Supreme authority was vested in the Shogun but the real power had been exercised by Ieyasu. An unceasing stream of decisions and directives flowed down from the top through layer upon layer of bureaucrats for implementation at the appropriate level. There were no independent ministries. Each layer of the pyramid was subservient to the one above, and all officials, major and minor, worked within strict guidelines. Any problems that fell outside those parameters were referred back up the chain.

While alive, Ieyasu had controlled everything- and had made it look easy - but there was now a black hole at the centre of the web he had spun and the strands were starting to fall apart.

That was why the radio operator still safely concealed in the Winter Palace did not report leyasu'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 circ.u.mstances, 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 BreakOut.

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 subhuman 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 s.p.a.ces. 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 Inst.i.tute: an individual with a high-resistance to ground-sickness - the disabling and potentially fatal psychological state produced by the twin fears of open s.p.a.ces and isolation from the combat or workgroup.

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 wing-men 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.s.

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 Inst.i.tute 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 cla.s.sified 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 always 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 pa.s.sing 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 fails 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.

n.o.body 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!"