John Barnes - Directive 51

“Well, here’s our concern for right now. The only thing that kept pure fusion bombs from making the whole world worse was that we didn’t have the right mix of knowledge and materials till recently. And with Daybreak, we probably won’t have the materials for much longer. But if they managed to build one at all—and with determination and enough computing capacity, it’s just conceivable that they did—there’s no reason to think that Daybreak, or il’Alb, or whoever would have built just one. I’ve been over what we know about the technical skills and resources of the cells and AGs that still have not done their thing, and seven of them might have pure fusion—”

Shaunsen rose. “I just looked at the time. I’ve got a major reconstruction bill to review at the Senate; the country needs to get moving and fixing things. I leave the defense decisions in your capable hands.”

The Secret Service closed ranks around him, and he was gone.

“Well,” Will Norcross said, “ I’m free.”

When Grady and Tracy finally arose, they carefully removed one of their shortwave radios from its sealed glass jar. The few news broadcasts they could find all told the same story. Grady snarled, “Fuckers. They’re hunting us down.” A whole commune had been massacred near Santa Fe.

“Then we want to be at sea for as long as we can,” Tracy said. “Southwest for the next few weeks; there’ll be somewhere in the South Pacific for us.” They crowded on sail in the fresh breeze and turned their backs on North America. “We’ll come back when it’s on sale again,” she said. “We’re full up on supplies; let’s not go home and be hanged from a phone pole.”

They were still idly talking about the cool new world to come when a phone rang, and they both jumped. Grady went below and found it, ringing away just as if the Big System were not gone. Apparently there was less nanoswarm down here than up on the deck.

Caller ID just showed that it was coming in from an overhead satellite; of course the nanoswarm couldn’t get at the satellites and not all the ground stations would be out yet. Could be anyone with direct satellite on any of the worldnets, even just a wrong number or a solicitation call from a charity. Curiosity overpowered Grady— what if it’s the last phone call I ever receive? “Hello?”

“Hello, Mr. Barbour. This is Nautical Specialties.”

The name was familiar, but Grady couldn’t remember from where.

“Uh, is this a sales call?”

“Customer service. We are calling you to ask about the specialty work you had us do in the hull of your vessel, the Mad Caprice. We wanted to make sure that the secret vault in the false hull is still satisfactory.”

“Uh, yeah, I looked there just before we left on this, uh, vacation, and it was, you know, cool. Everything was dry and everything was there that was supposed to be.” Like hell was he going to talk about that half ton of gold on the phone.

“And just to make sure, you remember the sealed part of the vault, that was to be accessed by our technicians only—you remember that it contains our patented moisture-control equipment, and that it would void the warranty if you were to enter that sealed area?”

“We haven’t touched it, really.”

“We had sort of hoped to inspect it when you came in to Los Angeles in a few days, if you remember—”

“We won’t be—” What the hell? This guy seemed to know too much. Tracy would be all over his case if he told them anything about where he was going, but it couldn’t hurt to tell them where they weren’t. “Uh, look, we changed our minds, sorry, but we’re not going to LA, so if—”

“Well, in that case, we just have one more question and then we’ll be done with you.”

“Oh, okay, sure.”

“Does your snotty, stupid wife still have big tits, and do you still have a tiny brain to match your tiny dick?”

“I—hey, what the—”

During Grady Barbour’s last instant of existence, his brain was signaling his mouth to form the word fuck , but the signal never arrived. Mad Caprice , Grady, Tracy, and several million liters of water vanished in a ball of solar-temperature plasma; across the next few minutes, the fireball rose and cooled, the steam condensed, and the mushroom cloud formed.

The men watched the screen in some amazement; even from low orbit, a smallish nuclear detonation is still impressive. “The last bit was just at the behest of the Daybreak AG that built the gold vault for him,” the man who had been on the phone explained, in English; the five men at the table had nineteen languages among them, but English was the only one they all had fluently. “The carpenter must’ve guessed something of what I had given him to install behind the vault, and he asked me to give him that message just before I ‘used that thing,’ as he put it. Since the test shot on Air Force Two didn’t happen, we had to use this as an alternate test, so I had to contact them by direct satellite phone to run down their position and buy the time on an orbital camera to watch the test. I had to talk to them anyway, so it didn’t hurt me to do a favor for a friend.”

“Did she really have big tits?” one of the men asked.

“I saw surveillance films,” another man said. “They were okay.”

“I wish we could have blown off the weapon on Air Force Two; it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that that was a test shot. As it is, we have to hope that the blast wasn’t noticed.”

“There is all of Daybreak going on, so we had to do it before any critical component died, and they were less than forty kilometers off Los Angeles. They may think it was an attack on that city.”

“True. And regret is useless, as the shot has been fired. If there are no more matters for discussion, it’s almost midnight and you have a long way to go in the dark.”

“What the fuck?”

That is not standard military protocol for a man watching a computer screen, so the captain moved over to administer a reprimand and find out what he was seeing. “Spy satellite just saw this. About 40 klicks southwest of LA. We’ve been copying on any shot bought on a commercial camera just to see what other people were looking at. Someone pointed the camera right at this. See, this little sailboat, it looks like, just minding its own business, then it gets a phone call—they pick up the side lobes from him talking to an overhead satellite—and then—”

The flash was brilliant; from its post far away, the satellite watched the mushroom cloud form.

“I jumped in on the military satellites and we’re getting more of a look, and Reagan isn’t far away from them and is bouncing up a recon.”

The captain decided no reprimand was warranted.

Heather hated to admit it but she was beginning to really like Will Norcross’s game spirit. For forty minutes he’d questioned, probed, and listened—especially listened—as he tried to absorb the whole complex mess of Daybreak, its relation to il’Alb, and why recovery was apt to be so time-consuming and difficult.

The door popped open and an assistant burst in. “Mr. Nguyen-Peters!” She held out a sheet of paper; Cam took it and read.

“Congratulations, Dr. Browder,” he said.