Will McIntosh - Watching Over Us

She wanted to disagree with him, but she couldn’t. Winning the war mattered above everything; that’s why her seventy-year-old bones were humping an assault rifle through the woods. But people had died. Kids. A bizarre and contradictory mix of emotions coursed through her: gratitude, resentment, awe, flat-out dislike. She didn’t know what to do with it all.

“Who’s giving you your orders?” she asked.

“We answer to General Peter, of the Defender High Command.” His tone bordered on reverence. “The defenders are a fully independent fighting force, for obvious reasons.”

They weren’t even under the authority of a human commander. Yes, it made sense. It was also chilling.

It was nearly dark when Laurel pushed through the foliage, into their camp. Her three comrades leaped up to greet her.

Jared gave her a big hug. “I was worried about you.”

“Let’s bed down,” she said as crickets peeped around them. “I’ll take first watch.”

“Where are the defenders?” Jared asked. He looked uneasy about the prospect of another night in the woods after such an awful day.

Laurel pointed into the trees. “They’re right over there, not two hundred yards away. So don’t worry. They’re watching over us.”

Will McIntosh is a Hugo award-winner and Nebula finalist whose latest novel, Defenders (Orbit Books), has been optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film. His previous novel, Love Minus Eighty , was named the best science fiction book of 2013 by the American Library Association, while his debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, was a finalist for a Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Compton Crook Award. Along with four novels, he has published short stories in Asimov’s (where he won Readers’ Awards in 2010 and 2013), Lightspeed , Science Fiction and Fantasy: Best of the Year , and elsewhere. Up next is a Young Adult novel, Burning Midnight , to be published by Delacorte Press/Penguin Random House. Will was a psychology professor before turning to writing full-time. You can follow him on Twitter @willmcintoshSF, or on his website, www.willmcintosh.net.

Love Minus Eighty

Defenders

The Heist

The Perimeter

Watching Over Us

City Living

Our Darkest Hour.

Our Only Hope.

The invaders came to claim earth as their own, overwhelming us with superior weapons and the ability to read our minds like open books.

Our only chance for survival was to engineer a new race of perfect soldiers to combat them. Seventeen feet tall, knowing and loving nothing but war, their minds closed to the aliens.

But these saviors could never be our servants. And what is done cannot be undone.

June 26, 2029. Morris Run, Pennsylvania.

It was a quaint Pennsylvania town, many of the buildings well over fifty years old, with green canopies shading narrow doorways. Even the town’s name was quaint: Morris Run. If not for the abandoned vehicles, filthy and faded by two years of exposure to the elements, and the trash stacked along the sidewalk, Quinto might have expected someone to step out of the Bullfrog Brewhouse and wave hello.

“Lieutenant Lucky?” Quinto turned to see Macalena, his platoon sergeant, making his way to the front of the carrier. Quinto wished he’d said something the first time someone called him Lucky, but it was far too late now. Most of the troops he was leading today probably didn’t know his real name.

“One of the new guys shit his pants,” Macalena said when he drew close, his voice low, giving Quinto a whiff of his sour breath.

Quinto sighed heavily. “Oh, hell.”

“The kid’s scared to death. He hasn’t been out of Philadelphia since this started.”

“No, I don’t blame him.” Quinto looked over Macalena’s shoulder, saw the kid perched on the side of the carrier, head down. He was about fourteen. The poor kid didn’t belong out here. Not that Quinto couldn’t use him; they called raw recruits “fish food,” but sometimes they were surprisingly effective in a firefight, because they were too scared to think. The starfish could get less of a read on what they were going to do, which way they were going to point their rifles. Usually the newbies didn’t shit their pants until the shooting started, though. “Does he have a spare pair?”

Macalena shook his head. “That’s the only pair he owns.”

Quinto reached into his pack, pulled out a pair of fatigue pants, and handed them to Macalena. “I hope he’s got a belt.”

Macalena laughed, stuck the pants under his armpit, and headed toward the kid.

What an awful thing, to be out here at fourteen, fifteen. When Quinto was fourteen, he’d spent his days playing video games, shooting bad guys in his room while Mom fetched fruit juice and chocolate chip cookies and told him when to go to bed.

They reached the end of the little downtown, which was composed of that single road, and the landscape opened up, revealing pine forest, the occasional house, mountains rising up on all horizons. There was little reason for any Luyten to be within eight miles of this abandoned backwater town, but they were all out there somewhere, so there was always a chance they’d be detected.

Quinto tried to access his helmet’s topographical maps, but the signal still wasn’t coming through. He pulled the old hard copy from his pack, unfolded it.

The carrier slowed; Quinto looked up from the map to see what was going on. There was a visual-recognition drone stuck in a drainage ditch along the side of the road. As they approached, the VRA drone—little more than a machine gun on treads—spun and trained its gun on each of the soldiers in turn. When it got to Quinto, it paused.

“Human. Human! ” Quinto shouted, engaging the thing’s vocal-recognition failsafe. It went on to the next soldier.

It was always an uncomfortable moment, having a VRA drone point a weapon at you. You’d think it would be hard to mistake a human for a Luyten.

Failing to identify anything that resembled a starfish, the gun spun away.

“Get a few guys to pull it out of the ditch,” Quinto said. Four troops hopped out of the transport and wrestled the thing back onto the road. It headed off down the road, continuing on its randomly determined route.

Pleasant Street dead-ended close to the mouth of the mine, about half a mile past an old hotel that should be coming up on their left. When they got to the mine they’d have to unseal it using the critical blast points indicated on the topo map, then a 2.5-mile ride on the maglev flats into the mine, to the storage facility.

If someone had told Quinto two years ago that he’d be going into an abandoned mine to retrieve seventy-year-old weapons and ammo, he would have laughed out loud.

It wasn’t funny now.

The locomotive and five boxcars were parked right where they were supposed to be—as close to the mouth of the mine as the track would allow. They were late-twentieth-century vintage, the locomotive orange and shaped like a stretched Mack truck. Quinto called Macalena and his squad leaders, instructed them to set the big recognition-targeting gun they’d brought along in the weeds on the far side of the road, and place two gunners near the entrance with interlocking fire. When that was done, they got the rest of the squads moving down the tunnel. The quicker they moved, the sooner they’d be out of hostile territory and back in Philly.