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.'
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.
