The Last President (21 page)

“Anyway, if things are the way we left'em, then we'll not only have Democrats, that other party is organizing there too, we're gonna elect a state constitutional convention in November, and we're hoping to apply for admission as a New State in the Restored Republic, if it lets there be any more New States. Last I knew most people seemed to want to come in as the state of Pelissippi, after the river, but there's some that want to call ourselves Appalachia or Clinch River, after the same river. That's gonna be on the ballot this fall, too. So we thought we'd just ask to have two votes, 'cause we think we can get at least enough turnout to justify that, come November.”

Perkins grinned. “Well, we're awful glad to see you, even if it's complicated. Maybe
because
it's complicated. Where should we put your two votes down, Probably-Pelissippi?”

“Two more for Graham Weisbrod. We were instructed to just help the front-runner 'cause the party needed a leader more than anything.”

“Well, then, two more for Weisbrod, and give it up for another fine New State, people!”

In the midst of the cheering, Norm McIntyre muttered, “Did you ever think people would be excited to find out that part of the country was still there?”

Weisbrod shrugged. “Review the national anthem, Norm. Sometimes still being there is the best news there is.”

When Perkins got them quiet again, Wyoming, anticlimactically, cast its two votes for Phat.

Then the panel of judges began to scribble and add; everyone was still relearning hand arithmetic.

They had had to run through the whole roll call because they had not known exactly how many would show up until the convention started that morning. Besides the last-minute appearance by Pelissippi, and the surprise fissions of Arizona and Oklahoma (which hadn't really been expected to attend at all, but had shown up as West Oklahoma plus the Allied First Nations), both the Utah and Texas delegations had arrived within the last twenty-four hours and then had to wait for radiogram instructions about whether to participate or not (both had been told to go ahead). Votes were assigned to each delegation according to the closest guess that could be managed about the number of voters likely to turn out in November, one convention vote per hundred thousand probable voters, and some delegations had been assigned their number of votes only that morning.

The scribbling went on. It was clearly going to take a while to check and reconfirm everything.

Allie noticed Cassie Cartland working at something. “Hunh. Something I want to check out,” she said, but since Graham was locked in conversation with McIntyre, she just slipped quietly down to the press table.

Cassie was working a soroban abacus, sliding beads, scribbling on a pad, sliding beads, scribbling, underlining a result just as Allie approached and asked, “What's it look like?”

“Just rechecked,” Cassie said. “Surely everyone knew it was going to be Graham; he was a majority with every delegation except Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Wabash, and Wyoming. Officially Nevada put him over, if you count those Arizona counties that voted with Nevada.”

“Actually I was more interested in the abacus.”

“Found a pamphlet about it, browsing through the GPO in Pueblo, last year while I was waiting for Chris to make it back from the Mensche Expedition. Knocked one together to have something to do, and found out how fast and accurate they are.”

“My uncles and father used to use those.”

“Bet I'm not as fast as they were.”

“With fifty years of practice like they had, maybe you will be. I was just thinking they might be a good thing in the schools.”

Cassie nodded. “Or we could just put the pamphlet out there. Lots of little businesses and farmers are either too old or don't have time for school. I was thinking we might run a series about it in the
Post-Times
.”

“About the abacus?”

“Good idea too, but I meant about everyone missing some years of school. We need to figure out some way to get a lot of skills and information out to a lot of people, and you're not going to get people who've been taking care of themselves in this mess to sit down at desks and fill out forms again. Eventually, maybe, but not—here we—”

She probably said
here we go
but the
go
had been swallowed in an immense hoot-to-scream of feedback, as Perkins tried to get the microphone to behave. The young tech types had rigged up a very simple amplifier using jelly-jar vacuum tubes and a treadwheel-powered dynamo; their best guess was that by constantly wiping it with a lye wash they could keep it running long enough for Graham's acceptance speech, if he didn't talk too long. It had bored Allie to death but the young nerds had been so proud of themselves that she had made herself pay warm attention to them.

As one of the young technicians walked inside the treadwheel; the other three crouched around the amp, wiping diligently, and the one in the treadmill signaled Perkins to try again. He announced that Graham Weisbrod was the nominee and, “After our victory, my friends, the first President of the Restored United States! Ladies and gentlemen, Graham Weisbrod!”

In a smaller hall the applause would have been thunderous; it was swallowed up in the dark here.

Graham stepped up to the condenser mike and said, “My friends,” triggering another squeal and roar of feedback. The crew fiddled frantically, then flashed him a thumbs-up.

He began again. “My friends and supporters in this room, my opponents and detractors all over the world, my fellow Americans however you feel about me, we're gathered here today to take a long step toward restoring our republic. Of course it is difficult for many of you who have struggled and fought so long for the Provisional Constitutional Government to admit that our struggle is now over; we never attained the full agreement of all citizens that the PCG was the legitimate continuation of the government founded by the Constitution of 1789. But since we did not, a new struggle begins tonight: to establish a new government, which will take office in January 2027, under the same Constitution that was in force until December 5, 2024.

“We have pledged ourselves to work and build for the Restored Republic, beginning with the elections in November. It is fitting enough; it is our 250th anniversary as a nation, this year. Yesterday was the 251st anniversary of the first fighting at Lexington and Concord. In addition to the states that chose to align with the PCG, we have the firm and honest commitments in hand of the Temporary National Government in Athens, and of the sixteen states who have chosen to report to them, to walk with us every step of the way; we have the commitment of the Duchy of California, and we seek to bring in other states such as Manbrookstat and the Virgin Islands. We will refuse or coerce no one, block nothing, accept every territory where people choose to be Americans, sacrifice whatever must be sacrificed except our Constitution and our democratic rights, and we will forge one nation again!”

The crowd did their best to fill the hall with applause.

“More than anything,” he said, leaning into the microphone to speak softly, “we need a Restored Republic to which everyone can be loyal, not one that drives away any large part of the population. We need to embrace the idea again that we are one nation.

“And we are going to.

“We held together, in that first 250 years, through good times and bad, through a bloody civil war, through appalling crimes that shocked the world and soaring triumphs that awed it, and through a million things the Framers and Founders could not have imagined, in a great measure because of our commitment to maintain the Constitution, and because so often it called us back to ourselves when we were in danger of losing ourselves.

“So I give my word, to our rival government in Athens, to all the governors, to the Duke and Duchess of California, and to everyone and to almighty God Himself, that we will make this new republic, and make it strong and seat it firmly.

“So let us go forward. As for the Provisional Constitutional Government, let us have faith that our good decisions will be ratified, our bad ones nullified, and our choices in the few months that remain will be as wise as we can make them. I thank you.”

The band wheezed to life with “America the Beautiful,” and the crowd cheered as wildly as they could manage, a few hundred people in a space designed for tens of thousands.
At least,
Allie thought,
they are drowning out that band.

Graham thanked them, and because daylight would not last much longer, dismissed them, urging them to be careful and safe going back to wherever they were staying. At least a third of them, Allie knew, were sleeping on floors or cots here in the building.

On their way out Cassie intercepted them. “I'm supposed to tell you that Chris Manckiewicz particularly wants me to extend his apologies; he's covering the war in the Ohio Valley right now, I guess because old guys get to go to everything really cool and young ladies are stuck with politics.”

Graham snorted. “You do realize that you are the main correspondent for the most important news source in the country at a national political convention? And that your predecessors would have been amazed that a girl your age could do such a job?”

“My predecessors obviously were too easily amazed,” Cassie said.

Allie liked that answer, but
nonetheless I'm still insulted that they decided we were second most important next to General Jeffrey Grayson's Traveling Massacre, Part Two.

2 DAYS LATER. PUEBLO. 4:30 PM MOUNTAIN TIME. THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 2026.

“Even back before,” James Hendrix said, “spring snowstorms weren't unusual around here.” Outside, stinging sleet sprayed across the old corn snow and mud patches of James's yard. “Look at that, it's still a couple hours till sunset and it's dark enough for lanterns.”

Beside him, Leslie also stared out at the tumbling, billowing gloom, then hefted the jug. “Another round all around? Still an hour and a half till classes start.”

“Sure,” James said. “It'll lift the mood, or deepen it.”

“Sticking to water,” Heather said.

“We have that too.” Leslie filled their glasses and Phat's. “To being warm and dry, and having something to think about, and sharing it with others.” She sat, and Wonder scrabbled around to lay his head in her lap. “Seriously, General Phat, you'll be fine. I'm no kind of a teacher, and James is a dusty old pedant, but the adult students keep coming back because it's a frontier town with too much work to do. Learning stuff is a chance to lift up their heads and feel human now and then. And you've got a great subject. I mean, ancient history, right? They can just listen and read, nobody's life is hanging on whether they remember anything, but they'll feel like today they were more than muscles turning wheels.”

Heather looked up from playing with Leo on the floor. “Leslie's right. Everyone is tired after a full day, they've mostly just come from mess hall and bath shift. So their bodies are exhausted but comfortable, and their brains are starved.”

Phat yawned. “I still feel like, how is this relevant? An old man's favorite stories about Greeks—”

“Who were cold and hungry and in danger a lot, and trying not to let barbarians smash everything, and making time to enjoy life anyway,” James said. “How is that not relevant? And besides, people who work too hard and long don't want to hear more about work, or that life is futile. They want some heroic adventure.”

Leslie smiled dreamily. “In books, you mean. That hard work they're escaping from is how we're coping with being in deep shit, a.k.a.
adventure
, and not giving up, a.k.a. being
heroic
.”

“Touché, Leslie.” Phat shook his head, smiling. “In Peloponnesian War Athens, I'd've wished I could just stay home, read Homer, and ignore Alcibiades, who was as big a character as anyone in the
Iliad
. Now that we
have
a larger-than-life but despicable hero striding around the stage—”

James said, “I don't really know Grayson well enough to despise him—”

“I despise him enough for all of us, and I notice you had no trouble figuring out who I meant.”

“But you still think he's a larger-than-life hero?”

“Oh, yeah. That's the problem, and why he scares me.”

Heather looked up, frowning. “I thought I was following your chain of thought till right now. You're
worried
about him being heroic?”

“Yeah.” Phat's tone seemed like an extension of the icy wet spray, now turning twilight gray, outside James's window. “Despicable, we can deal with. Plenty of our allies are pretty bad human beings but we just use'em and watch'em, same as they do with us. But look at Grayson. Look how he's reorganized his force from a mission to clear two big river valleys to a totally different mission, invading enemy territory and forcing a decisive battle. And he did that in less than eight weeks. That's on par with Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon, maybe.” His gaze was lost in the storm intensifying in the dimming light. “He's been brilliant. People may not have my feel for the technical aspects, but they sense that brilliance.

“When they look at that, they'll think he damned well deserves to be president, and you know, they won't be completely wrong. In any fair election, he's very likely to win. We're impaled on a classic fork—something else Caesar would have recognized. If Grayson hadn't won so far, right now Daybreakers would be cutting the country into vulnerable enclaves full of refugees, and we'd have lost most of our least-damaged areas; non-tribal society might not have lasted another five years.

“Now, maybe, thanks to the brutal mauling he gave the Daybreakers in the Ohio Valley, the main danger is past, and he can close the deal by midsummer, get us ready to retake the Lost Quarter the year after, turn all the curves on all those social-welfare graphs back upward.

“But here's the fork: we had to back him to the hilt and make sure he won, because the stakes were pretty much whether or not there would be civilization on this continent. We
still
have to; he broke three tribal hordes but the other eight are only turned back, not gone yet. So he's now our greatest visible hope, and a proven winner. If he confirms that by winning the Wabash campaign—and there is every likelihood he will—then no one, no one,
no one
is going to beat him in the election. You better believe that fork was deliberate.

“And it gets worse. My guess is that Grayson'll be a big success as president, at least if ‘big success' is defined as ‘getting what he tries to get.' At the end of his first term we'll have an established church, a military that totally ignores the courts and Congress, a political police enforcing blasphemy laws, a licensed press—and clean streets, trains that run on time, and shiny schools full of very polite children. If he loses, we're screwed, but if he wins, we're
really
screwed.”

4 HOURS LATER. ANEGADA (FORMERLY ONE OF THE BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS). 3:15 AM ATLANTIC TIME. FRIDAY, APRIL 24, 2026.

“What we got to worry about, that coral heads all round inside the reef,” Bartholomew said to Captain Highbotham. “You sure you rather not waitin' on sunrise?”

“No, I'm
not
sure,” she said, “but I'm guessing they think we can't do this in the dark, so dark will help our attack more than it will help their defense.”

Anegada had been a pirate base in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and now it was one again. Highbotham and the St. Croix militia had known the pirate base must be within a hundred miles or so, but the islanders of 2026 had been up against the same problems as those of 1726: once a ship was over the horizon, it could turn to head anywhere.

Besides, for the past eighteen months, the islanders had not had time to chase pirates. Fiberglass and plastic hulls, plus nylon fishing nets, lines, and sails, had turned fuzzy and blue and fallen apart. Magnetos, motors, and antennas had buried themselves in dense white spikes and feathers of metal salts, their spoiled rubber belts and hoses falling off beside them, leaving no way to pump the fuel that had suddenly become foul cheese. Even plywood had broken apart as the glue between the layers deteriorated, and asphalt roads had crumbled as some biotes acquired a taste for bitumen.

People who had spent years demonstrating traditional crafts for tourists back before, but had never had to really live by them, taught as much as they knew to everyone else, and eventually enough skills and knowledge had made it through the harsh sieve, but it had been a hungry time.

NSP-8, along with the loan of Bret Duquesne as pilot/mechanic until he could train enough local crew, and an adequate stock of biodiesel obtained by bartering three tons of scrap metal to an Argentine clipper, had enabled them to start scouting the neighborhood by air—slowly, because NSP-8 cruised at fifty miles per hour, topped out at twelve thousand feet, and could stay aloft for about four hours.

Ten days ago, flying over Anegada at “high altitude” (which would have been low altitude two years ago), Duquesne had spotted the characteristic semicircular outdoor theatre that Daybreaker tribes always built to perform
The Play of Daybreak
, and the burned pile of cars and trucks that had probably been part of an early Daybreak celebration. The next day, with a spyglass from the observer seat, as Duquesne ducked in and out of clouds with the sun at their back, Henry had positively identified three known pirate vessels, confirmed a large tent city around the burned-out tourist area, and found no visible fishing boats.

Strangely, too, a small general cargo ship was grounded on the beach, displaying a sun-faded red cross on its side, like a hospital or aid ship. No other island had been visited by any sort of aid ship, and why would one go to an isolated, barely populated island surrounded by complicated coral reefs, when dozens of equally desperate populations could have been reached more easily?

Just one more mystery to be resolved, along with where the original couple of hundred Anegadans were: Enslaved? Murdered? Joined the pirates?

The possibility of innocent prisoners or hostages, and the impossibility of bombing every important target in less than about fifteen sorties that might take a full week, had forced Highbotham to decide for an invasion that they had to hope would be a surprise.
Because if they get as much warning as we got against them a few months ago, they'll kick our ass at least as bad as we kicked theirs.

The sea was so calm, and the breeze so light, that they furled sails and deployed long sweeps early. For half an hour, they rowed as swiftly as could be kept silent; then they slowed to use the sounding line. In the bow of each boat, two big guys with poles stood by to keep them off the coral heads, whispering depths back to the boat captains at the helms. At Highbotham's soft drum signals, two boats peeled off and headed for the two pirate ships moored outside the reef.

An hour and a half passed as they worked their way through the reefs. Rowers changed places with resting fighters at twenty-minute intervals; most of the time the rowing was no louder than the breathing. The whispered depths and course corrections were as soft in the ear as a mother rabbit chuckling to the bunnies, but to Highbotham they seemed like screams; her brief backward flashes from a single, shielded candle lantern in the stern seemed like flashbulbs. But nothing moved on the island, and they drew nearer.

The dark line of Anegada along the horizon thickened and expanded into detail until the exposed girders of the never-to-be-finished hotel cut into the stars and the beached cargo ship bulged as a big, dark wedge against the white sand.

Still no alarm.

Perhaps the pirates hadn't set a watch; maybe they were gone. Henry had estimated tent space for more than a thousand of them. Now Highbotham focused on the two pirate ships moored offshore.

On the nearer ship there were bright orange flashes, the dirty flames of big-bored black-powder pistols. An instant later flames roared up along the mainmast of the more distant ship, and now they heard gunfire. On both vessels, fire burst out in a dozen places. Faintly, distantly they heard metal clash on metal, then screaming and wailing.

Highbotham blew her whistle, shatteringly loud after such long anxious silence. Rested rowers moved into seats for the last sprint to the beach. Gunners raced forward to the bow chasers and rocket arrays.

It was almost a relief when they heard shouting and saw torches striking up. Marksmen in the bow of Highbotham's lead boat brought down two of the torch holders.

Cries erupted all over the enemy camp. Shots flashed and cracked from Highbotham's boats as targets silhouetted themselves. As the bottom of her boat shushed softly up the sand of the beach, a mob of pirates, hastily armed and not at all organized, was running down to meet them.

“Bow chaser, fire,” Highbotham barked, the final r cut off by the roar of the small cannon. The puff of blue-gray smoke swirled and cleared to reveal that their homemade chainshot had mowed a great swath of dead and the wounded through the howling mob.

Highbotham drew her pistols and held them over her head. “Follow me, stick together, stay awake. Rockets, launch at will, then arm up and catch up with us.”

She bounded over the side, pistols still held high in the air, and the blood-warm water came only to her lower ribs. Good, she had some firepower; she kicked forward, planted her feet with the water around her waist, and waded forward.

A few paces onto the beach, a woman came at her, swinging a hatchet wildly. She fired twice from her right pistol and hatchet woman fell, screeching and clutching her guts. Highbotham strode up the beach, her crew around her, those whose pistols had stayed dry during the landing working quickly, using up the four shots in the good hand pistol, switching over the one in the off hand, emptying it too, just like in drill, leaving any wounded behind them for the rest of the crew's machetes and sharpened spades.

Another hatchet woman; were they some kind of cult? Wailing, filthy hair flopping around her, hatchet whirling over her head, the pirate rushed past one of the few remaining pistol shots, and straight at Highbotham.

Highbotham stepped back, pressed the rising hatchet hand back down with the flat of her cutlass, caught the wrist with her free hand, and struck up the arm into the neck in a hard backhand, dragging the blade out and feeling it rasp on the skull and spine. The woman fell dead at her feet.

“Stay close!” Her little force had made its way to the top of the beach already, and they were on the brink of the camp itself.

“Firebombs out!” She untied her own from the back of her belt. She was bellowing over deafening screaming, wailing, gunfire, drums, and horns; when had that started?

Her party rushed forward. Rockets had set many enemy tents and shelters on fire, and Highbotham's crew ran between the blazes, fighting the few pirates who tried to stand against them, igniting any structure not already burning, then standing outside it to capture or slay whatever ran out.

Highbotham paused; her glass jar of paper cartridges was still sealed, so with an old piece of toweling she swabbed out the chambers of her Newberry revolvers and reloaded them. Around her, the night was lit with the orange glow of black powder, the earthy roar of pistols, and the higher, flatter snaps of rifle fire.