William Dietrich - Getting back

The others were watching him grimly. His vague promises of journeying to a point to seek help had seemed like deliverance, and now his admission that a rival group was still on their heels smacked of betrayal. It was like the misleading half-truths of Outback Adventure all over again, he knew. By now, they trusted no one.

"We can't let this destroy us," he continued. "One of my original friends betrayed us in his desperation to escape. We can't let that happen again."

"So what do we do?" Peter asked.

"We've escaped for now. But they may find us again soon. That leaves all of you with a choice. You can stick with us in hopes we can elude our pursuers and try to call in some kind of rescue craft, once we get out from under this electronic cloud of jamming. That's always been a long shot, but it's our only shot. But if you come with us, we may end up in a bad fight- a desperate fight- trying to do it. Or, you can bail out now. If we split up you don't have any chance of getting back, but the group that is chasing us will probably leave you alone. Maybe." He stopped.

"Risk death with you or stay marooned by ourselves," Peter summed up. "That's it, isn't it?"

He nodded. "A bad choice, but we've never had very good ones, have we? I wasn't trying to keep anything from you, Peter. I just didn't want to worry you needlessly. If we can just signal for rescue, the convict pursuit becomes pointless. I hope."

There was a gloomy silence.

"And the only one guaranteed to have a ride out of here is her?" Iris clarified, pointing to Raven. "Why her?"

He took a breath. "Because she's the one who told us about this chance. We're going to send her and Ethan to try to bring help. That was our original plan and we're not changing it now. Any fight over who gets to go would be fruitless."

His followers digested all this. "Wish you were here- and I wasn't," Ned tried to joke.

Jessica stepped forward to stand next to Peter. "Well, I'm not giving up my only chance of getting out of here to a bunch of damned convicts," she announced. "I'm sticking with Daniel."

"Me too." Peter sighed. "If I'm going to die in Australia, it might as well be for a reason. At least with you guys there's a hope."

"Be realistic, everybody," Daniel warned. "If it comes down to a fight it will be with people United Corporations deemed beyond rehabilitation."

"In that case, we'd better start thinking about some serious weapons," Ethan said. "Amaya, could you work on a flamethrower, please?"

The others laughed, breaking the tension. Her ingenuity had become well known. There was a new fierceness to them since the dam, Daniel realized, a new confidence and resolve. They had a goal, and now they had the unity from sharing danger. One by one they began to stand. Unity like… United Corporations. No! Not like that!

"Which way, mate?" Oliver asked, a little unsteady now.

"Ollie, this really isn't your fight," Daniel said. "Or Angus's. I'll understand if you Australians want to bug out and leave it to us immigrants. Really."

Angus shook his head. "You said we're all Australians now."

Daniel glanced away, trying to hide the surge of emotion welling up in him. They were following! For desperate reasons, perhaps, but behind him, of all people. What would harridan Lundeen think?

"This river eventually leads to the sea, of course, but because of that it's a little too obvious," Daniel judged. "They'll expect us to go that way." He pointed east, over a range of mountains. "So we'll climb. Do it the hard way."

"Sounds like a bloody Outback Adventure!" Ned quipped, shouldering a pack.

"I'd pay a year's salary for this experience any day!" Ethan chirped.

"For people who ask why they do!" Jessica warbled.

"And need their bleedin' heads examined," Peter amended.

They headed east again.

Australia had changed. The taut harshness of the Outback had given way to the soft contours of rounded hills and thick forest, cut by streams and interspersed by meadows and abandoned pasture. Old farmsteads had become frequent, the rotting and rusting houses half swallowed by eruptions of brambles. Wild cows, horses, pigs, and goats were frequently encountered. Sheep had disappeared, destroyed perhaps by roving packs of wild dogs. And now the first city was glinting on the horizon.

Ethan sat next to Daniel as they rested in the grass of an east-facing slope, studying the abandoned towers. Ragged remnants of the building windows still caught the light of the sun. Somewhere, not too far beyond, must be the sea.

"Daniel, I've decided not to go back," Ethan announced quietly as they let their eyes skip across the overgrown cityscape, searching for any sign of life in the distant ruins.

"What?"

"I've decided it would be better if you returned with Raven. Not me."

"Why?"

"I think you make a better fit."

"It's your seat, Ethan. Your crash, your transmitter, yours by length of exile. We already decided this."

"I don't want to go back." He shook his head, as if puzzled himself. "Not yet, anyway. I miss things, sure, but not enough that I need to get back right now. There's things I'd miss even more here."

"Amaya."

"Yes. And another thing."

"What?"

"This country. I'm falling in love with it too."

They looked out across the rolling hills, blue with haze. Even in the underpopulated areas of the United Corporations world, roads curved, power lines strutted across the contours, and the invisible matrix of property lines and survey markers reminded how the planet had been parceled out. Here, everything was at the beginning again. No one owned anything. Everything still seemed possible.

Daniel sighed. "I'd rather have you go and want to come back. Amaya would be a pretty good guarantee you wouldn't forget us here."

"No, I'm beginning to think I could make a better life here, once we get past the convicts. Not out in the desert, no. But here we have wood and water and livestock and the remnants of a lot of technology. Not to mention land, and room, and freedom. It's beautiful here. In fact, it's the most beautiful place I've ever seen. The new Australians, like Raven said."

"I've been thinking the same thing."

"There you go then."

"So now we're going to argue about who has to go instead of who has to stay?"

He laughed. "We'd get plenty of volunteers, still. I'm just saying you make the most sense of any of us."

"I can't go back, Ethan. I can't lead this group in a race to the coast and then abandon them."

"You wouldn't be abandoning them, you'd be saving them, or at least giving them a choice of which world they want to live in. And you'd have far more influence over Raven than I would: you two together could get to people in power, maybe. She'd listen to you."

"No she wouldn't. She doesn't want anything to do with me."

"Nonsense. She's haunted by you. You haunt each other."

"Now you sound like Amaya."

"Amaya is smarter than any of us. You know, she'd take you over me, if she could."

"That's crazy."

"No it isn't. And it doesn't worry me. Because this connection between you and Raven is as obvious as gravity and as weird as… love. Not simple attraction so much as entwined destiny, I think. Everyone can see it. And somebody has to go, Daniel. Somebody has to take the story back. If Raven has to be one of them, the next most obvious choice is you. Start thinking about it, please."

"She keeps defending United Corporations."

"She keeps defending herself. Trying to live with herself. She'd love you for accepting her for what she is. And helping her to become what she wants to be."

The city was called Gleneden, and it was one of the New Towns that United Corporations had erected around the globe to rationalize the distribution of its workforce and maximize the efficiency of resource extraction: in this case, minerals in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. They approached the town on the raised deck of an expressway, the pavement littered and cracked but the underlying structure sturdy enough to last for centuries. A few abandoned vehicles sat on the roadway shoulder, their shells rusting through and their glass imploded, the fragments clustered on rotting seats like drifts of diamonds. Trees had grown up to embrace the causeway railings so the bridge deck seemed to float on the forest canopy, and birds sounded an alarm and glided ahead of them in a startled weave, announcing this unexpected reappearance of humans. More flocks exploded off the derelict towers, wheeling in consternation. Then the avian inhabitants settled down and Gleneden was quiet again. In the distance down an empty avenue, a wild dog loped away.