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.
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 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.