The Amtrak Wars: Blood River Read online

  These cities had vanished too, leaving only their names on the maps stored in the Federation’s computer archives. Names which helped to soften the grey anonymity of the massive slab-sided constructions that had taken their place. The bunkers, which hugged the earth like a cubist sculptor’s vision of a beached jellyfish, were the interface between the underground world of the Federation and the Blue-Sky World above.

  Like the network of smaller way-stations and work-camps, they were artefacts of the third millennium. Some dated back to the early part of the twenty-fourth century; beyond that very few traces of human habitation remained. All outward signs of the twentieth century had disappeared – vaporised by nuclear explosions or razed to the ground in the internecine struggles between crazed groups of survivors for control of uncontaminated resources in the immediate post-Holocaust period.

  The shattered ruins, the ransacked shells and anything left standing by the gangs of looters had been slowly destroyed by wind and rain, storms and hurricanes and the relentless passage of time. But despite being dealt an almost mortal blow, the planet had endured; had begun to heal itself.

  Unchecked for over nine hundred years, nature had reasserted its eternal supremacy over the transient, insubstantial works of humankind, grinding concrete into dust, and covering the piles of fallen bricks and forlorn debris with a shifting layer of sand or a carpet of red grass.

  Like the Santa Fe interface towards which Commander Hartmann was travelling, the wagon-train under his command was also an artefact of the third millennium. Built in 2961, The Lady from Louisiana – known to its crew as The Lady – was an armoured land-train that stood over thirty feet high and measured a staggering nine hundred feet from end to end when fitted with its full complement of sixteen wagons.

  This was the mobile home for a thousand Trail-Blazers – men and women who ate, showered, slept, fought and died alongside each other during the nine months of each year that the wagon-train spent on overground operations. They also used the same toilets, and it had been that way since the Holocaust. To date, the President-General had always been a man, and generations of women had served as guard-mothers to his children, but apart from these two immutable functions there was no discrimination on the basis of gender. In the Federation, men and women enjoyed total equality of status and opportunity from pipe-cleaning in the A-Level sewage farms to the top executive suite in the Black Tower and in front-line combat against the Mutes.

  Each wagon, which was linked to its neighbour by a flexible passway, was fifty-five feet long by thirty feet wide, with room inside for three decks, and it was supported at each end by two pairs of giant drum-shaped low-pressure tyres, twelve feet high and twelve feet wide.

  Hartmann sat in ‘the saddle’, the top deck of the forward command car. This was like the bridge of a pre-H naval frigate and below it was the wagon-train’s version of the ship’s fire/command control center. Hartmann’s deputy, Lt. Commander Cooper had charge of a second duplicate command car at the tail of the wagon-train which meant that, in tactical terms, there was no front or rear. The Lady could go back and forwards with equal facility or split up into two independently manouverable segments – a ploy that had often thrown attacking Mute clans into confusion.

  The wagon mix could be modified depending on whether The Lady was on a supply run to way-stations or on a fire-sweep. In combat configuration, the train would haul ten ‘battle-wagons’ equipped with multi-barrelled gun turrets along the top and sides, a ‘blood-wagon’ crewed by a team of combat medics headed by Surgeon-Captain Keever and a flight-car which housed the wagon-train’s own airforce – ten Skyhawk Mark 1’s, the single-seat delta-winged microlite whose production centenary had been celebrated in 2983.

  The flight car had an extra-wide flat roof which acted as a mini-runway. With throttles wide open, the Skyhawks were launched into the air from angled steam catapults and ‘landed on’ with the aid of an arrester hook just like the carrier planes of the twentieth century. Due to their interior layout, the flight-car and power-cars carried fewer guns than the others. It was the command cars and ‘battle-wagons’ that, quite literally, bristled with weaponry – body heat sensors, night-scopes and infra-red laser ranging devices.

  Like the submarine and long-range bomber crews in the last big war of the pre-Holocaust era, Trail-Blazers lived surrounded by their equipment and weapons. Stores and ammunition were stowed in underfloor and overhead compartments, bunks folded down and were shared by day and night-duty personnel and, like the submarines of the Old Time, there were no portholes. Narrow vision-slits could be uncovered in an emergency but under normal conditions, batteries of video screens displayed what lay outside.

  The wagon-train was a sealed environment, shielded against the radiation that still fouled the Blue-Sky World, and the air that circulated inside them was carefully and constantly filtered. In the nine centuries since the Holocaust conditions had improved but Trail-Blazers were still pulling ‘tricks’ – a slang term based on the acronym TRIC – Terminal Radiation-Induced Cancer.

  According to the First Family, it was the sub-human Mutes who were responsible for the sickness in the air. And everyone knew that to be true because they weren’t affected by it. Mutes had poisonous skins which, if touched with bare hands, caused the flesh of ordinary human beings to rot, and they exuded noxious chemicals which contaminated the atmosphere.

  Any Tracker breathing unfiltered air was at risk. Even if they were not killed in combat, Trail-Blazers knew that a nine-month tour on overground operations could shorten their already brief lives by several years but that was a sacrifice they made without hesitation. ‘They died so that others might live’ was a phrase imprinted daily on every Tracker’s consciousness from the age of two onwards, and the words were carved into the Memorial Walls to be seen in the central plazas of each divisional base. They could also be found painted in giant letters along corridors, galleries, the tunnel walls facing the platforms of subway stations, and the radials and ringways linking the network of accommodation deeps.

  You had to be blind and deaf not to get the message for it was regularly screened during programme breaks on the nine tv channels piped through the Federation and was often included in voice-over station identification announcements, along with a clutch of other homilies issued by the First Family.

  ‘They died so that others might live’. Yay, brother. Amen to that …

  Although prolonged exposure to overground radiation was still regarded as life-threatening, the level had been falling at a steadily increasing rate over the last few decades. This was entirely due to the dramatic reduction in the numbers of Southern Mutes whose presence had infected the mid-western states now cleansed and reclaimed by the Federation – Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, plus the New Territories of Colorado and Kansas. That was a big chunk of territory and required constant policing.

  Most of the Southern Mutes who had not been killed or enslaved had been driven towards the east and west coasts and down into the desert wastes of Mexico. A few marauding bands roamed the Outer States looking for easy pickings like scavenging crows but they did their best to avoid contact with patrolling wagon-trains and had become adept at concealing themselves from the circling Skyhawks whose presence announced the imminent arrival of one of the feared iron snakes.

  The present threat to the Federation’s plan to reconquer the Blue-Sky World was to be found in the New Territories and the vast rolling plains beyond. The Northern Mutes, who called themselves the Plainfolk, were proving a tougher proposition than their southern relatives. Raised to fight and die with the same dedication as the Trackers, they possessed animal cunning, incredible physical endurance and suicidal courage. Fortunately, they were illiterate savages locked into a nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence, and armed with primitive weapons – knives, clubbing axes and crossbows.

  Welded into a cohesive force under a shrewd, informed leader, they might have found ways to neutralise the
superior technology and fire-power of the wagon-trains but time and destiny were ranged against them. Despite their collective name, the Plainfolk clans had no sense of nationhood and were as keen to fight each other as they were to fight the Federation.

  After rolling out of Nixon/Fort Worth in early March for a run of stateside patrols, The Lady had spent the summer roaming the central plains – Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota where her crew had helped reduce the level of air pollution even further by racking up a body-count of seven hundred and twenty-nine lump-heads. Some were children but, as old Trail-Blazers were often heard to say: ‘… the little ’uns grow up to be as big, mean and bug-ugly as the bucks an’ beavers who reared ’em …’ Harsh but plain commonsense. By taking out the young and the child-rearing females, you effectively neutered the clan. And more often than not, their deaths often goaded the surviving male and female warriors into launching suicidal attacks against Trail-Blazer combat squads sent out from the wagon-train.

  Hartmann’s crew had taken some casualties but, all in all, it had been a successful tour, in marked contrast to The Lady’s first, catastrophic encounter with a strong force of Mutes in Wyoming, the previous year. On his return to the depot, Hartmann and his executive officers had been brought before a Board of Assessors to face a charge of recklessly endangering their train.

  It was accepted that lump-heads might kill Trail-Blazers, but they were not supposed to damage wagon-trains or outwit their commanders. With only twenty-one currently in service and a present production rate of one a year the wagon-trains were the most precious item in the Federation’s inventory. The Lady’s execs experienced a few bad moments, but in the end, everyone had gotten away with a severe reprimand and the loss of a year’s seniority.

  It could have been a lot worse. Hartmann had a shrewd idea why things had gone so wrong, but like all experienced hands, had not attempted to defend himself by telling the truth. To have suggested that the wagon-train and its crew had run up against the malevolent powers of a Mute summoner would have gotten him into real trouble. Mute magic – something which many overground veterans accepted as a proven fact – was a taboo subject within the Federation.

  The Manual, the video-archive containing the received wisdom of the First Family and the Behavioural Codes which governed the lives of Trackers from cradle to grave contained a cryptic reference to past allegations of ‘Mute magic’ and the Family’s final word on the subject. Officially, it did not exist. The mere mention of it was a Code One offence. If you were caught, or reported to the Provos and subsequently charged, no plea of mitigation could be allowed. Anyone found guilty of a Code One infraction was guaranteed a one-way ticket to the wall.

  This time, the homecoming would be different. The Lady had fallen short of the 1000-kill target that would have earned it a unit citation but after subtracting the time wasted on supply runs, 729 was still a respectable total. And there was always the chance they might nail down the odd clutch of Mute escapees or raiders on the way back to Nixon/Fort Worth.

  Despite their poisonous presence, a number of Mutes from the decimated southern clans were used in the overground work-camps. They were supposed to be chained down at night but sometimes, through sloppy security or outside help, they went over the wire. Escapees were usually unarmed but it always made the home run interesting and Hartmann sometimes sent his men out after ‘phantom’ targets to keep them on their toes. Experience had taught him that it was when you were rolling with the hatches battened down and your feet up that the unexpected happened.

  And it was a bit like that today. When decoded and screened, the TAC-OPS signal from CINC-TRAIN in Grand Central put an end to Hartmann’s thoughts of celebrating New Year with his kinfolk in Eisenhower/San Antonio. The Lady was ordered to change course immediately and head east, towards navref Kansas City.

  After crossing the Missouri, he was to take the wagon-train north through Des Moines, Iowa then east along the old US Highway 80 to Cedar Rapids. The Lady was to make the 1200-mile journey without the customary night halts and he was to ignore any targets of opportunity en route. On arrival at Cedar Rapids, he was to launch his Skyhawks on a search and rescue mission across the Mississippi.

  The order to head north so late in the year with snow already falling on the lower slopes of the Rockies came as an unwelcome surprise. Winter was the period set aside for rest and refit. Hartmann would not normally have expected to be called topside until March for supply runs and security sweeps inside the Federation. And when he got to the part of the signal which told him who he was supposed to be looking for, he got an even bigger surprise.

  Hartmann keyed the signal into the Command Log – the hard disk whose memory could only be accessed by a combination of his own ID-card and voiceprint – then screened himself through to the Duty RadCommTech and told him to send the standard IMMEDIATE ACTION response to Fort Worth. Having received the signal, the radio operator knew its time and reference coordinates, but at this point, no one, apart from Hartmann, was aware of its contents.

  Leaving his quarters, he roused his Navigation Exec and told him about the course change they were to make at Trinidad instead of rolling down to Santa Fe. Hartmann also told him he planned to wait until they had covered the ten miles to the turnoff point before breaking the news to the rest of the crew.

  Leaving the NavExec to draw up a new route and schedule based on a three-shift roll, Hartmann returned to his own quarters. CINC-TRAIN’S message had contained a third surprise that would be greeted with equal dismay by The Lady’s passengers – Colonel Marie Anderssen, commander of the Pueblo way-station, and sixty-four officers and men from her 1000-strong assault pioneer battalion who, prior to CINC-TRAIN’S signal, had been expecting to be off-loaded at the Santa Fe interface.

  The steely-grey lady colonel, referred to by her subordinates as Mary-Ann, had been summoned to Grand Central to attend a Forward Planning Review Board. And travelling with her were a mixed bag of officers and other ranks; soldiers, technicians and construction workers heading south for their first stateside leave after two years up the line.

  For some of her party, the journey home would have ended with the fifteen-hundred-foot ride down in the elevator to Level One-1 of Roosevelt Field and its centrepiece, New Deal Plaza; the remainder, whose kinfolk were quartered in other divisional bases, were due to catch the shuttle at the subway station immediately below New Deal Plaza. After trading a few credits for a hot meal or a session on one of the range of video battle or proficiency quiz games in the Plaza’s recreation arcade they would have trooped aboard the Trans-Am Express for a 120 mile an hour journey through the earth shield. A few hours later they too would have been home.

  But now all that had changed. The digital wall clock was marking up the last seconds towards 0705 when Hartmann re-entered his private quarters. As commander of the wagon-train he was allocated more personal space than anybody else but it was still severely limited. Service protocol and simple courtesy required him to share his quarters with Colonel Anderssen and the designers had thoughtfully provided an extra fold-down bunk for such occasions.

  Since there was only just enough room for one, it meant even less room for two. This called for a certain amount of coordination between host and guest, but on this trip it was not a problem. Hartmann and Anderssen were already well acquainted.

  They had been classmates at the MacArthur Military Academy and had both graduated summa cum laude. Anderssen’s posting to the Pioneer Corps who built and manned the way-stations caused them to lose touch for several years but both had moved with equal speed up the promotion ladder and with Hartmann’s appointment as commander of a wagon-train it was only a matter of time before their paths crossed again.

  In the intervening period, Hartmann had filed bond papers with Lauren, a young woman from a third generation Trail-Blazer family. A few months later, they were notified that she had been selected as a ‘guard-mother’. They had gotten along fine from the moment they had been formally
introduced and were looking forward to rearing the child but someone at the Life Institute had fouled up and Lauren had died two months after implantation of the microscopic embryo – the fruit of the President-General’s seed.

  Trackers were conditioned from birth to accept the loss of their kinfolk with a fatalistic shrug. Grief was permissible and in extreme cases counselling was available but you were expected to purge it in private. Death was to be viewed as a victory, not a disaster, which meant Hartmann had received notification of the event but no explanation. His partner’s death through negligence – for which no one was ever called to account – left a sour taste and discouraged him from entering into another officially approved relationship.

  Since he was not predisposed to jack up everything within sight Hartmann had opted for celibacy, contenting himself in off-duty hours with advanced video study-programs and the fraternal company of his fellow-officers. But whenever The Lady had been detailed to make a supply run to Pueblo that entailed a night stop-over, he had quartered with his former class- and bunk-mate Mary-Ann.

  And now and then, despite the tight-lipped disapproval of Mary-Ann’s dark-haired sidekick, Major Jerri Hiller, they would cast aside the burden of command and put the horse between the shafts. They told each other it was just for old time’s sake but they both knew there was more to it than that.

  Anderssen poked her glistening head around the edge of the shower curtain as he came in. ‘Hi …’ She watched him lock the door and switch on the ‘DO NOT ENTER’ sign. ‘You look as if you’ve got something to tell me.’