John Barnes - Directive 51

God bless California’s damn-the-expense safety-crazed legislature, she thought. However much Daddy rumbles and grumbles about taxes. The guardrail was a modern one, with grounding posts every hundred feet or so; she dragged the cable to the rail, pumped the buttons to open the locking slot, fitted it over the metal edge, and checked to make sure she had continuity. She clamped onto the rail, walked a few steps up the road, made sure she wasn’t touching the rail or any conductor that touched it, and pushed the connect button on the hand control.

A flurry of bangs like rifle shots. Flashes under the hood like welding arcs. Reek of ozone. Up the road, a seagull sitting on a guardrail post squalled and flapped into the air. Sorry, fella, glad I didn’t roast you.

Bambi looked down at her hand control; the small screen said FULLY DISCHARGED.

Very gingerly, she reached into the ruptured trunk and dragged her suit carrier through the broken opening, then reclaimed her laptop and iScribe from the passenger seat. The car’s front end was a foot inside the shoulder, so it was no longer in traffic, and it sure wasn’t going anywhere. Bambi looked out over the steep hillside, between the high hills, down to the Pacific on the horizon. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She popped the hood. Wads of something that looked like spiky snow around the battery, the generator, the capacitors, the front wheel motors, and the cyberrack. With her phone, she shot and narrated a couple minutes of video and sent it to Jim Browder’s mail; he’d know where to forward it.

She phoned Dave Carlucci, the local agent in charge.

He said, “Don’t worry about anything. You’re only a mile and a half away right now, and I’ll just drive out and retrieve you myself; we’ve got a biohazard car with a sealed engine compartment that I’ll be using all morning to retrieve stranded people. You’re not only not late, you’ll be one of the first ones here. And we won’t be starting even close to on time. The helicopter on its way to pick up Roth was forced down.”

“Nanoswarm?”

“Probably the tailored decay bacteria. The crew reported that the engine oil had turned into something that looked like lime Jell-O, smelled like fermented maple syrup, and functioned more like glue than oil; gave them a very dramatic engine seize-up. So the federales are just going to drive Roth up here themselves, since they’ve got one car that seems to be immune to everything for the moment, knock on wood. Everything’s going to start late and it’s all going to be a mess; welcome to the brave new world.”

Carlucci suggested that she walk up the road to an overlook point where there were benches and a drinking fountain, since it might take him a while. She dug out her walking shoes from her suit carrier—normally she favored something with more drama, which she liked to think was all that remained of the spectacularly spoiled wealthy teenage airhead she had once been. With her feet strapped into all-too-practical shoes, the walk was almost nice, too; she waved off a couple of cars that pulled over to offer rides.

While walking, she called up the rental car place and told them the car was probably totaled.

“No surprise,” the rental car guy said. “I hope this was the government’s money and not yours.”

“It is, but it’s my ass that has to get home eventually.”

“I understand. We’ll try to come up with some way to help you out with that, though it might not turn out to be a car. I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

“Unless the phones die.”

“Yeah. Hadn’t even thought about that yet. You have anywhere to go if you’re stranded?”

“If I had to, I could walk from here to my dad’s house.” Which is an ugly extravagant fortress that you probably see every day, now that he’s built it and moved in. “Hope you’re okay too.”

“Well, except for probably not having a job. Jeez. I used to party with these eco-hippie dudes who’d get all mystical talking about how someday there would be Daybreak and things would be great. I’d like to punch a few of them, I think.”

“Officially, citizens should not take vigilante action.”

“And unofficially?”

“Break something that they’d need a modern high-tech prosthetic for.” She appreciated his laugh. “Thanks for trying.”

She’d had a drink of cool water, found a bench with just enough shade, and done more meditative breathing than she’d done in years by the time Carlucci turned up in the biohazard truck.

Bambi asked, “So what’s the deal with Ysabel Roth?”

“She’s just crossed the border. The Bureau people in Washington have authorized me to offer immunity from prosecution, as long as she’s willing to turn over the bigger fish.”

They turned into the parking lot. Bambi said, “Our number one expert, Dr. Yang, thinks there’s no such thing as higher-ups, leadership, or any of that in Daybreak. It’s a brave new pond, and all the fish are equal.”

“Well, then Roth is real, real screwed—but then, so are we.”

In the private party room of an Italian sub shop about two blocks from St. Elizabeth’s, Heather cleared a chair and Lenny rolled into the space; she sat next to him. Cam was huddled up at the end of the table with Graham Weisbrod, Arnie, Allie, and Jim Browder; unofficially, he’d told all the DoF people, earlier, that although as a conservative Republican he had thought the Department of the Future was a boondoggle, now he couldn’t live without it. Graham Weisbrod had cheerfully pointed out that they were just doing for the government as a whole what Mark Garren did for the Pentagon—and no secretary of defense in living memory would have tried to function without someone like the DoDDUSP.

“The conspiracy theorists must be up on their roofs and howling at the moon. Washington is one of the few cities where all the cars are running, and most of the tinfoil hat brigade can’t get online to scare each other about that,” Heather observed.

Arnie turned away from the little group at the top of the table and grinned at her. “The few who can get online are making up in creativity what they lack in numbers. New paranoid Daybreak craziness is breeding with old paranoid conspiracy craziness like muskrats downstream from a Viagra plant.”

“You spent a while working on that metaphor,” Lenny commented.

“Guilty,” Arnie said. “Amusing myself in the shower this morning.” Cameron was nodding, and the others were taking seats; apparently his “meeting before the meeting before the meeting” had concluded successfully. Cam said, “It’s not just lunatics that are having crazy thoughts today—and the crazy thoughts aren’t necessarily wrong.” The prearranged food came then, and as everyone ate, Cam reminded them to take any leftovers home and eat them soon—“No telling how much longer your kitchen will function.”

That the warning was given so casually—with everyone just nodding and continuing to eat—told Heather more than anything else how much things were slipping.

They ate quickly. Cam stood. “All right, everyone, thanks for coming. I just wanted to have a quick talk before we present the findings-and-recs this afternoon to the Acting President and the Republican candidate, because that discussion could go off track, so I want to make sure we all stick close to the message.”

Besides the senior people from DoF and OFTA, and Lenny from NSA, Edwards was there from FBI, and Colonel Green from Cyber Command, along with the usual handful of quiet people in uniforms or black suits.

“The quick outline is this,” Cam said. “We have a vital issue that we need to explain briefly to the top-level people, which is potentially extremely distracting, and we must not allow them to be distracted. So with all the speed I can muster, and in language as much like English as Dr. Yang can muster”—even Arnie and Allison laughed—“we’re going to tell you what the issue is, what the sides are, why it doesn’t matter right now, and what we need to focus on. Then everyone will pull together this afternoon to keep focus where it needs to be. Clear?”