John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

“Glad to know you understand the business.”

“One thought, though. Should I write a few stories to sign your name to, so it’s at least less obvious that you’re gone? Everyone in Pueblo will know, of course, but would it be worth anything to cover for you away from here?”

“It might be. Be sure to put my name on anything about holiday decorating or fashion trends.”

“Of course.” She grinned at him and said, “Seriously, Chris, I’m scared shitless—without Daybreak I’d be hoping to edit my high school’s student news site right now, and you’re handing me the most important newspaper in America.”

Chris shrugged. “If anybody needs to look threatening, you’ve got Abel. If there’s a need for mature judgment, he’s got you.”

“I meant I was scared about how much I think I’m going to enjoy this.”

“Now I’m scared,” Abel said.

Chris Manckiewicz arrived and took his place beside Quattro, Bambi, Larry, and Jason. “Sorry I was so slow, I needed to arrange cover.”

“You’re well within bounds,” Heather said. “All right. Let me begin with the awful news.” She detailed it quickly, sparing nothing: Ecco had been intercepted and murdered by people who were clearly waiting for him; Pauline Kloster had escaped and Carol May was recording everything Pauline could remember about Castle Earthstone. “It looks like Pale Bluff is now our last secure settlement on that frontier, which means we’ve quietly lost a whole tier of counties on our side of the Wabash in the last ten weeks. There are obviously far more people than we’d thought in the Lost Quarter, tightly organized into tribes and apparently into Castles as well, controlled by Daybreak. The best news, and it’s not that good, is that I’m now sure I can get the Temper government to mount military expeditions against the tribes next spring—but we’ll need ten times what we would have thought.”

Manckiewicz saw it first, as she’d expected. “That isn’t the worst. We must have a traitor in the ranks, fairly high up to have known what Ecco’s real mission was.”

“Pauline Kloster said Ecco was caught within five minutes of crossing the Wabash. And that he walked almost up to Terre Haute, seeing patrols all the way. They can’t possibly have the resources to patrol their border that thoroughly; they had to have known everything. That means high-level traitor.”

“That’s right. They knew everything,” Larry said quietly.

She looked around the room. “I’m not going to tell you who’s suspected, though I’m sure the absence of some people is a dead giveaway as to who’s suspected, but please don’t discuss that. Were you all able to secure complete cover so that you can just go straight from here to the airport? Anybody absolutely have to go get a piece of personal gear or send a note to someone so they won’t talk?”

“Covered it,” Jason said.

“That’s what I was late for,” Chris added.

“We keep most of our stuff in the Gooney,” Quattro said, “and we won’t be gone long, will we?”

“No, not you. Good, then. Quattro and Bambi, you’re going to take the DC-3 and haul these three guys to wherever they think they can do the best penetration from the northwest, moving toward Castle Earthstone—it’s in the Palestine-Warsaw area in Indiana. Work out mechanics of it all in flight, including figuring out where you can refuel in the middle of the night without being conspicuous. Leave now , before anything can leak. By dawn tomorrow, Larry, Chris, and Jason need to have landed somewhere north and west of Lafayette. Cross the Tippecanoe, go at least as far as Castle Earthstone, report on what you find.”

“What about the traitor?” Jason asked.

“I know none of you are it,” she said. “You all have solid verifiable alibis for the whole time when Ecco’s mission could have been betrayed. I’ll be doing things here to find the traitor, but in the light of what we’ve just learned about the Lost Quarter, I’ve got to know what’s going on, right now. I can’t wait to establish perfect security.”

“Why us?” Jason asked quietly. “I mean—well, I have a wife with a child coming, Chris is a very public figure, Larry just found his lost daughter—”

Heather grimaced. “Everyone will have some reason not to go. Out of the ones I can clear right away, Quattro and Bambi, you’re in because this mission has to move as far as it can by air. Larry, you’ve got the woodcraft; Jason, there has to be an ex-Daybreaker along to make sense out of whatever you find, you’ll be more use in a fight than Ysabel, and she still has seizures around Daybreak stuff. I’m assuming you don’t want me to send your pregnant wife.”

Jason nodded, satisfied.

“What am I along for?” Chris asked.

“So you can publish articles and maybe a book that will infuriate the absolute living piss out of all the civilized people and motivate them to rise up and slay and slay and slay till there’s nothing left of Daybreak. It’s war. The public has to want to win it. In less than three weeks we have a summit conference here to get the ball rolling for the restart election, and in fourteen months we’re going to elect a new batch of politicians. God love’em, politicians are all about deals, so the way I see it is, the only way to ensure no deals with the devil is to ensure there’s no devil. Now, go.”

Deb Mensche arrived first, right at four. The directions had said not to come early. She slipped in and closed the door so quietly that Heather did not notice her before she looked up from breastfeeding Leo. She didn’t exactly jump, but Leo felt the difference and wailed. She helped him find his way back to the nipple. “That was spooky. You might as well be invisible.”

“Leo caught me.”

“Leo’s only been around a week. He’s harder to fool because he makes fewer assumptions.” Heather smiled at her. “Glad you’re here first. Come over here, there’s something I want to say softly in case the next people in might hear through the door.”

Deb put her ear to Heather’s mouth and Heather said, “Your mission will be a decoy, but you’re not supposed to know that. One of the two people I’m going to put in charge of briefing you might betray you to the other side. I don’t know which. Be super careful and—”

Deb squeezed QRT—stop sending—on Heather’s elbow, and went to the door, opening it an instant after Arnie knocked. As he was coming in, Leslie Antonowicz joined them, carrying a large load of books and papers.

“Well,” Heather said. “Thank you for being prompt.” In a few swift, brutal sentences, she sketched what had happened to Ecco and added that the encrypted station somewhere near Bloomington had been active not long after. That much was true—it had been Arnie’s direction-finding stations that had spotted it. “You’ll be going in another way,” she told Deb, “around Uniontown, Kentucky, a nice little town just above where the Wabash joins the Ohio.” She launched into a far more detailed than necessary description of Uniontown, all the while listening intently while she talked.

When she heard the first telltale cough-and-thud of the Gooney’s engine starting, she raised her voice, rising from her desk. “Now, listen closely, I can’t stress enough—”

She had put her lunch tray as close to the edge of the desk as possible, for just this moment, and now a little turn of one finger flipped it over. The crash of dishes was abrupt; Heather swore loudly, and from his crib, Leo woke screaming. It covered the DC-3 starting its run-up for takeoff; Leo, bless his sound little lungs, could easily have drowned out a missile launch and two rock concerts.