Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "Rugard?"

  "I think so, with a small army. A hundred people or more. Should we run?"

  "Too late for that, especially if they have horses." Daniel thought about the tower. "Better to fight them here, perhaps, than in the open." He looked down to the plaza, one hundred and fifty feet below. "Keep everyone out of sight. I'll be right down."

  She disappeared.

  Raven touched his sleeve. "Daniel, if it doesn't matter where we are- you and me, I mean- maybe I should just give it up. Surrender the transmitter to Rugard."

  He smiled at that, leaning to kiss her. "We can't make that decision by ourselves. Because it's more than just us now." He stood. "You'd better go get the machine and see if it works yet. This may be our last chance to get back."

  She looked over the parapet at the approaching convicts and nodded gloomily.

  Down in the lobby, Daniel assessed his group. Their look was of defiance. They were tired of being marooned, tricked, tracked, and preyed upon. Tired of being pushed around. That was good. There was a hard core to these people now, a determination to hang on to the hope they'd earned. He could rely on that.

  "Okay," he began. "Is everyone here?"

  "Even Iris," Ned said. His shoulder had almost healed but now his forehead had a new raw cut. From the horse scouts, Daniel assumed. "Our shopper."

  She'd calmed from her fright. "The best prices I'd ever seen and I dropped it all."

  The others laughed.

  "It was bad luck to linger here," Angus reminded. He'd come back when he saw Rugard's army, and now he was trapped with them.

  That made them quiet.

  "Where's Oliver?"

  "Staying away."

  Daniel took a breath. "Okay. What's done is done. We tried to outrun them but that didn't work. It doesn't look like we can run through them, either; there's too many. What they want is the transmitter. What they want is to take away our chance to get back. So, we give up. Or, we fight so hard that they give up."

  "You've seen this Warden," Peter said quietly. "What are our chances?"

  "As bankable as a lottery ticket. As unanswerable as a prayer. They're tough, wild, nasty people." He grinned fiercely. "But so are we, now."

  "Damn straight," Ethan said.

  "The only ones who can decide if it's time to fight, however, are you. It depends on how badly you want to get back. How badly you want the outside world to know what happened to you. How willing you are to stay here."

  "We decided this at the river, Daniel," Jessica replied. "It's not just getting back. It's what's right, not just for us but everyone. It's about contacting the cyber underground and the opposition and exposing this place in order to shut it down. It's about not just our little group, but every person they put in Australia. We ran away to come here. We've all run away our whole lives. We're still running. But Outback Adventure suggested we'd find our why if we came here. This is mine, I think. Not to get back, but to make a stand for something. It's not right for those convicts to steal our hope. To steal everyone's hope. I say we fight for that. For hope."

  The others nodded. There was a grim resolve in their eyes. A quickening of pulse. A tensing of muscle.

  "Can we beat them?" asked Peter.

  Daniel stuck his hands in his pockets and glanced upward at the lobby ceiling. "Well, we've got the high ground. We can barricade the lobby and throw things down from above. This building will work as a fort, or a castle. If we hurt them enough, maybe they'll go away. If we can talk to them, we can tell them the truth: that Raven is the one allowed to get back."

  "But can we do that?" Peter persisted.

  He pulled out a figure from his pocket. "My good luck charm tells me we can."

  "What the devil is that?"

  "Gordo Firecracker, nemesis of evil," Amaya recalled dryly. "The worst charm you've ever seen. He's been carrying that doll all the way across Australia."

  "Gordo is not a doll," Daniel said with mock tartness, holding it up so others could see. "He's an action figure. Not to mention my field marshal and chief strategist."

  They laughed again.

  "Great," Peter said. "And what does Gordo suggest we do?"

  "Fortify for attack. Prepare for negotiation. And…" He looked thoughtful.

  "Pray for a miracle?" Peter suggested.

  "Build a catapult."

  So the fugitives had run to ground in the first city they came to! After all the fancy talk of wilderness nirvana, they'd taken instinctive refuge in a damn skyscraper!

  Ico snickered at the irony of it.

  The Expedition of Recovery might have missed the fugitives entirely if they'd had the sense to hide in this civic labyrinth, but instead they'd gone looting for all the goods they professed to disdain. One of their fool women had been spotted scurrying down a side street, her arms loaded with useless jewelry. When the scouts had tried to ride her down the fugitives had boiled out of the Coraco Building like a disturbed hive, Rugard's men barely galloping off with their lives. But the incident had revealed the thieves' location and number, allowing the convicts to swiftly surround the base of the tower. Ico could see the baubles now, scattered on the plaza as uselessly as coins in a fountain.

  The fugitives, visible through the broken windows, were working desperately to prepare. The lobby had been barricaded and it wouldn't be easy to get to them, the convicts knew. The Warden circuited the office tower thoughtfully and then walked out into the plaza, alone. Arrogant, weaponless.

  Both sides watched him, the fugitives crouched by the windows.

  He took a breath. "I… want… Raven!" he suddenly roared. His voice echoed away among the old towers. "Where is the bitch? She has something of mine!" The demand seemed to float, hanging in the air.

  Daniel stood up in full view. "She can't come to the door right now!"

  Men on both sides laughed. Rugard jerked around and his side quieted.

  He turned back. "Your run is over, Dyson! You're surrounded, outnumbered, and out of options! You can't get back now without us!"

  "And your men can't get back at all! Have you told your rabble there's no room on the rescue craft for anyone but you, Rugard? Have you told them that you've led them a thousand miles and are risking their lives to save only your own skin?"

  He wheeled around to face his troops. "That's a lie!"

  "No it isn't!" Daniel shouted.

  "It's a lie like the lies United Corporations has told us all our lives!" Rugard roared. "Look at him! He's built a whole gang out of his promise to get people back, and they're laughing at us right now! He's sucked in followers with the promise that they can have the seats that by rights go to you!"

  The convicts growled like the thunder from an approaching storm.

  "No! That's not true…"

  "He's a thief who's trying to keep you here like the others of his kind back home!"

  The convicts roared, angry now, and a drumming started. They beat on pavement, they beat on stone, and they beat on rotting benches, rusting siding, and corrugated doors. Rugard strode back and forth in front of them, jerking his arms up in rhythm. Boom. Boom. Boom. As regular as a machine, as ominous as an approaching footfall. There was no complexity to it. Just a steady, solemn, ceaseless pounding to drive home their menace. It was a music of warning, a drumming to summon courage and infect a prey with fear. They'd found it! The key, perhaps, to getting back.

  The sound rolled up to the windows where Daniel's followers worked more furiously, stockpiling anything they could pry loose to hurl down on their besiegers. It looked like a battle.

  "The one advantage we have is height," Daniel kept lecturing, climbing from one floor to another. "I want them to think this tower is coming down on them if they try to rush us. I want an avalanche of furniture. A blizzard of debris."

  I sound like a demented Napoleon, he thought wryly. He stopped to see what Amaya was doing. "You couldn't whip up another batch of gunpowder, could you?"

  "Probably something worse if I'd ti
me to thoroughly explore," she replied. "There might even be modern explosives somewhere, if we looked: this was a mining town. But we didn't get time for that so all we can do is strip this building." She began to point. "The rubber bumpers on some of the table furniture are being stripped off and fashioned into slingshots. For ammunition we can pull nails and screws out of the walls. There's metal trim with enough flex to pull back for makeshift bows, rods from shades already notched for scraps of glass to make arrows, and sprinkler pipe to use as spears. Not to mention tons of stuff to simply heave out of the windows."

  "Your talents are wasted, Amaya. You belong in an arms race."

  "I want to get rid of these people so we don't have to have arms races." She looked past him through the window to the green hills beyond the city's buildings. "It's so beautiful here, Daniel. Why infest it with criminals?"

  "It must have seemed like an easy solution."

  "If they ever came here- if they ever got out of their boardrooms and visited this place they've made- they'd see their mistake." She meant the executives of United Corporations.

  "They won't. And I'm not sure they didn't intend this. Everyone at each other's throats. As a lesson for us, and a solution for them."

  She looked at him softly. "It's good then that you and Raven…"

  "Yes." He smiled sheepishly. "Things might have been different between us, you know, if she'd gone."

  "If you'd let her go."

  He nodded. "Right. You know, I love her, but I still don't know about her, Amaya. I still don't know her heart."

  "I do. She's changed."

  The drumming went on for an hour. The sound was enough to unnerve, if you let it, but they wouldn't.

  "Christ, they're out of tune," Ethan complained, covering his ears.

  "Musically impaired," Amaya added.

  The convicts drummed and shook and reached inside themselves for the savagery the modern world had tried to cram beneath their surface, bringing it out again in snarls and wild howls so that they'd have the courage to charge for what they wanted. The coordination of the drumming brought them together, focused on the building and transmitter within. Then Rugard lifted his arm and the convicts fell raggedly into silence.

  "Listen to me!" he shouted to his followers. "You want to get back? The way back is in that building! You want to get out of prison! It's through those people up there, the kind of people who put you into prison in the first place! Up there is the only way!"

  "Don't listen to him!" Daniel tried again from the third story. "You can't get- "

  "The way back is through him!"

  The convicts roared. And as the Warden swung his arm the ragged army surged forward in the afternoon sunshine, a Stone Age charge of spear and club and sling and rock as timeless as humanity. Clan against tribe. Ego against ego. Pounding blood and dry-mouthed excitement.

  Instinct had come to Eden.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Rugard had a mob, not an army. He had a goal, not a strategy. His aim was simply the transmitter. The men and women who surged toward the base of the office tower came in a ragged yelling line like a noose being tightened on a condemned neck, but it was a garrote that was frayed. Some assailants lagged back, hoping their comrades would do the hard fighting. Others, faced mostly with blank concrete on three sides of the first two floors, ran around to congregate at the lobby door.

  The windows above erupted.

  The defenders threw everything they had at their attackers. Desks came hurtling down like meteors. Lengths of pipe whistled down like spears. Light fixtures plummeted, porcelain sinks that had been ripped loose from abandoned lavatories exploded on the pavement, and bits of metal were fired from Amaya's makeshift slingshots and bows. Screams and panic erupted among the convicts. Some were struck down, many fell back in confusion, and a few of the boldest ran the gauntlet to hack their way through the initial barricade and into the lobby.

  Ethan met them with half a dozen adventurers in a wild counterattack, swinging staves, makeshift swords, and hardened wooden spears. Cut off from reinforcement by the rain of debris from above, the convicts recoiled. Beyond their opponents was the stairwell with yet another barricade. Who knew how many defenders were behind that?

  Wrench dodged a spear thrust, clubbed one of the adventurers aside, and then saw the convict on his right howl and go down with an arrow. Hellfire! It was like the dam, a space so narrow that numbers didn't count.

  "We've seen enough!" he shouted, turning to retreat. The others followed him out while dragging their wounded, two staggering as they were hit by still more hurled pieces from the building. Fired bolts and nails whizzed around their ears, bouncing off the pavement and then skittering away. One retreating attacker slipped on the debris littering the plaza and sprawled, giving those above enough time to hit him with a rain of junk. He scrabbled away.

  It was the same quick dumb rush they'd tried in the canyon at Erehwon, Wrench thought. Four attackers were left behind, either unconscious or dead. A dozen were hurt.

  Back across the plaza, the leaders clustered under a nearby overhang.

  "Well, that didn't work," Ico observed.

  "Shut up." Rugard looked at the offending office tower with fury. They could hear defiant, derisive cheers from the transmitter thieves within.

  "To get at them we've got to go through a bottleneck," Wrench described. "We'll win eventually, but not without a lot of blood."

  "How many are there?" Rugard asked.

  "Not that many, I think, judging from what we saw at the dam. Less than twenty. But if we fight them in the stairwells, going uphill, they have all the advantage."

  "So if we could spread them out…"

  "But how?"

  "I've got an idea," Ico said.

  There was a new hammering, but not rhythmic this time. Rugard's troops were building something, and it didn't take long to figure out what it was. Daniel hastened to build his own weapon in defense.

  The torsion catapult of the ancient world was a sophisticated device, relying on twisted rope or sinew for the energy to repeatedly fling a projectile at an enemy. While such a machine was quick to aim and fire, Daniel's beleaguered fugitives didn't have the time to build artillery so complex. Simpler was a catapult that relied on a simple counterweight: a trebuchet. It actually had two buckets, one on either end of a beam of wood that pivoted on an axle. One bucket held the missile, and the other a counterweight that was hoisted into the sky. When fired, the counterweight dropped, the other end of the beam snapped up, and the payload was launched skyward. Gravity provided the energy.

  Daniel's trebuchet was mounted on the roof. Two tripods that had supported radio masts, unbolted from their bases so they could be moved to allow the machine to pivot, held the pipe used as the catapult axle four meters above the ground. This axle threaded through an unbolted steel beam that became the trebuchet arm. A hole was hacked in the roof to a central shaft where a dusty, powerless elevator was tied to one end of the trebuchet arm with its rusting cables. This box could be dropped as the counterweight. Amaya and Ethan contributed ideas about some simple gearing rigged to ratchet the elevator up a floor for each firing. Upon release it would plummet the same distance before automatically braking, hurtling the bucketed missile.

  "You could throw an electric car with this thing," Ethan promised, black from grease he had collected from frozen machinery and redistributed on their new one. With a throwing beam six meters long, the trebuchet looked formidable.

  "Or a year's supply of Microcore company directives," Daniel added. "But we've got to throw what we have. Are they bringing up some desks?"

  "Cursing your name in vain even as we speak." Metal desks from the floor below were being laboriously carried up to the roof and dumped there as ammunition: gigantic catapult balls. "Even if it doesn't hit anyone, it should scare the hell out of them."

  "Amaya's shotgun payload might prove more effective," Daniel said. She'd heaped a small mountain of mugs and bottles, dis
mounted pencil sharpeners, dead modems, frayed manuals, and broken lamps to spray at any attackers.

  "Well, they're going to try to spread us, to bring their superior numbers to bear. We'll have four on the roof here to fire this thing, and the rest down below again to guard the entrance. If they get a foothold in the building, it's over."

  "Which they will if this doesn't work," Ethan said.

  "I built another one once," Daniel said. "It sort of worked." Centuries ago, he thought, when his only task was winning the attentions of Mona Pietri.

  "Sort of?"

  "The only thing wrong was that it missed."

  The convicts came again at night, their advance marked by torchlight and bonfires lit in the corners of the plaza. The drumming now marked time to the stately advance of what Ico had suggested and Rugard had ordered his army to build: a siege tower.

  Inspired by the towers used to assault castle walls, this one used as its foundation the bottom frame of four automobiles, two side by side in the front and two in the rear to create a square platform with sixteen rusting steel wheels, stripped of their flattened rubber. An aluminum electrical transmission tower, shorn of its arms, had been lashed to this foundation using some dead electrical cable, producing a tower one hundred feet high. Car hoods and trunk lids had been bolted to it like scales, giving it a protective covering of light armor on three sides. At the top was the flatbed of a light truck, mounted on rails, that could be slid forward when the tower reached Daniel's office building. If the tower worked as planned, attacking convicts would swarm up ladders to its summit and charge across the flatbed, smashing through the windows of the ninth floor at the same time another group stormed the lobby. The creaking contraption would give the convicts attacking on the ground some cover by blocking fire from the plaza wall of windows.

  "We've advanced from the Stone Age to the Medieval in half a day," Ethan marveled. "What happens in the next round? A nuclear exchange?"

  "Let's get through this round first," said Daniel. "Can you hold the lobby again?"