Getting back

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 kind of bastards who killed my best friend. Their force is divided and we outnumber both groups combined."

"Yes," Ethan said. "Let's fight."

Raven had been looking about. "There's a better way," she said quickly. "Let's just jump into the river."

The others looked down the face of the dam, as high as a three-story building. "That's a good drop," Iris objected.

"And the river's sluggish," Daniel said. "We can't swim faster than they can run. They'll just follow us down the valley and we'll lose all our supplies too." He glanced around, trying to summon some of the tactics he'd once studied on dry, dead pages. They outnumbered their antagonists, yes, but the narrowness of the dam crest made it impossible to flank Rugard's watchdogs and bring their superiority to bear. It was like the narrow defile at Erehwon except here the situation was reversed: it wasn't Tucker holding Rugard off, it was Rugard's men holding them in place until the Warden could arrive with reinforcements. "Maybe a few of the men could swim downstream and circle back around," he thought aloud. "Take them from behind."

"We don't have time for that," Raven said. "Who knows when Rugard might show up? And we didn't come all this way to give away everything, either. Amaya, do you think we could get those spillway gears working?"

"Maybe with that old wheel and the levers. They're rusted, but with enough men pulling…"

"What good will that do?" Ethan asked.

"The catwalk supports are half rotted," Raven explained hurriedly. "We lash our supplies onto the decking, use the tools we've picked up to hack at its base, and send the platform over the dam. With any luck it becomes a raft that people can cling to on their way downstream."

"Meanwhile," Amaya added excitedly, grasping her idea, "we open these gates for an instant flood. That pushes us downstream and leaves Rugard's men stranded on either side of the dam. Maybe it buys us enough time to get to the coast and try the transmitter!"

Daniel looked at his two female strategists with wonder. "Let me get this straight. You want to start our own torrent and jump into it? With our supplies lashed to a rotting catwalk?"

They nodded.

He shrugged. "Makes sense to me. Ethan?"

He looked down the gearhouse steps. "We'll have to hold them off while we work. There's some deck gratings down there. Maybe we can pry them up for temporary shields."

Daniel smiled. "Okay. Two men behind each shield. Women to chop down the catwalk. The rest of the men down here on those levers." He began snapping out names, the authority coming naturally to him now, glancing at the blocking convicts at either end of the dam. "It's time to leave again without saying goodbye."

The fugitives pried up two of the steel floor gratings on one side of the gearhouse and carried them up the stairs, putting one on each side of the central catwalk. Two men took position behind each grating, spears pointed out. Meanwhile the old tools salvaged from the ruins were rapidly distributed. Some of the women dropped down into the shallow water running over the spillway and cautiously felt their way under the catwalk, holding on to its posts as they moved. Other women carried their packs to the decking of the catwalk overhead, hastily lashing their belongings in place even as their sisters began hacking at the posts beneath them. With each blow, the wooden bridge trembled. Meanwhile the remaining men descended into the gearhouse to pry at the frozen workings of the dam spillway gates.

Rugard's men watched uncertainly. Belatedly, Wrench and Gallo realized that the entire party they were hunting had disappeared as easy targets: some men were crouched behind some kind of metal mesh, others had hidden in the gearhouse, and the last of the women were dropping down to muck about in the spillway underneath the catwalk, almost entirely hidden as they bent over. Something was going on, and it wasn't surrender. The men glanced nervously at each other: none had forgotten the shocking roar and concussion of the bewildering explosion back at Erehwon. Did the transmitter thieves have more witchery up their sleeve? While the convicts had the fugitives pinned, their quarry outnumbered them. Gallo wished Rugard were here, but it would take a couple of days to find and bring him. Maybe they should just back off and trail these troublemakers.

"Send some rocks at them," he instructed his slingman uncertainly.

The man whirled his weapon over his head and let fly. The stone rocketed along the crest of the dam and banged off the metal grate harmlessly. He flung again, and again. One rock ricocheted into the adjacent reservoir and a third bounced up in the air and fell down on the dam crest behind the bastards crouched with the grate. One of them scampered back, scooped it up, and hurled it back, forcing Gallo's men to duck out of the way.

"You dropped something, you clumsy cretins!" the pitcher yelled. It looked like the bastard they'd already hit with a rock.

"Maybe we should just rush them," one of the convicts ventured.

"There's too many," Gallo snapped. "You want to get pushed off the face of this dam? I say we keep them pinned here until help comes. They're trapped."

Wrench had arrived at the same conclusion. He'd actually loped forward along the other end of the dam with the intention of jabbing tentatively at the metal grating with his spear, but as soon as he started the fugitives hurled chunks of concrete, the blows sending him scampering back out of the way. If he tried to climb over the gratings they'd stick him like a pig. Well, if he couldn't advance on the dam's crest, neither could they, right? It was a standoff. He hoped.

Still, he was worried about doing nothing and getting the Warden mad at him. He stood watching the frenetic activity at the center of the dam with foul confusion. What the hell were they trying to do?

Suddenly there was a shrill, wailing shriek, so loud and unearthly that the convicts on either side of the structure instinctively jumped. What the devil was that? Excited shouts were coming from the gearhouse. Then there was another shriek, and encouraging yells from the women. The flow of water down the face of the dam began to quicken. The catwalk was beginning to lean out over the dropoff, increasingly precarious.

"Are they trying to commit suicide?" Wrench muttered, his chest sore from a thrown missile. If they lost the transmitter in the river Rugard would hang them all. Damn! He began to realize that things were going horribly wrong.

There was another metallic squeal, the complaint of corroded metal, and then a sudden bang. One of the spillway gates snapped open and a plume of water shot out from the crest of the spillway, carrying two women with it. Screaming, they hit the river below. The catwalk shuddered and, with a creak of its own and a snapping of timbers, it followed the two women off the top of the dam, toppling into the river with a titanic splash. The wood went under for a moment and then floated in a boil of foam, rocking away downstream. Shrieking with a combination of triumph and fear, more women jumped into the growing waterfall and slid down the face of the dam to follow their makeshift raft.

Behind them there were more snaps of metal, a chain reaction of failure, and the spillway gates pried open wider, pushed by the force of the reservoir behind them. The roar of the unleashed flood was growing. Men boiled out of the gearhouse, shouting and waving their arms at their comrades behind the shields. Abruptly the gratings clanged down and the two defenders behind each one ran to the lip of the spillway. "Jump, jump!" Daniel cried. One by one, they obeyed him.

Wrench and Gallo started to lead their men across the top of the dam.

Raven hesitated at the edge of the spillway, eyes wide with excitement at the growing flood, the transmitter strapped to her belly.

"These are your people, now," Daniel shouted to her above the growing roar of the water. "They've decided to put their trust in you. Don't let them down!"

She looked at the heads bobbing downstream, thrashing after the makeshift raft. "I won't." Then she leaped.

"Ayyyyyy!" Daniel glanced around. Wrench was charging at him with a wild cry, sword swinging over his head.

It cut empty air where Daniel had been. He'd jumped too.

There was the terrifying irruption of foam below, the endless seconds of free fall, and then the plunge into cold water and the buffeting of current until he could force his way back upward, gasping for air. All he could see was water. He began swimming downstream.

Gallo and Wrench wavered to a stop at the two edges of the spillway, separated from each other by ninety feet of roaring flood. "Fire, fire!" the two squad leaders screamed. The convicts hurled spears and sticks but the fusillade was a pointless mistake: they were simply throwing away their best weapons. All they had to aim at was mist, and white water, and beyond it a series of heads swirling downstream like corks. One by one the fugitives were reaching the floating catwalk, accelerated by the growing flood.

"Jump in after them!" Wrench roared in frustration. But his companions hesitated. The pounding of the unleashed water was getting more violent as the corroded gates were pried aside, the reservoir swirling toward the dam's open mouth with an ominous suck. And how would they fight in the water? Rugard's scouts began backing warily away from the spillway lip.

The fugitives were already out of sight.

Wrench and Gallo looked at each other across the gap, as impassable as an ocean. The lake behind was big and might take hours, even days, to drain itself back down to the level of the new opening. They howled in frustration. And then turned to try to follow as best they could along the steep, brushy banks on either side of the river, falling farther and farther behind.

The energy that swept Daniel's party downstream was frightening in its power, and a narrower river canyon with more rocks might have resulted in serious injury to the members of his party. The reservoir water was cold, deep, and turbulent. But the valley below the dam was wide enough so that the pouring water had room to spread and run smoothly as it rushed downstream. The fugitives were mostly young, immensely fit after months in the wilderness, and good swimmers: none had come to Australia without that skill. So instead of being caught in a white-water death trap, Daniel's group was instead sped by a brownish current that was tidelike in its steady power. The wreckage of the catwalk became a life raft that supported most of the fugitives, though a few clung to random logs that had been picked up and carried downstream as well. The water moved so fast that the frustrated cries of Rugard's men were soon left behind. Then the pulse of the current began to slow, and by concerted effort the group clinging to the catwalk eventually managed to kick the structure to the eastern side of the stream so that it grounded on a sandbar. By that time they'd been washed down several miles.

The shaken trekkers staggered ashore to collapse and steam in the sun, panting, and then roused themselves to unlash their belongings and sort themselves out. Surprisingly, few of their supplies had been lost: Raven's plan had worked. And besides cuts and bruises, there were no serious injuries. Even Ned had decided his shoulder was only hurt, not broken, by the slung rock.

"Well, we crossed the river," Ethan spat. "Not quite the way we intended."

The other fugitives were looking at Daniel with a mixture of triumph and stunned uncertainty. What now? He stood stiffly, took a deep breath, and faced them. Everyone was a bit dazed by the sudden confrontation but also exhilarated to have escaped: thrilled to have beaten this sudden foe, thrilled to still be alive. Come alive! Outback Adventure had promised. They had this day.

Now they had a choice to make, and a hard one. If they were going to help him, he had to play to their desire for escape.

"We've told you all that we think we have a way to get a couple of us back to where we came from," he began quietly. "And if the transmitter works they might just be able to expose this scandal for what it is and get the rest of us back as well. But to use the transmitter we were forced to flee with it from a convict community hundreds of miles to the west of here. After so much distance and time, we thought the convicts had given up any hope of pursuit, but obviously we were wrong."

The others were watching him grimly. His vague promises of journeying to a point to seek help had seemed like deliverance, and now his admission that a rival group was still on their heels smacked of betrayal. It was like the misleading half-truths of Outback Adventure all over again, he knew. By now, they trusted no one.

"We can't let this destroy us," he continued. "One of my original friends betrayed us in his desperation to escape. We can't let that happen again."

"So what do we do?" Peter asked.

"We've escaped for now. But they may find us again soon. That leaves all of you with a choice. You can stick with us in hopes we can elude our pursuers and try to call in some kind of rescue craft, once we get out from under this electronic cloud of jamming. That's always been a long shot, but it's our only shot. But if you come with us, we may end up in a bad fight- a desperate fight- trying to do it. Or, you can bail out now. If we split up you don't have any chance of getting back, but the group that is chasing us will probably leave you alone. Maybe." He stopped.

"Risk death with you or stay marooned by ourselves," Peter summed up. "That's it, isn't it?"

He nodded. "A bad choice, but we've never had very good ones, have we? I wasn't trying to keep anything from you, Peter. I just didn't want to worry you needlessly. If we can just signal for rescue, the convict pursuit becomes pointless. I hope."

There was a gloomy silence.

"And the only one guaranteed to have a ride out of here is her?" Iris clarified, pointing to Raven. "Why her?"

He took a breath. "Because she's the one who told us about this chance. We're going to send her and Ethan to try to bring help. That was our original plan and we're not changing it now. Any fight over who gets to go would be fruitless."

His followers digested all this. "Wish you were here- and I wasn't," Ned tried to joke.

Jessica stepped forward to stand next to Peter. "Well, I'm not giving up my only chance of getting out of here to a bunch of damned convicts," she announced. "I'm sticking with Daniel."

"Me too." Peter sighed. "If I'm going to die in Australia, it might as well be for a reason. At least with you guys there's a hope."

"Be realistic, everybody," Daniel warned. "If it comes down to a fight it will be with people United Corporations deemed beyond rehabilitation."

"In that case, we'd better start thinking about some serious weapons," Ethan said. "Amaya, could you work on a flamethrower, please?"

The others laughed, breaking the tension. Her ingenuity had become well known. There was a new fierceness to them since the dam, Daniel realized, a new confidence and resolve. They had a goal, and now they had the unity from sharing danger. One by one they began to stand. Unity like… United Corporations. No! Not like that!

"Which way, mate?" Oliver asked, a little unsteady now.

"Ollie, this really isn't your fight," Daniel said. "Or Angus's. I'll understand if you Australians want to bug out and leave it to us immigrants. Really."

Angus shook his head. "You said we're all Australians now."

Daniel glanced away, trying to hide the surge of emotion welling up in him. They were following! For desperate reasons, perhaps, but behind him, of all people. What would harridan Lundeen think?

"This river eventually leads to the sea, of course, but because of that it's a little too obvious," Daniel judged. "They'll expect us to go that way." He pointed east, over a range of mountains. "So we'll climb. Do it the hard way."

"Sounds like a bloody Outback Adventure!" Ned quipped, shouldering a pack.

"I'd pay a year's salary for this experience any day!" Ethan chirped.

"For people who ask why they do!" Jessica warbled.

"And need their bleedin' heads examined," Peter amended.

They headed east again.