William Dietrich - Getting back

"I do love you, dammit," she admitted fiercely when she broke briefly away. "You know I do! I love all the mixed-up craziness that's in you, all the longing, all the desire. That's been the problem from the beginning!"

"Then it shouldn't matter where we are, should it?"

"No." She sighed and kissed him again. "It shouldn't."

He took her hand and led her back to the musty stairs. Instead of descending, they climbed upward. It took two kicks to break open the door to the roof. Birds flew up, crying, but the couple found a corner away from their nests that was clean and warm, bleached deck boards providing a platform above the vinyl roofing. She knelt with him beside her, looking east. "I wonder when we'll see the ocean."

He reached over her shoulders from behind and began undressing her, watching the garments slide off her brown shoulders and mounding around the swell of her hips. Her nipples were hard, her belly trembling, and he caressed her torso as he kissed her, pulling the luxuriant fall of her dark hair aside to bare her neck. "Say you'll live with me in Australia," he murmured. "Say you'll trade that world for this one."

And with a moan she pulled him down on top of her, making a bed of their clothes on the wooden slats of the deck and promising nothingexcept, that for this moment, they were one.

Ico Washington believed he knew what Exodus Port really was.

He hadn't found a geographic Exodus, of course. There was no bay on Australia's eastern coast that harbored an exit from this continental hell, of that he was sure. But there was a way to get back, Ico thought, a way that depended on exercising the mind more than the legs. You had to find a key to the lock, the answer to the riddle: that was the test of Outback Adventure. A test of wits! And in his case the answer was the transmitter. Whoever successfully signaled deserved to get back, and whoever did not deserved permanent exile. Every man for himself! Survival of the fittest! The orange-speckled cube that he'd safeguarded across half of Australia, and the battered transmitter that Raven had stolen, were- in combination- Exodus Port! With them he could not just escape, but return to the world of United Corporations a designated winner. Unless Raven got out from under the Cone and signaled first.

Right now Ico was in a world of losers. A dust-shrouded column of the crude, stupid, stinking, and dull. Rugard's Expedition of Recovery seemed to have developed some kind of perverse gravity, drawing in the desperate and cruel to make a small army, despite periodic desertions from its less-than-reliable ranks. People liked to belong to a group, Ico supposed. They liked being led. Plus, the vaguely understood promise of possible escape fired the growing mob like a promise of treasure. None knew, of course, that there was no room on a rescue craft for anyone but Rugard and himself. They'd realize that when the pair were gone.

Ico's conscience was not bothered by this planned abandonment because he'd come to loathe his allies. Familiarity had given him time to despise their tasteless jokes and vile nicknames and adolescent gang mentality. They deserved to be forgotten! They'd called him Psycho! And yet he was the only one who had brought them this far, he and the map that everyone had laughed at from the beginning.

Well, he'd leave them soon. Ico would win, he told himself, because unlike the others who were marooned, he'd been thinking from the beginning. That, he was convinced, was what United Corporations was secretly looking for. While the others had been drugged to sleep, he'd fought to stay awake. While the others had sheepishly agreed to geographic ignorance, he'd been out buying a black market map. Admittedly the map was crude and somewhat inaccurate. It showed highways that didn't exist, and omitted some that did. In main, however, it was a decent redraw- maybe from memory- of an Australia that had been real. Ico was convinced of this now because the map had been right too many times. Now, after the report of the confusion at the dam, the main army should meet the transmitter thieves on the road. Maybe in this abandoned city ahead in the foothills. The Expedition could see its towers.

Information was the edge, always the edge. Ico had it.

He looked back along the line of trudging men, swaying camels, and captured horses, the Warden riding commandingly on one steed liberated from an owner whose foolish resistance had gotten him killed. There were clusters of women too, some as heavily armed and nasty as the males and others the terrified and subdued inductees to Rugard's Cohort of Joy. A mob united by greed and fear. But they were following him. And if his guess was right, they'd already outflanked the fugitives and now, heading back west, they would shortly intercept them. It was possible he was wrong, of course, but Ico trusted his own instincts. Dyson had been bullheaded about direction from the very beginning: east, east, east. Dyson would think he could still outrun Rugard's big group. But then Dyson thought the map was useless, that Ico would tolerate being left behind, and that the bitch he was smitten with could be trusted. Dyson was a smug, immature, naive nitwit who deserved to be left behind. He belonged here.

Ico couldn't wait, from the door of an aircraft, to wave goodbye.

It was a scream which jerked Daniel awake, a wail of fear that penetrated the afternoon slumber he'd fallen into after satiation with Raven. He jerked up guiltily, momentarily disoriented. There were shouts of alarm in the plaza below.

He crawled to the edge of the parapet surrounding the flat roof. There was a confused knot of people and two horsemen galloping wildly away, one swaying unsteadily as if injured. There'd been some kind of brief fight, Iris weeping. He watched the mounted scouts retreat toward a stream of people coming into the outskirts of the city just two miles away down the main avenue, a swarm of convicts trotting toward them with excited purpose, yipping and crowing like animals. His heart sank. They'd been found, and not just found, but likely trapped.

He woke Raven and they hastily began to dress.

"Daniel! Where are you!" Amaya's voice.

"Just a minute!"

They both were half covered when Amaya stepped out onto the tower roof, jerking to an abrupt halt when she saw them. Then she blinked and composed herself.

"Thank God I found you. They surprised Iris and the men just barely saved her. Everyone's coming into the lobby."

"Rugard?"

"I think so, with a small army. A hundred people or more. Should we run?"

"Too late for that, especially if they have horses." Daniel thought about the tower. "Better to fight them here, perhaps, than in the open." He looked down to the plaza, one hundred and fifty feet below. "Keep everyone out of sight. I'll be right down."

She disappeared.

Raven touched his sleeve. "Daniel, if it doesn't matter where we are- you and me, I mean- maybe I should just give it up. Surrender the transmitter to Rugard."

He smiled at that, leaning to kiss her. "We can't make that decision by ourselves. Because it's more than just us now." He stood. "You'd better go get the machine and see if it works yet. This may be our last chance to get back."

She looked over the parapet at the approaching convicts and nodded gloomily.

Down in the lobby, Daniel assessed his group. Their look was of defiance. They were tired of being marooned, tricked, tracked, and preyed upon. Tired of being pushed around. That was good. There was a hard core to these people now, a determination to hang on to the hope they'd earned. He could rely on that.

"Okay," he began. "Is everyone here?"

"Even Iris," Ned said. His shoulder had almost healed but now his forehead had a new raw cut. From the horse scouts, Daniel assumed. "Our shopper."