Getting back

by William Dietrich

  Raven was crafty as well, or at least had a core of hard practicality. Ico looked over at her beauty, cold and remote when directed at him. He didn't like her, never had. But he admired her realism. He saw now what she'd been trying to protect: order, against anarchy. She'd always done what she had to do, just as his own alliance with Rugard had been necessary: both had acted in order to get back. They were no different, morally speaking. Somebody had to get back, if there was to be any hope for the others. Not everybody could get back. So it came down to the most logical people. Her, the United Corporations minion. He, the only one who had really seen things clearly. And Rugard… Rugard to cow the pilot into taking them where they needed to go.

  It should have been this way from the very beginning.

  Ico didn't feel pity for the ones being left behind. After spending so much enforced time with them, he wasn't at all sure United Corporations didn't have the right idea about Australia. There was an advantage to stability, after all, to having a society safe from disruption from cretins like these. An advantage to a pressure-relief valve. When you had unruly children, you sent them to a time-out corner. Was this continent any different? Even sending him here, he realized, had opened his eyes. There was a method to their madness.

  But it rankled Ico that Raven didn't trust him. Like Dyson hadn't trusted him. When they stopped at a stream to water their horses he approached her.

  "Raven, I didn't want to go to Rugard," he tried to justify. "I didn't want to leave you behind. I just wanted to go too. I needed to go, as the one best able to understand the political situation back home. If the rest of you hadn't run away from the compound we could have worked something out, I know it. I tried to reason with Tucker, but he wouldn't listen either. None of this violence was necessary."

  "Yes it was," she replied.

  He looked at her in frustration.

  "Because I was going to leave you behind. I'm not your friend, Ico. You're just a means to an end."

  "To get away."

  "To save Daniel. Rugard would have killed him easily and he would have died for nothing."

  "You did it to get away."

  She didn't answer. Didn't want to. Because in the end her loyalty was stronger to United Corporations than to the man who'd fallen for her. Dyson was a fool. She wasn't that beautiful.

  The disappearance of Raven and Rugard hit the warring groups hard. All that blood and then they'd been abandoned in Australia after all! Daniel had been prepared to die to end the fighting, but in the cool ruins of the morning's dawn he found he'd been condemned to a worse fate: abandonment by the woman he loved.

  "She's trying to save you," Amaya reasoned. "That's the only way she would've gone with Rugard and Ico. You know that."

  "I don't know it." His reply was hollow. He didn't know anything anymore. "That's what's so hard to accept. Why would she steal off like that without a word? I mean I felt I'd finally broken through to her. To leave me with no way to know…"

  Amaya looked at him sadly. She didn't know why either. To slip away without a word or a message seemed a betrayal worse than taking the transmitter. Didn't Raven love at all? In the tumult of the last few months, Amaya's own life had changed profoundly. She'd found herself- a confidence in herself as a resourceful, valuable human being- and once she'd done that she'd found a man named Ethan she was beginning to love deeply. Would she leave him with no explanation? It would kill her if he left that way.

  As for the transmitter, she was relieved it was finally gone, and with it all the trouble it had caused. She didn't need to get back. Not anymore.

  Daniel's group came out of the office tower at mid-morning, their hands empty. Rugard's demoralized army met them the same way. With the transmitter gone, there was nothing to fight about. They gathered in the plaza.

  "We're not getting back, are we?" one of the convicts asked plaintively.

  "You've gotten back as far as you're going to go."

  "Maybe we can catch them," Wrench said darkly. "Together."

  "No," Daniel said. "They took horses, right? And I told you the truth. Only two can go on any rescue plane. Rugard misled you. You'd never have gotten out of Australia anyway."

  The convict studied the office tower gloomily. "We've been fighting over nothing?"

  "It always seems like something at the time. Now listen. We're marooned here, unless a miracle happens, but this is good country. My group is going to keep heading east until we reach the ocean. That's what we trekkers set out to do, and it's a kind of closure for us. It won't get us back anymore, but we'll have gotten… someplace."

  They looked pained and confused.

  "Or we've always been there," said Amaya. "From the very beginning."

  He nodded. "So now you have to decide. I don't care what your past was. I don't care what we did to each other last night. You can join us, if you care to. If you behave. I expect we'll try to settle down somewhere and make a new community better than the ones we came from. We don't want anything from you, and we don't have anything for you. But if you're done fighting, so are we."

  In the end about a dozen of Rugard's followers joined Daniel, as well as the frightened women of the Cohort of Joy. The others drifted off, many of them dazed by their sudden freedom. Possibility! It was the most frightening thing about the wilderness.

  Wrench took him aside. "Look," he confessed, "I don't know much except fighting. Can I come with you anyway?"

  Daniel looked him up and down. "To do what?"

  "I'm strong. I can work."

  Daniel sighed, debating. This man looked like an animal, and he remembered him from the dam. "If you come with us, Wrench, you have to be civilized. You have to follow the rules. Can you do that?"

  "What rules?"

  "I don't know. We'll have to make some." He winced at his own words.

  The trio stopped at a grassy ridge about thirty miles east of Gleneden. In the distance was the glimmer of the sea.

  Rugard pointed at Raven. "Can you make it work from here?"

  "I hope."

  "Then get to it. I'm late for my appointment with a soaking tub, two Asian whores, and a bottle of scotch."

  "You're quite the man of refinement, Warden," Ico remarked.

  "I'm quite the man of fucking appetites." Lord, he was tired of having to be polite to these two! Just a few more hours. If the bitch thought he'd forgotten her treachery then she had quite the education coming. She'd be getting off the hover with him, at a place of his choosing. And then he'd begin to teach her how to beg.

  The weasel he'd simply destroy.

  It was late afternoon by now, the light golden. She took the two pieces of the transmitter and united them swiftly this time, using the electronic supplies that Ico had safeguarded across the breadth of Australia. Then they sat regarding it for a moment, all their hopes on two linked boxes of battered metal. Would the batteries still work? Would anyone even listen?

  She switched it on.

  It pulsed as before, but this time its digital readout displayed their geographic coordinates. It could read the Global Positioning System satellites overhead. The electronic fog had lifted!

  "It's penetrating the Cone," she reported. "It can send and receive. If I had the right equipment I could phone my parents. I could receive some news. We're back, in a way."

  Rugard looked sourly out from the ridge to the hills along the coast. In the distance were the ruins of another town, glimmering and decayed. "Not yet. We're still in a fucking graveyard."

  "What do we do now?" Ico said.

  "We wait," she said. "We're a thousand miles from where they expected to get this signal. I have no idea how they'll react to it. Or how long it will take."

  "What if it doesn't come?"

  Rugard snorted. "Then I cut out your little weasel heart. Before our ex-friends catch up with us and cut out ours."

  It took eleven hours. The rescue craft came in at the end of a long night, lightless and with a low whine, dropping from the heavens li
ke a spaceship or angel. They were only certain it was there when a stabbing spotlight painted the ridge with illumination.

  Raven stood in the glare. "Get ready!" Ico and Rugard began circling around, outside the cone of light.

  The craft slipped in closer, the grass flattening down beneath its blowers and shuddering from the exhaust. How many other hovers were also dropping down across Australia this night, depositing fresh groups of eager Outback Adventurers and sullen, frightened convicts?

  The rear cockpit door swung open and she ran for it.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" the pilot barked at her.

  "I had some problems. It's quite a story."

  "The beacon- you have both parts?" A light was in her eyes as he scanned her identity picture. She wondered how close to it she still looked. More like a wild woman now, she supposed. A wilderness woman.

  She nodded and pointed. "Back there, in the grass."

  "You know we can't leave that crap here! Go get it! Now, now, move!" He glanced around nervously. They hated to touch down in this place.

  She sprinted back, trusting their eyes would hold on her form as she did so. That gave enough time. Rugard and Ico rushed the hover from the other side, and before the pilots could react the convict was on top of them, his knife at the co-pilot's throat.

  "They held the gate for us," Rugard cooed. "Aren't you going to say 'welcome aboard'?"

  Ico crawled past him and began hunting for a seat belt to snap himself in.

  Raven came running back and threw the transmitter and activator on board.

  "Who are these guys?" the pilot asked.

  "The ones you're taking back."

  "There's not room for three. Can't you see that?"

  "Indeed I can," Rugard agreed. "You friend here is getting off." He pulled the knife tighter to the co-pilot's throat and began to half haul him out of the aircraft. The man's hand drifted and the knife cut into flesh. "You reach for that gun again," Rugard hissed to his victim, "and you'll deplane dead."

  "Let him go," Raven said.

  "He's in your spot, bitch."

  "No he isn't. I'm staying here."

  The men turned to look at her.

  "You two go on. Ico, do what you think best when you get back."

  "Are you crazy?" Ico protested. "This is the only ticket home!"

  "I don't want to go back. And I don't want the transmitter, either. It's caused nothing but trouble. I'm staying in Australia."

  "But why?"

  She smiled then, a secret smile to herself. "When I went outside, I found my inside," she explained softly. "I'm in love. With a man. With a place. And maybe, someday, with myself."

  There was a dead silence. Rugard stared at her in disbelief. She'd give up the world to stay with a loser like Dyson? He broke into a harsh laugh. "You're choosing squalor?"

  "I sent people here, and I've sent enough. It's time to see what it was I was trying to send them to."

  "To hell!" Ico cried.

  She just smiled at him. "Goodbye, Ico."

  The men looked at each other, then shrugged. Rugard confiscated the co-pilot's gun, took his knife away from the man's throat, and shoved him back into place. Then he settled into the seat behind him. "Fine. What do I care?" The bitch was getting away again, but so what? Staying in the wilderness was a worse fate than anything he could devise for her. She'd suffer a lifetime. "You're welcome to it."

  "This man," Raven told the pilots, pointing to Ico, "is my designated successor and replacement. He can tell my superiors everything I can about conditions here. Probably more. He's earned the right to get back. Do you understand?"

  Slowly, they nodded.

  "Be careful of the other one," she said. "He has a temper."

  "Damn right I do."

  Then, before anyone could change their mind, she ran from the rescue craft and vanished in the bush like an extinguished spark. The hover lights switched off and the craft began rising into the sky.

  "Stay off the com," Rugard told the pilots. "If you need to talk, you can chat with me."

  Raven looked up at the hover's shadow wheeling away across the stars, and gulped. I'm trying to lose my way, she'd once told Daniel. It had seemed like a clever line at the time. Now it was simply true.

  Then she walked back down the ridge to find her way with the man she loved.

  The hover swung out over a glittering sea and followed a road of moonlight. The illumination was so bright they could see the dark pattern of huge reefs below, the water sparkling with luminescence.

  "Where are we going?" Ico asked.

  "To a recovery ship offshore," the pilot replied.

  "No we're not," said Rugard. He tapped the pilot's shoulder with the gun. "Set a course for Jakarta. There's a lot of islands in Indonesia a man can get lost in."

  "They'll be suspicious if we turn off course," the pilot warned.

  "Then go down to wave level and get off their fucking radar, you moron." He grinned. "This is your captain speaking."

  They descended to skim the sea surface as they flew north, spray speckling the hover canopy. Rugard sat back more easily, the knife in one hand and the gun in the other. He'd done it! He was getting back! He'd slipped out of the toughest cage they'd devised for him yet, and he had a lot of plans to make up for lost time. "See how easy life is when you just take what you want?" he told Ico. "And after that little spell of Purgatory, I've got a lot of taking to do. A lot of taking, indeed!"

  "You're a moral-impaired, aren't you?" the pilot accused.

  "I am the fucking face of pure evil, my friend! Your worst nightmare, sitting just one row behind you! That's why I say, and you do!"

  "You got that right." The pilot's hand had drifted to an armrest console. Now a finger extended, and before Ico could open his mouth to ask why, there was a bang, a howling hiss, and Rugard was gone.

  Ico was stunned, slammed aside so hard that the wind had been knocked out of him. Rugard Sloan and his flight chair had been shot out of the aircraft with a small explosion, moist tropic air now roaring into the emptiness where the convict had sat a moment before. Later, much later, Ico would remember he'd heard a trailing scream. But maybe that was just his imagination.

  Certainly there was an impressive splash where the convict hit the ocean, twenty miles from the Australian coast.

  The hover canopy snapped back down and the shriek of wind was shut out. They banked. "Some of the biggest sharks in the world down there," the pilot commented. "Of course he might never come conscious enough to notice, since his chute didn't have time to deploy."

  Ico sat as if made of stone, his arm bruised from where the adjacent chair had erupted upward. The emptiness of the space it had occupied felt like an abyss.

  "These Q-180s all have ejection seats," the co-pilot added. "Of course, a smart boy like you probably knew that, didn't you?"

  Ico opened his mouth but could say nothing. His bowels felt like water. He was waiting to be fired out into space. Had Raven known?

  "Now," the pilot continued in a drawl, "where was it you wanted to go?"

  "Where… wherever you take me," Ico stammered.

  "That's what I thought." And the craft set a steady course to the east.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  "What do you miss most?" Daniel asked his wife.

  Raven was showing now, swelling like a ripe melon, but they still came for daily walks. They followed a grassy ridge above the watered valley where the group had finally settled. To the east the sea glittered, to the west blue mountains loomed. It was such soft land after the desert. A place kissed by rain.

  "Who says I miss anything?" She sat on a rock, sighing contentedly and feeling her unfamiliar roundness. She wasn't really tired but she stopped more frequently now for the baby, making sure the new Australian inside her had time to absorb the country as she was doing. She could see the new wood of their cabin in the glade below, and a wisp of smoke from the forge where Wrench, improbably content, was developing a new
skill refashioning salvaged metal. She was alive and in love, if a little breathless. The climate was good and the potential of this place boundless. "I don't," she replied simply.

  "Come on, you know you do. We all do."

  "All right, what do you miss?"

  He considered, looking down at their new village. Domestic animals gone wild had been captured to start new herds, and overgrown fields had been recleared for new crops. They'd been unanimous in agreeing to not settle in the sad ruins of an abandoned city, choosing this new site instead. But they made frequent trips "to town" to salvage the fundamentals of survival. Windmills turned lazily and a waterwheel spun with tireless regularity. They had a crude dynamo and lights now. The pooling of skills had lifted them out of the Stone Age rather rapidly, and they lived better than most people of just a couple centuries ago. They were already planning a school, and children to fill it.

  "I miss knowing," he reflected. In the months since Ico and Rugard had disappeared there'd been no sign that anyone knew of their exile. Sometimes they spied flashes of light high in the sky and wondered if there were aircraft or surveillance drones far overhead. If so, they were as remote as heaven. Periodically another exhausted adventurer would stagger in from the west, a refugee from Outback Adventure, recounting a familiar struggle for survival. Nothing seemed to have changed. Their isolation continued.

  "I like the work I do now," Daniel went on. "Build this, grow that. The payoff is tangible and it seems honest. And I don't miss the entertainment of the old world. It's like a blinding noise has fallen away that's allowed me to see. I like our new stories, told around the fire, and our walks, and our long, slow meals. I like knowing people again, knowing them deeply- even their faults. My friendships are deeper here. I like belonging to this place."