Daybreak Zero

John Barnes DAYBREAK ZERO A NOVEL OF DAYBREAK

For Stephen and Michael Rodriguez,

known troublemakers

May the world you will be running

be a bigger world than this,

with better things to do,

and just as many challenges

Scyros

snuffle and sniff and handkerchief

The doctor punched my vein
The captain called me Cain
Upon my belly sat the sow of fear
With coins on either eye
The President came by
And whispered to the braid what none could hear

High over where the storm
Stood steadfast cruciform
The golden eagle sank in wounded wheels
White Negroes laughing still
Crept fiercely on Brazil
Turning the navies upward on their keels

Now one by one the trees
Stripped to their naked knees
And danced upon the heaps of shrunken dead
The roof of England fell
Great Paris tolled her bell
And China staunched her milk and wept for bread

No island singly lay
But lost its name that day
The Ainu dived across the plunging sands
From dawn to dawn to dawn
King George’s birds came on
Strafing the tulips from his children’s hands

Thus in the classic sea
Southeast from Thessaly
The dynamited mermen washed ashore
And tritons dressed in steel
Trolled heads with rod and reel
And dredged potatoes from the Aegean floor

Hot is the sky and green
Where Germans have been seen
The moon leaks metal on the Atlantic fields
Pink boys in birthday shrouds
Loop lightly through the clouds
Or coast the peaks of Finland on their shields

That prophet year by year
Lay still but could not hear
Where scholars tapped to find his new remains
Gog and Magog ate pork
In vertical New York
And war began next Wednesday on the Danes.

—KARL SHAPIRO

ONE: LOOP LIGHTLY THROUGH THE CLOUDS

ABOVE THE FORMER I-84, ALONG THE IDAHO — OREGON BORDER. 5:51 PM PST. WEDNESDAY, JULY 9, 2025.

A black flag, grayed by the blowing desert dust, snapped and yanked at the pole at the Ontario, Oregon, airfield. From the rear cockpit of her Stearman biplane, barely five feet behind the roaring engine, Bambi Castro couldn’t hear the cracking and booming of the flag in the wind, but even a quarter mile above, she could see the way the flag bent the pole. It would have been a scary landing, but now she wouldn’t be landing.

The black flag meant CONTAMINATED FUEL HERE, DO NOT LAND. The biotes that had spoiled the aviation fuel on the ground at Ontario were as contagious to avgas as refrigerator mold was to cucumbers. The most common strains of biote could turn the fuel in the Stearman’s tank to yellow-orange vinegar, lumpy green goo that resembled baby diarrhea, or brown sludge that reeked of cheese, but there were thousands of one-off biote strains that might do something equally bad. If any biote contaminated the Stearman, the whole fuel system and engine would have to be pulled out, boiled, and reinstalled, taking one of the last dozen working airplanes in the United States out of service for weeks.

Bambi banked right and pulled the stick back, putting the Stearman into a circling climb. Coming around to the west, the propeller and engine roared even louder at the hard work against the wind. Didn’t even get a chance to warm up, she thought; even in July, she needed a couple of sweaters, gloves, helmet, and scarf at cruising altitude, a mile and a half above the high desert and with the plane’s propeller and motion putting a hundred-mile-an-hour wind always in her face. Well, nothing to be done for it; she couldn’t land here and she needed to get above and upwind as quickly as she could. I’ll need to drain and check at Baker City. Gah. One more thing between me and dinner and bed.

Holding the stick with her knees to keep the Stearman spiraling upward, Bambi dragged the Ontario mailbag from the front cockpit and rested it on her lap, tearing it out of its paper grocery bag.

Mostly Athens bureaucrats bashing antlers with Olympia bureaucrats, but the mail must go through.

She pointed the nose north to cross west, to the windward, of the field. With the stick between her knees and her feet steady on the rudder pedals, she gripped the eyebolt that protruded from the concrete-filled tin can in her right hand, and balanced the mailbag and streamer on her left. She whipped the weight downward in a seated slam dunk and tossed the mailbag and streamer across her body over the side.

The mailbag rig cleared the stabilizer; the weight pulled the rope to the mailbag taut, and the red streamer unfolded behind, fluttering down onto the former golf course by the airfield.

Ontario was screwed. All the fuel on the ground would have to be burned, and the tanks, pipes, and hoses scoured with boiling water and disinfectant, and then there would be a three-month quarantine to confirm that exposed fuel was no longer becoming infected. Their mail would have to wait for a train that had a decontamination car—perhaps twice a month, because there just weren’t enough steam locomotives.

Actually, I could give a shit about the nice folks in Ontario. I’m about up to my own ass in trouble.

Bambi had pushed hard to reach Ontario today—taken off from Pueblo as early as she could get the ground crew to forgive her for, and then flown all the way to Ogden, Utah, on the first hop; on the way she’d dropped mail to Rangely, Vernal, and Provo, but she’d elected not to land because that exposed the Stearman to the dangers of biotes and nanoswarm. She had planned to land only at Ontario, with Baker City as her only Plan B.

Oh shit. If Ontario’s infected, what about Baker City? Baker was even more exposed to the wind off the desert; from here to the coast there were dozens of gas stations whose abandoned tanks seeped foul-smelling goo, thousands of houses where vinyl siding had decayed into slime, and tens of thousands of abandoned cars and trucks sitting on their rotted tires, their fuel tanks reeking of vinegar, refrigerator mold, or spoiled milk. A single spore from any of those could bring ruin, as one probably had for Ontario.

Well, I can’t fix yesterday’s poor planning now. At eight thousand feet she leveled off and throttled up; the little plane shook with the effort of flying into the wind. Below her, the brown scrub and dirt of midsummer late afternoon sent up unpredictable thermals, and swirled with thin gold and gray dust; to her right, big piles of cumulonimbus roiled above the mountains. Late-summer afternoons out here were a nightmare for a tiny powered kite like the Stearman.

She rechecked instruments. Oil pressure, temp, tach, airspeed all fine, altimeter and compass as they should be. The little tank of lye solution that sprayed the alternator and spark coil, preventing nanoswarm from taking hold, was low.

The fuel gauge said Make Baker soon.