The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy

by Mark D. Diehl

  “Hang in there, Robi,” Dok said, his labored breathing making it difficult to get the words out. “Hopefully the range of these chemical bombs is wider than the range of the rats’ effectiveness. If so, Team 1 should soon be released, armed and ready to fight for the humans again.”

  Dok jumped up and clung on to the back edge of the machine so he could look between its shovel and spinning disks to where Team 1 was approaching the chemical bomb. His arms quaked but he held tight, watching, sheltered under the conveyor belt track.

  “All right!” Dok said. “Team 1, prepare to be rescued!”

  The members of Team 1 turned toward each other and fired their weapons. Five suits collapsed to the clay.

  Dok’s fingers lost their hold and he dropped back to the ground. He turned, but before he could take a step the mining machine hit him, knocking him to his knees. The underside of the vehicle shoved against him as it rumbled onward, his HAZMAT suit scraping against the roughened surface between the treads as the machine’s weight pressed him into the dusty sediment. The material of his suit wouldn’t withstand much of this, but the machine was moving too fast for him to do anything but crouch and hope.

  A shadow fell across the ground as insectile jaws rose above the riverbank. They tilted down at a sharp angle from the Amelix craft and seized the mining vehicle, untouched by its wheels of spinning teeth. Robi screamed. The jaws angled upward again and squeezed tightly together, crushing the machine and silencing Robi. Dok was left exposed, knees still embedded in the dirt. As he struggled to stand, the Amelix craft’s jaws opened, dropping the wreckage to the dry riverbed, where its impact caused a tremor that nearly knocked him down again. An even stronger shockwave shook the ground as the Amelix structure brought one of its feet down to crush what was left.

  The Amelix craft stopped. For a moment, the only sound was the wind ruffling the HAZMAT suit and whipping dust against it.

  Then the giant beetle shifted. Dok gasped and stumbled backward as it raised an enormous leg above his head. He fought to suppress his panic and summon a rational thought.

  Don’t just stand here and let it kill you. Overcome the anxiety. Be someone else again! Kel. What would Kel do? Be Kel.

  Dok imagined it was Kel in this situation instead of himself, overriding his instinct to run away. As the enormous foot shot down toward him, Dok ran forward at the beetle as fast as he could. The beetle tried to compensate but could not bend enough to catch him. Its foot sank deep into the dusty sediment as Dok darted beneath the structure and out again. He raised both middle fingers at the machine. “Bitch!” he said.

  Dok smiled to himself. Imagining he was Kel was a lot more fun than imagining he was the Prophet. By resurrecting his old associates, he could understand and adapt to circumstances to which he was ill suited on his own. Through him, they lived again, if only in his mind.

  The riverbed was the only hiding place in many square kilometers of desert. Dok ran for a bend as the structure turned again. Its leg movements were startlingly quick and agile, while the hull remained balanced and stable. Dok dove around the curving sandy bank, clenching his teeth as the suit scraped across the grit.

  In seconds, the machine was above him again, straddling the riverbed and angling its jaws toward him.

  Dok’s own personality had retreated in terror and now even Kel was inaccessible. He stood staring up at the beetle, paralyzed and insensible.

  But the beetle was no longer moving. A man-sized piece of the machine fell off and disappeared behind the riverbank, out of Dok’s line of sight. He heard it crash to the ground.

  Lawrence’s voice came through the speakers. “Dok, I’ll be right there. The other beetle is retreating and we’re chasing it now. At least that one won’t be giving you any more trouble, huh?”

  The rail gun had opened a small entry hole several stories above the ground, which now looked to be dripping something. As Dok watched, a tiny speck became slightly bigger and then impacted the dry riverbed a few meters in front of him. More and more specks appeared, like droplets in a building thunderstorm.

  They were too big to be droplets.

  Rats!

  The dropping things were rats, leaping from the hole five stories above and falling onto a growing pile. The first ones to fall remained there, either dead or badly injured, but soon some of them began to crawl off the pile and limp toward him.

  He took one of the chemical bombs out of the white duffel bag he still carried and armed it, watching as the pile grew bigger and rats that survived the fall approached him in greater numbers.

  The newest ones bounced from the pile and ran at him full force. Dok triggered the bomb and threw it, running backwards until he reached the bank. He triggered another and tossed it halfway across, filling the riverbed with haze. Careful to avoid scraping the suit any more than necessary, he gingerly climbed up the bank, watching behind him for any rats that might have gotten through. He prepared another chemical bomb, keeping his eyes on the pile and the drifting mist of the bomb he’d lobbed at the descending rats. The wind was blowing toward the dead structure so the cloud had moved in that direction, now looking like a tornado on its side as it jetted out and expanded. Every rat landed in the same spot and immediately rolled upwind, in exactly the same way.

  Dok felt suddenly, irrationally furious, dizzy, and sick. He reeled, then tripped over something. Several wild rats had come up from behind. They had already made contact with the suit but not punctured it yet. Even earlier today when he’d finally been angered enough to kill a man, he’d not felt anything like the utter compulsion he had to destroy these animals. He activated the bomb he was holding and kept it in his hand as he stomped, twisted, and jumped, being careful to stay within the toxic cloud.

  “Lawrence?” Dok said. “Where are you now?”

  “Probably about ten kilometers away, Dok,” Lawrence said. “The other beetle’s doing a good job of hiding. I only see it in flashes, and it keeps vanishing behind the hills again before I can pull the trigger.”

  “Rats are pouring out of the Amelix craft, Lawrence. More all the time. The chemical bombs drift in the wind. I have this one and one more after that, but they don’t last long out in the open like this. I can’t hold them much longer.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  The wind was pushing on the HAZMAT suit, rippling and folding it against him, feeling very much like the rats had as they’d climbed. Dok set the chemical bomb on the ground upwind of him and put both his feet together so that the stream of chemicals was blasting his ankles. It impacted the suit and dissipated, expanding up and around him. As long as he stayed still, the rats couldn’t make contact with the suit.

  A few meters farther upwind, a rat stood on its hind legs, watching him. Another joined it, and another. Soon there were between twenty and thirty of them.

  The dead Amelix beetle

  “Dok? I’m here!” Sett said.

  Dok was easy to spot, at the tip of a plume of white chemical fog. Upwind of him was a mass of rats, running away at top speed.

  Dok ran up, carrying the still spewing bomb. “Look at that!” he said, pointing at the rats. “They weren’t afraid of chemical bombs or leaping to their deaths, but your truck terrified them!” He placed the chemical bomb into a little tool compartment on the truck’s exterior and climbed into the passenger area.

  “Maybe that’s a weakness we can exploit,” Sett said.

  Aboard the Agnes, site of the dead Amelix beetle

  547 watched as the Agnes extended saws and other tools to break up the dead beetle. The advanced Amelix technology was lost, but at least the Agnes was claiming most of its organic recyclables. A long tube carried the various pieces up to where they were smashed, broken down with acid, and processed for use and storage.

  Together, Dok, Sett, and the two sisters had returned to the Williams mine to collect its two best trucks. 547’s most recent contact with them had been a few brief words of encouragement through Sett’s EI
as he’d taught the others to drive. Now, two to a truck, the surviving members of Team 2 were trailing the Agnes.

  A pleasant chime alerted him to a request for intercom communication. As commander of the ship, 547 had opted to change his settings back to less intrusive forms of communication than he’d endured as an underling. A text notification appeared at the edge of his vision:

  Kevin Bashar, Marketing Dept.

  Requesting Voice Communication

  “Proceed,” he said aloud.

  “Hello, sir,” Bashar said. “The video you asked me to compile is now complete.”

  “Great. I’ll watch it and let you know what I think.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  547 terminated the connection and opened the file. It was only about a minute long, assembled from camera footage of the two missions.

  First there were shots from different cameras outside the mine, showing an edited and dialogue-free version of the driving lesson Sett had given the girls. In this context and at the front of the compilation, it appeared to be the beginning phase of a mission. Footage from Dok’s camera showed the two linked Amelix beetles outside the Federal Building as he approached. The next shot was from Team 1 when it discovered the weapons underground, giving the impression that a single, small team had infiltrated the Federal Building right underneath the Amelix beetles. The scenes shifted quickly after that. Dok swatted and stomped rats and then appeared next to a huge pile of dead ones. Sett gave chase, with the Amelix beetle skittering over hills and eluding him, then the Amelix beetle dead, felled by a single shot. Finally there was a still shot of Sett’s face framed by the white HAZMAT suit. White letters appeared over it, slightly difficult to read at first but becoming clearer as the picture faded to black, with an announcer reading the words: “Andro-Heathcliffe humbly thanks the heroic Williams Gypsum Corporation, through whose sacrifice we fight on.”

  This would work well.

  547 opened communication with Sett.

  “Hey, 547,” his old friend said.

  “It’s ready,” 547 said. “Take a look. If you agree, we’ll send it out around the world. Once there’s enough chatter about your heroism, we’ll announce the merger of our firms, to be managed under your company’s leadership.”

  “Heh,” Sett said. “As it should be.”

  Outside the Williams Gypsum mine

  “Five minutes, Sett,” Li’l Ed’s voice said, over the speakers in Dok’s HAZMAT hood.

  “Thanks, Ed,” Lawrence said. He was speaking faster than normal and breathing shallowly.

  “Hey, Lawrence,” Dok said. “How are you doing?”

  Lawrence nodded at Dok from inside his white suit, but the nod was as quick as his breathing.

  Dok made sure the communication setting was private just between them. “Nervous, huh?”

  “I’m addressing the whole world in five minutes, Dok. Yeah, I’m a bit nervous.”

  “I can help if you want.”

  “Sure.”

  “All right. We’re going to let you imagine someone else is facing this for you. It’ll be your face and your words, but you can pretend that another person is actually doing it. Now I want you to take a deep breath and hold it. Close your eyes. Now let out that breath, and feel your whole body just relax completely. Now do it again. Hold it, now exhale and relax, sinking down. Again. Now, this time when you exhale, I want you to count down slowly from ten to one, all the way down with one strong breath.”

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.”

  “Good. Again. Hold it, then exhale. We’re going to keep doing this until you’re deeply relaxed. Then I want you to think of someone with charisma, someone with the power and presence to address the whole world in a live broadcast. We’re going to relax you completely, and then I want you to adopt that other persona, that magnetism, as your own. Let that person live in you, let that person play your role in the broadcast.”

  Lawrence followed along and did as Dok instructed.

  “Have you identified that person?” Dok asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you adopted that persona to play you in this broadcast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then open your eyes and prepare to address the world.”

  Dok smiled. “I recognize the steel in those eyes,” he said. “Hello, Eadie.”

  Every human-controlled EI in the world

  The face and body were sealed inside a white HAZMAT suit, but the person speaking commanded attention like no one else alive.

  “This is Lawrence Williams the Seventh, Chairman of the reinstated Williams Gypsum Corporation, addressing you, the world’s remaining free corporations. We are seeking merger partners. Williams Gypsum has a plan for the future of human-controlled humanity, and we want you to join us. Here in the former Des Moines area we were able to slay an Amelix beetle and chase another one away. We can show you how to do the same.

  “As the world’s final surviving terrestrial corporation, and as the one who has sacrificed itself to save all of you, Williams Gypsum hereby claims title to all land area on this planet. Those not participating in our offer of merger will be trespassing.

  “The mergers have already begun. Andro-Heathcliffe is our latest partner in our mutual struggle against Amelix. At this time, we are seeking to merge with any and all other free corporations. Individual organizations will maintain control over all their existing assets, subject to Williams Gypsum authority for combat, coordination, and resolution of any disputes with other merged firms. My company and everyone in it have made the ultimate sacrifice to benefit our merger partners; I must demand that those partners submit to our direction in these matters.

  “If you feel that your firm is worthy of this merger, contact me before it’s too late.”

  A northbound Williams Gypsum truck, towed with three others behind the Agnes

  The calls were stacked one after the other, and Sett had already been talking for hours. Still, each of these mergers had to be done right, or at least as rightly as they could manage, under these circumstances. He ended one conversation and left the others holding for a moment, needing to talk about something else—anything else but the same merger stuff again—even if just for a minute.

  “Thanks for teaching me that trick, Dok,” he said, turning to make eye contact through the two plastic hoods. “Looks like my alter ego might have saved the world.”

  “You did it, Lawrence,” Dok said. “She lived again only in your mind. It was really you speaking, and you leading.”

  “You and I both know I’m just a figurehead. What can I do, really? And for how long?”

  “You’re Chairman of the world’s second-largest corporation,” Dok said. “That’s something, anyway.”

  “I suppose. Okay, back to absorbing the world’s surviving industries.” Sett opened the channel to the next caller. “Hello, this is Lawrence Williams the Seventh, of Williams Gypsum.”

  “Mr. Williams, sir?” It was the voice of a young woman. “This is W-6e80xh of the Odette, outside Toulouse, France. We would like to accept your offer of merger, for the purpose of defending against Amelix.”

  “Good,” Sett said. “And you understand that while you’ll maintain your own assets, my firm is bringing you in as a subsidiary, subject to my firm’s final discretion in terms of combat, coordination, and dispute resolution?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Sett said. “We’ll store a copy of this conversation as proof of our binding arrangement. Odette, here’s the information you need and the plan you’ll be following:

  “The Amelix ships are afraid of trucks. We shot one from a truck, and now we are able to chase Amelix from trucks, without firing a shot. It’s likely that your best chance at survival is to find volunteer drivers and send them out as soon as possible. We have no idea how long this pattern of behavior will last. While it does, we need to come together as much as possible, in the safest place possible. Head no
rth, and meet others as close as you can get to the Arctic Circle.”

  “Very good, sir. And if I may ask, sir, what is our long-term goal after gathering there?”

  “I think the area is small enough to be defendable. Through this merger we’ve learned there are a few structures that can navigate on the ocean, so hopefully they can keep us all in contact. It’s unlikely there are many Amelix beetles that far north as of yet, so I’m hoping we can form and hold a perimeter at the sixty-six degree, thirty-three minute mark. I’m going to transfer you to a staff member aboard the Andro-Heathcliffe Agnes who can work with you to coordinate your approach. We hope to connect you with others making the journey so you can all watch each other’s backs. Welcome to Williams Gypsum, Odette. We’ll see you at the top of the world.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s an honor to be part of such an heroic organization, sir.”

  Sett terminated the conversation and answered another call.

  Another voice responded. “This is the May Wah, of Nanjing, China.”

  Sett formed the merger and gave the same instructions.

  “This is La Línea, of Buenos Aires,” said another voice.

  Sett formed the merger and gave the same instructions. He did it sixteen more times, merging each new corporation into the fold, from places like Pakistan and Cameroon. Some, like the Dryandra and the Morlina, both of Australia, had to receive different instructions since they’d never crawl to the Arctic Circle from there. Instead, they coordinated moves to a suitably defendable edge of their own continent.

  A text appeared in the lower left corner of his vision.

  ??

  It was 547, wondering how the merger was going. Sett replied.

  29

  547 answered right away.

  Contratulations, Sett!

  You are leader of the free world.

  The Agnes slowly lumbered north.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my wife Jennifer, upon whose love and support I depend for absolutely everything. Thanks also to Alan Irving, Andy Snyder, Kari Sanders, and Heather Payson.