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.
'They won't. And I'm not sure they didn't intend this. Everyone at each other's throats. As a lesson for us, and a solution for them.'
She looked at him softly. 'It's good then that you and Raven…'
'Yes.' He smiled sheepishly. 'Things might have been different between us, you know, if she'd gone.'
'If you'd let her go.'
He nodded. 'Right. You know, I love her, but I still don't know about her, Amaya. I still don't know her heart.'
'I do. She's changed.'
The drumming went on for an hour. The sound was enough to unnerve, if you let it, but they wouldn't.
'Christ, they're out of tune,' Ethan complained, covering his ears.
'Musically impaired,' Amaya added.
The convicts drummed and shook and reached inside themselves for the savagery the modern world had tried to cram beneath their surface, bringing it out again in snarls and wild howls so that they'd have the courage to charge for what they wanted. The coordination of the drumming brought them together, focused on the building and transmitter within. Then Rugard lifted his arm and the convicts fell raggedly into silence.
'Listen to me!' he shouted to his followers. 'You want to get back? The way back is in that building! You want to get out of prison! It's through those people up there, the kind of people who put you into prison in the first place! Up there is the only way!'
'Don't listen to him!' Daniel tried again from the third story. 'You can't get- '
'The way back is through him!'
The convicts roared. And as the Warden swung his arm the ragged army surged forward in the afternoon sunshine, a Stone Age charge of spear and club and sling and rock as timeless as humanity. Clan against tribe. Ego against ego. Pounding blood and dry-mouthed excitement.
Instinct had come to Eden.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Rugard had a mob, not an army. He had a goal, not a strategy. His aim was simply the transmitter. The men and women who surged toward the base of the office tower came in a ragged yelling line like a noose being tightened on a condemned neck, but it was a garrote that was frayed. Some assailants lagged back, hoping their comrades would do the hard fighting. Others, faced mostly with blank concrete on three sides of the first two floors, ran around to congregate at the lobby door.
The windows above erupted.
The defenders threw everything they had at their attackers. Desks came hurtling down like meteors. Lengths of pipe whistled down like spears. Light fixtures plummeted, porcelain sinks that had been ripped loose from abandoned lavatories exploded on the pavement, and bits of metal were fired from Amaya's makeshift slingshots and bows. Screams and panic erupted among the convicts. Some were struck down, many fell back in confusion, and a few of the boldest ran the gauntlet to hack their way through the initial barricade and into the lobby.
Ethan met them with half a dozen adventurers in a wild counterattack, swinging staves, makeshift swords, and hardened wooden spears. Cut off from reinforcement by the rain of debris from above, the convicts recoiled. Beyond their opponents was the stairwell with yet another barricade. Who knew how many defenders were behind that?
