Pennsylvania

(28 A LONG HAUL

NOW

Jed rocked back and forth beneath the wide blue sky. He was lying on his back, a green soldier’s blanket laid over his chest, as he was carried on a stretcher held aloft by four men. He saw the beautiful wispy clouds, some connected by gossamer threads of vapor and others seemingly more solid, like great billowy ships adrift in a heavenly sea, and he felt the rhythm of the swaying as the men walked. He had a headache, there was no denying that, and he could hear the people who traveled with him talking as the group moved.

“The only portal left is up on the Shelf, and now with the AZ gone, it’s our only hope.” It was Pook Rayburn talking, and Jed smiled when he recognized the voice. He’d grown to like Pook while working with him on the farm over this past week. He closed his eyes and focused his attention on the voices, hoping that by doing so maybe the headache would fade.

“It’s a long haul, but we’ll make it.” This time it was Dawn Beachy speaking. “We don’t really have any other choice.”

“I hope he’s going to be able to walk at least part of the way,” a third voice said.

There was a loud, derisive sound as one of the men snorted aloud and then spat. “Boy being hurting,” that deep and easily identifiable voice scolded. “Eeguls and boys carrying he all everywhere if needing be.”

“I understand, Eagles,” the third voice said. Ducky, Jed thought. I know his voice and his tendency to worry. “And I’m not complaining,” Ducky added. “Besides, as short as I am I’m not really carrying any of Jed’s weight at all. I’m just saying it would be nice if he improves and he can walk part of the way.”

“He’s had a major head injury,” Dawn said. “Angelo and I had to do four hours of surgery just to get all the shrapnel from his shattered BICE out of him… all so no little piece would get into his bloodstream or work its way around so that it cut something important.”

“He’s lucky to be alive after that fall,” Pook added.

“Okay!” Ducky said with a sigh. “Just so everyone knows: I’m not complaining about us having to carry Jed. Not at all.”

“We all want him to improve and get better, Ducky,” Dawn said.

“That’s all I was saying,” Ducky said.

Jed opened his eyes again and stared into the sky. So beautiful. The headache blurred a little around the edges, and he concentrated on breathing deeply, tried to focus his attention on where he was and what might be happening. So: his BICE was gone. Shattered in a fall. That was one thing. He tried to access it, as if he believed that what he’d just heard wasn’t true. He concentrated and imagined his BICE control panel coming up, but however much he focused, nothing happened.

He watched the clouds again as they moved, and then closed his eyes and took several very deep breaths. He tried to let all of the tension go out of his body, noting that as he did so, the headache seemed to lessen just a bit. Then he opened his eyes again. He imagined the sky and the clouds as being made of tiny pixels, and he tried to soar up there so he could get a closer look. Nothing happened, so he settled himself again. To be without the BICE interface now… it seemed like trying to think or operate without part of his own mind. Surely all of his new powers hadn’t been stripped from him?

He tried to remember everything he’d been told about how the brain worked. He evened out his breathing again, and this time he really concentrated. He imagined the new synapses that had been formed when the BICE was first installed, and he tried to think of them as little switches that could be flipped on and off at will. He once again pictured himself bringing up his BICE control interface. And this time, something spectacular happened.

Darkness permeated his mind, and in moments the white screen appeared before him. He immediately reacted by dividing the screen into nine windows, just as he’d done the last time he’d used his BICE.

Next, he imagined himself dividing his mind—his own consciousness—so that a whole new Jed was operating each screen, and simultaneously all nine of the windows came to life, each monitor showing him different data.

Now he was faced with a whole new reality. What was happening to him? He could feel the sway of the stretcher, and the cool breeze on his face. He could still faintly hear the voices of his friends as they carried him along. But in his mind, he was looking up at nine view screens, like nine panes of glass in a window. He looked closely at the bottom right-hand pane, and on that ninth video screen the image of the coffee can appeared.

Either he was suffering from brain damage and he was now hallucinating that his BICE was still functioning, or… could it be? Could his brain have been permanently altered by the presence of his BICE? He remembered back to the early days, when he was just studying about the BICE and how it worked. He remembered someone… maybe it was Dawn… telling him about experiments that had been done on the brain in the past. In one such experiment, soldiers were given goggles that inverted their vision, and therefore the world that they saw. Since the lenses naturally inverted every bit of light that enters the eyes, the brain had the job of flipping the upside-down images into a right-side-up picture. With the inversion goggles on, everything looked upside-down. The soldiers’ feet touched the ground above their eyes, and the sky hovered below. A tool lying on the ground would appear to be “up,” but if they tilted their head up to look at it, their view would pan in the opposite direction—toward the sky. Which was “down.”

In short, the goggles were very disorienting, and at first, the soldiers often got very sick. Doing the simplest tasks became extremely difficult. But then a strange thing happened. After several days of wearing the goggles non-stop, their brains eventually began to re-invert the images. The brain was able to correct for the inversion goggles, by turning the images back over so that the men began to see things right-side-up again. Their brains had re-trained themselves.

Then the goggles were removed—and the brain, having grown accustomed to inverting upside-down visual inputs, continued to invert the images. As a result, the men once again had the feeling that everything was upside down, even though they weren’t wearing the goggles. Fortunately, within a few days their brains had re-re-trained themselves, and everyone’s vision had returned to normal.

Overall, it was a fascinating lesson in how the brain can learn to function and adapt to alterations to its normal input.

Jed’s brain (it seemed) had learned to work as if the BICE was still there, providing him visual input so that the newer, higher-functioning areas of his mind could interpret data. On one screen, an image was displayed. It showed a large empty area, devoid of hills or valleys, where the Amish Zone should have been. It was as if the whole community had just disappeared. He didn’t know how he knew that this had once been where the Amish Zone was, but he did. Even the immense walls were completely gone. On another screen he was seeing the process of okcillium being extracted from reclaimed road base, back in the old world. On still another screen, he examined maps and data that appeared to show a location up on the Great Shelf. All of these things—except for the image of the empty space where the Amish Zone had been—were things his brain already knew. His mind was simply using a new process for interpreting and organizing data, having learned this method from working with the BICE.

The other screens showed things like force readiness reports, and files about the history of the AZ and the building of the wall. All things he’d read before. He thought of Dawn Beachy, and a file containing her picture appeared on one of the screens. He scrolled to an overall summary of the information Transport had about her. He had the feeling that, if he’d ever looked at or studied a piece of information before in all of his life, he now had access to it in real time.

This was all impossible, of course. If he had no BICE interface, he couldn’t be accessing the Internet. Maybe he was just having hallucinations. Maybe his brain was somehow responding to the injury, and as a result he was flashing back to an earlier episode in his bizarre experience.

He felt a drowsiness coming over him then, and he breathed deeply again. He heard voices: those of his friends as they carried him along on the stretcher. And there were other voices, too. The voices of strangers he’d never met.

He squeezed his eyes tightly, and he saw the screens in his mind, and they’d gone dark.

Ask questions.

He thought for a moment.What is the next step? Where do we go from here?

And the screens answered him.

(29 ABOUT TIME

ONE WEEK EARLIER: SUNDAY

In his sleep, Jed soared high above the Amish Zone and looked down on it from the air. Down below, his body was ostensibly sleeping, cramped but not too uncomfortable, on the floor of Matthias’s kitchen, along with Pook, Billy, and Ducky.

At altitude, he took it all in. He could see the entire extent of the Amish Zone, and the incredibly high and thick walls that surrounded it. Looking closer, he discovered that the walls appeared to have been constructed of rubble, pushed into the form of perimeter walls. But the top of the wall and the inside—facing the Amish countryside—had been finished and smoothed with concrete. Stairs and railings had been added here and there, so that anyone from inside the Zone could scale to the top if they felt like it.

Jed still didn’t have answers about who had first built the walls… or why. The barrier had not been built to keep the community safe from animal predators, this much he knew. He studied the walls a while longer, then shifted his perspective so that he could see the whole community in one scene—and found himself deeply moved by the awesomeness of it all. This plain community, connected by blood and heritage to the old world of before, and even to the still-older world of medieval Europe, had survived and thrived—while the largest empires ever built by humans had all come and gone.

Although it was night, Jed could still see every detail, and he adjusted the light until it was perfect for his purposes. He could see the rich soil, the tree-lined lanes, the perfect intersecting lines of plowed fields and fences. He could see the immaculate houses and yards and barns set in stark relief against the verdant nature the community revered and managed. He saw a people who’d determined that they would define themselves rather than have their reality and culture defined by the times. That thought satisfied Jed, and soothed his soul.

He came to a stop and hovered in space, just studying it all awhile, reveling in the same beauty that had made Amish communities the target of tourism for hundreds of years. After a bit of reflection, Jed took a few deep breaths and then brought up his BICE control interface. He examined the file drawers for a moment.

He tried unsuccessfully to bring up Dawn’s avatar, but wasn’t surprised by that; he was starting to suspect that her BICE had somehow been removed or turned off while she was being held by the Yoders. He regretted now that he hadn’t cleared up that little mystery with Dawn before setting her up in his bedroom for the night. When he’d told her goodnight, she’d given him the bottle of Quadrille, so he knew she expected him to get online. But if she’d planned on joining him in cyberspace… well, he had no way of knowing.

Regardless, Jed certainly wasn’t going to waste the whole night sleeping. He wanted to know more about what was going on, and how he was being used by both his brother and Transport. It was like he was being pulled in a single direction, but by two diametrically opposed forces—if such a thing could be possible. He wanted to be online, because he wanted to know more about this place, and what was happening to him, and, at the same time, he wanted to find out why he was being used… why his being online was so important to his brother.

He started reading through the files again, repeating his process of hacking into Transport’s system. He accessed the information on how Transport had determined that they could mine okcillium from the road base back on Earth. It was all right there in a memo sent to Transport command:

This information perplexed Jed. If Transport hadn’t harvested the okcillium from the road base the “first time around” (whatever that meant), and had only subsequently learned that the okcillium was in the road base, then what did that mean? That they went back to Earth to get it? So they went back in time?

He’d always liked puzzles, but this one seemed to be unsolvable. So he switched gears. Rather than study events in time, why not study time itself? He searched for anything he could find about the basis and science of time… and time travel. He studied documents and reports from throughout written history. For the most part, these papers were written in a style and manner that was completely over his head. He couldn’t make head nor tail out of them. So he closed his eyes, looked out into the universe above the Amish Zone, and tried to imagine what time must look like. He tried visualizing many different concepts, but every time he would encounter some flaw in his analogy. That is, until he struck on the idea of thinking of time as a long string—or, rather, an immense fabric made up of a large number of strings. This analogy wasn’t perfect, but it held up better than any other he’d come up with.

He remembered that as a boy his father had once told him that space was like an enormous blanket, or carpet, which God had stretched into place starting from a single point. Not like a blanket that swaddled the Earth like a baby, but more like an unimaginably large fabric that stretched through nothingness and the void. And the planet Earth was just one little element embedded in the fabric.

He’d seen Amish women making fabric on looms, so he understood that process. And, he thought, his own life had been like a journey along one of these threads. It started at one point and had progressed “normally” in one direction. Even if someone had tied a knot in the string (a concept he could understand), he’d still only traveled forward, and never any other way.

Two ants traveling on a string in this manner could have different journeys. An ant walking along the top of a taut, straight string would never loop back to where he’d already been. But another ant, perhaps walking along the bottom of the same string, could detour around a loose, hanging knot or loop, circling back to where he’d been before, while the ant on top of the thread kept right on walking.

Now Jed thought of an almost (but not quite) infinite number of threads—enough threads to form a fabric containing everything that is. Any single thread in that fabric could be crossed or looped at any point along any of the threads. This thought process helped him get his bearings, even if it didn’t help him solve any of his immediate problems.

As an Amish man, Jed had never progressed beyond the eighth grade in his education. Amish education existed mainly to prepare the plain people to deal with real-life issues and challenges. Things like communication, simple work, fellowship, humility, and submission were emphasized. For Amish men and women, education and job training would go on for life, but the primary, community level of education finished when one was about fourteen years old. Logic was learned by solving real-life problems in real time.

Well, he thought. Apparently, time travel has just become a real-life issue.

But Jed also recognized that if an education beyond the eighth grade automatically helped in solving time-travel problems, then probably a whole lot of the English would already be bopping around time by now, and it didn’t seem like they were. So maybe he didn’t need a public education. Maybe what he needed was just the ability to think things through.

He wondered: maybe some force had been applied to loop the thread of time back on itself. If time is an immense fabric, then like fabric, it can be wrinkled, looped, or folded. Jed remembered playing a game with Matthias where they would put a heavy leather ball (a toy they called a “corner ball”) in a small baby’s blanket, and then each of them would take two corners of the blanket. They’d pull tight and rocket the corner ball into the air. Then, when the ball descended, they would catch it in the blanket. As it came down with great force, they would lessen the tension on the blanket, and the ball would push the blanket down and curl the fabric back around on itself. From this loose analogy, it seemed to Jed that bending time might be possible if only the one wishing to do the bending could apply enough power, force, speed, or some such expression of energy.

Bending the fabric of time? That would take a lot of energy, he thought.

It seemed logical that the energy behind this time-bending force must be okcillium. He didn’t even know what okcillium was or what it did, but he knew that it was a unique and very efficient power source, and that both sides in the current war were keen to have a lot of it. Perhaps some enterprising scientist working for the government had been the first to use okcillium power to bend time?

Jed immediately pulled up a file that discussed the attributes of okcillium. He had dozens of documents to choose from, so he just pulled one randomly from the cabinet and began to read. It was a paper done for a university back on Earth. From what Jed could gather, okcillium was a completely new and different kind of power source. And it was incredibly efficient; this fact was repeated over and over again. Power generated by okcillium produced very little resistance as it traveled through just about any material at all. That means it didn’t produce a tremendous amount of heat, or a lot of noise either. A common piece of copper electrical wire was sufficient to send enough power to light a small town.

Here, he thought, is enough energy to produce a bend or loop in the fabric of time. So somehow, during his travels, he’d been tossed forward in time. His mind reeled at the thought of it.

He reflected on his journey to New Pennsylvania. How Dawn had told him that he’d never really ever gone to Texas. That apparently that part of the journey had been a show—a sham—perhaps some government method used to track down rebels trying to pass through time using Transport resources.

But then he’d been released by the Transport Authority, put inside his pod, and prepped by the woman whose job it was to monitor him on his trip. He remembered now that the woman hooked a tube up to his catheter. That was supposed to be his waste-processing system. Before now, he’d never considered that the catheter might have been for some other purpose. He pressed his eyes closed and tried to amplify his recollection of events. He remembered pushing the blue button, and he recalled the almost immediate cool sensation of some liquid pulsing through his veins. He remembered thinking that the cooling of his veins was odd, but not unpleasant, and then he remembered being surprised to see Dawn in the pod next to him, right before the lights went out for him.

Was it possible that he’d been drugged just so that, while he took some strange loop along the thread of time, he wouldn’t know what was happening? Could it be that he’d never really left Columbia, Pennsylvania at all? That somehow he’d been kept in suspended animation for some requisite time while he and the ship he was in merely passed forward into another era?

Dawn. She said she’d been back and forth several times.

She knew Billy and Pook and Ducky like they’d been friends forever. Yet she also knew Amos from when they were both back on Earth, and Amos had contacted her and asked her to travel with Jed to New Pennsylvania.

Then there was the window with the coffee-can pane. That was easy enough to explain if the window had come through the same portal. Maybe not at the same time, but who knew? Pook had stored his forged papers in the back of the window frame. No way was that a coincidence. Jed knew that his brother had intended for him to see the window. When he’d mentioned as much to Amos, his brother had smiled.

Jed’s thoughts raced now.

Here’s what he knew. He was either completely insane, or… well, he felt like he could safely assume four things: 1. The Columbia Transport Station was (or contained) some kind of okcillium time-bending device. 2. Transport, at some point, had figured out how to perform this time bending, and was using it to colonize… what? Some future Earth? Was he in the future? Was he still on Earth? 3. The limited amount of okcillium available on Earth at the time meant that TRACE was forced to use Transport’s travel portal. 4. The City was gone.

Also this: Transport now had access to a large supply of okcillium back on Earth. Conclusion? Everything has changed.

(30 THE COUNCIL

This Council meeting was unlike any the SOMA had experienced in all his years of leading TRACE. For the first time, his leadership and decisions were being questioned—openly. His natural fighting instinct inclined him to threaten to retire again. In the past, that ploy had usually worked to get the council to back off—but with so many pieces of the endgame finally in place, he was just a little afraid they might actually accept his resignation this time, and move on without him. That was a fear he’d never really experienced before in all his time as the supreme commander of TRACE forces. And now, at long last, he had his brother in play, and things were going so well in that regard.

Councilman Bennings stood and placed both hands on the table. Bennings was a traditionally contrarian voice on the council. Slow to move and difficult to convince. Amos was also convinced that the man wanted power, and the sooner the better.

“Now that Transport has retreated beyond the Shelf, why have they not moved against the Amish? Either to take the Amish with them, or to destroy their community so that it cannot exist to support and feed the resistance?” Bennings asked. “We’re all sure that the government didn’t bring the Amish here in order to abandon them to us. So why not destroy them?”

Bennings didn’t direct his questions to anyone in particular, but all eyes turned to Amos anyway. He was always expected to have all the answers.

“The only reason the Amish haven’t been destroyed in the new world,” Amos replied, “is because they produce raw materials from nothing—from the ground—and most of the new world would starve without them.” He put his hands behind his back and began to pace slowly back and forth before the giant screen that showed a map of the Amish Zone.

“Colonization of the Great Shelf has largely failed,” he continued. “Despite all of Transport’s schemes and machinations, the big cities are still only lightly populated, and the immigrants who have chosen to live there work for slave wages, earning unbacked and inflated unis in the factories and service industries, to support Transport’s imperial plans. The cities are not cities in any real sense of the word. They are basically large factory prisons. Just because the prisoners choose to remain there as some quirk of their makeup doesn’t make the prison any less real.”

Bennings nodded. “These are all things we know, Commander. But they don’t explain why Transport hasn’t yet attacked the AZ.”

“It is the foundation of my answer, Councilman,” Amos said. “If you’ll allow me to continue?”

Bennings nodded and waved his hand, almost dismissively.

Amos resumed his speech. “Transport’s hope has been that the population of the cities would explode—through immigration and through natural population growth. The government’s erroneous belief has been that where there’s a growing population, eventually productivity will follow suit. The theory, as backward as we know it to be, is that the more consumers there are, the more consumables can be produced in the factories, and the better everyone will do. Of course, we know that population growth does not just magically spawn productivity. Building factories and stocking them full of people does not mystically produce either raw materials or good ideas. But understanding Transport’s thinking helps us to predict how they might act. For example, since they believe that population equals production, and that city folk are more compliant and more easily governed, we can expect that they are incentivizing births in the cities. We were able to predict this even before we learned from our spies that the city folk up on the shelf are encouraged to reproduce offspring wildly, while country folk—if they are caught—are punished for having children, unless they commit to having their children schooled by the government and trained for city work.

“Understanding Transport helps us know what we need to do to defeat them,” Amos said.

“And what if they’re successful?” It was Councilwoman Reynosa. She sat back and fixed her eyes on Amos. She spoke respectfully, but with firm intent. “What if they’re able to begin making these factories more productive than they are currently?”

Amos nodded at the Councilwoman. “Those who are creative or who can produce have mostly escaped the cities and are now living in the countryside—off-grid—much like the Amish in the east. The brain drain is almost absolute.”

“If you are correct,” Reynosa said, “then we should be able to sit back and wait. Eventually the cities will collapse, and Transport will have failed to rebuild.”

“Unfortunately, that is not true,” Amos said. “They have access to a portal. And with it, they can bring through raw materials, even okcillium, all taken from the old world. History shows us that many tyrannical governments have been able to build up large and powerful armies using coercive industrialism. Nazi Germany is one example.” Amos paused for a moment to let the visual sink in. “If Transport hadn’t found a way to access okcillium from the old world, I would completely agree with you, Councilwoman. We could contain them, and just wait for their system to collapse. But as we have seen… okcillium changes everything.”

Bennings scowled. He was growing frustrated. “That still doesn’t explain why the Amish have not been destroyed.” The Councilman stood and walked closer to where Amos stood. The approach wasn’t threatening, but it carried with it a message; and that message was understood by everyone in the room. “If the Amish aren’t in a position to supply goods and services to Transport up on the Shelf, why does the government allow them to survive—when they know all the Amish will be doing is producing for us?”

Amos looked down at the floor and sighed. “I don’t know.” He looked up again. “I only know that food production up on the Shelf is not sufficient to provide for the cities for very long. We know it, and they know it.”

“And what, then, are we to conclude from these facts?” Bennings asked.

“They must attack at some point,” Amos said. “As soon as they feel they are strong enough, or that they have an advantage.”

“If we know this, and we expect an attack on the AZ, what are we going to do to protect the Amish there?”

“Everything that can be done.”

“Can we guarantee that they will not be harmed?”

“No.”

This answer caused a general buzz to run through the room. The voices carried with them every form of human emotion. Anger. Concern. Fear. Amos knew that fear, when properly curated, could be a great ally. It is good that they fear, he thought. If they are not afraid, then they are stupid. And if they are afraid, then they should listen to me.

Amos spoke loudly to be heard over the general din. “On this side of the cliffs, Transport forces are only performing occasional probing actions. But we should not get cavalier and forget the dangers. We’ve seen what they did to their own city.”

“What you say they did to their own city!” It was Councilman Graham, a politician who represented rebels who lived in the countryside beyond the Shelf.

Amos Troyer smiled, but it was a smile dripping with irony. “If you have information about the bombing that contradicts the facts we know, Councilman Graham, I’d love to receive them.” He knew that Graham was a great supporter of his. The man was just making a joke to lighten the mood and to emphasize that some members of the Council didn’t trust Amos Troyer with power. Not now that TRACE was winning the war.

Bennings waved off the small performance between the two allies. “What about our soldiers who stopped the attack on your brother in the AZ?”

Amos noted—and not for the first time—that whenever his military actions were successful, Bennings would refer to the soldiers as our soldiers. Our forces. Our actions. But if something failed, as it did in the recent limited attack on the Tulsa, Bennings had emphasized that “Your people were not ready.” “Your people were caught by surprise,” he’d said. Amos decided, wisely, not to point out this anomaly, but he intended to mention it to some of the other Council members in private conversations later.

“Our people,” Amos said, “have been permitted by the elders in the AZ to stay for one week, to tend to their wounded or to make other arrangements. But after that, they’ll have to go. This is in accord with the agreement the Amish have with Transport, going back to the foundation of the colony.”

“But Transport has no authority there now!” Councilman Bennings shouted. “They’re gone from the east. Why are the Amish still obeying Transport?”

Amos stared at Bennings for a moment before answering. “The Amish have their own reasons for everything they do, and you know that,” he said. “They don’t have to answer to me or to you. However, they’ve graciously given us some insight into their decisions. The elders realize that their colonization agreement may be voided now that Transport has fled beyond the Shelf, but they don’t want to be harboring violent rebels beyond the time limit that they believe allows them to satisfy the Biblical requirement for charity and mercy. This is the best that we can expect.”

“And what about your brother?” Bennings asked.

“Yes?” Amos said. “What about him?”

“Are the Amish going to ask him to leave, too?”

“No.”

Bennings nodded. “And how does this affect the war?”

“Although they cannot yet ask Jedediah to leave, the elders also voiced the opinion that he should pray about whether or not he is becoming a detriment to the future happiness of the colony. Jed was not found to have engaged in any violence, or to have encouraged it in any way, but they ask that he consider whether or not his presence among the plain people is likely to encourage more violence to happen in the Amish Zone.”

“And how does Jedediah figure in your plans?”

Amos smiled. “I’m not free to divulge that yet, other than to say that my brother is of primary importance to our war effort.”

At this point, Bennings stood and threw his hands into the air. “So you don’t even feel the need to inform this council of your plans?”

Amos shook his head. “I do not.”

Councilman Graham interrupted. He had his hands spread apart like he was separating two prizefighters in the ring. “Can you at least tell us why you don’t just mount a full attack on Transport? Those of us who live on the Shelf would greatly appreciate the relief. We’ve given you the Tulsa, as you asked. We’ve achieved air superiority. We have them on the run beyond the Shelf—”

Amos raised his hand, palm out, to silence his friend. “If we defeat them here… if we destroy them, and any means or method they have to travel back to the old world—which is no easy task… we still have the fundamental problem.”

“And what problem is that, sir?” Bennings asked.

“They still have control of the old world. According to my brother, they have now discovered a means to gather and utilize an enormous amount of okcillium. If we win the war here, the fight only shifts back to the old world. From there, if they are not stopped, they can build a thousand portals—and flood this world again in a way that we’ll never stop.”

Bennings looked around at the other faces and frowned. “But if we don’t win the war here first, then they still control both worlds, and can shut the portal any time they please…”

“Something they’ve already done by destroying the City, haven’t they?” Reynosa asked.

Amos Troyer put up his hands again, indicating a request for silence. After a moment, the talking and bickering quieted down, and Amos waited a few more beats before speaking.

“By destroying the City, Transport succeeded in destroying the only… official… travel portal between the old world and New Pennsylvania. This is true. But we should all be prepared to accept the reality that they would not have done this if they didn’t already have another portal ready and operating. We suspect that this new portal is somewhere beyond the Shelf.”

Bennings sat down in frustration. He sighed deeply and rubbed his face with his hands. “I guess I hadn’t really thought about that with everything going on here. The Transport station in the City was our main means of maintaining the war in both worlds… and now it’s gone.”

Silence reigned for a few moments, and all eyes were on Amos.

“The good news is that we have another portal, too,” he said. He began pacing again, but looked at each Council member in turn as he spoke. “The existence and location of that portal is currently a military secret. I will not divulge it to this council or to any other person at this time.”

Silence.

Bennings stood again. “Either we must win here, or we must win there—in order to guarantee ourselves a future.”

“That is incorrect,” Amos said. “We must win here and there, or we are all finished.”

“Which war is more winnable?” Graham asked.

“This one.”

“Then we must win this one first, and win that one eventually,” Bennings said.

“I agree,” Amos said, nodding. “And I have every intention of making certain our eventual victory.”

When it appeared that no one had anything else to add, Amos fixed his eyes on Bennings and approached the man, who turned in his chair to face the SOMA.

“If we are done here,” Amos said, “I am going to ask you to get out of my office—and off my ship.” He paused for a moment and then smiled. He directed his next statement to the rest of the Council. “If the rest of you want this little man running your war, just let me know, and I’ll turn over the keys to him. If not, then I don’t want to see him on my ship again until this war is over and I’m retired.”

(31 LIGHTER

Isaiah King’s family took Matthias into their home—to care for him and tend to his bullet wound. Of course, this was after he’d received first aid from Pook’s unit medic (a tall man named Angelo), and after he’d been seen by Elder Bontrager at the Amish clinic. The Kings were an Amish family who’d come to New Pennsylvania from the smaller Missouri Amish Zone in one of the earliest migrations from the old world.

The Amish of the New Pennsylvania colony were an amalgamated people. The community was made up of converts from among the English back in the old world, Amish-raised transplants from the four different AZ’s of Earth, and even some other plain people who didn’t self-identify as Amish. But one thing the community in New Pennsylvania had that has always been common to communities of plain people the world over, was a sense of obligation to care for one another. They all possessed an intense desire to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and to take care of the aged and infirm no matter the cost.

Matthias’s life had been spared because the bullet fired at him from the pistol of a Transport soldier had missed an artery in his shoulder by an eighth of an inch. Despite the close call, and the fact that Matthias was still not out of the woods, everyone was hopeful that he’d make a full recovery. They were hopeful, but not deceived. They wanted him to live and thrive, but no one could really know for sure that he would—not yet. There were no hospitals in the Amish Zone (though there was a clinic) and with the destruction of the City, critical medical care had become something that, once again, they couldn’t depend on. Though they weren’t at all hesitant to make use of advanced medical care when it was available, and when it fit with their overall worldview, the Amish generally relied on common sense, intensive personal attention to the sick or injured, and prayer, more than they ever relied on some system devised by the English.

After he’d made assurances that Matthias was being well cared for, Jed, Dawn, and Pook’s soldiers had all made their way back to Matthias’s farm where, by agreement with the elders, they would stay until after the barn-raising, which was scheduled for the coming Saturday. Even with Matthias injured, the barn-raising would go forward. However dour and serious the Amish might seem to outsiders, they are an overwhelmingly optimistic people. Their faith, and the evidence of a thousand years, convinced them that plowing forward despite the obstacles was always the best policy.

But while it is true that they are an optimistic people, they are not particularly inclusive. They have their own culture and rules, and they expect to be left alone to live according to them. So once the barn was raised, the rebel soldiers being housed at Matthias’s house would be expected to leave the Amish Zone—and the elders were not-so-privately hoping that Jedediah would go with them.

Back at Matthias’s small farmhouse, the tiny structure became the temporary home of Jed, Dawn, Billy, Pook, and Ducky—which was all the people the little cottage could comfortably hold. The rest of the rebel squad bedded down in Matthias’s temporary “barn.” He called it a barn because it was where he stored his buggy, wagon, and tack, but for all intents and purposes it was a small shed that was barely weatherproof. Built of old, re-purposed barn wood, the shed had taken four days of lonely labor for Matthias to construct, and the young Amish man had been clear in pointing out that he looked forward to tearing the shed down so that he could reuse the wood yet again.

The shed was no motel, but it was plenty fine according to the standards of the TRACE soldiers. It was certainly better than they could expect most anywhere they’d be billeted outside the Amish Zone. Many times in the past, through their battles and travels, the team had slept in caves, or dens of rocks. They’d often stretched themselves out on the frozen ground of New Pennsylvania for a shivery night of very little sleep. No, for them, Matthias’s shed would do just fine for the week, and they were glad to have it.

Being dead, the Yoders could no longer be relied upon to bring meals, so a committee of the Amish had created a rotating meal-assignment list that would spread the responsibility of feeding the inhabitants of Matthias’s farm until it came time for them all to leave. These arrangements were a matter of course for the Amish, and were never seen as a burden. Jed remembered that his family back in the old world was constantly preparing food to be delivered somewhere, for some charitable reason or another. Among the Amish, a person’s sense of self-worth and personal value was intricately tied to the communal idea of helping others. Independence and individuality were never considered positive things to be sought after. Dependence on one another, and losing oneself in the body of the brethren, were the foundations of the community. To not have that extra work to do would have been quite troubling for the plain people.

Jed gave his little bedroom over to Dawn, and the four other men bedded down on fleeces and blankets in the tiny kitchen. They all slept well after the ordeal of the previous day. Just before bed, Dawn had pressed a small bottle of white pills into Jed’s hand. “Q,” she’d said. “In case you need it.”

On Sunday morning, Jed awoke early and cleaned up his area, stowing his fleece and blanket out of the way so that the kitchen could be used. He wanted to be up early enough to show the soldiers who’d slept out in the barn how to perform many of the daily farm tasks. Since they’d be there for a week, and since Matthias wouldn’t be able to work, the soldiers were expected to pitch in. It was the Amish way.

Jed stepped out into the cool morning air and inhaled deeply. The scents of manured fields and fresh hay, and the pungent aroma of damp grass made him feel almost like he was at home. Almost. There were lingering doubts in him that threw everything just a little off kilter. It isn’t natural for a human to not be grounded in “place” and “time.” To be cast adrift unsettles the soul, and until a new place becomes home, it remains foreign. Jed felt unmoored from the foundations of his life, and even his Amishness wasn’t quite the anchor that it had always been for him.

He wasn’t excited about waking the soldiers in the milking shed at 4:30 a.m. either, but it needed to be done, and the cows certainly wouldn’t milk themselves. They were used to being milked at this hour, which meant that their udders would be full and giving the animals a feeling of urgency. The cows knew when it was almost time to let down their milk, and Jed had seen Zoe so eager to be milked at milking time that her teats were literally leaking the fluid when he’d gone in to start the process.

He pulled open the shed door, expecting to be an irritant to the soldiers, only to be pleasantly surprised by what he saw. Several lanterns were already burning in the small shed, and their yellow-orange light flickered and cast long shadows against the walls. It seems Jed wouldn’t have to wake the men after all. Apparently, Eagles had already—to his own evident joy and amusement—rudely woken the other men, and he was now showing the sleepy team how to milk the cows. The soldiers were all crowded around a stall while the burly wild man tried to explain the process of milking in his broken English.

“Eeguls juicing cow!” he said to Jed as soon as he noticed him watching from the doorway. He had a huge smile on his face. It was evident that the salvager was very pleased with himself for recognizing the need, and for taking on the task.

Jed had never seen Eagles without a big chunk of uncured tobac in his mouth, so he was a little surprised that greenish goo didn’t fly from the man’s lips as he spoke. In fact, the man wasn’t chewing the green tobacco at all.

“Squeezing teat down. Topping to bottom. Ziiiip! Juicing!” Eagles repeated the feat again and again, and then added his other hand. “Ziiip! Ziip! Bothing hands now playing musics!”

“I’ll never figure that out,” Ducky said with a sleepy scowl.

“Little man figuring out!” Eagles shouted angrily. “Little man eating not if not juicing cow!” The big man pointed around the barn randomly and said, “Farm!” Then he pointed at the cow and said, “Cow!” Then he pointed at the teats and said, “Juice!” Then he pointed at his mouth and said, “And eating only then!” To conclude his filibuster, he pointed at Ducky. “Juicing cow no? Eating no!”

“Somebody give this man some tobacco,” Pook said, shaking his head.

“He’s a little cranky in the morning.”

“Not cranking, dummy! Shutting the Pook!” Eagles snapped. His right hand continued the milking, but his free hand began to strike out, flailing at the soldiers wildly, and he succeeded in knocking Billy off the neighboring stool. Eagles stopped milking then and stood up, glaring at Pook. “You!” He narrowed his eyes in a threatening way, pointing at the rebel leader.

Pook looked around. “Me?”

“You!”

“Me what?”

“Juicing cow.”

“Wait. I’m juicing the cow?”

Eagles nodded. “Now!”

Pook grinned. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Eagles glared at Pook, but didn’t say a word.

Pook shook his head. “I’m an officer now. I’m not milking any cow.”

The wild man snarled and then nodded again. He shrugged, and then hauled back and punched Ducky right in the face. The little man flew backward and landed on his rump, skidding up against the wall of the shed.

“Whoa!” Pook yelled, and pulled his weapon, pointing it at Eagles. “What did you do that for?”

Ducky, now propped up against the far wall, shook his head and rubbed his jaw. He tried to clear his vision, and a few of the other soldiers ran to help him up.

“Pook juicing cow!” Eagles demanded.

Pook was pointing the weapon at Eagles and trying to figure out what had just happened. He backed up slowly and then reached over to steady Ducky. “Why did you punch him and not me?”

Eagles made another fist, and then reached behind him with his other hand and snatched Billy up from the stool. “Being Pook is boss!”

Ducky looked up at Pook while still rubbing his jaw. “I think he’s saying that if you don’t get milking, he’s going to kick all of our butts.”

“What the—?” Pook said.

Eagles tightened his fist and looked at Billy.

“Okay! Okay!” Pook said. “Sheesh! Unbelievable.”

“Juicing, now!” Eagles said.

“Juicing now,” Pook said. He exhaled deeply and sat down on the stool and took the teats in his hands.

Eagles looked around and smiled. He smacked his hand together like he was done with his work, and winked at Jed. “Timing for tobac!” he said as he walked out of the shed.

Jed watched as the wild salvager skipped across the dirt drive on his way to the small house. As Eagles walked, he tossed up a piece of metal that glinted in the moonlight, commanding Jed’s attention. Eagles caught the piece of metal deftly and then tossed it up again. Just then, Ducky walked up next to Jed, still working his jaw back and forth and stretching his neck.

“Hmmm…” Ducky said to Jed. “I wonder if Eagles got that okcillium lighter back somehow. I thought he’d lost it in the firefight with Transport in No Man’s Land, when you and Dawn were first captured.”

(32 THE PEACEFUL KIND

MONDAY

A dozen Amish men arrived at Matthias’s farm just as the pink-orange glow of sunrise began to paint the eastern sky. They brought two large wagons, filled with tons of lumber and building supplies for the new barn. Heavy beams cut from ancient trees, rough-cut studs, and one inch-thick siding boards were strapped on with heavy hand-made ropes.

Pook’s team worked alongside the Amish men, unloading all of the materials. Then two of the Amish craftsmen began leveling and laying out the foundation and base of the banked barn, while another team began cutting and notching the heavy beams like puzzle pieces, according to plans they stored only in their heads. By noon, the Amish artisans were teaching Pook and his team how to lay concrete block. Although the barn would be built on Saturday, this prep team was sent to make sure that things went smoothly on barn-raising day.

Jed and Dawn took the opportunity to spend some time together, so in minutes they were walking along the tree-lined roads of the Amish Zone, stopping every once in a while to study neighboring farms and structures. As they walked, Dawn briefed Jed on what had happened to her after she’d been captured by the Yoders.

“They had been working for Transport, but Amos turned them,” Dawn said. “Or the other way around—I’m not sure. Anyway, they were double agents. And maybe we’ll never really learn where their real allegiances lay.”

Jed reached up and touched the back of Dawn’s kapp. “They removed your BICE? Is it healing up all right? Do you have any pain?”

“I’ve had a BICE removed before, remember?” Dawn said. “I’ll be all right. It is kind of hard to get used to not having Internet access, but I think I kind of like it.”

Jed just nodded. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be without the chip just yet. Certainly in the long run he wanted to be done with it all, but having the chip gave him a strange and even eerie sense of comfort. It was a very non-Amish feeling, but however paradoxical it was, the feeling was there nonetheless.

“Being here,” Dawn said, “walking these lanes and being with you… Well, it shows me that I’d like to live here when this is all over,” Dawn said.

Jed blushed and put his hands into the pockets of his broadfall pants. “I’d like for you to live here, too.”

Dawn took his elbow and pulled him to a stop, turning toward him. “So, do you think we could get married? You and I? And live with the Amish here in this community?”

Jed blushed. He didn’t know what to say. He studied Dawn’s face to see if she was serious about what she was saying. It was different to actually be talking to her face to face, without the subconscious knowledge that what he was looking at was actually just her avatar. “I don’t know,” he said. He turned and began walking again, so Dawn followed him. “The elders have made it pretty clear that they don’t want me here.”

“Once this is all over,” Dawn said, “they’ll know you didn’t participate in any violence. They’ll know you were just trying to survive in a peaceful way, Jed.”

“I don’t even know if that’s true,” Jed said. “I don’t know myself well enough to know if I’m the peaceful kind.”

Dawn put her hand on his back. “You are, Jed.”

“I don’t know,” Jed repeated. “Maybe I’m more like my brother.”

“I know you both,” Dawn said. “And I love your brother. He’s been like a father to me. But you and he are nothing alike, Jed.”

“He brought me here. He planned all of this so that I’d join in the fight with him,” Jed said.

Dawn pursed her lips. “I don’t think so. He brought you here, for sure. And there’s no doubt that he’s been using you to help the resistance. That part is also true. But he hasn’t asked you to fight.”

Jed didn’t say anything for a while after that. They walked on, and after a short spell he took her hand and squeezed it. “I would very much like to marry you, Dawn. Wherever we end up.” He smiled at her. “I’ll be Amish wherever I am, I know that. And I hope you know that too.”

They walked up to a large clearing that looked very familiar to Jed. There were a few low rises that seemed out of place, but if he didn’t know better, he’d have said that this land could have been the location of his family’s farm.

“I brought you here on purpose,” Dawn said. “I thought you would recognize it.” She put her hands behind her back as they walked. “I thought you might be ready to see it.”

Jed didn’t speak as he looked around. He wasn’t sure what he thought about seeing the place.

“I was raised Amish,” Dawn said.

Jed’s attention was on the land—he was trying to compare it with his memories of his old farm—but when he realized that Dawn was being serious, he turned to her. “You were raised Amish?” Jed asked. “What happened?”

“My father left the Amish when I was ten years old. After my mother died.” Dawn looked down at the ground and shuffled her feet. “He wasn’t excommunicated or anything. He just said he couldn’t stand to see the Amish life continue without her. Like it sullied his memory of her or something. It never did make sense to me.”

Jed didn’t know what to say to that.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Dawn said, as if she’d read his mind. “It’s just something that happened. I guess that’s why I married so young, and married a former Amish boy.”

“Ben Beachy?” Jed said.

“Yeah. Ben.”

“He died?”

“Yes. In this war.” Dawn walked up the long, weed-strewn drive that led onto the empty property. “He was Pook’s best friend. Billy is Ben’s younger brother. The three of them were inseparable.”

Jed just nodded. He still didn’t know what to say, and it didn’t seem like Dawn expected him to say anything. It was like she was unburdening her soul. Like she was clearing the decks so that her relationship with him could go forward unhindered. So he just let her talk.

“Billy was in love with me too,” Dawn said. “Still is, I think. There could never be anything between us, though. But we both loved Ben very much. I think of Billy as if he were my brother.” She nodded very faintly, as if giving herself permission to admit something. “In that way, he is my brother.”

“Having a brother can be tough,” Jed said.

“Yes. And pretty great.”

“Yes.”

As they walked up the lane, Jed was getting the strong feeling that he’d been on this property before. The bend of the road, even though it was unkempt and covered over with weeds, was very familiar to him.

“I was ordered to make you fall in love with me, Jed,” Dawn said. “Might as well get it all out in the open at once.”

Jed stopped and looked at her. It was all so overwhelming, so he just blinked and nodded his head. Somehow he knew that what she was saying was the truth.

Dawn pulled him by his hands until he took a reluctant step toward her. “But that doesn’t mean I didn’t really fall in love with you.”

“So how does it stand with us now?” Jed asked.

“I love you,” Dawn said.

“I love you, too.”

“This is my old farm,” Jed said, and pointed out at the land. “It just feels like it. It has to be. I halfway recognize some of the trees, though they’re a lot larger than I remember.”

Dawn didn’t say anything for a few moments. They walked up onto a low hill that seemed to have been made artificially.

“This would be where the barn was,” Jed said.

Dawn just nodded.

“What happened to it all?” Jed asked.

“Fire,” Dawn said.

“Everything?” Jed asked. “Everything burned?”

“Twenty percent of the homes and other structures burned down when the community first got here.”

“The community?”

“The whole thing. The entire Amish Zone,” Dawn said.

“I don’t get it,” Jed said. “If this is my old farm, then it has always been here.”

Dawn shook her head. “You’ll need to talk to Amos to get all the details.”

“Are you saying the whole community, land and all, was somehow transported here from the old world?”

Dawn nodded. “Talk to your brother, Jed.”

(33 ANOTHER EARTH

TUESDAY

The next morning, the Amish women from the community showed up to clean and work on Matthias’s little house. This was a common practice in plain communities, a unifying tradition that, renewed generation by generation, tied the people together and made everyone’s life easier. Even weekly worship meetings are held house to house, every other weekend, so that a different family hosts the meeting each time. Every two weeks, on the weekend when a meeting was scheduled to be held, a group of community members would show up at the host’s house—usually on Friday afternoon—and the home would be readied for the meeting. Needful repairs would be made, no questions asked. Sprucing up, sometimes even including major projects, would be completed so that the house would be ready for the Sunday meeting.

On the Saturday afternoon before a typical Sunday meeting, a wagon appears at the host’s home. In the wagon are all of the portable pews for the Sunday fellowship. The pews are unloaded, and the wagon is carefully re-loaded with furniture from the parts of the house that are to be used for the meeting. Then the pews are arranged in the vacated rooms. In this way, the plain people believe that they are carrying on the practices of the Apostles and the early Church in holding their fellowship meetings house to house.

The cleaning going on in Matthias’s house, however, was not for a scheduled Sabbath meeting. This was instead for the barn-raising scheduled for Saturday. On this Tuesday morning in Matthias’s cottage, screens were fixed, blinds were dusted, and the whole house was given a thorough cleaning from top to bottom. Dawn joined in, and spent most of the day chatting and making friends with the young Amish women from the community, many of whom were close to her age. Though she’d been raised Amish, she’d been gone for many years, and was surprised to find out that the Amish girls were so goofy and full of joy. They joked around a lot, and teased one another incessantly. And even though Dawn was dressed in Amish garb, the girls all called her “The Englischer,” but they did so with a wink and a smile. Overall, she felt very comfortable with the girls of the community. That is, until two of the girls asked her about Jed.

For the most part, this was a forbidden thing in an Amish society, this talking about an unmarried young man. Girls did not talk about boys, except maybe to their closest sisters. Dawn was a little surprised that in this young colony, the girls seemed to be more forward about male/female relationships than she remembered from her own district back in the old world. In most traditionalist districts, there was no talk at all about relationships between men and women. Most people (even parents and siblings) found out that a young couple was in love at the moment they announced their marital intentions to the family. But that had been a long time ago.

Dawn couldn’t really tell if these girls were actually interested in Jed, or if they were just curious and looking for gossip, but both girls specifically asked if Jed might be looking for a wife, and if Dawn had any intentions toward him. Although she was embarrassed to be asked, and she blushed when she answered, she admitted that she did care very much for Jed, and that she was hopeful that he cared for her too. Both girls smiled and seemed to be authentically happy for her. Their curiosities sated, they all got back to work.

How exciting to be thinking about love, Dawn thought. Even if things don’t work out for us, it has been a pleasant interlude in my life of war: to be dressed for peace, and in love with a man like Jed.

Out in the barn, Pook’s team took the opportunity to clean their weapons. This was another thing that was frowned upon in Amish society, but the squad felt that it was necessary that they keep up their battle readiness even during this peaceful respite. Eagles also gave knife-throwing lessons to any of the squad who were interested. He just called it “knifing,” but nobody could get him to change his word for the activity. Eagles was good at “knifing.” Very good. He always tried to throw a knife in such a way that the blade would stick into the gouge left in the beam from the last throw. He called his perfect throws “bullsings.” He wasn’t always successful, but he was always close. And when he did hit the mark perfectly, he would yell “Bullsing!” at the top of his lungs, and then crush anyone within reach with an almost paralyzing bear hug. It got to the point that when the soldiers of TRACE heard the cry “Bullsing!” they would all jump out of the way and run to the corners of the shed.

After the knifing lesson, Jed showed the squad how to hook up the milk wagon to the horses, and to prepare the milk to be hauled away. Prepping the horses and the wagon was something all the members of the TRACE team grew to love. Already, this early in the week, they would race one another to get to work with the horses and attach the wagon.

As for Jed, he wanted to find a place where he could spend some time alone… so he could get on the Internet and learn more about his situation. A man’s mind can float around untethered in the sea for only so long before it seeks a lighthouse, or at least a bird with leaves in its beak. So, after delivering the milk to the neighbor’s springhouse, Jed received Tom Hochstetler’s permission to crawl up into the man’s hayloft so he could “rest” while the women worked on Matthias’s house. Eagles and Ducky drove the wagon back to Matthias’s place (Eagles loved driving the horses) while Jed stayed behind.

After he’d found a good resting spot in the loft, Jed took a Quadrille tablet and lay down. He calmed his mind and tried his best to relax himself. Closing his eyes, he felt the calm feeling grow in him, and when he felt he was ready, he brought up his BICE interface.

This time he didn’t soar up into the sky, something he dearly liked to do. He didn’t zip through immersive Transport maps of the cities on the Shelf, and he didn’t study the geography of New Pennsylvania from on high, trying to figure out the “where” of his life. This time he immediately went to his messaging interface and sent an alert to his brother. Only moments later, he saw Amos’s avatar, transparent and seemingly sleeping, appear in the control room. As he watched, the avatar became opaque, then the eyes opened, and Jed’s brother Amos was standing before him.

When Jed saw his brother, he felt a chill go up his spine. For the first time, he really got a sense of the years having gone by in Amos’s life. Jed felt that the man he was looking at wasn’t just an avatar displaying for him what his brother would look like as he approached seventy. No, this really was his brother—though not in the flesh—and those decades that showed so plainly on his skin and weighed so heavily on his shoulders had really happened to the man.

“Jed,” Amos said with a nod, by way of greeting.

“Amos,” Jed said, nodding in return.

“How is life in the Amish Zone, brother?”

Jed scowled a little at his brother’s familiarity. “A little confusing, Amos.”

“Confusing? How so?”

“Dawn took me to the location of our old farm. I could see the foundations of the house and the barn. It was very troubling.”

“Fifty-three years have come and gone since you left that place. A lot can happen in over five decades.” Amos paused for a moment, choking back a sob. “A lot has happened…”

“She said that the whole Amish Zone traveled to this new world.”

Amos looked at his brother. A whole range of emotions flooded over the older man. He longed to bring his brother into his arms—to hug him in a long embrace. And to tell the boy everything… everything he could possibly want to know. It won’t work, he thought. You’ve known it from the beginning. He can’t take it all at once. No one could. “She did, did she?” he said.

“She did.”

“And what else did she say?”

Jed put one hand in his pocket, but with the other he pointed at Amos. “She said I needed to talk to you about it.”

Amos nodded. He exhaled, and his eyes scanned his brother’s face as he considered how best to explain things in a way that wouldn’t confuse Jed even more than he already was. “I understand that this is all still perplexing to you, Jedediah,” he finally said. “With everything you’ve discovered, there is still so much about what’s going on that you don’t know.”

“So why don’t you tell me about this part,” Jed said.

The brothers stared at one another for a long moment. Jed could see that even the idea of explaining it all was taxing on Amos. The leader of the resistance was, after all, an old man—regardless of the fact that he’d been born four years after Jed.

“There was a war that broke out,” Amos began. “Shortly after you left for New Pennsylvania. We all call it the Second Transport War. In fact, it was breaking out in Oklahoma even as you were boarding your ship.” Amos put both hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “The war was confusing at first. There were a lot of factions. Eventually foreign governments got involved. It got ugly fast.”

“A World War?” Jed asked.

“In a way,” Amos said. “And in that war, several major cities not far from the Amish Zone on Earth were destroyed. Most of Columbia, Pennsylvania was destroyed as well. That’s the city from which you embarked on your journey, and the same city where you landed when you arrived in New Pennsylvania. Now,” Amos raised up an old, wrinkled hand, “not all of Columbia was destroyed. Luckily for you—and for all of us—the Transport Station in Columbia survived. But most of the city became a huge pile of rubble. And with all these cities reduced to nothing but bricks and rocks and ashes, someone decided that all of the rubble—the shattered structures, the concrete; the bricks, rebar, and wiring that make up a modern metropolis—should be hauled off.”

Jed could see it all happening in his mind’s eye. But just in case he couldn’t, Amos brought up a white screen, and a video began to play on it. It showed enormous pieces of construction equipment clearing away the remains of a city.

Amos pointed with his finger. “All of that debris went to build—”

“—the Great Wall,” Jed interrupted.

Amos sighed deeply and began to pace as he talked. “Yes. At some point, the decision was made by Transport to construct a wall around the Amish Zone.”

The video screen began to show images of the wall being constructed. “Many reasons were given for the construction of the wall. Some said it was to protect the Amish from the war, and from the refugees who flooded the AZ after the destruction of the cities. Those were very real problems that needed to be addressed. Some said that the wall was designed to keep the Amish from openly trading with the rebels.” Amos had a sad look of chagrin on his face. “This was also a very real issue, I must admit.” He flipped his hand as if indicating some imaginary other group. “Still others—the more conspiracy-minded among us—believed that the plan all along had been to intentionally… How should I say this?” He made a flipping motion with his fingers, like he was turning on a light. “Transport… the AZ to New Pennsylvania.”

Jed was confused. “But there was already an AZ in New Pennsylvania before I even went through the emigration process,” Jed said. “I saw pictures.”

“That’s right,” Amos said.

“Which was before the war started.”

“That’s right. Think back on those pictures, Jed,” Amos said. “Did they look anything like the Amish Zone you found when you arrived here?”

Jed closed his eyes and tried to access that part of his memory. “Well, now that you mention it,” Jed said, “the brochures mentioned that the AZ in New Pennsylvania was still a tiny village. It never mentioned a wall at all.”

“Over thirty-five thousand miles of copper cable and wiring—debris from destroyed cities—was laid out in the construction of the wall. All the power lines, wire, and cable that existed in several major metropolises near the AZ. Not to mention all the steel rebar, re-mesh, and reinforcing materials that existed in the piles of rubble.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Jed asked.

“It has everything to do with everything,” Amos said. “Basically, the designers of the wall created the world’s largest portal—a huge Faraday cage that could take an unprecedented burst of pure energy and cycle it through the walls.”

Jed narrowed his eyes and chewed on his lip. He took a step closer and stared at the video screen. “You say ‘energy.’ By that do you mean electricity?”

“Everyone still uses the term ‘electricity’ to explain the energy that is produced by okcillium, but strictly speaking, it’s not electricity at all. It is a whole new thing altogether. It’s like the English using the term ‘horsepower’ to describe the locomotive force produced by their automobiles. It is something people understand because when the term was coined it hearkened back to what they used to know. But it is not strictly accurate.”

Jed nodded. “So okcillium produces an enormous amount of energy, right? Enough to fundamentally affect the physics around us?”

“It does,” Amos said.

“To bend time?” Jed asked.

“Yes,” Amos said. “To bend time.” He brought up the image of a large coil of cables suspended in the center of what looked to be a laboratory. “The first okcillium portals were very simple and small-scale. How the scientists figured out that there was a where—a real location, even if they didn’t know where the where was—where all of the stuff that disappeared through this portal was going, is a story in itself. Books could be written on the experiments that happened in a very short window of time.”

“‘Window of time,’” Jed said and smiled. “Very clever.”’

“Unintentionally so,” Amos said with a dismissive wave. “Through trial and error, and a whole lot of math, the people running the experiments were able to—in a general way—control the process, and even came up with a way to send a human through the portal and bring them back. They didn’t really go anywhere. It was time that moved, not them… but that’s a lecture for another day. Anyway, within a few years the phenomenon had been perfected, and Transport had the okcillium portal built into the Transport Station at Columbia. The emigration system—the whole process—was really an elaborate ruse designed to colonize New Pennsylvania while leaving the rebellion and all elements of TRACE behind.”

“Wow,” Jed said.

“Yes. Wow. They hoped to steal away with millions of potential slaves, and leave the rebellion behind on a planet they’d ruined.”

“So they… they… took the whole AZ?”

Amos nodded. “Of course, at the beginning they were just taking people, like you and hundreds of others. They’d built in the nine-year delay to explain away the distance traveled and so forth. But as the war heated up, they changed their plan. They took the whole AZ, and all at one time.”

“Unbelievable!” Jed said.

“All it required was a low-yield okcillium explosion, perfectly placed and timed, to send the whole Zone away… into the future. Or, if you prefer, into another dimension.”

“That sounds impossible,” Jed said.

“With all prior technologies, it was,” Amos said. “And frankly, they didn’t know it would work. A lot of good Amish folk died in the translation. Including…” He trailed off.

“Our parents.”

Amos couldn’t answer. He just nodded. Both men were silent, and the old man wiped away a tear. After a long period of quiet reflection, Amos continued. “There were a lot of fires… I… can’t even think about it without…”

Jed nodded. “I understand.”

Amos gathered himself and cleared his throat. “But okcillium changed everything. It allowed for a shocking amount of power to be transmitted down wires and through metals without it creating much heat or resistance. You know that when electricity flows through a coil of wires it produces electromagnetism, right?”

Jed shrugged. “I guess. But I never really thought about it.”

“In effect,” Amos said, “Transport did the same thing. Only with the astronomical amount of energy produced by okcillium, the process created enough gravitational disruption to transport the entire Amish Zone.”

“So… where did it go?” Jed asked.

“The Amish Zone? Well, in a way it went here, to New Pennsylvania. It became part of the reality of this new place.”

“In a way?”

“My scientist friends tell me it never went anywhere. Einstein, they say, talked of time as if it were a long, lazy, meandering river, and said that everything along that river of time always existed at that place. We perceive time as passing because we are traveling along with the river. But if we could go back up the river, we would find that everything that has ever happened is still happening back where we’d been. So, in this sense, the Amish Zone never went anywhere. The Zone stayed in place. The time around it changed. In essence, you could say that the zone just changed epochs or dimensions, but in reality it never moved.”

Jed’s mind spun. “And New Pennsylvania is the Earth in the future?”

Amos laughed. “Well, that’s the joke of the thing, brother. We don’t know for sure.” Amos threw his hands up as if his guess was as good as anyone’s. “No one does. We think so. Much of the old world was still present in the new one. Basements in Columbia were still intact when New Pennsylvania first began to be explored. You just recently saw the foundations and ‘tells’ of our old farm. In some ways it was as if the community was just transported forward in time. New Pennsylvania was very much like the Earth… but in the future.”

Jed had a pensive look on his face, and he narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Very much like?” He said. “But in some ways it was different?”

“In some ways it was remarkably different,” Amos said. “The Great Shelf, for example. The geography of the planet is fundamentally changed in a lot of ways. So it’s like I said… very much alike, but also changed. The Great Shelf looks as though the New Madrid fault, running through the Midwest, suffered a massive, world-changing earthquake that elevated the land to the west of it, and created the massive cliffs we call the Shelf. That event would have changed the makeup of the continent forever.” Amos looked at Jed, scanning him to see if the young man believed what he was being told. “The Mississippi River, for another example, isn’t there anymore.”

“But we are on Earth, right?” Jed said.

“That’s the thing,” Amos replied. “Everything mostly lines up with that theory. But it still… it still seems to be another Earth altogether. Like maybe we came to a parallel Earth, where subtle things are different.”

“Subtle things?” Jed said. His mind was racing back through the facts he knew, trying to make sense of this new information.

“Like the weather, for example,” Amos said. “The weather here is more stable and predictable, with fewer devastating storms. In the years the Amish have been here, the dates of the first and last freeze have been so consistent that they don’t even speak of those events in relation to ‘dates’ anymore. They predict the first and last freeze of the season to the closest hour!”

Jed just shook his head. He thought of all the times a late freeze had done damage to the fruit trees or to the gardens on the old farm.

“And there were very few humans on the planet when it was discovered… or re-discovered.”

Jed was taken aback. He shook his head, “Very few humans? So there were some?”

“Yes,” Amos said.

“Because I was told that the planet was devoid of intelligent life when the first explorers arrived here.”

“That’s not true,” Amos said. “There were the wild people. Your friend Eagles is one of them. These were indigenous people, or maybe humans who had reverted back to a more wild and natural kind of life. They didn’t come here through the portal. They lived through the time in between.”

“How many years was that?” Jed asked. “Because Dawn told me it’s now the year 2121. So it was like… I don’t know, fifty years?”

Amos grimaced.

“You said fifty-three years, Amos,” Jed said.

“I did say that, but it’s not… It’s just what we say. You don’t know, and nobody else does either,” Amos said. “The current year has been reckoned based on the differences in the ages of people who came through the portal at different times, and on estimations of the age of ruins and rubble found here when we got here.”

“Couldn’t we determine the year by looking at the stars and the locations of the planets?”

“That’s one of the problematic things,” Amos said. “Remember? I said that some subtle things were different? Well, that’s one of them.”

“The stars?”

“The stars. The planets. All the heavenly bodies,” Amos said. “Things just don’t add up.”

Jed was speechless. He stared at his brother, not sure exactly what he should be thinking or believing.

“Anyway,” Amos continued, “the indigenous people mostly lived in the wilderness, like the tribes in early America: warlike and highly intelligent. They’d developed their own very peculiar language that seemed to have its roots in our own English.”

Jed nodded his head. “The ‘salvagers,’ right?”

“There are a lot of names applied to them. The salvagers are just a subset. Others have established trading clans. Some of them live in the remote areas of the wastes and are very peaceful and pastoral—almost like they’re Amish. Our people get along very well with most of them.”

“And they speak a form of English?” Jed asked.

“It’s a strange thing, brother,” Amos said. “It’s a form of English, but if you listen very closely, you can almost hear an Amish foundation to it. In Old Pennsylvania, many of our people spoke a broken English that was a combination of Pennsylvania Deutsch and English, with a lot of made-up words thrown in here and there. The wild people have some hints of this in their own dialect.”

“So maybe they’re made up of people who left, or were kicked out of, the Amish communities.”

“This too,” Amos said, “lends credence to the theory that we’re in the future. But we can’t be certain. There are other theories that could also be true. We could be all the way across the universe, on another Earth that developed in parallel to our own. That one is tough for me to swallow, because I don’t know what intelligence had us land here instead of on any of the billions of planets that could never support human life… or in the middle of the vacuum of space where we would all have died instantly.

“So yes, we could be on the same planet on which we were born. That’s my prevailing theory. Or we could be on a different plane of existence altogether, as if this planet is right on top of the other one, only with each inhabiting different dimensions of space-time. We just don’t know. And for most of the Amish, this isn’t a question they spend too much time thinking about. They don’t reckon it’s profitable. To them, they left one place and ended up in another.”

Jed inhaled deeply, then exhaled. Amos was right: this was too much to take in all at once. “I want to learn all of this,” he said finally, “but maybe in a way that’s a little more spread out.”

“Now you see what I’ve been saying,” Amos said. “It’s a lot to take in.”

Jed paused, then broached a new subject. “Tell me about your plans against Transport.”

“I thought you were a man of peace.”

“I am,” Jed said.

“Then you have no need to know of my plans,” Amos said. “You have your BICE, and you can do your own research. I would appreciate one thing, though: if you do learn anything that will be of assistance in protecting and serving the people of New Pennsylvania, will you inform me?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Amos.”

For a long moment, there were no words. Then, when the silence became too heavy for either of them to lift, Amos spoke.

“I’m not asking you to fight, brother. I know you wouldn’t, and you’ve helped us enough already. I respect who you are and what you are, and I always will. I hope you know that. I’m just asking you to go be what the rest of us are fighting for. Maybe that’s something we can both get behind.”

(34 DIGGING IN

WEDNESDAY

On Wednesday, after the chores were done, two of the Amish elders showed up at Matthias’s farm to help with the next step of preparing for the barn-raising. These were the two men who had the most experience with these events, so they were put in charge of the construction of Matthias’s barn.

As part of the overall project, Matthias would also, eventually, be getting a springhouse. Just like Tom Hochstetler’s, the partially buried building would serve as a place for him to store his fresh milk until it could be delivered or processed into another product. The springhouse wouldn’t be built on Saturday, but the hole for the project was going to be dug now. It was really the dirt from the hole that they needed immediately, in order to bank the barn—the hole for the future springhouse was just an additional benefit.

A banked barn is a handy thing, because it means that the barn (usually) is built into a hillside. Having the barn built into the side of a hill means that the upper level of the barn is reachable directly by vehicle. So rather than lift heavy hay bales or other weighty items using a block and tackle, the farmer can haul these items into the barn directly from a wagon or other conveyance, which can be pulled up to—even backed into—the barn from the upper level. Hay or other crops can be easily stored upstairs, and then, as needed, dropped through a great opening in the middle of the barn to the animals—who, in the wintertime, are housed in the lower level.

The land Matthias’s farm sat on had a few slight elevation changes, but no slopes dramatic enough to support a banked barn. So instead, a suitable hill was going to be made. In effect, a banked hill of dirt would form a large, very gradual ramp up to the second floor of the barn. Such a project would require even more dirt than they’d get from digging the hole for the springhouse, so there would need to be a second excavation later in the week. But today they would just tackle the springhouse excavation.

The TRACE soldiers were all given shovels and other digging implements, and the Amish men marked out the area where the springhouse would go. The new structure wouldn’t have to be built directly on a spring. The cold water from the nearby spring, when developed, could flow into the springhouse through a piece of pipe, or a channel or tunnel formed by the careful laying of smooth rocks.

The Amish elders wanted a hole that was four meters square and two meters deep. And they made sure that the Englischer soldiers took turns with the hard digging. The dirt was scooped into wheelbarrows and carted the seventy meters to the location of the banked barn. The dirt wouldn’t be pushed up against the barn’s concrete and cinderblock foundation until Friday afternoon, to make sure the foundation had enough time to dry and cure before adding any lateral pressure to the new walls.

For the first time since he’d arrived in New Pennsylvania, Jed felt like he was able to immerse himself in farm work to the point that he was able to forget everything else that was going on outside the walls of the AZ. If only for a moment, his mind was completely absorbed in thoughts about the soil. He could breathe in the pure air, and dream of the process of building his own farm—maybe someday with a wife of his own. And for just that beautiful sliver of time, Jed was more than willing to let the Englischers have their own war, and hoped they could just leave him out of it.

Amos Troyer busied himself making sure the Tulsa was fully battle-ready. He and his officers personally toured the Tulsa’s massive platforms and decks, observing as the attack craft and support vehicles were made ready for the coming battle. Amos watched as the ships were being loaded with armaments, supplies, and equipment, and he sat in as the pilots were briefed on their missions. He visited the engineering and maintenance decks and personally interviewed the officers there to make certain that everyone was on the same page.

Just as he’d always been, Amos was a hands-on commander. He was briefed by the team that was implementing the now redesigned Corinth battlefield intelligence system, and he even observed as a few of the remaining intelligence officers had their Corinth chips flash-updated in the medical bays. Transport had hacked the Corinth chips once before, and he hoped now that the vulnerability issues had been fixed.

Amos didn’t know what event or proximate cause would act as the trigger for the next phase of the war. But while the council and the people waited and watched, he was preparing his force to invade the area beyond the Great Shelf—to find Transport’s forces and ships, and destroy them.

That night, Jed didn’t even get online. He was so exhausted from the digging, and so pleased with the day’s work, that he never even logged on to see if he had any messages from his brother. Had he gotten online—and had he, perhaps, hacked into Transport’s communications from out beyond the Shelf—he might have noticed some anomalies. There was some interesting chatter that might have indicated to him that something interesting was taking place out west. All of TRACE’s analysts missed it, but maybe Jed wouldn’t have. It could have been that with Jed’s unique perspective, and his willingness to question everything, he would have noticed something: some track, or trail, or telltale clue that an amassing armada must, inevitably, leave behind.

Because out beyond the Shelf, Transport’s forces were gathering. Hundreds of attack airships were being prepared, and a thousand unmarked white orbs—unmanned Transport drones, manufactured in the old world and relayed to New Pennsylvania through a makeshift portal hidden in a large factory in a mostly unpopulated city—were receiving their final memory updates from Transport command.

It’s possible that Jed would have missed all the signs. But it’s also possible that had he taken a look, he might have seen something that no one else did. And maybe he would have given his brother—and the whole world—another twenty-four hours to act. But such surmisings aren’t usually profitable. Who can say what might have happened in any situation?

What matters is what did happen.

And what did happen is, Jed didn’t get online. He was still an Amish man after all, and averse to getting involved in conflict. So Jed didn’t notice the signs of a pending Transport counteroffensive for another full day. And in that full day, while Jed slept and woke and worked and loved, the forces in the world around him rushed headlong toward an inevitable, and violent, climax.

(35 THE WASP

THURSDAY

On Thursday, after the milking and a large breakfast, the TRACE squad joined a dozen Amish men who showed up to move even more dirt. The concrete and cinderblock foundation walls they’d constructed a few days earlier were now sturdy enough to hold up against the strain. so half of the men were assigned to start forming the long, gradual ramp that would lead to the second floor of the barn. The soldiers, and the other half of the Amish men, would be digging a hole for a small stock pond.

First, the sod was cut from the whole area of the future pond, and the grassy turf was carefully laid aside. This grass would eventually be placed on the embankment they’d be building that day. After the sod was cut, a half dozen wheelbarrows trucked dirt back and forth from the site of the new pond to the barn. The barn needed the dirt, and the farm needed the pond, in order to trap and hold more surface moisture for the watering of animals. Digging, then, was on tap for the second straight day.

On this Thursday, Dawn and Jed worked together. The women didn’t usually join the men in their building chores, but Dawn insisted that she wanted to help, and no one was willing to tell her no. And if the truth be told, she wanted to spend some time with Jed as well. So she put her muscles to work and dug out big shovelfuls of deep, black soil, dumping them into the wheelbarrow; and when it was so full that she was afraid it might tip over, Jed would push the load up the low hill to the foundation of the new barn, where men were placing the soil, spreading it, and tamping it down to make the bank.

This process gave the two of them a lot of time to talk, because between runs, Jed would flop down on the grass while Dawn was digging (she got to rest while he was hauling).

“Do you want to swap jobs?” Jed asked.

“Nah, I’m all right,” Dawn said. “Besides, I have the easy job.”

“Digging’s not easy!” Jed said. “And I have the blisters from yesterday to prove it!”

“That’s why you should wear gloves,” Dawn said with a smile, and held up a gloved hand. “You may be the strongest one in this relationship, but I think I’m the smartest.” She winked at Jed.

“Oh, I don’t doubt that one single bit,” Jed said, nodding his head.

Dawn went back to digging, and Jed reached up and smoothed out a pile in the wheelbarrow that was looking like it might make the thing lean too much to one side. “Relationship, huh?” he said.

Dawn stopped digging and leaned on the shovel. “What?”

“You said ‘this relationship,’ and I wondered what you meant by that.”

“Uh… I don’t know,” Dawn said. “I thought we both said we might want to get married or something. Was I dreaming that part? Or…”

“No,” Jed said, “you weren’t dreaming at all. I just… It was just weird hearing it all official like.”

“Weird, huh?”

“No… no.” Jed held up his hands in mock surrender. “Wait a minute. I don’t mean weird. I meant it was… nice. It was nice to hear you say it. That’s all I meant to say.”

Dawn scowled at him. “Yes, I’m sure that is what you meant to say, Jed.”

“It was. I liked hearing it.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’d like hearing it too.”

Jed looked down at his boots, and shuffled them for a moment before he spoke again. “Dawn… listen… we have ways we do things. You know that. We don’t have girlfriends and stuff. We don’t ‘date.’”

“I know,” Dawn said. “But your parents aren’t around, and mine aren’t either. I mean, who are we going to ask for permission, or tell, so we can make things official?”

“When we’re ready, we’ll talk to the elders,” Jed said.

“I’ve been married before, and I’m not Amish.” Dawn didn’t say it like she was apologizing, because she wasn’t. She spoke in a very matter-of-fact tone, as if to say, “Okay, how do we deal with these facts?”

“You’re a widow, and you can be Amish again whenever you want to be,” Jed said.

“It’s just…” Dawn threw down the shovel and climbed up out of the low hole. She stood very close to him, and looked deeply into his eyes. “All I’ve wanted to do since Ben died was fight his enemies. It’s all I have done. But now…”

“But now?” Jed asked.

“But now, all I want to do is be with you. Wherever you are. I just want to build a life with you, Jed.”

Jed looked at Dawn and inhaled deeply. This was what he’d hoped for—maybe not openly, but he’d felt very strongly for Dawn almost from the moment he’d met her. From the instant his eyes had opened up in that pod in the Transport Station and he’d seen her looking down at him.

“Billy talked to me yesterday,” Dawn said.

“Oh… Oh, he did? What…” He put his hands into his pockets. “Well, I guess it’s not my business to ask.”

“Of course it’s your business, Jed. That’s why I’m telling you.”

“Okay, so…” He threw up his hands, showing that he was flustered.

“He asked me if there was any hope for the two of us,” Dawn said. “He wanted to know if he could take care of me. Like Ben did.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him that I loved you, Jed. That’s what I told him.”

Jed smiled. “I love you, too.”

“I just want to be with you.”

“Okay, so you’ll give up TRACE? You’ll leave the resistance?”

“I… I… I don’t know. I don’t know what to say. I haven’t thought it all out yet. I don’t know what to do.”

Jed smiled at her. “I understand.” He pushed a loose strand of hair out of her face, and smiled wider when he saw a grin break across her face. “We’ll wait until we know exactly what we should do, okay?”

Dawn looked up at him for a moment and then nodded.

“Okay.”

That night, worn out and dirty from a day’s work, and while they were delivering the evening milk to the neighbor, Jed asked Tom Hochstetler if he could sleep in his barn again. He didn’t mind sleeping on the floor of Matthias’s little house, but Jed thought back to how comfortable he’d been in the Hochstetlers’ hayloft, and he wanted to get online to see if there were any messages from his brother.

Once the milk was unloaded, and after Eagles and Ducky had turned the wagon around to head back to Matthias’s place, Jed took a sponge bath in some of the frigid water he drew from the springhouse. Not long after, shivering while he drip-dried in the evening air, he climbed into the hayloft for the night.

The sun was just dipping down below the horizon out to the west as Jed sat down in the hayloft door and took in the beauty of the evening. It was the gloaming; dark blues and shadows were becoming one, and fading pink-orange fingers of light touched the few puffy clouds still visible in the sky. Jed watched as the last sliver of the golden orb disappeared below the high walls of the Amish Zone—the tops of which barely poked up over the hills in the distance. The first stars—he couldn’t name them, and after what his brother had told him, he wasn’t sure if anyone could—were blinking on in the deepening sky, and a soft breeze made him shiver again, but not really from the cold. The weather was perfect, and taken altogether it was a scene out of a picture book, and Jed reveled in it, so exactly did it bring back to his memory the halcyon days of his youth.

From down below he heard a mild disturbance coming from the chicken coop as the Hochstetlers’ hens established their own sleeping roosts for the night. Even the simplest of God’s animals argue and fret over position and authority… asserting, sometimes with force, just who deserves what. The difference is, of course, that the wars of the chickens won’t ever break the world.

After he’d taken in his fill of the beautiful evening, Jed opened the small package—a meal wrapped in rough brown paper—which Dawn had given him when he told her he was going to stay in the neighbors’ barn for the night. He spread the paper with his hands and examined his supper. There was a piece of cornbread, with home-churned butter already spread on it, and three thick slices of bacon too. There was a pint-sized mason jar, with lemonade sweetened with the very smoky caramel-tinged sugar that was made by another one of Matthias’s neighbors.

Jed prayed over his meal and then chewed in silence as he watched the world get bathed in darkness. He lit one of the small lanterns and hung it on a hook from an overhead beam, making sure to be extra careful with it. Barn fires were still quite common in Amish country, so he was always very aware of how he worked with fire in any structure such as this one. In his mind’s eye, just for a moment, he was back in the old barn… back in the old world. He could see himself hanging a lantern on a hook up in the hayloft, and when he turned, he could just make out the window in the gabled end, and the coffee-can pane winking at him from the lower right-hand corner.

But he wasn’t in Old Pennsylvania. Wherever he was now, it was a different world altogether. He popped a Q pill in his mouth and chewed it up, and while the drug began to take effect, he prepared himself a little pallet and made it into a bed for the night.

There weren’t any messages from Amos, so Jed decided to take a look around in Transport’s files to see if he could get any news about what might be happening in the world of the English.

He searched through some file areas he was familiar with, and started to ask himself questions. This is how he sometimes made breakthroughs. Because even if he didn’t know what he was looking for, if he asked himself enough questions, usually he’d get onto an interesting trail at some point in the journey.

Is Transport’s Internet system still up and running at full capacity?

It seemed to Jed like it was. He did some cursory checks around many of the major hubs he knew about, and he didn’t see any serious problems with the flow of data.

What is Transport doing now that they’ve fled beyond the Shelf?

Jed found the data routes with the most traffic passing between points to the west, and tagged along—disguising himself as an innocuous email—until he found a portal where the messages were being distributed. Once there, he used some of his previous methods (along with Dawn’s pre-placed camouflage tactics) to hack in and begin scanning some of the raw data.

He brought up his viewscreen and had the data projected onto it, but even then the sheer amount of information was overwhelming, so he decided to improvise. He hacked a nearby hub and borrowed some of the processing power to implement some word searches. Every “war” word he could think of he then programmed into the search, and he fed “hits” to the main screen. This worked a lot better, and slowed down the mammoth amount of data by vetting most of it out, but it still didn’t give him a clear enough picture of what he wanted to see.

Now he had to really think. He wasn’t hamstrung by artificial or self-imposed limitations—that was the main reason why his brother had recruited him. His gift was that he didn’t know what he could do until he did it. He solved problems more like a farmer than like a technician, who can often be limited by artificial protocols or learned patterns. A farmer had a tendency to just try things until something worked, and the task was the main thing, not the method.

As Jed pondered on problems or obstructions, the words he needed (along with their definitions) and instructions would appear to him floating in the darkness. This was part of the program Dawn had placed into his BICE from the beginning.

The term multi-task appeared in the ether, and the definition explained to him that he could use the computing power to do several things at once. Without even a second of doubt as to whether his ideas could even be accomplished, he thought about it, and instantly the screen expanded and then divided into nine smaller screens laid out like panes of glass in a window. Now he could watch data stream by, and his eyes just naturally followed it all. Then he focused again and assigned a certain amount of his BICE chip’s computing power to each of the nine screens. Soon enough, he was flying through the data as it flowed by, and he was understanding everything he was seeing.

Drones.

The word caught his attention, so he focused his whole mind on it. He re-established all of the search parameters on all of the screens until they were all focused on finding anything and everything being said about drones.

He wanted to get comfortable in a way he couldn’t really explain if someone asked him, so he made up a grassy hillside in his mind, and he sat down to study the data as it arrived.

Drones, manufactured in the old world, and brought here using a secret portal somewhere beyond the shelf, were being prepared for an attack…

An attack on what?

Hard to say. Overall, there was a gist… a leaning… in the chatter that seemed to make Jed think that perhaps an attack on the east by Transport might be imminent. He paused his searches and pulled up his communications interface. He sent a message to Amos, and then went back to his work.

Amos.

He wondered if his brother was watching him work, so he looked around in the corners of his vision to see if he could see the AT10S code anywhere. He didn’t, so he just shook his head and laughed.

Well, if Amos is watching me, he probably wouldn’t let me know at this point. He only did that before because he was using the information to drag me into this world. It was only bait, and I was the fish. Now look at me, swimming in this ocean of the Englischers’ data. My brother is the high prophet of the worldlings, and I’m his little prize.

He wondered then if he could catch his brother spying on him. In those previous iterations, Amos had made the code visible in order to ensnare him; but what if the code was still there—only invisible—when Amos didn’t want to get caught? Was Amos a good enough hacker to hide from his younger/older brother?

The next thing Jed did was to disguise himself. He left an avatar of himself sitting on the hill, and made himself invisible to his own rendering system. He hid himself in the numbers and code, until even he couldn’t see where he ended and the data began.

Jed looked up into the corners again, but now he looked even deeper. Of course, the “corners” were not really there. All of this—everything he could see—was just part of the interface that the BICE and his brain had concocted to help him understand the bits of data that were flooding through his mind. So he looked still deeper. He made himself an invisible part of the code and began processing it all, looking for anything that was out of place. Combing through bits and elements, scanning for something that stood out.

And that’s when he found it: another entity. Another code looking down on his avatar, spying, taking it all in. But this time it wasn’t his brother. Even his brother was not this clever. This entity was watching Jed’s avatar watch the data he’d hacked, and up until now, the entity had been totally invisible.

Jed studied the entity’s data with intensity and caution. He parsed all of the code that made up the entity, and examined it until he knew what data was part of that code, and what data the entity was using outside of itself. Then Jed wrote a quick program, using his imagination with some help from Dawn’s helper program, and created an avatar for the entity. An avatar that only he would see. He didn’t know what made him think of it—of the figure he’d bestow upon this being. He didn’t know if this entity was good or evil. He didn’t know if it was friend or foe. But Jed created an avatar based on one of the most hated antagonists of his youth: the mahogany wasp. The rendering was done so quickly, and so perfectly from his memory, that Jed actually shivered and shrank away when he saw it.

Now, he could pull back and watch the wasp watch the avatar he’d made of himself.

I have to find out who is controlling this thing, Jed thought.

So he caused his BICE to stop rendering the drone data. Then he walked his own avatar back through the process that he’d used to break into the hubs in the first place. And as he pulled back, the wasp followed. The wasp appeared to be heedless of the drone information. It didn’t care about preparations for war. It was following Jed.

(36 THE FARM BUREAU

FRIDAY

A red light in the corner of his vision and a chiming sound woke Jed from his sleep. It was around three a.m., and it took him a moment to figure out what was happening. But then he remembered that he’d made sure to set up an alert in case Amos tried to contact him during the night.

Jed shook the cobwebs from his head, and then, when he was fully awake, he pulled up his BICE control interface. He hadn’t taken a Q since early in the previous evening, but the system still seemed to work pretty well for him.

Once he’d logged in and entered his control room, he found Amos there waiting for him.

“I got your messages, brother,” Amos said.

“Then you know?”

“I know. But I’d like you to brief me.”

“I hacked into Transport’s—”

“Just… please,” Amos said, “get to the part about the drones.”

Jed paused, and then nodded. “I put it all into the files I sent to you, but here’s the gist of it: Transport has an armada of aerial attack drones, white spheres much like the ones I saw when I was in the City. They have other support and attack craft readied as well. They’re preparing an offensive as we speak.”

“Any ideas about their targets?” Amos asked.

“Your ship, for one,” Jed replied.

“Of course. Any other targets?”

“I saw general plans for searching out and destroying your attack aircraft using something called a Corinth hack? I didn’t have time to figure out what that meant. All of this is in the file I sent you.”

Amos nodded his head. “The Corinth chip was hardened after we discovered their hack. That must have been old information. Any terrestrial targets you could identify?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Although these drone orbs can be used in air-to-air combat, that is not their primary purpose,” Amos said. “They’re designed for police work and population control. They were made to engage terrestrial based targets: cities, ground units, convoys… that sort of thing.”

Amos put his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth in place. It was obvious he was nervous, and maybe a little scared. “As you can imagine, we’re on a war footing here now. I don’t know how our enemy got this far without us discovering his plans. But I thank you, Jed, for this information. Hopefully we can use it to save lives. Our people are going through the files you sent as we speak, and we’re preparing to meet their attack…” His voice trailed off. He knew that Jed didn’t care to hear about the specifics of the war that raged around them all. “Is there anything else you need to tell me, Jed? Anything at all that isn’t in your file?”

Jed looked down for a moment, thinking. A few seconds later, he looked up at Amos and nodded his head. “I found… Do you… Do you remember when I said there might be a third party involved in all of this?”

Amos nodded his head. “Yes, brother, I do.”

“Well, I think I’ve learned something about that.”

“Which is?”

Jed pointed with his thumb over his shoulder, as if to say back there, but then he dropped his hand again and eventually worked it back into his pocket. “I tracked another hacker that was spying on me as I did my work. At first I thought it was you, so I set a trap for it, to try to figure out who it could be.”

“And what did you discover?” Amos asked.

“I tracked it back here,” Jed answered.

“Back here? To this side of the Shelf?”

“No. Back here. Back to the Amish Zone,” Jed said. “Apparently the Yoders—that family that you recruited as double agents, the ones you ordered to kidnap Dawn—well, apparently that family is bigger than I first thought. I traced the hacker back to the Yoders’ farm. It seems that they’re running some kind of operation out of that basement where they were holding Dawn.”

“What kind of operation?” Amos asked.

“From what I could learn in only a few hours of digging, it seems they’re playing both sides against the middle.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Amos said.

Jed looked up at his brother and grinned sheepishly as he shook his head. “Apparently they’re… I don’t know what you’d call them… techno-Amish terrorists is a descriptive enough title. Anyway, they’re doing their best to see that both TRACE and Transport lose the war for New Pennsylvania.”

Amos just stared at Jed without blinking. “Get me Pook Rayburn please, and find a way to get him in touch with me as soon as possible.”

When Eagles and Pook showed up at the Hochstetlers’ with the morning milk, Jed brought Pook up into the hayloft and contacted Amos again through his BICE. When Amos appeared, Jed communicated between the two military men as a sort of translator. Even while he was doing it, he wondered if he was crossing some kind of line in supporting the resistance in the war. He was certain that Transport would see it that way. If, somehow, they were hacking Jed’s BICE, the last two days’ activities could definitely be interpreted as acts of warfare perpetrated against the government, with those acts stemming from an Amish man in the Amish Zone. That fact alone would be enough for Transport to order an attack on the AZ.

So, what to do? Jed wasn’t sure what was the right thing, but he knew he needed to see this through. He didn’t know what else he could do. When in doubt, his father would tell him, plow forward.

Before he signed off, Jed remembered one more thing he needed to tell his brother.

“The Yoders took Dawn’s BICE chip,” Jed said.

“I know this,” Amos replied. “That was part of the plan from the beginning. To force you to use your chip and expand your participation with the system.”

“But you don’t know what the Yoders did with it. I mean… Dawn had a Corinth chip. Knowing what we know now about the Yoders, don’t you think it’s possible that this third-party group of Amish people… that they’ve hacked the chip? Or that they might have given it to the government?”

“It wouldn’t help them to just have the chip,” Amos said. “Although Transport having it is certainly not a good thing. They’ll definitely reverse-engineer it and probably copy the hardware. But they can’t hack it; once we had that hacking issue with Corinth before, we totally rewrote the software, and Dawn’s chip was never flashed with the new updates. No one outside of my inner circle or the Council has access to any of the data.”

Jed just stared at his brother, unflinching. “Could I hack the chip, Amos?”

“What?”

“Do you think I could hack into the Corinth chip?”

Amos shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Then don’t be so sure these techno-Amish haven’t done it.”

Back at the farm, a few of the Amish craftsmen were preparing work stations for the different teams that would be working on the following morning. Working with the TRACE soldiers, Amish men in suspenders and straw hats prepared an area for the timber framers. Weatherproofed boxes of tools—containing flarens, adzes, axes, shovel gouges, mallets, and other hardened tools used for moving and shaping heavy beams—were put in position. Then the men hauled all of the siding materials to the area where the siders would be stationed. They made certain that the blacksmith had provided enough nails for the siding and roofing. The rest of the structure would be fitted together using timber-framing notches, mortises, and tenons, and a dozen other advanced joints that would tighten and strengthen the structure so that, if God willed it, the barn could stand for centuries.

Once the structure started going up, the process would move very quickly. Even for Amishmen like Jed it was hard to imagine that the barn would be up and dried-in in a single day, but the plain people had become very adept at these complicated projects. Most of the workers, both men and women, would have an assigned task they’d done dozens and dozens of times before, and the day would fly by for them. To the Amish, a barn-raising is more a time of great fellowship than a time of work. To the outsiders, it can be almost a spiritual experience. The TRACE squad members were talking about the barn-raising in hushed and reverent tones, like they would be building a cathedral on the Temple Mount or some such thing.

The barn-raising is one of the most fundamental and necessary of the traditions that hold the plain people together. Working together on a project that is both necessary and important links families, and even generations, of the Amish together. When an Amish person looks at a neighbor’s farm and sees a barn that he or she helped build, it is reinforced that they are all together in this life. The Amish, therefore, are invested in one another. They are not strangers; they are family. Whether the English recognize this or not, they still know it, and their hearts burn when they see such a loving tribute to community played out in a land they call “Amish Country.” This is why the Amish barn-raising is held in esteem by every culture everywhere. It is a holy thing, even to the world ’round about.

“It’s a tunnel,” Ducky said. He held a lantern out in front of him and strained his eyes to see past the very edges of the orange-yellow light thrown by the lamp. Ducky, Pook, Eagles, and Billy were down in the basement of the Yoder house, and after moving old boxes and some broken furniture away from the walls, Ducky had spied a door that was almost hidden. It was a panel that was just not quite flush against the rest of the wall.

“Yep,” Ducky said. “It’s a tunnel, and it’s pretty long.”

“Well, we might as well find out where it leads,” Pook said. He turned to Eagles and smirked.

“Yippee,” Eagles said flatly.

The tunnel led downward and then broke hard to the left after about fifteen meters. The downward angle of the slope increased after that, and for a while they had to hold on to the sides of the walls so that they didn’t slide down the slick, damp floor. Another twenty meters and they came upon a part of the tunnel that had been heavily reinforced. Water dripped down from the ceiling and gathered in a low area off to the side of the walking path.

“We must be under the creek,” Pook said.

“Creeking must being up there,” Eagles repeated from behind Pook.

As they stepped carefully past the wet portion, the tunnel leveled out and started to angle upward again, only at a shallower slope than the section they’d just walked down. The tunnel continued straight and slightly upward for another fifty meters, then took a right turn and began to decline again.

The four men were wondering aloud how far the tunnel ran, when up ahead of them on the right, a door opened and a young Amish man stepped out. He was a tall man, about twenty years of age, and he wasn’t wearing his Amish hat. He didn’t run or try to scramble back through the doorway from whence he’d come. When he saw the TRACE men coming toward him, he just thrust his hands deeply into the pockets of his broadfall pants and cast his gaze downward at his boots.

Ducky had drawn his weapon and was hustling forward, but the rest of the men kept their pistols hidden, not wanting to have an accident or to fire the weapons indiscriminately in such a cramped tunnel. Ducky trained his pistol on the Amish man, and when he reached him, he asked the young man to put his hands up in the air. The man obeyed, and then Ducky gently pushed the man into the room he’d come from.

Inside the room were four other Amish men, all seated at desks. The room was filled with computer equipment, and it was obvious to Pook that they’d found the other Yoders—the rest of the extended family that had been wreaking havoc against both sides in the Transport war.

The men surrendered immediately and were submissive, and answered all of Pook’s questions without equivocation.

“So you’re the Techno-Amish Terrorists?” Pook asked.

The leader of the Amish group smiled. “We prefer to call ourselves the Farm Bureau.”

The Amish men admitted that they were operating on their own, and that they had learned to use the computer equipment from Amos Troyer’s spies and agents in the City back before it was blown to pieces. They’d procured pirated BICE chips, laptop computers, and other equipment, and they’d made contact with Transport too, promising to spy for the government in the Amish Zone. In this way, they’d triangulated themselves, putting themselves in a position to throw both military groups into disarray, and spreading both information and disinformation as needed to keep either side from winning the war. The men insisted that they’d never been involved in any violence, although when Ducky challenged them on that and said that their actions had almost certainly led to violence and death, the men just nodded, without saying anything more on the topic.

“What did you hope to accomplish?” Pook asked the leader of the group.

“Confusion,” the Amish man said. “And we hoped to exhaust both sides, hoping they would both give up and go home… or just quit.”

“What did you have to fear from the rebels?” Pook asked. “All we want is for everyone to be free.”

“Inherent in the power to make men free by force is the power to enslave them again,” the Amish leader said.

“You do realize that Transport is planning to attack and destroy this place—this Amish Zone—don’t you?” Billy asked.

The Amish leader’s head dropped again, and he looked at his boots for a moment before looking up again at Billy. “We have only just realized this.”

“And what do you plan to do about it?” Pook asked.

The Amish man stared into Pook’s eyes. “We will not fight them. But if it comes down to it, we will thwart their plans.”

“How?”

“Come,” the man said. “I’ll show you.”

(37 BARN RAISING

SATURDAY

The day dawned fresh and cool, and it wasn’t long after the sun was up that buggies began appearing at Matthias’s farm from every direction.

A long table was set up with hot coffee, tea, and every form and fashion of muffin, donut, and pastry, along with biscuits and pots of gravy and plates of thick-cut bacon.

From the buggies, ladies in pristine white kapps and long, somewhat formal Amish dresses of almost every color (although all of their capes and aprons were black) began to unload pans of roasted chickens and bowls of salads and fruit.

Most of the men, all wearing black broadfalls and roughspun shirts with suspenders crossing in the back, neatly folded their jackets and handed them to their wives, mothers, or sisters. They then grabbed hot coffee and a light breakfast, and ate it as they headed to their work stations.

Before long, the sounds of construction filled the air in the Amish Zone of New Pennsylvania. Boards were being sawn and then handed up to men who were standing on the already-completed concrete and cinderblock foundation. Within a half hour, the rough-sawn timbers were being fitted together, and the sounds of heavy mallets could be heard as the timbers were assembled and then raised into position using pikes and ropes.

The whole event was a symphony of cooperation and friendship. Young girls and boys carried pitchers of lemonade and filled glasses to the rim anywhere they could find someone willing to have another glass. To the Amish, a work time is simply a fellowship time where work happens to take place too. Although the job continued at a comparatively rapid pace, at any one time—if one were to take a snapshot (which would be frowned upon)—one might have seen groups of two or four or six Amish men leaning on their tools as they talked in an animated way. Breaks were common, but unspoken. Everyone just seemed to be where they were supposed to be when the time came for them to be useful. If a board was needed, the dimensions were shouted down from up top, and someone grabbed a hand saw and cut the board perfectly to fit. The board would then be handed up, and on its journey it might pass through the hands of a dozen men, crawling upon the structure like ants, before it reached its predestined location.

Jedediah Troyer had participated in many barn raisings, and he always loved the experience. Like the coffee-can window pane—still perfect in his mind—the barn raising kept him in touch with his roots. It reminded him of who he was, and what he stood for. It was an anchor… but only a temporary one.

Dawn Beachy couldn’t remember ever seeing a barn raising. She surely must have watched several as a young girl, but if she had, she couldn’t now remember them. For her, this was a very special day. A perfect day. And for a time, she was able to put the other world, and the war that had killed her husband Ben, out of her mind.

She looked up at Jed, up at the very top of the barn, sitting astride the center beam like he was riding a horse. Men were handing up roof rafters and Jed was hammering them into place, one after another.

Dawn smiled. This was the life she wanted to live, and this was the man she wanted to live it with.

Before noon, the frame of the barn was already in place, and when the midday meal was called, the siding was already beginning to go up.

A light and perfect breeze accented the day, moving just lightly enough to keep everyone cool in the bright sunlight, and the smell of mown grass, cut lumber, and roasted chicken mixed in the air.

The women were laughing and clearing the long wooden tables of empty platters and bowls when the first sounds of war were heard.

Dawn was doing what many of the young ladies had done just after the dinner was over. She was the last of the ladies who’d climbed up a very tall ladder to the peak of the new barn so that she could look out over New Pennsylvania from the very top. Jed was seated on the center beam, straddling it and nailing in a rafter, when he turned and saw Dawn looking at him with a big smile on her face.

“Get ye down before ye hurt ye by fallin’!” Jed said with a laugh.

“I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about,” Dawn said with a playful smile on her face.

“It’s just a barn,” Jed said.

Dawn laughed. “Oh, so you think all those single Amish beauties just climbed this rickety ladder one after another to look at a barn?”

“What else is there to look at?” Jed asked.

“Jedediah Troyer, that’s what!” Dawn said.

“Oh, get ye down!”

A low rumble shook the ground just then, and both Jed and Dawn looked up as a formation of maybe a dozen or more white drones, spherical and without markings, appeared over the high perimeter wall that ringed the Amish Zone.

“Dawn, get down!” Jed shouted. But Dawn, like everyone else who saw the sight, was frozen in place.

Just then, an attack craft—from Jed’s point of view it had to be a TRACE fighter—sped from his left and engaged the drones, shooting two of them down in a shower of laser light and sparks. The two drones exploded and spun toward the ground, crashing in balls of fire and smoke.

One of the drones dropped precipitously, then shot back upward and fired a long volley of phosphorescent projectiles that struck the TRACE fighter and blew it out of the sky.

Now chaos reigned. Explosions rocked the ground, and more drones appeared on the horizon. An endless number, seeming to stretch from one end of the heavens to the other.

“Dawn!” Jed yelled, and she looked up and caught his glance. “Please get down!” he hollered, as four TRACE fighters zoomed overhead and then banked toward the approaching drones.

“You too!” Dawn shouted, but not before a flash of laser light split the air near her, sending crackling electricity like lightning through the air. She was halfway down the ladder when another explosion hit Matthias’s little house, and almost at the same instant several of the buggies were struck and exploded, cartwheeling through the air before crashing down to the earth in splinters.

Another drone crashed nearby, and Dawn looked up in time to see three more TRACE fighters zip overhead at an extremely high speed. By now, Amish families were gathering together, and the parents were leading their children to run and hide—rushing to anywhere that might offer them safety. Dawn saw a family running across a field of low, green tobacco, and could only watch as a large TRACE ship crash-landed right in front of them. The family stared for a moment, and then turned and ran the other way.

The ship was huge, and Dawn was thankful that it hadn’t exploded on impact. As it was, the crash landing had gouged up several acres of cropland. She shook her head and stared out at the confusion and destruction. War had erupted in the Amish Zone, and death and destruction now rained down from the sky. This certainly wasn’t the first time a devilish government had unleashed its military to try destroy the Amish—but for those who were experiencing it, the scene was like none they’d ever imagined.

The Amish are raised on stories of persecution and violence. They know the tales by heart from the time they are children in the crib. They’ve always known that such things have happened often enough in the past. But the human mind is alike in every race and sect of people: when the danger isn’t close enough, or when enough generations have passed so that the reality of hardship and persecution ceases to be real, the threats fade. They take on the quality of interesting fiction. But now, on this Saturday, as the blood of saints and tyrants began to mingle in the soil of New Pennsylvania, the ghosts and pains of the past took on new life for the residents of the Amish Zone.

From the wreckage of the downed TRACE aircraft, Dawn saw a figure appear. Old, and bowed down a bit from age and circumstance, the figure crawled out of the fighter and began to walk stoically toward the new barn.

Amos.

Dawn began to run toward her friend, but she’d only taken a few steps when she remembered that Jed was still atop the barn. She skidded to a stop and swung around just in time to see a phosphorescent projectile split the center beam of the barn—which gave way under Jed’s weight.

Dawn’s eyes met Jed’s for just a moment as he began to fall, but in an instant he had flipped over backward and plummeted to the ground, landing beyond her view. Her breath caught in her throat and her hands came up to her mouth and she had to look away. As she did, she saw that Amos was running toward her with a hand outstretched. He got to her just as she pushed away and ran inside the barn.

As the two friends stepped over a portion of the shattered beam, they saw Jed lying in the rubble. He was bloody, and he looked for all the world like he was dead.

A buggy pulled by two galloping black horses sped up the lane and then turned into the drive at Matthias’s farm. Black buggies were everywhere: some scattered as horses bolted in fear, some shattered from explosions, and others being used by Amish farmers to get their families to safety.

Eagles was driving the horses hard, and Pook and Ducky were crammed into the buggy, holding on for dear life. Another buggy backed out into the drive as an Amish man tried to get control of his horses, and to avoid a collision Eagles turned the horses through a hedge. Their buggy nearly launched into the air as it crashed through the bushes and slid across the lawn, and the weight of the three militia soldiers, all thrown against one side of the buggy, flipped the vehicle over, separating it from the horses, who broke and ran across the field in terror.

Just as another buggy pulled up next to the destroyed one, Pook Rayburn kicked open the side door of the crashed vehicle—the side door which was now pointed straight upward toward the sky—and he and Ducky crawled stiffly out of the wrecked pile of wood and metal. Once they’d made their way to the ground, they checked one another for injuries and, finding none, looked around to see what might have happened to Eagles. But the salvager was nowhere in sight. Two of the Yoder boys climbed out of the newly arrived buggy and joined Ducky and Pook next to the wreckage.

They all looked at one another and started to walk around the wrecked buggy when they saw the whole shattered vehicle shift and move. From the midst of the debris, Eagles stood slowly to his feet. He had splinters and pieces of shrapnel in his beard, and there was blood running down one side of his face. The wild man spat his wad of green tobac on the busted-up buggy and then looked up at Pook, Ducky, and the Yoder boys.

“Taadaa?” he said.

Pook found the rest of his squad, along with Dawn, his supreme commander Amos Troyer, and an injured and unconscious Jedediah Troyer, huddled next to the damaged and smoking skeleton that used to be Matthias’s house.

Pook rushed to his team and did a quick numbers check to make sure everyone was accounted for.

“Where’s Billy?” Dawn asked

“He had to stay behind to finish a critical task,” Pook answered. “But we don’t have time to talk about that. We have to get all of us, especially Amos, outside of the Amish Zone, and we only have about twenty minutes left before it’ll be too late.”

“I don’t understand,” Dawn said. “Is Transport going to destroy the AZ and kill everyone? Because if they are, we need to fight!”

“I’ll explain it all when we’re on the move,” Pook said. He began to shout orders to his squad, then he pointed at Eagles and Ducky and told them to locate a working buggy.

“Load Jed into it and get him outside the walls as quickly as you can,” he said. “The rest of us will find our way out and meet you due east of the AZ in the next thirty minutes. Got it?”

Eagles and Ducky nodded and rushed off to complete their orders.

“Okay, the rest of you, we’re going to hoof it out of here. The Amish are going to need as many of these buggies as possible to use as ambulances, so we’re going to have to double-time it out of the Zone on foot.” He turned to Amos. “Except you, sir. We need you out for certain. You’ll ride with Jed.”

“No,” Amos said, and closed his eyes.

“What do you mean?” Pook asked. “We need to get you out of here.”

“I’m staying.”

“Sir, you can’t.” Pook put his hands on his hips, ready to dig in if Amos wanted to argue.

“You don’t tell me what I can’t do, officer,” Amos snapped. “I know what you have planned, and it may work; but if it does, someone needs to stay on this side who knows what’s going on.”

“But…” Pook said. “But… who will command if you’re gone?”

Amos put his hand on Pook’s shoulder. “You will, son.”

“Wait,” Dawn interrupted. “I don’t understand what’s happening! Where is Amos going? Why are we fleeing the Zone?”

Pook turned to Dawn and reached out to hold her by the shoulders, steadying her. “Because in twenty minutes—less than that now—there’s going to be an explosion and a blinding white light in the sky over the Zone. That’ll be an okcillium explosion, and it will cause something very much like an electromagnetic pulse. It will destroy anything in the air in a fifty-mile radius, including every warship or drone on both sides of this battle. They’ll all crash to the ground.”

Just as he said “crash,” a drone that had been shot down by a TRACE fighter crashed in the neighbors’ field, sending forth a shower of sparks, fire, and smoke. Pook waited until the sound died down before he spoke again.

“And then, immediately after that, there’ll be a smaller explosion, but you won’t see or hear that one. You’ll only see the results.”

“What… what will happen? What will we see?” Dawn asked.

“This whole place,” Pook answered, pointing all around them. “The whole Amish Zone, and everything in it, is going to disappear.”

“Disappear?” Dawn said. “But where will it go?”

Pook shook his head, shrugged, and began to walk away, shouting orders to his men. Then he stopped and took a step back toward Dawn before reaching out and taking her by the hand.

“We don’t know for sure,” he said. “Maybe a hundred years in the future. Maybe the past? Can’t be sure. But it’ll go someplace.”

Dawn held Pook’s hand tightly, not about to let him leave again.

“Why don’t we just go with it?” she asked. “Go with the Zone to wherever it ends up?”

Pook pulled on her hand and the two began to walk. “Because if we want to have any opportunity, any opportunity at all, to finish this for final and for good… then we have to stay here, in this time, and figure it out.”

(38 WINDOW PANE

NOW

Jed rocked back and forth beneath the wide blue sky. He was lying on his back, a green soldier’s blanket laid over his chest, as he was carried on a stretcher held aloft by four men. He saw the beautiful wispy clouds, some connected by gossamer threads of vapor and others seemingly more solid, like great billowy ships adrift in a heavenly sea, and he felt the rhythm of the swaying as the men walked. He had a headache, there was no denying that, and he could hear the people who traveled with him talking as the group moved.

“The only portal left is up on the Shelf, and now with the AZ gone, it’s our only hope.” It was Pook Rayburn talking, and Jed smiled when he recognized the voice. He’d grown to like Pook while working with him on the farm over this past week. He closed his eyes and focused his attention on the voices, hoping that by doing so maybe the headache would fade.

“It’s a long haul, but we’ll make it.” This time it was Dawn Beachy speaking. “We don’t really have any other choice.”

“I hope he’s going to be able to walk at least part of the way,” a third voice said.

Jed’s brain had learned to work as if the BICE was still there, providing him visual input so that the newer, higher-functioning areas of his mind could interpret data. On one screen, an image was displayed. It showed a large empty area, devoid of hills or valleys, where the Amish Zone should have been. It was as if the whole community had just disappeared. He didn’t know how he knew that this had once been where the Amish Zone was, but he did. Even the immense walls were completely gone. On another screen he was seeing the process of okcillium being extracted from reclaimed road base, back in the old world. On still another screen, he examined maps and data that appeared to show a location up on the Great Shelf. All of these things—except for the image of the empty space where the Amish Zone had been—were things his brain already knew. His mind was simply using a new process for interpreting and organizing data, having learned this method from working with the BICE.

The other screens showed things like force readiness reports, and files about the history of the AZ and the building of the wall. All things he’d read before. He thought of Dawn Beachy, and a file containing her picture appeared on one of the screens. He scrolled to an overall summary of the information Transport had about her. He had the feeling that, if he’d ever looked at or studied a piece of information before in all of his life, he now had access to it in real time.

He squeezed his eyes tightly, and he saw the screens in his mind, and they’d all gone dark. All of them except one. The one there on the bottom right, with the picture of the faded and embossed coffee can, stomped flat and cut to fit. That screen didn’t change. In his mind it was permanent—like an anchor, grounding him to…

…to what?

And then that screen faded to black as well.

And now he had another anchor. He felt his hand being clasped by someone, and when he concentrated, and really felt the other hand, he knew it to be Dawn’s. As the team walked and carried him along on the stretcher, Dawn was holding his hand, letting him know that she was there, that she was a part of him, and a part of his life. Something that was real, tangible. Solid. Something on which he could depend. Someone he could love. She was his window…

Ask questions.

He thought for a moment. What is the next step? Where do we go from here?

And the black screens answered him. A single word in all caps. Italicized in white print. Stark against the darkness of the screens…