Pennsylvania Omnibus (39 page)

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.”

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.