John Barnes - Directive 51

Jim looked like he’d received an electric shock. “For what?”

“Somebody just fired a nuke off about twenty-five miles southwest of LA. Luckily we got the flash on a random recording from a Deep Black satellite and were able to get it to a team with working gear to analyze the recording. No uranium, no plutonium, in fact for some unimaginable reason the only significant heavy element in the spectrography of the flash was gold, but there was a huge amount of that. Reagan was less than 100 kilometers away and scrambled a drone; they got a sample from the mushroom cloud itself. Unusual amounts of helium-3. Lots of tritium and sodium-24, which is what you get when you blow off the helium-3/deuterium reaction in seawater. No trace of polonium or any other hard alpha emitter, and only as much beryllium as you’d expect from batteries and capacitors on the ship’s electrical system, plus what’s in the seawater. Some excess lithium and deuterium, consistent again with a fusion bomb. You were right—they’ve got a pure fusion bomb.”

“Weird,” Browder said. “Very weird. Why would someone waste a bomb on empty ocean? It wasn’t by any chance an enhanced-fallout weapon?”

“Dead on again,” Cameron said. “Preliminary measurements show the plume is hot as hell with induced radioactivity, and the center of it is heading dead on for Los Angeles. We’ve got people scrambling to try to tell everyone to get out of the way, but it’s pretty much hopeless; we’re going to lose the city unless the wind shifts.”

“What’d they jacket it with?” Browder asked. “Sodium, cobalt, potassium?”

“That’s the weird part,” Cam said, shaking his head. “What’s in that cloud, besides the sodium-24 and the tritium from the salt water, is all the hot isotopes of gold.”

“I guess it works,” Browder said.

“Only about as well as cobalt would have. They make their atom bombs with helium-3, and jacket them in gold… I just wonder if we’re facing a bunch of compulsive nuts who have to do everything the hardest, most expensive way they can think of.”

Will Norcross stood. “I’m told there are other briefings I need to get to,” he said. “What I just heard was this: We have established that our enemy, whatever it may be, has pure fusion weapons, which we also know is one of the worst possible things for any enemy to have. Is there anything else I can do here, besides be in your way?”

Heads were shaking all over the room. Norcross gave them that cocky grin that so many liberals found unbearable. “Then do what needs to be done; make the country proud of you.” He nodded and exited.

“Now that was a curtain line,” Lenny said, under his breath.

“I’m scared that the phrase ‘President Norcross’ is starting to sound sort of comforting,” Heather agreed.

Cameron Nguyen-Peters glanced around. “Defense, security, intelligence people, they’re going to want you in your home departments. Law enforcement and everyone in charge of catching Daybreakers, now we know it’s not over yet, we’ve got to round up as many of them as we can, as fast as we can, and you’ll want to go too. Department of the Future, Department of Energy, Department of Peace—all you analysts, brain trusters, think tankers, all you idea people, plus all the liaisons to civil agencies, if you can, go home . If you’re not tracking bombs or tracking Daybreakers, get out of here for now. And…” Cam was obviously trying to find a way to say it gently. “…look, we’re in the national capital here, and we’re facing an enemy with nuclear weapons; I don’t know why we still exist, in fact. So… if you can find a way for your families and loved ones to be out of town—do it. Move your family somewhere safe. Clear? I’m not dismissing anyone, we need everyone here, and you took an oath—but your spouses and kids didn’t, so get them out of the danger zones, and free your mind to concentrate on the mess we have here.”

Heather asked, “How long till the plumes hit the coast?”

“About an hour,” the guy from NOAA said. “Call anybody you have out there and tell them to run if they can get over the mountains, or find someplace to dig in for a couple weeks and hope we can get rescue people out there in that time. But it would be better to run.”

On her way out, she saw that Lenny was scribbling something on his pad; she looked down to see he’d written, If yr cats okay, my place 2night. U lucky sexy bitch.

Night in with my guy. While the power’s still on. Yeah, he’s right, I’m a lucky bitch. Hope he doesn’t expect me to be as sexy as I am lucky.

Must’ve been kind of an interesting building back when you could see something besides just the dome, Chris Manckiewicz thought. He’d been inside the concrete and steel barricades around the Capitol many times, but he was thinking of the newsreels from the thirties and forties, when the vast flight of steps had been unimpeded by all the hardware.

Norcross had been summoned to some secret briefing, and Shaunsen was going to hold some big press event in a couple days, but meanwhile Chris had little to do except wipe his gear with lye and rubbing alcohol; if anything “historic” happened, Chris was to shoot it and try to send it, and if it got there, Anne said she’d “probably find a way to use it, and if we do, definitely find a way to pay you.”

So here he was, idly wandering among the historic buildings on the Mall, like any tourist with time to kill.

“You look like a reporter.” The tall woman, her gray hair dyed a fairly natural shade of red, was dressed in knee-high boots and a real old-school jacket/straight skirt/string tie suit, as 1970s as if she’d just walked out of his grandparents’ class pictures. She had a pleasant flat expression. “Am I right?”

“Uh, yeah, how did you know?”

“Because you’re Chris Manckiewicz,” she said. “I’m Rusty Parlotta—I used to work for the Washington Times back when there were still paper papers.”

“You were the city editor,” Chris said. “Some people said you were the last of the greats at that.”

She smiled, this time for real. “Actually, what I wanted to talk to you about is, I plan to be the next of the greats,” she said. “You’re looking at the new editor and owner of the Washington Advertiser-Gazette . I’ve got a buddy who collects and restores old printing machinery. Between what he can make work and what he can build because he understands it, he’s promised me we can put out a paper. Maybe not with photos, even, but a paper. Have you ever written?”

“I write my stories and keep a blog. Yeah, I can turn out a sentence.”

“And are they still paying you?”

“I’ve got cash, if anyone will still take it.” He’d extracted $750, the legal limit, from the one working ATM he’d found, and he had the two grand in hundreds that were all the branch of his bank would give him. Shaunsen had frozen prices, so his money should last a week or so—if the hotel didn’t close its doors, the way most businesses had in the last big price freeze a few years ago. Didn’t even think about needing black-market barter, but it’s gonna be 2017 all over again, bet on it.

“I thought you might need a job that pays in food and rent.”

“I was just thinking that.”

“Well, the Washington Advertiser-Gazette is putting out its first edition tomorrow, while a lot of the higher-tech gear still works. I’ve even got newsboys I’m paying in food for their families, because I grew up Mormon and I have a few months of canned goods and dried beans in my basement. My news staff will be the first eight people to take me up on the offer of a room in my big old wreck of a house—inherited from my folks, and I’m sentimental—plus meals. We’ll go to real money pay as soon as there is real money to pay you with, and you first eight eventually get shares of the biz. Tomorrow morning, there’s going to be kids out on the streets yelling ‘Read all about it in the Advertiser-Gazette !’ Want in?”