He was lying, wasn't he? Daniel said they got the transmitter.
"Listen to me! We can still cut a deal!"
"You made your deal, Ico!"
The little man fell silent for a minute. Then: "Let me talk to Daniel!"
Tucker didn't reply.
"Let me talk to Raven!"
Again he was quiet. They were trying to determine how many were ahead.
"What did they do, ditch you too? You all alone, Tucker?"
He didn't answer because he did feel suddenly alone, terribly alone. The quiet of the convicts bothered him. What were they up to?
"Tucker, listen, I did it for your own good! That corporate bimbo was bewitching Dyson! You know that! She was going to fly off and leave us all here like a bunch of bumpkins! It was insane to let her escape! This way, we get to go!"
"Your Warden pal promise that?"
"Tucker, think! If we don't get the transmitter back, our party is stuck here! If you don't help us, we're all stuck here for the rest of our lives. Come on, listen to reason!"
"You come up here where I can see you!" Tucker called. "You come up here where we can talk!"
There was more wrestling, and Ico was shoved lurching ahead. He stopped, straightened, and then walked forward hesitantly.
"All we want is the transmitter, Tucker," he soothed, his arms spread wide. "We're not going to hurt you guys. We need each other now. I did it for you, man."
When Ico was close enough, Tucker hurled the spear. The shorter man squeaked and dodged, but not quite quickly enough. The spear head sliced across one arm and he yelped, scurrying back out of the way. The convicts roared, the sound angry and ominous, and rocks and a couple of other spears fired back. Tucker ducked behind an outcrop as the missiles rattled harmlessly by him. Then he retrieved them and ran back around the corner of the canyon. No one followed. Somewhere to the east, the others were getting away.
Yeah, come on you bastards, Tucker thought. Come and get it.
Several minutes passed. Tucker stayed pressed against the canyon wall, looking for movement. Nothing. He was alone in a dark hole.
It was funny to feel so confined, after the big spaces of Australia.
Then there was a shattering rattle from above and Tucker looked up. Something was falling in amongst the stars. Rock fall! They were up on the rim and trying to get around him! They were throwing things at him from above!
He lurched back to the tunnel entrance and fell on the bomb. Stones banged down. He wiggled into the tunnel backward, pulling Amaya's crude device after him, the rocks bouncing harmlessly outside. Well, that was that: they'd outflanked him just like Daniel's Spartans. This damn bomb had better work.
He unwrapped the matches and put one carefully in a breast pocket.
There were already voices outside the hole. They'd tried to rush him and were baffled at his disappearance until they spied the tunnel. Now someone was scrabbling in. Tucker struck the other match, held it to the fuse, and waited. Nothing. A dud. Oh boy, Amaya. And then there was a flash, a fizz, and the bomb began burning. God be praised, the crazy woman had done it! He dropped the smoking sphere in front of him and began wriggling backward toward the eastern entrance, light from the fuse helping illuminate the way. He heard cries of alarm and a frantic crawling from the convicts.
Then the light went out with a smothering hiss. "I got it!" Someone had extinguished the thing.
"Damn!" Tucker reversed course and hurriedly crawled back, seeing the dim shape of someone backing up the tunnel. He caught up with the bomb snatcher just as the other man was about to wriggle out, and grabbed.
There was a grunt of pain and a curse. Jago, Rugard's guard! The man stank from the smoke of the burning cabin roof. The convict and Tucker grappled awkwardly in the tight space, the others clustered outside the tunnel entrance. "He's got me!" Jago shouted. "Get me the hell out of here!" Tucker was punching, clawing, butting, trying to get the bomb back. It was like a struggle for a football. Hands were reaching in, clutching at them both, and he felt the two of them being inexorably hauled out of the tunnel. Jago was cutting him, he realized- a knife, he supposed- and he chopped at the man's throat, stopping the irritation. The bomb came loose and Tucker clutched it to his own breast. Men were starting to pummel his body as they pulled him out toward the open.
The match. Broken, but he could feel the piece with the head in his pocket.
The mob was howling, yanking them like a cork from a bottle, whooping at the opportunity for revenge. Tucker felt Jago being jerked away from him and then hands dragging, punching, tearing. Their screams of frustration filled his ears, the anger hitting him harder than the pain. He lit his match and pressed it to the fuse. Please, let me succeed at something just once, he prayed.
Just once.
He felt a curious lightness as they beat him. The future had disappeared, and with it the weight of the past. Here in the eroded cluster of sculpted rock, carved by unimaginable eons of time, he was at the cumulative instant he was supposed to be at, he recognized. All his life had come down to this. So when the fuse flared and screams erupted and hands clutched frantically at the bomb, he felt a curious serenity. Tucker had found his why.
Then the bomb went off.
The quartet of fleeing adventurers heard the boom of the explosion as they ran out into the broad desert, the horizon flush with the coming sun. The thudding roar echoed and reechoed among the labyrinth of canyons, sending startled birds flying prematurely up and into the morning air.
They stopped and turned. There was a groan of collapsing rock and a following rumble, as if stones were sliding down to seal the defile more completely. "It worked," Amaya said quietly, as if she'd never really been convinced the ancient formula could be quite so simple. "It exploded."
"Did he make it?" It was Ethan, asking a question he knew couldn't be rationally answered yet. A cloud of smoke and dust rolled out of the slit they had emerged from.
The noise finally grumbled away and there was dead silence.
"No," said Daniel, knowing the answer without knowing it. "He didn't."
Amaya was silently weeping.
"Let's not make it be for nothing," Ethan finally said. "We have to be out of sight by sunrise and lay low until it's safe to trigger the beacon. Maybe tomorrow night."
"We can't," Daniel said.
"Can't what?"
"Trigger the beacon. We can't signal for rescue. We can't penetrate the Cone."
"I thought you said you got it!"
"I got the transmitter but… I threw the activator at Ico." He looked at Raven. "You two are going to have to hike to the coast with us."
The other three looked stunned. Amaya was looking from Daniel to Raven, crestfallen.
"It's better this way," he said. "Not some of us fly off, some of us stay."
Raven was looking at him in shock. "Oh, Daniel," she whispered.
"It will give us time to ask why we do."
Then he turned, and led the way into the rising sun.
"Lord, what a painting."
Rugard Sloan, blackened and scorched, turned a grim circle at the mouth of what had been the tunnel. Fresh rock had covered it, and the walls nearby had been sprayed with gore. One man had done this, he thought, one big man he hadn't had time to reach with reason. One man! This giant named Tucker had killed five men, wounded half a dozen more, and turned the remaining pack of pursuers into a band of drunken, sick, whipped dogs. Rugard couldn't have driven them on at gunpoint, not right now.
The snitch Ico had lived by hanging back because of his little spear cut, whimpering like a punished child. Rugard himself had been saved by the death of a man in front of him, a flesh-and-blood shield that had knocked him flat. He was spattered with offal and singed and grimy from the flames of his own roof. They'd made a fool of him, of that he was certain.