'Where'd they get all those other people?'
'Or where did they get her?'
'She doesn't look like a captive. And I think I recognize some of the others.'
Wrench wondered if the scouts on the other side of the canyon wall had stayed awake. 'Didn't expect this many, but damn! Signal the others! It looks like Ico the Psycho was right after all.' He grinned, wondering if he'd get some kind of reward. 'We got 'em.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The dam was the most substantive relic of Australian civilization that Daniel's group had seen yet, and it was intact. The reservoir it had created was full, water lapping near the lip of the dam, and a small falls poured over the spillway gates at its middle. The wedge of concrete was of moderate size, its crest two hundred yards long and its downstream face thirty feet high. At its middle was a notch thirty yards long where the dam elevation dropped half the height of a man to a set of rusted spillway gates. It was here the reservoir water slid to the river below.
Before the plague the spillway gates were routinely opened and closed to control reservoir depth, electricity generation, and the flow of the river downstream. Disuse and rust had frozen them shut, corrosion eating into the steel to allow a spray of leakage around the gate edges. The reservoir had risen enough to top the old gates, the outlet water looking orange where it ran down the old steel. Bridging this sheet of water was an old wooden catwalk, connecting one end of the dam's concrete crest to the other. The dam and its catwalk made a bridge across the waterway, its top wide enough for Daniel's group to begin filing over two by two.
'Well, this is convenient,' he remarked to himself, leading the way. Almost too convenient.
There was a small concrete blockhouse on the western dam crest, adjacent to the spillway gates. Its door had rotted to paper. Out of curiosity, Ethan kicked it down and went in. Wet concrete steps led down in the gloom to a cluster of gigantic gears and levers that had once controlled the spillway gates. The electric motors to do so were powerless, their electrical cables withered like dead vines. Amaya poked around the machinery curiously, fingering the levers.
'This must be a manual override,' she said, pointing to a large wheel.
A short flight of wooden steps led up to the catwalk over the spillway. Daniel told the others to wait, mounted the steps, and stepped out onto the wooden bridge. It creaked and rocked slightly because its posts were slowly rotting, but it still looked capable of bearing human weight. He looked down at the river below the dam, flat and brown, flowing north through a thickly forested valley. At some point it must turn east through the mountains to the sea. Maybe they could follow the river to the coast.
But first to the other bank. 'One at a time!' he called. 'It's pretty wobbly!'
He went across gingerly. So far, so good. One by one the others began to follow, those having crossed the creaking catwalk waiting on the eastern half of the dam for the others to catch up.
The group was evenly split, half on either side of the spillway, when a rock suddenly sizzled out of the trees on the far bank and hit a recent recruit named Ned Putnam. He grunted in surprise, spun, and almost went over the lip of the dam before the others caught him. Everyone crouched in stunned surprise. The attack was so unexpected they had difficulty grasping what had happened.
The trees on the eastern shore hid their attackers. Ned was down on the concrete, cursing. 'It might be broken,' he hissed, holding his shoulder.
Daniel and some others quickly picked up a few random chunks of concrete that had eroded on the crest, and others anxiously pointed their spears. They felt exposed and vulnerable. Then three men stepped into sight, one letting a sling dangle menacingly from his right hand. It was the most ancient of weapons, the simple killer that had allowed David to topple Goliath. A stone was fitted into a long loop of leather, twirled around the head to gain momentum, and then released with a snap of the wrist. If it hit the head it could kill. The other two convicts had steel-tipped spears, crude swords, and the same kind of curved throwing sticks the aborigines had once hurled. It was a war party. The trio were tall, bearded, ragged, streaked with menacing daubs of white mud, and confident- looking. Not to mention familiar.
'Who the hell is that?' their first recruit, Peter, asked in bewilderment.
'I recognize them from Erehwon,' Ethan muttered. 'Rugard's clan.'
'Who?'
'There's some convicts who know we have the transmitter,' Daniel reluctantly explained. 'We thought we'd left them far behind, but obviously we didn't.'
Peter looked at the trio with alarm. 'We've got the morally impaired after us?' he asked in disbelief. 'We have to fight for it?'
'If we want to get back,' Daniel replied grimly.
'You didn't tell us about this!'
'No, I hoped we wouldn't have to. Now we have to decide what to do.'
The three convicts stood shoulder to shoulder at the end of the dam like an impassable wall. 'You left without saying goodbye!' one of the ominous trio called. Gallo, Daniel thought his name was. Extortionist, if memory served. Bullying or sniveling, depending on who he was with. The man pointed toward the groaning Ned with the tip of his spear. 'So we dispensed with hello, as well! That's just a warning!'
'A warning of what?' Daniel said, trying to think as he stalled.
'There's a toll for crossing this particular waterway! One stolen transmitter!'
'Daniel, let's rush those bastards,' Ethan growled. 'We outnumber them.'
'No, we're not ready for that.' He glanced back. 'We haven't talked this over, and there are a lot of women. I don't want to get anyone killed. Maybe we can find another way around them.' His group quickly filed back across the catwalk in retreat. Yet even as they did so, four more of Rugard's men appeared at the other end of the dam. The tallest one was easily recognizable, his scarred face memorable. Wrench, Daniel remembered. A brutal enforcer before he came to Australia.
'The toll is the same this way too!' Wrench called.
They were trapped, and without cover or room to maneuver on the crest of the dam.
'How the devil did they get ahead of us?' Ethan wondered. 'And behind us? And where's Rugard?'
'We haven't been moving that fast,' Daniel said. 'Somehow they guessed where we're going: maybe Ico helped them. Who knows? I was foolish not to hurry, but I thought they'd have given up by now.'
'Why would they give up? We've got the only way back.' Ethan's tone was gloomy.
'What are we going to do?' a woman named Iris asked plaintively. She was looking from one end of the dam to the other.
Daniel was silent, thinking.
Raven came up out of the gearhouse.
'Rugard's goons are here,' he told her quietly. 'It's your transmitter. Your ticket home. And these people's lives. Do you want to fight for it, or not?'
She glanced around quickly, taking in the situation.
'Better hurry before the Warden gets here!' Gallo shouted. 'The toll goes up then!'
'If we give it up and Rugard uses it, he'll simply disappear,' Amaya warned. 'The world will never know what's happening here. Or believe him, even if he tells.'
'But we didn't tell these people about this danger,' Daniel added. The others had clustered around. 'It's a terrible place for a battle.'
Raven shook her head. 'I can't ask you to fight so I can get back.'
'Damn right,' the injured Ned said. 'It wasn't right not to tell us about this.'
'I didn't want to worry anyone,' Daniel said. 'You've had worries enough.'
No one said anything.
'Well, it's a group choice,' he went on. 'We can give up the transmitter.'
They considered that.
Finally Ned sighed and spoke up again, his voice strained from the pain in his shoulder. 'Daniel, you weren't right for not trusting us with the full story, but I'm also tired of being picked on by men like these. These are the
