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.