Daybreak Zero Read Online Free

the programming.
    If everything worked, a flash in Mare Fecunditatis on the moon sometime in the next four days should be followed, 73 to 85 hours later, by an EMP directly over Mota Elliptica. By then the complete loop of programming would have played at least eleven times.
    “How’s signal strength?” Arnie asked.
    Pahludin grinned. “Daybreakers in Panama are picking us up on their dental fillings. Our planet is hearing us, Arnie; if there was anyone to listen on Mars, they’d hear us too.” The men fist-bumped, and Arnie and Trish handed out chilled pre-Daybreak beers for a toast before the first-shift running crew took over.
    As they walked back to the house, Arnie decided that Trish Eliot was definitely walking close to him. Have to think what to do about that, but maybe not tonight. Kind of built funny, big butt and small top, a little frog-faced. Arnie knew that was unfair. It wasn’t Trish’s fault that his last girlfriend had been Allison Sok Banh, who pretty much defined “head-turner,” was far out of his league, and dumped him to become the First Lady in Olympia.
    But if it weren’t for Trish, I’d be so lonely here—
    The farmhouse had probably been the spiffiest thing in the county when the newspaper landing on its porch said GARFIELD ASSASSINATED. In the century and a half since then it had been a successful farmhouse, then a failed hotel, then a boarded-up derelict advertised as a “fixer-upper Victorian.” Probably no previous owner would recognize it now, with its steel shutters, faced with mirrors, covering every window; mirror-covered roof; silver-painted walls; and carefully rounded-off corners and edges. In the gray-blue moonlight it looked like a just-beginning-to-melt tin model of Auntie Em’s house.
    Trish had begun as his senior electrostatics engineer because she had a mostly completed doctorate in physics and a willingness to try, and he had a desperate need and a minuscule applicant pool. Her great gift for dealing with people—a gift Arnie felt he totally lacked—had proved more important than her adequate talent for explaining weird electric effects.
    The warmth of her body close beside him in the cool summer night was distracting. “Pahludin was a great choice for your radio chief,” she said, quietly. “One of the few of them that doesn’t resent you.”
    “Are the techies still saying a real scientist should be in charge?”
    “All except Odawa. She says a real mathematician should be.” Trish shrugged. “You know, before the next experiment, I wish you’d take three days or so, and spend some blackboard time, and just let the technical people know what you do and why you’re in charge. Half of them think it’s nepotism because you were Heather’s protégé, and the other half think it’s because Heather can’t tell one guy who works with numbers from another.”
    “What do you think?” Arnie asked.
    “I think you’re a pretty good boss. And a statistical semiotician is probably the closest thing Heather has to a cryptographer. I’m guessing you’re part of Heather trying to keep the PCG and TNG from going to war, by settling one of the big questions between them. The Provis want it all to be a big accident that’s over now except for the moon gun, so they can reconstruct after Daybreak. The Tempers want it to be Fu Manchu or Doctor No sitting on a mountain someplace giving orders so they can have a war with Daybreak. The Provis would be more comfortable in a reconstruction, and the Tempers would be more comfortable in a war. Like the guy with a hammer sees a nail, and the guy with the wrench sees a bolt.”
    “What do you see?”
    “That you’re the only guy who doesn’t know what it is and wants to find that out before he reaches into the toolbox.” Her hand slipped around his biceps, light as a toilet-paper noose, and he didn’t shake it off. “And I want to be on your side. Can you tell me what this experiment is about?”
    “Well, kind of.