The Last President (10 page)

“Red cards aren't necessarily the worst things happening, or the best things not happening,” Heather said. “Red cards are just the things that most interfere with putting a new President and Congress in place under the Constitution. We're going to relaunch the Federal government in the middle of a famine, a civil war, and maybe the collapse of civilization.

“Objectively any of those are worse than not having a Federal government. The most comfortable parts of the country are back to about 1910 for standard of living, and in the worst-off areas we hold, it's more like 1810, and in tribal territory, it's the Dark Ages, at best.
But none of that is the RRC's concern right now.
Our job is setting up and handing off to the Restored Republic. Once we do, dealing with the mess is
their
job.

“So I have red cards about tribals, not because they're crazy, evil, and destructive bastards—although they are!—but because they will make the election difficult. I have red cards for getting Grayson to quit calling himself the NCCC, and the same deal about Weisbrod calling himself Acting President, because that makes either one of them a rallying point for sore losers to rebel against the Restored Republic in the name of the extinct one. That's also why there's a red card for finding someone that the whole country can vote for—because we also can't afford too many sore losers, and we really can't afford to have any important region with a majority of sore losers.” She purposely did not look at General Phat, but she could feel everyone else did. “So this chart has nothing about collapsing dams in Nevada and Arizona, or that cattle epidemic on the Great Plains, but I have a great big red card here for the Post Raptural Church because the Tempers declared them the National Church, and another one for Manbrookstat, because they have secret police, tribunal courts, and a state monopoly on exports. An established church and a fascist police state are not necessarily worse, or better for that matter, than collapsing dams and dying cattle, but they are not allowed under the Constitution, so we can't have any such thing on January 20, 2027.

“Now, this is probably the last time we can all be together here, because we're going to be busy. We have nineteen red cards to take off this chart, somehow, in the next nine months, so that twenty-four streams of green can flow down to that magic word DONE. I have you all here because it's our last chance to talk, all together, before we plunge into it. Do we all still agree that Daybreak is planning a major tribal surge in the spring?”

Nancy Teirson spoke first. “Flying the Ohio Valley between the mouth of the Wabash and Fort Norcross, it's one big camp after another. They're packed.”

Roger Jackson said, “Coming back from Castle Earthstone I saw boat and canoe convoys on the rivers, some a mile long, all headed down to the camps.”

Heather took a deep breath. “Then does anyone see any reason to modify General Grayson's plan to roll spoiling attacks down the Ohio and up the Wabash?”

Phat said, “I think General Patton said it best. ‘A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.'”

Heather nodded. “Grayson is already at Fort Norcross as of today.”

“I flew him there on my way here,” Bret Duquesne explained. “Him and his wife. Picked him up outside Athens, after they faked a departure for a vacation on the Gulf Coast.”

Chris Manckiewicz added, “We don't think that deception can hold more than three days.”

Heather asked Malcolm Cornwall, the only remaining meteorologist, “Forecast for the Ohio Valley for the next few days?”

“Clear and warming. Ground should stay hard another ten days; it froze pretty deep this winter. Ice will be breaking up below Uniontown in a week or two at most.”

“Last chance to say stop.” Heather looked around from face to face. “Ruth?”

“Everything from crypto looks like the tribals are not quite ready, and we are.”

“Freddie?”

Freddie Pranger drawled, “Wabash Valley's quiet, right now. Ohio's closer to ready to move. Just a matter of they gotta carry more stuff further to set up on the Wabash, like we always figured.”

“Roger?”

“No guarantees on what Lord Robert will do. He's freakin' nuts, Ms. O'Grainne. But he did just do several things that must've ticked Daybreak off pretty badly; they won't be eager to be buddies with him again for a while.”

James Hendrix said, softly, “Agents in Athens, Olympia, Manbrookstat, San Antonio, and Tallahassee are reporting all the major decision makers are either with the program or at least won't interfere. We're as united as we are ever likely to be.”

“One more time, do I hear a ‘wait'?” Heather asked.

She watched the clock on the mantel, whose second hand was just crossing the two, and told herself
wait, listen, give them a chance
. It was so quiet that she heard every tick of the clock.

Just as the second hand crossed eight, Phat spoke. “So we don't wait. Time to go. The die is cast.”

Slowly, emphatically, loudly, Larry Mensche began to clap, and the rest joined in.

THE NEXT DAY. PUEBLO. 3:15 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2026.

The eight pilots arrived in a group, as had been agreed; silently, Ruth Odawa handed each of them a batch of encrypted messages, and working together, they all verified, one more time, where each encrypted message was to go. When they finished, the pilots rode to the airfield in two wagons, each escorted by a squad of militia. No one spoke an unnecessary word.

At the field, there were handshakes, taps on the shoulder, pats on the back, and then each pilot walked to a plane.

Three hours before dawn, Pueblo was bitter cold but windless. Nancy Teirson's homebuilt Acro Sport led the taxiing parade of aircraft around to the wait point.
This will tell everyone that something is up,
she thought.
Eight planes all taking off one after the other.
And
they've turned the runway lights on; they'll be wiping them with lye for weeks after this. Must've been at least a year since anyone in America saw a mass takeoff at night.

She turned for a moment and waved at Bambi Castro, in the Curtiss JNE in line behind her; Bambi waved back. It helped Nancy feel slightly less alone.

Then the first flagger advanced to the line, raised both flags, and lowered them in parallel to point down the runway. Nancy opened the throttle slightly and depressed the left rudder pedal. Her tiny biplane waddled toward the next flagger, who held up his left flag and motioned downward with his right. Nancy watched the flagger, who watched the tower.

In the corner of her eye, Nancy saw a light flash in the tower window.

Facing Nancy, the flagger brought his left flag to his side and raised his right with the elbow bent at a right angle. With both flags in his left hand at his side, he saluted.

Nancy opened the throttle and roared along the runway, the oiled-linen tires feeling squishy and draggy even when freshly inflated. The Acro Sport seemed to bound forward and up from the pavement; in a shallow climb as the end of the runway passed 300 feet below, she banked to head east.

The slightly-more-than-half moon behind her, halfway down the western sky, shed more than enough light to distinguish US-24 and follow it through the snowy plains to Garden City; now and then there were other lights. A few windows shone in the walled towns. Dark blobs of cattle herds surrounded the fires in the cowboy camps. Twice she saw makeshift camps that might have been tribals or refugees, and made notes to help cavalry patrols locate them, but tonight she did not circle and sketch; she held her course, east over the old highway, and the moon slowly sank till it was on her tail.

In the pre-dawn twilight, she came in over the earthen ramparts of Garden City, waving back to the night sentry in his rooftop shelter.

The crew dragged the little red and yellow biplane into the hangar. They would refuel it, wipe its engine with lye, and go over every inch of it looking for crusty white nanospawn. Another day she might have gone with them to help, but today she hurried to the old stone house across the airfield, the local Jayhawk Guard commander's office.

He opened the door with a broad smile, and gestured for her to sit at the table pulled up close to the fireplace; she gulped a bowl of shredded beef chili with eggs over cornmeal mush while he worked the coding. “How beautiful are the feet,” he muttered, looking at the message.

“Unh?”

He grinned. “Preacher's kid can't help quoting. It's from Isaiah. ‘
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.' But I kind of like the blasphemous version, ‘How beautiful over Kansas is the biplane of she that bringeth good tidings, that declareth war.' Take this message back to them:
RECEIVED BREAK 'BOUT TIME BREAK MOVING ASAP FULL STOP
. They might not know Isaiah.”

In less than half an hour, she took off again, climbing into the light, fitful west wind, wheeling around toward sunrise in a wide semicircle.

As she flew on, the sun ascended between columns of smoke from the chimneys of newly reoccupied farmhouses; it looked more like 1876 than 2026. Farmyards bustled with people feeding poultry, chopping wood, and pumping water. Wagons bumped over potholed roads. Herders on horseback in heavy cloaks drove cattle and sheep out into the winter pasture.
At least, only flying at a quarter of the speed and altitude that planes used to, I get to see it all.
A stream of coal smoke revealed a train passing far to her north.

The sun was high when the Ozarks rose beneath her. In Springfield, Missouri, lunch was noodles and rabbit with hot, milky tea, in the kitchen of the RRC's new station chief, Paul Ferrier.

As Nancy finished her meal, he looked up from his code pad. “Tell Heather that it's crazy busy here, but the Ozark and Ouachita tribals have pulled some pretty gruesome shit in raids lately. I think I can get public opinion behind calling up the militia and sending out some big punitive raids into tribal country in early March. Sorry we can't do it sooner—we're up to our ass in alligators with trying to get ready for having the whole Federal government move in by the end of the year.”

“We all do what we can,” Nancy said. James had given the pilots that generic response for any message recipient who sounded less than enthusiastic, and besides, in Ferrier's case, it was true.

Airborne again in the early afternoon, she flew over the wooded hills of southern Missouri to Poplar Bluff. The country grew less harsh and richer; spring was greening the land and lifting it out of the snow below her.

In Poplar Bluff the militia commander was out with a cavalry detachment, intercepting a tribal incursion coming up from Arkansas. She tried to explain that when their commander read the message, he would understand why she hadn't been able to take a few hours out and go scout for them, but they seemed unconvinced and resentful, so she took off again as soon as she could, firmly telling them that the message needed to be decrypted as soon as possible, and everything would be clearer once it was.

Crossing the Mississippi, with Cairo just to her left, Nancy saw big floes of ice coming down the Ohio, groaning and booming as they collided with floes from the upper Mississippi and the Missouri above St. Charles Rock, and scribbled a note to alert the downstream towns that still had standing bridges; the radio operator at Pale Bluff could send that for her.

Up the Ohio Valley, snow still lay deep and the river was still frozen. At the Uniontown Dam, she turned north-by-northeast, and descended over the winter-bare apple orchards into Pale Bluff just before 4 p.m. Carol May Kloster, the RRC station chief there, ran the central station for the whole Wabash front, and also reported for the
Pueblo Post-Times
, so she was probably the busiest person on this frontier of civilization. But she had found time to make a quiche and a dried-apple pie, and most of both went into Nancy, along with an unexpected treat: a whole pot of real, fresh coffee. “I have plenty,” Carol May said. “And you look tired.”

“I love my Acro Sport with all my heart,” Nancy said, “built it all with my own hands after Daybreak, and it gets me out of militia drill and digging ditches, so I don't feel like I can complain about it. But it does feel like being shaken inside a kite with a running lawnmower engine in my lap. And with no hydraulics, I feel every bit of the wind I touch.” She drank deeply from her coffee cup. “This stuff puts heart into you; no wonder our first post-Daybreak plutocrat is Lisa Fanchion. I usually only get coffee when I pass through Pueblo, every couple of weeks.”

Carol May smiled. “I'm just glad to see it go to good use. Quattro keeps me supplied, every week when he passes through in the Gooney Express, and I use it to lure the local Temper and Provi spies in here; a little access to good coffee and they blab everything they know.”

Carol May's pencil played over the decoding grid as she copied numbers from the one-time pad, added, and wrote the string of new numbers into the green strip for the clear message. When she read it, she said, “I was going to suggest that you just hold off flying to Put-In-Bay and stay the night in my guest room, but now that I see what this is about, I guess not. You'll want to get moving while it's light.”

Shadows grew long below her as Nancy flew northwest across the Lost Quarter. No light shone from the abandoned farms and burned-out towns of what had been Indiana and Ohio. Here and there, she saw a wide trampled track in the late afternoon sunlight, rising smoke from campfires, or a still-standing bridge, and would lock the controls and make reconnaissance notes; those were much more important here, over hostile territory, than they had been in Kansas.

It was deep twilight when she passed over the lights of Catawba Point and the little settlements around Sandusky Bay. To her left, Lake Erie was still frozen over, with occasional patches of dark, open water. She circled wide to come into Put-In-Bay with a headwind; from a few hundred feet up, she could clearly see the burned sleds and huts on the ice where the islanders had intercepted a tribal attack across the frozen lake.

The runway was freshly shoveled and graveled, a good thing since she was landing in late twilight; when she killed the engine on the tiny Acro Sport, and saw the ground crew running up to tow it into the hangar, she realized her shoulder blades were sore from tension and her clothes under her flying leathers were soaked with sweat.
Just like running a marathon, it's the last long haul that kicks your ass.

Fred Rhodes, the head of Stone Lab, was an old friend, and he was waiting with the ground crew. With his very dark skin, dreads, chest-length beard, and multiple colorful sweaters and caps, he looked like a Rastafarian with a compulsively-knitting Dadaist grandmother. “Right this way,” he said. “You're here, you're alive, so by modern standards I guess you had a good flight.” They walked across the field to his horse-drawn sleigh. She accepted blankets and a towel-wrapped pot of hot mulled wine gratefully. “Drink it all,” he said, “I need to stay sober to do my calculations. I brought my one-time pad with me, and I want to confirm that this is what I think it is.”

As they clopped along and Nancy sank into the warmth inside and outside, she noticed that Fred wasn't bothering to look at the road, and a little bit of a tune from childhood came to mind—
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh.
It made her think of the smell of an overheated schoolroom, and she wondered if anywhere smelled like that anymore, or ever would again.

Rhodes finished his calculations as they were pulling up at the Edgewater Hotel. “You go check in, they're expecting you,” Rhodes said. “I'll give you an hour to freshen if you need it.”

“Make that half an hour,” she said, “so I can stagger to bed sooner.”

“Fair enough. You're having dinner with me, Rosie and Barb Rosenstern, and Scott and Ruth Niskala. It won't go long but we need to pull our intel together.” He grabbed her bag before she could. “Do you know what's in the message?”

“They kept the details from us in case we were forced down.” Exhausted, and relaxed by the wine, Nancy shuffled after him. “My notes are pretty clear, maybe I could give them to—”

“Did they tell you we're starting
now
?”

The lobby of the Edgewater, lit by soft yellow oil lamp light, abruptly sprang into harsh relief, and she felt herself stand straight, as if with a click. “I'll throw my bag into the room. Give me five minutes for the bathroom, then let's get your planning dinner started.”

ABOUT THE SAME TIME. FORT NORCROSS (ON THE OHIO RIVER, NEAR WARSAW, KENTUCKY). 6:30 PM EASTERN TIME. SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2026.

In the clear twilight, Bambi Castro could see the runway, a black slash of carefully cleared and graveled highway, while she was still several miles from Grayson's camp. The JNE seemed to like the chilly, wet, dense air, which made the engine run well and gave the wings a little extra lift.
Of course, that's till it freezes the fuel line and ices the wings, which it would be doing if it were any colder. Glad I'm landing now.

As the ground crew took over the plane, General Grayson rode up on a white stallion.
Well, now, that's putting your symbolism in order,
Bambi thought. Behind him, his wife, Jenny, rode a palomino that Bambi immediately pegged as
the horse every girl wanted when she was twelve
, and led a gray-and-white pinto, already saddled.

Feeling like she should salute—the general was in faultless-as-far-as-Bambi-could-tell uniform—she handed over the message. He accepted with that annoying, mocking smile of his. “Are you going to make me wait till it's processed through crypto, or can you just tell me if it's what I've been expecting?”

Security violation be damned,
Bambi thought,
give him every spare second we can
. “Yes, it's exactly what you're expecting.”

“In that case,” he said, “I'll turn you over to Jenny, who will entertain you for dinner; I've got a long night ahead of me. Thank you for bringing such good news.” He mounted again and rode off at a fast trot.

Bambi had met Jenny Whilmire Grayson a few times before, and tried hard not to detest her because she understood her so well: they had both been the beloved, brainy, spoiled-but-pushed, beautiful daughters of famous, spectacularly wealthy fathers.
But I used the head start Daddy gave me to become a Fed and go bust bad guys for thrills, and Jenny used those boobs and that hair for a shot at being the First Lady.

Meow, and stop that,
Bambi reminded herself sternly.

Jenny said, “I told Jeff that there was no way that Harrison Castro's daughter wouldn't be an expert horsewoman, so I just brought along Splash here, but I thought you'd have more recent practice on airplanes, so in case I was wrong I brought a horse that's more docile than most armchairs.”