Patrick Tilley - Amtrak 6 - Earth - Thunder

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The Amtrak Wars - Book 6 - Earth-Thunder
By: Patrick Tilley
Synopsis:
As the great mountain in the west speaks to the sky with a tongue of
flame, the Talisman Prophecy is on the verge of fulfilment.
The rulers of the Federation believe that Clearwater's unborn child is
the Thrice-Gifted One, and they hold both in their power. Cadillac and
Roz, who have combined their formidable talents, are determined to free
her, but Steve, lured by the prospect of a dazzling career within the
First Family, is no longer certain who to support or betray. He has
little time left in which to decide, for in Ne-Issan, home of the Iron
Masters, a lone woman intent on avenging her dead lover, is about to
plunge her nation into a civil war that will set the whole continent
ablaze.
Also by Patrick Tilley."
THE AMTRAK WARS BOOK 1: CLOUD WARRIOR THE AMTRAK WARS BOOK 2 FIRST
FAMILY THE AMTRAK WARS BOOK 3; IRON MASTER THE AMTRAK WARS BOOK 4:
BLOOD RIVER THE AMTRAK WARS BOOK 5 DEATH-BRINGER MISSION FADEOUT STAR
WARTZ
The Amtrak Wars Book 6: Earth-Thunder
PATRICK TILLEY
ORBIT
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An Orbit Book
First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd 1990
Reprinted 1990, 1991, 1992
Reprinted by Warner Books 1993
Reprinted 1995, 1996
Reprinted by Orbit 1998
Copyright © Patrick Tilley 1990
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in
any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 1 85723 540 I
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Orbit
A Division of Little, Brown and Company (ilK) Brettenham House
Lancaster Place
London we2E 7EN
The following list is a guide to the Iron Master, Mute and Federation
names for key locations mentioned in EARTH-THUNDER:
Aron-giren (Long Island, New York)
Awashi-tana (Washington, D.C.)
Banti-moro (Baltimore, Maryland)
Beoisha - Post-house Inn (Bishop, Maryland)
Bei-poro (Bellport, Long Island)
Bei-shura (Bay Shore, Long Island)
Beni-tana - Toh-Yota Palace (Benton, Connecticutt)
Big White Running Water (Sioux Falls, South Dakota)
Bu-faro (Buffalo, New York State)
Cape Fear, North Carolina
Cloudlands - First Family enclave, Houston, Texas
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Govo-nasa (Governor's Island, New York)
Grand Central (Houston, Texas)
Korina-gawu (Collingwood, Ontario)
Lake O-neida (L. Oneida, New York State)
Lake Ona-taryo (L. Ontario)
Mana-tana (Manhattan Island, New York)
Mira-bara (Millsboro, Delaware)
Monroe/Wichita - Divisional Base (Wichita, Kansas)
O-shawa (Oshawa, Ontario)
Osa-wego (Oswego, New York State)
Oshana-sita (Ocean City, Maryland)
San-Oransa (St. Lawrence River, Quebec)
Sara-kusa (Syracuse, New York State)
Sta-tana (Staten Island, New York)
Summer Palace, Yedo (Middle Island, L.I.)
Twin Forks (North Platte, Nebraska)
Uda-sona (Hudson River, New York State)
Winter Palace, Showa (Showell, Maryland)
Additional background information including various maps can be found
in Book 3: IRON MASTER and in DARK VISIONS: The Illustrated Guide to
The Amtrak Wars.
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DEDICATION
I should like to express my gratitude to all the readers of THE AMTRAK
WARS and everyone at Sphere Books, Forbidden Planet and Andromeda whose
enthusiasm (and patience) helped make this series a success.
Special thanks to those of you who wrote, the many others who took the
trouble to come and meet me in the bookshops, all you Australians who
boosted AMTRAK onto your best-seller list, and last, but not least, to
my fan in the Shetlands whose thoughtful Glaswegian friend got me to
autograph a brown paper bag.
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CHAPTER ONE
Armed with a stolen carbine, Cadillac marched slowly through the
drifting plumes of smoke that rose from the charred remains of the huts
which- just one brief day ago - had been the home of the Clan m'call.
Roz - clutching another carbine with the awkwardness of someone trained
to save lives not terminate them followed him as he scoured the
settlement from end to end. The soldiers had done their work with the
thoroughness that was the mark of the Federation.
Goods and chattels had been put to the torch, every living soul
regardless of age had been killed.
The decapitated bodies of the den mothers, their children, and the
She-Wolves who had stayed to defend them were scattered everywhere.
Some, burnt beyond recognition, lay smouldering in the glowing rings of
ashes that had once been huts of skin and wood; others, partially
stripped, their naked bodies ripped by bayonet thrusts, lay sprawled
awkwardly where they had been gunned down - either running away from,
or towards the enemy: the tall faceless figures in their blood-red and
flame-orange uniforms who showed no mercy and expected none.
When the last hope of finding any survivors finally expired, Cadillac
turned to Roz, his eyes brimming with bitter tears. His lips moved but
no words came. He had come down from the hills fearing the worst, but
the shock of discovering this scene of sensaless slaughter had driven
the breath from his body.
Roz threw aside her carbine and supported him as he lurched towards
her. She knew what he was thinking.
He was the last of the M'Calls; the only one still alive.
The remainder of his clanfolk - every man, woman and
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child of fighting
age - had gone forth to do battle with one of the dreaded iron-snakes,
the Mute name for the wagon-trains of the Amtrak Federation.
And despite falling into a trap, they had confounded their enemy,
capturing and destroying The Lady from Louisiana before being
surrounded by four more of the giant land-cruisers - each one carrying
a thousand TrailBlazers.
When Cadillac had flown west, taking Roz with him on the orders of Mr
Snow, the M'Call Bears and She-Wolves, bloodied but triumphant from
their victory over The Lady, were preparing to make a last stand as the
circle of fire closed in remorselessly around them.
Roz and Cadillac had escaped in the last aircraft to leave the
flight-deck of The Lady and they had not been fired upon because no one
on the advancing wagon-trains had suspected that the Skyhawk was being
flown by a Mute. The same thing had happened when they had overflown
the settlement and seen the groups of camouflaged Trail-Blazers moving
through it sowing a trail of death and destruction. Some had even
paused long enough to lower their weapons and raise their dark, visored
faces as Cadillac circled overhead.
His first impulse had been to dive down and spray them with a prolonged
burst from the mini-Vulk in the nose of the Skyhawk, but he did not
dare risk damaging his precious cargo: Roz - the young stranger whom Mr
Snow had given into his care. Gritting his teeth, Cadillac had made
two low passes, dipping his wings to salute the murderers of his
clanfolk.
The Trail-Blazers had waved to him. And then, as he flew off - wracked
with guilt - to find a landing place higher up in the hills, those same
hands had dropped back onto their weapons to continue the slaughter of
the innocents.
From an overlooking crag, he and Roz had watched the distant fiery glow
wax and wane throughout the night then, in the grey dawn of the
following day, they had gone down to take stock of his inheritance.
But there was nothing left.
On the very same day he had become wordsmith to the Clan M'Call - the
greatest clan ever to spring from the bloodline of the She-Kargo - his
clanfolk had perished in a last blaze of glory and the hell-fires of
vengeance.
As the first shock faded and new breath forced its way into his lungs,
Cadillac stepped away from Roz, raised his face to the sky and howled
with grief. A heart-rending cry that came from deep within the soul.
Inarticulate, more animal than human, but which expressed his deep-felt
sense of loss and desolation in a way which mere words could not
encompass.
Falling to his knees, he pounded the bloodstained earth then furrowed
it with clawed fingers, scooping it up and smearing it over his neck,
arms and chest.
Roz knelt down beside him- this clear-skinned, smooth-boned Mute whose
future was now inextricably enmeshed with hers. They had met less than
24 hours ago, surrounded, as now, by the stench of death, but it had
only served to strengthen the instinctive bond between them.
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She watched patiently as Cadillac, oblivious to her presence, continued
to claw at the crimson earth and daub it on his body. To the detached
medical side of her mind, he seemed, by these frenzied gestures, to be
trying to share the dying agonies of his clanfolk. Gradually, the raw
edge of his guilt and anger became blunted. He slumped back on his
heels, round-shouldered under the burden of sorrow and lapsed into
total immobility, hands hanging limply between his thighs, his
expressionless eyes blind to all external sensation - the classic
symptoms of catatonia. For nearly an hour, not a muscle twitched.
Nothing moved except for the occasional tear which rolled down his
cheeks then, suddenly, he jerked into life and when he turned his
bloodied, dirt-streaked face towards her, the eyes were dry and
clear.
'Come,' he said. 'We have work to do."
Using Tracker machetes, they cut down and hauled back a large quantity
of pine saplings which they hewed into eight-foot lengths and built a
square funeral pyre, interleaving the layers of slim logs with the
broken bodies
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of the women and the young children, laid on a bed and
under a cover of pine branches.
Despite her training, Roz found it a heartbreaking task. In the
Federation, dead bodies were whisked away by the bag-men. Some were
delivered to the Medical College for autopsies and dissection by
students but once again the bag-men collected the bits. And it
occurred to Roz that she had never enquired what happened next.
She had merely assumed that the mortal remains of its soldier-citizens
were disposed of with the same clinical efficiency that characterised
most of the procedures evolved by the Amtrak Federation.
True or false, she was certain of one thing. The operation was not
something the kin-folk of the deceased were required to perform or
watch - as she had to do now.
They piled more branches around the outside of the log squares to mask
the bodies from view, then Cadillac set light to it using a potful of
glowing ashes from one of the burnt-out huts. There was a pungent
smell of resin as the pine needles caught fire, and with a crackling
roar the flames leapt skywards, carrying the spirits of the dead into
the arms of Mo-Town on a rising current of air.
With his half-naked body smeared with grey ash in the traditional style
of the Plainfolk, Cadillac squatted before the column of fire, just out
of range of the blistering heat, his arms wrapped around his
rib-cage.
And so began the second period of mourning.
For the rest of that day and throughout the following night, Cadillac
rocked silently back and forth, his heart and mind imprisoned in a
private world of grief which Roz could comprehend but could not wholly
share.
The funeral pyre blazed throughout the evening, then around midnight,
as he maintained his vigil while she slept fitfully nearby, it slowly
collapsed with a shower of sparks into a mound of glowing embers. By
morning, all that remained was a grey-shrouded hump in the middle of a
blackened square of earth. But it still gave off a fierce heat, and
quickly ignited the odd branch and bits of debris that Roz threw onto
it as she tidied up around her seated companion.
Cadillac did not utter a word throughout the whole of that second
day.
And Roz did not attempt to engage him in conversation. She was content
to be; to savour to the full the expansive beauty of the surrounding
landscape, the fathomless depths of the blue sky world above her
head.
A sky flecked with ever-changing patterns of cloud that stretched away
towards a horizon that was so distant it surpassed understanding.
Up here in the hills, the world about her was much vaster than the one
she had experienced from the flight deck of Red River. Coming from a
life-time spent in the confines of the Federation, she had - like most
Trackers - no proper sense of scale, no grasp of the truly awesome
dimensions of the universe. If someone had told her that from where
she now stood the farthest point she could see towards the east lay
over a hundred miles away it would have meant nothing. And to have
talked about the size of the earth or the distance between it and the
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moon would have meant even less.
On the first day, while Cadillac sat grieving in front of the blazing
pyre, she had taken the edge off her hunger by dipping into the
emergency ration pack that all Skyhawks carried. Now, on the second
day, as the sun reached its zenith, Cadillac rose, made a cooking fire
and silently prepared a meal for two.
Not everything had been been destroyed by the soldiers or thrown onto
the funeral pyre. Cadillac had salvaged and set aside pots and pans,
tools and implements, sleeping furs, some walking skins, even some
dried food - everything they needed to survive the immediate future and
were able to carry on trucking poles between them.
Without being asked, Roz had brought water from the stream that burst
from the moss-covered rocks deep within the forested slopes to the
north of the settlement.
The same stream that cascaded over the glistening tongue of rock
overhanging the bluff then fell in a long filmy ribbon onto the rocks
below. The same rocks on which
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Steve Brickman had stood to refresh
himself before his fateful second encounter with Clearwater.
Roz helped Cadillac prepare the meal, her gestures complementing his
without a hint of awkwardness. They ate in silence, but on the
occasions when their eyes met they fixed each other with an unwavering
gaze that was only broken by mutual, unspoken agreement.
They were like two castaways, marooned on a wooded island amid an ocean
of red grass. But although they had only been in each other's presence
for a matter of hours, they were not strangers. Neither Roz nor
Cadillac had anything to hide. There was no need for timid, furtive
glances; no time for anything other than a frank appraisal.
There was no need to say anything. The eyes said it all.
The afternoon lengthened into evening. Roz helped him erect a hut
using a selection of unburnt poles and a patchwork of skins, then they
went into the forest to fetch more wood for the fire.
While they were there Cadillac bathed in the stream, washing away the
grey ash that had covered his body.
Night fell. They communed in silence over the evening meal that
Cadillac prepared with her help, then he gathered up the sleeping furs
that had been warming by the fire and took them into the hut.
A short while later he crawled out through the low door flap and picked
up the two carbines. Seating himself with his back to the hut, he laid
one of the guns across his lap and placed the other on the ground
beside him.
'Sleep now." They were the first words he had uttered in two days.
Roz stood up and slowly unzipped her camouflage fatigues, then rolled
them into a neat bundle. Cadillac averted his eyes as she stripped off
her underclothes, but she stood before him and willed him to look up at
her naked body, its smooth artificially-tanned skin tinted deep orange
by the firelight glow. When their eyes finally met, she held up the
garments that marked her out as a Tracker and dropped them onto the
red-hot embers.
They both watched as the flames took hold.
When there was nothing left, Roz said: 'There is no need to stand
guard. My power will protect both of us."
She walked past Cadillac, brushing his head lightly with one hand.
Entering the hut, Roz saw the firestone had been trimmed, leaving only
a tiny flame to light the way to bed. Picking up the stone, she pushed
it out through the door flap then found her way back to the bed in the
pitch dark and snuggled down between the soft layers of furs.
She knew what was going to happen; had known with an overwhelming
certainty ever since she had been introduced to Cadillac on the
flight-deck of The Lady.
It was just a question of time. Her whole life had been a voyage of
discovery, but in the past year the pace had accelerated. One
revelation had succeeded another with bewildering speed. It was like
being in a sail-boat driven by a hurricane which preceded a gigantic
storm: a storm that threatened to sweep away the world she had known.
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摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Patrick%20Tilley/Patrick%20Tilley%20-%20Amtrak%20Wars%20Book%206%20-%20Earth-Thunder.txtTheAmtrakWars-Book6-Earth-ThunderBy:PatrickTilleySynopsis:Asthegreatmountaininthewestspeakstotheskywithatongueofflame,theTalismanProphecyisonthevergeoffulfilment.TherulersoftheFederationbelievetha...

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