John Barnes - Directive 51

On April 12th, forces from Fort Bragg, having come upstream from Cairo, arrived in St. Louis and intervened in favor of the white-supremacist army to take control of St. Louis, thus severing the southern rail link between Olympia and the New State of Wabash. Simultaneously, the Ranger Regiment (Reconstituted) from Fort Stewart took control of the three key independent cities in the mountains, which had refused to align with either national government: Chattanooga, Lexington, and Louisville.

The white-supremacist triumph in St. Louis was short-lived; once the city was firmly in Athenian hands, the white leadership was put on a sealed train and sent to firmly Olympian Cedar Rapids. They were told to have all the fun they wanted as long as they never came back; the mayor of Cedar Rapids jailed them, saying, “We’ll think of a charge for it later.”

On April 13th, in Lincoln, Nebraska, an Olympian postmaster ordered the sorting room to pull mail addressed to all of the states that had declared for Athens out of the mailbags and leave it outside on the loading dock; on his own authority he imprisoned two postal workers who refused to comply.

On April 14th, Second Battalion, Third Infantry, a mechanized unit converted to horse cavalry, was dropped off by a fast steam train in Berthold, North Dakota, just after sunset. At four in the morning they hit the compound on the former Minot AFB where the Olympian officials were held, rescuing all the prisoners, and leaving seven guards dead. On their way out, they torched two workshops and four experimental planes under construction.

On the docks in Morgan City, Louisana, in early March, Navy officers loyal to Athens had attempted to commandeer SS Polyxena , a schooner from Monterey that had arrived carrying forty tons of hand-canned orange pulp and fifteen tons of beets. The crew fought them, destroying the Navy’s dinghy and killing a lieutenant, and escaped with its cargo; the bank in Morgan City canceled payment. In Jamaica the citrus and beets were bartered for marijuana, which was bartered in Caracas for beef jerky; Polyxena headed south, bound eventually around the Horn. On April 16th, the Athenian government issued a warrant for Polyxena ’s crew for piracy and barratry; the Olympian government declared Polyxena to be under its protection.

On April 17th, Radio Perth (Australia) was knocked off the air by an EMP; massive fusing systems in that city limited the damage, and fire crews were ready for the many small fires that sprang up around unused water pipes, electric cables, guardrails, and wire fences.

On April 19th, Heather found herself facing two very unhappy factions of workers from the EMP Attraction Project. After some jockeying and arguing, she identified the three political agents from Olympia and the two from Athens and put them onto the next available trains under guard. With each party, she sent a letter.

While the letters were on their way, on April 22nd, Cameron sent a brief, coded radio message to the remaining carrier groups in the Pacific, ordering them to be prepared to seize Olympia; the Pueblo code room, which was now reading both sides’ codes, decrypted it on the 24th. Heather hoped her letter might get to Cam within a day or two more.

She could tell that Olympia was reading Athens’s code, also, because on the 23rd, according to a message which reached Heather through the Reno pony express on the 25th, Graham Weisbrod authorized equipping four partially rebuilt planes, and twenty small boats with their experimental diesel outboards, to carry two hundred pounds each of nanoswarm crystals packed in glass bottles. They sent a copy of the order and photographs of the machinery being used to make nanoswarm—just a simple make-and-break electric coil, not unlike an old-fashioned doorbell, powered by a windmill generator—to Cameron Nguyen-Peters, via biplane to the neutral city of Hannibal, Missouri, where a fast train picked it up for delivery the next day.

On the 27th, Arnie told Heather that there was an immense spike in communications traffic, including radio, to and from Olympia and Athens. “That’s it,” he said.

“How much time do we have?”

“At a guess, with the tech they use, and where I think the Navy carriers are, seventy-two hours before one side or the other jumps. But it could be less. They’re racing each other; the one that’s ready to go all-out first probably wins.”

Heather nodded. “Is your land line phone link up to the experiment? Could you send them something, and if you ordered them to broadcast it, could they do it?”

“Yeah, but you don’t mean—”

“Can you power it up?”

“Yeah, but none of the instruments are in place yet and—”

“Well, then. All right. I’ll build you another one, I promise, with my bare hands, if big bad EMP cooks your experiment. But tell your scientists they can take any observations they want as long as they get this sent now. ” She handed him a little folio of ten neatly typed sheets. “Can they record off the phone line?”

“That was always the intention, but they won’t be happy because this is all out of order.”

“By which you mean—”

He shrugged, plainly unhappy himself. “We were going to do a set of sequential tests, starting with raw noise and then ramping up until we were broadcasting outright anti-Daybreak propaganda, and see at what point the EMP hits. Obviously if it’s for random noise, it’s a system artifact, and if they won’t hit us till we’re screaming Everybody kill a Daybreaker and cut down a forest, it’s an enemy. This broadcast, if we were following the rules for the experiment, would be the last , not the first, one we would run, because it will draw fire for sure if anything can. But you know, we’ll at least still get the observations that might let us figure out where the bombs are coming from. And I hate to be practical and sensible, but you’re right. No point waiting to run better experiments if we’re about to lose civilization to an idiotic civil war right this minute anyway.” Arnie looked down at the document she’d drafted, leafed through, and whistled. “You’re really going for broke, here. Just to make sure, this is what you intend?”

“Yep. Transmit at full power. Broadcast it in clear, then in Athens code, then in Olympia code, like a Rosetta stone, loop the recording, and keep playing it till we get replies.”

“All right, I’ll phone Mota Elliptica and tell them to stand by, then wake up Manckiewicz—if he ever sleeps—and by the time he’s practiced, they’ll be ready to record him. Just like you asked. Probably we’ll have it going out over the air within three hours.”

“You still look pretty unhappy, Arn.”

“I’ll get over it.” He let out a whew as if he’d run five miles and barely made it in time, and Heather saw that he was refusing to tell her how big a sacrifice this really was— which means he’s convinced it is necessary too, and he’s shutting up to avoid putting any pressure on me. Arnie held his hands up, palm out, in complete surrender. “Heather, it’s the right thing to do. But we are throwing away an experimental protocol that all my people worked very hard on, and I will have to soothe them about that, and of course this might not work.”

“Sitting on our thumbs for sure won’t work.”

“Like I said, I hate being sensible and practical, especially when it’s the right thing to do. I better run; if we’re doing it we need to do it now. ”

Weisbrod arrived first, in Quattro Larsen’s DC-3. He looked like the oldest man in the history of the world, exhausted and sad, and for the first time she could remember, Heather saw no welcome in his eyes and no smile when she shook his hand. “Where to?” he asked.