The Last President

^{2 WEEKS LATER. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 2:30 PM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2026.}

Jenny Whilmire Grayson thanked the crowd and left the rostrum on the steps of the First National Church (the former University of Georgia chapel) knowing that she had given one of her best speeches, ever: just Christian enough so that her father’s disciples would not feel deserted; heavy on Army, patriotism, and honor for Jeff’s home crowd; enough quotes about restoring the Constitution for the Provi audience that would read the speech in the Pueblo Post-Times next week. And she’d written some good catchy phrases, and delivered them well.

Her father’s expression brought her up short. “Honey, I’m proud of you, of course—”

“But… ?”

“As we move deeper into the Tribulation, we also move the saving remnant of America toward its union with the Lord, and—”

“Daddy, I can tell you’re not speaking as my father, you’re intoning as the Chief Bishop of the Post Raptural Church—”

“Jenny, I am your father. You were always my smart, beautiful daughter, and I love you, but if you are going to be our First Lady, you have to be more than smart and beautiful.”

“What else did you have in mind?”

“America needs a First Lady who is a model Christian woman, because the President and First Lady, in a very important symbolic way, are the national mother and father—”

“Daddy, Jeff has had a vasectomy and nowadays there’s no way to reverse it.” Sorry about lying to Daddy, Jesus, but we will just have to wait for the ten-year shot that Mama got me when I went off to college to wear off, because there’s no counter-shot anymore. I guess once it does wear off we’ll say we’d been praying and the Lord saw fit to reload Jeff’s musket.

“I don’t mean literally, physically parents, I mean that you represent motherhood and fatherhood, in the same way that the President himself represents not just fatherhood but our Father in heaven, too. Ever since Kennedy, America has responded to filth in the White House like the boy who saw his father with a prostitute—”

“And you think I’m behaving like a prostitute around the National Daddy?”

It was a calculated tantrum; before he could gather himself to protest that he hadn’t meant that, she had pushed past him, and the guards had waved her into her husband’s inner office.

Jeffrey Grayson looked up. “Well. Your speech was brilliant, and you look unhappy, so I guess you talked to your father.”

Her chuckle was humorless. “Do you want me to be more of a good National Mommy?”

He shook his head. “I want you around. And in love with me. That’s first and second. Third, I want to know I’ve done my duty as an officer. And then, way down the list, but still on it, I want to be president.”

“And you think all that might conflict?”

“I think you’re already angry and I didn’t cause it.”

“True. But do you think I should go bake cookies like what’s-her-name?”

“Hillary Clinton? She got in trouble for saying that people expected her to. I’ll win with you the way you are. Or if I don’t, keeping your love is what matters to me anyway. Everything else is just what I do for a living.” He drew a breath and was watching her intently when he added, “Okay?”

He wants my approval. She smiled, and relished the relief in his eyes.

^{5 HOURS LATER. MANBROOKSTAT (FORMERLY THE AREAS SURROUNDING NEW YORK HARBOR). 8:30 PM EASTERN TIME. THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2026.}

The shiny cylinders and dull spheres resembled heavy children’s toys or mathematical demonstrations, but Jamayu Rollings felt like he was spreading out diamonds on the black velvet drape that covered the folding table.

Like the pale-skinned, smiling men facing him, Rollings wore a tuxedo. Beside him, the Commandant and his two Special Assistants were in dress uniform. The Special Assistants wore their shoulder holsters ostentatiously, as if to deter the Galway trade negotiators from lunging across the table and grabbing the ferromolybdenum, tungsten, and palladium. “We hope to have use for all these materials, soon, ourselves,” Rollings said, “but for the moment, truthfully, our labs and factories aren’t ready.

“These were all found in a specialty metals workshop just a bit up the river from Albany, undisturbed in their containers, with full paperwork. I don’t need to tell you that for the next ten years at least, no one on Earth will be able to refine any more, and if, let’s say, you have any people working on hydrogen-based energy tech, there’s no substitute for palladium.

“Gold, silver, or special barter are acceptable, but I won’t give credit. I’ll await your offer with interest, gentlemen. Anything else you’d like me to be looking out for?”

Dr. O’Ryan, who had spoken little till now, said, “We have a very acute interest in titanium, especially in sheets, but any piece larger than five kilograms. If you should happen to find anything like that on any future salvage expedition, you can notify the trade mission and have them send a message to my attention at the Recovered Technology Project in Galway.”

Rollings made a note in his pad. “Anything else, gentlemen? I should get out of Captain Carton’s way, as he has a lot of good stuff to show you too.”

“Excellent stuff, Captain Rollings.” Doyle, the Irish trade delegation leader, extended a firm handshake and a warm smile. “You’ll be hearing our offer within a few days.”

Rollings’s younger son Whorf stepped up beside him and slipped the samples into velvet jeweler’s bags with flair and reverence. I could have brought Geordie but he’d just have shoved our samples into bags, and never met the eyes of the Irishmen. Whorf’s got the I am the keeper of tungsten, and who are you? condescending stare down perfect.

God, I’m going to miss him so much. Time to tell him, though, keeping him in suspense wouldn’t be fair to anyone.

As Whorf took up the cloth from the table, Carton came in with his samples of salvage timber.

The Commandant walked Rollings to the ballroom. “Nice job, Captain Rollings. I think we’ll have a deal for your metals with them.”

“If they beat Discovery’s offer, sure. We’ll take the best deal we can get.”

“An excellent principle.” At the ballroom door, the Commandant added, “But I think it will turn out the Galway men can offer us far more than the rednecks for Jesus. Enjoy the party.” He clapped Rollings on the shoulder too heartily, and headed back to the conference room. The Special Assistants at his heels wheeled and closed up behind him. Over his shoulder, he added, “If you can persuade Uhura to save me a dance, it will be much appreciated.”

And if I can keep Uhura away from you, she’ll appreciate that, Rollings thought.

The Commandant’s engineering team had rigged the Ritz-Carlton ballroom with producer-gas lighting. The warm, brilliant glow, after so many months of candles and oil lanterns, could almost make you forget the sharp, dirty odor and the soot streaks on the wall above each light.

At his side, Whorf said, “Wow, a whole room full of people with clean clothes and a recent bath.”

Rollings choked on a laugh. “Thanks for that. The Commandant dropped me a big hint about your little sis.”

“I’d be just as happy if Uhura went home early,” Whorf muttered, looking down at the floor so no one could read his lips.

“Me too,” Jamayu said, also looking down. When he looked up, he was smiling again. “Let’s grab some free chow and then take a short walk outside; there’re details I’d like to go over. Unless, of course, I’m spoiling your chances to hustle the local ladies?”

Whorf snorted. “Dad, look around. The single ladies my age are not here to have fun. Any more than I am. Let’s get some of that stew.”

They found a table back in the shadows, and, wary of being overheard, concentrated on eating, watching their neighbors in tuxedos and long dresses dancing not-very-well to a still-not-very-good band. Rollings glanced sideways; Whorf had grown into a big, strong young man with a piercing, alert expression. Both men wore dreads, but whereas Jamayu’s were gray and rough, Whorf’s were black and glistening.

He’s not going to want to spend his good, vigorous years mining junk, Rollings thought, and resisting sadness, smiled broadly when he asked, “So, about that walk… ?”

In the lobby, they pulled on heavy coats against the fierce cold.

They were silent until they stood in the dark, far from where anyone could hear them, looking at the flaring gaslights and lanterns in the harbor. Outside that yellow-orange pool of light, beyond what had once been the western boundary of Battery Park, Rollings finally spoke, his voice low, his face pointed down at the icy rubble around his feet. “The Temper offer is real good,” he said, softly. “I didn’t tell the Commandant, but Captain Halleck sent a guy by on the down low this afternoon, and Discovery is offering cash and carry—they’re carrying enough gold and silver to pay for all our specialty metals, and they want to take them to Savannah once their repairs are done at the end of the month.”

“And it’s a good offer?”

“It’s excellent. I want to take it without bothering to hear what Doyle and his people offer. I’d rather be selling to the government of America than to those slick Irishmen.”

“Athens is one government of America,” Whorf pointed out. “They’ll want our metals for their labs at Castle Newberry. The Provis are just as American, Hanford probably needs those metals just as bad, and when a coffee clipper comes—”

“Discovery will leave before any other American ship comes in. And once I’ve got that metal on board Discovery, I won’t have it in my possession, for the Commandant to seize and tell me who’s buying it.” Rollings kicked at a scrap of steel. “That metal came from a government lab, so it belongs to some American government, and not this one. Because it’s obvious that the Commandant wants some deal with the Irish. Like he can just decide what to do after we did the work, and with stuff we retrieved at our own risk, from…” He shook his head, his arms rising with his shrug under his thick coat. “Back before, he was a plain old cadet at West Point.”

“Pop, back before, you were a dentist with an expensive boat, and I was a freshman in African-American Studies,” Whorf pointed out. “Daybreak hit, you had a schooner, and we made a good life. The Commandant had a military force, and he’s made himself a great life. We all feed off the wreckage.”

“True.” Rollings sighed, listening to the crackle of the water vapor in his breath freezing. “Cold out here. Let’s not stay too long. Look, if the metal is in my possession and hasn’t been sold yet, the Commandant can push that deal onto me with his thugs and their guns. I already might have to make some bad trades to avoid having him for a son-in-law. For that matter, he might want Uhura for something a lot less than a wife.” Rollings kicked the ground with his heel as if trying to bury the thought. “So, they’ve offered you a spot on Discovery.”

The name had magic. They both turned to look to where the handsome three-master was moored, gleaming in the ruddy gaslights on the pier. The ship was taller to the eye even than most tall ships, with her hull long and low and her superstructure raking back in a series of smoothed out, oblique steps; most of her was freshly painted a gleaming white that glowed gold in the gaslights, and her masts seemed to reach right up into the stars.

USS Discovery had been SS l’Esprit de Brest, offering the priciest of Caribbean sailing cruises. Back before, she’d been just finishing an overhaul, awaiting the crew that would never fly in to Savannah.

The TNG had rechristened Discovery as a science ship, because she had been designed for a minimal sailing crew and the old recreational spaces made decent labs, libraries, and sample storage. In addition she had ample room for a staff of fifty, who came from every intellectual center on the continent: the RRC at Pueblo, the Oregon Exploration Center at Eugene, the Scholar’s League at Santa Fe, the NASA remnant at Houston, and Stone Lab up in the Erie Islands.

On Discovery’s shakedown cruise up the coast to map the Atlantic shore of the Dead Belt, the winter weather had shaken her harder than they’d expected. Repairs would take a few weeks. Some crew were too injured or sick to continue; Captain Halleck had offered Whorf a chance to take over a berth as a “scholar-sailor,” bluntly describing it as “a chance to work as an Able Seaman and do homework, too.”

“So, do you think Halleck offered me the job because he wanted our metals?”

Rollings shook his head emphatically, stamping his feet to warm them. “Halleck made the offer to you before he ever saw or even heard about the metal. And he’s not a man to link a deal or take advantage, that Halleck. I’ve always prided myself on sharp unsentimental dealing, but now I find I’d rather deal with an honest Yankee who had a real commission in the old Navy than a passel of slick Irishmen and ambitious kay-dets.” Rollings tracked Whorf’s gaze as it reached out to Discovery. “Got to admit it,” Rollings said, softly, “I mean, look at her, she’s gorgeous.”

“Yeah.” Whorf sounded choked up.

“Whorf, I’m thinking about the family here. You know how we keep Ferengi stocked and ready to go, and we all know we might have to run for it any time. Geordie’s a good guy, but—and don’t you ever quote this to your brother—even though he can take Ferengi anywhere with enough water under her keel, I think he will always need someone to tell him where.

“Deanna’s no sailor and never will be, but she’ll run Ferengi Enterprises some day—from an office, someplace, like it should be run. If I’m gone, and your brother pulls any oldest-male privilege bullshit, you take Deanna’s back and make sure she keeps the company. So Deanna needs to stay here to inherit the company, Geordie needs to stay here to sail Ferengi, and Uhura needs to stay here because she’s young yet. And that leaves you, Whorf.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.” Whorf sighed.

“If anything happens to me, Deanna’ll need your judgment and maybe your gun. So promise me you’ll come home as fast as you can—if you hear of that kind of trouble.”

“You knew before you asked I’d—Wait, come home?” Whorf’s stare was almost comic. “Where am I going to be, Pop?”

Rollings thought, in my heart, like always, but he said, “The family needs somebody away from Manbrookstat, ’specially if we get into a major thing with the Commandant. You’ve got a fine mind and you’d like to see the big world before you settle down, and I understand that being the biggest junk man on the Hudson is not your idea of the good life. So all I’m going to ask is for you to haul ass home if you hear we need you.

“But meanwhile, it’s a big world, and Discovery is a beautiful ship. Halleck’s a skipper I trust. You’ll never get a better chance. Besides as soon as your Moms heard that you can get a bachelor’s degree from being a scholar-sailor, she was ready to tie you up and throw you on board.”

“Oh, man, she would, wouldn’t she? Pop, I don’t know how to say it—”

“You don’t have to, I already know.” Rollings thumped his son on the back, and somehow that turned into an awkward bear hug between the men. “Hell, yeah, sign on with Discovery. I wouldn’t want to be the man who kept you home.” The men held each other in the icy dark for a long time. “All right, let’s get back in and try to keep that creepy white boy’s eyes off your sister.”

“I don’t worry about his eyes, Pop.”

They were settled at a table with warmed wine punch, and Uhura had just joined them, when the band played a brassy, clumsy fanfare and the Commandant strode in, half a dozen Special Assistants at his heels, followed by the Galway trade delegation.

The Commandant spoke first, and at length; his gift for an inflated phrase had them half stupefied when finally Doyle strode forward to speak.

“Well, with the fine food, and warmth and light on a cold winter’s night, and it’s good to be here,” he said, “so I won’t detain you long. From here on, you’ll be seeing a great deal of us. A bit like what happened after Rome fell, once again we Irish were a well-educated people far away from the worst of it. And because of how the wind blows, and being so far west and north, and a certain amount of luck in beating back our tribals, Galway was hardly scathed at all.

“So we’ve got everything to make a new world, except natural resources and sheer space. But New England is empty now, and has all we need, and more. Empty cities, forests, and fields. Fast steep rivers for hydropower, brisk winds to turn mills, and though the regrown forest is mostly dead at the moment, that makes it all the better fuel for the next fifty years. New England is stony but it fed itself before, for centuries, with horse-drawn farming. We’ve got the people, and Manbrookstat has the land—so your country’ll be seeing a great deal of us, and we’ll be seeing a great deal of your country.”

Looking down at the floor, Whorf muttered, “So now the Commandant has all of New England to trade away.”

Uhura said, “I’m kind of tired and feeling a little headachy, Pop, can we go home?”

They emerged from the cloakroom to make their excuses to the two Special Assistants who had been looking for them, and after some fast talk from Rollings, and a couple of realistic dry heaves from Uhura, they were back out in the clean, icy chill of the winter night.

Out of earshot of the Ritz-Carlton, Uhura “revived,” and she and Whorf chattered eagerly about his shipping out. She seemed to say, “I want to go too!” with every other breath.

Passing the pier, looking up along Discovery’s masts deep into the field of stars, and then down to the open road of water reaching south toward the Atlantic, Rollings thought, I wish we all were going.

^{3 HOURS LATER. CHRISTIANSTED NAVAL OBSERVATORY, ST. CROIX, US VIRGIN ISLANDS. ABOUT 2 AM ATLANTIC TIME. FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2026.}

Tarantina Highbotham was enjoying her crab cake sandwich, watching waves roll in, slow, low, and dark, their crests silvered by the light of the waning gibbous moon that stood high in the sky.

Peggy barked, “Got it!” and Abby crowed, “Yes! Oh, yes!”

Highbotham turned; her five observers were sliding from their telescope stools to the desks beside them, opening candle lanterns shielded in red glass. Behind the scribbling, hunched silhouettes of the observers, the parapet wall looked like a grainy, dull black-and-white photograph. Their faces and hands, close to the lanterns, glowed vivid red, like ghosts half-emerging into the living world. The sea was so quiet that Highbotham could hear pencils scratching.

Richard was chief recorder tonight. “Times are 2:08:09, 2:08:12, 2:08:08, and 2:08:05, with an outlier at 2:08:17. How’d everyone do on location?” He had been a pudgy old drunken beach bum, retired early from an architecture practice. Nowadays muscles moved under Richard’s loose baggy skin, and he spoke crisply and precisely.

Highbotham reminded herself not to think he’s better off because of Daybreak. According to the Jamesgrams from Pueblo, that was an entry path for the mind to catch Daybreak.

“I’ve got’em,” Peggy said. Lit with red from below, and framed by her too-dark homemade lipstick, her maniacal grin beneath her charcoal-darkened eyelids gave her the look of Mrs. Joker.

Highbotham and Richard hurried to look. Peggy proudly showed them her pencil lines on her painstakingly hand-copied map of the moon. “I saw the flash itself directly, first time Fecunditatis has been dark on a flash in months. And I marked six good shadows. And look at that.” Six pencil lines from her shadow marks converged on her marked flash site. “A closure error smaller than the thickness of the pencil line.”

“Same here, Peggy, with five shadow lines, and it looks like we agree.” Abby, a tall young woman, had been an alt-tech engineer before Daybreak. Highbotham privately worried that in a fight, Abby’s waist-length ash-blonde ponytail might get her shot for a Daybreaker.

Gilead, slim, dark, at one time a Miami stock analyst, clicked his tongue. “Same spot but with one out of six shadow lines that was a little off. Looks like girls rule today.”

Henry, who had been a math grad student, was nodding too. “On this scale a pencil line is about 667 meters wide. We can’t get any more precise than that with the instruments we have. We’ve got the moon gun nailed.” The hand-whittled frames and hand-ground lenses of his glasses in the moonlight looked like an outsized silver domino mask.

“Unless when we combine all our observations,” Richard said, “it turns out we have it nailed to more than one place.”

“Two pitchers of beer and good meal say the CEP will be less than a click,” Henry said.

“You’re on.”

“Well, now that you all have food and beer riding on it,” Highbotham said, “I know I can trust you with the calculations you’re about to get to.”

The team bent to the job of combining all their observations into one best result with pencil, abacus, adding machine, and slide rule; the process would take till well past dawn.

Highbotham scribbled Morse for a brief radiogram to alert the world that another EMP bomb was coming in, but her pencil stopped after two lines. She stared out to sea, listening hard. Something’s wrong.

She sat back. So why now?

The moon gun launched an EMP weapon to burst over any strong radio source. There were half a dozen hypotheses about how Daybreak had placed it there, but for the foreseeable future those questions were merely interesting. The more significant question was how much the operators, if any, of the moon gun were able to communicate with the leadership, if any, of Daybreak. Arnie Yang’s experiments, before he himself had been seduced by Daybreak, had demonstrated that to some extent it responded to the content of the messages as much as the strength of the signal, and that it had some ability to coordinate with the tribes on the ground, suggesting that the moon gun, like the tribes, had been ready to go sometime back before.

As recently as last May, they had hoped to cobble together something out of existing nuclear gear and rocket engines at sea, and Christiansted and the other observatories had been working to locate the moon gun to within a kilometer, which they were estimating would be the necessary accuracy since they were only getting one shot.

But nanospawn and biotes had beaten them to the punch; the last, crumbling nuclear carrier had barely made it home to ground on a Georgia beach two months ago, its inventory of rocket and jet fuel already turning to slimy, stinking soap and its computers and communications gear turning to crumbly white powder. Nothing remained of the old Navy and Air Force; probably nothing on Earth now could get as high as 20,000 feet above the ground, let alone to the moon.

Highbotham drummed her fingers. That’s why it doesn’t make any sense for us to bother about them. Not the issue. The Temper government at Athens’s first exploration mission to Europe was going by sailing ship, for the love of god, barely a step up from Provi explorers and scientists who went out from Puget Sound as paying passengers on coffee clippers. Pueblo’s “aerial reconnaissance” was almost entirely mailplane pilots’ handwritten notes and maps.

Heather’s RRC in Pueblo just archived Highbotham’s reports; nothing they can do. Right now we’d have a hard time attacking the moon gun if it was in Vermont.

But no one had told Highbotham’s team to stop, and they needed something to do besides feeding and educating the Academy kids, so for now, they carried on.

But that was what was normal, now. The new normal, they’d have called it when she was a young commander on an old destroyer. The tech of 1850 or 1900 is the new normal.

But normal was the wrong place to look for an answer.

This particular moon gun shot was utterly abnormal.

Since May, the moon gun had fired only when it was in bright sunlight; yet tonight, the moon was waning gibbous, so Fecunditatis was in full darkness, and all the observers had a good fix on the flash. And why fire at all? Till now the moon gun had always targeted large, fixed radio stations, but there were none of those left.

Yet something was wrong. She was sure of it. Was the clue on Earth, or on the moon?

Shit.

The moon was slightly south of bang overhead. High tide here comes about three hours after lunar transit, so the tide’s about half run in. Highbotham’s last few commands before retirement had been in the perpetual overseas wars of the 20-teens, in small surface warships. She had planned dozens of raids, invasions, and landings, both in staff college and for real, and sea raids come in with the tide and go out with it. And that gigantic tribal raid that destroyed the West Texas Research Center used the moon gun as a diversion.

“Raiders,” she said. Her observer team turned and stared at her. “Raiders have probably already landed somewhere on the island.”

Not questioning, not panicking, they moved faster than Highbotham could rattle off reminders. “Henry, Peggy, blinker to the regular watchtowers and Christiansted militia. Signal Cuppa Joe too—Fanchion’s ships travel well-armed and they’ll give us a hand. Richard, Abby—”

“Kids,” Abby said.

“Right. Keep them quiet. Little ones to shelters along with the books—”

“Big ones to battle stations. On our way, Captain.” Richard bolted like a bull with bees on its butt; Abby ran after him, hair and long skirts streaming.

“Gilead—”

“—charts and plots into the safe,” he said, not looking up from his quick folding and stacking.

Henry yanked up and slammed down with the whole force of his scrawny body on the long lever linked to a line of modified tire pumps, making a deafening clatter. Air and methane flowed; Peggy lit the torch and adjusted it to play on the stick of calcite, then closed the door on the steel drum. The limelight blazed to life. Peggy chopped the light on and off with the slatted wooden blind covering the open end. The wooden pieces rattled and thumped despite all the lard lubricating them, adding to the din of Henry’s gasping and pumping and the fierce deep hiss of gas on calcite. Peggy swung the blinker to signal Christiansted, then the watchtower chains east and south of them, and—

“Cuppa Joe is already signaling,” Peggy said. “They must have read our blinker to Christiansted. They’re weighing anchor and moving out for sea room, requesting any info we have on the raiders’ position. Answering with—”

A blinker flashed far down the eastern shore. Henry said, “Chenay Bay reports all quiet, they’ve relayed to Prune Bay and are waiting for—”

The flashing dot went out; a huge orange flame leapt up. Chenay Bay watchtower must have had just time to throw a signaling lantern against the pre-laid warning fire.

Highbotham held her voice low and even. “Peggy, is Murcheson on line now?”

“They just said so.”

“Good. Message: RAIDERS AT CHENAY BAY, TOWER DOWN, EXPECTING ATTACK HERE. Same to the south tower chain. Same to Cuppa Joe but add: RAIDERS PROBABLY LANDED COAKLEY BAY. Make sure you include ‘probably.’”

“Sure.” She began flashing, not pausing as she asked, “Why Coakley?”

“That’s all low ground, the road’s close to the sea, and if they surprised the Coakley watchtower, they would have had good cover to surprise every station before Chenay. It’s what I’d’ve done. We were just lucky that Chenay is higher up and better defended.” Was, she thought.

Cuppa Joe’s mainsail was unfurling; lights flickered all over Christiansted and blinkers flashed from the towers on the hills to the south. Highbotham could see motion in the streets—militia running to their posts, everyone else to cover.

It was more noise than Highbotham had heard in many nights. Peggy’s hands worked the clattering, banging wooden slats with crisp precision. Henry’s furious pumping added gasps, thuds, rattles, and slurps. Across the harbor, church bells rang and snare drums beat “To Quarters.”

But above all the uproar, they heard the distant chant on the wind:

Abby said, “The Academy’s Company is all present, armed, and ready, Captain.”

Highbotham turned around and sternly ordered herself not to smile at the raggedness of the CAM kids’ fighting clothes; what mattered was the people inside them, after all. Months of drill had paid off; some kids looked afraid, but none looked panicked, and they held their spears, leaf-spring crossbows, and plumbing-pipe muskets with confident competence.

“All right then,” she said. “You are going to shoot, or load and clean, or run and carry, whatever your job is, just like in drills. If the enemy penetrate the compound, use your knife, hatchet, or spear. Don’t hesitate, hit hard, and keep hitting till they stop moving. Let’s go.”

That, she thought, has to be the lamest pre-battle speech ever.

Henry, Gilead, and three of the older kids led their squads down the gentle slope of the promontory to their assigned firing pits, on a low rise overlooking the six-foot stone fence across the small peninsula. During countless hours building the fence over the summer, the children had covered its outer surface with broken-off bottles, steak knife blades whose plastic handles had dissolved, and scraps of old barbed wire, and systematically cleared everything out of the fifty yards between the pits and the fence. If it worked as intended, the fence would force the attackers to come over it slowly enough for the firing pits to butcher them.

Of course if they ever learn to make decent bows or slings, or start using guns, that fence is cover for them, and we’ll be in deep shit. But you have to take your bet and play it.

Abby spoke beside her. “Captain, rockets are—”

“Boats! Coming around the point to the east!” a voice shouted from the tower.

Abby whirled and ran toward the beach.

Highbotham looked over the reserve force on the patio. Confidence comes from seeing confidence, she reminded herself, and took an extra moment to tuck her dreads under her kerchief and tie it tighter. “Reminders, people,” she said. “Hair where it can’t fall into your eyes. Shoes on tight. Check all weapons again. Stick close to your squad leader; if you get separated, regroup here. If it all turns to—uh, if it all goes into the soup, this is where we’ll make our stand.”

They were all looking past her, down toward the landward fence. She turned to see a stream of tribals coming up the road, still too far away for the rifles or crossbows in the firing pits.

When she turned back, she saw boats rowing in across Punnett Bay. “All right, our guests are arriving,” she said to her reserve squads. “Showtime soon, but nothing we can do till the range closes. Stay loose till we’re needed, breathe, relax, check your weapon.”

Shit, how did Jebby Surdyke get into Squad Nine? She’s only twelve, she should have gone with the little ones.

Most of the kids at the Caribbean Academy of Mathematics were orphaned or separated from their families in the chaos after Daybreak; some had been street kids, back before. CAM offered hot meals, a safe place to sleep, and as much instruction as they could manage to children with mathematical talent. Highbotham privately defined “mathematical talent” as “homelessness and hunger,” but she thought phrasing it as a scholarship helped the kids find the pride they needed to work at their studies.

“One more order, everyone. No matter what happens tonight, live. The world needs your brains.”

“Br-r-rains,” an unidentifiable voice said, like a movie zombie.

She saw many of them freeze, anticipating one of the Captain’s famous tirades. Not tonight, guys. “Right. Keep yours, don’t let anyone spill them. A famous general pointed out that you don’t win by dying for your country, you win by making the other son of a bitch die for his. He was right, despite his being Army and a West Pointer and a bigoted old asshole.” And I hope he was right that you use language like that to people going into battle.

The landward mob of Daybreakers was fanning out from the road as they rushed the fence. As they came into range of the firing pits, Newberry Standard rifles flared and banged. A few leaders carrying spirit sticks fell.

The Daybreaker swarm kept coming. Crossbow bolts flicked into the front ranks, now, and more fell, but still, losing leaders did nothing to slow the raiders. They all knew the plan: move toward the plaztatic enemies of Gaia and kill them where you find them.

At the fence, the first wave didn’t even try to take cover, grabbing and climbing till they hung up on wire, blades, and bottles. The ones behind piled against them until the human wave stalled, and bolts and bullets stabbed into the accumulating crowd.

If the Daybreakers had numbered in the thousands, as they had in the human waves that had swept away WTRC and threatened Pullman and Athens, they might have carried the fence and destroyed the observatory and CAM in a matter of minutes, but counting and guessing, Highbotham thought there were only four hundred at most. Still, that was enough sheer pressure to begin to crack the stone fence from its foundation, toppling stones set in the poorly cured, inadequate mortar.

Henry and two of his team leapt from their pit and ran toward the fence, each carrying a bottle bomb. Those had been Henry’s idea: guncotton made and dried in the bottle. While the guncotton was still wet and therefore safe, the little ones had scratched the glass all over with a cutter. Then they had dipped the bottle in animal glue, and rolled it in shredded metal, gravel, and broken glass as if breading a deadly chicken leg. A paper-wrapped squib of black powder—really just a big firecracker—glued into the neck a couple of weeks later, after long drying in the sun, had completed the process.

At about twenty yards from the wall, all three of them struck matches, touched the fuses, and threw the bottles into a high arc toward the screaming mob. One bottle bomb burst impressively, knocking down half a dozen people; in two seconds, the Daybreakers behind the dead and wounded stepped over and closed up the hole. Another bomb disappeared into the crowd without any effect. Henry threw so hard that his bomb sailed over the heads of the crowd, bounced, tumbled, ignited without bursting, and scooted around trailing hot white exhaust like a firework.

As Henry and his two grenadiers ran back to their pit, one fell, clutching her leg; Henry, turning back, fell beside her.

Instantly the other CAM students in Henry’s pit rushed forward. Shit, that’s a hole, gotta plug it. “Squads Nine, Ten, Eleven, follow me! Twelve and Thirteen, watch for Abby’s signal in case she needs you!”

Highbotham ran down the grassy slope with three squads just behind her. The pits on either side were firing, but Henry’s pit had been the center of the line, and Henry had been commanding this whole side of the defense. I hope he’s still alive so I can chew him out about excessive personal initiative.

A Daybreaker rose atop the stone fence, drawing his bow; he fell backward with a crossbow bolt in the eye. But the bowman that followed him leapt down into the cleared space and loosed an arrow into the press of Henry’s squad; someone screamed.

Highbotham’s small force flung themselves prone in the firing pit and wriggled forward to the mounded dirt at the front. Several Daybreaker bowmen were over the fence and shooting, and more were climbing in over their dead.

She drew her black-powder revolver, leveled it on crossed wrists, and brought down two bowmen on four shots. Homing missiles were a lot easier. Beside her, little Jebby was working her crossbow with grim efficiency. Okay, kid, from now on you can kill with the grown-ups.

“Squad Ten, hold this pit and keep up firing,” Highbotham’s voice was as unnaturally clear and calm as a language lesson. “Squad Nine! Squad Eleven! We’re going down there to bring our people in. Stick together. Nobody leaves early and nobody gets left. On my call, three, two, one, now.” She jumped, and felt them jump beside her.

With her revolver emptied and no time to reload, she pulled the cutlass from her scabbard. An old martial arts freak named Bobby had taught her the dhao, which was similar; she hoped—

On her right.

Raising an ax over his head.

Her hands were already moving in the bamboo cut. The blade tip bit into his neck and broke through his collarbone; he fell over backward, almost dragging her cutlass out of her hand. She glanced back, saw a man behind her raising a poleax to strike Jebby, and her cutlass turned in her hand as it passed low across her front, flew back past her thigh, and struck upward into the man’s lower ribs faster than she could think any of those words, jarring against her hand as if she’d hit a sandbag with a mallet. He froze and stared. Her blade continued up and around, the tip parting shirt and skin all the way to his shoulder, rose past his head, and came back in a neck-high slash that cut his windpipe and carotids. It felt like parting a rope.

Staying with her blade, she faced forward again, and seeing the way clear, advanced to Henry in two big leaps. Her cutlass beat down an enemy spear tip on her flank; in a two-handed grip, she let the cutlass ride up beside her body, then whipped it full force down across the man’s skull. She wrenched her sword clear of his head and whirled toward something moving in the corner of her eye.

The man raising a hatchet was being pushed over backwards by Jebby’s spear in his throat. Highbotham swept his foot, stepped forward, and chopped between his eyes. Her wrists ached; those had been some forceful shocks.

Henry was at her feet, Jebby at her side, the rest of her squads and the survivors from Henry’s Squad Three in a cluster around her. Looking down the slope, she saw the last tribal bowmen fleeing toward the wall. As a space opened between friend and foe, crossbow bolts whizzed after the few surviving raiders, bringing several down.

Henry better live. I owe him props on the crossbows. They were his idea, from that Nantucket book he was always talking about. Is always talking about.

Highbotham ordered, “Crossbowmen, cover us, everyone else, carry the wounded, back to the center pit. Two runners!”

Two survivors from Henry’s team stepped forward. “You, go to Squads One and Two. You, Four and Five. Let Gilead know he’s in command now, and Squad Ten will hold the center pit. Bartie commands Squad Ten and he’s Gilead’s second in command. Tell them this is an order: No one is to rush the fence or try to carry the attack beyond it. Hold this side of the fence till the town militia relieves us. Do not charge into the enemy like some crazy-ass hero. Repeat that.”

They did, crazy-ass hero and all. She nodded, and the runners were off across the thick lawn.

“My fault,” Henry said, as two boys lifted him from the ground at her feet. “Bombs didn’t—”

“Rest,” she said. “And your crossbows are great.” A few more steps brought them back to the center firing pit. “Anyone left from Squad Three—”

“Sorry—”

“Shut up, Henry. I said rest. Squad Three survivors, you’re in Squad Ten, under Bartie’s orders, now. Bartie, hold the center pit for me, and you’re Gilead’s second in command for the whole force.”

Whooshes and booms resounded from the sea side of the big house; flashes of light flickered behind the low rise. “Squads Nine and Eleven, back to the rally point and we’ll probably keep running when we get there.”

It was not a long run—back before, a high school runner would have called it “middle distance”—and they were warmed up and well into second wind, so it seemed to Highbotham that she and her little force almost flew up the hill and onto the patio. Abby had just signaled, and squads Twelve and Thirteen were running down to the beach ahead of them.

They put on a burst of speed and caught up, racing into well-rehearsed positions on the first rise above the water, between the rocket squads and the incoming boats. “Everyone down! Prone firing position!”

The force lay down instantly, wriggling forward, weapons pointed down the beach, checking mechanisms and laying out ammunition within easy reach without being ordered to.

Highbotham stayed on her feet to look the situation over. Rockets had set the lead boat on fire, but most of its crew had made it to shore; the other two were just landing, and already there were almost as many raiders as defenders. Three more boats had already rounded the point.

The voice of a long-ago instructor echoed in her head: The first rule of repelling invasions is act now, because it won’t get better. If you screw that one up, there is no second rule.

Highbotham turned and shouted to Abby and Richard behind her. “Three-rocket volley into their landing! Then concentrate on the ones further out!”

Abby and Richard were yelling to their squads as Highbotham spoke quietly. “Squads Nine, Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, form up. Make sure you’re reloaded. Stay down till the rockets go over, then we’re going to rush them. Be ready.” She stretched out prone. Her hands busied themselves reloading her revolver. She had just pushed the last paper cartridge in, topped it with a percussion cap, and swung the cylinder back into place when three roars of thunder overlapped scant yards above them, the white glare lighting the beach like an old-time flashbulb.

“Now!”

She felt more than saw two dozen CAM kids jump up and race forward with her. The tail flames of the three rockets shot out beyond them, wobbling and spiraling like footballs through the 200 yards.

In less than two seconds, one rocket augured into the sand about 20 feet short, exploding in a big burst that sprayed the raiders with grit and gravel but hurt them very little. The second bent upward, tumbled, and sailed out over the water.

The third hit a jackpot. Before the Daybreakers had recovered from the blinding explosion and spray of gravel, the lucky rocket’s short fuse set off its 15 pounds of crude dynamite less than 10 feet off the ground, directly above the main body of Daybreakers. The rocket had flown only a fifth of its normal range, so the dynamite set off most of the fuel—a saltpeter/tallow/powdered-aluminum slurry—in a fireball 50 feet across, which flared and went black in the time of one gasp. The reeling, groping figures emerged from it with clothes and hair on fire where blazing tallow clung to them.

“Follow me!” Highbotham and her reserve squads raced down the beach. Some of the Daybreakers dove into the water, extinguishing the flames, but exposing themselves to bullets and bolts when they stood. Others ran screaming, to be run down and chopped, stabbed, or clubbed, as the islanders drove all the way to the water’s edge in that first charge.

It was victory for the moment, but the additional three longboats were now close enough for a bowman in the lead one to launch inaccurate, wobbly arrows onto the shore. Abby’s voice carried on the wind behind them. “Everybody down!”

“Down!” Highbotham echoed, and dove onto the sand. All around her she could hear the kids doing the same. Three more rockets roared over them. The beach and sea were briefly brighter than day.

One splashed to extinction without detonating. One burst early, scattering blobs of burning tallow onto the water. The last lost a fin, looped once, and fizzled into brief pathetic fire as it fell harmlessly into the sea. The Daybreakers cheered, rowing as hard as they could, much closer, now, because the rockets had taken up time when snipers might have been working.

“Crossbowmen and riflemen,” Highbotham said, “pick one target—a helmsman or a bowman—and on my count of three, take one real good shot. Squads Nine and Eleven, as soon as those shots are fired, move back into a line fifty yards back. Twelve and Thirteen, fifty yards behind the first line. Backwards leapfrog, like in drills; we’ve got to give the rocketeers time to reload. All right, on—”

A boom! shockingly loud and close.

Highbotham looked and laughed, a little madly. “Belay all that! Pick targets and fire at will, we’re winning.”

Cuppa Joe, under full sail in the light land breeze, was sailing into Punnett Bay; a shot from her bow chaser had capsized the longboat nearest shore. The cannon boomed again, making a big splash in front of the next boat, which then veered when a crossbow bolt struck the steersman in the face, knocking him backwards into the sea. Another shot from Cuppa Joe holed the boat, sinking it in seconds.

The last boat was pulling south, either running away or trying for a flank attack. Cuppa Joe fired again, capsizing it.

As heads bobbed up in the bay, crossbowmen began picking them off. We really should talk about taking prisoners, soon.

Morse blinked from the stern of Cuppa Joe; it wasn’t encrypted, so Highbotham and everyone read it together. TOWN MILITIA ARRIVING. CJ PROCEEDING COAKLEY. GOOD HUNTING.

Highbotham walked slowly back up the beach. The sounds from the landward side were no longer of battle but of rout. The absence of chanting and drums, and the rhythm of volley fire, told her that the Daybreakers who had overstayed were trapped between the fence and the town militia.

As she arrived at Abby’s rocket station, she heard no more volleys, just wailing from the few Daybreakers left alive. A few of those could be rehabilitated in their seizure-recovery phases, according to the latest Jamesgram; the Christiansted town council had voted to try it the next time they had prisoners. Scattered distant shots meant pursuit continued.

Highbotham couldn’t hear waves hissing down the shore, and some people’s mouths were moving without her being able to understand them; ear protection for everyone, one more thing to think about soon. Right now she just needed to report to Murcheson, who commanded overall island defense, and “get everyone to bed, Abby, as soon as you can.”

Abby looked up from where they were swabbing out rocket tubes. “Right, Captain. Richard’s already taken a party to go bring the little kids back.”

“Good job on the rockets,” Highbotham said. “Good job on everything.”

Abby nodded; in the moonlight her hair was almost phosphorescent, and her face was streaked ghostly white and black from the soot of her rocket launching. “We can do everything here now. You’ll want to get the land side squared away, and then get down to C-sted for the commanders’ meeting.”

“Yeah. Tired.”

“Well, we were fighting for nearly four hours, Captain. That’s false dawn over east.” Abby took a deep drink from her water bottle.

That reminded Highbotham to drink from her own. “I’m kind of disturbed that none of our kids gives any of the enemy a chance to surrender.”

Abby shook her head. “You spent too many years hanging out with the boys, Captain. This is a woman kind of fight—if you’re going to kill each other, kill each other, no good-sport bullshit like it’s a football game or a deer hunt.” Among the smears of soot on her face, a toothy grin glinted in the dim light. “Besides, you haven’t seen yourself yet, but you’ve been wiping that cutlass on your pants, and your shirt’s got so much black-powder smoke and blood on it, you look like something straight out of hell. At least wash up before you try to teach the kids about the Geneva Conventions.”

As she walked back to the main house, Highbotham noticed Jebby Surdyke holding her hand. “I waan learn dat Ge-ne-va Con-vic-tion,” she said, “if you waan me a learn.”

Highbotham smiled. “Later, honey, but you’ll learn it, I promise. It’s part of that civilization thing we’re working on bringing back. And speaking of civilization, we all need some breakfast and cleanup. Shouldn’t you be with Squad Nine?”

“They don gimme no squad so I go wid yah.” Jebby’s hand closed on hers a little tighter.

Highbotham thought, Well, I’m not going to scold a first-rate bodyguard for not following procedure. Some parts of civilization can wait.

^{3 HOURS LATER. PUEBLO. ABOUT 6:30 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2026.}

When James Hendrix heard the knock at the door, he had just pulled two trays of muffins from the oven. Patrick and Ntale, of course. Lately Patrick had been teasing him every day with Don’t shoot, it’s me, oh wait, where’s your gun? so this time he carefully took his pistol from its rack by the door, pointed to the side to avoid accidents, and opened the door.

Patrick grinned at seeing the pistol. “Hey, Ms. O’Grainne was right, Mister Hendrix, we’re finally getting you trained.”

James racked the pistol again. “Enter, my young trainer.”

“Lock that door,” Ntale said, following her brother in. “If tribals barge in here and kill us all, no more muffins.”

“Excellent point,” James said. Back before I was always a little intimidated by how fast kids picked up new technology; now it’s the same thing with security. “Nothing new this time,” he said, apologetically, “just oat-and-corn muffins with some dried apple again, and some leftover elk stew.”

Patrick, tall for fifteen and seeming to be mostly head and feet, laughed. “Mister Hendrix, it’s hot breakfast.”

“And help on the homework,” Ntale added.

While the brother and sister ate, James scanned through the overnight dispatches; the excuse for Patrick and Ntale to come here every morning was to deliver the first package of received radio messages from Incoming Crypto. Besides, nothing is better for a cook’s ego than a teenage appetite, he thought, watching the food vanish into the kids.

First item on the top priority list: the moon gun had fired again. Word would already be going out everywhere to prepare for an EMP sometime Monday, and normally it would have been no more than a small nuisance to think about, but Captain Highbotham’s note made him stop and think; there weren’t any big stationary radio stations anymore. What the hell had they shot at?

Red Dog, in Athens, reported that Jenny Whilmire Grayson was clearly siding with her husband and against her father, and people had overheard her quarreling with Reverend Whilmire in public. James rated that a plus; if the Army won its struggle with the Church, Constitutional restoration became easier.

White Fang in Manbrookstat had details about the Commandant’s deal granting away everything from Cape Cod to Niagara to Halifax to the Irish. The Commandant’s handpicked judge had refused habeas corpus for a jailed opposition newspaper editor. Not good.

Bambi and Quattro wanted his thoughts about their scheme to hand over taxing authority to a legislature, not easy when you’re already a Duke and a Duchess and most Californians would be happy to make you the King and Queen.

Blue Heeler said he saw no prospect of avoiding the Provi government in Olympia declaring a deliberate policy of genocide against the tribes. Allie Sok Banh had left all idea of restraint behind after fighting off Daybreak’s assault on her mind just a few months ago, and since she was First Lady, Chief of Staff, Secretary of State, and almost any other job she wanted, only her opinion really mattered. President Weisbrod was too weak and tired, and General Norm McIntyre too afraid, to restrain her.

Five pieces moved, James thought. The Commandant moves for more power, the Duke and Duchess move for less, Allie Sok Banh moves for vengeance, Jenny Grayson moves for independence, and Daybreak moves, but I don’t know why. It’s a big, complicated board.

He looked up to see the last of breakfast disappearing into his brother-and-sister messengers. “So,” he said, “how’s that Hamlet thing doing, Patrick?”

“I just wish I could figure out why that guy does anything.”

“You have all the evidence anyone else does.”

“Anyone else doesn’t have to be graded by Mrs. Thrammer. And how can there be so much evidence and no conclusion, anyway?”

“Get used to that question,” James said. “Expect to be asking it forever.”