17

Dominique Wiewall

May 25, 2030. Easter Island.

When the colonel put his hand on her knee, Dominique wanted to hack it off with a knife, but instead had to settle for shifting to the left to dislodge it. How dare he use this, the culminating moment of all of their work, to pull this kind of stunt?

She’d been drunk the night she slept with him. Extremely drunk. Also wallowing in a modicum of self-pity, because it had been her birthday. She’d regretted it the moment it was over, before she’d even sobered up. When she did sober up, she more than regretted it—she’d been mortified. Not that Colonel Willis was unattractive, he was just … too military. A walking stereotype. It made him seem clownish in Dominique’s eyes.

Shaking off the memory of his pale body rocking atop hers, Dominique focused on the feeds. They had three to start. Some might be knocked out once combat began, but hopefully not all. They needed to collect as much information as possible about the defenders’ performance. It would be tricky, to pass on recommendations that might aid the defenders in subsequent engagements without passing on information that might help the Luyten, who would undoubtedly intercept everything they sent.

Her pulse was racing. These were her children. Many, many others had helped, but no one would argue that she was the primary architect. Besides everything at stake for humanity, Dominique felt in a very personal way that her life would be either vindicated or ruined in the next few hours. She was so glad she’d opted to stay on Easter Island. No one off the island would witness this, not even the premier.

Dominique was cautiously optimistic that the defenders would do well. The Luyten depended heavily on knowing their enemy’s minds; they’d had no need to develop tactical expertise in battle. And while their weapons were sophisticated, most only had what was embedded in the biologically grown suit that fit them like a second skin. The defenders, by contrast, knew nothing but military tactics, and were armed to the teeth.

Dominique watched the feed from one of the little aerial butterfly cameras, which was temporarily perched on the helmet of the operation’s commander, a defender named Douglas. He was traveling with the Airborne Battalion, briefing his officers in a clipped baritone, squatting in the hold of the huge stealth-enabled C-5, which was typically used to transport heavy artillery and buses. She enabled the sound.

“We establish two separate LZs. The first, five miles north-northeast of the objective.” Douglas pointed to the spot on the relief map. The first LZ, which Dominique assumed meant landing zone, lit up in red. “The second, five miles south-southeast.” He marked this one as well. “One squad from each drop zone will be designated as a security squad and will move as follows: From drop zone one, directly north. From drop zone two, directly south. The northern moving squad will secure Highway 60 and establish a perimeter defense. The southern moving squad will secure Highway 5. The full security squad will deny any Luyten movement from west to east—”

From what she knew of military tactics, the plan seemed solid. It soothed her drumming heart, how competent the commander sounded.

“—additional squad will be dropped in the southern LZ and will proceed to the area just north of San Antonio. Center of gravity, CP, and HQ will be established at that location, here, ten miles south-southeast of the objective.”

A commander named Luigi was overseeing the defense of the production facility in Santiago, but taking the power plant was the more challenging of the two missions. Not only did the Luyten already hold it, but the defenders couldn’t use large weapons to bombard the plant, because they needed it to be operational. To compensate, they were sending a large force—120 defenders.

“Here they go,” Colonel Willis said, leaning forward. Dominique reflexively drew her leg away, afraid he’d use the shift in posture as an opportunity to reestablish an LZ on her thigh.

As the defenders jumped, two at a time, from the aircraft, they didn’t appear to be almost three times as large as humans. The oversized aircraft and gear threw off Dominique’s perception. But as they dropped to the ground in an open field adjacent to a forest, they were almost half as tall as the trees, and the illusion was shattered.

Douglas grunted orders to his men, as the butterfly camera lifted off, giving Dominique a wider view of the terrain. A gentle slope led up to another wall of trees. The defenders fanned out, trotted across the field in what seemed like half a dozen steps, and disappeared into the forest.

It was strange, to think the Luyten didn’t know they were coming.

Dominique glanced at the feed originating with the sea-based B Company. The company was in skiffs, heading toward the beach. They looked awkward, riding six to a skiff in boats meant to carry twenty humans. They would attack from the west, while the airborne company attacked from the east.

The butterfly camera panned down to provide a glimpse of defenders moving through the forest below, then up, to provide their first look at the power plant. It was shaped like a figure eight lying flat. Four enormous storage tanks on stilts stood behind it, and all of this sat on a platform surrounded by a placid artificial lake of steel-blue seawater, pumped in from the nearby Pacific. The lake was bisected by three breezeways. A Luyten-modified heavy construction vehicle was crossing one of the breezeways, its Luyten operator clearly visible. Half a dozen other Luyten were moving around outside the plant.

The crackle of small-arms fire erupted in the forest below. The camera swung toward the trees.

By the time Dominique could see what was happening, it was over. Two Luyten lay dead, their centers jellied with ordnance wounds. Defenders confiscated the fallen Luyten weapons, and the company pushed on.

“There goes the element of surprise,” Willis said. “Though I doubt the defenders expected to make it right up to the gates without being spotted.”

Willis’s final words were partially drowned by an explosion coming over the feed, then two more on top of one another. The camera rose.

The Luyten had blown the three breezeways. Water surged to fill the gaps. The plant was now on an island.

“They’d better not set foot in that water. The Luyten will electrify it and fry them,” Colonel Willis said, stating the obvious. Dominique was certain the defenders would realize that immediately. They weren’t stupid grunts; their IQs were higher than the colonel’s.

When C Company reached the edge of the forest they hung back, out of range of the Luyten weapons. B Company—the one coming by sea—had landed on the beaches and was spread out, waiting for orders. Now the question was how to reach the Luyten.

Fifteen minutes crawled by as the defenders continued to hang back. Dominique wished whoever was controlling the camera would set it back down on Commander Douglas so they could hear the defenders’ planning, but it remained above the trees, providing a useless bird’s-eye view. Another camera was embedded with B Company, the third at HQ.

Three A-7 Razorback Harriers buzzed over the horizon from the north, from HQ and the Engineering Company. Dominique couldn’t easily see how three Harriers helped the situation, unless they used them to bomb the shit out of the Luyten position, which would mean destroying the power plant.

The first Harrier dropped low, close to the tree line. A defender sprinted out of the trees, leaped, and grabbed one of the Harrier’s skids, as if it were trying to pull the thing out of the air. The Harrier was more powerful than Dominique would have guessed; it rose rapidly, the defender clinging to it with one hand. Each of the other two Harriers took on a hitcher and rose as well. They rose steeply, headed toward the air above the fusion plant with blinding speed.

The Luyten, brandishing Y-shaped lightning rods, opened fire as they drew close. The defenders returned fire, pumping hot rounds from the handheld mortar launchers in their free hands. Dominique’s heart raced as she saw a Luyten go down. Then another, clipped on one limb and spun around.

From the beach side of the plant, defenders surged forward in twos, carrying the skiffs that had transported them to shore.

The first pair were hit by heaters, bursting into flame short of the artificial lake. Despite being thousands of miles away, Dominique felt singed by the heat that engulfed them, felt their loss like a sting as each managed a few steps before they fell, nothing but husks, black smoke rising from them.

Dominique took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She hadn’t expected to feel their deaths so strongly, to take them so personally.

The next pair made it, as the airborne defenders continued to lay down a blinding cloak of cover fire, the Harriers diving toward the plant, then rising just as rapidly. The pair hurled the skiff into the lake and retreated. The lake was shallow; the skiff landed with a splash and lay impotently on its side.

The third pair heaved their skiff beyond the first, and suddenly Dominique understood what they were doing: They were building a bridge out of the skiffs, which were undoubtedly composed of carbon fiber, and not electricity-conducting.

Another aircraft flew into view to the east, this one large, clearly not a fighter. Without slowing it dropped a pile of unidentifiable materials—slabs and poles.

One of the Harriers was hit. It spun in a tight circle, dropping rapidly. The defender clinging to it let go, plummeted a hundred feet, and landed in a tucked roll on the edge of the platform surrounding the plant. It came up firing, its shots uncannily accurate.

Seconds later lightning crackled, the pale blue zigzag landing just beyond the stranded defender. It trembled violently and dropped.

“Shit,” Dominique said. Colonel Willis looked at her. She kept her eyes on the feed.

Ten or eleven defenders were down, maybe more. Each time one fell, Dominique felt it like a punch in the heart. Another skiff went into the water, this one hurled, flying end over end before landing. One more, and there was a ragged line in place, like stones across a brook.

Immediately, the defenders charged across it. The first few had no chance, but there was no hesitation in their steps as they leaped from skiff to skiff until they were hit, and fell.

C Company surged from the tree line. As they passed the materials dropped moments earlier, each scooped up rectangular sections and pilings.

As the battle raged to the west, the defenders to the east constructed a bridge, fitting pilings into slots in the large rectangles. They took Luyten lightning and heat fire, but it was tepid compared to what B Company had faced, because now the Luyten were under siege. Only one of the Harriers was still in the air, but it was wreaking havoc on the Luyten position. Maybe three dozen defenders had made it to the platform surrounding the plant.

Dominique watched as a defender, screaming with a rage that seemed all too personal, charged two Luyten blocking the entrance to the plant. He put a dozen bullets in one while slashing the other open with an uppercut of his edged forearm. Before reinforcements could reach him, he stepped to one side of the door, swung his arm around, and pumped artillery bursts at the door from his forearm unit. Before the smoke had cleared, one of his comrades charged what was left of the big door, dropping his shoulder and battering it open.

Fighting at close range, the defenders made vicious use of their size and the built-in blades running down their limbs. To say they were fierce fighters didn’t capture the jaw-dropping combination of rage and cold efficiency they displayed. Dominique found herself on her feet, roaring with her companions as the defenders tore the Luyten apart.

When the defenders dragged the last of the Luyten bodies from inside the plant, Dominique counted fifty-four. It would take a while, because the Andes to the east and the DeValparaiso range to the west would slow them, but more Luyten would come. They would come three at a time, from the nearest quadrants first, their numbers growing each day until they believed they had enough to retake the plant.

There had better be a lot of them.