Another desk was hurled into the night, again arcing down at the approaching tower. This time it clipped the contraption with a loud bang, jerking the top so violently that the convicts there were nearly thrown off. One of the protective auto hoods was torn away and came down with the desk. The tower stopped again.
'No, no!' Rugard shouted. 'Go faster! Get in under their reach!'
His men were hesitating. The source of these meteoric desks was unknown and the escalating war was beginning to rattle them. They wanted the transmitter, but not at the cost of their lives.
'Move! Move if you want to live! If you don't move, by God I'll kill you!'
The tower had just started trundling forward again when it was hit broadside, a desk hitting it like a gong and making the entire structure reverberate. Then the missile slid harmlessly down the steel scales, crashing onto the pavement below. Two men ran forward and dragged it out of the way before the defenders could hit them with missiles.
'They can't break it!' Rugard roared. 'It's stronger than their fire! Now, now, move across and let's end this thing!'
Up on the roof of the office tower, Daniel's men were desperate. 'That was our best shot,' Peter said grimly. 'The thing hardly even rocked. What are we going to do?'
Daniel looked wildly around. 'We need something heavier.' He pointed. 'That rusted-out air-conditioning unit, maybe!'
Peter looked dubious. 'That elephant? I don't know if the elevator is heavy enough to counterweight it.'
'It might be if we climb onto the elevator!'
'Are you crazy! The cable might snap!'
'Then we'll use the automatic brakes! Come on, help me pry this sucker loose!'
The air conditioner was not much bigger than a hurled desk, but twice as heavy. They rolled it on the trebuchet arm and balanced it between holding prongs. It seemed too ponderous to throw. Daniel ran to the lip of the building. The siege tower was rolling closer.
What other chance did they have?
'Okay, we've got one shot at this thing!' He jumped onto the top of the elevator. 'Peter, you aim and fire!'
The others looked down the elevator well dubiously at where he was standing, eight feet below them. A loose steel cable led from the elevator to the trebuchet arm. 'Come on, get down here with me! We need your weight!'
They jumped aboard. Peter had disappeared. Then they heard his voice: 'Launch!' With the jerk of a lever the elevator began to fall. The cable went taut, the counterweight arm came down, and the ponderously heavy air- conditioning unit soared up.
Then there was a jerk, a bang, and the counterweight elevator cable snapped. Instead of stopping after a one-floor drop, the box with three men on top started plunging toward the basement of the building.
'Brakes!' one of them screeched.
The emergency brakes had been pried open with a steel bar. Now Daniel lunged at it. 'I can't get the damn bar out!' he shouted.
The elevator was accelerating. Angus lurched over, grabbed, and jerked. Suddenly the bar was out, whipping so violently that it slapped them against the concrete of the elevator shaft and scraping them as they tumbled, falling with the box. Then the brakes designed to halt such falls snapped outward in a shower of sparks. There was a long howl of metal. Then the elevator abruptly stopped, rocking slightly.
The three men were in a stunned heap on the elevator roof. 'I hear cheering,' Angus grunted.
'Which side?' Daniel gasped.
'We stopped near a door.' The third man, named Royce, pointed. They used the brake bar to lever it open and crawled onto the sixth floor, then ran to the window.
The siege tower was gone.
No, not gone, but toppled, broken, its transmission tower framework crumpled and the hurled air-conditioning unit wedged where it had creased the tower in two. The women, three floors below, were cheering.
The men ran down to them. 'What happened?'
'You hit them dead center and it went over like a tree,' Amaya reported excitedly. 'They ran like cockroaches from light. Some are pretty badly hurt and I think the fight went out of them. They'd started to rush the lobby but ran back out!'
'Casualties?'
'Henry's dead and three more are seriously wounded. Almost everyone is a little banged up, and everyone's shaken. The convicts are hurting even worse.'
Peter came down. 'The trebuchet arm broke when we fired,' he reported. 'Maybe we can repair it but we've lost our counterweight, and we have to drag up more ammunition.'
'We're also running low on things to throw or shoot,' Amaya added quietly.
Daniel nodded. 'Where's Raven?'
'Here.' She came out of the shadows. She was bruised, and a hand was wrapped in a bloody bandage. 'I keep trying the transmitter, but it's still jammed. We're awfully close to the ocean, Daniel. Maybe the Cone doesn't have an edge, at least not here. Maybe the coastline extends farther east elsewhere. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid the only way it's going to work is to get back the activator.'
'You mean make a deal?'
'I mean we may be fighting to save something I can't promise will work.'
He regarded them somberly. 'Do we give up?'
Then they heard Rugard's voice, calling ftom the plaza.
'Dyson! You in there? You still alive, you son of a bitch?'
What a balls-up, blood-spattered, rubble-strewn, humiliating nightmare of a mess! Damnation! Rugard Sloan had felt like a goddamn Genghis Khan when he came up with his siege tower idea, straight out of old movies-well, it was the weasel's idea, but same thing- and then that bitch and her thief companion had started spitting furniture at him like they'd packed an atomic cannon! Where the hell had that come from? Stuff flying off the roof like it was being put into orbit! The hastily erected tower had toppled, he had a dozen people dead or seriously wounded, two dozen more crying about minor injuries, and a whole army that was thoroughly spooked. Rugard wasn't certain a single convict would follow him if he led another charge across the plaza. The Warden was desperate, as desperate as he'd ever been in his life. He just hoped the fugitives he'd trapped were desperate too.
'Dyson! You too hurt to answer?' He kept edging farther out into the plaza, keeping a wary eye for a sudden rock or bolt.
If he couldn't get in, Rugard reasoned, they still couldn't get out. That was his key. He could starve them, or maybe smoke them: start a fire at the base that might choke them where they stood. But maybe there was an easier way: a way he should have tried from the beginning.
'Dyson, you come out where I can see you! You come out and talk like a man!'
'You coming to surrender?'
Rugard looked up. The voice had floated defiantly again from that third-floor window and he could see Dyson's head up there now, a pale balloon in the firelight from the rim of the plaza. He'd love to put an arrow or a rock in the middle of it, but that wouldn't do what he wanted to do.
'I'm coming to gut you all like pigs!' the Warden replied, hoping his bluster masked his frustration. 'I'm coming to put your heads on poles! I'm coming to set a fire that'll roast you all like hamburger! Unless you listen to reason!'
It was quiet for a moment as they digested this. Then, 'We're not giving you the transmitter, Rugard! We've beaten the best you can do and we'll beat you again! Let us go! Someday, maybe all of us will get back.'
Rugard hesitated. The problem was, Dyson didn't sound scared enough. Not that he doubted he could beat him if they came to grips with each other, but he wanted more fear. That's when he knew he had his opponents, when they mentally gave up. There was a disquieting chance that this guy had a martyr complex, and that gave Rugard pause. The truth was, any man could be dangerous if he was unafraid to die. Yet what choice did the Warden have? The others wouldn't follow him much longer.
'I'm not a man of violence, Dyson!' he now yelled. 'I'm just a man of order. Of organization! I didn't want it to
