Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "If you can keep that moving junkyard away."

  A skirmishing fire from the office tower windows and the surrounding streets began immediately, the convicts trying to provide cover for their approaching siege engine with sling-launched rocks. The women under Amaya replied with slingshots and bows. It was impossible to be accurate in the darkness but the whiz and swap of stone and bolt and arrow created a weird pinging music, some of the shots bouncing off the armor of the approaching siege tower with a punctuating clang. Those on both sides jerked in apprehension at the sound. One of the convicts howled as an arrow struck home, and a woman in the offices screamed as a rock broke her hand.

  "Fire!" Daniel shouted. With no powder to ignite the word didn't really fit a catapult, he found himself thinking randomly: ancient artillery captains must have yelled something more appropriate to their technology such as "shoot," or "throw." No matter, his trebuchet operators knew exactly what he meant. A ratchet gear was released, the old, now powerless elevator made a brief plunge down its shaft, and the steel beam sprang forward. With ponderous grace a metal desk was launched into flight with a whoosh, arcing toward the approaching siege tower.

  It missed to the right by twenty feet, plunging down to explode into shrapnel, its panels clattering as they bounced in all directions. The impact got the convicts to jerk to a startled halt but otherwise didn't hurt a thing.

  "What the hell was that?" one of them cried.

  "They're trying to hit us!" Rugard's voice roared. "Hurry, hurry! Get against the building and they can't reach us!" The convicts leaned against the rear of the tower platform again and it began lumbering forward once more, groaning and swaying. Some convicts darted forward to pull debris out of its way. At the tower's top, a couple of the Warden's men began trying to lob stones at Daniel's trebuchet squad on the roof of the office tower.

  The trebuchet had been reloaded. "Release!" Daniel cried this time.

  "What?" his befuddled crew asked.

  "I mean fire. Fire, fire!"

  "Oh."

  Another desk was hurled into the night, again arcing down at the approaching tower. This time it clipped the contraption with a loud bang, jerking the top so violently that the convicts there were nearly thrown off. One of the protective auto hoods was torn away and came down with the desk. The tower stopped again.

  "No, no!" Rugard shouted. "Go faster! Get in under their reach!"

  His men were hesitating. The source of these meteoric desks was unknown and the escalating war was beginning to rattle them. They wanted the transmitter, but not at the cost of their lives.

  "Move! Move if you want to live! If you don't move, by God I'll kill you!"

  The tower had just started trundling forward again when it was hit broadside, a desk hitting it like a gong and making the entire structure reverberate. Then the missile slid harmlessly down the steel scales, crashing onto the pavement below. Two men ran forward and dragged it out of the way before the defenders could hit them with missiles.

  "They can't break it!" Rugard roared. "It's stronger than their fire! Now, now, move across and let's end this thing!"

  Up on the roof of the office tower, Daniel's men were desperate. "That was our best shot," Peter said grimly. "The thing hardly even rocked. What are we going to do?"

  Daniel looked wildly around. "We need something heavier." He pointed. "That rusted-out air-conditioning unit, maybe!"

  Peter looked dubious. "That elephant? I don't know if the elevator is heavy enough to counterweight it."

  "It might be if we climb onto the elevator!"

  "Are you crazy! The cable might snap!"

  "Then we'll use the automatic brakes! Come on, help me pry this sucker loose!"

  The air conditioner was not much bigger than a hurled desk, but twice as heavy. They rolled it on the trebuchet arm and balanced it between holding prongs. It seemed too ponderous to throw. Daniel ran to the lip of the building. The siege tower was rolling closer.

  What other chance did they have?

  "Okay, we've got one shot at this thing!" He jumped onto the top of the elevator. "Peter, you aim and fire!"

  The others looked down the elevator well dubiously at where he was standing, eight feet below them. A loose steel cable led from the elevator to the trebuchet arm. "Come on, get down here with me! We need your weight!"

  They jumped aboard. Peter had disappeared. Then they heard his voice: "Launch!" With the jerk of a lever the elevator began to fall. The cable went taut, the counterweight arm came down, and the ponderously heavy air-conditioning unit soared up.

  Then there was a jerk, a bang, and the counterweight elevator cable snapped. Instead of stopping after a one-floor drop, the box with three men on top started plunging toward the basement of the building.

  "Brakes!" one of them screeched.

  The emergency brakes had been pried open with a steel bar. Now Daniel lunged at it. "I can't get the damn bar out!" he shouted.

  The elevator was accelerating. Angus lurched over, grabbed, and jerked. Suddenly the bar was out, whipping so violently that it slapped them against the concrete of the elevator shaft and scraping them as they tumbled, falling with the box. Then the brakes designed to halt such falls snapped outward in a shower of sparks. There was a long howl of metal. Then the elevator abruptly stopped, rocking slightly.

  The three men were in a stunned heap on the elevator roof. "I hear cheering," Angus grunted.

  "Which side?" Daniel gasped.

  "We stopped near a door." The third man, named Royce, pointed. They used the brake bar to lever it open and crawled onto the sixth floor, then ran to the window.

  The siege tower was gone.

  No, not gone, but toppled, broken, its transmission tower framework crumpled and the hurled air-conditioning unit wedged where it had creased the tower in two. The women, three floors below, were cheering.

  The men ran down to them. "What happened?"

  "You hit them dead center and it went over like a tree," Amaya reported excitedly. "They ran like cockroaches from light. Some are pretty badly hurt and I think the fight went out of them. They'd started to rush the lobby but ran back out!"

  "Casualties?"

  "Henry's dead and three more are seriously wounded. Almost everyone is a little banged up, and everyone's shaken. The convicts are hurting even worse."

  Peter came down. "The trebuchet arm broke when we fired," he reported. "Maybe we can repair it but we've lost our counterweight, and we have to drag up more ammunition."

  "We're also running low on things to throw or shoot," Amaya added quietly.

  Daniel nodded. "Where's Raven?"

  "Here." She came out of the shadows. She was bruised, and a hand was wrapped in a bloody bandage. "I keep trying the transmitter, but it's still jammed. We're awfully close to the ocean, Daniel. Maybe the Cone doesn't have an edge, at least not here. Maybe the coastline extends farther east elsewhere. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid the only way it's going to work is to get back the activator."

  "You mean make a deal?"

  "I mean we may be fighting to save something I can't promise will work."

  He regarded them somberly. "Do we give up?"

  Then they heard Rugard's voice, calling ftom the plaza.

  "Dyson! You in there? You still alive, you son of a bitch?"

  What a balls-up, blood-spattered, rubble-strewn, humiliating nightmare of a mess! Damnation! Rugard Sloan had felt like a goddamn Genghis Khan when he came up with his siege tower idea, straight out of old movies-well, it was the weasel's idea, but same thing- and then that bitch and her thief companion had started spitting furniture at him like they'd packed an atomic cannon! Where the hell had that come from? Stuff flying off the roof like it was being put into orbit! The hastily erected tower had toppled, he had a dozen people dead or seriously wounded, two dozen more crying about minor injuries, and a whole army that was thoroughly spooked. Rugard wasn't certain a single convict would follow him if he led another charge across the p
laza. The Warden was desperate, as desperate as he'd ever been in his life. He just hoped the fugitives he'd trapped were desperate too.

  "Dyson! You too hurt to answer?" He kept edging farther out into the plaza, keeping a wary eye for a sudden rock or bolt.

  If he couldn't get in, Rugard reasoned, they still couldn't get out. That was his key. He could starve them, or maybe smoke them: start a fire at the base that might choke them where they stood. But maybe there was an easier way: a way he should have tried from the beginning.

  "Dyson, you come out where I can see you! You come out and talk like a man!"

  "You coming to surrender?"

  Rugard looked up. The voice had floated defiantly again from that third-floor window and he could see Dyson's head up there now, a pale balloon in the firelight from the rim of the plaza. He'd love to put an arrow or a rock in the middle of it, but that wouldn't do what he wanted to do.

  "I'm coming to gut you all like pigs!" the Warden replied, hoping his bluster masked his frustration. "I'm coming to put your heads on poles! I'm coming to set a fire that'll roast you all like hamburger! Unless you listen to reason!"

  It was quiet for a moment as they digested this. Then, "We're not giving you the transmitter, Rugard! We've beaten the best you can do and we'll beat you again! Let us go! Someday, maybe all of us will get back."

  Rugard hesitated. The problem was, Dyson didn't sound scared enough. Not that he doubted he could beat him if they came to grips with each other, but he wanted more fear. That's when he knew he had his opponents, when they mentally gave up. There was a disquieting chance that this guy had a martyr complex, and that gave Rugard pause. The truth was, any man could be dangerous if he was unafraid to die. Yet what choice did the Warden have? The others wouldn't follow him much longer.

  "I'm not a man of violence, Dyson!" he now yelled. "I'm just a man of order. Of organization! I didn't want it to come to this! I just want what's rightfully mine! So I say we end this before any others get hurt. You and me! One on one!"

  "What?" Dyson's voice was quieter now.

  "You heard me! You got the guts to back up your big mouth? You willing to fight for all these people you led into a trap? I'll fight you for the transmitter alone. At dawn! I win, I take it back! You win, we let you go!"

  The face disappeared from the window. Somebody had pulled at him. Raven, it looked like. She knew what a mean sonofabitch the Warden could be. And Dyson was weak for her. He was afraid she'd talk him out of it.

  "You and me, Dyson, to the death!" he called. "Your choice of weapons! Then it's over for everyone! You man enough to face me alone? You man enough to come away from that woman of yours?"

  Nothing. Silence. If nothing else his challenge was winning his own followers back, he felt. Rugard wasn't asking them to do what he wouldn't do. Rugard was going to fight for it himself.

  "Dyson!" He was getting impatient. "You willing to end this thing?"

  Then the head came back. "No!" Daniel shouted. It echoed over the plaza. "You win, you get the transmitter. I win, we get the activator and free passage. That way, somebody gets back. And the bloodshed stops."

  Rugard was taken aback a bit. Give the fugitives the activator? Gamble everything? He didn't like the strength of Dyson's voice.

  "You and me at dawn, Rugard!" Daniel continued, the challenge coming down defiantly, almost mocking. "Spears! Winner gets the other's machine, and free passage! Winner takes all!"

  Damn him. The Warden was quiet, absorbing his surprise at the acceptance. They must be desperate because the transmitter still didn't work. And yet that just drew them into his trap, didn't it? The fight was still his way out, his key to escape. Because Rugard Sloan could take a pissant like Dyson any day. He could chew up little men like that with hardly a breath, his domination complete. And then leave all these cretins behind.

  "All right then." He said it absently, almost to himself. Then he raised his voice. "All right then! You be ready, boy! Dawn! To the death!" He swaggered as he left the plaza, a swagger for both Dyson and his own men. He knew he could take him, take him easily.

  But he'd have to be careful. Rugard glanced back. Men without hope were dangerous.

  Ethan shook Daniel awake. Light was filtering through the broken windows of the battered tower. Dawn was near.

  Surprising himself, Daniel hadn't brooded on his decision but slept. Slept well: the battle had left him exhausted. He'd pushed aside Raven's fear before it became his own. Now it was almost morning. His last day in Australia if he won the activator, signaled for help, and left with Raven.

  Or his last morning ever.

  "It's time, mate." Ethan stood back to let him get up.

  "You're starting to sound like Oliver, you damn Australian."

  Ethan smiled. "Oliver came back last night you know, after you were asleep. Through some tunnel under the city, like a little mole. Pretty shaken when he got here. I don't think he's used to what big groups of people do to each other."

  "I'm not used to it either."

  "Do you want some breakfast?" It was Amaya.

  "No, I'm not hungry." The statement made him chuckle at a memory.

  "What?" she asked, looking at him strangely.

  "Outback Adventure's screening lady. She asked me what I'd want for my last meal."

  She looked sad. "And what did you say?"

  "That I wouldn't have an appetite."

  He walked to the window. It was light enough that he could see the tired convicts sleeping around the edges of the plaza, keeping them penned. He didn't see Rugard.

  It will all be over in fifteen seconds, one way or another, a trainer had said. He turned back. "I need a good spear."

  "I'll find one," said Ethan.

  "And I'd like to say goodbye to Raven."

  "I'll find her," Amaya said.

  He sat by the window, still waking up, enjoying the growing pink splendor of the dawn in the direction of the sea. Such a lovely place, Australia. He should be concentrating on tactics-It wouldn't hurt to know how to run, the instructor had told him- but his mind was so crowded with memories it was impossible to think about the fight. Microcore, the tunnels, the clearing where he'd awakened in Australia, the wrecked transport, the climb up the monolith. It seemed like a dream.

  That was the way to go, he thought. In a dream.

  Ethan came back with a spear and Daniel hefted it for balance. They'd fitted an old knife on the end and it was dark with blood, which was good. Give Rugard something to think about.

  "You okay?" Ethan asked.

  "I'm okay."

  There were steps on the concrete stairs and he turned to greet Raven. Instead it was Amaya, looking worried.

  "Raven's gone," she said.

  "What?"

  "I looked all through the tower and she isn't here. Neither is Oliver. She's gone, with all her gear."

  "With her gear?" he looked at her dumbly, not comprehending. "Gone?"

  She nodded. "Gone. With the transmitter."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Ico Washington felt vindicated as he clung awkwardly to a pony and rode hastily eastward away from Gleneden with Rugard and Raven. He'd been right! Right about the enigmatic double-talk of Outback Adventure. Right about his map. And right about Raven DeCarlo. In the end she'd deserted her friends and betrayed her lover in her desperation to get back to civilization. She'd cut a deal with the enemy! Ico didn't despise her for it, he respected her. It was the logical thing to do. But it also confirmed his view of human nature. People are what they are, not what they pretend to be.

  Now they were trying to put as much distance between themselves and the derelict city as possible, before signaling for rescue and escape.

  Raven had come to Ico out of some sewer in the city, accompanied by a strange, smelly Australian who'd delivered her and then melted away in that deepest darkness before dawn. "The bad people need to stop," the man she'd called Oliver had kept muttering. Raven had come whispering that she was going to t
ake him, Ico Washington, home. Then she had him quietly summon Rugard and they met in the empty showroom of an abandoned auto dealership. There she professed that she'd come to save the life of the suicidal Dyson because of his lunatic agreement to a duel. Too vain, still, to admit she wanted to save her own skin like anyone else. "If you and I and Ico run with the transmitter, there's nothing and nobody for them to fight about any longer," she explained.

  Rugard was suspicious. "What's to prevent me from slitting your throat and taking that transmitter right now?"

  "The hover won't put down unless they see me. They won't wait unless I walk to the door. They'd shoot at you as soon as rescue you. Ask Ico if you don't believe me."

  Rugard looked at Ico.

  "That's the story she's been telling from the first," Ico conceded. "Who knows if it's the truth?"

  "So let's cut a deal," Raven said fiercely. "I need your activator. We're almost to the coast and the transmitter still doesn't work."

  "We were wrong about the Cone?" Ico asked.

  "I don't know. I don't think so, if your pilot talked about walking here. But maybe we'd have to find a point where the coast extends farther eastward. So right now I need the activator, and you need me to call in the aircraft."

  Rugard scowled. "You promise to get me on board?"

  "I promise."

  "Wait a minute," Ico protested. "Back at Erehwon you said there was only room for two on a rescue craft. I count three of us."

  "I can count," she replied impatiently. "Rugard can overpower the co-pilot. We leave that aviator here, take his place, and have the two rear seats as well. Then the pilot flies us to wherever you two want to go."

  "But why take the runt along?" Rugard asked dubiously.

  "Because I got you here!"

  Raven ignored him. "We both need him to help us watch each other," she told Rugard. "I don't trust you."

  The Warden spat. "I don't trust you, either."

  "And neither of us trust him. This keeps us all honest."

  The Warden smiled. "Hey. I'm the first honest man you ever met."

  So now they rode, awkwardly trotting on their unaccustomed transport, taking three horses Rugard's army had gathered along the way. The Warden had distributed the few horses to reward whichever men held his favor at the moment, like parceling out women or sharing the best food or intervening in a quarrel. It maintained his hold over the convicts. The man had a base political craftiness to him, Ico admitted. When he vanished his mob would disintegrate like an unstable star.