by John Barnes
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CLAY SPUR. WYOMING. 7:08 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Jason and Zach hurried across the dark, cold gravel of the parking lot like a couple of criminals. At least they weren’t conspicuous; half the people in the restaurant were fleeing to their warm safe cars, down the highway, back to the family or the lover.
Zach started the car and, with more obsessive care than ground crew checking out an Orion for liftoff, ran over the lights and controls. “Is your laptop IBIS-capable?”
“Yeah. I was getting broadband Internet just fine till we turned off 90.”
“Then let’s go 90 to 25 all the way to Raton. I’m scared. I want to know my family’s okay, because the country’s under attack and I don’t know what’s going on.” Zach sighed. “Now is that dumb, or what? I mean, we’re attacking the United States, aren’t we?”
“Well, the United States and the whole Big System,” Jason said. “But I know what you mean. I feel it myself—damn foreigners have no right to attack America; only us Americans should attack America.”
“Yeah.” He put the car in gear and turned out of the parking lot. “That—uh, that whole thing with Air Force Two, that couldn’t be—there was no way—”
“That can’t be Daybreak,” Jason said. “We all spent, like, forever talking collectively about what was in bounds and what wasn’t, and I saw a bunch of ideas shot down for being too—you know, terroristic.”
“Yeah, except, why did it happen right on the exact day of Daybreak? Did all of Daybreak get conned?”
Jason balanced a hand. “Maybe. Or maybe somebody infiltrated us and piggybacked onto Daybreak. I can’t imagine how it could all be coincidence.”
“Makes me sick.”
“Me too. God I hope it has nothing to do with Daybreak.”
On I-90, Jason unfolded his laptop and made the free connection to IBIS, the chain of wireless stations that ran down the median. “Good news,” Jason said. “About every fifth or sixth wireless transceiver is down.”
Zach raised a fist in ironic salute, and said, “What’s the news?”
“I’ll have it up in a sec. The first thing we need after starting Daybreak is Internet access. Seems like a great prank of God.”
“Not God,” Zach said, quietly. “Someone who is often mistaken for Him, I think.”
ABOUT FIVE MINUTES LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 9:15 P.M. EST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Something moved in Heather’s peripheral vision; a message from Browder had popped up:
smoke of plane crash poss=Na2O, consistent w/eye&lung injuries. check for radiation esp. beta & hard gamma & for U or Pt. maybe i was wrong? maybe nuke on board?
Na: the chemical abbreviation for sodium. And Browder thought the mystery plume looked like smoke from burning sodium. She forwarded to Cameron right away, and a moment later her headset was live. “Heather, I’m patching through to Browder, and I’ve got four DoE guys and two hazmat people from EPA kibitzing in.”
“Right here and ready,” Heather said.
“All right, for the record, we have Browder and O’Grainne from Department of the Future; Caspar, Pellegrino, Murchison, and Oe from Department of Energy; and Smith and Svejk from EPA, and my iScribe is taking all this down. Very quick briefing: We’ve got air samples from the plumes, both the gray-white caustic one coming from the hot spots, and the black smoke from the main body of the burning fuselage. The gray-white caustic plume is almost pure disodium oxide dust, and the spectroscopic analysis on the bright yellow-white fires shows very bright lines for sodium and oxygen, so there’s no question that it’s burning sodium.
“However the disodium oxide is not at all radioactive—it’s sodium-23 with a trace of other isotopes, not radioactive sodium-24. This is consistent with Dr. Browder’s speculation that sodium was being carried on board as a radiological enhancer for a nuclear weapon, especially a fusion weapon, since they produce enough neutron flux to transmute several tons of sodium instantaneously. Any problems with my understanding of the science so far?”
“Oe, DoE.” It was an older man’s voice with that flat, clipped Californiamall accent that all the stars used to have. “We’ve always worried about sodium-24 more than any other enhancer because of its chemical activity and extreme radioactivity, and because with the short half-life, the more eco-conscious terrorists might feel better about using it, since the radioactive component goes down from pure to less than a part per million in about ten days.”
“Caspar, DoE. Concur. The only reason to be carrying that stuff was if they had a nuke on board they were planning to use; metallic sodium is hard to handle and dangerous to work with and there are much more effective ways to enhance a fire—powdered aluminum or magnesium would be way easier to handle and make ten times the mess, and besides, they were crashing an airliner, which is going to start a big fire anyway. So the only possible reason to go to all that expense, danger, and complexity was if they intended to convert it all to sodium-24 with a nuclear bomb.”
“Thank you,” Cam said. He sounded desperate. “And yet the other plume analysis shows no trace of any tritium or deuterium beyond ordinary background levels, no chemical traces of uranium or plutonium, and no unexpected radioactivity at all—the only radioactivity we’re getting is a very slight trace of americium, which is almost certainly from the on-board smoke detectors. Any further speculation in light of that? I confess I’m baffled, but I’m not a physicist or chemist.”
There was a long pause. “Browder, DoF. No uranium or plutonium means no fission trigger, as far as I know.”
“Oe, DoE, that’s correct.”
“Svejk, EPA. Any trace of lithium or beryllium? We might as well check all the commonly known fusible nuclei that we can.”
“A little bit, but the on-site assessor said that there’s enough in half a dozen modern laptops and the plane’s own computers to produce the quantity they are seeing.”
“Browder, DoF. All the fusible nuclei you can check? I assume that means you can’t check for helium?”
“Svejk, EPA. Not easily. But we can probably cross helium off the list because fusing helium-4 into carbon is so far beyond what can be done on Earth, and helium-3 is so scarce and hard to isolate.
“Caspar, DoE, concur. Also helium-3 is somewhat harder to work with than tritium or deuterium, to boot. If they were using helium-3, it would almost certainly be easier, cheaper, and more effective to use tritium.”
“Nonetheless,” Cam said, “I’m alerting the crews to watch out for a nuclear weapon in the wreckage. Anybody have anything they need to add before we end this call?”
On the screen, the burning sodium continued to light the site in eerie, dancing flames; network feed showed a swarm of talking heads, all trying to explain everything else to each other.
Heather messaged Browder: thx, good job, stay online, wl b long night.
He sent back: ^surest prediction DoF ever made.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. YUMA. ARIZONA. 6:23 P.M. PST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Ysabel took the Yuma city bus to the mall and picked up the pack she’d left at the door of Sam’s Club that morning. The developmentally disabled guy at the service desk seemed to remember her, but maybe nobody would believe him, if anyone even thought to ask him anything.
She walked across the parking lot to the little tour company where she’d bought a pass for a cheapie three-day package that went down to a little bed-and-breakfast in Puerto Penasco. They promised you the fun of waking up “in a foreign country” the next morning.
She planned to set her clock and slip out of the bed-and-breakfast about an hour before dawn, when the third-class buses in the zocalo would be picking up hotel workers from the graveyard shift. She’d just get on whichever one was going the farthest south on Highway 2; from there, she could be lost among the peasants until Daybreak eliminated pursuit.
“Would you mind if I sit with you?”
Ysabel looked up to see the only other person under fifty on the bus. The
girl had an awfully big backpack for a three-day trip; she wore baggy shorts and sandals with socks, and the super-retro WrapLens glasses that made you look like a giant insect, the early smart-lens glasses from back in the ’teens. She mumbled as she introduced herself, and Ysabel didn’t really catch her name. Oh, well, at least I remembered my alias is “Jane.”
The Bug-Faced Girl was off on her first vacation entirely on her own. “I’ve never crossed any border before, I’ve never gone anywhere by myself, and I’ve only really been to Kansas, Oklahoma, a ski resort in Colorado, and Urbana, Illinois, because my grandma lives there. So here I was with a real job, nobody I had to see or plan with, and I just decided I’d see some places I hadn’t seen before. So I got a two-week pass on Greyhound, and went out to see the beach in San Diego, and now I’m doing this side trip so I can see another beach and sort of have been in another country. I must seem like the biggest dork in the world to you.”
“Well, having seen more of the world, I know there are way bigger dorks.”
Bug-Eyed Nerdchick took a second to get it, then laughed. “My mother is so freaked; but I left San Diego yesterday, and I was nowhere near where Air Force Two crashed.”
“Where—?” Ysabel asked. “Where what? ”
Miss High Adventure explained. Ysabel was flabbergasted—so that was why everyone had been piled around the TV set in the waiting area before they boarded the bus. Ysabel had figured it must be the stupid World Series; now she realized that she was fleeing across a border after shooting down a piece of military hardware, during a major terrorist attack.
It might be wise to be obviously buddies with someone conventional. And Nerdette herself was just saying she was “scared to death, even though I know this is about as safe as foreign travel gets.”
So they chattered about everything in the world, with Ysabel changing just enough of her bio not to be too recognizable in case they were looking for her. She’d thought it was a pretty good joke to call herself Jane Llano—“plain Jane”—on her false passport—but now her head was filled with, must remember, must remember, my name is Jane, Spanish major at UT-Austin, please don’t let anyone ask about anything there because I’ve never been there—
The border guard got on, and said, “Folks, they’re asking me to scan all the passports and record them, because of what’s happened, but it shouldn’t take more than five minutes.”
Ysabel thought she’d explode, but Nerd Chick actually put a hand on her back, and said, “Hey, relax, you’re the old hand here. You know it’s nothing to do with us.”
“Yeah. I guess I’m having flashbacks. You travel down south of Mexico at all, into Nicaragua or Honduras, and sometimes border checkpoints are scary.”
They scanned the fake passport without comment. The guard even smiled and said, “Have a good time, Jane.” It would have been even better if the guy had happened to use SuperAmericanGirl’s first name too.
As the bus rolled into Mexico, Miss Texas Nerdface of 2024 was telling an apparently endless story about some elaborate prank that her brother had played on her other brother, which involved hiding underwear. From there she progressed to talking about how exciting-but-scary the world was.
Honey, you’ve got no freakin’ idea, Ysabel thought, between trying to think of more synonyms for that’s interesting and oh really?
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. JUST WEST OF AVOCA. IOWA. 8:30 P.M. CST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
Del Quintano was known as “Leprechaun” to his friends because, despite being solid Mexican as far back as the family knew, his bushy sideburns made him look more like the Notre Dame mascot than anyone had any right to. He’d made a virtue of it, growing his sideburns out and hanging the cab of his semi-tractor with little plastic leprechauns and decals, and he had to admit, his luck did seem to be pretty good.
He was listening to a talk station on IBIS radio, all the news about Air Force Two, shaking his head. Man, you never knew what was going to happen, except that when it did, every idiot in the world would call up every station in the world, and they’d all talk about it.
He had a mandatory sleep-layover coming up in Des Moines. A shower, a bed, and not being allowed to drive any farther until he’d had some sleep looked pretty nice to Del. Some of the old truckers complained about CELT, Continuous Electronic Load Tracking, because they couldn’t skate around the rest-rules and take more work, but as far as Del was concerned, it meant nobody else could cut in on you while you followed the rules and worked a reasonable pace.
But even at a reasonable pace, that last hundred miles or so could get pretty tiring. Maybe he’d put on some music, something lively to stay awake to. “Radio, search, find coustajam,” he said. He liked that new stuff.
The computer answered, “Searching, interruptions very frequent in IBIS, some scrawk.” Then it fell dead quiet.
“Radio, acknowledge.”
No sound.
“Radio, reboot.”
“Rebooting and loading—” a harsh squeal, then silence.
“Computer, internal check.”
A brief, rumbling hiss—then nothing.
Shit, he’d spent a fortune on a good voice-actuated system.
He pulled over at the next roadside rest. When he popped the cover, crusty gray-white stuff that looked like dried toothpaste fell out into his hand from the fuse box. He stared at the mess. It stung and burned where it had touched his fingers.
Del shook the mess off his hand into his litter bag, grabbed a wipe from his box, and swabbed his hands, looking in consternation at the tiny red dots that peppered his palms and fingers.
That gray-white stuff looked like battery corrosion. He took his flashlight around to take a look.
There were drifts and piles of that white crud everywhere, clustering and spilling around every little electronic gadget, engulfing every electric motor and encrusting every cable. The battery sat in a ball of crusty white goo the size of a beach ball.
“Holy shit,” he muttered. He closed up the compartment, got in, prayed—not something he did often, and seldom this sincerely—and tried to start it again. There were clunks and thuds on the first try; fewer of them after he’d tried a few times and then nothing at all.
Furious, thinking about a late load and all that would cost him, and about the bed and shower waiting for him in Des Moines, he took out his cell phone to make the call to the dispatcher. The phone’s screen was an unrecognizable scrawl of light and dark. Fighting panic, Del tried turning it off and on; it came on, wavered, and turned itself off. After that, it wouldn’t come on at all.
On a hunch he didn’t quite understand, he turned his phone over, pulled the battery, and tapped the phone in his hand; little gray-white crumbles fell out, stinging his hand again. The light in his cab went out, and wouldn’t come back on.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. I-90 EAST OF GILLETTE. WYOMING. 7:40 P.M. MST. MONDAY. OCTOBER 28.
It was warm without being stifling in Zach’s Dadmobile. He drives like my dad, too, Jason thought. Dad always said it was his “precious cargo habit”—all those years of never looking away from the road because he couldn’t stand to have one of his kids hurt. Cool, actually, once you understand it. “You must be dying to get home.”
“Oh, yeah. Wrap up tight, down into the burrow with the cubs.” Zach smiled. “I still want to take down the Big System—but not before the Big System gets me home and lets me find out that everything’s basically okay. Speaking of that, I wonder why we haven’t heard from the President yet?”
“That is weird, isn’t it?” Jason said. “All I can find is recaps of what’s already been in the news.” His connection was still up and clear, and still tracking IBISNuStream Samuelson. In a fresh window he called up Goo- 22. “We’re not the only ones worrying. ‘Pendano’ is one of the five most searched words. But there’s just one statement out of the White House—he won’t be appearing at a fund-raiser in West Virginia in the morning. That’s it.”
“What do you suppose he’s doin
g?”
Jason shrugged. “The media always made a big deal about what good buds Pendano and Samuelson were. Maybe he’s crying.”
“I never liked him, but I hope that’s not true.”
“Yeah. I liked him, but I know what you mean. Funny how it still matters even when we know it’s all going away.”
“What’s all going away?”
“Dude. The Big System. I mean, Daybreak’s here. Whoever grabbed Samuelson, why they did it, everything—it’s all old stuff with no meaning, just history. This is just like a hangover or something. Once the Big System is down, we’ll stop having all these emotional attachments to media figures.”
“I don’t know about that,” Zach said. “I read history a lot. After Lincoln was assassinated, a few hundred thousand people dropped everything and went to Washington.”
“I was kind of hoping Daybreak would mean going, you know, like all the way tribal, no government past the next hill.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think it will turn out people still want to build some steam trains and sailing ships, and maybe even a few dirigibles or some telegraphs if they, you know, keep them clean and wrapped in antiseptic cloth all the time…”
“You mean if they practice safe machinery?”
“Exactly.”
“I was kind of hoping to maybe get rid of the wheel.”
“Wheels let you raise clean water from depth, and clean water means healthy babies,” Zach said. “You can have my wheel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”
Jason liked to argue, and he was about to, but he felt that familiar, comforting internal hug, the reminder that you didn’t quibble about Daybreak matters. Take down the Big System and then work out how it was supposed to be after. He felt a surge of warm friendship toward Zach, and it was a while before they talked again.
