First Family Read online

  The Amtrak Wars

  The Talisman Prophecies

  Book 2:

  First Family

  PATRICK TILLEY

  To my sons,

  Pieree-André, who solved the

  problem of the wagon-trains

  and

  Bruno-Christian, whose photographs

  gave me the key to the

  overground.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  A Note on the Author

  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 life-blood

  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

  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 watch-tower. These were the ever watchful eyes of the way-station. Through them, Deke and the other VidCommTechs 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 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 audio-visual alarm.

  Normally, Deke looked forward to his four hour stint as Duty VidCommTech but today, the overground had failed to deliver the special kind of action he craved. Never mind. Deke had devised his own back-up 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 an 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 VidCommTech (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 is 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.

  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 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 trace
ry 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 Trail-Blazer 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 millenium 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.

  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 coloured-coded tips that showed which wagon-train it belonged to. No… this might be a flying machine but it had not 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 swift 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 guard room.

  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 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.’

  Harmer turned away and spoke rapidly to someone off-screen. ‘Jake?! We’ve got a single hostile intercept. Unidentified – but could be an 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 VidCommTech, 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.

  Dotted around the bunker at a distance of one hundred yards was a ring of turrets set at ground level like a mini-Maginot line – with one important difference: the guns in this defensive line had a three hundred and sixty degree field of fire. Now that Harmer had sounded the alert, these turrets – which looked a bit like those of 20th century tanks buried hull-down – were occupied by four-man gun crews.