Daybreak Zero (14 page)

40 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:30 PM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.

Since Sumer, the smart and the powerful have always met over food, somewhere discreet, where they can stretch out comfortably and decide what the rest of the world ought to do. Elizabeth I’s ministers traded barbs at the Mermaid; the Founding Fathers argued more freely in the City Tavern than in Independence Hall; atom bomb scientists drank at the Owl. When Washington DC still existed, the too-late decision to expand the Daybreak investigation had been taken in a hole-in-the-wall Cambodian diner belonging to Allie Sok Banh’s uncle.

Nowadays, in Pueblo, Johanna’s What There Is was the place to be well-fed and not overheard.

Johanna charged by the seat and served family style. She didn’t attempt a menu—she couldn’t depend on having any particular ingredient, and the big wood stove and barbecue grill in her improvised backyard cookshed were really only adequate for preparing one large common meal.

Heather and Arnie had barely taken their seats in the Mountain View Room—the most isolated room on the third floor of Johanna’s—when Johanna herself brought in a crisp field-green salad surrounding a chilled trout loaf, and a side of elk ragout over polenta.

It would have been blasphemy to talk business over such a lunch. When they had eaten all of it, Heather said, “Arnie, my problem is when I listen to you, I’m always saying,
Yes, sure, the way to get good, balanced, accurate knowledge of anything is to pursue it for its own sake
, but when I’m on the radio for any length of time with Cam in Athens, or with Graham in Olympia, I find myself thinking,
Right, we’re losing a war here and Arnie’s doing pure science instead of figuring out what to hit and how.
And I don’t like being a creature of whatever I heard last. I
think
you are right. Can you help me settle firmly into your side?”

“I can try. I wish I knew if it even
is
a war. Originally I thought it wasn’t—I thought Daybreak was more like a storm than an invasion—and then I thought that it was, because a storm doesn’t pick its targets—and now I think Daybreak is just really hard on analogies; it doesn’t behave like anything else, it’s just Daybreak. We won’t understand anything about it till we admit there’s never been anything like it before. But I do understand that we won’t get it, either, if Daybreak takes the world down into a dark age while we’re still trying to understand. We need to know enough to win, soon enough to use it, and right now we don’t even know what it would mean to know that.”

“You could be more reassuring.”

“Yeah, but you wanted the truth, as I see it.”

“I did.” Heather brought her feet up onto the couch where she’d half-sat during the meal. “Oh, man, Johanna knows how to make a room comfortable.” She groaned. “I really wish I could wait to think about this till after I get my body back, but that’s way too long to wait. So, you think the tribes are the key to . . . well, what
are
they the key to?”

Arnie spread his hands. “Maybe just to finding the right question. But as for your situation with Larry—look, Heather, this is a gift, not a problem. You’ve got a shrewd investigator who knows the territory, and who wants to look into it. And I can’t show you graphs—”

“I don’t need’em, Arn, I believe in your intuition much more than you do. If you say we have to know about the tribes, then we have to know about the tribes, and I’ll declare that to be Larry’s main mission. The biggest problem I see is that whenever he gets back with Debbie, he might want to spend some time getting reacquainted, I would think, and frankly, as much time as he’s spent in the woods since December, he’s got to be
tired
. And I don’t think I have anyone more entitled to a vacation if he asks for one.”

Arnie leaned back, thinking. “Well, we need way more than one investigator on the job, anyway, if we want results in time to use them. And though we’ve learned so much from Larry’s exploring the Inland Northwest, that’s kind of like looking under the streetlight for the quarter you dropped in the alley, because the light is better. I think we could learn more from penetrating the Lost Quarter, ideally from a traverse of it.”

“If anybody ever came back after going in,” Heather said.

“Oh yeah,” Arnie said. “Oh yeah, it would definitely depend on that.”

“Apart from some Army scouts who never get ten miles north of the boundary rivers, has anyone come back yet?”

“Not really.” Arnie was looking down at the table. “Two bodies have floated downstream on the Wabash, and one on the James.” He dragged some of the water from around his glass into a long thin line. “Heather, it’s got to be done, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be soon.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “All right. I’ve got an agent that was going to go out to Pale Bluff, just to see how he did on a milk run. He was going to leave late next week anyway. He’ll be about twenty miles from where the Lost Quarter starts, by the nearest approach. Ex-Army ranger, did mountain man re-creation, martial artist—”

“Is it Steve Ecco or Dan Samson?”

“Ecco. Is there a difference?”

“Not really. They’re both my friends. And I just lost a friend to Daybreak, trying to find out how it works and what it thinks, and I don’t know if I’m ready to lose another one.”

Heather nodded slowly and sadly. “Someday, I hope, RRC will be big enough so that I don’t know and like everyone who works for us. Till then, though, I’m always sending my friends into danger. One more time, Arn, is this the best way to find out what we need to know?”

He seemed to be looking at something a million miles away. “I don’t know. I can’t know. But it’s our best guess, and if we don’t take it, we might still be guessing when Daybreak burns the last book. Steve Ecco will be glad to get the assignment. I think he’s afraid that he’ll never get his chance to prove himself. And I like giving him the chance to do what he wants to do, but I don’t want to lose another friend. I know you make harder decisions than that all the time, and I’m being selfish and silly.”

“I’d say, just human.”

“I just wish being human didn’t have to be quite . . . so . . . human.”

They talked about how life hurried on, and the friends that they had made and lost, for another hour.

He had walked all the way home in the glaring Colorado summer afternoon, and was checking the temperature of his solar hot water tank with the idea of a long hot shower, before he remembered that he still hadn’t told Heather about Aaron.

But I guess now I don’t need to. The conversations with Aaron will give me insights I couldn’t get any other way—in fact, yeah. What I extract from Aaron, I can use to plan Steve’s mission, make sure he’s safe and his mission’s productive, and it will be much more believable coming from a guy like Ecco, and from first-hand observation, than it will be coming from my talking to a hippie in a blanket in the middle of the night. RRC will get independently verified information, and my friend will have a much better chance at succeeding at this mission, which is going to mean so much to him.

Besides, what the hell could I tell Heather now? That I just forgot?

THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 3:20 PM MST. SUNDAY, JULY 20, 2025.

James Hendrix was lost in
Great Expectations
; Miss Havisham had just gone up in flames, and he was considering whether it might be worth opening the ice box for some cold roast chicken, and contemplating his tight waistband, trying not to let the idea prey on his mind.
Can’t stay under fifty years old, much as I’d like to, but I’d sure like to stay under a hundred kilograms.

He was far ahead of his students in the literacy class that he taught most nights of the week. But conditions were perfect for reading: on this bright, sunny day, opening one set of drapes and laying a mirror on the floor to reflect up to his white ceiling made lovely indirect reading light where he lay sprawled on his comfortable couch. Besides, he would rather be doing this than anything else in the world. Perhaps some cold water would help him ignore his stomach? He could—

The knock at the door was followed at once by scratching, so he knew it had to be Leslie Antonowicz and Wonder. He pretended to sigh at the interruption, but three seconds later as he opened the door, he was grinning.

“Come on, old man,” Leslie said. “It’s beautiful outside but I had radio room crypto duty all morning, so I couldn’t get out to the fun part of the woods.” By “fun part,” he knew the tall, slim blonde woman meant some mixture of “scary” and “exhausting.” She was beaming at him. “I saw that one window open and knew you were lying here in the dark turning into a library fossil. Now come on, you and Wonder both need a walk.” Wonder, hearing his name, woofed once; he was a shepherd-husky cross—James always said,
crossed with a moose
.

“Just so you don’t expect us to use the same trees,” James said, pulling his boots on.

The morning’s rain had left the air damp and cool, and the sunlight since hadn’t warmed things much; down by the rain-swollen Arkansas River, they followed the trail away from town, watching Wonder run back and forth and smell everything. Friends from long before Daybreak, they didn’t have to talk; James knew that Leslie usually didn’t want to spend her weekends in his indolent company, so there must be something on her mind, and she knew she could take as long as she wanted about getting around to it.

He wanted to watch for the moment when she’d say something, but that was too much like watching her all the time, and he didn’t feel free to do that: years ago he’d let himself get fascinated by her grace, by the big eyes and high cheekbones, and by her lithe, muscular body, until awkwardly, angrily, she’d told him it was creepy. So he looked at the sky and the river and enjoyed her nearness.

After a while, she said, “Last night, when I was walking home from Dell’s Brew, something just slightly weird happened.” After a few more steps she said, “Arnie Yang asked me to walk him home.”

He fought down the twinge of jealousy; Arnie was their boss and close to Leslie’s age. Word had it that the girl he was courting at Mota Elliptica had died in the tribal raid there. He’d long suspected Leslie told him more about her love life than she really wanted to, just to keep him from developing hopes again, and was sorry she had to do that.

She still hadn’t spoken, and he was calm now.
Keep it light.
“It’s not
that
unusual for a man to ask you to go home with him.”

“No, it’s not, you dirty old man, but what was really unusual was, he just wanted me to
walk
with him. Expressed no interest in having me come inside. Really didn’t talk much, either. Now, since I always take Wonder when I go to Dell’s, it wasn’t unreasonably dangerous—after we dropped Arnie off we went on home, me and the mutt, no problems on the way and for part of it we walked along with the watch, anyway. But . . . well, everyone’s heard how brave Arnie was in the battle at Mota Elliptica, and everyone knows he’s pretty good with those double knives he carries. If anything, I should’ve been asking him to walk
me
home.”

“Maybe he’s just shy or got cold feet.”

“No, I’m sure he wasn’t trying to hit on me, James, because I have a pretty good sense of that, and because he didn’t hang around me at the bar before, and he didn’t ask like a guy who was trying to find company for the night.”

“Hunh. What did he ask like?”

“Well, that’s the weird part I wanted to talk to you about. He asked like a guy who was really scared. At least that was my first impression. But if you’re bringing along backup because you’re afraid of something, don’t you tell the backup what it is?”

“Well, I would. Maybe Arnie is weird.”

“Definitely Arnie is weird. I’ve just never seen him weird this way before—really, he was terrified. But he didn’t tell me what of. Do you know anything about him?”

“Just what I know from working with him. I archived his report on the Battle of Mota Elliptica yesterday afternoon, but it was more or less a normal action report. It’s a mystery to me, too.”

They walked for another hour and a half, and then James fixed them a light supper before Leslie went home, well before sundown because she had early morning duties. He watched the tall, strong girl and the big dog till they went out of sight around a building, then adjusted his mirror to catch the last hour of sunlight, and returned to
Great Expectations
.

2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 10:15 PM MST. MONDAY, JULY 21, 2025.

Tonight was starting out like Stephen Ecco’s favorite books and daydreams did. Heather O’Grainne’s note, delivered in a neat pocket-drop by Patrick, had asked for a night meeting and specified “tell no one you are coming.” Even if it was Heather, not M or Wild Bill Donovan, and the organization was the Reconstruction Research Center, not MI6 or Mosby’s Raiders, still, it was a secret night meeting straight out of his fifteen-year-old self’s fantasies.

Central Pueblo was inhabited, but it was already dark; candles and lamp oil were expensive, and nowadays people rose early. He saw the watch only once, from more than a mile away.

Knowing himself too well, he tried to fight down his excitement, not wanting the sheer romance to affect the mission.
Sure hope it
is
a mission or I’m gonna feel like a total fool with a headful of dreams. Which ain’t exactly unfamiliar.

Something moved.

He turned, center low, body neutral—and laughed. A gigantic possum scuttled across the road.
You could be a little more romantic, dude. But then I bet you’re thinkin’, “You could be droppin’ a little more food, dude.”

The guard nodded and let Ecco pass. He ascended the dark stairs in the old courthouse; the only open doorway glowed with candlelight.

“Steve, thanks for coming.” Heather sat in an armchair with her feet propped up on a desk. “I’m claiming pregnant lady privilege and not getting up; Arnie will show you what’s up and then we’ll talk about what we need you to do.

Arnie Yang had laid out maps on an old picnic table; standing over it with a pointer, he looked like he was running some weird casino game. On the tabletop, sheets of drafting vellum covered topo maps of southern Illinois and Indiana. Pale Bluff was near the lower left corner of the map, and the upper right just reached to Fort Wayne. A swarm of different marks gathered on the left of the Wabash; penciled lines intersected in the Palestine/Warsaw area and just east of Bloomington. Bridges on the Wabash and the Tippecanoe were tagged with bits of construction paper.

“It looks like you want me to go some beyond Pale Bluff?”

“We sure do,” Heather said.

“And come back alive,” Arnie said. “
That’s
the tough part. There is something real bad happening east of the Wabash and the Tippecanoe, and north of the Ohio; that lobe of the Lost Quarter is much more lost than it was even two months ago, and we can’t find out what’s happening.” His strong, thin fingers walked like dividers down the line of the Wabash, tapping black arrows that pointed across the river. “Stations across the Wabash stopped reporting around mid-May. The flow of refugees dried up by early June. Since then, five different local governments have tried to send someone over onto the left bank of the Wabash, plus these two attempts to cross the Tippecanoe. Every mission disappeared completely, and those were all local guys that knew the territory and had some background. One was a force of four guys.

“But this one—we’re not supposed to know about it, but we have a source in the TNG’s Defense Department down in Athens. Three weeks ago the TNG’s Department of Intelligence sent a team of six Rangers across here”—he tapped a black arrow south of Terre Haute—“and they disappeared with no trace. One of them, too decayed for the pathologist to determine how he died, was found floating dead in the Wabash three days ago.”

Ecco tried to look imperturbable while his heart thumped. “And things are so bad over there, they think, that they’ll lose that many men trying to find out?”

Arnie’s finger traced out the arc of red crosses that paralleled the Wabash. “Assassinations since April: twenty-two. Town constables, militia officers, sheriffs, mayors, one very diligent postmaster—anybody who was making things work on our side of the Wabash. The seven black circles are the four towns—villages really, none of them had more than two hundred people—that were burned out, and the three Castles. Nineteen black squares mark farms where the family was killed and the house burned. All that’s since April first. A few of them might have been Provi or Temper partisans burning each other out, or plain old bandits. But this looks much more to me like we have an enemy on the other side of the Wabash, and it doesn’t plan to stay there. Right now the thing we need most is
information
. We need you to see things, figure out what’s going on, understand it all—and most of all,
bring it back
.”

Ecco nodded, made serious by Arnie’s evident passion. “I understand the mission.”

Heather said, “Well, we can’t define what you should look for, exactly, or where you should look for it. We know
nothing
once you get any distance north or east of Pale Bluff. If it’s too hot south of Terre Haute, head north, maybe try crossing the Tippecanoe. And bring back what you see. That’s the most important thing on this mission. Don’t be a brave lion; what we need is a perceptive weasel.”

“Got it.”

Arnie said, “Now, this might or might not come up. We’re making a guess that the Lost Quarter is nearly hollow—most of the tribes are right up near the edge, where they can live by looting civilization. We’re basing that partly on the photos from the surviving Navy reconnaissance planes, which we can’t fly nearly often enough now, and partly just on the fact that so much of the Lost Quarter was a radioactive dead zone for months, so it doesn’t seem like there could be enough there to keep any sizable number of people alive. So our guess is there’s a tough outside and an empty inside. If it turns out we’re right, then just a few miles past the border you might find it much easier and safer to travel than it was getting in. So here’s something I’d like you to look into
if
—and
only
if—it looks like we’re right about that.” His fingers traced many pencil lines on the vellum. “Our direction-finding operation has gotten fixes on two stations broadcasting in a code that’s not ours, or either Federal government, or any Castle’s; all these bearing lines crisscross in these two small areas. We think this one near Bloomington is just a relay or a subHQ: it only broadcasts occasionally, usually after the other one does but not every time. When it does broadcast, it broadcasts for about as long as the first station did.

“The really active transmitter, the one that seems to start conversations, both with Bloomington and with other stations in the Lost Quarter, is this one, between Warsaw and Palestine, Indiana.” He laid down a few photographs. “These air photos from February show nothing in Warsaw or Palestine, but this one from April looks like dirt ramparts and walls under construction. So if by any chance, once you’re over the Wabash and you’ve evaded whatever has already cost twenty lives, if you need something to go take a look at, this might be something to look at.”

“But you’re really figuring I should just get in far enough to see what stopped the others, and then come back?” Ecco tried for a laconic drawl, but the more he looked at that map, the more his heart hammered and his stomach sank.

“Yeah,” Heather said. “Arnie is just making sure that if you get a really lucky break it won’t go to waste. You remember your Rogers’ Rangers rules, the bastard version?”

“ ‘Don’t take no chances you don’t have to’? You bet. Just by going on this trip, I’ve about used up my luck.”

“Right answer.” Heather nodded to Arnie. “I see why you said to send this guy.”

“I want him back,” Arnie said. “We’ve got beer to drink and waitresses to hustle.” The two men shook hands; Arnie added, “No kidding. I recommended sending you for a whole long list of good reasons. Make sure you come back!”

“Got it,” Ecco said. “And thanks for giving me the break; I wanted a mission like this.”

After he left, Heather said, “Is he crazy or what, to want this kind of mission?”

Arnie shrugged. “He wants to be the kind of man who can do it. Men all have dreams about what kind of guy they’d like to be—usually the kind of guy that can do something. It keeps you going when nothing else will, sometimes.” He rolled up the maps. “I myself want to be the kind of guy who hangs around with tough manly types. Why do you think I always come right over when
you
call, boss?”

Heather stuck her tongue out and made the raspberry noise.

On his way home, Ecco kept to the centers of the dark streets. The high, dark haze, the floating ashes of burned civilization, dimmed the waning moonlight more than usual. That was fine with Ecco. Nowadays, the moon was enemy territory; he couldn’t shake the feeling that if he could see it, it could see him.