H2O (17 page)

Miloff parked
and led us into one of the buildings. Inside, a group of marauders was eating.
Miloff pointed Lily, Benny and me to the back, where we grabbed plates, and
served ourselves from bowls of food set out buffet style.

Miloff
exchanged greetings with the marauders and they asked him about Crater. I saw
their faces darken. They weren’t prepared for the loss. Crater was a hero to
them and I understood why. Even though I’d only known him for a few days, I’d
felt his bravery and calmness.

As Lily,
Benny, and I headed to an empty table, I thought the marauders were eyeing me.
Maybe they were blaming me for Crater’s death since he’d been sent to fetch me.
But before that paranoia got the better of me, Miloff came over and said, “I
want you to meet someone.” I was about to find out that the marauders
had
been eyeing me, but it wasn’t because they blamed me for Crater’s death.

I headed out
with Miloff and, in the car, I asked him what was up. He said I’d find out in a
minute. We drove down Iron Horse’s one street and back into the wilderness. We
passed a few cabins on the outskirts of town and came to one which was set way
back in the forest. It was an unadorned cabin at the end of long dirt driveway.
Miloff drove up the driveway, pulled up to the cabin, and said, “Go on in.”

“Who’s in
there?” I said.

“Will Xere.”

“You’re not
going to introduce us?” I said, confused as to why he was delivering me to
Xere.

“He knows who
you are.”

I stepped into the cabin. It was
packed from floor to ceiling with shelves of books. The books dwarfed the worn
couch, gouged coffee table, and two chairs which made up the humble living
room. On the other side of the room, a large man stood up from a desk and
turned to face me.

I was shocked.
Emotions that I’d never felt before swept over me. I was staring at my dad.

He held me in his steady gaze and
didn’t say a thing. His eyes were filled with tears.

He looked
older. Much older than the memories of him etched in my mind. He took a step
forward and I rushed him and we hugged, tightly.

“Roy,” he
said.

I felt tears
on my face. My tears. This was a miracle. A miracle I’d never let myself
believe in. From the time I was nine, I had spent every day forcing myself to
accept that my father was dead and gone forever.

“I’m sorry,
Roy,” he said.

I wiped the
tears from my face and asked, “What happened?” And that question came from
anger, not joy.

“I love you,
Roy,” he said. “And I hope that you can forgive me.” He stepped over to the
couch and sat down, then motioned for me to do the same.

I sat in one
of the chairs and I couldn’t say anything. Joy and anger were battling to
control me.

“When the
Virus hit, it killed most scientists, just like it killed most everyone,” he
said. “But unlike other survivors, the scientists who made it through didn’t
really have a chance. The aliens hunted them down and killed them. We still
don’t know how they did it, the Fibs weren’t around yet, but they did it.
Still, some managed to fall through the cracks.”

“Like Lily’s
grandmother,” I said, wondering if he thought Lily might be a traitor, like
Crater had hinted at.

“Exactly,” he
said, without betraying his thoughts about Lily. “And like Zach Bell, a grad
student studying physics at a school on the east coast. He was visiting his
girlfriend in Bend, Oregon, when the Virus hit, so he escaped it and somehow
escaped that wave of slaughter, too. Eventually, he settled down in Clearview
and that’s where I met him.

“I was a kid
and by that time, he was a very old man. But he still remembered science. A
hell of a lot of it. And he wanted to pass it on to someone. Someone who’d
appreciate it and understand it. So he taught me what he knew. But Roy, he
never put the pieces together. Probably because back then, it was all about
putting the pieces of a society back together.

“Anyway, I was
obsessed with what he’d taught me. And as the years passed, I kept learning
more and then I figured out that something wasn’t quite right about the
Territory. So I quietly reached out to others, but not quietly enough. The Fibs
were about to hunt me down when Jonah Wolfe offered me sanctuary. He offered to
fake my death.”

“Why didn’t
you ever contact me?” I blurted out. I wanted to hear more of his story but I
needed to ask that question.

“I wanted to,”
he said. “And I kept promising myself that I would. But it was a risk. I knew
you’d want to join me, Roy. You’d want to be a marauder. And that would’ve made
you a target for execution. So I waited. And months turned into years.”

“You
sacrificed me,” I said.

“I did, and
that’s why I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

“You could’ve
come to me. Just once.”

“I didn’t.”

I expected him
to add to that. To justify what he’d done. But he was silent.

And so was I.
I resisted the urge to cram all the missing years into this one conversation. I
wanted to go back to the day I was staring out the window of our house, waiting
for him to return home from Merryville. I wanted him to come home
that
afternoon. I wanted to start again from
then
. To live all those years
with my dad.

He must’ve
taken my silence to mean he could skip all those years. “I need your help,” he
said.

“You’re going
to attack the space tanker.”

“No. We’re
going to take back control of the Territory.”

Will Xere, my father, told me the
plan. The marauders believed that if they had any chance of winning a battle
with the aliens, they first had to tell everyone in the Territory that Earth
was a mining colony. Once everyone understood that they were slaves on their
own planet, then they’d band together to free themselves.

And the key
was the Line. It wasn’t just that the marauders could get the truth out on the
Line, though that was part of it, it was that if the marauders could control
the Line, the aliens could no longer use it to manipulate the Territory.

I learned that
the heart of the Line was in Palo Alto, the Fibs’ hometown. It was housed in a
concrete building under the constant watch of the Fibs. And inside that
building was a restricted area, an area that the Fibs, themselves, had never
entered. All the Territory’s communications ran through the routers, servers,
and switchers located in that restricted area. Through that hardware, the
aliens manipulated and controlled the entire Territory.

The marauders
planned to enter that concrete building, and that restricted area, and destroy
the heart of the Line. But when my father got to that part, I didn’t get it. I
asked him how the marauders were going to control the Line if they’d just
destroyed it. His answer took me my surprise. It was the last thing I’d
expected.

The marauders
had built
another
Line, in Santa Barbara, a dead town close to Port
Hueneme. There, the marauders had found a University which hadn’t been stripped
clean of its routers, servers, and switchers, and they’d used that equipment as
the foundation for the new Line. The new Line used the old Line’s
infrastructure, all the cables already laid out throughout the Territory. But
the marauders had looped it around Palo Alto. It had taken years to get it
right and those mysterious data packets that Benny had seen were test runs for
the new Line.

After explaining it all, my
father stood up, walked across the room, and pulled a book down from one of the
shelves. He handled it with reverence and I saw the title,
The Old Man and
The Sea
.

“The old man
was you,” I said. “And the sea was the water.”

“That’s
right,” he said.

“You thought
I’d understand that when I was nine?” Some of my anger was resurfacing.

“No, but I
knew you’d get it later.”

He was right.
Somehow, it’d sunk in and helped point me to the water. “Like the four
elements,” I said. “You taught them to me just so I’d get that water was
important.”

“I couldn’t
tell you the truth. You were too young. But I had to lay the groundwork. I hoped
that when you were old enough, you’d figure it out.”

“I did.”

He smiled. “I
knew you would.”

He put the
book back. “I didn’t want you to come to Iron Horse because you wanted to find
your father,” he said. “I wanted you to come because of the water. Because you
wanted answers.”

I could tell
he was lying. And it was that lie that made me less angry. Will Xere, the
marauder leader, may have wanted me to come to Iron Horse because of the water,
but Will Xere,
my father
, wanted me to come so he could see his son
before the assault. That was written on his face. My dad wanted to see me
because he knew he might die in battle.

We stepped into the cabin’s small
kitchen, and my dad opened a bottle of Curado and poured us each a glass. Then
he began to cook dinner. Fried fish and potatoes.

The potatoes
sizzled and that warm feeling from long ago began to fill me up. Love for my
dad. But still, all those years of loneliness and sadness refused to move over.
I remembered our last meal together. My dad had been quiet. He’d known he was
leaving forever. “Why didn’t you just tell me you had to go?” I said. “Why did
you want me to believe you were dead?”

“If you knew I
was out there somewhere, someday you’d come looking for me,” he said. “I didn’t
want to risk that. It was setting you up to die.” He pulled the potato slices
from the oil and changed the subject. He asked about my life.

We ate and I
filled him in. But when I took into account the last few days, filling him in
about my life amounted to telling a simple story: I’d built on what he’d taught
me and kept the promise he asked of me. To keep learning. Then I became an
outsider because I’d learned too much. But I kept going and discovered that
there was something about the water. And I was just curious enough about the
water to head south to find answers. And I found my dad.

The next morning, Alek Sanders
briefed Lily, Benny, and me on the assault. The marauders would launch the
attack tomorrow night. The timetable had been pushed up because of Yachats.
Originally, the marauders were going to detonate bombs in Yachats twelve hours
before the assault, to draw the Fibs from Palo Alto to Yachats. But the Fibs
had swarmed into town way before anything drew them there. Crater and Miloff
had been as surprised as I’d been to find them in town. The only good part
about the surprise was that those explosives were then used to free Lily and
me.

The original
plan called for the Fibs and their helicopters to be on their way
to
Yachats during the assault on the Line, but now they’d be returning
from
Yachats, if they weren’t already back. But that was a chance the marauders had
to take. Like Crater, my father believed that someone had tipped the Fibs off
about Yachats. Now he figured the longer he waited, the greater the chance of
the Fibs finding out about the real plan. But neither my father, nor any of the
other marauders, accused Lily of being the snitch. Even if they thought it,
they hadn’t treated her any differently than they’d treated Benny and me. So
far.

Sanders told us the assault on
Palo Alto would incorporate four diversionary attacks on the town’s most
critical sites. The marauders planned to set off explosives at Arastradero
Road, where power lines brought electricity into Palo Alto, at the El Camino
Reservoir, which supplied water to the city, at the Stapleton Warehouse, where
the Fibs stored their food, and at Victor Crow’s headquarters.

This was all
in the service of getting as many of the Fibs as possible away from the real
target, the entrance to the concrete building which housed the Line.

The logistics
had been laid out weeks ago, but Sanders added us in. Benny and I were going to
be part of the direct assault on the Line. With Benny, the marauders now had a
communications expert who could go in with them, which was why they’d recruited
him. They didn’t want to risk sending in Sue Chen, the marauders’ own expert.
She had designed the new Line and would run it, so was taking part in one of
the diversionary attacks. If possible, the marauders wanted Benny to find out
how the aliens controlled the Line. That information could prove to be valuable
in the future. But he was told the priority was to destroy the Line regardless
of what information was gleaned during the assault.

Like Benny, I
was chosen for the assault on the Line. I wasn’t a communications expert, but I
knew enough about technology and various kinds of equipment that I, too, might
be able to figure out how the aliens controlled the Line.

After the briefing, over lunch,
Alek Sanders told us how he came to be a marauder, and I began to see a
pattern. When the aliens went too far with the wrong people, or right people if
you looked at it from our perspective, those people were driven to find the
truth and the truth led through the wilderness and to the marauders.

Before joining
the marauders, Alek worked in the refineries. His job was to find spare parts
for the refineries and when he couldn’t find spare parts, his job was to
construct makeshift parts. It took a smart man to design and construct those
parts and Sanders fit the bill.

Sanders’
daughter, Laura, worked on the shipping side of the refineries. She was smart
like her dad and she helped monitor the oil coming in to Rapahanoc from Port
Huemene, and the resulting gas and diesel going out to the Territory. After a
few years on the job, she began to notice some anomalies, so she started to dig
deeper into the shipping data, much more than her job required. Eventually, she
came to the conclusion that somewhere up north, diesel was being stored. She
told her father and a few other people in Rapahanoc, but no one cared.