Will McIntosh - Defenders

October 23, 2047. Washington, D.C.

He was standing in the shower, drying himself off, when he heard the sound of a coin dropping into a vending machine. It was the sound his phone made when he had an incoming text message. He dropped the towel and rushed into the living room, dripping wet and cold.

Peter—

Here are the statistics for the products you’re interested in. Good luck with your business venture!

Diane

He opened the attachment, scanned the numbers. His heart sank as he read down the columns. Shipments of filet mignon, jumbo shrimp, and leg of lamb coming into Karachi, Shanghai, São Paulo, and the other cities Five had listed had dropped precipitously. They were the foods only defenders could afford, the ones defenders favored. Shipments of those foods to major cities not on Five’s list had actually increased somewhat.

A human inquiring about defender troop movement was a dead human, but there were many ways to determine if a specific population was on the move.

“Oh, Christ,” he said under his breath.

Oliver began typing a quick note of thanks to Alissa Valeri, who’d been a top-notch data hound at the CIA.

The doorbell rang. Almost no one knew he lived there; the door hadn’t rung in a month. He went to the window.

For a moment he didn’t recognize the woman standing at his door, then it registered.

It was Vanessa.

Fingers trembling, Oliver flipped the lock and opened the door. “ Hi. How did you find me?” She looked older than when he’d last seen her. That had been almost ten years earlier, when he bumped into her at a Nationals game. She was still beautiful. Oliver pulled the door open wider so Vanessa could come in, but she stayed where she was.

“ Will you please get that thing out of my head? ” she said.

“What? What thing?”

Vanessa’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know about it? Honestly?”

“Vanessa, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Vanessa closed her eyes, spoke very slowly. “The alien is trying to convince me to reconcile with you.”

“ What? Oh, no. You’ve got to be kidding.” It made sense. Five was trying to fix what it had done, to prove his sincerity.

Vanessa was studying him carefully. “You had nothing to do with it? You didn’t ask it to do this?”

“God, no. I wouldn’t inflict that monster on my worst enemy.” He reached out as if to touch Vanessa, but hesitated. “I’m so sorry about this, Vanessa. Believe me, I know what it’s like to have that monster in your head.”

She gave Oliver a sarcastic smile. “You’ll be happy to know it takes full responsibility for the misunderstanding between us.”

Even her indirect reference to his tragic blunder made him cringe. What an idiot he’d been back then. “Well, that’s big of him.”

“Can you get it to leave me alone? I’m going to jump off a bridge if it doesn’t stop.”

Oliver heaved a big sigh. “I’ll try. He has to be within telepathic range to hear me, and he has to be willing to speak to me. Although lately, the latter’s been less of a challenge than it used to be.”

“So you’ve been in touch with it recently?”

Oliver kicked himself for letting that information slip. He’d been a CIA bureau chief, for God’s sake. “Five contacted me, yes.”

“What did it want? To reminisce about the good old days?” A touch of bitterness leaked into her tone. She swept her long black hair, now infused with strands of white, out of her face in a gesture that was painfully familiar.

The smart thing would be to latch on to Vanessa’s suggestion, laugh it off, but Oliver couldn’t bring himself to tell her an outright lie. “If you really want to know, ask me again in six months and I’ll tell you.” One way or another, it would be safe to tell her in six months. By then the secret would be out. Because, Oliver realized, if he had a say in this, they were going to go through with it. Not because Five’s little gesture of remorse had moved him in the slightest; it was the cold, hard data in that email message that convinced him. If they did nothing, 80 percent of the world’s population would die. If they acted, they put the final 20 percent at risk, but at least everyone had a fighting chance. If the Luyten double-crossed them, so be it. They’d beaten the Luyten once; they could do it again.

Vanessa had said something. Oliver had been so lost in thought he’d missed it. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I said, I’m sorry to bother you.” She glanced over her shoulder. For a moment Oliver wondered if someone was waiting in the car for her—a husband or boyfriend—but he couldn’t see the street from his door. “I would have called, but the Luyten refused to give me your number. Although this was probably too sensitive to talk about on the phone anyway.”

“You’re probably right.” He wanted to ask if she was married, or seeing someone. He knew that she and her second husband (whose name Oliver had forgotten—all he remembered was, it wasn’t Paul) had divorced six or seven years earlier. Fifteen years ago, he would have been stupid enough to ask that sort of question. Not now, though.

He held out his hand, and Vanessa took it. “It was good seeing you, Vanessa. I’ll get Five to leave you alone. I promise”

“Thank you. It was good to see you, too.”

She turned. Oliver closed the door and went to the window to watch her climb the steps. For a moment the terrible sadness returned, the hollowing loneliness that had tormented him after their divorce. He turned his thoughts to the work ahead, and the pain receded.

October 24, 2047. Washington, D.C.

Kai pointed into the woods. “Look at that.”

Lila spun, scanned the terrain. She didn’t see anything through the lattice of bare branches, nothing moving on the floor of fallen brown and orange leaves.

“Higher.”

She followed his pointing finger up into the trees, and spotted it: a huge woodpecker perched on a dead tree, poking at it with her long beak.

“A pileated woodpecker,” Kai said. “They’re rare.”

She was about to ask where Kai the city boy had learned about woodpeckers when she spotted Oliver heading toward them, head down, hands in his pockets. Lila tried to read his face for a hint of what he might have found out, but Oliver always looked worried.

“Not good news,” he said as he reached them. “Defenders are definitely clearing out of the cities Five gave us, and not out of others. I think the Luyten are telling the truth.”

He looked at Lila. She knew what he was going to say, and she didn’t want to hear it.

“I think we have to accept their offer.”

Lila cursed, turned away.

“I wish I was more confident we can trust them. I’m not at all confident about that, but, honestly? I think it’s our only chance.”

She didn’t want to agree to this. She would be the one who would actually hand the Luyten the power to wipe them out; it would all be on her shoulders.

“What other choice do we have, Lila?” Oliver asked. “Do nothing, while the defenders gas two billion people, quite possibly including your family?” Lila looked up at him. “They wouldn’t kill you , because you’re too valuable, but I could picture them whisking you off to Easter Island just before they gas the entire D.C. area.”

“It would take at least three months to get enough altered defenders trained and in place. What if the defenders carry out their plan before then?”

That’s why they’ve pressured you to ramp up production. They want to reinforce their numbers before they act. They want overwhelming force before they reveal their intentions, in case you fight back.