It was the typical double-bind he had come to expect – and one which every wagon-train commander had to live with.
After discussing the weather situation with Captain Baxter, the Flight Operations exec, Hartmann told him they’d been sent to recover five ‘bodies’ but did not identify them. CINC-TRAIN’s first transmission had stated that the details of the mission were only to be disclosed on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. When Baxter had grasped what was required of his ten wingmen, Hartmann called McDonnell up to the saddle and asked him to put some men up to clear the roof.
‘Start ’em on the flight-deck then work outwards, towards both ends. A fast clean job, Mr McDonnell. We need to get our birds in the air by eleven hundred hours.’
‘Yess-SURR!’ The Trail Boss slammed his brass-topped drill stick under his left arm, gave Hartmann an impeccable salute then left to galvanize his underlings. He was a big man, above average height for a Tracker, but he was capable of moving with surprising speed and agility.
At 0927 hours, the first two Skyhawks were catapulted off the angled ramps at the front of the flight deck within seconds of each other. The clouds of steam drifted round the ground crew as they quickly dragged the launching shackles back to the start position. Two more Skyhawks waited their turn on the rear lifts, wings and tails still folded, their helmeted pilots already strapped in the slim-nosed cockpit-pods. Behind the rear bulkhead lay the tanks of liquid methane that powered the hyper-efficient engine mounted at the rear, its two-bladed propellor in the vertical position, ready to turn over at the touch of a button.
Gus White, was the first pilot away. The only wingman to have survived The Lady’s first encounter with the Plainfolk Mutes the previous year, Gus had been posted to The Lady along with Steve and several other classmates. Gus had seen them all die or disappear over two days of nightmare action. He’d been with Steve when Jodi had been lost overboard, and he had seen Steve’s Skyhawk plunge into a burning cropfield they had both set alight with canisters of napalm.
A new section-leader with three years line experience had been drafted in to head up the replacements – most of whom were as raw as Gus, but after a shaky start when he’d fallen foul of Big D, he had applied himself diligently to his allotted tasks. Since he was also bucking for promotion he had worked hard to make himself Captain Baxter’s blue-eyed boy.
The reward for his brown-nosing had been his appointment as deputy section-leader. It was a post which brought no extra credits or any real executive clout. The only thing the holder earned was the chance to go boldly where no wingman had gone before. To lead, in other words, the more hazardous missions. Since the post was an essential stepping-stone to further promotion, they were risks a young ambitious schemer had to take.
Gus White knew he was searching for five survivors from two Skyriders that had been forced down through lack of fuel but he had not the slightest inkling they were being lead by his ex-classmate and rival, Steve Brickman. And while, on occasions, he experienced a vague nagging regret about leaving the trapped and injured Steve to burn in that Mute cropfield he had, to all intents and purposes, wiped the incident from his mind. There was really nothing he could have done with a jammed gun against so many screaming hostiles. Right or wrong, what did it matter? Gus didn’t believe in weighing himself down with moral burdens. Steve Brickman was dead. KIA, Wyoming, June 12th, 2989. End of story.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. And there was something else that Gus didn’t know. Steve had silently sworn to get even. Had Gus been aware of what was waiting for him down the pike, he might have searched the landscape with something less than his customary zeal.
Lieutenant Matt Harmer, who also figured on Steve’s hit list since he’d headed the welcoming committee at Pueblo, stood beside Buck McDonnell on the empty flight and watched the four Skyhawks spread out then disappear as they rose higher and higher into the eastern sky.
Normally, once the given task had been accomplished, Trail-Blazers rarely lingered for any length of time on top of the train – especially in Plainfolk territory where anyone standing in an exposed position ran the risk of being skewered by a ten-inch bolt from a Mute crossbow. But today wasn’t like any one of the countless days spent on previous overground fire-sweeps. Despite having spent six years up the line, McDonnell had never seen so much snow before – a smooth dazzling white carpet under a vast, unblemished blue sky. He wanted to take in the scene for real, in its true awe-inspiring dimensions rather than in miniature through a tv screen.
Even so, he was not a man to take needless risks just to ogle the landscape. As a seasoned campaigner he knew they were reasonably safe – for the moment, anyway. The wagon-trains were fitted with body scanners mounted in the lead and rear command car which could detect the presence of warm blooded animals and differentiate between the two-legged and four-legged variety.
The scanners were always switched on prior to any activity on the flight deck and had been used to cover the work parties clearing the snow off the roof. Their invisible beams, which could calibrate and pinpoint heat sources at a range of eight hundred yards, were linked to the wagon-train’s fire-control system. Once a target had been located, its position was passed directly to the gunners manning the turrets covering the relevant sector.
That was the theory; in practice – like most electronic gizmos in the Federation – the set-up aboard The Lady had never been 100% operational but it had greatly reduced the number of surprise attacks. And it meant Big D and the lieutenant from Pueblo could relax for a few minutes and take in the view instead of standing back to back with their eyes peeled, pumping out adrenalin, guns cocked and trained, ready to blow away the first thing that moved.
Harmer pivoted slowly on his heel, scanning the vast white emptiness that surrounded them like a hungry wolf, then returned and caught McDonnell’s eye. ‘The only thing that’s been keeping me going up to now is the thought I might get a chance to flatten a few lumps and thread some beaver. But up to now, we’ve rolled right past everything the scanners picked up. Okay, the heat is on. But now we’re here and you promised we’d see some action. So tell me – where are all the fuggin’ Mutes?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said McDonnell. ‘They’re out there.’
‘So when do we get started?’
‘Probably sooner than you think. I reckon they ain’t gonna take too kindly to us barging in just when they’re getting ready to celebrate the New Year.’
Harmer’s narrow eyes gleamed. ‘Great. There’s nothing I like better than spoiling some lumpshit’s day. Especially when they’re having a party. That’s the best time to hit ’em – when they’ve got nothing but smoke between their ears.’
Chapter Four
Buck McDonnell was right. There were Mutes out there and they weren’t all – as Izo Wantanabe believed – in a state of suspended animation.
While it was certainly true that, compared to the rest of the year, the winter months were marked by long periods of sleep and inactivity, the Plainfolk were still able, when awake, to get their brains in gear.
Like the other Iron Masters who had preceded him to the outlands, Izo Wantanabe was, by his very nature, unable to make a dispassionate study of Mute behaviour. Like the Trackers, he had come imbued with an unshakeable belief in his own superiority and full of second-hand information and preconceived ideas about the people he would be dealing with. None of the Resident Agents had been in place long enough to form a detailed picture of the daily life of Mutes during a bleak winter and, what was more, it was not something they had been asked to record.
As a Johnny-come-lately, Izo was forced to rely on the information gleaned by previous visitors and they – for the reasons stated above – had learned surprisingly little about the way Mutes really lived, how they thought – or what they thought about. As a result, Izo did not know that one of the defensive tactics employed by Mutes was to pretend to be even more stupid than they looked.
Many Mutes were hampered by a genetic fault th
at affected the link between the part of their brain which stored acquired knowledge and their mouth. In computer language, you could input data but due to a software fault, you couldn’t get a print-out. The severity of the problem varied widely between individuals but, in a social context, it made it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to put what they knew – as opposed to what they had seen, thought or felt – into words. And since Mutes did not know how to read or write, the knowledge they possessed often remained locked away.
In captivity, shackled and beaten, treated and worked like beasts of burden, they became morose and silent. ‘Mute’, an abbreviation of mutant, took on an added meaning. But they were far from dumb. In the history archives of the Federation they were referred to as ‘the wily Mute’, but the attributes they were considered to possess were low animal cunning and primal ferocity. Courage and a lively intelligence were not qualities that could be ascribed to sub-humans.
Trackers – who believed themselves to be the only true human beings to have survived the Holocaust – knew how ‘real people’ were supposed to look. Since the Mutes did not conform to this model they were regarded as misshapen and ugly, and this lack of symmetry, this ugliness was proof of their sub-human status and irredeemable stupidity.
Their enemies from the dark cities beneath the deserts of the south, convinced they were opposed by witless savages, had been lulled into a false sense of security. Believing themselves to be superior in both firepower and brainpower, commanders of overground units had, on numerous occasions, made tactical errors they would probably not have committed against a more respected opponent.
The irony was, when the inevitable post mortem took place, the sand-burrowers were so convinced they were the master-race they preferred to find scapegoats among their own ranks rather than face up to the proposition that they might have been outsmarted.
The same tactics had been employed to cope with the threat from the east. The Plainfolk, whose warrior ethos was based on the courage of the individual in one-to-one combat, were quick to realize they could not fight a war on two fronts against foes who both possessed what Mutes regarded as weapons of mass destruction; long sharp iron that could kill or maim whole groups of people with a single blow delivered from a great distance.
Apart from a few bloody skirmishes when the wheelboats had made their first forays along the shores of the Great River, relations had been reasonably smooth and mutually beneficial despite the fact that the Iron Masters appeared to be calling the shots. The leaders of the delegations from the Mute clans who gathered annually at the trading post were painfully aware that the barter deals negotiated by the masked yellow dwarfs were loaded against them but it had been agreed (amongst hereditary blood-enemies who could agree on precious little) that a bad bargain was better than no bargain at all.
There was much to be learned, by adopting the role of the awed and not very bright savage and much to be gained in the way of quiet satisfaction – as was the case with the Mutes whose winter slumbers Izo had so rudely interrupted.
As it happened, none of the inhabitants who emerged from the three settlements he had approached on his initial sortie had seen any arrowheads flying through the sky or coming to earth. Given a warm spring or summer’s day, the prospect of looking for such an object and being rewarded for finding it would have aroused their enthusiasm. Only an idiot – or an Iron Master – could sustain the necessary level of excitement with intermittent blizzards sweeping in from the north over a thigh-deep layer of snow.
So the reception committees of warriors and elders had stared at him with sleepy eyes and slack mouths, pretending not to understand. When all the fire-water that was on offer had been drunk by a fortunate few, and the pompous little fart finally abandoned his attempts to persuade every available adult to join in the search for the elusive arrowheads, they watched him wobble off astride his strange, four-legged beast then returned to their huts to warm their chilled bodies over blazing hearthstones.
And while Izo and his weary escort struggled on through the snow, they squatted on their talking mats, passed around a pipe of rainbow grass and laughed at the Iron Master’s absurd behaviour. Only clever people, they agreed, who used silent speech to record everything they saw and did but understood nothing were capable of such foolishness. Winter – the period known to the Mutes as The White Death – was the moment when Mo-Town, the Great Sky-Mother who breathed life into the land each spring mourned its passing. As the last leaves were stripped from the trees by the icy winds that came howling out of the northern wastes, her heart grew chill and the world was covered with her frozen tears. Everyone knew that the cloud-warriors – unlike the dead faces – had the good sense to stay in their burrows from the end of Yellowing to the time of the New Earth.
But not this year – as some of their blood-brothers were soon to discover …
The same hostile weather system that had almost doubled The Lady’s journey-time to navref Iowa City had also wrecked Steve’s hopes of making a speedy getaway. Driven by the fear that Karlstrom might send in an MX snatch squad but without having any clear plan of action, Steve’s prime objective had been to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the point at which they had come to earth. But since leaving their first campsite beneath the wing of the wrecked Skyhawk they had been moving with painful slowness, taking several days to cover just over sixty miles. On two of those days, bitterly cold winds and driving snow had prevented them from moving at all and it was only the expert trail-craft of Cadillac and Clearwater that saved them from dying from exposure.
Although Kelso was kept liberally dosed with pain-killer, he had recovered from the initial shock of the accident. The morphine substitutes Jodi and Steve injected him with produced a state of drowsiness interspersed with periods of lucidity. And during these latter moments it soon became evident that, despite his injuries, he was as combative and caustic as ever and there were occasions when Steve found himself wishing Kelso had broken his jaw instead of his pelvis.
Day eight dawned bright and clear. Stepping out from the shelter of the pine trees, they scanned the cloudless blue sky and the dazzling white landscape. An overnight frost had brushed a thin layer of ice crystals over the undulating carpet of snow, making it gleam and sparkle with countless points of rainbow-tinted light.
It was a scene which, on any other occasion, would have inspired feelings of pure joy at just being alive but, despite its breathtaking beauty, the four stretcher bearers took in the view then eyed each other with something less than total enthusiasm. The fact that there was no razor-sharp wind and no threatening cloud-wall of snow lurking on the horizon meant there was no excuse for not moving forward. But the same good weather could also entice the warriors of hostile Mute clans out into the open in search of fresh meat.
Each of them knew that the atrocious conditions they had encountered since landing were the main reasons why the Plainfolk clans who inhabited the area had not put in an appearance. So far. Without having it spelled out, everyone knew there was no way they could reach Wyoming without stepping on the turf of a hostile clan. Snow or no snow, it was only a matter of time before they would have to face their first challenge. And again, without having someone spell it out they also knew the first would probably be their last. If attacked by a determined and numerically superior group the handguns they carried would only afford them a brief respite and would probably be more effective if turned against themselves. Suicide was infinitely preferable to an excruciating death through ritual mutilation.
The subject of how to defend themselves when this inevitable – and terminal – encounter took place had been broached on several occasions as they sat huddled over a fire inside their overnight shelters but no one had put forward a coherent plan. Jodi was left with the impression it had been tacitly agreed that if the problem did arise, Clearwater would somehow use the inexplicable power she possessed to get them out of trouble.
Since the first day, when the four of them had
staggered like drunken sailors through a blizzard carrying Dave Kelso’s stretcher shoulder-high, they had got themselves better organized. The hatch cover to which he was strapped had been turned into a sled which they pulled along with a lot less effort two at a time. It gave Kelso a much smoother ride and meant that the two who weren’t pulling could hump the home-made backpacks into which their supplies had been loaded.
Towards noon, the trouble they’d been expecting appeared in the shape of solitary fur-clad Mute warrior who ambled up out of a dip in the ground and stopped as he caught sight of Cadillac and Clearwater who were walking about a hundred yards ahead of Steve, Jodi and Kelso.
Everyone froze – including the Mute, who was carrying a crossbow. Steve weighed up the distance between them and decided there wasn’t a lot he could do. The warrior was a couple of hundred yards away from where he stood – too far even for Cadillac to pick off with a handgun. And it was just as well none of them tried because more fur-clad Mutes rose into view on either side of the first.
‘Shee-iitt …’ breathed Jodi. ‘What the eff-eff are we gonna do?’
‘Stay calm and start counting,’ said Steve. There were thirty of them – five hands – spread out in a long line that started behind Steve’s right shoulder then angled in past Cadillac and Clearwater barring the way ahead. Roughly a third of them carried crossbows; the rest were armed with a mixture of spiked head-crushers and knife-sticks. Without the rapid intervention of Talisman, the presence of so many bowmen beyond the reach of their handguns made the outcome of any fight a foregone conclusion.
The Amtrak Wars: Blood River Page 9
