Tilley, Patrick - The Amtrack Wars 04 by Tilley Patrick

Author:Tilley, Patrick [Tilley, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-02-26T06:50:40+00:00

Annie let a couple of oncoming wheelies pass then turned right and drove into the crowded parking area.

Pressing the ‘Hold’ button on the dash, she pulled her card and returned it to its protective wallet. This action reserved the vehicle - which would now only start if the same card was inserted, and a slow wink-light on top of the dash came on to indicate the wheelie was still in use.

But not for ever. The ‘Hold’ button had a countdown mechanism. If the card-holder didn’t return within an hour, the micro-chip turned off the wink-light and put the wheelie back on offer.

The memorial shrine of the Founding Father attracted a steady stream of visitors like Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. The red marble mausoleum, along with the nearby Kremlin had been vaporized in the global Holocaust that had obliterated virtually everything ever built from the time of the Pharaohs to the beginning of the 21st century.

Lenin’s tomb had lasted less than a hundred years but the Founding Father’s last resting place, fifteen hundred feet below ground, had been kept safe and secure for nearly five hundred years and would remain so. Not just for another five hundred years but for five hundred thousand. That proud boast was an indication of how long the First Family planned to stay at the helm.

Skirting the slowly moving eight-deep line, Annie and Roz found an empty bench carved out of the same white marble as the fifteen foot-high sculpted portrait head of George Washington Jefferson the 1st. The base of the neck rested on a deliberately rough, jagged granite plinth, standing ten feet high so that no matter how many people crowded into the rotunda, his face could always be seen by those entering. His two immortal phrases were carved into the surrounding wall on either side so that those queuing up on the left to touch the spot worn smooth by pilgrims approached under the words, ‘They died so that others might live’ and walked out past the ominous reminder, ‘Only people fail, not the system.”

The Founding Father had actually died in 2045 AD, some thirty years after the Holocaust but his vision of the Federation and the future had been stamped indelibly on his descendants. The shrine, formally opened in 2500

AD, had been built to commemorate the BreakOut in 2445: the long-dreamed-of moment when the first Pioneer Battalions broke through the earth-shield and began construction of the first permanent interface, above Houston/Grand Central.

This return to the overground, which the Founding Father had laid down as the overriding objective of the following generations, had been the first step in the present battle to repossess the Blue-Sky World. Five and a half centuries of unrelenting guerrilla warfare with the wily Mute, to which was added the equally violent struggle to tame the vast, hostile landscape. A landscape which was overlaid by an invisible, poisonous blanket of air. Those five and a half centuries of conflict had taken its toll, as the Wall of Heroes and the lesser Monuments to The Fallen in the divisional bases testified.

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