“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.