From behind a rock, a merchant opened up with the Dunemarket's lone machine gun, shredding the trunks of the palms. Three islanders tumbled into the grass. A searing bolt of heat answered, silencing the automatic fire.
A hundred feet away, Karslaw guided his men to a thicket of trees. They took cover and slashed their lasers across the riflemen's positions in second-long sweeps. Fires sprung up along the hillside. One of the merchants broke cover and sprinted up the hill. Two more followed. Raina could feel it unraveling before her.
She leveled her pistol at Karslaw and pulled the trigger until there were no bullets left. He hunkered behind a tree, shouted angrily, and gestured in her direction. Mauser's shot slammed into the trunk with a spray of splintered bark.
A platoon of men peeled off from Karslaw's lines and charged Raina's position. Mauser shot one down, then swore and ran up the hill. Raina's heart broke. She turned her back and followed.
Heat seared the side of her calf. She crashed into the dry grass. Mauser grabbed her shoulder and hauled her up. Another laser licked past her head. Her wound was just a surface burn; she was still able to run. It wouldn't help. The enemy was too many and too near.
Thirty feet uphill, a figure appeared at the top of the ridge. The man dropped to one knee and leveled a long, fat tube across his skinny shoulder. Fire and smoke blasted from the end of the tube.
"Holy shit, that's Martin!" Mauser screamed.
A rocket sizzled over Raina's head. It exploded a second later, washing her with heat, thundering her ears, kicking her from her feet so hard her organs ached. For a moment, the lasers ceased. A massive crater scarred the hill, bodies flung down around its edges. Dirt pattered to the ground in a gritty rain. She found her feet and ran uphill, ears ringing.
Martin set down the rocket launcher and went for his bag. He withdrew another long missile. A laser flashed between a point downhill and a point on his chest. He looked up, gasped, and fell down.
"Martin!" Raina screamed.
Rifles roared, increasingly sporadic as the rebels retreated over the hill. Raina ran to him. His eyes were open and his chest was still. Fire smoldered around the hole punched through his shirt. Burnt meat wafted on the breeze, overwhelming the smell of smoke. Mauser grabbed Raina's shoulder. She ran with him.
Everything went away for a while. The pain. The noise. The meaning of what was still happening on the hillside. Her feet thudded the dirt, and her knife bounced on her hip, but she only felt these things later, after she and Mauser were a mile away inside an empty house, watching coils of smoke rise from the ashes of the Dunemarket.
The rebellion was over before it had begun.
30
She helped her men haul Walt up into the daylight. The ship was berthed at a dock leading to nothing. Sunlight shimmered on a vast sea. The mainland was a dark blue lump along the horizon, miles and miles away.
"Where are we?" Walt said. "Wait, aliens? I thought we got them all. I thought that was the whole fucking point!"
"We killed the ones we could," Lorna said. "As for the ones we couldn't—well, this will take care of that."
"You're buying them off with my hide!"
She didn't bother to reply. The soldiers dragged him onto a narrow beach. Scraggly grass sprouted along the sand. Behind, sheer cliffs climbed fifty feet high.
"I was wrong," Walt said. "This is history's greatest act of ingratitude."
Lorna reached down and touched his face. "One more thing for you to be proud of. That's what it's always about with you, isn't it? Being admired for all you've done? Now you get to die alone on this beach."
Thirty yards from shore, the water roiled. A dark shape emerged from the sea. Lorna gestured to her men. They ran back onto the dock, untying the boat from the cleats and scrambling aboard.
"Fuck you!" Walt yelled. Not terribly original, but some things were classics for a reason. He rolled to his knees, hampered by the cuffs. He saw no staircases or gaps in the cliffs. No way he could climb with his hands and feet chained together. He tottered up to the grass, found a fist-sized rock, braced the chains on his ankles over another rock, and bashed them as hard as he could. The metal clinked. A small scrape marred the steel.
He laughed sickly. He struck again. Water sloshed from the surf. An alien strode through the breakers. A thin, pale man walked beside it, his chest tattooed with glyphs like the ones Walt had seen inside the ship. Walt stood, stone in hand, and hopped down to meet them.
"Look out!" he said, brandishing his fist and rattling his cuffs. "I've got a rock!"
The pale man laughed but didn't smile. The creature with him clacked its claws rapidly. The man stopped on the sand, waves hissing over his ankles. "Put that thing down."
"No," Walt said. "I'm going to clobber you with it."
"Huh. So you're Walt."
"Walt who? I was kidnapped. Dumped here by a crazy lady. I don't know what's going on."
"Stop that."
"Or what?" Walt said. "You'll kill me twice?"
"Who says we're here to kill you?"
"The woman who brought me here."
"Can you trust her?"
"About this?" Walt laughed. "Doesn't matter. You know damn well who I am."
"To a point," the man said. He stood as still as the alien beside him, making no gestures to accompany his speech or express his emotions. Walt found it very off-putting.
"Then I'm guessing your silent partner there isn't here for my autograph."
The pale man shook his head. "We're here to judge you."
"Like, in court? Who are you to judge me?"
"A man with a gun and an alien brother."
"I guess that beats a degree," Walt laughed. "Which of my crimes am I on trial for? Grand theft mothership? Or the stuff we did a couple weeks ago? Because the former was like six years ago, and there might be a statute of limitations."
"Why would you assume we care what you did to the crash survivors? Or that you brought down the ship?"
"Is this a trick question?"
The man looked like he might shrug, then didn't. "As their killer, there's something you should understand about them. They were convinced to the marrow of their cause. They figured you all were mistreating the world so badly that all they had to do was show up and it would take to them with open arms. But there was more resistance than they expected. And when two assholes literally dropped in and busted their whole operation into the ocean, well, that knocked rifts in the faithful."
At last, the man smiled wryly. "I mean, come on, man. You think just because they're all from the same species, they magically get along? How's that working for humanity?"
"First off, what?" Walt said. "Second, speaking of getting along, how can you do business with Karslaw? He wants you all dead."
"To get the truth from you."
"You're zipping around the world in an atomic submarine, and you can't just snatch me up? I thought snatching was what aliens do best."
"You were elusive. It was decided this would be a good way to put an end to the wild goose chase." The man wiped his nose. "Anyway, who cares what kind of arrangement we made with the barbarian? You think we got to honor that shit?"
"Well, you got me," Walt said. He made a face at the unrelenting sun. "It's a long story. Where should I start?"
"The beginning."
Walt plunked down in the sand, thought for a minute, then started with the plague. How fast it had been. How it killed everyone he knew, leaving him suicidal—
"Slow down, man," the pale man said. "I got to translate."
Walt squinted up. The man was gesturing furiously toward the alien, his fingertips dancing while the alien looked on.
"Like I was saying," Walt said. "Suicide."
And that, of course, transitioned into the story of his long walk, which in turn became a wrathful fight against the invaders. And when even that didn't kill him, he wandered south, traveling with the unhurried interest of a man refurbishing time-worn relics.
&nb
sp; After several years in the jungle—uneventful, for the most part, except for a few tangles with the locals and a couple bouts of comically intense diarrhea—Lorna and the others brought him up here to help. Which he'd done, only to be betrayed by lunatics and hauled here to the island.
"So there you have it," he said. Sea lions barked from somewhere down the shore. "The thrilling tale of how loneliness, an almost willful ignorance, a carelessness toward violence, and a lot of shameless deceit resulted in the death of your buddies down in the ship. As for crashing it in the first place, let the record show that they attacked us first."
He had more—a whole sob story ginned up while he spoke, an epic tale of guilt and sorrow for his part in the aliens' death, followed by his resolve to redeem himself, should he somehow be spared—but he stopped cold. He didn't know how the pale man and his alien buddy thought well enough to BS them. Anyway, between Lorna and Karslaw, he'd had enough lies. They were going to kill him no matter what he said. May as well go out on the truth.
"But you know what, I didn't come up here just on a lark, or because of some girl. Or even to try to save the Catalinans. Is it possible for this sort of thing to be a calling? Like instead of a priest being called to serve God, I was called to kill aliens? I mean, not to get all mystical or pretentious. But I was good at it. So when Karslaw sent for me with Lorna and her husband—who seemed like an all right guy, by the way, but who must have had one hell of a cuckold fetish—it felt like something I had to do. Like I didn't have a choice."
He frowned. "I did, though. Everything's a choice. Including the choice to come back here and finish off your maybe-friends in the ship. I did it. I'm guilty."
He sat back, breathed. The sun felt good. The man went on translating for a while. The alien gestured back, tentacles wriggling, claws moving in small, subtle jerks.
When at last they stopped, Walt raised his eyebrows. "So? Have we reached the part where you sentence me to death and I try to choke you with my handcuffs before your tentacled friend rips me limb from limb?"
The man stared at him, expressionless. "My name is Ness. This is Sebastian. We have decided we'd like to talk some more."
"Right," Walt said. "Can I have some water first? I'm about to die of thirst. I'd hate to rob you of the satisfaction of doing it yourself."
Ness gestured to Sebastian, who withdrew a bottle from one of the gray bandoliers strapped to its body. The water tasted strange, like something distilled from a tidepool, or a failed brand of Gatorade. He must have made a face, because Ness laughed.
"Don't worry. Not poison. Took me a while to get used to the taste, too."
"Has anyone ever told you you're a little weird?"
"Since the day I was born. Now. Let's talk."
Walt handed the alien the bottle. It took it back with a prehensile tentacle. The skin glided over Walt's, smooth and dry. He shuddered. "What's up?"
"You spent a heck of a lot of time explaining the why," Ness said. "We believe it's more about the how."
"How did we kill them? With a bunch of guns."
"But you didn't just blow up the ship."
"Turns out none of us had a jet. Or a nuke. Anyway, every boat we brought near it got blasted to splinters."
"The ship thinks it's underwater," Ness said. "Switched its defenses. Its programming isn't doing too well anymore." He gazed toward the mainland, but the ship was too far away to make out from the blur of city and mountains. "I'm not real sure how to put these concepts in human terms, let alone English. But dirt wants to be life. To put it another way, life wants to be. To emerge from matter. If a pool of water lasts long enough, something will crawl from it. Even stars work and dance. We have a saying: the dirt wants to stand up, too.
"But when you make a thing inert, you kill it. You insult the universe's purpose. That's why they came here. To let the Earth live as it should. That, and to take all mankind's shit."
Walt laughed. "So they wiped out civilization because we made too many cars and soda cans? How do they excuse that mile-wide marvel of metal I dunked into the bay?"
"Hypocritically," Ness said. "One of those necessary evils. You seen any of our buildings?"
"Your buildings? The aliens'?"
"Yes."
"Sure. Weird blue things. Sometimes orange. Kind of look like mounds of coral."
"That's because we grow them. Through an accelerated process. Humans, you chip stone out of the living dirt and put the bones in a pile over your heads."
"We got killed because we wanted to get out of the cold," Walt said. "That's bullshit. I recycled!"
"You're thinking wrong," Ness said. Frustration crossed his face, standing starkly from his usual lack of visible emotion. "It's a hell of a lot bigger than environmentalism, but the fact your civic leaders had to enact recycling programs in the first place only proves how detached you all are from the Way. Dude, you think it's a coincidence the invaders killed mankind through a process that allowed billions of trillions of viruses to find life?"
"I assumed it was just a whole lot more efficient than Operation Entire-Planet-Storm."
"Sure, but that ties in, too. Letting a living virus do the work means they don't have to defy the universe with a whole bunch of tanks and shit."
Sebastian gestured beside him. The two exchanged signs for some time. Ness turned back to Walt. "My brother reminds me we're getting off course. Here's the thing. We find what you've achieved offensive, but we admire the ways you achieved those ends."
Walt laughed. "That absolves me of killing thousands of your people?"
Ness' face remained blank. "Here's the deal. The old ways of thinking is what launched that whole stupid invasion. Got all our people—on both sides—killed. Me and Sebastian, you might call us monks. Reformists. Us and a few friends are trying to do things different. Getting back to our roots. Not being so quick to judge. We're still gonna step in when we see something trying to destroy the Way, but we're doing our best to look at things from a more objective perspective."
"You're not going to kill me."
"We'll get to that."
"Then why did you deal with Karslaw for me in the first place?"
"I told you, to get the truth. And to understand him better. He came to us alone. Unarmed. Big old balls."
"Delusions of grandeur," Walt said. "He uses a lot of romantic speech to get his people to do what he wants. I think it's getting to him. It's like he's writing his own heroic myth in his head."
"Well, despite his balls, I don't think real highly of him. He does bad things and he does them badly." Ness stared off to sea, as if remembering long-gone times. "Lying. Conquering. Taking slaves. Not that he's alone in that. Sometimes I wish the virus had killed us to the last man."
"Well, we could go beat him up together."
Ness shot him a look of amused contempt. "Just because I've decided not to shoot you doesn't mean I'd ever work with you. You're kind of terrible."
"Can I at least have a ride back to the city?"
The pale man gave him an unreadable look. "We're not going to judge you. We're going to let the dirt do it instead."
Walt frowned. "The dirt? I'd like to check if it attended an accredited law school first."
"We're going to leave you here on this lump of dirt in the middle of the water. If the Way approves of you, you'll find your way home."
"You're going to desert me on an island?" He beckoned at the cliffs. "There are trees up there. I'll build a raft. All that's going to prove is whether there's a current running to the mainland."
"What are you gonna do, chop down the trees with your hands?" Ness stood, knees popping. "Here's the deal. We're gonna cut off your handcuffs. You're gonna give us everything you got. Including your clothes. Then we wave goodbye, and it's just you and the Way."
"So instead of having Sebastian squeeze my head until it goes pop, you're going to let the dirt kill me instead. That doesn't wash your claws of responsibility, you know."
"Sure it does. N
ow hold still. Lasers are sadly removed from the Way. They don't know the difference between dead steel and a live hand."
Ness gestured to the alien, who produced a blunt pistol and held Walt down with a slew of claws and tentacles. Heat flared at his left ankle, then his right. He didn't dare to move. With gentle strength, Sebastian straightened his arms from his body and lased through the cuffs on his wrists. Melted steel beaded and fell to the sand. A metallic tang hung in the air.
"Do I really have to strip?" he said. "I mean, if anybody's watching, it's just going to look weird."
"As bare as when you were born," Ness said. "Pardon me if I don't turn my back on you."
Walt sighed and undressed. Sebastian collected his clothes and the cuffs and stuffed them into the pouches in its bandoliers. At least it was a warm day.
"What now?" he said.
"I don't know," Ness said. "I hope I never see you again, but if I do, please tell me the story of your judgment."
"Anything for a friend."
Ness gave him a blank look, then turned and waded into the sea, Sebastian beside him, the waves foaming over his hard, shiny legs. Walt thought about rushing them, but other than the possibility of lashing their bodies into a raft, it wouldn't do him a single bit of good.
Sea lions barked from around the cliffs. The deep blue shape of Catalina rested to the east. The city was a blur to the north, miles and miles further away. Walt closed his eyes and laughed.
31
"They killed Martin."
Mauser pressed his palms into his eyes. "I'm so sorry, Raina."
"Did you see who did it?"
He shook his head. "It all happened so fast."
They had broken into a house on a corner with a turreted top floor and a view of the valley leading to the back slopes of the Dunemarket. Empty houses lay below them like rows of pulled teeth.
"Then we'll have to kill all of them," she said. "That's the only way to make sure Martin's spirit goes free."
Mauser looked up. "You little lunatic. You're not still thinking of fighting."
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 100
