He tracked it all the way down to the deck of the ship. It landed with a clunk a couple hundred yards away; men and women ran to it, prying it open and passing around assault rifles, pistols, ammunition, dry shoes, and maps.
That was where the blimp came in. Most balloons were only good for carrying three or four people. Between the pilot and two men strong enough to chuck boxes of supplies over the side, that only left room for a couple hundred pounds of cargo. Armaments added weight fast. Especially bullets.
The blimp, on the other hand, was good for a dozen passengers—or three soldiers and a literal ton of gear. And instead of battling the winds to achieve position like a balloon—let alone getting four or five of them to occupy the same general airspace at once—it could be counted on to maneuver overhead at the same time the troops swam aboard.
One by one, the boxes floated down from the sky. No missiles lanced up to meet them. Were the targets too small to trigger the defenses? Was the missile system only activated by water-borne threats? What the hell kind of sense did that make on a spaceship? Had he knocked out its radar-equivalent in the crash, and all it had left to track threats with was sonar? Walt hadn't been certain that any of the boxes would land safely. Getting all of them would be a coup. Soldiers swarmed to each package, dim shapes dwarfed by the vast landscape of the ship.
After the last package thumped to the deck, Karslaw's chute deployed against the stars.
A few scouts joined Walt at the spiral staircase. The rest waited to move until Karslaw landed. Bare legs marched over the metal ground. Rifles and machine guns flashed in the moonlight. Walt didn't know what waited for them below. Even before he'd dumped the ship into the sea like an old tire, the thing had been run by a skeleton crew. And the crash had been catastrophic. The kind of thing that converted healthy bones into dog treats. Most of the crew must have died on impact.
But the damn things looked like bugs. Crabs or crickets or ants, with a lot of squiddish space-horror thrown in for good measure. If they bred like bugs, there was no telling how many of their children lurked in the city-sized interior.
Karslaw strode up and clasped his hand. "This has all gone too well. Could we be walking into a trap?"
Walt shrugged. "Or a ghost town."
"The question is not whether the enemy is here. The question is how many."
He turned to face the gathering of troops. Faces of both sexes and all races went sober.
"I don't know what awaits us in the darkness." Karslaw kept his voice low, but his baritone words resonated through the damp, warm air. "Perhaps I'm leading you into folly. It could be that we'll never see the sun again. This ship could become our tomb.
"But if so, we will rest in it together. Just as we fought in it together. Just as we built our community together. We can no longer allow this threat to mount on our doorstep. If we turn our backs to it, we invite the knife. And so we take the plunge. We step through the doorway into darkness. And when we reemerge, it will be to a new world. A world that is finally ours. A world we can leave to our children knowing they will grow up as we did: safe. Secure. Able to pass it to children of their own."
He smiled, teeth standing out in the night. "You are the bravest men and women I've ever know. I would ask you to do me proud, but you already have a hundred times over."
He raised his fist in salute and took the first step down the stairs.
Along with guns and ammo, the blimp-dropped boxes had been packed with basic exploratory gear. A team of knot-versed sailors rigged a rope ladder across the gaps in the staircase. Troops climbed down to the catwalk overlooking the blackness of the former landing bay. Walt wasn't certain it was the same one he and Otto had used to penetrate the ship five years ago, but if not, it was virtually identical. After the stairs, soldiers snuck along a platform into a short tunnel overlooking a chasm of space where smaller spacecraft had once entered and left. It was too dark to see the bottom clearly, but he didn't think there was any water down there.
Walt followed the foremost scouts across the catwalk. He knew there was no sense in trying too hard to be quiet—he was 99% certain the aliens had no sense of hearing—but he found himself creeping around like a cat burglar anyway. A set of circular doors rested in the wall, seamed down the middle. A couple of troopers went for the handles while others knelt and readied their guns.
The doors opened to blackness. Walt shined his flashlight into the tunnel, illuminating high ceilings and rounded walls. Unmarked doors sat in the walls at regular intervals. Karslaw assigned a couple pairs of soldiers to check each door while the main body of troops moved on, scouts jogging ahead.
The tunnel ran on and on, curving gently, pitched downward by the slant of the ship in the ocean outside. A thin layer of dust lay undisturbed on the ground. On his first and only other visit to the ship, motion-sensing lights had flicked on as he passed, illuminating his way down the halls. Dozens of different hums and rumbles had fought for the full spectrum of his hearing. This time, all he could hear was his own breath, the scrape of his feet on the rubbery floor. The only lights were the ones they carried.
The tunnel hit a six-pointed intersection. Walt played his flashlight over the inscrutable glyphs written around its steeply pitched ceiling.
"I don't have the first clue where we went from here," he murmured to Karslaw.
"Not to worry," the big man said. "This is why the good lord invented scouts."
He gathered ten men and women and sent them down the branches of the hall, redirecting the bulk of his forces to retreat a short ways down the tunnel. His soldiers knelt, guns ready, waiting for the scouts to return. Walt crouched beside a doorway in the intersection and watched the hall for lights.
The scouts filtered back. Most hadn't seen a thing, but one reported finding a ramp leading deeper into the ship. It showed tracks in the dust.
Karslaw motioned the troops onward, leaving two behind as a rearguard. The new tunnel led past several open doors to small, sparse rooms of no obvious function, then to a great hall of some kind. Debris lay piled against one wall, thrown there by the crash, but most of the stools and spindly chairs were stuck to the ground and remained in place.
At the end of the tunnel, a wide blue ramp spiraled down into the darkness. Walt thought he recognized the material—he'd seen it inside the alien settlements established during the invasion—but previously, the substance had been slightly yielding and tacky, assisting the climb up and down. This ramp had gone as hard and brittle as old coral.
But the air rising from it smelled briny. A little rotten. Like something the flies would flock to on the tideline. Lines as thick as Walt's wrist traced the dust leading to the ramp.
Karslaw led his people down the long spiral. Another tunnel stretched into the darkness, but the ceiling here was thirty feet high. A scout waited in the gloom.
Karslaw spoke with her, then beckoned Walt over. "Do you know where we are?"
"I don't think I saw this level," Walt said. "If I did, I was running away from it at top speed."
"There is a chamber ahead. A very large one." He glanced at the scout. "Amanda believes it is inhabited."
"That's what we're here for, isn't it?"
Karslaw smiled grimly. He gathered the leaders of his very basic platoon system and sketched out quick orders. The hallway was wide enough for five men to walk abreast. Those at the front clicked off their lights. They advanced down the tunnel.
After fifty yards, a wide, semi-circular door opened in the wall. The troops crept in two by two, dispersing to either side of the door. Walt slunk through. Dim light filtered from irregular patches on the far walls and high ceiling. The space was large enough to have been a hangar or repair bay; mangled machinery was heaped against one wall.
The middle of the room was filled with houses. Round, orange mounds twelve feet high and twice as wide. Some of the doors appeared to be nothing more than sheets or curtains. A few dozen of them filled the space. The house walls were lumpy. Parts we
re patchwork, plastic and metal plates scavenged from the ruined machinery. Huddled within a ship the size of a town, one that had crossed light-years of space and smashed humanity to splinters, this makeshift village was so pathetic and low-rent it made Walt's heart feel small.
The curtains parted in one of the doorways. A bulbous oval head poked into the dusky room.
A rifle shot echoed through the cavernous room. The head snapped behind the curtain. A body thumped. Tentacles writhed.
"Take no prisoners!" Karslaw bellowed. "Fight for the lives of your families on the island!"
Ten squads rushed ten separate houses. Walt charged alongside his assigned squad. Machine guns rattled through the hangar. A man kicked open the door of the house and two soldiers rushed in before Walt. Their shots knocked two aliens to the ground. Walt lasered a third, severing claws, its yellow, gloppy blood spattering the bare floor. A fourth creature rose from a pocket set into the wall and the men behind Walt riddled it with bullets. It was half the size of the others.
Outside, aliens streamed from the orange mounds, firing blue beams. A man screamed. Others fired back, knocking the monsters from their spidery legs. They fell with unnerving silence. Walt followed his squad to another home. A laser licked from the doorway, spinning a woman to the floor. She grunted and curled into a ball. The air stank of old seawater and burnt meat.
Another woman knelt and fired a long burst into the doorway. Walt moved beside the entry. As soon as she ceased shooting, he swung around the frame, joined by another soldier. Blue light crackled past his shoulder. He dropped prone and returned fire, punching a steaming hole in the alien's head. His partner opened fire, filling the room with noise and smoke and blood.
It was over within another minute. Most of the enemy had been shot unarmed, or caught in the open as they attempted to flee. The few who tried to hole up were shot in their dens. In the shocking quiet that followed, Walt wandered the grounds, turning his flashlight on the bodies. He counted up to fifty, then ballparked the rest. Two hundred, tops, perhaps a tenth of them obviously smaller than the others. He had expected...more. A thrumming hive. Eggs sitting in countless rows, hatching even as he watched.
Instead, it had been like stumbling into a third world village. And then slaughtering it.
Karslaw's side had suffered just four deaths. He'd brought a former nurse and a veterinarian and the pair treated the handful of wounded with limited supplies. Men walked among the dead aliens, stooping to pick up weapons and gather them into backpacks.
Walt headed over to Karslaw, who knelt beside the woman who'd been shot in front of Walt, hand on her shoulder. Her eyes were tightly shut and sweat glistened from her pale face. She'd been hit in the stomach and it smelled like burning garbage.
Karslaw murmured to the woman the whole time the vet and nurse bandaged her up. After, he straightened and waved Walt away with him.
"That went about as well as we could've hoped," Walt said.
"They were unprepared," Karslaw said. "No one has made it inside this place since it went down. It's tough to keep your people vigilant when the threats are so distant."
"Yeah, but look at this place. It's a shit heap. They're attacking Avalon with submarines and their home base is a shantytown?"
"You act like it's already over. How much of this ship have we yet to explore?"
Something was wrong. It didn't add up. Karslaw left two squads among the houses to protect the wounded, provide a base of operations, and take out any aliens who wandered in from elsewhere in the ship. The rest of the troops advanced methodically through the ship, scouts ranging ahead and coming back to report what little they'd seen. They surprised and massacred another twenty aliens, finding most of the creatures scuttling around alone or in pairs. Once, they walked into an ambush—a hastily-arranged mine, followed by a barrage of laser fire. Karslaw lost four men in moments. But there were just two of the things holding them off behind the scorched doorway. They fell quickly.
Down in the darkness, lit only by flashlights and the luminescent mold that seemed to grow wherever the aliens had set up settlements, time lost its meaning. They searched the ship for hours on end. Karslaw rotated out the squads at the base, allowing two to sleep while a third kept watch and the rest continued working their way across the ship.
They encountered little but wreckage and death. Smashed equipment. Desiccated bodies broken against the walls. They found three functional banks of computers and destroyed them all.
Karslaw's scouts did a banner job locating the creatures' tracks and hunting them down, but the warlord knew it was impossible to check the whole ship. The lower sections were slanted below the waterline. Some were flooded. It was possible for some of the aliens to have taken refuge there, alerted by the gunfire. And the vessel was just too enormous. Scouring all of its inner holds would take weeks. They'd only brought enough food and water in the blimp-boxes to last them a few days.
But when at last they emerged into the brilliant sunlight of a gorgeous Southern California late afternoon, they had not seen a single alien without cutting it down where it stood.
25
It took nearly a day for Martin to wake for more than a few minutes at a time. A bandage covered his broken nose. Both eye sockets were swollen and bruised. The doctor Jill had sent them from the Dunemarket thought he had a concussion and a couple cracked ribs. When the woman asked Mauser about the state of their medical supplies, he danced around the issue for a minute, then allowed that he might have some painkillers stashed away after all.
"I don't think he suffered anything internal," she said. "But if you see any neurological symptoms—dizziness, confusion, memory loss, ataxia or impaired motor function—come see me at once."
"That's it?" Raina said.
"There's no pill to cure a beating." The doctor stood up from the bed and picked up her bag. "Make sure he gets plenty of rest. Try to limit his exposure to angry gangsters. He'll be fine."
Raina watched him for a while, then went to meet up with Carl. Martin was still asleep when she returned that night. In the morning, she ate breakfast in his room. With a spoonful of oatmeal halfway to her mouth, he sat up and groaned.
"Am I going to be okay?"
She swallowed. "What were you thinking?"
"Huh?"
"We said not to go to the Osseys. We told you it was too dangerous."
He frowned, tried to pull the blankets down from his chest, and gasped in pain. "Well, we needed to find out what was going on, didn't we?"
"Did you?"
"I tried."
"And almost got killed," Raina said. "One of the couriers found you in a ditch."
He shrugged, ignoring the pain. "So what? If you'd thought it was worth doing, you would have done it no matter what I said."
"But you're not me."
Martin clenched his jaw. "I'm going back to sleep."
"The doctor said you'll be fine," she said.
He rolled over. "I'm tired, Raina."
She stared at his back for a moment, then got up and left. She walked out the door and bumped right into Mauser's chest.
"Such bedside manner," he said. "It's no wonder he's devoted to you."
She walked out of earshot before replying. "Well, he could have been killed."
"Because you treat him like a child. He was trying to prove he's not."
"You thought it was a bad idea, too!"
"Yeah, but I wasn't all grumpy about it." Mauser glanced across the house. "Anyway, I'm not the one he's got a crush on. I don't have to be responsible for his feelings."
She went to the door. "It's not my fault how he feels."
"I suppose that's true. But a good person would act like it was anyway."
Annoyance spiked through her chest. She walked out. Their pantry was getting bare again and she had worn out her best socks. She headed down to the ruins to cast around and clear her head before it was time to see Carl.
Martin recovered well. Raina kept an eye on hi
m for any signs of brain injuries, but he was walking fine, if stiffly, by that night. He didn't talk to her much, but a couple days later, she offered to help re-tape his ribs. It had been months since they'd swam together and his chest didn't look quite as sunken as it had before their last few months of racing around the L.A. Basin.
Everything stayed quiet. After the market closed one night, Jill held a meeting in the shelter of the hills. Raina wasn't invited. Mauser was, but wouldn't go into detail.
"It would only bore you," he claimed. "It was primarily a discussion of the logistics of maintaining communications across a diverse group spread across the greater city. At one point, they actually spent ten minutes discussion the feasibility of capturing and training a team of passenger pigeons."
"That sounds awesome," Martin said.
"What's a passenger pigeon?" Raina said.
"See?" Mauser said.
Jill held another meeting a couple days later, but beyond that, and the reports from a few travelers that the Osseys had returned to trolling the bridges of Long Beach, the entire area seemed to be holding its breath. Waiting to see what the Catalinans would do next. That was fine with Raina. Quiet time meant more time she could spend at Carl's. Preparing for war—whether that war came as a troop in Jill's army, or alone in the fields of Catalina hunting Karslaw by herself.
The day came and went for the Catalinans to come collect their taxes. The ship and its crew never showed up.
The following night, Mauser called a meeting of his own. A household meeting, just the three of them. They sat in the warm night on the back porch, three candles wavering on the glass end table.
"I expect you're wondering why I gathered you all tonight," Mauser said.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 96