The Book of Eadie, Volume One of the Seventeen Trilogy

by Mark D. Diehl

  “It’s Eadie!” Dok said. “Do you think we can reach her?”

  “We might as well take our chances there,” Old Fart said. “Won’t last long out here in the open.”

  Dok took a last look at Lawrence, who was being roughly pushed into a black truck.

  The street where Sato had last seen the General

  Coiner glared down at Sato. “You took a whoole Front from my Paatrol, in the miiddle of a raid. You chaallenged the Unnamed and the Feds, and you got hiit haard. Whyy? Whyy do thiis?”

  Sato’s face was calm. Not steel. Relaxed. He could still send help to the General, as long as he could make Coiner believe. “Special ooorders from Top Dog, Patrol Leader.” Sato attempted to raise his arm toward the building which had been the General’s destination. His Elements were protecting her; he could occasionally spot them running here and there to give cover. “Secret mission. My Rounder, Spiiiral, knows all now. He leads the Front. He will explaaain when you go to assist him.” He nodded toward the new Federal weapon he had taken. The bracelet gleamed around its handle. Coiner raised his eyebrows. “My giiift to you,” Sato said. “And this.”

  Sato presented his sword to Coiner, handle first. “My mission is complete.”

  Under one of the beetle buildings

  “Eadie!” Dok yelled. “It’s us. Don’t shoot!”

  She gestured for them to approach.

  A group of twelve Fiends had surrounded Eadie when she had entered the CBD, the wild-eyed leader telling her his orders were to protect her. Brian’s influence, no doubt, but somehow it felt natural to have them there now.

  Her Fiends aimed elsewhere and Dok and Old Fart ran up, gaping at the mass of dead Unnamed and Subjects.

  “Of course it’s you,” she said. “The Fiends have been watching you. Who took Lawrence?”

  “His family,” Dok said.

  Her forehead wrinkled slightly. “Why? So they can kill him themselves?”

  “Dunno. They weren’t friendly, but they could have killed him right here.”

  She stared in the direction they had taken him. Lawrence had sacrificed everything to save her when she was powerless. Now she had her Subjects, her Fiends, and guns. She might be able to rescue him. But to drag him back into the battle zone would hardly guarantee his safety, and the effort would almost certainly cost other lives. She had to let him go. He would have to fend for himself back in his own world.

  Dok and Old Fart were watching her. She exhaled slowly and turned away from the open area, shaking her head at the bloody concrete and ruined bodies surrounding them. “This building had its own Unnamed guarding it,” she explained. “Lot of blood, but it was closest and we needed cover fast. Now the Feds are sniping from helios.” Two Subjects disappeared behind her with the dizzying splatters created by those new weapons. Fiends fired up from behind a few abandoned UE trucks but the helios were still far out of range. Another Subject disappeared, followed by a Fiend, and then another Subject. Eadie led Dok and Old Fart to the area where five pairs of escalators reached up into the giant building, but the group wasn’t much safer for being farther underneath. The helios were so far back that they were shooting almost horizontally.

  “We can’t run anymore,” she said. “But we can’t get up there, either.” She gestured toward the closest escalator, which had been shut down and stood almost vertical. “Subjects can’t climb that.”

  “Somebody is giving it a try,” Old Fart said, pointing. A scrawny Subject began climbing the stairs, lifting himself up with his hands as much as his feet.

  Eadie recognized the ascending figure. “It’s the Prophet!”

  Half a truck suddenly disappeared. A few Fiends tried to return fire, the muzzle flashes standing out against the darkening, cloudy evening. A few raindrops blew in under the building, driven by high winds from a distant storm. The Prophet made it to the top and wedged something against the metal door, then scrambled, half sliding, back down the stairs.

  “What is that?” Old Fart asked. “That black disc he left there.”

  “Get back!” Eadie said.

  The bomb went off, sending flaming bits of metal down toward the pavement. Flames ringed the door at the top of the escalator but there appeared to be a small hole there. A handgun appeared within it. The gun fired in a three-shot burst, wounding two Subjects. A Fiend shot back and the hand disappeared.

  A different Fiend snatched a disc bomb from the Prophet’s hand and shimmied up, arming it and stuffing it into the hole the first had made. Another three-shot burst sounded from inside and the Fiend dropped to the concrete below. The bomb sounded, flashing through the hole.

  The Prophet climbed back up, swatting at the flames with his jacket, which sent showers of flaming jelled chemical raining down but cleared it from most of the door. He reached inside the hole the bomb had made, working some mechanism inside. The door slid out of the way and the Prophet climbed up.

  Eadie and Old Fart exchanged a glance. A loud whir and some sudden hydraulic noise startled several of the Subjects, who dove for the ground. The building lowered somewhat and the escalators angled more gently into them.

  “Not the best escape plan, but at least we can take cover for now,” Eadie said.

  The street

  “All right, you crazy son of a bitch,” Coiner said to the samurai’s unconscious body. “I respect you as a warrior, okay?” Holding the topknot, he put a knee on the chest. The sword wasn’t serrated so it took a while, but he managed to saw the head off.

  The beetle building

  Eadie scrambled up the escalator and into the building with a few of her Fiends. The Subjects followed as quickly as their exhausted legs would allow. Dok and Old Fart came next, the rest of the Fiends trailing behind to provide protective fire. Inside, all of the walls, floors, and furniture were Corporate Green. Double sets of stairs wound around each other in the large open center of the building, rising toward its transparent ceiling several stories above. The Prophet was standing at the base of the closest stairway, looking up at an enormous portrait of a lean, intense-looking Statused man. The figure’s striking blue eyes seemed to glow with an electric charge. Eadie recognized the face from the news: Walt Zytem, famous biochemist and CEO.

  Shots rang out from a hallway and the Fiends immediately responded. The Unnamed fell back with Fiends in pursuit. More Fiends took off down other passages. Eadie checked the UE gun she’d been given and started toward the hallway with the most fighting.

  “General,” said the Prophet. “The signs indicate that there are laboratories in that direction. Standard procedure would be for laboratories to lock down in the case of an emergency, and the power will soon be cut. Activity in that hallway will cease rather quickly, but I believe you will find something much more interesting here.” He started up the stairs.

  Eadie hesitated a moment, watching him. Then she followed, still surrounded by her cluster of Fiends. Their steps were so whisper-quiet that it sounded like she was running alone.

  Subjects and Fiends began climbing other stairways in search of hiding places. Unnamed popped out of rooms and up from under desks, thinning out the mass of Subjects and then fleeing back to the shadows as Fiends returned fire.

  The Prophet continued to ascend, his pace growing more rapid the higher he rose.

  The street where Samurai met Unity

  The helios were almost directly overhead now, hovering high enough that they were barely visible against the grey sky and beyond range of standard weapons. Each aircraft was carrying a Federal sniper. All around him, entire Rounds of New Union Elements were being decimated. Coiner tucked the sword in his belt and hefted the twitching Federal weapon. He aimed it at the sky, sweeping slowly back and forth, trying to get a feel for it. The moving barrels vibrated, seeming to sense the clouds. When they suddenly jerked, moving slightly apart, he pulled the trigger and the gun made a furious, vibrating hiss.

  What had been a tiny dark spot against an immense gray cloud suddenly expanded
, growing larger and larger until it became two distinct spots. These grew larger still until they became two jagged halves of a helio. One crashed onto the top of a beetle building and the other slammed into the street. The piece on top of the building rolled slowly sideways and down the rounded edge, crushing walls and glass until it broke free and plunged to the concrete below.

  The weapon quivered in his hands, as though it were pleading with Coiner to do it again. He swept it across the sky and brought down the other helio.

  Dear Dr. Kessler:

  Sir, the attackers have commandeered the Amelix offices and I have heard them on this floor. I am hiding under my desk to avoid detection. I ask your forgiveness in case I am not able to complete my work as I had promised. I stayed through the evacuation to work but I can’t accomplish anything now.

  If I do not survive, know how sincerely grateful I am for all of your support and encouragement. Please tell my family that I have truly learned to love Amelix Integrations, just as they always hoped I would.

  Eric Basali

  Inside the beetle building

  Dok followed Eadie and her group of Fiends, who in turn were following the Prophet up the stairway that spiraled through the center of the building. From below it had seemed all the staircases were the same height, but as they climbed higher it was clear that this was the only one that reached all the way to the top floor. The transparent roof revealed a darkening sky, and sheets of rain rippled over its curved surface.

  An explosion flashed orange at the top of the stairs. Dok recoiled, twisting sideways to dodge the bits of flaming debris that shot down past him. Then gunfire sounded. Shots came in rhythmic, organized clusters from inside the top office and were answered by frenzied, chaotic return fire from Eadie’s Fiends. The din built to a deafening level and then fell silent.

  Dok climbed the remaining stairs as quickly as he could, grabbing the handrails and pulling himself up with his arms. At the top, three Fiends lay dead outside splintered, smoking Grown wood doors. The room beyond the doors was a gigantic office, decorated in dark, rich green and real gold, extravagantly furnished with black Grown wood, but with a bioplexi fume hood and other biochemistry equipment in one corner. It was Walt Zytem’s office, instantly recognizable by anyone who had seen the man’s countless press conferences.

  The Prophet had seated himself behind the famous Grown desk, which had been bioengineered to Grow around its own metallic tumors and produce in itself perfect inlays of the company’s stylized double helix logo. Dead Unnamed lay crumpled on the floor but the office’s opulence seemed to claim them, making them appear more like further decoration, Zytem’s personal gargoyles. Suspended from the transparent ceiling some five meters above their heads was a crystal chandelier, more than twice as long as Dok was tall, replicating the famous helical logo in three dimensions. Eadie was standing beneath it, shouting across the immense desk at the Prophet.

  “ … You said I’d solve the Subjects’ resource problem, but all I did was get most of them killed!” Eadie said.

  The Prophet answered without taking his eyes off the computer he was manipulating. “By getting so many of them killed, General, you did solve their resource problem.” A hologram of a Statused man popped up above the computer. Dok stared at it in disbelief. He knew this face. The rumpled and disheveled clothes didn’t match the man’s station in life and the blue eyes seemed to shine with less confidence than usual, but his identity was unmistakable. This was the legend himself: Walt Zytem, Chairman and CEO of Amelix Integrations.

  “I’ve been watching you on the security cameras, Roger,” Zytem told the Prophet. “You must know you won’t succeed.”

  The Prophet shook his head. “I’m surprised I had to call you, Mister President. I was almost certain you would feel your commanding presence was essential in a situation like this. I thought you were so assured of your absolute power that you would stay here, guarding your little fiefdom while the rest of the CBD was being evacuated.”

  Dok’s breath caught. Zytem knows the Prophet and calls him Roger. That was the name of the researcher—Roger Terry—who turned against the Amelix corporation. And he had worked with fungi.

  “I’m in D.C,” Zytem said. “Where they know how to handle terrorists like you.”

  The Prophet stood and walked to the lab bench at the other side of the room. Zytem’s hologram turned, watching him. “I imagine you’re in D.C. to work out a new deal for weapons research, Mr. President. Something fungal, perhaps? Now, let’s see … ah, here it is.” The Prophet lifted a part of the lab bench, revealing a bioplastic gas retention bag with a hose running into the wall. “I remember watching you disable the gas this way on the day you took the spores from me.” The Prophet turned a lever so that it was perpendicular to its pipe.

  “You won’t be able to open the safe, Roger, even with the gas defense disabled,” Zytem said. “It takes my iris scan.”

  The Prophet pushed away a couch along the wall and removed a piece of Grown paneling to reveal a safe as tall as Zytem’s giant desk and half as wide.

  Returning to the lab bench, the Prophet—Roger Terry —opened a metal cabinet and removed a couple of glass bottles and a few pairs of tongs. He returned to the safe and splashed the contents of one bottle onto the door, where it soaked in and disappeared. He emptied the other onto the same area and stood there, watching it. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this, Mister President,” he said.

  The lights went off but the computer continued on battery power, the hologram eerily illuminating the room. The other buildings of the CBD had also gone dark, but bright lights shone from some news trucks that had congregated outside the fence.

  Blasts of gunfire resumed outside the office, then faded as the action seemed to move farther away.

  Part of the safe’s front dissolved, revealing the door’s inner workings behind a thin latticework of material the chemicals had not yet reached. The Prophet inserted the two sets of tongs into the latticework and pushed them sideways. The damaged door popped open. He swung it out of his way and leaned inside. He emerged holding a transparent bioplexi brick with a test tube sealed inside. He tilted it, causing a black substance within the test tube to shift.

  Zytem’s face was ashen. He cleared his throat. “Roger? Just put that back now.”

  “Sorry, Mr. President. I don’t work for you anymore.”

  “And what are you planning to do?”

  The Prophet’s eyes shifted from the brick to Zytem and back again. “Maybe you can put the pieces together for yourself, Mr. President. Perhaps it was a good thing that you ruined my career and my life, sir, so that all of this could come to pass. I know how powerful this made you feel, how important. That’s why you kept it here in your office, is it not, sir?” The Prophet tilted the brick again, watching the black material inside.

  “It’s not like that, Roger. I just couldn’t trust anyone else to keep it.”

  “Keep it? It should have been destroyed.”

  Eadie spoke in a low voice. “Prophet? What is this?”

  The Prophet smiled at Eadie and turned back to Zytem. Dok clenched his jaw, fighting the impulse to shudder.

  Dok took a few steps closer to Eadie. “He’s Roger Terry. And I’m guessing that’s his creation. They called it the Slatewiper.”

  The Prophet shook his head. “I did not create it, doctor. Nature did. God made the Slatewiper. And I called it no such thing.”

  Dok locked eyes with him. “But that’s what it is.”

  “Oh, yes, doctor,” the Prophet said. “This strain could quite easily erase humanity.” He eyed the hologram and then turned to Eadie. “I didn’t plan to develop anything like this, of course, General. My research dealt with mitochondrial aging.”

  Eadie looked at Dok. “Mitochondrial aging?”

  “You’ve seen pictures of cells, right?” Dok asked Eadie quietly. “All the little spots inside? Mitochondria are the little wrinkly ones—the parts of a cell that package e
nergy. They have their own DNA.”

  “Okay,” Eadie said. “And the ‘aging’ part?”

  “Mitochondria divide faster than cells themselves, and they age faster,” Dok said. “They play a role in all sorts of diseases associated with aging—brain stuff, heart, liver.” He gestured at the Prophet and the hologram. “They were apparently trying to keep mitochondria young longer … with fungi?”

  “That’s correct, doctor,” the Prophet said. “Bioengineered Fungi can live in tissues and deliver their drugs or other products instantly, everywhere they are needed. Not true with a needle, patch, or pill. Even bacteria and viruses can’t do it for any length of time, but we pioneered fungal strains that triggered no human immune response and could be programmed to secrete various chemicals in locations that the body needed them. The idea that led to the Slatewiper was that we could engineer the fungus to provide all the components for mitochondria, along with special packaging to ensure transport through cell membranes, and chemicals that encouraged the use of these components when the mitochondria replicated.”

  “You were going to have a fungus make spare parts, so the mitochondria could keep rebuilding themselves?” Eadie asked.

  Dok nodded. “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Yes, General,” the Prophet said. “Precisely.” He snatched a crystal carafe and knocked the crystal stopper against the desktop while his other hand held the plexi brick steady. The stopper fell to the soft carpet and the Prophet took a deep drink.

  “If mitochondria were replicated more efficiently and more often,” said the Prophet, “people would continue to grow stronger and smarter over time. And it worked, too, General. In rats. We had an amazing line of rats we called the Rat Gods.”