by John Barnes
“Reminders,” Niskala whispered. “Kill two. Plant four. Come back.”
The three boys all nodded and slipped into the darkness; Niskala slipped quietly through the darkness towards the tribal encampment. Being out on a night raid-and-rec was as familiar as an old sweater. He had grown up in the Iron Range, where venison was a staple and a rifle was a tool for acquiring it; his father had pushed a military career so hard that Niskala had done most of a tour in LRPs before he’d really considered doing anything else, and even then, he’d gone straight into the Forest Service and spent his life in the woods, often carrying a weapon. Wonder if I’m the only Vietnam vet currently serving in the US Armed Forces?
Wonder if the Wapak Scouts Company of the Stone Laboratory Militia Battalion counts as US Armed Forces?
Wonder if it’s still the US?
Shut up, old man.
That last thought was by far the most comforting.
His first kill was easy; the man was bent over a frying pan on the little fire, poking at his dinner with a stick. Niskala slid in beside him and hatcheted the back of his head so hard that the blade went in up to the shaft. Letting the body lie facedown across the fire, he planted a foot on the neck and wrenched the hatchet back out.
The second was almost trouble; he glimpsed motion on the far side of a tent, crept around slowly, and looked into the wide, white eyes of a man squatting to crap on the ground. His hatchet lashed out in a hard backhand, knocking the man over sideways, but embedding itself in his jaw.
The tribal screamed through his shattered mouth, a bubbling inarticulate sound, and Niskala stepped over the thrashing body, pulled a garrote from his pocket, and wrapped the man’s neck, but not before his target moaned again. “That’s right,” Niskala said, loud enough to carry. “Take it all the way, bitch, take it all the way.”
He heard laughter from the surrounding tents. Weird thing about tribals, they’re communal but there’s no community spirit. I guess people that are all planning to die anyway don’t get so attached. He tightened the garrote more, hampered a little by the hatchet handle still sticking sideways out of the man’s jaw. A moment later his victim went limp. The damp night air reeked of warm shit and blood.
Niskala pulled out the hatchet and set about planting his four “little bottles of surprise,” as Fred Rhodes, back at Stone Laboratory, had called them. Each was a bottle of wood alcohol; to set them, Niskala inserted a test tube into the neck, filled the test tube with acid from the flask he carried, dropped in a gelatin capsule of whatever it was that Fred had brewed up, inserted the narrow part of an oversized cork into the test tube, and pushed the tube and cork down into the bottle till the outer edge of the cork seated.
When the acid ate through the gelatin, an hour or two from now, there would be a small hot explosion to set the alcohol on fire and scatter it around. For the last half hour before detonation, the thinning gelatin capsule would be less and less stable, so that a light touch might set it off; if they found it right away, the Daybreakers might disarm it, but after half an hour it would be on a hair trigger until it blew spontaneously.
Keeping to shadows, Niskala crept down to the old pre-Daybreak buildings, figuring they would have been reserved for something important. They were up a couple of feet on pilings, so he rolled a bottle in under the first one; he realized there were people sleeping under the second, so he crawled in and wedged the bottle into the brace of a floor joist, less than a yard from a particularly dense huddle; when the blazing liquid hit their blankets, with them trapped in this low space, that ought to be good for plenty of chaos and panic, which was what the mission was all about. Like I tell the boys, try to exceed specs on the core mission.
Following the marked path to the nearest raft on the ice, he found it was sitting up on concrete blocks. Sort of clever. Bottom and sides don’t get frozen in. Then when it thaws, it just settles into the water, and the blocks sink away.
A snore alerted him; peering over the gunwale cautiously, he saw that several of them were bunched together in an open-fronted cabin, piled onto each other like stacked cordwood. Probably the crew-to-be. He felt along the gunwale and found several oarlocks. All right, and they’re planning on rowing. Enough intel, let’s go to ops.
Rather than chance climbing in, after preparing his bottle, he reached over the gunwale and wedged it into the external corner of the aft cabin. That’ll make another wakeup call.
That left one bottle and plenty of time to go. He thought about it for a moment, and decided to leave it in the sailboat with the tallest mast, moored in the pool of kept-open water by the pier. Quietly, he crept out on the pier; by the moon, he still had more than an hour.
Something was subtly wrong. A dark smear on the deck led his eye to a hand stretched outside a doorway.
His shoulder was gently squeezed with the Morse for 73—“friend.” He turned.
It was Kyle, who pointed at the boat and drew a finger across his throat. Niskala held up the bottle; Kyle gestured that there was already one aboard the boat.
Lying prone and leaning out, with Kyle holding his feet, he planted it on the crossbeam closest to shore under the pier; if the pier itself burned, it might take several boats with it.
Still not having spoken, they crept in the shadows of the trees by the shore back to the canoes, where Derek and Marty were already waiting. As they pushed off and glided away, Niskala thought, I really ought to do something about getting these boys their Eagles. This is one hell of a service project and I think we can waive a merit badge or two.
• • •
The moment they had swung their canoes aboard Kelleys Dancer and tied them down, Rosie whispered, “Ready? Everyone back aboard?”
“Yep,” Niskala said. “Went real well.”
“Need two of you on the lines and two working the anchor winch.”
In less than a minute, they were moving, with Rosie going aft to take the tiller from Barbara. The wind was light but steady. In an hour the rising sun would raise a land breeze against them. “We might have to make you all row, so stay dressed,” Barbara warned. “Meanwhile I’ve got some hot broth and not-too-awful biscuits.”
The biscuits were delicious and abundant. As they finished wolfing them down, Barbara leaned in to say, “Rosie says something you should see on deck.”
The bruise-red sun rose from the lake in front of them, turning the snow-covered ice a dozen shades of crimson, pink, and orange. The dim peninsular shore to their south, shrouded in dense mist, bent around west behind them, and Niskala watched that way, waiting for sounds or light.
After a little while, the low clouds were lit with orange flickers, and sounds of screaming and shouting came to them through the fog. Abruptly, flames reached above that black horizon.
“The ground at Pottohawk would’ve been just out of sight from the crows’-nest about now,” Rosie observed. “So the flames are about that high, which is forty-nine feet. One of you sure hit the jackpot.”
“Any chance any of them saw our sail?” Niskala asked.
“Maybe. But even if they try to run all the way to the tip of Long Point to cut us off, we’ll get there before they do.”
“What’s burning that high?” Niskala asked. “I bombed a raft, the old pier, and a couple of the main buildings. Nothing I’d’ve thought would go up like that.”
Derek laughed. “That was probably me. They had this massive wood-fired still, and a big pyramid, of barrels of booze. I shoved one bomb way deep into the middle of that pyramid. So if that booze was distilled enough to burn, the whole thing probably went off in one big whoosh.”
A big, blazing orange ball of flames climbed out of the tribal camp, and the screaming became wailing.
Marty and Kyle laughed with obvious admiration, and clapped Derek on the back, telling him he had the bragging rights for the op.
Not exactly the kind of scout
s I used to produce, Niskala thought. He wished he were already back with Ruth.
THE NEXT DAY. GIBRALTAR. 11:45 AM CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME. MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2026.
“First time I saw the Rock,” Ihor said, “I was fourteen, and my papers said I was eighteen, and they were working me so hard I felt like I was a hundred. But it was beautiful, and just like all the pictures.”
“It’s a big white rock,” Whorf said. It sounded stupid to him even as he said it.
As usual when coming into a port, they were standing by with nothing to do, waiting to be madly busy. On their way across the Atlantic, all the scholar-sailors had had plenty of time for study, and everyone else had been happy to help them fill it. Whorf had drawn images from the microscope for Lisa Reyes till his hand was sore, and then until it was strong, and finally till it was indefatigable. Ihor’s knack for languages had made him the pet of their three language-and-linguistics specialists, so he had spent his time cramming Portuguese, Arabic, Catalan, and Italian.
“This is nice, just waiting to pull on a rope,” Whorf said. “My brain’s about ready for a rest.”
“Yours and mine both,” Ihor said. “That is how you say it?”
“That is. You sound Old New York already.”
“Someday when we are old, nobody will believe we remember Old New York, before it was Manbrookstat, and the kids—”
Then Halleck’s bellowed orders set them scrambling, as Discovery worked her way into the harbor under sail alone, the immense white rock larger whenever Whorf had time to look.
THE NEXT DAY. CASTLE SUNSNAKE, HOME OF THE PEOPLE OF GAIA’S DAWN, IN THE FORMER HELLS CANYON NATIONAL RECREATIONAL PARK. 8:30 PM LOCAL SOLAR TIME. TUESDAY, MARCH 31, 2026.
Darcage had watched the entire Play of Daybreak with tears of joy pouring over his face just to be home.
He knew he was believing, totally and utterly, something he had not always believed. Of course, once he had been someone else and had a different name. His memories overlapped peculiarly.
One of the most hateful of all the hateful things in his involuntary stay in alleged civilization had been the cruelty and relish with which they had repeatedly forced Darcage to confront those inconsistencies. They had dug into his mind like painful little burrs: how could he remember both his initiation as a man into his tribe, at age fourteen, and first hearing of Daybreak when a girl he was hot for took him to a warehouse dance-and-chant in south Queens? Why could he be tricked into crossing himself if he had been raised as the son of a Teaching Shaman of the Guardian on the Moon? Why did he insist on pronouncing his name dar-SAHJ like some phony Frenchman when his memories did not include France, and why, when they asked him the question in French, had he started to answer it?
Every little burr of conflict had been the seed of a tooth-rattling seizure, from which he had emerged to worse questions, uglier threats, more abuse of himself and his tribe and Mother Gaia, between mocking, laughing visits from the Horrid Bitch.
Now, he simply wallowed in the way that he could just accept all the pieces of the contradiction, knowing that he had always been destined for a special shamanhood, conducting diplomacy between the tribes by leading them all to the correct and real Daybreak, and knowing that he had lived off the grid but on the net in a Daybreaker nest filled with computers and fabricators until Daybreak day in 2024, when they had picked up the buckets of biote culture and nanospawn from the benches, climbed to the roof to throw them into the early morning breeze, broken the doors off, and left forever.
His mind held his first Sun Dance and his first Sundance Festival comfortably next to each other, and that was one of the finest comforts of home. Now he relaxed and accepted all those dreams of memories and memories of dreams, drifting graceful and untouched between the horns of the dilemma and into its friendly, gentle, toothless mouth.
The Play of Daybreak was the tribe’s weekly enactment of the story he had always known, loved, and lived. Mother Gaia’s seven daughters lovingly seduced the servants of the Seven Misters, and brought forth the nanospawn and biotes to end the plaztatic world; if somehow it seemed to overlie or exist at the same time as Star Wars and First Communion, that was not anything to worry about right now. Eventually, the world would be consistent.
Daybreak loved him.
Every terrifying moment of his captivity, escape, and flight was now worth it just to be back here in the sanity.
His heart leapt up at the final dance by the whole cast, as the Servant of Mister Atom proclaimed that he was going to live on the moon and hurl his thunderbolts against anyone who tried to resurrect deadly Mister Electron again, and for a moment, he did not realize that the Servant of Mister Atom had just asked, “Would Darcage, of the New Green World People, please come forward?”
Darcage stood and walked slowly down the aisle; the people around him rose and cheered, welcoming him, loving him, making him feel he belonged there. He approached the Servant of Mister Atom slowly and tentatively, much like the first time a very young child knows who Santa is. “Kneel, Darcage, for I have a blessing for you.”
Applause thundered through the crowd, for everyone knew the story of the horrors Darcage had witnessed in the last holdouts of the plaztatic world. The People of Gaia’s Dawn themselves had lost a shaman and a war leader to the Provis’s brutal regime within the last two months. “Will Crystal Vision please come forward to assist Darcage?”
He felt her strong, cool hands on his shoulders, but did not look back at the chief shamaness.
“I speak now as the representative of the Guardian on the Moon.” The actor’s voice took on the slow, precisely articulated quality that marked a direct message from Daybreak itself. “Blessed are you, Darcage, for a mighty work is prepared for you as soon as you are strong and well. One task remains in your life before you go to dwell with the Guardian on the Moon, and for this task, you will be known forever to all the tribes who keep true faith with Mother Earth. Crystal Priestess, you may whisper his mission to him now.”
He felt the soft touch of her lips by his ear, and realized she had taken a moment to kiss his neck first. She whispered, “You have been chosen to slay the last President of the United States of America, and free the world from the shadow of plaztatic empire. Come to my sleeping place for the details tonight. And then”—her tongue ran slowly over his earlobe—“stay there, in the bed, for I want to bear the child of the Great Slayer.”
The surge of joy in his heart was accompanied by a more primal surge in another organ.
She led him to the front of the stage where he took several bows while the crowd roared at him in a glorious, joyous thunder of approval. They guided him to a seat of honor with the chiefs and shamans, and the play resumed.
The Servant of Mister Atom declared that his exposure to evil plaztatic radiation had made him unfit to father children, and therefore he would take no spouse. He proclaimed that he would fly to the moon, there to listen for the whisperings of Mister Electron trying to rise from the grave, and hurling the fire he had taken from Mister Atom and the lightning of Mister Electron himself against them whenever he heard the least trace, being ever vigilant and ready to strike.
The burial of Mister Smart, everyone was assured, would be forever permanent.
After a last choral hymn to Mother Earth, Crystal Priestess came forward to lead him to her home, but they had to stop first and delay a while, because the whole tribe wanted to hug Darcage. At last, however, he was free to go home with her, where he accepted both the spiritual and physical gifts of the priestess with immense enthusiasm.
2 DAYS LATER. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 3:30 PM LOCAL SOLAR TIME. THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2026.
Robert watched the man’s eyes widen at the sight of the heads on sticks. First, they sent the Cop; then Gandalf; then Enchantress Woo Woo. They must be running low on quality people to sacrifice, because what they’ve sent me here is Scared Little Man.
“Well,” Robert said. “You have a message to deliver. Maybe you should.”
The little gray man, in his oversized T-shirt, blanket poncho, and pigskin moccasins said, “Daybreak has commanded me to ask a favor.”
“Whether I do anything for Daybreak, or not, and whether I accept your message, or not,” Robert said, “stay with us. We will help you through withdrawal from that wrong and untrue version of Daybreak that your tribe uses to control you. And we’ll give you the True Daybreak, and make you a better and happier man here than you ever were there.”
“I was chosen because I am of little value,” the man said, tears running down his face, “and I want—I want—” He fainted.
“Now what, boss?” Bernstein asked.
“He’s having one of those seizures, obviously.”
Bernstein was already kneeling by the little man, turning him so he wouldn’t choke and firmly pushing his flailing limbs down. “I know that, boss, I’ve seen as many as you have. I mean, why’d you do it?”
“Just a wild hair up my ass, maybe. I have an idea, maybe a good one. We’ll see when he comes out. Talk nice to him when he does, gentle him, you know how we did with the slaves.”
When the man’s eyes opened and Bernstein had made some soothing sounds and given him a drink of water, Robert said, “You are welcome to stay; it may be rough for a few days. But I won’t throw you away the way Daybreak did you. All my people here matter to me. We don’t keep slaves. Everyone can get married, and I don’t make them kill their babies. Everybody has a name and we’re not looking for a way to use you all up and kill you. You’re going to like it here. For now, though, I guess we should hear your message.”
The little man, seen close up and helpless on the floor, looked even smaller and less prepossessing; the sort of fellow that, back before, had worked a counter, pushed a mop, or guarded a building that didn’t need guarding, and been nearly invisible. He gasped and more tears gushed; his mouth worked but no sound came out.