Defenders (26 page)

Struggling to her feet, Lila staggered on.

She wondered if Oliver was still alive, if the others had reached shelter in time. Then she thought of Kai, their little man, Errol, and she nearly sobbed.

Up ahead, one of the enormous exhaust grates built into the sidewalks was leaned against a storefront, exposing a huge open hole. Lila ran bent at the waist, listing to the right, correcting, drifting right again until she reached the hole.

There was an enormous ladder, the rungs too far apart. She hugged one of the ladder’s vertical bars, paused, and took one last look at the city, the bombers overhead like a chain-link steel roof, the air stinking of soot and gasoline. Then she slid into near darkness.

She reached a huge horizontal sewer pipe as the earth above continued to rattle, the
boom
s only slightly muffled. She sensed she wasn’t nearly far enough underground to be safe if a bomb landed nearby, but looking around, she couldn’t see a way to go lower.

Then she spotted an opening, and limped a hundred feet deeper into the tunnel. Shrouded in darkness, there was a ragged hole in the side of the enormous pipe. She stepped through and found herself in a wider tunnel, freshly dug, angling downward. It was pitch-black.

Every fiber in her was repulsed by the thought of climbing into that hole.

A bomb struck fairly close; dirt rained down onto her head. The open wound burned. She had to go farther down. Alan had said the Alliance would pound the city for hours, maybe days.

Lila sat, then eased herself down the steep grade. The thought of being alone in a dark tunnel for hours or days terrified her to the core.

She kept sliding, freshly dug earth tumbling down with her. Once she was down, would she be able to climb back up? The thought sent bright stabs of panic through her as she dropped. It was too late to go back.

The tunnel leveled out; Lila spotted a faint blue glow ahead. Cautiously, she got to her feet, walked the final sixty feet, the light growing brighter. She reached a curve in the wall and, heart drumming, followed the curve a dozen more feet.

The tunnel opened onto a dimly lit room packed with Luyten. Some were curled into balls; others stood along the walls. One was wounded; it lay near the center while two others tried to stanch the bleeding from a half dozen ragged gashes.

Lila turned and fled back through the tunnel, running blindly, hands in front of her, expecting to feel a Luyten’s cilia wrap around her ankle at any second and drag her back into the room where they would tear her apart. She reached the slope, stumbled in the soft earth, landed face-first, sprang up immediately, and clawed at the dirt, panting in fear. Overhead, bombs thumped like the whole city was being reduced to dust. Lila felt blood dripping off her hair onto her shoulder and chest as she scrabbled in the soft dirt with her hands and feet, trying to find purchase.

She’d managed to climb twenty feet or so, the angle growing steadily steeper, when she lost her grip and slid down again.

Lila pressed her forehead into the dirt and shook her head. There was no way. She was trapped.

It occurred to her that if the Luyten were chasing her, they would have caught her before now. She turned and sat, listening to the sounds of Luyten moving around in the bunker. Five had told Oliver they were going to remain neutral. Maybe they meant it.

She leaned against the tunnel wall, drew up her knees. This was insane. The World Alliance was bombing defenders while Lila took refuge in a shelter filled with Luyten.

Lila shrieked and scurried backward as a thick Luyten appendage pressed against her. She backed into the shelter, where the Luyten squeezed past her and continued into the shelter.

The Luyten in the shelter simply ignored her. Rather than risk being in the way of other arriving Luyten, she sat against the wall, in a wedge near the exit where the wall angled.

Looking around the makeshift shelter, she spotted crates of food tucked into the far corner, plastic barrels of water. Blue iridescent lights jutted from the walls at rough intervals. Lila wondered if the Luyten preferred the blue tinge because it approximated the light of their home world, because it made it more difficult for defenders to detect them, or simply because it had been easiest to pilfer from their masters. One thing was certain: They’d prepared for this. Thanks to Oliver, they’d had warning.

Every Luyten in the shelter could hear her thoughts. In the dim light, her mind conjured unbidden images of Luyten cooking cars full of screaming people, crawling up from the sewers in Atlanta, bearing down on her father …

Yet in the end, when they’d lost, they set down their weapons and marched into those camps, leaving themselves at the mercy of humans. And Lila’s people had betrayed them.

Why were they tolerating her presence now, she wondered?

Head down, shirt pressed to his mouth, eyes half closed against the dust and blinding flashes, Oliver ducked under a huge pipe that was probably a standard household-sized plumbing pipe in this Brobdingnagian city.

The explosions went on and on.

Oliver paused, then turned to Alan, who was behind him. “How long is this likely to go on?”

“Until any more bombing would be pointless. Then they’ll send in troops and drones.”

That wasn’t an answer. “Well, how long is that likely to
take
?”

“There it is,” Galatea called out, pointing. Sure enough, there was the pipe where they’d held their covert meetings. The still-smoking wreckage of a bomber was strewn to one side of it. They picked up their pace, eager to have cover, although a drainage pipe wouldn’t lead far enough underground to shield them from a direct hit.

Galatea, who was a few paces ahead of Oliver, stopped suddenly.

“What is it?” Oliver caught up to her and peered inside.

The pipe was full of bodies. Twenty or thirty of their colleagues lay in a burnt, bloody tangle thirty feet inside the pipe. Oliver turned away, gasping, trying to catch his breath. The sight in the tunnel had knocked the wind out of him.

“They must have been spying on us,” Sook said. “They knew we were meeting here, and when the invasion started, they guessed we’d seek refuge here.”

“We have to get out of here,” Alan said. “They might come back.”

“I have to see if Lila is in there,” Oliver said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “Go on, I’ll catch up.”

“No,” Galatea said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll help you.” She turned to Sook and Alan. “Shout if they come.”

At the start of the Luyten War, Luyten had dropped from the sky like falling stars. This time it was humans who dropped from the sky.

“It looks like most of them are dropping over there.” Sook pointed to the west.

During the long, cold night in a restaurant sub-basement, they’d finally agreed that their best course of action was to leave the safety of the basement when the bombing stopped and find Alliance soldiers to take them to one of the ships off the coast. Oliver couldn’t leave without finding Lila, but Galatea had convinced him it would be both suicidal and pointless to wander the city looking for her. Wiser to get a platoon of soldiers to search for her.

“We’re better off heading east,” Alan said. “Most of the force will be coming off the boats.” They headed east along the top of the drainage bed, less than forty feet from Trafalgar Street. Because Alan had a degree in military history to go along with his extensive knowledge of modern weapons, they were grudgingly following his lead for the most part.

Another wave of Alliance paratrooper planes buzzed overhead. Then, moments later, another.

“Here comes the full invasion,” Alan said. “They’ll drop a few kilometers west of the city, then sweep this way.”

Cautiously, Oliver lifted his head above street level. The city was unrecognizable—a postapocalyptic nightmare. The enormous scale of the infrastructure meant that much more wreckage. In places, Trafalgar Street looked impassable.

“If all goes well, how long will it take before the Alliance is in control?” Galatea asked Alan.

“Based on how quickly they’ve put boots on the ground, I’d say they’re planning a quick, violent assault. Either they control the continent in a matter of weeks, or they won’t control it at all.”

Oliver clapped his hands to his ears as dozens of defender fliers roared by overhead. Oliver recognized them as the ones lined row upon row at one of the first factories they’d passed on the initial tour. They were enormous, angry-looking things, almost rectangular save for a pointed nose, loaded with turrets and cylinders that were clearly weapon systems.

“I was hoping the Alliance had gotten all of those during the bombing.”

“I’m sure they got some,” Alan said. “Hopefully, most.”

The thumping of many pairs of boots in the street sent a thrill of fear through Oliver. Risking a glance, he saw defenders carrying automatic rifles, running in step. Their eyes were wide and wild, their teeth clenched.

Gunfire erupted. Two of the lead defenders dropped heavily; the rest scattered left and right. Two more were hit by what must have been large-caliber ordnance, because it tore right through the defenders’ body armor, spraying flesh, blood, and bone.

Oliver and his companions watched from their cover as the defenders disappeared down side streets, behind vehicles. From the west, a baritone moan and a metallic clicking rose. More of the defenders’ gigantic weapons.

“We should get out of here,” Oliver said, but no one moved. They were mesmerized by the sight of defenders fighting humans.

“Look,” Galatea said.

Oliver looked where she was pointing, and saw a defender climbing out a third-story window clutching an assault rifle. He perched on the ledge right above the spot where the Alliance shots had originated, and jumped.

The defender hit the debris boots-first with staggering force, yet stayed on his feet. Howling, he unleashed a barrage of rapid, booming fire, point-blank. Oliver couldn’t see the human troops hiding in the debris, but he knew they were dying.

Four Alliance soldiers broke from their cover. Screaming, his face twisted with rage, the defender turned his fire on the fleeing soldiers.

When he finally stopped, they were in pieces.

“Let’s go,” Oliver repeated. This time, everyone moved.

Seemingly all at once, the bombing stopped. Lila had been half dozing, in a twilight state where Luyten and defenders lurked in the corners of her vision, constantly jolting her from any chance of real sleep. Now she woke fully, listened for the muffled thump of bombs exploding overhead. All was silent.

Lila jumped as something dropped into her lap. It was a defender-sized package of cereal. Weetabix. She turned to see a Luyten returning to its place beside the food stores.

“No milk?” Lila called. The package hissed as she ran her finger along the airtight seal.

The bridge across Sydney Harbor was gone. From behind an overturned piece of a bombed fountain in Dawes Point Park, they watched a flotilla of defender submarines head out toward the sea, silent, dipping under the water then resurfacing like porpoises crossed with tanks.

“It’s going to take us forever to get to the beach with the bridge gone,” Sook said.

“Hopefully we’ll encounter some Alliance troops before then. We just have to keep moving toward them,” Alan said, pointing in the direction he thought they should go.

“
Down
,” Galatea hissed. Everyone ducked. Oliver had a tight view of the street running along the river through a cracked place in the fountain. He counted four defenders as they passed, walking single file, the first three carrying assault rifles, the fourth something larger and heavier, with two enormous barrels and a shoulder brace.

When the defenders were out of sight, the emissaries waited five minutes, then headed toward the beach. They stuck to the backstreets, which were tight alleys to the defenders but felt wide and exposed to Oliver. They had to backtrack often to navigate around fallen buildings, and did their best to stifle coughs that might give them away as the smoke-filled air tortured their lungs.

Oliver was sick about being separated from Lila. It had been a tremendous relief when it turned out she wasn’t among the bodies in the pipe, but if she hadn’t made it to the rendezvous point, where was she? He didn’t want to believe she was dead in this rubble. Surely she’d sought shelter, was holed up somewhere.

They’d wound a third of a mile from the downed Sydney Bay Bridge when they hit a wall of rubble a hundred feet high, stretching out of sight in both directions.

“Which way?” Sook asked.

A small jet appeared over the rooftops and paused directly overhead. They pressed into the doorway of a department store, but the jet darted down, hovered thirty feet above the street, facing them. It was like a toy, no bigger than a bicycle. From its muscular appearance—like a jagged bullet with wings—it was clearly defender made.

It whisked off.

“A spy drone. They know where we are,” Oliver said. “They’ll be coming. Run.”

They ran north along the edge of the mound, looking for a breach they could squeeze through.

“Can we climb over it?” Galatea asked.

The soft hiss of aircraft engines broke through the din. Three defender Harriers swooped into view, hovered, then landed in a semicircle, pinning them against the mound of debris.

Doors whisked open and defenders jumped out of the craft, charging at them, snorting, their eyes glowing with rage.

“
Hold fire!
” a defender in officer’s gold and black fatigues shouted. “Hold. I think those are the ones.”

The officer stepped between two defenders and peered at the emissaries. “You.” He pointed at Oliver. “You’re Lila’s father.”