Getting Back (30 page)

Amaya was silently weeping.

"Let's not make it be for nothing," Ethan finally said. "We have to be out of sight by sunrise and lay low until it's safe to trigger the beacon. Maybe tomorrow night."

"We can't," Daniel said.

"Can't what?"

"Trigger the beacon. We can't signal for rescue. We can't penetrate the Cone."

"I thought you said you got it!"

"I got the transmitter but… I threw the activator at Ico." He looked at Raven. "You two are going to have to hike to the coast with us."

The other three looked stunned. Amaya was looking from Daniel to Raven, crestfallen.

"It's better this way," he said. "Not some of us fly off, some of us stay."

Raven was looking at him in shock. "Oh, Daniel," she whispered.

"It will give us time to ask why we do."

Then he turned, and led the way into the rising sun.

"Lord, what a painting."

Rugard Sloan, blackened and scorched, turned a grim circle at the mouth of what had been the tunnel. Fresh rock had covered it, and the walls nearby had been sprayed with gore. One man had done this, he thought, one big man he hadn't had time to reach with reason. One man! This giant named Tucker had killed five men, wounded half a dozen more, and turned the remaining pack of pursuers into a band of drunken, sick, whipped dogs. Rugard couldn't have driven them on at gunpoint, not right now.

The snitch Ico had lived by hanging back because of his little spear cut, whimpering like a punished child. Rugard himself had been saved by the death of a man in front of him, a flesh-and-blood shield that had knocked him flat. He was spattered with offal and singed and grimy from the flames of his own roof. They'd made a fool of him, of that he was certain.

Otherwise, it was hard to think. The Warden's ears were ringing and his head ached. There was a fuzziness to his vision he suspected would take hours to go away. And in front of him was a wall of unstable rock, sealing the fugitives' exit route. Men could climb over it or dig through it, he knew, but none had the stomach for it at the moment. Least of all him. The bastards were gone, escaped into the desert, and to follow them he'd have to organize a party with proper food and water to hunt them down. It was maddening.

Despite this fiasco, Rugard knew the others would look to him for answers. People were dung, expendable and cheap, and they'd follow a strong man as far as he'd lead them. The Warden felt not a thing for the men who had just been blown to bits by the explosion. They were fools to be in the front rank.

He limped back down the canyon past his groaning, stunned men. Explosives! How? Had that bitch Raven brought them with her? There was something odd about her, some lack of ordinary fear and confusion. He hadn't liked her arrogance from the start. She'd scorned his advances, was condescending to his authority, and was probably laughing at him right now. Clearly she knew too much. And she'd go on laughing until he hunted her down and had her in a different way. And then turned her whole being into a bloody locus of pain.

"We can't let them go."

Rugard turned. It was the weasel. He held men like that in contempt, but they were necessary. This little pissant might know where the others were going.

"We've got to get it back, so we can get back," Ico mumbled, as dazed by the explosion as the others. "The activator is useless until we get the transmitter to hook it to."

"Obviously," Rugard growled. "And you're going to help get it for me. You're going to help me hunt them down in the desert by telling me which way they'll go. They can't get back either, not without us. Right?"

Ico winced. "Not exactly." He looked down in wonder at his bloody arm. Welcome to real life, he thought drolly. It ached like hell. "I know where they're going, I think."

"Where?"

"The coast. Raven thinks the transmitter alone will work there."

"What!"

"If we don't catch them before they reach it, she'll be gone." Ico looked around morosely. He'd thought he'd be leaving these cretins in hours, or days. Now he might be stuck with them for weeks or months.

"We'll catch them then." They'd follow the thieves to wherever they might run, Rugard thought. Use them to assuage his own humiliation. Get the transmitter to unite with its activator. And then take proper vengeance on the whole damnable world.

The fugitives strode toward the rising sun with a grim, anxious pace, always looking backward: for a miraculous reappearance of Tucker, for pursuit, for a last glimpse of human settlement and community. They saw none of these. Just burnished domes of rock beginning to slip down the horizon as they hurried, and ahead shrub-shrouded desert and the undulating swell of red sand dunes.

There was no conversation. Their narrow escape, continued peril, and Daniel's loss of the activator had shocked them all into a tense silence. Raven's fury and fear at being trapped in Australia had left her speechless. Ethan looked at the pair with an accusatory stare, as if their tangled emotions had doomed him as well as themselves. Amaya was morose at the loss of Tucker and Ico and the continued presence of Raven. Their little family had become dysfunctional.

"We need to talk," Amaya ventured once.

There was no answer.

The fugitives would be easy enough to track if pursued immediately, Daniel knew. Their feet left a scuffed trail in the sand like the frozen wake of a passing boat. The question was whether Rugard would bother to follow and, if he did, how quickly he could organize a posse. Given time, wind or rain would eventually erase their footsteps, and then surely the fugitives could elude pursuit in the immensity of the continent. They would pick their way slowly east to the sea, signal for a rescue craft… and after that? The possibility was so impossibly distant that it wasn't worth thinking about.

It was more important, Daniel knew, to think about the here and now. To stop focusing on the world of United Corporations and start focusing on Australia. It was this obsession about getting back that was causing so much trouble.

By weary agreement they didn't take a midday break but pushed on, the sand giving way to hardpan and dry, dead-looking vegetation. The land was ugly but easier to walk across. The day grew hot but not as oppressive as the punishing furnace of their first arrival. The desert winter was slowly approaching. Daniel also noticed the group's steady endurance after a sleepless night. His own body had acquired a wiry stamina far different from the calculated strengths of his health club regimen. He could push on with a dogged tirelessness that allowed him to keep going even when reason called for collapse and sleep.

They were close enough to Erehwon that Raven and Ethan knew of a dependable seep. It was a risk making for it because any pursuers could guess at their decision, but it was a greater risk to push into the unknown without as much water as possible. They threw themselves down at the puddle at mid-afternoon to drink to satiation, and then slowly, impatient at the delay, topped off every container they had.

"I still don't see him," Amaya said quietly, looking back the way they had come.

"No," Daniel said. "We won't."

And then they pushed on.

The sun set behind their backs, the monoliths black stubs in the distance now, and they marched on into dusk. There was no question of stopping. They walked as the moon came up, the desert lit like an old black-and-white movie, and held their direction by keeping the Southern Cross on their right hand. It was so quiet they could hear the squeak of sand under their feet. At midnight they came to the bank of a dry wash where ghost gums overhung the sandy channel like adults leaning over a cradle.

And there they collapsed and slept, fallen carelessly to the ground like leaves. The four of them slept in a cluster, huddling instinctively for warmth and reassurance, and were unconscious from exhaustion before anyone had a chance to comment on their geometry.

Ethan roused them shortly before dawn. They wordlessly wolfed down a few mouthfuls of cold food, drank, and pushed on. They didn't dare light a fire yet. A rhythm came into their flight. They walked hard for about an hour, rested five minutes, and then pushed hard again. They began to cross a series of flat pans of featureless clay. "Dry lakes," Raven guessed. "They probably flood in the rains." White salt glittered on the cracked mud.

At midday they crawled wordlessly into the shade of a cluster of ironwood trees to nap restlessly for two hours. Then they hiked on, walking again until midnight, their conversation mostly monosyllabic. The rocks of Erehwon had slipped permanently below the horizon. They saw no one, heard nothing. They were alone again, four adventurers in a desert wilderness, with no idea where they were or precisely where they were going, except east. It didn't matter. Walking was a substitute for talk.

When they stopped that night their weariness was so complete that it kept them from immediately falling asleep. They were brittle with tension. Ethan refused to sit after he dropped his pack and simply looked out over the dark desert, his shoulders hunched, his face gloomy, his body shivering slightly from the long hours of exertion. Raven sat slumped forward and pressed into the pack on her lap, her hair falling around her face like a cowl. Daniel's muscles were so tired that he watched his thighs tremble, tendons jumping under his skin like snakes.

It was Amaya who again broke the traumatized silence. "I think we should talk about Tucker," she said.

No one answered again.

"If we don't, we aren't going to make it."

Ethan turned, his arms around himself. "What about Tucker?"

"Our guilt."

"What guilt?"

"That we're alive and he's dead."

"We don't know for sure that he's dead. And it was his decision to be the rear guard."

"Not guilt," Raven interrupted. "Fear." She hadn't looked up and the voice seemed to come from deep inside her, as if issuing from a cave. "That we'll all end up like him."

"You mean dead," Ethan said.

She didn't reply.

"We know we shouldn't have let him stay behind alone," Amaya persisted. "We shouldn't…" She stopped, sighing hopelessly.

"Have built a bomb?" Daniel guessed.

Amaya looked away.

"If you hadn't we'd all be dead or worse," he said. "You didn't take Tucker's life, you saved ours. We were in a pretty desperate situation. We still are."

"Because we threw away our means of escape," Raven amended hollowly, still not looking up, her voice exhausted. "Used it like a rock, to hit someone."

The rebuke irritated him. "Your means of escape." He said it bitterly. "After you let me be lowered into a trap you knew was about to be sprung."

"That's not fair," Ethan told Daniel sullenly. "She didn't know what this little irate friend of yours would do until it was too late. We'd met as a group and agreed as a group that she and I would go. And it's no secret why you might prefer to leave the activator behind. You threw it all away because…" He stopped in frustration.

"Because we've never been a group and never truly agreed. Raven has been setting us up from the beginning and so have you, never telling us our true situation until the last minute and using us like game pieces to get you back home. You turned us against each other. You turned Ico. Tucker's almost certainly dead. You've made a goddamned mess of the whole situation and now you can just sit in the middle of it like we have to. We walk to the coast, or stay in Australia, together."

"That's unfair!" Ethan shouted. "You'd already be dead without us!"

"Daniel, I was trying to help you," Raven added with a groan. "Help you get back, where you could do some good."

"Why?" he challenged her.

"Why what?" Her reply was weary.

"Why get back? Why are you trying to achieve what United Corporations obviously doesn't encourage: our return? What if your bosses are right, Raven? What if I really belong here? What if you belong here?"

"Don't be absurd. Rugard belongs here. Not me. Not… us."

"Why are you even here, Raven?"

"I had a mission. I wanted to see."

"No you didn't."

"It's for the best, Daniel. It's always for the best: I believe in them. It's all I have to believe in. I was going soft and getting confused, and so by checking the pilot's fate and getting the electronics I'd prove myself and either be confirmed in my mission or abandon it. I'm being tested, just like you. The problem is, you've turned a test into torture. We're more than a thousand miles from where we need to be."

"Are we?"

Raven looked at him with exasperation. "Yes. It's a long walk to the beach."

"What if this is where we need to be?"

"What do you mean?" Amaya asked.

"What if we don't get back, ever? Could we make a life here? Find meaning here?"

"In that lunatic's prison?" Raven scoffed.

"No, not there. Not even here, exactly. But in Australia. There have to be more habitable places than this on the continent, if people truly lived here. What if we could find one of them and start over?"

"Haven't you had enough privation and savagery yet?"

"There have to be ruins we could use for salvage. New adventurers arriving with needed skills. Maybe we could turn the tables on United Corporations and stay by choice, creating a new colony as radical as America was, or the old Australia. It could be the utopia they pretended they were sending us to. We'd start over, but we wouldn't make the mistakes they made. Lives would have more meaning. We'd always be asking why, instead of how much."

"Stay in this wilderness?"

"Stay for what I came for. To truly live life."

She looked at him in wonder. "You've gone insane, haven't you? You didn't throw the activator away, you thrust it away. You've burned our ships so we can't turn back, like Cortes in Mexico. You haven't learned a thing by coming here."