Twilight's Last Gleaming

by John Michael Greer

  Bridgeport got out, filled the tank. The line was getting longer; no doubt word had gotten out on social media that there was still a station in town with gas, and they'd be mobbed until their storage tank was as dry as the other stations’.

  He got back in, rolled his window up, pulled out of the station. “I suppose,” he said to his daughter, “you just happened to have some British money on you.”

  “I heard that the dollar was tanking when we got to Germany.” She glanced at him. “We all had back pay coming, so when I got mine, I cashed it out and took the money to the exchange bureau. A lot of people from the base were doing that. They were literally out of euros—they were waiting for an armored car from Dusseldorf with more—but they still had British pounds.”

  “Smart. Not that I'm surprised, you understand.”

  She laughed, sat back in the seat as he guided the car back onto the freeway.

  10 November 2029: Silver Spring, Maryland

  “It hasn't changed much,” said Bridgeport, as he unlocked the door to his condo. “Well, except that you'll have to meet the new tenant.”

  The tenant in question meowed up at them as they entered. “Hello, Bus,” Bridgeport said.

  Melanie squatted down and reached out a hand, which the cat sniffed carefully. “I don't believe,” she said, “we've met. Mr. Bustopher Jones, I presume? Colonel Melanie Bridgeport, at your service.”

  The cat submitted graciously to having its ears scratched and tugged, and then walked pointedly across the entry to the kitchenette, across the floor to the food dish, and glanced back over its shoulder at Bridgeport to make sure he was paying attention.

  “Dogs have owners, cats have staff,” Melanie said, getting to her feet. “Do you want me to feed him?”

  “Not at all. In fact, I'm going to chase you out of the kitchen—I have a surprise planned.”

  She laughed, headed to the spare bedroom with her duffel bag over her shoulder.

  Once the cat had its face in the food dish and the surprise was tucked into the oven, he went into the living room, settled on the couch. She was already curled up on the other side of it, looking tired but not half as ragged as she'd been at the airfield.

  “If it's okay,” he said, “I want to ask some things about—” He fumbled for a word.

  “The war? I was wondering when you'd get to that.” She smiled. “Yes, it's okay. What do you want to know?”

  “Just how badly we got beaten.”

  She drew in an uneven breath, nodded. “The short version is that we got our butts handed to us. Do you know what happened to the Navy task force?”

  “Yes. That hit the media a week ago.”

  “It wasn't quite that bad for the rest of us. No, I take that back: It wasn't quite that fast. The fighter wings got ground down a few planes at a time, the Army units got driven back a battle at a time. It wasn't one-sided—we took out two of their planes for every three of ours that we lost—but that's just it; none of us knew how to fight a war that wasn't one-sided. Once we didn't have air superiority any more and couldn't bring in all the supplies we wanted, nobody really knew what to do. So it turned into a slugging match, and the Chinese and the Coalition forces kept slugging until we didn't have anything left to fight with.”

  The cat came out of the kitchenette, licking its whiskers, and walked up to the couch. After a moment of contemplation, it leapt up, climbed onto Melanie's lap, circled twice and settled down there.

  “You,” she told it, rubbing between its ears, “are a worthy successor to the late lamented Macavity.” Looking up at her father: “On the flight back, some of the staff officers were talking about whether the administration was going to blame us for what happened. Maybe there was a way we could have won. I don't—”

  She stopped in mid-sentence, sniffed the air. “Oh my God,” she said. “You didn't. Mac and cheese?”

  “With tomatoes,” said Bridgeport.

  “You,” she said, “are the best dad anyone ever had. I mean that.”

  10 November 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  “Finally,” Jameson Weed said, “I want to ask you and all Americans everywhere to join together with President Gurney and put an end to this unhappy chapter of our nation's history. God bless each and every one of you, and God bless America. Thank you.”

  They were applauding as he left the podium, kept it up as he came down the stairs and headed toward the door. Andie met him there, with an embrace and a kiss that felt less forced than anything of the kind she'd done in years. She had been crying, he could see that even through the heavy makeup she'd put on to cover it. He tried not to think of that, returned the kiss, pulled away from her and left the East Room.

  And after all of it—

  He tried to wrench his mind away from the thought, and failed.

  —the shit he'd had to put up with—

  Someone called after him—Andie? He couldn't tell, didn't want to know.

  —the deals he'd had to make—

  He could still hear them applauding in the East Room as he started up the stairs.

  —the lies he'd had to tell—

  Did they expect him to stay there, smiling and nodding, at his own political funeral?

  —this.

  He got to the top of the stairs, stumbled forward half blindly, turned into the Center Hall. More dead presidents looked down at him from the walls. If Nixon had been there, or Harding, or one of the other great failures of the presidency, that might have been some consolation, but of course they were nowhere to be seen: it was Washington and Lincoln, Reagan and the Roosevelts, the men whose shoes he'd tried to fill and whose pictures he'd insisted on having there as a reminder of his hopes. Well, they were doing their job now.

  Enough, he told himself. Enough. There was one answer not even they could argue with.

  As he got to the door of the private sitting room, he heard Andie calling up the stairs, calling his name. He paused, then hurried in, closed the door behind him, locked it to spare himself that further humiliation. She would know soon enough.

  Bottom drawer of the bureau, box on the left, under the papers: blued metal gleamed. He pulled the revolver out, made sure it was loaded. Then, before he could have second thoughts, he pressed the muzzle up against the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  11 November 2029: Silver Spring, Maryland

  Lights sparkled in the still air as Bridgeport stared out the window. Melanie was asleep; they'd sat on the couch and talked until she could barely keep her eyes open, and he'd sent her off to bed the way he'd done when she still wore her hair in pigtails. She'd laughed then, and wept a little, and told him that she felt as though she'd finally come home.

  Home, Bridgeport thought. It's a very different place these days.

  He hadn't even tried to go to bed. The air around him felt brittle and bright as glass. Nerves, certainly, but it was more than that: something had changed irrevocably, maybe for him, maybe for the country or the world, he couldn't tell.

  As he stared out at the lights, what came to mind was the waitress from Philadelphia he'd met at the Air Force base that morning. Just one more ordinary American, he thought. These are the people we say we're leading, the people whose votes we buy and sell. He remembered the squeal of delight she'd let out when her son appeared at the top of the boarding ramp, and asked himself: What if things had gone the other way, and she'd gotten the call from the Pentagon telling her that her son wasn't coming home at all?

  We take them for granted, he thought. I've done it as much as anybody. And that it took something like this to remind me that her Jamie is just as precious to her as Mel is to me—God forgive me for that.

  He half turned toward the kitchenette, thinking of the bourbon on the top shelf of the cabinet; decided against it, went to his computer instead, tapped the mouse to wake it and then walked over to the couch while the screen slowly brightened. Bus was mostly asleep, sprawled across the cushions, but stretched and purred vaguely w
hen Bridgeport reached down and stroked his back.

  Then he turned back to the computer, and saw the news.

  TWENTY-TWO

  15 November 2029: Silver Spring, Maryland

  Bridgeport put down the telephone, stood there for one frozen moment, and then shook his head and let out a breath he hadn't been conscious of holding. Mel was watching him; she'd been typing something into her laptop on the other side of the room until halfway through the call, and had the expression of someone who wasn't sure whether to ask a question or not.

  “That was Gurney,” Bridgeport said. “He's offered me the vice presidency.”

  Her face lit up, and she started to say something, then stopped.

  “I know,” he said. “It's basically a bribe to head off the hearings.”

  “Are you going to accept?”

  “I don't know,” he admitted. “I told him I'd get back to him later today with an answer.”

  It was a tempting possibility, no question, and it also showed with painful clarity just how badly Gurney wanted to keep the fine details of the nation's military failure out of the media. No, he corrected himself, not Gurney: the offer had Ellen Harbin's fingerprints all over it. Rumors in the Senate had it that she and the new president were thick as thieves: the polite term was “close allies,” though there were plenty of more scurrilous claims as well.

  He frowned, shook his head again. “Well, we'll see.” Turning toward her: “Any luck?”

  “Not a bit.” She'd been trying to get some kind of clarification from the Air Force about her status. Officially she was on indefinite leave from the 33rd Fighter Wing, and entitled to her normal pay, but there was some kind of bureaucratic tangle involved and no one could tell her exactly when to expect a paycheck.

  “I'll see if I can shake something loose from the Pentagon,” he promised. “I've got to talk to Ralph Wittkower anyway about this new thing. He's gone way out on a limb to help me get things set up for the hearings; I owe him that much.”

  Mel considered that. “What do you think he'll say?”

  “I don't know. I really don't know.” In Washington, those in the know referred to the Pentagon as the fourth branch of government, as influential as the executive, legislative and judicial branches—sometimes more influential, when push came to shove—and you never knew quite what game the military was playing. “I'll have to talk to Joe and a couple of other people in the office, and then we'll see.”

  15 November 2029: The Pentagon, Washington DC

  “He called this afternoon,” Wittkower said.

  “And?” Admiral Waite looked up from his drink.

  “We'll see. I did my best to talk him into taking it.”

  The two of them were in Waite's secure office, a windowless room not far from his public office but screened from eavesdropping by every technological trick the US military had at its disposal. Back when the room was built, the security measures had been directed against the agents of hostile foreign powers; these days, as often as not, the eyes and ears that had to be foiled worked for some other branch of the federal government.

  Waite sipped the gin and tonic, his face unreadable. “Did you tell him why?”

  “Of course not. I mentioned that we're not too happy about Gurney, and Harbin's name came up, but that's as far as it went. I promised him I'd work with whoever gets the Armed Services committee so the hearings can go forward, that sort of thing.”

  “Those are going to hurt,” Waite said.

  Wittkower said nothing. It was an open question, he knew, whether funding for the carrier fleet would survive the outcry over the Battle of Kilindini, and he remembered that Waite had been a naval fighter pilot and then a carrier officer before finding his way into the Navy's upper ranks. The flattops were probably as obsolete as oared galleys, but Wittkower wasn't about to press the point; you didn't make rude comments about a man's first love.

  “The thing I wish I knew,” said Waite then, “is just how far we'll have to go. Not about Gurney—he's incompetent, no question, but he's hardly the first clueless political hack that's landed in the White House. About Harbin.”

  “What I want to know is how far she'll go.”

  “Good question. Do you know about her papers on constitutional theory, the ones she wrote when she was teaching at Harvard?”

  “I know she wrote some,” said Wittkower.

  “I'll have my staff send you an outline. She was banking off some of the ideas the old neoconservatives came up with twenty or thirty years ago. Her theory—unitary government theory was the label she used—is that all the powers of government belong to the president; he farms them out to the other agencies and branches of government, federal, state, local, you name it, but he can take them back any time he wants to.”

  Wittkower took that in. “I don't think that's quite what the guys who wrote the Constitution had in mind.”

  “No, but it's actually quite impressive to watch her finesse that point.” Waite finished his drink. “The question in my mind is whether she'll try to act on that theory.”

  “In which case…”

  “Exactly.”

  Even in a secure office, the phrase on both of their minds didn't bear repeating. Military intervention in the US political process happened all the time, but it happened subtly—members of Congress could be lobbied or pressured, defense contractors encouraged to cut checks for one candidate or another, the votes of servicepeople and their families on military bases manipulated this way or that, and so on. Only a dozen times in the history of the republic had the Chiefs of Staff been forced to draw up plans and make preparations for something beyond that, and each time, that had been enough to panic the politicians and get the necessary policy changes made.

  Someday, it might not be enough. How many of Waite's predecessors, Wittkower wondered, had to sit there and wonder: are the tanks actually going to have to head out into the streets this time?

  “Have your people start drafting plans,” Waite said then. “If something has to be done, we need to be ready.”

  2 December 2029: The White House, Washington DC

  “So help me God,” said Pete Bridgeport.

  The East Room exploded in applause and flashing cameras. President Gurney, beaming, crossed the podium to shake the hand of his new vice president. The First Lady, Julia Gurney, followed, and gave him one of those bright Southern smiles that could mean anything or nothing. Voices, tumult, more flashes, and then he and Melanie were following the Gurneys out of the East Room, down the Cross Hall, and into the State Dining Room for the inaugural banquet.

  Bridgeport still wasn't sure why he'd agreed to the job. It wasn't ambition—God knows he had enough of that, but he'd set his sights on a long career in the Senate, working his way up step by step to one of the top positions there, which was certainly more appealing than sitting around and waiting in the wings in case Gurney happened to die in office. It certainly wasn't because he owed anything to Gurney, or to poor Weed—he'd attended the funeral at Arlington Cemetery along with the rest of official Washington, of course, standing there bareheaded under bleak November skies as a presidency that had begun with so much promise ended with a flag-draped coffin sliding into the ground, but that was as far as his duty to the man went.

  No, if it was anything, it was an uneasy feeling somewhere in the back of his brain that somehow, saying yes to Gurney's offer might matter more than he could imagine. You didn't get far in the political game without learning to pay attention to your hunches, and night after night, as he'd wrestled with the question, the same unformed sense had surfaced: you have to do this.

  So he'd arranged for Joe Egmont to get all the plans and papers for the hearings to Rosemary Muller, who would be taking over the Armed Services Committee; he'd taken care of the remaining promises he'd made to the voters back home, and had lunch with Leona Price, who knew everyone and everything in the District, including the corner of it where he'd be living once the movers got through packing up hi
s things in the Silver Spring condo and hauling them to One Observatory Circle. He'd had a long talk with Melanie, who would be staying in the condo but would be his hostess for official events—and now here he was, with Melanie resplendent in her full dress Air Force uniform and the movers and shakers of the Washington establishment there to congratulate him, and still not certain why.

  He helped Melanie to her seat, took his own place between her and Gurney, bowed his head while somebody with a Deep South accent said grace—Julia Gurney was a very public Christian, sitting in the pews in some church or other every Sunday without fail, and had a favorite Baptist preacher of hers in to bless the meal. Afterwards, as the waiters began bustling around with food and drink, Gurney leaned over and said, “I hope I can count on you to help me with Congress.”

  “That's my intention,” Bridgeport told him.

  “Good. You've got three days of briefings ahead—I remember, trust me. After that—well, how about Monday after the Cabinet meeting? I can fill you in on my plans then.”

  Bridgeport nodded, and wondered what the man had in mind.

  9 December 2029: Washington DC

  “Oh for God's sake,” said Leona Price. “That just about figures.”

  Her husband Robert, who was on the other side of the living room, looked up from his laptop; he was correcting papers for one of the history classes he taught at Georgetown University. “What?”

  “Gurney.”

  “Babe, if you can say anything about that man that I have a hard time believing, lunch tomorrow is on me.”

  “You're on,” she said. “Care to guess what his big plan for getting America back on its feet amounts to?”

  He gestured for her to go ahead.

  “New aircraft carriers.”

  “No way.”

  “A new generation of carriers that can shrug off cruise missiles, to quote, regain our rightful place at the center of the world order, unquote.”

  He blinked, then got to his feet and came over.

  On her computer screen was a transcript of Gurney's speech to Congress that day, courtesy of one of the big news websites. Reading over Leona's shoulder, Robert skimmed past a paragraph of rhetoric about getting past partisan bickering and bringing the country back together, then reached the next two paragraphs. “Okay,” he said, “you got me.”