Defenders

by Will McIntosh

  “Thank you for coming,” the defender said as Lila stepped off the jet. He repeated this as each ambassador and special envoy stepped through the door, which meant he repeated the same phrase ninety-four times.

  When they had all disembarked, the defender grimaced (or perhaps it was meant as a smile) and said, “My name is Vladimir. I will be your guide for the initial part of your stay. You must be hungry after your flight.” The flight had been less than six hours from Geneva, and they’d been served a meal, but Lila nodded politely, a tight smile on her face as Vladimir gestured to their left.

  Something large squeezed out of a hangar.

  Even from a hundred yards, even after fifteen years, there was no mistaking the thing that rushed at them.

  When Lila was next aware of her surroundings, she was sprinting across the runway, her terror given voice by a tight squeal on each outbreath. A Luyten. A Luyten was charging at them. One of the other ambassadors passed Lila, his arms pumping, his loose, old cheeks flapping, his eyes round with fear.

  “There is no danger. No danger!” Vladimir called, and as before, with “Thank you for coming,” he repeated the words over and over. Lila glanced over her shoulder and saw she wasn’t mistaken: It was a Luyten. It wasn’t chasing them, though. It stood beside Vladimir on five legs, something balanced on its sixth.

  A silver tray. With food on it.

  Lila slowed, stopped. The defender continued to shout, “No danger!”

  “What the hell is going on?” It was Bolibar, suddenly beside her.

  “Is it a… I don’t know, a reproduction of some kind?”

  “It doesn’t look like a reproduction.” Bolibar took a few tentative steps toward the thing. Lila followed. When the Luyten didn’t move they took a few more. Soon most of the ambassadors were standing in a loose circle, a hundred feet out from Vladimir and the Luyten.

  “I am profoundly sorry,” the defender said, bowing its head. “This was meant as a surprise, but not a cruel one. I will find out whose idea it was and surely he will be killed.” He gestured toward the Luyten. “Please, eat. It won’t harm you.”

  No one moved. In the stunned silence the same question had to be running through every ambassador’s head: What was a Luyten doing here, alive? Hadn’t they all been executed, their ship destroyed? The moment stretched as Vladimir held his gesture of invitation, his prominent brow leaving his sunken eyes hidden in a swatch of shadow.

  Lila wanted to get as far from the Luyten as she could; the hair on her arms was prickling, her heart drumming.

  Bolibar finally broke the circle. The Luyten extended the enormous tray toward him as he approached. There were a hundred delicacies on the tray, from caviar to a whole, steaming roast turkey. Lila tried to follow suit, because Bolibar was right: Establishing a positive tone from the outset was crucial; they shouldn’t refuse a gesture of hospitality. But her feet wouldn’t move. She kept seeing that Luyten breaking from the trees and charging at the school.

  It must be reading her thoughts at that very moment. The idea horrified her, that this creature was in her head, knew that she was afraid, felt her revulsion.

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, focused on turning her fear into searing hatred. Let the stinking starfish read that. Striding into the circle, Lila plucked a croissant from the edge of the tray, held her smile, and took a bite, resisting a desperate urge to flee from under the shadow of the massive beast.

  Some of the other ambassadors followed. The defender’s mouth stretched into a long, straight line of satisfaction.

  Lila couldn’t take her eyes off the Luyten. Few had seen one from this distance and lived. There were two bands of color around their pupils; their skin was heavily textured, thick and waxy. A half dozen randomly placed apertures contracted and expanded like giant anuses. They were interchangeable, Lila knew—each could be used for eating, breathing, excreting, mating.

  “I don’t understand,” Oliver said to their host. “What is a Luyten doing here? Weren’t they executed?”

  “Some were killed. Some were kept.” Vladimir lifted one of his arms and worked his three-fingered claw. “Our manual dexterity is quite limited. Our fathers built us to fight, not to live afterward. Luyten perform tasks we can’t, or don’t want to.”

  Lila looked to her left and right. The other ambassadors looked as stunned and incredulous as she felt.

  “How many of them have you… kept?” Bolibar asked.

  The defender wobbled its free leg. “Several million.”

  “Several million?” the ambassador from China said. He sounded very far away. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths, tried to clear her spinning head. Several million of them were here, all around her. Suddenly the lack of contact with the outside world seemed enormous. Through all of those strategy sessions, no one had ever brought up this possibility. Several million?

  They choked down a few anxious bites of the feast, then Vladimir whisked them off in three limos the size of buses. Lifts took them to seats retrofitted to human size.

  “Please relax and enjoy the sights,” Vladimir said. “I’ll show you our city, then I have a surprise for you that is very thoughtful of us.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Oliver said, ever the diplomat. He was such a doofus. Lila loved her father-in-law, and he’d turned out to be a surprisingly effective administrator, adept at playing the Washington game, but he was such a doofus. As usual, he’d missed a big old spot shaving; there was a finger-sized line of dark stubble along the side of his otherwise freshly shaven face.

  The city was bustling—it was downright packed with defenders. They were wearing clothes: massive three-legged jeans, business suits with ties like tarpaulins. Luyten were also plentiful, following deferentially behind defenders, repairing vehicles, cleaning the streets with steaming, high-pressured water.

  There was no surprisingly advanced technology as far as she could see, but the vehicle they were riding in looked to have self-navigating capability, and the city was far from primitive. The more Lila saw, the more astonished she was that the defenders had constructed all of this in fifteen years. Of course they didn’t sleep, and had millions of Luyten slaves to assist them.

  “I keep expecting to see Five,” Oliver whispered in her ear, “or hear his voice in my head. Assuming he wasn’t executed fifteen years ago. I know chances are he’s not in this vicinity, but if he is…” Oliver let the implications go unspoken. If he was, Oliver might be able to learn more than the defenders would be willing to share about what was going on with the Luyten.

  “Does anyone know Sydney?” Azumi asked, his voice low. “Is the city exactly the same?”

  It was a good question. Lila examined passing stores and high-rises.

  “Does anyone see any churches?” a young, nattily dressed man Lila couldn’t place said in a British accent. “The turrets of St. Mary’s should be visible now and again.”

  Everyone looked toward the rooftops. No turrets. So it wasn’t an exact replica. The defenders hadn’t included churches, and she guessed they’d also left out some of the more frivolous things, like Luna Park, Sydney’s famous amusement park. That was a pity—riding a gigantic roller coaster would have been vascular.

  They passed several dozen defenders seated at tables outside a café, Luyten waiters scrambling around them. Lila wondered if the defenders had executed any Luyten at all. The defenders had been engineered to despise the Luyten, but you don’t always kill what you despise, especially if you control them, and they are of benefit to you.

  She inhaled sharply. Down a crossing street, a Luyten was strung up between two lampposts, partially torn in two, its blood puddled on the sidewalk below. “Look at that,” Lila said, pointing. Her companions studied the scene until it disappeared from view.

  Bolibar leaned toward the front of the vehicle. “Vladimir, what was that?”

  “What was what?” Vladimir asked.

  “It looked like a Luyten that had been lynched. It was dead, s
trung up by four of its limbs.”

  Vladimir shrugged. “It must have made someone angry.”

  Bolibar sank back into his seat, looking uneasy. Lila wasn’t completely sure what to feel. On the one hand, she liked dead Luyten far more than she liked live ones. On the other, the means of its demise seemed a little excessive.

  Their limo pulled to a stop in front of an especially imposing sandstone building, the doors set at the top of massive steps. The sign on the façade indicated it was the MUSEUM OF THE LUYTEN WAR.

  “I think you’ll be impressed by an exhibit developed especially for your visit,” Vladimir said as the doors slid open. Lila wasn’t in the mood to relive the war after their encounter with the Luyten on the tarmac, but she sucked it up, smiling brightly as they marched up the human-sized wooden steps that had obviously been installed just for them.

  31

  Oliver Bowen

  May 19, 2045. Sydney, Australia.

  His hotel room was enormous. It made Oliver feel like a little boy, which was exactly what CIA interrogators attempted to do to their prisoners to gain advantage over them. It also reminded him of what Five had said, years ago, about his comic collection. It’s so easy a child could do it.

  At least the furniture was human-sized. Evidently their hosts had salvaged furnishings from human houses still standing outside Sydney. It was one thing—the only thing, really, besides his colleagues—that shattered the illusion that Oliver had shrunk to toddler size.

  This trip was proving harder on him than he ever could have imagined. Mostly it was because of the Luyten, rising from the dead like boogeymen. How careless of the defenders, to allow them to roam free. Surely the Luyten were waiting for the right moment to strike. However, it had been fifteen years; if they were going to revolt, wouldn’t they have done so by now? Then again, maybe they had, and failed.

  Oliver eyed the TV on the wall. He’d noticed it last night but had been too tired to see what defenders TV was like.

  “Television on.”

  CNN anchors Conchita Perez and Arthur Figgins materialized on the wall, reporting on the year’s sea level rise figures.

  “Entertainment. Comedy.”

  Oliver didn’t recognize the television program, but he didn’t watch much television, so that wasn’t surprising. Maybe the link had been installed in their rooms so they’d feel at home, but Oliver didn’t think so. The defenders watched human television.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come on in.”

  Smiling tightly, Lila said, “Ready?” It was obvious she wanted to talk, compare notes, but who knew if their rooms were being monitored? It would surprise Oliver to learn they weren’t. They may not have an opportunity to speak privately all day; their hosts had scheduled a full slate, all of it chaperoned.

  First up was a tour of the countryside, to Adelaide and back. Oliver was hardly in the mood for a quiet ride through the country, and for the life of him he couldn’t imagine why the defenders had scheduled it. Had they genetically engineered giant trees to match their giant buildings? Would they encounter wallabies the size of dinosaurs?

  Everyone seemed tense as they boarded the high-speed train. Their host was waiting for them.

  “Hello, Vlad—” Oliver began, but Lila squeezed his elbow.

  “I’m Lila Easterlin, US ambassador. This is Oliver Bowen, science and technology emissary attached to the US contingent.”

  It wasn’t Vladimir. They all looked the same to Oliver. Evidently Lila was able to distinguish one defender from another. Maybe that wasn’t surprising; sometimes Oliver had trouble recognizing people after he’d met them a half dozen times. He wasn’t good with faces.

  “My name is Erik. I’ve been assigned as liaison for the North and Central American emissaries, because I have exceptionally good interpersonal skills.”

  Under other circumstances Oliver might have smiled at the oxymoronic nature of Erik’s proclamation, but he only nodded while he studied Erik’s face, trying to find a way to distinguish it from all the other long, angular faces.

  “Please choose a comfortable seat and make yourselves…” Erik paused, frowned. “… comfortable.”

  Oliver and Lila sat across from the British contingent, Ambassador Galatea McManus and a military expert, Alan Nicely. Galatea was in her fifties, slim bordering on bony, with a lean, elegant face and red hair streaked with white. Alan was pudgy, impeccably dressed in a tight white tunic with tied lace cuffs and a matching bowler hat.

  The train whisked them out of the city, into the exurbs of Sydney (much of the suburbs had evidently been consumed by the oversized version of the city the defenders had created). Massive new defender construction gave way to dilapidated human towns. Far fewer defenders lived in Australia than there had been humans, so it made sense the defenders’ renovations left off in the outlying areas.

  Erik joined them as they hurtled through the eerily deserted human towns.

  “Erik, how many defender cities have been constructed?” Oliver asked as soon as he sat down.

  “Several,” Erik replied. An awkward silence followed, as Oliver digested the evasive answer.

  Lila finally broke the silence. “Where were you stationed during the war, Erik?”

  “I led the Eighth Airborne Battalion in England. My rank is colonel.”

  “Ah,” Galatea said. “Did you spend any time in London? I might have passed you while running for my life.”

  They all chuckled except for Erik, whose flat expression didn’t change. With serotonin absent from their biochemistry, the defenders would have a difficult time with humor. Lila had a better grasp on the defenders’ limitations than Oliver. He made a mental note to avoid joking. Better to keep communication formal until they developed a better understanding of the defenders’ psychological makeup. In many ways they were dealing with another alien species, although hopefully they would prove easier to comprehend than Luyten.

  “I was in London late in the campaign,” Erik answered. Abruptly, he turned to Lila. “I understand you studied under Dominique Wiewall.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Oliver watched Lila adjust to the abrupt shift in topic. They’d been surprised, when the defenders requested Lila. She’d been fifteen when they left for Australia. For the past thirteen years humans had been incapable of monitoring the defenders, because of the cloak, but clearly the defenders had been watching them closely, and not just their television programs.

  “What can you tell me about her?” Erik asked.

  Lila tilted her head to one side. “What do you want to know?”

  Erik leaned toward her. “Anything. Anything other defenders wouldn’t know. What are her hobbies? Does she paint?”

  “Um, no, she doesn’t paint.” Lila pressed a finger to her lips for a moment. “She’s not exactly the hobby type. She runs, a lot. And plays volleyball.”

  Erik folded his arms. “She’s no-nonsense. Hardworking. Pragmatic. I suspected as much.”

  Lila grinned. “You’ve got her pegged. She holds herself to very high standards. If you want to find Dominique, day or night, look in her lab.”

  “Excellent. Excellent,” Erik said.

  There was something strange about Lila that had been nagging Oliver as he watched her, and Oliver finally put his finger on what it was: She was glowing; all of her irony and sarcasm had melted away when the defender singled her out for attention. Sometimes when the three of them were together, Oliver felt like Lila and Kai were speaking a different language, punctuated with odd tonality and wry non sequiturs. Suddenly Lila was back to speaking straight English.

  As Erik went off to mingle with his other charges, the exurbs gave way to open country—alternating farmland and forest.

  “So, Oliver,” Galatea said, “I have to admit, I did quite a bit of research into you before the trip. I’m fascinated by your interactions with the Luyten, Five. I’m hoping you’ll be willing to share some details I wouldn’t be able to find in books.” />
  “It was a long time ago, but I’d be happy to—” Oliver stopped speaking. The woodland the train had been traveling through had given way to open space again, only instead of farmland, all was blacktop, surrounding an immense factory. It must have been a mile long, fit with dozens of steel smokestacks, each hundreds of feet high. The paved lots surrounding the factory were filled with shiny, brand-new weapons: huge fighter jets that resembled manta rays; muscular tanks on four sets of treads on squat legs, sporting three independent turrets; building-sized winged monstrosities that might have been bombers. Chrome and silver sparkled in the sunlight, as if the weapons had recently been polished.

  Alan stood, pressed his nose to the window. “Holy Christ.”

  “What sort of weapons are those?” Lila asked, her voice just above a whisper.

  Alan didn’t answer immediately. He studied the machinery passing by. “Those look like amphibian craft.” He pointed at rows of chrome shovel-shaped vehicles. “But they have wheels. They may be dual-purpose. One thing’s for certain: They’re heavily armed. Heavily armed.”

  Oliver looked at Erik, who was leaning in their direction, eavesdropping. This was the reason for the ride in the country. The defenders didn’t want to show them trees; they wanted to show off their military might.

  Ten minutes later, they passed another factory.

  Then another, twenty minutes after that.

  Aircraft, artillery, guerrilla craft. Oliver’s insides felt like liquid as he surveyed seas of shining metal. They must have a weapon for every defender alive. Unless they were making more defenders as well. Surely, surely, that was well beyond their technological abilities. Machines were one thing, genetic codes another.

  A sound caught Oliver’s attention. Overhead, defender fighter aircraft as big as houses flew drills. They were the same models human engineers had designed for them in their war against the Luyten.

  “Look at those—it looks like Luyten technology.”

  Oliver followed Alan’s gaze. Row upon row of assault sleeves, similar to the ones the Luyten used, filled a valley paved in concrete. Hushed whispers shot about the cabin. Since they had Luyten slaves, it seemed they had access to Luyten technological knowledge.