The Breakers Series: Books 1-3

by Edward W. Robertson

  He stuffed a laser in both pockets, stashed the bag under a shrub, and went back inside. Pillows and cushions of all sorts adorned the couches and wall seats of the throne room. He yanked off four pillowcases, draped them around his shoulders, and returned to the armory for another load. The second trip was done in five minutes. Outside, he tied off the end of the pillowcase and set it down next to his backpack, lasers rattling inside.

  He crept back to the throne room as quietly as he knew how, a pistol in each hand, suddenly convinced that guards would leap from behind the curtains. It was as silent as ever. Everyone was drunk or exhausted after the trip from the mainland. Would be a great time to wipe them all out.

  It took five trips in all. He was sure he didn't have every single laser—Karslaw was probably spooning with one right now, and the tower guards and most trusted lieutenants might have been allowed to keep theirs as well—but however many remained, it wouldn't be enough for an army.

  But the laser closet hadn't been the only room in the armory. The others held racks and racks of conventional weapons: .30-06 hunting rifles, assault SKSes with banana clips, semiauto handguns and revolvers of all kinds. Ammo stacked in hefty blue-gray tins. One room held nothing but swords and axes and quivers and bows.

  He returned to the room with the blue-gray boxes and gave them a good stare. There were literal tons of materiel down here. Far too much to carry to the surface one pillowcase at a time. But if he were to rig up a long enough fuse, and then light that fuse with one of the lighters he'd stolen from Lorna's dresser, he could castrate the Catalinans' ability to make war. Shit, with the amount of bullets stored down there, he might well wind up blowing the entire castle to hell and gone.

  Fuses were nothing special. Just a length of anything that would burn slowly enough to allow you to run away before the fire reached the combustibles and kicked off the fireworks. There might even be some among all the weapons here. He'd seen a few wooden boxes. The kind that might be used for carrying dynamite. He stepped back into the hall to give them a look.

  A shout rang out upstairs. Boots thudded over the ceiling, loosening dust on Walt's upturned face. He swore. They were heading straight for the stairwell.

  35

  The boat plowed into the darkness. The wind was strong. There were spirits within it and they were hungry for blood.

  All their plans had centered on attacking the Dunemarket and were now obsolete. While Raina trimmed the sails and set the ship straight for Catalina, Mauser went inside the cabin of the crowded boat to sketch out maps of the island, the town at its northeast tip, and the castle a couple miles inland to the west. When he finished, Raina asked Mrs. Grundheitz to watch the ship while she joined the others in the wind-sheltered space behind the cabin.

  "Stealth and speed," Raina said. "That's how we get to Karslaw."

  Mauser tapped the map. "We land on the shore dead north of the palace. Head straight in. A few of us climb the wall and neutralize the guards. If we make any noise at all, Bryson will have a hell of a time picking the front lock while he's dancing the 'Oh God They're Shooting at Me' jig."

  "Karslaw lives on the top floor."

  "How do you know that?" Mauser said.

  "Because he is the type of man who likes to look down on those he rules. And that's where he keeps his women."

  "Take one of the stairwells," Bryson said. "Real quiet. Post two people at each landing to hold off reinforcements. Raina finds Karslaw, then we move door to door from there."

  Raina nodded. "No matter how quiet we are to the ears, violence is noisy to the soul. The others won't stay asleep for long. Once Karslaw's dead, there's no shame in running."

  "What?" Mauser said. "Don't tell them to run away. Then we'll die for sure."

  She continued speaking to the troops. "None of you are my hands or my feet or my heart. You can go your own way."

  "While that's literally true, I'd just as soon stick together. If we do get split up, however, I suggest we rally down here." Mauser tapped the southeast corner of the island where they'd landed on their initial scouting mission. "That's the opposite way from our boat, but that's why they won't find us. We can steal one of their boats later."

  They settled a few more details, then broke apart, each man and woman watching the island growing in the distance. The plan was so simple Raina began to believe they might come out alive. She stamped that thought out as soon as she had it. She couldn't risk a repeat of her failure to take Karslaw's life at the Dunemarket.

  The sails began to flap. She trimmed them to the wind, which poured out of the northwest as if scared for its life. The island loomed larger. By midnight, she turned the ship into a bay north of the castle, struck the sails, and dropped anchor. Four at a time, they rowed the dingy in to the sandy shore.

  Raina was in the final group to leave the boat. She had no sooner jumped onto the sand when the water boiled behind them.

  Her blood went icy. "It's him."

  Mauser glanced out to sea. "Huh?"

  "The pale man."

  "Shit on a griddle, they followed us?"

  "Fan out and get down," she said to the others. "In a minute, a man will walk out of the water."

  "The fuck?" Bryson said.

  Martin's mom gaped. "Is he friendly?"

  "I don't know," Raina said. "And he might not be alone. There could be aliens with him. But if you shoot before I tell you to, I'll water this beach with your blood."

  Carl shook his head. "Wherever you learned that, it wasn't from me."

  Bryson looked like he might protest, then lay prone in the glass, crooking his rifle against his shoulder. The others joined him, spreading out along the beach and taking cover behind rocks and grass. Mauser touched Raina's shoulder. Together, they returned to the sand and faced the sea.

  The water stirred. A head broke the surface. Water sloughed and spattered from the man's body. An alien followed him, its crablike claws and squid-like limbs thrashing at the waves. Someone gasped from back in the grass. Raina turned her head and glared.

  "You got something of ours," the pale man said. The alien stood silent beside him.

  "We tried to give it back," Mauser said. "Where were you then?"

  "Watching. You gonna attack?"

  "Do you have a problem with that?" Raina said.

  The man gazed at the troops bunkered down on the beach. "Not a whole lot of you."

  "Then join us. That's why you came here. Quit playing games and help us."

  "Is that an official invitation?"

  "Hold on a second," Mauser said. "Is this a trick? You've got a submarine out there. If you want the islanders dead, why not just attack their boats in the open ocean?"

  The man gestured to the alien for a moment, who responded with quick jerks of its tentacle tips.

  "Ran out of torpedoes ages ago. Only weapons we got left are surface-only. Meanwhile, some goddamn fool let these people get their hands on lasers. If they damage our ship, how we gonna replace it? That's not just a sub. That's our home."

  "I don't care," Raina said. "Will you stand with us or not?"

  The man stared blankly. "There aren't many of us. We don't like these people, but we aren't gonna die to take them down."

  "What an inspiring pledge of support," Mauser said.

  "We'll help you get inside. We'll watch your backs. Then you're on your own."

  "Agreed," Raina said.

  Mauser looked pained. "Are we sure this is a good idea?"

  "We don't have lasers. If he wanted us dead, he could have attacked our boat." She gestured inland. South. "It doesn't matter. An hour from now, it will all be over."

  He sighed. "It's your show."

  The man reached into his pocket and removed a device identical to the one Mauser had stolen. "I'll call in the others. Might want to let your people know the score before their fingers get itchy."

  Raina explained quickly. Bryson's quiet friend shook his head. "I'm not fightin' with no fuckin' aliens."

/>   Bryson snorted. "You seen their hardware?"

  "Sure. They showed it off pretty well when they mounted an invasion of the whole goddamn planet."

  "These ones are different," Raina said.

  The man raised one brow. "I'd fuckin' hope so."

  "I don't trust them completely. But if they mean to betray us, I don't want them skulking around behind us. I want them close enough to cut."

  "Jesus," Bryson's friend laughed. "All right. Consider me convinced."

  Four more aliens strode from the black waves. They wore bandoliers along their long ovoid bodies. Tentacles carried snubby black guns. The pale man led them to the grass. Most of Raina's people flinched or grew stiff, but some watched the aliens with the amusement of those for whom all life has become a joke.

  Raina turned her back and led the group up the hill. The pale man got out a small black tube and held it to his eye. If he saw anything in the darkness, he kept it to himself. His creatures scuttled along in a loose group, several feet of open grass separating them from the line of humans.

  Raina moved over to walk beside the pale man. She briefly explained their strategy. "I want you to cover us when we climb up the towers. If any of the guards makes a word, you silence him."

  "You givin' me orders?"

  "Does it sound like a good plan or not?"

  He smiled a bit. "Sure. A laser's mighty bright, though. Hope you brought your sneaking shoes."

  She glanced down at her feet. She was wearing sneakers, in fact. The man spoke strangely. She would have chalked it up to living among aliens, but Mauser spoke even less intelligibly, and as far as she knew he'd been among humans the whole time.

  Past the hill, the wind died down to a mild breeze, grass swaying around the troops' thighs. She tried to feel for the spirit of her father, but there were too many people around. Maybe there were too many other ghosts, too. She didn't know how these things worked. Just that when you killed a thing, it became yours.

  That was what set her apart from the others. Most of them had been raised by supermarkets. When they grew hungry, they went to the stores with the big red letters and the stores handed down packages of meat tidily wrapped in skin-tight plastic. In her early years, she had been no different—her first parents serving her grilled cheese and rice and beans, as if by magic, as if from a place where the food never stopped.

  But then everything changed. She killed her own food. Fish. Possums. Cats and rats and dogs and snails. And maybe the others had done this, too, but they were too old, their eyes long adjusted to the light of the old ways, too dazzled by the past to see the other world that had always been there. When you killed a thing, it lingered beyond the flesh. It became you.

  In this way, Karslaw had taken her father. If the bearded man killed her tonight, she would become his as well, and she would have the small consolation of being reunited with her dad. But that idea terrified her, too. She would not be any man's. She would kill him. And if fate denied her, choosing to take her life instead, she would kill herself before Karslaw got the chance.

  The castle loomed from the hills.

  "No more words," Raina said. "Our blades talk now."

  The pale man's hands danced as if he were weaving spells. The thick foretentacles of the aliens climbed, swiveling to face the man's hands. Each creature made a quick gesture with their lash-like tentacles.

  The castle's gate faced the east and she circled them around its back side to hide them from the towers standing at either side of the drawbridge. As they neared, she crouched lower and lower until the grass swished past her ears. A single tower rose from the back wall. Its windows were too narrow and dark to see inside. Raina gestured the others to stop. They knelt in the grass, the aliens flattening themselves until nothing but their glaring, unwinking eyes projected from the breeze-stirred blades.

  "Give me a boost up the wall," she said to Mauser. "I'll flash my knife from the windows when it's finished."

  Faced with the hard reality of the palace, Mauser looked ready to turn tail and run, but it was too late. Too many eyes watched him. He handed his rifle to Vince, checked to see he still had his pistol and knife, then gave her the thumbs-up and a manic grin.

  They crawled through the grass on their bellies. Dew soaked her shirt. The breeze stopped and she grabbed Mauser's arm. He went still. She waited until the wind once more tousled the grass, obscuring their movement and noise, then crawled on.

  The grass ceased. The wooden wall waited a foot from her face. She tipped back her head. She was almost directly beneath the tower. The walls were vertical with no gaps between the boards. Mauser faced the palisade and squatted. She planted her left foot on his shoulder and he grabbed her ankle. She braced herself against the wood and lifted her other foot, wobbling on his shoulders. He grunted softly and stood.

  Even when she raised her arms as high as she could, the serrated top of the palisade remained a foot out of reach. She lowered herself, knees bent, then sprung. She grabbed the top of the wall, splinters gouging her palms. Her heels thumped the boards and she grimaced. Mauser got his hands under her dangling feet and pushed. She wriggled up the wall and swung her leg over the side.

  A wooden platform fringed the inner edge of the wall three. She lowered herself to it in silence. Overhead, the tower remained noiseless and dark. She entered its base. A ladder extended into the shadows. She loosened her tanto and climbed.

  After thirty feet, the ladder reached a square hole in a platform. Raina waited, listening, then poked her head into the room above. Weak moonlight touched an empty chair. A flashlight hung from a peg by one of the windows. A rifle stood propped in the corner. A shape moved away from another window, silhouetted. The man's hair and skin was so dark he'd blended with the night completely. She felt a pang of envy. The man clumped across the platform, passing the hole and leaning into the window beside the flashlight. Raina eased herself up as slowly as a stalking cat, drew her knife, and closed in.

  At the last second, he straightened from the window. She jerked the blade into his neck, grabbing his mouth with her open right hand. Blood gargled from the cut, spraying with each pump of his heart. He struggled, shoes thumping, lifting her off the ground, but she held fast. His strength left him in seconds. He sagged to the platform, blood washing down his front. She fought his body's dead weight, lowering it to the floor, and watched until she was sure it would never move again.

  She wiped the knife on the man's shirt, put it out the window, and angled it back and forth in the moonlight.

  She couldn't see the others hidden in the grass; the breeze disguised their movements. Feet scuffed in the dirt directly below her. She took the flashlight and the black alien pistol on the man's belt. The grip was heavy. She secured it in the back of her pants and climbed down the ladder to the wall.

  Carl, Mauser, and Bryson's friend waited for her. Mauser looked anxious. Bryson's friend looked ready. Carl was composed, unreadable. The platform ran unbroken all the way around the inner walls. There was a tower on both the north and south extremes of the wall and two more on either side of the eastern gate. Raina pointed to each man, then a tower. Her people moved in perfect silence along the wall. She no longer felt fear. Just the gut-down need to plunge her knife into those who had wronged her.

  Mauser reached his tower and stopped beneath it. Raina continued on, crawling along in the shadow of the parapet. A handful of candles burned in the windows of the keep. A man coughed. She reached her tower. Across the gates, Carl raised his hand. She answered in kind, then gestured across the wall at Mauser, who did the same. They started up their ladders.

  She took the rungs one at a time, hands rasping on the metal. This part would be tricksiest of all. They'd all started up the ladders at the same time, but they had no way to coordinate their attacks. Each would have to be perfect or risk alerting the guards in the other towers.

  Just below the entry to the tower platform, Raina's foot slipped. She scrabbled, metal ringing under her feet.
/>
  "Dan?" a man called from above. Elsewhere around the walls, soft thumps carried on the breeze. A face appeared in the gap above Raina's head. "Dan?"

  The man's eyes went wide. She flung herself up the ladder. He shouted in surprise and pulled away from the hole. A whistle trilled, long and loud, splitting the night in half.

  Lasers flashed through the gap overhead. The whistle stopped, replaced by a scream. The man staggered, boots thumping. Fat sizzled down on Raina's face. Smoke gushed through the tower. A body banged into the wood. Shouts echoed through the keep. One by one, its windows lit with lanterns.

  "The gate!" Raina yelled.

  She slid down the ladder and landed on the platform. A winch held the drawbridge fast. She got out the laser and fumbled with its buttons. Blue light licked the planks at her feet, sending up a curl of smoke. She jolted, then lased straight through the rope. The drawbridge groaned, parted like the mouth of a dying beast, and crashed across the span. Her troops sprinted through the grass.

  A hot beam sliced from one of the keep's windows, burning into the wall to Raina's left. She flung herself to the grass. The laser whisked overhead and winked off. The pale man and his aliens flanked the gates, returning fire, gridding the courtyard with strobing blue bolts and navy shadows. Raina got up and ran toward the front doors, hustling up the stone steps. Her people streamed across the courtyard, weapons in hand, taking up position at either side of the doors. They were locked. Raina turned the laser on the lock-plate and reduced it to red-hot slag.

  Automatic fire rattled from the windows. Lasers lanced at the stone facing.

  "Ready?" Raina said.

  "Let's fuck 'em up," Mauser said.

  She pulled open the left door, leaping off the steps into the grass to the side. Rifles opened fire, bullets and a couple of lasers pouring from the doorway. Mauser and Bryson took cover behind the side of the stairs, edging for position. A metal egg bonked onto the top step and rolled crookedly to a stop.