Almost half of the Lookout Pass truck train, which hit a patch of failed IBIS on a downgrade, went off a cliff, and that was the most spectacular loss of its kind. But the worst was actually in western Kansas, near Hays, when over four hundred trucks cyber-linked in a train, including seven gasoline trucks, a truckload of liquid ammonia, and a double trailer of liquid oxygen, had picked up enough biotes to weaken most of the tires. When deer wandered onto the highway in front of the lead truck, the four hundred trucks were moving at almost one hundred miles per hour, and the IBIS station nearest the front truck relayed correct braking instructions as the first driver hit his brakes. The third truck, however, lost eleven tires and rolled; forty trucks piled into it, and a failed IBIS station didn’t allow for quick-enough braking for the next hundred or so trucks. An oxygen-gasoline mixture in the tangled wreckage ignited, setting off an explosion from the ammonia-gasoline mix behind it, and the flame front swept down the line and caught the rest of the gasoline trucks. Two more failed IBIS stations and uncountable burst tires completed the process; all but the last nine trucks were caught up in the vast wreck before anyone had time to react.
Power had already begun to fail in the small towns in that area, so there was nothing to hide the brilliant flames towering up into the sky. The best guess was that about 350 truckers died, along with about twenty State Troopers, firefighters from Hays and Goodland, and citizen volunteers trying to rescue people from the wreckage. It was never really possible to determine an exact number; in some areas near the center of the wreck, steel and aluminum ran and puddled onto the pavement.
A local reporter with video of the event, unable to access the Internet, tried to drive to Wichita with his video; at four A.M., walking away from his no-longer-running car on his rapidly decaying tennis shoes, he was run over by a headlightless van that was trying to get home before anything else stopped working.
Across the United States, the first incidents were scattered and few, and local people took care of it. The fear and anger over the Samuelson hijacking/ murder found an outlet in bringing in motorists stranded as their engines stopped running or their tires exploded; in making up lists of canned goods to buy the next day; in putting together groups to go relieve the hard-hit towns. The last night in which nearly every broadcast station was up, and nearly everyone had a working receiver, was a time of hope and of heart-warming stories of people pulling together; many of those still awake at midnight only needed to hear that the people in charge were on the job and that everyone would be pulling together to sleep soundly.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. MIDNIGHT. EST. OCTOBER 28/29.
As the head of Working Group Daybreak, Heather was on the list for a brief caucus with Peter Shaunsen, before or after the swearing in, so she and the others, plus Mark Garren, had to wait patiently in the small video studio in the St. Elizabeth’s complex. Everyone had assumed that when Pendano declared himself unfit, the Speaker of the House would become the Acting President, but Kowalski had firmly reminded them that his parents had not yet been U.S. citizens when he was born, and he’d been born in Gdansk. Kowalski was likeable, smart, knew his way around, and had been mayor of Knoxville and Tennessee Attorney General before running for the House; he’d have been fine. Instead, since the Succession Act of 1947 barred Acting Presidents who were not eligible to be President, and the Constitution barred naturalized foreign-born citizens from the presidency, there was nothing for it; the next one in line was Senate President Pro Tempore Shaunsen.
Because Vice President Samuelson had spent so much of his time managing the President’s agenda for his party in the Senate, it had not mattered that Peter Shaunsen was a querulous, almost-senile old party hack who had first arrived in Congress in the Ford Administration, entitled to his position by seniority but nothing else. Nobody wanted to quarrel with the mean old fool, so they let him stay in.
She knew it might be indiscreet, but Heather quietly asked, “You couldn’t do anything?”
Cam shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I did point out that he could decline and let Secretary of State Randolph take the job. He shook his finger at me and said I was very clever, but he wasn’t giving up the greatest opportunity of his career.”
“Couldn’t the Senate convene and elect another President Pro Tempore?”
“Already checked, and the 1947 Act specifically prohibits that. We’re not allowed to adjust the line of succession once it’s invoked—that’s to prevent a coup.” Cameron shook his head, sadly. “I admit I’m less than crazy about a guy who talks about opportunity—and not duty or responsibility—in the middle of a mess like this. But like it or not, he’s who we’ve got.”
“You’re the NCCC; aren’t you supposed to find us a good president? I mean, if he was eating imaginary bugs and insisted that he was actually Carmen Miranda—”
“Directive 51 says I’m to locate the qualified and competent person highest in the line of succession,” Cam said. “If Shaunsen were obviously mad, in a coma, or in jail in Beijing, or maybe even just hopelessly drunk all the time, it would be my job to pass over him and go to the first competent person in the line of succession. But the job of the NCCC is to hand over the White House to the correct President or Acting President, and then get out of the way, and ‘correct’ doesn’t mean ‘the one I’d prefer,’ as I understand it; it means ‘the first one in line who conceivably could do the job,’ and I think I have to define ‘conceivably’ in a pretty broad, liberal way. Anyway, the Cabinet will be here in a few minutes—I’ve got Secretary Weisbrod and Secretary Ferein up there to greet them and bring them down as they come in; the Chief Justice should be here any minute, she’s scaring the hell out of everyone by driving herself like she always does; and Shaunsen will be along as soon as the barber shaves him and he figures out what suit he’s wearing. It was harder to find a barber on such short notice than it was to get the Secretary of Defense or the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, by the way.”
“Must be a pretty fine shave. I didn’t even know that we swore in Acting Presidents. Isn’t the Vice President the Acting President whenever the President has surgery with anesthesia? Have they all been taking oaths all these years?”
“We’ve never done it before,” Cameron admitted. “But I had to promise it to Shaunsen so he’d come down here and go on the air.”
“Shit.”
“Unofficially, that’s my opinion too. But we’ve had an oath ready for decades, in case there was a need for swearing in. It’s the Presidential oath except that there’s a bit about handing the job back when he’s told to, and it has ‘temporary’ and ‘acting’ all through it. And it’s not all downside; sure, it’s stroking Shaunsen’s oversized ego, and that’s probably just going to make a bad situation worse, but the PR consultants do seem to think that it will help reassure Americans, now that they’ve been completely freaked by not hearing from their president all night.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” Heather said, “but this almost makes me wish Norcross was in office.”
Cam smirked, just a little. “After today, who knows? He might be. But this isn’t the way I wanted it to happen.”
“No—”
Chief Justice Lopez came in, her motorcycle helmet still under her arm, with her two “wingmen,” the Secret Service who rode with her. They discreetly steered her to Cam, who handed her a copy of the Acting President’s Oath of Office. She pulled out a pen and began marking changes.