Defenders (27 page)

“Yes,” Oliver said.

“Erik? It’s Galatea.” She took a step forward. “It’s good to see you.”

“We’re not combatants,” Alan chimed in. “We had no idea this would happen.”

“Do you know where Lila is?” Erik asked, ignoring them. He sounded ready to tear Oliver’s head off and crush it in his fist.

“We haven’t seen her since before—” Oliver stammered, not wanting to use the word
invasion
, or
attack
. “Since things went bad.”

Erik motioned to his troops. His meaning was evident: Kill them.

Oliver held up his hands. “I can help you find her. I know places she might be. Don’t hurt Galatea, Alan, and Sook. Take them into custody, and I’ll help you.” He named each of his companions intentionally. It was harder to kill people if you knew their names. He didn’t know if that applied to defenders.

“Lila is strategically valuable. We need her,” Erik said, as if someone had questioned his motives.

“Yes, I understand that,” Oliver said. “Let me help you find her.”

Erik eyed them from under his heavy brow. “Why?” Erik asked. “Why did you do this?”

How could Oliver answer a question like that? A truthful answer could get them all killed. Silence wouldn’t improve their odds, either.

Alan started to answer, but Oliver spoke over him. “You asked for too much.”

Erik glared at him. “We asked to be treated as equals. We asked for respect. You gave us parades, but you don’t want to live with us as equals. You think we’re a joke.”

Behind Erik, a series of huge aircraft roared by. Erik turned and watched them for a moment. They were heading north, away from the Alliance forces.

“We don’t think you’re a joke,” Oliver said. “We take you very seriously.”

“You will.” Erik studied the emissaries a moment longer, then turned toward one of his men. “Take them into custody.” He pointed at Oliver. “You, come with me.”

General Willis rose from his seat. Dominique guessed that, in the general’s mind, he was
springing
from his seat, but the truth was that his aging legs didn’t have much spring left in them.

Squinting, Willis approached the satellite feed, where a number of enemy aircraft were traveling north. Dominique guessed they were planning to attack the enormous Alliance fleet from the rear.

Dominique sat ramrod straight, watching the feed, still unable to accept that this was really happening. They’d attacked the defenders. The
defenders
.

The aircraft just kept going. Up the coast, out over the Coral Sea.

“
They’re running
,” Willis said, sounding almost jubilant. He’d been slumped in his chair since the defenders’ coastline antiaircraft system had picked off all fifty-six of the bombers carrying nuclear warheads. He shouldn’t have been surprised—the US had almost perfected a spectroscopic technique for remote detection of nuclear weapons before the Luyten invasion had derailed the program. The defenders had been granted full access to US military databases during the desperate days of the war.

Dominique watched the feed. “Where are they running
to
?”

No one answered. The defenders had no safe harbor outside Australia.

More aircraft appeared, following the same route.

In Melbourne to the south, a fleet of defender warships hugged the coast,
avoiding
Alliance forces. Pacific Command hadn’t known about those warships. Thanks to the cloak, all they had was what the emissaries on the ground had told them. They had no idea how large the defender army actually was.

Dominique watched the aircraft. What were they up to? If they pulled a substantial part of their forces out of Australia, the Alliance would take it in a matter of days. Dominique pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to think like a defender. They were fighters. They were ruthlessly aggressive. They—

“They’re going on the offensive,” Dominique said aloud.

Everyone in the war room looked at her. Mouths fell open. Admiral Adler cursed under her breath.

“They’re just going to cede Australia to us?” Willis asked, pointing at the blips that represented the Alliance ships and aircraft, a force ten times larger than any ever before assembled in one place.

“Humans always protect their homeland, because they have no choice,” Dominique said. “They can’t leave their children behind, their parents. Defenders have no children to protect, no old people.”

On the virtual map, some of the defender aircraft headed west, between Australia and Papua New Guinea. Others split off and headed east, toward the Pacific. Closer to Sydney, several Alliance aircraft carriers were flashing red on the map.

“What’s going on there?” Willis asked, pointing at the carriers.

Laura Dramis, their tech, zoomed in, giving them a tight aerial view of one of the aircraft carriers. It was canted at a thirty-degree angle, sinking.

“Holy shit. Did they get hit by aircraft, or rockets? Why didn’t our perimeter defenses take them out?” Willis asked.

Peter Hernandez spoke directly to someone in the fleet in a quick, clipped exchange. He spun in his chair. “The attack came from underwater, but sonar did not detect any foreign bodies below. There are reports of defenders surfacing in big
sacks
, like the ones the Luyten used.”

That they had weapons based on Luyten technology shouldn’t have surprised anyone. The report from their weapons expert on the ground had said as much. But that wasn’t the problem right now; the problem was the conventional defender aircraft and warships leaving Australia. Yet more were taking flight out of New South Wales, heading due north.

“Get every ship to send some butterfly cameras under that water, see if they can locate the enemy visually.” Willis reached out, squeezing the air like he was clutching a shoulder. “No. First, tell them to detonate depth charges, tight in, close to their ships. Detonate them as shallowly as possible.”

“General, you need to redeploy your forces,” Dominique said, interrupting. “Most of the world’s major population centers are defenseless right now.” She couldn’t believe the Alliance had put him in charge of the invasion. How did these old, incompetent relics always manage to retain power?

General Willis glared at her, then swept a backhand at the map. “I can see it as well as you can, Miss Wiewall. I’m not blind.”

No, he was just an idiot.

“You’re here to provide insight into the defenders, not advise on military strategy. Now let me do my job.”

He went on arranging for the defense of their naval forces as precious minutes ticked by. He went about it methodically, deliberately, as if to show Dominique who was in charge.

“
Now
,” he said, finally, dipping his head toward Dominique in mock deference, “divert forces to pursue the unfriendlies leaving the vicinity. Send warnings to strategically significant targets and major population centers to be on full alert.”

Dominique realized that by threatening the general’s ego, she’d delayed the deployment by ten or twelve minutes. They were on their way now, though. She relaxed, but not much. She’d pictured this war taking place in Australia. How foolish of her. She of all people should have known better.

She of all people. When the president refused to let her be part of the diplomatic mission to Australia, she should have tried harder to change his mind. Maybe she could have defused the situation before it even started.

There were no human-sized seats in the aircraft, so Oliver stood clutching the pant leg of a fire suit hanging from a hook above him, trying to stay on his feet as the Harrier weaved and dove and banked. He watched what was left of Sydney through the bottom of a window. Human soldiers ran from the cover of one bombed-out building to another. A platoon of defenders vaulted over rubble, looking eager to kill.

“Where are our heavy weapons?” Oliver heard Erik shout into his comm.

“Most have been redeployed,” a gravelly-voiced defender replied.

“Redeployed to where?”

“Moscow, Mumbai, Washington, Shanghai…”

Oliver had a moment of thinking he must be dreaming this. Surely this wasn’t happening. Kai was in Washington.

“What about Sydney?” Erik asked. “What about me?”

“If the Alliance doesn’t turn its force to engage us in their cities, you’re going to die.”

Erik turned toward Oliver, shock and fear evident on his face. It was reassuring to see Erik was afraid to die. “I need Lila. We have to find her.”

“I agree.” His mind was racing. Besides being major population centers, there was something about the cities the defender on the comm had mentioned that struck a chord.

Then it came to him: They were all cities that held mothballed defender production facilities. They were going right after those facilities. Surely the Alliance had thought to destroy those facilities before they launched the invasion. Surely.

Below, blackened rubble and fires were replaced by the green calm of grass and trees. Belmore Park. Since Lila hadn’t returned to the hotel after the funeral, and she clearly hadn’t gone somewhere with Erik, Oliver’s best guess was the park. She spent a lot of her free time there; the normal-sized trees and plants made her feel less like a child, she’d said.

The Harrier dropped close to the ground, its enormous rotors causing the trees to bend and sway like reeds as leaves were torn from branches and blew in all directions.

They cruised along the main walkway, everyone aboard seeking some sign of Lila. Now that they were here, Oliver realized how futile this was. If she’d been here when the bombs began to fall, she would have sought shelter. Not in buildings adjacent to the park, though; she was too smart for that. She would have sought low, protected ground, or better yet, climbed down into a sewer.

“Watch for open sewer holes, or other places she might have taken cover.” Of course, all of this assumed Lila had been in the park when the invasion hit.

Kai was fairly certain Tony Vellikovsky had a third seven in the hole. He so hoped he was right, because if he was, there was no way Vellikovsky could cut loose, and Kai had just drawn the ten he needed for a straight.

Kai saw Vellikovsky’s bet. “Raise.” He pushed another eighty thousand into the pot.

Vellikovsky looked pained, yet pleased. He saw the bet, raised another eighty.

Just in case he’d read it wrong and Vellikovsky had a full house instead of a set of sevens, Kai saw the raise, flipped his hole cards. “Straight.”

Vellikovsky leaned toward the cards, as if he doubted Kai’s assessment, then he looked up at Kai. “You called my raise with a jack-nine?” He pushed away from the table and stormed over to the gallery. “Honey, did you see this?” He gestured toward Kai. “He called my raise with a jack-nine.” He turned back toward the table. “Can you even
spell
‘poker’?”

Kai smiled. “Sorry, Tony. Insults don’t sting much when you’re raking the insulting party’s money toward you.”

“You play like a twelve-year-old.” Evidently, Vellikovsky wasn’t finished. “Seeing my raise when you
know
the odds are against you, just in case you get lucky?” He pointed at Kai. “You won the hand, but you’re an idiot. I don’t know how you’ve lasted this long.
Ben.
” Finally, he sat down.

With great effort, Kai kept the smile on his face, but he could feel himself flushing, with embarrassment and anger. No one called him that. No one called him Benedict Arnold.

The next hands were dealt; he tried to concentrate.

He’d never even met Mandy Caron, the author of the book that insisted on defining his life, yet he hated her more than everyone else he hated on Earth combined. The book itself painted Kai as being far more instrumental in winning the Luyten War than he’d actually been, but it was the title that people remembered, even though it was meant to be ironic.

The Boy Who Betrayed the World.

“Ante is thirty thousand,” the dealer announced.

“And thanks for the rotten cards,” Vellikovsky said to the dealer. “All night, you’ve been handing me shit. You deal me a set, then finish off his straight.”

“Come on, this is getting embarrassing,” Kai said, his patience gone. “Stop with the tantrum and play your goddamned cards.”

Someone in the gallery spoke over him, shouting, “Jesus, they’re invading Australia!”

Kai jumped from his chair. “What? Who?” The last time he’d spoken to Lila, everything had been okay.

“The Alliance.”

“What Alliance?” Vellikovsky said. “There is no Alliance.”

The guy projected the feed onto the wall so everyone could see. There were four POV screens, most of them aerial shots above a city in smoking ruins. Planes filled the sky, some of them enormous, like nothing Kai had ever seen. They were like flying aircraft carriers.

“We’re invading the defenders?” Kai asked. Lila had hinted at problems, but
war
? He pulled out his comm and tried to reach Lila at the number she’d given him, although he knew it would be blocked. It was.

There was an emergency exit to the left of the gallery. Kai headed for it, ignoring the alarm that sounded when he shoved the door open. Unless they’d airlifted the emissaries out before the assault, Lila was in that ruined city. So was Oliver.

First, he had to get Errol. It would change nothing about what was happening in Australia, but suddenly Kai had an overwhelming need to have Errol with him. It was ironic—most mornings he was relieved when the nanny showed up to care for the boundless, chaotic force that was Errol. Now all he wanted was to be with him.

He’d clambered down two flights, taking the steps three at a time, when he finally stopped to catch his breath and think about what to do. He needed to understand exactly what was happening. Breathing hard, his fingers shaking, he activated the news on his phone.

The newscaster said the defenders had delivered an ultimatum, demanding huge territorial concessions, and threatened military action if their demands weren’t met. That must have been the problem Lila had alluded to but couldn’t talk about. In response, the World Alliance had re-formed, and attacked Australia.