Izo broke the tiny container with trembling fingers and unrolled the ribbon of paper. It was longer than usual and double-sided. The dispatch – sent directly from the Sara-kusa Palace, home of Yama-Shita – was signed by Aishi Sakimoto, one of the domain-lord’s uncles and key member of the family’s Inner Council. But Sakimoto had also written the dispatch with his own hand, using the intimate form of address normally reserved for correspondence between noblemen of equivalent rank. The gesture was not lost on Izo.
The contents of the dispatch were startling. The house of Yama-Shita sought five slaves who had murdered scores of high-ranking Iron Masters with a deadly combination of black powder and The Dark Light, then had escaped by means of ‘flying-horses’.
Izo was requested to do his utmost to discover the subsequent fate of the two straight-winged craft. If it was found that their aerial journey had continued, Sakimoto wished to be informed of their last known heading. If, on the other hand, the weather had forced them to come to earth in the area mandated to him, Izo was urged to do his utmost to discover the present whereabouts of the riders – alive or dead.
Sakimoto acknowledged that the search might prove fruitless but the honour of the Yama-Shita family was at stake. If the riders were found alive, Izo was to use the subtlest means at his disposal to detain them in the area without giving then cause for alarm. A punitive expedition would be mounted to bring them and their accomplices to justice but this could not leave Ne-Issan until spring of the following year.
A delaying action was therefore essential but Izo was ordered not to intervene directly with his own small force. The riders had powerful friends and secret means to summon them in the twinkling of an eye. Izo was empowered to offer inducements to the Plainfolk to secure their cooperation. He was, of course, expected to use his discretion but the Yama-Shita family undertook to honour any such promises he made on their behalf – if they led to positive results.
The message ended with a warm greeting and the promise that, if Izo was successful, he and his family would be richly rewarded with lands and titles. Izo needed no further prompting. With the discovery of the two abandoned ‘flying-horses’, his dream of attaining social status and material rewards commensurate with his abilities was already within his grasp. If the cloud-warriors were to be apprehended, there was not a moment to lose.
While the engine room crew laboured to raise a head of steam, Izo watched from the bridge as a second pigeon bearing the latest report – humbly addressed to Aishi Sakimoto – was launched towards Sara-kusa. A small guard-detail was put ashore to look after the stables and log store then, when his sergeant reported the boat was ready to put to sea, Izo gave the order to raise the anchor and directed the helmsman to steer due west across Lake Mi-shiga towards the legendary birthplace of the She-Kargo Mutes.
The preliminary schedule drawn up by Captain Ryder, the navigation officer, showed The Lady’s ETA at Cedar Rapids as 1615 hours on the 15th November. Given the time of year, it proved imprudently optimistic but although Ryder bore the brunt of CINC-TRAIN’s subsequent displeasure, he could hardly be blamed for getting it wrong. No wagon-train had ever ventured beyond the snow-line before.
From Trinidad, Colorado, to the banks of the Missouri, everything went according to plan. Travelling round the clock on what Trail-Blazer crews termed a three-shift roll The Lady logged an average of 18 mph over the first 620 miles of her journey, arriving at Kansas City in the late afternoon of the 13th.
Although the night air and ground temperatures were plunging with the onset of winter they had not encountered a drop of rain or a flake of snow, despite the cloudy, threatening skies. That left The Lady rolling over a dry-bed – the optimum conditions for a long haul over the crumbling, grass and weed-infested foundations of the pre-Holocaust highway system.
The bridges spanning rivers and gorges had vanished long ago. Shallow, slow-running rivers could be negotiated by simply driving across at the marked fording points; the deeper, wider ones – like the Missouri – could only be crossed with the aid of special ferrying equipment. Rivers with precipitous banks or rock-strewn rapids formed impassable barriers that had to be circumnavigated.
Where possible, the Federation’s wagon-trains also followed the gentle curves and gradients fashioned by the predecessors of Amtrak, the company that had inherited the shrunken remains of the American railway network – the giant, epoch-making enterprise which had tamed and transformed a savage continent.
The width of the wagon-trains meant they could only travel along lines where, in the distant past, two or more sets of tracks had been laid and because of their height, the tunnels – many of which, in any case, had fallen in on themselves – were as impassable as river gorges.
One of the tasks the First Family intended to dedicate itself to after the conquest of the Blue-Sky World, was the restoration of the American railroad system. The Founding Father, George Washington Jefferson the First had been one of the dedicated visionaries who had helped to create the MX missile trains that had ridden the rails before the Holocaust and it was to honour his memory that the historic lines were to be rebuilt. Not only rebuilt. History was to be recreated. The new rolling stock would not be overground versions of the Trans-Am shuttle with its high-speed linear induction motor, they would be lovingly-constructed replicas of the giant 4-6-4 Union Pacific locos from the glorious era of steam when brains and brawn formed an enduring and unequalled partnership that could – and quite literally did – move mountains.
Disguised as ordinary freight trains, the MX launch vehicles and command modules circulated around the Amtrak system from coast to coast. The concrete ICBM silos buried beneath the prairies had been targeted by the enemy for decades, but the MX trains – the Pentagon’s best-kept secret of the last years of the 20th century – remained safely hidden from the prying camera lenses of hostile reconnaissance satellites: impossible to find, fix and strike.
Some perished through random targeting – being in the wrong place at the wrong time during the first strike – but many more survived, their crews protected in their sealed, radiation-proof environments. It was from these trains, as America was turned into a giant funeral pyre, that the second devastating strike had been launched – the strike that utterly destroyed the enemies of freedom but which also triggered the detonation of their orbiting Doomsday weapons, bringing about the end of what the Mutes called The Old Time.
The knowledge of that particular piece of history was confined to the very top echelons of the First Family. As far as the rest of the Federation was concerned, the history archives that could be accessed by courtesy of COLUMBUS left the viewer in no doubt as to who was responsible for the Holocaust: the Mutes.
Since leaving Pueblo, two of The Lady’s complement of twelve new Mark Two Skyhawks had been constantly aloft during the hours of daylight on what were known as Forward Air Patrols. The single-seat rear-engined microlites were the airborne equivalent of the sharp-eyed horsemen who once rode ahead of the ox-drawn pioneer wagons and US Cavalry columns that blazed their way across the continent and into history.
Now, twelve centuries later, the Skyhawks – like the birds of prey who were their namesakes – drifted back and forth across the cloud-filled blue with the same effortless grace, scanning the flanks and the route ahead for any obstacles or hidden dangers.
In the gathering dusk, Gus White, a classmate of Steve Brickman and leader of the last patrol of the day, switched on the two landing lights mounted behind perspex fairings at the front of the slim fuselage pod and turned westwards over the wide placid waters of the Missouri. His wingman, curving in from a last search of The Lady’s northern flank, followed suit, throttling back to put half a mile between them as he lined up on Gus’s tail.
The Lady, who had already turned into wind, switched on the required illumination. A green laser beam, designed to act as a long-range beacon was fired vertically from the roof of the command car. As it punched through the cloud base and went on up, a
row of lights set into the top of the train rippled on to form a centre line and the four edges of the flight deck were outlined in blue.
On the wide deck, atop the extra-long flight car, three sets of arrester wires had been raised to snag the hook which had now been lowered between the two fat rear wheels of Gus’s Skyhawk, and the ground crew, stationed in the ‘duck-holes’ on either side of the deck, stood poised ready to leap into action.
Apart from the total absence of deck officers waving bats, or the succeeding generations of electronic aids, the procedure – as noted earlier – was essentially the same as that used for landing US Navy jets on pre-Holocaust carriers. But instead of several astronomically-expensive metric tons of airframe thudding down at speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour, the Skyhawks breezed in over the stern at a modest thirty-five.
BB-BMMMFFF! As Gus White snagged the second wire and touched down, the ground crew leaped into action. His wingman, now a mile downwind on the same glide path would be landing on in just under two and half minutes. More than enough time to unhook the Skyhawk from the arrester wire, fold each wing in two places, unlock the twin tail booms, swing the rear section downwards and underneath the wings, and run the resulting package onto the starboard bow lift.
With Gus still in the cockpit, it dropped swiftly out of sight looking like the crumpled creature that emerges from a chrysalis then unfolds in the drying rays of the sun to become an elegantly-proportioned dragonfly. The plane was quickly wheeled into the hangar deck, the lift came back up and – BB-BMMMFFF! The second Skyhawk landed on, bonking down hard on its nose wheel as the arrester wire brought it rapidly to a halt.
Ordinarily, apart from the watch, the crew of the wagon-train would have stood down until dawn, but the evening’s activities were just begining. CINC-TRAIN had decided to refuel The Lady on its outward journey rather than get locked into sending a tank-train further north to an uncertain rendezvous on the return journey from Iowa. ‘Let’s face it,’ said the tanker captain to Hartmann with disarming honesty, ‘There’s no point in both of us ending up with our asses stuck in the snow.’
Since The Lady had already replenished its stock of hydrogen granules during the stop-over at the Pueblo way-station, Hartmann was directed to hitch up two of the tank-train’s hopper wagons – one at each end, next to the power-cars. Two more would be left at the Monroe/Wichita interface in case The Lady needed to top up on its southward run to the wagon-train depot at Fort Worth. It was reassuring to hear that their return was envisaged.
Hartmann and the men and women of his Trail-Blaze battalion set to work, assisted by the tank-train crew and the sixty-four Pioneers from the Pueblo way-station. Most of them had gotten over their initial grouchiness at having their leave abruptly postponed but whatever their feelings they were now rostered for trail-duty just like their hosts.
A handful, led by a pugnacious lieutenant called Matt Harmer and a VidCommTech-4 by the name of Deke Haywood, had volunteered their services. Buck McDonnell, better known as Big D, the Lady’s Trail Boss, gathered the remainder together before The Lady began its crossing of the Missouri and announced in his gruff but fatherly fashion that he sympathized with their undeserved plight. They had, as he put it, ‘drawn the shitty end of the straw’.
However (and here the tone and tempo of his delivery changed) they had now had two whole days in which to adjust to the situation and/or cry their eyes out. From here on in, he did not intend to have a disaffected bunch of moon-faced sack-happy lump-sucking shit-assed piss-brained Pioneers lying around feeding their faces and doing sweet fuck-all.
Regardless of their rank or special qualifications they were, as of now, under his orders and assigned to general duties until they disembarked. No slacking or malingering would be tolerated and anyone reporting sick who was not actually dead would very soon wish he were. So they had better buckle to. Over and out …
Ferrying the wagon-train across the Missouri kept both crews busy for the next twenty-four hours. Each of The Lady’s sixteen wagons plus the two hoppers had to be carefully loaded one at a time onto a steerable bridging raft. The raft, which had been assembled in advance by the tank-train crew was mounted on two dozen large inflatable pontoons and was powered by heavy-duty water-jet motors. In Texas, the Inner State, several rivers had permanent pontoon bridges made from these assemblies and more were being installed at key points in the safer areas of the Outer States.
The designers of the wagon-trains had solved the transmission problem by giving each wheel its own electric motor. Emergency batteries, fitted in each wagon, enabled it to move backwards or forwards at low speed under its own power. Both sets of wheels were steerable and the movement of the wagon could be controlled by an on-board operator, or from the outside by means of an umbilical unit.
This facility made it relatively easy to marshal a train in the depot, or re-sequence the wagons to meet altered operational requirements. It also meant that the individual wagons could be driven on and off the bridging rafts without having to be coupled to one of the power-cars.
Once safely across and re-assembled, The Lady headed north, retracing the line of the old US Highway 35 that linked navref Kansas City with navref Des Moines. It was on this leg that Ryder’s timings started going out the window. The first flakes blew across their path as they neared the Missouri/Iowa state line and it was not long before their average speed dropped to around 8 mph. The dramatic slowdown was due, in almost equal parts, to the deepening layer of snow that cloaked the natural hazards of the terrain and the fact that the chosen route was criss-crossed with minor tributaries draining southwest into the Missouri River or southeast into the Mississippi.
Approaching Des Moines with The Lady at times over axle-deep in snow, Commander Hartmann had the genial notion of using the battery of superheated steam jets mounted under the nose of his command car to clear a path down to ground level. That way, at least, they would be able to see what they were running into. The jets, which had been fitted to repel close-quarter attacks by Mutes, were angled to cover the underneath and flanks of the train without melting the armoured rubber wheels. If they could blast flesh clean off the bone in seconds, snow would present no problem at all.
And so it proved. Like all brilliant ideas, it was incredibly simple. The reason no one had thought of it before was because the problem hadn’t arisen. There was only one drawback. The superheated steam jet system was not designed for continuous operation. This meant frequent stops to replenish the water tanks which, on this part of the journey, meant filling up with melted snow.
Onwards they pressed, through pitch dark nights and days of eerie twilight that seeped through an endless grey blanket of cloud so heavy with snow it seemed about to collapse under its own weight. With its batteries of bug-eyed headlights blazing and its nose and flanks wreathed in clouds of hissing steam and whirling snow, The Lady looked liked a latter-day Loch Ness monster, surrounded by a foaming wake as it ploughed its way across the surface of a bleak Arctic sea.
By late afternoon on the 21st November, they reached Iowa City twenty miles south of Cedar Rapids, five days behind schedule and nearly nine days after Hartmann’s dawn tryst in the shower with Colonel Marie Anderssen. Once again, as on their arrival at navref Kansas City, the light was fading. It was also snowing. Heavily …
The next day, more snow fell – for an unbroken fourteen hours, burying the lens housings on the tv cameras which acted as their windows on the world. Working under the eagle eye of Big D, groups of Trail-Blazers and press-ganged Pioneers from Pueblo struggled to keep the roof of the train clear of snow, using ordinary steam hoses and deck swabs. It proved a thankless task – like picking up leaves in an autumn gale – and by the morning of the 23rd another eight-inch thick crisp white carpet lay waiting to be cleared.
This time, however, the roof details found themselves working under a still blue sky. Most Trail-Blazers weren’t too enthralled by the sights and sounds of the overground but it was such a gorgeous sig
ht, several people – including Deke Haywood from Pueblo, who was a covert cloud-freak – went up just to take a look and fill their lungs with crisp, cold air.
On days like this, reflected Deke, it was hard to believe the overground was still cloaked in an atmosphere that had to be filtered before it was fit for Trackers to breathe. According to the First Family, those few deep breaths had shortened his already all-too-brief life by a few more months.
What the hell. Everybody had to die of something. And if you were a Tracker, it sure as hell wouldn’t be of old age …
Hartmann huddled over a map of the area with Ryder, The Lady’s navigator. A meandering cluster of lakes and old reservoirs lay across the shortest route linking his present position and navref Cedar Rapids. To get there would mean going the long way round. In Ryder’s opinion, given the present weather conditions, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.
If CINC-TRAIN wanted them to get closer to where they thought Brickman and his friends might be, it made more sense to push along the line of the Interstate towards Davenport on the west bank of the Mississippi. But as Ryder was quick to point out, that meant finding a place to cross the Cedar River. On the other hand, it would put them seventy miles closer to the primary search area, south-west of navref Gary, Indiana.
To fly there and back from their present position plus the standard square search-pattern when they got there meant a round trip of over five hundred miles. That was uncomfortably close to the limit of the Skyhawk’s range but, more importantly, it meant that any planes they dispatched would be airborne for over four hours. If the weather suddenly deteriorated – and on the journey north it had proved it could, with frightening rapidity – they might not make it back to the train.
Hartmann took the point but decided it was a risk his wing-men would have to live – or die – with. In an exchange of messages with CINC-TRAIN – already chafing at the time he’d taken to get as far as he had – he obtained permission to re-route The Lady in whichever direction he thought best, having taken into account the suitability of the terrain and the prevailing weather. The First Family only required two things of him: he was to do his utmost to bring in Brickman and his fellow-travellers, but in attempting to do so, he was not to pursue any course of action that might jeopardize the security of the wagon-train. Crewmen were expendable. The Lady from Louisiana wasn’t.
The Amtrak Wars: Blood River Page 8
