William Dietrich - Getting back

"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."

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, and confident-looking. Not to mention familiar.