Getting Back (23 page)

Daniel glanced at the woman who had intrigued him. She seemed to have discovered a way out of this exile when everyone else had failed. Interesting.

With Ethan recognizing the country with increasing confidence, they found the transport by noon. It was in two pieces. There was the intact tail where Ethan had survived, its metal frame glinting in the heat. Then a stretch of unmarked desert where the nose section had skipped ahead over a rise, followed by a sand furrow still seeded with debris. At its end was the burned-out hulk of the forward section of the aircraft, the fuselage ripped open to the sky.

Ethan hung back. "Some of my friends might still be in there."

"Yuck," Ico whispered.

It wasn't the possibility of bodies that made Daniel reluctant to approach the forward fuselage. Rather, the derelict machine made clear just how completely cut off from civilization they now were. Somewhere in the sky above, satellites orbited. Somewhere across the heat-glazed horizon the sea broke, and out there ships ran and jets flew toward populated shores. But all that was across a gulf as impassable as the abyss between the stars, and instead of reassuring him of the reality of civilization, this burnt husk confirmed how far he was from it.

"It's not a sight to inspire confidence," he said.

"Where one transport came, another might follow," Raven countered. "Come on, this is the way home."

The group went cautiously forward. Despite Ethan's uneasiness, whatever corpses the transport had contained were long gone, disposed by scavengers and decay. One cockpit seat had disappeared where the pilot had ejected. The other remained, the instrument panel stained dark with what might have been the co-pilot's blood. It was the panel itself that interested Raven.

"See the empty place that held an instrument?" she said. "That must be what the pilot came back for: a transmitter."

"Which the Warden took and which doesn't work," Daniel summarized.

"Yes. So now we look at the tail."

It was a pillaged stub, some of its metal panels stripped for salvage and its seats uprooted. The absence of fire had saved Ethan's life and made that part of the wreckage valuable for salvage. Raven crawled into the rearmost recess and hunted, then backed out. "The other instrument I'm looking for is gone too," she reported. "There's a hole where it's been removed."

"Great," said Ico.

"No, that's good. It fits my guess. I think the pilot gave it to Ethan."

"How do you know that?"

"The pilot gave me something for safekeeping before we separated," Ethan said. "I was pretty groggy, but I knew he was anxious to get some other component and leave. He told me that what he was stuffing in my pack would keep us from having to walk to the beach, but I didn't understand what he meant."

"So what happened?"

"He left and the convicts came, drawn by the smoke I suppose," Ethan said. "And he was screaming, and I was running for my life and trying to lighten my load…"

"You threw it away."

"I didn't know what it was. I resented having to carry it."

"He threw the damn thing away," Ico repeated to Daniel. "Unbelievable."

"You'd better hope so," Ethan said with irritation, "or the Warden would already have taken the only way out of here."

Daniel looked out the oval opening of the sheared-off tail at the desert. "What if we can't find it?"

"That's not an option," Ethan said.

They came back out. "I'm looking for a box smaller than a shoe box," Raven told them.

"Oh good," Ico said, glancing around. "That will stick out."

Ethan pointed to some sandstone hills on the horizon. "I ran that way and threw things into a ravine. We'll have to search there."

As they hiked toward the hills, Flint's memory of the place began to come back to him. Here he'd left a GPS and range finder, he pointed, both long since pirated and scrapped by the Erehwon group to make metal tools. Farther on… yes, he'd come this way, he thought. The ravine looked familiar, as did the crest of the ridge. The convicts had found and looted his pack near here. But the useless box which he'd never mentioned to the Warden… it could have been dropped anywhere.

"All right, we'll spread out and search the ravine," Raven said. "Meet by that pink rock by dusk. Ethan, where did you fall from?"

"That way," he pointed.

"I'm going to look up there. The rest of you try here." The men slid down loose scree into the brushy gully.

It was stifling hot. Flies found Daniel, there was no water, and he searched in a fog of depression so thick that it was difficult to even function. This is what his life had come down to: searching a hot desert for a metal box to get back to a place he'd been desperate to flee from just two weeks before. What would he do if he did get back? He could no longer imagine a future.

Hours went by with no sign of a human artifact. He drifted down the ravine from the other two men, looking as much for shade as for an electronic black box. He suspected that Ico, skeptical of the whole story, was already napping.

Then, while sitting despondently beneath a gum tree and studying a sandy bottom raked by intermittent water as artfully as a Japanese garden, he realized their mistake. The floods! In the months since Ethan's crash there must have been enough rain to carry things downhill. Or downstream. It was the hunt for their supplies all over again! The box was heavy, no doubt, more like a rock than a log. Still, streams had the power to move entire boulders when running high. Think like an animal, Raven had told him. Now he had to think like a rock. How far could a flood push it? Where in the stream course would it come to rest?

He quickly walked a mile down the ravine bottom, seeing nothing, and then turned to return upstream more slowly and carefully, probing the center of the sandy basins where the heaviest debris would collect. He found rocks all right, and even at one point some dampness signaling water close to the surface. But a transmitter? He worried its weight would have carried it beneath a covering layer of sand.

What saved him in the end was that the box was orange, its battered surface flecked with scratches revealing a black undercoating like a speckled egg. The beacon was jammed under a larger boulder, sand sucked away from it by the current. Could such a thing still work?

The metal was hot to the touch so he wrapped it in his shirt like a baby, carrying it upstream. Ethan and Ico were waiting at the pink rock, looking hot, sticky, and depressed, and so he shielded it behind his back until he came up to them. Then he held it out.

"Here it is," he announced. "Phone home."

Ethan looked at it warily. "That's it?"

"I'm asking you."

He looked at it dubiously. "I can hardly remember." He peered closer, inspecting the switch and socket ports. The memory of it was coming back to him now- his familiar world of electronics seemed an eternity away!-but how much did he want his new companions to know? "I guess so."

"Good grief," Ico said. "Well, let's go find Raven. She must be upstream."

There was no stream of course, just the sandy bed and a bottom of heat. It ended in a cul-de-sac of cliffs with a litter of boulders at their base. Raven was in the shade of one, looking drained.

"We found it," Ethan called. "Maybe."

She didn't look up.

"You don't seem very excited," Ico observed.

She looked up at him morosely, clearly disturbed. "I found him."

Ico walked past her into a cluster of boulders, the others following. The rocks formed a kind of nest with an open-roofed room in their middle.

"Ouch," Ico breathed.

A cross hung on the rocks, except a moment's inspection revealed the cross was really a man, or had been a man, arms outstretched where he'd been pinioned, and now almost black and desiccated by the sun. Dried flesh pulled back from screaming teeth. Eyes gone. Stained strips of clothes and leathered flesh.

There was a glint on one finger. Daniel stepped forward. "Academy ring."

"So we've found your pilot," Ico said.

Ethan was looking at the figure in dismay. "I didn't know the Warden did this. They told me the pilot was missing and… I didn't ask. My God, the man could have helped us! It's insane."

"This Warden of yours must have really been pissed off."

Raven had come in behind them, looking upward. The rocks radiated heat like an oven. She looked not so much horrified as depressed.

"I guess we want to steer clear of the morally impaired, right?" Ico said to her. "Good thing we're getting out of here."

She looked at him sadly. "There's something I haven't told you."

They buried the pilot in the sand, Raven taking care to first remove his ring and the molar filling of identification micro-data that had replaced the dog tag for employees on remote and risky missions. Then the group filed back to Car Camp as the sun sank, walking the last few miles under the stars. They were exhausted, but they were also impatient to learn what Raven had to tell them. She simply suggested she save it until Amaya and the recovering Tucker could hear too. She walked ahead of them as if rehearsing what she would say.

Upon returning they built up the fire.

"What I haven't told you is that we have to go back to Erehwon," Raven began without preamble. "We have to go see the Warden."

"What!" Ethan cried. Clearly, she hadn't told him this.

She nodded, acknowledging his surprise. "You already know ordinary communications don't work in Australia. You know the Warden took a transmitter from the plane- from the pilot- and it didn't work."

"So?" Daniel said. "That's why we found this one."

"Yes. Because the continent must be jammed." She glanced around, gauging their reaction. "Outback Adventure- United Corporations- doesn't want its clients calling out. You need a special instrument."

"The Cone!" Ico said.

"Hmm?"

He looked excited. "I stayed awake when they shipped us out here and heard the pilot talking about some damned Cone. I thought it was a password, slang, for the continent. But what if it's this zone of jamming?"

"You stayed awake?" Raven asked.

"Damn right I did. My trust only goes so far, and a good thing too. So they fly us into this zone made from… what? A satellite?"

She nodded, watching him. "The question is whether they could do that over an entire continent."

"Strongly enough to confound weak consumer electronics, I'll bet. Maybe strongly enough to defeat ordinary rescue beacons. They used narrow-focus satellite jamming beams in the Taiwanese War."

"That explains why my GPS didn't work," Ethan remembered.

"My stuff too," Ico said. "I thought it was just on the fritz."

Raven nodded. "When I came here and recognized there was no normal exit point, I began to think about alternative ways to signal for help," she explained. "Then I talked to Ethan and he told me about his crash. My theory is that no pilot would fly into this place unless they could expect rescue in the event of disaster, but that United Corporations would want to make sure it wasn't sending rescue craft in after the wrong people, risking a hijack by the morally impaired. The survivor who was signaling had to be someone knowledgeable enough to do something to activate the rescue beacon: a bona fide pilot, in other words. When I heard that the transmitter the convicts had brought back from the crash didn't work, I at first thought they simply must have taken the wrong one. But that made no sense- if they'd stumbled on the right one, U.C. would be sending its rescue crew into the lion's den. There couldn't be a right one. So then I reasoned the transmitter must require another component to penetrate this jamming- an idea I remembered from my aviation work. The beacon only works if a pilot puts two halves together: the transmitter itself, and the activator we just found. I think the body we discovered confirms this idea."

"How so?" Ethan asked.

"My guess is that the pilot tried to bargain for his life by promising he could signal for help if they could catch you, because you were unwittingly carrying the crucial component- the activator to penetrate this jamming. But when they found you unconscious, you didn't have it. It wasn't even in your pack. Maybe the pilot remained evasive in hopes of finding the activator by himself, later. And the Warden, in an impatient rage, killed him."

"So now we have to go to this psycho and ask him for the other half?" Ico asked. "This is the plan you didn't tell us about?"

"Ask. Take. Bargain. Whatever it requires to get back."

"Great. Whoopee."

Amaya was looking at Raven skeptically, glancing from her to Daniel. "You figured this out all by yourself?"

"I'm not promising it will work. It's a chance, that's all."

"Nobody's that smart, Raven."

"It's common sense, Amaya."

"You said you knew avionics. Tell me what a neural-rod stabilizer is."

Raven looked at her with irritation.

"Tell me what a wing pulse-circuit is."

"That wasn't my area."

"You don't know a thing about avionics, do you?"

"I don't have to prove myself to you! You're just jealous of my relationship with Daniel!"

He looked up at that, curious. What relationship?

"You don't know a thing about aviation," Amaya persisted. "But you do know a lot about Outback Adventure. You're lying to us, aren't you? Just like you lied to Daniel."

"I'm trying to help you!"

"Why were you so surprised to find him here? You were the one who told him about Australia."

"It's a big continent!"

"Why did you save us at all?"

"I'm beginning to wonder that too! Go back out into the damn desert if you don't like my help!"

"Who are you, Raven?"

She was angry. The two women glared at each other.