Isolation (4 page)

ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA

June 9, 2060

H
eron hurried down the stairs and out into the courtyard, flashing her general’s retinue colors to anyone who looked like they might try to stop her. The antiair guns were on the roof of Building 2, the highest of the factory buildings, with a clear view of the surrounding skyline. She considered a frontal assault, but discarded the idea almost immediately—she was armed only with a sidearm, and a low-caliber one at that. Besides, her orders were odd enough that she wanted to keep her options as open as possible. A frontal assault, even if she succeeded, could leave her wounded, or worse, outed as an enemy agent. She stepped through the doorway of Building 2, which was still swarming with workers in the twenty-four-hour factory, and walked purposefully past them to the elevator. Seduction was always an option, and she had been engineered with exceptional beauty for that very purpose, but on the roof there would be too many.
A four-man crew for each of the four gun emplacements, plus guards.
The elevator arrived and she stepped in, half smiling at the challenge.
Can I actually do it? Twenty men, give or take. But then again, I don’t have to distract them all at once, do I?

She smiled again, taking off her jacket to expose the blouse beneath—it was army issue, and fairly plain, but adjusted properly, it showed a fair amount of cleavage. She pulled her hair out of its tight bun and shook it loose, running her fingers through it to give it body. She hiked up her skirt to show a little thigh, and waited as the elevator rose slowly to the top. On the top floor she screwed a silencer onto the end of her gun, hid it in her jacket and threw it over her arm as she exited the elevator and walked up the stairs to the roof. The cannons were laid out in a line, and she walked slowly toward the farthest one, letting all the soldiers watch appreciatively as she passed.

As always, Heron was fascinated by the men’s reaction to her. She felt removed from their attention, as if they were watching not her but a character she had created, and through her creations she could manipulate their every action. A certain walk and their pulse would quicken; a smile, a bit of eye contact, and their entire attitudes would change. Some wanted to protect her, like General Bao; others wanted to talk to her, to learn who she was; and still others wanted simply to touch her. All these reactions, and more, were a form of control—they saw something pretty and wanted it for themselves. How many of them suspected that she was the one controlling them?

The antiair guns were set up on turrets, able to turn in any direction and track their heavy double cannons up and down in a huge range of fire. They had a blind spot directly overhead, where the turret couldn’t rotate quite far enough, but the other guns could cover one another as needed. Heron reached the last one in the line and smiled at the four-man crew, not seductively but innocently. For a long-term seduction you needed wit and intelligence, but for something quick and dirty there was nothing even half as effective as gorgeous naïveté.

“Hey, boys.” She lifted a flap of her jacket, showing the general’s symbol. “Wu asked me to come check on the artillery, but I’m afraid I don’t know anything about it.”

The men stared, uncertain how to react. The two youngest were smiling like idiots in the back, and Heron favored them with a mischievous smile. The leader of the crew asked what she needed to know, and she ran her hand along the cannon’s thick metal barrel. “Does it really take all four of you to fire it?” They laughed and shook their heads, explaining in broad terms their individual jobs: one man spotted, one man aimed and fired, and the two youngest kept the gun well fed with ammo. She cooed over each new revelation, bending over and laughing and generally making a fool of herself, and the men responded in kind, treating her more and more like an idiot but telling her, and giving her, anything she wanted. After all, what could an idiot do to hurt them?

She bent low at the waist, pointing to something in the gun’s turret system and preparing to ask a question, when suddenly an artillery shell struck the civilian building to the east. She straightened slowly, glancing at her watch: 2220.
That can’t be the invasion.

“That wasn’t ours,” said one of the gunners. They wandered to the railing, shocked, and looked down at the city beyond the complex walls. Two more artillery shells landed, destroying the buildings that stood in the path of the Partial advance. They were coming now.

They were coming early.

Heron straightened up, pulling her gun from the folds of her jacket. “Sorry, boys.” One of them managed to turn around, his eyes wide with shock and confusion; she shot him in the chest and the other three in the back, her silenced pistol making no more noise than a staple gun. Their rifles were leaning against the wall nearby, and she picked one up, checked the chamber, and turned to take aim on the nearest guard. He was looking toward her, diligently concerned with the noises on his roof instead of the spectacle across the way. She dropped him at range with two shots from the rifle, deafening reports that even the distracted soldiers on the other cannons couldn’t ignore. They turned to see what had happened, but Heron was already climbing into the first antiaircraft turret. The crew had glossed over the nitty-gritty details of its operation, but she’d been trained on one of these when she was four months old. A simple joystick steered the thing, and she swung the gun around, not toward the sky but toward the next turret in line. A control pad on her right activated the smart rounds, but she didn’t need them for a stationary target barely twenty yards away. She jammed down the fire button and the entire turret shuddered, the twin barrels thudding in and out as the cannon roared and the turret next to hers exploded in a hail of fire. She kept her finger firm on the trigger, watching dispassionately as the rounds hammered into the cannon, piercing its armor, destroying its insides, and then punching through and flying on toward the next turret, destroying that one in a similar storm of shrieking metal. She ran out of bullets before destroying the final cannon, having no crew to keep her loaded, and jumped out with her stolen rifle. The rooftop was a chaos of smoke and fire, and she ran down the line toward the last target, shooting as she went the three shell-shocked soldiers who’d managed to survive her initial onslaught.

But the last turret was unscathed, and apparently still manned. Its turret swung around and fired back toward her, destroying what was left of the two guns in the middle as well as the turret she had just fired, and Heron dove for cover behind the remains of the third turret. The sound was deafening, and though she covered her ears to protect them, she still felt each shot rippling through the air and numbing her entire body. When the cannon stopped, she felt as shell-shocked as the other soldiers had, and she closed her eyes to calm herself, willing her body to overcome the effects. The world was eerily silent, all sounds replaced by a distant tone that faded in and out. She gritted her teeth, grabbed her rifle, and peeked around the remains of the smoking gun turret. A bullet ricocheted inches from her face, and she ducked back behind. A guard popped up in front of her, and she shot him in a single motion: raising her rifle, sighting along it, and pulling the trigger before lowering the gun back down to her lap. How many more guards were up here? How many soldiers were shooting from the final turret, and how many were tending it?

She peeked around again, and again their rifles lit up with muzzle flashes: two shooters, with one manning the cannon and one feeding it ammo. She still couldn’t hear anything. She was presumably safe from the cannon itself, because aiming it low enough to hit her meant putting holes in the roof, and the building was too flimsy to withstand that. Another guard popped up from behind an air-conditioning unit, and she dropped him almost without thinking. If she could see them, she could kill them, but they had her so completely pinned down that she couldn’t see anything near the final turret. She needed a distraction; she reached for her jacket, but it was long gone back by the first turret. She pulled off a nearby soldier’s jacket instead, holding it in her left hand and her rifle in her right.
Time to see who has better reflexes.

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 glass of the cockpit, 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 massive 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

H
eron 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 classic 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 pronunciation 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 surpassed 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 classes 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 hell, 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 passive. “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. Glass after glass, 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 cocked 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 dispassionate 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 hell 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, flustered 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.