Daybreak Zero (26 page)

40 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 3:15 PM MST. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2025.

“At least it’s a nice day to watch them come in,” Heather remarked. The two steam trains each flew American flags from the locomotive and the caboose; between, there were two big steam locomotives, coal car, a sleeper for the VIPs, a passenger car outfitted as an office, and the “fort car,” a boxcar armored with steel plates bolted to its inner walls, loopholed for the guns of the guards. “But with fifty-eight working full-gauge locomotives on the continent, should two of them be hauling politicians? We really need coal. They’re pretty well certain this is going to be a cold, early winter.”

“Maybe we could burn politicians,” Leslie suggested.

“Too wet to burn well.”

“Let’s burn them anyway,” Leslie said, taking a step forward. She turned to the officer beside her and said, “May I borrow your field glasses?” Leslie gazed at the distant locomotives; for Heather, they were just two tiny three-car trains in the sea of sagebrush, crawling along the track that shone in the afternoon sun, trailing their big plumes of gray-blue smoke.

“What are you seeing, Leslie?”

“Oh, man. You’re going to want to burn them both, Heather. Remember how much time we put into making sure they’d fly the real American flag from their locomotives?”

“Yeah, you mean they’re not?”

“Oh, they are. That’s what I was trying to make out. It’s what they’re flying from their cabooses.”

“Damn. I better look for myself.”

Heather peered through the antique field glasses, thinking, oddly, that when these were made, they might have been tested on that locomotive—both were well over a hundred years old.

The lead train, from Athens, flew the fifty-star, thirteen-stripe flag from the locomotive, but from the caboose, it flew the same design with a blotch on the stripes—the Army eagle, superimposed on a cross. The train behind it, from Olympia, flew the correct American flag from its locomotive—but the nineteen-star, double circle flag waved from its caboose.

“You know, if you’d put one’s stripes with the other’s stars, it would all be fine,” Leslie said.

“Do you suppose they both decided to be offensive, independently, or that one of them started it?” Heather asked.

Positioning both the office-cars directly behind equally placed podiums took a long time. Leo began fussing, so Leslie held him and soothed him, since Heather needed a hand free to shake with. Peering at Heather over Leslie’s shoulder, he looked immensely weary and irritated. “Yeah, I know, kid,” Heather whispered. “I’m not thrilled with either of my old friends, either.”

But when Cameron Nguyen-Peters and Graham Weisbrod emerged from their trains, they appeared not to see each other’s offensive flags at all; rather, they shook hands cordially enough, introduced their grimacing, stone-faced staffs, and then both insisted on visiting with Leo and looking Heather over to tell her she was doing well. For a few minutes, she let herself remember that the Temper Natcon and the Provi President had both been pretty good guys, and even friends with each other.

I just hope they remember, because I think their staffs are here to make them forget.

Afterward, walking back, Leslie said, “I did a little mixing with their staffs. Learned some things. It was General Grayson’s wife, and her loony father the reverend, that broke out the Temper flag and had them put it on the caboose; I don’t know if Cam even knew they’d done it, it was just the last few miles. Allie Sok Banh was the one who decided to retaliate with the Provi flag. Everyone’s mad at their own people, but they all keep saying it’s their own affair and they’re not about to apologize to the other side.”

Leo, back in Heather’s papoose pack, belched and fussed; Heather ran a finger down his soft little cheek. “You were right, Leslie. We ought to be testing whether they’re really too wet to burn.”

TEN :

WITH COINS ON EITHER EYE

LATER THAT MORNING. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:30 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.

Heather had deliberately been the last to enter; letting the Provi and Temper delegations settle in first, with just her staff to guide them to their chairs and the coffee, might give them a chance to mix informally. No such thing had happened.

Well, thanks to paranoia and a good staff, Heather had plans out to Z and beyond; time for B. “Just to remind everyone,” she said, “this is the first session of the first day and the real purpose is to make sure your chairs are comfy and that we take some photographs of Graham and Cam smiling at each other. Anything beyond that is gravy.”
Hunh. No smiles. Allie is making a point of not looking at me, the generals are looking at each other like gunfighters waiting to draw, and Reverend Whilmire could be a mannequin if he had enough expression.
“But in the interests of saving time, and not creating barriers, let’s just see if we can agree on this: We will hold a national election on the first Tuesday in November of 2026, to put the United States entirely back in the hands of a regularly elected, fully Constitutional government. In January 2027, we’ll swear in the new government, no matter who or what it is, at some location that is not Olympia and not Athens, and both sides will turn over all authority to it.

“I’ll need to confer with staff,” Weisbrod said, and Cam added, “So will I.”

Not only no smiles. Anger, too, I think, from the staffs; and Graham and Cam looked—embarrassed. That’s it. Embarrassed.

20 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.

Leslie Antonowicz had asked, “Won’t they be careful about security in this setting?”

“Some will, some won’t. Cam will be tight as a drum. Both generals will be security-conscious. They’ve all spent their lives in national security and it’s engrained. Allison will be careful when she remembers to, but she’s an old public policy hack and expects to leak things. Graham is a professor, he blabs without thinking; Whilmire’s a preacher, ditto but more so. And the main thing is that we got them to come without staff of their own—except for Grayson’s little Barbie-for-Jesus—on this idea of James’s that if they both agreed to use the same independent research staff, they wouldn’t get into paralysis from only having their own talking points. Very useful bullshit.”

“Thank you,” James had said. “I try.”

Every so often, and she never told him so, James did something to make Leslie wish she was attracted to old, fussy, stodgy fat guys. By carefully stepping out each time that the Temper team started something confidential, and then having to be asked back in to run into the research room and dig up reports, she’d worn them out; they were tired of thinking about her, and now she was furniture when they talked in front of her.

Now General Grayson was on one of his rhetorical rolls. “The whole country could still slide back into the secular swamp, and we can’t afford that. This war could last centuries. We are a Christian nation by origin and long custom, and we need to fight as one.”

Jenny Grayson was the only person who appeared even to be listening, and her expression of adoration for her general was more fixed than would have been ideal.

Reverend Whilmire broke in. “The important thing is that the Constitution is the instrument of God’s will, not the other way around, and to save the true Constitution of this country, when we lost so many good people in the Rapture, God focused the Tribulation to remove the most anti-Constitutional elements—”

“Shall I inform everyone,” Cam had asked, staring at his staffers, “that it is the TNG’s position that the death, in a period of months, of more than three-quarters of our population, was the decision of a just and loving God?”

Whilmire winced. “That’s so unnecessarily harsh.”

“Reverend Peet preaches it every Sunday—”

“To Christians, who understand it in context,” Grayson said. “The point is that in this struggle the cross is as important a weapon as the rifle—”

As she laid out maps of the Lost Quarter on the side table, Leslie struggled for balance. The repetition bored her, so it was hard to listen, but the content infuriated her, so it was harder still to appear indifferent. She wished Cameron Nguyen-Peters would talk more, and less deferentially.

20 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11:30 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.

“So the assessments from our other sources”—so close physically to the delegations, Heather did not dare even to speak the code name
Red Dog
—“seem to be right on target. Grayson plays up to Whilmire to keep the Post Rapturalists in his corner, and Whilmire just recites Post Raptural talking points. Cam doesn’t really have a staff, just a double veto team.”

“The general and the reverend aren’t much of a team,” Leslie said. “Grayson keeps reminding them both about the military expeditions against the tribes he has led. He definitely wants the Post Raptural Church to understand that they are a useful auxiliary to the Army—not the other way round. Whilmire is the exact opposite. And Nguyen-Peters just sits there and asks them if they can agree on anything, when the obvious answer is, they can’t.”

Heather nodded. “How is it over on your side, James?”

“Like our sources said. Allie wants to just call the shots but Graham Weisbrod is old, tired, and passive-aggressive; he won’t do anything
she
doesn’t like but he won’t take active steps to do anything that might require him to do some work. Norm McIntyre acts less like a three-star general and more like a ten-term Congressman all the time; he thinks about the politics of everything, and all in terms of quid pro quo and deal-making. They’re not going to let Weisbrod move, and he doesn’t want to.”

“So neither of them is just going to overrule the handlers and do the deal,” Heather said. “So much for Plan B.”

James shrugged. “You had to try. If they could do what they did back in April, we’d have the business settled, the country moving ahead, and everything on track. But it was never likely. Back then they had one big overriding danger, of sliding into Civil War Two, to motivate them, and they had the power because they were essentially dictators. Now they’re both losing ground in their own regimes; Allison’s bureaucrats run the PCG, and Grayson’s church-and-army coalition is tightening its grip on the TNG. Graham and Cam are both answering to invisible elephants in the room, and the elephants want the
legitimacy
of being Constitutional much more than they want the reality of returning to the Constitution.” He shrugged and held up his hands. “I’m not judging, I don’t think. But it seems to me that part of the problem is that nobody in either staff was anybody of real national consequence before Daybreak, and before the new governments formed. They
like
being important. I understand this. I was an archival librarian in an obscure—”

A tap at the door. “Ms. O’Grainne, the TNG delegation has sent word they’re ready.”

10 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 11:55 AM MST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.

Heather listened while Graham read aloud, and then while Cam did. The brief written statements said only that the idea was interesting and the principle was good, and proposed more dialogue.
Not outright rejection. Could be worse.

“Well,” Graham said, “I know that this hasn’t been cleared with my people, but I propose that we break for lunch.”

Cam rarely smiled, but this was almost a grin. “I propose to accept that idea with a friendly modification: a long lunch.”

“Accepted,” Graham said.

The two of them stood, smiled, and shook hands. Heather popped a photo; she’d promised Cary at the
Post-Times
, in exchange for a no-leaks-printed policy, that she’d take a few candids every day.
Smiling and shaking hands like they like each other. Score! Try to erase that one from the history books.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CASTLE EARTHSTONE. 3:40 PM EST. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025.

Finally, after all Robert’s nagging, Karl had shown him how to work the encrypted radio setup, and now because the message wasn’t to Karl’s liking, it would probably be another two weeks before Robert could get any more information out of him. “It’s about time Aaron sent something useful!” the old fat man shouted. “And now it’s still nothing useful, just that his contact is dodging him! He had to get help from Darcage just to get his contact to talk to him! And just look at what he’s telling us! We should have known about this weeks ago; that fat O’Grainne bitch must’ve sent the mission out the day after she heard about Steve Ecco. Why the hell wasn’t Aaron on the job?”

Robert shrugged. “Making a guess, Karl, Yang might’ve been freaked out that Ecco got killed, and if a guy freaks and won’t talk to him, there’s not much Aaron can do.”

“So just tell me what the fuck we’re going to do now?”

“One, let this Roger Jackson kid through; Yang’s still useful and we have to protect him, and you might not’ve noticed, Karl, but Aaron doped out the two-contact decoy system they’re using, there, and basically we can point the finger at either this James guy or this Leslie bitch. All we know about him is he’s an older guy; he might be smart or sneaky or something, so I say, throw the shit on the one with the tits, there’s a better chance she won’t be able to handle it.

“Then we need to trap that deep-secret operation here at Castle Earthstone, where it can look like an unlucky accident. Do it right, and at the end of the day the Pueblo bitch’ll’ve lost six agents and arrested the wrong one from her staff.

“Besides, it’s time to get rid of Bloomington; we were only using it to relay to agents in Kentucky and those have all been rolled up, and the techie people at Bloomington are all too close to the border and know too much. If you say go, soldiers can leave at dawn—”

“Go.” Karl beamed at him. “That was easy. Robert, you are probably the smartest decision I ever made.”

“Love you too, boss. Let me start things rolling; I’ll be back later for a drink and some hanging out.”

Once Robert had learned that Karl was afraid of being alone, he had lost his fear of him.
I am going to run this place so much better than you.
Robert caught a whiff of broiling deer liver, and contemplated which bitch he’d bed that night.
From assistant lineman to about-to-be-lord in ten months. How could anybody not
love
Daybreak?