The Last President

^{THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. 3:15 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2026.}

The eight pilots arrived in a group, as had been agreed; silently, Ruth Odawa handed each of them a batch of encrypted messages, and working together, they all verified, one more time, where each encrypted message was to go. When they finished, the pilots rode to the airfield in two wagons, each escorted by a squad of militia. No one spoke an unnecessary word.

At the field, there were handshakes, taps on the shoulder, pats on the back, and then each pilot walked to a plane.

Three hours before dawn, Pueblo was bitter cold but windless. Nancy Teirson’s homebuilt Acro Sport led the taxiing parade of aircraft around to the wait point. This will tell everyone that something is up, she thought. Eight planes all taking off one after the other. And they’ve turned the runway lights on; they’ll be wiping them with lye for weeks after this. Must’ve been at least a year since anyone in America saw a mass takeoff at night.

She turned for a moment and waved at Bambi Castro, in the Curtiss JNE in line behind her; Bambi waved back. It helped Nancy feel slightly less alone.

Then the first flagger advanced to the line, raised both flags, and lowered them in parallel to point down the runway. Nancy opened the throttle slightly and depressed the left rudder pedal. Her tiny biplane waddled toward the next flagger, who held up his left flag and motioned downward with his right. Nancy watched the flagger, who watched the tower.

In the corner of her eye, Nancy saw a light flash in the tower window.

Facing Nancy, the flagger brought his left flag to his side and raised his right with the elbow bent at a right angle. With both flags in his left hand at his side, he saluted.

Nancy opened the throttle and roared along the runway, the oiled-linen tires feeling squishy and draggy even when freshly inflated. The Acro Sport seemed to bound forward and up from the pavement; in a shallow climb as the end of the runway passed 300 feet below, she banked to head east.

The slightly-more-than-half moon behind her, halfway down the western sky, shed more than enough light to distinguish US-24 and follow it through the snowy plains to Garden City; now and then there were other lights. A few windows shone in the walled towns. Dark blobs of cattle herds surrounded the fires in the cowboy camps. Twice she saw makeshift camps that might have been tribals or refugees, and made notes to help cavalry patrols locate them, but tonight she did not circle and sketch; she held her course, east over the old highway, and the moon slowly sank till it was on her tail.

In the pre-dawn twilight, she came in over the earthen ramparts of Garden City, waving back to the night sentry in his rooftop shelter.

The crew dragged the little red and yellow biplane into the hangar. They would refuel it, wipe its engine with lye, and go over every inch of it looking for crusty white nanospawn. Another day she might have gone with them to help, but today she hurried to the old stone house across the airfield, the local Jayhawk Guard commander’s office.

He opened the door with a broad smile, and gestured for her to sit at the table pulled up close to the fireplace; she gulped a bowl of shredded beef chili with eggs over cornmeal mush while he worked the coding. “How beautiful are the feet,” he muttered, looking at the message.

“Unh?”

He grinned. “Preacher’s kid can’t help quoting. It’s from Isaiah. ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.’ But I kind of like the blasphemous version, ‘How beautiful over Kansas is the biplane of she that bringeth good tidings, that declareth war.’ Take this message back to them: RECEIVED BREAK ’BOUT TIME BREAK MOVING ASAP FULL STOP. They might not know Isaiah.”

In less than half an hour, she took off again, climbing into the light, fitful west wind, wheeling around toward sunrise in a wide semicircle.

As she flew on, the sun ascended between columns of smoke from the chimneys of newly reoccupied farmhouses; it looked more like 1876 than 2026. Farmyards bustled with people feeding poultry, chopping wood, and pumping water. Wagons bumped over potholed roads. Herders on horseback in heavy cloaks drove cattle and sheep out into the winter pasture. At least, only flying at a quarter of the speed and altitude that planes used to, I get to see it all. A stream of coal smoke revealed a train passing far to her north.

The sun was high when the Ozarks rose beneath her. In Springfield, Missouri, lunch was noodles and rabbit with hot, milky tea, in the kitchen of the RRC’s new station chief, Paul Ferrier.

As Nancy finished her meal, he looked up from his code pad. “Tell Heather that it’s crazy busy here, but the Ozark and Ouachita tribals have pulled some pretty gruesome shit in raids lately. I think I can get public opinion behind calling up the militia and sending out some big punitive raids into tribal country in early March. Sorry we can’t do it sooner—we’re up to our ass in alligators with trying to get ready for having the whole Federal government move in by the end of the year.”

“We all do what we can,” Nancy said. James had given the pilots that generic response for any message recipient who sounded less than enthusiastic, and besides, in Ferrier’s case, it was true.

Airborne again in the early afternoon, she flew over the wooded hills of southern Missouri to Poplar Bluff. The country grew less harsh and richer; spring was greening the land and lifting it out of the snow below her.

In Poplar Bluff the militia commander was out with a cavalry detachment, intercepting a tribal incursion coming up from Arkansas. She tried to explain that when their commander read the message, he would understand why she hadn’t been able to take a few hours out and go scout for them, but they seemed unconvinced and resentful, so she took off again as soon as she could, firmly telling them that the message needed to be decrypted as soon as possible, and everything would be clearer once it was.

Crossing the Mississippi, with Cairo just to her left, Nancy saw big floes of ice coming down the Ohio, groaning and booming as they collided with floes from the upper Mississippi and the Missouri above St. Charles Rock, and scribbled a note to alert the downstream towns that still had standing bridges; the radio operator at Pale Bluff could send that for her.

Up the Ohio Valley, snow still lay deep and the river was still frozen. At the Uniontown Dam, she turned north-by-northeast, and descended over the winter-bare apple orchards into Pale Bluff just before 4 p.m. Carol May Kloster, the RRC station chief there, ran the central station for the whole Wabash front, and also reported for the Pueblo Post-Times, so she was probably the busiest person on this frontier of civilization. But she had found time to make a quiche and a dried-apple pie, and most of both went into Nancy, along with an unexpected treat: a whole pot of real, fresh coffee. “I have plenty,” Carol May said. “And you look tired.”

“I love my Acro Sport with all my heart,” Nancy said, “built it all with my own hands after Daybreak, and it gets me out of militia drill and digging ditches, so I don’t feel like I can complain about it. But it does feel like being shaken inside a kite with a running lawnmower engine in my lap. And with no hydraulics, I feel every bit of the wind I touch.” She drank deeply from her coffee cup. “This stuff puts heart into you; no wonder our first post-Daybreak plutocrat is Lisa Fanchion. I usually only get coffee when I pass through Pueblo, every couple of weeks.”

Carol May smiled. “I’m just glad to see it go to good use. Quattro keeps me supplied, every week when he passes through in the Gooney Express, and I use it to lure the local Temper and Provi spies in here; a little access to good coffee and they blab everything they know.”

Carol May’s pencil played over the decoding grid as she copied numbers from the one-time pad, added, and wrote the string of new numbers into the green strip for the clear message. When she read it, she said, “I was going to suggest that you just hold off flying to Put-In-Bay and stay the night in my guest room, but now that I see what this is about, I guess not. You’ll want to get moving while it’s light.”

Shadows grew long below her as Nancy flew northwest across the Lost Quarter. No light shone from the abandoned farms and burned-out towns of what had been Indiana and Ohio. Here and there, she saw a wide trampled track in the late afternoon sunlight, rising smoke from campfires, or a still-standing bridge, and would lock the controls and make reconnaissance notes; those were much more important here, over hostile territory, than they had been in Kansas.

It was deep twilight when she passed over the lights of Catawba Point and the little settlements around Sandusky Bay. To her left, Lake Erie was still frozen over, with occasional patches of dark, open water. She circled wide to come into Put-In-Bay with a headwind; from a few hundred feet up, she could clearly see the burned sleds and huts on the ice where the islanders had intercepted a tribal attack across the frozen lake.

The runway was freshly shoveled and graveled, a good thing since she was landing in late twilight; when she killed the engine on the tiny Acro Sport, and saw the ground crew running up to tow it into the hangar, she realized her shoulder blades were sore from tension and her clothes under her flying leathers were soaked with sweat. Just like running a marathon, it’s the last long haul that kicks your ass.

Fred Rhodes, the head of Stone Lab, was an old friend, and he was waiting with the ground crew. With his very dark skin, dreads, chest-length beard, and multiple colorful sweaters and caps, he looked like a Rastafarian with a compulsively-knitting Dadaist grandmother. “Right this way,” he said. “You’re here, you’re alive, so by modern standards I guess you had a good flight.” They walked across the field to his horse-drawn sleigh. She accepted blankets and a towel-wrapped pot of hot mulled wine gratefully. “Drink it all,” he said, “I need to stay sober to do my calculations. I brought my one-time pad with me, and I want to confirm that this is what I think it is.”

As they clopped along and Nancy sank into the warmth inside and outside, she noticed that Fred wasn’t bothering to look at the road, and a little bit of a tune from childhood came to mind—the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh. It made her think of the smell of an overheated schoolroom, and she wondered if anywhere smelled like that anymore, or ever would again.

Rhodes finished his calculations as they were pulling up at the Edgewater Hotel. “You go check in, they’re expecting you,” Rhodes said. “I’ll give you an hour to freshen if you need it.”

“Make that half an hour,” she said, “so I can stagger to bed sooner.”

“Fair enough. You’re having dinner with me, Rosie and Barb Rosenstern, and Scott and Ruth Niskala. It won’t go long but we need to pull our intel together.” He grabbed her bag before she could. “Do you know what’s in the message?”

“They kept the details from us in case we were forced down.” Exhausted, and relaxed by the wine, Nancy shuffled after him. “My notes are pretty clear, maybe I could give them to—”

“Did they tell you we’re starting now?”

The lobby of the Edgewater, lit by soft yellow oil lamp light, abruptly sprang into harsh relief, and she felt herself stand straight, as if with a click. “I’ll throw my bag into the room. Give me five minutes for the bathroom, then let’s get your planning dinner started.”

^{ABOUT THE SAME TIME. FORT NORCROSS (ON THE OHIO RIVER, NEAR WARSAW, KENTUCKY). 6:30 PM EASTERN TIME. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2026.}

In the clear twilight, Bambi Castro could see the runway, a black slash of carefully cleared and graveled highway, while she was still several miles from Grayson’s camp. The JNE seemed to like the chilly, wet, dense air, which made the engine run well and gave the wings a little extra lift. Of course, that’s till it freezes the fuel line and ices the wings, which it would be doing if it were any colder. Glad I’m landing now.

As the ground crew took over the plane, General Grayson rode up on a white stallion. Well, now, that’s putting your symbolism in order, Bambi thought. Behind him, his wife, Jenny, rode a palomino that Bambi immediately pegged as the horse every girl wanted when she was twelve, and led a gray-and-white pinto, already saddled.

Feeling like she should salute—the general was in faultless-as-far-as-Bambi-could-tell uniform—she handed over the message. He accepted with that annoying, mocking smile of his. “Are you going to make me wait till it’s processed through crypto, or can you just tell me if it’s what I’ve been expecting?”

Security violation be damned, Bambi thought, give him every spare second we can. “Yes, it’s exactly what you’re expecting.”

“In that case,” he said, “I’ll turn you over to Jenny, who will entertain you for dinner; I’ve got a long night ahead of me. Thank you for bringing such good news.” He mounted again and rode off at a fast trot.

Bambi had met Jenny Whilmire Grayson a few times before, and tried hard not to detest her because she understood her so well: they had both been the beloved, brainy, spoiled-but-pushed, beautiful daughters of famous, spectacularly wealthy fathers. But I used the head start Daddy gave me to become a Fed and go bust bad guys for thrills, and Jenny used those boobs and that hair for a shot at being the First Lady.

Meow, and stop that, Bambi reminded herself sternly.

Jenny said, “I told Jeff that there was no way that Harrison Castro’s daughter wouldn’t be an expert horsewoman, so I just brought along Splash here, but I thought you’d have more recent practice on airplanes, so in case I was wrong I brought a horse that’s more docile than most armchairs.”

“Daddy made me learn to ride,” Bambi said, “but the truth is I was a lot more in love with the Porsche and the sailboat than I ever was with the horse.”

“Oh yeah. I would so have agreed with you when I was sixteen. If there were still Porsches, I’d still agree with you. But since you can ride, let’s get to dinner. Our cook Luther is kind of a genius, and he won’t have many more chances to show off till the campaign’s over.”

They rode for several minutes in silence. At the gate to the airfield, one of the younger soldiers started to salute and caught himself. Jenny grinned. “You go saluting the wrong person too often and my husband’ll catch you.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry, won’t happen again.”

After another block, safely out of earshot of the sentries, Jenny sighed and said, “The regular Army held together pretty well down south around the big bases, but as for the militia, Jeff says we’re back to recruiting cannon fodder, and forget esprit de corps, they’re just thrilled to have a job, regular food, and someone to tell them what to do. The regular Army sergeants that are all captains now have terrified the militia boys into saluting, but they’re not so good on who or what yet.”

“Pbbt. It’s a different world. I go to grab a sandwich in the kitchen and fifteen bowing fools are there to tell me a duchess can’t slice her own bread,” Bambi said. “See your salutes and raise.”

Jenny laughed. “Fold. At least they don’t expect me to go around in a tiara.”

“Part of why I insist on flying so much—that leather helmet precludes even sillier hats. Quattro loves the hats, though.”

Dinner was everything Jenny had implied; “Luther is not ‘kind of’ a genius, he’s a genius,” Bambi said.

“Let me write that down.” Jenny grinned. “He keeps a quote book of things famous people say about his food. He’ll love getting a quote from a duchess.”

“In that case,” Bambi said, “write down that I said that if I’d known about him, I’d’ve had him cook for my coronation.” She let Jenny have a moment to scribble before asking, “So was the general just being a workaholic, or did he really need to ride off in a hurry like that?”

Jenny smiled. “Both, always. Jeff only relaxes when I shame him into it, but I only do that when he’s falling-down non-functionally tired, because he really does need to be that busy. We’ve been talking with Heather about Operation Full Court Press since Cameron Nguyen-Peters proposed it last fall.”

“It’s a shame he’s not here to see it bear fruit,” Bambi said, staying carefully neutral in tone. She had only met the last regular NCCC of the United States a couple of times, briefly, and hadn’t liked him at all, but he had been one of two indisputably legitimate links to the old United States government, his assassination had made everything far more difficult, and Heather was absolutely certain the Graysons had been behind it.

Jenny sighed, not taking the bait. “Jeff says, at least ten times a day, that he wishes he had Cam at the other end of the supply lines.”

Gosh, do you mean now he thinks that shooting Cam was a bad thing? Bambi wanted to ask. Red Dog’s report had said that Grayson had actually done it personally, and that Jenny had not only known it was going to happen, but had urged Grayson to go through with it. Bambi remembered James’s briefing about Jenny Whilmire Grayson: Looks like Barbie but under that plastic is the brass heart of Lady Macbeth, and don’t forget it. “So I guess there’s a lot on his mind and a lot to take care of.”

Jenny grinned fiercely. “We’ve been doing everything we can to convince everyone below battalion commanders that it’ll take us ten days to execute an order to start. Everybody thinks they’re in the very first advance guard and that other troops will be catching up with them for days, but most people aren’t dumb enough to talk about what their own unit is doing. But an ‘obvious problem’ for the whole army, though, well, that doesn’t seem like much of a secret, and so the cover story about the ten days has been leaking like crazy.”

“How do the tribals hear any rumors from our side of the river?”

“Oh, there’s a huge black market across the Ohio. Tribals aren’t supposed to but lots of their scouts trade looted jewelry and tools for canned food and real bread. So by now everyone at the first big tribal encampment, just downriver from here, is dead certain that they have a week at least before we even start to move.”

“So how long do they really have?”

“Jeff was riding off to tell the engineers to start putting a temporary bridge across the ice right here; it’s all preplaced ready-to-go pieces. That will be done by about two in the morning, he hopes. Meanwhile the tribal spies and scouts won’t be meeting the people they expect, and their regular patrols are going to have some real bad luck; we’ve been following but not taking them for weeks. So with a little luck, almost none of them will make it back to the tribal encampment before our army is on top of them, right about dawn. If Jeff’s plan works, the first tribal horde will be gone before lunch tomorrow.” Her eyes, reflecting the candlelight, seemed feral and vicious, but her smile was still a beauty-pageant dazzler.

“Brilliant,” Bambi said, meaning it. Lady, you scare me just a little, but right now we need scary people on our side.

^{THE NEXT DAY. OLYMPIA, NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (FORMERLY OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON). 12:30 PM PACIFIC TIME. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026.}

It amused Quattro Larsen that nobody was there to meet him at the airport. No perqs for the Duke.

He did what he usually did on his regular route—made sure the right people would be working on the Gooney, then swapped his leather flying helmet for his trademark floppy hat with a feather, slung up his bag, and flagged down a taxi, a museum-piece buggy that had probably been in the business of giving romantic rides around a park somewhere, back before. “The New White House, please.”

The driver nodded. “Little White House, right.”

Quattro paid the cabbie with one of the new California Eagles, the twenty-dollar gold coins that he and Bambi had begun minting privately, and told him to keep the change. The cabbie managed a sketchy bow that amused Quattro, but he returned it gravely. Wish more people got that all this Duck and Doochess stuff is a joke, he thought. Laying on the awe and majesty is kind of fun in a silly ironic way but I’m starting to worry about the number of people taking it seriously. Hate to admit that to Bambi, though, she’ll say she told me so, and she’s been worrying about it for ages already.

Inside the New White House there was a great deal more bowing and saluting in the foyer before Quattro was allowed to just proceed into the plain office to his right. The moment the door closed, he sighed and relaxed, and his three old friends rose to greet him.

Graham Weisbrod, the last living person with any claim to be President of the United States, was scrawny and short, and the stress of the last couple of years had removed most of his white hair, stooped his shoulders, and shrunk his hips and belly to slackness, but he still had the same lopsided cynic’s grin that had terrified generations of grad students.

Next to Weisbrod, General Norm McIntyre, tall, iron-gray hair, wearing plain fatigues, the highest-ranking surviving officer from the old army, was almost expressionless; we’ve all aged a lot in the last sixteen months, Quattro thought, but it’s like Norm was cut off from all his life force. Norm’s not the type to start over; his head’s too full of what he did back before.

Allie Sok Banh, half the age of either man, scrawled one more thing on the pad on her desk before she rushed to Quattro, giving him a quick phony hug and air-kiss. The last year had probably been harder on her than either of the men, but she was a generation younger and had adapted better. “I hope it’s the package we’ve been expecting,” she said.

“Well, it’s not new Federal standards for laundry detergents.”

Weisbrod said, “Allie, you’re faster than either of us with a coding pad, so if you wouldn’t mind? Quattro, while she works, can we offer you coffee?”

The men chatted quietly while Allie scribbled swiftly through the hundreds of two-digit additions on her coding pad.

Quattro did his best to concentrate on Graham’s talk of building a new rail line over the Upper Peninsula and across the Mackinac Bridge to connect the whole New State of Superior, and McIntyre’s elaborate plans for re-merging the mostly-former-National Guard Provi Army with the mostly-former-regular Temper Army so that everyone’s seniority was respected and the required promotions and demotions could be fairly distributed. Quattro could not forget that what was happening on Allie’s coding pad was capital-h History; maybe they can’t either and that’s why they’re talking about procedural crap like mid-level postal clerks.

When she looked up, they were all instantly silent.

“Operation Full Court Press is set to begin as fast as we can begin it,” she said. “Apparently everyone is jumping on it; if he’s on plan, Grayson is already across the Ohio and has attacked the first horde.”

“Well, we can put it on the agenda for the Cabinet meeting for next week,” Graham said, “and see what everyone says.”

McIntyre nodded. “That’ll give me a chance to assess the impact of all the requests for troop commitments—”

“There are only two, for right now,” Allie said. “Grayson wants the six regiments you already promised, especially the President’s Own Rangers, for the Wabash Valley campaign, rendezvous at Pale Bluff, early May. And Utah, even though they’re still declining to take their seats in our Congress, wants to coordinate so that when they slam the tribals in their northwest corner, we’ll be ready to close the trap in southern Idaho and western Wyoming. We’ve already got the requested regiments preparing to join Grayson, and the forts in the Yellowstone are ready for the reinforcements. So all we need to do—”

“I’m sure all that can be pulled together at the Cabinet meeting—” Graham began.

Allie showed neither irritation nor impatience, apparently taking their agreement for granted. “Well, I’ll start the things rolling that can’t wait, and I’ll clear everyone’s calendar so we can move that meeting up to tomorrow morning. You’ll want to review the planned deployments before we finalize them, General.” She stood. “Quattro, I am guessing no one has fed you, you’re probably starving, and so am I. Are you too tired for dinner?”

“Never.”

“Well, then,” she said to the two older men, who looked stunned, “I’ll do my Chief of Staffly thing on the calendar when I get back; meanwhile, the full document and all the addenda are right here on the pad, and you both should read all through it. Quattro and I will eat in the Secure Dining Room. Are you sure you won’t join us?”

“I, um, I don’t think—” McIntyre said.

Graham Weisbrod looked mildly annoyed. “There are some serious political issues to discuss—”

“Well, of course,” Allie said. “That’s what Quattro and I will be discussing—are you sure you gents don’t want to join us?”

Graham Weisbrod froze like a listening rabbit, then sagged. “Well, I guess we can iron out details after you get back.”

The Secure Dining Room was located in the attic space; as they passed by the kitchen at the back of the house, Allie leaned in to say, “Bobbi? Secure Dining Room, just two, for lunch—”

“Of course, ma’am. Today it’s chowder, fresh bread, and greens, need anything special?”

“Got a pot of coffee we can take up?”

“Right here.”

Allie led the way upstairs. “Craig?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Ranger sergeant replied.

“We’ll be talking and eating in the Secure Dining Room. Could you have a guard come up with Bobbi? We’ll stick to small talk till the food comes.”

“Sure thing, ma’am.”

The Secure Dining Room seated eight at a central table and three at a smaller table by the window, which looked out over Puget Sound. Allie sat at the small table, gesturing Quattro into the chair facing the window. “Best view in the New District,” she said. “I often bring a notepad and a pot of coffee up here when I need to work.”

“Wow, I’ve got a better view, but you’ve got reliable coffee.”

“It’s Lisa Fanchion’s bribe to us, in exchange for a friendly, low-tax, no-regs port to operate from.”

“I think if we heard she was unhappy with you at noon, we’d be rolling out the red carpet at San Diego before one.”

The food and coffee arrived, and the guard took up his post outside the door. When they had finished, Allie gestured toward the harbor again. “The country is going to regrow in some other shape this time. Probably much more facing the Pacific than we did before; it’s the quick way to Australia and India, and that’s the friendly two-thirds of the Big Three.”

“You think we’re going to have trouble with the Argies?”

“Wish we wouldn’t but… too much says we will. They’ve already signed special arrangements with ports all over South America, and they’re pushing into Central America and the Caribbean. The surviving national governments wouldn’t run without Argie advisors and loans, and sometimes their troops. Given how beat up Daybreak left Mexico, and how little we can do for them right away, I think we’ll lose them to the Argentine orbit too. The RRC espionage teams over in Manbrookstat say that Argentine ships are already sniffing around at the Chesapeake and making offers to the Commandant for stuff he doesn’t own.”

“Stuff like—”

“Like the Delmarva, and maybe the Potomac Valley. I don’t really like the idea that the site of DC might be inside an Argentine colony in the next generation. Besides being our capital, it’s my home town, and if anything is ever built there again, I want it to be American. I thought I was an internationalist with a broad perspective, back before, and maybe I was, but nowadays: not one inch of dirt to outsiders. Hell, I even resent the Texans talking about secession, and I’ll miss those cranky impossible hicks if they do.

“And the Commandant really pisses me off most of all. An ex-cadet selling off the upper right corner of the country! The minute we settle the tribals, whether the next president is Phat, Grayson, or Weisbrod, I want to send a fleet to plug up New York Harbor and an expeditionary force to go in and arrest him, put Manbrookstat under martial law, hold a fast election, and bring them in as another New State in the Union.”

“Grayson would go for that.”

“Yep, I hate the son of a bitch and he hates me more, but we’d both rather live in the other one’s complete America than see it torn up by these petty shithead wannabe kings.”

Quattro grinned. “That’s Duke Petty Shithead to you.”

“Oh, bah.” She flipped her hair away from her face. “We know perfectly well that you’re holding California to bring it back into the Union whenever you can make sure it’ll come back and stay back.”

Quattro nodded, acknowledging it, and tried a slightly riskier question. “Why all the foot-dragging from Graham and Norm?”

“Half them. Half me.” Allie sighed. “Graham is old and a liberal, and since we’re tied with Russia, Europe, and China for biggest basket case, he wants to focus on rebuilding, not fight a long big war, especially not against what he still thinks of as American citizens. Norm liked fighting when he was younger and running an army when he got older; his heart’s not in it, because as far as he’s concerned, the real America is back before, and he can’t fight for that. So he’s going through the motions of being a good administrator, because he took an oath, but in his heart he just wants to die somewhere quietly. Still, they’d both probably be more enthusiastic about settling the tribal problem if they weren’t dealing with me all the time. Sometimes I think my husband and the general are the only people who understand that when I say I want to wipe the tribes out, I mean that. Ever since Graham brought me back from a mostly-complete takeover by Daybreak, knowing what Daybreak’s grip on the mind feels like, and feeling what Daybreak really wants to do, I cannot imagine any way we can rehabilitate more than a handful of the tribals.

“Graham and Norm think they can solve the tribal problem the same way they think they can solve everything else: by concentrating on reconstruction. They think if we can get enough food, and running water, and schools and roads and all that bullshit, why, those naughty tribals will come begging us to take them back, because their having destroyed modern civilization was surely just a silly mistake.

“I, on the other hand, agree with Heather, and Grayson, and everyone else with half a brain. So I’ll get you as many men and guns as I can squeeze out of the Provisional Constitutional Government, but it’ll take some desk pounding and some whining to push them into doing the right thing. Grayson’ll have the whole regiment of the President’s Own Rangers, and everything else I’ve promised. More if I can.” She was staring intently. “But here’s what I have to have: no criticism and no attempt to block what we’re going to be doing in our own tribal pockets.”

“What are you going to be doing?”

“Eliminating the problem for good and forever. No waiting, no rehabilitating, no more chances.”

“No quarter. No survivors.”

She beamed at him. “Almost none. Our tribals will be given a window of opportunity for mercy—just not open very far or for very long.” She reached out and stroked his hand with one long nail, polished blood-red, almost hard enough to scratch. “Just tell Heather and James that I insist on giving them more than they asked for.”

^{2 HOURS LATER. MANBROOKSTAT. 4:15 PM EASTERN TIME. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2026.}

Huddling around the upper harbor in the ruins of old New York, the puny city-state of Manbrookstat might be headed for great things, but currently they lived by trading usable wreckage for food. Yet to get the Commandant even to look at this message, Heather had had to promise him more and deeper reconnaissance than was usual. Bambi had come in ninety minutes north of the usual mailplane route, swinging much deeper into the Lost Quarter than she liked. At least those hours of anxiety were safely over; now she was flying in over the abandoned zones of Queens and Brooklyn, descending toward the southern tip of Manhattan. At almost any other airfield, she would be looking forward to a good meal, a comfortable room, and some major attention; in post-Daybreak America, a mail pilot was at least as big a celebrity as a Duchess.

Having flown into Manbrookstat before, she expected to be treated as a nuisance at best, but Heather had emphasized that she was to pick no quarrels with the Commandant.

The tail wheel touched down. The JNE’s squishy tires grabbed FDR Drive. Now she was rolling rather than flying. At the flagger’s signal she cut the engine and braked the prop. The ground crew chief who came to help her down from the cockpit was Knox, an old friend from the early days just after Daybreak. “Welcome, Countess, we don’t see enough of you here.”

“It’s good to be back,” she lied, smiling back at him. “Take good care of the Jenny.”

Knox nodded. “Like always.” Then, so softly Bambi might have missed it, he added, “Keep your eyes open. There’s a lot you oughta see but you gotta look.”

Bambi listened without expression, remembered carefully, and reacted not at all. She slung up her flight bag and walked toward where the Commandant waited with his entourage. At least the son of a bitch saw fit to meet me himself. Maybe he’s only ninety percent of the asshole I always thought he was. Twenty feet before they were in reach of each other, she extended her hand so he could not bow to extort a bow in return.

Dinner that night was in the Ritz-Carlton by a southeast-facing window. The deep red sunset, filtered through the haze that still hung over the burned continent, lit the sad stump of the Statue of Liberty.

“The arm with the torch fell off on Christmas Day,” the Commandant said, following her gaze. “Something about the big electric currents that ran through the steel made it super-vulnerable to rust, that’s what one of my engineers guessed, but I wonder if it wasn’t the ice load that built up on the upper part for a month; it looked like she was holding a big load of cotton candy just before it went.”

Bambi nodded. “I traveled a lot, back before, when I was a Fed, and now I fly everywhere. I see things like this all the time… still, somehow, it’s different when it’s the Lady, isn’t it?”

The Commandant shrugged. “As soon as there’s less floating ice around the island, we’ll cut up the arm and torch, probably trade it to Argentina for tinned beef. Life goes on and a statue doesn’t need to eat.”

Bambi changed the subject. “Since you asked me to come in over the Dead Belt and give you some recon, first of all, it’s still dead but showing signs of life.”

The Dead Belt was the lumpy strip across Michigan, lower Ontario, upstate New York, and New England where the fallout from the Chicago superbomb had killed everything except grass and bugs. The 250-megaton bomb had been a pure-fusion weapon, so its mostly-light-metals fallout had been intensely radioactive but very short lived. For a few weeks after the detonation, it had been enough to kill nearly all vertebrates and trees, leaving only corpses and mud under the deep snow, and forests of mere upright logs; now radiation was almost completely returned to background levels.

Bambi summed up. “Dead cities, empty land, not one column of smoke horizon to horizon, washouts miles across that cut right through roads and subdivisions. Big drifts of silt in all the rivers, and the rivers themselves are cutting snaky, complicated channels and forming new lakes—everything the Mensche expedition saw a few months ago, but more so after so much rain and snow. Big parts of it won’t be farmable again for thousands of years, it’s going to be some kind of a badlands. But all those empty snowfields did make it easy to see five big Daybreaker trails, and one of your Special Assistants is copying my notes about those; it looks like each trail represents a horde of at least four thousand tribals moving south and west.”

“None coming this way, though?”

“No. But remember I didn’t overfly New England.”

“We have sources of our own up that way,” he said. He snapped his fingers; a young girl, eyes downcast, came and poured more wine for him. Bambi declined. The Commandant ran his finger slowly around the edge of the wineglass. “Would the RRC—and you—like some advice?”

Since I’ll undoubtedly get it anyway… “Always. We listen to anyone.”

“I wonder. The message Heather O’Grainne sent makes me wonder about the quality of your intel or maybe the wisdom you apply to it. Of course, it’s obvious that the tribals are planning some big raids this summer, so it makes sense for you to attack the tribals, pre-emptively, at a few points, to help their attack fizzle—but don’t you realize it’s going to fizzle anyway? When are you going to consider that you don’t have to have a war unless you want one? The tribals are starving and getting weaker. They aren’t farmers—most of them are trying to end farming, and they only survived this long because canned and boxed food in the Dead Belt stayed edible, the people who would have eaten it were all dead, and the tribes could move in and mine for food. Sure, a horde of twenty thousand people sounds like a lot, but coming out of areas that had how many millions in them, back before?

“So what if the tribals surge this summer, or even two or three more? They lose thousands on every surge, and more to starvation and disease over the winter. Bribe or talk them into staying put a couple more years, and eventually you can walk back into the empty land, because the tribals will be irrelevant.”

“Isn’t that pretty hard on the people that will be burned out, looted from, maybe slaughtered, to wait for the tribals to ‘become irrelevant’?”

“Almost the whole world’s irrelevant already, because it’s dead. And without planes and radio, whatever is left is mostly far away. Which brings me to my advice to you personally. You used to be a Fed, you took an oath, I understand all that, I was a senior at West Point, after all, back before. It’s hard to change old mental habits. But… here we are. I own New York Harbor, because of a few things I did right after Daybreak day. You own San Diego Harbor, because of what your father did. For that matter that silly bastard Lord Robert with his mud-hut empire did a couple things right, and he’s at least got the best hut in the whole empire of mud. We’re alike.”

“You’re suggesting something,” Bambi said. She was watching the last blood-red light fade from the Statue of Liberty; the contrast between the blackened areas and the reflection from the flows of resmelted copper on the lump turned it into a red and black abstraction. She knew what the Commandant’s suggestion would be, but she waited for it anyway.

“The old world is gone. We’re powerless to bring it back. Most people who would benefit from that are already dead, aren’t they? Do we owe them anything?” He drank deeply, and set his glass down in a prissy way that Bambi realized was probably a twenty-three-year-old’s idea of sophistication. “Someday, at a summit conference, you and I will say ‘United States’ just as we now do ‘Soviet Union’ or ‘Roman Empire,’ and probably no more frequently.”

“So Operation Full Court Press—”

“Although it is regrettable that the tribes are smashing up civilized areas a long way from here… well, ‘a long way from here’ covers it.”

“You’re part of the same country.”

“That’s the issue, isn’t it?”