This explained why rumors of other surviving towns made the rounds in the Territory. It stemmed from the lie that the Fibs were protecting. And that lie was the perfect front for the true nature of the mining operating. Let the slave labor force spend their time suspecting the existence of other towns rather than suspecting even a grain of the truth.
Crater emphasized the importance of the Line. He said that even though the marauders had been able to tap into it, they still hadn’t been able to figure out how the aliens controlled it. And the Line was the key to keeping the whole façade going.
We turned onto a tiny rural road and followed it for twenty miles or so. It turned into a dirt road which we followed until it ended in the middle of a forest even more untamed than the one we’d just driven through. From there, we began to hike through the woods and I broached a topic that I was sure Crater wasn’t going to bring up himself.
I asked him about the salamander in the dirt. He denied drawing it, but I didn’t believe him. And just as I was ready to press him about it, he launched into the story of Jonah Wolfe, the man who first discovered the secret of Black Rock.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Jonah Wolfe was from Port Huemene, a town on the southern tip of the Santa Barbara Channel. Port Huemene was a fuel town. Everything revolved around the extraction of oil and every family worked the rigs. It was hard and dangerous work. Before the Virus, the Channel had been home to twenty-seven platform rigs. After the Virus, it was home to four, and those four provided the fuel for the Territory.
After the crude oil was extracted, it was trucked south to Rapahanoc for refining and then trucked all over the Territory. At least that’s what those who were privy to information about commerce believed. But the truth was that after the oil was refined, only some of it ended up in the scattered towns of the Territory. Most of it ended up in Yachats where tank trucks used it to fuel the transportation of water.
Jonah and his brother worked the rigs, just as their father and grandfather had. By the time they were in their thirties, the brothers had worked all four rigs. Platforms Gina, Gail, Gilda, and Grace.
Platform Grace killed Jonah’s brother. A thick steel cable snapped, swung violently across the deck and into his brother’s stomach. It all happened in the blink of an eye and Jonah found himself holding his brother in his arms, trying to push his brother’s guts back into his stomach. He tried to stem the flow of blood and pull the torn flesh back into place. But his brother died in his arms.
With a heavy heart, Jonah buried him.
And he didn’t return to Platform Grace. Or to Gina, Gilda, or Gail. He wanted to run from Port Huemene. His brother had been his only friend. It’d been that way from the start. When Jonah first spoke, at the age of two, he spoke to his brother. His brother was four years older and he listened and answered. That had never stopped.
Those conversations had been enough for Jonah. He didn’t need anyone else.
After his brother’s death, Jonah applied to the Port Huemene Town Council for a visa to leave town. He wanted to go to Obispo, a town with a handful of people. They farmed for themselves and didn’t trade with other towns. Jonah figured he’d farm a small plot of land and on that land, he’d talk to his brother. Even if his brother never answered.
But the Town Council didn’t want to lose Jonah. Oil rig workers were hard to come by. Not many people wanted to do those jobs. The Town Council denied his visa and told him to go back to work.
Jonah left Port Huemene, anyway. He journeyed north and somewhere along the way, he realized that there were a hell of a lot of trucks headed to Yachats. Trucks loaded with either gas, diesel, or water. So he traveled to Yachats and discovered the water storage facility. But he didn’t know anything about the Territory’s water supply and concluded that this must be the Territory’s central water distribution hub, which made sense. What didn’t make sense were the comings and goings of the double and triple tank trucks. They all left and returned within a couple of days. None of their trips lasted any longer. How could they be hauling water across the entire Territory? To him, it looked like they were hauling water to one location then coming back for more. So he stowed away in the back of one of the cabs and made it out to Black Rock and, there, he saw the golden space tanker loading up on water and bolting up into the infinite blackness of space.
Jonah didn’t like to talk to others, but now he had to. He had to tell others that they were all part of a slave labor force. Slaves that mined water for an alien race. But even though he wanted to tell others, he didn’t know whom to trust. He was sure those in charge already knew the secret and that they were protecting it. If he talked to them, they’d kill him. His solution was to find others like him, outsiders, people who wanted to leave their towns, but weren’t allowed to.
Jonah would tell those people what he’d seen and if they didn’t believe him, he’d bring them to Black Rock. He wanted their help. He wanted to free the Territory from the aliens. And most of all, he wanted to avenge his brother’s death. He now understood that his brother hadn’t died providing for his family and his town. His brother had died mining water for these aliens.
Over the next few years, Jonah put together a group of outsiders. First, by taking them to see the golden space tanker themselves, and then, by setting up a base camp in the western part of what used to be New Mexico. By now, the Fibs were calling this band of deserters ‘marauders’ and considered them criminals and not just deserters. But this didn’t stop Jonah from moving forward. He used his thirty years of pent-up words to inspire his followers to take on the mission of freeing the Territory and soon he and two dozen marauders began to implement a plan.
They needed cars and fuel, so they stole them. They used the fuel to create incendiary bombs. Jonah wasn’t a scientist, but growing up in Port Huemene, he’d learned enough about gas and oil to build simple and deadly bombs. Bombs which the marauders would launch at the space tanker.
It took them two years to gather and build what they needed and, during that time, a few more men and women joined them. These newcomers were different than the people whom Jonah had recruited. The new arrivals came with technological and scientific knowledge and one of them even redesigned the incendiary bombs. They were drawn here because they’d managed to learn enough to suspect that something wasn’t right about the Territory and they’d heard that Jonah Wolfe might know what that something was.
Jonah welcomed them. He knew that the marauders needed them. The enemy was far more technologically advanced than the marauders would ever be. He thought the new arrivals were so valuable that he didn’t allow any of them to go on the mission to Black Rock. He feared that there’d be many casualties and he didn’t want to risk losing any of them. He understood that, in the end, the marauders’ most effective weapon would be knowledge. That was why the aliens had destroyed as much of it as they could without raising suspicion, and continued to wipe it out whenever it was rediscovered.
Jonah made a wise decision not to send those men into battle.
On the night of the attack, the sky was clear and the stars were crisp.
Jonah and the marauders drove their cars to the edge of the flats and waited. They knew exactly what time the tanker came down from the stars. So forty minutes before the ship bolted down, the cars set out across the mud flats. It would take thirty-five minutes to drive into position and five minutes to set up the bombs. They’d be exposed during that time, but there was no way around that. Jonah had timed it for minimum exposure.
Each car carried four marauders and each car towed another car. These other cars had their tops shorn off, their seats removed, and they carried massive bombs in the open cavities where the seats once were. Under each bomb was a launching device, and most of these launchers would target the belly of the ship, the part from where the fiery bronze cylinders emerged. Jonah thought this was the most vulnerable part of the ship. A few launchers had more power. They’d launch the bombs above the space tanker, and the
marauders hoped that these bombs would rain down on top of the ship.
At T-minus forty minutes, the marauders began their drive across the silent flats. Thirty-five minutes later, they stopped at the edge of the spot where the mud flats opened up for the space tanker. They unhitched the bomb-laden cars and drove the other cars back a hundred yards. Then they returned to the bombs and readied the launchers.
The mud flats opened up and the marauders looked to the sky and within minutes they saw the shooting star that didn’t fade. They watched its bright yellow tail turn to orange fire and then burning blue and, like an all-powerful God, the golden craft was suddenly right there above them.
The marauders launched their bombs and sprinted back toward their cars. The bombs exploded on impact and the bottom of the ship was suddenly awash in flames. The orange fire clung to the space tanker, then spread in blazing waves across its underside. Seconds later, flames shot off of the top of the ship.
The ship was drenched in fire, flames falling to the ground.
Jonah and his men arrived at their cars and this was their moment of triumph.
Crater told us that he saw joy in his colleagues’ eyes, but then suddenly everything turned. A blinding blue light engulfed everyone. The blue was sharp and clean and it covered the flats in every direction and, in less than two seconds, it vanished, like it’d never been there.
Jonah and the other marauders were gone. So were the cars.
Crater looked up to the ship. The flames were gone. The ship’s sleek, golden body was perfect and the seven fiery bronze cylinders descended from its belly and into the opening.
The space tanker loaded up on water.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
We hiked in silence. There wasn’t much else to say after hearing the story of Jonah Wolfe. It was the story of the marauders’ founding and it was a powerful story.
Lily broke the silence when she asked Crater why he thought he’d been spared that night. He had two theories, neither of which could be proved. It was possible that there was something about his physical make-up that had made him resistant to the blue weapon. Or there was a glitch with the weapon and that glitch had saved him. He’d never know why he was spared, but I could tell that there was something that weighed on him more than the question of why. You could hear in his voice that he felt terribly guilty for being the only survivor.
We arrived at a cabin and Crater told us that this would be a temporary stop. Considering how deep we’d gone into the wilderness, I kind of figured that. He said we’d spend the night and in the morning I could decide if I wanted to help the marauders. I’d hoped he’d ask Lily to join, too, since that would make my decision easier, but so far he hadn’t even hinted at that.
We stepped into the cabin, and the life I thought I’d never see again came rushing back. Benny was sitting at a table, his leg jittering and I’d never been happier to see it jitter.
“So you finally did a little exploring,” he said, and headed over to me. We hugged, then all of us sat down and he filled me in on how he’d ended up here.
On the same night that Crater had approached me in the Swan Peninsula, Miloff had approached Benny in Clearview.
Benny had been exploring Colfax Junction, Clearview’s abandoned train station. He’d pried open a rusted locker and discovered an old Internet Protocol manual inside. He couldn’t believe his luck and as he headed back out, through the station, he started to flip through the manual, looking forward to reading it in its entirety that night. Every once in while, he’d learn something new about the Line from one of these old manuals.
He looked up from the manual and that’s when he saw Miloff standing in front of the exit doors.
Benny started to run toward the back of the station and the abandoned tracks and Miloff shouted out, “Read this,” then put a note down on a nearby bench and took off.
Benny, curious, stopped running and headed over to the bench. He scooped up the note and read it. By the time he finished reading it, he knew that whoever wrote that note understood more about the Line than anyone else in the Territory. The note explained how to decipher one of those mysterious data packets floating through the Line. Now he was much more excited about this than the Internet Protocol manual, and he didn’t want to wait until the next day to decipher one of the data packets.
So he bicycled to the Town Hall, fired up the Line, and waited for a packet to come across it. The first few packets didn’t fit the bill. It had to be the right kind. After two hours, he spotted one, went to work, and unlocked it. It revealed a code that promised to access a part of the Line that he didn’t even know existed. He didn’t believe that it did exist, but when he tried the code, it opened up a secret part of the Line and there he found another message waiting for him. It was an invitation to learn more about the Line. More than he could imagine. But he’d have to travel south and he’d have to leave tonight. Miloff would be waiting for him at the end of the Mory Aqueduct.
Benny didn’t decide to go south right then, but he did decide to meet Miloff.
At the Mory Aqueduct, Miloff told Benny that there was a small group of people who knew more about the Line than anyone in the Territory and they wanted Benny to join them. But Benny was still undecided. Then Miloff told him that I wouldn’t be coming back to Clearview, and it was because I was right about the water. That sealed the deal. At least, enough for him to go with Miloff and find out if I wasn’t coming back.
Benny said, “So is it true?”
“I can’t go back,” I said, and told him why. I told him about Black Rock. But I didn’t tell him there was another reason. Lily.
Benny asked me dozens of questions about the alien facility and I answered him as best I could. Then he asked Crater a question that I’d wanted to ask, but hadn’t yet. Had the marauders ever told the Fibs what was going on at Black Rock? Crater said that they’d told Victor Crow, twice.
Many years ago, Jonah Wolfe had sent a marauder to a young Victor Crow. This was before the marauders had discovered how to monitor the Line, so Jonah had no idea that Crow was being fed that big lie. Crow listened to the marauder’s outlandish claim and, of course, he didn’t believe him. But he did worry that this marauder could jeopardize the Fibs’ high-paid work of supplying water to faraway towns. So he executed him.
Many years later, Jonah’s successor, Will Xere, sent another marauder to Victor Crow, but this time with proof. Photos of the golden ship. But the photos were grainy and dark and because of the empty vastness of Black Rock, they also lacked perspective as to size and distance. The hope was that Crow would be intrigued enough to check it out himself, but he wasn’t. He responded by executing this marauder, too.
It was after this that false accusations against the marauders flooded the Line. Accusations of sabotage and violent crimes. Threats to the stability of the Territory. So the Fibs started to hunt down the marauders and execute them. But the few who survived managed to learn something from this relentless persecution. They were on the right track. The aliens were manipulating Crow to attack because they feared the marauders could damage their mining operation. To Will Xere this meant that if he and his men could survive the Fib onslaught, they’d have a shot at freeing the Territory.
These false charges also led Xere to devise his first great plan as leader of the marauders: Tap into the Line to get ahead of the charges. And that success led to the critical revelation that the aliens were also planting other kinds of false information on the Line. Information that secured their control of the Fibs and the Territory. From that time on, Xere and the marauders knew they’d have to pursue freeing the Territory on their own.
Crater then told us that Will Xere had been part of that second wave of marauders. A man with knowledge. Jonah Wolfe had known from the start that Xere was the smartest of that second wave and that he had the ability to inspire other men. Still, it wasn’t Jonah who’d picked him as the next leader. He hadn’t picked any successor. He didn’t know he was going to die
that night at Black Rock. It was the surviving marauders, the ones who didn’t attack the space tanker, who chose him.
Crater told us that after many, many years of discussing and planning, Xere and the marauders finally came up with a plan to take another shot at freeing the Territory. And over the last ten years, they’d put everything in place. If we went with him to Iron Horse, the marauders’ base camp, we’d learn about the plan and take part in it. But Crater didn’t tell us much about Will Xere and I figured that was because the story of Jonah Wolfe was the tale the marauders bonded over. But I was wrong. There was another reason. A reason I’d learn from Xere himself.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The next morning, I made my decision. It wasn’t really that hard a decision to make. I was already a fugitive and I had nowhere to go. It wasn’t a heroic decision, but a practical one. I’d go to Iron Horse.
Benny said he’d go, too, and Lily wanted to go, but she hadn’t been asked. So she volunteered and Crater accepted, but I could see that he wasn’t enthusiastic about taking her and I wanted to know why. About thirty minutes later, I had a chance to ask him.
We’d eaten a small meal and were hiking through the woods back to our car. Crater was up ahead of us, alone, so I caught up to him.
“You didn’t want to take Lily,” I said.
“You and Benny were cleared. She’s an unknown.”
“She must’ve been on your radar screen. She was on Crow’s radar screen.”
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