John Barnes - The Last President

“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 .

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.