Directive 51

^BLASTULA

Every new life begins with division: the fertilized cell splits, and the split parts split, and the split parts split again, until there is a ball of identical cells, the blastula. In the beginning there is division.

The new world grew and divided and divided again. In the next two weeks, the electric power system collapsed completely as the nanoswarm destroyed components for the control systems; biotes ate insulation and shelter; and wrecked transportation, bandits, and riots kept anyone from reaching substations and power lines. As late as November 15th, perhaps one in twelve homes had electricity; nearly everyone listened to President Norcross’s Thanksgiving prayer broadcast on an unpowered crystal set, or using carefully hoarded batteries, by candle or lamplight.

By the last week in November, Detroit, Louisville, Buffalo, Kansas City, Jacksonville, Chattanooga, and Sacramento had all suffered catastrophic fires like the first ones in St. Paul, Boston, and Chicago, spreading for many blocks, with firefighters powerless. No one knew how many died; no one looked for bodies in the rubble.

On November 11th, nanoswarm infected the nuclear aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan; by November 14th it was clear that even whole-crew round-the-clock efforts could not eradicate them. On November 17th, 18th, and 19th the ship made one last fast pass northward along the California coast. The helicopters judged to be still safe flew back and forth, off-loading crew onto any wide, flat spot near enough to a town; when the helicopters went bad, the last few hundred of the crew departed in boats. Finally a skeleton crew took her northward, hoping to keep her running long enough to scram her reactors and scuttle her in the Queen Charlotte Trench, eventually to be run over and buried several miles deep by North America itself. If the reactors did not breach in the next few decades, the ship would be under a hundred feet of bottom mud before any radioactive materials leaked. Nobody had heard from Ronald Reagan since; probably there wasn’t a working radio on board, but they had hoped that the captain and residual crew would have been able to reach shore in a small boat by now and find an operating ham or other way to call in.

The Sixth Fleet, after losing two support ships and about forty planes to airborne nanoswarm, had made the risky run through Gibraltar, and joined the Second Fleet, out in the Atlantic. The Navy ships didn’t have much of anywhere to hide; near the American Atlantic coast, prevailing winds carried nanoswarm and biotes eastward, and the Gulf Stream flowed out of extremely human-and-technology-infested waters.

To conserve precious oil, the nuclear ships towed the others, as much as possible. They spent several days on the Grand Banks because the fishing was good, and there were many thousands of mouths to feed, but those waters are rough in November, and they had to flee southward at the first signs of storms.

Satellite and cautious air reconnaissance revealed all but complete collapse in Africa, without even apparent local order; India appeared to be holding together with a couple of sizable rebellions under control and immense planting efforts under way. South America was in flux, with some local military commanders carving out chunks of territory and threatening to seize capitals, but the analysts thought it would stabilize into something like its old map, with a few cities and provinces either becoming independent or switching nations; Europe was breaking down in something that looked distressingly like warlordism, and famine was worst there. Streams of refugees poured up the Rhine Valley and across the German plain from the Low Countries; without power machinery for the pumps, the sea was creeping in, and everyone knew that in a bad storm, there would be no rescues. Russia was collapsing into the hands of dozens of petty kings, each with his own transmitter, manifesto, and mission to save the world, but at least it looked like a fair amount of winter wheat was being planted; if roads to the west, especially rail lines, were re-opened soon enough, next year might be better.

After a rocky few weeks, central Mexico was regaining control of the rest of the country, and the Mexican government was in regular touch with Washington and Ottawa; there was talk of a unified continental policy, and of joint action to stabilize the Caribbean, where drug lords, local military, religious cults, criminal gangs, and American filibusteros were re-creating the Pirate’s Main of four hundred years before.

The American Midwest and East were freezing and starving; surely not all of the reports of cannibalism were true, but it seemed likely before spring. Death tolls from exposure and hunger-related diseases were high but nothing like those in Asia or Europe. The South was under “soft martial law”—local military bases providing government services—and doing fairly well, with little chafing at the lost rights so far. Mountain West city and county governments seemed to be holding together.

More than sixty different theocracies had been proclaimed in California alone, which was turning into another general pool of anarchy.

For Federal, State, and local governments, the libertarian/survivalist Castles were rapidly becoming more of an asset than a liability. President Norcross turned back a request from Harrison Castro and forty other freeholders to grant them an official status, but he did permit Federal agencies to acknowledge Castles both as locations and as local governments in his reports. “Just a matter of reality,” he assured his staff. “Yes, we’ll need to remind them that they’re large local businesses, not feudal fiefs, sometime. But for right now, most of ’em do what we need ’em to do, so don’t let’s pick any fights we can’t afford.”

The divisions went on, everything everywhere splitting into more pieces; and as the pieces began to make their own way in the world, they began to take different pathways.

Differentiation is the way a blastula becomes, eventually, a whole new person in its own right; no longer a blob, its cells become bone and muscle, hair and blood, and then arm bone and leg muscle, eyebrows and scalp hair, a pumping heart, a seeing eye; and three weeks after Daybreak, differentiation was proceeding.

^{CASTLE LARSEN. (JENNER. CALIFORNIA.) 11:00 A.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 27.}

“Maybe we should stop for today and start again on Friday,” Larry Mensche said, “I’d still like to ask about a few things, but you’ve already had two seizures and you look exhausted.” Funny thing, he thought, with this one, you don’t do tough-cop nice-cop, you do “the nice cop who is pleased” and “the nice cop who is disappointed.” Going by what I’m seeing of her personality here and now, this little girl shouldn’t have been able to be a shoplifter, let alone a terrorist—she was only ever any kind of rebel because she didn’t want to disappoint her parents. While he waited for her answer, he filled a glass with cold water from the pitcher and handed it to her.

She drank gratefully. “Why not tomorrow?”

“It’s Thanksgiving,” he said, “and I guess Quattro Larsen has sort of a big day planned. He’s—”

Ysabel’s face crumpled and she grabbed for a fresh handkerchief from the pile beside her.

He sat beside her on the couch and asked, “Missing your family?”

“Yeah. Used to be Dad and Mom called from wherever in the world they were, no matter the cost or the inconvenience. They never had anything to talk with me about… or we’d have a really brief cold awkward conversation… or we’d argue. But it was something that happened every Christmas and Thanksgiving. But they were in backcountry Tanzania, so…” she seemed to grope for some conclusion, and settled on, “now they can’t call.”

She wiped her eyes furiously, adding, “And considering I’ve just helped a few hundred million people starve to death, I have a lot of fucking nerve getting upset about having my Thanksgiving spoiled.”

“You feel what you feel.”

“Thank you. You’re very nice to me.”

“You know things I want to know, Ysabel. And you tell me. I stay nice because you stay cooperative.”

She looked up at him with a sadly twisted little smile. “So if I ever stop talking, you’re going to get out your Taser?”

“No,” he said, “and Bambi wouldn’t either. We’d just turn you over to someone else who would.”

“That’s how things work, really, isn’t it? Daybreak used me to get you, you’ll use me to get Daybreak.”

“Would you like food, or do you just want a nap?”

“I feel like a piece of wrung-out shit, but seizures make me hungry, I guess they burn a lot of energy. If there’s any of that bread left from breakfast? With maybe some of the veggie butter? The sugar rush’ll probably knock me out.”

Mensche left her in her room, with the outside lock thrown; Larsen had put bars on the windows, but Mensche’d never seen anyone who was less of an escape risk. He found Bambi and Quattro sitting in the kitchen, drinking some of “the possibly last stash of coffee for a hundred miles,” as Quattro called it, and going over a map, trying to figure out whether the best way east would be to sail to Tehuantepec and try to cross Mexico there; walk on I-70; or wait for one of the steam trains that the railroad nuts were working on getting running.

“Of all the precious resources,” Bambi said, “who’d’ve thought our railroad nuts would be so invaluable? If we can just get the coal to them, we have at least a hundred good, operable steam locomotives, if we can believe KP-1.”

“Now that the mainstream media is basically one radio station,” Quattro said. “and we don’t have any way to check up on them, everyone believes them again.”

Mensche sliced three thick pieces of Quattro’s whole-grain concrete, which he privately thought of as “political-extremist bread”—only right-wing survivalists and left-wing granolas could possibly pretend it tasted good. He smeared it with veggie butter, more political-extremist food. “Roth’s pretty wiped. The questions that Arnie Yang has been sending all seem to hit her like electric shocks, but after she comes out of the seizure, she spills her guts. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s some kind of genius.”

“At DoF, we called him the House Genius,” Bambi Castro said. “Need someone to watch your back while you set it down for her?”

“I’m more likely to be attacked by a dishrag. This little chick is beaten.”

He lunged for the bolt, dropping the tray, and flung the door open before he was even conscious of hearing the strange, throttled noise. She had tied one corner of her sheet around the motor of the ceiling fan; she held the other end over her head, fighting the loop she had tied as if it were trying to fasten itself around her neck. Though her eyes bulged from her deep red face, only her own straining muscles constricted her throat; she held the sheet back from herself as if it were an anaconda trying to put a loop around her neck.

Mensche couldn’t break her grip, but he could hold the loop away from her head. What the hell can it be like inside her head? He remembered something Arnie had suggested. “Ysabel, your parents love you very much, and they want to see you again someday.”

Her face seemed to fall into itself like a ball of burning newspaper, she let go of the sheet and fell to the floor; a great gasp of air howled painfully into her throat. Mensche sat down next to her on the floor and pulled her over so that she could hang on to him; Bambi burst in, but Mensche just shook his head and gestured shhh.

Bambi whispered, “Hey, your daughter?”

“Yeah?”

“She had a great dad, you know.”

“Thanks.” Mensche didn’t see any reason to explain about the endless fights and screaming when Deb was a teenager, about being played against Deb’s mother into hapless veering between excessive bribes and excessive punishment, about believing Deb when she lied and doubting her when she needed his belief, about any of those awful years of too much hope mixed with too little a decade ago. Any damn idiot can look like a good dad if he only has to deal with one kind of trouble and his whole life isn’t at stake.

^{ONE DAY LATER. ANTONITO. COLORADO. 7:15 P.M. MST. THANKSGIVING DAY. NOVEMBER 28.}

Thanksgiving Day was unseasonably warm. Jason got a day’s work from the town on the north approach crew, taking a long walk up US 285 to help bring refugees in; whenever the weather lifted enough, desperate refugees from the Front Range would leave their improvised shelter and start trickling into Antonito along 285 again, some thrown out, some because walking south had become a habit after they’d escaped the linear deathtrap of the I-25 corridor from the Springs to Fort Collins.

They had ridden out in Doc Bashore’s wagon and set up base six miles north of town at dawn. After that it had been a long day of taking his turn walking out, sometimes as much as two miles, to meet the little clusters of refugees, figuring out their immediate needs, and then flagging for a nurse, or for Doc and the wagon, or just walking them back in.

“It was great of Doc to come all the way out on 17 and give us all a ride in. That wagon’s no faster than walking, but if we stay here, I want to get one, and the horse to pull it,” Jason said. “I love the part where the horse does all the work.”

“Till you get home. Doc’s prolly still rubbing that horse down. He says you gotta always take care of the horse before you take care of yourself. How come you had to end up way over on 17?”

“Bobby Kronstadt ran into some hostiles, and we all ran like mad to back him up—now that’s exercise. Four big angry men, and one very shrill woman, looking for a town that’d want them to run it, and mad as all shit that it wasn’t us. Told ’em we didn’t care where they went, but they weren’t getting any closer to our town. Bobby and I tracked them all the way cross-country till they headed west on 17. Cap figured we were the youngest and healthiest, with the best shoes. That’ll teach me to let you make moccasins.”

“Aw, bullshit, baby. The other guys prolly think you’re lucky ’cause I’m hot, but they know you’re lucky about them shoes.”

He grinned at her. “You know I think about how nice it is to have the mocs every day on the trail.” He stepped closer to her. “All day long I think, can’t wait to get home to that gal o’mine, and see if there are any new shoes…” His fingers traced delicately down the sides of her neck, stroking the dragon tattoo.

“The soup’s pretty hot, now, but I think them potatoes’ll prolly need to cook some more.”

“Then let ’em. Our first Thanksgiving here should be a good one.”

When they were happy and satisfied and just cuddling on the bed, she asked, “So is this Thanksgiving being good so far?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m about as thankful as I can get.”

“Let me get dressed and see about the soup, and maybe I can get you thankfuller.”

Beth’s fringe benefit for helping with the mass dressing-out of mule deer and pronghorns at the community kitchen had been a generous pail of trimmings. For their Thanksgiving soup, she had boiled that with some potatoes, a share of leftover cooked rice from the community kitchen, a can of tomatoes, a handful of thawed-but-probably-not-yet-spoiled frozen brussels sprouts, and a couple of old, stringy carrots. They promised themselves that by next Thanksgiving they’d have turkey, or at least chicken.

For now, compared to Thanksgiving with his family or at the commune, this was, hands down, the best he’d had: no football, no tofu, no sermons about making something of himself, no dark little hints about Beth having grown up in a doublewide, no sermons about not oppressing people.

“For two refugees, this place is a palace,” Jason said. “You’re right, I really am even more thankful.”

“Yeah, baby, we’re so lucky. And I listen to that wind and I just think, the place is warm and toasty and all ours.” She pulled out a potato on a long-handled fork, cut it in half, and tried a bite. “That’s about as done as it’s getting.”

Later on, when the warmth, safety, privacy, and full bellies pulled them toward bed, they banked the fire, put the soup-pot into the cold corner of the room to keep it fresh longer, and washed with warm water from the iron bucket that Beth kept by the stove. Holding Beth, on a box spring and mattress with real sheets, up on a platform Jason had made from some old crates and boards, he thought, This is living.

^{ONE DAY LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. (DRE T COMPOUND. NEAR THE COLUMBUS SIDE OF THE BASE.) A LITTLE AFTER 1:00 P.M. EST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 29.}

Heather had made the appointment with Cameron specifically, rather than Graham, because stupid me, I thought if Cam just understood the other side, that would solve the problem. Now I see that’s what was causing it.

He was giving her his usual small, polite, meaningless smile, and he’d been nodding more and more as he listened to her. Finally, he said, “Heather, that’s just politics. The real world is complicated and contradictory, but policies have to be clear and monovalent to be carried out. If Graham wins the argument—and he might, he and Norcross talk a lot and get along well—then I will shrug, carry out the policy, and pray that Graham is right. You know it’s not personal with me and Graham. I like the man. I know he’s sincere, and respect his judgment. And Arnie is the cleverest guy in the world and absolutely indispensable, but every so often, his extreme cleverness overpowers his common sense, he starts sniffing up his own butt, he falls in, and he disappears up his own ass like a star falling into a black hole. And when that happens, I have to not follow Arnie up his own ass. So I say—”

There was a knock at the door, and before Cameron could say, “Come in,” Sherry stuck her head in. “Heather, note from Lenny—he said it was urgent—meet him over at the infirmary.”

“Go,” Cam said.

Heather hurried through the gray fall mist, her heart sinking.

It wasn’t fair.

They’d made the dangerous trip down here, lived through the constant danger of exposure in Washington, she’d carried him in her bare hands down through corridors and stairwells that must have been crawling with biotes, and she’d been so careful to scrub and clean him everywhere, brushing every bit of exposed plastic with alcohol and…

She knew it couldn’t make any difference, but she ran, anyway. Maybe he has something else, maybe it’s serious but it’s not that, maybe—

At the door to the infirmary, she made herself slow to a walk. If this is it, I’m going to do it right. Inside, they’d been watching for her, and she was guided down the corridor to the room where Lenny waited.

Give Army doctors credit, they don’t run off and let people face their troubles alone, Heather thought. The lady who stood there waiting for her was tall and dark, with close-cropped hair; she was as dignified, and implacable, as a mountain. “Ms. O’Grainne. I’m Dr. Lee. Dr. Plekhanov wanted you to be present while we discuss something very serious.”

“I came as quick as I could.” She was crouched beside Lenny; he hates to look up, don’t make him do that, she wanted to say to Dr. Lee, but then she saw that the doctor had squatted down on Lenny’s other side.

Lenny said, “Heather, babe. This is it. Dr. Lee just scraped four millimeters of decayed plastic goo off my kidney drain—”

“But—Lenny, there was nothing this morning—”

“Of course there wasn’t,” Lenny said.

Dr. Lee added, “We’ll never know how it got to him, and it wouldn’t help us if we did. It could have been floating on the air this morning while he was getting dressed. The stuff grows so fast, faster than yeast in bread dough or a virus in your sinuses, Ms. O’Grainne.”

“I just… he was safe when I left this morning.”

Lenny’s strong good hand reached out and took her by the back of the neck, turning her face to him, catching her eyes. “I was safe. Time enough to talk about me like I’m not here when I’m not.”

She let him hold her while she cried, not for long, but enough to find her heart again. Wiping her eyes, she said, “Dr. Lee. You said there was a difficult decision to make.”

“Well, I’ve drilled out as much plastic as I dare, and refilled with surgical cement from a clean tube. Maybe I got it all. Maybe nothing will happen. The next few hours, a day at most, and we’ll know.

“In a way, the sensible, conservative thing to do would be to replace his kidney drain with one of the clean spare drains we sealed into glass jars right after Daybreak. None of those has any visible signs of decay. The problem with surgery is that we have nothing we can use inside the human body that reliably kills nanoswarm, and we might let that in, where it would destroy Dr. Plekhanov’s pacemaker, or his artificial kidney or spleen, or attack his aortal booster pumps. Between all of those he has six running electric motors, four microcomputers, and eight motion-driven generators in his body. Losing any of those could be fatal, and internal nanoswarm excreting strong acid would be a painful way to go.

“But I can tell you still think surgery and a replacement drain would be better. ”

“Even if I got the whole infection today, I’m not sure that my surgical cement plug will hold together. Dr. Plekhanov has to remove the accumulated fluid about every ten days, and I’m afraid my fix on that plug will break when he does; there were no specs to tell me if that surgical cement would work in that application, but it was all I had.”

“So that’s the choice,” Heather said numbly. “Replace the drain now, while the biotes are in check, and hope the nanoswarm don’t kill him; or wait and see if the drain starts to spoil again, and run the risk of an emergency surgery with even more danger.”

“That’s it,” Lenny agreed.

“Not much of a choice.”

“Oh, it’s a big choice. There’s just not much selection.” Lenny put his hand on her cheek; she pressed against it. His fingers are so strong, right now he’s still so healthy— “Dr. Lee says we can figure that surgical cement plug won’t last either; something will contaminate it even if it went in clean, and sooner or later it will start to decay. The new drain, if they put that in, will come down with decay sooner or later too; maybe in a week, maybe in ten years, but eventually. The longest they could keep me alive would probably be in an almost-sterile environment, where you could visit me and we could touch if every time you go through the kind of scrub that they gave us coming into Benning.

“And yet I’d still be doomed, Heather, we both know that. I’m a little chunk of the Big System, and Daybreak is going to kill the Big System. But here’s the thing. We don’t know if my drain getting infected was a once-in-ten-years fluke, or if it’s something that is bound to happen every three months. But we do know that drain has already been infected once, and despite Dr. Lee’s best efforts, it might not be clean now. And we do know that surgical cement isn’t going to be as durable as the original plastic. So I figure, if everything is perfect with the repair job she just did on me—I’ve got less than a year. Just too many things that are too close to certain to go wrong.

“But if I go in right away for the surgery… well, there are three possibilities. Opening me up is always dangerous; too many parts are broken already. Or I might get nanoswarm. Or—and I think it’s the most likely—they’ll get me back to where I was a day or so ago. And at that point… maybe getting a plastic infection is something that will happen every few weeks, and that’s all the life extension I’ll get. But maybe this really was a freak case, maybe it won’t happen again for ten or fifteen years. I might even live long enough for them to redevelop all the stuff that’s needed to keep me alive.

“So, basically, if I don’t go in for the surgery, it’s a near certainty I’ll die this year. If I do go in for surgery, odds are I’ll just die this year anyway, and there’s maybe an increased chance of dying tomorrow, but there’s a tiny little chance of living with you for years and years. So… hey.” He brushed her tears away with his hand again. “Do you need some time to get it back together?”

“Yeah, but I can spend the rest of my life doing that.” She sighed. “I see the point. I really do.” She wiped her eyes. “Lenny. You’re not doing anything to me that I’m not also doing to you. You know I’m not going to sit this whole thing out behind a desk; any time, Cam or the president might send me where I could come down with a bad case of shot or stabbed. Even if you’re here for ten more years, there’s no guarantee I will be. So I think you better take your chance to really live.”

Lenny nodded. “I told Dr. Lee you’d say that. There’s one thing you can do that would be great.”

“Name it.”

“They can’t open me up and get to work till midday tomorrow. I can’t safely go back to our place, so I’m in the hospital for tonight, but if you’re willing to let them do a full scrub on you, we could be in the same bed.”

“A full scrub is like the one we had on arrival, where they shave my head and exfoliate me?”

“That’s the one.”

“I’m glad you like your girls bald and bright pink.”

“I like my girls you. Bald and bright pink is just a side benefit.”

^{SIX HOURS LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 7:30 P.M. EST. FRIDAY. NOVEMBER 29.}

Her skin was rubbed raw, and Lenny suggested that next time she ask them to use finer-grain sandpaper, but they forgot it all in the pleasures of one more night with each other. “I’m glad you’re good at in-the-moment and for-right-now,” Lenny said, “because I sure needed you to be tonight.” His powerful hands were gently pulling and tugging at her scalp muscles, enough to force them to relax, and the release of tension was wonderful. “Does this feel good?”

“Mmm. The best.”

“I’m kind of liking it myself.” He rubbed and tugged firmly, and she let herself get lost in the sensations, being just here, just now. “Got the energy for another round, or is it time to sleep?”

“I’m not sure I want to sleep at all, tonight.” She moved him gently into a better position and kissed him.

Coming up briefly for air, he said, “Well, they’re going to knock me out for a lot of hours tomorrow; why sleep now?”

^{THE NEXT MORNING. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 6:48 A.M. EST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 30.}

The next morning, they were turning toward each other, cuddling and touching, not sure whether to be awake yet, when Heather smelled a combination of rotten cheese and flyblown meat.

Lenny saw her expression and sniffed. “Fuck. Oh, shit. Where do I have it?”

The new piece in his plastic kidney drain, which Dr. Lee had sculpted so carefully from surgical cement, had brownish ooze around its edges. Heather kissed him once more, and said, “They’ll be rushing you through everything from here on. You make it through and come back, ’kay?”

“I will if any of it is up to me. Whether I do or not, I love you.”

“And I love you.” She pushed the call button that would start the chaos, and dressed all but instantly in the scrubs they’d given her; Lenny asked her to help him into the awkward hospital wheelchair, and she was just making sure he was comfortable, even if it was only for the short trip down the hall, when the nursing team arrived.

^{ABOUT FOUR HOURS LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 11:15 A.M. EST. SATURDAY. NOVEMBER 30.}

They had put her at some distance from the operating room; Dr. Lee had said, “I don’t want your instincts kicking in if there’s some running and yelling.”

Heather admitted it made sense, but still, she wished she were close enough to be sure of knowing whatever was going on. She knew they’d be taking a lot of extra time, working with extra-sterilized instruments and giving everything much more than the usual scrubbing, doublechecklisting everything to make sure that nothing was contaminated inside; caution would take time, and so would working as systematically as they would have to.

She was bored after a while, sitting in the waiting area, so when she saw Sherry passing by, she flagged her down and had the dullest and most tedious paperwork files brought over and sterilized; she sat with her legs up on the bench, scribbling out each new document, accumulating a tidy heap.

They offered her lunch just before the hospital kitchen closed to start fixing dinner; she couldn’t have told anyone, afterward, what it was. Pretty typical hospital experience, that’s what I’ll tell Lenny, because he’ll scold me for hanging around here and fretting. She kept working because it was easy to put a few words down on a form, stare off into space for a few minutes, then put a few more words down on the form.

Late that afternoon, Dr. Lee came in, sat beside her, and put an arm around her; she was already weeping when the doctor finally said, “His heart just stopped—even with the pacemaker going—and nothing would restart it. We don’t know if it was a toxin from the infection, or something wrong in his artificial systems, or it was just time; but he just stopped, and we couldn’t start him again.”

They sat together for a long time, but neither of them seemed to have anything to say.

That night, back in their quarters, she packed Lenny’s things, because she didn’t expect to sleep, and if she didn’t do it then, she might not for a year. His clothes went into a box for decontamination and distribution; his books and papers would go to his colleagues to look through, to try to pick up the threads of his work; the few mementos he had carried in his pack from his apartment to across DC, when he’d made the trek with Heather and Sherry, went into her own keepsake box. Maybe someday I’ll meet his family, and they can explain the ones that I don’t know about. I wish I’ d thought to ask. I guess people always think there will be time.

^{TWO DAYS LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 11:00 A.M. EST. MONDAY. DECEMBER 2.}

Heather remembered every detail of Lenny’s funeral; for safety’s sake, he was cremated. She remembered blubbering something briefly about how much he’d meant to her; it hadn’t been exactly what was on the little typed sheet she’d written, because she couldn’t read through the tears. She remembered more about the other speakers—Arnie, warm and fond, helping everyone smile with gratitude that Lenny had been in their lives; Graham, brief, stiff, too dignified; Cam, reading a short message from President Norcross, and then adding his own few sentences.

“Taps” had always torn her heart out even before now; there were no firearm salutes because guns that definitely fired were still too scarce. Norcross had requested that Lenny’s ashes be stored on the base until it was practical to inter them at Arlington.

Afterward, Allie walked Heather back to her now-too-lonely quarters “just to make sure you get to bed okay tonight.” She hung around, giving Heather orders—“Now into your pj’s, now turn the covers back—”

“Are you going to read me a story?”

“If I have to. What I’m not going to do is leave you here sitting up for days, or wandering around, till you’re sick and exhausted.”

“You’re a good friend.”

“I’m a good staffer. Strict orders from Graham and Cam both: Make sure she’s okay.”

“You’re also a good friend.”

“Yeah. Get into the bed; I’ll turn the light off on my way out.”

Heather stretched out and shut her eyes. Not sure about sleeping, but I’m certainly tired. “Thank Arnie for me. His eulogy was… well, it was Arnie that made me remember Lenny.”

“Sometimes he has a pretty human touch,” Allie said.

That seemed odd but Heather was sleepy. “Okay, you can go. Really. Turn out the light. I’ll try to sleep.”

“’Night, Heather. I’ll check in on you tomorrow.”

She didn’t even hear the door close.

^{THE NEXT DAY. NEWBERRY. SOUTH CAROLINA. 7:30 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 3.}

Manckiewicz had originally thought he would follow the interstates and skirt Atlanta as he had done Richmond, on his way down to Fort Benning. But he’d found that away from the big concrete ribbons, people were friendlier and barriers easier to pass, so he’d gone higher than and west of his original plan. Whenever he met a traveler headed back to Washington, he gave the traveler a hand copy of his writing so far on the trip, and told them to present it to George Parwin for a bath, bed, and meals. The endless hand-copying seemed to improve his style. I sure skip the clichés when I know I’ll be hand-copying them four or five times.

In Spartanburg, he’d heard that the refugee pulse from Atlanta had been far larger and more violent than anything he’d encountered before, probably because it was the biggest city he’d passed so far and its position next to the mountains narrowed the way out. He heard the fires to his west had been worse as well, so he had decided to go south through the space between Columbia and Augusta; both towns were apparently keeping it together, so there shouldn’t be more than occasional bandits—or the petty fortified houses that their right-wing-nut owners called Castles, which could make you just as dead if you walked into their territory before you knew where you were. Once he was well south of Atlanta, he’d cut west toward Fort Benning again.

He’d been pretty tired and his pack had been almost empty three days ago when he found work, helping to build a solar-hot-water setup for a businessman in Newberry, South Carolina. The guy was rigging up an abandoned hotel that had had water-radiator heating and cooling, not for travelers since there weren’t many yet, but figuring he’d be able to offer comfortable shelter once his water-driven machine shop was up and running, and that would be how he’d secure employees. “Sort of a company dorm,” he explained. “Got a guy talking with me about maybe building a little coal-gas or Brown-gas project to supply that hotel kitchen. I got a lot of belt-driven stuff out of two old closed factories, and I’m planning on waterwheels for small hydro.”

Newberry, Chris had written in his diary the night before, is one of a thousand small towns aiming to become one of the industrial centers for a new America. Collum Duquesne does not look at what is lost, but at what can be gained. He wants Newberry to have a newspaper because it would increase its influence in the region, and wants to help me find financing. Reluctantly, I told him I had decided to push on to Fort Benning; I’d rather be the paper, or at least a paper, for the capital of the United States.

Yet the spirit of the smaller cities that are seeing their chance…

When he had finished his entry, he’d carefully made three hand copies of it in case he ran into a traveler headed in the right direction. He’d been gratified, in North Carolina, when he’d found a week-old Advertiser-Gazette with his story about his passage around Richmond. He’d fantasized that when he arrived at Fort Benning, they’d have a complete run of the A-G, and he’d find all his stories there, along with a letter addressed to him demanding more.

Then he’d laughed at himself, packed what he had, including a big load of tradable canned food, blown out the candle, and gone to sleep. Now he was on his way out of Newberry, on the road to Fort Benning, aiming to cross the Savannah on the Thurmond Dam.

Houses and shops were getting fewer and meaner when something caught his eye on a side street. Weeds had already grown up around it, and the door hanging at a broken angle from the store was hardly unusual, but something—he approached more closely and saw what should have been impossible, unopened cans strewn around.

He trotted up the street and solved the mystery: the cans were labeled only in an alphabet that he thought must be Hangul. If the store was too far away from any Korean community, probably the people who looted it had only taken cans labeled in English, or with pictures of what they contained. He set to work stacking cans by matching characters; when each pile had a few of each different kind, he opened a can in each pile. The lychees were wonderfully refreshing, more for their liquid than the fruit itself; the second pile turned out to be a ferocious kimchi that he could only take one bite of before needing more lychees. The third held small, tightly-packed meat and vegetable rolls that were pretty palatable. When he was sure he understood what all the cans contained, he decided to take all the lychees, half the tinned fish, and some of those rolls; now his pack was well and truly topped up.

He was just crouching down to make sure his bag was properly balanced before tying it up, when a brilliant double flash of light, as if lightning had hit in the street just outside, froze him. He ran outside to look.

One giant sun rose in the north-northeast, and another in the northwest. Two great blinding balls of light, five times the width of the full moon, climbed up from the horizon. They were too bright to look at, and Chris covered his eyes belatedly, but though the fireballs had left his vision temporarily a red blur, he could tell as he blinked and the view of his palms slowly came back that he had been blessed, by being far enough away not to be blinded. The sense of heat from the fireball was like a very hot sun-lamp, but things were not bursting into flames, and his skin felt warmed, not burned.

Belatedly, through the fog of shock, his training from his days as a cam jock in Iran asserted itself. Nuke. Get away from windows and people. Slowed by his pack, he had covered four blocks when something slammed against his feet and made him stumble to his hands and knees; he’d lived in California long enough to think earthquake, and then to realize it was a big wave moving through the ground. Less than ten seconds later, another shock wave rolled under his feet. He was surrounded by cracking and crumbling sounds as walls broke, chimneys fell, window glass snapped in distorting frames, and utility poles tipped, cracked, and leaned crazily.

He turned and looked back. Where the fireballs had been there were now distinct mushroom clouds; I was right, it was two nukes. Wow, this is like video from Iran in 2018. The mushroom clouds looked funny, though, cut off at the tops, as if some god of the sky had simply dragged an eraser in a straight line over the tops of the clouds. Let’s see, the rule they gave me, the shock waves in the ground should travel at about ten miles every three seconds, so… but that makes no sense. It was at least three minutes, that would put the bombs… six hundred miles away. I shouldn’t be able to see the mushroom clouds or the light, let alone feel the shock waves in my feet! There are no bombs that big!

He’d been told, not for attribution, that Daybreak or il’Alb might have a new kind of nuke, but he’d had the impression it might be smaller, not bigger.

He had still not heard the sound. Sound travels at five seconds per mile; every Boy Scout learns to count one, Mississippi, two Mississippi, and divide by five to find out how far away the sound is. Figure three or four minutes had gone by and he had yet to hear the sound; and the sound should carry farther but slower than the ground shock, he thought, so he could not have missed it. Say four minutes. That was around fifty miles. More than fifty miles away… six hundred miles? That should take three thousand seconds, which would be fifty minutes, most of an hour. Well, if he heard a really big boom around forty-five minutes from now, he’d have to believe it. He looked down at the windup watch he’d found in a jewelry store and made a mental note.

The mushroom clouds looked odder still, distorting and stretching out to the east in a shape like a bucket-topped boot, with the toe sliding eastward. Normally they stay in the troposphere, he thought, where winds aren’t much more than a hundred miles an hour at most, but in the stratosphere and higher…

He bent, opened his pack, and pulled out his big map of the United States. Assume that he was only seeing the top parts of the mushroom clouds. Assume the bomb was so big you could feel the ground wave six hundred miles away. Orient the map with the compass…

Washington. And Chicago. I’m almost at the apex of an isosceles triangle of them.

Hit with bombs so big that the top of each mushroom cloud flew right into space.

By the time he had refolded the map, the morning sky was streaked, everywhere, with millions of shooting stars, bits of the mushroom cloud re-entering. Some of those shooting stars were still falling later on, when he had put a couple of miles behind him, stopped to enjoy a can of lychees and listen, and finally heard, right on schedule, the two terrible booms.

Whoever my readers are going to be, how the hell am I going to explain even the idea of bombs that big to them? He chewed that over as his feet put him on the road that would lead through McKinley and Lincolnsburg tomorrow; he preferred betting that the concrete-pier bridge would still be standing, rather than take his chances on a dam after shock waves like that. By the time he camped that night, in an east-facing clearing, he had several good analogies and was seeing diagrams in his head. Gotta find a printer, a graphic artist, and the capital of the United States, he added to his mental do-list, as he fell asleep in the cool, wet forest, a light rain just spattering on his tent. Nothing to it, really, if I just keep moving.

^{BEFORE. DURING. AND AFTER. EARTH. 12:30 P.M. GMT. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 3.}

Each of the five flashes would have appeared as a tiny round dot—not a point, but a circle—to the naked eye of an observer standing on the moon, and though the flashes on the night side of the Earth, darker than it had been in more than a century, would have been more dramatic, the circular flares would have been visible even on Washington and Chicago, both in bright daylight.

From low Earth orbit, where the weather satellites orbited, the five mushroom clouds would have looked far more impressive; they were the five biggest nuclear bombs ever set off on Earth, each of them five times the power of the gigantic Russian test shot that had terrified the world sixty years before. The tops dispersed strangely, for they were literally in space—more than a hundred kilometers high. From orbit one could see the boundary where the particles of debris and smoke ceased to billow and separated into trillions of lines of fire, outlining a parabolic funnel like the top of a vase, cooling into invisible grit and pebbles that re-entered as bright streaks in all directions around the pillar of fire. Out to about 150 miles altitude, weather and communication satellites ran into the debris and were pounded apart by their own high velocity.

The maintenance vehicle shed for the East Potomac Golf Course, far down in the southwest corner, had long been superseded by a newer one on the north edge of the course, and so it had been unused for a long time; months before Daybreak, a succession of semi trailers, all with papers perfectly in order, had arrived and delivered a large number of crates into the unused shed. If anyone had looked at the papers seriously, they might have muttered, “Hunh, guess they’re finally doing something with that old tractor and truck shed.”

A few days later, an apparent group of joggers had noted a signal from a man with binoculars down a long fairway from themselves. Abruptly they had turned as one and sprinted through the side door on the shed, where the padlock had been cut and reattached so that it locked nothing. The “joggers” had not emerged for eight days, and when they did, they had slipped out at about six in the morning, running back the way they had come as if just finishing a morning run. Inside the shed, painted matte black to blend into the dark interior, a sphere nine meters in diameter sat with its top between the rafters of the old shed.

Beneath the black paint was steel three centimeters thick, covered on its inner surface with a tungsten-thorium foil, a special order made by a Chinese firm that didn’t ask what it was for (tungsten-thorium alloys are common in, among other things, jet engines and expensive specialty light bulbs; obviously someone wanted a super-dense conductor that was strong in thin sheets at high temperatures. Must be some new product, maybe we’ll see some of them in the store next year, the factory manager had thought).

Inside the steel sphere, resting on dozens of steel legs, there was a second sphere of thin plastic; no Daybreak biotes had penetrated because the outer sphere had no openings. The space between the two spheres was about a half meter, and in that space were 131 pure fusion devices, each identical to the device that had been destroyed in Air Force Two, and that had detonated inside Mad Caprice, weeks before. They were just about a meter apart, from center to center, and each one talked to its six nearest neighbors via a laser relay; the messages they sent each other were simply comparing their clocks, keeping each of them synchronized to the tenth of a nanosecond, such a small interval of time that each bomb, in its quiet every-second calculation, had to measure and compensate for the travel time of the light from all its neighbors a meter away.

Inside the thin plastic sphere was about 220 tons of lithium deuteride, the basic fuel for the H-bomb.

The programmed moment arrived. The sphere of 131 small fusion bombs—each only a twentieth of a kiloton—detonated, so nearly simultaneously that if anyone had been able to observe the gamma rays from each bomb, they would have been seen to meet at the centers of all the equilateral triangles between the bombs.

Radiation exerts pressure; the gamma rays from the fusion, moving at the speed of light, squeezed the lithium deuteride sphere to the density at the core of the sun. Arriving an instant later, the relativistic protons—hydrogen nuclei moving at close to the speed of light—held the immense ball of fusion fuel together, and compressed it even further.

Meanwhile, the protons that had not gone into the fusible mass collided with the tungsten-thorium foil, releasing a shower of hard X-rays, which further compressed the lithium deuteride at its center.

Technically, the material was now so compressed that it was no longer lithium deuteride but a dense soup of lithium and deuterium nuclei, pushed into each other by the terrible force; in a microsecond, a small fraction of the most-compressed fused into beryllium and released enormous energy; the ball of nuclei was further heated by that energy, yet held together by the incoming radiation. The added heat caused more fusion, releasing more heat and bringing on still more fusion.

An instant later, less than the time it would take for light to reach your eyes from a stoplight a mile away, the balance changed; the outward force from the fusion-heating of the sphere was greater than the inward force from the radiation.

The energy released.

The 250-megaton blast scooped out a crater 350 feet deep and nearly four miles across. The fireball was almost twenty-five miles across, and extended into the stratosphere in the first millisecond. President Norcross, his Cabinet, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and every living thing in the city had no time even to sense that anything was amiss; a signal could not cross a single synapse in their brains before they just ceased to be. Washington’s vaporized remains boiled upward so violently that when the cloud of plasma cooled enough for molecules to form again,much of it fell as glassy artificial meteors ranging in size from peaches to BBs, the farthest-flying ones landing in Iceland. The immense ground shock wave in the melted rock created concentric ridges every hundred yards or so for ten miles beyond the crater rim.

The heat radiated by the fireball was effectively far greater than that in a familiar fission-triggered bomb, because the fireball lasted much longer; it charred skin 100 miles away, and set dry treetops on fire as far as 150. The most remote fires it triggered, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in office towers in Richmond, and on some east-facing hillsides in Charles-ton, West Virginia, burned uncontrolled. Weeks after Daybreak, almost nothing and no one was left to fight them; fires spread across that whole vast area.

Blast effects were less than they might have been with an old-school H-Bomb of the same megatonnage, but still, the blast wave toppled office buildings at twenty miles and knocked down houses at sixty.

Every pure fusion weapon is innately a neutron bomb, creating deadly levels of fast neutrons at distances where people under cover can survive the flash and blast—sixty miles away, anyone sheltered from the terrible burning light and the flying rubble received a payment-due from Death, to be collected at leisure after days or weeks of diarrhea, vomiting, hemorrhage, and lesions.

The bomb that burst in a Chicago warehouse at the same moment did many of the same things; the famous skyline was gone. A four-story-high wall of boiling water rolled north on Lake Michigan, and over the next three hours the towns on the shore drowned, and the big wave still had energy enough to cause flooding around Huron and Superior as well. Immediate deaths were fewer, for the great fires in Chicago and Milwaukee had emptied those cities; most of those vaporized, buried, burned, and irradiated were already corpses. Still, the immense plume of neutron-bathed water, silicon, nitrogen, and carbon rained down across the northeastern United States, fell into the ocean even a hundred miles out, and commingled with the ashes of Washington on the Atlantic floor, and for the first few days, it was intensely radioactive, and many humans and many more creatures, especially the mammals and birds, received the dose that would kill them in the coming weeks.

On October 31st, as the world slipped into chaos, a ship had anchored in the North Sea, four long, strong cables securing it to the bottom, at a point carefully located with the GPS systems that were still working at the time, on a line between London and Antwerp. Now, in the early hours of the evening, the black sphere in the abandoned ship detonated; the mass of water it vaporized and converted into a superheated shock wave was about one-quarter the volume of Lake Erie.

London, Dover, Lille, Calais, and the cities of the southern Netherlands burst into widespread flames, great conflagrations that were to burn on for days. Some fires, where particularly flammable objects were facing the fireball, broke out as far away as York, Amsterdam, and Paris, and the mighty artificial tsunami from the blast topped and breached dikes all along the Dutch coast and carried mountains of debris into all the channels of the Rhine; in that instant every chart became obsolete, and for decades the river would be finding new courses.

Because the bomb had detonated in seawater, across the next forty-eight hours, deadly radiosodium and tritium fell in dust-gray salty snow as far east as Moscow. Europe had been freezing, starving, and disintegrating before; radiation poisoning killed millions, and before the spring, millions more, their immune systems weakened by the radiation, died of tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, flu, plague, and every old returning enemy of humanity.

The bomb in Jerusalem took most of the inhabited parts of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and southern Syria. Detonated on land, like the Chicago bomb but with even less water, it caused a rain of radioactive tektites, some falling as far away as India; in centuries to come, the Monist faith would declare those bits of glass, in which the only remaining relics of several peoples and of shrines sacred to three great faiths were intermingled eternally, to be sacred. There were more than enough so that, no matter how big the Monist Confession grew to be, all Monists could have as many sacred tektites as they wanted.

Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou formed an equilateral triangle; at the center, the fifth great explosion worked its same monstrous results.

Though it was one of the Earth’s largest cities, with a huge population to feed and care for, the combination of discipline and cooperation, plus the sizable fishing fleet and better-than-average food reserves, had been working in Shanghai, and while there was misery enough for everyone, there had been relatively few deaths, and the civil order, if far from perfect, was functioning. In the last ten days, emissaries from Shanghai had been out to negotiate with the smaller cities that could be reached on foot or on the new oiled-linen-tire bicycles that one entrepreneur had created. Boats had begun to go south along the coast to the other commercial cities, and there had been talk of a Next China, of which Shanghai would be the leading city.

That was over in the blast and flame that smashed the western side of the city and set much of it on fire. The Shanghai city government staggered on for most of a week until deaths from neutron-induced radiation poisoning finally brought everything to a halt; the fires that had been almost controlled by hand pumping and bucket brigades broke out anew, and finished the city off in the next few days.

In Buenos Aires, perhaps the assemblers had been less careful, or the biotes had been luckier. The sixth black sphere had been breached, the enclosing plastic sphere had turned to slime, and the lithium deuteride lay in a heap in its bottom, asymmetric with respect to the nanoswarm-encrusted sphere of 131 pure fusion charges. Less than twenty of them fired. They vaporized the lithium deuteride, fused a very small bit of it, and mostly just scattered it around, creating a dense cloud of poisonous, corrosive gas that drifted into the harbor and out into the great mouth of the Rio Plata, where it killed so many fish that the sea wind stank all that following summer. The blast itself, not much more than a kiloton, leveled ten city blocks around the harbor, killed over two thousand people, broke countless windows, and scared the hell out of everyone, but by morning the next day, as news trickled in from the rest of the world, Argentines thought of themselves as the luckiest people on Earth.

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. (DRET COMPOUND.) 7:30 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 3.}

Graham had insistently told her, after the funeral, that he was rising at 5:30 most mornings and it would be all right to knock on his door at any time after 5:45, especially if she needed company. Heather had awakened at 5:35, having slept for almost twelve hours, unable to go back to sleep, lonely, and sad. Annoyed at herself, she had knocked on Graham’s door.

He’d welcomed her in to eggs, toast, and bacon, and had to be talked out of using up his last reserve of instant coffee. Instead, after cups of hot chicory milk, he’d put the kettle on and made tea to put in sip-cups (hers with powdered milk and brown sugar, the way she liked it). “You and I are going for a walk.”

If there is any form of recreation that an Army base usually offers, it is room for people to walk long distances. The day was dawning slow and gray, the sun unable to fight through the thick cover to find the color in the grassy hills; it would only grudgingly brush the pines. They walked in silence, Graham clearly just letting her decide whether there would be conversation or not.

“I guess I’m being dumb about this,” she said.

“Are you saying that because you really think that, or because you feel you’re expected to say it?”

“I guess because I feel I’m expected to say it. I was only with the guy, really, for about a month, but it feels like he was the love of my life.”

“Maybe he was. I haven’t heard there’s a time limit or a legal waiting period on that.”

“Yeah.”

“Love does weird things that don’t always fit in with our self-interest. That was one reason why I told students I’d advise them about everything else, but never their love lives.”

“Probably sensible of you.”

“Or cold-hearted. Take your pick.”

From the crest of the ridge, the evergreen forest in front of them was shrouded in fog; beyond, the few lights in the dark and still town dimly illuminated long tendrils of rising woodsmoke. A distant creak-and-squeak told them the cable-car rig was beginning to run for the day. It was dark from the overcast, and when distant lightning flashed, Heather said, “Maybe we should head back; that looks like it could storm.” They turned and headed back the way they had come. After a couple of minutes, she said, “It might be a while before I know what to do with myself.”

“If you don’t have any use for yourself, your country does,” Weisbrod pointed out, “and eventually you—what’s that?”

Heather knew the way a native Angeleno does. “Earthquake.” There was a second shock moments later. “I didn’t know we even had those around here.”

“I don’t know,” Graham said, “maybe the New Madrid Fault? That’s actually supposed to be the biggest one in the country but it’s up in Missouri or Tennessee, I remember, so if we’re feeling that here, St. Louis must be rubble. We’d better hurry back.”

^{ABOUT AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. [DRET COMPOUND.] 9:00 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 3.}

The lecture hall was packed to the walls. Senior personnel like Heather and Arnie were wedged in uncomfortably down front; Sherry and the other “gofers-general,” as Allie had dubbed them, were jammed shoulder to shoulder up in the back rows.

Not at all like his usual entrance, in which he’d stop to talk with or encourage a few people along the way, Cam strode in swiftly, surrounded by uniforms, straight to the podium.

He nodded at Graham and gestured for him to come down and join him.

The room had fallen terribly silent.

“I must begin by confirming some very bad news,” Cam began. “About an hour and a half ago, nuclear weapons of unprecedented power destroyed Washington, DC, and Chicago. Spectrographic data and some airborne sampling have now confirmed that these were pure fusion devices, as first identified by Jim Browder, who many of you knew as a friend and colleague.

“I am making inquiries into the possible location of anyone in the chain of succession who may have been outside Washington, but I do not think it is likely that I will find anyone; all evidence is that the President and the entire line of succession, except for Dr. Weisbrod, have perished in the attack.”

Heather sat stunned; maybe I’ve cried so much lately that I don’t have any more in me now. Around her, she could hear small gasps and sobs.

“Satellite photos, seismographs, and other reconnaissance,” Cameron added, “show similar detonations have occurred in the North Sea, near Shanghai, and in Israel. A so-far unverified military shortwave message, purporting to be from the Argentine Navy, claims that there was an abortive attack on Buenos Aires as well, but it sounds as if either the bomb fizzled or it was a different type of weapon.

“The weapons are estimated at between 225 and 400 megatons. There is no experience with anything remotely that size, so we must expect very large, surprising effects about which at the moment we know nothing. A reporter for KP-1 in Pittsburgh has reached us via a ham operator’s backup rig, for example, and reported that when KP-1 was knocked off the air, its main antenna literally vaporized; overhead wires all over Pittsburgh are burning or melting; and in some cases water pipes, railings, and railroad tracks became hot enough to burn unprotected flesh. Dr. Solomon, our specialist for nuclear weapons physics, says she thinks it may be that a burst of that size, even at surface level, either puts out enough X-rays to reach the ionosphere and cause an EMP, or that possibly the fireball is so hot, and so long-lasting, that it is still emitting X-rays or gamma rays even as it rises to altitudes of fifty miles or more.

“Observers everywhere are also reporting an apparent meteor shower, dwarfing anything ever seen before, in broad daylight, which we are guessing is a hitherto-unknown form of space-transiting fallout.

“Most of you will already have urgent business on your desks; the rest of you can expect to have something vital to do within a short time. I only ask that you show even more of the dedication you have shown as we cope with this latest enemy attack; I don’t for a minute believe we will go down, but if we must, let us go down fighting. Better yet, let us win.”

^{TEN MINUTES LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 9:15 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 3.}

Graham Weisbrod and Cameron Nguyen-Peters had become not so much close friends as close comrades, and Weisbrod knew something was up from Cam’s careful politeness. He didn’t know General McIntyre or General Phat well, but one way or another, I guess I am going to.

After they had gathered in a small room, and Cameron had offered them all water and coffee, Graham Weisbrod said, “Cameron, you have thoughts you haven’t shared with me. There’s some reason you didn’t just rush into swearing me in and getting the NCCC monkey off your back. Is there a Cabinet officer out there who might be alive?”

The younger man looked down at the floor, and then up into Graham’s eyes. “We sort of established, during the whole horrible Shaunsen Acting Presidency, that the NCCC is not only responsible for locating the presidential successor and getting him sworn in, but also sort of for… well, the quality of the successor.”

“I’m not mad or brain-damaged, I haven’t been kidnapped, and no one is holding any of my loved ones hostage.”

“But you’re the very last in line; there is no legitimate successor after you, at least not till you appoint a Vice President, and a new Congress—which there is no provision for creating—confirms him. So I need to think; if we swear you in, you’re the President, period, from then on, with no ability to take it back.” Cameron sighed. “Shaunsen was a bad precedent.”

“Cam, plainly you think that I’m not fully competent to be President. I’m liberal and you’re conservative, but that isn’t the reason, unless you’re much more petty-political than I’ve always taken you for. Look, pretend we’re just having a beer and talking pure theory. So… why should I not be president?”

Cameron looked straight into Weisbrod’s eyes. “I made a terrible mistake before when I made Shaunsen president. And a more terrible mistake in not removing him promptly. And you would be the President, not the Acting President, so I could not Constitutionally remove you. I know you’re not Peter Shaunsen, and you would not turn the whole thing into a corrupt bonanza.”

“I understand that. When the President of the United States died in my arms, it made an impression. That’s not the answer to my question. I understand that if I am a terrible mistake, you will have no way to undo it, and that makes you hesitate. But you still haven’t told me why you think that making me President might be a terrible mistake.”

“Because as far as I can see, we are in a war—a war for national survival—and I must have a president who will seriously prosecute that war, all the way to victory.”

Weisbrod considered. “General McIntyre, General Phat, I’m assuming you are here as witnesses?”

“Actually,” Phat said, “I wasn’t told why we’d be gathering, and I’m not altogether sure that the Army should be playing a role in choosing the commander in chief. It feels too much like Bolivia.”

McIntyre nodded slowly. “I suppose Cam wanted to make absolutely certain that we knew why he hadn’t sworn you in, because if I thought the rightful President under the Constitution was being prevented from taking office… well, I’d have to take action. I took an oath, and I meant that oath.”

Cameron nodded. “It seemed best that no matter what we decided, the military leadership should at least know what was going on.”

Phat said, “I guess I’m stuck with asking the question then. I’ve spent most of my time making sure our troops have some mobility and that our units are holding together. I purposely haven’t followed the policy debates. So… Dr. Weisbrod, if you wouldn’t mind… I understand that Mr. Nguyen-Peters thinks there is a war, and based on the events of the past few months—and particularly today—it sure looks like a war to me. Maybe you can explain why you think it’s not a war? If that is what you think.”

“That may be the politest way I’ve ever been asked to prove I’m not crazy.” Weisbrod relaxed, and sketched out the basic ideas and evidence from Arnie’s work in a few minutes. “The problem is that most of the analysis we would use to locate the enemy, formulate strategy, and fight the war would be coming from Arnie’s analyses—but those same analyses show that there’s no enemy, no war, just a self-extinguished system artifact that left behind an undetermined number of booby traps.”

“Well,” McIntyre said, “it seems… it’s an odd idea. So it’s a system artifact that grew out of people sharing their self-hatred with each other—through the net… wallowing in it, really, I guess… and it took over and called all these forces into being, including planting the sleeper bombs… and now it’s gone, except for whatever traps it left behind, and here we are in the ruins. I hope you’ll pardon me when I point out that even if it’s true, an old soldier like me would probably rather believe in a real bombable, shootable enemy.”

Weisbrod smiled. “I guess I’d understand that.”

Phat was picking at his fingers nervously; he looked up, and asked, “So suppose Dr. Weisbrod is unfit to be president? I guess not believing in the existence of the enemy, in wartime, would qualify as unfit—unless there really isn’t a war or an enemy, I mean. But suppose you declare him unfit, Mr. Nguyen-Peters. What would you do then?”

“In a general way, I’d ask our military and our intelligence agencies to find the people, organizations, nations, whatever, responsible for these terrible attacks; defeat and subjugate them; bring them to justice and to unconditional surrender so that they can never do it again. Then rebuild the country, find ways around all the Daybreak roadblocks to technology; I suppose it’s a hundred or thousand year program.”

“And Dr. Weisbrod? If you are made president?”

“It’s surprisingly similar in many ways. I’d start from the idea that the enemy is gone and was never exactly a person or people anyway, though for public morale we should haul some of Daybreak’s minions in front of a judge. Because I wouldn’t spend years chasing an enemy that doesn’t exist, we’d still have more of our nuclear ships, operating aircraft, all the tools to make the job of reconstruction easier and faster. If we try to fight a war, no matter how careful we are with the little bit of remaining high-tech hardware we have, it will be gone before we realize that there never was any war, and it’s all been a tragic error. I just don’t think there’s a war, and therefore I think there’s better, more urgent use for resources that we’ll be losing very soon anyway, the way we lost the USS Reagan, or the way the reconnaissance planes are going now.”

The silence stretched.

Cameron said, “I’ve never had a duty this painful before. Graham, I am going to hold you incommunicado, and announce that in view of our wartime situation, although you are the president, you have been moved to a confidential location for security reasons; I’ll have to issue orders over your name, I suppose, and I’m sorry for that as well. Gentlemen, I’ll need a few chosen troops to help carry out this decision, and they are to be absolutely discreet—and as gentle and kind about this business as it is possible to be. We need to accomplish this before Graham leaves this room.” He visibly forced himself to look directly at Graham. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorrier for your broken oath than I am for me being locked up,” Graham said quietly.

“I think I’m keeping my oath. It’s my heart that’s breaking.” Cam turned to the two generals, who were standing frozen, numb, unsure what to do. “General McIntyre, I’m making that officially an order; please detain Graham Weisbrod incommunicado, with all the reasonable comfort—”

“Sir, no. With all due respect, I cannot obey that order, in light of my oath.”

“General Phat, please relieve General McIntyre and carry out my orders.”

Weisbrod watched, numbly, as it all happened; it wasn’t until he and McIntyre were being led between armed guards to their new home that he thought of something to say. “General, do you play chess?”

“Not as well as I should.”

“Me either. Perhaps we’ll get better with all the practice.”

“Mr. Nguyen-Peters,” General Phat said, “may I have a word with you?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t much care for this situation. I am thinking strongly of following McIntyre into arrest. You would probably find Grayson, the next officer in line, to be a much more cooperative person.”

“I see. I had thought that too; I had also thought that if General Grayson takes over the Army, the Army is very likely to take over everything. But I don’t think I can safely try to remove him at the moment.”

“Which is one reason why I will stay in, at least until we get Grayson shunted somewhere harmless. Instead, it occurs to me that as NCCC you can do pretty much anything you want, is that right?”

“I’m supposed to restore Constitutional government as soon as it’s feasible and I have qualified people to do it with.”

“Well, then. So as long as you pursue that goal, you can do whatever you like?”

“Subject to my personal sense of honor.”

Phat nodded. “I see you have one; I see it eating you alive. All right, here are my conditions for not resigning. First of all, move the temporary government off this base. The United States should be run from a civilian capital city, not an Army base. Second, full elections in ’26. Give us a Congress and President, put together a Supreme Court, do whatever it takes, but I want to see a civilian Constitutional government—and not one where you get to decide who it is or who’s elected. Third, the minute it takes power, resign.”

Cam asked, “You realize that you’re imposing more difficulty on the government during a wartime crisis?”

“If some difficulty, as you call it, is going to stop us from following and having our Constitution, sir… well, then it’s not much of a Constitution, our oaths don’t mean much, and it’s all just a game, eh? Congress made me an officer, Directive 51 made you the dictator, and none of that would exist without that Constitution. It created us; we owe it some loyalty, even in the face of ‘difficulties.’”

“So I’m not going to bargain you into any easier arrangement, am I?”

“Not a chance, sir. I’m a good general and a poor negotiator, and I’ll only do the thing I’m good at. And if you agree, I will expect you to keep your word.”

Cameron sat down, and said, “How long before I have to move to a civilian capital?”

“I’ll give you a month.”

“And… well, there’s already an existing plan, it’s in one of the classified annexes to Directive 51. I’m sure we can elect a House twenty months from now, which is actually on schedule. We can stagger the Senate terms the way they did back in 1788, elect a third of them to six-year terms, a third to four years, and a third to two. We could elect a president for two years, to get back on the original four-year cycle that started in 1788, but I’d rather put one in for four years and just start from a slightly different beginning date. Probably have him appoint a three-man Supreme Court, next guy takes it to five, next guy takes it to seven, and so on; that’s more or less what they did by accident back at the start. We have rules for creating provisional states if need be, out of areas where there’s no government, but I’d rather just leave some states present-and-not-voting… those are details, I think about those too much… yeah, it can be done. I’d rather take ten years about it, but I can do it in two.”

“Then—if you want my support, and frankly, sir, you will need it—remember what they used to say on Star Trek—make it so.” Phat was not tall, or physically prepossessing at all, but his salute and the way he strode away plainly declared a deal that Cameron had better keep.

^{TWO DAYS LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 11:15 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. DECEMBER 5.}

Heather was working on catching up on Bambi’s and Larry Mensche’s reports from Castle Larsen. Cameron had wanted a more extensive report because he was trying to figure out some kind of dragnet to catch more former Daybreakers, in hopes of eventually locating the ringleaders, along with the foreign and terrorist-organization connections that he was sure were there.

Well, her job was just to report what was coming in; they could make whatever use of it they liked. As Ysabel Roth recovered, Bambi and Mensche were beginning to worry about suicide—

A knock at the door.

“Come in.”

It was Arnie; he looked tired and ill. “I was kind of hoping for an unofficial chat,” he said.

“My favorite kind,” Heather said. “Do we need enough privacy to take a walk?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been kind of turning a bunch of ideas over and having trouble sleeping.”

“Well, I can always carry you home on my shoulder,” she said. “Let’s just take the trail up the ridge, and you talk whenever you feel like talking.”

On the gentle slope in the strong winter scent of the evergreens—the cold of the mornings seemed to cling to the shadows even though the afternoon was warm—Arnie said, “I know sometimes I’m an irritating bastard.”

“You’re also a brain we depend on, Arn. And if something’s disturbing that brain, spill it.”

“There’s an idea I’ve been hoping to run by Graham, privately, but I guess he’s not coming back anytime soon?”

“Basically he’s stashed till the war is won. Cam is convinced that Graham is target number one. My guess is that they found some way to take him out to an aircraft carrier.”

“That’s what I’m having a problem with.”

They walked on for a while, Arnie kicking occasional stones from the trail; he must be trying to think of the least offensive way to say it. That, all by itself, was out of character. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to sound like a sore loser about the system artifact idea. But just consider where Daybreak used its big bombs. It looks to me like Daybreak wasn’t able to change its plans. Chicago, Milwaukee, Gary, the whole industrial southern end of Lake Michigan, had been a burned-out wasteland for most of a month. Its factories and facilities, labs and resources, canals, roads, and rails were already useless. And yet they hit it.

“At the same time, Fort Benning and a dozen other vital centers went untouched. It looks to me like Daybreak intended to destroy several of the places where technically advanced civilization is most likely to regrow: the northeast United States; northwest Europe; the industrial heart of modern China; Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Add in LA and south California if that bomb in the Pacific was just a case of the delivery crew screwing up. Add Buenos Aires for that matter. All of those were places with good concentrations of resources nearby, plenty of people with technical educations, and some kind of entrepreneurial tradition.

“So it looks to me like they may have been targeting the places where they guessed civilization would re-grow and they had to make their guesses before Daybreak.”

“What difference does it make whether they picked the targets before or after Daybreak? Weren’t the guesses obvious? Didn’t their plan work?”

“Some of it worked brilliantly. Shanghai was a great guess and so was Buenos Aires. The Palestine bomb looks like someone using a bomb to pay off a score or settle a debt, or maybe just to make sure the Israelis didn’t inherit the Earth, but things were collapsing there and they didn’t really need to do it—for Daybreak’s purposes it would have been more effective on Mumbai. Los Angeles was weird.”

“It sure was, wasn’t it?”

“Okay, I guess the whole idea is stupid.” He lurched on up the trail ahead of her.

“Arnie, wait.” She swallowed hard and said, “It was a really dumb joke and especially considering everyone there was killed with that radiation bomb it was extra dumb and totally heartless and I’m sorry. You’re making me nervous about where this is going, and I don’t know if I want to hear it, but I guess I have to listen to you anyway, because you sound like you might be right.”

He stopped, very quietly, and said, “Why hit Los Angeles with two bombs? They’d already have hit Anaheim, if their plans had worked, and besides, we still don’t have any idea why they used radiological enhancement instead of a superbomb there, let alone why they used gold instead of cobalt. If they had any way at all to monitor what had happened in the month after the nanoswarm and biotes were released, and target accordingly, there were fifty better targets than Los Angeles or Chicago or even Washington—Pittsburgh, Savannah, Fort Lewis, or here for that matter. Especially the North Sea, Washington, and Chicago bombs mostly just re-scattered rubble, re-ignited debris, and killed people who were going to die anyway.” He ticked it off on his fingers. “That looks to me like something that can’t change its mind—a dead hand, not a live enemy.”

“So you think if this were really a war—”

“The enemy would have shifted to target Fort Benning, San Diego, Denver, or Pittsburgh, not Chicago. But Chicago was a good guess before Daybreak.”

“But you yourself said Shanghai was a good target.”

“On that one, they got lucky. No law requires all of their luck to be bad.”

They walked on for a while.

When they stopped to look down on Columbus, at all the plumes from the chimneys and the streets crowded with wagons, workers, soldiers, and families, Heather said, “So I see what you’re thinking. And all the explosions being groundbursts suggests they were pre-positioned too. But maybe they just had to do that anyway. They planted them where they expected it to work, and set timers, because they knew they couldn’t count on having a working plane or missile by now. Not because they aren’t still around, but because the only way to use the bombs was in places they had chosen before they started the war.”

“That could be,” Arnie said. “And I thought of it; that’s why I can’t go to Cam, and say, ‘Look, it has to be a system artifact.’ All I can tell him is ‘It’s not as strong a proof that we’re at war as you think it is.’ I don’t deal well with uncertainty.”

“That’s a weird thing for a statistical guy to say,” she said, taking his arm and steering him back down the hill. Don’t go into a depression on me, Arn, I’ve got to keep myself glued together, and that’s hard enough.

“Even so,” Arnie said, “my gut isn’t uncertain at all. I realize they probably just buried the bombs and put them on a timer to go off five weeks after Daybreak. It was one more try to put another stake through the heart of civilization, to make sure the Big System doesn’t rise up again—but they didn’t have any way to aim. But it was the kind of thing a system artifact does. It doesn’t feel as confusing and weird and malicious as something a human being would do.”

A thought struck Heather. “Arnie, how are you doing on the human side?”

He shrugged; transparently he didn’t want to volunteer but was desperate to talk about it.

Heather put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, guy. Your brain is a national resource. I can’t let anything disturb it without filling out forms in triplicate.”

“Well, it’s Allie. This’ll sound stupid. I just get… it bothers me that she’s so obsessed with finding out Graham’s secure location. I mean, okay, he’s one of her closest, oldest friends, okay, she really liked being his chief of staff, okay, all that, okay—”

Heather hugged him. “You know, two of my ex-husbands were really jealous of Graham, and after every divorce he was the first guy I ran to. It sort of goes with being his former student.”

“Did your exes have any reason to be jealous?”

“I don’t know. Graham never made a move. But his wife was still alive back then, and he was pretty crazy about her, and about his kids. Anyway, all I mean, Arnie, is that if you think your jealousy is irrational, it probably is.”

“I didn’t even want to think it was jealousy.” He turned and beat his hands on a dead tree, not hard, but as if trying to wake something up. “I feel so stupid and schoolboyish. It’s just… see, it’s really a New Asian thing, you know, the big deal they started making about it a few years ago when they realized that Asian-Americans were… um… well, not exactly taking over, but because… um.”

“I’m not one of the Euros who thinks you’re a menace, Arnie. And I read the news too, and we’re the same generation. I’m used to the idea that in most offices I’ve worked in there’s been way more dark straight hair than frizzy red like mine.”

“Wavy,” Arnie said. “Lenny always insisted it was wavy. You don’t get to change that. Even though at the moment”—he reached out and brushed her scalp—“it’s more fuzzy than anything.”

The mention of Lenny had brought tears to her eyes, and Arnie looked away awkwardly. “Anyway,” he said, “anyway, um… okay, so it’s like, why the deal with Allie is a New Asian thing, at least to me. See, there were two stereotypes. Nerdy genius people and stylish brilliant people. And for a guy like me—nerdy genius—the idea of someone as stylish and brilliant as Allison Sok Banh wanting me for a boyfriend… jeez, I don’t know if I can explain what it meant. It made me feel, I don’t know, different about myself, less like a freak, more like… um…”

“More like a genius, which you still are,” Heather said, firmly. “And you’re attached to someone who besides being brilliant and stylish, is also ambitious, and is used to climbing on the coattails of her mentor, who has just disappeared. Relax, Arn, the part of you that’s saying to just chill is right. Concentrate on the issue you just brought up, and thank you for making me pay attention. You’re right to be worried. If it’s really a war, we’re losing, and if it’s not we’ve got to stop fighting before we do something stupid.”

^{FOUR DAYS LATER. ATHENS. GEORGIA. 2:35 P.M. EST. MONDAY. DECEMBER 9.}

“I’m looking for graphite lubricant,” Chris Manckiewicz said, “the pure stuff that’s used for a Linotype machine. I’ll trade cans of tomatoes for it.”

The old man behind the counter said, “You’re about two weeks too late. Guy came in here and bought me out of it just before Thanksgiving. Also got a box of matrices and I think some escapements from a torn-down Linotype.”

“Humm. Think he was getting them to sell or getting them for his own Linotype?”

“Oh, he was a hobby printer, easy to tell that, trying to set himself up as a real printer. I guess he’d got ahold of an old Linotype that had a gas heater for the metal pot or something, real old, World War One or so, in one of the little towns near here, and he had most of a couple more recent ones, and was trying to figure out how to cannibalize everything all together. Took every Linotype supply part I had. He’s local, and I’ve got his card because he wanted me to tag up with him if anything else for a Linotype came in. You want to get in touch with him and see if the two of you can do some kind of deal?”

Chris nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. Maybe he’s sorted out what he’s keeping by now; I’ll probably want anything he didn’t end up using. Hope he likes tomatoes.”

A few minutes later, Chris was walking south, in the middle of Lumpkin Street, hands well in sight, no weapons visible, all the things you did in a peaceable, functioning town nowadays. A beat cop stopped him for a minute to get his name and business—that happened to everyone all the time, these days, and Chris reminded himself to comment about that in some story soon—and seemed pleased that a newsman was looking for a local printer, and even more pleased to find out who it was. “Abel Marx is a good guy,” the cop said, “you’ll get along. And he’s no writer or reporter, he won’t be wanting to compete with you—he’ll be happy printing your paper. He’ll be glad to have a steady job to do with his printing stuff, he loves that, but even though he opened up his shop just a couple days after Daybreak, he hasn’t had much work yet, just the flyers for the town government.”

Reporters and policemen learn to keep a conversation going because you never know what bit of information might be useful, so Chris and the cop had a nice chat there in the street. The cop learned a great deal about conditions east and north of town. Chris learned that Athens, Georgia, hadn’t suffered terribly because so many of the students had fled homeward immediately, leaving the town with food reserves for a much bigger population; the remaining students, being young, strong, healthy, and willing to work, had been the labor force needed to deal with the many crises that Athens, like every other functioning town, had faced daily.

“And of course the real critical thing we did, we were able to throw out a line of militia all over to the west of town, so the refugee wave out of Atlanta were turned aside, or went back, or at least calmed down before we let ’em in. We really only had to hold about a half dozen crossroads,” the cop explained, “and from Atlanta to here is one long walk for hungry, desperate people, so they didn’t arrive in too good of a shape.

“Once we sorted the dangerous ones out, we could take in a lot of decent folks, put ’em in the dorms and hotels and all. The bad actors showed up early, and there was some bad fighting over by Bogart that I was in, but once we chased off the worst, we could be pretty Christian with the rest. I felt pretty good about that.”

Chris wrote down the officer’s name—John Longstreet—and station, thinking, FIGHTING AT BOGART—there’s a good long article to put together for some issue soon. VETERANS SHARE MEMORIES OF FIGHTING THAT SAVED OUR CITY. HEROIC LOCAL MILITIA KEEPS ATHENS SAFE. MILITIA VETERANS RECALL BATTLE OF BOGART. Something like that. Create local pride and tie it in to support for the paper.

“So how do you feel about Athens being declared the new capital?” Chris asked. “I was over in Lincolnton, on my way to Fort Benning, when I heard. So now I’ll just let the government come to me. Want to be my first man on the street?”

“Can you spell ‘this is gonna be a pain in the ass for us cops’?”

“Yep. And I can spell anonymous.”

“Then we have a deal. Abel ought to be in his shop, still, if you hurry.”

As he neared the university, he could see the scramble of preparations for the Temporary National Government that was supposed to at least try to be here before Christmas. Nothing could really have prepared a classic state-college town for abruptly becoming the capital of the United States, but at least the University of Georgia had enough big buildings with big rooms for meetings, smaller rooms for offices, and the remains of a library close at hand, as workers carried the paper books, journals, and so forth back from storage, scrounged for shelves, and dragged out most of the lounge furniture that had been put in when the library had gone electronic.

Chris collected man-in-the-streets from a crew of the workers at a bar called Dawgz Inn; they were pretty happy about having work and getting paid in meals and sleeping quarters, and they all said the idea of a newspaper in town just seemed to fit in with being the capital.

He didn’t hurry, figuring he could always find Abel Marx the next day or the day after, and he stopped several more people for his man-in-the-streets, figuring they’d talk about it and the rumor mill would be running in his favor by the time the first issue came out. No doubt, for some in the town the arrival of the Federal government was just one more disaster—their reasonably orderly lives turned upside-down by an infestation of pushy strangers. For others, of course, it was going to be a gold mine, and probably a lot of them were praying their thanks regularly.

The shop was where he’d been told; a cardboard sign in the window proclaimed

The man behind the counter was huge, with immense, dark, sensitive eyes, deep brown skin, and a south coast Georgia accent as thick and slow-moving as a swamp creek. He listened to Chris for a while, and then gave him a slow, broad smile. “So you got no capital to launch on?”

“Depends on whether you think of canned tuna, tomatoes, and chicken soup as capital.”

Marx laughed. “Guess it does. What I was thinking about, though, is this. This town needs a paper. I need work. You need to get a paper out there. That sounds like a good bet to me. So instead of worrying about the bill, how about, you put it together, I print it, and I’m say forty-percent owner of the paper?”

“Deal.” I’ d’ve given him forty-nine if he asked.

“You happen to have a place you’re staying?”

“Not yet, I’m here with what I walked into town with.”

Marx grinned at him. “My mother owns this building. There’s an office next door that could make a good newspaper office, I guess, get a few desks in there, and we have at least four up in storage, you and me could move them down there. And there’s a little one-bedroom apartment up there that might work for a man who doesn’t have too much, you know, specially since they got city water coming back on in a week or two they think, and water’s included. Got a old woodstove we can drag up there, you could even heat a couple big pots of water on it and have yourself a bath now and then.”

“Mr. Marx—”

“Call me Abel.”

“Abel, then. And I’m Chris. Uh, what field were you in before Daybreak? I mean, you said you liked printing because your father and grandfather were printers, you didn’t say you were one before now, so, I was just wondering—”

Abel grinned at him. “Up till Halloween, I was a car salesman. Best in the city, four years running.”

They both laughed. “All right,” Chris said. “No sense fighting it when I can see how it’s going to go. How much was your mom thinking of asking for rent on that office space plus that apartment?”

“Well, now, the apartment will be furnished—”

“Abel, how much?”

“Well, cash or canned goods, might be more than you can carry, but if Mom could invest in your paper… say, for the office and the living space, both furnished… twelve percent?”

“Hmm. That would give you controlling interest.”

“If you think I can control my Moms, you got some learning to do.”

“Nonetheless, what if I offered her six percent? Six percent of what is going to be the most influential paper in America?”

“Who reads newspapers anymore? And it ain’t like America is really, you know, America, anymore, not as we knew it, you know…”

“But your descendants will be major stakeholders in the country’s next big media empire.”

“Maybe you have a point. I’d come down to eleven. But you know, we’re fronting everything but the content, and yeah, we need content, but—”

“Now here’s a thought. Maybe I could come up to seven for this. Every paper in the world makes most of its money on advertising, you know. And I can write decent ad copy”—Chris hoped that was true, not having tried yet—“but I don’t know about selling ads to local businesses, that takes a salesman and someone who knows local people—”

“And in between printing, you think… hmm. What’s a normal commission on an ad?”

“Ten on the little ones, twenty on the quarter page or bigger—”

“Call it fifteen and thirty and Mom’s share could go down to nine—I think I could talk her into that.”

“So fifty-one, forty, and nine, and you get fifteen and thirty in commissions?”

Marx nodded.

“Done,” Chris said, sticking his hand out.

After a meal of canned tuna and beans, smeared onto fresh homemade bread, they began shifting the furniture around, as Abel filled Chris in on what his improvised press could and couldn’t do (actually I bet eventually it can do whatever he really wants it to, Chris thought) and Chris explained the news business (based on my two months in print journalism—but then, I’ve at least written most of a paper, and he hasn’t printed one yet. We’ll make it work. And I’m gonna have hot baths!)

^{ONE DAY LATER. CASTLE LARSEN. (JENNER. CALIFORNIA.) 3:18 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 10.}

Bambi had been trying the old tack of deliberately getting off the topic and talking about something the subject liked to talk about, to distract the subject with her own interests, get her to really enjoy talking and having the interrogator’s attention, and then see what she might blurt out.

Ysabel seemed to have the same problem as she’d had on the day of her capture; consciously she wanted to spill everything, but whenever she tried, her nervous system went into spasm. So Bambi had steered Ysabel into talking about the year her parents had worked with creating community-based businesses in a fishing village in Chile. It sounded kind of stupid to Bambi—her parents had put a year of their lives into trying to organize small, occasionally profitable fishing operations, where the boat owner made all the decisions and made all the money, into something where many people participated in the decision and making money was only one consideration. “It doesn’t sound like all that voting and all those meetings would produce much in the way of profits, or fish,” Bambi said, trying to get Ysabel lathered up about defending it.

Ysabel surprised her and laughed. “I was a rebellious fourteen-year-old at the time and I said that to my mother constantly. She about had a fit. For her the fishing business wasn’t about business and wasn’t about fishing, it was…”

She froze.

Oh, crap, how could this trigger a seizure? I didn’t even say the word—

But Ysabel’s tense muscles and mad stare were not a seizure, or at least not yet. She swallowed hard and barked, “Daybreak. Daybreak! Fucking Daybreak. Daybreak was just like that. Daybreak didn’t care what happened to people, it just wanted to be right, like my damn stupid parents who were so busy being right—like the fishing! The fishing village… you know what Daybreak destroyed in that village, you know what’s gone now?”

Well, at least it’s not a seizure, but I have no idea what she’s so worked up about. “Uh, I guess you’ll have to tell me—”

“Three things—radio, outboard motors, and nylon fishing nets! No weather forecasts to keep them off the sea when bad crap is blowing in, and no way for a boat that hits a big school to help anyone else find it! And without a motor, a fishing boat spends hours and hours just getting in and out of harbor—so they get less hours to fish! And nets that rot—that’s a day or two every week just to keep pulling out the rotten strings and putting in fresh hemp or jute! Probably a lot of villages don’t even have anyone who knows how to make a net by hand anymore! Oh, Christ, what did Daybreak do? What was I thinking?”

Bambi saw a couple of small muscle twitches, but it looked like Ysabel was going to remain conscious. “Tell me more.”

“Don’t you get it? More fishermen drown in storms, more days with no fish because they don’t find a school, if the wind’s not right it could be three hours to get out in the morning and three hours to get in at night and no fishing in all that time, and maybe a third of their days on shore hand-fixing a hemp net that rots, because their nylon one fell apart—that’s if anyone even remembers how to make the hemp net. More work for less fish! They’re gonna starve, Bambi, that’s what me and Daybreak did to them, those fishermen are gonna starve!”

Ysabel’s sobs were terrible, wracking sounds, as if she were being punched in the gut on each one, but, Bambi thought, as she rubbed the girl’s back, there was something strangely healthy there, like the bursting of a boil.

After many long minutes, not looking up, Ysabel said, “When Daybreak had my head, I couldn’t see that that was what it was about.”

“About what?” Bambi asked.

“Daybreak was about killing the fishermen. It wasn’t an accident at all, it was deliberate. Daybreak was about killing the fishermen and their families to punish them for liking what they liked and wanting what they wanted. I wanted to force those fucking fisherman bastards to stop having time to sit around and watch old American soap operas and drink German beer, like they wanted to, and not to send their kids to school to become all engineers and lawyers and shit, because that was like a plaztatic life, and they were supposed to reject it and hate it, like I did. It was their, like, job, they were peasants, they owed it to me to be peasants, all close to the Earth and in harmony and everything, not… not… I needed them to be real.”

Ysabel’s fists were sunk deep and knotted in the couch cushions. She was breathing shallowly and fast, pupils dilated, and then she sagged, all at once. She sat with her head down in her hands. After a few seconds’ pause, she said, “Right there, did you hear that, I slid right over into being all Daybreak again. It just grabbed me. Now, here with you, isolated from it, I came right out of it, but back when I had Internet, I’d’ve plugged in, and the Daybreak newsfeed would’ve fed me like fifty stories that hit me right where I most hated the Big System, and all my friends would’ve been there yelling, yeah, that rocks, and I’d’ve been moving deeper into it, thinking more about how the Big System had to come down and death to the plaztatic people, and telling myself it was because I loved the peasants so much. See? That’s what hits me when I have the seizures, only it hits so hard and fast I can’t tell you about it… but I guess I just did.”

She looked drained and exhausted, and Bambi said, “I should write this up and send it to Arnie Yang; are you okay?”

“Okay? Yeah. Maybe for the first time in a few years. I gotta sleep, though, I really do.”

Bambi left Roth tucked in, with a nurse/guard from town watching, and went to talk things over with Larry Mensche. She was going to miss the FBI agent—he’d be headed north to the Coffee Creek prison, to try to find his daughter, Debbie, and make sure that she was all right. That was his real mission, as far as Bambi, Larry, and Quattro were concerned; officially, he’d be gathering intel about the Castles between here and Canada, how they actually leaned politically, how much they had taken over their regions, whether they were still just well-prepared rich nuts, or a base for the temporary national government to organize from, or a nascent enemy to be suppressed.

Between his official and his unofficial duties, she wanted his thoughts about Ysabel. He’d said he loved backpacking in the old days because it gave him time to think things over; perhaps a week of walking north would give him time enough to see into this riddle, and maybe he’d find a way to send her the answer.

^{THE NEXT MORNING. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. (DRET COMPOUND.) 8:09 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 11.}

Bambi’s report on Roth’s interrogation was on Heather’s desk when she came in. Oh, man, this is going to be another report where Roth’s interrogation turns up results not consistent with anything except a system artifact, Cam isn’t going to like that, he’s going to think Bambi’s leading her into that instead of pursuing the information about the enemy—trying to head off trouble, she scribbled a note that it looked like even a medium-high-level member of the conspiracy like Roth must have been carefully kept away from any knowledge about who she was actually working for.

Yeah, that ought to keep Cam off her case; she didn’t need another fight with him. Cam said he talked to Graham daily, so I bet he’s getting an earful. Wish I could be there, but I understand, if Cam’s afraid that there will be a nuclear attack again, he’s got to keep the President hidden.

She tossed her hand-scribbled memo into the out basket, grimacing at her childish scrawl. It still beat the manual typewriter they’d assigned her, despite the bottle of Lock-Ease she’d applied to the ancient contraption.

Okay, what else have I not done in weeks? Maybe on my calendar—

Well, there. She hadn’t torn off a calendar page; she had never really used a paper calendar before Daybreak, but when she and Lenny had started talking about having a child, she’d tried to start tracking her cycle. And then they’d realized that from a fertility standpoint, there’s no benefit to knowing the fertile days if you have sex every day anyway, so—

Hold it.

The calendar was still reading November 11, the date she’d taken it from its box, here in her new office, and hung it. She tore back through the pages to make sure—

Hunh. Her heart leaped up.

They hadn’t had long to try, but she and Lenny had really tried. (The memories made her smile so much.) And since her teen years, Heather had always gotten her period right on time, bang, set your watch by it. But in the frantic environment of DRET, with so much going on all the time, she’d lost track. She’d been overdue by ten days on the day Lenny died… and I’m about to be overdue for the next one.

She thought about running to the infirmary but wasn’t sure whether you were allowed to run in… “my condition.”

She walked, briskly, to the infirmary.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. FORT BENNING. GEORGIA. 9:45 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 11.}

The first non-medical person to hear the news, besides Heather, was Sherry, which just seemed right; this particular infirmary liked her as a gofer, so she was frequently their runner and gradually picking up nursing, record keeping, and all the other things that might make her useful, to add to her old social-work skills. When Heather saw her rocketing by the door, she just stopped her and told her.

Sherry grinned. “Wow. And you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t get morning sickness, but I now know that a lot of people don’t. And I’m a big girl, as you may have noticed; Lenny was small because of his condition but he said his whole family was short and skinny, so it’s probably not a real big baby, and even if it is, there’s plenty of room anyway. I might not even start to show for another few weeks, the doctor says. But he had enough working gadgets to be able to tell me, yep, I’ve got a healthy little person inside me.”

The younger woman hugged her. “Heather, I know for you it’s probably a pain in the ass—”

“Or somewhere around there. Eventually.”

“Pbbt. You are walking proof that the world is going to go on, and the human race isn’t beat yet, and that’s how I’m going to look at it. Listen, I’ve been seeing a nice guy named Everett, he’s a civilian contractor guy, used to be part of base security, and him and me just got quarters together—we were thinking of throwing a housewarming—can we throw you a little party? Just something to celebrate, because there’s something to celebrate? Here it is two weeks before Christmas; why don’t we let a little happiness into the world? Say yes or I’ll keep talking till you do.”

Heather said yes. On the way back to her office, she noticed that Benning was kind of pretty, this time of year, when the sun was shining.

^{TWO DAYS LATER. COLUMBUS. GEORGIA. 7:15 P.M. EST. FRIDAY. DECEMBER 13.}

“Car bearings work okay with corn oil, especially if you never go faster’n twenty,” the driver explained, “and it turned out that the historical-re-creation guys had a guy who knew wheelwrighting. So he put the wheels on this old school bus—’scuse me—” He reached up with the long pole and lifted the grapple off the tow rope; momentum carried the old school bus forward, and he set the grapple down on the next eastbound cable. “And took off the cab roof so I could use this here pole, and the only steering we need to do is to not hit the posts and not hit the other buggies. And the old thing rolls along like a kid’s quacky duck.”

Heather watched idly as the operator kept the cable buggy moving; he’d become good at a craft that hadn’t existed two months ago and wouldn’t have existed if an engineer who volunteered at a museum hadn’t happened to be the main restorer on an old steam thresher, and realized it had an engine big enough to drive the cable system. Allie and Arnie were chattering away, talking and pointing at things, in the seat behind her; at least it looked like they were happy with each other again. Could be the problem was all in Arnie’s mind.

I feel pretty good myself. Their first trip out of the DRET compound since getting here, and it was for a party.

The party itself was pleasantly, predictably dull; everyone congratulated Heather and looked for a nice way to say that it was a shame Lenny couldn’t be here for this. She was asked if she was hoping to have a boy or a girl (“Yes,” she would say, “it would be so much easier than having a monkey or a platypus”); if she had thought about names (“Leonardo if it’s a boy—that was Lenny’s full name—and Riley if it’s a girl—that was my mother’s name”), and if she felt well (“Strong as a moose, let’s not start pretending I’m a blushing flower now!”)

Most of the conversation, though, was about the upcoming move to Athens. The state of Georgia was donating the new TNG District, and the campus of the University of Georgia would be the capital buildings for the foreseeable future. The move was already under way now that the Corps of Engineers, under the hasty tutelage of Georgia’s dozens of old railroad buffs, had pieced together a viable pathway for the three operating steam locomotives that they’d managed to find. Conveniently, the line that hauled coal to the U of Georgia power plant was still in business, so there would be access directly to the campus/government buildings.

They were using the lines through Atlanta, because they needed only minor repairs for the moment. Given that Atlanta might not be re-inhabited for generations, the Corps was planning to rehab the connection from Bishop to Madison, because rail traffic between Benning and Athens, a major military base and the new national capital, with a war on, was anticipated to be very heavy.

There were two other good reasons for doing the project, according to one pleasantly drunk young engineer that Heather found herself talking to—it cut a hundred or so miles out of the trip, and whereas Atlanta was dead and couldn’t possibly do any legislators any favors to get the rail traffic, Macon was functioning pretty well.

Everett’s bread and hummus were delicious, and a French chiropractor did talk Heather into the single glass of red wine “for the iron, to be sure, it’s just for the iron, and you don’t have to enjoy it even one little bit, if you are too American for that!”

She’s probably right, but how will I ever explain it to Lenny if I give birth to a Frenchman?

Much of the time she felt like she was trying to remember the whole party so she could tell Lenny about it afterward, but it felt good rather than sad. Lenny, I am going to bore our child stiff with reminiscences about you, guy.

On her way back from the outhouse, Arnie took her arm and guided her into the darkness of the side yard. “Allie’s bringing Everett around to here. You know what his security company guards?”

“I don’t know, nukes?”

“Some of those. Mostly, though, for some years they’ve had the contract to run and guard the special facility where they keep the politically awkward cases.”

“Which are what?”

“Well, originally… School of the Americas was here—the place where America trained right-wing dictators and their secret police, and sometimes helped them plan coups. There was also a research arm, where DIA and some other agencies interrogated Soviet or Cuban agents that we knew the coms wouldn’t want back. And now and then, the facility held American radicals, usually ones who had been ‘disappeared’ while overseas. Basically the Department of Never Seen Again.”

She shuddered. “I thought those days were over, but since there’s a war on—”

Arnie held up a finger. Allie and Everett joined them in the dark. Sherry’s boyfriend was a very dark-skinned African-American, tall and fit, with close-cropped hair and beard. He didn’t bother with formalities. “Okay, you didn’t hear this from me. But it’s true. The secret holding facility has a couple new guests—one of them is General McIntyre, who used to be the base commander. He’s there because he wouldn’t arrest and hold the other one—”

“Graham Weisbrod,” Heather breathed. “Is he all right?”

“Except that he’s rightfully the President of the United States, and he’s in jail, he’s just fine.” Everett glanced around them. “Look, I don’t know what it’s about, and I ain’t a lawyer, but I don’t think the Continuity Coordinator gets to pick the president, or decide when the Constitution applies. That sounds all backward to me. And I took an oath back when I was in the service myself, to support and defend the Constitution—not to work for any old guy who said he might give us our Constitution back sometime. You understand? I just… it’s not right. So here’s the other thing you didn’t hear from me. General Phat, I guess, doesn’t want to have McIntyre and Weisbrod in his secret stockade, so they’re going to move them up to someplace outside Athens. Seems to me that what with passing through a lot of empty country…” He shrugged.

“If we wanted to do something, would you help us?” Heather asked.

“I’d sure want to be a guy that you could ask.”

“We’re asking,” Allie said.

“Then I guess I’ll try to help. Enough for tonight, see you in a day or so when I have an excuse to bump into one of you. I’ll let you know through Sherry.” He vanished into the crowd; Heather went the other way. Arnie and Allie were about to have a quarrel, she could tell, and she preferred to be well away from them before it started. Well, I suppose Arnie has a point. Being volunteered for a coup, or a countercoup, without being asked first, is outside the usual boyfriendly duties.

^{FOUR DAYS LATER. IN THE RUINS OF ATLANTA. GEORGIA. 1:15 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 17.}

“I feel like I’m in a damned costume,” Heather complained to Arnie.

“We all are,” he said, pulling his hat lower and making sure the bandana was still up around his face.

Sergeant Rogers chuckled. “That’s good, a costume. I guess it is.” He too wore jeans; a big flannel shirt (to hide the body armor, just unwrapped that morning and not yet deteriorating); the broadest hat he could find, low over his face; and a bandana covering his nose and mouth. “I guess we look like the James gang or something.” That little chuckle of his was beginning to creep Heather out. “I just want to thank you for letting me be in on this.” He and nine Rangers from Third Battalion were the nucleus of the force; Everett, who had once been a Ranger himself, hadn’t had much choice about whom he could recruit on four days’ notice.

Heather had persuaded them to let her come in as an added gun. She hadn’t mentioned that she was pregnant. Everett hadn’t ratted her out about that either, or else the Rangers had figured if she didn’t care, why should they? Whatever the reason, she was grateful; she didn’t think she could have stood to be on the sidelines for this.

Everett sat now, quiet and staring into space; everyone waits for action their own way, Heather thought. Bambi wants to chatter like a mad sorority girl, I get cross and whiny, and as far as I can tell, Rogers thinks everything is slightly funny and there for his amusement.

“Checklist, Plan B,” Everett said, looking around at the five Rangers who were present. “It’s still possible that somebody’s been turned or caught, or something big came up at the last minute. The steam train from Columbus is supposed to be flying two American flags on the front and back cars, with two red flags on the front of the locomotive. One of our guys is in charge of those flags, and his backup is one of ours, too. Check?”

“Check,” they chorused.

“So if it’s one American flag down, Rogers?”

“Package is not on the train but everything else is fine, so we pull down the block from the track, let them roll by, and if it’s safe there’ll be a note dropped from the last car.”

“Two American flags down, Machado?”

The short skinny man did not move from the crate where he sat with legs spraddled, but his voice was loud and clear. “Package is not on the train, we’re blown, run for it.”

“Extra American flag, Diem?”

“Package is on the train, proceed with operation, expect surprises or difficulties.”

“Extra red flag on the front, everybody?”

“Come in prepared to shoot, sir.”

Everett had them recite, more times than Heather could count, “Two American two red, go by plan. One down, let it pass. Two down, run. Three up, make it up. Three red, fight.”

Everett had rolled off two trains ago, reset a switch, and hung a flag; hours later, Heather and the main team had dropped out of a boxcar and hurried under cover while everybody up front was busy dealing with backing the train out of the siding it should not have gone into. Since the engineer had already been hitting the brakes after seeing the flag, and there was literally at that point not another train for miles, there was no danger, just a loss of time; since Heather and the rest of the team were not officially on the train, they were not missed when it rolled again.

Now they waited at the chosen interception point, where an observer—Sherry, taking her turn up there—in a high window could see the train far off, but the oncoming train wouldn’t see the barricade of semi trailers across the tracks too soon. The objective was to have them come to a dead halt so that the locomotive, and the five cars carrying security forces and the prisoners, stood just opposite this warehouse.

“Train,” Sherry sang out. Everyone stood up, stretched, reached for gear, and froze when Sherry added, “Three American flags and three red flags.”

They’ve got Graham, things have changed, expect to fight.

Heather felt the pit of her stomach roll over. Hey, Leonardo, (she didn’t know why but she was sure he was a boy), hang on, kid.

The time before they heard the steam train’s whistle screaming, and the grinding of wheels on rails as the brakes tried to take hold, was long; the time before the train came to a halt, where they had planned, longer still. They had moved forward into their positions by the doors; three Rangers had darted across the tracks to take up their places behind Dumpsters and wrecked cars. Rogers barked, “Go!”

Heather was with Everett and the slim man named Machado; they were tasked with rushing the second car, where Weisbrod and McIntyre were supposed to be, if their informant was right and if no plans had changed in the interim. Heather was just putting her hand on the door handle when it slid open. Kim, the Ranger on the train in charge of securing the car, had opened it. “In,” he said, and they dashed in.

There was a dead soldier propped in one corner. Heather had a nasty moment when she saw Graham and General McIntyre lying face down on the floor, but Weisbrod said, “We’re all right, Sergeant Kim is just making sure we stay that way.”

Kim gestured at the dead man. “He said he was sent to secure the prisoners, and I told him they weren’t his prisoners anymore, but he was mine. So he went for his weapon. Bad move. I think he was Georgia Guard. So I made our special guests lie down flat, locked the doors, and waited for you. There was some shooting up forward, but my orders were to just hold this car.”

“Dearmond, or someone, changed the flags,” Everett explained.

There was a knock on the internal door toward the locomotive—thud THUD thud THUD THUD thud, the agreed signal. Machado moved to the door and slid it open, cautiously.

Rogers stepped through. “Dearmond and Crespin just learned to drive the choo-choo,” he said. “The engineer jumped for it, letting the dead man switch stop the train. Dearmond was supposed to be the guard in the locomotive cabin, and Crespin was supposed to detain six Georgia Guard in the next car. They got the Guard under control—just a couple injuries, they’ll all be okay—but they had to figure out how to be an engineer and a fireman for about a quarter mile there.”

“Hell,” Dearmond said, “it’s pretty simple. You don’t even have to steer or navigate.”

“So what’s in the car behind us?”

“That would’ve been Taggart’s job.”

“Well, we can’t move our main package till we’ve secured the next car.” They directed Weisbrod and McIntyre to crawl out of the line of fire. Then, cautiously, Rogers moved to the far side of the car, and made a flurry of hand gestures out the open boxcar door.

Crashing and shouting in the car behind them; a shot, and then what sounded like a volley.

“All clear, sir, but we’ve lost Taggart,” a voice called.

“Dammit.” Rogers dropped from the car and ran to the one behind it.

There had only been three Georgia Guard in that car, but they had been clever or lucky, and when Taggart seized control, one of them had shot him. They had lain in wait, hoping to ambush whoever was attacking the train; they had not anticipated how fast things would happen with three Rangers entering from two doors and a window simultaneously. Only one of the Guard had fired, and he had been killed instantly by the returned fire.

“This really sucks,” Rogers said. “Taggart was just transferred here from the Second Battalion, which is based up in Washington State, and his family’s all up there. He might’ve been home for Christmas, and… well, shit. Guess we’ll have to let the Third Battalion bury him, too, and hope they won’t let the politicians make an example of him. But I don’t see any way we can take his body with us.”

They laid him out carefully on one of the benches. “You Georgia Guard need to attend to your dead. We can’t leave you here completely unarmed,” Everett explained to the exhausted, frightened young men. “But we also can’t let you interfere with what we’re doing. Now, I am going to tell you this once, and I hope you will believe me. First of all, this is Graham Weisbrod, the sole surviving member of the Cabinet, and that means he’s President, and as soon as we can we’re gonna put him in front of a Federal judge to take the oath. We were rescuing him because he was being held illegally. Your duty as loyal soldiers under oath is to help us, and I am sorry that there was no way to explain that to your brave comrades before the shooting started.

“But whether or not you believe me, I think it’s advisable for me to confiscate your weapons and move them on up the tracks to those semi trailers. I’ll leave two men with your weapons; if any of you comes out of this car while they are there, they will shoot, and they are expert snipers. Just before they depart, they’ll wave a white flag at you. I suggest you take your time about retrieving your weapons, and especially do not even think about trying to run to them and fire upon my rearguard. By way of incentive, the weapons will also be partly disassembled.

“Once you have re-secured your weapons, I suggest you immediately send a man up the track in one direction, and down the track in the other, with a red flag to stop the next train. Any questions?”

There were none. The rescue party and the freed prisoners moved out quickly, walking up the tracks until they were out of sight of the train, and then veering sharply to the west.

“I don’t suppose you’d mind telling us where we’re going,” General McIntyre said after a while. “I think the risk of recapture is small, and I’d really like to know what is going on. It sounds like some of you are serious about supporting and defending the Constitution.”

“We like to think so,” Heather said. “The bandanas are kind of hot and hard to breathe in, too, and I don’t feel like dressing like a Wild West train robber anymore, anyway.” She took hers off. “We have about an hour to walk, but we do have water in our packs. We have a stretcher if either of you is injured, but you look—”

“The water would be good, but I can walk fine,” Weisbrod said.

“Same here. Now where are we going?” the general asked.

“Peachtree; used to be one of the big general-aviation airports for Atlanta.”

“You’ve got a functioning airplane?” Weisbrod was incredulous.

“Well, for certain values of ‘airplane’ and ‘functioning,’ yes,” Arnie said.

^{ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. PEACHTREE AIRPORT. ATLANTA. GEORGIA. 3:15 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 17.}

Heather breathed a sigh of relief when they arrived at Peachtree; there was a clear runway. They’d had only three aerial and six satellite photos, all days apart, and it had always been possible that someone or something had made the field unusable.

Arnie began rigging up the transmitter, though he warned, “This’ll be tricky—I might or might not be able to reach the plane before it leaves St. Louis.”

Graham found a notepad and a pencil in the abandoned doublewide office of a construction contractor. “Too many years as an academic,” Graham said. “I can’t think if I don’t take notes. All right, Heather, I’ve been locked up for two weeks, there’s a lot I need to know. First tell me what’s up with the Castle movement. How many of them are there and what exactly are they doing that you know about?”

He grilled everyone in turn, even the Rangers, scribbling as if his life depended on it. “General McIntyre,” he said, “any new observations about what we’ve just heard?”

“Uh, I’m not sure whether I’m sad or glad that I was never one of your students.”

Sherry was running toward them. “The Ugliest Airplane in the World is coming in to land!” she shouted.

“That’s ours,” Heather said.

That was one of Bambi’s nicknames for Quattro Larsen’s cherished baby. The other was the Checker Cab of the Air. It was his rebuilt DC-3, now equipped with greased-linen tires and a homebuilt gadget that sprayed a stream of hot lye solution from a charcoal-heated pot over the generator and battery, sweeping off and killing the nanoswarm. Its top speed wasn’t even the original 150 mph, it had to stay below 10,000 feet and not fly in freezing weather because the spray could ice the engine—but it was an airplane, and it flew, and it had made it all the way here from Castle Larsen more or less on schedule.

It was bright yellow all over, except for Quattro Larsen’s personal insignia, the black-and-white-checkerboard patterns around the nose and on the tail. The rebuilt old-style radial engines ran on his homebrewed biodiesel. The blue-black streak across the wing behind each engine attested to the miserable fuel quality, and according to Bambi, the lubricants were mostly lard; she’d said she had dubbed it the Checker Cab of the Air to avoid having it called the Flying Frier, based on its odor.

On touchdown, the plane whumped like a pillow hitting a bed; the tires weren’t as full as they should be, and the nose dipped for an instant, but Quattro wrestled it into taxiing to a stop.

Climbing down, he said, “The whole back of the plane is full of cans of biodiesel, which is why my airplane smells like a bad fire at KFC. I plan to take a nap; all of you are going to fuel the plane, under the direction of my lovely copilot.”

Bambi was grinning at them, jaunty in a striped stocking cap that tied under her jaw, carpenter’s safety goggles, a probably-cashmere sweater, and bib overalls. “Come on,” she said. “He needs the sleep, and I know what to do.”

As Heather was waiting, with her five-gallon metal can of biodiesel, for Graham to finish pouring his into the fuel tank, he said, “This is reminding me of Lost Horizon. The scene where they refuel the plane in the middle of nowhere.”

“Lost Horizon?”

“Great movie from the 1930s… you’ll have to see it some time…” He gazed at something far away. “Shit. It probably existed online, and maybe on obsolete media like CDs, DVDs, and plastic-based film, so… shit. I guess it’s gone.” He shook out the last drops of the can into the funnel, and said, “I don’t know why, with so much else that was so much more important gone, the idea that 125 years of movies are gone should bother me so much, but I feel like crying.” He took the can over to the stack of empties; Heather uncapped her can of biodiesel and began to pour. Probably we’ll all feel like crying, often, for the rest of our lives.

^{THE NEXT DAY. OVER SOUTHERN ILLINOIS. 8:17 A.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18}

“I can see why you wanted to rest up before flying this thing again,” Heather said to Quattro Larsen, raising her voice to be heard. “Also why you didn’t want to go till the sun was full up.”

“I was nervous about that too.” Larsen’s eyes always looked forward and outward; they had been blessed with a warm day, above freezing even a mile and a half above the Illinois prairie, but that only meant a greater potential for abrupt changes in the always-unpredictable Midwestern weather. “I’ll be glad to touch down in Belleville instead of St. Louis.”

“What’s in Belleville?”

“A politically secure airfield. In St. Louis, there was fighting along the neighborhood boundaries and I had to negotiate a truce from Denver, via radio. Now that your old buddy Nguyen-Peters has been on KP-1 telling people not to harbor us, and that the President is a lunatic, and so on, I’m guessing the areas north and west of Lambert Field will line up with Cam’s government, and we won’t get a ceasefire again. On the other hand, I think we’ve got friends at Belleville—”

“We do,” Arnie said. He was hunched over the tube radio, 1950s vintage and military, but some souvenir company had rebuilt it into an oak box stamped with stars and bronze flags. “They’ve cleared a runway and they can get us clean fuel within a day from our friends in St. Louis.” He fiddled for a moment, and said, “I’m getting… shit.” He spoke into the microphone. “Yankee One, this is the DC-3 you are hailing. If necessary we will comply with your order to land. Are you aware of who is aboard here and why?” Covering the mic with his hand, Arnie said, “It’s an F-35, off one of the carriers. He’s gotta be working at the outer limits of his range, but he’s definitely got us; if he fires, we’re dead.”

“Let me see what I can do.” General McIntyre came forward and took the headset. “This is General Norman McIntyre, temporary commander of the armed forces, appointed by President Graham Weisbrod. If you are acting on orders originating with the NCCC, please be advised that he has been removed from his position as of this morning.”

He listened intently for a moment, then interrupted. “Patch me through to your CO if you can. Better yet, if his CO is Shorty Phat—that would be General Phat to you, Lieutenant—put me through to him. Just put me as far up the chain of command as you can—you’ve caught us, you did your duty, we’ll play ball, but we need to talk to your higher-ups.” A bare three seconds later he asked, “Have you communicated my request to your—”

^{THE SAME TIME. 95 MILES ABOVE PITTSBURGH. PENNSYLVANIA. 9:24 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.}

The lumpy bundle of fused rock was roughly cylindrical, about five feet in diameter and ten feet long. It had been falling from the moon toward the bright radio source for three days now, correcting as it went with little jets of steam.

The air so high above the ground is thin, almost a vacuum, but the rock was moving at 25,000 miles per hour, seven miles per second. High spots on its surface were beginning to glow cherry red, and a streak of heated, glowing air was forming behind it, more than enough to activate its temperature and pressure sensors. The timer began its countdown.

One second later, the surface went from glowing red to glowing white, and the layer of water inside began to boil; the rock was 88 miles high.

Two seconds. If the rock had had an eye or camera to see, most of one side of the Earth would still spread out before it. An envelope of white-hot air enclosed it; at night it would have been brighter than a full moon. 83 miles high.

Three seconds. Observers on the Plains and in the Rockies, looking from the west toward the east, saw it as a white streak in the sky. The ice inside liquefied. 79 miles high.

Four seconds. The internal temperature and pressure sensors signaled charges in the pins holding the hollow rock together; the pins ruptured, and the back of the rock blew upward on a plume of steam, to fall wherever it happened to. The rock, shaped like an inverted drinking glass, righted itself with its broad curved bottom pointed down and its Shriner’s-hat top surrounded and held in place by the slipstream.

The device, about as big as a large armchair, had been made on the moon, by the painstaking efforts of many thousands of robots, themselves also made on the moon. Its job was to reach this point, 75 miles above the Earth, directly over the loudest radio source the scanner on the moon had detected—KP-1. It squatted there on its rock perch like a trapdoor spider waiting for prey.

Three more seconds elapsed. At 65 miles above the Earth’s surface, the device—an entirely helium-3 fusion device—detonated. Its explosive power, about one megaton, so far from anything, caused an irrelevant stirring and heating of empty air.

What mattered was not the blast. From about thirty to about sixty miles up, varying by latitude and season, the Earth’s atmosphere is electrically charged—it is called the ionosphere because a charged atom is an ion. Normally little electric current flows there, despite the gigantic potentials. But if something creates enough free electrons in that part of the atmosphere to carry current, mighty arcs—effectively lightning strokes many miles across and thousands of miles long—abruptly appear in the ionosphere, and those gigantic currents cause the EMP below.

The helium-3 pure fusion warhead was the best EMP bomb ever devised. First the soft gamma, a sizable part of its energy release, irradiated the ionosphere within a thousand-mile radius, knocking electrons off the unimaginably many, many atoms in a thousand miles of even very thin air. Less than a microsecond behind, the relativistic protons released by the explosion, with their own charge and enormous velocity, raced through, ripping electrons from the atoms as they passed, hitting nuclei so hard that they left their electrons behind like the dishes on a swiftly snatched tablecloth, and in general breaking everything in their path; one proton, at such high speeds, had to collide violently with more than 30,000 atoms to lose its force.

In a microsecond, a disk of the ionosphere, two thousand miles across and more than thirty miles thick, became as conductive as the inside of a fluorescent tube. Vast currents, with far more energy than the bomb that had freed them, surged back and forth in the atmosphere.

And as everyone learns in high-school physics, a changing electric field induces a changing magnetic field, and vice versa; that is how radio propagates in a vacuum, electric field change inducing magnetic field change that induces another electric field change and so forth, world without end, until there is an antenna somewhere to drain off the moving energy.

The great current surge high overhead induced an extraordinarily strong and rapidly changing magnetic field at the earth’s surface, which induced a current in every conductor. The effect was strongest around Pittsburgh. Still-standing power lines and barbed-wire fences flashed into vapor; highway guardrails and aluminum rain gutters electrocuted birds sitting on them; coathangers in abandoned closets crackled and sparked violently, causing fires that no one came to extinguish. Currents formed in the wiring of battery lanterns, leaped the OFF switch, burned out the filament of the bulb, and exploded the batteries; the electric generators at Westinghouse, rotating at terrifying speed, abruptly melted and flung themselves as molten metal around their housings.

And at KP-1, a mighty current roared down the just-rebuilt antenna, destroying all the station’s equipment and killing a dozen scientists and engineers instantly; no one heard this over the radio, for anyone listening on a crystal set close by was electrocuted, and those farther away were suddenly, desperately trying to put out the flames.

The surge weakened with distance, but still, at St. Louis, the Gateway Arch rattled and sparked with artificial thunder; in New York Harbor, the skeleton of Miss Liberty sizzled with blue glows; everywhere, instantly, far too much electricity.

Dying off with distance, the surging, whirling, swift-changing electromagnetic fields were still strong enough to create shocks and sparks around every conductor they crossed in Kansas City, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Raleigh.

^{THE SAME TIME. OVER SOUTHERN ILLINOIS A FEW MILES FROM PALE BLUFF. 8:22 A.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.}

Inside the oak cabinet something went off like a flashbulb; a moment later, Heather realized that the plane had stopped shaking. Larsen slapped at the panel of dials and tried throwing switches.

“Come in, Yankee One,” McIntyre was saying.

Arnie had already leaned across him, turned the casing around, and was prying off the back. “No good, sir,” Arnie said. “All these tubes are burned black and that smoke smell is roasted insulation.”

Quattro stopped flipping toggles. “All our electric stuff is fried. I’ll have to glide us down onto the highway. At least it’s empty. Was that some kind of secret weapon?”

McIntyre said, “That F-35 might’ve popped us with an e-bomb, one of those missiles that sets off a baby EMP.”

“I doubt it,” Quattro said, pointing ahead of them to the F-35 spiraling downward, leaving a thin trail of smoke behind itself. “Those are fly-by-wire with no hydraulic or mechanical backups for the electronic controls, so when it takes an EMP hit, it’s done. And I doubt he used any weapon that would get him too.”

There was a flash of flame and a burst of smoke from the Navy jet and a dot shot away from it, then blossomed into a parachute. The dead F-35 plummeted onward.

“He must’ve been angling generally down at us when his controls locked, and it sent him into that tailspin,” Larsen said. “The Daybreakers might have had a point about relying too much on too-high tech; this old thing is controlled by hydraulics that are not as complicated as the brakes on a modern car, and it’s built to glide pretty well because the original engines it was built for were kind of pathetic. So I think I can glide us down on I-64 and just hope we don’t run into an abandoned car. Landing in about one minute, and I suggest you all get belted in and tied down right now.”

Already, the land was coming up to meet them, and everyone was strapping in; McIntyre was last, muttering about always having hated to fly anyway.

At the last moment, Larsen had to pull the stick back to pass over a deer on the road, so the DC-3 came in higher and harder than intended, but though they were soft, the linen and oil tires held, and though the tail rose alarmingly, the nose didn’t touch, the landing gear didn’t buckle, and when the tail wheel slammed back down, the plane shuddered but didn’t bend. They were shaken through almost eighty degrees, and Heather vomited as the old airliner came to a rest, but that was the worst of it. Quattro was leaping out the door with a fire extinguisher, and Bambi followed him with another, shouting for everyone to get off the plane now. After they had stood for a couple of minutes, a hundred yards back, watching Quattro and Bambi circle the DC-3, nothing had happened. Bambi and Quattro set their extinguishers down and came over to explain.

“Mostly empty tanks can slosh,” Quattro said, “especially an older design like that, and if you shake the plane hard enough, some fuel can slop through the pressure reliefs. Between two hot engines, the heaters for the sterilizing spray, and god knows how many little sparks the EMP might have caused, I didn’t want to take any chances; something weird might happen.”

Heather looked over the Checker Cab of the Air and the little crowd of Army Rangers, ex-Feds, current geeks, one general, and one president, and then back to the slightly mad ex-millionaire—and freeholder of Castle Larsen—in his bulky farmer coveralls and vintage leather flying helmet. “That’s a reasonable concern,” Heather said. “It is always possible that something weird might happen.”

^{FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER. ATHENS. TEMPORARY NATIONAL GOVERNMENT (TNG) DISTRICT. (FORMERLY AT HENS. GEORGIA.) 9:40 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.}

“So that’s as much as we can get from the instruments,” the physicist was saying. “And the Navy’s data were invaluable. I’m afraid we lost at least six aircraft, including the—uh—”

“The one chasing Weisbrod’s plane,” Nguyen-Peters said. “What’s your estimate on the extent of the damage?”

“So far nobody has called in at all for three hundred miles around Pittsburgh, but it’s awfully soon. I’m sure they’re all fighting fires, and probably any equipment they wrapped up and put by arced over and died, so even if they have the time they probably don’t have the radio. Outside that radius, it gets better, until in the outermost ring it’s just small fires in the ruins and current surges burning out stuff the nanoswarm would have eaten eventually anyway.”

Cam smiled with grim satisfaction. “Well, I’m glad Arnie Yang and Graham Weisbrod are alive and in good shape, because the next time I see either of them, I so get to say I told you so. Look what we have. A direct hit with an EMP right above Pittsburgh, knocking out KP-1, the Westinghouse and PPG labs, and all that stuff at Pitt and CMU. Just about the worst blow we could have taken, obviously aimed, perfectly timed to disrupt our attempt to recapture Weisbrod, leaving us more disorganized. That meets Arnie’s criteria if anything does. No question anymore—it’s a war, because we have an enemy.”

“I’m glad we have that settled, sir,” General Phat said. “May I have a moment of your time? General Grayson will come with us if you don’t mind.”

In the privacy of the office, Cameron said, “Something is serious.”

Phat handed him a short, signed, typewritten note. “My resignation. I had very grave doubts about this whole situation from the beginning. We now have a legitimate President of the United States who will take the oath anytime now, if he hasn’t taken it already. I don’t see any way I can go any further with you, so here’s my resignation, and good luck to you and General Grayson.”

Cam blinked at the small, harsh-featured man in front of him, one of that generation of military heroes that had come out of the Iran campaigns. He and Grayson both towered over Phat, and yet Cam felt small to the pit of his soul. This is where a charismatic guy like Pendano would know just what to say, to win him back. All Cameron could think of was, “Well, but… I turned out to be right. I think the evidence is overwhelming that we’re under attack.”

“That’s true, sir. But the evidence is also overwhelming that under the Constitution, we have a president, to whom I owe my loyalty. And I didn’t take an oath to back whoever had the right analysis. I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Were you ever in the service, or an officer?”

“No.”

“Then you wouldn’t get it. But then Grayson doesn’t either, do you?”

“You can stop harassing me now that you’re not my superior officer.”

“I also have that privilege as your prisoner. Do you want to call an MP or shall I go find one?”

^{ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER. SOUTHEAST OF PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 12:15 P.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.}

“Sir,” Rogers said, lowering his binoculars, “after due inspection and observation, I believe the person approaching us is Davy Crockett.”

McIntyre gave him a sour glare. “You’re enjoying the absence of a proper chain of command more than you should, Rogers. Let me have a look.”

To the naked eye, the figure that had just come over a low rise in the road was no more than a dot. McIntyre looked through the binoculars. “Well, that looks like a black-powder rifle, that’s definitely a coonskin cap, and there’s fringe on his jacket. But he’s wearing leather dress shoes, and I don’t think Davy Crockett’s jacket had a zipper, either. Perhaps your Ranger training at observation is failing you.”

“Could be, sir. Maybe he’s hunting? The dog looks like it’s doing more than just hanging around and keeping company, and the sheath knife is too short to be much in a fight but just right for field dressing something.”

“I missed the knife, so we’re even.” McIntyre handed the binoculars to Heather, saying, “Well, let’s see how a Fed does with this.”

She saw everything they’d pointed out, and then laughed. “You guys missed something a law-enforcement person wouldn’t. There’s a badge on that silly hat, and I’m guessing that white armband means something too. He’s some kind of cop.”

When they had closed the distance, they saw he was young, maybe not even thirty yet, deeply tanned, and thin to the point of scrawny. He kept his black-powder rifle, which Machado whispered looked like a percussion cap/paper cartridge model, carefully pointed at the sky, and when the dog ran forward to meet them, he said, firmly, “Skip. Back here.” Skip trotted back behind him, as if saying, Okay, boss, we’ll play by the rules, but they smell okay to me.

“I’m Freddie Pranger,” the man said. “Long Range Patrolling Constable for the village of Pale Bluff, Illinois.”

“General Norm McIntyre, U.S. Army, and—”

“Then this is the party I’m looking for,” Pranger said. “I’m assuming you are Graham Weisbrod, the former Secretary of the Future?”

Graham nodded. “And current President of the United States.”

“That’s what folks want to discuss back at Pale Bluff,” Constable Pranger said. “I’m betting most of those M4s still work, so I’m not going to try to make you come along, but I was sent out to invite you in. We can give you beds and food for the night, and have a little discussion. Our governor up in Springfield has sent us word over the semaphore chain that you’re to be detained and turned over to the state, but quite a few people in the village don’t hold with our governor, being as he’s actually the secretary of state, and the wrong party too—the real gov and his lieutenant were up by Chicago when the big bomb went off.

“So the folks in town voted that I was to walk up this road and make you the offer of shelter and a chance to talk. There’re people around Alton who could find you a train west, if we passed the word to them, which I guess we’ll do if you win the vote.”

“What happens if we just walk on by?”

“Nothing—from us. Don’t know what any other town up the line might do. Probably’d depend on how they voted.” He took off the coonskin cap and rubbed his damp hair. “What I can offer you is, Pale Bluff is close, we have a lot of apple pies baking because some of our people are out to impress the president, and you’ll get a hearing at the Town Meeting; our mayor doesn’t allow people to act out much.”

“Roof, bed, pie, and a fair hearing,” Weisbrod said. “A pretty good deal.”

“Well, that, and we’re mostly Democrats here. Next few towns are iffy.”

“Then I think we have a deal, Constable Pranger.”

^{ABOUT THREE HOURS LATER. PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 4:30 P.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.}

It was even easier than they had expected. A few older men, and one young woman with a big cross on her neck, made a fuss about Weisbrod’s being wanted by the armed forces and the police, but the testimony of a general— particularly one who talked as eloquently about the Constitution as McIntyre did—seemed to quiet them.

Asked to make a final statement before the vote, Graham Weisbrod said, “Let me just say that it is the essence of living under a government of laws and not of men that we have to let the laws go against us, sometimes, when it’s our turn. Right now, I don’t know what they’ve figured out about this EMP down in Athens, because they haven’t released their official statement, but the news from Radio Pullman, which wasn’t knocked out, says that the physics guys at WSU think it was centered over Pittsburgh, which, as we all know, is where KP-1 is. We all hope they’ll get back on the air soon. I expect when they do we’ll hear some more bad news from Pittsburgh itself, and from Youngstown, Wheeling, Erie, Johnstown, and so on.

“If that was where the blow fell, then depending where the Atlantic Fleet was, they may have taken some damage too. I hope you’ll remember them in your prayers.

“And please, everyone, keep looking for the pilot of that Navy fighter. He ejected and his chute opened, we all saw that, but he might have come down as much as ten miles away from where we did. If he hasn’t found a nice town like this, or a friendly farm, he might be pretty cold and hungry right now, and of course he might’ve been hurt by the fire in his plane, or in the ejection. Please keep looking out for him.”

Not bad for a guy who’s no politician, Graham, Heather thought. Some of the vets-first crowd is nodding like you really pleased them.

“Anyway, let me point out an irony here: if the Pittsburgh EMP turns out to have been a clear-cut act of war, then the political difference between me and the NCCC will be zero. None, zip, nada. If it really is a war, we’ll go win that war. And we’ll do it without abrogating or mauling our Constitution. I understand that Mr. Nguyen-Peters acted in good faith, feeling that in time of war the country must have a president who is committed to that war—but that’s not what it says in our Constitution.

“The Constitution makes the President the Commander in Chief, so it gives him the duty to repel foreign attacks. But it doesn’t require him to see them when they aren’t there. He owes you his judgment and perception as much as he owes you his loyal, energetic service.

“Up till today, I saw no war. Once I become more acquainted with the evidence—and I will be getting more of it soon, I believe, from many sources—then if indeed we are under attack and at war, I will contact Mr. Nguyen-Peters, offer him an apology, and reconcile; I will not want to lose a man of his abilities when our needs are so great.

“On the other hand, should the evidence prove—as I believe—that Daybreak and the terrorist attacks associated with it were the result of a now-extinguished system artifact, a terrible self-organization of the malicious and wilful destructive side of all of us, manifested through a technology we did not fully understand—if the evidence shows it—then I call on Mr. Nguyen-Peters, his supporters, and whatever civil governments and military units may have aligned with him, to join with us in reconciliation, without any penalty or prejudice. It is the holiday season; it is appropriate for there to be peace among men of good will, and deep though our differences are, bound though I am by the Constitution, I extend my hand, and hope to find it clasped by another man of good will.”

The vote on “Resolved: That the Village of Pale Bluff recognizes Graham Weisbrod as President of the United States of America and so will offer all needed assistance within our power,” was 289 for, 36 against.

There was one more item of business on the agenda; Quattro Larsen asked for volunteers to help him walk back to the DC-3 and see if it could be rehabbed. “I’m guessing,” he explained, “that it’s a matter of replacing some wires and fuses, and probably rebuilding the spark coil, and I guess I’ll have to figure out what to do about the deflated tires, so far away from any source of compressed air. But it seems like a shame to lose one of the few remaining airplanes, and honestly, it’s kind of my baby; I’ve worked on it so long that I guess whether I get volunteer help here or not, I’ll be walking back there tomorrow to work on it again.”

He had half a dozen volunteers immediately.

After the meeting, as they were shown to their rooms in the community center’s emergency shelter (four large bedrooms with six cots each, usually used for when flooding or fire left a family homeless), a small woman with narrow glasses, gray hair, and a too-lumpy-to-be anything-but-home-knitted poinsettia-patterned sweater approached. “President Weisbrod? I’m Carol May Kloster. I’m the Secretary for the Town Meeting.”

“Pleased to meet you—I was a secretary till recently, myself!”

The woman flushed deeply. “I, uh, I took down your remarks in shorthand; I was wondering… would you mind signing them, and maybe dating them? Because I think I might have just seen the most history I’ll ever see, up close. I’m sorry all I have for you to sign with is the pencil I took the notes in.”

Weisbrod smiled broadly. “Carol May Kloster, I was hoping there’d be notes, because I’m not sure I remember what all I said—I was speaking from the back of a parking-ticket envelope I scribbled about twenty words on.” He signed and dated with a flourish.

As he turned to go to his room, Allison Sok Banh was standing in front of him. “Graham,” she said softly, “what have you done?”

“I did something wrong?”

“You pledged to give up the presidency that it’s already cost us our safety and security—and a couple of men their lives—to give to you. What if it turns out that the EMP is the proof that we really are in a war?”

“It might be ironic, but it would simplify things,” Weisbrod said. “And I wouldn’t give up being President; the legitimate succession is too valuable. I’d just tell Cameron I was willing to stooge for him, take the oath, and do and say whatever he told me to; as soon as he had a Congress available, I’d appoint whoever he picked as VP, and resign immediately after confirmation. If he does turn out to be right, what else can I decently do?”

She was standing very close and glaring into his eyes; her intense anger startled him. “You’re the president. If it turns out we’re in a war, you’re supposed to lead us, as best you can—not find someone else to do it, not take instructions, but lead. Having been wrong once doesn’t excuse you from doing your duty.” She seemed to force herself to stop before saying more than she wanted to, and finished with, “The Constitution and the Congress made you the president. Be the president.”

“Well, at the moment,” Weisbrod said, “my presidential priorities are identifying a place for the president to sleep tonight.” He meant it as a light joke to deflect the subject; but he saw in her face what she had thought for a moment, and that it was a welcome thought. Awkwardly, he said good night; looking down, he realized he was holding her hands.

When he looked up again, she was smiling. She squeezed his hands and said, “Sleep well,” and was gone around the corner to sleep with the other women tonight.

^{THE NEXT DAY. ATHENS. TNG DISTRICT. (ATHENS. GEORGIA.) 10:15 A.M. EST. THURSDAY. DECEMBER 19.}

“You are going to be in deep shit for this,” Abel said, leaning over Chris’s shoulder, “and I am not so sure that I will not be in deep shit for setting it and printing it.”

Chris looked up and said, “Now you’re a critic.”

“I ain’t a critic, but if I got to be I’ll sure as shit be a censor. You are going to embarrass the crap out of the NCCC, and he is not going to take it well, because just now he’s dealing with the fact that he’s sort of the president, and Graham Weisbrod is sort of the president, and that’s one more than people are used to, so everyone’s good and nervous to begin with. Then on top of that, there’s the fact that good old Cam, it turns out, was keeping his good old buddy Graham all wrapped up tight in secret jail, and all the time giving out that they was still friends and Graham was calling the shots, which means NCCC-Cam’s now established for a big fat liar, and he’s got this escaped other president, and if that story about him taking the oath in that little town in Illinois from a city traffic judge is true, it’s a sworn-in and taking-control kind of president. Last time anything like this happened around here, a guy named Sherman burned the damn state down.”

“He also freed your ancestors.”

“Yeah. Everybody’s got some good points and sometimes you got to take the bitter with the sweet. But now that I’m free—and like you say, right now I’m America’s leading publisher and the founder of a media dynasty—I don’t want Georgia burned down anymore. It’s like once you own, instead of rent, you care about the property more, you know? No more Shermans, that’s what I say. And when you got two governments in one nation, that kind of thing can happen.”

Abel’s goofing around, of course, but he’s got a more-than-real point. Chris considered for a moment. “How many people would you guess feel like you do?”

“All of ’em, if they have any brains. Look, go out in the street and interview the man in it, and tell me we ain’t worrying about a new Civil War. Talk to some of the army guys and see if they ain’t worried stiff that they’re gonna have to shoot some of their own. Ask a guy who just got a roof over his family’s head again, and something for his kids to eat, if he wants it bombed. And then ask any of them if they think it’s a good thing to have two governments, and one trying to arrest the other one. It’s like two cops gone bad, both playing for different gangs, and the whole damn country is stuck in the crossfire.”

“Well,” Chris said, rising from his chair and pulling on his hat. “Yeah, I think you’re right, I’d better get out and do some man-in-the-streets, and talk to some people up at the campus, and see if I can put together something about this.”

“I was trying to talk you out of it entirely. I’m telling you, you’re embarrassing the government, and that is not something a government forgives.”

“It’s Cam Nguyen-Peters, Abel. I know him. I’ve interviewed him over beer and pizza, you know? And there isn’t a guy in the whole blessed Republic with more of a commitment to the Constitution, which includes the First Amendment. I’m telling you, he is not going to jail a newspaper editor.”

Abel sat on the desk, resting his large, strong hands on his massive thighs, looking like an imminent human avalanche. “And I am telling you, you’re embarrassing a man with power, and two-thirds of his power is the respect he gets. And as for the Constitution, yeah, he loves it—and he’s trying his damnedest to put it back—because we ain’t under it, right now. And weren’t we just talking about him locking up a buddy? But I can’t stop you, so I guess I’m just gonna wait for my chance to say I told you so.”

^{SEVEN HOURS LATER. ATHENS. TNG DISTRICT. (ATHENS. GEORGIA.) 5:30 P.M. EST. THURSDAY. DECEMBER 19.}

“I guess we’ll have to go for a third printing,” Chris said, though his arms ached and he was thinking They must call this job the printer’s devil because you work like hell. “That’s the sixth newsboy to come in empty and needing more. We can set out the sandwich trays for them and have papers in their hands in an hour, if we hustle.”

Abel looked with satisfaction at the mountain of cans and jars, and the box stuffed with TNG scrip. “Definitely our most profitable day,” he said, “I got to give you that.”

They turned back to the press; it didn’t like to work this long without wipe-downs and general cleaning, as the lye they used to keep the nanoswarm off the electric motors tended to turn all the lubricants into soft brown soap that burned into black gunk in the bearings. Have to tear the old girl down for a day after this run is over, Chris thought. Glad we’re not a daily yet. He glanced down at the marked-up sample sheet. Now, this headline will be part of history:

“Hey, Mr. Big Editor, quit daydreaming so Mr. Lowly Scum Printer’s Devil can get to work.”

“Caught!” Chris said, and started to move one of the big rolls of paper into the ready rack.

“Mr. Manckiewicz?” a voice said.

He turned to see a man who wore a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, and might as well have worn a sign around his neck: COP. The man held out a piece of paper and said, “I have a warrant; you need to come with me.”

“Am I being arrested? What are the charges?”

The man shrugged. “You’re to come with me. I’m authorized to use force if you won’t come peaceably. So are you coming with me?”

Chris looked around. Abel. Abel’s building and business. Newsboys eating and depending on him for their meals and work. And though Chris was in much better physical condition than he was a few months ago, this guy looked young and strong and probably had a gun.

“I’m coming,” he said. “Let me just get someone to help with the printing—”

“You won’t have to do that,” the man said, “because I have an order here that says no more of this edition is to be printed, and the paper is not to bring out any more editions till further notice.”

As they walked toward the campus, the man said nothing, despite Chris’s urgent questions. I guess it’s not the accused that has the right to remain silent anymore, he thought, and then Hunh, an America where they don’t read you your rights. That made it real to Chris; for the first time, ever, he felt America is gone.

^{THE NEXT DAY. ATHENS. TNG DISTRICT. (ATHENS. GEORGIA.) 10:30 A.M. EST. FRIDAY. DECEMBER 20.}

Cameron Nguyen-Peters looked around the room. Problem of balance in a democracy, he thought. You had to keep everyone loyal and on the same page in times of troubles, but you also had to give them the feeling that what they thought and felt, individually, mattered. Democracy was the greatest system ever invented for producing buy-in, but it constantly risked turning everything into a debate.

“Well,” he said, “I think the first thing to say is that the results of the investigation at least indicate we were not crazy. There is no evidence that any of the conspirators had any involvement with any foreign power, or with any domestic Daybreak terrorist organization. Absolutely none. So one reason we didn’t see it coming was that they genuinely acted on their own—but that also means we haven’t just been hit by another attack from the actual enemy, we’re just suffering from disorder in our own ranks.”

The rest of the meeting ran like clockwork and the only people who talked were the ones making reports. Vaguely, at the end, Cameron thought, I do miss the Weisbrod group; they had so many interesting ideas. But one thing to say for this team, they’ll never make me late for lunch.

^{THREE DAYS LATER. DENVER. COLORADO. 11:30 A.M. MST. MONDAY. DECEMBER 23.}

“Where did they all come from?” Graham asked, looking out at the vast, swarming throng on the south side of Denver’s Union Station.

“Well, a lot of the population of Denver starved, or moved away, or was killed in the big fire a few weeks ago,” the mayor said, “but luckily for us the Front Range urban strip was narrow, so anyone who could walk either east or west was only a day or two from shelter and food. Some of them have been coming back as trade gets going again, and the state capital was always here, so a lot of the agencies we needed were too, and well, we just managed to get it going again, sort of, at least right here around the downtown. So some people have returned, maybe more than in other big cities. And then you brought in visitors from everywhere south to Trinidad and north to Laramie. People just want to see that they have a president again, I guess.”

Graham looked over the crowd and nodded toward the signs that said ONCE A DEMOCRAT, ALWAYS A TRAITOR and WHY WASN’T HE IN WASH DC THAT DAY? GOT TRUTH? “Looks like some people aren’t all that happy with what they’re seeing, but then that’s the ‘normal’ we’re trying to get back to. Well, I guess it’s time.”

The fourth attempt to build a working amp had failed earlier that morning, after a promising start, when insulation had rotted off a wire and the resulting short had fried an irreplaceable capacitor. For the moment, they were stuck with the technology that would have been familiar to Abe Lincoln: the mayor shouted for everyone to shut up. The crowd leaned in to listen, and fell silent, and except for the occasional chuff of escaping steam from a locomotive that had recently been rescued from the Denver Railway Museum, people seemed to be able to hear.

For reasons obscure even to herself, Heather had chosen to be out among the crowd. She’d told Graham, “it’s so I can shout ‘louder’ if you start to mumble like a dotty old college professor,” but she just had a feeling that she should be out among the crowd.

The Federal District Court judge who swore Graham Weisbrod in used a family Bible to do it, which he would be taking home as a souvenir; as Graham said, it was more dignified than tipping him a hundred. They weren’t sure whether the oath administered by the traffic court judge of Pale Bluff was enough, so to make sure, they were re-doing it with the first available Federal judge. After that, with the whole Supreme Court dead in DC three weeks ago, this would have to do.

They had managed to put together enough musicians proficient on band instruments for a respectable rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and found a local singer with the range; Graham had told her, “Make this the plainest one you’ve ever done; hit every pitch and every emotion, but don’t make a show out of it.” She had glared at him, but she complied, and everyone cheered at the end.

Weisbrod’s inaugural address was as brief as he could make it, which meant it was “still six times as long as Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” as Weisbrod himself pointed out. “It’s a garrulous, bureaucratic age, you know.” He called for provisional elections in 2026, leading to a “restart” in 2027, to be modeled on the 1788/9 startup of the Federal government, thus de facto agreeing to Cameron’s publicly announced plan; he called for “immediate and thorough investigation to determine whether the recent tragedies suffered by our nation, our planet, and our species were the acts of deliberate enemies, and to find a course of action.”

For most of the speech, he outlined a plan for ongoing reconstruction and redevelopment, including research into curing, reversing, or neutralizing the effects of the nanoswarm and biotes. Arnie had pleaded with him to include a line about just learning to live with them, because, Arnie said, the odds were overwhelming that that would be what they would have to do, for decades or centuries. Graham had said he didn’t think anyone was ready for that thought yet.

There was a carefully drafted paragraph that the judge and General McIntyre had worked over, in which Graham unambiguously claimed his Constitutional role as commander in chief, but thanked Cameron for his prior execution of his duties as NCCC, and stipulated that troops who had obeyed their commanding officers had committed no offenses. As Graham said, it was difficult to express the idea of amnesty, pardon, and complete forgiveness without using any of those words, but they had managed to do it, and that was what the country needed.

The speech ended with a rousing closing about enduring the tough days ahead and emerging as a great nation.

The woman standing beside Heather in the crowd said, “Oh, well, I suppose he has a lot on his mind.”

Something in the woman’s tone of disappointment made Heather take a closer look. The woman was tall, only an inch or two shorter than Heather; slim, rangy, and muscular; perhaps thirty years old; with the sort of sharply etched, squared-off features that Heather’s father had always described as “skipped the pretty stage and went straight to handsome.” Her companion was a short, powerfully built man of around fifty, in baggy, worn clothes that suggested he’d lost some weight lately; he wore a thick wool jacket over a couple of shirts and sweaters, thick steel-framed glasses, and a ski band around his ears that exposed the pink and peeling skin of his bald scalp. Both of them had on well-worn leather boots resoled with thick rawhide, and looked so tired and discouraged that Heather blurted out, “What did you think Weisbrod missed, or should have talked about?”

The woman assessed Heather with an expression that held no expectations; just a simple Who are you and how do you fit into my life? The short man said, “Well, Leslie and I—uh, I’m James—uh, we walked all the way from Pueblo to get here, they don’t have a train running yet, and we thought since it’s one of the biggest government dealies in Colorado, you know, the president might have at least mentioned us, or invited us to write to him, or something, so we’d know what he wanted and needed from us.”

“I—uh, I work for him,” Heather said, “and the Federal government is… well, even now it’s huge, and of course he was only the head of a small department till recently, so he’s not necessarily up on everything…” She was afraid that she might be talking to a couple of petty bureaucrats administering a program that was gone forever, worried about their pensions and perks; she didn’t want to fend off inquiries from the Federal Poultry Inspection Corps or the Regional Authorized Paper Rearrangement Facility, and she especially didn’t want to make any promises to them. “How far was it from Pueblo?” she asked, lamely, and feeling how lame that was.

Leslie, the tall, rangy woman, said, “It’s about 135 miles. It wasn’t really bad because we could break the trip at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, where they let us stay a night, and the town of Castle Rock is in okay shape now, so we could get some food and shelter there. So we only actually had to camp every other day.”

Heather was wracking her brains; what’s in Pueblo? Anything? Or are these two postal clerks with delusions of grandeur?

She could tell they were about to turn away. She imagined them walking back, defeated, for the long week or so it might take, and perhaps getting stuck in a blizzard; she couldn’t stand it. “I can’t remember what Federal facility is in Pueblo,” she finally admitted. “I used to be in law enforcement so I know it’s not a prison or an agency regional office.”

James surprised her by clapping his hands together and laughing. “Leslie, what did I say to everyone about it not being like the old days?”

She rolled her eyes and looked like she’d eaten something sour. “Great, now he’s been right about something and I’ll have to hear about it the whole walk back. Well, we’re the people you used to hear about on television, as in ‘Pueblo, Colorado, 81009.’ The Government Printing Office and the Federal Consumer Information Center. For the past couple decades we mostly maintained a homepage that gave access to around two hundred thousand Federal web sites, so that if people wanted HUD’s information about removing lead paint or the Department of Agriculture’s procedure for collecting soybean subsidies, they could find it online. But we’re still the Government Printing Office and we have a few billion pamphlets, books, maps, everything that the Feds put together that consumers might want, including a lot of stuff on paper that goes back a few decades, everything from home gardening and canning to building your own pottery kiln to safe field sanitation, and especially with the Library of Congress gone, and the damage they say that the big libraries in the East have been taking, with us having all this practical stuff, we just thought—”

“Especially,” the short, heavy man put in, “because we do still have a lot of the old printing machinery, I don’t know which parts can be put back in service but some of the people who used to run it retired to Pueblo—”

Heather felt like she might just stare for an hour, but oh my dear god don’t let them get away! “You mean, we’ve got a whole library of all those practical skills—”

James’s head was pumping up and down violently. “And lots of impractical too. ‘Greek Word Roots Used in Scientific Vocabulary.’ ‘Chemistry Sets for School Instruction from Materials Purchased in Drug, Hardware, and Feed Stores.’ ‘Fundamentals of Amateur Astronomy.’ Stuff going back ninety years to the 1930s and before.” For the guy in the cynic role, he wasn’t doing much of a job. “I mean, we don’t know what will be useful, but it’s all there in the warehouses, and Pueblo’s kind of lucky; Fort Carson held down the Springs and blocked the main road from Denver, so we didn’t have much of a refugee problem or a civil disorder problem, and we still have plenty of food and clean water, and we do have those presses, so, really, if the president is serious about getting civilization restarted, and if he meant that line about ‘relearning all the old arts of peace’—”

“Oh, he meant it,” Heather said. She stuck out her hand. “My name is Heather O’Grainne. I can walk you straight to President Weisbrod. Might even be able to get you a meal or two, and some supplies for your trip home. And there’s a couple people—Dr. Arnold Yang, maybe General McIntyre—that I want you to meet too. In fact, I think maybe we should have you talk to Arnie, then to the president. Can you come along now? And where were you staying?”

“We’re in the bedroll crowd at the Oxford,” Leslie admitted, looking a little embarrassed. “The GPO didn’t exactly have a budget for us to do this, so—”

“Then you’re staying in the same hotel with the president anyway,” Heather said, enjoying the irony. “And I’ve just shared a major national security secret with you. Hope you don’t mind climbing stairs.”

But on the top floor, Arnie and McIntyre were “the two most unavailable people you could have asked for,” Allie explained to Heather.

“Do you know what it’s about?”

Allie glanced at Leslie and James, and Heather said, “They’re Federal employees I just found, and they’re the guardians of something we really want to keep.”

“How about we feed them while I tell you the classified stuff?”

“Deal,” Heather said, and steered the GPO employees down the hall. To the Oxford cooks, she said, “These are Federal employees, part of the party till I tell you different, and feed them, okay? They’ve come here over a hard road.”

In a room alone with Allie, she asked, “All right, what is it?”

“Radiogram from Cam. There’s been another EMP, this time over the South China Sea. Nailed the Canton/Macau/Hong Kong area, Manila, most of Taiwan, and the Western Pacific Fleet. They’re going to have to scuttle one carrier and two subs—all the reactor control stuff fried and the reactors failsafed into shutdown—and they’re towing all of them, hoping to get them into a deep trench like they did the Reagan. And just like before, no identified launch site.”

“So what’s the huddle about?”

“Cam’s radiogram was making the point that we’re getting hit with targeted attacks, don’t we see there’s a war on? That area was the best-equipped remaining base for rebuilding civilization in Asia, plus they also destroyed the protection and resources that area was borrowing from us; they could hardly have hit the human race harder. I don’t know if Cam knows yet about those stupid things Graham said in Pale Bluff, but he’s acting as if he did—practically inviting Graham to just hand over the presidency. Makes me furious!”

“Well, it definitely looks like a targeted attack.”

“It looks like an attack targeted by a robot, not by a living, thinking being. Arnie’s already pointed out that so far the pattern is that the EMP weapon hits the brightest radio source. He wants to do some serious study before anyone goes into a decision blind.”

“I thought you usually didn’t like it when Arnie wanted to study everything to death.”

“If one of Arnie’s studies can keep Graham Weisbrod from kicking away everything he ought to claim, then as far as I’m concerned, Arnie can study everything and everybody till doomsday. His idea for a test is really simple: He just wants everyone worldwide to go dead on the radio as much as possible, or at least keep signals to very low energy, and he wants to do some kind of experiment, I don’t get what, to see if whatever it is knows what it’s shooting at, or just shoots at the brightest radio signal.

“Meanwhile, McIntyre just wants his old job back so he can be put in charge of knocking out the launch site, assuming we ever manage to find it. And Graham keeps scribbling on his damned pad and muttering ‘Hmmm,’ and he’s just not speaking up and asserting himself, which is what he needs to do!” Allison Sok Banh was normally one of those reserved women who must endure the ice-princess label, but that didn’t seem to be her problem today. “Anyway,” she said, calming a little, “they told me to brief you, so I decided I’d just save time and tell you the truth.”

“Shit. You want to be careful with that stuff, people get hurt playing with it. Before we go into any more detail, I’ve got two people who walked six days to get here, with access to a resource that might help save the whole country across the next century, and it sounds like I won’t be able to set them up with anyone to talk to.”

“Well,” Allie said, “there’s me. How about I go out there, make all sorts of nice apologies for everyone, turn on the charm, and generally win them over to the cause?”

“Well, you can certainly do it—I’ve seen you—”

“I’m pretty sure I can speak for Graham and make it sound convincing. And if they need a presidential decision on something, I’ll sweet-talk Graham to go along with whatever deal I need to cut or arrangement I need to make. He listens to me a lot these days.” Something about Allie’s smile bothered Heather, and she hoped she didn’t know what it was. “Better fill me in on what your two new friends do and why you think it’s vital; we want them to feel valued, and nothing creates the impression of neglect like being asked the same questions over and over.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. EAST OF GRAND JUNCTION. COLORADO. 1:45 P.M. MST. TUESDAY. DECEMBER 24.}

Heather and Allie sat at a newly-bolted-in picnic table in the observation car that was attached ahead of Amtrak One, as the presidential car was being called, much to Graham’s annoyance. Spectacular scenery rolled by; they had time to review Allie’s notes about what was available at Pueblo.

“I can’t believe how many obsolete-tech people came out of the woodwork,” Heather said, after a while. “Steam railroad buffs. Hobby printers. Guys who build their own tubes for tube amps. Steam car collectors, and that guy with all those nineteenth-century machine guns, and of course guys like Quattro with his old airplanes. I suppose it’s not that shocking that there’s a whole nest of them with printing presses and warehouses full of pamphlets down in Pueblo.”

Allie shrugged. “People spent their working lives learning a technology, and that’s a pretty deep commitment. That nice lady in Pale Bluff was a Gregg shorthand expert, probably one of the youngest and last I would guess.”

“Steam trains, though? Too far in the past; no one nowadays grew up around them.”

“Oh, well, as far as I can tell, steam trains are a religion. We think that the United States might have as many as two hundred working steam locomotives, eighty-four of them narrow-gauge. Anyway, the bottom line is this: If James and Leslie are giving me an accurate picture, in their warehouses, they have all, or almost all, the information we need to get people at least back to a 1940s or 1950s level of comfort—much of it on reserve printing plates, which means with some materials and training, enough to paper the country with it. GPO is a huge repository of how to do everything, and we just need to get a train running down to them, find them the paper and ink and maybe some spare parts, and feed them regularly.”

Heather smiled, thinking how happy Leslie and James must have been after their meeting with Allie. “So I did good putting them in touch with you? This is about as excited as I’ve seen you get about anything since Daybreak.”

“You did brilliantly. And of course I’m jacked about this, Heather, if I’d been smart enough I’d’ve been praying for Pueblo or something like it to turn up—they have so much potential for knitting the country together. Back when distances were bigger and travel wasn’t common, that used to be one of the things that reminded people they were Americans, not just Nebraskans or whatever—that little pamphlet from the Federal government about how to keep milk from spoiling, or how to build a tower for your windmill. Hah, now there’s a view!”

The land fell away to the south and west as they descended the long curve, and below them a deep lake, surrounded by redrock, reflected the sky back. “I’ve driven through here but never seen what it looked like—my eyes were always on the road ahead, too much to worry about,” Heather said. “Speaking of which… you think we’ll find a way to bring Cam and Graham back together?”

“I think Graham still hopes so, but as for me—”

“We’re coming up on Glenwood Springs,” Sherry said, sticking her head up from the stairway below. “Nobody’s told me if that’s Colorado or Utah.”

“Colorado,” Heather said. “Two more stops before Utah. I should splash some water on my face; it’s my turn to be standing near Graham, looking attentive and visibly holding a gun.”

As Heather heard the speech for the fourth time and ostentatiously looked over the crowd, hoping to seem intimidating, Allie was standing pretty close to Graham Weisbrod and shining Nancy-Reagan-style adoration at him.

Crap. Innocent or not, this is gonna weird out Arnie, and I need him not crazy. And I don’t really think it’s innocent.

Furthermore… Graham had been a media darling for a long time and knew how to work a crowd. But had he always enjoyed it quite this much? Maybe we need a politician for this job, but I’m not sure I wanted the politician to be Graham. This is the guy who used to tell me that I knew better; I wonder, nowadays, if he does?

^{THE NEXT DAY. ATHENS. TNG DISTRICT. (ATHENS. GEORGIA.) 10:30 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 25.}

It wasn’t the worst prison in the world; they fed him the same as they did the guards, and he was allowed notebooks and paper, and the time to sit and write.

When the summons came, the guard said, “While you’re meeting with the NCCC, we’re supposed to pack all your things. He said to ask you if the notebooks go in a special order, and if you’d rather have them any particular place in this.”

The man held up a canvas/steel rucksack that was probably an antique, since there was no whiff of rotting plastic or nylon about it.

“If this one goes in this outside pocket,” Chris said, “with a few pens, so I can whip it out and write fast, that would be great. The older ones over there on the bench should all go in on top of my spare boots and clothes, so they won’t get damp from just setting the pack down, but not too close to the top in case rain leaks in.”

“Kind of bury them in the middle? Got it. He also wanted us to see if you wanted one or two more spare blank notebooks to take with you, but he thought you’d be able to forage for them on your way, too.”

“Maybe one spare would be nice, so I don’t have to forage too soon. Where am I going?”

“Beats me, Mr. Manckiewicz, I’m supposed to take you to the Natcon, and get your pack ready while you’re in with him. Maybe he’ll tell you.”

Cameron Nguyen-Peters was thinner than ever, and whatever traces of a smile had ever been around his mouth had vanished. He still had his pliers-like handshake and disconcerting way of looking directly at you. “Chris,” he said, “you are a problem, and there are only three things that can be done with a problem—ignore it, solve it, or make it someone else’s problem. Have a seat, and we’ll discuss the situation and the options.”

“Um,” Chris said. “I kind of thought I was being held for sedition or some such.”

“Well, that’s the problem. I have a war to run, and the war may go on for decades. From a winning-the-war perspective, which is the only perspective I can really allow myself, a free press has a lousy track record. Yes, I know”—Cameron waved a quick dismissal—“there have been many journalists who did great things for the war effort in past wars, and many ethical journalists who at least did no harm, and so on. But even the best journalists in the wars where they did the best jobs sometimes leaked vital information. As of this moment, we’re beaten, Chris, badly beaten, and I think we’re more likely than not to lose—don’t quote that, anywhere, ever. But I think there’s still a chance to win—if we get it all together and fight seriously. The next year or so will tell the tale, and if we win, then in 2026 we’ll hold those elections, and in 2027 I will set the entire Constitutional apparatus back up. I suppose after that I’ll retire to a farm or something, or maybe hire you to ghostwrite my memoirs. If we lose it won’t matter. But for right now, the Constitution is suspended—to preserve the possibility that someday I will set it back up.”

“I don’t imagine you’re asking for my opinion.”

“Not at all. But here’s the rest of the situation. There can be no point in getting into a civil war, and frankly, almost all of the country’s remaining military strength is down here in the South—actually pretty much in a belt across the bottom of the country from the Carolinas to Arizona. The upper-left-hand corner of the country that went over to Weisbrod, which we might call the Goofy Quadrant, are no danger to us. None. They have historically low rates of military enlistment, they’re not very disciplined in any other way, they’re just not going to put together an army for a civil war, and if they try it will take them years. And they can’t possibly be an invasion route for the other side—whoever that is—because we control most of the warships still moving. So the Goofy Quadrant can’t help us much in the war, and they can’t hurt us much, and common sense says to let them go.

“Which brings me to my solution to the problem of you. I’m giving you the gear you need, and a space-a pass that you should be able to ride out to somewhere on the Plains or maybe down to the Canal Zone, telling you to have fun and go do what you do, and sending you over to Graham Weisbrod. As a public official, I can’t ignore you; as an American, I can’t stand to do anything that would solve you; but luckily, I can make you someone else’s problem. Good luck, Chris, and Merry Christmas! I’ll watch for your byline.”

Chris thought, Well, Cameron Nguyen-Peters has given up smiling for the duration, I guess, but I’ve seldom seen him so cheerful.

^{FOUR DAYS LATER. SOUTHEAST OF PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 11:00 A.M. CST. SUNDAY. DECEMBER 29.}

Chris had struck I-64 the day before, and thanks to his old TV days and his time at KP-1, he hadn’t had to sleep outside or go hungry so far; people here remembered him, and when he said he was going to Olympia to start a new paper there, mostly people seemed to be happy to help.

He’d risen with a couple nice old-farmer types before dawn. They’d given him a large breakfast, filled both his canteens, and sent him on his way. Good weather was holding, so far. There’re a lot of worse walks in the world.

He topped the rise and decided that he was either having the best luck or the worst hallucination of his career. Right there in front of him was what could only be the DC-3 that had brought Weisbrod to Pale Bluff, Illinois. That meant two things: a chance to look at a piece of history, and that Pale Bluff was nearby, which meant a hundred good interviews in all probability.

He was about a hundred feet from the plane when he realized that there was a man inside, talking to himself and swearing. He crept closer and discovered a man in a pair of coveralls, seated on the floor of the plane, and busily wrapping pieces of copper wire with flannel and Elmer’s Glue. It looked like the maddest craft project he’d ever seen.

The man said, “I don’t have any money or food and I’m not leaving soon.”

“I wasn’t going to rob you or jack you. Are you, by any chance, Quattro Larsen, freeholder of Castle Larsen?”

“I am. I am also Quattro Larsen, man bored out of his skull as he wraps miles of wire and hand-rebuilds fuses. The barometer is falling, the hygrometer is rising, and the clouds tell me I’ve got a storm coming; I’ve a day at best to get this idiot thing fixed so I can fly south, dodge the storm, and get home. And I’m a fumble-fingered idiot. Plus I won’t be able to work after dark; I don’t have any artificial light, and I’ll have to walk back to the village in the dark. So I am getting very scared and very sorry for myself.”

“Mind if I climb up and join you?”

“Help yourself.”

“Suppose you show me how to wrap wire. My name is Chris Manckiewicz, I’m a reporter, and I’d be very happy to be your assistant. And it so happens I have a small oil lamp.”

“I used to hear you on the radio.”

“So you know you can trust me.”

“Wrap some wire and let’s see.”

^{THREE HOURS LATER. PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 2:00 P.M. CST. SUNDAY. DECEMBER 29.}

Chris explained who he was quickly; Carol May Kloster said, “Well, I’d sort of like to hang on to the original document. Can you read shorthand?”

“Not a blessed bit. They didn’t even teach it anymore in J-school.”

“Well, of course, I’m flattered and honored that you want a copy of this, but I’ve only had time in the last couple of weeks to make four copies in decent handwriting; my niece Pauline has made about twenty in shorthand, practicing her Gregg, so I was going to give you one of those instead. But that’s all right; I kind of like the idea that my work is going to be published in the country’s biggest newspaper.”

“Actually if you wanted to send me news reports or even just letters from this part of the country, I need a Lower Ohio Valley Correspondent.”

“You have no idea how long-winded I am.”

“You have no idea how short on copy, and reporters, I’m going to be, especially if I’m trying to cover the country. My guess is that if you wait a couple of weeks and then address it to Chris Manckiewicz, the Newspaper, Olympia, and give it to anyone going that way to be passed on to the next person going that way, it’ll find me. Sort of like Internet by hand.” He looked down at the copy of Weisbrod’s speech, and his eyes were pulled into the paper; before he knew it he’d read the whole thing. “Hey, this is a great speech, and yes, you get all the credit for transcribing it. Here’s your first assigned gig: write me an account of your impressions of the speech, how he said it, how people reacted, everything.”

“Really? You want me to write something like that for you?”

“No, just make something up and I’ll throw it in the wastebasket.”

She swatted him playfully, they grinned at each other, and Chris figured I’ve got no paper and it’s breaking my heart, but I’ve got a stringer, and that’s a start. Carol May said, “Pauline should be back any time; she was going to round up a few teenagers who don’t have enough to do to go out and help you all with getting the plane ready. You’re just lucky the harvest is in, and we all like Mr. Larsen, so we can spare him some time and effort to keep him flying. Especially since he was so good as to put us on the map and has been such a pleasant man to have around these past few days.”

“He thinks he’s not good with people,” Chris said, grinning. “Can’t be persuaded otherwise.”

“Pooh. All he needed to do was ask for help; I’m glad you came along to do it for him!” Carol May Kloster looked at the sky. “If you all hurry, he can take off sometime before the storm hits, and I’m sure that would be a good thing.”

^{FOUR DAYS LATER. SACRAMENTO. CALIFORNIA. 2:30 P.M. PS£T. THURSDAY. JANUARY 2.}

Heather and Bambi were working the crowd in front of the platform, looking for anyone with a weapon, when Bambi whooped. Grinning like a maniac, Quattro Larsen stepped forward. They embraced, laughing just as though it had been years instead of weeks. Another thing we all have to get used to, Heather thought. Nowadays a thousand miles is a long way.

“I take it your giant mechanical bumblebee is working again?” Heather said.

“Giant—I’ll have you know, if there’s ever a National Museum again, that’s the one plane that for sure’ll be in it. At least after there’s another operating plane on the continent, besides my other one.”

“The Stearman’s flying?”

“That’s how Chris and I—Chris!”

Chris Manckiewicz turned from where he’d been taking notes on an intense conversation. “My entire history of the period,” he said, mournfully, “which is all future historians will ever know of our age, will be filled with the phrase, ‘But then Quattro shouted for me, and we had to go.’”

“We met at the Washington Advertiser-Gazette, a long time ago,” Heather said, sticking out her hand.

“I remember you, Ms. O’Grainne, and thanks for all your help on that day.”

“I had no idea at the time you were a pilot. And how did you get out here?”

If Manckiewicz could do anything, it was tell a story, and after a few minutes he’d made Heather laugh more than she had in weeks, describing the adventures of “a guy who thought the props must be the fake parts of the plane,” on his first trip as “assistant mechanic, copilot intern, master chef, and chief wailer-in-terror.” “But,” he added, “by the time we landed at Castle Larsen, I was approaching competence, though I am told I never attained the kind of copilothood that was first achieved by the one, the only, the Amelia Earhart of her generation—”

Bambi made a fart noise with her tongue.

“Which is one-third of the mission here,” Quattro said, smoothly. “I was kind of hoping your interrogation of Ysabel Roth is not complete, that Bambi Castro is still essential to it, and that you’d see the wisdom of leaving them both at Castle Larsen, actually.”

Heather grinned at him. “And you didn’t even mention securing the enduring loyalty of a critical Castle on the California coast.”

“Seemed rude and unnecessary.”

“Well, as for Roth, I don’t think we’ll get more cooperation out of her in another location, and we don’t have to guard her where she is. And we don’t have any way to hold employees against their will, nor—”

“Larry!” Bambi shouted and waved.

Heather turned around and found herself facing a guy who seemed to have been sent from Central Casting as “old sourdough”—baggy wool pants, rope suspenders, immense flannel shirt, floppy broad-brimmed hat, and bushy beard. All he needs is an arrow through that silly hat.

He grinned. “Do you have any idea how great life is when I don’t have to fit the FBI dress code?” He stuck out his hand.

Heather looked down at her current outfit—a heavily stained men’s safari shirt (you could never have too many pockets), black-powder carbine on a sling, combat knife in an arm holster, camo pants, and calf-high moccaboots she’d traded a case of pre-Daybreak Coors for in Limon, Colorado—and said, “Well, I have to admit, I could get through quite a few more years without ever putting on black pumps, jacket, skirt, and a blouse. Biz outfits used to make me look like a giant poodle.”

“Me too,” Mensche said. “I don’t care what Hoover thought, speaking as an FBI agent, the pumps always killed my back.”

“Did you find Debbie?” Bambi asked.

“No luck yet. But she was alive when that bunch of women left Coffee Creek, and she was among the leaders, and at least I’ve established that no one ran into them around the mouth of the Columbia or on the south shore of Puget Sound. It was while I was up there that I persuaded the governor to invite you all to move the Federal government there, and now he seems to think that it was his idea and I was his brilliant assistant, so he thinks he owes me some favors. I’m planning to cash in on them by having him put out sort of a permanent APB for Deb. Meanwhile, I’m thinking maybe Deb’s group out of Coffee Creek headed east for some reason, gonna try to pick up the trail that way.”

“So are you leaving the FBI for good?” Quattro asked.

“Soon as they open an office, I plan to transfer to the US Marshals. I’m not looking to be Eliot Ness anymore. I’m thinking more Wyatt Earp.”

“Or Gabby Hayes,” Bambi suggested.

^{TWO DAYS LATER. THE COW CREEK COUNTRY. NORTH OF GRANT’S PASS. OREGON. NOON PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 4.}

Word from farther up the line was that coal was getting hard to locate, so they were towing six coal cars in addition to Amtrak One and the supporting staff and troop cars, which made for a slow climb; they had crossed into southern Oregon a few hours ago, and stopped for the obligatory speech in Grant’s Pass, which seemed, like many smaller cities that had always been somewhat isolated, to be doing relatively well. The crowd had been enthusiastic, putting Graham in what Heather was beginning to think of as a too-good mood.

We’d have been in Olympia three days ago if it weren’t for all the whistle stops, she thought. It’s like he’s practicing running for president—and I guess with there being an election next year (again, dammit!) and his being the president, he might decide to run for re-election. Now there’s a… scary? cheerful? ironic? well, it’s a thought, anyway.

After Grant’s Pass, the rail line swung wide of I-5 and the modern roads, winding up through the Cow Creek country, threading between pine-covered, fog-shrounded mountains, turning back and forth in great swooping bends. We started late, too, out of Ashland. For a daring escape, this has sure turned into a parade.

She was just checking whether there was any tea left—they had run out of coffee two days ago and she was still headachy from caffeine withdrawal—when the train’s brakes shrieked. Everyone and everything fell or slid forward. Chris Manckiewicz, in the corner and working as ever in one of his notebooks, grunted sharply in frustration.

Heather staggered to her feet and headed forward. Oh crap, having to start on an up slope, and towing all this coal, it’s going to take forever to get going again.

Strange sound—familiar and yet not familiar—and then she realized.

She shouted, “Helicopters!” and dropped to her knees to peer over the edge of the window.

Here, where the rails made a wide 180-degree turn, there was a broad spot on the road to their right, and the creek was to their left, far down the hill; a Marine helicopter was skimming just above the road, dropping men in battle armor as it went, and they were rolling and diving into the brush between the road and the train, moving forward in a rapid buddy rush, each man advancing a few paces ahead of the man covering him, dropping, and covering the man behind him who ran forward in turn, a swift leapfrog to close the distance.

Shots cracked from the Ranger car; Heather rolled onto the floor as windows shattered from the Marines returning fire. Their stuff has been sealed on shipboard all this time and they’ve still got modern smokeless powder and automatic. At least twenty of them to our nine Rangers and three Feds.

Manckiewicz rolled, punched the door, and darted into the Ranger car. Heather considered following—get the guns together, better organized defense—no, I can probably do more good here, between the Rangers in the lead car and the president’s car, at least slow them up if they try to come through here, keep them from having this car to work from.

She rolled and came up beside a shattered window. They want him alive, otherwise they’ d’ve bombed the train or shredded it with the helicopter’s guns. So—

She drew her 9mm and fired at a hand reaching over the sill of the window beside her; it was a relief that the gun worked at least once; she’d cleaned it just that morning, but the ammunition had been smelling strange for weeks, and she was using Crisco because they had no unspoiled gun oil.

Scrambling sounds outside the car. A burst of automatic fire from the Rangers’ car; apparently maniacal maintenance had kept a few of their modern weapons working.

One of the Marines outside poked a stick over the sill; careful not to waste a round, Heather didn’t go for that, but positioned herself carefully to see where the next try would come, watching both sides because it occurred to her that one of them might try crawling under the cars.

Another flurry of automatic-weapons fire, mixed with some deeper bangs from black-powder guns, from the car ahead. Then some bangs from far back on the train; Rogers and Machado, if she remembered right, had been taking a turn as snipers in the caboose, and either they had a shot at the attackers, or more likely the attackers were trying to flank them on that side.

The stick came in again, still on the road side of the train, but a moment later on the creek side, a stealthy hand reached up and tried the window; Heather aimed and squeezed the trigger, but it didn’t fire. She ejected the bad round as she crept closer; then there were two hands.

Heather took the least risky alternative and smashed across both hands with the pistol butt. The man shouted. Looking into his eyes, she jammed the gun toward his face, wondering what she could do with a prisoner in the circumstances but not wanting to kill him. As he leaned back away from her gun, the Marine’s injured hands lost their grip. He fell backward down the gravel-covered embankment, rolling toward the creek far below. She ducked back down; a shot hit the ceiling above her head.

Yes, they’re definitely trying to take Graham alive, and they probably don’t want to kill any of the rest of us if they don’t have to. I don’t really want to kill any of them either.

Another Marine was halfway through the window behind her, leveling his weapon, as she rolled sideways; he fired, not aiming, and she came up, aimed, fired, and heard him shriek in pain; at a guess, she’d broken a bone in his arm, and he was unable to stop himself from sliding back out of the window.

Another sound penetrated her consciousness, a raspy buzzing with a sort of whining overtone; some other aircraft? They must’ve sent everything they have. A last couple of gunshots sounded in the Ranger car ahead; now it sounded like a bar brawl in there.

The door from the Ranger car slid open.

A Marine moved in. Heather tried firing her 9mm and came up with another dead round; the Marine kicked it out of her hand and presented her with a view straight into the muzzle of his own weapon. She raised her hands—

The thundering boom outside took both her and the Marine by surprise as the railroad car shook. For a moment they stared wide-eyed at each other, aware he could have been startled into killing her; then he stepped back, to give himself more distance, and looked out the window. “Fuck,” he said. She could tell he still had her in his peripheral vision, so she didn’t move, but she said, very softly, “What?”

“Don’t know. Did you all have air cover?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Because our chopper just blew up. I don’t know what hit it, but it sounds like a lawn mower engine up in the sky.”

Heather listened and heard the same rattling buzz she’d heard before; she turned cautiously to look and saw a biplane.

“The fuck?” he said, looking at it around her.

“Cropduster with an antitank rocket?” she said. “Nobody told me we had anything that would fly except the Gooney.” If we win it won’t matter and if they win I don’t want them to go looking for Quattro Larsen. “Even that wasn’t working this morning.”

“Fuck,” the Marine said. “So we’ve got your train and you’ve got us; it’s a standoff unless—”

Heather heard another, more familiar, sound, the stuttering, coughing roar that had to be the Checker Cab of the Sky. She held her breath, then made herself relax.

“That’s another plane,” he said. “Must be one of yours, can’t be one of ours.”

“If I keep my hands where you can see them, can I put them down?”

“Yeah.” He pointed his rifle away from her but kept it on his hip where he could swing it back; she put her hands down on the back of the seat in front of her. “Escalera, USMC, I’m a corporal.”

“O’Grainne, OFTA, I run it.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.”

“I bet.” There was another, smaller explosion outside. “God, that chopper is burning like mad, someone really hit it with something.”

“Did you have friends on there?”

“Shit, we’ve been at sea forever, a carrier’s like a small town, after a while you know everyone.”

Heather waited with her captor; after a time they heard the rumble and thud of the DC-3 landing. “Smart enough to land out of sight and range,” the Marine said, with grudging approval.

“While they figure out which side is in charge,” Heather said, “don’t lose track of this: I clubbed one of your guys pretty hard and he rolled down the slope into the ravine. Make sure they find him; he’s probably still alive but he might not be in great shape.”

“Okay, thanks.”

More time went by; Heather figured that to land on the road, out of sight of the train, they must have come down a mile or more away, so this was going to take time. She just hoped there were enough—

They must have had that bullhorn in a clean box, Heather thought, missing the words because of the strangeness of hearing amplified speech again. “—Alpha Company, Second Ranger Battalion. Your aircraft has been destroyed, and we have you surrounded. We have functioning automatic weapons, and there is no escape route; we have both ends of the train under observation and can fire on any point around the train. Please release the president and his party unharmed. You will be treated in accord with the Geneva Conventions, and we intend to release you as soon as possible.”

“Shit,” Escalera said. “We’ve been out in the world so long now, with what’s gotta be growing on us, they won’t let us back on the ship till we’ve been boiled.”

^{TWO HOURS LATER. THE COW CREEK COUNTRY. NORTH OF GRANT’S PASS. OREGON. 2:30 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 4.}

Sorting everything out seemed interminably long to Heather. Everett, in the car ahead of her, had been wounded, and would probably limp the rest of his days, but the medic seemed to think he’d be able to keep and use the leg. Rogers and Machado had been killed by Marine snipers; the Marines had had their ambush in place since the night before.

“How did you know we were here, and in trouble?” Heather asked.

Quattro perched on a rock beside her while they watched all the people with authority argue with each other. “This morning, Bambi and I were flying the Stearman, and this gadget, up to Olympia, to catch the big party, you know? And we were following the tracks because we thought we might see you. When what to our wondering eyes should appear, I guess you’d say, but a Marine helicopter on one side of the mountain, and a pile of logs on the tracks on the other, which we didn’t think was a good thing.

“I guess we were high enough, and it’s always so overcast, and they just weren’t listening so they didn’t hear us over the noise of their chopper’s blades—they were rotating when we passed over. So we continued on up to Olympia, I hopped over to Fort Lewis—where they still had some real avgas, can you imagine that—great stuff!

“I did some fast talking and the Second Ranger Battalion either decided they were loyal to the president or they wanted an excuse to go fight Marines. Now, the Stearman was a trainer, the trainee seat is normally the front, and it’s an open cockpit. So we put one Ranger that was supposed to be a crack shot with a shoulder-fired missile in the front seat. It turned out he was.”

“That was four men killed instantly,” Heather said, annoyed by a feeling that Quattro was in this whole thing because it was the kind of adventure he’d imagined having when he was fourteen. “Your sharpshooter must’ve hit right on a fuel tank or maybe set off some ordnance.”

“That would be my guess. It was one sweet shot.” So much for compassion. “But yeah, Bambi and the sergeant kind of thought there might be a lot of negative feelings around, so they just headed back to Fort Lewis. No reason to rub anyone’s nose in it, you know. And I kind of think she wanted to go someplace else anyway. I don’t think she’s real used to the idea of killing anyone—let alone burning several men to death.”

“I hope she doesn’t ever get used to that,” Heather said.

“That’s very reasonable,” Quattro admitted. “Want to give me a hand cleaning scunge out of the DC-3 while they make up their minds who’s riding in it? I’m one of two people that has a guaranteed seat, so I don’t need to be involved in that discussion.”

They scrubbed with rags and sticks—“jeez, I wish we had toothbrushes, except if we did, I’d want to keep them for my teeth,” Quattro said.

Heather bent to her scrubbing. “Quattro, let me ask you a dangerous question—what do you think? Is it a war or a system artifact that we’re up against?”

“I think in a couple years I can be selling canned fish into the middle of the country, before people get iodine deficiencies. And that’s all I think. I used to think I cared about political issues. Now that I’m the freeholder of Castle Larsen, I think about feeding people, building shit, making shit work, all the people that count on me, and shit that won’t get done without me. Basically it’s down to people and shit. I prefer it that way.” He took another rag, put one end in the bleach, pulled it up and shook it, and wiped along an already-shining surface near the spark coil. “And I don’t envy you your job, Heather, but I sure as hell am glad someone is doing it.”

“I’m not so sure I’m glad it’s me.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s you. You at least kind of seem to have your head on straight.” He glanced around, and lowered his voice. “Is it just me, or does it look like our president is becoming excessively presidential? I mean, when we picked him up, he was just a little guy trying to do a big job; now I think he’s becoming a very big guy who feels entitled to a very big job. The way he was with the California legislature? Like fucking Mussolini or something. And lately when he speaks to a crowd, like in Sacramento… he’s not quite the guy that I saw in Pale Bluff.”

It was very much what Heather had been saying to herself, and she wanted to argue, but it just seemed… true. “It used to be he was right about so much, and no one listened. Now they—”

A Ranger sergeant from Fort Lewis was trotting toward them, carrying a clipboard, and Chris Manckiewicz was running beside him, comical as only a middle-aged former fat guy trying to keep up with a young athlete can be. “Looks like there’ve been some decisions,” Heather said.

The sergeant said, “Mr. Larsen, we’ve finally got a manifest together, sort of, with who’s going where. Ms. O’Grainne, you’re on, along with Mr. Manckiewicz here—”

Heather was annoyed. “So apparently the new president is so far gone into playing president that he has to have media coverage—”

“Uh,” Chris said, “I think that—”

“I don’t blame you for wanting to be with the president, Chris, but—”

“Actually,” Chris said, “it’s more of a—”

“But I’m getting seriously pissed off and worried about the way that he’s coming down with Shaunsen’s disease, and—”

“Heather.” Quattro’s voice was soft but very firm, and she stopped. “Chris gets a seat because he’s sitting next to me; he’s the copilot.”

“Oh,” Heather said, flushing.

“So I’ll be busy on the flight,” Chris said, “but I do think you’ve got some interesting things to say. How about an interview once we’re in Olympia?”

^{ABOUT TWO WEEKS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 1:00 P.M. PST. MONDAY. JANUARY 20.}

“It’s hard to put together much of a band when all the plastic goes,” Ramirez was saying, apologetically, to Heather. “Some of the more expensive wooden clarinets with felt pads, a few all-metal brass instruments, a couple of drums where the skins are really skins, that’s about all we could do. Too many little plastic rings and gaskets in modern instruments, so that even the ones that were mostly metal or mostly wood have pads and fittings, here and there, that are gone and can’t be replaced right away.” Ramirez was the senior bandmaster from Fort Lewis, where four units had bands and three National Guard bands came for practice. He’d rounded up players and instruments from the Army, the National Guard, several different fife and drum corps, a couple of conservatories, and local high schools, and managed to get them all together to rehearse on just three weeks’ notice. He didn’t even seem to think it had been hard, saying only that “band standards tend to be patriotic numbers, anyway, we just had to work out what version of what we were playing.”

Heather had been put in charge of this silly little parade, which was officially the Inauguration of the Fiftieth President. By counting Shaunsen, the boss gets a significant-looking number—and he wanted that. I don’t know if he’s becoming more presidential, but his marketing instincts are getting sharper. Maybe that is becoming more presidential.

Ramirez would be leading and conducting the New National Band, and the only evidence he had that all his hard work mattered was Heather’s interest—which I’m faking as hard as I can, so I sure hope it works. All she knew about music was that it came out of funny-looking machines, and you didn’t want to marry the people who made it.

They decided without much fuss that the band would play whatever songs popped into Ramirez’s head along the two-mile route of the march, “America the Beautiful” as they passed the reviewing stand, “Hail to the Chief” when Graham went up to the rostrum, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” just after the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Remind everyone of the word change on that one,” Heather said.

“One indivisible nation under God,” he said. “We’ve been practicing. Nobody’s told us why.”

“Because Graham Weisbrod is a fussy old professor, and grammatically that’s closer to right, and there are a large number of people, some with guns, out there, who have doubts about whether we are really one indivisible nation, so we’re supposed to say we are. And Graham says that ‘under God’ was wedged in there in the first place, decades after the Pledge was written, because a lot of Rebs who wouldn’t admit they’d lost the war wanted to separate the ideas of ‘indivisible’ and ‘nation.’”

Ramirez glanced around first, and kept his voice low. “You’ve known President Weisbrod a long time?”

“Twenty-one years. More than half my life.”

“Do you think he’s up to the job?”

“I think he’ll do his absolute best to do it,” except of course when he’s reveling in having his ego massaged—and whatever else Allie is massaging for him.

Meow, she self-critiqued. She knew that wasn’t completely fair, and hell, a few months ago, if Graham had found a younger, intelligent girlfriend like Allie… Well, but I have to clean up the mess that this made of Arnie to keep our Genius in Chief functioning, and deal with Allie’s complete devotion to Graham’s career; used to be he had a chief of staff who would tell him when he was being an idiot, not encourage it. It seems dumb in an egotistical way, Graham, I just want to say that to you and have you listen, I just want you to consider it.

“I guess that’s all we can really ask of anyone,” the bandleader said.

His words fit her thought so well that it took her a moment to retrace the conversation. “I wish I knew for sure that Graham Weisbrod’s best would be as much as we need. I wasn’t really trying to evade your question, or not much, anyway. It’s just that there’s three questions behind it. Will Graham do his best? He always has, as long as I’ve known him.” Crossed fingers. “Will his best be good enough for the job? I wish I knew.” Crossed till the knuckles bleed. “And could anyone’s best be good enough to do the job, or is it just impossible? Only God knows that.” And You’ d better be crossing Your fingers, too.

The man nodded. “Well, tell him we all pray for him to succeed.”

“He knows, but I’ll tell him again.”

Comparatively, arranging the Rangers was easy; they knew how to march, they all knew where they were going, they’d march there. “I don’t think we can get lost,” Captain Parmenter said, grinning. “We know we’re between the band and the screaming junkpile.”

She grinned back. “Thanks for giving me a one-minute break between people with difficulties. Congratulations on the unit honor and I’m going to applaud my brains out when you receive it.”

Her next stop was at the “screaming junkpile”—the experimental coal-dust turbine car from Evergreen State that was going to be carrying the mayor, the governor, and the base commander from Lewis. Its best feature was also its worst; the experiment with putting a damped hydraulic into a double-bowed axle, so that the whole thing could run on steel-rimmed wheels, seemed to be working, but with only a greased axle for a bearing, it made a horrendous grinding squeal. At least it would keep people from noticing any mistakes by the band. Actually it could easily keep people from noticing a fire engine, an air raid, and Rainier erupting.

The two engineering professors in charge of it were warming it up, so it was hard to hear each other over the whoosh and howl of its exhaust, but she figured they knew that they were supposed to follow the Rangers and not drop back where their foul blue exhaust might annoy the president, who would be riding with General McIntyre, the new Secretary of the Armed Forces, in a ceremonial coach, pulled from a museum, in which an early governor of Washington had once ridden.

And if Allie is in there with them, I’m going to rip her hair off to use for wadding when I ram her puny tits down her throat. The least he could do is make a First Lady of her; they should be thinking about how it looks to have the Chief of Staff be the presidential skank. Whoa, that thought came naturally. Guess I’ll have to keep working on those professionalism and civility issues. Maybe HR will offer a seminar or something.

Behind Graham Weisbrod and Norm McIntyre, there would be a wagon with the rest of the Cabinet-To-Be, mostly politicians with a scattering of professors and businesspeople, all from Washington and Oregon.

Heather made sure the new Cabinet were all there, ready to “walk and wave.” Heather told them that as far as she was concerned, it would be fine if Commerce and Future held hands during the parade; made sure Education’s backup wheelchair would stay within easy reach; and reassured Treasury and Foreign Relations that this wasn’t too much like a circus coming to town. Not too much. Actually I’m afraid it may not be enough.

Wonder if anyone will even notice that Graham Weisbrod reorganized and renamed half the jobs in the Cabinet? Let alone that he should have waited for Congress to do that, that it’s their prerogative.

After the Cabinet, there was the agglomeration of volunteer organizations and units whose positions Heather had allocated by rolling dice, which she privately thought of as the Department of Everything Else: everyone who just wanted to be in the first inaugural parade ever held in the new national capital. There were Boy Scout troops, fragmentary high-school bands, and the GLBT Small Apple Growers (it had become clearer once she realized that it was the farm, not the apple, that was small); several unions, veterans’ associations, and the Daughters of the World Wars; antique machinery buffs driving steam combines and highwheels, a diving salvage company that was pledging to be the “first back in the water,” and the “Portland to Reno Reconstituted Pony Express, Orphans Preferred.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to speculate about how you reconstituted a pony.

The parade took a surprisingly long time, for many reasons. Some of the marching units were made up of the elderly, some of the rolling units broke down, and the Secret Grand Master of the Parade appeared to be Murphy, but miraculously, though it was chilly, it wasn’t painfully cold. The weather was astonishingly good; Rainier gleamed magnificently in the distance, the sky was a deep cloudless blue, and the winter sunshine was almost warm. Graham Weisbrod and Norm McIntyre seemed to be perfectly happy to just stand and wave from their platform in front of the Winged Victory statue, as an hour went by getting the last unit into the West Circle between the Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion.

When, finally, everyone was in place, and it was established that the hand-built tube amp was working for the moment, the ceremonies began. Graham took the oath of office again, this time from an Appeals Court judge. If he wants to go any higher he’ll have to appoint some Supremes. They all said the new, modified pledge to the old, unmodified fifty-star flag—Graham’s position was that there was no other government, just a somewhat-uppity temporary regional military command; that no other states had aligned with it, just some were reporting to that temporary office as a matter of convenience; and that the eleven states in the Northeast that many people were calling the Lost Quarter were going to call in any minute now. Graham had General McIntyre confer the new title of the President’s Own Rangers on the Second Ranger Battalion, which was authorized to expand into a regiment with all deliberate speed.

Finally, Graham began his Inaugural Address. It might have earned an A on a creative writing prof ’s assignment to “write your inaugural address,” Heather thought. Weisbrod pledged that everyone would work hard, thanked everyone for coming, announced the Cabinet lineup officially, and urged every state that was able to do so to elect or appoint replacement Senators and Representatives and have them here by February 1st. He commended the offer from the Governor of Washington, who had prepared a list of citizens of other states who were known to be in Washington and willing to be appointed if getting someone here before February 1st would be too difficult.

He swung into his vision statement with enthusiasm, and to judge by the cheering, the crowd was eating it up. “We are forced to meet here, and not in what had been our capital for 234 years, because we failed to see that the powerful engines of our collective dreams had been possessed by the will to self-destruction. We stand in the rubble of our earlier civilization, with the way back barred to us, with some unknown number of other barriers ready to spring up if we try to take that road. We must therefore rebuild with caution, with an awareness that some roads will close as we try to take them, that time after time we may have to turn back before going forward again, that our situation demands a patience and humility that we lacked the first time—but we shall rebuild.”

Corny, Heather thought. But after all, things were going to be improvisational and low-rent here for a long time. Maybe the country needed more corn. Maybe she was just getting too old and cynical.

Maybe the Graham Weisbrod who might have tsked at how overdone this was would not have been as effective a president as the one she was watching now. Is that possible? Is this really for the best?

He wound up with “… with a vision that we will again be in a position to choose a future, and we will choose wisely, and build that future—because this is America, which has always been the land of the future!”

Walking back from the ceremony to her quarters in the old Evergreen dorms, she watched the sun go down over the lake, and as she so often did these days, rested her hand on her belly and thought, Kid, I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’ve got to find somewhere better for you to grow up.

She felt a presence moving up from her side, and glanced, half-hoping for some pathetic would-be mugger she could knock down or dismiss with a glare.

Nothing so appealing. Chris Manckiewicz.

She asked, “How’s the fish-wrapper business?”

“The Olympia Observer, at this point, has five staff members locally, nine stringers nationally, and a promising line on a printing plant. Which I needed anyway because I keep having to revise the resumé. The 24/7 News Network, the Washington Advertiser-Gazette, the Athens Free Ticket to the Pen…”

She chuckled, though it wasn’t very funny, just to show she bore no ill will. “Chris, I know you want to interview me because I’m having differences with Graham Weisbrod and I’m not altogether happy with the direction the new government is taking. Honestly, I understand that, and I understand that since I’ve been his close friend for so long, now that he’s president, it’s news. I’m not begrudging you that. But I’d rather try to bring him around in private conversation—not by arguing with him in the press.”

“I’m also working on the definitive history of our era—”

“Catch me when I’m retired. But I’m saving the hot stuff for my memoirs.” She gave him a little wiggle-finger wave and turned off toward her quarters, the former commons room of an honors dorm, which gave her the privilege of a fireplace. Yesterday’s soup was going to taste wonderful; she’d put it in the banked coals, and with luck enough fire would have stayed alive to keep it warm.

^{FIVE DAYS LATER. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 7:15 A.M. PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 25.}

Chris Manckiewicz held it in his hands, turned it over, looked at the perfection of its plain gray cloth cover.

“That was the fabric that was cheap, but we worked in some wax and a little linseed oil, and it’ll at least shed water while it’s new,” Rob Cartland, the printer, was saying. “Title and all that went on with a big linoleum block stamp. Used a smaller stamp for the spine. Thud, thud. Twenty-two hundred times each way. You can thank my son Ephraim that it came out so neat; he’s the one that thought of that frame gadget so the stamp always hit in the same place. I know it ain’t how they do it in a real printing plant—”

“You are the real printing plant,” Chris said. He turned the book back over and read the India-ink linoleum-cut cover to himself: A Battle of Articles: how our Constitution made the struggle between Olympia and Athens inevitable, and what citizens can do about it, by Chris Manckiewicz, publisher and editor, the Olympia Observer. “And we’re ready to go for setting up and printing issue one, right?” he asked, very unnecessarily. “Because I’m sure depending on the book to get me some subscriptions.”

“Ready to go, and your credit’s still good with me,” Cartland said. “I just wish my old man was here to see this. All those years being his assistant on his silly projects, trying to make things come out just the way they did in 1880, and swearing I’d never look at a piece of paper after I got away from the son of a bitch, and… well, here I am. A living for me and probably for Ephraim, too.”

“I’ve been a printer’s assistant,” Chris pointed out, “though only for a month. But that was enough time for me to say, now, be good to Ephraim.”

“He’s a smart kid, and so’s Cassie. And this is my chance to leave a successful business to both of them, and they’re old enough and serious enough kids that I think they appreciate that—so many kids are so much older and more serious, after just these few months.”

“Gone hungry, been homeless in a world without homes, seen friends and family die,” Chris said. “I imagine that ages them pretty fast.” He turned the book over in his hands again. “Of course, if you’d like to write something up about that—maybe a feature, parents noticing how much more mature the kids are? Or an editorial about whether or not it’s a good thing? I’ll always be looking for material.”

“I doubt I will, but I’ll pass the idea on to Cassie. She’s always writing letters to friends—all the people she used to text with—the ones where she knows their street address or can find it. Mostly just trying to find out if they’re still alive, I guess. She just heard back from two of them this week. She might have some things she could tell you about.”

“Sounds like it. And there’s a whole generation of possible customers that doesn’t remember newspapers at all; I need some writers from that generation if I’m going to get the habit restarted.”

“If you could sell newspapers with coffee as a single package,” Cartland said, “I’d be your slave forever. My dad used to read the paper and have coffee, every morning. For me, it was Twitter and a Red Bull, and for my kids it wasn’t even that organized. But I remember he used to look like the most relaxed creature in the universe, feet up on a spare chair, big mug of coffee by his hand, looking for something to read out loud to all of us. God, I thought he looked like a moron. Now my definition of luxury would be to start every day off like that.”

“Well, we’ll have the newspaper, weekly at first; the coffee’s kind of a problem, of course, but at least we’re on this coast, and among my first stories in the biz section, there’s a woman here in town who bartered for five sailing yachts with a warehouse full of liquor, and had enough booze left over to hire crews; she’s billing those as the ‘coffee fleet’ and I guess they’ll be running over to Hawaii, down to Mexico, wherever, to bring in the beans. My guess is she’s going to own the West Coast in a few years.”

“Lisa Fanchion. Yeah. My guess too.”

“I have an interview with her in the notepad already,” Chris said, smiling. “Closest I can get to coffee till some of her ships come back. I was teasing her that when the coffee fleet comes back, I’ll be trading full-page ads to get some, and she just shrugged and said she figured the boats coming in would be news, which I’d have to cover for free, and once that’s in the paper, she’ll have all the buyers she’ll need. She thought it might be twenty years before she needs to advertise. She really doesn’t miss a trick.”

Cartland laughed. “Well, one thing you can say for Daybreak, it’s a great opportunity for smart ruthless bastards, ne?”

“Like everything else that ever happened,” Chris agreed. The two picked up their wheelbarrows, aiming to be in the market at first light, since they’d be mostly paid in barter goods that would be better when fresh.

^{EIGHT HOURS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 3:00 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 25.}

At mid-afternoon, they were getting used to the rhythm of things. One of them would push a wheelbarrow into the market, full of copies of Battle of Articles; the other would then depart from their slot with the other barrow, laden down with produce, jewelry, paper cash, and pre-Daybreak canned goods, moving it into their lockup in the print shop. The one who had just arrived would take over the head of the line where so many people waited for a copy. Apparently the idea of a book about something that had happened since Daybreak appealed to people.

They would be back to press, and for the moment they would have to work the newspaper in around printing the book. Though if the newspaper is as big a hit as the book, Chris thought happily, we might have to find more printers someplace. Wonder if anything survived up toward Tacoma? That was a bad fire but some areas didn’t burn.

He sold the last book and handed the Ping-Pong paddle to the man at the front of the line; they’d hit on that as a system to preserve “firstness” and reduce anxiety; now all Chris would have to do was shout “stand behind the man holding up the Ping-Pong paddle!” until Cartland came back with the next load of books.

“Mr. Manckiewicz?” a man said at his elbow.

“If you want to buy a book, get into the line; I’m not going to help anyone jump it, I’d be lynched.”

“Not what I had in mind,” the man said. “Do you have a moment for a possible scoop?”

“Tell me what it is and I’ll tell you if it’s a scoop.” He glanced sideways; the man was in T-shirt, jeans, and a leather jacket, holding out a file folder.

“Read,” the man said. “Make notes. Make a copy if you can find the time to type that much, photograph it if anyone you know has a working camera. Use any of it you want in your paper. But don’t tell anyone where you got it, and I wouldn’t publish while you still have it. You’ll see why not. When you’re done—and make that within one week—move the potted plant in the Observer’s window to the other window, and leave this folder, with all the documents in it, out on your fire escape by your window at noon. Bye.” He dropped the folder at Chris’s feet; Chris picked it up, looked again, and the man was gone.

Well, either the guy is very paranoid and watches a lot of old movies, or the guy is very paranoid and I’ve got a scoop. He looked around and didn’t see Cartland coming yet; the man with the paddle was being good about yelling “This is the line for the book about the two governments! Line up behind this paddle!” so Chris didn’t have much to do. Either this barrowload or one more, and we’re sold out. This is going so well.

Curiosity overpowered him and he peeked into the folder. The document was new, and had been typewritten rather than printed; there were several XXXed out mistakes on the first page, which was a letter addressed from “General Norman McIntyre, Sec. Armed Forces” to “Dr. Graham Weisbrod, POTUS.” When I was working for 247NN, they’ d have given a fortune to get any document from this level, but I suppose nowadays getting hold of a high-level national document isn’t much harder than stealing a proposed zoning plan from a small-town planning commission used to be.

At the bottom of the first page was scrawled, “Recommended, further discussion suggested.”

Still no sign of Cartland. The line was still quiet, patiently waiting for their chance to buy a book. I hope that guy way back there with the live lamb gets to the head before we’re out of books; Cartland’s kids would love that as a pet.

He flipped the letter to the back of the stack and looked at the title page. OVERALL PLAN FOR SPRING OFFENSIVE.

He froze. On the next page was a map of the Dakotas, with arrows running along rail lines and roads, and junctions marked with D+2, D+9, and so forth, all the way to Minnesota. The next page was a table of West Coast and Rocky Mountain Castles that had declared for Nguyen-Peters, with columns for “troop strength,” “probable arms,” “allies,” “estimated food stocks”—

“Mr. Manckiewicz?”

“Yes, I can’t accept this, it’s—”

It wasn’t the same man; it was four of the President’s Own Rangers. “Sir, we have to ask you to come with us, and we were told to secure all documents in your possession.”

“Yes,” Chris said, “you definitely need to secure this. The man who gave it to me—”

“You can explain that later, sir.”

It wasn’t until they cuffed him that he realized what was happening. Wonder if they’re registering trademarks anywhere yet? Maybe I’ll start a whole chain of papers called Free Trip to the Pen.

^{FIVE HOURS LATER. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 8:45 P.M. PST. SATURDAY. JANUARY 25.}

At first Captain Wallace, Army Counterintelligence, seemed pretty nice; he explained that he had once been a Seattle police detective, working fraud, ID theft, and cash-hacks, and he was still more used to civilian investigations. He hoped Chris would cooperate.

Chris told him exactly what had happened and described the man as well as he could remember; Wallace was oddly uninterested, as if he already knew who had done it (Perhaps the spy was already busted? Chris thought). He established that Chris had looked at the documents but had no intention of disclosing their contents.

“I hate the idea of a civil war,” Chris explained, “but if there is one, I’m on the side of this government, and I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize victory.”

“Is that a matter of revenge? You were jailed by the Athens government before being sent here—”

“Well, it didn’t make me especially like them, of course, but my real problem is that the Southeast is turning into one big Army base, gearing up to attack some squatty little patch of dirt that had nothing to do with Daybreak. And while they’re getting ready, they’re wiping out most of the traditional liberties.”

“Such as freedom of the press?”

“Well, I’m pretty attached to that one. Look, I had just realized what I’d been given when the Rangers came and busted me. I hadn’t had time or opportunity to turn it in—jeez, I guess your office would have been the right place, I didn’t even know that.”

“Yes, actually, my office would have been the right place.”

“Off the record, did you catch the guy?”

“You might say that. Off the record entirely, though.” Wallace sat down, so close to Chris that their knees almost touched. “So let me make sure of a few things. No one else saw the documents but yourself. How would you describe what you saw?”

“It looked like the first stages of a military offensive against the Athens government—securing our communications through Montana and the Dakotas to the New State of Superior, and cleaning out Castles that might act as enemy bases in our rear.”

“I can see you’ve done some military reporting before.”

“Second Iranian War; I was embedded with Tenth Mountain for three months, and almost all that was at headquarters.”

“Ah. And your record there?”

“Flawless on security issues, Captain Wallace. Not that anyone can prove anything with all the computers down.”

“True, but good to know.” The captain sat down and gazed straight into his eyes. “And you would not have divulged or published because—?”

“Because I’m a loyal citizen of this government. I’d be interested as all hell of course and I might have written a book after the war—probably would have—but I wasn’t going to let anything I publish harm us in the struggle, if it comes down to a war between a military-intel-administrative dictatorship and the actual Constitutional government.”

“You wouldn’t let anything you publish harm our side?”

“No, I would not. No matter what they show in the movies, not every reporter—”

The captain grabbed Chris by the lapels and shouted into his face, a long wailing scream, hot breath pouring in through Chris’s gaping mouth and flooding his throat, spittle spraying into his staring eyes. With his nose almost on Chris’s, he bellowed, “And yet you go and publish, and sell it in the marketplace, a book jammed full of lies, that slanders our president and our entire leadership, explains in detail the illegal position of the junta in Athens, directly says the Constitution is at fault, and cannot be called anything but treasonous slander! You run that ridiculous speech that you invented for the president to have given in Pale Bluff, promising to hand over power to the junta! In your own words, this book is exactly intended to harm us in this struggle! What do you have to say for yourself, you lying sack of shit? How much did they pay you to do this, in Athens? ”

Captain Wallace shook Chris, yanking him back and forth, and repeated the accusations, over and over, screaming and scattering spit over Chris’s face. When he ran out of air he threw Chris back in the chair. “Now, if you really meant that about supporting the legitimate government, you’ll sign these documents!”

“What if I don’t sign?”

“What if you don’t sign?” The captain grabbed him by the hair, tilted his face back, and slapped him. “Didn’t you say you were supporting our side? Didn’t you say that?”

Chris knew he was going to be here for a long time.

^{FOUR DAYS LATER. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COL UMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 9:11 A.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. JANUARY 29.}

“So,” Arnie said, turning the page over on the old flip chart, “big windmill with generator here, supplies power to this rotary-quenched spark gap, the high tech of 1915 here today. It’s a big piece of equipment, with a huge capacitance and at high voltage, so we’ll want to keep people far from it. Then we hook it to this oval of old high-tension lines, which will be our antenna. And the result is that we’ve got the biggest, loudest radio transmitter on Earth, by far.

“Now, in a warehouse, we found four hundred toy telescopes, all metal and glass, which we set up in arrays of fifty, spaced and angled to be looking at space above the antenna. Dark construction paper over the eyepieces like so. We use old surveying transits, sextants, and the almanac to get them aimed perfectly—”

“Let me guess. It’s a religious ritual,” Graham Weisbrod said. Several Cabinet members chuckled, which made Heather add a few points to their Sycophancy Index, a statistic she’d been making up for some time; Allie, sitting at his elbow, laughed and rubbed Graham’s arm.

Arnie flushed, and Heather beamed a thought at him: Come on, don’t let the bitch fluster you, she’s trying to fluster you. You’ll have a bucket of beer, and the kid and I will have some milk, and we will joke around about the Sycophancy Index over dinner, and it won’t matter. Arnie seemed to gather himself as if he could hear her. “So this will attract one of the EMP gadgets—whatever they are. From a robot’s-ear view, it’ll be the biggest and most obvious target this side of Jupiter. The toy telescopes that happen to catch the flash will burn holes in their construction paper, so the array will tell us about where the bomb went off, and the recording windup clock here can be coordinated with it.”

“If you have the telescopes, why do you need the clock?” McIntyre asked.

“We coordinate them. The EMP will be a huge, unmistakable mark on the disk, but in the few seconds before it, we’ll also be recording the echoes of the radio waves off the object, and with ten accurate chronometers scattered over a few thousand miles, we’ll be able—using graph paper and a lot of hand calculations—to put together what amounts to one good radar image. We’ll have its trajectory, and we’ll be able to solve that trajectory backward and know where it came from.

“And here’s the kicker. The AM modulator will work off a mechanical-disk recording device—”

“A record player, Arnie,” Heather said. Even she couldn’t help grinning at that one.

“Well, yes, it works just like an old-fashioned phonograph, and we’ll be broadcasting that we are using this gadget to identify the source of the EMPs, over and over, and nothing else.”

McIntyre nodded. “So if it’s a real thinking enemy, or even a medium-good artificial intelligence, it won’t target our big transmitter—it’ll hit something with more value, or hold its fire.”

“Exactly,” Arnie said. “But if it’s just a machine, no smarter than a bug, as we think it is—well, then it’ll go for the brightest light on the porch. And if it’s just a machine, with no enemy in control of it anymore, then basically there’s no war and we’re just dealing with a leftover mine. No war.”

Graham nodded. “Thankyou for yourclarity. So if yourexperiment works, we’re facing a system artifact, not an enemy nation or organization—”

“Well, the experiment works either way. The result will either be consistent with a system artifact or with enemy action—”

Allie said, “We already know it’s a system artifact, Arnie, your research on that was brilliant and you did it back when you had real computers to work with. What we need is an experiment that proves it.”

“Proving it is impossible,” Arnie said. “All we can do is marshall more and better evidence. Even if results are completely consistent with a system artifact, it could be an enemy laying low by pretending to be a system artifact. And for that matter something that looks like conscious enemy action might be a system artifact getting lucky. So—”

“And you want to launch a project this big, and involve the illegal junta in it, when it doesn’t prove anything?” Allie asked. She was sitting very close to Graham, who was looking down at the table. Heather thought, I hope that means he’s at least a little ashamed.

Heather had tried to steer Graham into approving it without seeing the politics behind it, but that wasn’t going to happen, so she waded in. “What Arnie is proposing is that we try an experiment, predict the results, and see what happens—and because the EMP will happen where we’ll be watching, we’ll see more. It’s not expensive, it mostly uses resources that were just going to crumble in the next few years anyway, and besides if the government in Athens goes in on it with us, and sends observers and scientists, then whether or not we get anything scientifically out of it, it ought to kind of get the ball rolling toward reconciliation.”

“There’s already been too many gestures of reconciliation,” Allie put in. “If you ask me. Especially with Manckiewicz publishing that so-called Pale Bluff Address that—”

“That you and I both heard Graham actually say,” Heather said. “Don’t forget that detail. Are you going to put me in jail for remembering it? Whether you approve of it or not, he said it, and it was a door to reconciliation, which—”

“Door to surrender,” Allie said, looking at McIntyre.

Weisbrod made a tent with his hands and stared into space. God, I hope that means you’re actually thinking and not trying to impress your aggressive little minion with what a thinker you are, Heather thought, and I wish I didn’t have to worry about that. It just seems so unfair. I never had to worry about that before.

“Well,” he said, “if you could float the idea past Cameron Nguyen-Peters, through a back channel, then I’d say we wouldn’t want to be the side that said no.”

“But we’re not quite saying we’re going to do it, for sure.”

“No, I guess we’re not.”

“Then what if they say the same thing?”

Weisbrod shrugged. “We’ll consider that situation if it comes up. Right now we can just probe each other about it. My guess is that they won’t want to run the risk of an experiment that is apt to bolster the system-artifact hypothesis.” He smiled at her, and it was a moment where she saw the old Graham. “So I’m saying go ahead because I think we’ll get some cheap propaganda points, and if they agree, we’ll get some slightly more expensive propaganda points. Either way, we come out ahead, and I don’t really think there’s any risk of our being embarrassed.” He glanced around the room and said, “Any dissent?”

He’s not including Allie’s pouting expression as dissent, Heather thought, that’s something.

^{SIX DAYS LATER. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 7:15 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. FEBRUARY 4.}

Because they did not dare use radio anymore, the fastest secure communication these days was via the Bubble Drop: letters written in pencil and wetted with disinfectant were sealed in a glass jar with a nail tied to a piece of copper wire. The jar was degaussed in the Big Ripper, as the Evergreen State physicist who had devised it had dubbed it—a generator-magnet-coil system, driven by a weight descending on a line from a six-story building. Whatever was inside the coil received enough strong, shifting electric and magnetic fields to kill most nanoswarm, and if any of them survived, the field and current surges were enough to cause them to start breeding at the junction of copper and iron. So if an hour after degaussing, no white fuzz was growing where the nail joined the wire, the bottle was pronounced sterile.

Then Bambi Castro, taking the Stearman on the down-coast mail run to the nine Castles that were aligned with Olympia, would fly the jar a hundred miles or so out into the Pacific, loft a brightly colored paper kite on a five-hundred-foot cotton kite string, and work downward until the plane was just skimming the waves. At that point, she’d toss the jar, tied to the kite string, over the side, where it would drop into the water and act as a sea-anchor to the kite.

The Stearman would head for land, and a Pacific Fleet Navy helicopter, which had been watching from a safe distance upwind, would swing in at low speed and, using a grapnel on a long rope, grab the kite and begin hauling up, eventually bringing the jar to within a hundred feet of the helicopter, where it would hang until it could be set down on a ship’s deck—not one of the precious nuclear vessels, of course, but one of their still-functioning oil-fueled escorts.

On shipboard, they’d dip the jar in boiling water and pass it to the carrier in a zipline package. From the carrier it went into a parachute package in an F-35, to be dropped on the golf course at Athens; the F-35 would go on to land on a carrier with the Atlantic Fleet. The whole process was awkward, but it emitted no radio waves, included a reconnaissance of the country, and posed relatively little risk of contaminating the Navy’s precious few remaining ships, planes, and helicopters.

The return process involved a jar launched on a hot-air balloon from the Georgia coast, snagged by a helicopter, and walked through the same process, with one package of mail eventually being dropped by parachute onto Gray Field at Fort Lewis.

“And that’s what’s amazing about this,” Arnie explained. “Cam must have written back within an hour or two of getting the message, which means he must have put everything together in that time. He’s gotta be pretty serious about this.”

“We know it has to be a trick,” Allie said, glancing at Graham, “so the question is what kind of trick. It looks to me like they’re turning it into military intelligence gathering, which means implicitly we’re agreeing to get involved in their war against the Unfindable Enemy. I don’t know how we’ll back out of this—”

Arnie said, “This is exactly what we wanted, and I don’t see why we don’t just accept it.”

The room felt freezing cold, despite the big fire built against the February damp.

Softly, Heather said, “Graham, you said you didn’t want to be the one who said no.”

“And I don’t,” he said. “And I won’t be. Make it happen. Arnie, you’re the project leader—you’ll be in the field; you’ll report to Heather, since she was already going to set up the reconstruction research offices in Pueblo. Allie, this is one where I’m not taking your advice. General McIntyre, find a smart intelligence officer to send along so that whatever they learn by working with us, we know that they learned it. Don’t stop them and for god’s sake don’t sabotage the project, but I want to know what they’re getting out of this.” He looked around the room with the face of a man who not only can’t please everyone, but can’t please anyone. “That’s a decision, people; make it happen or show me why it’s wrong.”

When he left, a couple of minutes later, he was talking intently with McIntyre; Allie was on his arm, working it pretty hard, Heather thought. Meow, she reminded herself. But I’m glad to see her lose one, and if I’m a cat, she’s still a bitch.

She felt something flutter as she stood, and instinctively reached down to touch her belly.

“Kick?” Arnie asked.

“Big one.”

“He’s trying to tell us,” Arnie said, “to get things in order before he gets here.”

She gave Arnie the raspberry, and the two of them went to a gossipy lunch; at least he seemed to be recovering from the whole Allie mess nowadays, and a year or two down in Texas playing with the physicists would probably mend whatever was left of the crack in his heart.

But walking home, trying to get her mind on the little bit of packing she needed to do, she couldn’t help thinking that Arnie had a point about putting things in order. The little kicker gave her another feathery touch, and she thought, Kid, Mommy had better move you someplace before I get too big and off-balance for the running, jumping, and fighting end of things. Hang on tight; I think this ride might get a little wild.

^{THE NEXT DAY. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON.) ABOUT 8:00 P.M. PST. WEDNESDAY. FEBRUARY 5.}

Graham Weisbrod looked tired and old in the flaring light of the oil lamp; a Renaissance painter might have loved the way the gold-yellow light flickered and played on his face, but Heather was saddened by every wrinkle and sag. This job is eating him alive.

Graham smiled as if it took an effort, but he seemed to mean it. “Heather. God, thanks for coming. I need someone to tell me I’m full of shit.”

“At least some things haven’t changed.”

“Like a beer?”

“Um, I know I’m not showing yet, but—”

“Not showing and not European, either,” he said. “How about pineapple juice in a can?”

“Oh, that’s better anyway.”

“I know—I’m hoarding it—that’s why I offered you beer first!” He grinned, handed her a can from a cooler beside him, and poured himself a glass of beer.

Maybe he’s his old self again. Maybe he called me here to talk about getting his act together.

The pineapple juice was wonderful; she hadn’t tasted any in months and really hadn’t expected to taste any ever again. Graham looked pretty blissed at the taste of cold beer, as well. Finally, he said, “All right, I’m being a coward here, Heather. I have something difficult and painful to discuss, and I seem to have acquired several roomfuls of sycophants, not least the First-Lady-To-Be.”

“You’re marrying her?”

His nod was curt and challenging.

“Congratulations.” It seemed the best thing to say. “You’ve been alone way too long.”

He relaxed and extended his beer glass; she clinked it with the canned juice, and they toasted something or other: friendship, or his marriage, or her avoiding the fight. Graham said, “Somehow I never internalized the plain old truth that it really is lonely at the top.” He half smiled. “I need a real friend to help me think straight about this thing in front of me.”

Heather savored the last sip of pineapple juice, a cover to buy time to think. Maybe Graham was coming to the realization that he’d succumbed to the temptations of pomp and power. She felt the baby kick. Hey, kid, don’t be cynical, leave that to people who’ve been born.

Weisbrod ran his hand over the top of his head, making all the little white wisps stand up, in exactly the way the media handlers used to take him to task about when he had first come to DoF. “Well, it won’t get any easier. Look, I’m getting very worried about Arnie Yang. He came up with this experiment idea, which was fine as far as it went, and I thought it might put some pressure on Athens, so of course I said to look into it. Then they came back with a way to put some pressure on me, fair enough, but it makes me wonder about Arnie—is he really… loyal?”

“Well, yes, he is.”

“I just think, as we go into this next year and a half, we’ve got to be very careful not to give too much to the other side—”

Heather said, sharply, “And you think they’re the other side.”

“Well, we don’t exactly agree on who’s the government—”

“Yes we do—or we will if you and Cam both keep your stupid eyes on the prize. You’re both caretakers. Your job is to keep things together till the real government arrives. And the real government of the United States isn’t going to be elected till twenty months from now, or take power until three months after that. You and the other caretaker are having coordination problems. It’s not a civil war unless the two of you decide to have one—and if you do, now that is disloyalty.” She surprised herself with her tone; maybe I just don’t like the idea that I can be bought for a couple reminiscences about college and a can of pineapple juice.

“Have you changed your mind? Have you decided that Directive 51 trumps the Constitution, too?”

He isn’t pulling off the et-tu-Brute/must you betray me with a kiss act nearly as well as he thinks he is. Crap, now he’s little old lost King Lear asking me to prove I love him the most.

She forced her voice to stay low and even. “Graham, we threw Shaunsen out for suppressing a journalist. Now you’ve done it—the same one that Cam jailed—and you’ve all had the excellent reason that the country needed to be secure, so the leader needed to be secure, and after all this was just going to be temporary, and all that. I’m still in the intel loop. I know you’re slowly moving troops forward, a station at a time, along the transcontinental rail lines, and Cam’s doing the same thing from the other side; you’re both deliberately running the risk of having American troops killing other American troops to establish who gets control of Jesus Junction, South Dakota. We’ve already had a skirmish between the Army and the Marines. Cam is turning the Southeast into one big Army base—”

“And I’ve sent letters of protest—”

“And you’re turning the Northwest into one big social services bureau or maybe high school. You’re both trying to nail down your pet things before the new government can make any decisions, sending every signal that they’ll have to abide by the decisions you’ve pre-made for them. But they’ll be elected, unlike either of you, and they should make the decisions. That’s how it works. The people are going to pick them to do what the people think should be done—not to carry out either of your sets of expert professional plans. That is, if you and Cam even permit the elections, and I’m seriously doubting either of you will.”

Graham looked like he’d been shoved backward against the wall and was trying to breathe. Well, good. Maybe I can hang out with Chris Manckiewicz in his cell.

After a moment, Weisbrod took off his glasses and cleaned them with a little glass atomizer and flannel rag from his desktop. “I suppose that I can see how it can look that way to you. From where I sit—”

“You’re sitting in the most comfortable—not to mention ego-stroking—job you’ve ever sat in. That gives you a great number of things, but perspective won’t be one of them.”

He set his freshly cleaned glasses down, blinking at her; it was one of his old manipulate-the-student tricks, and she wondered if he’d forgotten that he’d admitted to her that, since he wore bifocals, when he did that he did not see the other person more clearly but only as a blur. Finally, softly, he said, “Suppose that I were to try—fallible as I am, and subject to my own opinion and judgment—but suppose I were to just try to achieve a regularly elected, fully empowered government twenty-three months from now. Imagining that is my goal, what do you think I should do about Arnie Yang’s constant backdoor communication with the… with the other caretaker’s part of the government? What do you think I should do about the polarization and sense of struggle that is building daily?

“You don’t want me to try to bring Athens under our control. You don’t seem to be advocating that we surrender to them. And although ‘unite in favor of the elected government that will replace you both’ is a very nice sentiment in the long run, I don’t see that it tells me what to do this week. So let me put it squarely in your court. What should I do about the present circumstances?”

“Start with what you’re doing. Send Arnie and me to Pueblo, and give wholehearted support to the experiment, and if Cam is letting you have all those home-built radars, thank him and ask him for all the data he gets.” She leaned forward. “Expand my mission to the GPO in Pueblo, call it something like the Reconstruction Information Development Center, some broad title that lets us throw our weight behind everything that can re-unite the country, and put us in charge of getting every kind of information the country needs and getting it to everyone who needs it by every means we can. Support us as much as you can and challenge the boys in Athens to give us even more support, but let us have our independence from both of you.”

She had been surprised about her anger at Graham before, but she was double-surprised by her enthusiasm for an idea she had only thought of that moment.

He put his glasses on again, and said, “More beer for me. Do you want more juice? Pineapple again? Or I’m saving a couple small bottles of orange.”

“Whichever you’d rather give me. I take it we’re going to talk about the possibility of setting up what I have in mind for Pueblo rather than you pressing a button and bringing in people to straitjacket me and take me out the back way.”

“Yes we are.” He handed her another can of pineapple juice, opened a beer for himself, and said, “You’re behind the times, by the way. If I wanted you arrested and taken out privately, there’s no bell-and-buzzer system for me to use—too hard to maintain it. I’ve got a concealed string to a bell downstairs under my desk.”

She held the can of juice up in salute. “Modern times.”

“Modern times. May we get back to good old soulless technology as soon as we can.” They both drank reverently, savoring the remnants of the old civilization. “Actually I like what you’re proposing, but the name’s got to change—that acronym would pronounce like ridick, which would be an invitation for puns on ridiculous. We’ll call it the RRC, the Reconstruction Research Center—now there’s a golden expression, that’ll let you do anything. Anyway, a third power in the middle of the continent—one that has people’s loyalty but not an army—could be an honest broker we could call in for misunderstandings, and not only do a lot of good, but do it in a way that caused people to attribute it to the Federal government—basically build up a reserve of good will for that elected government in 2027. It would tend to keep Athens honest, and I’m sure they’d say it will help to keep Olympia honest. Maybe in the long run, it would be easier for both this government, and the Athens government, to gradually cede influence to it. I see many advantages. Futorologically—”

“Now that’s an awful word.”

“It was inevitable once we let futurology be coined.” The oil lamp was suddenly leaping high, casting bright flashes of red and yellow on his pale skin, and as he leaned forward and dimmed it, the swift-falling shadows cut deeply into his face until he seemed a million years old. She wondered whether any part of the effect was deliberate. “Look, here’s the thing. Given a real choice, the human race will rebuild technological civilization; the knowledge is widely distributed and people know they want it. But the way Daybreak has hit us, very likely there won’t be anyone left alive who really remembers our world by the time they’re anywhere near being able to make it over again. And besides the biotes are alive and the nanoswarm might as well be; we can’t exterminate them any more than we ever could cockroaches or rats. The new world will live with them all the time, one way or another.

“So the new world will have to have the idea that there can be a future, different from today, and that it can be better. A future that will be built more consciously, not because people are smarter or better, of course, but just because they’re aware. So we’re going to inject you—and a little band of ex-futurologists—into one of the early, nurturing streams of information where the new civilization will be taking root and growing. You’ll… I don’t know, suffuse it with the future-oriented perspective. I think that in the long run I will cast a longer, better shadow on history through that than I am apt to do through anything I do here—not that I intend to stop trying here.” His smile was as warm, wry, and welcoming as she remembered. “Or in short, Heather, I’m going to play you the dirtiest trick of all. I’m going to give you exactly what you just asked for, and more.”

“More?”

“You’re right that the President of the United States has simply no damned business at all arresting and holding a journalist without trial, which is exactly what I’ve done with Chris Manckiewicz. Absolutely right about that, you know. But on the other hand, I can’t let him run around loose in the capital, either. On the other hand, Pueblo is going to be the continental center for distributing information for at least the next few years; and we both know that the government ought not to have a monopoly on information, eh? So I’m going to release Chris Manckiewicz into your custody…”

“Oh, crap,” Heather said. “And he’ll have the whole train trip to interview me.” She clinked her juice can against his beer. “You’re a treacherous old bastard, Prof.”

“Let’s just hope I’m an effective treacherous old bastard,” he said, answering her toast.

They might have ended the conversation there, but they had drinks to finish, the lamp’s glow was warm and friendly, and they were in more comfort and safety than they had been accustomed to, so they talked late into the night, almost none of it about business.

^{ONE MONTH LATER. ANTONITO. COLORADO. 8:30 P.M. MST. THURSDAY. MARCH 6.}

Today had been an extra-long day; Jason had gotten up at the break of dawn for a day of assigned labor on the repair project for the rail line to Alamosa. When completed, it would give Antonito a connection through Walsenburg, over on the east side of the mountains, to the rest of the country. The newly organized Antonito and Northern Railroad (in which Jason proudly held nineteen shares of stock, one for each day he’d worked) should have restored the line so that a steam engine could run at speed over it by the end of the summer, and the enthusiasts up at the Railroad Museum in Golden thought there might be a locomotive they could use on it by then.

Meanwhile, filling and leveling a roadbed with picks and shovels was hard work, but it paid well, and Jason not only enjoyed the share-per-day program, he was thinking of trading five deer hides he’d cured for another two shares. The price will go up a lot once the railroad is running, especially because by late summer the valley will be producing a lot more food than it eats, and the trains will have a good reason to come this way. Might as well buy stock while it’s cheap; that’s the time to do it.

He imagined his brother, Clayt, laughing and clapping him on the back, and it felt good but sad; he wished his brother could be here to rag him about it.

Jason came home just as Beth arrived herself, fresh from a day of teaching textile crafts at Doc Bashore’s school. Many adults wanted those classes, so they were offered late in the day, and Beth was rarely home before dark. They did their usual hi-honey-I’m-home ironies as Jason lit the pre-laid large fire in the woodstove; then he pumped three big kettles of water and set them on the back of the stove. “I’ve been working on the railroad, all the live-long day,” he said. “Hey, there’s a song idea. But while I’m thinking up the song, I want a hot soak.”

“Good plan. Soak some of that off and you might score with a hot schoolteacher, especially if you let her take a quick splash in the tub first, before it’s half sweat from you.” She pulled down the pizza pan from the warming rack they’d built over the stove; the dough had risen, and it would be ready to bake as soon as the oven was hot, in about forty minutes. Meanwhile, they each had a bottle of Coors—bottled beer was fairly durable, especially in an unheated winter, and there had been plenty of it in the area on the day of Daybreak—and a slice of black bean bread with goat cheese. As the fire caught and began to warm the small converted garage, they stripped down to underwear for comfort, and Jason contemplated a couple more beers; some elk, goat cheese, and home-canned-tomato pizza; and a hot bath, and thought, Well, this is more like what I had in mind for Daybreak. If I could ignore all the corpses I guess I might feel all right about it.

“Did you see the new Weekly Pamphlet down from Pueblo today?”

“No, there’s not a lot of reading time out there. Has someone come up with a way to make gopher meatballs taste better?”

“The people in Pueblo are geniuses, Jason, but that would take more than genius.”

The Pueblo Weekly Pamphlet was widely mocked and derided, and just as avidly read. Realizing that it might be a long time before people could reliably write to request free information, and probably even longer before an old-fashioned paper catalog could be prepared, the good scholars of Pueblo looked for anything potentially useful in surplus in the warehouse, and once a week, sent out a pile of pamphlets in rough proportion to the population of the towns that had subscribed.

The pamphlets were whatever happened to be possibly useful in the America of today, and to take up too much room in the warehouse of yesterday: how to hand-sew a shirt from scratch without a pattern, how to maintain a compost heap, and so on. People had laughed when they received “Fun Indian Crafts for Boys and Girls 10-15” until they discovered it had directions on making moccasins. Some of the pamphlets must have been eighty years old—the one on laying out a victory garden probably was—and people laughed at the silly graphics and odd social assumptions of the past, but the pamphlets were read eagerly, passed from hand to hand, and their recipes and procedures recopied into notebooks; the interpretation of some of their directions could provide a whole evening of conversation nowadays. (“When they say to cull the runts in the baby rabbits, can we still eat them, just as long as we don’t let them breed?”—Jason remembered two guys arguing about that for most of an afternoon while they dressed deer hides together.)

“This one’s from the wrapper,” Beth said. “So it’s a bigger deal.” Each bundle of pamphlets was tucked into the wrapper, a folded sheet of newsprint, on which were printed all the government announcements from both Athens and Olympia. They double-wrapped each package of pamphlets, since wrappers were printed front and back; the receiving towns posted the wrappers somewhere everyone went: the town hall if there was one, the general store for towns that had been able to maintain private commerce, the town dining hall for those which had not. People stood in line to read the wrapper with a pencil and pad at hand; there might be any number of possible things, from a call-up of reservists for a particular year to the offer of a position of postmaster in a neighboring town. Decoding the wrapper was another source of conversation—did the search for former commodities investors mean that futures markets might re-open? Did the request for information about aircraft near Austin, Texas, mean enemy reconnaissance, an eccentric inventor, or an attempt to find a person maliciously spreading rumors? Did the request for desks and chairs in the Denver area mean some Federal offices would be opening there?

“So…” Jason said, “what’s the news?”

“They want former Daybreakers to come to Pueblo and be studied. It says ‘No one will be investigated, arrested, or punished.’ They’re looking for people who have turned against Daybreak and would like to help undo it.”

“And that’s us. If we want to do it.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel?”

“I love life here,” Beth said. “I got friends, we got our own comfy place. And my wrist ain’t all the way healed yet, and it’s a long, hard, dangerous walk, and… but we said it, Jason, we said it ourselves, we said it all the time all winter, we said we wanted to undo Daybreak, it was all a big mistake.”

He sighed. “Yeah. Well, for tonight it’s hot fresh pizza and a hot bath.”

“And a hot schoolteacher.”

“You see what a lucky bastard I am. But, yeah, look how warm and comfortable we are. Life seems, I don’t know, more meaningful, I mean, the work we do really matters to people we care about, and I kind of find myself thinking that maybe Daybreak was a good idea after all. Except for everyone we killed, of course. And all the sadness and physical misery and people dying too young.”

“I can’t even tell if you’re being sarcastic.”

“Me either. If the oven’s hot enough, let’s put the pizza in, and open another beer. We’re not going to decide tonight.”