Part 13 (1/2)

As he came to that decision, the young Shogun had no inkling that the wild card he sought lay hidden in a forest on the western flank of the Ari-geni Mountains, above a road that had once been known as the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

It took the shape of a hungry, dirt-stained fugitive armed with a knife and a primitive halberd. His body bore the swirling patterns that identified him as a Plainfolk Mute. But he was no ordinary lumphead.

His bones were well formed, the skin covering his young hard body was as smooth as saddle leather and he had not been ringed or branded. The hard blue eyes were those of a warrior at bay, not a hunted slave, and a keen observer would have noticed that his dark brown hair had turned blond at the roots to match the growth around his mouth and along the line of his jaw.

His name was Steve Brickman but, unlike the industrious long-dog at the Heron Pool who answered to the same name, he was the genuine article: 2102-8902.

Brickman, S.R. from Roosevelt/Santa Fe, New Mexico: graduate of Lindbergh Field Air Force Academy, Cla.s.s of 2989.

Trained as a wingman, Steve was now a 'mexican', one of a select group of undercover agents controlled by AMEXICO, an ultra-top-secret unit working directly for the President-General of the Amtrak Federation.

Officially he was dead, killed in action over Wyoming Territory. The fiction was not all that far removed from the truth. He had been shot down during a combat mission over Wyoming and, since hitting the ground, had come close to death on more than one occasion. In an action-packed year, Steve had found himself in some tight corners and, once again, he was in all kinds of trouble.

CHAPTER FIVE.

For the past two weeks, Steve Brickman had been living dangerously as an illegal immigrant in a foreign country whose people spoke an incomprehensible language and acted with extreme hostility towards strangers. It had quickly become obvious that he could not have chosen a worse disguise. The Iron Masters treated Mute journeymen as slaves who, when not working under the whips of overseers, were herded into prison compounds; the groups he had seen moving along roads had been chained together and closely guarded. He had not come across any renegade Trackers but, on the evidence so far, they were probably getting a rough ride too.

Unable to make contact with anybody who could help him, Steve had become a scavenger, stealing sc.r.a.ps of food whenever he could. But there were soldiers and officials everywhere checking the movement of goods and people. It was like trying to move around one of the Federation's underground bases without an ID card.

Steve's basic dilemma was this: he could not move openly without becoming part of the system, but if he did find a way to become part of it as a Mute he risked ending up in a chain gang unable to move at all.

In one of his more successful sorties he had managed to steal a padded cotton blanket to help ward off the bone-chilling hours before the dawn, but on his last two scavenging expeditions he had almost been caught and had only escaped by the skin of his teeth. To evade his pursuers, he had taken refuge deep in the forests and there he had remained, living on whatever wild game he could catch, and moving mostly at night. Steve had discovered that the hours between dusk and dawn were the only time the Iron Masters ceased their relentless round of activity. Even so, it was too dangerous to light a fire; anything edible he managed to catch or steal had to be eaten raw.

The day, now drawing to a close, had been warm and sunny but, for Steve, it had been as tense and frustrating as the day before. And the day before that. The mission that had brought him to the land of the Iron Masters and which he had entered with hopelessly inadequate preparation - seemed doomed to failure. Steve had come to Ne-Issan to find Clearwater and Cadillac. His only lead was a reported conversation which had mentioned a place called the Heron Pool. With no idea where that might be, he had been working his way across country in a more or less easterly direction in the vague hope that something might turn up. Up to now, his luck had failed him and there was no point in trying to kid himself any longer. He had no idea where he was or in which direction he was supposed to be heading, and the only thing he had to look forward to was another night of fretful sleep on an almost empty stomach.

When darkness fell, Steve curled up under the stolen blanket with his bladed quarterstaff clasped in his arms.

His excuse for not being on his feet and on the move was the clouds which, for the second night running, covered the sky; the truth was that his body yearned achingly for a brief respite. One half of his brain agreed; the other half refused to co-operate, keeping one ear open and the alarm bells jangling. For a time it worked, causing Steve to twist and fidget, but finally, when it became clear that he was no longer responding, the obstinate grey cells turned in for the night and whiled away the hours with dreams of food: hot, spicy Mute stews, dried meat twists, new-baked flatbread and juicy yellow-fists. The menu even included a mountainous, mouth-watering pile of soya bean-burgers fresh from a giant microwave.

Steve woke as the new day dawned, springing to his feet with the alertness of a wild animal, all six senses attuned to danger. He slowly relaxed his grip on the quarterstaff. The only sounds that filled the air were the natural sounds of the forest: the cries of birds, some shrill, some harsh, some melodic; an improvised pastorale underscored by the staccato chatter and snuffling grunts of their four-legged neighbours and played to a whispering audience of leaves stirred by the wind. The keen listener could also hear the creaks and groans of trees flexing their sap-filled timbers as they continued their yearly cycle of growth; trunks thickening inch by imperceptible inch to support the upward climb and outward spread of youthful branches; roots forever seeking a firmer foothold, wriggling snakelike through the earth, splitting buried rocks with a primeval power that defied comprehension.

The next move, now part of his daily ritual, was to check the tiny radio transceiver hidden in the handle of his combat knife. Under the wooden side-pieces was a marvel of microcircuitry with an alphanumeric keyboard on which you could enter text or data for high-speed transmission at a pre-set time. Incoming messages were preceded by a signal that switched on the electronic memory. Steve unclipped the tiny stylus and activated the recall b.u.t.ton which caused any stored messages to scroll across the fifteen-character liquid crystal display.

Eleven familiar letters marched across the screen from right to left and halted. MEMORY CLEAR.

Side-Winder, the undercover agent who had helped him stow away on the wheelboat, had hinted that Karlstrom had been concerned by Steve's failure to keep in contact. There had been reasons for that, but now he had been given the means to do so he had no excuses and no wish to increase the nagging doubts about his loyalty to the Federation.

Unaware that the device had been rigged to transmit his call-sign at regular intervals, Steve had programmed it to broadcast HGFR in Morse code for ten minutes twice a day so that a fix could be obtained on his position.

When giving him the knife, Side-Winder had said, 'The Family always keep one ear close to the ground.”

Steve, ever curious, had been trying to figure out how.

The maximum range of the radio knife was fifty miles.

But he was now, at the very least, more than a thousand miles from the nearest way-station or wagon-train. If the First Family were able to track him, they must have installed some kind of secret network on Iron Master territory which allowed them to pick up and relay the signals he was pus.h.i.+ng out. So far, he had drawn no response. Okay. Maybe that was because he had not filed any progress reports or asked for help.

Even so, they could have let him know that somebody was on the other end of the line.