by John Barnes
“A politically secure airfield. In St. Louis, there was fighting along the neighborhood boundaries and I had to negotiate a truce from Denver, via radio. Now that your old buddy Nguyen-Peters has been on KP-1 telling people not to harbor us, and that the President is a lunatic, and so on, I’m guessing the areas north and west of Lambert Field will line up with Cam’s government, and we won’t get a ceasefire again. On the other hand, I think we’ve got friends at Belleville—”
“We do,” Arnie said. He was hunched over the tube radio, 1950s vintage and military, but some souvenir company had rebuilt it into an oak box stamped with stars and bronze flags. “They’ve cleared a runway and they can get us clean fuel within a day from our friends in St. Louis.” He fiddled for a moment, and said, “I’m getting . . . shit.” He spoke into the microphone. “Yankee One, this is the DC-3 you are hailing. If necessary we will comply with your order to land. Are you aware of who is aboard here and why?” Covering the mic with his hand, Arnie said, “It’s an F-35, off one of the carriers. He’s gotta be working at the outer limits of his range, but he’s definitely got us; if he fires, we’re dead.”
“Let me see what I can do.” General McIntyre came forward and took the headset. “This is General Norman McIntyre, temporary commander of the armed forces, appointed by President Graham Weisbrod. If you are acting on orders originating with the NCCC, please be advised that he has been removed from his position as of this morning.”
He listened intently for a moment, then interrupted. “Patch me through to your CO if you can. Better yet, if his CO is Shorty Phat—that would be General Phat to you, Lieutenant—put me through to him. Just put me as far up the chain of command as you can—you’ve caught us, you did your duty, we’ll play ball, but we need to talk to your higher-ups.” A bare three seconds later he asked, “Have you communicated my request to your—”
THE SAME TIME. 95 MILES ABOVE PITTSBURGH. PENNSYLVANIA. 9:24 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.
The lumpy bundle of fused rock was roughly cylindrical, about five feet in diameter and ten feet long. It had been falling from the moon toward the bright radio source for three days now, correcting as it went with little jets of steam.
The air so high above the ground is thin, almost a vacuum, but the rock was moving at 25,000 miles per hour, seven miles per second. High spots on its surface were beginning to glow cherry red, and a streak of heated, glowing air was forming behind it, more than enough to activate its temperature and pressure sensors. The timer began its countdown.
One second later, the surface went from glowing red to glowing white, and the layer of water inside began to boil; the rock was 88 miles high.
Two seconds. If the rock had had an eye or camera to see, most of one side of the Earth would still spread out before it. An envelope of white-hot air enclosed it; at night it would have been brighter than a full moon. 83 miles high.
Three seconds. Observers on the Plains and in the Rockies, looking from the west toward the east, saw it as a white streak in the sky. The ice inside liquefied. 79 miles high.
Four seconds. The internal temperature and pressure sensors signaled charges in the pins holding the hollow rock together; the pins ruptured, and the back of the rock blew upward on a plume of steam, to fall wherever it happened to. The rock, shaped like an inverted drinking glass, righted itself with its broad curved bottom pointed down and its Shriner’s-hat top surrounded and held in place by the slipstream.
The device, about as big as a large armchair, had been made on the moon, by the painstaking efforts of many thousands of robots, themselves also made on the moon. Its job was to reach this point, 75 miles above the Earth, directly over the loudest radio source the scanner on the moon had detected—KP-1. It squatted there on its rock perch like a trapdoor spider waiting for prey.
Three more seconds elapsed. At 65 miles above the Earth’s surface, the device—an entirely helium-3 fusion device—detonated. Its explosive power, about one megaton, so far from anything, caused an irrelevant stirring and heating of empty air.
What mattered was not the blast. From about thirty to about sixty miles up, varying by latitude and season, the Earth’s atmosphere is electrically charged—it is called the ionosphere because a charged atom is an ion. Normally little electric current flows there, despite the gigantic potentials. But if something creates enough free electrons in that part of the atmosphere to carry current, mighty arcs—effectively lightning strokes many miles across and thousands of miles long—abruptly appear in the ionosphere, and those gigantic currents cause the EMP below.
The helium-3 pure fusion warhead was the best EMP bomb ever devised. First the soft gamma, a sizable part of its energy release, irradiated the ionosphere within a thousand-mile radius, knocking electrons off the unimaginably many, many atoms in a thousand miles of even very thin air. Less than a microsecond behind, the relativistic protons released by the explosion, with their own charge and enormous velocity, raced through, ripping electrons from the atoms as they passed, hitting nuclei so hard that they left their electrons behind like the dishes on a swiftly snatched tablecloth, and in general breaking everything in their path; one proton, at such high speeds, had to collide violently with more than 30,000 atoms to lose its force.
In a microsecond, a disk of the ionosphere, two thousand miles across and more than thirty miles thick, became as conductive as the inside of a fluorescent tube. Vast currents, with far more energy than the bomb that had freed them, surged back and forth in the atmosphere.
And as everyone learns in high-school physics, a changing electric field induces a changing magnetic field, and vice versa; that is how radio propagates in a vacuum, electric field change inducing magnetic field change that induces another electric field change and so forth, world without end, until there is an antenna somewhere to drain off the moving energy.
The great current surge high overhead induced an extraordinarily strong and rapidly changing magnetic field at the earth’s surface, which induced a current in every conductor. The effect was strongest around Pittsburgh. Still-standing power lines and barbed-wire fences flashed into vapor; highway guardrails and aluminum rain gutters electrocuted birds sitting on them; coathangers in abandoned closets crackled and sparked violently, causing fires that no one came to extinguish. Currents formed in the wiring of battery lanterns, leaped the OFF switch, burned out the filament of the bulb, and exploded the batteries; the electric generators at Westinghouse, rotating at terrifying speed, abruptly melted and flung themselves as molten metal around their housings.
And at KP-1, a mighty current roared down the just-rebuilt antenna, destroying all the station’s equipment and killing a dozen scientists and engineers instantly; no one heard this over the radio, for anyone listening on a crystal set close by was electrocuted, and those farther away were suddenly, desperately trying to put out the flames.
The surge weakened with distance, but still, at St. Louis, the Gateway Arch rattled and sparked with artificial thunder; in New York Harbor, the skeleton of Miss Liberty sizzled with blue glows; everywhere, instantly, far too much electricity.
Dying off with distance, the surging, whirling, swift-changing electromagnetic fields were still strong enough to create shocks and sparks around every conductor they crossed in Kansas City, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Raleigh.
THE SAME TIME. OVER SOUTHERN ILLINOIS A FEW MILES FROM PALE BLUFF. 8:22 A.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.
Inside the oak cabinet something went off like a flashbulb; a moment later, Heather realized that the plane had stopped shaking. Larsen slapped at the panel of dials and tried throwing switches.
“Come in, Yankee One,” McIntyre was saying.
Arnie had already leaned across him, turned the casing around, and was prying off the back. “No good, sir,” Arnie said. “All these tubes are burned black and that smoke smell is roasted insulation.”
Quattro stopped flipping toggles. “All our electric stuff is fried. I’ll have to glide us down onto t
he highway. At least it’s empty. Was that some kind of secret weapon?”
McIntyre said, “That F-35 might’ve popped us with an e-bomb, one of those missiles that sets off a baby EMP.”
“I doubt it,” Quattro said, pointing ahead of them to the F-35 spiraling downward, leaving a thin trail of smoke behind itself. “Those are fly-by-wire with no hydraulic or mechanical backups for the electronic controls, so when it takes an EMP hit, it’s done. And I doubt he used any weapon that would get him too.”
There was a flash of flame and a burst of smoke from the Navy jet and a dot shot away from it, then blossomed into a parachute. The dead F-35 plummeted onward.
“He must’ve been angling generally down at us when his controls locked, and it sent him into that tailspin,” Larsen said. “The Daybreakers might have had a point about relying too much on too-high tech; this old thing is controlled by hydraulics that are not as complicated as the brakes on a modern car, and it’s built to glide pretty well because the original engines it was built for were kind of pathetic. So I think I can glide us down on I-64 and just hope we don’t run into an abandoned car. Landing in about one minute, and I suggest you all get belted in and tied down right now.”
Already, the land was coming up to meet them, and everyone was strapping in; McIntyre was last, muttering about always having hated to fly anyway.
At the last moment, Larsen had to pull the stick back to pass over a deer on the road, so the DC-3 came in higher and harder than intended, but though they were soft, the linen and oil tires held, and though the tail rose alarmingly, the nose didn’t touch, the landing gear didn’t buckle, and when the tail wheel slammed back down, the plane shuddered but didn’t bend. They were shaken through almost eighty degrees, and Heather vomited as the old airliner came to a rest, but that was the worst of it. Quattro was leaping out the door with a fire extinguisher, and Bambi followed him with another, shouting for everyone to get off the plane now. After they had stood for a couple of minutes, a hundred yards back, watching Quattro and Bambi circle the DC-3, nothing had happened. Bambi and Quattro set their extinguishers down and came over to explain.
“Mostly empty tanks can slosh,” Quattro said, “especially an older design like that, and if you shake the plane hard enough, some fuel can slop through the pressure reliefs. Between two hot engines, the heaters for the sterilizing spray, and god knows how many little sparks the EMP might have caused, I didn’t want to take any chances; something weird might happen.”
Heather looked over the Checker Cab of the Air and the little crowd of Army Rangers, ex-Feds, current geeks, one general, and one president, and then back to the slightly mad ex-millionaire—and freeholder of Castle Larsen—in his bulky farmer coveralls and vintage leather flying helmet. “That’s a reasonable concern,” Heather said. “It is always possible that something weird might happen.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER . ATHENS. TEMPORARY NATIONAL GOVERNMENT (TNG) DISTRICT. (FORMERLY AT HENS. GEORGIA. ) 9:40 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.
“So that’s as much as we can get from the instruments,” the physicist was saying. “And the Navy’s data were invaluable. I’m afraid we lost at least six aircraft, including the—uh—”
“The one chasing Weisbrod’s plane,” Nguyen-Peters said. “What’s your estimate on the extent of the damage?”
“So far nobody has called in at all for three hundred miles around Pittsburgh, but it’s awfully soon. I’m sure they’re all fighting fires, and probably any equipment they wrapped up and put by arced over and died, so even if they have the time they probably don’t have the radio. Outside that radius, it gets better, until in the outermost ring it’s just small fires in the ruins and current surges burning out stuff the nanoswarm would have eaten eventually anyway.”
Cam smiled with grim satisfaction. “Well, I’m glad Arnie Yang and Graham Weisbrod are alive and in good shape, because the next time I see either of them, I so get to say I told you so. Look what we have. A direct hit with an EMP right above Pittsburgh, knocking out KP-1, the Westinghouse and PPG labs, and all that stuff at Pitt and CMU. Just about the worst blow we could have taken, obviously aimed, perfectly timed to disrupt our attempt to recapture Weisbrod, leaving us more disorganized. That meets Arnie’s criteria if anything does. No question anymore—it’s a war, because we have an enemy.”
“I’m glad we have that settled, sir,” General Phat said. “May I have a moment of your time? General Grayson will come with us if you don’t mind.”
In the privacy of the office, Cameron said, “Something is serious.”
Phat handed him a short, signed, typewritten note. “My resignation. I had very grave doubts about this whole situation from the beginning. We now have a legitimate President of the United States who will take the oath anytime now, if he hasn’t taken it already. I don’t see any way I can go any further with you, so here’s my resignation, and good luck to you and General Grayson.”
Cam blinked at the small, harsh-featured man in front of him, one of that generation of military heroes that had come out of the Iran campaigns. He and Grayson both towered over Phat, and yet Cam felt small to the pit of his soul. This is where a charismatic guy like Pendano would know just what to say, to win him back. All Cameron could think of was, “Well, but . . . I turned out to be right. I think the evidence is overwhelming that we’re under attack.”
“That’s true, sir. But the evidence is also overwhelming that under the Constitution, we have a president, to whom I owe my loyalty. And I didn’t take an oath to back whoever had the right analysis. I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Were you ever in the service, or an officer?”
“No.”
“Then you wouldn’t get it. But then Grayson doesn’t either, do you?”
“You can stop harassing me now that you’re not my superior officer.”
“I also have that privilege as your prisoner. Do you want to call an MP or shall I go find one?”
ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER . SOUTHEAST OF PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 12:15 P.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.
“Sir,” Rogers said, lowering his binoculars, “after due inspection and observation, I believe the person approaching us is Davy Crockett.”
McIntyre gave him a sour glare. “You’re enjoying the absence of a proper chain of command more than you should, Rogers. Let me have a look.”
To the naked eye, the figure that had just come over a low rise in the road was no more than a dot. McIntyre looked through the binoculars. “Well, that looks like a black-powder rifle, that’s definitely a coonskin cap, and there’s fringe on his jacket. But he’s wearing leather dress shoes, and I don’t think Davy Crockett’s jacket had a zipper, either. Perhaps your Ranger training at observation is failing you.”
“Could be, sir. Maybe he’s hunting? The dog looks like it’s doing more than just hanging around and keeping company, and the sheath knife is too short to be much in a fight but just right for field dressing something.”
“I missed the knife, so we’re even.” McIntyre handed the binoculars to Heather, saying, “Well, let’s see how a Fed does with this.”
She saw everything they’d pointed out, and then laughed. “You guys missed something a law-enforcement person wouldn’t. There’s a badge on that silly hat, and I’m guessing that white armband means something too. He’s some kind of cop.”
When they had closed the distance, they saw he was young, maybe not even thirty yet, deeply tanned, and thin to the point of scrawny. He kept his black-powder rifle, which Machado whispered looked like a percussion cap/paper cartridge model, carefully pointed at the sky, and when the dog ran forward to meet them, he said, firmly, “Skip. Back here.” Skip trotted back behind him, as if saying, Okay, boss, we’ll play by the rules, but they smell okay to me.
“I’m Freddie Pranger,” the man said. “Long Range Patrolling Constable for the village of Pale Bluff, Illinois.”
“General Norm McIntyre, U.S. Army, and—”
“The
n this is the party I’m looking for,” Pranger said. “I’m assuming you are Graham Weisbrod, the former Secretary of the Future?”
Graham nodded. “And current President of the United States.”
“That’s what folks want to discuss back at Pale Bluff,” Constable Pranger said. “I’m betting most of those M4s still work, so I’m not going to try to make you come along, but I was sent out to invite you in. We can give you beds and food for the night, and have a little discussion. Our governor up in Springfield has sent us word over the semaphore chain that you’re to be detained and turned over to the state, but quite a few people in the village don’t hold with our governor, being as he’s actually the secretary of state, and the wrong party too—the real gov and his lieutenant were up by Chicago when the big bomb went off.
“So the folks in town voted that I was to walk up this road and make you the offer of shelter and a chance to talk. There’re people around Alton who could find you a train west, if we passed the word to them, which I guess we’ll do if you win the vote.”
“What happens if we just walk on by?”
“Nothing—from us. Don’t know what any other town up the line might do. Probably’d depend on how they voted.” He took off the coonskin cap and rubbed his damp hair. “What I can offer you is, Pale Bluff is close, we have a lot of apple pies baking because some of our people are out to impress the president, and you’ll get a hearing at the Town Meeting; our mayor doesn’t allow people to act out much.”
“Roof, bed, pie, and a fair hearing,” Weisbrod said. “A pretty good deal.”
“Well, that, and we’re mostly Democrats here. Next few towns are iffy.”
“Then I think we have a deal, Constable Pranger.”
ABOUT THREE HOURS LATER . PALE BLUFF. ILLINOIS. 4:30 P.M. CST. WEDNESDAY. DECEMBER 18.
It was even easier than they had expected. A few older men, and one young woman with a big cross on her neck, made a fuss about Weisbrod’s being wanted by the armed forces and the police, but the testimony of a general— particularly one who talked as eloquently about the Constitution as McIntyre did—seemed to quiet them.
