William Dietrich - Getting back

She'd calmed from her fright. "The best prices I'd ever seen and I dropped it all."

The others laughed.

"It was bad luck to linger here," Angus reminded. He'd come back when he saw Rugard's army, and now he was trapped with them.

That made them quiet.

"Where's Oliver?"

"Staying away."

Daniel took a breath. "Okay. What's done is done. We tried to outrun them but that didn't work. It doesn't look like we can run through them, either; there's too many. What they want is the transmitter. What they want is to take away our chance to get back. So, we give up. Or, we fight so hard that they give up."

"You've seen this Warden," Peter said quietly. "What are our chances?"

"As bankable as a lottery ticket. As unanswerable as a prayer. They're tough, wild, nasty people." He grinned fiercely. "But so are we, now."

"Damn straight," Ethan said.

"The only ones who can decide if it's time to fight, however, are you. It depends on how badly you want to get back. How badly you want the outside world to know what happened to you. How willing you are to stay here."

"We decided this at the river, Daniel," Jessica replied. "It's not just getting back. It's what's right, not just for us but everyone. It's about contacting the cyber underground and the opposition and exposing this place in order to shut it down. It's about not just our little group, but every person they put in Australia. We ran away to come here. We've all run away our whole lives. We're still running. But Outback Adventure suggested we'd find our why if we came here. This is mine, I think. Not to get back, but to make a stand for something. It's not right for those convicts to steal our hope. To steal everyone's hope. I say we fight for that. For hope."

The others nodded. There was a grim resolve in their eyes. A quickening of pulse. A tensing of muscle.

"Can we beat them?" asked Peter.

Daniel stuck his hands in his pockets and glanced upward at the lobby ceiling. "Well, we've got the high ground. We can barricade the lobby and throw things down from above. This building will work as a fort, or a castle. If we hurt them enough, maybe they'll go away. If we can talk to them, we can tell them the truth: that Raven is the one allowed to get back."

"But can we do that?" Peter persisted.

He pulled out a figure from his pocket. "My good luck charm tells me we can."

"What the devil is that?"

"Gordo Firecracker, nemesis of evil," Amaya recalled dryly. "The worst charm you've ever seen. He's been carrying that doll all the way across Australia."

"Gordo is not a doll," Daniel said with mock tartness, holding it up so others could see. "He's an action figure. Not to mention my field marshal and chief strategist."

They laughed again.

"Great," Peter said. "And what does Gordo suggest we do?"

"Fortify for attack. Prepare for negotiation. And…" He looked thoughtful.

"Pray for a miracle?" Peter suggested.

"Build a catapult."

So the fugitives had run to ground in the first city they came to! After all the fancy talk of wilderness nirvana, they'd taken instinctive refuge in a damn skyscraper!

Ico snickered at the irony of it.

The Expedition of Recovery might have missed the fugitives entirely if they'd had the sense to hide in this civic labyrinth, but instead they'd gone looting for all the goods they professed to disdain. One of their fool women had been spotted scurrying down a side street, her arms loaded with useless jewelry. When the scouts had tried to ride her down the fugitives had boiled out of the Coraco Building like a disturbed hive, Rugard's men barely galloping off with their lives. But the incident had revealed the thieves' location and number, allowing the convicts to swiftly surround the base of the tower. Ico could see the baubles now, scattered on the plaza as uselessly as coins in a fountain.

The fugitives, visible through the broken windows, were working desperately to prepare. The lobby had been barricaded and it wouldn't be easy to get to them, the convicts knew. The Warden circuited the office tower thoughtfully and then walked out into the plaza, alone. Arrogant, weaponless.

Both sides watched him, the fugitives crouched by the windows.

He took a breath. "I… want… Raven!" he suddenly roared. His voice echoed away among the old towers. "Where is the bitch? She has something of mine!" The demand seemed to float, hanging in the air.

Daniel stood up in full view. "She can't come to the door right now!"

Men on both sides laughed. Rugard jerked around and his side quieted.

He turned back. "Your run is over, Dyson! You're surrounded, outnumbered, and out of options! You can't get back now without us!"

"And your men can't get back at all! Have you told your rabble there's no room on the rescue craft for anyone but you, Rugard? Have you told them that you've led them a thousand miles and are risking their lives to save only your own skin?"

He wheeled around to face his troops. "That's a lie!"

"No it isn't!" Daniel shouted.

"It's a lie like the lies United Corporations has told us all our lives!" Rugard roared. "Look at him! He's built a whole gang out of his promise to get people back, and they're laughing at us right now! He's sucked in followers with the promise that they can have the seats that by rights go to you!"

The convicts growled like the thunder from an approaching storm.

"No! That's not true…"

"He's a thief who's trying to keep you here like the others of his kind back home!"

The convicts roared, angry now, and a drumming started. They beat on pavement, they beat on stone, and they beat on rotting benches, rusting siding, and corrugated doors. Rugard strode back and forth in front of them, jerking his arms up in rhythm. Boom. Boom. Boom. As regular as a machine, as ominous as an approaching footfall. There was no complexity to it. Just a steady, solemn, ceaseless pounding to drive home their menace. It was a music of warning, a drumming to summon courage and infect a prey with fear. They'd found it! The key, perhaps, to getting back.

The sound rolled up to the windows where Daniel's followers worked more furiously, stockpiling anything they could pry loose to hurl down on their besiegers. It looked like a battle.

"The one advantage we have is height," Daniel kept lecturing, climbing from one floor to another. "I want them to think this tower is coming down on them if they try to rush us. I want an avalanche of furniture. A blizzard of debris."

I sound like a demented Napoleon, he thought wryly. He stopped to see what Amaya was doing. "You couldn't whip up another batch of gunpowder, could you?"

"Probably something worse if I'd time to thoroughly explore," she replied. "There might even be modern explosives somewhere, if we looked: this was a mining town. But we didn't get time for that so all we can do is strip this building." She began to point. "The rubber bumpers on some of the table furniture are being stripped off and fashioned into slingshots. For ammunition we can pull nails and screws out of the walls. There's metal trim with enough flex to pull back for makeshift bows, rods from shades already notched for scraps of glass to make arrows, and sprinkler pipe to use as spears. Not to mention tons of stuff to simply heave out of the windows."

"Your talents are wasted, Amaya. You belong in an arms race."

"I want to get rid of these people so we don't have to have arms races." She looked past him through the window to the green hills beyond the city's buildings. "It's so beautiful here, Daniel. Why infest it with criminals?"

"It must have seemed like an easy solution."

"If they ever came here- if they ever got out of their boardrooms and visited this place they've made- they'd see their mistake." She meant the executives of United Corporations.