John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Definitely Arnie is weird. I’ve just never seen him weird this way before—really, he was terrified. But he didn’t tell me what of. Do you know anything about him?”

“Just what I know from working with him. I archived his report on the Battle of Mota Elliptica yesterday afternoon, but it was more or less a normal action report. It’s a mystery to me, too.”

They walked for another hour and a half, and then James fixed them a light supper before Leslie went home, well before sundown because she had early morning duties. He watched the tall, strong girl and the big dog till they went out of sight around a building, then adjusted his mirror to catch the last hour of sunlight, and returned to Great Expectations .

Tonight was starting out like Stephen Ecco’s favorite books and daydreams did. Heather O’Grainne’s note, delivered in a neat pocket-drop by Patrick, had asked for a night meeting and specified “tell no one you are coming.” Even if it was Heather, not M or Wild Bill Donovan, and the organization was the Reconstruction Research Center, not MI6 or Mosby’s Raiders, still, it was a secret night meeting straight out of his fifteen-year-old self’s fantasies.

Central Pueblo was inhabited, but it was already dark; candles and lamp oil were expensive, and nowadays people rose early. He saw the watch only once, from more than a mile away.

Knowing himself too well, he tried to fight down his excitement, not wanting the sheer romance to affect the mission. Sure hope it is a mission or I’m gonna feel like a total fool with a headful of dreams. Which ain’t exactly unfamiliar.

Something moved.

He turned, center low, body neutral—and laughed. A gigantic possum scuttled across the road. You could be a little more romantic, dude. But then I bet you’re thinkin’, “You could be droppin’ a little more food, dude.”

The guard nodded and let Ecco pass. He ascended the dark stairs in the old courthouse; the only open doorway glowed with candlelight.

“Steve, thanks for coming.” Heather sat in an armchair with her feet propped up on a desk. “I’m claiming pregnant lady privilege and not getting up; Arnie will show you what’s up and then we’ll talk about what we need you to do.

Arnie Yang had laid out maps on an old picnic table; standing over it with a pointer, he looked like he was running some weird casino game. On the tabletop, sheets of drafting vellum covered topo maps of southern Illinois and Indiana. Pale Bluff was near the lower left corner of the map, and the upper right just reached to Fort Wayne. A swarm of different marks gathered on the left of the Wabash; penciled lines intersected in the Palestine/Warsaw area and just east of Bloomington. Bridges on the Wabash and the Tippecanoe were tagged with bits of construction paper.

“It looks like you want me to go some beyond Pale Bluff?”

“We sure do,” Heather said.

“And come back alive,” Arnie said. “ That’s the tough part. There is something real bad happening east of the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, and north of the Ohio; that lobe of the Lost Quarter is much more lost than it was even two months ago, and we can’t find out what’s happening.” His strong, thin fingers walked like dividers down the line of the Wabash, tapping black arrows that pointed across the river. “Stations across the Wabash stopped reporting around mid-May. The flow of refugees dried up by early June. Since then, five different local governments have tried to send someone over onto the left bank of the Wabash, plus these two attempts to cross the Tippecanoe. Every mission disappeared completely, and those were all local guys that knew the territory and had some background. One was a force of four guys.

“But this one—we’re not supposed to know about it, but we have a source in the TNG’s Defense Department down in Athens. Three weeks ago the TNG’s Department of Intelligence sent a team of six Rangers across here”—he tapped a black arrow south of Terre Haute—“and they disappeared with no trace. One of them, too decayed for the pathologist to determine how he died, was found floating dead in the Wabash three days ago.”

Ecco tried to look imperturbable while his heart thumped. “And things are so bad over there, they think, that they’ll lose that many men trying to find out?”

Arnie’s finger traced out the arc of red crosses that paralleled the Wabash. “Assassinations since April: twenty-two. Town constables, militia officers, sheriffs, mayors, one very diligent postmaster—anybody who was making things work on our side of the Wabash. The seven black circles are the four towns—villages really, none of them had more than two hundred people—that were burned out, and the three Castles. Nineteen black squares mark farms where the family was killed and the house burned. All that’s since April first. A few of them might have been Provi or Temper partisans burning each other out, or plain old bandits. But this looks much more to me like we have an enemy on the other side of the Wabash, and it doesn’t plan to stay there. Right now the thing we need most is information . We need you to see things, figure out what’s going on, understand it all—and most of all, bring it back .”

Ecco nodded, made serious by Arnie’s evident passion. “I understand the mission.”

Heather said, “Well, we can’t define what you should look for, exactly, or where you should look for it. We know nothing once you get any distance north or east of Pale Bluff. If it’s too hot south of Terre Haute, head north, maybe try crossing the Tippecanoe. And bring back what you see. That’s the most important thing on this mission. Don’t be a brave lion; what we need is a perceptive weasel.”

“Got it.”

Arnie said, “Now, this might or might not come up. We’re making a guess that the Lost Quarter is nearly hollow—most of the tribes are right up near the edge, where they can live by looting civilization. We’re basing that partly on the photos from the surviving Navy reconnaissance planes, which we can’t fly nearly often enough now, and partly just on the fact that so much of the Lost Quarter was a radioactive dead zone for months, so it doesn’t seem like there could be enough there to keep any sizable number of people alive. So our guess is there’s a tough outside and an empty inside. If it turns out we’re right, then just a few miles past the border you might find it much easier and safer to travel than it was getting in. So here’s something I’d like you to look into if —and only if—it looks like we’re right about that.” His fingers traced many pencil lines on the vellum. “Our direction-finding operation has gotten fixes on two stations broadcasting in a code that’s not ours, or either Federal government, or any Castle’s; all these bearing lines crisscross in these two small areas. We think this one near Bloomington is just a relay or a subHQ: it only broadcasts occasionally, usually after the other one does but not every time. When it does broadcast, it broadcasts for about as long as the first station did.

“The really active transmitter, the one that seems to start conversations, both with Bloomington and with other stations in the Lost Quarter, is this one, between Warsaw and Palestine, Indiana.” He laid down a few photographs. “These air photos from February show nothing in Warsaw or Palestine, but this one from April looks like dirt ramparts and walls under construction. So if by any chance, once you’re over the Wabash and you’ve evaded whatever has already cost twenty lives, if you need something to go take a look at, this might be something to look at.”