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

his tongue. “Same spot but with one out of six shadow lines that was a little off. Looks like girls rule today.”
    Henry, who had been a math grad student, was nodding too. “On this scale a pencil line is about 667 meters wide. We can’t get any more precise than that with the instruments we have. We’ve got the moon gun
nailed
.” The hand-whittled frames and hand-ground lenses of his glasses in the moonlight looked like an outsized silver domino mask.
    â€œUnless when we combine all our observations,” Richard said, “it turns out we have it nailed to more than one place.”
    â€œTwo pitchers of beer and good meal say the CEP will be less than a click,” Henry said.
    â€œYou’re on.”
    â€œWell, now that you all have food and beer riding on it,” Highbotham said, “I
know
I can trust you with the calculations you’re about to get to.”
    The team bent to the job of combining all their observations into one best result with pencil, abacus, adding machine, and slide rule; the process would take till well past dawn.
    Highbotham scribbled Morse for a brief radiogram to alert the world that another EMP bomb was coming in, but her pencil stopped after two lines. She stared out to sea, listening hard.
Something’s wrong.
    She sat back.
So why now?
    The moon gun launched an EMP weapon to burst over any strong radio source. There were half a dozen hypotheses about how Daybreak had placed it there, but for the foreseeable future those questions were merely interesting. The more significant question was how much the operators, if any, of the moon gun were able to communicate with the leadership, if any, of Daybreak. Arnie Yang’s experiments, before he himself had been seduced by Daybreak, had demonstrated that to some extent it responded to the content of the messages as much as the strength of the signal, and that it had some ability to coordinate with the tribes on the ground, suggesting that the moon gun, like the tribes, had been ready to go sometime back before.
    As recently as last May, they had hoped to cobble together something out of existing nuclear gear and rocket engines at sea, and Christiansted and the other observatories had been working to locate the moon gun to within a kilometer, which they were estimating would be the necessary accuracy since they were only getting one shot.
    But nanospawn and biotes had beaten them to the punch; the last, crumbling nuclear carrier had barely made it home to ground on a Georgia beach two months ago, its inventory of rocket and jet fuel already turning to slimy, stinking soap and its computers and communications gear turning to crumbly white powder. Nothing remained of the old Navy and Air Force; probably nothing on Earth now could get as high as 20,000 feet above the ground, let alone to the moon.
    Highbotham drummed her fingers.
That’s why it doesn’t make any sense for us to bother about them. Not the issue.
The Temper government at Athens’s first exploration mission to Europe was going by
sailing ship
, for the love of god, barely a step up from Provi explorers and scientists who went out from Puget Sound as paying passengers on coffee clippers. Pueblo’s “aerial reconnaissance” was almost entirely mailplane pilots’ handwritten notes and maps.
    Heather’s RRC in Pueblo just archived Highbotham’s reports;
nothing they can do. Right now we’d have a hard time attacking the moon gun if it was in Vermont.
    But no one had told Highbotham’s team to stop, and they needed something to do besides feeding and educating the Academy kids, so for now, they carried on.
    But that was what was normal, now.
The new normal
, they’d have called it when she was a young commander on an old destroyer.
The tech of 1850 or 1900 is the new normal.
    But
normal
was the wrong place to look for an answer.
    This particular moon gun shot was utterly
abnormal
.
    Since May, the