“So…” Jason said, “what’s the news?”
“They want former Daybreakers to come to Pueblo and be studied. It says ‘No one will be investigated, arrested, or punished.’ They’re looking for people who have turned against Daybreak and would like to help undo it.”
“And that’s us. If we want to do it.”
“Yeah.”
“How do you feel?”
“I love life here,” Beth said. “I got friends, we got our own comfy place. And my wrist ain’t all the way healed yet, and it’s a long, hard, dangerous walk, and… but we said it, Jason, we said it ourselves, we said it all the time all winter, we said we wanted to undo Daybreak, it was all a big mistake.”
He sighed. “Yeah. Well, for tonight it’s hot fresh pizza and a hot bath.”
“And a hot schoolteacher.”
“You see what a lucky bastard I am. But, yeah, look how warm and comfortable we are. Life seems, I don’t know, more meaningful, I mean, the work we do really matters to people we care about, and I kind of find myself thinking that maybe Daybreak was a good idea after all. Except for everyone we killed, of course. And all the sadness and physical misery and people dying too young.”
“I can’t even tell if you’re being sarcastic.”
“Me either. If the oven’s hot enough, let’s put the pizza in, and open another beer. We’re not going to decide tonight.”
PART 4
ONE MONTH AND TWO DAYS
THE CRUELEST MONTH
April has always been the month of danger in the Northern Hemisphere; if you think of war, if you brood upon it all winter, if you are longing and thirsting to fight, then in April the ground is just dry enough to move upon, there has been just enough good weather to drill the troops, the danger of sudden winter storms is low enough, the need for men for the spring plowing and planting has mostly passed.
In more recent centuries, late summer became dangerous, because armies moved so swiftly that there was the hope to finish the fighting just as the snow fell and “send the boys home for Christmas.”
But this year, almost nothing moved any faster than it had in 1850, and as with so many things, the rhythm of war fever fell back into its more ancient pattern.
From Pueblo, Heather and her team followed the bad news that poured in from everywhere.
On April 1st, on the old Great Northern Line, a steam train dispatched by the Olympia government was intercepted on the long trestle east of Minot by pro-Athens partisans who were at least partly led by Air Force officers from the base. The train carried 250 newly-sworn-in Federal officials to be the liaison with the New State of Superior, which was supposed to combine the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan until they could resume their independent existences. The partisans’ makeshift barricade derailed and destroyed one precious steam locomotive, and in the brief confused melee after the wreck, about forty of the Olympian clerks and administrators were killed. Some witnesses reported injured men and women being shot where they were pinned in the wreckage. Three Olympians who had returned fire during the brief fighting were hanged from the trestle. The rest were imprisoned on the former air base.
Simultaneously, in Green Bay, the capital of Superior, the Olympian temporary government was attacked by an armed mob which purported to be defending the traditional rights of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Quick action by a company of Wisconsin Guard suppressed the mob. Among those captured were ten soldiers from Fort Bragg. Treated as soldiers out of uniform on a sabotage mission, they were sentenced to death the next day, but the governor of Superior suspended their sentences.
On April 4th, Alpha/2 of the President’s Own Rangers arrested the pro-Athens commanding officer and many of his officers at Mountain Home AFB, taking the survivors back to Olympia for a possible prisoner exchange—or a trial if necessary. The remaining personnel on the base were given a choice of “nine minutes to swear loyalty to Olympia, or ninety days to walk to Utah.”
On April 12th, forces from Fort Bragg, having come upstream from Cairo, arrived in St. Louis and intervened in favor of the white-supremacist army to take control of St. Louis, thus severing the southern rail link between Olympia and the New State of Wabash. Simultaneously, the Ranger Regiment (Reconstituted) from Fort Stewart took control of the three key independent cities in the mountains, which had refused to align with either national government: Chattanooga, Lexington, and Louisville.
The white-supremacist triumph in St. Louis was short-lived; once the city was firmly in Athenian hands, the white leadership was put on a sealed train and sent to firmly Olympian Cedar Rapids. They were told to have all the fun they wanted as long as they never came back; the mayor of Cedar Rapids jailed them, saying, “We’ll think of a charge for it later.”
On April 13th, in Lincoln, Nebraska, an Olympian postmaster ordered the sorting room to pull mail addressed to all of the states that had declared for Athens out of the mailbags and leave it outside on the loading dock; on his own authority he imprisoned two postal workers who refused to comply.
On April 14th, Second Battalion, Third Infantry, a mechanized unit converted to horse cavalry, was dropped off by a fast steam train in Berthold, North Dakota, just after sunset. At four in the morning they hit the compound on the former Minot AFB where the Olympian officials were held, rescuing all the prisoners, and leaving seven guards dead. On their way out, they torched two workshops and four experimental planes under construction.
On the docks in Morgan City, Louisana, in early March, Navy officers loyal to Athens had attempted to commandeer SS Polyxena, a schooner from Monterey that had arrived carrying forty tons of hand-canned orange pulp and fifteen tons of beets. The crew fought them, destroying the Navy’s dinghy and killing a lieutenant, and escaped with its cargo; the bank in Morgan City canceled payment. In Jamaica the citrus and beets were bartered for marijuana, which was bartered in Caracas for beef jerky; Polyxena headed south, bound eventually around the Horn. On April 16th, the Athenian government issued a warrant for Polyxena’s crew for piracy and barratry; the Olympian government declared Polyxena to be under its protection.
On April 17th, Radio Perth (Australia) was knocked off the air by an EMP; massive fusing systems in that city limited the damage, and fire crews were ready for the many small fires that sprang up around unused water pipes, electric cables, guardrails, and wire fences.
On April 19th, Heather found herself facing two very unhappy factions of workers from the EMP Attraction Project. After some jockeying and arguing, she identified the three political agents from Olympia and the two from Athens and put them onto the next available trains under guard. With each party, she sent a letter.
While the letters were on their way, on April 22nd, Cameron sent a brief, coded radio message to the remaining carrier groups in the Pacific, ordering them to be prepared to seize Olympia; the Pueblo code room, which was now reading both sides’ codes, decrypted it on the 24th. Heather hoped her letter might get to Cam within a day or two more.
She could tell that Olympia was reading Athens’s code, also, because on the 23rd, according to a message which reached Heather through the Reno pony express on the 25th, Graham Weisbrod authorized equipping four partially rebuilt planes, and twenty small boats with their experimental diesel outboards, to carry two hundred pounds each of nanoswarm crystals packed in glass bottles. They sent a copy of the order and photographs of the machinery being used to make nanoswarm—just a simple make-and-break electric coil, not unlike an old-fashioned doorbell, powered by a windmill generator—to Cameron Nguyen-Peters, via biplane to the neutral city of Hannibal, Missouri, where a fast train picked it up for delivery the next day.