by John Barnes
The apparent judge, Susan Marthasdaughter, reminded everyone that Bambi was a woman of color, so if they did put her to death, they ought to do so quickly and mercifully.
Geez, if my old pal Dave Carlucci was here, he’ d be complaining his ass off about reverse discrimination. Wish he was here, though. With about thirty other Feds.
Helen Chelseasdaughter demanded that Bambi testify about her actual cultural heritage, purpose in landing here, and any other information she thought relevant.
“Well,” Bambi said, “my family are Old Californians; they had a rancho with furniture they’d looted from San Juan Capistrano before the ’49ers turned up. So my ancestry is Hispanic but it’s not the least bit poor.” (Good going, Bambi, give them another reason to torch you.) “As for what I was doing, I was flying mail on the Pueblo-to-Olympia northern route when I was forced off the main route by bad weather, ran out of fuel, and had to land. There’d be ransom for me and the plane if you were to contact the Reconstruction Research Center in Pueblo; they’d pay—”
“That’s three things that are wrong right there,” the prosecutor said, folding her arms. “Reconstruction is what we don’t want, research leads to technology and all that bullshit, and we’re decentralist.”
“How much ransom?” the judge asked.
Michael Amandasson wondered if they could just ransom the mail, destroy the plane, and keep the captive, and was accused of masculinity.
Susan Marthasdaughter said, “Why don’t we break for dinner, meditation, and rest, and resume in the morning? Also, we’ll feed the prisoner and give her a blanket; there’s no reason for unnecessary suffering.”
For the first time since I went into law enforcement, Bambi thought, I’m kind of liking a liberal judge.
2 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE, IN THE LOST QUARTER. NEAR THE FORMER VILLAGE OF PALESTINE, KOSCIUSKO COUNTY, INDIANA. 7:44 AM EST. SATURDAY, JULY 12, 2025.
Robert figured, What the hell, today might as well be the day I ask, Karl must be in a good mood. The soldiers behind them carried two big strings of bluegill, bass, perch, and walleye. Nine months after Daybreak, a whole spring hatch hadn’t been fished except by Karl and Robert; they’d caught all these in the hour around dawn. There’d been plenty of ducks and geese too, but Karl’d said to let them go till fall, give’em a chance to raise one family without interference.
The sun lay blood-red on the treeline; their shadows stretched far ahead. A deep red sunrise no longer meant a storm; sunrises and sunsets were always blood-colored now by the soot in the air. Robert inhaled the cold damp of early summer morning, delicious before the broiling afternoon heat and humidity.
It was a good morning. Did he want to risk spoiling it by maybe setting Karl off? As assistant lord or whatever he was—Karl had never given him a title, he was just “Robert” to all their people—Robert was the only person at Castle Earthstone who could say “Karl” and not “Lord Karl,” and the only survivor who knew they’d both been linemen for the electric company, or that their comfortable house in the inner compound of Castle Earthstone had been Karl’s hunting cabin last year.
Two soldiers walked at point. Karl followed, with Robert one polite step behind, and the half dozen soldiers of the honor guard (a pretty grand title for fish-gutters, boat-rowers, and hook-baiters) four or five steps behind Robert. The ground, maybe two notches of damp away from being mud, was pleasant on his bare feet; dew from the tall grass brushed his lower legs.
The trail joined the main, dirt road to Castle Earthstone by a burned farmhouse. The skulls on sticks along the driveway were already being obscured by weeds breaking through the macadam; Robert had put that dent in Cindy’s himself, when she’d acted like just because they’d been in high school together he couldn’t do what he wanted with her and her dumbass stuck-up family.
I always thought they were stuck up with sticks up their butts, and now here they are. Stuck up with sticks.
Robert glanced back. The soldiers struggled to keep two big strings of fish from hitting the ground; Robert’s string was carefully three fewer fish than Karl’s. Yeah. Good fishing, nice morning, he’s ahead of me on everything, he’s gonna be in a good mood.
“Uh, Karl?”
The bulky, older man glanced back at him, one bushy white eyebrow up, a grin showing white teeth between his red lips in the middle of the white beard that covered the lower half of his sunburned baldness. Rings of red and white, Robert thought, like a bull’s-eye. “Yeah, Robert, come on up and walk with me.”
Good mood for sure. “Got some questions. Just wanted some time to talk privately.”
“Yeah, we can make some time, and we should do it today. How ’bout over our breakfast beer? If I get snakebit and die, there’s a raft of things you need to know, and I’ve been neglecting that.”
“Thanks.” Robert dropped back a pace to his usual position.
“No, walk with me the rest of the way. It’s good for them to see us talking, it helps remind them that you’re not one of them. How d’y’think we’ll do for corn? I never grew any before, but that field looks pretty healthy to me; what do you think?”
The barbed wire fence was interrupted by an arch of two-by-fours in a spline-curve pattern. From that, a neatly painted plank sign hung:
CASTLE EARTHSTONE
BLESS DAYBREAK
SAVE MOTHER GAIA
On each side of the arch, four posts held up heads at face height. Inside the barbed wire enclosure, the way bent ninety degrees around the outside of a double wall—two cinderblock walls, four feet apart, the outside about twelve feet high, the inside about eight, filled with trash and dirt between, and with a board floor over the trash.
The only opening in the outer wall was into a double-Z of corrugatediron-on-plywood walls screwed into posts, to create a narrow, dark passage with two blind corners. The passage had sliding firing windows every few feet and holes for trip sticks at ankle height.
The slaves had worked all day long as soon as the dirt was soft in the spring, every day, as grateful as if the water and canned food doled out by Lord Karl and Master Robert was divine manna, and singing Daybreak songs while they worked.
The inner courtyard of Castle Earthstone was a simple chain-link enclosure with towers at the corners, surrounding Karl’s old cabin and an array of canvas-roofed cabins for the soldiers and improvised tents, lean-tos, and crates for the slaves. At the gate to this, Robert told the soldiers, “Take these fish to the kitchen bitches, tell’em clean’em and build a fire in the big barbecue. We’ll have’em for lunch.”
In the old hunting cabin’s living room, Karl and Robert stretched out on old leather sofas facing each other, and opened pre-Daybreak beers chilled in the springhouse. “Nothing like a cold brew before breakfast,” Karl said.
Robert laughed and took a chilly swig. He wasn’t about to say he missed coffee.
After reviewing the morning’s fishing and deciding which field to hunt this afternoon, which slaves to bed this evening, and which creek to fish tomorrow, the two men were quiet, until finally Karl said, “I know you hardly ever talk without being asked, and I know you’re thinking, Robert, so what’s on your mind?”
One thing Robert liked about Karl: most people thought because you didn’t talk, you didn’t think, but Karl knew Robert thought all the time. Robert asked, “Who do you talk to late at night over that hidden radio?”
“Daybreak,” Karl said. “I am Daybreak, and I talk to the rest of Daybreak.”
“And what is Daybreak really?”
“That’s like asking who God, or you or I, or anything that took a long, long time to grow is really, or what made it the way it is.”
“But it wasn’t just a back-to-nature club? And it’s not all gone now that the plaztatic world is down?”
“No more than the Catholics are just a wine-and-bread club that folded up after the crucifixion. We knew all along Daybreak couldn’t be a one-time thing. Too damn many asshats out there who want their plaztati
c TVs and Wal-Marts and cars and stuff back, too many bastards that think they’re more important than the Earth so they get to crap all over it, too many shitheads that want to be warm in the winter and fill the world with little shitheads that grow up and want houses too. So Daybreak’s not more than half over, even now. Maybe half of what was planned before Daybreak day has not even activated yet.”
“That’s how a couple thousand slaves turned up in early spring to build all this stuff, and as soon as it was built a battalion of soldiers showed up to move in?”
“That’s how. Castle Earthstone was made for a purpose, Robert, and that purpose is still ahead of us. For right now we drill the soldiers, build the castle, and work the slaves.”
“I kind of like drilling slaves, too.”
“Me too, and I love hunting and fishing and living in a world that’s going to be clean and free. But this place has a purpose. That’s how I knew to go loot those warehouses the week before the Chicago bomb went off.”
“A couple dozen slaves died in the storm coming back, though. I guess even Daybreak doesn’t know everything.”
“Daybreak knows everything we need to know, Robert. The slaves mostly gave their lives over to Daybreak a long time ago. They’re here to help Daybreak root out the last stems and shoots of the Big System. Then they’ll die, mostly. The soldiers too. Good, clean, Daybreak people are here to kill the Big System and its servants, then die. We needed supplies for the people coming, because Daybreak needed them to stay alive. After that, when we didn’t need as many slaves, they died.”
“Is that why we kill the babies?”
“Unhhunh. And that’s why we neither of us and none of the soldiers gets a bitch all to himself; nobody can get too worked up about whether any particular little pink monkey is his little bundle of Gaia-raping evil. We’re going to be the last generation, Robert. But we’re going to have a grand time while we do it.” He tossed him another cold beer. Spraddled on the couch, in his long red T-shirt, suspenders holding up his baggy pants, Karl looked more like Santa Claus than ever. “Now, cold beer, hot lunch, straightening out the soldiers and the construction, and then more shooting, fucking, and fishing. Daybreak doesn’t need us just yet.”
“Karl, I don’t know enough yet to take over if you die.”
“We’ll talk more, later today, tomorrow, in a month I’ll have you all briefed. No need to rush unless there’s something important right now.”
Robert thought, taking his time, sipping his beer and watching Karl sip his. “So, Karl, why’d you take me along on Daybreak day?”
“Well, I like to talk and you like to listen. That’s a flaw in our whole species, always figuring crap out and sharing it and making more of our stupid selves, just because we’re too scared to be really alone and quiet.”
“Alone and quiet.” Robert held his bottle up in a toast, and Karl beamed and reciprocated.
THREE:
THE MOON LEAKS METAL ON THE ATLANTIC FIELDS
2 DAYS LATER. CHRISTIANSTED NAVAL RESEARCH OBSERVATORY, CHRISTIANSTED, ST. CROIX, VIRGIN ISLANDS. 3:04 AM AST. MONDAY, JULY 14, 2025.
Tarantina Highbotham had a Ph.D. from Cal Tech, an Annapolis ring, and an honorable retirement from the Navy as a captain—equivalent to a colonel in the other services. Her whole life’s experience had been in getting things exactly right.
“That moon is too bright to have so much of it in your scope,” she told Henry, the new observer who was just getting his scope positioned. “Just the northeast corner, less if you can. Make sure you can see Fecunditatis, but don’t blind yourself with any more light than you have to.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked around the darkened platform; the rest were right on the money. All this can’t be easy. At least my first class in celestial nav involved manual instruments. What must it be like, trying to learn this and do it right, if you grew up filling out a screen to tell the telescope where to point?
No matter. Wherever they came from, they were doing it.
Henry had been on his honeymoon on St. Croix; on Daybreak day, his new bride had traded her jewelry for a ride to the mainland, leaving him a note. He’d probably never know whether she had gone off with slavers, pirates, coyotes, or just plain idiots. After that he’d worked odd jobs, begged in the street, and drunk, until Highbotham hired him to dig a latrine, and discovered he had been a math major.
Abby, on St. Croix to work for some alternate-energy foundation, had the best paper-and-pencil math skills of all Highbotham’s team, and drew well—better than well—accurately.
Peggy was a retired high school math teacher who had spent thirty some years with DoDEA. Her husband, a newly retired Marine general, had dropped dead when the Pittsburgh EMP apparently reached just far enough to give him a current surge in the pacemaker. She always showed up in full makeup.
Richard, a beefy old sad sack with a heavy drinker’s face, had been an architect; Gilead, dark-skinned and with a prominent Cuban accent, had been a technical analyst for a brokerage.
Now they were Christiansted Naval Observatory, by the authority of Pueblo and the Second Fleet, and when they weren’t the Observatory, they were the Caribbean Academy of Mathematics—a brilliant idea Abby had had and Peggy had pushed, feeding about fifty orphaned children in order to lure them in for a heavy dose of math and science. Those kids might be our most important work—our descendants will still know the world is a planet, the sky is a vacuum, the sun is a star, and the moon’s a big rock that doesn’t fall down because it falls in a circle. And be able to find their way to the other side of the planet, and come back.
Not for the first time, Captain Highbotham realized she loved her team, and her new work, immoderately. Truth is, retirement was dull and I hated not mattering. The moon, just past full, silvered the still figures bent over their telescopes.
Highbotham looked up at the moon, picking out Fecunditatis—the next dark spot over from Tranquility. Were you trying to tell us something, putting your damned moon gun right next to where the Eagle landed?
They all hit their clocks.
“Where and what?” she asked, quietly.
“Still in the daylight,” Henry said. “But a definite flash. A few of the shadows blinked.” He was scribbling frantically at his drawing. “I’m marking which ones.”
That had been one of his ideas—that as a backup, if the launcher fired while it was still in daylight, and they had pre-drawn the shadows around the suspected launcher location, each observer could check off the briefly vanished shadows. From their checksheets, it might be possible to calculate the location of the launcher.
“Everyone else?” Highbotham asked.
“Confirmed, in the bright area, I’m still marking shadows,” Gilead said.
“Confirmed and marking,” Abby said.
“Confirmed,” Peggy said. “Also marking. I think I saw the flash, marking that too.”
“I was blinking, I guess,” Richard said, disconsolately.
“You’ve seen a couple others, and we have multiple observers so someone can blink.” Highbotham noted times from everyone’s clock. “I have 3:04:16.02, 3:04:15.98, 3:04:15.91, and 3:04:16.17 and that is… 3:04:16.02. Good work, everyone, and back to the scopes. Henry, I’ll want to see how your shadow calculations panned out tomorrow—so take your time, if you need to, to make them good.”
Back in the quiet of her house, she copiedwtrc attn arnie pkg on way 3:04:16.02 fectas agn
onto the top line of the page, translated all the characters to ASCII, wrote a line of digits from her one-time pad, added, and brought the characters back from ASCII. She ran through the usual annoying precautions to make sure her radio had no nanoswarm, and finally began to tap the key, sending the coded message. Hand cryptography. Morse. Wonder how soon I’ ll strap on a cutlass and lead a boarding party.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. MOTA ELLIPTICA, TEXAS (WEST TEXAS RESEARCH CENTER). 3:20 AM CST. MONDAY, JULY 14, 2025.
So that’s it. The E
MP will burst over us somewhere between 4 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the 17th. Arnie scribbled a note and had the desk attendants copy it for every relevant officer, department head, and technician at Mota Elliptica, to get preparations under way at WTRC; gave a short note to the radio room to alert Pueblo, Athens, and Olympia; and dropped a note titled URGENT INSERT into the basket for the control bunker, so that once an hour they would stop the rolling tapes and warn the planet of the impending EMP.
With nothing more to do, he headed up the stairs for bed.
“So,” Trish said, behind him. “Five days of delay before the moon gun went off. Longest ever. Does that mean it’s an AI?”
“I hope so,” Arnie said. “Because if it is, our job is much easier. And if it’s not, it’s what I’m scared of. Why are you up so late?”
“Same reason you are. I asked them to wake me if a report of a flash on the moon came in. So was it Christiansted that got the fix?”
“Yeah. As always; best observatory we’ve got and they’re in the right place for a trajectory from the moon that’s coming here.”
“Did they get an exact fix?”
“Exacter than the last time. We’re narrowing in. But the flash happened with Fecunditatis still in daylight, so the launch site is still someplace in a forty-mile circle on our map of the moon. Captain Highbotham will be disappointed.”
Trish shrugged. “Highbotham’s not thinking about how long it will be before we can go to the moon to deal with it, because that’s not her job. Her job was to nail the moon gun’s location, and it slipped away again.” She peered at him through those strange wire-and-strap goggles; her eyes were an interesting shade of sea-green. “Arnie, you look pretty bummed yourself. Do you just need the sleep, or would you like to get a snack in the kitchen and just hang for a while?”