Tilley, Patrick - The Amtrack Wars 02 - First Family

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The Amtrak Wars - First Family - Book 2

By: Patrick Tilley

Synopsis:

After countless years of fighting - of pitting sophistticated

technology against the primitive surface-dwelling people who seemed to

possess supernatural powers - the Federation was still no nearer to

ending the battle with the Mutes. But then a lone flier was hauled

into one of its underground bunkers - a man whose very existence was a

challenge to the all-pervading wisdom of the First Family. A man whose

destiny would determine the future for both the Federation and the

Mutes...

Also by Patrick Tilley

THE AMTRAK WARS - BOOK 1: CLOUD WARRIOR THE AMTRAK WARS - BOOK 3: IRON

MASTER THE AMTRAK WARS - BOOK 4: BLOOD RIVER THE AMTRAK WARS - BOOK 5:

DEATH BRINGER THE AMTRAK WARS - BOOK 6: EARTH-THUNDER DARK VISIONS: AN

ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO THE AMTRAK WARS MISSION FADEOUT STAR WARTZ Book 2:

First Family

Patrick Tilley

lO R B I TI

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An Orbit Book

First published in Great Britain 1985 by Sphere Books Ltd Reprinted

1986, 1987 (twice), 1988 (twice), 1989, 1990 (twice), 1991

Reprinted by Orbit 1998

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.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham ,[c, Chatham, Kent

ISBN 1 85723 536 3

Orbit

A Division of

Little, Brown and Company (ilK)

Brettenham House

Lancaster Place

London we2E 7EN

To my sons, Pierre-Andre, who solved the problem of the wagon-trains

and Bruno-Christian, whose photographs gave me the key to the

overground.

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THE TRACKER PRAYER (Offered thrice-daily to images of the

President-General) Hail to the Chief!

All-seeing Father, Leader and Sage With our hand on our heart We praise

and salute you.

Glory be to the First Family!

Gift of Ages Past, Rulers till the end of Time Bedrock of Amtrak,

Founders of the Federation Guardians of the Earth-Shield Chosen

Saviours of the Blue-Sky World Creators of the Light, the Work and the

Way Keepers of all Knowledge, Wisdom and Truth In whom the Seven Great

Qualities are enshrined And from whose sacred lifeblood our lives

spring All-seeing Father, Leader and Sage Chief among the Chosen,

Creator of Life This day you have given us we dedicate to you Let your

wise counsel guide our thoughts Let your power strengthen our hands and

hearts So that we may strike down those who oppose Your Will Teach us

to follow the glorious example Of the Minutemen and the Foragers So

that we may serve you better through all our days The life you gave us

we gladly offer up again Use it as you will so that, by the manner of

our dying We may honour their great sacrifice Just as you will honour

ours at the Final Victory.

Amen

CHAPTER ONE

Deke Haywood stretched back in his chair, linked his hands above his

head and yawned cavernously. He squinted through one eye at the

digital time/date display on one of the battery of tv screens that

surrounded him: 17.20 hours, 14 November 2989. Another forty minutes

to go before Glen Wyler took over the watch. And another eleven years

to the end of the century: 3000 AD; the long-awaited moment when

according to the First Family - the Amtrak Federation was due to

repossess the blue-sky world. Deke couldn't see it happening, not in

his lifetime anyway. That particular dream, like so many of the

current operations, was badly behind schedule. Deke was careful to

keep his thoughts on the matter to himself. It did not pay to comment

on any shortfall in the Federation's performance. Like all Trackers,

Deke had been bludgeoned from birth by one, constantly reiterated,

fundamental truth - 'It is only people who fail; not the system'.

The desktop console that required Deke's attention while on duty was a

three-sided affair with twenty-four tv monitors ranged in two rows

around it. The monitors were linked to remote-controlled cameras

mounted overhead, on the top of the windowless watchtower.

These were the ever-watchful eyes of the way-station.

Through them, Deke and the other VidComm Techs kept the surrounding

area - known as the station precinct - under constant surveillance;

twenty-four hours a day; 365 days a year. Their purpose was to provide

early warning of a precinct incursion by hostiles; armed bands of Mutes

- the perpetual enemies of the Federation. It was not necessary to sit

glued to the

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screens. Each camera had an image analyser and was

programmed to react to a range of specific shapes and movements. It

knew what the area it covered looked like down to the last pebble and

if it saw anything on four or two legs or a rock or bush that had moved

out of place it alerted the duty crewman by means of an audiovisual

alarm.

Normally, Deke looked forward to his four-hour stint as Duty VidComm

Tech but today, the overground had failed to deliver the special kind

of action he craved.

Never mind. Deke had devised his own backup entertainment. Swivelling

round in his chair, he slid open the bottom drawer of a stack under the

left wing of the desk, inserted his forearm and retrieved a video

cassette lying right at the back in the dead space between the

underside of the drawer and the floor.

Deke pushed the video cassette into the nearest record/play slot,

slipped a lightweight headset over his ears, started the tape running

and brought the picture up on the screen in front of him. It was a

dawn sequence, a deep rose-pink sky overhung with ragged clusters of

pale violet clouds. A thin soft-edged line of deep chrome yellow

appeared and spread swiftly north and south along the horizon,

heralding the rising sun. The sharp clear sounds of the illicitly-made

electronic sound track cut through the muzzy boredom that clogged his

brain and made his spine tingle with its forbidden rhythmic beat.

Reared at Nixon/Fort Worth and originally a lineman aboard the Rio

Bravo wagon-train, Deke had been caught in a Mute ambush on his third

operational tour and badly wounded in the legs. Although this

automatically qualified him for a home-base assignment, Deke had

applied for retraining as a VidComm Tech (OG) and had gotten himself

posted to the Tracker way-station at Pueblo. His eagerness to get back

to where the action was had been warmly commended by his superiors and

had earned him ten plus points at the next quarterly assessment. This,

in turn, had resulted in a welcome boost to his credit rating. The

added privileges that came with an upgraded ID-card could always be put

to good use but the real pleasure came from the knowledge that he had

beaten the system. Had the Assessors known the real reason behind

Deke's wish to return overground they would, without doubt, have been a

great deal less generous.

Deke was a covert cloud-freak. He had become addicted on his first

trip aboard the Rio Bravo and, since reaching Pueblo, had been using

the facilities in the watch-tower to secretly record the more

spectacular sunrises and sunsets on videotape. He had, of course, only

been able to do this when he was alone. Though most Trackers might

have considered it a distinctly bizarre way of passing the time,

looking at clouds did not, in itself, contravene any of the statutory

codes of behaviour laid down by the First Family; on the other hand,

making unauthorised video recordings certainly did.

Deke was not quite sure whether it was a Code Two or Code Three offence

but, either way, getting caught could be bad news, especially if - as

in this case - the videotape included a sound-track featuring a

proscribed form of music known as 'blackjack'. Hence the need for a

secure place in which to stash the tape - not an easy thing to find in

a Tracker way-station or indeed anywhere else, for there were few doors

and even fewer of them could be locked. In the Federation, the

emphasis was on group identity, group activity and shared facilities;

privacy, in the normally accepted sense of the word, was deemed to be

unnecessary; personal possessions were regarded as unimportant.

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Deke was different to the majority of Trackers at Pueblo who lived,

ate, fought, slept and screwed around in small, close-knit groups and

looked forward eagerly to the next overground sweep, or an incursion by

hostiles.

They needed that extra shot of adrenalin generated by

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combat to feel

fully alive. Deke had gotten the same buzz during his time on the

wagon-trains but his real kicks came from gazing upon sun-tinted towers

of cumulus, the dark menacing bulk of thunderheads, the delicate

tracery of alto-cirrus, teased out by the wind like the tails of horses

- one of the many extinct animal species. His four-hour solo stint in

the watch-tower had become very precious to him. He liked the

solitude, the privacy - even though neither word-concept was included

in the official Tracker vocabulary. The videotape, with its illegal

sound-track, was his alone; his most precious possession. The last

thing Deke wanted to see while on duty was a bunch of screaming

lumpheads.

An alert packed the tower with people and blew his chances of adding

another cloudscape to his collection.

Despite being a code-breaker Deke was still a good soldier. His leg

injuries had meant being downgraded to line-support status but he still

wore his TrailBlazer badge with pride. Mutes were still the enemy. He

had simply lost interest in body-counts shortly after glimpsing his

first sunrise. He'd gone on dutifully to do his share of killing and

had even made sergeant at the end of his second tour, but from that

first, glorious golden moment only clouds had counted. Indeed, it

became an almost fatal obsession. At the back of his mind lurked the

knowledge that, had he paid more attention to the ground instead of

looking at the sky he might not have led his squad into the ambush from

which only he had emerged alive.

Today, like most days, there had been no Pis. Which was good news as

far as Deke was concerned. The bad news was that, this time round,

there had been very little to look at, and absolutely nothing worth

recording. The sky on the bank of screens in front of him had been

depressingly empty of cloud. The airborne drifters, whose multi-hued,

ever-changing forms fired his imagination, had wandered over the far

horizon leaving behind a bland hazy canvas; a smoothly-graded wash of

colour which began right of screen as pale violet blue and changed

imperceptibly to pale yellow on his left.

Deke reached over the back of his chair and picked up a cup of java

from the table behind him. Java was the synthetic, third millennium

equivalent of the pre-Holocaust drink known as coffee; a minor

historical fact Deke had uncovered during one of his occasional dips

into the video archives. As he blew on it and took a trial sip he saw,

out of the corner of his eye, a brief flash of light in the top

right-hand corner of the screen fed by Camera One - fitted with a six

hundred millimetre telephoto lens and known to the watch-tower crews as

'Zoomer'.

Deke knew that the pin-point flash of light he had glimpsed on the

screen could only be caused by sunlight bouncing off the wings of a

Federation Skyhawk - but he was puzzled by the lack of prior radio

contact.

Wagon-trains putting up air patrols always informed way-stations if any

of their aircraft were likely to enter its precinct - a notional circle

drawn around its overground location with a radius of ten miles. It

was not just a matter of courtesy. Under a procedure known as PAL

(Precinct Air Liaison) tower crews, when notified of overflights, would

monitor the appropriate radio channel for any distress calls and, by

maintaining a sky watch for the duration of the patrol, could provide

invaluable help in any subsequent search and rescue operation.

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Just when Deke thought he must have been imagining things, Zoomer

zeroed in on a small, blurred, bluish object. Whatever it was was now

inside the extreme range of the lens. Using the keyboard, Deke called

for maximum resolution. He was confidently expecting the blur to

resolve itself into the familiar shape of a Skyhawk but to his surprise

the object on the screen did not have the normal three-wheeled cockpit

pod, cowled pusher engine and the inflated delta wing with the

colour-coded tips that showed which wagon-train it belonged to.

No . . . this might be a flying machine but it had not

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rolled off the

assembly line at Reagan/Lubbock. This was a cee-bee rig with a

single-ply wing braced by a tangle of wires and struts. The pilot was

slung underneath, lying on his belly in a strap harness with his legs

straight out behind him and the wind blowing round his balls; his hands

rested on a large triangular strut in front of his face.

Deke hit some more buttons to bring the optical rangefinder into sync

with Zoomer and noted the read-out: distance, three miles; altitude,

twelve hundred feet; estimated airspeed, fifteen to twenty miles an

hour.

Returning to the keyboard he instructed Zoomer to hold focus on the

approaching craft and keep it in the centre of the screen. As he

watched, it became clear that the pilot was steering the craft by

swinging his suspended body from side to side while pushing or pulling

on the lateral section of the triangular strut. It was still too far

away to allow him to distinguish any small details but he could see the

pilot's red and white bone dome with its dark face visor. The craft

itself was unarmed but there was no way of knowing what its passenger

might have up his sleeve.

Deke knew that similar red and white helmets were worn by wingmen

aboard The Lady from Louisiana - a wagon-train that had made a supply

run to Pueblo in the spring and which, later, had been badly mauled in

some heavy action in Wyoming. He also knew that the same type of

helmet was worn by Tracker renegades - small scattered bands of

thieving scavengers who roamed the overground in search of abandoned

items of equipment and stores. Sick individuals, wasted by the lethal

radiation that blanketed the overground. Deserters who had abandoned

their kinfolk and comrades, broken their oath of loyalty to the

Federation and betrayed the trust of the First Family; a Code One

offence and the ultimate crime. It was little wonder that, when

captured, such anti-social elements were usually sentenced to summary

execution without trial.

In the verbal shorthand used by Trail-Blazers, renegades were usually

referred to as cee-bees - derived from the term code-breaker (any

individual who, by their actions, contravened the Behavioural Codes

laid down by the First Family and contained in the Manual of the

Federation).

Deke was aware that if the pilot was a renegade he was crazy to come

anywhere near a way-station. But then you had to be crazy to be a

renegade in the first place. His was not to reason why. In one swirl

movement he pressed the eject button, retrieved his videotape, stowed

it back under the bottom drawer and hit the Precinct Incursion

button.

It glowed red under his finger as, five floors below, a high-pitched

electronic bleeper sounded in the guardroom.

The head and shoulders of Lieutenant Matt Harmer, the duty officer,

appeared on the visicomm screen. 'Okay, gimme the sit-rep." Harmer

was a pugnacious individual with an undersized chin. To compensate for

not being cast in the heroic mould he had Worked hard to develop the

rest of his body and the less attractive side of his nature.

He was, in other words, a lean mean gung-ho sonofabitch who could drive

nails into rocks with his fist.

Deke told him about the approaching unidentified flyer and relayed the

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picture from Zoomer onto the screen in the guard-room so that Harmer

could decide on the appropriate response.

Harmer faced up to Deke, his eyes studying the flyer on the adjacent

screen. 'Looks like he's heading right for us."

'Has been since I first picked him up,' replied Deke.

'You reckon he's from some renegade outfit?"

'Don't know where else he could be from. What I can't figure out is

why he would be calling on us."

'Maybe he's lost his way." The duty officer gave a harsh laugh.

'Never mind. Once he's down he'll find it's only a short walk to the

wall. Do you have an ETA?"

'Yeah. If he keeps coming he'll be overhead in about eight to ten

minutes."

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Harmer turned away and spoke rapidly to someone off-screen. 'Jake?!

We've got a single hostile intercept.

Unidentified - but could be a cee-bee - coming in from the

north-west.

By air. Don't ask how, just listen! I want Units Three and Four

suited up and on the ramp in five minutes. Stand by to take Three out

on the South Side.

I'll take the North Side with Four. Okay, go for it."

Harmer pivoted on his heel, threw his right hand towards a control

panel adjacent to the visicomm screen and hit the button triggering a

Level Four alert - the next-to-lowest state of readiness.

In the watch-tower, a klaxon mounted on the wall facing Deke emitted a

series of long bleeps. Since, as the Duty VidComm Tech, he was already

seated at his post no further response on his part was required, but

elsewhere, as the alarm sounded throughout the way-station, specific

groups of Trackers stopped whatever they were doing and ran along

subterranean passageways to man the gun positions around the perimeter

of the way-station and other key points within it.

Harmer faced up to Deke Haywood's screen image.

'Anything else to tell me?"

'Only that maybe you should try and bring him down in one piece,'

suggested Deke. 'Grand Central will want to know whether he's a

one-off loonie or whether those bad hats have gotten themselves an air

force. Hard data like that could put the station in line for a

commendation."

'My thoughts exactly,' said Harmer. 'Gimme a voice hook-up on Channel

Five and put Mary-Ann in the picture. I'll get back to you when I've

loosened a few teeth. Meanwhile, don't lose him."

'Wilco,' replied Deke.

To 'loosen a few teeth' was Trail-Blazer jargon for an overground

sortie; a macabre reference to one of the nastier phases of radiation

sickness in which the gums became swollen and ulcerous and bled

continuously.

Mary-Ann was the unit's nickname for Colonel Marie Anderssen, the

thirty-five-year-old way-station, commander.

Built overlooking the Arkansas River near the pre-Holocaust site of

Pueblo, the way-station under Anderssen's control was the most

northerly of the Federation's overground bases; the subterranean home

of a one thousand-strong pioneer battalion made up of men and women in

almost equal numbers, aged twelve and upwards. In its overall physical

shape, it resembled a concrete iceberg: one-tenth of it was visible

above ground, the other nine-tenths was buried safely within the

earthshield. The exposed section consisted of a stepped, eight-sided

bunker with each of the three layers overhanging the one beneath like

an inverted ziggurat.

Weapon ports set in short but massive reinforcing spurs at each corner

allowed all exits and entrances to be covered with enfilading fire.

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