The Last President by John Barnes Page B

restart civilization, except it doesn’t make sense to me that a bunch of save-Mother-Earth types would introduce invasive species.”
    Whorf shrugged. “They used giant H-bombs. Their moon gun is probably the highest tech still working in the solar system. And Daybreak itself was coordinated and maybe created on the Internet. They
aren’t
environmentalists, at least not as we used to know them, and if they’re back-to- nature it’s not necessarily nature’s idea of nature.”
    Reyes frowned, looking at her wristwatch. “Based on what we’ve seen all along the Florida coast, we need to assemble a report on the possibility that Daybreak is trying to re-shape the environment to make it more human-hostile. Unfortunately most of the supporting material belongs to Mister Pembrooke, who will need to keep it here for further research, so Whorf, you copy drawings, and Ihor, you copy text. We’ll need to be getting back aboard when the tide turns, in six hours.”
    â€œOn the other hand,” Pembrooke said, “your working conditions include a fresh boiled crab lunch and nearly unlimited lemonade—warm, though, I’m afraid.”
    â€œAnd I suddenly realized I really should stay and help,” Reyes said. “We all make sacrifices.”
    2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 9:00 AM MOUNTAIN TIME. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2026.
    When Heather carried the big, flat object, draped in cloth, into what had once been the judge’s chambers, there were three knots of people around the big table.
    At one corner, the scouts lounged in their Walmart/mountain-man mixture of deerskin shirts, heavy jeans, slouch hats, and knee-high moccasin boots. Larry and Debbie Mensche, father and daughter, sat on the table; Dan Samson leaned back in a chair with his feet almost on Larry, and Freddie Pranger and Roger Jackson draped themselves sideways over the arms of the chairs.
    Conveniently near the luxury of the coffee urn, Quattro, Bambi, Nancy Teirson, Sally Overhaus, and Bret Duquesne, the aviators, stood in leather jackets, scarves, coveralls, soft moccasins, and confident wide stances, with their leather helmets under their arms or dangling by straps from their hands. Bret was explaining something complex about the southern route to Mobile Bay.
    At the far end of the table from the scouts were Heather’s wizards: Ruth Odawa and her academic group of codebreakers, and analysts like Chris Manckiewicz and Jason Nemarec, and librarians and archivists like Leslie Antonowicz. In old, worn suit jackets, pullover shirts, and rumpled pants, they looked like a shabby faculty club that shopped at Salvation Army. They were mostly scribbling and muttering to each other, making lists and notes, starting sentences that other people finished. All of them were constantly checking everything with James, who sat at the center of the group.
The way Arnie Yang used to,
Heather thought, with a pang. James had grown to be a close friend and he was quite possibly better at the Chief of Intel job than Arnie had been—at least he wasn’t a traitor—but the lack of Arnie still felt like a missing limb.
How many times did I stop him from explaining something that we’re only realizing now we needed to know? How many clues to our situation was he holding in his head, how many insights were there because our best analyst had been all the way inside Daybreak, and how much irreplaceable knowledge went through the trap in the scaffold and out of our reach forever? We were always so crazy to do something, anything, that we wouldn’t listen to him. It’s a miracle he ever got to tell us anything besides “I told you so.”
    She had let Arnie himself talk her into hanging him, and though his reasoning had seemed right at the time, and emotionally it had made sense to execute the biggest traitor they’d ever caught, she and James had concluded later that it might have been Daybreak they had been