The Amtrak Wars - Ironmaster Part 40

Looking back towards the town and the land beyond it that stretched away westwards to the horizon, and to an infinity of horizons beyond that, Jodi wondered what fate had befallen the other captured renegades from Malone's group. In particular, she wondered about Medicine-Hat, who had nursed her broken body back to health after three breakers from Malone's group had found her half buried in mud deposited by the flash-flood in the Now and Then River.

Kelso had been one of the guys who had helped to dig her out. A lot had happened since then. She had become a renegade through circ.u.mstance, not choice, but her experience of overground life had awakened new feelings which had left her troubled and confused.

Meeting up with Steve Brickman again hadn't helped.

She had done everything she could to save her former crew-mate's life and then - jack me - he had painted his body, plaited his hair and decked himself out in a Mute pebble-suit! The argument they'd had over that, and over some of the things she had learned about how the First Family kept control over the Amtrak Federation, still bothered her.

Jodi had heard a lot that seemed to make sense - but how much of it was true? Brickman had dismissed her accusations and had pleaded with her to trust him. But how could you trust a Tracker who chose to bed down with the enemy rather than stick with his own kind?

But then - who could you trust?

According to the First Family, it was the Mutes who were poisoning the air with their presence. That was why they all had to be killed - to make the air safe to breathe again. But what about the Iron Masters?

Theirs might not be a hi-tech world, but they were a highly organised, industrious and inventive bunch and quite clearly in a different league from the Mutes. And a lot more dangerous. Where had they come from?

Did the fact that they were surface-dwellers mean they were poisoning the atmosphere with their presence too? If they were, it meant they were next in line for extermination in the battle for the Blue-Sky World. So how come there was no mention of them in the public archives? The First Family must know about them. The Family knew all there was to know about everything.

Before being swept overboard from the Lady in a ball of flame and then half drowned in the flash-flood, everything had been so simple. The world had been neatly divided into us and them; Tracker and Mute. A guy knew who the enemy was, and why he had to do what the Family asked of him. But the presence of the Iron Masters confused the issue; spoiled the brutal symmetry. Okay, they might be flat-faced, squatty-a.s.sed runts but they could hardly be categorised as subhuman.

They were kind of halfway-in-between. And that made it a whole new ball game. Because if there was a third race, then there could be a fourth and a fifth out there somewhere who had staked a claim to a piece of the overground.

How would the Federation react if some of these other human-type beings turned out to be even further up the evolutionary and technological tree than the Iron Masters?

The Mutes were easy to cla.s.sify - they were made-to-measure fall-guysbut what did the word 'subhuman' really mean? Who laid down the criteria - and how did they know where to draw the line?

Once you began picking away at it, the whole concept started to look distinctly flaky. And that was dangerous, because it called into question the historical basis for the First Family's claim that Trackers were destined to inherit the earth and be the sole masters of all therein.

Yeah ... somebody, somewhere, had a lot of explaining to do.

The Delaware marked the eastern boundary of the Mitsu-Bis.h.i.+ domain.

Once across the river you were in Nyo-jasei. The territory, together with Aron-giren, had once belonged to the Da-Tsuni, but following their defeat at the hands of the Toh-Yota they had been dispossessed. As a result of that victory, the Shogun's family now held a slice of land stretching from the St Lawrence at Quebec to Cape Charles at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The remnants of the Da-Tsuni, their desire for revenge neutered by marriage ties with the new ruling family, now occupied a domain carved out of the virgin hill forests on the south-west frontier.

When the ferry docked on the far sh.o.r.e, the sealed carriage-box was loaded on to a two-wheeled cha.s.sis which could be hired for that purpose, along with a pair of porters to man the poles front and back.

The serving-women and the two Korean clerks rode in open hand-carts - a downmarket version of the jinrikisha, lacking weather cover, padded seats and the luxury of sprung axles. Jodi and Kelso, as usual, were obliged to hoof it.

They found themselves at the western end of a fifty-four-mile stretch of highway that ran in an almost straight line through forests of sweet-smelling pine and white cedar and across marshlands carpeted with cranberries. The small party rested at a post-house some thirty miles along the road at which the two breakers got their first meal of the day. It came courtesy of the White Lady, whose carriage box was lifted off its wheels and carried inside her room so that she could alight safe from prying eyes.

At the other end of the road, which they reached in the late afternoon of the following day, lay a bare sandy coastal plain. The wide beaches running away to the north and south were sheltered from the breaking waves by a chain of narrow sandbars and scattered islets. The few trees that had managed to get a foothold were not so lucky. Their twisted trunks and stunted branches had a bent and beaten look which bore witness to the brutal force of the winter gales that swept in from the Eastern Sea.

A wooden bridge, with a split middle section that was cranked up by capstans and plaited ropes as thick as a man's arms, spanned a narrow waterway between the mainland and a large island, called Atiran-tikkasita. A fis.h.i.+ng village with a sheltered harbour had been built amongst the ruins of pre-Holocaust buildings whose shrouded sand-filled shapes gave no clue to their former function. Succeeding generations of scavengers, whose occupation of the island pre-dated the arrival of the Iron Masters, had long since pillaged the collapsed structures of any useful items.

Beyond the village, the fossilised stumps of squared timbers stuck out of the sand in rows like the broken ribs of half-buried dinosaurs. The weathered boardwalks they had once supported had also vanished long ago - torn up to fuel cooking fires and warm the freezing limbs of the few grey phantoms who had found the mental and physical strength to survive the un-numbered years known to the Mutes as the Great Ice Dark.

The harbour was home to a motley fleet of small fis.h.i.+ng boats and a port of call for several slab-sided oceangoing junks. It was towards one of these that the Korean s.h.i.+pping clerks directed their human cargo. The jetty was lined with wooden shacks that came in a variety of shapes and sizes. As they drew level with the moored vessel, the local leg-man for the agent in Fin emerged from his s...o...b..x of an office to help speed the paperwork through the various layers of officialdom. Ident.i.ty doc.u.ments and travel pa.s.ses were checked and stamped, names were taken, details noted. And since they were travelling to another domain, their modest baggage was searched for any undeclared items on which an export tax might be levied.

Trade and tariffs were the twin preoccupations of the Iron Masters in time of peace. The Toh-Yota family was now immensely rich, but it hadn't always been that way.

As supreme rulers of Ne-Issan, they were merely profiting from a time-honoured tradition that had enriched their predecessors, the Da-Tsuni - whose liquid a.s.sets had been expropriated along with their domains.

'To the victor the spoils' was a maxim that still held good.

Government was an expensive business, and any opportunity to raise additional revenue was eagerly seized on - no matter how piffling the sum. When you took into account the number of transactions, it all added up, thereby justifying the existence of the huge army of tax-gatherers and customs men - and also providing the means to pay their wages.

The doc.u.ments of 'Yoko Mi-s.h.i.+ma' were presented by Su-Shan. After he had knocked respectfully, the door of the carriage-box was opened far enough to enable the harbour-master to satisfy himself that its sole occupant appeared to be a courtesan dressed in the traditional manner.

After bowing politely, he signalled the door to be closed. No attempt was made to search the carriage-box or come face to face with the person behind the mask. As long as the papers were in order, such people were always pa.s.sed through on the nod.

And with good reason. The masking of courtesans who had won the favour of domain-lords and the Shogun dated back two centuries and was a status-symbol granted by their n.o.ble masters, along with certain other privileges - such as being able to travel incognito. As a result of the discretion they were accorded it had become the custom among high-born ladies to adopt the same protective colouring when indulging in illicit liaisons. It must also be said that, on occasions, the white mask and heavy silk kimono had concealed high-born gentlemen.

In order to avoid embarra.s.sing discoveries, it was now standard practice to treat such travellers with the utmost circ.u.mspection. All professions have their cautionary tales, and it was common knowledge that, in the past, a number of over-zealous customs officials and tollgate keepers had ended up knowing far too much for their own good.

Jodi and Kelso, who possessed nothing beyond what they stood up in, had been provided with small flapped doc.u.ment-cases made of woven straw that hung around their necks, where they could be read at a glance.

Together with their numbered armlets, it provided all the relevant details: departure point and issuing authority to travel, route to be followed, final destination and name of their new owner. Any Tracker or Mute found wandering about the countryside without a "yellow card'

faced arrest and speedy execution as a runaway. They had already been stamped with indelible ink on entering Atiran-tikkasita and, now they were about to exit, the harbour-master's cachet was added to the growing collection on the inside of their forearms.

After the customary round of haggling between the junk-captain and the local leg-man, an all-in package price for the trip to Porofi-danisa was agreed upon and sealed with cups of sake and smiles all round. The Korean clerks coughed up the cash, the leg-man took his cut - which included a rake-off for the harbourmaster and his opposite number in the customs house - and, when all the niceties had been observed, the travellers were invited to mount the gangplank.

Su-Shan and Nan-Khe preceded the porters beating the sealed carriage-box on its carrying poles; Jodi and Kelso, as befitted their station, brought up the rear. The box was set down opposite the door leading to the stern deck cabins - one of which had been reserved for the White Lady. The two house-women stood either side of the doorway to mask Clearwater's exit, then followed her below. Jodi and Kelso who had been booked on board as deck cargo - were allotted the fresh-air suite between the raised bow-section and the forward hold.

The next two days on the water were spent wearing leg-irons, but they drew some comfort from the fact that the sea was relatively calm, and they were able to keep warm at night by burrowing in between the bales of cotton stacked on the foredeck. The spartan diet of boiled rice and chopped vegetables was also easy to digest, and this time, in contrast to their trip across the Great Lakes, they managed to keep most of it down.

The junk-captain made a brief stop at a small harbour further up the coast, then headed out to sea on a curving course that kept them well to the south of Arongiren, before swinging northwards past Baro-kiren into what was once known as Rhode Island Sound.

Block Island- to use its old name - was the eastern limit of the protective zone set up around Aron-giren when the Shogun was in residence. Swinging wide around it meant they would not be intercepted by the inquisitive crews of the Shogun's patrol vessels. On this occasion, the junk-captain had nothing to hide, but he and his crew had been born and raised in their home port of Ba-satana, which meant their primary allegiance was to the Min-Orota family. They therefore regarded it as a matter of honour to keep the Toh-Yota's lackeys off the decks of their vessel whenever possible - a sentiment shared by all seafarers from Ro-diren and Masachusa.

It was at Providence that Jodi and Kelso parted company with the White Lady. Taking advantage of a moment when everyone on board seemed to have forgotten about them, they leaned on the deck rail and watched as an Iron Master, whose imperious gestures and style of dress suggested he was a man of some substance, took charge of the sealed carriage-box and had it carted away by a quartet of energetic porters. Jodi never ceased to be amazed at the staggering size of the loads some of them carried, the weight borne partly on their backs and partly by a cloth band looped round their forehead. It was not surprising they were all bandy-legged.

The man was, in fact, the same dried-fish merchant who had arranged for Clearwater to be convoyed to Karifaran; his task now was to ensure her discreet return to the Consul-General's island love-nest.

Three white-stripes armed with whipping canes collected the two Trackers from the junk and marched them out of the harbour and northwards through the town on to the open road beyond. Jodi and Kelso, now without leg restraints but bound loosely together by a rope around their necks, marched side by side. One d.i.n.k led the way, the other two followed on behind, gingering their charges with a stinging stroke of the cane whenever they broke step or started to flag, and sometimes - to' judge from the guffaws of laughter -just for the h.e.l.l of it.

The two Trackers bore it stoically. Just wait fellas. One of these days...

After a brisk thirty-five-mile hike, Jodi and Kelso reached their appointed destination: the Heron Pool, situated close to the small farming community of Mara-bara. Had they had access to a post-house map, they would have discovered that they were about twenty-five miles west of Boston on what had once been Highway 20. The area was dotted with ponds and reservoirs. The largest, which lay just to the south and contained two islands, formed part of the estate of Nakane Toh-s.h.i.+ba, Consul-General for Ro-diren and Masa-chusa. And it was to his back door, by a devious, roundabout route, that Clearwater was now being delivered.

As they covered the last mile down the dusty road, under the curious gaze of people working in the nearby fields, Jodi Kazan and Dave Kelso were totally unaware of the deal between Mr Snow and Yama-s.h.i.+ta over the delivery 'of a flying-horse, and the plots and counterplots which were now afoot. And apart from the realisation that they had been singled out from the other breakers because they knew how to fly, no one had told them where they were going, or why.

It was only when they both looked up almost simultaneously and caught sight of a glider whose shape was clearly inspired by the Federation Skyhawk that they got the first glimmering of what they were getting into.

The glider, covered in white silk tinted rose-pink by the rays of the setting sun and bearing a solid red disc under each wing, circled almost directly overhead, then dropped its right wing, making a deep, sideways descent before straightening out to land beyond the cl.u.s.ter of buildings that were now in sight to the left of the road.

Kelso looked across at Jodi with raised eyebrows. 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

'I doubt it - but they sure as heck didn't bring us all this way just to sweep the yard."