John Barnes - Daybreak Zero

They walked the mile of winding, crumbling road in dead silence. At the end of the runway, they found a short-winged little biplane, an Acro Sport, painted in red and yellow stripes, marred by the black and gray smears where the biofuel engine and its lye spray had stained it with burnt-soap exhaust.

Since they couldn’t open the package marked EYES ONLY till they were back in their rooms at the Edgewater Hotel, waiting for the wagon and riding back gave them time to catch up on gossip. Nancy Teirson, the pilot, mostly flew from Green Bay, the capital of the New State of Superior, alternating between the northern mail route to Olympia and a circuit of the Castles and walled towns in Michigan. “And out to here maybe once a month,” she said. “This time I had orders to swing further south and east, overfly the Lost Quarter more than usual.”

“Tell’em,” Larry said.

She lowered her voice, plainly not wanting to be overheard by the wagon driver. “Tribals on the march on the old roads. Bands of hundreds of them, maybe one band more than a thousand.”

Back at the hotel, the instant the door was closed, Larry ripped open the envelope. “Mail for all three of us.” He tossed Beth’s letter to Jason, who went into the other room to read in privacy.

Chris dove into the notes from Cassie and Abel, chuckling and tsking in the corner.

Larry read Heather’s orders—just a few sentences—several times, keeping his eyes on the page to look like he was concentrating intently, or like they were lengthy. He wanted Chris and Jason to have time with their mail before he shared the part he was supposed to share:

URGENT TO DO OVERLAND TRAVERSE, BUFFALO NY TO ALBANY & DOWN HUDSON; SHIPS AVAILABLE IN NYC HARBOR, RETURN VIA TNG TERRITORY. GO AT ONCE

When both of them had savored their mail, and asked what the orders were, he showed them.

“Overland in the Lost Quarter, with winter coming?” Chris asked. “Is she nuts or does she hate us?”

“Not mutually exclusive,” Larry pointed out. And if you knew what was in the message that was just for me, you’d be pretty sure the real answer is “Both.”

Chris rose and stretched. “Larry, if you could give me an hour or two to write something for Nancy to take back—”

“You have the night. I’ll need to arrange a ship, and I’m guessing we won’t be able to sail before tomorrow morning, maybe longer. You guys just write what you need to write, so it’s ready to go out, and it’s all right if you sleep all day after we’re on the boat, okay?”

Jason looked almost pathetically grateful. “Yeah, thanks.”

Larry shrugged. “If I just send Debbie a note that she’s a great human being, and to try to only kill people that deserve it, it’ll make both of us happier than we’ve been in years—and won’t take me five. Plan to be packed at dawn tomorrow, and I’ll fill you in sometime before I go to bed. I’d better get down to the docks before everyone buttons up for the night.” He was out the door almost instantly.

Chris and Jason exchanged glances; there was obviously something the senior agent wasn’t telling them, and just as obviously if Larry didn’t want to talk about it, they shouldn’t. As they both sat down to write, Chris said, “Funny thing, I wish I had time to go fishing.”

Jason stared. “You complained about fishing all afternoon.”

“And rightly so. And if I had the time, I’d do something better than go fishing. I just wish I had the time.”

The dank cold of predawn early winter mornings in Athens smells like a soggy snowball shoved up your nose. Cam’s warm coat and watch cap felt good as he hurried along the path. No point in varying his route; his awkward shadow, who occasionally crashed around in the bushes behind him, knew perfectly well that he was going to the crypto radio facility. And he knows I’m going there to call Pueblo or Olympia, because I need enemies and neutrals to keep my “friends” from taking over. Must be how the last few Bourbons, Romanovs, and Tokugawas felt.

While Athens techs talked to Pueblo techs, he savored the big mug of coffee that the night tech had waiting for him, concentrating on each sip, drinking it all before it could cool, finishing it before Heather came on the line.

They talked at this hour because it was Cam’s getting-up time, Leo’s middle-of-the-night feeding, and the best time in the ionosphere for long-range radio. But since it looked sneaky, they needed the appearance of a possibly innocent reason for sneaking. So this morning, like every other, they began with the usual array of flirty double-entendres, wasting ten minutes or so out of the half hour in pretending to be on the brink of phone sex.

Next Cam rattled off a list of sentences about colors, animals, and a not-impossible-to-break code for dates and times that coincided with meeting various officials in the TNG government, none of which was at all important, except that since he knew Grayson’s people would be trying to match up codes to people and actions, looking for RRC agents, he sowed suspicion onto some of Grayson’s loyalists.

Today he began with “Brown Hen polishes silverware with Green Dog” and read on down through “Gray Weasel is cooking macaroni for Red Squirrel’s barbecue.” As always, purposely he used Red Dog to refer to a passionately Post Raptural lieutenant he saw for a few minutes every week, implying that he was betraying Grayson’s secrets to Peet.

In fact, all the apparent messages either referred to random events of no real importance, minor matters it didn’t hurt for the opposition to learn, and things it was useful to tell them (whether true or disinformational). If the other side read them, they would gain nothing other than another layer of deception. The real message was in a positional code, one of the World War One era pencil and paper expedients that the absence of computers had forced on them. The first eight and last three sentences were nulls. The number of messages between the first eight and last three was an hour between one and twelve, the first letter of the last word in the eighth sentence indicating a.m. or p.m., and the last letters of the last three null sentences coding urgency, possible topic, and level of danger.

Together, they told Heather what to relay to Red Dog: a safe meeting time and the relative urgency of meeting. Today Cam was sending VERY HIGH URGENCY, POLITICAL MATTER, HIGHER THAN AVERAGE DANGER, TEN THIRTY A.M.

After the cryptic sentences they traded gossip about mutual friends for a few minutes, and Heather gave him a quick summary of what the Lost Quarter expedition had reported. She read him a nonsense text; he memorized every fourth word, after the first number in the text was “seven,” because he added seven to the first number and dropped the high digits. This was a longer message than usual; twenty pairs of words.

They finished by talking longingly about how lonely they were. Cam found that much too easy.

Back at his office, Cam riffled through his dictionary as he did so often; lately he’d made a habit of complaining to his assistants about their limited vocabularies and improper use of words, and leafed through the dictionary often. This time, though, as he waited for his breakfast, he took the first word pair: tear clearance . Tear was the eleventh word on page 648, clearance the third on page 98; reversing pages and positions gave the eleventh word on page 98 ( clean ) and the third word on 648 ( team ).

Writing nothing down, he lost his place and had to start over a couple of times, but finally he knew

Clean team available november two zero early est smash stall if can or bail and defect if must halt messy extraction possible on one week notice fractionate but even after success civil war certain and failure risk astronomical replete whoa