The Amtrack Wars - Earth Thunder Part 5

It was terrifying...

She stood up and offered him her hand. As they came face to face she said, 'If I can do that to you - whom I love - just imagine what I can do to our enemies..."

Cadillac nodded but said nothing.

They ate in silence and later, when their bodies came together in the dark, he had not still uttered a word.

As he entered her, Roz whispered: 'I know what's going through your mind. Relax." She locked her legs around the small of his back and thrust upwards to meet him. 'What you can feel is not a figment of your imagination. Trust me. This is for real!" And it was. Oh, yes.

It was. It was ....

CHAPTER TWO.

In the heart of the Federation, a thousand miles southwest of the pine-forested slopes of the Laramie Mountains, Steve Brickman was busy working both ends against the middle.

Six weeks after his promotion to captain and probationary membership of the First Family, he still found it hard to believe his good fortune.

In Cloudlands the large overground estate where the First Family lived in colonial-style splendour - Steve was now the acknowledged companion and bed-mate of Franklynne Delano Jefferson, a close and favoured relative of the President-General. And the liaison with Fran provided him with an entree to the highest levels of the Family. The contacts at this stage were purely social but they provided Steve with an opportunity to make himself known and, above all, to be seen.

In eighteen action-packed months, he had risen from a workgang in the A-Levels to the charmed inner circle at the top of the tree. And in between, he had travelled further, seen things that others only dreamt of, and had been involved in more violence and intrigue than most other Trackers would meet in their entire lifetime - and he was still only nineteen!

Up to a few short weeks ago, Steve had always figured he had only another twenty or so years ahead of him.

Trackers who avoided a violent death usually died from natural causes between the age of 40 and 45. But Steve had discovered that he and his kin-sister Roz were Plainfolk Mutes - smooth-boned clear-skinned 'super-straights' - reared in the underground world of the Federation.

For some reason he had yet to fathom, Mutes had a greater life expectancy than Trackers, remaining alert and active into their mid-sixties. Like the First Family.

They were also immune to the lethal radiation still present in the atmosphere - again like the First Family - a fact that had only become apparent to Steve after his arrival in Cloudlands.

At the first mention of the name he had guessed it was an overground installation, but he had been surprised to discover it was not a sealed environment. The entire estate was open to the sky.

Given the favourable circ.u.mstances in which he found himself, Steve decided it was wiser to accept the situation without comment, but it raised several questions that were impossible to ignore. The problem was - how could he discover the answers without jeopardising his newly-acquired life-style and the prospects of further promotion?

His delicate balancing act inside the First Family was not the only problem he had to contend with. Clearwater was still held in 'soft confinement' at the Life Inst.i.tute.

Her shattered left thigh was mending well and she was expected to take her first tentative steps in September - the same month in which the Plainfolk were due to hold their first council at Sioux Falls: an item of news which Steve had not yet pa.s.sed on to his masters. The child Clearwater was carrying within her was scheduled for delivery in mid-December. The official Federation calendar- designed for an underground world untouched by the pa.s.sing seasons - had discarded the twelve pre-H months in favour of four quarters and three terms, but even after nine centuries old habits die hard.

The fact that he had actually fathered a child was something else Steve found difficult to accept. And he was not quite sure how he was meant to react to the situation. From the moment he was old enough to understand, Steve had been taught that the President-General was the Father of All Life, but now even that - one of the basic tenets of Trackerdom - was no longer true.

His feelings for Clearwater had not changed, but they were now tinged with a certain confusion and more than a little guilt. He kept telling himself that his physical relationship with Fran was nothing more than a smart career move; a means by which - through his new status and the valuable contacts he was making - he would be better able to organise their escape from the Federation.

But although he wanted to secure freedom for Clearwater and her child their child - he was beginning to lose the absolute certainty that his future lay with the Plainfolk. Steve was confident that in any contest for leadership of The Chosen, he would beat Cadillac hands down, but it was no longer that simple. The emergence of Roz as the fourth element in the equation had upset his calculations. Their guard-mother's revelation that they had been exchanged for her own new-born children, and as a consequence might not be related by blood, had undermined the kin-folk bond. They might still be linked by the mid-bridge but Roz was no longer under his control - the little sister content to bask in his shadow.

Steve could not understand why the mysterious force that the Mutes called 'destiny' - and which had so favoured him - had brought Roz and Cadillac together, but he knew his rival would grab this heaven-sent opportunity to even the score. He would make the most of the situation and might even succeed in turning Roz against him. If she were to place her new, frightening power at Cadillac's disposal, it would be a whole new ball-game.

nd where would Clearwater - who from his own observations while on the Red River wagon-train had developed an unexpectedly close rapport with Roz stand in all this?

It was, Steve decided, a potentially dangerous situation.

If he did not tread carefully, he could find himself the odd man out.

And if that was so, it would be better off to remain where he was - in the Federation. But how could he sell that idea to Clearwater?

The short answer was- he couldn't. She would regard it as a complete and utter betrayal. And half of him agreed with her. Her return to the Plainfolk had been promised by Mr Snow. Steve had seen enough to convince him that prophetic visions and utterances were not to be taken lightly, but the other, darker half of his psyche found itself increasingly attracted to an alternative scenario based on the breathtaking supposition that the First Family themselves might be super-straights or, at the very least, were Trackers who had interbred with this rare, gifted type of Mute.

Steve had no hard proof, but once the germ of this idea had entered his head, it began to make more and more sense. Externally, super-straight Mutes were indistinguishable from Trackers. They also shared one important attribute with the known members of the First Family - both were immune to atmospheric radiation.

They might even share another- longevity. Steve had no proof of this since he had never met an old super-straight.

Or had he? Could he have Shaken the hand of one in the Oval Office?

Why else would the Family be so different from their loyal soldier-citizens? How else could people like Malone and other mexicans like Side-Winder operate for so long on the overground without pulling a trick?

It would also explain why the President-General took the Talisman Prophecy so seriously - along with Mute magic. A real true-blue Tracker, raised from birth in a hi-tech society where the physical sciences provided an answer for everything, would never, for one moment, have entertained the idea that some things happened 'by magic'.

In the Federation, there was a total ban on the discussion of such intangible concepts, and if ordinary Trackers so much as mentioned the idea it could earn them a trip to the wall.

More important still was the fact that the President-General knew something Steve had yet to discover-his true origins and the circ.u.mstances surrounding his birth. They knew he was a Mute and yet they had condoned the unthinkable: they had allowed him to jack up Franklynne Delano Jefferson. Not just once, but on a regular basis, sometimes notching up three or four ball-breaking sessions a night.

There was only one set of circ.u.mstances which would permit such a relationship. Fran was also a Mute. They all were - or had enough Mute blood in them for it not to matter. Which meant - in theory there was nothing to stop him from becoming the next but one President-General...

George Washington Jefferson the 33rd.

It was a mind-blowing notion, and the historical perspective it opened up was equally disturbing. At what point had Mute blood entered the veins of the First Family? Or had it always been there?

Mr Snow had told him that Mute and Tracker shared a common ancestry whose roots ran back to the Old Time - the pre-Holocaust era that the Iron Masters called the World Before. Super-straights like Clearwater and Cadillac were living proof of that- and so, it would seem, was he.

Their existence supported Mr Snow's claim that the Mutes had not unleashed the Holocaust but were, instead, its princ.i.p.al victims.

If so, the bone and skin deformations and mental impairment that caused the Federation to cla.s.sify them as sub-human did not precede the Holocaust; it was part of its dreadful legacy. Mutes did not exhale the poisonous elements that filled the air, and it was not exuded through the sweat glands on their multi-coloured skins. And touching that skin did not cause Trackers to develop gangrene. According to Mr Snow, that was another of the great lies invented by the Federation.

In the oral history of the Mutes, it was the servants of Pent-Agon, Lord of Chaos, who had unleashed The War of a Thousand Suns by launching countless numbers of iron birds into the air. Iron birds which rose into the sky-on plumes of fire, flew in a great arch towards the stars then returned to earth as falling suns.

Many of these birds, said Mr Snow, had been caged deep in the earth in underground cities - like those of the Federation; others had burst free from the bodies of great iron-snakes that travelled on shining hard-ways. Not the crumbling remains that marked the routes once used by the giant, man-carrying beetles, but endless ribbons of polished iron which glittered in the sun like the flawless blades of the samurai.

In the last six weeks, Steve had seen those shining hard-ways, and a new kind of iron-snake whose fiery breath was used not to kill, but to power its ma.s.sive wheels.

Steam trains, lovingly restored and maintained by the First Family, running on rails - two ribbons of rolled steel pinned to wooden 'sleepers'. They were part of a grandiose project still several decades from completion - the rebuilding of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad which, when eventually connected to rebuilt sections of the pre-H Southern, and Southern Pacific routes, would link the east and west coasts of America.

Such trains could have carried the iron birds Mr Snow had spoken of.

Steve, of course, had no knowledge of intercontinental ballistic missile systems, or the destructive force of nuclear warheads but he knew about small air-to-ground rockets, and the firework variety made by the Iron Masters which he had adapted into a propulsion system for Lord Min-Orota's 'flying-horses'. The 'iron birds' were obviously large rockets with an explosive warhead.

If it was true - if they had been launched from trains then - reasoned Steve - it was equally possible that the Founding Father and the Four Hundred whose names topped the Roll of Honour were directly linked to those 'servants of Pent-Agon'. If they were, their finger might even have been on the firing b.u.t.ton!

After Fran, anything was possible. It meant adjusting to the idea that George Washington Jefferson the 1st had neatly shifted the blame for the Holocaust onto the Mutes and - even more incredible still - the nine-hundred year war of retribution waged by the soldier-citizens of the Federation against the Plainfolk and their southern cousins in the name of racial purity was being led by a carefully-bred selection of super-straights!