John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“I’ll pass the word along, sir.”

Grayson continued at a swift jog; the cold bit at his toes and seared his lungs. Don’t slip and bust a leg on the bridge, he thought, that would be one irony too many.

“What the fuck is that? ” General Phat blurted.

“Tribals, close, coming this way,” Larry said. “We can’t stay by the fires, we’ll be silhouetted.”

“The helicopter—”

“Talk to them if that gadget still works, but come on .”

Chris and Larry dragged Phat, almost by main force; Jason backed a few steps away from the fire, trying to put it between himself and the oncoming wave. “I’ll be along in a minute,” he yelled.

I think I owe this to the cause, he thought. Could have been me out there howling like a nut and dying just to kill other people; as Daybreaker poet I was all set up for it. Instead I got a nice clean comfy world, if you don’t mind the company of so many billion corpses. He hoped he was far enough back not to be readily visible; black-powder pistols made nearly as much light at night as they did smoke in the day, but he wanted to get off at least one shot before they knew where he was. Besides, I want to try something.

Dark shapes swarmed on the far side of the fire. “Mister Gun!” Jason shouted at the top of his lungs. “Mister Gun lives! Mother Gaia is a lie, Mister Gun lives!” Chanting, the tribals had entered the firelight in a solid wave. Jason pointed into the thickest part of the crowd and pulled the trigger.

In the split second of silence, he let the Daybreak poet he had once been merge with what Larry and Debbie had brought back about The Play of Daybreak , and shouted, “Mister Gun rises from the dead! Slay them all, slaughter them, Mister Gun is mightier than Mother Gaia!” He fired again, then bellowed, “Mister Gun!” as he fired again.

The crowd faltered, whimpered, tried to raise its chant, and that gave him a moment to swap out magazines. “Mister Gun!” a voice cried behind him— Larry, of course , he saw what I was doing! —and another shot lashed into the milling Daybreakers. One with a spirit stick stumbled and fell.

“Mister Gun slays your spirit stick!” Blam. “Mister Gun shits on your spirit stick and breaks it!” Blam. “Your spirit stick is dead!” Blam. Jason fired at the end of each scream.

Now Chris was shouting about Mister Gun, too. I swear, Jason thought, reloading with his last magazine, if I somehow get home alive, I am organizing the First Church of Mister Gun.

It had delayed the human wave, made it falter when it might have swept across and killed them all, but they had only had forty rounds to begin with, and those were almost gone. “Jason,” Larry said, quietly. “Back up with us. Phat’s got the chopper coming into the center of the triangle. It’ll be here soon. We just have to hope— Mister Gun! Mister Gun, feed on the tribes, rape Mother Gaia, Mister Gun! ” He shot into the crowd; Jason used up his last magazine doing the same, and then fell back with Larry and Chris. Chris was almost shaking with laughter. “I didn’t think humor was called for here, but my dear sweet God I wanted to shout that Mother Gaia swims out to meet troopships.”

“Not long now,” Phat murmured, as they joined him. “The chopper—Right!” he held the little radio to his ear. “Yes, in the center, that’s us!”

Chris listened hard. “An H-92. It’s a distinct sound. Jocking a camera in Eritrea, you couldn’t mistake them for anything else. I always followed that sound, it meant Navy, and that far inland, Navy meant Marines—”

Phat was shouting instructions into the radio; they heard “Mister Gun” a few times before the helicopter roared over them. Its searchlights swept outward, revealing hundreds of tribals milling in confusion.

“They’re not afraid of guns,” Jason said. “Not out in the real world. They’re afraid of Mister Gun. Mister Gun lives in the part of them where Daybreak lives.” Phat repeated that into the radio, loudly. The searchlights swept a second time.

“The light hasn’t touched us,” Jason pointed out.

“No need,” Phat said, “they have us on IR, and why show anyone where we are? They just have to look around for a second first.”

“What are they looking for?”

“Trees, bad ground, bad guys,” Phat said. “If I was flying what’s probably the last working chopper in the world on what’s probably its last mission ever, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get ambushed—let alone run into a tree, or sink in a swamp.”

The helicopter crept forward toward the milling tribals. Its loudspeaker thundered, “You have not respected Mister Gun! Mother Gaia cannot save you! Mister Gun must punish you!”

The machine guns blasted into the tribals, who had been staring into the searchlights. Some fell; the rest fled. The searchlight winked out.

The helicopter descended to ground height, and the four men ran to it, diving forward, letting the crew drag them in by the arms. “That everyone?” the crewman shouted, as he pulled Jason aboard. “How many of you?”

“Four.”

“Got the last one, sir.”

The door slid shut behind him, the crewman pushed him into a seat, and the helicopter went up the way Jason had imagined a rocket might. “The skipper isn’t about to lose this thing to ground fire at this point,” the crewman said, apologetically. “We have every luxury we could snag from the Bush that wasn’t too big and heavy. How about coffee and ice cream cones?”

So the rendezvous had been the old golf course; Grayson had been able to put watchers on every road, on the railroad tracks, and at the airport, but there had simply been too many open, grassy areas to cover on foot, and he hadn’t been willing to risk the few trained cavalry ponies trying to cover the territory. And honestly, he couldn’t have imagined that Bush would be in league with Pueblo; just one more proof that you could never trust those Navy bastards. Rum, sodomy, and the lash, he quoted to himself. Especially sodomy. Which is what they’re doing to me and the whole TNG.

He heard gunfire ahead, and shouting. Ahead of them, above the low rise, he saw the helicopter against the stars, descending beyond the hill. Then brilliant electric light, unintelligible shouting and loudspeakers, and machine guns—real ones, firing fast and without the slow hollow claps of hand-turned black-powder guns.

“Pick up the pace and expect a fight,” he told the major.

They had covered only about two hundred yards more when Grayson saw the helicopter rise vertically and fly away to the northwest.

“Did they get away, sir?”

“I don’t know, Major. I think we’ve got to go take a look. But—”

Gunfire from the van.

The main body plunged into the ditches on either side, all in the dark shadows of the trees in starlight.

A messenger was at Grayson’s side. “General, Bravo captain says we plowed into the flank of a big party of tribals, and Second Platoon, out front, is fighting them; First and Third are moving to flank. He thinks they were going somewhere else and we just ran into them—”

Grayson was shouting again, sending forces around on each of his flanks, firming up his center with his rearguard, and driving them forward to find and massacre the tribals. Frustrated by failure and betrayal, he exulted in the volleys and single shots and the screams in the dark. And either these tribal fuckers stopped Phat or they didn’t, but I was too late and too slow, and that makes me mad, and by Christ I’m going to make them pay for making me mad.