The Breakers Series: Books 1-3

by Edward W. Robertson

  "You have an idea." Karslaw grinned. "Perhaps sending for you wasn't my worst move after all."

  "It's time to drop some science on their ass, man. See what there is to see. And even if it's bad news, it should be pretty fun to find out."

  * * *

  Wind tousled his hair. The boat pitched on the waves, turning Walt's stomach. A mile away from them and several hundred yards from Santa Monica Beach, the disc of the mothership projected from the ocean, cracked and skewed.

  "Can we get any closer?" he said.

  Karslaw shook his head. "Not a good idea. God invented binoculars for a reason."

  The man called out to the raft floating beside them, tethered by a single rope. On it, Lorna and another man hauled up the sail and trimmed it to the wind. The sail flapped raggedly, then went taut. The raft drifted toward the downed vessel. Lorna untied the lines to the yacht and flung them into the sea. Men on the yacht hauled in the lines.

  A wave flooded over the raft's deck, slopping over Lorna's bare feet. The vessel was as simple as they could make it: wooden logs roped together, a square-sailed mast rising from near its center. No metal at all, and aside from its mast, its profile climbed less than a foot above the water.

  It separated itself from the anchored yacht, moving so slowly over the water that Walt could have overtaken it at walking speed, assuming he had Jesus-like powers. Lorna adjusted the sail and turned to face the mothership. The raft dawdled another hundred yards nearer the aliens. Lorna and the second sailor dived off the edge and swam for the yacht.

  Karslaw lowered a rope ladder and helped bring them in. Walt offered Lorna a towel. She took it with the polite smile of a stranger and closed herself in the cabin to change clothes.

  Walt sat and dangled his legs between the rails. "Think they can see us?"

  Karslaw shrugged his broad shoulders. "If they do, they don't care enough to shoot us. Their system has limited range or it's completely automated. They don't blast anything unless it comes within a half mile or better. You'll see."

  Waves sloshed against the hull. Pelicans and gulls winged on the breeze. The raft pulled further and further away. Lorna's reading of the wind and tide was perfect; the downed ship made for a big enough target that there was plenty of room for error, but the raft headed straight toward its center.

  It was a sunny day and the reflected light had Walt sweating and squinting. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his head. The raft continued its maiden and final voyage. Walt held the binoculars to his face, wiping off the sweat whenever the eyepieces grew too slick. The little boat closed halfway to the other ship.

  "Is this going to work?" Walt said.

  Karslaw scratched his beard. "Too soon to tell."

  "I mean, it must not shoot everything. Unless you've noticed a sudden upswing in dolphin funerals."

  The man laughed. He had the sort of easy, booming laughter that felt like a reward. Walt wasn't surprised Karslaw had wound up in charge. He was a natural leader, wholly at ease with his position, inhabiting the mantle of command as casually as most people sat on their own toilet. The kind of man you wanted to please. Walt had only been around him a few days—it had taken two to rig up the raft, and a third to haul it out here—but he already believed in the man's cause. He had a good thing going. A few hundred people who were already self-sustaining and protected from the mainland while having ready access to its abandoned treasures. Karslaw had vision, too, and the will to carry it out. If they could scour the last of the aliens out of the area, Walt had no doubt the man would cultivate Catalina into a walled garden safe from the chaos and entropy of the rest of the world.

  The raft bobbed nearer the ship. The breeze tugged at the sea, hazing the horizons. Something flashed from the ship, sped through the air in a line drive arc, and slammed into the raft. White light burst from it in a vast semicircle.

  Walt pulled away from the binoculars, grunting. "Was that a missile?"

  "Hard to say from here," Karslaw said. A rolling boom crackled over the waters, the noise tinny and distant, like an old movie played over bad speakers. "Would you like to take a closer look?"

  "Well shit."

  "Lost five men the first time we came too close."

  "Guess this rules out an approach through air or on water. Got any submarines parked back in town?"

  "We may have one stashed beneath the aircraft carrier."

  "Um," Walt said. He blinked against the negative-flash still tingling on his retinas. "Can your men swim?"

  "While keeping their rifles dry?" Karslaw laughed his rolling laugh. "I've chewed this problem in my mind's teeth for months, Walt. I hoped you'd know something I didn't."

  "Well, either I got lucky or they learned from their mistakes, because they weren't using missiles before." Walt rubbed his eyes. Since destroying the raft, the enemy vessel had been utterly silent. If he'd just stumbled out onto the deck, he'd never know the mothership wasn't the corpse it appeared to be. "There's got to be some way to get at it. Give me some time to think."

  "Take as long as you need," Karslaw said. "The only thing riding on it is our future."

  He hollered to his men to turn the boat around. Back at the island, Walt spent several days yutzing around with alternative designs to try to slip past the crashed ship's defenses, including a raft with a long, narrow, ribbon-like sail just a couple feet tall and another with an outboard and no vertical profile whatsoever. Both were demolished around a quarter mile from the ship.

  In a sign of less than perfect trust, they housed him at Avalon, the port town where Lorna had made landfall. By the standards of the day, it was a hustling metropolis: boats came and went from the piers at the rate of three or four a day. Sometimes when he sat on his porch and gazed downhill, he could see actual pedestrians in the streets. Dogs barked. When the wind blew in the right direction, the bleats of sheep carried from the valleys.

  He didn't see Lorna much. Friends dropped by her house every day to catch up and console her about the loss of her friends. When he wasn't too busy tying logs together and doodling sketches on his porch, he missed her. When he missed her, he worked harder. What if they ran it out of resources? Flung raft after raft at it until its missiles dried up? Or just overwhelmed it Zerg rush-style, launching a hundred boats at it at once, with Karslaw's soldiers hidden in motorboats ready to zoom in while the cannon fodder tied up the defenses?

  Problem was, if it had the power to launch those missiles, or whatever they were, then maybe it had the power to manufacture new ones, too. And as for oversaturating it with targets, there was no guarantee that would work even if they had the ten thousand men required to pull it off.

  "So we bomb the hell out of it," he told Karslaw. "Find a plane and just blast it to smithereens."

  "Know any pilots?" Karslaw answered. "Any warplanes that survived the invasion? We've checked the nearby Air Force bases. Aliens laid them to waste. Are there jets left in the interior of the country? Maybe. But here's the problem, stranger. Unless we atomize every square inch of that ship, we have no guarantee we've got them all. I want to go inside. Gut them like a fish. Ensure their threat is ended once and for all. Only then will my people be safe."

  Walt frowned and went straight to Lorna's, entering without knocking. She was in her living room with a young woman who shared Hannigan's chin and deep-set eyes. Sister, maybe.

  Lorna rose without a smile. "Walt. I have a guest."

  "Is she going to be here forever?"

  "Not unless something goes terribly wrong," the woman smiled.

  "Then I'll wait."

  "What do you want?" Lorna said.

  "For you to show me around the island," Walt said. "I'm going crazy trying to draw up Karslaw's battle plan against that stupid squid-infested mountain growing out of the bay. I want to see something new. Jog my brain."

  "You've already seen Avalon. The palace."

  "Come on, Lorna." The other woman nudged her. "Has he seen the Scaveteria? The fort?"
<
br />   "The Scaveteria?" Walt said. "That sounds horrible. I have to see it."

  "I'll show myself out," the woman smiled.

  The door clicked behind her. Lorna folded her arms. "Do you really want to see the island? Or are you here to see me?"

  "I can't do both? I've got two eyes, don't I?"

  "The Scaveteria's not nearly as interesting as she makes it sound." Lorna laughed. "Grab your pack. It's a full day's hike to the fort."

  Walt grinned and ran to his house in the hills for his day-pack. When he returned, Lorna led him down the winding roads to the base of town. A longhaired black cat lay across a stoop, tracking them. A few blocks from the piers, in a downtown of boutiques and inns, real live people strolled around, chatting and going in and out of open, operational stores, which were marked by sandwich boards out front. At a corner cafe, a couple shared a table. Grilled pork wafted from the doorway.

  "I don't know if you guys know this," Walt said, "but you appear to possess a civilization."

  "That's the goal."

  She brought him through the tourist waterfront to the esplanade. The shops ended, replaced by open fields of grass and trees. On the other side, a bike path lined a short, rocky beach. A quarter mile ahead, the land curled into a small, short point dominated by a single building: round and orange-roofed, easily a couple hundred feet across. A few small boats were tied up at its piers.

  "There's the Scaveteria," Lorna said.

  "Isn't it kind of fancy?"

  "Formerly a ballroom. Who knows? Maybe it will be again."

  The road led all the way to its steps. The front doors opened to a gigantic single room. Walt stopped and gaped. "You guys did this on purpose?"

  Shelves lined the walls and divided the floor into a city-like grid of rises and avenues. Two-thirds of the shelves were full, crammed with shoes, jeans, blankets, scrap metal, boxes of screws. A thousand different things. Walt spotted a box of red Christmas ornaments. A handful of people wandered amongst it all. A couple appeared to be browsing, picking up items and turning them over, examining them for cracks or wear, but other people were adding things to the shelves, pulling flatbed carts through the aisles and transferring debris to the racks.

  "What is this place?" he whispered.

  "Some of our people go into the city on a regular basis." Lorna wandered forward, taking a pair of pliers from a shelf. "Some do it because they need things. Others do it for fun. Whatever the case, Karslaw passed a law requiring them to bring back more than they intend to keep for themselves. It can be anything people might need. When they sail back home, they check in with the dockmaster, who goes over their goods and brings everything they don't want back here. To the Scaveteria."

  "And then what?"

  "Then, when people here need something, they see if they can find it here."

  "And they just take it? Like a library for stuff?"

  "Pretty much."

  "Huh. That is incredibly cool." Walt picked up a pack of pens still in its bubble packaging. "What do you do with people who take too much? Whippings? I bet public whippings are a major deterrent."

  "Nobody ever has."

  "How lucky that you've built an entire society of the only honest people on earth."

  She pointed to a man at a desk beside the front doors. "The clerks keep track of what leaves and who takes it."

  "Is he wearing a visor?"

  "Anyone who takes more than a reasonable person might need is sentenced to a month of scavenging. So far, nobody's exceeded reason."

  Walt set back the pens. "What does a person do if he can't find what he's looking for here?"

  She raised a brow at him. "Same as everyone else. They go without. Or if it's something that can be crafted, maybe they go to the blacksmith."

  "You guys have a blacksmith?"

  "Where else would we get our black?"

  "Really, what does he make?" Walt said. "Horseshoes?"

  Lorna shrugged. "Whatever. Karslaw keeps him occupied, but sometimes his apprentices have spare time. When the clerks here aren't busy, they'll haul a wagon of scrap up to the palace."

  "And Karslaw just came up with this?"

  "Just because he looks like Attila the Hun doesn't mean he burns books and drinks fermented goat spit."

  "I bet he'd try it, though." Walt glanced outside to check the sun. "I can't wait to see the fort. Does it have cannons?"

  "Not yet."

  She took him up the hills past the valley and the palace. A couple of lakes filled the crevices between the rocky green hills. The land got browner, scrubby grass and tough shrubs. The road snaked along the sides of the ridges. Once, Walt looked down on a green plateau studded with shuffling brown lumps as big as boulders.

  "What is that?"

  "Bison," Lorna said.

  "Karslaw brought bison here, too? What's he planning next, a gold rush?"

  "They were here before we were," she said. "Don't ask me. People do strange things when they get their hands on an island."

  As far as remote, semi-mountainous roads went—and in the last five years, Walt had seen more than a few—Catalina's were good and walkable, and they made good time, sweating in the moderate heat. Even so, the sun dropped below the hills before they'd made it to the fort. Lorna walked on for another hour anyway, traveling down the middle of the road, lit by the stars and a quarter of the moon.

  They slept beside the road. At dawn, they got up and continued on. After a slow trek over rolling hills, the road dropped down into a flat shelf of tree-heavy fields. Waves pounded the shore a couple hundred feet to their right. After less than a mile, they entered a clearing. At the beach, a tall wooden fence surrounded a five-story wooden tower.

  "That's it?" Walt said.

  Lorna laughed. "You were expecting another castle?"

  "Sort of."

  "Do you have any idea what a pain it is to haul lumber someplace as remote as this? We brought it in by boat. Took six months to erect it. Project like that gives you a whole new appreciation for why homes used to be so expensive."

  "You know what would have been a whole lot easier? Building it in Avalon."

  "We wanted a view of Santa Monica Bay." She pointed northwest toward the hazy hills of Malibu, then swept her finger to the right along the curve of the city, past the black blot of the mothership, all the way to the high, mounded hills of the peninsula to the northeast. "Including the ship. It's got one of two radios we leave on permanently. Other one's at the palace. Batteries are getting hard to find. Don't know what we'll do when we run out."

  They watched the fort for a while longer, then turned around and headed back the way they'd come. Other than the roads, and the occasional crumpled, sun-faded can of Coke along the shoulders, much of the island showed no sign of habitation. There was lots of room here. A bit on the dry side, but plenty of potential. They'd walked through several different climates on the way here—warm coastal, dry upland, hills, light forests. He liked that.

  Lorna called it quits a while after sundown. "Thought we could make it back today. Palace is just ahead if you want for try for it."

  "Nah. I'm enjoying it out here," Walt said. They unrolled their blankets on the side of the road and ate the last of the dried fish they'd brought with them.

  "I don't know what's up with that ship," he said. "If it had been doing that missile shit when I came for it, you'd still be finding bits of me washing up on the shore."

  Lorna got out a towel and tipped a water bottle into it and scrubbed off the worst of the day's sweat. "Think you can do it?"

  "I don't know. I want to. This place is pretty cool."

  "Were you thinking of staying?"

  He looked up. "Would you have a problem with that?"

  "I haven't had a lot of time to think about the future," she said. "Not when I'm still dealing with past lives and present troubles."

  Walt frowned. It was the perfect time to broach the subject of their future together, but he lost his nerve. He knew why he didn
't want to push things—because there was the chance he'd push them into a place he didn't want to go to, would uncover truths he'd prefer to leave as imagined fears—but that didn't help. Now wasn't the time to push. Not when things were so unsettled. It would be best to wait until she was ready to talk.

  "We'll see," he said. "Maybe I should help stamp out those aliens before I set down roots within sight of their watery fortress."

  They laid down together, but he was too tired to do more than sleep. He woke while it was still dark. He'd heard something. Something wrong. He lay under the stars, warm where Lorna's sleeping body touched him, cool where he was exposed to the raw hilltop air.

  Another boom crackled over the hills, a long, rumbling explosion. From the east. Toward Avalon. Lorna's breath caught. She jumped up, eyes bright in the darkness. They grabbed their bags and ran.

  19

  "Did you ever think of this stuff not in terms of ruins," Mauser said, "but as just another form of terrain?"

  Raina glanced up from the empty houses. "No."

  "People used to call it the concrete jungle, and that's not a bad description. There's all kinds of goodies if you know where to look. There's also horrible things that could kill us at any moment, but at least there are a million places to hole up in, too."

  "Did you see something?" Martin said.

  "What? No. No, it's totally clear. But the fault in the whole jungle analogy is that there are roads in a city. If you were in a hurry, you could walk across the entire L.A. Basin in a day. How long would it take you to cross thirty miles of the Amazon? Eternity, because the poisonous frogs would get you first."

  Martin swirled his canteen and took a drink. They were a few miles inland and it was notably hotter than along the coast, heat simmering off the asphalt. "It's kind of like a prairie. Except you can't see more than a couple blocks ahead of you. And there are lots of places to hide."

  "So it combines the attributes of both the jungle and the wasteland," Mauser said. "Does that mean it's unique? Raina, what do you think?"