“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 EMP 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.