That was why the radio operator still safely concealed in the Winter Palace did not report Ieyasu’s death to AMEXICO when the news reached Showa by courier-pigeon. Senior Secretary Shikobu, his immediate boss, who had been left holding the fort, was not empowered to initiate transmissions with the Federation. But there was another more pressing reason. The same courier-pigeon had brought word of Yoritomo’s death and the last order he had given – the arrest of all members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office on a charge of suspected high treason.
The sudden removal of the top two men in a single night, and the accusation levelled by one against the other, had thrown the Court into total disarray. Promising careers came to a grinding halt, everybody’s position was imperilled, no one knew who to give their allegiance to. In the circumstances, it was not surprising that contacting AMEXICO did not even figure on Shikobu’s list of things to do.
The only people with a compelling reason for bringing this critical situation to Karlstrom’s attention were the small number of mexicans working inside Ne-Issan, disguised as Mute slaves. As it happened, none of them were stationed on Aron-Giren, but even if one of them had managed to get wind of what had occurred, Karlstrom would have been none the wiser. The disguised mexicans were not working directly for him; they were on loan to Ieyasu’s spy network – and it was the secret section of the Chamberlain’s Office which controlled all communications between them and AMEXICO.
This organisational weakness delayed, by several days, the news that the Toh-Yota family was in serious trouble. Indeed, it was not until a steam-powered junk sailed boldly into Galveston Bay (the first ever to do so) that the hard facts began to emerge.
At this particular point, however, the junk – with Steve Brickman and Skull-Face on board – was still en route, heading south past Cape Hatteras towards Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, and in Grand Central, Karlstrom and the P-G, confident that everything was proceeding smoothly, had switched their attention to news from another quarter.
According to Mr Snow, the Talisman Prophecy had first been uttered by a wordsmith called Cincinatti-Red, some six hundred and fifty years ago – a century before the Trackers emerged from their concrete burrows in 2465 AD – an event known in the annals of the Federation as the Break-Out.
It was another three hundred years before the first garbled version came to the notice of the Family and was quickly dismissed as the pipe-dream of a race which – confronted by the growing might of the Federation – sensed it was destined for oblivion. For a sub-human species, this was a remarkable deduction; the plans to eradicate the savage Mutes had not yet been drawn up, and the Trail-Blazer Division which would conduct the fire-sweeps did not exist. The first priority, following the Break-Out, had been the construction of way-stations across the Home State of Texas.
Way-stations were Tracker equivalent of the US Cavalry forts built to garrison the West during the 1800s, and served a similar purpose; to protect and house the new pioneer-soldiers whose future task was to renew the exploitation of natural resources, mineral, vegetable and animal – in the shape of marauding bands of Southern Mutes. In those early days, the emerging Federation was unaware of the existence of the Plainfolk, their northern cousins.
The long-drawn out programme of construction between 2465 and 2700 AD was a remarkable achievement. It established, in an undeniable fashion, the Federation’s claim to the blue-sky world, but the transition from an underground to a semi-overground existence was beset with problems which, at times, brought the whole enterprise dangerously close to collapse.
Four hundred and fifty years of living in a warren of concrete tunnels within the earth-shield had produced a race of agoraphobic pack-rats – soldier-citizens with an extreme fear of open spaces. Prolonged exposure caused disorientation which the victim tried to cure by seeking shelter. If no remedial action was taken, muscular and mental paralysis set in, leading to death from exposure or starvation. Some Trackers were not affected so severely, but even they could only function coherently when engaged in some form of group activity which also kept them in relatively close visual contact with each other. Isolation induced panic then collapse.
That was why the way-stations were little more than overground versions of the divisional bases within the earth-shield – windowless structures whose view of the outside world was supplied by batteries of video-cameras – and why later, in the period of territorial expansion which began in the early 2700s, the first wagon-trains were similar enclosed environments, secure, sanitised, mobile bases into which the same agoraphobics could retreat from the terrors presented by the overwhelming vastness of the land- and sky-scapes and the unknown perils of the night.
Around the same time, the first microlite aircraft, forerunner of the Skyhawk line, had appeared – piloted by members of the First Family. Aerial activity remained limited until the moment when – after a long period of biological experimentation – a new type of Tracker started to fill the cots in the Life Institute: an individual with a high-resistance to ground-sickness – the disabling and potentially fatal psychological state produced by the twin fears of open spaces and isolation from the combat or work-group.
Wing-men were able to resist both; the problem was their scarcity – a result of the continuing high percentage of infertile males and females in the population and the relatively short average life-span of forty years. Even now, nearly a thousand years after the birth of the Federation, its population was only a little over 750,000 men, women and children and the statistics showed zero growth for the last nine. The latest conservative estimates put the combined total of Southern Mutes and the more numerous Plainfolk at around fifteen million.
These odds, combined with the now undeniable fact that the ancient verses contained clear references to wingmen and Skyhawks (‘cloud-warriors’) and wagon-trains (‘iron-snakes’) made over four hundred years before the Federation had gotten around to actually building them, had forced the Family to rethink their attitude to the art of prophecy.
If the creation of Skyhawks and wagon-trains had been foreseen then one had to accept the other more sinister events predicted in the verses would also come to pass. Which was bad news since they described – in unequivocal terms – the total destruction of the Federation by the Plainfolk led by Talisman, the Thrice-Gifted One – a messianic warrior whose birth would be heralded by a volcanic eruption.
Jefferson the 31st, and the hand-picked medical team at the Life Institute were convinced the child that Clearwater was carrying within her was the long-awaited saviour. And they believed that the ‘great mountain in the West’ that would speak with ‘a tongue of flame that burns the sky’ was either Mount Rainier or Mount St Helens – both located in what had once been the Pacific coast state of Washington, home of the Seattle Supersonics and birth-place of the Boeing Jumbo-jet.
Of the two, Mount Rainier was the highest, peaking at over 14,000 feet, but the pre-H geological records held by COLUMBUS categorised Rainier as extinct, with no evidence of any volcanic activity over the previous 2,000 years, whereas Mount St Helens, 9,600 feet high and situated fifty miles SSW of Mount Rainer, had exploded with great violence in May 1980, blowing off the entire top section and part of the north-facing slope, in what was classified as a Vulcanian-type eruption – the highest of four grades capable of registering up to 9.9 out of a possible 10 on the Richter Scale.
The records for the world as a whole also showed that even extinct volcanoes could come to life through shifts in the underlying geological formations. Mount Rainer was only one of several volcanic peaks in the Cascade Range, which was why a long-dead Supreme Council had decided a watch should be kept on them all.
Earth tremors could be detected at long range by seismographs which produced the familiar needle-traces of the Shockwaves travelling outwards from the epicentre of the disturbance through the earth’s crust. These were routinely monitored by all nine divisional underground bases as part of their own security procedures, but it was not alway
s possible to differentiate between a severe earthquake and a volcanic eruption.
To eliminate any misreading of the signs, electronic packages designed to record the frequency and strength of earth tremors and then broadcast the data at weekly intervals to the Federation had been placed on the slopes of the likely candidates and had been in operation for the last one hundred and fifty-seven years.
The only snag was maintenance. Because the instrument packages were concealed to avoid attracting the attention of passing animals or Mutes, solar panels had not been a viable power option. The Federation had used its unparalled expertise to produce batteries that only needed to be changed every two years. Recently, a new version with a five-year life-span had been perfected and installed. These were now due for replacement, and the usual SIG-INT field engineer unit had been despatched from Johnson/Phoenix, the divisional base beneath the parched wastes of Arizona.
Travelling in six Bobcat amphibs, each armed with a multiple rocket-launcher, and hauling a heavy trailerload of fuel, the team of twenty-four combat engineers under the command of Lieutenant Jack Marriot drove north past the way-stations at Flagstaff and Page, retracing the route taken by the old US Highway 89 across Utah to Salt Lake City, before swinging north-westwards onto the even more ancient Oregon Trail which would take them through the vanished cities of Boise, Idaho and Portland, Oregon – now both reduced to navref points; names on a plasfilm map that marked turn-off points on the crumbling hard-ways.
From here the Bobcats used their stern water-jets to propel them across the Columbia River towards Mount St Helens on the western flank of the Cascade Mountains. The usual procedure was to start at the most northerly target peak and work their way back down and this year was no different. St Helens would be their last stop before the fourteen hundred mile run for home.
For several decades, the expedition had been mounted in the winter to take advantage of the fall-off in the movements of Plainfolk Mutes. The White Death was a period of semi-hibernation in which few hunting sorties were made, and there was a corresponding drop in the number of armed clashes when groups of young warriors invaded the ‘turf’ of a neighbouring clan.
To a SIG-INT unit, a long way from home, it meant a relatively quiet ride, and that outweighed any problems posed by floods, freezing rain or heavy falls of snow. The Bobcats were tough, reliable, all-terrain vehicles with puncture-proof tyres and skin and a sting in the tail. The odd, rare breakdown was something the engineers could handle, but carrying out repairs under accurate cross-bow fire from unseen hostiles was something everyone preferred to do without – and that also applied to checking instrument packages and changing the batteries.
The fact that Marriot’s unit happened to be in the Cascade Mountains in the same month that Clearwater was due to give birth to an eagerly awaited baby was a fateful, but quite accidental, coincidence. The expedition had been scheduled for December 2991 because the batteries installed in 2986 were nearing the end of their useful life.
And so, unfortunately, were some of Marriot’s engineers.…
Jefferson the 31st rose to greet Karlstrom as he was rotated through the turnstile of the Oval Office. The President-General was not what you would call an excitable man, but on this occasion he was positively bubbling.
‘Ben! Glad you could make it. Sit down, sit down.’
‘Glad you could make it’ was a polite extravagance. Nobody turned down a summons to the Oval Office.
The P-G kept a firm grip on Karlstrom’s hand as he guided him over to the chair facing the desk and the curved window behind. Today, they offered a view of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains.
Jefferson went behind his desk and resumed his seat. ‘I could have screened this news through to you, but it’s so good I wanted to tell you face to face. The Mute, uhh –’
‘Clearwater …?’
‘Yes. She’s gone into labour. The first pains came an hour ago. The duty nurse logged the time.’ Jefferson shook his head in wonderment. ‘And this is the unbelievable part. I checked with the Geo-Survey Section. They were processing the data on a strong underground tremor that was picked up at Johnson/Phoenix, Monroe/Wichita and here in Grand Central.
‘The bearings from Johnson and Monroe were enough to give them a fix on the location and with the aid of some geological jiggery-pokery they were able to calculate the event-time.’ He gave his voice dramatic emphasis. ‘The tremor came from Mount St Helens, and it coincided with the onset of Clearwater’s labour pains! This has got to be it, Ben!’ He slapped the desk top. ‘By Johnny! If we pull this one off, we’ll sweep the board!’
The ‘Johnny’ he’d sworn by was John Wayne, hero of the First Family and the nearest thing the godless Amtrak Federation had to a patron saint.
Karlstrom, whose organisation kept tabs on all overground movements, cast his mind back to that morning’s overview presented by his operational command staff. ‘Don’t we have a SIG-INT unit in that area at the moment?’
‘Yes, we do. They’re in radio contact with Johnson/Phoenix. When they called in, they were between Mount Rainier and Mount St Helens. I instructed SIG-INT to tell them to re-set the monitoring package so that it broadcasts the seismic data every hour.’
Jefferson read the unspoken question in Karlstrom’s eyes and spread his palms. ‘They’re out there to replace the batteries, Ben. This adjustment I’m asking for takes fifteen minutes at the most. The people at the Life Institute tell me a woman can be in labour for anything up to eighteen. hours’
‘Or less than four.…’
‘There’s is no set time, Ben. But since this is Clearwater’s first child, she’ll probably be in labour for several hours. The SIG-INT unit will have plenty of time to get clear.’ Jefferson smiled. ‘It’s not like you to be squeamish.’
‘I’m not – but getting run down by a stream of molten lava must be a hell of a way to go.’
Jefferson disagreed: ‘No, I’ve been screening the data on this. Unless you’re very unlucky, lava streams are something you can run away from. The thing you want to avoid is what they call a nuée ardente – a fire-cloud of hot gases and small, incandescent particles of rock like coarse grains of sand.
‘These fire-clouds – which are triggered by an explosive release of gas – burst out of a volcano, then roll down the side like an avalanche. Burns everything in its path – and here’s the real bad news – they can travel at speeds of up to a hundred miles an hour.’
‘Jeeezusss!’
Jefferson laughed. ‘Fortunately, nobody inside the Family can access this data if they have a below-5 rating. Which means that most people outside this office – including this SIG-INT unit – knows squat about volcanoes. They were sent out to service some equipment and that’s what I expect them to do – whether the ground is shaking or not.’
‘In other words, if it blows, they won’t know what hit them.’
Jefferson sat forward in his chair. ‘Why the sudden concern, Ben? You didn’t turn a hair when we sacrificed the crew of The Lady.’
Karlstrom made a calming gesture. ‘I must be sending out the wrong signals. It’s not the men. It’s this whole prophecy thing that makes me uneasy. The birth tied in with the eruption. If this child is the Talisman, and he has these powers, we could be letting ourselves in for more than we bargained for.’
‘That’s why I’ve done everything to make sure the cards are stacked in our favour. We’re playing for high stakes, Ben. It’s not just the lives of the men in that SIG-INT unit that are at risk, it’s the lives of everyone in the Federation! If we want to secure the future, it’s a gamble we have to take.’ He smiled. There is, of course, always the possibility that I’ve allowed myself to be totally misled by the Institute. And overexcited. The cramps could be a false alarm, and the fact that this earth-tremor occurred at the same time could be pure coincidence.’
He hadn’t, they’re weren’t and it wasn’t.…
The bi-annual expeditions to the Cascade range had kept a road o
pen through the dense pine forests from Mount Rainier to Mount St Helens. It had once been a state highway, but was now little more than a muddy logging track, running south-west to Davisson Lake. Lieutenant Marriot led the Bobcats across the headwaters at the eastern end, then snaked round the western flank of Winter Mountain to begin the eleven mile run south towards the strange, cratered, mud and lava landscape that surrounded the meandering headwaters of the Toutle River.
From here, a track – last cleared five years ago – ran eastwards for nine miles up towards Spirit Lake, a big stretch of water that filled the saucer-shaped hollow between Mount Margaret and her southern sister, Mount St Helens. From the lake, the track turned sharp right towards the shattered mountain and continued on up for another three and a half. The equipment package was at the top of this spur, in the open-ended caldera formed by the 1980 eruption.
It was as the column of Bobcats came out from behind Winter Mountain that Lt Marriot had the luckiest breakdown of his life. A fractured drive shaft. Fortunately, the unit carried a range of crucial spare parts but it was a three to four hour repair job.
Marriot consulted his watch. 12.45. This was his second run out to the Cascades, but his first as commander. To reach the equipment, the ‘Cats had to travel another twenty-three miles over difficult terrain, the package had to be fitted with a new power pack, then reset for hourly transmissions and checked using its own built-in diagnostic programme, and finally the radio signal had to be tested and confirmed by Johnson/Phoenix. Three hours at the most, but if they all waited until his ‘Cat was back on the road, they would run out of daylight.
Marriot talked it over with his No. 2, Ensign Cantrill, and Sgt Lyman who had logged three such trips. Both agreed there was no point in losing another day. Marriot called the unit together and explained the revised plan. One Bobcat crew would stay behind to cover his own crew and help speed the repairs, a third would wait at the Toutle River turn-off and the remaining three, led by Ensign Cantrill and Sgt Lyman would head on up to Spirit Lake, from where Lyman’s crew would service and reset the equipment while a second ‘Cat rode shotgun. The third, Cantrill’s, would remain on stake-out by the lake at the foot of the mountain road.
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