The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy

by Mark D. Diehl

  “Thirty degrees to port,” NJt994 said. “Get into that trough between the hills.”

  “Thirty degrees to port,” IAi503 said. The Agnes lurched accordingly.

  “Ready the grid guns,” NJt994 said. “Hail them and make sure they know we consider this action of following us to be extremely hostile.”’

  547 ran the emergency hailing programs standard to all organizations, used mostly between Unnamed of different companies when duty forced them into contact. There was no response.

  “Stay in the valley between the hills as best you can,” NJt994 said.

  “The valley, yes, sir.”

  With the Agnes squeezed in between the small hills, 547 could no longer see the Amelix craft. He withdrew the camera from underneath and raised it as high as possible, but the action afforded him no view. “No sign of Amelix but they have to be very close now,” he said.

  547 scanned from behind, up along the starboard side, to front, and back again, in case Amelix was trying to head them off. A foot appeared behind them, wrapping around the hill they had just passed. Another appeared across from it, and the front of the Amelix craft came into view.

  “Directly behind us!” 547 said. “Sensors say it will be upon us in twenty-two seconds! It has what appear to be windows or segmented sensory equipment in shapes resembling eyes at the front, like the compound eyes of insects. Still no answer from our repeated hailing attempts. Ten seconds. Five. Taking over our space now.”

  The structure echoed with an ear-splitting grinding tear of metal being crushed and bent.

  “Grid guns firing, sir”

  The Agnes vibrated. The grid guns had locked on the closest part of the breaching target, which in this case was the massive set of jaws. The shots bounced off harmlessly.

  “It just seized our rear starboard leg!” 547 said. “I have visual.”

  “Switching 547’s visual to the main screen,” NJt994 said. “Did the leg autoseal?”

  “Yessir,” someone said. “Sealed and foamed. The leg does not appear to be functional or fixable, sir.”

  547 adjusted the camera to show the jaws and the crumpled leg from a better angle, and then panned back along the hillside. Without any scale to indicate that the combatants were the size of office buildings, the scene looked like it could have come from an old nature show about wild, living beetles. The Amelix craft yanked backward and the Agnes lurched sideways.

  “The grid guns were ineffective, sir.”

  “Take manual control and aim for those eye things,” NJt994 said.

  547 positioned the camera near the point where the jaw contacted the leg, angling it upward to take in the maximum view of the eye. The shots impacted, leaving abrasions and scars on the transparent material, but did not breach it.

  The Amelix beetle’s jaws let go. It stepped slightly backward and turned, scuttling away over a hill.

  IV

  18

  White dining area aboard the Agnes

  “Tell these guys, 547,” 636 said. He had brought 547 over to another table of Whites from where they’d been sitting. “Tell them what you told me.”

  Back in his student days at McGuillian, before he’d become White or even donned Unnamed black, being called upon this way would have produced anxiety and uncertainty. Most such responses had now been completely trained out of him, and any residual feelings on the matter were successfully tweaked away by the glasses. Now anything worth saying was worth telling all of his kind.

  “I have a book,” 547 said. “Old. Real paper. Written by hand, by an Amelix employee. If you have ever doubted the evil that is our most hated enemy, it will restore your faith. I made an electronic copy and added notes to guide anyone reading it.”

  “You’ll want to follow the link, brothers and sisters,” 636 said. “It shows how wicked and dangerous Amelix has always been. The notes 547 made bring it all into focus and show how the culture there ended up destroying the world.”

  636 began looking around the table, locking eyes with the others to share the link.

  Dr. Chelsea’s lab aboard the Amelix beetle

  It was one collective mind that had claimed Chelsea. Any individual rat was like a single cell in a massive brain, yet she always thought of them as a plurality, as the Rat Gods. It seemed gentler to have been captured by multiple little animals than by the single, worldwide consciousness that was actually consuming the rats and humans in similar ways.

  In the weeks since the Rat Gods had taken control, they had carefully and relentlessly monitored Chelsea’s thoughts and movements, administering rewards or punishments to hone her behavior. She had quickly learned to direct her thinking to please them. It worked in much the same way as the corporate reconditioning process, though in this case there was no filter inside her head, no way to excuse her own actions and make peace with them. The rats dealt with any errant idea swiftly and mercilessly.

  The Thrall’s pleasure was powerful enough to completely wash away the waves of terror and suffocating claustrophobia with which the Amelix Medical Doctor had seen fit to punish Chelsea, but only for brief periods of time. Now those dreadful feelings were welling up again, threatening to explode into her psyche and cripple her. Her mind swam with desperate thoughts which she fought to suppress, but one idea managed to penetrate her cerebral prophylactic:

  I have enough scientific skill to fix this! I could fix all kinds of issues for everyone onboard this structure, even company-wide, if only I had authority to second-guess a Medical Doctor!

  Chelsea would have gasped, but such behavior was no longer under her control. She was thinking independently and the rats would punish her! The thought became the sole focal point of her consciousness, blocking everything else as pathway amplification took over and intensified her fear into crippling dread. Her mind spiraled downward under the staggering weight of the sensation.

  How had she dared to think that she, herself, could synthesize her own compounds and cure her own physical issues, simply because she had advanced scientific expertise? It was legally, ethically and morally prohibited for anyone but a Medical Doctor to alter the chemical composition of human tissue!

  Chelsea struggled to bring her emotions back under control.

  I am not one to reallocate Amelix resources or create physiologically active substances! I cannot step outside my assigned—

  Suddenly, her fear and anxiety began to diminish. She could still feel the chemically induced icy black pool deep inside, from which the trepidation would undoubtedly rise again. But the rat in the pocket of her lab coat was helping, this time, dosing her with so much euphoria that the terror subsided.

  They like the idea!

  So many people had been killed by suffocation already that Chelsea had suspected that the rats were preparing to eliminate her species entirely. Then the air had become toxic, the beetles had become operational, and the rats had found a use for humans after all, as integral parts of the Amelix structures, the world’s most powerful and important biomachines. Perhaps, as the undisputed new masters of Amelix and the planet, the Rat Gods would let Chelsea assume the most important and prestigious role aboard the vessel, which was by default the most important and prestigious role anywhere in the world.

  But was there truly a way around the protocols that had stood at Amelix for so long, that everyone aboard every ship was programmed to obey without question? The rats undoubtedly had power, but Chelsea could only function along defined lines. If she pushed too far against her reconditioning, her mind would shatter and leave her useless. As it stood now, what she was considering was not simply against policy; it would require her to tread upon the most dubious legal and moral ground possible.

  Reallocating Amelix resources for a private purpose would be the same as stealing from the company, and her reconditioned mind would ensure she’d die before she did that. The only hope was to redefine what she was hoping to accomplish. She needed to restate her goal in a way that pathway amplification wouldn’t seize u
pon.

  She needed Gregor Kessler.

  Control room in one of the science labs aboard the Agnes

  “This is it, 547,” NJt994 said, “The most important operation of the post-Event world. Glad to have you as my official second in command on this mission.”

  “It’s thrilling, sir,” 547 said. “I hope we’re successful. There has to be something there we can use to fend off Amelix.”

  This lab had originally been set up to monitor activities within living organisms via nanocameras, but it had been modified in order to follow the activities of the excursion crew that was now descending into the empty Federal Building. 547 stood with NJt994 in the center of the darkened room, with all the views from the lead crewmember’s cameras currently assembled into a full-circle projection on the walls. The other crewmembers’ front camera feeds were displayed through the Whites’ EIs at the bottom of their visual fields and could be pulled up for the 360-degree view as needed.

  The six people they were watching were wearing bright orange HAZMAT suits. Tubes integrated into the tops of their suits at the crown emitted rings of greenish light that collectively did a decent job of illuminating the space around them. They had reached a windowless office room a few floors below ground without major incident, but it had become apparent that the team leader, Nanci, was stupid and clumsy.

  “Okay, Nanci,” NJt994 said to the crew leader. “Place the putty over the lock and stand far back. We’re going to blow it. Remember that even a tiny puncture in your suit will be disastrous, so go way back to the other side of the room when we detonate so no little particles hit you.

  “Yes, sir,” the woman said. The camera showed her fumbling with the lock, her orange-gloved hands shaking as she tried to make the putty stick to the surface.

  547 ensured his voice link with the excursion crew was off and turned to NJt994. “Please educate me as to how you chose this one to lead, sir. She seems the least capable of the six.”

  “We’re so understaffed in this structure that it’s hard to justify ejecting anyone like this,” NJt994 said. “But certain specialties became irrelevant when we sealed. We no longer need tax people, for example. Most of the newly obsolete have managed to find functions aboard Agnes that make them useful, like the techs from this lab did, for example, reworking the equipment to show feed from the expedition cameras instead of their research projects. The six out there in the excursion crew were found to be in a low tier of importance.”

  “But they’ve not been told they’re Departing, sir.”

  “Oh, no, technically they’re not Departing. If they were to Depart, they wouldn’t be employees anymore. They would have no duty to obey orders. In this case, we need them to do exactly as they’re told out there. We didn’t Depart them; they were Selected. They’re still fully employed and their compliance training and reconditioning remain intact.”

  “But they can’t come back in here, sir. When we’re under seal, the only entry is through the front port where everything is ground to bits and soaked in acid. Nothing gets through but sterile minerals and aminos. Even mechanical devices couldn’t survive it.” 547 wanted to turn his head and make eye contact but he was tasked with looking behind the crew via the panoramic display.

  “Of course they’re not coming back,” NJt994 said. “My guess is they know that. In answer to your question, though, you remember that four kids were aboard Agnes when we sealed? One of them, Gen-li, also happened to have a parent on board. I put Nanci in charge because she’s that one parent; her daughter is still inside. Nobody will be as dedicated to this mission as Nanci is.”

  “Brilliant, sir,” 547 said.

  “Give me vocal to Nanci again,” NJt994 said. “Nanci? Keep backing up, now. Here we go.”

  NJt994 activated the detonation with his EI and the putty exploded. The excursion crew slid open the splintered bioplexi door and entered a low-ceilinged room, divided by bioplexi walls into storage rooms lined up along a hallway. Behind the transparent walls were weapons, including the latest model of the famed Gloria sidearm only Federal Agents could carry. However, the new structures like the Agnes and the Amelix beetles were built to withstand bombs; even Gloria firepower would be useless against them.

  Only constant monitoring and fleeing at the earliest sight of the Amelix craft had kept them from another physical confrontation. The Organization’s remaining scientists were analyzing information from footage of every encounter, no matter how brief, but an Amelix weakness had not yet been discovered.

  “Look for something big,” NJt994 said to the excursion crew. “Rockets, land mines, that kind of thing. We don’t need to destroy the structure, just poke a hole in one of those eyes, but even that’s going to take something incredibly powerful.”

  547 doubted any of the weapons down there could take down an Amelix beetle. Even if a rocket could puncture the armored but hopefully more vulnerable eye surface, it would first have to connect. The Amelix tech was significantly more advanced than anything they had aboard the Agnes, and the Agnes could sense rats (the only living animals they had detected so far, other than the Amelix beetle) to the horizon in every direction. How would they even get close enough to deploy whatever weapon they discovered?

  Obviously the Organization would have had a better chance with something from one of the hangars above, like a heliodrone, an anti-aircraft rocket battery, or a tank, but databases of Federal acts and regulations showed that fully one hundred percent of such weapons had been retrofitted for EI control by specific Federal agents. Even Whites, with Federal authority inside the new structures, couldn’t make them work. Digging around down inside the Federal Building like this was the best plan they’d come up with, largely based on hope and speculation that perhaps the Feds hadn’t gotten around to changing over every piece of smaller ordinance.

  Two glowing dots appeared in the bottom of the doorway behind the excursion crew.

  “Rat behind you!” 547 said. He calmed his voice and started again. “You two on the wings, turn and take care of that rat like we told you. Do it now.”

  The two turned and fired the old Unnamed guns with which they’d been equipped. The rat disappeared. “You two keep watching that door,” 547 said. “We don’t want another one showing up without us knowing. Shoot them on sight; don’t wait for me to tell you.”

  “Yes, sir,” a male voice said.

  “Yes, sir,” a female voice said.

  “Everyone else, keep searching those storage rooms. Look for old stuff that looks like it hasn’t been touched in a long time, and big.”

  “How about these, sir?” one of the others, a male voice, asked. “Would these work?”

  It was a rack of small missiles that could be fired by a team of two or three people.

  “Show me some serial numbers,” NJt994 said. Orange gloves turned one of the missiles until a number was visible.

  Stand by,” 547 said. There was a pause as NJt994 checked Federal files.

  The glowing eyes appeared again in the doorway. “Rat’s back,” 547 said. “Hit it this time, please.”

  “Yes, sir,” both said together, and another barrage shredded the doorway and floor. They kept pulling their triggers, wasting far too many three-shot bursts, but at least the glow disappeared again.

  “Not those,” NJt994 said. “Records show they’re retrofitted. Look for anything stored with the metal bracelets Federal Agents used to wear. How about the ones in the corner, there, the launchers, the tubes on the third shelf up? Are there bracelets I see in the plastic packet attached to the front? Show me a number from those.”

  Hands fumbled with the tubes.

  “Yessir.”

  “You two on the wings,” 547 said. “Advance on that hallway where the rat was. I want to see its body, or at least a smear of blood or something. Sir, I’d like to switch one of their cameras to our three-sixty holo for a while, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Yeah,” NJt994 grunted. “I’ll scan the numbers through
my EI.” 547 switched over.

  “Okay, keep those guns up,” 547 said. The camera advanced a little farther toward the door, and the expanding circle of light there revealed a second dead rat, or at least red lumpy pulp that had once been a rat. “There it is! Keep the guns up, I said.” This crew was pathetically unskilled for this kind of work, but apparently even office workers could shoot a rat with a machine gun. At close range, anyway.

  “You killed both,” 547 said. “Nice job. Now advance to the hallway. Let’s make sure there aren’t any more out there. Remember, we don’t know how close they have to be to take over your mind. If you see a rat, shoot it.”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman said.

  “Spread out. Each of you take one side of the door and lean against the frame, looking down the hallway past each other. No, don’t lean in through the door. Look down the other way—there you go.” Now each was aiming down the hallway, gun barrels pointed across each other’s direction.

  “Okay, now lean through just enough to put the barrels of the guns past the frame and get more light into that hall.”

  NJt994 was still conversing with the crewmember who was helping to identify the missile launchers. “Right there,” he said. “Hold it steady so I can load the number. Wait. I said hold it, not carry it around. Why are you—”

  The panoramic view from 547’s rat hunters rotated as they turned back to face the room. “No, wait! Don’t go back in!” 547 said.

  Both re-entered the room from the hall. Through their cameras, 547 saw the others lined up against one of the transparent walls. The rat hunters approached the rest of the crew, but did not line up next to them. Instead, the two began clawing at a vent set in the wall just above their heads, apparently trying to rip the grate away.