Defenders

by Will McIntosh

  There was a knock at her door, which meant Erik was paying her a visit, because no one else knocked.

  “Come in.”

  “How are you today?” Erik asked as he let himself in.

  “I’m lonely, and I’m worried about my people, and yours.” She always gave the same answer, yet Erik kept asking.

  “I’ll have to find time in my schedule to visit more often. I don’t want you to be lonely.”

  Lila had decided Erik was simply incapable of grasping that loneliness involved yearning not just for company, but for the company of specific people.

  “How nice,” she said.

  Erik made himself comfortable in the plush defender-sized seat near the window. He planted all three of his feet firmly on the floor, as a warrior does. There was no more banter between them, no playful moments.

  “Our most renowned philosopher has come out with a new treatise.”

  “Oh? Is this Ravi?”

  Erik seemed pleased. “You remember him. His new treatise argues that when you created us, you left out the things you value most in yourselves.”

  “What would those be?”

  “Your capacity for joy, humor, and affection. Ravi refers to them as the three pillars of madness. He argues that we’re superior for lacking them.”

  Lila folded her arms, stared at the slate-gray carpet. They knew there was something missing in them, and they were angry about it. Maybe they had a right to be. She had no energy for this; she was tired of carrying the weight of how carelessly the defenders had been designed. She’d been fifteen and running for her life at the time.

  “Maybe you are superior for lacking them. I don’t know. What I do know is you lack them because your brains lack serotonin, and they lack serotonin because it renders Luyten incapable of reading your minds. Like your third leg, there was a reason for the design decision.”

  Erik grunted, folded his arms, mirroring her posture.

  “How are my colleagues?” Lila asked.

  “They’re well.” Erik wouldn’t tell her where they were, what they were doing. All she knew was one of them had admitted that the emissaries knew the invasion was being considered. Lila couldn’t imagine any of them divulging that information, except through torture.

  “Can I see my father-in-law? Just for a few minutes?” After every meeting with Erik, she promised herself that next time she wouldn’t beg. But she was so lonely; so scared and depressed.

  “I’ve told you, if any of you were to go out in public, you’d be torn apart.”

  “Yet you don’t tear me apart.”

  “Because I know you. I know you’re not the same as the rest of them.”

  Maybe it was inevitable. No matter how much you admired a people, when you went to war with them you so quickly learned to hate everything about them.

  61

  Dominique Wiewall

  July 15, 2045. Colorado Springs, Colorado.

  When President Wood announced that the covert operation to take out the defenders’ center of gravity at Easter Island had failed, the room went silent.

  Dominique hadn’t realized just how much hope she’d staked on a few dozen elite Alliance forces. She wondered what went wrong, how they’d been discovered before making it into the underground complex to detonate the nuclear device.

  That was to be their game changer: take out the defenders’ high command, throw them off balance. It had been a brilliant and psychologically fascinating move on the defenders’ part, to take Easter Island, reinforce it, and make it their center of gravity.

  Dominique rubbed her eyes, which were burning from lack of sleep. The war just went on and on; there was never an opportune time to sleep, and hadn’t been for the past five months. Mostly, Dominique slept in her chair in the war room.

  “We have to find a way to get populations in occupied territories to rise up,” Peter Smythe said. He punched his palm. Smythe had been a baseball star, once upon a time. Despite that, he wasn’t an arrogant dickhead. Dominique appreciated that. “That’s the defenders’ weakness: The forces they leave behind to hold captured territory are wafer-thin. If they had to keep backtracking to put down insurrections, we could wear them down.”

  Trying not to show the exasperation she felt, Dominique went to the back for more coffee. They’d been broadcasting pleas for resistance to the captured populations almost from the start, but the defenders were ruthlessly effective at making gruesome examples of anyone caught listening to those pleas, let alone plotting resistance.

  With the coffee warming her hand through the Styrofoam cup, Dominique studied the big map at the front of the room. The defenders were positioning themselves to storm their facility, as well as Alliance headquarters in Baghdad. Those were their two primary targets. So far, Alliance forces were repelling the defenders in both locations, but the defenders were choking off supply routes, and once those were under defender control… well, you can’t fight without food and fuel.

  “How are you holding up?” It was her Secret Service guardian angel, Forrest.

  “Tired. Depressed.” She looked up at him. “They’re my children. At the end of the day the defenders are my children, and they’ve done unspeakable things. You know?”

  Forrest put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His touch felt good, nourishing. “I don’t think you can think about it like that. The mistake was provoking them, not making them.”

  Dominique nodded, wiped a tear from the end of her nose.

  “I think we’re all well past our breaking point. Hang on. We’ll get through this.”

  “Somehow,” Dominique whispered.

  “Somehow.”

  62

  Kai Zhou

  July 15, 2045. Provo, Utah.

  “Kai? Come on, Kai, you have to get up.”

  Kai didn’t want to wake up. Waking meant returning to the pain—the relentless, maddening pain. But someone was tugging on his cheek, pulling him awake, away from his only means of escape. Whoever it was had better have a very good reason.

  “Let’s go. You have to get up.”

  Kai opened his eyes. The pain was there, waiting for him.

  “Come on.” It was Evelyn, the nurse who was playing the part of MD and chief surgeon in the tent that was playing the part of hospital in this nightmare farce. Evelyn put a hand behind his head and lifted, as if she were trying to get him out of bed, which was absurd.

  “What are you doing?” he groaned.

  “You have to get up. Right now. You have to walk out of here.”

  Although there was no morphine running through Kai’s veins, because there was no morphine at this mobile hospital, Evelyn’s face was hazy and swimming as it hung over him. “What are you talking about?”

  Evelyn lowered her voice. “There are three defenders outside. They’re going to burn the hospital. If you can walk out under your own power, that means you’re strong enough to work, which means you can live. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Suddenly Kai was wide awake. His wounds were throbbing exquisitely, simply at the thought of standing and walking.

  He lifted his head and looked at his wounds more carefully than he’d been willing to before. Most of his right hand was gone. The bandage over his thigh sagged in the middle where there was a hole that resembled a crater. His shoulder was only partly there. There was just no way.

  Only, he could see in Evelyn’s eyes that he had no choice.

  “I have to keep moving, we don’t have much time. Get up.” She hurried away.

  Gritting his teeth against the grinding pain, Kai slid over to the left side of the cot—on his uninjured side. It wasn’t too bad as he let his left foot slide out from beneath the sheets and drop until it reached the dead grass on the floor.

  When he tried to swing his right leg around, blistering pain shot up his thigh, across his side. Gasping, every fiber in him not wanting to do this, he let his right leg drop until it touched the ground, and grimaced as fresh pain shot up the leg
.

  He took a moment, allowed the worst of the pain to recede, then used his good hand to push himself upright.

  He screamed, then realized the defenders might hear him. He bit his lip, staggered to his feet, putting most of his weight on his left leg as tears rolled down his cheeks.

  The world grew fuzzy—he was passing out. “No. No.” If he passed out he’d never wake up. He took a few deep, whooshing breaths, trying to clear his head.

  “Okay,” he hissed. He took a step on his bad leg, and immediately shifted the weight back to his good leg. He felt blood dribble down his pant leg, off his shoe and into the yellow grass in a series of streams. He didn’t know which wound it was coming from. Maybe all of them. He took another step, stifled a scream that instead turned into a high mewling, then grabbed the end of the next cot to steady himself.

  There was a man lying in the cot, his eyes open, watching Kai. A tube trailed from the man’s chest, draining blood. Avoiding eye contact, Kai took two more steps, leaving the man behind.

  If anything, it got harder as he went. His limited energy quickly became depleted, and his injured leg dragged. Two defenders were waiting, one on either side of the door as he staggered out of the tent, covered with sweat, trailing blood, gasping from the pain.

  The defender on the left said, “You—go back inside.” Kai stared straight ahead and kept walking, not sure if the defender was speaking to him, and not wanting to find out.

  “You,” the defender barked. Reluctantly, Kai looked up, saw the defender staring down at him. “Go back inside.”

  “I’m fine,” Kai stammered. “I can work.”

  “With one hand?”

  “I can—” Kai tried to think. What could he do with one hand? What would the defenders value?

  His pulse slowed as it came to him. He looked the defender square in the eye and said, “I’m a nuclear physicist. I worked at the North Anna Power Station, in Virginia.”

  The defender studied him for a long moment, then motioned him to step to one side. “Wait there.”

  Kai waited, remaining on his feet through sheer force of will. He’d never even been inside a nuclear power plant. Hopefully the people he was assigned to work with would cover his ass until he figured it out.

  63

  Dominique Wiewall

  July 15, 2045. Colorado Springs, Colorado.

  It had taken Dominique less than twenty minutes to stuff her belongings into a rucksack, but when she reached the hangar, the transport plane was already on the tarmac, its engines revving. Trying to tamp down rising panic (and the irrational, childlike voice in her head saying they were leaving her behind on purpose, as punishment), she swung the bag over her back, put her head down, and ran. Surely they wouldn’t leave people behind. Of course, they were leaving everyone behind; all of the soldiers defending the facility, all of the noncrucial facility personnel they couldn’t fit in the transport plane. They were leaving them here to die. The defenders had their underground command complex surrounded. Anyone still inside was going to die.

  “Come on, let’s go.” Forrest was standing at the bottom of the stairs, waving her up. She hustled inside, took a seat along the wall. The president, his wife, his brother Anthony the ex-president, and a dozen others were already strapped in, but there were still plenty of empty seats. She wasn’t late; it was a relief to know she hadn’t been holding up the flight.

  Soon others were rushing across the tarmac: Smythe, the secretary of defense; President Wood’s adult daughter, Solyn. Meryem Cevik, chief of the Secret Service, was the last. They were in the air by the time she was in her seat.

  They climbed at a steep angle; there were no windows nearby, so Dominique couldn’t see what was going on. That was probably a good thing; if they were going to be shot down, Dominique didn’t want to know in advance.

  As the plane leveled off, so did Dominique’s pulse. The president and his inner circle left their seats almost immediately, retreating toward the cockpit.

  They weren’t ever going back to the United States. No one had said that out loud, but Dominique knew that if the president was fleeing to the Arctic, things weren’t going to turn around. How could they, at this point? The defenders had dispatched troops from Turkey to the south, Iran to the west, and Syria to the east, and were closing in on the UN command complex in Baghdad. They controlled the seas, the air. They controlled 90 percent of the world’s power sources.

  She’d engineered the defenders to be vicious warriors, brilliant tacticians, so they could defeat the Luyten and save the world. She’d designed them too well. And too poorly.

  “Dr. Wiewall?” Forrest set a hand on her shoulder. “The president would like to see you.” With the buzz of the engine vibrating underfoot, Dominique made her way to the front of the plane.

  The president and his advisors were standing around a technician operating a shortwave radio that was now their sole means of communicating with Central Command in Baghdad. He looked up as Dominique entered the war room. “Dr. Wiewall, the premier has asked for your assistance in drafting a peace proposal to present to the defenders.”

  Dominique nodded. She was not surprised by this news. She’d learned a few things standing around war rooms for the past few months, and one of those things was that once you can’t resupply your center of gravity and your troops, it is time to surrender.

  PART III

  OCCUPATION

  64

  Kai Zhou

  October 8, 2047. Washington, D.C.

  The defender watched the dealer turn the card. Kai watched the defender, who sat up straighter in his chair and licked his lips. Now Kai knew both of the defender’s hole cards. They were so absurdly easy to read, so clownishly bad at masking their reactions.

  “Bet twenty-five thousand.” The defender, whose name was Sidney, slid oversized chips into the pot with his clawed fingers. The motion aired out Sidney’s armpit, causing his stress-stink to waft in Kai’s direction. When defenders were nervous they sweated profusely, and the stink was incredible.

  Kai called the bet. This was a good hand to lose. It wouldn’t be obvious, given that Kai had a smaller two pair. He saw the bet and raised forty thousand, not worried about scaring Sidney into folding, because defenders didn’t know what the word meant. If they had a bad hand, most of the time they tried to bluff. They hated losing. Everyone hated losing, but defenders had turned sore losing into an art form. Kai had seen it once firsthand, when a defender named Francois had crushed Pete Sheehy’s head after Sheehy wiped him out with a bluff. What a horrible thing that had been—as bad as anything Kai had seen in the war.

  Kai flipped his cards, feigned disappointment as Sidney revealed his paired king-ten, and watched as the defender gleefully raked in the pot.

  “You’re a Poker World Series champion,” Sidney said.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m an outstanding player, if I can beat you.”

  “That would follow, yes.” The other human players at the table might have picked up the slightest hint of sarcasm in Kai’s tone, but they wouldn’t dare smirk. Kai’s own face generated nothing but earnestness as he looked up at Sidney.

  If Kai had known from the outset how much defenders revered poker, he could have saved himself the stress of spending two months working at a nuclear power plant with no idea what he was doing. He really owed the people at that plant; they’d risked their lives covering for him.

  Kai shifted to the left, then the right, trying to find a position that made his hip and side ache less. Sometimes it was hard for him to believe he was not yet thirty years old. He felt eighty.

  Sidney raised old Paul Heller’s bet fifty thousand, proclaiming the raise with such ham-handed bravado that even a hamster would know he was bluffing. Kai folded.

  He had probably been safer as a fraud in a nuclear power plant than he was playing poker with defenders. Once in a while you had to beat them, or they’d suspect you were patronizing them and they’d kill you. But
you’d better be sure they were in a good mood when you beat them, or else they’d kill you then, too.

  “Poker is war, disguised as a game,” Sidney proclaimed, apropos of nothing, as he raked in the pot after Paul folded.

  Head down, Kai restacked his dwindling pile of chips. He still found it difficult, stacking chips and handling cards with only his left hand. Maybe he always would.

  Poker wasn’t war; war was war. And if you lost a war, you’d better let the victors beat you at poker.

  Kai’s phone vibrated. He checked it, saw it was a message from Lila.

  Erik and I are going to dinner tonight. Can you pick up Errol?

  It was so stupid, so pointless to be jealous, to feel angry at Lila for a situation she could not possibly control. Yet that’s what Kai felt as he read the message. Erik had turned their marriage into an incredibly dysfunctional sort of polyamory.

  Yes, he punched, taking his frustration out on the keys. He wanted to say more, but there was always the risk that Erik, or some defender at ultra-paranoid Central Command screening messages for subversive content, might read his message. Another night of babysitting while his wife and her platonic lover went out on the town. Kai wasn’t sure how much more of this he could stand, but in the new order of things, he had no choice but to stand it.

  65

  Lila Easterlin

  October 8, 2047. Washington, D.C.

  It was stupid, but Lila found herself getting choked up watching the demolition of Disney World on her computer. Maybe it was because Disney World so perfectly represented the modern human world, with its combination of commercial crassness and creative audacity. She watched bulldozers flatten snack bars, wrecking balls topple Cinderella’s Castle and the monorail. Did the defenders really need to supersize Orlando in that direction, or were they trying to make a statement about how childish humans were? She took a big swig of coffee; she was hoping the caffeine would kill the pounding headache she had. She’d stayed up too late, drinking too much and popping too many pills.