Defenders (10 page)

The breeze kicked up and the plane wobbled, the stabilizers on the wings whirring, trying to compensate. They were above the tall pine trees, the highway visible on Lila’s right, a long strip shrinking in the distance.

“You’re doing great!” Lila said, having to shout over the wind.

Dad only nodded, his attention glued to the task. He kept going up, up; Lila had imagined clearing the trees and then staying as low as possible.

“How high are you going?” she asked.

“High enough that we’re out of range of Luyten weapons. There’s no hiding the fact we’re up here. If any Luyten on the ground can just point a heater or lightning rod and cook us, we won’t make it far.”

Lila hadn’t thought of that. Being in the air—away from all the Luyten on the ground—made her feel safe from them, but every Luyten they passed would know they were there.

“How high can we go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. How high can you go and still breathe?”

Lila thought about mountain climbers. At the top of tall peaks, climbers could barely breathe, but how high was that? She missed her feed; whenever teachers had wanted her to remember some esoteric detail like the heights of mountains, Lila had rolled her eyes and ignored them. “Like, I don’t know, maybe twelve or thirteen thousand feet?”

Dad nodded. “I guess if we’re getting too high, we’ll know.”

When the altimeter read thirteen thousand feet, they were still breathing fine, although Lila felt slightly out of breath, and inhaling deeply didn’t make the feeling go away. The cold was worse. Lila was wearing a thin short-sleeved tunic, and she was trembling. Their emergency packs, which included warm clothes, were back in their fried car.

The ground below was a patchwork of black-and-white towns, brown fields, green forest.

“How do we find Atlanta?” Lila asked. The ultralight had a built-in GPS system, but with satellites down it was useless.

“I’m just heading due west.”

Was Atlanta due west? It must be, more or less. Certainly they’d spot the downtown skyscrapers if they were anywhere close.

Dad glanced at her. “I can’t believe you were able to assemble this. It would’ve taken me a week.”

“You told me to find something productive to do.”

“I did. And you did.”

Lila studied the airspeed indicator. They were going just over sixty miles per hour, which meant maybe a two-hour trip. She turned to look over her shoulder at Savannah.

Smoke was rising from a thousand places. Some of the larger buildings were visibly on fire, the flames licking the sky. A container ship was sinking on the river.

“Oh, shit.”

The words jolted Lila awake, set her heart pounding. She looked around and immediately spotted what had caused her father to cry out: seven or eight Luyten were in the air, heading toward them.

They were in modified human Harriers, their massive bodies hanging in harnesses below the craft. Dad was descending, the nose of the ultralight pointed at a steep angle that sent uneasy butterflies through Lila’s gut.

It was hard to tell if the Luyten were dropping to intercept them. If they were, Lila and her father were going to die.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” her father was chanting, clearly in shock. Lila gripped the dash, afraid to look for the Luyten. The ground below was a checker of farmland broken by roads and occasionally buildings.

Lila ventured a look up: The Luyten craft were much closer. They were flying in a circular formation, as Luyten always did, closing on them.

“
They’re coming after us!
” Lila screamed.

“I’m gonna ditch us,” Dad said, his chin pressed into his neck, his mouth stretched in a grimace. “Find the—”

Suddenly, Lila was burning. She screamed in pain, the worst of it coming from her fingers, where her rings were searing her skin.

Dad was screaming, too, his fingers sizzling where they gripped the controls. “We lost the engine.” He held fast to the controls, as the ultralight plunged and his fingers burned.

The heat was getting intolerable as the Luyten closed on them. Lila scanned the dash, frantically seeking the crash suit indicator. There was nothing she could see that looked like an emergency icon. Surely all aircraft, no matter how small, were equipped with crash suits.

Then she saw it, down by her dad’s right foot: a square yellow icon with a fold-up ring. She struggled to read the simple, red-ringed instructions:
Pull ring out, turn clockwise
.

“Wait until we’re close to the ground,” Dad said. “As close as possible.”

“I
know
!” Lila screamed, trying to concentrate. Her shoes were burning her feet. She kicked them off.

Suddenly the heat let up.

Crying with relief, Lila looked up and back, and spotted the Luyten pulling away.

It was deadly silent save for the whistle of the wind. They were close to the ground, quickly growing closer. Pine trees hurtled by just below. Lila realized they were moving much faster than they seemed.

Her skin was throbbing all over. They’d been just on the edge of the heater’s range. Besides her ring finger and feet, she felt like she had a very bad sunburn.

They cleared the line of trees; Dad tried to bank so they would drop along the length of a cornfield. Lila hadn’t known you could grow corn in Georgia. For some reason the thought made her laugh hysterically. She tried to stifle the laugh, but that only made it worse. They were going down, about to crash, and she couldn’t stop laughing.

The ultralight was canted, the left wing lower than the right. When the left wing was about a dozen feet above the corn, Lila twisted the ring to activate the crash suits.

She had the barest instant to see the ultralight burst apart, then the suit inflated around her, pushing her flat, pinning her arms at her sides. She was turning in the air, head over heels, the blue sky framed inside the tight rectangle of vision the suit afforded, then trees, then the startlingly green cornfield, and blue sky again.

Hitting the ground was much worse than Lila had anticipated. It felt like she was being beaten with a steel bar as she slammed into the ground again and again. Then she rolled and skidded, her momentum carrying her farther than she thought possible.

Finally, she stopped rolling and lay still. She stared up at the sky, the clouds drifting by.

High above, a lone Luyten flew by. Although it was high, it was surely not eight miles high, so it was reading her thoughts at this very moment, perhaps considering whether it was worth the trouble to land and finish them.

It continued on, maybe because they were only civilians, weaponless, lying in a field scattered with wreckage.

“Lila?”

She had no idea how to deactivate a crash suit. When she’d seen them on the news, the people inside were always surrounded by concerned medical personnel who knew how to deflate them.

Lila felt around with her fingers, the only part of her body she could move. They came in contact with a bulb. She squeezed it three or four times, and suddenly the suit hissed and settled around her in a plastic puddle. She pushed it off and struggled to her knees.

Dad was heading toward her, limping deeply, a purple bruise rising on his cheek. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit, Lila.” He looked at his hands: His palms were covered with angry red sores. “Holy shit.”

“Do you know how far we are from Atlanta?” Lila asked.

Dad nodded. “It was in sight when the Luyten showed. Maybe ten or fifteen miles to the suburbs?” He pointed to the right. “The interstate is that way. Maybe we can hitch a ride with some of the refugees.”

Lila struggled to her feet. She expected to feel lancing pain in one limb or another, but besides her burning skin and a lot of soreness and a few bumps and bruises, she was all right.

As they stepped onto the ramp leading off the submarine, Oliver found the fresh, salty breeze delightful. They’d been on the sub for only four days, but it had felt like a month. At first all Oliver could see were the rocks of a jetty. He climbed a ramp, and as he cleared the rise he saw palm trees scattered on an open, rocky plain sloping upward. A handful of horses were grazing in the shadow of a line of a dozen or more enormous stone figures. Oliver recognized the long heads; the sharp, angular, features; the shelflike brows and unreadable expressions.

“Easter Island. Rapa Nui.” He’d always wanted to visit, never found the time.

Off to his left, close to shore, Oliver spotted a group of crisply uniformed officers disappearing down a stairway leading underground. There was no military base on Rapa Nui as far as he knew. It must have been constructed since the invasion. Closer to the water, a large forklift was carrying Five and his entire enclosure. The forklift set Five on a raised platform, which sank slowly into the ground until Five disappeared.

“Dr. Bowen? This way, please.” A woman with gray crewcut hair, wearing a black suit, sidearm, clearly CIA security, touched his elbow. She steered him toward the staircase that led under the island.

Oliver followed the agent down the steps, stunned as the size and scope of this operation unfolded before him. He was descending into an immense open space. The cavernous room was bisected into dozens of smaller spaces, separated by transparent material that gave the facility an unnerving sense of weightlessness. Hundreds of people were visible, hurrying about, seemingly walking on air.

“What is this place?”

“I’m taking you to a briefing, sir,” the agent said.

“It must have cost billions to construct this facility.”

“You’re only seeing a fraction of it. It covers most of the space under the island.”

The far walls were raw stone. Oliver watched as someone stepped onto a small framed platform, grasped the handles jutting from its frame, and shot out of sight. He was led into a room along one wall—one of the few fully enclosed rooms. A thin black woman who looked about sixteen met him at the door.

“Dr. Bowen, I’m Dominique Wiewall. I head up the biological side of the defenders project.” She had a lilting Caribbean accent and spoke quickly, breathlessly. “I’ll be providing your orientation, which, if you don’t mind, I’d like to start straightaway.”

Oliver nodded. “Please, I’m dying to know what’s going on here.”

Wiewall motioned for Oliver to take a seat at a circular meeting table in what looked to be her office. There was a computer station in one corner, a dozen or so small wood carvings of Moai along a single shelf, and a big framed poster of a gorgeous rain forest. Along the bottom of the poster,
Island Rain
was printed in teal cursive lettering.

As they sat at the meeting table, an impressive three-dimensional display of the island materialized above it.

“Rapa Nui is a volcanic island,” Wiewall said without any preamble, still speaking rapidly. “The underground is riddled with caves—lave tubes created by three volcanoes that formed the island. The original residents lived in these caves in the years before they died off. The caves, and the incredibly remote location of the island, made it a perfect base of operations.”

A red line appeared, surrounding the island.

“Elaborate precautions have been taken to keep the Luyten from becoming aware of this project.
No one
knows the details of the project except those on the island, and anyone who comes to the island, stays.”

“You mean, I have to stay here indefinitely?” Oliver thought of Vanessa, then reminded himself: Vanessa was a weakness. No weakness.

Wiewall nodded. “You will. If all goes well, though, that should not be long. Maybe three months. The project is in its final stages.” Her head was nearly shaved, leaving only a sheen of tight black curls outlining the elegant shape of her skull. Come to think of it, most of the people Oliver had seen had severe haircuts, as if time was too precious to devote to hair grooming.

He couldn’t imagine what they were working on, what sort of weapon would justify expending such massive resources. For the first time in a year, he felt a flicker of hope.

It’s a desperate, last-ditch effort.

Oliver had almost forgotten Five was there.
What is?
he thought. Five would already know the details.

Five didn’t answer.

The display changed, from Easter Island to an enlarged map of a human neural network, the receptor sites for the various neurotransmitters highlighted with different colors.

“I know you have a background in psychology, so I’ll skip the preliminaries,” Wiewall said. “We’ve studied Luyten physiology using corpses salvaged from battles. Based on those examinations, our medical experts think the Luyten’s telepathic ability relies on the presence of the neurotransmitter serotonin.”

Oliver nodded. That made sense. Serotonin was what made humans feel human, what made them feel love, sexual desire, awareness, and interest in the world.

In the display, the serotonin receptor sites vanished. “If there is no serotonin present, the Luyten can’t read the target, and their telepathic advantage is neutralized.”

“If you removed people’s serotonin receptors, they’d be in a catatonic state, so there’d be no mind to read.”

Wiewall nodded. “That’s true. But we haven’t removed serotonin receptors from human brains; we’ve designed a brain that functions without serotonin.”

“Designed a brain?” All Oliver could think was Wiewall was speaking metaphorically. “You mean some sort of advanced AI?”

The display changed to another neural network. It was organic, but utterly unrecognizable to Oliver.

“The world’s superpowers have all had well-funded genetic engineering programs since the beginning of the century. Soon after the Luyten invaded, they began pooling their resources and knowledge.”

Oliver leaned forward, examined the display more closely. “But if you excised the entire serotonin system, you’d have a domino effect. You’d have to change everything.”

“We did. And more.” She stood, motioned Oliver toward the door. As Oliver stood, Wiewall paused, then smiled for the first time. “I have to admit, I’m looking forward to seeing your reaction to this. Most of us have been here the whole time, and we’ve gotten used to seeing them.”