Getting Back (40 page)

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.

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?

Wrench dodged a spear thrust, clubbed one of the adventurers aside, and then saw the convict on his right howl and go down with an arrow. Hellfire! It was like the dam, a space so narrow that numbers didn't count.

"We've seen enough!" he shouted, turning to retreat. The others followed him out while dragging their wounded, two staggering as they were hit by still more hurled pieces from the building. Fired bolts and nails whizzed around their ears, bouncing off the pavement and then skittering away. One retreating attacker slipped on the debris littering the plaza and sprawled, giving those above enough time to hit him with a rain of junk. He scrabbled away.

It was the same quick dumb rush they'd tried in the canyon at Erehwon, Wrench thought. Four attackers were left behind, either unconscious or dead. A dozen were hurt.

Back across the plaza, the leaders clustered under a nearby overhang.

"Well, that didn't work," Ico observed.

"Shut up." Rugard looked at the offending office tower with fury. They could hear defiant, derisive cheers from the transmitter thieves within.

"To get at them we've got to go through a bottleneck," Wrench described. "We'll win eventually, but not without a lot of blood."

"How many are there?" Rugard asked.

"Not that many, I think, judging from what we saw at the dam. Less than twenty. But if we fight them in the stairwells, going uphill, they have all the advantage."

"So if we could spread them out…"

"But how?"

"I've got an idea," Ico said.

There was a new hammering, but not rhythmic this time. Rugard's troops were building something, and it didn't take long to figure out what it was. Daniel hastened to build his own weapon in defense.

The torsion catapult of the ancient world was a sophisticated device, relying on twisted rope or sinew for the energy to repeatedly fling a projectile at an enemy. While such a machine was quick to aim and fire, Daniel's beleaguered fugitives didn't have the time to build artillery so complex. Simpler was a catapult that relied on a simple counterweight: a trebuchet. It actually had two buckets, one on either end of a beam of wood that pivoted on an axle. One bucket held the missile, and the other a counterweight that was hoisted into the sky. When fired, the counterweight dropped, the other end of the beam snapped up, and the payload was launched skyward. Gravity provided the energy.

Daniel's trebuchet was mounted on the roof. Two tripods that had supported radio masts, unbolted from their bases so they could be moved to allow the machine to pivot, held the pipe used as the catapult axle four meters above the ground. This axle threaded through an unbolted steel beam that became the trebuchet arm. A hole was hacked in the roof to a central shaft where a dusty, powerless elevator was tied to one end of the trebuchet arm with its rusting cables. This box could be dropped as the counterweight. Amaya and Ethan contributed ideas about some simple gearing rigged to ratchet the elevator up a floor for each firing. Upon release it would plummet the same distance before automatically braking, hurtling the bucketed missile.

"You could throw an electric car with this thing," Ethan promised, black from grease he had collected from frozen machinery and redistributed on their new one. With a throwing beam six meters long, the trebuchet looked formidable.

"Or a year's supply of Microcore company directives," Daniel added. "But we've got to throw what we have. Are they bringing up some desks?"

"Cursing your name in vain even as we speak." Metal desks from the floor below were being laboriously carried up to the roof and dumped there as ammunition: gigantic catapult balls. "Even if it doesn't hit anyone, it should scare the hell out of them."

"Amaya's shotgun payload might prove more effective," Daniel said. She'd heaped a small mountain of mugs and bottles, dismounted pencil sharpeners, dead modems, frayed manuals, and broken lamps to spray at any attackers.

"Well, they're going to try to spread us, to bring their superior numbers to bear. We'll have four on the roof here to fire this thing, and the rest down below again to guard the entrance. If they get a foothold in the building, it's over."

"Which they will if this doesn't work," Ethan said.

"I built another one once," Daniel said. "It sort of worked." Centuries ago, he thought, when his only task was winning the attentions of Mona Pietri.

"Sort of?"

"The only thing wrong was that it missed."

The convicts came again at night, their advance marked by torchlight and bonfires lit in the corners of the plaza. The drumming now marked time to the stately advance of what Ico had suggested and Rugard had ordered his army to build: a siege tower.

Inspired by the towers used to assault castle walls, this one used as its foundation the bottom frame of four automobiles, two side by side in the front and two in the rear to create a square platform with sixteen rusting steel wheels, stripped of their flattened rubber. An aluminum electrical transmission tower, shorn of its arms, had been lashed to this foundation using some dead electrical cable, producing a tower one hundred feet high. Car hoods and trunk lids had been bolted to it like scales, giving it a protective covering of light armor on three sides. At the top was the flatbed of a light truck, mounted on rails, that could be slid forward when the tower reached Daniel's office building. If the tower worked as planned, attacking convicts would swarm up ladders to its summit and charge across the flatbed, smashing through the windows of the ninth floor at the same time another group stormed the lobby. The creaking contraption would give the convicts attacking on the ground some cover by blocking fire from the plaza wall of windows.

"We've advanced from the Stone Age to the Medieval in half a day," Ethan marveled. "What happens in the next round? A nuclear exchange?"

"Let's get through this round first," said Daniel. "Can you hold the lobby again?"

"If you can keep that moving junkyard away."

A skirmishing fire from the office tower windows and the surrounding streets began immediately, the convicts trying to provide cover for their approaching siege engine with sling-launched rocks. The women under Amaya replied with slingshots and bows. It was impossible to be accurate in the darkness but the whiz and swap of stone and bolt and arrow created a weird pinging music, some of the shots bouncing off the armor of the approaching siege tower with a punctuating clang. Those on both sides jerked in apprehension at the sound. One of the convicts howled as an arrow struck home, and a woman in the offices screamed as a rock broke her hand.

"Fire!" Daniel shouted. With no powder to ignite the word didn't really fit a catapult, he found himself thinking randomly: ancient artillery captains must have yelled something more appropriate to their technology such as "shoot," or "throw." No matter, his trebuchet operators knew exactly what he meant. A ratchet gear was released, the old, now powerless elevator made a brief plunge down its shaft, and the steel beam sprang forward. With ponderous grace a metal desk was launched into flight with a whoosh, arcing toward the approaching siege tower.

It missed to the right by twenty feet, plunging down to explode into shrapnel, its panels clattering as they bounced in all directions. The impact got the convicts to jerk to a startled halt but otherwise didn't hurt a thing.

"What the hell was that?" one of them cried.

"They're trying to hit us!" Rugard's voice roared. "Hurry, hurry! Get against the building and they can't reach us!" The convicts leaned against the rear of the tower platform again and it began lumbering forward once more, groaning and swaying. Some convicts darted forward to pull debris out of its way. At the tower's top, a couple of the Warden's men began trying to lob stones at Daniel's trebuchet squad on the roof of the office tower.

The trebuchet had been reloaded. "Release!" Daniel cried this time.

"What?" his befuddled crew asked.

"I mean fire. Fire, fire!"

"Oh."

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.