Defenders (19 page)

“Have you ever taken a close look at a defender’s hands?” the man said. Lila moved her head left, then right, trying to see who it was. Finally, she caught a glimpse of Azumi Bello, the big, affable Nigerian ambassador. He held up his own hand, made a fist. “Their hands weren’t engineered with fine-motor skills in mind. They were made to hold weapons. I can’t imagine how they could mend boots with those hands, or manufacture dishes, or paint a picture.”

“How did they create the cloak, then?” Sook asked. “That sort of technology would require extremely fine motor skills.”

Azumi shook his head. “That, Ms. Sook, is a mystery.”

Lila lifted her hand from the armrest, felt more weight than had been there a moment earlier. They were descending. She ran her hands over her thighs, wiping sweat. Fifteen years of wondering, and in a minute they’d have their answers.

People were leaving their seats, crowding around the windows, seeking a first glimpse of Sydney. The cabin was hushed as the jet broke through the clouds and a city took shape below.

“Oh,” Bolibar said, clearly disappointed.

The city had barely changed. Visible below were skyscrapers, roads, vehicles, bridges. The jet descended, dropping below the tops of the skyscrapers.

“Oh,” Oliver said, his tone laced with surprise and disbelief. As they dropped, the size of the city became more apparent. The skyscrapers were immense. Their jet was a toy that could nearly fit through an office window. The defenders had retained the look of the city, but had rebuilt it to their scale.

“Of course,” Lila said softly. She meant it as a personal aside, but others looked at her, waiting for her to elaborate. “They’re brand-new beings—their only point of reference is how humans do things.” If everything was designed to defenders’ scale, the city would be almost triple in size. The tallest buildings might be three thousand feet tall.

The landing gear ground into place beneath them. The
FASTEN SEAT BELTS
sign chimed. Reluctantly, the ambassadors returned to their seats. It was quiet as the jet descended. Everyone was peering out the windows, taking in Sydney.

They landed on a strip as long and wide as a small desert, then taxied to the airport for ten minutes.

As they lined up to get off, Bolibar grinned at her. “Here we go. Into the fray.” There was a buzz of excitement, a plane mostly full of jaded politicos sounding like kids on Christmas morning.

Lila gave Oliver a playful nudge in the back. “Hurry,” she said. He turned to look at her, his eyebrows raised. He was effectively here as her babysitter, someone the feds thought could control her, someone she would listen to if push came to shove. That made her smile. It was true, to a degree. But only to a degree.

Oliver had shown her the file the CIA worked up after the defenders requested her. She was impulsive, she drank too much, exhibited classic symptoms of PTSD. In short, she was damaged goods. Big surprise. Who the hell wasn’t?
Them?
The clowns in charge were probably more damaged than most people; the difference was they were too arrogant to admit it.

As they approached the exit, Lila took a deep breath and swept her hair out of her face. Screw their file, she wasn’t here for them. She was here for the defenders.

A defender was waiting on the tarmac. Lila had always found them strangely beautiful. So like the statues on Easter Island, if those statues were stretched, and stood on three legs, and had what looked like enormous shards of broken glass running down each side. Their faces were chiseled and angular, set on a long, almost neckless cylinder.

“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, strung 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.

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.