Authors: John Barnes
DURING THE SAME DAY. CASTLE CASTRO (SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA). 10 AM PST. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2025.
The waste of it all seemed obscene to Bambi; they had used precious electricity in one of the few places that had it reliably to run an even more precious freezer, just to keep her father’s body in condition for this memorial. Then Bambi and Quattro had taken one of the few precious airplanes the United States had to fly here for this memorial, in part so that she could claim her father’s inheritance and declare herself Freeholder of Castle Castro, Earl of San Diego, and Leader of the League of South Coast Castles.
And Daddy was right, damn him, there is now every likelihood that Quattro and I will be having the future Duke of California. Or Duchess. Have to tell Quattro that there’s not going to be any stupid rules about boys first in
my
absolute monarchy.
More waste as she threw the big feast to feed all of Daddy’s vassals and their households (at least there weren’t quite so many of those, since everyone left big forces back at their Castles, with so much recent tribal activity). Even more in the salutes and flourishes, speeches and pomp, as a few thousand people didn’t do any useful work for a couple of days.
Daddy, if you had to set up your own little world to run, why couldn’t you have been a Stalinist? We’ d’ve been done in ten minutes and everybody’d be happy with their black bread and potato soup.
Then the long meetings with the vassals, being applauded for changing their conditions of fealty to the same generous ones that Quattro used for the North Coast Castles. Then the endless meetings with stewards in which she told them to keep things running well and she’d be back as often as she could, and that she was sure that anyone who had her father’s confidence would do a fine job.
And have the patience of a saint, and be somewhere near perfect, because you were pretty damned hard on help that wasn’t, eh, Daddy? But at least I’m safe assuming these people know their jobs and will do them.
And after that, the long meeting with Carlucci and Bolton in which her old, trusted friends apologized over and over for not preventing what no one could have foreseen, and discussed their efforts to find the holes in Castle Castro’s security and the confederates in her father’s murder.
Any other time it would be so soothing to just talk cop talk with these guys; now I have to put all this energy into assuring them I trust them to do the right thing and don’t blame them for what happened, and make myself pay attention because later on I’ll want to remember all this. And not keep thinking
Daddy
when they say
the victim
. I wonder how long there is to go?
It was past midnight when Bambi Castro could finally curl up next to her husband, put her face on his chest, and just let herself cry because Daddy was dead, and she was going to miss him forever, and she hadn’t been ready to say good-bye. It was much later than that when she finally fell asleep.
2 DAYS LATER. MANBROOKSTAT HEADQUARTERS (IN THE FORMER BATTERY GARDENS, NEW YORK CITY). 12:20 PM EST. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2025.
“If there’d been any natives here to bargain with,” the Commandant was saying, “I probably could have gotten it for twenty-four dollars, though not in beads. Canned hams, that would’ve been a deal in a second. But almost everyone was dead by the time we got here; we have six thousand people now, but only maybe four hundred were from Brooklyn before Daybreak, five hundred from Staten Island, and less than fifty from Manhattan. And the ones we have didn’t ride it out here in the city. Most of them sheltered over on Long Island or New Jersey someplace, but they were just such compulsive New Yorkers that they came back as soon as the city stopped burning and the Hudson stopped running radioactive. I’m real glad to have them, though—they had to be tough and clever to do what they did, and what would New York be without New Yorkers?”
“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.”
“Where to?”
“The place where the other one has a long-distance affair going. And it sounds like there’s a price; if he rides now, he’s gotta run later.”
Grayson stood, braced his hands on the stone railing, and pushed down into a hamstring stretch he didn’t need any more than he needed breathing time. Face toward the stones, he asked, “So any idea what the one that isn’t Phat is getting out of all this?”
“Probably he just thinks it’s a Nguyen-win situation,” Perkins said.
Grayson never timed himself, but he suspected that the anger pushing him through the remaining hills probably fueled a personal best. There had not been enough sun that morning, either, so the shower was first lukewarm, then suddenly cold, excusing his furious scream.
THE NEXT DAY. ATHENS, TNG DISTRICT. 10:45 AM EST. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2025.
Cam and Grayson always forced themselves to finish their Thursday morning meeting by looking through the graphs in the last folder, “ongoing statistics.” The intel clerks added new data points as they came in and drew connecting lines on the master graphs; the analysts traced them, worked out a fitted curve with adding machines and slide rules, and drew the curve on their tracings. Cam and Grayson turned to the graphs for a sobering dose of reality.
This week, only three bad things were decreasing: uncontrolled wide-area fires, dam bursts, and bridge collapses. Cam grimaced. “Even that’s not good news—we’re just running out of unburned urban areas, standing dams, and functioning bridges.”
“I’m afraid so. The only upward trend in a good category is that the food-supply-to-demand ratio is trending up—because dead people don’t eat.” General Grayson tapped the last graph. “
That’s
the hard one to face.”
The graph showed the size, frequency, and damage from tribal raids; the size of the military response; and the estimated damage to the tribes. For the eighth week in a row, the tribes had raided more, with bigger forces, and done more damage. Responding armed forces were bigger but winning less. “If the RRC has the tribes figured out, their goal is a high death toll on both sides—and how do you beat that? By the time our troops get there, the tribals have already gotten most of what they want, and nothing in the world can deter them, if Pueblo is right.”
Grayson forced himself to say, “There’s a Pueblo issue we should consider.”
“Yes?”
“It’s my belief . . . sir. Um. I have ample evidence that you are planning to assist General Phat in escaping to Pueblo, and you’re working with the top leadership at the RRC to do that.”
Cam had no expression. “Obviously there would be no point in my lying to you about it now. Would you like to know why I am doing it?”
Grayson’s lips compressed and he looked down. “I
do
know why you’re doing it. I
understand
that you are trying to get the United States back together, Cameron, one nation indivisible, all of that. I understand that I’m not the ideal candidate.”
“That was a pretty good rally when you came into Pueblo, and not a bad one when you left, the last time.”
Grayson shrugged uncomfortably. “I’m sure you know the welcome rally at the airport was orchestrated by the Post Raptural Church. They even cheered for Reverend Whilmire, and he’s
painfully
dull.”
“I suppose a son-in-law would know. But the send-off at the train station was real enough.”
“Oh, it was real. Just most of them were there to cheer for you and Graham Weisbrod, for promising to bring their country back. They were cheering for me too, but mainly because I wasn’t being in the way.” He gripped his own elbows, like a small boy stubbornly insisting on his feelings when the whole adult world is telling him he feels something else. “I understand why Phat is better for your purposes than I am. You need a president who isn’t a regional candidate, someone who gets votes all over. And . . . well, it’s childish, but I feel like you promised me, and on that basis I helped you . . .” After a moment, he said, “I really do feel screwed.”
Cameron said, “I probably did screw you—for the good of the country, but I’m sure that doesn’t make it feel better. Technically I never promised you anything, but of course I let you feel that you had a deal, and that wasn’t fair or honest. So you may not trust me for this, but I do have an offer I hope you’ll take, all the cards on the table this time.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“You’re already going to command the first real offensive against the tribals in the spring. Graham Weisbrod and I have discussed the list of options you gave him. Your biggest ‘Cadillac plan’ is doable, but rather than a punitive expedition to trash Castle Earthstone and a march out to the south, ripping up the tribes as you go, what if you just roll right on in that area, reconquering and occupying it?”
“How big an area? And you mean you’ll give me everything in the high-end plan?”
“I would like you to smash the tribes so hard that by autumn our new frontier with them is at the Miami—or at the Scioto, if you get enough breaks. For the summer of the election year, you’d be in the news constantly, and if you succeed, you’ll reduce the Lost Quarter tribes from urgent menace to persistent nuisance.”
“Well.” Grayson was taken aback, startled by the scale of the offer. “You’re offering me the best command a man running for president could have. Do we even have the resources to do all that in one fighting season?”
“If you think we can do it, and you need more than was in your original plan to march from the Tippecanoe to the Ohio, I’ll get you the men and guns and money, from our forces, from twisting Graham Weisbrod’s arm, from the state armies and the Castles if we have to. Put all your planning staff on the problem. Figure out whether it’s doable by October 1st, 2026. Plan on a short, wet fighting season, because all the soot in the air is predicted to make next winter even colder, damper, and earlier than this coming one. Remember spring will be late too. If it can’t be done in one fighting season, take two—but one is better.”
“And you’re willing to take the chance I might be elected president? You know if I am, your career here is over.”
“Ending my career is my
job
. We’ve already had a Natcon for about ten times as long as we ever should. Yes, I’m giving you a big, important chance—if you smash the tribes, you are going to be a hero in Superior and Wabash. For that matter
all
the Provi states have had major tribal raids.” Cameron Nguyen-Peters moved his hands across the table, palms down, as if laying out cards. “Don’t misunderstand me, I’ll personally vote for Phat—I’d like a secular, moderate conservative with good national security credentials. But a conservative Christian is acceptable too, and so for that matter would be a foaming liberal, just as long as our first restoration president will follow the Constitution—all of it—
and
get substantial support from every region. We can’t afford anyone who creates even the appearance of shutting out a side or a region.”
“So you’re offering me a great chance to win the presidency, but you want me to win it across the whole country, and you are not offering me an in-the-bag deal.”
“That’s right, General. But I was never offering an in-the-bag deal anyway—it wasn’t mine to offer. I am sorry that it sounded like I was, and I admit I should have made sure you understood that I can position you but you have to win the election yourself.”
“Why do you care, if you’re voting for Phat?”
“He might not win. General Grayson, I know you, I’ve seen you, I know your abilities, if you’re the president the country can survive and thrive. I’m worried about who or what else might be a candidate with the backing of the churches. I’d rather you had that Christian-right slot, because I can live with you winning—but not with most of the other likely Christian-right candidates.”
“What do you get out of offering me this big chance, other than buying me off again?”
Cam shrugged. “I didn’t think I bought you before; you’re not for sale. Look, the military and political advantage is that retaking those areas would give the Temper Army a short, fast overland connection to the Provi bases and fleets on Lake Erie. That way, the next year, in the spring of 2027, the new president will be poised to take back the Lost Quarter. You know how serious I am about reuniting the country.”
“But you think Phat’s a better candidate than I am.”
“To unify the country, sure. I want him to do that, and you to win the war. As for who would be a better president, let the voters figure it out. They may well come your way if you put an end to the tribal problem. Can you see yourself in that role?”
“I can, of course. You know me well enough.” Grayson stood. “It’s a pretty handsome offer—if I can trust you after the last time. I’m going to have to go home, talk to Jenny, maybe pray; I’ll let you know whether I’m in or out. If I’m out—”
“You’ll move fast, and probably do something big. It’s the way you are, and that’s why I’m offering you this campaign command if you want it.” Cameron stuck his hand out and Grayson shook it, more in respect than in contract. Cam’s faint smile twitched momentarily into being. “General, you will not be the only man praying tonight.”