Defenders

by Will McIntosh

  “Wait. What is that?” Lila asked. Lila thought Danika must be eating poison, but how would that make her death count? The lump was slick on the outside, like it was sheathed in stretched plastic—a deflated balloon, or a condom.

  Danika slid it farther, into her throat. She gagged, pulled it out. Whatever it was, she was trying to swallow it.

  “If someone doesn’t tell me what’s going on right now, I’m leaving.” She turned toward Clete. “And if you try to stop me, I’m going to scream like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Take your time,” Clete said to Danika. “Relax. Relax your throat. Let gravity do the work.”

  Lila spun toward Danika in time to see the lump disappear. Danika made a terrible choking sound; her eyes grew huge as she pressed her hand to her bulging throat.

  “There you go. That’s it,” Clete said softly.

  When it was down, Danika cried out in a mix of horror and relief. “It was bigger than the ones I practiced on. Much bigger.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to risk you choking in practice. Or maybe your throat is tighter because you’re tense.”

  “You’re damned right I’m tense.” Danika was on the verge of hysteria.

  “For God’s sake, what did you just swallow?” Lila asked.

  “A bomb,” Clete said. “Now she’s going to walk into the heart of the production facility and detonate it.”

  For a moment Lila was speechless. When she finally regained her voice, she shouted, “Are you out of your fucking minds? There are people in there. Some of them are my friends. Besides that, there are eight other facilities. They’ll just divert production to the others.”

  “No they won’t,” Clete said, “because we’re hitting all of them at once.”

  “How are you bombing the Easter Island facility?”

  “All but that one,” Clete allowed. “It will still cripple their production capability.”

  Lila’s head was spinning. She wasn’t sure she was on the same side as these people. She should be, but they were talking about bombing her facility. She’d designed it, she ran it, and some of her friends were in it. And this woman, this math teacher, was about to kill herself.

  “Wait a minute—you don’t look like me. They’re not going to let you waltz into the lab just because you have my ID.”

  “She’s the same height and weight as you, the same hair color,” Clete said. “That’s all defenders use. They can’t tell one face from another. We’re counting on the human workers to instinctively keep their mouths shut.”

  “So you can blow them up. How nice.” He was right about the defenders not being able to distinguish human faces, though. Erik had told Lila as much. Still, this was insane.

  Danika stood. “I need your ID.”

  “You also need the pass code,” Lila said, not sure she was going to give it to her.

  “We have the pass code.” Danika reached to check Lila’s pockets.

  Lila slapped her hand away. Danika reached again, drew Lila’s ID out of her breast pocket.

  “I’m sorry if you don’t agree with this,” Danika said, “but the president does. His people do.”

  Lila didn’t see how this would bring down the defenders. Unless… “There’s more to the plan. More to come.” Lila said it aloud, but mainly for her own benefit. Clete and Danika already knew it.

  At the door, Clete and Danika clasped hands. Maybe hugging risked detonating the explosive, or maybe they didn’t know each other well enough to hug. Danika was clutching a thin satchel, which Lila guessed held the igniting agent—something Danika would inject to induce a chemical reaction.

  Then Danika was gone, and it was just Lila and Clete. Lila wasn’t sure if she wanted to stop them or not. She hovered in the middle of the room, deciding whether to scream, try to get past Clete, or do nothing. In the end, she took a seat in a stuffed chair by the window.

  “How will you know if she’s successful?”

  “We’re close enough that we should hear the blast.” Clete pulled the briefcase off the bed, took it to the little hotel desk, and pulled out a laptop.

  Curious, Lila leaned in to see what he was doing. Clete opened Earth2 and got an avatar up and running.

  “Is that your means of relaxing during stressful situations?” Lila asked, knowing full well what he was doing.

  Clete looked up from the screen, said nothing. Lila moved closer to the computer so she could read what Clete was typing.

  It was nothing surprising or enlightening. He was communicating with an avatar named Sandovar, saying all had gone well so far. He was keeping the message intentionally vague.

  After a few minutes he signed off and closed the computer. He stood, sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Now comes the hard part.”

  “The hard part? We haven’t gotten to the hard part yet?”

  He gave Lila a hard, direct look. “We have to make it look like this happened against your will.”

  That had crossed her mind. After the explosion the defenders would assume she was the one who bombed the facility. When they found her alive, she’d be a prime suspect, and they weren’t ones to wait for a trial, or even facts, before they started meting out punishment.

  “And how do we do that?”

  Clete looked at the floor, like he was suddenly feeling terribly sad, or ashamed. “It has to be immediately obvious to them.”

  Then she understood, and felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. It had to be immediately obvious, as in, she had to sport the bleeding, swollen face of someone who’d put up a fight. She wasn’t convinced their plot would do any good in the long run, yet they had dragged her into it, risked her life, and now they needed to kick the shit out of her so the defenders wouldn’t kill her. She was supposed to stand there while this asshole beat her.

  She looked up, returned Clete’s level stare for a moment, then punched him in the face.

  Teary-eyed with pain, Clete clutched his nose. His fingers came away bloody. “Why did you do that?”

  Lila punched him again, in the eye this time. The blow landed with a satisfying smack.

  Clete started to fight back. His first punch felt like a hammer blow to Lila’s cheek.

  70

  Lila Easterlin

  October 15, 2047. Washington, D.C.

  The man at the front desk called, “Jesus, are you all right?” as Lila stumbled past. She kept walking.

  She couldn’t see out of her left eye. Although she knew it was because it was swollen shut, a small, scared voice in her was sure she’d been blinded. Her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. Before he left, Clete had said that was good, let the blood pour all over her shirt. She had the worst headache of her life, and felt like she had thick clumps of mud plastered to her cheek, her lower lip, her forehead. Lila wondered if the kicks to her face had been planned ahead of time, or improvised.

  Outside, she texted Kai to meet her at home while she waited for a cab to happen by.

  The cabby, a woman in her seventies, said nothing about Lila’s injuries. She nodded when Lila gave her the address, and took off. Lila had to get back to her house—to Erik’s house. When he saw her face, Erik would believe her story and protect her.

  She still hadn’t heard an explosion. As the taxi hurdled over the cracked, pothole-laden streets, Lila guessed the explosion must have happened by now. She must be out of hearing range.

  When she got home, she went straight to the freezer. She found a defender-sized bag of frozen brussels sprouts, collapsed on the couch, and gently pressed the bag over her eye.

  She jerked the bag from her eye. What was she doing? She didn’t want the swelling to go down. Easing herself to her feet, she tried to jostle her pounding head as little as possible. She had to find Erik, tell him what happened. Maybe she could act like she was trying to warn him, trying to prevent the blast.

  The door flew open. Erik stormed in, flanked by two defenders in combat gear.

  “Erik.” Lila stumbled,
fell to her knees, and caught herself on Erik’s ottoman. She was acting, and she was not. It was easy to act like you’d been beaten senseless when you had. “They’re going to bomb the facility.”

  In an instant Erik was at her side. He helped her lean up against the ottoman, then studied her face, her bloody shirt. “We caught her. She was trying to pass herself off as you, but I know what you look like.” He reached out, then brushed her hair with the gentlest of touches before turning to the soldiers. “Find a doctor.”

  Both soldiers froze. “We were told to kill her.”

  “Did you hear what she just said? How do you think she sustained these injuries?” Erik shouted. “By helping them?”

  They left to fetch a doctor.

  “It was a coordinated attack. Five of our production facilities were hit.” He studied her face.

  “What is it?” She touched her nose. “Am I bleeding again?”

  “I’m trying to read your expression. Part of you must be glad about these attacks, even if you tried to stop them.”

  The front door clicked open. “Lila? Lila.” Kai rushed to her, pushing between her and Erik. “Oh my God. What happened?”

  “I was attacked by rebels,” she said.

  Kai slid his hand behind her back. “We have to get you to a hospital.”

  “I’ve already sent for a doctor,” Erik said. “I have everything under control. I’d suggest you make sure your son is safe. Things could get bad out there.”

  “Where is he?” Lila tried to sit up further.

  “He’s at Charlie’s, down the street.” His voice tight, he added, “I’ll get him.”

  Erik relaxed visibly after Kai left. If anything ever happened to her, she wondered if Erik would kill Kai. She was confident he’d make sure Errol was taken care of, but she worried about Kai.

  “What did you mean, ‘things could get bad out there’?”

  Erik turned on the TV, tuned it to the channel that was not a channel—the Eye in the Sky, the live feed only defenders could access. He tuned it to a surveillance camera on a street corner in a city Lila didn’t recognize, where defenders were going berserk. The air was hazy; in the background smoke poured from the broken windows of a wide, flat building Lila recognized as the Moscow production facility. They were pulling people out of a grocery store and lining them up against the wall. A defender was going down the line and shooting each person in the head. Three men broke away from the wall and ran: They were torched by a defender with a flamethrower. In the street, four defenders in a jeep were strafing the upper floors of office buildings with automatic weapons.

  “I’m so relieved you weren’t involved in this. I knew you wouldn’t be.”

  Lila looked at her hands, to avoid having to watch the screen. Most of the people being butchered hadn’t been involved in it, either.

  “They’re going to execute the woman who impersonated you tomorrow. Why don’t you join me for the execution? I have excellent seats.”

  After nearly choking with surprise, Lila managed to say, “I’d like that.” Erik had presented it as an invitation, but Lila knew he wasn’t asking her, he was telling her. Her presence would prove her loyalty and give the other defenders in power a chance to see what had been done to her face.

  71

  Dominique Wiewall

  October 18, 2047. Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada.

  She wasn’t sure whether to feel ecstatic or dejected. They’d disabled five production facilities, but not seven. When those two were added to the Easter Island facility, the defenders could still roll out about 80 percent of the new troops they’d planned, if they ran the facilities full tilt, cracked the whip on the technicians. Security would be super-tight at those remaining facilities, so hitting them again wasn’t an option.

  Someone knocked. “Come in!” she called, hoping it was Forrest.

  It was. Gasping from the cold, he pulled off his gloves, a big, goofy smile on his face.

  “What?” Dominique said.

  “Nothing.” He went on smiling.

  “What?”

  “Have dinner with me?”

  Dominique gave him a puzzled look. They had dinner together every night, though usually he didn’t phrase it quite like that. Usually it was “You going to dinner?” or “You ready?”

  She checked the time on her screen. “Dinner’s not for another hour and a half. Unless you’re taking me to a swanky new restaurant I don’t know about.”

  He clapped his hands together, spun in a half circle. “Damn. You guessed my surprise.”

  Lila raised her eyebrows.

  “Okay, maybe not a new restaurant. Blake agreed to cook us dinner early, so we could have the cafeteria to ourselves for a change.”

  “Blake did? Wow, what did you have to trade for that, your last pair of warm socks?”

  “Don’t even ask.” Forrest looked pained.

  “Wait a minute,” Dominique said. She put her hands on her hips. “Are you asking me out?”

  Forrest nodded. “Bad idea?”

  Dominique shook her head. “Excellent idea. I could use some cheering up. Or should we be celebrating? I have no idea.”

  The meal was creamed spinach and corned beef hash on toast, not exactly swanky restaurant fare, but they each claimed one of the remaining bottles of beer in their ration, and Dominique found herself excited by the idea of a shift in their relationship. Any change was welcome, but even if they weren’t trapped in this arctic hell, Dominique would have liked this guy.

  “Did you hear Barry shot a walrus?” Forrest asked. On the way over they’d agreed not to talk about the resistance. All anyone ever talked about was what was going on through Earth2. There’d be plenty of time for that when the others arrived for dinner.

  “I didn’t. How nice. I mean, nice that we’ll have fresh meat.” She tilted her head. “Do walruses have meat, or just blubber?”

  “Mostly blubber, I think.”

  “I can’t say I’ve ever had blubber.”

  “It’s considered a delicacy in some cultures,” Forrest said.

  Dominique grinned. “What cultures are those?”

  Forrest cleared his throat, shrugged. “I can’t list any specific cultures, but rest assured, it’s a delicacy in some cultures.”

  Laughing, Dominique put her hand over Forrest’s, which was resting on the table. He looked down at their hands, turned his over, spread his fingers.

  “So what was it like, studying at COGE?”

  Dominique turned her gaze toward the low foam-tiled ceiling. “Weird. Exciting, but weird.”

  “You really weren’t allowed to leave the island?”

  “Not for the first three years. I was in a college run by the equivalent of the CIA. They were teaching us things the US government denied it knew how to do.”

  Forrest shook his head. “How times have changed. It’s hard to imagine there were such hard, fast lines between countries back then. State secrets. Cold wars. It all seems stupid now.”

  The door flew open; Dominique and Forrest quickly unclasped their hands, as if they’d been caught doing something wrong.

  It was the president. “We think the defenders have infiltrated Earth2.”

  Both Dominique and Forrest leaped from their chairs and followed Wood through the supply room, into the operations room. Nora was at the computer. Dominique watched over her shoulder as she controlled Island Rain. Rain was in a bar, speaking to two male avatars. One was dressed in a black ninja outfit, the other in jeans and a T-shirt. Both were clearly newbies, given their generic appearance and the stiffness of their movements.

  Nora glanced up at Dominique. “I have a very bad feeling about these two, but you’d know better than I.”

  We both have military training. I’m conversant in all manner of explosives, and Daniel was a Navy SEAL. We’re ready and eager to strike at the enemy.

  Dominique pressed her hands to her face. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

  “What should I rep
ly?” Nora asked.

  Dominique just stood there, her mind not working.

  “Dominique? What should I reply? Something that’ll tell us for sure.”

  “We can’t know for sure, but—” She cursed under her breath. “Give them an opportunity to brag, or try to piss them off.”

  Nora typed. You don’t sound intelligent enough to be Special Forces and Navy SEAL. Are you sure I’m not talking to two kids playing G.I. Joe?

  There was an inordinately long pause, during which no one in the room said a word, or even breathed heavily. Finally, a reply came.

  My IQ is 147. Daniel’s is 139. If you suspect there’s a child in this conversation, check the mirror.

  “Shit,” Dominique nearly shouted. “Oh, holy Christ.”

  “You’re sure?” the president asked.

  “They’re defenders. The awkward phrasing, the arrogance.” She gestured at the avatars. “The IQs he mentioned are right in the defender range.” She stared at President Wood, the implications sinking in. The defenders could locate them.

  “Everyone be ready to leave in one hour,” Wood said. “Fuel the plane. Concentrate on packing survival gear—we’ll have to land and ditch the plane before we reach defender territory.”

  Zipping her coat as she ran, Dominique headed for her quarters to get packed.

  72

  Lila Easterlin

  October 18, 2047. Washington, D.C.

  It took forty minutes to reach the Capitol Shopping Center’s parking lot, and another half hour to find a parking space. Most of that time Lila relived Danika’s execution, over and over. Only it hadn’t been an execution: It had been an exhibition on torture, a primer on all the things defenders would do to you if you defied them. Why was it that the mind insisted on lingering on exactly the things you most wanted to forget?

  Lila tried to drag her thoughts back to the present, to the vehicles parked everywhere—in fire lanes, on the grass medians, along the road leading to the shopping center. No one was sure if the defenders had a reliable way to keep track of who was complying with their designated shopping day and who wasn’t, but no one wanted to risk finding out.