BOOK THREE
Chapter 14
AFTERSHOCKS
Mohammed Ishmael’s condor glided gently on the thermals high above Constitution Avenue, following Crane and his motorcade as it tracked through the ghost town of Washington, DC, toward the Capitol building.
Much had changed during the past year—and each change brought surprises. When Li Cheun had told the President of the United States in February of ’25 there would be no quake on the Mississippi, he could not have guessed that he would be dead within thirty-six hours. And by his own hand.
The cataclysm on the Reelfoot had been so devastating in so many areas—and so much more so because of Mr. Li’s connivance—that within a day it had been obvious Liang Int America would show a loss for calendar 2025, a first in its North American history.
Upon seeing the financial projections and being a man of honor, Mr. Li had doused himself in Sterno, stepped within his beloved diorama, and set himself ablaze. Most considerate of Mr. Li, Mui Tsao thought. His death made it possible to carry on without having to change much of anything. Had Mr. Li gone into exile or been imprisoned, company rules would have compelled a change of every code.
Mr. Mui then survived a corporate inquisition by bringing forth all the records he had sent to the home office in Beijing concerning what he had termed Mr. Li’s “increasingly foolish” behavior. He also accused the dead man of “egotism and intractability” in his business dealings and vowed to be a more levelheaded, compromising manager who would put Liang America back in the black within a year. That last part was, of course, a lie and everyone knew it, but optimism is fundamental in business theory.
Mr. Mui immediately acquired his own Harpy, a young and ambitious corporate man named Tang. The new Harpy was pushing hard for Liang to compete with Yo-Yu in the mind chip business, an area in which he had great interest as he himself was a double-ported chippy.
Truth of the matter was, the Liang Int empire was slowly collapsing under its own weight and the Reelfoot quake, along with its associated eight hundred aftershocks, simply had accelerated the process.
In 2011, Liang had bought up all of America’s debts, all its chits. Basically, it owned the country, with most of the taxes collected going to interest payments on the huge debt owed to Liang, although a small amount of tax dollars had to be applied to various programs for the people. Liang Int not only owned and exploited America, but also didn’t want to maintain its investment. Since the company was the de facto government, however, it was left holding the bag when Reelfoot hit.
Reelfoot had been big enough to fell a giant. The main shock was an 8.5 on the scale, about as high as the scale measured. Memphis never got out from under the Mississippi, though the river continued to change course for three months after the quake. It was simply the memory of a city now, a place for divers to search for lost treasure.
Little Rock and Paducah were rendered all but uninhabitable. Nashville was severely damaged, as were Louisville and Evansville and Carbondale. In St. Louis, the river swamped the city under a huge wave, knocking the Arch onto the city itself and leveling buildings. In Kansas City, the Quay River left its banks and drowned more people than were directly affected by the quake. Lake Michigan also overflowed, and flood waters along with aftershocks in Chicago toppled the twin black Liang office towers on Dearborn.
Knoxville, Lexington, Frankfort, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, both Springfields (Missouri and Illinois), Jefferson City—all towns suffered Mercali VII or VIII damage.
Four dams in the TVA system collapsed, flooding Tennessee and cutting off hydroelectric power to a region of the continent that still used it. Levees in Mississippi and Louisiana crumbled.
The death toll reached nearly three million; a staggering ten million were left homeless. Damage ran into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Liang was a streamlined operation that matched production to natural resources. Hundreds of chemical plants, paper mills, auto factories, food processors and distributors, focus factories, and shield manufacturers went down with the quake, to say nothing of the retail outlets Liang owned to sell their products. People turned to their government for financial help, and Liang Int was put in the unenviable position of demanding restitution from itself.
They couldn’t afford it. Neither could their insurance carriers.
Corporate decided simply to try and get the flow of goods and services moving back through the area and rebuild slowly. To that end the company declared the quake region a total loss and walked away from it, leaving the Midwestern United States a poverty-and-disease-ridden dead zone of collapsed buildings and broken dreams. Revenue loss was staggering, public relations destroyed.
President Gideon had become the most hated man in America. He refused to step down because he needed the paycheck, and he was unable to put the blame on Mr. Li, where it rightfully belonged, because that would be admitting that Mr. Li had told him what to do in the first place. Gideon had become a prisoner in his own White House.
Brother Ishmael’s condor dropped to treetop level for close-ups of the motorcade as it pulled up to the Capitol. Its occupants hurried out of their vehicles and into the building.
The edited version of Jimmy Earl’s viddy, The Last Best Hope, had been the most watched show in the world in 2025, bringing him awards and fame and, parenthetically, turning Lewis Crane into the most beloved and recognizable man in the country.
Then there were the Zoners who had escaped the cataclysm in Memphis. They’d gone south and taken military control of a small town named Friars Point, Mississippi. Renamed New Cairo, the city had attracted fifty thousand refugees.
The Mississippi had always run right by the town. Now it was several miles away, but it had left behind the richest silt on the face of the planet. Quickly enough, the initial fifty thousand had been joined by a million others, disaffected southern Africks, escapees from the Zones, or any Muslim wanting a start on a new life. The original boundaries expanded, taking in more and more land, pushing out the previous landowners until finally Mr. Mui was forced to step in.
Mui regarded the spread of Islam as an inevitability. Besides that, he was not about to undertake the expense of a full-scale war to roust them from the land. What he did, in effect, was create another War Zone, larger than any other. Immense, in fact. He built a wall seventy feet high that completely surrounded New Cairo, though several miles from its front lines and not a direct threat. People were allowed to travel freely, unarmed, in and out of the walled area.
NOI set up immediate contacts with other Islamic States worldwide that supplied them with food and materials while they got on their feet. Soon after, Brother Newcombe went to Yo-Yu and struck a trade deal that gave NOI enough shields to cover the delta crops it would need to raise to allow New Cairo to become self-sufficient.
It worked. What also worked was violence, ever-escalating guerrilla and economic warfare with unrelenting confrontations with the FPF and threats or actual boycotts of Liang Int products. In the deepest inner sanctum of NOI leadership the split was more profound than ever. Martin Aziz and Dan Newcombe versus Mohammed Ishmael … neither side able to prove itself conclusively. Stalemate.
Sumi Chan sat on her lofty perch in the Senate chamber and presided over the bumptious gladhanders who called themselves congressmen. Currently they were “debating” whether or not to pass a nonbinding resolution that would, in a miracle of complex rhetoric and dazzling illogic, blame the Yo-Yu Syndicate for the tragedy at Reelfoot Rift.