Defenders (33 page)

“That’s killer, Kai. Good for you.” Shoelace sounded like he was crying. “Where are you, buddy? I’m gonna come and get you.”

“That’s really nice of you.” Kai grunted as another truly hellish wave of pain lanced through his side. His hand, or what was left of it, was still mostly numb. “I’d appreciate that.”

Kai got most of the way through telling Shoelace where to find him before he blacked out.

Lila took a break from her work and went to the single window in her office/jail cell. From forty defender-sized stories high, she could see much of Sydney, stretching to the river and beyond. It looked just as it had when the last of the Alliance forces had fled or been killed. As far as she could see, not one shard of glass had been swept. The streets were mostly deserted, the bulk of the defender population off fighting elsewhere.

Elsewhere. Lila had only a vague idea where that might be. The Internet she had access to was a static Internet—a snapshot in time the defenders uploaded just before they began knocking out the power sources that allowed the Internet to function. It told her nothing about what was happening in the outside world. Everything she knew came from the bits of news Erik chose to share.

Time to get back to work. She was monitored at all times and didn’t want some defender poking his head in to tell her to get back to work. They never threatened; they just told her what was expected of her. The threat was implicit.

Sitting at her human-sized desk in front of her human-sized computer, Lila considered the files she’d compiled—the first steps toward creating a defender production facility in Sydney. Erik assured her the personnel she’d need to actually construct and run a functional production facility would eventually join her.

That certainly set her mind at ease.

She kept thinking of Kai dropping food into that church basement.
The Boy Who Betrayed the World
. Now here she was, drawing up plans to create more of the creatures her species was at war with. They were quite the couple.

Ironically, she was able to draw most of the information she needed from the Internet. Project Defender had been top secret during the war, but because it had been a truly global effort, detailed specifications for the project had been made available to the world scientific community after the war. It was all there, right down to the genetic codes.

She knew her cooperation was all that kept her and her colleagues alive, so as far as she was concerned, she didn’t have a choice. Maybe the heroic thing to do was to let the defenders torture her as she steadfastly refused to cooperate, but she didn’t have it in her to be that kind of hero. Her hope was that the information she was gathering would never be put to use.

If they’d only let her make changes. She kept coming back to that. She would do this work gladly, enthusiastically,
tirelessly
if they’d let her improve on the design. But no; other humans would check her work, and if it was discovered that she had tampered with their genetic code in any way … The threat was implicit.

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.

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.”

“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.

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.