John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Well, I like to talk and you like to listen. That’s a flaw in our whole species, always figuring crap out and sharing it and making more of our stupid selves, just because we’re too scared to be really alone and quiet.”

“Alone and quiet.” Robert held his bottle up in a toast, and Karl beamed and reciprocated.

Tarantina Highbotham had a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, an Annapolis ring, and an honorable retirement from the Navy as a captain—equivalent to a colonel in the other services. Her whole life’s experience had been in getting things exactly right.

“That moon is too bright to have so much of it in your scope,” she told Henry, the new observer who was just getting his scope positioned. “Just the northeast corner, less if you can. Make sure you can see Fecunditatis, but don’t blind yourself with any more light than you have to.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked around the darkened platform; the rest were right on the money. All this can’t be easy. At least my first class in celestial nav involved manual instruments. What must it be like, trying to learn this and do it right, if you grew up filling out a screen to tell the telescope where to point?

No matter. Wherever they came from, they were doing it.

Henry had been on his honeymoon on St. Croix; on Daybreak day, his new bride had traded her jewelry for a ride to the mainland, leaving him a note. He’d probably never know whether she had gone off with slavers, pirates, coyotes, or just plain idiots. After that he’d worked odd jobs, begged in the street, and drunk, until Highbotham hired him to dig a latrine, and discovered he had been a math major.

Abby, on St. Croix to work for some alternate-energy foundation, had the best paper-and-pencil math skills of all Highbotham’s team, and drew well— better than well — accurately .

Peggy was a retired high school math teacher who had spent thirty some years with DoDEA. Her husband, a newly retired Marine general, had dropped dead when the Pittsburgh EMP apparently reached just far enough to give him a current surge in the pacemaker. She always showed up in full makeup.

Richard, a beefy old sad sack with a heavy drinker’s face, had been an architect; Gilead, dark-skinned and with a prominent Cuban accent, had been a technical analyst for a brokerage.

Now they were Christiansted Naval Observatory, by the authority of Pueblo and the Second Fleet, and when they weren’t the Observatory, they were the Caribbean Academy of Mathematics—a brilliant idea Abby had had and Peggy had pushed, feeding about fifty orphaned children in order to lure them in for a heavy dose of math and science. Those kids might be our most important work—our descendants will still know the world is a planet, the sky is a vacuum, the sun is a star, and the moon’s a big rock that doesn’t fall down because it falls in a circle. And be able to find their way to the other side of the planet, and come back.

Not for the first time, Captain Highbotham realized she loved her team, and her new work, immoderately. Truth is, retirement was dull and I hated not mattering. The moon, just past full, silvered the still figures bent over their telescopes.

Highbotham looked up at the moon, picking out Fecunditatis—the next dark spot over from Tranquility. Were you trying to tell us something, putting your damned moon gun right next to where the Eagle landed?

They all hit their clocks.

“Where and what?” she asked, quietly.

“Still in the daylight,” Henry said. “But a definite flash. A few of the shadows blinked.” He was scribbling frantically at his drawing. “I’m marking which ones.”

That had been one of his ideas—that as a backup, if the launcher fired while it was still in daylight, and they had pre-drawn the shadows around the suspected launcher location, each observer could check off the briefly vanished shadows. From their checksheets, it might be possible to calculate the location of the launcher.

“Everyone else?” Highbotham asked.

“Confirmed, in the bright area, I’m still marking shadows,” Gilead said.

“Confirmed and marking,” Abby said.

“Confirmed,” Peggy said. “Also marking. I think I saw the flash, marking that too.”

“I was blinking, I guess,” Richard said, disconsolately.

“You’ve seen a couple others, and we have multiple observers so someone can blink.” Highbotham noted times from everyone’s clock. “I have 3:04:16.02, 3:04:15.98, 3:04:15.91, and 3:04:16.17 and that is… 3:04:16.02. Good work, everyone, and back to the scopes. Henry, I’ll want to see how your shadow calculations panned out tomorrow—so take your time, if you need to, to make them good.”

Back in the quiet of her house, she copied wtrc attn arnie pkg on way 3:04:16.02 fectas agn

onto the top line of the page, translated all the characters to ASCII, wrote a line of digits from her one-time pad, added, and brought the characters back from ASCII. She ran through the usual annoying precautions to make sure her radio had no nanoswarm, and finally began to tap the key, sending the coded message. Hand cryptography. Morse. Wonder how soon I’ ll strap on a cutlass and lead a boarding party.

So that’s it. The EMP will burst over us somewhere between 4 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the 17th. Arnie scribbled a note and had the desk attendants copy it for every relevant officer, department head, and technician at Mota Elliptica, to get preparations under way at WTRC; gave a short note to the radio room to alert Pueblo, Athens, and Olympia; and dropped a note titled URGENT INSERT into the basket for the control bunker, so that once an hour they would stop the rolling tapes and warn the planet of the impending EMP.

With nothing more to do, he headed up the stairs for bed.

“So,” Trish said, behind him. “Five days of delay before the moon gun went off. Longest ever. Does that mean it’s an AI?”

“I hope so,” Arnie said. “Because if it is, our job is much easier. And if it’s not, it’s what I’m scared of. Why are you up so late?”

“Same reason you are. I asked them to wake me if a report of a flash on the moon came in. So was it Christiansted that got the fix?”

“Yeah. As always; best observatory we’ve got and they’re in the right place for a trajectory from the moon that’s coming here.”

“Did they get an exact fix?”

“Exacter than the last time. We’re narrowing in. But the flash happened with Fecunditatis still in daylight, so the launch site is still someplace in a forty-mile circle on our map of the moon. Captain Highbotham will be disappointed.”

Trish shrugged. “Highbotham’s not thinking about how long it will be before we can go to the moon to deal with it, because that’s not her job. Her job was to nail the moon gun’s location, and it slipped away again.” She peered at him through those strange wire-and-strap goggles; her eyes were an interesting shade of sea-green. “Arnie, you look pretty bummed yourself. Do you just need the sleep, or would you like to get a snack in the kitchen and just hang for a while?”

They made grilled cheese sandwiches and chamomile tea. He was surprised at how good it was; how long had it been since he’d sat down to eat warm food with company?

Trish gave him her puckish, crooked smile. “Is this a secure-enough location for you to share rampant speculation?”