Marriot ran over to the vehicle as it slid to a halt. It was covered with ash and hot to the touch. Tiermeyer, the crew-chief, tumbled out of the portside door, his face as grey as the pumice-stone coating.

'Sheee-itt!" he croaked. 'What the f.u.c.k was all that?!" 'Something they forgot to tell us about,' said Marriot.

He led Tiermeyer and his crew up to the vantage point where the other men were cl.u.s.tered, and stood side by side, watching the mountain burn.

Both of them knew there was no point in speculating about the fate of the other crewmen. Nothing in the path of that cloud could have survived, and repeated radio calls had been met with silence.

Zwemmer, the crew-chief of the parked Bobcat, looked down from his perch on the rim of the roof hatch. 'Hey, lootennant! Ain't it time we got out of here?"

'No,' said Marriot. 'I think we ought to stay here on the high ground and wait till things quieten down."

Two hours later, after a series of minor tremors, they heard a long, rumbling roar like the boom of the Trans-Am shuttle hurtling through the approach tunnel towards a subway station. Then there was another, much louder, m.u.f.fled peal of thunder that seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth.

The ground shook- throwing the watching crewmen off balance.

'Jeezuss. H. Kurrist!" cried Tiermeyer. 'It's happening again?

He was right and wrong at the same time. This wasn't another fire-cloud, this was the big event; a full-scale eruption, the like of which the Trackers had never seen - or hoped to see again.

A vast underground pocket of gas and glowing magma exploded with colossal force, sending a towering column of fire into the' sky and taking the lining of the vent with it. The SIG-INT team arched their necks and watched, open-mouthed, as several thousand tons of incendiary debris rose several thousand feet into the air, reached its apogee then arched outwards like one of Versailles' elegant fountains and rained streamlined gobbets of magma and jagged lumps of red-hot rock over the surrounding terrain.

The outcrop they were standing on was eighteen miles from the eruption and on the fringe of the fall-out area.

Everyone dived for cover inside their vehicles as they saw a wide-s.p.a.ced shower of volcanic 'bombs' heading their way.

Marriot, realising the need to doc.u.ment the event as part of his operational report, timed the second, main eruption at 16:42.

At precisely the same moment, at locations thousands of miles apart, two other events occurred. Both were linked to the eruption and each other by the strange geometry of fate, forming a triangle whose importance was to remain hidden by those who sought to gain control of Talisman.

At 16:42, in the Federation's Life Inst.i.tute, a dark-haired child was gently eased from Clearwater's body and drew in its first life-giving breath with a sharp, choking cry.

Clearwater, her vision slightly blurred from a drug injection, searched for sight of her baby, but a raised green sheet, prevented her seeing the lower half of her body.

The masked nurse who had sat at her shoulder during the delivery, leant over and mopped the sweat from her brow. 'It's a boy,' she whispered.

'A strong, healthy boy.

Lie back, they'll bring him to you in a minute as soon as he's been cleaned and weighed."

Clearwater was overwhelmed by a feeling of desolation.

The nurse attempted to soothe her. 'Don't cry ...

don't cry."

Watching the scene on television, Jefferson the 31st could hardly contain his excitement. Talisman was in the hands of the First Family.

The world was within their grasp ....

In Ne-Issan, in the domain of the Yama-s.h.i.ta, in the family stronghold at Sara-kusa, Roz lay sleeping in the bed-chamber that had been prepared for her and Cadillac by their grateful hosts.

Placing the severed heads of Yoritomo and Ieyasu before Aishi Sakimoto and the other members of the family council had won them the praise they expected, and had left the Iron Masters in even greater awe of their po.wer than on their last visit.

They were, in fact, regarded as una.s.sailable - and even if they weren't, who would be foolish enough to kill two geese which laid such golden eggs?

The hospitality they now enjoyed and the circ.u.mspection with which they were treated came as a welcome relief. On boarding the junk that was waiting offsh.o.r.e, both Roz and Cadillac had been shocked to realise that they were mentally and physically drained.

The long land and sea journey from Sioux Falls, the deceptive imagery they had been forced to weave around themselves, the plotting with the Yama-s.h.i.ta, the mounting tension of the journey south with Lord Min-Orota, the nail-biting suspense and the blood-soaked climax had taken their toll. They had been running on a high octane mixture of fear and adrenaline and the tanks were now empty.

Even so, they had not been able to unwind until they were out of reach of the Toh-Yota in the relative safety of the Sara-kusa palace. Then, at long last, they had been able to take shelter in each other's arms and shut out the world for a long, loving, tender moment.

That had been yesterday. And now, as Roz lay in the darkened room, a crucial chemical change was taking place inside her body.

Clinging to the wall of the uterine tube was a newly fertilised egg.

An egg which had succ.u.mbed to the advances of one out of two hundred and fifty million potential suitors implanted by Cadillac.

Shorn of its tail, the sperm head had pierced the protective membrane, then had chemically sealed it against his rivals. And in the wondrous alchemy that governs our existence, the successful suitor had been transformed into what is known as the male p.r.o.nucleus.

Within the maturing egg, a female p.r.o.nucleus had also formed.

At 16:42, as Mount St Helens spoke with a tongue of flame, the two p.r.o.nuclei moved towards the centre of the egg, shed their protective membrane and fused together.

And in that instant, a new, unique human being was created ....

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Mount St Helens continued to erupt with varying degrees of violence over the next seventeen days, pumping out a column of dense smoke and hot ash into the upper atmosphere. It was like an upturned s.p.a.ce heater incinerating the laundry that had been placed on it to dry.

The cold moist air sweeping in from the northwest over the Pacific found itself riding a giant thermal which lifted it up over the Rockies onto the plains beyond where it collided with the polar air stream also warmed by the spreading plume of volcanic ash.

As these two unseasonably warm air ma.s.ses came into contact with the freezing earth, the result was not the expected heavy falls of snow, but rain - precipitation on a scale that had rarely been equalled in the annals of North America and which, in falling, dragged the thousands of tons of grey ash out of the sky and cast it across the landscape like a death shroud.

The snow that had already fallen was washed away, and the melt which normally filled the streams and rivers in April and May was turned into a flood as the incessant downpour drained off the surrounding land bringing to pa.s.s the third line of the Talisman Prophecy: And the earth drowns in its own tears ....

From the Milk River, the northernmost tributary of the great Missouri, from the Yellowstone, the Cheyenne, the Niobara, and the Platte, the silt-laden waters rushed eastwards to join the huge flood heading down from the Dakotas, while from northern Minnesota, the mighty Mississippi fed from both east and west by the St Croix, Chippewa, Cedar, Rock, Iowa, Des Moines and Illinois swept south towards the looping junction with the Missouri just north of navref St Louis.

By the time it was joined by the swollen waters of the Ohio River, a hundred miles further south, the Mississippi had become an unstoppable grey-brown tidal wave that overwhelmed the remains of the concrete levees and run-offs which had been put in place during the mid-20th century. In the aftermath of the Holocaust they had been an irrelevance, and by 2465 AD, the year of the Break-Out, they were judged to be beyond repair.

Work on shoring up the river banks had begun following the incorporation of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas to the Federation, but the continuing shortages of labour and heavy equipment and other more urgent tasks had turned it into yet another on-going construction project - which in this instance was still incomplete after two hundred and forty-three years.

Even if the original flood-control system had been in place, it probably could not have held back the gigantic volume of water now descending onto the coastal plain.

The uncompleted system stood no chance at all, and within a matter of days, some thirty thousand square miles were submerged - creating a vast inland sea.

It was not just overground facilities that were affected when these floods burst upon an unsuspecting Federation.