The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma

by Brian Herbert

  This time it sped directly toward the Janus Machine, and Joss heard the gathering roar of power from the heart of the SciO unit. Kupi opened up by shooting waves of black particles that hit the aircraft’s flak system and melted it. Moments later her Splitter waves hit the craft itself, causing it to blacken into an unidentifiable, shapeless amalgam, which tumbled out of the sky and thudded onto a grassy expanse at the center of the compound. The J-Mac crew cheered.

  “A longer-range Splitter would be nice to have,” Kupi said.

  “You did great with this one,” Joss said.

  Still keeping a wary eye on the sky, she shrugged and said, “Guess I’ll have to notch my cannon barrel now.”

  Joss heard the sirens of emergency equipment and watched black-uniformed anarchist soldiers running toward the three crash sites. In the distance he saw something large and tube-shaped on the ground, but for only a few moments before it exploded and burst into flames.

  * * *

  BECAUSE OF THE commotion, with Revolutionary Guardsmen running around and sirens continuing to wail, the security clearance for Joss’s truck was being delayed. From the platform he saw two anarchist soldiers below him talking with the driver, and heard them order the man to keep his rig parked until the base commander gave security clearance.

  “My crew is dead tired,” the ruddy-faced driver protested, “and we’ve just shot down an enemy aircraft. Isn’t that clearance enough for us to proceed?”

  One of the soldiers shook his head. “We’re concerned about your safety as you proceed into the reservation, so we need to perform security checks on all entry roads. That’s an expensive machine you’re driving, and you’ve got at least one hero onboard.” He nodded toward Kupi, who stood at the railing of the platform, looking down at him. “I know you’re all tired, but we want to ensure that you make it to your beds tonight.”

  The driver grumbled, and looked up at Joss, the commander, for instructions. Joss shrugged and spread his palms in acknowledgment that nothing else could be done, so the driver sat on a running board to wait.

  In the distance, Joss heard more explosions, and saw fireballs and smoke rising into the sky. The better part of an hour passed. Finally a procession of military trucks rumbled into the center of the base, filled with boisterous anarchist troops who waved energy rifles in the air and fired off celebratory bursts in various colors. The trucks screeched to a stop and the soldiers dragged out the charred bodies of enemy fighters—perhaps thirty in all from the first two aircraft, though certainly not from the one that Kupi had split into raw elements. They piled the dead on the grass, poured fuel on them, and lit them on fire.

  In another truck, Joss saw more Revolutionary Guard fighters with a pair of live prisoners, undoubtedly taking them somewhere for interrogation. He didn’t recognize the enemy uniforms, which appeared to have only common green-and-brown camouflage designs on them and no easily identifiable markings.

  The wind was blowing toward Joss, filling his nostrils with the sickening odor of burning human flesh. Yet he knew this unpleasantry could not be avoided. It was just one of many examples in which anarchists were permitted to vent their anger against Corporate interests. There had been so many years of frustration when the anarchists could do little except protest against the old United States government, and now the Chairman was channeling their raw aggression into useful purposes, permitting them to employ unfettered carnage against enemies of the state, be they Corporate remnants, common eco-criminals, or any other opposition groups.

  There were many stories of anarchists going too far, killing animals and damaging ecosystems during violent attacks against people, and he’d heard that the Chairman sometimes admonished the black-uniformed men and women for their lack of discretion. A rumor held that Rahma worried about what would happen if the Black Shirts ever ran out of Corporate guerrillas to kill and turned their rage against the GSA—because anarchists had a long history of opposing governmental authority, and might only be cooperating as long as it served their interests to do so. Because of this, Rahma Popal had reportedly set up systems to monitor and control these fighters.

  Joss and Kupi raised their arms in victory, and fired their own rifle shots in the air, as did the rest of their dedicated crew.

  4

  Chairman Rahma constructed the myth structure around himself carefully, beginning with a powerful, compelling concept and enhancing it with symbolism, a pantheon of political and pseudo-religious leaders, and a highly organized bureaucracy.

  —The Book of Forbidden Thoughts (Anarchist Press, banned)

  A STOCKY MAN with a narrow face and dark, probing eyes, Dylan Bane stood on a platform high over the subterranean cavern, looking down on his builders and engineers as they prepared immense voleers—military cargo haulers that were built according to his precise specifications. He was inside the main cavern of his base camp, deep beneath the mountains of Michoacán in central Mexico. It was an ideal location for launching attacks north and south, against both continents of the Green States of America.

  Long and tubular in shape, each armored voleer had Splitter tubes on the front to break open underground passageways, through which the machine would flow through soil and rock, compressing the debris and passing it to the rear, where built-in earthformers closed the tunnels behind. Vanishing tunnels, he called them, or VTs, giving him the advantage of surprise that enabled him to make guerrilla attacks and then disappear back into the ground.

  With his short-cropped hair, clean-shaven face, and suit-and-tie uniform bearing medals and braids of rank, the self-proclaimed general looked like the antithesis of his enemies. He loathed the long-hairs with every breath he took, and had laid careful plans to annihilate them. Bane called them “Tree Nazis” and any other insult that came to mind. He was always thinking of ways to bring them down, and not without reason. Despite acting as if they loved peace, they were actually homicidal hippies, operating under a pack mentality that caused them to run roughshod over anyone who dared to disagree with their radical environmental views. For the Chairman’s minions, there were no shades of interpretation or meaning. People were expected to accept his green doctrines one hundred percent, without questioning the slightest thing. In the alternative, nonbelievers were recycled.

  That had been the fate of most of Bane’s family, including his parents, siblings, and half of his cousins—all split into goo and dumped on the earth as if they were nothing but garbage. Because of his own high-level connections he’d escaped their fate, and had even taken a loyalty oath to Chairman Rahma that he didn’t actually believe. To keep up appearances, he’d worn a beard for a time and appeared to be a contributor to the new reality, while actually waiting for his chance to get even with the GSA government and its powerful supporters.

  He wasn’t proud of his self-serving actions, but they’d enabled him to stay alive, so that he could fight another day. Rahma had created the deadly laws under which people were recycled for the slightest perceived infraction, even based on the word of others who simply disliked them. Survival under such conditions often required ingenuity and cunning, in a society that seemed like a brutal experiment in social Darwinism, fostered by a madman.

  The path to Dylan Bane’s personal survival niche had been difficult for him, one in which he had been forced to compromise his most closely held principles. Now his old self no longer existed. It, like much of his family, had been murdered.

  For all of that, Bane would never forgive the Chairman, or anyone associated with him.

  * * *

  UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, the voleer-construction activities would have been quite loud in this immense underground chamber, but at the moment he had electronic noise suppressers and diverters in place, making it unnecessary for anyone to wear ear protection equipment. It was just one of several technological advantages Bane had, all of which were working in concert to get him to his goal. In addition, he had placed the facility beneath the central Mexican plateau of the Green Sta
tes of America, where there were no densely populated reservations for humans and hardly any government-run facilities at all—just a few remote game reserves and eco-study outposts.

  He nodded to a female officer who stood at attention nearby, waiting for him. Young, prim, and proper in appearance, the shapely brunette wore a silver uniform that bore the image of a white shirt and a patterned blue tie on the front, except with lesser designations of rank than the General wore. A former mercenary solder who knew martial arts and how to use virtually any weapon, Marissa Chase was as tough and smart as she was gorgeous. And, though he hesitated to fully trust her because of her history, the two of them seemed to have reached an understanding. It was quite simple, really, and amusingly classic in comparison with many male-female relationships throughout history: If she slept with him and he enjoyed it, she got perks—in this case, faster promotions. She was a Blue Looey now, a Blue Lieutenant who had risen through the ranks of non-com officers while under his command.

  At his signal she approached stiffly and pointed a glowing ring on her finger at a more ornate ring that her superior wore. As the spheres completed their electronic connection, Bane focused on receiving a message in his brain, one he could have listened to had he desired to do so. Instead, he closed his eyes and read it like a printed letter in the ether, dark purple lettering against a white background.

  There were numerous pages and he flipped through them mentally, skimming the words. It was a summary report, providing information his clandestine agents had obtained about GSA troop movements and other military matters that could affect his own tactics and strategy. One item caught his attention, an attack on the GSA military base outside the Bostoner Reservation for Humans.

  “You read all of this?” he asked Marissa, opening his eyes to look at her.

  She nodded, after making an electronic connection that enabled her to see what he was reading. “Do you think it was Zachary?” she asked.

  Bane looked over the report, wishing he could find evidence that the Bostoner attack had been committed by other opposition fighters hiding around the GSA, groups without any central command structure or coordination.

  “I’m afraid so.” He shook his head sadly.

  From descriptions of the aircraft involved in the attack and of a tube-shaped transport vehicle that had emerged from the ground just before the assault, he was certain it was committed by a breakaway element from his own forces, led by a hotheaded young officer named Reed Zachary—a Red Major with great talent, but little patience. Refusing to wait any longer for Bane’s tunneling machines to be constructed and fully tested, Zachary had wanted to employ immediate guerrilla methods against the widely dispersed GSA forces. After arguing vehemently with Bane over this, he left without permission, using a ruse to take a voleer and three aircraft with him, along with their crews and soldiers, both human and robotic.

  The equipment he took was from a construction shed, and not yet fitted with all weaponry and accessories. Somehow Zachary had jury-rigged various operating systems, but apparently not the Splitter cannons on the aircraft—or the GSA reports would say something about that. Bane was confident that the subterranean transporter, the aircraft, and the robotic soldiers all had self-destruct mechanisms to prevent their secrets from falling into enemy hands—systems that Zachary could not possibly have disabled.

  Bane’s group was undoubtedly the largest among the disaffected, and had drawn officers, fighters, engineers, and war matériel from a number of groups—Corporate and otherwise—that benefited his interests and accepted him as their commander. Now he had hundreds of military aircraft, two thousand armored vehicles, and three old-style nuclear-missile submarines. But all of that, and the seventy thousand fighters in his force, would never be enough to defeat the Chairman and his powerful armies by conventional means. Only guerrilla attacks had any possibility of success; on that he and Zachary had agreed—though not about the timing or other details of attack.

  Despite their difficult relationship, Bane felt no happiness at the possibility—the probability, actually—of the officer’s death.

  “That will be all,” he said to Marissa. Then, with a crooked smile he added, “For now.”

  “You realize that you’re a sexist bastard, don’t you, sir?”

  Dylan Bane nodded, and watched the wiggle of her figure in the uniform as she walked away. He imagined going after her right now and pulling off her clothes. No one would say anything if he forced himself on her, certainly not her. But he didn’t want to risk a loss of decorum in the ranks, a diminishment of respect for him. He would wait for a few more hours, until their preappointed time and place.

  He looked back down at the cavern floor and the work that was progressing there. For most of the two decades since the fall of the American Corporates, he had been supervising the construction and testing of VT-machine prototypes, and now he was preparing a nasty surprise for the Greenies who had taken power. Bane’s hidden forces would rise from the ground like demons from hell and strike wherever he pleased.

  And the element of surprise was not all he had.

  With special access to technology, he possessed small and large weapons to match the Splitters of the SciOs. He understood the primal secrets of Dark Energy, and the easier-to-comprehend (though no less natural) technology of greenforming. He even knew that the SciOs had secret, quasi-religious rituals involving these two opposing forces, and believed they needed to be in constant interplay in order to balance nature—an infinite process of destruction and regeneration.

  Bane had a vast fortune with which to fund his operations, accumulated from the assets of wealthy people who continued to join his forces, from high-level politicians who didn’t join, and from coordinated raids that his specialists made all over the world, using two-man mini-voleers to steal gold, precious jewels, artwork, and other valuables.

  His financial and political contacts were very high-level.

  5

  Despite the oft-expressed opinions of our anarchist brothers and sisters who are contributing mightily to our green cause, we are not against all technology; we do not propose reverting to the woods, or to the Age of Agriculture, or to the Stone Age. The problem with technology is not technology itself. Rather, it is the misuse of it by Corporate and allied interests, who find ways of detaching themselves from the concerns of average citizens, hiding behind armor plates of machines, and reaping huge financial rewards.

  —joint statement of the Berkeley Eight, just before their stunning military victory

  JOSS SAT AT a window table as his train sped along a maglev rail that had been cut through the wilderness, with evergreen trees towering on either side that made it look as if he were going through a narrow green defile. He hadn’t eaten most of the lunch in front of him, and pushed it aside. He and Kupi were bound for their next gig, in the Quebec Territory, having completed their important transformative work in New England. Their subsequent assignment did not involve Janus Machine duties, not the usual sort, anyway. Instead, they were scheduled to attend a gala event in Quebec with high-level progressives to talk about environmental issues, and to provide a demonstration of splitting and greenforming work.

  He heard the smooth hum of machinery around him, along with the voices of passengers and the tinkle of silverware on plates. The pungent, ever-present odor of juana sticks lingered in the air, casting a brown haze throughout the car. There were a number of J-Mac crews riding inside the string of passenger cars, and huge flatcars brought up the rear of the train, with environmental restoration machines strapped to them.

  Thinking back, Joss wondered who the attackers had been near Bostoner, an onslaught that undoubtedly led to the rigid security inspection the train and its passengers had been forced to undergo before departure. When the train finally pulled away he’d seen flatbed trucks carrying pieces of charred, unidentifiable debris from the battle. Presumably they were from the destroyed aircraft and the tube-shaped vessel he’d seen before it exploded—a ve
ssel that reportedly had emerged from the ground and launched the aircraft. Undoubtedly the mission was carried out by one of the small resistance groups that kept cropping up. Nothing of real concern to the Chairman or his followers.

  Kupi sat across the aisle in one of four seats facing another table, smoking a joint and chatting with an anarchist like herself, a slender man who wore the signature black garb of their ilk—except Kupi had a golden peace-symbol medal on her lapel, awarded to her by the GSA government for her bravery and quick thinking with the Splitter Cannon. Her companion’s preference was red wine, not juana, and he was drinking straight from a large bottle.

  Occasionally Joss saw the remnants of cities, towns, and industrial sites whiz by outside, locations where the linked processes of splitting and greenforming had been incomplete, for any number of reasons. Sometimes in the rush to map and chart all details and set priorities for J-Mac work crews, mistakes were committed that other crews needed to correct later. If a Splitter Cannon was not calibrated and aimed properly, for instance, it could result in the incomplete melting of buildings, infrastructure, and other man-made objects. He had also heard of some greenformers not loading the proper genetic materials into their Seed Cannons, thus resulting in plants not surviving in particular localized environments, or in the introduction of invasive species or parasitic organisms that required additional eco-tech work.