The Last President

^{2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 4:30 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 2026.}

“Even back before,” James Hendrix said, “spring snowstorms weren’t unusual around here.” Outside, stinging sleet sprayed across the old corn snow and mud patches of James’s yard. “Look at that, it’s still a couple hours till sunset and it’s dark enough for lanterns.”

Beside him, Leslie also stared out at the tumbling, billowing gloom, then hefted the jug. “Another round all around? Still an hour and a half till classes start.”

“Sure,” James said. “It’ll lift the mood, or deepen it.”

“Sticking to water,” Heather said.

“We have that too.” Leslie filled their glasses and Phat’s. “To being warm and dry, and having something to think about, and sharing it with others.” She sat, and Wonder scrabbled around to lay his head in her lap. “Seriously, General Phat, you’ll be fine. I’m no kind of a teacher, and James is a dusty old pedant, but the adult students keep coming back because it’s a frontier town with too much work to do. Learning stuff is a chance to lift up their heads and feel human now and then. And you’ve got a great subject. I mean, ancient history, right? They can just listen and read, nobody’s life is hanging on whether they remember anything, but they’ll feel like today they were more than muscles turning wheels.”

Heather looked up from playing with Leo on the floor. “Leslie’s right. Everyone is tired after a full day, they’ve mostly just come from mess hall and bath shift. So their bodies are exhausted but comfortable, and their brains are starved.”

Phat yawned. “I still feel like, how is this relevant? An old man’s favorite stories about Greeks—”

“Who were cold and hungry and in danger a lot, and trying not to let barbarians smash everything, and making time to enjoy life anyway,” James said. “How is that not relevant? And besides, people who work too hard and long don’t want to hear more about work, or that life is futile. They want some heroic adventure.”

Leslie smiled dreamily. “In books, you mean. That hard work they’re escaping from is how we’re coping with being in deep shit, a.k.a. adventure, and not giving up, a.k.a. being heroic.”

“Touché, Leslie.” Phat shook his head, smiling. “In Peloponnesian War Athens, I’d’ve wished I could just stay home, read Homer, and ignore Alcibiades, who was as big a character as anyone in the Iliad. Now that we have a larger-than-life but despicable hero striding around the stage—”

James said, “I don’t really know Grayson well enough to despise him—”

“I despise him enough for all of us, and I notice you had no trouble figuring out who I meant.”

“But you still think he’s a larger-than-life hero?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s the problem, and why he scares me.”

Heather looked up, frowning. “I thought I was following your chain of thought till right now. You’re worried about him being heroic?”

“Yeah.” Phat’s tone seemed like an extension of the icy wet spray, now turning twilight gray, outside James’s window. “Despicable, we can deal with. Plenty of our allies are pretty bad human beings but we just use’em and watch’em, same as they do with us. But look at Grayson. Look how he’s reorganized his force from a mission to clear two big river valleys to a totally different mission, invading enemy territory and forcing a decisive battle. And he did that in less than eight weeks. That’s on par with Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon, maybe.” His gaze was lost in the storm intensifying in the dimming light. “He’s been brilliant. People may not have my feel for the technical aspects, but they sense that brilliance.

“When they look at that, they’ll think he damned well deserves to be president, and you know, they won’t be completely wrong. In any fair election, he’s very likely to win. We’re impaled on a classic fork—something else Caesar would have recognized. If Grayson hadn’t won so far, right now Daybreakers would be cutting the country into vulnerable enclaves full of refugees, and we’d have lost most of our least-damaged areas; non-tribal society might not have lasted another five years.

“Now, maybe, thanks to the brutal mauling he gave the Daybreakers in the Ohio Valley, the main danger is past, and he can close the deal by midsummer, get us ready to retake the Lost Quarter the year after, turn all the curves on all those social-welfare graphs back upward.

“But here’s the fork: we had to back him to the hilt and make sure he won, because the stakes were pretty much whether or not there would be civilization on this continent. We still have to; he broke three tribal hordes but the other eight are only turned back, not gone yet. So he’s now our greatest visible hope, and a proven winner. If he confirms that by winning the Wabash campaign—and there is every likelihood he will—then no one, no one, no one is going to beat him in the election. You better believe that fork was deliberate.

“And it gets worse. My guess is that Grayson’ll be a big success as president, at least if ‘big success’ is defined as ‘getting what he tries to get.’ At the end of his first term we’ll have an established church, a military that totally ignores the courts and Congress, a political police enforcing blasphemy laws, a licensed press—and clean streets, trains that run on time, and shiny schools full of very polite children. If he loses, we’re screwed, but if he wins, we’re really screwed.”

^{4 HOURS LATER. ANEGADA (FORMERLY ONE OF THE BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS). 3:15 AM ATLANTIC TIME. FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2026.}

“What we got to worry about, that coral heads all round inside the reef,” Bartholomew said to Captain Highbotham. “You sure you rather not waitin’ on sunrise?”

“No, I’m not sure,” she said, “but I’m guessing they think we can’t do this in the dark, so dark will help our attack more than it will help their defense.”

Anegada had been a pirate base in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and now it was one again. Highbotham and the St. Croix militia had known the pirate base must be within a hundred miles or so, but the islanders of 2026 had been up against the same problems as those of 1726: once a ship was over the horizon, it could turn to head anywhere.

Besides, for the past eighteen months, the islanders had not had time to chase pirates. Fiberglass and plastic hulls, plus nylon fishing nets, lines, and sails, had turned fuzzy and blue and fallen apart. Magnetos, motors, and antennas had buried themselves in dense white spikes and feathers of metal salts, their spoiled rubber belts and hoses falling off beside them, leaving no way to pump the fuel that had suddenly become foul cheese. Even plywood had broken apart as the glue between the layers deteriorated, and asphalt roads had crumbled as some biotes acquired a taste for bitumen.

People who had spent years demonstrating traditional crafts for tourists back before, but had never had to really live by them, taught as much as they knew to everyone else, and eventually enough skills and knowledge had made it through the harsh sieve, but it had been a hungry time.

NSP-8, along with the loan of Bret Duquesne as pilot/mechanic until he could train enough local crew, and an adequate stock of biodiesel obtained by bartering three tons of scrap metal to an Argentine clipper, had enabled them to start scouting the neighborhood by air—slowly, because NSP-8 cruised at fifty miles per hour, topped out at twelve thousand feet, and could stay aloft for about four hours.

Ten days ago, flying over Anegada at “high altitude” (which would have been low altitude two years ago), Duquesne had spotted the characteristic semicircular outdoor theatre that Daybreaker tribes always built to perform The Play of Daybreak, and the burned pile of cars and trucks that had probably been part of an early Daybreak celebration. The next day, with a spyglass from the observer seat, as Duquesne ducked in and out of clouds with the sun at their back, Henry had positively identified three known pirate vessels, confirmed a large tent city around the burned-out tourist area, and found no visible fishing boats.

Strangely, too, a small general cargo ship was grounded on the beach, displaying a sun-faded red cross on its side, like a hospital or aid ship. No other island had been visited by any sort of aid ship, and why would one go to an isolated, barely populated island surrounded by complicated coral reefs, when dozens of equally desperate populations could have been reached more easily?

Just one more mystery to be resolved, along with where the original couple of hundred Anegadans were: Enslaved? Murdered? Joined the pirates?

The possibility of innocent prisoners or hostages, and the impossibility of bombing every important target in less than about fifteen sorties that might take a full week, had forced Highbotham to decide for an invasion that they had to hope would be a surprise. Because if they get as much warning as we got against them a few months ago, they’ll kick our ass at least as bad as we kicked theirs.

The sea was so calm, and the breeze so light, that they furled sails and deployed long sweeps early. For half an hour, they rowed as swiftly as could be kept silent; then they slowed to use the sounding line. In the bow of each boat, two big guys with poles stood by to keep them off the coral heads, whispering depths back to the boat captains at the helms. At Highbotham’s soft drum signals, two boats peeled off and headed for the two pirate ships moored outside the reef.

An hour and a half passed as they worked their way through the reefs. Rowers changed places with resting fighters at twenty-minute intervals; most of the time the rowing was no louder than the breathing. The whispered depths and course corrections were as soft in the ear as a mother rabbit chuckling to the bunnies, but to Highbotham they seemed like screams; her brief backward flashes from a single, shielded candle lantern in the stern seemed like flashbulbs. But nothing moved on the island, and they drew nearer.

The dark line of Anegada along the horizon thickened and expanded into detail until the exposed girders of the never-to-be-finished hotel cut into the stars and the beached cargo ship bulged as a big, dark wedge against the white sand.

Still no alarm.

Perhaps the pirates hadn’t set a watch; maybe they were gone. Henry had estimated tent space for more than a thousand of them. Now Highbotham focused on the two pirate ships moored offshore.

On the nearer ship there were bright orange flashes, the dirty flames of big-bored black-powder pistols. An instant later flames roared up along the mainmast of the more distant ship, and now they heard gunfire. On both vessels, fire burst out in a dozen places. Faintly, distantly they heard metal clash on metal, then screaming and wailing.

Highbotham blew her whistle, shatteringly loud after such long anxious silence. Rested rowers moved into seats for the last sprint to the beach. Gunners raced forward to the bow chasers and rocket arrays.

It was almost a relief when they heard shouting and saw torches striking up. Marksmen in the bow of Highbotham’s lead boat brought down two of the torch holders.

Cries erupted all over the enemy camp. Shots flashed and cracked from Highbotham’s boats as targets silhouetted themselves. As the bottom of her boat shushed softly up the sand of the beach, a mob of pirates, hastily armed and not at all organized, was running down to meet them.

“Bow chaser, fire,” Highbotham barked, the final r cut off by the roar of the small cannon. The puff of blue-gray smoke swirled and cleared to reveal that their homemade chainshot had mowed a great swath of dead and the wounded through the howling mob.

Highbotham drew her pistols and held them over her head. “Follow me, stick together, stay awake. Rockets, launch at will, then arm up and catch up with us.”

She bounded over the side, pistols still held high in the air, and the blood-warm water came only to her lower ribs. Good, she had some firepower; she kicked forward, planted her feet with the water around her waist, and waded forward.

A few paces onto the beach, a woman came at her, swinging a hatchet wildly. She fired twice from her right pistol and hatchet woman fell, screeching and clutching her guts. Highbotham strode up the beach, her crew around her, those whose pistols had stayed dry during the landing working quickly, using up the four shots in the good hand pistol, switching over the one in the off hand, emptying it too, just like in drill, leaving any wounded behind them for the rest of the crew’s machetes and sharpened spades.

Another hatchet woman; were they some kind of cult? Wailing, filthy hair flopping around her, hatchet whirling over her head, the pirate rushed past one of the few remaining pistol shots, and straight at Highbotham.

Highbotham stepped back, pressed the rising hatchet hand back down with the flat of her cutlass, caught the wrist with her free hand, and struck up the arm into the neck in a hard backhand, dragging the blade out and feeling it rasp on the skull and spine. The woman fell dead at her feet.

“Stay close!” Her little force had made its way to the top of the beach already, and they were on the brink of the camp itself.

“Firebombs out!” She untied her own from the back of her belt. She was bellowing over deafening screaming, wailing, gunfire, drums, and horns; when had that started?

Her party rushed forward. Rockets had set many enemy tents and shelters on fire, and Highbotham’s crew ran between the blazes, fighting the few pirates who tried to stand against them, igniting any structure not already burning, then standing outside it to capture or slay whatever ran out.

Highbotham paused; her glass jar of paper cartridges was still sealed, so with an old piece of toweling she swabbed out the chambers of her Newberry revolvers and reloaded them. Around her, the night was lit with the orange glow of black powder, the earthy roar of pistols, and the higher, flatter snaps of rifle fire.

Reloaded pistols in her holsters, Highbotham again drew her cutlass and waved it to get the attention of other boat crews. She felt her face constricting into its familiar battle rictus. “Forward, forward, keep them running!” Using her upraised cutlass as a sort of crook, she shepherded her raiders forward into the heart of the pirate camp. I probably look a bit piratical, myself, she thought. Good thing I know we’re the good guys.

When the sun came up, plumes of smoke were rising from everywhere that had been the pirate camp, and from the pirate ships offshore. An American flag flew by the tables where Highbotham and her officers were sorting out prisoners as quickly as they could.

The saddest cases were the relatively uninfected ones with deeply committed friends or relatives. “Protocol would say put the not-too-deeps on our boats,” Gilead said, “and as soon as they’re over the horizon, hang the incurables and be done with it.”

“Reality would say that other forces have triggered riots by doing that,” Highbotham pointed out. “Of all the odd things, there was an article about that from Jenny Grayson, that bimbo that’s probably going to be the First Lady. She said after they freed a couple big camps along the Ohio, they tried separating out the curables and hanging their incurable relatives, and as it happened some of the curables had only stayed sane in the hope that the troops would show up and rescue their kids, or parents, or lovers, or friends.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. She was headlining it urgent, which I think was right, and it had General Hubby’s endorsement, and I think Chris Manckiewicz’s, and she did it as an open letter to James Hendrix at Pueblo.”

“But there’s no reply from him yet?”

“He forwarded it for my consideration with a big underlined use your judgment.”

“All right, so what do we do?”

“If someone promises to try to cure them, tie’em up, I guess, I mean we have room in the boats. Back at St. Croix we’ll let families stay together in the re-ed camp. Then we hope they get better. So—”

“Sir.”

She turned. She might have reprimanded the messenger’s extremely sketchy salute, but considering the boy looked about eleven, she simply returned it very properly. “Message?”

“Sir, Darren at First Platoon says they found a high priority prisoner and—”

“Take me there.”

The boy saluted again, with considerably better form and exuberant energy. Hah. Maybe Abby has a point about the power of example.

At First Platoon, she found Darren with an emaciated woman with weather-beaten skin. “Carlita,” Darren said, “this is Captain Highbotham. She’s the one who will be taking us all back to St. Croix to live. She’s very nice and you’ll be safe telling her everything.” His voice was high and a little singsong, the way people who don’t have much experience talk to a frightened child.

Carlita nodded, tears streaking down her cheeks. Highbotham realized this was a frightened child, just one who had been kept outside, starving and terrified, for two years. Darren said, “Carlita was here on Daybreak day.”

The girl wiped her face, nodding. Highbotham squatted down—Abby had taught her to do that with kids, get to their eye level. She waited for the tentative eye contact, and smiled a little, just enough, she hoped, to signal someday I’ll be your friend. “You know Darren needs you to tell me something, right?” she asked. “Just let it tumble out; don’t worry how you say it.”

“We were okay, right after Daybreak. We were. It was gonna be okay.” This was not grief but helpless rage. “Plenty to eat from the lagoon, and stuff still working ’cause we wiped everything good. Dad-daddy was making a thing for fresh water, a thingie, it was a still, that’s what the word was. And we were gonna, gonna grow vegetables, he said we’d be okay. And then they saw the ship with the red cross, and it was coming in, and our radio still working and they directed it in, and everything, they helped them come in through the reef, and soon, soon, soon as it came up on shore—they were yelling, nobody knew why it kept coming up onto the beach—all those people jumping out, over the sides, swarming out, they killed a lot of people, they said we were all plaztatic, they made us burn all the books and everything, and they dumped stuff from jars all over—”

“I knew you wanted to know what the story was behind that ‘Red Cross’ ship,” Darren said, very softly.

“You were right,” Highbotham said, folding the girl within her arms. Into the girl’s ear, she murmured, “You’re coming with us, and you’re going to grow up and help us push Daybreak back.” She pressed her hand against the girl’s cheek. “I hope you like math, sweetie.”

^{2 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 5:45 AM LOCAL SOLAR TIME. SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 2026.}

Lord Robert stood on the platform they had built over the gate in the main wall of his Castle, and raised his arms to salute the sunrise. Corny as hell, he thought, but this new world is pretty corny too.

On his right, the gathered armies of the tribes stood in their long, silent files, waiting his orders. Directly east of his platform, signaling their privileged position in his kingdom, three thousand of the Lake Erie tribals, who had made the brisk march overland from Luna Pier, raised their weapons as one. South of the platform, the main body, almost ten thousand strong, saluted as well.

He turned west and saluted toward the Old First—a handpicked five hundred of his own Castle Earthstone troops, whom he had built up into some kind of magic sacred band, Jedis, call them whatever you want, but he could sleep safely in the middle of them, and the rest of the tribal army was more afraid of the Old First than they were of the enemy.

Inside Castle Earthstone, the freed slaves and the remaining soldiers sat tensely alert, staying out of sight of the army outside, both to avoid provocation and to hide their numbers; another fifteen hundred Earthstoners would join the combined army as a rearguard, but only once most of it was safely away and headed downriver. It was never far from Lord Robert’s mind that Daybreak might yet betray him, and even if they did not, surely in the ranks of his new army of thirteen thousand there might be another Daybreak-immune person with ambitions.

Makes it real important not to snicker while I’m showing’em all my armpits, too. He stretched out his arms for a few more invocations.

Beside him, Nathanson stood solemnly at attention. It was one of the man’s chief talents. Glad I’ve got Bernstein to leave in charge.

“Soldiers!” Robert cried, trying to sound like the barbarian king in one of those silly old computer games. “Soldiers of Daybreak! Hear me!”

They cheered like a bunch of idiots. Wonder if back before these were the people that used to cheer for sound checks.

“Daybreak has brought you to me to be freed!” he shouted. “Freed into the True Daybreak, the Daybreak of Castle Earthstone, and because of what we will teach you, you will be victorious in battle, and free in spirit, and you will not just make the clean and healthy world of Daybreak, you will be blessed to live there! You were told you would build paradise, but I tell you now you will live there!”

Now the cheers were wilder and louder, and he had to wait for a while for it to subside. “You have been commanded to follow me and to do as I say, and I say, come and be free. Come and follow willingly, and when you return to your tribes, you will live the life Daybreak promised you.”

Robert had read the phrase “deafening applause” a few times; here it was in real life. He wondered if the people in the back rows were even hearing him, or just cheering to cheer.

After a few more shouts and blessings, with the sun full up, he proclaimed, “Follow me, and let’s free Mother Gaia once and for all! Follow me!”

A summer of war, be back in time for deer hunting, and then the world the way I always wanted it, he thought, the way I wanted it before I even knew what I wanted. Some times, Robert just had to believe some power had grabbed hold of him and was working through him.

The deep blue sky and the green sparkle in the air were like echoes of his soul as he raised his arms over his head, again and again and again, accepting cheers so loud he could feel them pulse against his face and his outspread palms.

^{THE NEXT DAY. RAS JEBEL (FORMERLY TUNISIA). 8:25 AM CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME. MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2026.}

The officers and social scientists of Discovery had thought it was a lucky thing to be invited to a major Monist public service last night; Ras Jebel was a center from which Monism was spreading around the Mediterranean, and here was a chance to hear several of the best-known Monist speakers, teachers, testifiers, and preachers, and to see how the new religion was presenting itself to the world.

Captain Halleck had suggested that anyone who was comfortable with the idea should attend, though after the experience of Menorca he also made sure there was a substantial guard on both the ship and the pier, with enough reserve for a rescue mission to the stadium if need be. But there had been no need. The evening service, lit by bonfires, torches, and lanterns, had been innocuous; the preaching about the love, peace, tolerance, and kindness of the One God, had been more calming than agitating; and the actual applications and commandments that might have roused any passions had been minimal. Most of the crew had been pleasantly bored, tuning it out and just enjoying being in a big public space with occasional music.

Whorf and Ihor, due to their anything-but-exalted position, had been expected to stay attentive and make note of everything. Now, at the breakfast meeting that was part seminar, part debriefing, on deck because the day was beautiful, they were trying to explain a few of the more surprising features.

“Well, we don’t really understand how it’s organized, but it’s more like a network than a hierarchy, and more like a tight-knit community than true anarchy,” Whorf said, feeling a bit foolish because he was sure he was wrong somewhere, but not at all sure where. “There’s a huge amount of communication going through Monist channels, compared to every other way, from western India and Pakistan all the way to the Atlantic. A lot of it is about conversions and ceremonies that went well and miraculous healings, like you’d expect, but there’s also a fair bit of information about everything from soccer and pop songs to epidemics and Daybreak-proof tech. Many people who are not Monist—at least not yet—are hanging around Monist Houses of the One just because it’s the best source of business and political news, and fashions and music, that there is.”

Ihor took over at that point, as they’d planned, and held up a brownish-yellow pebble of glass. “This is a Jerusalem Tektite.” He read a little stiffly from the paper in front of him: “When the Jerusalem superbomb went off, vitrified chunks of Jerusalem rained down all over South Asia. Because of how small atoms are and how thoroughly it was all mixed, a Jerusalem Tektite probably has a few atoms from the Wailing Wall, the Holy Sepulcher, and the Dome of the Rock, and all those other religious sites too. Every good Monist always has his Jerusalem Tektites with him, because they hold one in their right hand when they pray. The market for Jerusalem Tektites might actually be bigger than the coffee or tobacco trade—”

“I would like permission to come aboard and talk to your captain,” a voice said, politely enough but quite loudly. They turned to see a bearded, olive-skinned man in a worn-out three piece suit, standing by the guard on the gangplank. Just behind him, a quiet Asian man in a sweatsuit appeared to be staring into space. “Also I could not help overhearing and I wanted to correct something; you hold the Jerusalem Tektite in your dominant hand, left if you are left-handed, alternating if you are ambidextrous.” The three short, thin stoles, red, blue, and yellow, attested that he was Monist clergy. “I have a matter of some urgency to discuss with your captain. And if it is permissible, I would like to bring my student with me.”

“I’m the captain,” Halleck said. “Perry, you and these two young guys come along; I need some guidance if this is a religious matter.”

In Halleck’s cabin, the Monist preacher introduced himself as Samar Rezakhani. “I am in fact a Monist preacher and that is how I have supported myself as I walked and sometimes caught ships to move westward. But it is not about Monism that we need to talk. I was an engineer on the Iranian-Chinese lunar expedition project in 2019, and after Daybreak, until Teheran government collapsed about a year ago, it was my job to investigate whether our expedition was infiltrated or taken over by Daybreak, since so many nations have accused us of this, and since we had found evidence of Daybreak among some of the engineers and scientists.

“My colleague here, Tang Qan Qi, has traveled even farther, from the research center on the island of Hainan, overland through India, because he was trying to find me; before the Shanghai superbomb put an end to them, the Chinese government was very anxious to know if their moon expedition had been corrupted by Daybreak, and because Tang had been the liaison to the Iranian team, he was sent to see what he could find out from us. Alas, we had been shut down and dismissed by the time he arrived.”

“I do not actually require you to speak for me,” Tang said.

His accent was different from what Whorf had heard; it took him a moment to realize. “You must’ve gone to school in California.”

“Stanford,” Tang said. “Yes.”

“In any case,” Rezakhani continued, apparently trying to take the conversation back, “the important thing is this: the moon expedition did in fact conduct experiments with robotic prospector/samplers, but they were essentially just moving mechanical pigeonhole desks, which loaded a rock into each chamber and recorded where they got the rock. Nothing that was remotely capable of smelting, forging, casting, cutting, or making anything, let alone of self-replication. They were just rock gathering machines that could detect and pick up lumps of something valuable and ignore other rocks. Nothing like that could possibly have built the moon gun, unless it was completely reprogrammed and there were half a dozen other machines for it to work with.

“But the strange thing is, we did find a Trojan horse in the software. After the expedition left the little sampler-miner-prospectors on the moon, and they started roving around looking for resources and bringing things back to the assay labs, we were going to announce that we had a resource map once enough data had come in. But long before we got the chance, something took over the little robots, and they locked us out. And you know, if you look at the mass of one of those EMP bombs, and how often they seem to be able to drop them, it does sort of look like the robots are carrying the rocks to make it out of—the capacities are just about right. Except they couldn’t make a moon gun. A hundred good engineers—human ones, anyway—couldn’t make one.”

“What do you mean, human?” Halleck asked.

Rezakhani shrugged. “Just that. Back before, no power on Earth even had pure-fusion bombs working.”

“Let alone being able to build them via robots 400,000 kilometers away,” Tang added.

“None of us on the team had ever done anything one tenth as hard as a complex assembly from raw materials on another world. But something apparently could, and did. And it might have hijacked our robots to do it. At least five years before Daybreak day, too.

“Well, we had learned from picking up a couple of radio broadcasts that you have a Doctor Arnold Yang in the States, in the city of Pueblo, Colorado, who is also working on identifying and understanding the moon gun, and since neither of our governments nor our research institutions are still there, and the human race needs this problem figured out… here we are. We are quite prepared to work for our passage in order to see Doctor Yang and pool our knowledge with him.”

Halleck looked genuinely sad as he explained that Arnold Yang had been corrupted by Daybreak, committed treason on its behalf, and been executed.

Tang frowned. “That is amateurish.”

“Amateurish?”

“To have captured a brilliant person with deep knowledge who has been corrupted by Daybreak, and then to execute that person like a petulant child angry at a toy, rather than to keep them and try to turn them and harvest the information. I do not think our political police would ever have made so amateurish a mistake.”

Ihor nodded eagerly. Whorf was still trying to decide whether having amateurish political police was a good thing or a bad thing when Halleck said, “Either this is the most outrageous con game and tall tale in the history of Earth, or you’re telling the truth. And anybody who could lie that well wouldn’t tell this lie, I don’t think; a thousand more convincing and simpler ones are available that would also have gotten me to take you on board.”

“So we’re in?” Tang asked.

“You’re in. Whorf, Ihor, I think you probably have two more math tutors. Mister Whorf, find Mister Rezakhani some bedding, and put him in berth 104; Mister Reshetnyk, same thing for Mister Tang, berth 88.”

^{2 DAYS LATER. ABOVE THE INTERSECTION OF THE FORMER INDIANA HIGHWAY 14 AND INDIANA HIGHWAY 17. (DOMAIN OF CASTLE EARTHSTONE/NEW STATE OF WABASH). 12:30 PM LOCAL SOLAR TIME/1:15 PM EASTERN TIME. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026.}

The continuing cold and soggy spring had grounded Nancy Teirson for a couple of days, but today was bright and clear, and there was plenty to see. Two miles below her Acro Sport, Highway 14 was a river of tribals pouring west. She guessed that they extended a little less than seven hundred yards along the road, in loose ranks of six to ten abreast. She circled lower for a better look; rocks and arrows rose toward her, dropping back far below. The tribals were pumping their spears and axes up and down in rhythm; sorry, guys, the engine’s a little loud for me to appreciate all that ooga booga you’re doing.

She thought about buzzing them for fun, but the Acro Sport was unarmed and unarmored, and there was no sense pushing her luck. In the months after Daybreak, it had occurred to her that her old expensive hobby of building kit airplanes might be highly relevant to becoming rich in the new world, and she’d had the kit already, though she’d had to copy many parts in materials that stood up to biotes.

Her “all natural materials” Acro Sport was a great aerobatic biplane, a short-landing tail dragger she could set down on a short stretch of dirt road or even a large building roof, but building it without synthetic fabric, fiberglass, plywood, or plastic had added weight and cost structural strength, and her version of a bio-diesel flathead 8, running on modified kitchen grease in a fog of spraying lye, was badly underpowered. Poor old Acro, stuck as a mailplane with a part-time job in reconnaissance, she thought. Besides, right after Daybreak day, who knew I’d even want a mount point for a gun, let alone a bomb bay?

She circled, staying up out of arrow range, taking a good look before she turned away from them and headed back to the makeshift airstrip at Terre Haute.

Affectionately, she patted the cowling on the Acro Sport. This coming winter, she was supposed to spend a few months down at Castle Newberry, helping them start building the next-generation copy. You’re going to have grandchildren, she thought to her plane. Don’t you mind that you’re not a war bird; we’re going to win the war, get some peace, and go back to being a country where the mail must go through.

^{AN HOUR LATER. TERRE HAUTE, NEW STATE OF WABASH (FORMERLY INDIANA). 3:20 PM CENTRAL TIME. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026.}

“What did something like this?” Neville Jawarah asked Jimmy. Most of the old frame houses were burned down to the foundations, and the streets were a tangled maze of wind-drifted debris heaps higher than a man’s head with blown-clear pathways between them. The reek of the rotting asphalt was everywhere. But directly in front of them, a circle seemed to have been scoured, with an almost-neat edge; dunes of debris encircled it like rings around a black carbon bull’s-eye.

“Firestorms look like this sometimes,” a voice said behind them; they jumped into salutes, because it was General Grayson. He returned their salutes absently, talking to the officers around him.

Neville thought, Please God, don’t let anyone notice a general and ten other guys could just walk right up behind us. Also please don’t let me be that absentminded when we’re fighting. Also please let me get home. Especially also please help Jimmy keep his stupid wiseass mouth shut.

“…more like a fire tornado,” Grayson was explaining to the men around him. “Sometimes with so much fuel per acre you get a vortex with winds up to hundreds of miles an hour, and blast-furnace temperatures. I saw something like this one time in Teheran. What makes it so eerie is you never see a really bare space this big in a city, normally, so the sheer scale gets to you. Look at that office building and count windows—five storeys, right? So it’s—”

“My dear God.” The voice was deep and resonant; Neville recognized Reverend Whilmire from mandatory chapel. “This circle must be ten times as big as it looks.”

“Worse than that. Your eye wants it to be about a block across, and it’s more like fifteen, and that works out to maybe fifty times as big as your eye tries to estimate.” Grayson glanced at the patch on Neville’s sleeve. “Pullman Militia?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If this firestorm happened in the part of Pullman that’s still inhabited, how much would be left?”

“Not much, sir.”

“We have to beat these assholes because if we don’t”—Grayson’s arm swept out toward the empty space in front of them—“somewhere in there, Mom’s house. Got that, soldier?”

“Got it, sir.”

“Well, I’ve kept you from working long enough, your sergeant’ll be looking for you. Carry on.”

“Yes, sir.”

The general and his officers were long out of earshot, and Neville and Jimmy were pounding a post into the strangely soft, crusted black dirt of the circle, before Jimmy said, “You sure said ‘Yes, sir,’ a lot, there, Nev.”

“He’s a general. It’s what they’re for.”

“Yeah. Anyone ever tell you you’re a kiss-ass?”

“Yeah, you. All the time. But since we got here, nobody’s told me I’m getting a lash on the butt or time in the stockade.”

“I do believe you frightened those boys,” Whilmire said, as they rode north.

Colonel Goncalves, the commander of the President’s Own Rangers, fluffed his long gray beard. “The general also made their day. Frightening attention from authority makes a young man stand straighter and try harder.” He grinned.

Grayson thought of Jenny’s private nickname for Goncalves, Santa the Hun, and grinned back. “Just reminding them that even this far away, they’re still defending their town and their family. Which they need help remembering.”

Whilmire frowned. “Obviously you saw something else I didn’t.”

“Those two gave off the not-subtle aroma of having been sent to mark trail as a punishment for doing something stupid,” Grayson explained. “They were out away from the main body, and out here that means ‘in danger.’ But they were slumped over, looking at their feet, and dragging themselves through their work. I mean, honestly, sneaked up on by a whole pack of brass?” Grayson’s smirk was as annoying to his father-in-law as it was to anyone else. “I guess I felt sorry for them too. Being sad sacks in a pretty good army must suck. But if loser-ness could be screamed and punished out of them, their CO would’ve done it by now. So I figure, remind’em about Mom’s house.”

^{THE NEXT DAY. RUINS OF MONTEZUMA, NEW STATE OF WABASH. 3:30 PM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 2026.}

At first Larry Mensche thought someone had tied a piece of firewood to the lamppost on the former US 36 bridge across the Wabash. But it was a naked corpse, covered with pitch.

The eye sockets were empty. The hair was matted into a slick cap on the skull. The face was distorted, as if it saw something horrible on the horizon. A sign had been wired around its legs:

Steve Ecco, scout for the RRC, sent here last summer. Betrayed by Arnie Yang before he ever got here. Captured and tortured to death by that half-ass warlord who now called himself Lord Robert.

The right thumb was missing. Pauline Kloster had described how Robert had battered it off with a hammer and cauterized it with hot solder. The strangely clean emptiness of the eye sockets, so unlike what a bird would do, was probably because they had been burned out with a hot screwdriver while Ecco was alive.

Larry whirled at the soft cough.

Freddie Pranger was there, with Chris Manckiewicz, and Roger Jackson, and other scouts Larry knew less well. “You got here,” Freddie said. “We were kind of waiting for you, ’cause we’d heard you were coming this way too, and we knew you knew Steve.”

“Yeah, I did. Pretty well. And all of you?”

Roger said, “He was the first guy who trained me as a scout.”

Chris Manckiewicz added, “And he wanted to be a great scout more than anything else. If it hadn’t been for him, Pauline would never have escaped, and she was our main warning about what was brewing at Castle Earthstone. And we all know Steve was as good as any of us, and it wasn’t lack of skill or bad luck.” The words “Arnie Yang” seemed wrong to speak here.

“So we were thinking,” Freddie said. “They sent us scouts to make sure the bridge was open and secure, and we did that, and to hold it till the army gets here later today, and with no tribals for miles around, we can do that. We have some time on our hands, and Steve Ecco was a scout. Scouts should bury him.”

Larry nodded. “Let’s put him somewhere where he can rest easy. Maybe facing east, toward the enemy?”

Freddie nodded. “Might make sense, and it would honor him, but I kind of think about times I’ve been scared and alone, and I thought he might want to face toward Albuquerque.”

The other scouts looked at each other.

“Where his kids and their mother live,” Freddie said. “Home. Where we all wish we could go.”

^{3 DAYS LATER. PORTA CORSINI (AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE RAVENNA CANAL), ITALY. 4:30 PM CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME. SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2026.}

So far north, and so close to the solstice, the sun rose before 5 a.m., but Whorf was already awake, casting, sounding, and calling as Discovery made her way into the canal that joined Ravenna to the coast. A few minutes before the graying light had made it unnecessary to hold the depth line up to the lantern; now at Whorf’s call of “five fathoms,” Captain Halleck ordered, “Heave to, then, and drop anchor when she’s steady.”

They were in Ravenna precisely because there was nothing there: the city lay within the southern edge of the Dead Belt produced by the North Sea bomb.

Lisa Reyes found most other radiation sources negligible, and background tritium down to tolerable levels, but recommended they not stay long.

A shore-scouting party came back with an odd request: please detach Whorf from drawing microorganisms for Lisa, and send him to draw what looked like a long list of places that began with “San.”

“Feel like I’m in California,” Whorf muttered.

Ihor went along to keep watch while Whorf drew.

As Whorf was rolling up his sketch of San Vitale, Ihor asked, “May I look at this one?”

“It’s not really finished, I’m going to get some of it done on the ship, but now I remember enough.”

“But may I see?”

“Sure, but it’s not finished.”

Ihor looked for a long time. Then he wanted to see Whorf’s sketch of the tomb of Gallia Placidia, and said, “I see it now because you showed it to me, Whorf. It is so good that the first voyage I have where I get to look, I have you to show me how to see.”

“Dude, the philosophy is getting deep around here. Our shoes are going to be a mess.”

By the end of the day, Whorf had made a few dozen sketches, most not finished but all at the point where he thought he could finish them well enough from memory later. He was surprised how many people wanted to see them. “It’s just draftsmanship,” he said. “I know just enough about art to know I’m not an artist.”

“They’re still having a hard time redeveloping cameras with film that works and lasts,” Lisa Reyes said. “By the time someone gets back here with a working camera, this might all be lost—tribals might come up from the south to knock it down, more fires might sweep through the city, anything. So this is the last chance humanity gets to see what it looks like, and we all see through your eyes and hand, Whorf. I don’t know about art at all, but I know this: you might be our last view of Ravenna. And if you’ve been listening to your history tutor at all, this was the last place where the Western Roman Empire sort of guttered, gasped, and slid before finally giving up.”

“Sort of like Pueblo today,” Whorf said.

^{THE NEXT DAY. RUINS OF LAFAYETTE, NEW STATE OF WABASH. 4:30 PM EASTERN TIME. MONDAY, MAY 4, 2026.}

“Sir,” the major beside him said, “there’s a scout approaching; he just came out of that side street—”

Grayson looked up from the tattered paper street map of Lafayette, Indiana, on which he’d been trying to place the only standing street sign in sight. He did not need to raise his field glasses to see which scout it was; he could pick out Larry Mensche’s awkward seat on a horse clear to the horizon, or possibly from the moon. There’s a man with an incentive to see the bicycle redeveloped, he thought.

As soon as it was practical, Mensche dismounted and walked to them. “Sir, a party of about two hundred tribals is digging in at Battle Ground State Park; looks like they’re preparing a fortified camp for a much larger party. As of about three hours ago, they had some breastworks up along the edge of a rise, they were building some fires, and they were clearing junk out where the roof of the visitor center had fallen in, turning it into sort of a fort, I guess. There’s a creek—”

“On the west of the hill?” Grayson gave him that strange smile, the one that always made people uncomfortable.

“Exactly, sir.”

“I was kind of thinking this might be where they’d meet us. Maybe they have a sense of history, or maybe it’s just that it’s about the only defensible piece of ground near the confluence of the Tippecanoe and the Wabash, but either way, they are setting up camp exactly where William Henry Harrison defeated Tenskwatawa.”

“You think it’s on purpose?”

“Definitely. I just don’t know what purpose it’s on. It’s the only high, dry ground around here with covered access to water and there’s a ton of symbolism too.” Grayson scrawled on a sheet of paper. “Messenger, take this to Colonel Prewitt at the TexICs’ HQ, and bring me back word that he’s received it. Urgent.”

“Sir.” The messenger mounted and galloped away.

Goncalves said, “You’re sending the TexICs to raid them while they’re setting up?”

“Yes. That force of four thousand of them coming down the Tippecanoe that Nancy Teirson has been shadowing was well below Monticello at nine this morning; they’ll be down here at the Tippecanoe battlefield before dawn tomorrow. Half a day behind them there’s another horde that size, and when Quattro bombed them at Winamac he didn’t think he had slowed them up at all, so figure they’ll be here by noon tomorrow. Larry, did that force at the battleground park look like they were working hard?”

“They were digging trenches and throwing up breastworks like maniacs, sir.”

“Well, there you have it. By noon tomorrow, which is about the soonest our main force could get there, they’ll be dug in up there with eight thousand fighters. At logistics and maneuver, this guy Robert is at least a very gifted amateur: he put together two forces the size of back-before divisions, and moved them a long way into a position where they’re a serious threat. Just in case he also turns out to have a knack for combat command, we’re not going to spot him any more advantages. I think the TexICs can get there by six tonight, and sunset’s not till almost eight. Plenty of time to smash up whatever preparations Robert’s advance parties have made. But once they do, a short regiment of cavalry doesn’t have the firepower to hold it against what’s coming down the Tippecanoe.”

“Sir,” Goncalves said, “I hope this doesn’t look like I’m angling for glory—”

“You’re ahead of me, Goncalves, and you’re right. Whatever it looks like, I need the President’s Own Rangers to get there before those first four thousand Daybreakers do, dig in, and hold that hill. I’ll push a couple of reserve regiments to try to reinforce you by noon, but I think three is more realistic. You’ve seen the same things I have: soldiers staggering till they fall asleep wherever they lie down. We’ll be lucky to get the main body moving any time before noon tomorrow, and I doubt they’ll be able to maintain route step, let alone anything faster. So, if you have to do it alone, can your Rangers get there before the Daybreakers and hold that hill till the main army gets there?”

“I would feel honored—”

“Goncalves, I know you’ll say ‘yes, sir,’ if I order you to, and die trying if you have to. If I asked you to take four guys and conquer Asia you’d say ‘yes, sir,’ and offer to leave two behind for a reserve. But physical reality counts for something too. You started off from Pale Bluff with an official three battalions, but in numbers you’re more like two. And you were the avant garde coming in here, so your troops are tired, even if they show it a lot less than the regulars and the militia. So I don’t need the answer from your pride, which I already know. I need your judgment. If I send you to do this, will our side still be holding the hill when I get there with the main army tomorrow evening? And will I still have a functioning President’s Own Rangers once you do that?”

Goncalves stroked down his belly-length beard slowly; Grayson had learned to respect it as the Don’t interrupt, I’m thinking hard gesture. “Candidly, sir, yes. If it’s not any later than sundown tomorrow. Just don’t be any later.”

“It’s a deal. I’ll make sure that whenever the TexICs send a report back it goes straight to you. Get going.”

Goncalves saluted and thundered away.

Grayson turned back to Mensche. “All right, I’ll send you after Goncalves in a minute, to give him the details, but while he’s kicking things into motion, you’ll have time to tell me the rest. So is anything else unusual about the Daybreaker force?”

“Looked well fed and healthy. No obvious slaves—everyone was armed, looked like they were carrying roughly equal loads, no whipping post. And the few that I got a close look at didn’t have that whacked-out expression most Daybreakers do.”

“Castle Earthstoners?”

“Roger Jackson’s heading over to investigate that right now, since he’s seen so many Earthstoners, but yes, sir, it looks like it. We’re not the only ones who are sending their best to that field.”

At their main encampment, in the old County Fairgrounds, Larry briefed Colonel Goncalves—though Larry privately thought of it as anything but brief. He was just glad that his memory for roads and terrain in general had become pretty good after more than a year of full-time scouting, because Goncalves and his majors and captains were a demanding audience. In between describing seemingly every tree and wall between here and the Tippecanoe battlefield, and answering even more questions when he failed to be detailed enough, he swallowed about a dozen pancakes and several venison sausages, the rations the cooks were able to put together quickly. “At least we’re missing the split peas with corn they’re going to lay out for breakfast tomorrow,” one of the officers said, cheerfully.

After two hours of interrogatory dinner, Goncalves said, “All right, make sure everyone’s ready. Plans to the lieutenants and sergeants. Nap till eleven. Moon’ll be up at quarter after eleven, we go as soon as we can see, or as soon as Larry can see and we can see Larry. Kit has to be together by then but make sure they use as much time as they can to sleep. We’re going to want to make most of the trip at double time.”

At loose ends, Larry drifted toward the “auxiliaries area,” which was the polite expression for “where we store all the not-quite military people who have nowhere else to bunk.”

Tonight, in the corner of the former dairy barn, the auxiliaries were the Reverend Whilmire, perched with his back to a window to cast the last light of the setting sun on his Bible, and Freddie Pranger, stretched on his back with his arms folded over his chest and his hat pulled over his face.

Larry nodded and lay down near Freddie; Whilmire asked, “Can I ask you something? I’ll try to be brief, I know you need to sleep.”

“It’ll have to be brief.”

“A great deal of what my son-in-law was saying to Goncalves went right over my head. I was just wondering what happened at the Battle of Tippecanoe, since it seems Jeff is basing so much of his thinking—”

Freddie Pranger said, “I spent years on all that frontier-history stuff, and I can tell you, so Larry can sleep. I’m not going out till close to dawn but he’s only got to moonrise.”

“Thank you,” Whilmire and Mensche said, simultaneously.

Decades as an FBI agent and more than a year as a scout had taught Larry to fall asleep instantly whenever he could, but he wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid hearing Freddie explain, “Well, back in 1811, the Army under Harrison won and the tribes under Tenskwatawa lost, so it’s a good site if you’re thinking American army and militia versus tribes. But the way Harrison won was, the Americans occupied that hill the tribals are on right now, which made them such a big threat that the Indians had to do something right away. So some of the Indians rushed to take back the hill, and when they got in trouble Tenskwatawa sent more in after them, and the Americans on the hill just kept beating the bigger and bigger forces the Indians brought in, and at the end of the day, the Indiana Militia had taken a lot more casualties than the Indians, but they still had the hill and the Shawnee Confederacy was wrecked forever. So that little hill is also a good place to break an army that’s trying to take it away from you. Precedents both ways, I guess you’d say.”

Larry firmly told himself the world was no different than it was before he’d heard that, and went to sleep.

“Am I going to be scared tonight?” Jenny asked.

“Have you ever been?” Grayson was sliding her robe off. “I’m sorry about having to rush, if you’d rather not—”

“It’s the night before a battle, baby, I want you, too, what if it’s the last chance or something terrible happens? And I don’t mind hurrying, I need my sleep too.” She turned and caught his hands in hers, moving them down away from her breasts. “But sometimes when you’re emotionally wound up, like you’re angry or sad or something big just happened, you hurt me, and if you’re really wound up, you don’t always stop when I say so. The night after you killed Cameron, remember? I had bruises for weeks.” She could feel the tension in his forearms, and perhaps he was just wrought up, or did he want to start hurting her? Was her fear making him worse? “I just don’t want to be scared tonight,” she said. “It was sexy back when I didn’t know you or love you yet, but now, I don’t want my demon lover anymore. I want Jeff.”

Something in his eyes looked so far away and sad that she felt safe letting go of his arms, and stroking his cheek. She felt a tear, and rubbed it gently, and was going in for a soft kiss when he shoved her down onto the pavilion floor, yanking up her nightie.

His eyes were as blank as a Greek statue’s or a store mannequin’s. He clasped her hair in one fist, forced her head back, and pried her legs apart with his thighs. He pushed in; he was very hard and she wasn’t ready yet. She grunted with pain. “Jeff, slow down, that hurts.”

He smiled that weird smile, and kept going; the twisted mouth and the flat expressionless eyes seemed like a mask together. The hand clutching her hair pulled her head back farther as he reared up on that arm. He’s watching himself hurt me, she thought.

With his free hand, he pinched and slapped her all over. She was crying and couldn’t breathe, snot running down her throat, making her choke and gasp.

She had no idea how long it took him to finish. As he did, he slapped her in all the sensitive spots, finishing with one on her face that made her head ring.

He pulled out and sat up beside her. She rolled over, curled up, trying to protect her sore body with her hands. “Don’t try to tell me you’re sorry, this time I’m not buying it, you meant to hurt me.”

“All right.” His voice sounded mechanical. “I love doing that to you. If you have any sense you’ll get rid of me. I will miss you terribly. You’re about the only real friend I’ve ever had. But if we stay together someday I will do something worse, and I think it would be better if you got rid of me.”

She shuddered with the force of her sobbing, but she also heard her own voice in her head, calm but desperately urgent. Jenny, be careful, get away. She checked to make sure she could move everything, and inside her fetal self-hug, she probed for sore ribs or abdominal pain, and found her cheek bruised but nothing broken. She forced her breathing to calm and began to gather her clothes.

“A long time ago,” he said, “I lost control of myself, and almost beat a girl to death. She was a little piece of shit whore, the kind of thing Mama told me I should use for my needs—”

Jenny finished yanking her sweatshirt over her head, afraid for the moment that her head was covered. “And I’m the kind you use for your career. Except when you use me for a piece of shit whore too.”

He turned to look at her, and even through her fury, she thought, Oh, shit, he’s Jeff again, now, and if I stay here he’ll get to me—and if he gets to me, I’ll stay.

“I really do love you, it scares me and… makes me angry, I get angry when I’m scared. I’m sorry.”

She thought, You are a dangerous nut job, and you are in charge of the army that is supposed to save civilization. And you are very likely to be the next President of the United States. And I’m not used to not being in love with you, at least not yet. “Jeff, I’m not saying I’ll stay, but I know you’re not dangerous after you have one of these… things. Not for a while. Usually. So tonight I’ll stay beside you, because I know you won’t sleep if I don’t, and the whole world is counting on you, and I care what happens to you. I might not ever sleep beside you again, though, are we clear on that?”

He was crying, but nodding. “Whatever you say.”

“After the battle, or as soon as there’s a spare minute, find a psychiatrist, tell them everything, do whatever they tell you to.”

“I promise. I want.” He stopped. “I don’t want.” Stopped again. “I don’t know.”

“Jeff, all of civilization is depending on you. I might be divorcing you next week, but you’ve got to win tomorrow. So get up in the morning and just do your duty. Do your best at it. I’ll stick around at least till the end of the battle, and I won’t go without saying goodbye. Now undress, and lie down here beside me.”

She lay fully clothed on top of the covers, holding his hand while he slept. After a while, she slept too.