“Aren’t you calling it Manbrookstat now?” Jason asked.
“It’ll be New York ten generations after I’m dead. And the inhabitants will still be known for talking too fast, hustling too hard, and telling everyone else what to do in an accent that sounds like a duck using nasal floss.” The Commandant himself had a soft Maryland accent; he was younger than Jason, with movie-actor good looks, and dressed beautifully in what Jason thought of as Latin American Fascist Rococo.
He seemed immensely proud of the settlement surrounding the Upper Bay. But then ensuring food and shelter for everyone in Manbrookstat is bragging material, Jason reminded himself. And by all accounts it was the Commandant’s iron determination that had put everyone who could do it last spring to fishing; to digging up golf courses to plant potatoes; to going overland to the west to trade for living pigs, sheep, and goats and turning them loose in Central Park; and to building greenhouses and coldframes in every open space.
Manbrookstat was a composite of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Staten Island; the name was already unfair, because the settled area was really a sliver of Bayonne, extreme lower Manhattan, Brooklyn facing the bay, and the shore side of Staten Island.
“I know Pueblo had no idea you had anything like this here, and I’m sure Olympia didn’t either.”
The Commandant didn’t so much shrug as twitch a shoulder impatiently. “The TNG knows we exist because we trade loot south to them, but I doubt they know much about us. Right now, most ships come in from Argentina.”
“What do they trade?”
“They bring in canned beef, and you can’t imagine how much people here want that. In their spare time, our people dig out copper pipe, aluminum siding, and heavy-gauge wire from all those empty buildings, and mostly it goes for canned beef. The Argies cheat us but nobody cares. At Savannah or Charleston, they offload all the junk we sell them, because the factories around Castle Newberry are screaming for raw materials, and will pay for metal with corn whiskey and tobacco. Liquor and tobacco trade for coffee in Colombia, and the Argies go back rich as kings.”
“They’re canning beef in Kansas right now,” Jason pointed out.
“Find a way to get it to us. Long before the Dead Belt runs out of minable junk, we’ll be making stuff good enough to sell—a bunch of the artisans have already got some good-sized looms running, and we have a couple old chem professors, a sculptor, and two blacksmiths working on making iron and steel.”
The Commandant had been a senior at West Point; after the Chicago and Washington superbombs, he had led the cadets who chose to stay at the Academy through that terrible winter, with nearly half of them surviving. In early April they had come downstream to claim the best harbor in the world.
When Captain Rollings had introduced them, the Commandant and Jason had hit it off, and since Larry had some particular business with the TNG trading agent in town, as well as arranging passage, and Chris wanted to put together a long piece for the Post-Times, that left Jason to socialize with the Commandant, who seemed to be eager to show off his city.
“One reason you didn’t know we were here,” he said, “is that we’re going very, very slowly with radio—we have so many wires and pipes still out there, an EMP would still cause fires everywhere, which would burn inward from the abandoned part of the city and get us here. That’s why I limited your boss Larry to sending 150 words, and to one acknowledgment for one message back. Besides, even if the moon gun doesn’t take an interest in us, it’s better not to have any extra attention from the rival governments. We don’t want to become a prize for the Provis and the Tempers to fight over.” He gestured north toward the fire-gutted skyscrapers, then around them to the shantytown in what had been Battery Park. “If we’re lucky, by 2050, we’ll have grown back to Canal Street, maybe even to Houston. The last thing we want to do is get into a war between Georgia and Washington State, about anything, on either side. Right now, whether or not the quarrel between Olympia and Athens is America’s business, it’s just not Manbrookstat’s.”
Larry booked passage on an Argentine trader, the Martin Fierro, sailing the next morning. If there was anything suspicious about the quickness of the arrangement, or the early sailing time, Jason figured that the Commandant was entitled to his paranoia.
Martin Fierro was a rusty old bucket whose engineer had installed a restored coal-fired steam engine from a museum; to save coal, she traveled under sail whenever possible.
Dawn the next morning found them passing Miss Liberty, webbed with scars from the EMPs that had caused currents in her copper skin; some streaks had re-smelted in place, creating new-penny copper bands on her; some had blackened as the old corrosion oxidized. “Something between camo and a leopard print,” Chris said. “The white trash version of Miss Liberty—”
“You can shut up now,” Larry said, walking away.
Jason, sensing that it would be a great time to be invisible, went up near the bow to read Nostromo and watch for dolphins; the Commandant had said the harbor was full of them.
The sun was full up as they passed through the Narrows. The crew banked the fires and hoisted the sails, and Martin Fierro made a wide, slow turn, heading south.
Chris is irritating sometimes, Jason thought, but Larry’s usually easygoing. And this was the first chance he got to communicate with the RRC since Put-in-Bay. I wonder if I want to know what’s eating him.
Then he looked up to see dolphins playing in front of the ship, pulled out pen and paper, and added another couple paragraphs to his long letter to Beth. He’d mail it in Savannah, and he might get home before it did, but so what? The half dozen leaping, splashing dolphins were the kind of thing a man shares with his wife and his kid, and this was the only way to do it right now.
SEVENTEEN:
WHAT NONE COULD HEAR
3 DAYS LATER. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 2:30 PM EST. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2025.
Jeffrey Grayson was not a man to feel normal sneaking around. When he was out in public, he liked to be seen, and he seldom did anything he didn’t want people to see.
But this was important, and he had no other choice. His office was one door from Cameron Nguyen-Peters’s office, so he couldn’t very well have one of Phat’s guards reporting to him there. He couldn’t plausibly slip over to the guards’ break room for a conversation while visiting Phat in prison, because he couldn’t plausibly visit Phat: the two had openly loathed each other for more than a decade before Daybreak. Besides, Grayson saw no reason to provoke Phat into repeating that story that he’d always feared.
So Jeffrey Grayson had cultivated a habit of going for a run in mid-afternoon, occasionally mentioning that that was when solar-heated water for a shower was apt to be at its most available, and letting people figure that an older man with a hot young wife is motivated to stay in shape. On his off days, Porter Perkins, the guard, would sometimes be fishing off a bridge in Dudley Park, along Grayson’s usual route. Whether Perkins was at the bridge or not, Grayson always stopped to bend over, hands on his knees, and breathe hard.
Today, Perkins, without moving his eyes from the North Oconee below, said, “They talk sometimes while they play chess. Low voices and heads down so you can’t read their lips or hear them too good. But they forget that the table’s by the wall, and the wall is thin. So I’ve been hearing some back and forth, and it sounds like that Phat one might be catching a flight, late November.”