William Dietrich - Getting back

"Good grief," Ico said. "Well, let's go find Raven. She must be upstream."

There was no stream of course, just the sandy bed and a bottom of heat. It ended in a cul-de-sac of cliffs with a litter of boulders at their base. Raven was in the shade of one, looking drained.

"We found it," Ethan called. "Maybe."

She didn't look up.

"You don't seem very excited," Ico observed.

She looked up at him morosely, clearly disturbed. "I found him."

Ico walked past her into a cluster of boulders, the others following. The rocks formed a kind of nest with an open-roofed room in their middle.

"Ouch," Ico breathed.

A cross hung on the rocks, except a moment's inspection revealed the cross was really a man, or had been a man, arms outstretched where he'd been pinioned, and now almost black and desiccated by the sun. Dried flesh pulled back from screaming teeth. Eyes gone. Stained strips of clothes and leathered flesh.

There was a glint on one finger. Daniel stepped forward. "Academy ring."

"So we've found your pilot," Ico said.

Ethan was looking at the figure in dismay. "I didn't know the Warden did this. They told me the pilot was missing and… I didn't ask. My God, the man could have helped us! It's insane."

"This Warden of yours must have really been pissed off."

Raven had come in behind them, looking upward. The rocks radiated heat like an oven. She looked not so much horrified as depressed.

"I guess we want to steer clear of the morally impaired, right?" Ico said to her. "Good thing we're getting out of here."

She looked at him sadly. "There's something I haven't told you."

They buried the pilot in the sand, Raven taking care to first remove his ring and the molar filling of identification micro-data that had replaced the dog tag for employees on remote and risky missions. Then the group filed back to Car Camp as the sun sank, walking the last few miles under the stars. They were exhausted, but they were also impatient to learn what Raven had to tell them. She simply suggested she save it until Amaya and the recovering Tucker could hear too. She walked ahead of them as if rehearsing what she would say.

Upon returning they built up the fire.

"What I haven't told you is that we have to go back to Erehwon," Raven began without preamble. "We have to go see the Warden."

"What!" Ethan cried. Clearly, she hadn't told him this.

She nodded, acknowledging his surprise. "You already know ordinary communications don't work in Australia. You know the Warden took a transmitter from the plane- from the pilot- and it didn't work."

"So?" Daniel said. "That's why we found this one."

"Yes. Because the continent must be jammed." She glanced around, gauging their reaction. "Outback Adventure- United Corporationsdoesn't want its clients calling out. You need a special instrument."

"The Cone!" Ico said.

"Hmm?"

He looked excited. "I stayed awake when they shipped us out here and heard the pilot talking about some damned Cone. I thought it was a password, slang, for the continent. But what if it's this zone of jamming?"

"You stayed awake?" Raven asked.

"Damn right I did. My trust only goes so far, and a good thing too. So they fly us into this zone made from… what? A satellite?"

She nodded, watching him. "The question is whether they could do that over an entire continent."

"Strongly enough to confound weak consumer electronics, I'll bet. Maybe strongly enough to defeat ordinary rescue beacons. They used narrow-focus satellite jamming beams in the Taiwanese War."

"That explains why my GPS didn't work," Ethan remembered.

"My stuff too," Ico said. "I thought it was just on the fritz."

Raven nodded. "When I came here and recognized there was no normal exit point, I began to think about alternative ways to signal for help," she explained. "Then I talked to Ethan and he told me about his crash. My theory is that no pilot would fly into this place unless they could expect rescue in the event of disaster, but that United Corporations would want to make sure it wasn't sending rescue craft in after the wrong people, risking a hijack by the morally impaired. The survivor who was signaling had to be someone knowledgeable enough to do something to activate the rescue beacon: a bona fide pilot, in other words. When I heard that the transmitter the convicts had brought back from the crash didn't work, I at first thought they simply must have taken the wrong one. But that made no sense- if they'd stumbled on the right one, U.C. would be sending its rescue crew into the lion's den. There couldn't be a right one. So then I reasoned the transmitter must require another component to penetrate this jamming- an idea I remembered from my aviation work. The beacon only works if a pilot puts two halves together: the transmitter itself, and the activator we just found. I think the body we discovered confirms this idea."

"How so?" Ethan asked.

"My guess is that the pilot tried to bargain for his life by promising he could signal for help if they could catch you, because you were unwittingly carrying the crucial component- the activator to penetrate this jamming. But when they found you unconscious, you didn't have it. It wasn't even in your pack. Maybe the pilot remained evasive in hopes of finding the activator by himself, later. And the Warden, in an impatient rage, killed him."

"So now we have to go to this psycho and ask him for the other half?" Ico asked. "This is the plan you didn't tell us about?"

"Ask. Take. Bargain. Whatever it requires to get back."

"Great. Whoopee."

Amaya was looking at Raven skeptically, glancing from her to Daniel. "You figured this out all by yourself?"

"I'm not promising it will work. It's a chance, that's all."

"Nobody's that smart, Raven."

"It's common sense, Amaya."

"You said you knew avionics. Tell me what a neural-rod stabilizer is."

Raven looked at her with irritation.

"Tell me what a wing pulse-circuit is."

"That wasn't my area."

"You don't know a thing about avionics, do you?"

"I don't have to prove myself to you! You're just jealous of my relationship with Daniel!"

He looked up at that, curious. What relationship?

"You don't know a thing about aviation," Amaya persisted. "But you do know a lot about Outback Adventure. You're lying to us, aren't you? Just like you lied to Daniel."

"I'm trying to help you!"

"Why were you so surprised to find him here? You were the one who told him about Australia."

"It's a big continent!"

"Why did you save us at all?"

"I'm beginning to wonder that too! Go back out into the damn desert if you don't like my help!"

"Who are you, Raven?"

She was angry. The two women glared at each other.

"Who is Luther Cox?" It was Daniel, interrupting softly.

Raven turned to him impatiently. "You know who he is. Your supervisor back home."

"Sure, I know. But how did you know last night? I never mentioned him to you."

"You must have." Her eyes flickered away.

"No I didn't."

"You just don't remember."

"Amaya's right. You know too much. When we were dying of thirst and you found us, you knew who Ico was, and his relationship to meeven though we haven't talked since I met him. You've always known too much. You recruited me, didn't you, Raven?"

She stared back at him, her expression flat. "You recruited yourself."

"What are you talking about?" It was Tucker, sitting up against his propped travois.

"She works for them," Daniel said, watching her. "She came on to me and talked wilderness but she was working for them all the time. It's the only thing that makes sense. She's some kind of agent. She found me, and got me interested, and gave me the passwords to get in, even while pretending she didn't want to. It was a seduction, a seduction without sex. She worked with my employer to do it. And now she's still working for them, but doing what? Picking up junk from the Outback?"