Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "Maybe there's room here to do that."

  "At least we seem to have eluded the convicts. I can't believe Rugard would still be following. Maybe he never left Erehwon."

  "Or, if he did, we're going to break clear of the Cone so soon that his pursuit will become academic." Ethan glanced around. "I hope." They hadn't told the newcomers about the Warden, and didn't want to. They didn't want Rugard to become a new bogeyman, seeming to hide behind every tree.

  "We've been meandering for months. I don't think we could find ourselves."

  "Not unless he knows something we don't."

  The convict had been nicknamed Wrench for the things he did to people's arms and legs when they didn't meet their obligations on time. Here in the Outback, his size had won him leadership of one of Rugard's scouting parties. As such he was drowsing in the shade of a ridge-crest eucalyptus, lazy but mentally restless. He'd thought it lunacy when the Warden had ordered them to chase the Outback marks across the desert, and greater lunacy when that smart-mouthed toad called Ico had led the Expedition of Recovery off on highways that seemed to go in the wrong direction. Even assuming the fugitives weren't already dead- birds pecking out their eyes five hundred kilometers back- what chance did they have of intercepting them on the other side of Australia? But Ico the Psycho, a nickname he'd inevitably been tagged with (his shrill protests assuring it would stick) had insisted that he could lead the Warden's men to a point ahead of the fugitives. Ico had predicted that terrain and old roadways might push them in this direction, toward a pass in what his dog-eared, oft-ridiculed map called the Great Dividing Range of Australia. The convicts believed the little bastard not because they thought he was really right, but because there was nothing else to believe.

  Actually the journey hadn't been too bad. They'd found some wanderers to rob, shortening their own necessary search for food, and some women to forcibly enlist into what Rugard had jokingly dubbed their Cohort of Joy. They'd found wild cows and pigs and goats to hunt as they went east, whole rivers of clean water, and plague-emptied buildings to sleep in. The truth was, Ico the Psycho had brought them to a far nicer place than they'd come from, and whether they found the transmitter or not, Wrench wasn't about to go back to Rugard's desert dungeon. Screw that! Life was better here.

  But unless he wanted to run off on his own, Wrench still had to humor the Warden by keeping watch for the fugitives. It was an easy, brainless job, but so far it had also been a futile one. The convict wished his boss would just give it up and enjoy this greener paradise, but Rugard had become steadily more obsessed with the transmitter, not less, turning ever more irritable and vicious. So Wrench had been posted here for a week, waiting for the bitch and her boyfriends to show up. He was bored beyond belief.

  Except that Ico's suggestion did have a core of sense. There was a pass through the mountains that led down to a big lake, with a river canyon below the lake. The only easy way across the water was on the crest of the old dam that had created the reservoir. Anyone passing through came here, to the dam, and here Wrench would wait. And wait. And wait. Until the Warden tired of the game and called them in.

  "Wrench! Somebody coming!"

  He groaned. "If they're not carrying a damned communications satellite on their back, let them pass." The convicts had already robbed and killed two nitwits who'd stumbled this way. He was tired of it. Let the next ones go by.

  "No, this is a big group! A regular army!"

  Rivals? Cursing, he rolled upright to look, squinting at a group switchbacking down a hillside toward the dam. No army, but quite a few traveling together. Why? It was peculiar, and didn't match the four they were looking for. Then he looked harder.

  "That one there," he muttered, pointing. "That's the woman, isn't it?" A slim, dark-haired woman strode steadily in the midst of the group. Raven, her name was.

  "Where'd they get all those other people?"

  "Or where did they get her?"

  "She doesn't look like a captive. And I think I recognize some of the others."

  Wrench wondered if the scouts on the other side of the canyon wall had stayed awake. "Didn't expect this many, but damn! Signal the others! It looks like Ico the Psycho was right after all." He grinned, wondering if he'd get some kind of reward. "We got 'em."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The dam was the most substantive relic of Australian civilization that Daniel's group had seen yet, and it was intact. The reservoir it had created was full, water lapping near the lip of the dam, and a small falls poured over the spillway gates at its middle. The wedge of concrete was of moderate size, its crest two hundred yards long and its downstream face thirty feet high. At its middle was a notch thirty yards long where the dam elevation dropped half the height of a man to a set of rusted spillway gates. It was here the reservoir water slid to the river below.

  Before the plague the spillway gates were routinely opened and closed to control reservoir depth, electricity generation, and the flow of the river downstream. Disuse and rust had frozen them shut, corrosion eating into the steel to allow a spray of leakage around the gate edges. The reservoir had risen enough to top the old gates, the outlet water looking orange where it ran down the old steel. Bridging this sheet of water was an old wooden catwalk, connecting one end of the dam's concrete crest to the other. The dam and its catwalk made a bridge across the waterway, its top wide enough for Daniel's group to begin filing over two by two.

  "Well, this is convenient," he remarked to himself, leading the way. Almost too convenient.

  There was a small concrete blockhouse on the western dam crest, adjacent to the spillway gates. Its door had rotted to paper. Out of curiosity, Ethan kicked it down and went in. Wet concrete steps led down in the gloom to a cluster of gigantic gears and levers that had once controlled the spillway gates. The electric motors to do so were powerless, their electrical cables withered like dead vines. Amaya poked around the machinery curiously, fingering the levers.

  "This must be a manual override," she said, pointing to a large wheel.

  A short flight of wooden steps led up to the catwalk over the spillway. Daniel told the others to wait, mounted the steps, and stepped out onto the wooden bridge. It creaked and rocked slightly because its posts were slowly rotting, but it still looked capable of bearing human weight. He looked down at the river below the dam, flat and brown, flowing north through a thickly forested valley. At some point it must turn east through the mountains to the sea. Maybe they could follow the river to the coast.

  But first to the other bank. "One at a time!" he called. "It's pretty wobbly!"

  He went across gingerly. So far, so good. One by one the others began to follow, those having crossed the creaking catwalk waiting on the eastern half of the dam for the others to catch up.

  The group was evenly split, half on either side of the spillway, when a rock suddenly sizzled out of the trees on the far bank and hit a recent recruit named Ned Putnam. He grunted in surprise, spun, and almost went over the lip of the dam before the others caught him. Everyone crouched in stunned surprise. The attack was so unexpected they had difficulty grasping what had happened.

  The trees on the eastern shore hid their attackers. Ned was down on the concrete, cursing. "It might be broken," he hissed, holding his shoulder.

  Daniel and some others quickly picked up a few random chunks of concrete that had eroded on the crest, and others anxiously pointed their spears. They felt exposed and vulnerable. Then three men stepped into sight, one letting a sling dangle menacingly from his right hand. It was the most ancient of weapons, the simple killer that had allowed David to topple Goliath. A stone was fitted into a long loop of leather, twirled around the head to gain momentum, and then released with a snap of the wrist. If it hit the head it could kill. The other two convicts had steel-tipped spears, crude swords, and the same kind of curved throwing sticks the aborigines had once hurled. It was a war party. The trio were tall, bearded, ragged, streaked with menacing daubs of white mud, a
nd confident-looking. Not to mention familiar.

  "Who the hell is that?" their first recruit, Peter, asked in bewilderment.

  "I recognize them from Erehwon," Ethan muttered. "Rugard's clan."

  "Who?"

  "There's some convicts who know we have the transmitter," Daniel reluctantly explained. "We thought we'd left them far behind, but obviously we didn't."

  Peter looked at the trio with alarm. "We've got the morally impaired after us?" he asked in disbelief. "We have to fight for it?"

  "If we want to get back," Daniel replied grimly.

  "You didn't tell us about this!"

  "No, I hoped we wouldn't have to. Now we have to decide what to do."

  The three convicts stood shoulder to shoulder at the end of the dam like an impassable wall. "You left without saying goodbye!" one of the ominous trio called. Gallo, Daniel thought his name was. Extortionist, if memory served. Bullying or sniveling, depending on who he was with. The man pointed toward the groaning Ned with the tip of his spear. "So we dispensed with hello, as well! That's just a warning!"

  "A warning of what?" Daniel said, trying to think as he stalled.

  "There's a toll for crossing this particular waterway! One stolen transmitter!"

  "Daniel, let's rush those bastards," Ethan growled. "We outnumber them."

  "No, we're not ready for that." He glanced back. "We haven't talked this over, and there are a lot of women. I don't want to get anyone killed. Maybe we can find another way around them." His group quickly filed back across the catwalk in retreat. Yet even as they did so, four more of Rugard's men appeared at the other end of the dam. The tallest one was easily recognizable, his scarred face memorable. Wrench, Daniel remembered. A brutal enforcer before he came to Australia.

  "The toll is the same this way too!" Wrench called.

  They were trapped, and without cover or room to maneuver on the crest of the dam.

  "How the devil did they get ahead of us?" Ethan wondered. "And behind us? And where's Rugard?"

  "We haven't been moving that fast," Daniel said. "Somehow they guessed where we're going: maybe Ico helped them. Who knows? I was foolish not to hurry, but I thought they'd have given up by now."

  "Why would they give up? We've got the only way back." Ethan's tone was gloomy.

  "What are we going to do?" a woman named Iris asked plaintively. She was looking from one end of the dam to the other.

  Daniel was silent, thinking.

  Raven came up out of the gearhouse.

  "Rugard's goons are here," he told her quietly. "It's your transmitter. Your ticket home. And these people's lives. Do you want to fight for it, or not?"

  She glanced around quickly, taking in the situation.

  "Better hurry before the Warden gets here!" Gallo shouted. "The toll goes up then!"

  "If we give it up and Rugard uses it, he'll simply disappear," Amaya warned. "The world will never know what's happening here. Or believe him, even if he tells."

  "But we didn't tell these people about this danger," Daniel added. The others had clustered around. "It's a terrible place for a battle."

  Raven shook her head. "I can't ask you to fight so I can get back."

  "Damn right," the injured Ned said. "It wasn't right not to tell us about this."

  "I didn't want to worry anyone," Daniel said. "You've had worries enough."

  No one said anything.

  "Well, it's a group choice," he went on. "We can give up the transmitter."

  They considered that.

  Finally Ned sighed and spoke up again, his voice strained from the pain in his shoulder. "Daniel, you weren't right for not trusting us with the full story, but I'm also tired of being picked on by men like these. These are the kind of bastards who killed my best friend. Their force is divided and we outnumber both groups combined."

  "Yes," Ethan said. "Let's fight."

  Raven had been looking about. "There's a better way," she said quickly. "Let's just jump into the river."

  The others looked down the face of the dam, as high as a three-story building. "That's a good drop," Iris objected.

  "And the river's sluggish," Daniel said. "We can't swim faster than they can run. They'll just follow us down the valley and we'll lose all our supplies too." He glanced around, trying to summon some of the tactics he'd once studied on dry, dead pages. They outnumbered their antagonists, yes, but the narrowness of the dam crest made it impossible to flank Rugard's watchdogs and bring their superiority to bear. It was like the narrow defile at Erehwon except here the situation was reversed: it wasn't Tucker holding Rugard off, it was Rugard's men holding them in place until the Warden could arrive with reinforcements. "Maybe a few of the men could swim downstream and circle back around," he thought aloud. "Take them from behind."

  "We don't have time for that," Raven said. "Who knows when Rugard might show up? And we didn't come all this way to give away everything, either. Amaya, do you think we could get those spillway gears working?"

  "Maybe with that old wheel and the levers. They're rusted, but with enough men pulling…"

  "What good will that do?" Ethan asked.

  "The catwalk supports are half rotted," Raven explained hurriedly. "We lash our supplies onto the decking, use the tools we've picked up to hack at its base, and send the platform over the dam. With any luck it becomes a raft that people can cling to on their way downstream."

  "Meanwhile," Amaya added excitedly, grasping her idea, "we open these gates for an instant flood. That pushes us downstream and leaves Rugard's men stranded on either side of the dam. Maybe it buys us enough time to get to the coast and try the transmitter!"

  Daniel looked at his two female strategists with wonder. "Let me get this straight. You want to start our own torrent and jump into it? With our supplies lashed to a rotting catwalk?"

  They nodded.

  He shrugged. "Makes sense to me. Ethan?"

  He looked down the gearhouse steps. "We'll have to hold them off while we work. There's some deck gratings down there. Maybe we can pry them up for temporary shields."

  Daniel smiled. "Okay. Two men behind each shield. Women to chop down the catwalk. The rest of the men down here on those levers." He began snapping out names, the authority coming naturally to him now, glancing at the blocking convicts at either end of the dam. "It's time to leave again without saying goodbye."

  The fugitives pried up two of the steel floor gratings on one side of the gearhouse and carried them up the stairs, putting one on each side of the central catwalk. Two men took position behind each grating, spears pointed out. Meanwhile the old tools salvaged from the ruins were rapidly distributed. Some of the women dropped down into the shallow water running over the spillway and cautiously felt their way under the catwalk, holding on to its posts as they moved. Other women carried their packs to the decking of the catwalk overhead, hastily lashing their belongings in place even as their sisters began hacking at the posts beneath them. With each blow, the wooden bridge trembled. Meanwhile the remaining men descended into the gearhouse to pry at the frozen workings of the dam spillway gates.

  Rugard's men watched uncertainly. Belatedly, Wrench and Gallo realized that the entire party they were hunting had disappeared as easy targets: some men were crouched behind some kind of metal mesh, others had hidden in the gearhouse, and the last of the women were dropping down to muck about in the spillway underneath the catwalk, almost entirely hidden as they bent over. Something was going on, and it wasn't surrender. The men glanced nervously at each other: none had forgotten the shocking roar and concussion of the bewildering explosion back at Erehwon. Did the transmitter thieves have more witchery up their sleeve? While the convicts had the fugitives pinned, their quarry outnumbered them. Gallo wished Rugard were here, but it would take a couple of days to find and bring him. Maybe they should just back off and trail these troublemakers.

  "Send some rocks at them," he instructed his slingman uncertainly.

  The man whirled hi
s weapon over his head and let fly. The stone rocketed along the crest of the dam and banged off the metal grate harmlessly. He flung again, and again. One rock ricocheted into the adjacent reservoir and a third bounced up in the air and fell down on the dam crest behind the bastards crouched with the grate. One of them scampered back, scooped it up, and hurled it back, forcing Gallo's men to duck out of the way.

  "You dropped something, you clumsy cretins!" the pitcher yelled. It looked like the bastard they'd already hit with a rock.

  "Maybe we should just rush them," one of the convicts ventured.

  "There's too many," Gallo snapped. "You want to get pushed off the face of this dam? I say we keep them pinned here until help comes. They're trapped."

  Wrench had arrived at the same conclusion. He'd actually loped forward along the other end of the dam with the intention of jabbing tentatively at the metal grating with his spear, but as soon as he started the fugitives hurled chunks of concrete, the blows sending him scampering back out of the way. If he tried to climb over the gratings they'd stick him like a pig. Well, if he couldn't advance on the dam's crest, neither could they, right? It was a standoff. He hoped.

  Still, he was worried about doing nothing and getting the Warden mad at him. He stood watching the frenetic activity at the center of the dam with foul confusion. What the hell were they trying to do?

  Suddenly there was a shrill, wailing shriek, so loud and unearthly that the convicts on either side of the structure instinctively jumped. What the devil was that? Excited shouts were coming from the gearhouse. Then there was another shriek, and encouraging yells from the women. The flow of water down the face of the dam began to quicken. The catwalk was beginning to lean out over the dropoff, increasingly precarious.

  "Are they trying to commit suicide?" Wrench muttered, his chest sore from a thrown missile. If they lost the transmitter in the river Rugard would hang them all. Damn! He began to realize that things were going horribly wrong.