dressed in a simple shift that looked cut from salvaged cloth- a parachute? Daniel wonderedthat showed her figure to good effect. Her brown arms and calves were bare and she was shoeless, her soles apparently hardened to the hot earth. 'The Warden will see you now,' she said, smug as a prom queen, her eyes passing appraisingly over Raven and Amaya to calibrate any competition. 'Bring your offering.' Then she walked back, provocatively swaying.
'Offering?' Tucker asked.
'That's you,' Raven explained. 'Fresh labor.'
'Great.'
'At least I know what he stayed up for,' Ico said, following the blonde with his eyes.
'Keep away from her,' Ethan said. 'Drina is Rugard's.'
'Rugard?'
'That's the Warden's name. Rugard Sloan. But don't call him that. He doesn't like it.'
They climbed the hill. The log cabin walls facing the compound were broken only by the stout wooden door and slit-like loophole windows. Side walls extended to the rock of the backing cliff, making the structure look more like a blockhouse than a residence. The door opening was dark, and the newcomers expected the house to be stifling inside. When they ducked through, however, they saw that a back wall was absent from the cabin and the roof extended only halfway. There was a rear open terrace of hardpan dirt against the cliff, half of it shaded by a flat roof of woven branches. A low cave in the cliff face was closed off by a stake door, and a spring at the rock's base fed a shallow pool. The backing cliff rose two hundred feet. Daniel recognized the essential elements of a well- situated fortress: high ground, thick walls, a secure water supply, and even an apparent storeroom. The place was designed to withstand a siege. No vote, indeed.
He looked around. A shadowy figure leaned in one of the dark corners, the gleam of what looked to be some kind of long knife or sword at his side. A bodyguard? Drina lounged on a crude wooden bed in a corner.
'So you didn't like the desert after all,' a rough voice said from another shadow. They turned to the sound, graveled from liquor or barked commands. 'I could have told you what you'd find out there.' Their host was sitting, they saw as their eyes adjusted, lazing arrogantly back in a surprisingly modern chair of metal and fabric. It came from an airplane, Daniel realized: probably the one that had crashed with Ethan.
'We found more than you think,' Raven said.
'Yes, four more boobs, dropped from the sky. Well, come on then. Let's have a look.' They shuffled forward, the Warden evaluating them as they studied him. He was tanned a swarthy dark like his underlings, his face clean- shaven and his dark hair cropped close as a helmet. Small scars wrote a history of combat on his face. His jaw was strong, his nose slightly hooked like a Roman aristocrat's, and his eyes were a curious, empty gray: the color of lunar dust, Daniel thought. The effect was cold.
'Not much of a find, Raven. And me to care for them.'
'We weren't looking for anybody's help,' Daniel interrupted.
The Warden's eyes narrowed at him. 'Then lucky for you that you found it,' he growled. 'You'd be bones otherwise.' He had an arrogant authority that dominated the room, and the corded muscle of a man used to hard company. There was a stink of menace about him, a manner as instinctively vicious as a pit bull. He also appeared unapologetic about it. No, proud.
'I'm not as bad as all that,' he said, as if reading Daniel's mind. 'I'm not going to bite.' And then he gave a yellowed smile that suggested he just might. 'My name is Rugard Sloan, but you'll call me Warden. Only Warden. I'm the father of this community.'
'Of Nowhere-ville,' Ico said.
He squinted at Ico. 'You appreciate my joke. And you chose to come to Nowhere because the alternative was death in the desert, right? So. Who are you? What are your skills?'
They gave their names and, at the Warden's urging, their former occupations. Only Ico hesitated. 'A systems manager,' he finally said.
'Fired.' It was not a question.
'An opportunities transfer,' Ico said defensively.
'And before that?'
'Tax analyst.'
'And fired. And before that fired. And before that fired. Am I correct?'
Ico looked at him sourly. 'Only because I tell the truth.'
'Don't be embarrassed. Your work history is typical of half the wanderers who come to me. Misfits, rejects, incompetents, rebels. In that world. But not in mine. I give them a home. In return they work for me, and work hard. We've come a long ways in a short time. I hope you give our little community a chance.'
Daniel spoke up. 'We came here on a kind of wilderness sabbatical. Since our arrival we've been flooded, baked, and bitten. We weren't warned of any of this. We're a little hesitant to give anything a chance right now.'
Rugard nodded. 'Do you think I created our little Purgatory? That I pulled the strings that put you here?' He snorted. 'They told me less than they told you. But I've put it together, by gleaning information from this soul and that.'
'That we're marooned with a bunch of cons,' Ico said.
'I believe the phrase is 'morally impaired.' '
'But rehabilitation…' Amaya began.
'… Is a fairy tale to lull dumplings like you into believing they're safe from people like me,' Rugard completed. He grinned. 'Oh, they tried, of course, but I was really quite wicked. I like to be wicked, because it's payback for a lousy, unfair world I never asked to be a part of. They made me what I am! So they don't cure us, dear, they get rid of us. It used to be drugs and costly warehouse prisons; now it's a continent full of nowheres, fit for nothings. Cheap, guiltless. We got a speech: 'No guards, no walls. You're free to starve, slit each other's throats, or live like brute savages. If you try to get back by boat we'll sink you with the help of satellite surveillance. But if by some miracle you make it through our net, no one will believe you. And even if they believe you- even just as a paranoid legend on the cyber underground- the story will never get into our corporate-controlled media. Oh, and have a nice day.' '
'So there's a lot of you?' she asked.
'Thousands, I'd guess. Most die before we ever see them. Or maybe there's other compounds like this one. Who knows? Who cares? We're all just heinous criminals, sent Down Under to remake ourselves. Except we never get back, even when we do.'
'A whole continent as a prison?' Ico asked.
'A whole continent to salve their conscience, is my guess. We all know capital punishment is abhorrent in today's politically correct world. Life imprisonment is expensive. Rehabilitation for the worst of us is a fraud. And Australia is already written off, a killing ground of plague. So my kind is dumped here while United Corporations makes up stories about our scientific rehabilitation, claiming they give us new identities to reenter society without moral stain. 'Cause any strife and you lose your old life.' We've all heard the jingle. It's just truer than we thought. It's not because we're brain-sponged that we don't get in touch with our families. It's because we're down here. It saves them a fortune.'
'But we're not convicts,' Tucker objected.
'Yes, the puzzling mystery. Why drop urban dilettantes into Devil's Island? Certainly you prove useful for my kind to feed off: we started robbing you of your supplies from the beginning. But if they wanted to deliver manna from heaven, why include you useless knobs of flesh in the freightage? It was only after talking to enough of you self-absorbed bastards that I figured out the common linkage.'
'Our challenge of authority,' Ico said.
'No! Your pathetic acceptance of it. You didn't challenge society, you whined about it. It's not just that you're useless- God knows the world is carrying billions of chunks of human deadwood right now, dispirited and zoned out- but you were worse than useless. You spread dissatisfaction like a virus without proposing any cure. At least my kind had the balls to take what we wanted. But you weaklings! You wanted to run away! So, they put you down here with the likes of me, the criminal and disaffected in one happy family. The only difference is that you paid to go.'
'That's not fair,' Tucker protested.
