John Barnes - Directive 51

“Then—if you want my support, and frankly, sir, you will need it—remember what they used to say on Star Trek —make it so.” Phat was not tall, or physically prepossessing at all, but his salute and the way he strode away plainly declared a deal that Cameron had better keep.

Heather was working on catching up on Bambi’s and Larry Mensche’s reports from Castle Larsen. Cameron had wanted a more extensive report because he was trying to figure out some kind of dragnet to catch more former Daybreakers, in hopes of eventually locating the ringleaders, along with the foreign and terrorist-organization connections that he was sure were there.

Well, her job was just to report what was coming in; they could make whatever use of it they liked. As Ysabel Roth recovered, Bambi and Mensche were beginning to worry about suicide—

A knock at the door.

“Come in.”

It was Arnie; he looked tired and ill. “I was kind of hoping for an unofficial chat,” he said.

“My favorite kind,” Heather said. “Do we need enough privacy to take a walk?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been kind of turning a bunch of ideas over and having trouble sleeping.”

“Well, I can always carry you home on my shoulder,” she said. “Let’s just take the trail up the ridge, and you talk whenever you feel like talking.”

On the gentle slope in the strong winter scent of the evergreens—the cold of the mornings seemed to cling to the shadows even though the afternoon was warm—Arnie said, “I know sometimes I’m an irritating bastard.”

“You’re also a brain we depend on, Arn. And if something’s disturbing that brain, spill it.”

“There’s an idea I’ve been hoping to run by Graham, privately, but I guess he’s not coming back anytime soon?”

“Basically he’s stashed till the war is won. Cam is convinced that Graham is target number one. My guess is that they found some way to take him out to an aircraft carrier.”

“That’s what I’m having a problem with.”

They walked on for a while, Arnie kicking occasional stones from the trail; he must be trying to think of the least offensive way to say it. That, all by itself, was out of character. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to sound like a sore loser about the system artifact idea. But just consider where Daybreak used its big bombs. It looks to me like Daybreak wasn’t able to change its plans. Chicago, Milwaukee, Gary, the whole industrial southern end of Lake Michigan, had been a burned-out wasteland for most of a month. Its factories and facilities, labs and resources, canals, roads, and rails were already useless. And yet they hit it.

“At the same time, Fort Benning and a dozen other vital centers went untouched. It looks to me like Daybreak intended to destroy several of the places where technically advanced civilization is most likely to regrow: the northeast United States; northwest Europe; the industrial heart of modern China; Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Add in LA and south California if that bomb in the Pacific was just a case of the delivery crew screwing up. Add Buenos Aires for that matter. All of those were places with good concentrations of resources nearby, plenty of people with technical educations, and some kind of entrepreneurial tradition.

“So it looks to me like they may have been targeting the places where they guessed civilization would re-grow and they had to make their guesses before Daybreak .”

“What difference does it make whether they picked the targets before or after Daybreak? Weren’t the guesses obvious ? Didn’t their plan work ?”

“ Some of it worked brilliantly. Shanghai was a great guess and so was Buenos Aires. The Palestine bomb looks like someone using a bomb to pay off a score or settle a debt, or maybe just to make sure the Israelis didn’t inherit the Earth, but things were collapsing there and they didn’t really need to do it—for Daybreak’s purposes it would have been more effective on Mumbai. Los Angeles was weird .”

“It sure was, wasn’t it?”

“Okay, I guess the whole idea is stupid.” He lurched on up the trail ahead of her.

“Arnie, wait.” She swallowed hard and said, “It was a really dumb joke and especially considering everyone there was killed with that radiation bomb it was extra dumb and totally heartless and I’m sorry. You’re making me nervous about where this is going, and I don’t know if I want to hear it, but I guess I have to listen to you anyway, because you sound like you might be right.”

He stopped, very quietly, and said, “Why hit Los Angeles with two bombs? They’d already have hit Anaheim, if their plans had worked, and besides, we still don’t have any idea why they used radiological enhancement instead of a superbomb there, let alone why they used gold instead of cobalt. If they had any way at all to monitor what had happened in the month after the nanoswarm and biotes were released, and target accordingly, there were fifty better targets than Los Angeles or Chicago or even Washington—Pittsburgh, Savannah, Fort Lewis, or here for that matter. Especially the North Sea, Washington, and Chicago bombs mostly just re-scattered rubble, re-ignited debris, and killed people who were going to die anyway.” He ticked it off on his fingers. “That looks to me like something that can’t change its mind—a dead hand, not a live enemy.”

“So you think if this were really a war—”

“The enemy would have shifted to target Fort Benning, San Diego, Denver, or Pittsburgh, not Chicago. But Chicago was a good guess before Daybreak.”

“But you yourself said Shanghai was a good target.”

“On that one, they got lucky. No law requires all of their luck to be bad.”

They walked on for a while.

When they stopped to look down on Columbus, at all the plumes from the chimneys and the streets crowded with wagons, workers, soldiers, and families, Heather said, “So I see what you’re thinking. And all the explosions being groundbursts suggests they were pre-positioned too. But maybe they just had to do that anyway. They planted them where they expected it to work, and set timers, because they knew they couldn’t count on having a working plane or missile by now. Not because they aren’t still around, but because the only way to use the bombs was in places they had chosen before they started the war.”

“That could be,” Arnie said. “And I thought of it; that’s why I can’t go to Cam, and say, ‘Look, it has to be a system artifact.’ All I can tell him is ‘It’s not as strong a proof that we’re at war as you think it is.’ I don’t deal well with uncertainty.”

“That’s a weird thing for a statistical guy to say,” she said, taking his arm and steering him back down the hill. Don’t go into a depression on me, Arn, I’ve got to keep myself glued together, and that’s hard enough.

“Even so,” Arnie said, “my gut isn’t uncertain at all. I realize they probably just buried the bombs and put them on a timer to go off five weeks after Daybreak. It was one more try to put another stake through the heart of civilization, to make sure the Big System doesn’t rise up again—but they didn’t have any way to aim. But it was the kind of thing a system artifact does. It doesn’t feel as confusing and weird and malicious as something a human being would do.”

A thought struck Heather. “Arnie, how are you doing on the human side?”

He shrugged; transparently he didn’t want to volunteer but was desperate to talk about it.

Heather put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, guy. Your brain is a national resource. I can’t let anything disturb it without filling out forms in triplicate.”