Defenders (34 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was stupid that the destruction of Disney World was bothering her. The real tragedy was the destruction of all those works of art at the Met, MoMA, the Louvre, on and on, to make room for defender artwork. They could have removed the human works of art instead of destroying them, but who was going to question defenders’ instructions?

Even with all of that space devoted to defender artwork, nothing of Erik’s was on public display. It gave Lila childish pleasure, yet she also felt sorry for him. That was the difference between how she and Kai felt about the defenders: They both hated them, but Lila also pitied them. Maybe if she’d been shot by a defender, and dealt with the pain Kai dealt with on a daily basis, she’d find it hard to pity them.

“Lila? You ready?” Minka stood in Lila’s defender-sized doorway.

“Sure.” She closed the feed on the demolition, grabbed her phone, and joined Minka in the hall. “Who’s doing the review?”

“Pierre.”

Lila groaned inwardly. Pierre was a walking neurosis. Lila wasn’t sure if defenders were capable of developing PTSD, but something had to account for how far from the defender norm Pierre was when it came to being tightly wound.

Pierre was waiting outside the delivery room (as they referred to it when no defenders were present). “How many?” he asked as they approached.

“Eight hundred,” Lila replied.

“Eight hundred exactly?”

“Eight hundred exactly.” Eight hundred more defenders, with their dead souls and sociopathic narcissism. With the advances in genetic engineering made between the end of the Luyten War and the beginning of the Defender Ascension (as the defenders had named it), Lila could have engineered them to be so much more stable, if they’d let her. But no. The new defenders couldn’t be in any way superior to the existing ones.

Lila and Minka followed Pierre down concrete stairs to the parade floor, where the new defenders were lined up, ready for review.

She should kill herself. Blow her brains out, or jump from a bridge. More of these monsters only added suffering to the world. If she wasn’t such a coward, if she didn’t love Kai and Errol so much, she would remove herself from the equation. They would get someone else to oversee production at this facility, but that rationalization was wearing thin for her. Lately she felt so disgusting most of the time. Most humans who learned what she did for a living shared her contempt for herself.

Other officers tended to strut around during a review, making it more a ceremonial show than a true inspection, but Pierre looked the new defenders up and down as if expecting some to be missing fingers, or major organs.

Lila waited by the door for more than an hour before Pierre finally nodded his approval. “Brothers,” he called, “welcome to the world.”

Lila and Minka stood aside as the new defenders paraded past, five at a time, up the stairs to join the hellish world they’d all created together.

Lila dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and headed for her room. She had twenty minutes to get ready to go with Erik to this thing, whatever it was.

“Lila?” Erik called from his room. “Is that you? Come here, please.”

“Coming.” She always felt uneasy, being alone in the house with Erik. It made her feel too much like his wife.

He was lying on the bed, wearing what looked like a giant pair of boxer shorts, his artificial legs on the bed beside him.

He looked less than imposing lying there, his stumped flesh-and-bone legs ending just below the knee, the last few inches of his legs deeply notched to accept the bionic appendages, his friction sores salved.

“Can you help me with these?”

“Sure.”

She clamped and locked his limbs into place as gently as she could, trying not to aggravate the open sores. The fit was never perfect, and friction was inevitable. The arms weren’t as bad.

She hated the cold. Absolutely despised it. She’d turned down a postdoc at UMass in favor of LSU solely because it was warm in Louisiana and cold in Massachusetts. That she might live out the rest of her life in the northernmost outpost on Earth was a biting irony.

As she did at the start of every information-gathering session on the Internet, she checked her sister’s Facebook page. There was nothing new. Richelle was still working on a construction project for the defenders in Sarasota, Florida, building a government office facility, working right alongside Luyten. As always, Dominique had to resist the urge to leave an anonymous message that only Richelle would understand, to let her know Dominique was still alive. She’d never actually do it, of course. If by some wild chance the defender intelligentsia checked her account that day and realized what the message was, they could trace the computer’s IP address, and ultimately discover that the computer in question was issued to CFS Alert, the northernmost continually inhabited outpost in the world, one of those out-of-the-way locales they hadn’t bothered to formally conquer. Dominique wondered why they couldn’t have fled to some out-of-the-way Polynesian island. There were plenty of those the defenders hadn’t bothered to conquer, either.

With her daily check on Richelle out of the way, Dominique got to work, starting with a check of the
New York Times
. Most of it was fluff now, stories of pets finding their way home from a thousand miles away, coverage of construction projects, details of the planned changeover in the NFL from human players to defenders. Very little helpful information. No one put anything helpful in writing; the president and his people assumed significant communication was happening the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. That left the good people hiding out at CFS Alert frustratingly uninformed.

Dominique wasn’t sure what good it would do them to be informed. There were fewer than fifty people at CFS Alert. They had no weapons to speak of, no army to command. The war was over. They’d lost. Still, they were one of the last vestiges of free human leadership, of legitimate human authority, and they had zero information.

Dominique lifted her hot cocoa, blew on it, took a sip. It was powdered and not very good, but how much was she going to miss it when it was gone? They would deplete their food stores by spring, by which time they’d have to know how to live off the land. Dominique shuddered at the thought of dried seal blubber for breakfast. They should fly south and surrender. Only they couldn’t, because they’d be executed for fleeing, and for being important and powerful people. No, what they needed was a way to communicate with people in the larger world that didn’t give away their existence, let alone their location.

There was a rap on her door.

“Come in!” she shouted, to be heard over the howling wind outside.

Forrest squeezed inside and closed the door, gasping from the morning cold. “That’ll wake you up in a hurry.”

“That’s why I’m still in here,” Dominique said, suddenly feeling energized. Forrest did that to her, and it was time and then some that one of them crossed that invisible line and overtly acknowledged the obvious attraction between them. Dominique wondered if they were both taking it slow because it was fun to be in this early, flirtatious stage. It was a breath of warm spring air in an otherwise barren, stifling existence. Maybe they should just go on like this. Only Dominique was tired of sleeping alone; Forrest’s warm body would be so much better than her army-issue electric blanket.