Getting Back by William Dietrich

Author:William Dietrich [Dietrich, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-19T04:05:04+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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.

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