years old. “We’re out of touch with at least half the force; the tribal attack overran three blockhouses out on our main line right during rotation, they were inside before the blockhouse crews knew what was happening, and the reliefs coming up were hit out in the open—Captain, thank God your TexICs were on top of that or we’d have lost all those men too—”

“Glad to help,” Captain Tranh said, his Texas twang broad and harsh; something about him reminded Arnie of a silly movie he’d seen long ago, John Wayne playing Genghis Khan. “Wish we could’ve been more use on the windmills, though. I think you have to figure they’re all lost; we can run’em off any one windmill but they’re right back on it, or after a different one, as soon as we turn our backs. I’m real sorry about that, Doctor Yang.”

“It’s gear,” Arnie said, though his heart was sinking. “People are what matter.”

Streen nodded. “Right. All right, now when I was with General Grayson in the Yough, we found out there’s no real leadership on the battlefield, even if their plan is sophisticated. Each little tribe has a structured, conditional list of tasks, every single tribal has that list memorized, and they run down their decision tree till they’re killed, dispersed, or victorious. So right now out in the dark they’re all finding each other, getting the right people on their left and right, and then when they’re all in place, there’s gonna be one big human wave, like a banzai charge, focused here, coming from all sides.”

“That’s what the tribals did at Pend Oreille,” Goncalves, the Ranger major, agreed; with his chest-length graying beard and all-black uniform, he looked like the wrath of Jehovah. “Fighting them around Grant’s Pass we could screw them up with three-man teams intercepting their runners and picking off the guys carrying spirit sticks, because they guide off those. I have six three-man teams out doing that right now; that should buy us a few minutes to prepare.”

“Cavalry can probably disrupt even better,” Tranh said. “Anyone running between groups of tribals, and anyone carrying a spirit stick—”

“And anyone that either of those are talking to,” the major said. “Leave no surviving witnesses—you have to kill the wounded. The tribal is just the medium, you’ve got to stop the message. If you get a spare second, break the spirit stick or scrape all that holy bric-a-brac off it, so nobody else can use it.”

“Do it, Captain,” the colonel said. “Cavalry won’t be any use pinned against this house, and we don’t know how much longer they’ll take before they launch their wave.”

The Texan saluted and went out, bellowing, “TexICs with me, now!”

“Other than that,” Colonel Streen said, “we’ll have to open windows—we can’t get enough guns on the enemy with those shutters closed. I want the second floor to open all at once, and then the ground floor, each on my command. Any thoughts?”

“Just glad to be here,” Goncalves said. “And my sympathies on your losses.”

Streen nodded. “Thank you. All right, let’s go. If anyone asks, the plan is to fight till we’re all dead, they’re all dead, or they run away, and the goal is complete victory. Everything else is details. This wave might have three or even four thousand tribals in it, but if all our people are careful about cover, and we don’t let the enemy close enough to set fire to the house, we should be all right, because in tribal attacks, the worst is always the first. Can we can stand a siege?”

“There’s a month of food for fifty in the pantry,” Arnie said, “and we’ve got an inside pump, so there’s water. We rigged up a bucket and pulley in the old dumbwaiter shaft to carry water upstairs; should we wet down the roof and walls?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Streen said. “All right, let’s go.”

On his way out, Arnie grabbed his six least enthusiastic shooters and put them on wetting-down duty, reminding them to keep their rifles with them and ready.

The Temper infantry had three surviving officers, all lieutenants; Streen allocated Quentin to the ground floor, and the other two to the axmen and pikemen on the north and south porches. “Major, if you would assign your two officers for the attic and second-floor commands, and if you and I declare ourselves HQ?”

“Works for me. Nice to have the US Army all back together again.”

“Isn’t it, though? Makes me feel like Custer.”

“I’d rather feel like Anthony Wayne. He won.”

A lookout shouted, “Colonel! Drums and singing!”

Arnie and Trish crouched to the right of their assigned window and listened; the melody was instantly recognizable—All we are saying, is give Gaia her rights.

Streen squatted beside him. “Any insight into that?”

“All the tribes use it,” Arnie said. “It’s almost certainly the pump-up before the big wave. Probably they’ll go to rhythmic shouting just as they start the charge.”

“So when they start to shout in rhythm, they’re coming? Is that a semiotics thing?”

Arnie shrugged. “It’s probably hardwired in the nervous system. Build up the feelings on long phrases with tones, release them on short atonal grunts.”

The singing had grown louder. The front door opened. “Sir.” A young soldier leaned in.

“Yes?”

“Flames from the control bunker. Nobody answering our calls there. Too much smoke to see what’s happening.”

“Thank you,” the colonel said. The young soldier slipped back out. “Quentin, double the rifles on the windows that can see the control bunker,” the colonel said. “Draw from whatever reserves we have. Don’t change anything else. Pass word up to the other floors to do the same. That’s where the main shock’ll be coming from. Tell them that.”

Quentin began giving orders.

Streen turned back to Arnie. “I’m guessing you’ve lost everyone and everything in that control bunker, but if there’s anything important enough we could try a sortie—”

“Colonel,” Arnie said, “with the windmills wrecked, it’s already the end of WTRC, and the only thing in the bunker we couldn’t replace was Pahludin, Bates, Greene, and Portarles. Don’t worry about saving anything but lives.”

Streen grinned. “One clear objective. Are you sure you’re really an administrator, Doctor Yang?”

“I have constant doubts.”

The colonel squeezed Arnie’s shoulder in friendly encouragement and moved on.

Outside, the singing faded into a chant backed up by drums—

—louder, faster, blending into booming drums and crashing metal.

“I’m going above,” Streen said. “Quentin, on my command or one minute after you hear second floor open up, throw the shutters open and give them everything you can from the ground-floor windows. On no account leave a window or door unguarded.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This’ll be it, people.” Streen bounded up the stairs, the Provi Ranger major at his heels; the spotted and black uniforms made them look like a Dalmatian and a Lab racing after a Frisbee. They’re enjoying this, Arnie thought, enviously.

The chant grew louder still, less words than grunts of rage. The shutters above creaked and groaned; volleys of rifle fire roared, a few seconds apart. Quentin clicked his stopwatch.

Streen bellowed, “Lower floor go!”

The men on the porch swung the steel shutters outward in a screech and boom. Arnie rolled to the middle of the window, awkwardly and slower than the soldier and Ranger coming from the other side. The soldier beside him broke out the glass, knocking the shards out with his rifle butt. Trish, Arnie, the soldier, and the Ranger laid their rifles onto the sill and sighted.

The silhouettes in the dingy moonlight became distinct over the barrel of Arnie’s rifle—light and dark smears of faces, hats of all kinds, baggy shirts, pantaloons. “Hold, hold, hold,” Quentin’s voice chopped through the din of the onrushing shouting Daybreakers, as level and even as if advising a taxi to turn right at the next corner. “Choose a target and aim. Fire on my command.”

Arnie kept his sight on a tall man with a bushy beard who was waving a hatchet over his head.

“Fire,” Quentin said.

Arnie held his breath, tightened his finger, felt the rifle shove his shoulder. As the dense smoke blew away on the night breeze, he saw the man doubled over, probably hit in the guts.

“Choose, aim, and fire at will,” Quentin said. “Work fast, people.”

As the curtains of smoke opened and closed in front of him, Arnie chose a young woman who was swinging something burning on a rope over her head, aimed, squeezed, saw her fall backwards. Chamber and the first from the mag. The next hole in the smoke revealed a man waving a spirit stick—a prime target because every tribal who could see it would be running to follow him. Arnie shot, missed, shot again. As the smoke cleared, he was thinking, One left, chamber it, fire. Spirit Stick Man fell almost at the porch; as Arnie reloaded, the pike and axmen were driving back the followers.

Existence settled into counting rounds, searching, aiming, shooting, and reloading.

Feet on the porch.

“Rifles stay down, axes and pikes away from windows, shotguns now,” Quentin said. Arnie felt feet standing between him and Trish. A great booming roar shook the room. “Rifles, axes, and pikes stay where you are. Shotguns, second barrel, now.” Another boom.

“Axes and pikes advance. Rifles and shotguns support with fire and be careful.”

Arnie rolled up into a kneeling position; his back leg brushed Trish’s. The porch was an incoherent struggle of flesh, uniformed backs closest to them, hats, plumes, and headdresses beyond. A shaggy man without a shirt, wielding a chain and a small hatchet, rammed between two uniforms; Arnie and Trish beside him shot simultaneously, and the man fell backward, hit in the face and chest.

A tribal rammed through the press, jabbing with a spear. Trish stiffened against Arnie; he felt a gurgle as he planted the muzzle in the tribal’s face and pulled the trigger.

The huge, heavy slug folded the man’s head inward like a rock dropped onto a pillow, and a mess flew out behind him.

While Arnie’s hands chambered another round, he took one instant to look to his right. Trish was pinned backwards by the spear through her neck to the floor, as if she were stretching her knees in yoga. Her goggle/ glasses lay in the pooling blood around her head; it was the first time he’d seen her without them.

Back at the window, a space opened between two uniformed backs, revealing a woman wielding two sickles; Arnie shot her squarely in the chest. A pike, swung like a ball bat, swept her body from the porch.

“Rifles, on your feet, advance behind the pikes and axes,” Streen ordered. Arnie stood up and stepped through the window, careful of the bodies lying there; a Daybreaker stirred at his feet, and as if it had been a venomous snake, Arnie slammed down his rifle butt on the back of her head.

He moved forward a step behind the soldiers with pikes; stray, unaimed arrows and rocks clattered on the porch roof.

The pikemen danced momentarily backward and forward on the edge of the porch. Streen cried, “Pikes, open for rifles, now.” Half the pikemen stepped back and to the side; suddenly it was as if a door had opened for Arnie, and even before Streen bellowed, “Rifles to the front and fire at will,” he was there.

The Daybreakers had fallen back just far enough to form a clear space, littered with bodies, between themselves and the pikemen. They were no longer chanting, and the front row was held in place only by the struggling, oscillating, confused mob behind them.

Arnie looked straight into the terrified eyes of a boy holding a machete. He shot him in the face. All around, rifles and shotguns lashed out into the mob. Arnie fired again and again, reloading as fast as he could, as the Daybreakers fell back screaming and begging; when they turned to run, he shot at their backs until his last couple of shots were simply too far to get even the stragglers; by now the roar of fire had faded down to the last few bangs.

Quentin gently pressed down on his forearm. “Point your rifle at the ground, and take the round out of the chamber. The colonel needs to talk to all of us.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE CASTRO (IN THE FORMER SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA). 11 AM PST. TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2025.}

“I appreciate your coming to see me,” Harrison Castro said, as Pat O’Grainne rolled his wheelchair onto the balcony of the big office that overlooked San Diego Harbor. “If you’ll join me at the table, let’s have a drink and just enjoy the fact that it’s a fine day and no one is shooting at us.”

Two weeks after the Awakening Dolphin Children’s assault, the main keep of Castle Castro looked like what it was: a fortress under a collection of wreckage. The original design had concealed its nature as a system of concrete bunkers by putting stuccoed-plywood and z-brick frouf, fancy stained glass windows with steel veining, and ornate (but heavy) metal gratings in front of the bunker walls, all sunny hallways on the inside, all frivolity on the outside.

During the attacks of the last six months, all that faux decor had been smashed and burned. The charred, broken remains of it now clung in strands and heaps to the reinforced concrete walls between open spots where Castro’s own forces had pushed it aside to clear loopholes, observation slits, and sally ports.

“I’m sure glad you built this place,” Pat said, “and even gladder that old Heather had a connection to you, to get me in here. It doesn’t look like the old neighborhood stayed very nice.”

“Well, the people who came out of there sure weren’t.” Castro poured the sweet red wine that his Steward of the Barracks had assured him was Pat’s favorite. To judge by how fast it went into Pat, the steward had been on top of things. Well, no matter. The old guy took his turns at his loophole, and sober or not, he was a good shot, and how many real fighters aren’t hard drinkers anyway? “One more bit of business I ought to check with you while I have you here and before I forget. Those wheels we came up with for your chair—”

“Working fine. We were lucky to get a wheelwright in here, too.”

Actually luck had nothing to do with it. I put in years developing a big, big list of people with unusual skills I could shelter whenever it finally all fell down. I had so many people on such a diverse list that I was even ready for something as weird as Daybreak turned out to be. But it’s better for people to believe in luck; they don’t resent it the way they do foresight. “Sometimes luck is all that matters,” Castro said, sipping at the cheap, too-sweet wine and stretching expansively.

Pat was stretching, also, his eyes closed in bliss. “Mister Castro, I’m aware that you have three thousand people here at your Castle, and an old biker wouldn’t usually rate a private room in the inner keep. So… I kind of think you’re hoping to lobby my daughter in Pueblo.”

“Why don’t we talk business after lunch? I take it you’re not offended by my approaching your daughter through you?”

“No, I’m not. She might be. She was always ornery; I always thought she became a cop in the hopes of busting me someday. She might throw a hissy fit, but you know, Mister Castro, I’ve been dealing with Heather’s tantrums since she was two years old.”

After lunch, Harrison Castro refilled Pat O’Grainne’s glass. “Here’s the thing. For all its many failings, this has been a good country, hell, a great country, but what it finally died of was what most people thought made it great—it died of democracy. We just plain forget that the first colonies were founded by men who survived all sorts of hardship and danger to do it, and then rose to the top, so you had about four generations of really brutal natural selection, and then afterward all those natural leaders intermarried. So there was a real, genetic superiority about the Founding Fathers, and they wrote a constitution that would keep power where it belonged, in those superior families. And there have been other little pockets of superiority, produced by adversity and breeding, as well—the Louisiana Creoles, the Russian Jews, and if I may say so, the old Californios.

“The Constitution rests on the premise that the only meaningful freedom is the freedom of the alphas to—” Castro heard a sort of wet buzzing.

Pat O’Grainne was sound asleep, his leathery liver-spotted face tipped up to welcome the sun.

Harrison Castro shrugged, called in a servant, and instructed him to quietly return the old guy to his quarters. After O’Grainne was wheeled out, Castro stood a while on his balcony.

In the harbor, the half dozen boats coming out and going in all belonged to him; the second-biggest port on this side of the continent, now, and it’s all mine, if I can keep it.

^{IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD. CASTLE CASTRO (IN THE FORMER SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA). 12:45 PM PST. TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2025.}

Pat O’Grainne had always loved crossword puzzles, and always been able to hold his liquor; many nights when Heather was growing up he’d gotten a sixer-buzz on and done a crossword puzzle, flawlessly, in ink, just to show her he could. He sometimes thought that the intellectual stimulation of figuring out “ten-letter word, breathing toward Cleopatra’s death,” might have had something to do with how well Heather had done in school.

This wasn’t very different; first he wrote the letter to her, then he scrawled out his handmade crossword puzzle. 15 across (the day of the month) was “orogeny.” He used the definition and the text after it as a key to code the letter he had just written. Sometimes he surprised himself at how fast he could do this drunk; Heather said it was good because he never shortened or simplified messages to make the coding easier.

It pissed him off, though, seriously, that she said he should use the crappy grammar and spelling that he’d have used texting his biker buddies; she said it made the code harder to break, but he thought if some enemy ever did break the code, they’d think he was an idiot.

He returned to his coding:

When he had finished, he recopied the code, wrote a mawkish note about how they didn’t pay enough attention to him and how Heather was ignoring him, copied the handmade crossword puzzle and the “secret code for you to work out, just like when you were a little girl” below that, and put the finished letter between books on his shelf; he’d give it to Carlucci or Bambi whenever they passed through. Then he put the original into the split log in his fireplace; it was a good thing this summer was so cold and he had an excuse for a fire almost every night.

^{THAT EVENING. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:15 PM MST. TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2025.}

When Heather couldn’t sleep, she’d go upstairs, roll out her chart, and study it. Tonight she felt huge, lonely, and miserable, and bitter experience had taught her that once it reached the point where she couldn’t find a comfortable position, she was going to be up for at least another hour. So she padded upstairs, feeling like a grouchy she-bear, lit a lamp, pulled out the chart, and let her eyes just roam.

If there was any consistent pattern in tribal attacks, she thought, it had to be that they were always bigger and sooner than anyone might reasonably have expected. She scrawled a note to Leslie, her librarian for intelligence reports, asking for the action reports on tribal attacks in the last ninety days. I suppose I’ ll be able to put Arnie on that one. Poor bastard, Mota Elliptica was such a good project for him, and now… well, poop. We had a solid five companies protecting it and we probably needed ten or fifteen. But it’s gone now, and God knows how many things we really needed with it.

She had pinned in more red cards, yarn, and construction paper blocking the DEFEAT MOON GUN path, and she had emphatically moved TRIBAL ACTIVITY way up on the priorities. Looking things over, she thought, Well, I had been thinking we needed to assert ourselves somewhere; Arnie tells me public opinion won’t stay with us if we don’t obviously do something to stand up to some bad guys. I was thinking it was time to move against the Castles, but we’ d better make it against the tribes. Her eyes fell on a deep red slash running across the chart. Now if Larry will just uncharacteristically call in and coordinate, and we get some cooperation from Olympia, I see my next move, plain as day.

With the choice made, she felt as if some hand had uncorked her head and poured a bucket of sleep into it. She barely made it back to bed before she was out for the night.