Isolation (5 page)

ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA

June 9, 2060

T
he generals’ office was in Building 1, the farthest west, and as she ran through the courtyard to reach it, she passed 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, assess 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 buttoned up her shirt and made the best excuse she could, because it was partly true.

“I was caught on the far side of the courtyard when the shelling 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 circumstances, 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’ assets 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

H
eron 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 classroom: 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 hardship, 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 passwords, and Li Gong himself thanked her for her shining 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.”

Heron cocked her head to the side. “You said ‘most.’”

McGuire smiled. “Thetas are designed with no conscience at all. A soldier is different from an assassin—when you kill, you must feel nothing for your target.”

“Then our existence is a crime,” said Heron. “My life is against the law.”

“Some laws are made to be broken.”

The words echoed in Heron’s mind as she stared at Huan Do.
I must feel nothing for my target.
She stepped forward, as silent as a shadow, and got to work.