Farther on… yes, he'd come this way, he thought. The ravine looked familiar, as did the crest of the ridge. The convicts had found and looted his pack near here. But the useless box which he'd never mentioned to the Warden… it could have been dropped anywhere.
'All right, we'll spread out and search the ravine,' Raven said. 'Meet by that pink rock by dusk. Ethan, where did you fall from?'
'That way,' he pointed.
'I'm going to look up there. The rest of you try here.' The men slid down loose scree into the brushy gully.
It was stifling hot. Flies found Daniel, there was no water, and he searched in a fog of depression so thick that it was difficult to even function. This is what his life had come down to: searching a hot desert for a metal box to get back to a place he'd been desperate to flee from just two weeks before. What would he do if he did get back? He could no longer imagine a future.
Hours went by with no sign of a human artifact. He drifted down the ravine from the other two men, looking as much for shade as for an electronic black box. He suspected that Ico, skeptical of the whole story, was already napping.
Then, while sitting despondently beneath a gum tree and studying a sandy bottom raked by intermittent water as artfully as a Japanese garden, he realized their mistake. The floods! In the months since Ethan's crash there must have been enough rain to carry things downhill. Or downstream. It was the hunt for their supplies all over again! The box was heavy, no doubt, more like a rock than a log. Still, streams had the power to move entire boulders when running high. Think like an animal, Raven had told him. Now he had to think like a rock. How far could a flood push it? Where in the stream course would it come to rest?
He quickly walked a mile down the ravine bottom, seeing nothing, and then turned to return upstream more slowly and carefully, probing the center of the sandy basins where the heaviest debris would collect. He found rocks all right, and even at one point some dampness signaling water close to the surface. But a transmitter? He worried its weight would have carried it beneath a covering layer of sand.
What saved him in the end was that the box was orange, its battered surface flecked with scratches revealing a black undercoating like a speckled egg. The beacon was jammed under a larger boulder, sand sucked away from it by the current. Could such a thing still work?
The metal was hot to the touch so he wrapped it in his shirt like a baby, carrying it upstream. Ethan and Ico were waiting at the pink rock, looking hot, sticky, and depressed, and so he shielded it behind his back until he came up to them. Then he held it out.
'Here it is,' he announced. 'Phone home.'
Ethan looked at it warily. 'That's it?'
'I'm asking you.'
He looked at it dubiously. 'I can hardly remember.' He peered closer, inspecting the switch and socket ports. The memory of it was coming back to him now- his familiar world of electronics seemed an eternity away! — but how much did he want his new companions to know? 'I guess so.'
'Good grief,' Ico said. 'Well, let's go find Raven. She must be upstream.'
There was no stream of course, just the sandy bed and a bottom of heat. It ended in a cul-de-sac of cliffs with a litter of boulders at their base. Raven was in the shade of one, looking drained.
'We found it,' Ethan called. 'Maybe.'
She didn't look up.
'You don't seem very excited,' Ico observed.
She looked up at him morosely, clearly disturbed. 'I found him.'
Ico walked past her into a cluster of boulders, the others following. The rocks formed a kind of nest with an open-roofed room in their middle.
'Ouch,' Ico breathed.
A cross hung on the rocks, except a moment's inspection revealed the cross was really a man, or had been a man, arms outstretched where he'd been pinioned, and now almost black and desiccated by the sun. Dried flesh pulled back from screaming teeth. Eyes gone. Stained strips of clothes and leathered flesh.
There was a glint on one finger. Daniel stepped forward. 'Academy ring.'
'So we've found your pilot,' Ico said.
Ethan was looking at the figure in dismay. 'I didn't know the Warden did this. They told me the pilot was missing and… I didn't ask. My God, the man could have helped us! It's insane.'
'This Warden of yours must have really been pissed off.'
Raven had come in behind them, looking upward. The rocks radiated heat like an oven. She looked not so much horrified as depressed.
'I guess we want to steer clear of the morally impaired, right?' Ico said to her. 'Good thing we're getting out of here.'
She looked at him sadly. 'There's something I haven't told you.'
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They buried the pilot in the sand, Raven taking care to first remove his ring and the molar filling of identification micro-data that had replaced the dog tag for employees on remote and risky missions. Then the group filed back to Car Camp as the sun sank, walking the last few miles under the stars. They were exhausted, but they were also impatient to learn what Raven had to tell them. She simply suggested she save it until Amaya and the recovering Tucker could hear too. She walked ahead of them as if rehearsing what she would say.
Upon returning they built up the fire.
'What I haven't told you is that we have to go back to Erehwon,' Raven began without preamble. 'We have to go see the Warden.'
'What!' Ethan cried. Clearly, she hadn't told him this.
She nodded, acknowledging his surprise. 'You already know ordinary communications don't work in Australia. You know the Warden took a transmitter from the plane- from the pilot- and it didn't work.'
'So?' Daniel said. 'That's why we found this one.'
'Yes. Because the continent must be jammed.' She glanced around, gauging their reaction. 'Outback Adventure- United Corporationsdoesn't want its clients calling out. You need a special instrument.'
'The Cone!' Ico said.
'Hmm?'
He looked excited. 'I stayed awake when they shipped us out here and heard the pilot talking about some damned Cone. I thought it was a password, slang, for the continent. But what if it's this zone of jamming?'
'You stayed awake?' Raven asked.
'Damn right I did. My trust only goes so far, and a good thing too. So they fly us into this zone made from… what? A satellite?'
She nodded, watching him. 'The question is whether they could do that over an entire continent.'
'Strongly enough to confound weak consumer electronics, I'll bet. Maybe strongly enough to defeat ordinary rescue beacons. They used narrow-focus satellite jamming beams in the Taiwanese War.'
'That explains why my GPS didn't work,' Ethan remembered.
'My stuff too,' Ico said. 'I thought it was just on the fritz.'
Raven nodded. 'When I came here and recognized there was no normal exit point, I began to think about alternative ways to signal for help,' she explained. 'Then I talked to Ethan and he told me about his crash. My theory is that no pilot would fly into this place unless they could expect rescue in the event of disaster, but that United Corporations would want to make sure it wasn't sending rescue craft in after the wrong people, risking a hijack by the morally impaired. The survivor who was signaling had to be someone knowledgeable enough to do something to activate the rescue beacon: a bona fide pilot, in other words. When I heard that the transmitter the convicts had brought back from the crash didn't work, I at first thought they simply must have taken the wrong one. But that made no sense- if they'd stumbled on the right one, U.C. would be sending its rescue crew into the lion's
