Isolation. Part 2

She threw the jacket left and rolled around to the right of the destroyed turret, firing at the soldiers as they fired at her jacket. Almost immediately they realized their mistake, but it was too late. Both riflemen went down, shot through the neck, and when the ammo crewman poked his head around the turret, he went down as well. She turned her rifle toward the antiair cannon, and it turned toward her, its two giant barrels pointed straight at her, barely twenty yards away. She raised her rifle calmly, aiming back past the barrels to the gla.s.s of the c.o.c.kpit, seeing the faint glow of the targeting reticle display, and behind it the gunner. It was an incredibly tricky shot, and she lined it up carefully.

The cannon fired.

Heron's hearing still hadn't returned, but she felt the roar in her bones. The smart rounds exploded out of the barrels, perfectly centered on her . . . and missed her. The wide double barrels weren't calibrated to hit a human-sized target only twenty yards away, and the rounds flew harmlessly past her, punching ma.s.sive holes in the roof behind her. The gunner realized his mistake and starting turning the turret to compensate, but Heron already had her shot. She breathed out and squeezed the trigger, and the gunner fell lifeless on the controls.

Heron dropped the rifle and walked to the final turret, slapping her head to try to restore her hearing. The world was still ringing. She rotated the turret down to shoot directly at the roof below it, pulled an elastic hair band from her pocket, and wrapped it around the joystick trigger. It started firing, and she jumped out and ran down to the door leading back to the elevator. Her clothes were covered in dirt, and she brushed them off while she waited inside for the elevator. When it arrived she went knock-kneed, putting on her best expression of abject terror, and screamed in hysterical fright at the soldiers who stepped out of the elevator. "He's on the roof!" she shouted, clutching at them madly. "He's on the roof! He just started shooting the other turrets, I don't know what's going on! Please, you have to help me!"

They consoled her solemnly, though she couldn't hear a word of it, and pushed her gently but firmly into the elevator while they took up careful positions around the upper doorway. The cannon outside was still firing into the roof, each shot sending a powerful reverberation through Heron's legs; a moment later the roof gave way with a wrenching groan, and the cannon crashed through to the lower floors. The elevator doors closed, and Heron dropped the act of fear. Time to get the generals.

PARAGEN BIOSYNTH GROWTH AND TRAINING FACILITY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION.

February 15, 2059.

Heron recited the poem again as she showered, the first of Du Fu's Autumn Meditations: "Jade dew withers and wounds the groves of maple trees. On Wu mountain, in Wu gorge, the air is dull and drear." General Wu was slightly fond of cla.s.sic poetry, and very fond of his own name. It could be a useful poem to know in the right moment.

As she reviewed the poem-out loud, to practice her p.r.o.nunciation and delivery-another part of her brain was going over the day's lessons, reexamining the facts she had learned in history and the behaviors she'd practiced in etiquette. Another part of her brain was puzzling through the latest tactical problem Latimer had presented her with in their daily drill: Tomorrow morning she would be inserted into the training field while two groups of Partial infantry carried out a war simulation; she had to find a way to disrupt both teams' battle plans, resulting in a total loss on both sides. Neither side knew she was coming, and if she wanted full marks, neither side could know she'd ever been there. It was the trickiest puzzle he'd given her yet, and he seemed to have no confidence that she could pull it off. She turned off the water and stood in the remnants of the steam, planning her attack and her homework and her poem all at once. It was easy-after all, she was nearly five months old. It was time for a bigger challenge.

The door to the locker room opened-down a hall and around two corners, but with the water off she heard it clearly. The footsteps and the breathing marked the newcomer as male, and the lack of any link data marked him as a human. Latimer, perhaps? He'd never come to the showers before. She grabbed her towel and wrapped it around her.

Latimer appeared at the edge of the shower room and paused in the entryway. Heron snapped to attention, her feet sliding just slightly across the thick tile floor.

"At ease," he said, dismissing her formality with a wave. His voice was soft and casual, more easygoing than she'd ever heard him. He sauntered into the shower room, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a thin brown bottle. "You did well on your drills today." It was late, and they were the only two people in the entire locker area. He walked toward her slowly. "You've mastered every obstacle course we have, even the broken one they closed for being too dangerous. Your pistol accuracy has surpa.s.sed the human world record, and your long-range rifle work is some of the best I've ever seen. You convinced your new Chinese teacher you were a native speaker, and you tricked your new math teacher into thinking you were a physics professor, waiting in the same room for another student. You can run, shoot, think, and lie your way out of every problem we've ever given you. I gotta say, I'm impressed." He was directly in front of her now, nearly an arm's length away. His breath smelled faintly of alcohol. "But that's not all there is to being a spy."

Heron ran through the list of other topics she'd studied: acting, strategy, computer science, electronics, and more. She wasn't yet an expert in all of them, but she was getting there. They'd even started her in some piloting programs, running basic tank drills with the new Beta-model girls fresh out of the vats. Latimer said she'd be starting aircraft cla.s.ses soon as well-was that what this was? He seemed to be leading up to some kind of new instruction, but what?

"Have some." He handed her the bottle and stepped away, wandering through the empty shower. "So this is where you guys shower. For some reason it always surprises me how much the women's locker room looks like the men's. Seems like they ought to be more different, but I don't know how. Or why, really; it's kind of a stupid idea anyway."

Heron sniffed the bottle: definitely alcohol. And it was nearly full. Had he brought it specifically for her? "What's this for?" she asked.

"That's beer," he said, turning back toward her. "It's for drinking. Have some." He took a few steps toward her and leaned against the wall, about ten feet down where it was dry. "You're a spy, Heron; you're going to have to drink sooner or later. Standard training schedule for a Theta has you introduced to alcohol at six months, but I figure, what the h.e.l.l, huh? You're a big girl now. Have a drink."

She took a sip and grimaced. "I don't like it."

"Just try it." His voice was more insistent now, creeping up from "casual" toward "commanding officer." She stopped herself from frowning, refusing to show disapproval to her trainer, and took another drink. It tasted sour, like something that had gone bad.

She kept her face pa.s.sive. "People drink this on purpose? For fun?"

Latimer walked toward her and took the bottle, then knocked back a long, deep drink that nearly drained it. He was standing just a few inches away, far closer than he needed to. He lowered the bottle and smacked his lips. "I guess you're not getting the full effect of it anyway, are you? Crazy Partial metabolism." He took another drink and finished the bottle, then pointed at her with it. "You know, in early testing it took our boys nearly all night to get a Partial soldier intoxicated. Gla.s.s after gla.s.s, pitcher after pitcher. We eventually had to use the hard stuff-tequila, gin, whiskey-and all through a straw because I swear that gets you drunk faster. Don't ask me how it works. Poor kid got alcohol poisoning before he even got tipsy."

Heron c.o.c.ked her head to the side. "You were part of a research team?"

Latimer laughed. "You could call it that. Mostly we just wanted to see what happened, so we pulled some lucky punk from the barracks and got plastered. I couldn't walk for a day, and he spent a week in the hospital." He tried to take another swig from his bottle, discovered that it was empty, and lowered it again. "You realize how hard it is to put one of you things in the hospital?"

Heron turned to go. "Speaking of barracks, I need to get back to mine."

"Drop your towel," said Latimer.

By pure force of habit Heron reached for the fold that held her towel tight around her chest, ready to take it off, but stopped as her hand touched the cloth. Something's not right about this. She turned back to him, studying his face-he was smiling broadly, drinking in her image as deeply as he had drunk the beer. She became acutely aware of how little of her body the towel covered, and put her hand back down. "Why?"

"You have a genetically perfect body," said Latimer. There were a number of low metal stools in the room, and he set his bottle on the nearest one before stepping toward her. His voice seemed deeper now, as if his breathing had changed. "Do you know how to use it?"

Heron had no idea where any of this was going, or what it meant. "I can run a mile in three minutes five-point-two seconds," she said. "I have a standing vertical leap of four feet, and I can bench-press three times my own weight. Last night I hit a moving target with a throwing knife at thirty paces, direct bull's-eye, five out of five times. I think I use my body pretty well."

"I'm not talking about that," said Latimer. "I'm talking about seduction." He stopped in front of her and brushed his finger lightly against the cloth over her stomach. "Drop your towel."

She had heard the word "seduction" before and had a vague inkling of its meaning: to play on someone's emotions of love and physical attraction. It was a form of interrogation and coercion. One of the other Thetas had talked about seduction lessons from a special instructor-a female instructor, not her drill sergeant.

Something was very wrong about this.

She took a step backward. "No, sir." Even in this situation, where nothing made sense and his orders seemed so obviously wrong, she couldn't help but feel a deep pang of guilt for disobeying him.

She saw his slap coming long before it hit; she saw his shoulder tense, his arm fly out in a wide, powerful arc, his face twist into a dispa.s.sionate sneer with the sheer force of his blow. She saw it coming, she could have dodged it, but she had been trained too well. You obeyed your superiors. You accepted their punishments. The slap hit with a loud crack, whipping her head to the side and leaving, she was sure, a nasty red welt. It wouldn't last long. She rolled her spine to the side, absorbing the impact without faltering or falling, and turned back to face him.

"You do not say no to me!" he roared. "I am your superior officer! You do what I say, when I say it, and you don't even have the privilege of not liking it, because you are a machine. You're a doll-you're my doll-and I will play with you however the h.e.l.l I want to. Now drop your towel!" He reached for her, his fingers curled like claws, and in a split second Heron examined the situation in her mind. Everything he'd said was true: He asked, and she obeyed; he pointed, and she followed. She was an artificial thing, not a person but a product, and every decision she had ever made had come from him or someone like him. Her life was his, and always had been.

But she didn't like the way he was using it.

Heron stepped back, turned to the side, leading Latimer's hand as he reached, twisted, and lost his balance. He teetered, slipped on the wet tile floor, and fell. She caught a metal stool with her foot and slid it into place, perfectly aligned with the back of his neck. He hit it with the full weight of his fall, snapping his spine with a tiny, life-ending pop.

She looked around the shower, at his body, at hers. She tousled her hair and pinched her cheeks, giving them a bright, fl.u.s.tered sheen. The welt where he'd slapped her was already going away, no match for the incredible damage repair system of Partial physiology. She picked up the bottle and walked carefully across the wet floor, then ran through the locker room to the outer hall. She dropped the bottle in a half-full garbage can and then threw open the door to the hall, crying for help.

"Somebody come quick! My trainer slipped in the locker room! Get a paramedic team in here, now!"

It was late, but the training complex never truly slept, and the hall was soon filled with a flurry of motion and emergency responders. Heron walked back to the shower and watched as Latimer's clothes slowly soaked up the water from the floor of the shower. Paramedics arrived quickly, but there was nothing they could do.

I suppose I'll have a new trainer tomorrow, she thought. I'll follow his orders, and do what he says, and be a good little soldier.

But their goal is to use me, not to protect me. From now on I protect myself.

ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA.

June 9, 2060.

The generals' office was in Building 1, the farthest west, and as she ran through the courtyard to reach it, she pa.s.sed crowds of terrified workers and hundreds of soldiers running back and forth. The men on the eastern wall were already firing, telling Heron the Partials were closer, certainly closer than she'd thought. The early attack wasn't completely unexpected-her 2300 deadline implied only that the air strike was coming at that time, not the entire invasion. Under standard tactics they would launch the air strikes early, blunting the Chinese counterattack before it started, but they didn't have to, and Heron knew that there was nothing standard about these tactics. The orders still bothered her, and particularly her handler's suspicious way of delivering them-not to mention his timing. She needed to figure it out.

She heard the generals yelling through the door, but she wasn't sure how many other people were in the room with them. It would be safer to enter in character, a.s.sess the situation, and build a capture strategy around it. She smoothed her skirt and entered the room, and both generals cried out immediately.

"Where have you been?" shouted Wu, slamming the table angrily.

"Mei Hao," cried Bao. "You're okay!" He rushed toward her a step, then stopped, and Heron noted his lapse of protocol without reacting visibly. She realized she was still tarted up from the roof, though her skirt had worked its way back to a normal position. She b.u.t.toned up her s.h.i.+rt and made the best excuse she could, because it was partly true.

"I was caught on the far side of the courtyard when the sh.e.l.ling started," she said. "I barely survived the crossing."

"Bah," said General Wu. "Now that the entire Chinese army has waited on you to arrive, perhaps you would deign to activate the satbox."

You can turn it on as well as I can, thought Heron, though this wasn't the first time he'd waited to make her do it. Men liked exerting their authority. She glanced around the room, counting the people there with her: both generals; Bao's elderly secretary, Jin Wong; and three soldiers. She knew all of them, and she knew their capabilities, and without a better weapon she was unlikely to incapacitate all six people before they overpowered her-especially since she had to leave the generals alive. She sat down at the satbox and opened it up, waiting to see how the meeting unfolded.

"The best way to retake the factory is not to lose it," said Bao, evidently continuing the thread of their earlier conversation. "These are the devil soldiers we're talking about; if we let them get entrenched, we will never take it back from them."

"Perhaps your army cannot," said Wu.

"No army can do it!" cried Bao. He was more confrontational than normal, which Heron chalked up to the added stress. "Not even our armies together. But if we strike now, if we make the most devastating counterattack we can possibly make, we can kill them while they have no cover. No defense. It is our only hope of victory."

Wu mused on this. "A decisive blow now, while their entire army is committed, could destroy them utterly."

"Yes!" said Bao. "But we must act quickly."

"We will mobilize your army to the counterattack," said Wu, nodding at his own decision. "Mine shall hold the flanks."

"Hold the flanks against what?" asked Bao. "There is no other army-the Partials have committed every soldier in this sector to this fight. Ten thousand BioSynth super-soldiers. Our scouts report that their forward base is empty, and the devils stream through the streets like foul water."

"Then we must flee in the Rotors," said Wu, and Heron saw a hint of fear in his face. "We cannot allow . . . the satbox to fall into enemy hands!"

He wants to save himself, thought Heron, and searches for excuses.

"We must be seen to lead," said Bao, shaking his head adamantly. "How can you ask your soldiers to fight while you flee to the rear? It will break their morale."

They were both acting exactly according to type-exactly the way Heron knew they would act, following almost point by point the psychological profiles she had sent to her handler. Wu was a coward, and would sacrifice anything to save his own skin. Bao was an idealist, a man who saw himself as the savior of China. Wu would always seek to protect himself, and Bao would stand his ground even to his own destruction.

Both men, she realized, in this situation, facing this exact set of circ.u.mstances, would do the same thing.

"Every single devil in the army," said Wu softly. He wrung his hands in fear. "And us trapped here like crabs in a cage. We will need as many men as we can get."

"Yes," said Bao eagerly. "We will need both armies. We can stop them here-we can hold this factory and defeat the devils, but only together. Your army on one flank and mine on the other. We can take anything they send at us, and throw it right back in their faces."

"Our antiair weapons have been destroyed," said Wu, but Bao cut him off.

"Our men are our weapons," he said. "They are the only weapons we need."

Their men are their weapons, thought Heron, and in a flash she saw the whole plan: everything the NADI strategists had done to produce this exact situation, to force this exact response, to pave the way for the unthinkable attack that must come next. The factory complex was the most valuable objective in the city, and now the Chinese generals were in it, and in a matter of minutes their entire army would be in it as well-an army so well entrenched in the urban terrain that they had proven almost impossible to root out. But if they left their defenses and rushed the factory, fighting to hold it, all three of the defenders' a.s.sets would be in one place, at one time. A Partial victory here could destroy the Chinese military strength in the entire region, and that was a victory worth sacrificing for-even something as valuable as the munitions factory itself. Now that Heron had destroyed the antiair cannons, the Partials could-and would-destroy the entire complex with an air strike. It was a brilliant, devastating plan.

But it would work only if the Partial army was in the factory complex. Without that threat of overwhelming force, the Chinese would have no need to bring in so many of their own soldiers-pull the Partials back, and the Chinese would pull back as well. The air strike would hurt but not destroy them. The Partial army was bait.

The Partial army was a sacrifice.

PARAGEN BIOSYNTH GROWTH AND TRAINING FACILITY, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION.

April 12, 2059.

Heron lived with the Chinese prisoners for nearly a month: eating with them, sleeping in their barracks, talking and listening and learning everything she could. Though they didn't know it, they were teaching her invaluable information she couldn't possibly have learned in a cla.s.sroom: regional slang, body language, communal experiences that she studied, processed, and adopted into her own persona. The city of Zuoquan held a lantern festival every year, and had done so for centuries. Her history teacher had told her about the meaning of the festival, its origins, its size and timing and location. The prisoners had told her about Chen's Noodle House, and the sidewalk cart he used every year with the squeaky wheel on one side. They'd told her about Grandmother Mei and her old yellow dog, sitting on her roof and howling at the fireworks. They'd told her about the year the dragon had faltered in the rain, ruining the paper and halting the parade and forever branding Li Gong's oldest son as the Lord of Mud. Each story Heron heard she internalized, and as she moved from group to group she became one of them, so strongly identified as a Zuoquan native that many of the prisoners claimed to have known her as a girl.

They were a proud people, cheerful in the face of hards.h.i.+p, strong in the depths of captivity, and ruthless in their pursuit of freedom. She admired them, and was proud, in a way, to pretend to be one of them. She helped them plan half their escape attempts, and eavesdropped on the other half, and reported all of it back to her superiors. She was a secret hero to both the prisoners and the guards.

"It's time to send a message," said Vincent. He was her new trainer, and one of the de facto masters of the prison camp; she had thrown a rebellious fit, as she did every few days, and they used her alleged confinement as a time to talk. "Who are the leaders?"

"Li Gong is the oldest," said Heron, "and he has a lot of cultural presence because of it. People do what he says, but he doesn't say much. More active, but less important, is this young man." She tapped a photo in the prison log book. "Hsu Yan. He wants to lead an escape, and he doesn't like the way Huan Do is doing it. Do is the other leader, he and his wife, Lan. The two of them are probably the biggest leaders in the camp, Do and Lan."

"Define 'biggest,'" said Vincent.

"The most followers," said Heron. "The most influence, over both the prisoners and the guards. The most likely to form an escape plan capable of succeeding, and to unite a group capable of carrying it out."

"The most important, then," said Vincent. "The gear that makes the whole clock run."

Heron nodded. "In a way, yes." She looked up. "What message do you want me to send him?"

"He's not the recipient," said Vincent; "he's the message. We're using him to send a message to the entire camp."

"You're going to kill him," said Heron.

"No," said Vincent, "you're going to kill him."

The plan he laid out was simple. A message like this would usually require a lot of flash and visibility-a public execution to keep the rest of the camp in line-but what Vincent wanted was silence and mystery. If Huan Do died in public, the prisoners would learn to fear the guards, but they already feared them. They hid in the shadows and trusted only one another. But if Huan Do died in the shadows, safe among friends, the prisoners would have nowhere else to hide. Their resistance would crumble. Heron concealed a knife in her prison jumpsuit, and when her "punishment" ended, she returned to the camp.

She had been doing drills like this for months. Identify the target, infiltrate, and strike. In and out. She studied the camp with new eyes, noting each guard tower and bunkhouse, and decided she could do this job even without the guards' help. She returned to her room, commiserated with her bunkmates about the injustice of the prison system, and bowed to all the right people in the mess hall for dinner, showing deference and gaining, in return, renewed trust. Hsu Yan caught her up on the latest pa.s.swords, and Li Gong himself thanked her for her s.h.i.+ning example of resistance. It occurred to Heron that in her list of leaders she should have included herself: She was well known as a rebel, an agitator, and a planner. The camp looked up to her. If word got around that Mei Hao, of all people, had killed Huan Do, the camp would be crushed.

The guards called lights-out at nine p.m., cutting all power to the bunkhouses, but the prisoners stuffed sheets and blankets in the cracks of their windows, and burned small lamps and flashlights they'd either scrounged or built themselves. The women in Heron's bunkhouse talked about new plans for escape, and Heron made detailed mental notes just in case the death of Huan Do failed to break their spirits. When they finally went to sleep at one a.m., Heron lay in the dark and waited until every other prisoner was asleep before picking the lock and slipping outside. The camp was quiet and dark. Heron moved like a ghost through the streets and alleyways, dodging guards and searchlights and watchdogs as if they weren't even there. Huan Do's bunkhouse was near the center of camp and locked down even tighter than her own; he was a dangerous troublemaker, and the guards had been watching him for weeks. Heron picked the lock in five silent seconds, and her footsteps as she slipped inside were no louder than a snake gliding ghostlike across the floor.

The bunkhouses were separated by gender, so Huan Do was alone in his bed; the prisoners sometimes sneaked their wives in, but not tonight. There were eight rooms to a house, and eight men to a room. All the men in this house were fast asleep. Heron stood over Huan Do's sleeping form, the knife in her hand.

This is the first time I've killed one for real, she thought. All my other missions were drills; all my other targets were mannequins, or sensors, or drones. With the exception of Sergeant Latimer, who did most of the work himself, I have never killed a real human before. She stared at the sleeping man, listened to him breathe. Her knife was polycarbonate fiber, sharp as steel but a matte black that disappeared into the darkened room like a shard of shadow. Huan Do was helpless and oblivious, like a child.

This is my graduation, she realized. The message we're ostensibly sending to the prisoners will be effective, but unnecessary; their escapes never work, and they'd have nowhere to go if they did. It will make them easier to control, at least for a while, but that's not the full reason for this action. She looked down at her jumpsuit. I'm flying out to the real war in just one week, and this is my graduation. One final mission. "Prove you can kill when the target's a real person." She had learned in her seduction training-from Ms. McGuire, not a drunk sergeant in the shower-about the concept of empathy. Of seeing the world through someone else's eyes, and feeling the way they feel. "Make them love you," McGuire had said, "and they won't be able to kill you. Make them see you as a person, as a life, as a thing to be protected rather than harmed. All humans have empathy, and you can use it against them."

"Partials have it too," Heron had said. "We can feel each other's emotions through the link."

"That's different," said McGuire. "The link lets you know what those emotions are, but it doesn't make you care about them. This is how you must use emotion-as a tool to be understood, manipulated, and exploited."

Heron considered this. "Does that mean Partials have no conscience?"

"Most of them do," said McGuire. "By international law, all BioSynthetic sentients must have empathy, and a conscience, to keep them from hurting their creators. It is the primary safeguard that makes you more useful, and therefore more valuable, than robotics."