William Dietrich - Getting back

The quartet looked at each other. If they made it back, it wouldn't be to become chums with United Corporations.

"The transmitter alone will work?" Tucker said, sounding skeptical.

"You're not supposed to know that, but yes, it will. There, not here."

"All we have to do to make Rugard's transmitter work is go to the coast?" Daniel clarified, puzzled.

"The Cone," Amaya said slowly. "The circle. That's what she's talking about. I've been wondering about that myself. If a satellite is projecting a blanket of electronic interference it should fall on Australia with a regular geometry such as a circle or oval. But the continent can't be that regular. At its edges, some pieces of land must leak out from under the Cone."

"They'd just make it bigger."

"No," said Raven. "There are too many sea and air lanes and nearby islands to overlap out onto the ocean very far. Australia is wider east to west than north to south. If you get to the east coast, the transmitter should work."

"Should work?" Ico asked.

"That's what they told me," she said defensively.

"And that must have been what the pilot was talking about when he gave me the activator," Ethan said. "That if we didn't have it, we'd have to walk to the beach."

"Listen, Daniel, this is insane," Ico pleaded. "We can't let these two run off with our help and then be stranded here, taking our chances in the wild. Who cares if the transmitter will work by itself? They know we'll never make it across the remaining desert! One of us should go on that plane with Raven to make sure she'll bring somebody back for us: somebody back here."

"You want to wait with the morally impaired?"

"Better than dying of thirst on her itinerary for us. I'm sorry, but she's lied to you from the minute you met her. If she wants our help, one of us gets to go."

"Who?" Daniel asked.

"Not you. You can't be objective about her. Frankly, it should be me. I understand the system now, I'm a good talker, and I won't be taken in by a bunch of United Corporations bullshit."

"You?"

"I've seen through them from the beginning. And I'll see through them at home."

"No," said Amaya. "You're not the right person, Ico. No offense, but you rub people the wrong way."

"We need a revolutionary, not a glad-hander!"

"We need someone who will be listened to. You'll sound too abrasive. Too extreme. Too… nutty."

"I'm the only sane person here!"

"I'm sorry. I just don't trust you to do this."

He threw up his hands. "Okay, you then. Not just these two, who somehow find us in the desert and have been using us ever since. They're going to leave us in the lurch, I know it."

"No I'm not," said Ethan. "I came here like you, Ico. I'm as angry about it as you are. I forced Raven to agree to take me back if she wanted to be shown that plane."

Ico ignored him. "How about it, Amaya? Women and children first."

"No! That's silly." She looked hesitant. "I… I want to finish trying to sort out my life here." Her look ended at Daniel as she said that. Raven would be gone again. "Ethan's one of us. He's been here longer than any of us. He's the one who was in the crash with the transmitter. United Corporations can't object to taking him back after he helped Raven. And he can talk for all of us, even the convicts. He makes the most sense by far."

"Yes," said Daniel. "Ethan's the logical one."

"Tucker, for God's sake…"

The big man shrugged. "I don't know if any of this is going to work, but I came to walk across Australia. I say Ethan too. This way the four of us stick together. All for one, one for all."

Ico looked around the group. "In Purgatory."

Daniel shrugged. They were set, the decision made.

"Fine, great." Ico sighed. "Let's go break into the house of Napoleon fruitcake up the hill there, and then run out into the desert."

"Ico, I'm sorry I can't take you all right now," Raven said. "It's the only way."

"That's what you say."

The four men were roused at dawn and marched to work on the reservoir. The community needed more water and was excavating a basin at the base of a cliff. Daniel would have preferred to have stayed in camp to make final plans with the women, but he knew such malingering would only arouse suspicion. All he could hope was that Raven's crazy plan to steal the transmitter could work, and that in the confusion of preparing for the night's festival, Amaya could succeed in foraging supplies for their escape.

Amaya told him at breakfast not to worry. "The women are friendly, most of them. We're a minority here, so they tell me where things are. I've also got another idea."

"What's that?"

"It's a surprise. Something Raven and I are cooking up."

There was a sullen mood to the group of men detailed to dig the sand pit, the hardest and dirtiest of Erehwon's current projects. "Welcome to the Warden's shit detail," one muttered. The digging team, equipped with crude tools of wood and hammered scrap metal, was an amalgam of freshly arrived convicts and impressed adventurers, as well as the stupid, slow, and those who'd drawn Rugard's ire. Accordingly, the pace of excavation was desultory. "I'm supposed to be excited about building my own prison?" one grizzled moral-impaired, a chronic petty thief, complained to Daniel. "It feels like I'm digging my own grave. I don't want a reservoir. I want out of here."

"So go," Daniel said.

"And die in the desert."

"So quit."

"One man tried that. The Warden made the rest of us drink his blood from the bowl of his skull. He said we needed to bond if morale was so poor."

The work on the west-facing impoundment was tolerable until mid-morning, when the sun cleared the cliffs and began beating into the pit. Then the temperature began to soar. The men took a two-hour break at midday but the enclosure was even hotter afterward, everyone coated in sweat and dust and tormented by flies. By mid-afternoon, Ico did little more than lean on his shovel, depressed and exhausted, staring blankly out at the pan of surrounding desert with his thoughts far away.

"You okay, Washington?" Tucker asked him at one point.

"No, Tucker, I'm not okay."

"Can I get you something, man? Some water?"

He waved him off. "Leave me alone. I'm trying to figure out a way to get okay."

They broke off work with the sun dipping toward the horizon, the cliff face still throwing off waves of heat. The sky remained cloudless, the air parched. It was difficult to imagine the pit and its surrounding dike collecting anything but heat.

Back at the main compound, they got a skin of water to drink and wash and then slumped tiredly, waiting for the gathering at dark. The community would party hard and sleep it off the next day. As the stars popped out, Raven found them.

"I worked on the transmitter to confirm it's in his storehouse and pleaded the need to scrounge more parts," she whispered. "A rope is hidden at the base of the monolith. We'll all go to the party to allay suspicion and then you guys will have to slip away. If you can steal it, we meet at two A.M. at the boulders. If anything goes wrong, you four pretend I tricked you into all this."

"That won't take much pretending," Ico said.

She looked at him impatiently. "Ico, I didn't put you here."

"I'm just skeptical about who's going to get me out."

"Let him be," Daniel said wearily. "He's cranky. We're exhausted. Concentrate your thinking on going."

They dozed, and ate, and after dinner Daniel went in search of Amaya. He found her down by the stables, carrying a bag of something up toward the canyon where the women had been assigned. "Need any help?"

"No, it's not heavy. Besides, it's for the surprise."

He wrinkled his nose. "A pretty fragrant one, I take it."

"You'll see. Didn't Ico call me the devil's prospector?"