The Last President by John Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

of luck in beating back our tribals, Galway was hardly scathed at all.
    â€œSo we’ve got everything to make a new world, except natural resources and sheer space. But New England is empty now, and has all we need, and more. Empty cities, forests, and fields. Fast steep rivers for hydropower, brisk winds to turn mills, and though the regrown forest is mostly dead at the moment, that makes it all the better fuel for the next fifty years. New England is stony but it fed itself before, for centuries, with horse-drawn farming. We’ve got the people, and Manbrookstat has the land—so your country’ll be seeing a great deal of us, and we’ll be seeing a great deal of your country.”
    Looking down at the floor, Whorf muttered, “So now the Commandant has all of New England to trade away.”
    Uhura said, “I’m kind of tired and feeling a little headachy, Pop, can we go home?”
    They emerged from the cloakroom to make their excuses to the two Special Assistants who had been looking for them, and after some fast talk from Rollings, and a couple of realistic dry heaves from Uhura, they were back out in the clean, icy chill of the winter night.
    Out of earshot of the Ritz-Carlton, Uhura “revived,” and she and Whorf chattered eagerly about his shipping out. She seemed to say, “I want to go too!” with every other breath.
    Passing the pier, looking up along
Discovery
’s masts deep into the field of stars, and then down to the open road of water reaching south toward the Atlantic, Rollings thought,
I wish we
all
were going
.
    3 HOURS LATER. CHRISTIANSTED NAVAL OBSERVATORY, ST. CROIX, US VIRGIN ISLANDS. ABOUT 2 AM ATLANTIC TIME. FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2026.
    Tarantina Highbotham was enjoying her crab cake sandwich, watching waves roll in, slow, low, and dark, their crests silvered by the light of the waning gibbous moon that stood high in the sky.
    Peggy barked, “Got it!” and Abby crowed, “Yes! Oh, yes!”
    Highbotham turned; her five observers were sliding from their telescope stools to the desks beside them, opening candle lanterns shielded in red glass. Behind the scribbling, hunched silhouettes of the observers, the parapet wall looked like a grainy, dull black-and-white photograph. Their faces and hands, close to the lanterns, glowed vivid red, like ghosts half-emerging into the living world. The sea was so quiet that Highbotham could hear pencils scratching.
    Richard was chief recorder tonight. “Times are 2:08:09, 2:08:12, 2:08:08, and 2:08:05, with an outlier at 2:08:17. How’d everyone do on location?” He had been a pudgy old drunken beach bum, retired early from an architecture practice. Nowadays muscles moved under Richard’s loose baggy skin, and he spoke crisply and precisely.
    Highbotham reminded herself not to think
he’s better off because of Daybreak
. According to the Jamesgrams from Pueblo, that was an entry path for the mind to catch Daybreak.
    â€œI’ve
got
’em,” Peggy said. Lit with red from below, and framed by her too-dark homemade lipstick, her maniacal grin beneath her charcoal-darkened eyelids gave her the look of Mrs. Joker.
    Highbotham and Richard hurried to look. Peggy proudly showed them her pencil lines on her painstakingly hand-copied map of the moon. “I saw the flash itself directly, first time Fecunditatis has been dark on a flash in
months
. And I marked six good shadows. And look at that.” Six pencil lines from her shadow marks converged on her marked flash site. “A closure error smaller than the thickness of the pencil line.”
    â€œSame here, Peggy, with five shadow lines, and it looks like we agree.” Abby, a tall young woman, had been an alt-tech engineer before Daybreak. Highbotham privately worried that in a fight, Abby’s waist-length ash-blonde ponytail might get her shot for a Daybreaker.
    Gilead, slim, dark, at one time a Miami stock analyst, clicked