John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Sure, I’d like to have someone to talk to, too. We’ll talk next week.” The cams came to a halt as he was speaking; he wasn’t sure whether she’d heard the last of it.

Darcage was waiting for her, and grabbed her on the back stairs from the radio room to the suite she shared with Graham, pressing a hand over her mouth gently for a moment. “Just so you don’t scream from being startled. I wanted to discuss something. We very much approve of your idea of a back-channel contact with Doctor Yang in Pueblo, and we’d be happy to coordinate.”

“Coordinate what?” she asked.

“We don’t have to be enemies, you know. You must realize that once the Tempers are done with the tribes, they will turn on you, and we are better fighters—”

“About three thousand of yours couldn’t take Pullman against five hundred of ours. You die bravely. As for winning, not so much.”

“Wait until all the cowardly gunpowder and artillery are gone.” The man’s face was contorted with rage, but his hand stayed at his side.

“They’ll never be gone. We make them and we’re going to keep making them. I’ll talk to anyone, that’s what my job—”

He was gone.

Why didn’t I shout for help?

Arnie was almost home when Aaron said, “She’s very unhappy, you know.”

“Who?” Arnie asked, turning to face the shadowed figure.

Aaron’s face was completely lost in the dark void under the blanket. “She’s very unhappy. She will dream all week about talking to you again.” He vanished backward into the shadows.

Arnie heard the watch nearby. They’d want to know why he was standing here in the middle of the street and the middle of the night. He ran, silently, to his front door.

Harrison Castro was proud that they’d managed to build a radio voice encryptor to hack into high-level communications between Athens, Pueblo, and Olympia and the various ships and substations. He knew that objectively he would be better off listening to everyone and not letting them know he could, but it was also high time to make sure they couldn’t ignore him.

With a perfect excuse, he had brought Pat O’Grainne in here, and was now enjoying showing off the machine.

“We doped out all hundred or so of their eccentric cams, and then we just set up our mechanical scanner.” He pointed to the three ten-foot-long rotors, each with a hundred disks. “Every time we get a rotor right, the signal audibly becomes easier to understand. So we tune along one rotor to find the closest to intelligible, then along the next, then along the third, then back to the first, until it leaps out clearly. Do that long enough with enough messages, and eventually you can recognize the code they’re using right away, and read all their traffic.”

“You do know I never learned enough math to balance a checkbook, right? To me it looks like three giant camshafts and a bunch of guys with Walkman headphones hooked to an old phone plugboard,” Pat said.

Castro chuckled. “Pat, I like you. Okay, here’s the actual story: I don’t really give a damn about most of their secrets—we’re practically our own country down here nowadays—but I want them to know they don’t have a chance in hell of pushing me around. Now let’s call Pueblo, so you can say hi to your grandson.”

Harrison Castro himself spent only half a minute congratulating Heather and welcoming Leo to the world, and then he put Pat on and let the sentimental babble flow until Heather admitted to being tired.

Later, in his room, Pat told Heather what he really thought—not about Leo, because they had both agreed he was the most marvelous thing that ever happened, but about Harrison Castro. He made extra sure to destroy the original.

Heather understood perfectly well that Harrison Castro, in the guise of letting her father talk to her, had directly challenged her by letting her know he was listening to Federal encrypted radio, and also established that the freeholder of an important Castle could get access that an ordinary citizen couldn’t. Sure, before Daybreak, the CEO of Microsoft would have been put right through to any Cabinet secretary, probably to the President. But a Castle freeholder cracking Federal high-security communications and just coming on line— as a precedent, it blows .

Dad no doubt understood that too. Certainly his next covert, encrypted letter would give her a better picture of what was going on at Castle Castro. She’d never found much of a way to tell him that though he’d been kind of a loser at having a career and a fraud as a biker, he’d been great at loving his daughter and being a spy.

Besides, she loved talking to her father, because besides celebrating Leo, he understood how much she needed to talk, and cry, about missing Lenny, and about Leo never knowing his dad. That had really helped.

So, she thought, drifting off, Castro’s asshole gesture could wait for later. Then, as so often happened when she told herself a problem was for later, she had an idea. If she could—

The nurse came in. “If you don’t expect anyone else to call, it’s about time for everyone to rest.”

“I didn’t expect the last call.” Heather brushed at Leo’s little face and said, “Looks like he’s already starting on that rest thing.”

“We’ll put him right here—see, if you sit up, you can see right into the cradle—and we’ve got people in the hallway; just call or ring that little bell beside the bed if you need help or if anything worries you. You try to get some sleep.” She quenched the oil lamp; dim moonlight still filtered in.

Heather leaned up. Leo’s breathing seemed to be strong and steady. As she watched her son sleep, she was already formulating her note to Dave Carlucci, who ran the FBI West Headquarters a few miles from Castle Castro; although she had not quite formulated it, she had a smile as she fell asleep that would have frightened anyone who knew her well.

They unblindfolded Steve Ecco to walk him through the pileup of wrecked cars at one end of Reeder Park. He knew where he was because the memorial statue for the Second Iran War was so distinctive that Ecco had memorized it as a landmark, since it was less than a mile and a half from the still-intact US 36 bridge.

He smelled the river and the trees. Oh, crap, crap, crap if I could just get loose and run at my old pace, if they didn’t have any guards on that bridge, I could be on my way home; plenty of woods on the other side, all I’d have to do is follow the highway and turn south of the burned-out zone—

The stylized cross on this big, new, glass-and-steel building meant it was a church. Big hands pushed him through the doorway, then toppled him from the top of the stairs down into the basement. He wasn’t able to swing his head into harm’s way this time either; all he got was a couple more bruises on his chest and shoulder.

The guard at the bottom kicked him on the tailbone, hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to do much damage. His legs were already numb, and they didn’t bother asking him to stand; they just jerked him to his feet and threw him onto an old mattress.

Two men came in. The older, heavyset one had a huge bushy white beard; the younger, slimmer one was the sort of nondescript guy that used to work at some store you went to now and then, whose appearance you couldn’t remember by the time you were back in the parking lot.