The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma by Brian Herbert

bring the loathsome SciOs crashing down, along with Chairman Rahma Popal, using secret machines like this one to transport troops and war equipment. But he had to implement his guerrilla plan precisely, based on exquisite planning. There was no room for mistakes, such as those made by others in the attacks on Bostoner and Quebec. Those were small-time military assaults, no more than bee stings on the corpus of the Green government that were soon healed. When Bane finally made his move, it would be much, much bigger.
    As soon as an additional twenty-seven voleers were completed and fully tested, he would have forty-five great machines back at his base camp in central Mexico, filled with armaments and fighters—enough to attack and retreat in numerous places, disappearing into the ground at will. It would drive enemy commanders crazy trying to figure out a way to retaliate, and before they could respond, all of their forces would crumble into dust, along with the vile hippie government.
    And none of them would understand how it had happened. Though he had been raised in a well-to-do Corporate family, in his youth he had refused to follow in his father’s footsteps with Bane Enterprises, a company that manufactured plastic bottles. He’d loved his parents, but had seen the environmental damage caused by plastic, and didn’t want to earn money from that source. As a result, he’d pursued his own interests and developed his own talents, going to work for a laboratory in California and earning his way as a research scientist.
    For years Dylan Bane had gone to work every day, staying with the laboratory when it was taken over by the post-revolution SciOs, and ultimately becoming one of their most trusted researchers. This résumé had served him well later when his family came under attack for their activities. He alone had survived among them.
    Now he glanced over at Marissa Chase as the young officer approached him. “Within three hundred kilometers of the Buenos Aires Reservation for Humans,” she reported, with a crisp salute. “Making our final course correction to Delta Fifty-seven.”
    Bane grunted, looked away. He had no time for his customary thoughts about the attractive woman. Moments later, the ship came to a grinding stop inside a large underground cavern that was quite deep and high, considerably larger than the voleer.
    As hatches slid open he heard a buzzing over the rumble of the idling voleer engines, and saw the inside of the Delta 57 cavern, an expanse that was full of shipping containers that hovered in the air like giant bricks, each of them remote-controlled and self-propelled. In the midst of these containers flew tiny, black, bumblebee-shaped guideships, each with a human operator inside, for the purpose of air-traffic control and loading efficiency in the confined airspace.
    Looking at the black chrono embedded in the skin of his wrist—a mechanism that had the appearance of a tattoo with the numerals in motion—Dylan Bane set the timer on the multifunction device for eighteen minutes, which sent a transmission throughout the ship and cavern, synchronizing the loading operations. He needed to get loaded and be on his way quickly. This was not just a practice maneuver, though that was part of the reason for the trip to the Argentine Territory of the Green States of America. He had another purpose in mind as well, one of equal importance. His operatives in this region had been accumulating essential materials, soldiers, and military equipment.
    On missions such as this one over the past several months, using a number of voleer tunneling machines, he’d been making clandestine trips to obtain assets that he needed for the war effort—taking military personnel and matériel back to Michoacán. His far-flung martial operations were completely underground and electronically veiled, in multiple locations linked by vanishing tunnels, bases that could be