by John Barnes
Jason slid the burning stick under the little teepee of kindling. For tinder, he’d come up with a dried-out bird’s nest and pine twigs fuzzed with a steak knife from the guards’ kitchen, to eke out the crumpled pages of Thucydides. The blazing stick set it all off in a yard-high eruption of flames, engulfing the small teepee of deadwood sticks within the larger teepee of broken pine branches.
Jason looked up to see that Chris’s fire was jumping up even higher; Larry’s was ignited, but burning low and smoky.
“That’ll be enough fire to bring’em in,” Phat said.
In a few minutes, Larry and Chris joined them; this was the upwind fire, the easiest one for the helicopter to pick up from.
The war leaders of six tribes squatted on the hillside. Every few minutes, a scout came back from crawling down to where the four men built had three fires and now waited to light them. All night they had been telling their followers, wait, wait, of course we will kill the men, but we can also destroy whatever is coming for them, have a last glorious chance to smash some of the old plaztatic technology. Grumbling, the soldiers listened, obeyed, and continued to prepare for the attack.
One torch blazed up; two more answered; the fires themselves were lit. “This is it,” the senior war leader said, and they all stood up to give their war cries.
Before the last whoops and shrieks from the leaders were over, the hillside was dense with the silhouettes of fighters rising from their hiding places, and the cat-screams and bear-roars of a human wave gathering to pour down the hill toward the three fires.
Grayson looked out from the roof of Terrell Hall with some satisfaction; he didn’t know if they’d succeeded yet but he’d done all he could. At least now he had competent troops. He saw the three fires blaze up, marked their place on the map, and by the time that he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear the distant helicopter. In the quad, he shouted, “Major!”
“Sir!”
“Form up! We’re going to the old golf course north of campus, we’re running, and we might have to fight when we get there.”
“Right, sir. Bravo Company, up in the van; Delta Company, rearguard; Alpha, Charlie, and Echo, in that order, main body. We move in one, weapons ready.”
It was much less than one minute. With Alpha Company, in the lead of the main body, Grayson raced north along the old brick walkways, across the street, and into the abandoned part of town.
“What are we going to find, and what are we going to do, when we get there?” the major running beside him asked.
“We’ll get there about the same time as a helicopter from the Bush lands—I hope. There are some dangerous people, menaces to national security, who are there. I’m not sure what side the helicopter is on; the plot reaches very high up into our military. We don’t want to fight our own men—we’ve had enough of that already—but we can’t let the men on the ground get away, either.”
“Are they the spies from Pueblo, sir, the ones we busted last night?”
“Some of them.” Inspiration struck Grayson. “One of the reasons I want them is to question them about the Natcon’s murder. I don’t think they did it but I think they witnessed things that might give us a clue. So we can’t let them leave for Pueblo even if they’re innocent.”
“I’ll pass the word along, sir.”
Grayson continued at a swift jog; the cold bit at his toes and seared his lungs. Don’t slip and bust a leg on the bridge, he thought, that would be one irony too many.
“What the fuck is that?” General Phat blurted.
“Tribals, close, coming this way,” Larry said. “We can’t stay by the fires, we’ll be silhouetted.”
“The helicopter—”
“Talk to them if that gadget still works, but come on.”
Chris and Larry dragged Phat, almost by main force; Jason backed a few steps away from the fire, trying to put it between himself and the oncoming wave. “I’ll be along in a minute,” he yelled.
I think I owe this to the cause, he thought. Could have been me out there howling like a nut and dying just to kill other people; as Daybreaker poet I was all set up for it. Instead I got a nice clean comfy world, if you don’t mind the company of so many billion corpses. He hoped he was far enough back not to be readily visible; black-powder pistols made nearly as much light at night as they did smoke in the day, but he wanted to get off at least one shot before they knew where he was. Besides, I want to try something.
Dark shapes swarmed on the far side of the fire. “Mister Gun!” Jason shouted at the top of his lungs. “Mister Gun lives! Mother Gaia is a lie, Mister Gun lives!” Chanting, the tribals had entered the firelight in a solid wave. Jason pointed into the thickest part of the crowd and pulled the trigger.
In the split second of silence, he let the Daybreak poet he had once been merge with what Larry and Debbie had brought back about The Play of Daybreak, and shouted, “Mister Gun rises from the dead! Slay them all, slaughter them, Mister Gun is mightier than Mother Gaia!” He fired again, then bellowed, “Mister Gun!” as he fired again.
The crowd faltered, whimpered, tried to raise its chant, and that gave him a moment to swap out magazines. “Mister Gun!” a voice cried behind him—Larry, of course, he saw what I was doing!—and another shot lashed into the milling Daybreakers. One with a spirit stick stumbled and fell.
“Mister Gun slays your spirit stick!” Blam. “Mister Gun shits on your spirit stick and breaks it!” Blam. “Your spirit stick is dead!” Blam. Jason fired at the end of each scream.
Now Chris was shouting about Mister Gun, too. I swear, Jason thought, reloading with his last magazine, if I somehow get home alive, I am organizing the First Church of Mister Gun.
It had delayed the human wave, made it falter when it might have swept across and killed them all, but they had only had forty rounds to begin with, and those were almost gone. “Jason,” Larry said, quietly. “Back up with us. Phat’s got the chopper coming into the center of the triangle. It’ll be here soon. We just have to hope—Mister Gun! Mister Gun, feed on the tribes, rape Mother Gaia, Mister Gun!” He shot into the crowd; Jason used up his last magazine doing the same, and then fell back with Larry and Chris. Chris was almost shaking with laughter. “I didn’t think humor was called for here, but my dear sweet God I wanted to shout that Mother Gaia swims out to meet troopships.”
“Not long now,” Phat murmured, as they joined him. “The chopper—Right!” he held the little radio to his ear. “Yes, in the center, that’s us!”
Chris listened hard. “An H-92. It’s a distinct sound. Jocking a camera in Eritrea, you couldn’t mistake them for anything else. I always followed that sound, it meant Navy, and that far inland, Navy meant Marines—”
Phat was shouting instructions into the radio; they heard “Mister Gun” a few times before the helicopter roared over them. Its searchlights swept outward, revealing hundreds of tribals milling in confusion.
“They’re not afraid of guns,” Jason said. “Not out in the real world. They’re afraid of Mister Gun. Mister Gun lives in the part of them where Daybreak lives.” Phat repeated that into the radio, loudly. The searchlights swept a second time.
“The light hasn’t touched us,” Jason pointed out.
“No need,” Phat said, “they have us on IR, and why show anyone where we are? They just have to look around for a second first.”
“What are they looking for?”
“Trees, bad ground, bad guys,” Phat said. “If I was flying what’s probably the last working chopper in the world on what’s probably its last mission ever, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get ambushed—let alone run into a tree, or sink in a swamp.”
The helicopter crept forward toward the milling tribals. Its loudspeaker thundered, “You have not respected Mister Gun! Mother Gaia cannot save you! Mister Gun must punish you!”
The machine guns blasted into the tribals, who had been staring into the searchlights. Some fell; the rest fled. The searchlight winked out.
The helicopter descended to ground height, and the four men ran to it, diving forward, letting the crew drag them in by the arms. “That everyone?” the crewman shouted, as he pulled Jason aboard. “How many of you?”
“Four.”
“Got the last one, sir.”
The door slid shut behind him, the crewman pushed him into a seat, and the helicopter went up the way Jason had imagined a rocket might. “The skipper isn’t about to lose this thing to ground fire at this point,” the crewman said, apologetically. “We have every luxury we could snag from the Bush that wasn’t too big and heavy. How about coffee and ice cream cones?”
So the rendezvous had been the old golf course; Grayson had been able to put watchers on every road, on the railroad tracks, and at the airport, but there had simply been too many open, grassy areas to cover on foot, and he hadn’t been willing to risk the few trained cavalry ponies trying to cover the territory. And honestly, he couldn’t have imagined that Bush would be in league with Pueblo; just one more proof that you could never trust those Navy bastards. Rum, sodomy, and the lash, he quoted to himself. Especially sodomy. Which is what they’re doing to me and the whole TNG.
He heard gunfire ahead, and shouting. Ahead of them, above the low rise, he saw the helicopter against the stars, descending beyond the hill. Then brilliant electric light, unintelligible shouting and loudspeakers, and machine guns—real ones, firing fast and without the slow hollow claps of hand-turned black-powder guns.
“Pick up the pace and expect a fight,” he told the major.
They had covered only about two hundred yards more when Grayson saw the helicopter rise vertically and fly away to the northwest.
“Did they get away, sir?”
“I don’t know, Major. I think we’ve got to go take a look. But—”
Gunfire from the van.
The main body plunged into the ditches on either side, all in the dark shadows of the trees in starlight.
A messenger was at Grayson’s side. “General, Bravo captain says we plowed into the flank of a big party of tribals, and Second Platoon, out front, is fighting them; First and Third are moving to flank. He thinks they were going somewhere else and we just ran into them—”
Grayson was shouting again, sending forces around on each of his flanks, firming up his center with his rearguard, and driving them forward to find and massacre the tribals. Frustrated by failure and betrayal, he exulted in the volleys and single shots and the screams in the dark. And either these tribal fuckers stopped Phat or they didn’t, but I was too late and too slow, and that makes me mad, and by Christ I’m going to make them pay for making me mad.
When Athens was tiny, winking red fires far behind, Chris asked, “I don’t suppose anyone would care to tell us where we’re going?” He had consumed his ice cream cone with more reverence than he had ever shown the Host as an altar boy.
The Marine captain said, “Well, they told me to get you to anywhere with a runway, and take all the fuel I wanted because Bush was dying of nanoswarm, and didn’t have biotes yet, so we’ve got an extended-range Superhawk II here. Theoretically I could run all the way to Columbia, Missouri or so, but to be safe, we’re just going to Pale Bluff, Illinois, which should be friendly and has an airfield.”
“My ex-wife and my son Sam still live there,” the pilot added, “which is why I volunteered for this mission, it’s my chance to get back there. You might have heard about it if you ever read that Pueblo paper, or listen to the radio stations that read it on the air.”
“I might at that,” Chris said.
“So poor old Bush is gone, and that’s the last carrier, isn’t it?” Phat said.
“Yes, sir,” the Marine captain said. “More coffee all around for the guests, please, Chief? And for everyone? And there’s more ice cream, guests go first but I don’t want one drop of that wasted. We’ve got a while ahead of us, these things are fast but not that fast. Randy, let me know when you want me to take over and fly for a while.”
As they flew on to the northwest, the pilot revealed himself as a man who liked to talk. Jason decided that in light of his second bowl of ice cream, he could listen for a week if he had to. The pilot said, “Funny that the old Nimitz-class carriers outlasted all the new Ford-class ones, but those Fords were bad-luck ships from the beginning—the Ford herself set a record for going aground that I don’t suppose any carrier could possibly match, the terrorists sank poor old Franklin Roosevelt the year she was launched, W was zapped in the South China Sea EMP and then eaten by nanos, and, well, who the hell decided to name a ship after Jimmy Carter? It was like they were asking for what happened to it. But the Nimitzes kept right on ticking for most of this past year. Bush was the last, though, and in twenty years no one will remember there ever were aircraft carriers at all. I guess if Sam dreams about the sea, he’ll dream about commanding a ship-of-the-line.”
Phat cleared his throat. Very softly, he said, “Do you know who I am? Because you came here to rescue me.”
“Uh, no, sir, I don’t, and I didn’t mean any offense—”
“And none was taken. Lyndon Phat, known to those who do not wish to live much longer as ‘Shorty,’ general, U.S. Army, at one time the commander of military forces for the TNG, and as soon as I get to Pueblo and announce it—candidate for president of the United States in 2026. Which I will win, if for no other reason than that I will be damned if I’ll lose to that slimeball Grayson. And as for that ship-of-the-line, by the time Sam is your age, he’ll be bucking for a berth on the expedition to the moon, to shut that Daybreak gun down. Depend on it.”
“We all like to fly, sir.” They flew on through the silent dark. Hours later, dawn raced out from behind them and illuminated the mountains. Recent snow, and wood smoke rising from hundreds of chimneys, made it all look like a Christmas card from a hundred years ago.
THAT AFTERNOON. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 3 PM EST. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2025.
Grayson had slept until almost two; Whilmire, sitting across the table from him while he ate an enormous mid-day breakfast, said, “Well, it’s not any surprise to me that you have excellent taste in wives. Jenny issued a number of remarkably brutal threats about what would happen if you were not allowed your sleep, and having known her since her birth, I knew enough to take them seriously.”
“Daddy,” Jenny said, “I’ve got a husband to take care of.” She squeezed Grayson’s biceps. “And the next president of the United States.”
“I was going to ask if that was still on,” Grayson said, “because it seemed to me, after last night—”
Whilmire smiled. “Actually, things are better. First of all, as far as anyone in Pueblo can prove, you and Cameron Nguyen-Peters were trying to free Lyndon Phat, and the Natcon was killed by people blocking your plan. I’m sure the public will have their suspicions, but for public consumption, you come out looking like a fair man so devoted to the Constitution that you’ll risk your own life to restore it. Second, the actual interference with the escape came from a surprise assault by tribals that you defeated in battle. Of course, again, that O’Grainne woman won’t believe us, she’s not stupid, but our friends have every reason to keep believing us, our enemies were not going to anyway, and the people who just can’t make up their minds have an excellent reason to lean our way, because we’ve got the more appealing story. And to top it all off, problems between the Post Raptural Church and the government will be diminishing very shortly.”
Grayson said, “I realize I’m less doctrinaire about the Constitution than Cam—”
“Oh, I know there will be less truculence from the government side, but there will be far less pressure and hassle from the Church side.” Whilmire looked professionally sad. “I am afraid that Reverend Abner Peet has found it necessary to step down.” At Grayson’s startled expression, he added, “We’ve put together a story about the stress of the job. Confidentially, what happened is that the militia, pursuing tribals who were trying to flee through town
after your battle, discovered he was harboring a wounded tribal girl in his house, and when they tried to arrest her, Reverend Peet assaulted them. It emerged that she was hiding in his house because she knew he would hide her, and that the relationship had been a close one for some months. It would appear that poor old Doctor Arnold Yang was not the only person Daybreak had found a way to.”
Grayson peered at Whilmire, looking for any reaction or feeling, and saw none. “You know, I never really liked either man, and I tried to tell myself that the reason Arnie Yang could be sucked into Daybreak was that he was too interested in it, and besides he was a liberal elitist who thought he was smarter than all of us, and since I didn’t like him anyway… well. I didn’t like Peet, either, but you sure can’t say he was vulnerable because he was too smart. Or too impressed with his own cleverness. And looking back, I wasn’t being fair to Yang, just being scared about what it meant. Daybreak is going to try to take over all of us, at least if we’re potentially useful, I mean, and it doesn’t just want to kill us. And Daybreak could probably succeed with any of us; nobody’s immune or secure against it.” He shook his head, looking down into his coffee cup, not wanting either his political partner or his wife to see how shaken he was by the thought.
“It’s a lesson in caution for us all. So Reverend Peet will be staying at a secure facility while we try to understand what happened to him; we can’t let Pueblo be the only outfit that understands how Daybreak works in the individual mind. Unfortunately the girl went into a seizure, lost consciousness, and died, to some extent of her wounds.”
“So with Reverend Peet out of the game, the new head of the Post Raptural Church is, uh, you, sir?”
Whilmire spread his hands. “There was really no one else with my knowledge or experience, and at a difficult time like this, we need a steady, skilled hand on the job. Not to mention a prepared mind.” He leaned forward. “And your life is going to become easier because I believe the Church needs to liberalize on several issues, and I’ll be pursuing that both within the Church and on the Board of the Temporary National Government. It is my belief that we have to respect the fact that our people are independent and diverse, which are my polite words for cranky and mixed-up, and therefore the Church cannot expect full obedience yet, which is my very discreet way of saying that even down here, we are overrun with unbelievers and secularists and nutcases from the cults, and they will go off like a bomb if we try to exert our authority too quickly, so we have got to lay low till we have the strength to make them do the right thing.