ABOUT THE SAME TIME. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 9:13 PM MST. WEDNESDAY, JULY 16, 2025.
“The EMP hit right at
noon today,” Arnie said. “So, yes, it could have been just a
coincidence—maybe forty-five different tribes, everywhere from the
Ouachitas to Big Bend and the Sangre de Cristos to Texarkana,
all started moving at once, because
they all happened to have working
radios and we pissed them off, and then the moon gun happened to wait a long time to fire, so the moon
gun just happened to be a perfect
distraction by pure chance at the
exact moment when all the tribes
just happened to wander into Mota
Elliptica simultaneously.”
“Why are you throwing
all the sarcasm at me, Arnie?” Heather said. “I just asked if it
could be a coincidence.” She poured him a shot of whiskey and
pushed it over to him.
They sat in her
office above her living quarters, in the old Pueblo Courthouse.
He’d only come in with the rest of the survivors from Mota
Elliptica that afternoon. She said, “Streen gave me his action
report; no matter how much he blames himself, no one could have kept the tribals from wrecking
it.”
“It was bad,” Arnie
said, taking the whiskey in one quick gulp.
“Chris tells me the
Post-Times will call it the Battle of
Mota Elliptica. He says that way maybe people will get that we’re
at war. I don’t want a panic—”
“But it might be time
for one,” Arnie said. “Uh, look. I’m not at my best explaining
stuff right now. But I’ve gotta make you see it, Heather, really,
we’re sunk if you don’t. How many times have I been wrong about
anything this big?”
“Arnie, I understand
it was rough; Colonel Streen is shaken up and I wouldn’t have
thought that was possible.”
Arnie winced.
Rough. Bad. And she thinks Streen is
just shaken up? She can’t have any idea what
it was like. . . . Christ, why am I trying?
As dawn came up on
the morning after the attack, Streen’s forces had relieved the
three other isolated buildings still holding out, but at the other
four working stations, a few bodies lay near the doorways, plumed
with arrows and lances, and the rest were burned and smothered
inside, curled against walls with hands over their faces. The four
radio techs inside the control bunker had apparently been forced
back into the flames at spearpoint.
Besides Trish,
twenty-two other engineers and technicians were confirmed dead,
though a couple might yet find their way in, out of seven missing.
Streen’s final count on his military forces was sixty-four
dead—thirty-eight of his own TNG infantry, eleven of the
President’s Own Rangers, and thirteen of the Texans (eleven of
those, along with one of the Rangers, in a single, too-clever
ambush). They were missing three infantrymen, a Ranger, and a
TexIC; an actual majority of the survivors were
wounded.
“Try to tell me one
more time,” Heather said. “Slowly, don’t yell, don’t treat me like
an idiot.”
“Sorry,” Arnie
said.
“Quentin told me he
thought the scientist that was killed next to you was, uh,
important to you.” She poured him another shot, his fourth since
they’d begun the informal debriefing. “Here,” she said, patting her
immense belly. “Drink for those who can’t.”
Arnie took it in one
gulp, again, and said, “Yeah. I’m crying. I didn’t even notice I
was. But I’m crying.”
“Well, it’s about
time.”
Arnie looked down,
wiping his face and keening. She let him cry, until finally, wiping
his face, he said, “Trish Eliot was great . . . my number two on
the job, my best friend there, maybe she’d’ve been more if there’d
been time.” And the only person brave enough
for me to tell her the whole truth, and to believe me.
“Yeah, she was killed right beside me, and that was pretty awful.”
Pretty awful is all the more description I can
think of?
Heather waited for
him find his voice again. Usually you could count on Heather to
listen.
After a while, she
said, “Arnie, there’s more evidence than you know about. Captain
Highbotham’s observatory at Christiansted was attacked this
morning—tribals came ashore in small boats from a big sailing
yacht, and Highbotham and a party rowed out to the yacht and
captured it while the local militia beat the raiders on the beach.
Practically a pirate battle, but she won. And yes, it does look
like the moon gun and the tribes are either talking to each other,
or talking to some common superior. For one thing, we think they
might have launched another EMP bomb while Christiansted was tied
up in the battle, and Big Island, Cooke Castle, and Oaxaca were all
under cloud cover. USS Bush, in the
Indian Ocean, thinks they detected a flash, but it was daylight and
low on the horizon. I guess we’ll know in three days. So . . . all
right, Arnie, the moon gun isn’t just a leftover robot, because
there’s way too much strategy happening and it understands way too
much. And it’s not being run by some human overlord somewhere,
because like you say, the communications pattern doesn’t fit. All
right.”
Trish believed me because she was my friend. Heather’s my
friend too. I just have to find a way to make it real clear.
“So look, here’s the thing, put it all together, boss, use that cop
brain. How old is Daybreak and how completely integrated? The moon
gun and the tribes work together. Encrypted radio all over the Lost
Quarter. They’re plugged in to each other and they always intended
to be that way, and that took preparation way in advance. Well,
how far in advance? Daybreak themes
were there in coustajam music back when that was niche-stuff on
YouTube. And if we’re right about how the moon gun got there, it
must’ve been designed all the way back in the days of Google-One,
Facebook, and Twitter. I can’t prove
more than ten years, but I’m gut-certain Daybreak started before
the turn of the century.”
“Why do we
care how old it is? Isn’t this just
Professor Yang getting caught up in a research
project?”
“No,” Arnie said.
“The whole world keeps pushing me to find the magic bullet, but
until we understand how it got here, and how big and complex and
sophisticated it is, we don’t even know if there can be any kind of
bullet, magic or otherwise. I’m trying to figure out if it’s a
tornado, a giant shark, a serial killer, or a forest fire, and
you’re all insisting I tell you what caliber bullet to
use.”
“You’re becoming
angry again,” she said, softly. “And before Daybreak, you were
always ‘don’t ask me what to do, let me just study.’ ”
“And if I’d been able
to study then, we might know what to do today.” His own voice
sounded pathetic to him, now. “People want an answer, and they want
me to guarantee it’s true. They don’t want the answer that’s
true.”
“Yeah. All right. You
had me with your point that I wish we’d let you research it back
then. Tell me the rest of your idea.” She leaned forward, hands
resting on her knees, listening intently or resting her back or
both.
Arnie nodded. “Look
how fast the tribes happened. They weren’t even in our
maybe-trouble file back in March; first we heard of them was right
after the war scare and Open Signals Day, at the end of April, when
Larry Mensche came in with that report, and then all of a sudden
Springfield, Steubenville, Augusta, and Kettle Valley were all
trashed between May 10th and May 12th. Maybe a tenth, maybe more,
of the surviving population is in tribes, you see? Daybreak had the
moon gun ready to go, physically, and it had the tribes ready to
go, as a cultural idea with organizers and bards and
everything.”
“Bards?”
“Something I got out
of interrogations. When Daybreak had Jason, for at least three
years before 10-28-24, he was fantasizing intensely about being a
wandering poet for tribal people and wandering between Castles—and
none of that existed then, but in less than half a year, it all
did. You see? Daybreak prepared him for a world that Daybreak had
designed.”
Heather tented her
hands and leaned back. “Do we have to decide anything
tonight?”
“No, but soon. Look,
if I’m right, Daybreak is so far ahead of us—”
“All right, Arn,
you’ve given me the reality.” She was nodding, but she looked tired
and sick. “Let me give you the politics, and then let’s see if we
can drag the reality and the politics anywhere near each other, and
find a way to accommodate them both. I realize it’s true, but
you’re telling me the worst possible news, because if Daybreak is
really everywhere, if we’re falling right into its plan, and we
don’t even know what that plan is, if we have to doubt every move
we make . . . oh, man, Arn. Not an easy sell either to Graham or to
Cam.”
“But if I’m right,
and this is true, then we’ve got to study this thing, understand
what it’s capable of—”
Heather sighed.
“Politically, Arnie, I need a program, some definite number of
steps that will definitely defeat Daybreak, so I can get the
resources for the study you need to do.”
“But you need the
study to know what to do, to make sure we’re not falling right into
Daybreak’s plan!”
“I know, I know, I
know.” She waved her hand at him in the invisible yo-yo gesture
that meant Calm down and shut up. “Arn,
we’ve got to find a way for you to investigate this, I agree. But
right now as far as they’re concerned, I’m the dumb bitch that
wrecked one of our last big surviving generating stations to prove
that the other side didn’t like us, and you’re my pet
head-in-the-clouds Doctor Doofus. Olympia and Athens are looking
for an excuse to cut us off and start back down the warpath with
each other.”
“Do you believe me?”
“I believe I can’t
dismiss you. So find me something somewhere. A few good pieces of
evidence that we haven’t seen before. A real clear analogy. One
good completely counterintuitive thing to try that works. Whatever.
Just remember, Arn, the people in Athens and Olympia are much
dumber and less patient than I am. It has to be so simple that even
an old cop like me can explain it to frightened, imagination-free
bureaucrats like them. I know it’s probably impossible but you’ll
have to do it anyway. And soon—because if you’re right, we might
already be too late. Want another shot before I throw you out and
get my motherly sleep?”
“I want ten of them,
but I better not.” He rose, wiped his face, and said, “Trish was
the best, Heather. You don’t know what you lost.”
“None of us ever
do.”
He followed her gaze
to Lenny’s picture; she looked back at him soon enough to see the
moment when he realized she was looking at the father of her child,
the husband she’d lost in the first month of the Daybreak crisis,
and he said, softly, “Sorry. I guess we’re all pretty
clueless.”
“It makes us human,
and if you’re right, that’s what this is all about—staying human.
The world will never be able to add up how much we all lost, will
it?” She looked at him steadily. “But I am sorry you never had any
time together, and that in this new world, we never even have the
simple time to grieve.”
He nodded his thanks
for her sympathy, not trusting himself to speak, because he could
hear the rest of the message as clearly as if she’d said it aloud:
But we all know there’s nothing anyone can
do.