第2节
, for there were few doors
and even fewer of them could be locked. In the Federation, the
emphasis was on group identity, group activity and shared facilities;
privacy, in the normally accepted sense of the word, was deemed to be
unnecessary; personal possessions were regarded as unimportant.
Deke was different to the majority of Trackers at Pueblo who lived,
ate, fought, slept and screwed around in small, close-knit groups and
looked forward eagerly to the next overground sweep, or an incursion by
hostiles.
They needed that extra shot of adrenalin generated by combat to feel
fully alive. Deke had gotten the same buzz during his time on the
wagon-trains but his real kicks came from gazing upon sun-tinted towers
of cumulus, the dark menacing bulk of thunderheads, the delicate
tracery of alto-cirrus, teased out by the wind like the tails of horses
- one of the many extinct animal species. His four-hour solo stint in
the watch-tower had become very precious to him. He liked the
solitude, the privacy - even though neither word-concept was included
in the official Tracker vocabulary. The videotape, with its illegal
sound-track, was his alone; his most precious possession. The last
thing Deke wanted to see while on duty was a bunch of screaming
lumpheads.
An alert packed the tower with people and blew his chances of adding
another cloudscape to his collection.
Despite being a code-breaker Deke was still a good soldier. His leg
injuries had meant being downgraded to line-support status but he still
wore his TrailBlazer badge with pride. Mutes were still the enemy. He
had simply lost interest in body-counts shortly after glimpsing his
first sunrise. He'd gone on dutifully to do his share of killing and
had even made sergeant at the end of his second tour, but from that
first, glorious golden moment only clouds had counted. Indeed, it
became an almost fatal obsession. At the back of his mind lurked the
knowledge that, had he paid more attention to the ground instead of
looking at the sky he might not have led his squad into the ambush from
which only he had emerged alive.
Today, like most days, there had been no Pis. Which was good news as
far as Deke was concerned. The bad news was that, this time round,
there had been very little to look at, and absolutely nothing worth
recording. The sky on the bank of screens in front of him had been
depressingly empty of cloud. The airborne drifters, whose multi-hued,
ever-changing forms fired his imagination, had wandered over the far
horizon leaving behind a bland hazy canvas; a smoothly-graded wash of
colour which began right of screen as pale violet blue and changed
imperceptibly to pale yellow on his left.
Deke reached over the back of his chair and picked up a cup of java
from the table behind him. Java was the synthetic, third millennium
equivalent of the pre-Holocaust drink known as coffee; a minor
historical fact Deke had uncovered during one of his occasional dips
into the video archives. As he blew on it and took a trial sip he saw,
out of the corner of his eye, a brief flash of light in the top
right-hand corner of the screen fed by Camera One - fitted with a six
hundred millimetre telephoto lens and known to the watch-tower crews as
'Zoomer'.
Deke knew that the pin-point flash of light he had glimpsed on the
screen could only be caused by sunlight bouncing off the wings of a
Federation Skyhawk - but he was puzzled by the lack of prior radio
contact.
Wagon-trains putting up air patrols always informed way-stations if any
of their aircraft were likely to enter its precinct - a notional circle
drawn around its overground location with a radius of ten miles. It
was not just a matter of courtesy. Under a procedure known as PAL
(Precinct Air Liaison) tower crews, when notified of overflights, would
monitor the appropriate radio channel for any distress calls and, by
maintaining a sky watch for the duration of the patrol, could provide
invaluable help in any subsequent search and rescue operation.
Just when Deke thought he must have been imagining things, Zoomer