John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

God, half my age, but fifty times my youth and energy.

Some clergy might object to the sheer intensity of the sexual relationship , a phrase he used in his diary at least twice a month—whenever he was even in the same room with Jenny, everybody picked up on it. People objected to all sorts of things that were not their business. But after all, they were married, by Jenny’s dad, in fact, and Reverend Whilmire hadn’t seemed to have a problem with a son-in-law his own age, and who the hell else’s business was it?

Jenny was exactly Grayson’s idea of beautiful, and if there had been snotty media people around no doubt they’d have picked on him for marrying a Nazi-pinup-girl fantasy: creamy, almost eggshell white skin, huge blue eyes, very full lips, and a Barbie-doll boobs-on-a-stick body. ( Another good thing about Daybreak, he reflected. Barbie dolls are extinct, all rotted away, so there’s not a convenient term for mocking the women I’m attracted to. )

He didn’t know if it was nature, or Whilmire’s upbringing, but Jenny was one of those rare young women who act as if they like to please men for its own sake. And smart—when he explained things to her she always leapt forward to exactly his point.

And the values. She understood what his country, his Army, his everything were really all about.

Sometimes it seemed he’d brought her into the world, fully formed, just by having longed for her his whole life. “Now sit down with me, baby,” she said, “and you tell me everything everyone said at the meeting this morning, and then all about your meeting with that weird little man.”

That weird little man was what she called Cam; sometimes it bothered Grayson, because it didn’t seem like any way to talk about the rightful leader of the free world. But then, when a girl grows up with her father eternally at the right hand of God’s number one guy, I suppose she loses her reverence for titles and positions. Maybe that’s another one of her strengths.

“There’s one little favor I want you to do for me,” she said, and, memories of his long-ago first marriage grabbing him, he tensed. But a moment later he relaxed when she said, “I want you to look something over and see if I did it right. You just never have time to work on your articles about the Yough Valley campaign, baby, I know you don’t, but since you have all your notes in order, it’s not a problem for me to write from them, and I have nothing to do all day. So I’ve got the last installment done, and just like the others, I’d like to have you make sure I’m accurate, because—believe this or not, baby—being a minister’s daughter is not the best training in the world for being a military memoirist.”

Grayson leaned back and laughed. “No, but I guess being a general’s wife is. You realize this means the entire article series will be by you?”

“Baby, you did all the fighting and you beat the daylights out of the tribes. I’m just getting you the credit for it. Now read through it, correct the facts and don’t you dare inflict any modesty on it, and we’ll have it off to Chris at the Post-Times , and the rest of our time for ourselves. Which”—she had slipped a foot out of her pump, and was sliding it into his trouser leg—“we will need, because it’s time to celebrate our three-month anniversary.”

If she and the plane had not been on trial for their lives Bambi would have considered this to be the dullest meeting she’d ever attended. The heavyset woman who had led the arresting party, Helen Chelseasdaughter, argued that the solution to the problem of having captured evil technology and an evil Fed was to tie the Fed into the plane and set them both on fire; with luck it would also destroy the steel building, removing more blight from the face of the Earth.

Michael Amandasson, Bambi’s court-appointed defender—a tall good-looking guy who might have worked well on the cover of a romance novel, especially since he wore his vest open without a shirt—conceded that the plane was guilty of being a plane, but said Bambi was probably reformable after a few years of slavery with the other recent captive.

The prosecution accused Michael Amandasson of wanting to save Bambi as a slave because he wanted to own her; he vehemently denied it but Helen Chelseasdaughter pointed out he was male.

The apparent judge, Susan Marthasdaughter, reminded everyone that Bambi was a woman of color, so if they did put her to death, they ought to do so quickly and mercifully.

Geez, if my old pal Dave Carlucci was here, he’ d be complaining his ass off about reverse discrimination. Wish he was here, though. With about thirty other Feds.

Helen Chelseasdaughter demanded that Bambi testify about her actual cultural heritage, purpose in landing here, and any other information she thought relevant.

“Well,” Bambi said, “my family are Old Californians; they had a rancho with furniture they’d looted from San Juan Capistrano before the ’49ers turned up. So my ancestry is Hispanic but it’s not the least bit poor.” (Good going, Bambi, give them another reason to torch you.) “As for what I was doing, I was flying mail on the Pueblo-to-Olympia northern route when I was forced off the main route by bad weather, ran out of fuel, and had to land. There’d be ransom for me and the plane if you were to contact the Reconstruction Research Center in Pueblo; they’d pay—”

“That’s three things that are wrong right there,” the prosecutor said, folding her arms. “Reconstruction is what we don’t want, research leads to technology and all that bullshit, and we’re decentralist.”

“How much ransom?” the judge asked.

Michael Amandasson wondered if they could just ransom the mail, destroy the plane, and keep the captive, and was accused of masculinity.

Susan Marthasdaughter said, “Why don’t we break for dinner, meditation, and rest, and resume in the morning? Also, we’ll feed the prisoner and give her a blanket; there’s no reason for unnecessary suffering.”

For the first time since I went into law enforcement, Bambi thought, I’m kind of liking a liberal judge.

Robert figured, What the hell, today might as well be the day I ask, Karl must be in a good mood. The soldiers behind them carried two big strings of bluegill, bass, perch, and walleye. Nine months after Daybreak, a whole spring hatch hadn’t been fished except by Karl and Robert; they’d caught all these in the hour around dawn. There’d been plenty of ducks and geese too, but Karl’d said to let them go till fall, give’em a chance to raise one family without interference.

The sun lay blood-red on the treeline; their shadows stretched far ahead. A deep red sunrise no longer meant a storm; sunrises and sunsets were always blood-colored now by the soot in the air. Robert inhaled the cold damp of early summer morning, delicious before the broiling afternoon heat and humidity.

It was a good morning. Did he want to risk spoiling it by maybe setting Karl off? As assistant lord or whatever he was—Karl had never given him a title, he was just “Robert” to all their people—Robert was the only person at Castle Earthstone who could say “Karl” and not “Lord Karl,” and the only survivor who knew they’d both been linemen for the electric company, or that their comfortable house in the inner compound of Castle Earthstone had been Karl’s hunting cabin last year.