The Amtrak Wars.

Earth-Thunder.

By: Patrick Tilley.

DEDICATION.

I should like to express my grat.i.tude to all the readers of THE AMTRAK WARS and everyone at Sphere Books, Forbidden Planet and Andromeda whose enthusiasm (and patience) helped make this series a success.

Special thanks to those of you who wrote, the many others who took the trouble to come and meet me in the bookshops, all you Australians who boosted AMTRAK onto your best-seller list, and last, but not least, to my fan in the Shetlands whose thoughtful Glaswegian friend got me to autograph a brown paper bag.

CHAPTER ONE.

Armed with a stolen carbine, Cadillac marched slowly through the drifting plumes of smoke that rose from the charred remains of the huts which- just one brief day ago - had been the home of the Clan m'call.

Roz - clutching another carbine with the awkwardness of someone trained to save lives not terminate them followed him as he scoured the settlement from end to end. The soldiers had done their work with the thoroughness that was the mark of the Federation.

Goods and chattels had been put to the torch, every living soul regardless of age had been killed.

The decapitated bodies of the den mothers, their children, and the She-Wolves who had stayed to defend them were scattered everywhere.

Some, burnt beyond recognition, lay smouldering in the glowing rings of ashes that had once been huts of skin and wood; others, partially stripped, their naked bodies ripped by bayonet thrusts, lay sprawled awkwardly where they had been gunned down - either running away from, or towards the enemy: the tall faceless figures in their blood-red and flame-orange uniforms who showed no mercy and expected none.

When the last hope of finding any survivors finally expired, Cadillac turned to Roz, his eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with bitter tears. His lips moved but no words came. He had come down from the hills fearing the worst, but the shock of discovering this scene of sensaless slaughter had driven the breath from his body.

Roz threw aside her carbine and supported him as he lurched towards her. She knew what he was thinking.

He was the last of the M'Calls; the only one still alive.

The remainder of his clanfolk - every man, woman and child of fighting age - had gone forth to do battle with one of the dreaded iron-snakes, the Mute name for the wagon-trains of the Amtrak Federation.

And despite falling into a trap, they had confounded their enemy, capturing and destroying The Lady from Louisiana before being surrounded by four more of the giant land-cruisers - each one carrying a thousand TrailBlazers.

When Cadillac had flown west, taking Roz with him on the orders of Mr Snow, the M'Call Bears and She-Wolves, bloodied but triumphant from their victory over The Lady, were preparing to make a last stand as the circle of fire closed in remorselessly around them.

Roz and Cadillac had escaped in the last aircraft to leave the flight-deck of The Lady and they had not been fired upon because no one on the advancing wagon-trains had suspected that the Skyhawk was being flown by a Mute. The same thing had happened when they had overflown the settlement and seen the groups of camouflaged Trail-Blazers moving through it sowing a trail of death and destruction. Some had even paused long enough to lower their weapons and raise their dark, visored faces as Cadillac circled overhead.

His first impulse had been to dive down and spray them with a prolonged burst from the mini-Vulk in the nose of the Skyhawk, but he did not dare risk damaging his precious cargo: Roz - the young stranger whom Mr Snow had given into his care. Gritting his teeth, Cadillac had made two low pa.s.ses, dipping his wings to salute the murderers of his clanfolk.

The Trail-Blazers had waved to him. And then, as he flew off - wracked with guilt - to find a landing place higher up in the hills, those same hands had dropped back onto their weapons to continue the slaughter of the innocents.

From an overlooking crag, he and Roz had watched the distant fiery glow wax and wane throughout the night then, in the grey dawn of the following day, they had gone down to take stock of his inheritance.

But there was nothing left.

On the very same day he had become wordsmith to the Clan M'Call - the greatest clan ever to spring from the bloodline of the She-Kargo - his clanfolk had perished in a last blaze of glory and the h.e.l.l-fires of vengeance.

As the first shock faded and new breath forced its way into his lungs, Cadillac stepped away from Roz, raised his face to the sky and howled with grief. A heart-rending cry that came from deep within the soul.

Inarticulate, more animal than human, but which expressed his deep-felt sense of loss and desolation in a way which mere words could not encompa.s.s.

Falling to his knees, he pounded the bloodstained earth then furrowed it with clawed fingers, scooping it up and smearing it over his neck, arms and chest.

Roz knelt down beside him- this clear-skinned, smooth-boned Mute whose future was now inextricably enmeshed with hers. They had met less than 24 hours ago, surrounded, as now, by the stench of death, but it had only served to strengthen the instinctive bond between them.

She watched patiently as Cadillac, oblivious to her presence, continued to claw at the crimson earth and daub it on his body. To the detached medical side of her mind, he seemed, by these frenzied gestures, to be trying to share the dying agonies of his clanfolk. Gradually, the raw edge of his guilt and anger became blunted. He slumped back on his heels, round-shouldered under the burden of sorrow and lapsed into total immobility, hands hanging limply between his thighs, his expressionless eyes blind to all external sensation - the cla.s.sic symptoms of catatonia. For nearly an hour, not a muscle twitched.

Nothing moved except for the occasional tear which rolled down his cheeks then, suddenly, he jerked into life and when he turned his bloodied, dirt-streaked face towards her, the eyes were dry and clear.

'Come,' he said. 'We have work to do."

Using Tracker machetes, they cut down and hauled back a large quant.i.ty of pine saplings which they hewed into eight-foot lengths and built a square funeral pyre, interleaving the layers of slim logs with the broken bodies of the women and the young children, laid on a bed and under a cover of pine branches.

Despite her training, Roz found it a heartbreaking task. In the Federation, dead bodies were whisked away by the bag-men. Some were delivered to the Medical College for autopsies and dissection by students but once again the bag-men collected the bits. And it occurred to Roz that she had never enquired what happened next.

She had merely a.s.sumed that the mortal remains of its soldier-citizens were disposed of with the same clinical efficiency that characterised most of the procedures evolved by the Amtrak Federation.

True or false, she was certain of one thing. The operation was not something the kin-folk of the deceased were required to perform or watch - as she had to do now.

They piled more branches around the outside of the log squares to mask the bodies from view, then Cadillac set light to it using a potful of glowing ashes from one of the burnt-out huts. There was a pungent smell of resin as the pine needles caught fire, and with a crackling roar the flames leapt skywards, carrying the spirits of the dead into the arms of Mo-Town on a rising current of air.

With his half-naked body smeared with grey ash in the traditional style of the Plainfolk, Cadillac squatted before the column of fire, just out of range of the blistering heat, his arms wrapped around his rib-cage.

And so began the second period of mourning.

For the rest of that day and throughout the following night, Cadillac rocked silently back and forth, his heart and mind imprisoned in a private world of grief which Roz could comprehend but could not wholly share.

The funeral pyre blazed throughout the evening, then around midnight, as he maintained his vigil while she slept fitfully nearby, it slowly collapsed with a shower of sparks into a mound of glowing embers. By morning, all that remained was a grey-shrouded hump in the middle of a blackened square of earth. But it still gave off a fierce heat, and quickly ignited the odd branch and bits of debris that Roz threw onto it as she tidied up around her seated companion.

Cadillac did not utter a word throughout the whole of that second day.

And Roz did not attempt to engage him in conversation. She was content to be; to savour to the full the expansive beauty of the surrounding landscape, the fathomless depths of the blue sky world above her head.

A sky flecked with ever-changing patterns of cloud that stretched away towards a horizon that was so distant it surpa.s.sed understanding.

Up here in the hills, the world about her was much vaster than the one she had experienced from the flight deck of Red River. Coming from a life-time spent in the confines of the Federation, she had - like most Trackers - no proper sense of scale, no grasp of the truly awesome dimensions of the universe. If someone had told her that from where she now stood the farthest point she could see towards the east lay over a hundred miles away it would have meant nothing. And to have talked about the size of the earth or the distance between it and the moon would have meant even less.

On the first day, while Cadillac sat grieving in front of the blazing pyre, she had taken the edge off her hunger by dipping into the emergency ration pack that all Skyhawks carried. Now, on the second day, as the sun reached its zenith, Cadillac rose, made a cooking fire and silently prepared a meal for two.

Not everything had been been destroyed by the soldiers or thrown onto the funeral pyre. Cadillac had salvaged and set aside pots and pans, tools and implements, sleeping furs, some walking skins, even some dried food - everything they needed to survive the immediate future and were able to carry on trucking poles between them.

Without being asked, Roz had brought water from the stream that burst from the moss-covered rocks deep within the forested slopes to the north of the settlement.

The same stream that cascaded over the glistening tongue of rock overhanging the bluff then fell in a long filmy ribbon onto the rocks below. The same rocks on which Steve Brickman had stood to refresh himself before his fateful second encounter with Clearwater.

Roz helped Cadillac prepare the meal, her gestures complementing his without a hint of awkwardness. They ate in silence, but on the occasions when their eyes met they fixed each other with an unwavering gaze that was only broken by mutual, unspoken agreement.

They were like two castaways, marooned on a wooded island amid an ocean of red gra.s.s. But although they had only been in each other's presence for a matter of hours, they were not strangers. Neither Roz nor Cadillac had anything to hide. There was no need for timid, furtive glances; no time for anything other than a frank appraisal.