by Dan Wells
“New orders,” she said, careful not to use any specific jargon or protocol. “The enemy is entrenched in the complex, and we must act quickly.” She lowered the rifle slowly as she talked, watching Bao from the corner of her eye; this was not what she’d told him she would do, and the look of betrayal grew even harsher on his face. He would attack her, and she used a portion of her awareness to help gauge the precise moment at which he would try it. As she spoke she feigned preoccupation, letting her guard appear to drop further and further. “Bring your army into Building Five, on the south end of the complex, and engage the enemy with extreme force.” She ended the call and looked to the window.
Bao struck then, leaping at her and grabbing the rifle, grappling with her at close range where the long weapon would do no good. Heron dropped it and fought back—carefully, like before, putting up just enough resistance to make it look good. He landed a blow to her head and she dropped instantly, feigning unconsciousness.
This was the moment of truth—would he shoot her first, or would he send new orders to his men? Everything she knew of him said he would send the orders; he was too noble, and still too trapped by his former feelings for her, to shoot an unconscious woman, even if she was a devil. His emotions, his human empathy, were tools to be exploited. She waited, a motionless heap on the floor, to see if she had used them well.
“Commander Fung,” he said, speaking into his phone. His ground commander, thought Heron. I was right. “The devil army is headed toward Building Five. They have at least one traitor in the compound, and may have more. Entrench in Building Three and engage with deadly force.”
Heron smiled, and when she heard the phone beep to signal that the call was closed, she sat up. General Bao stepped back, raising his rifle in fear.
“Thank you,” she said, rising to her feet. “I had General Wu’s security codes, but not yours. It was kind of you to make that call yourself.”
Bao opened his mouth to protest, but the sudden shock of realization in his eyes told Heron he’d figured it out. He checked the call history in the phone and confirmed it: She hadn’t called the Partials at all; she’d called Wu’s ground commander, Shu Yeoh. Bao had just ordered his army to attack Wu’s, and Wu’s had been ordered to fire back; both would remain hidden in their buildings, unseen by the enemy and firing blind, trusting their commanders’ orders. The two armies would kill each other, with the Partials on the eastern flank to mop up the survivors. Bao tried to call back, desperate to warn them of the deception, but Heron stepped in almost casually, dodging Bao’s first, wide rifle shot and then yanking the weapon from his hands, knocking the phone away on the backswing. Bao leapt in to grapple her again, overconfident after his last attempt, but this time Heron had no reason to lose, and dropped him with a solid blow to the skull. He fell like a stone to the floor.
And then, because she wasn’t burdened by the same sentimentality that had undone him, she shot him in the back of the head.
Heron glanced at her watch: 2255. The air strike would come at any minute. She retrieved the fallen phone and opened the browser, connecting to the cloud network and, through there, to the NADI computer system. She didn’t have a lot of security access—she couldn’t reach the jets in the air, or even the air force in general, and even if she could, she didn’t have the authority to convince anyone to call off the air strike. Her network privileges were limited to two things: contacting her handler, and managing her data uploads. She accessed her online memory, purged the GPS files, and requested a refresh from the current position of the mapping device.
After all, anyone drawing on that information would need the latest, up-to-the-minute coordinates for anything they might be planning.
CHINESE AIRSPACE, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA
June 9, 2060
“General Wu,” said the pilot, “there’s something on radar. It looks like the devil jets are launching an air strike.”
“She was telling the truth!” cried Wu. “Blast all devils to hell, and devil women to the deepest part of it.” He glanced over his shoulder, but the planes were still too far to be seen with the naked eye. “Make sure we’re far away from the blast radius—we can’t let this satbox be lost.”
“I—” The pilot stopped talking, and Wu felt himself being pressed fiercely into his seat by a sudden acceleration.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
“The smart bombs flew past the factory complex,” said the pilot. “They’re coming for us.”
“Go faster!” said Wu. “Dodge them, go around them—they can’t follow us everywhere.”
“That’s exactly what they’re doing, General,” said the pilot, swerving madly through the air. “They seem to be homing in on us!”
“But . . .” The general’s eyes went wide. “No.” He opened the satbox, and there inside, clattering across the screen, was Mei Hao’s cell phone. Its screen was lit and seemed to be running some kind of GPS program. He opened his mouth to curse the devil whore, but the bombs struck, and he and everything around him evaporated in the heat of the explosion.
ZUOQUAN CITY, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA
June 10, 2060
SECURE CONNECTION ESTABLISHED, read the phone. Heron had procured a new one from the Partial ground troops after the fighting was over. The factory complex was intact, and it was theirs, and the defending armies had both been routed. Heron spoke calmly. “Agent Six reporting.”
There was a pause, and Heron could hear her handler’s breathing on the other end. He was not happy. “Good evening, Heron. Congratulations on a successful mission.”
Heron raised an eyebrow. “So you consider it a success?”
“The objective is ours, the defenders are on the run, and our casualties were minimal. Why wouldn’t that be a success?”
“Because you didn’t plan any of it,” said Heron. “You tried to kill your own army, and worse than that, you tried to kill me. I do not take kindly to people who try to kill me.”
“We thought you might have had something to do with—”
“I’m not finished,” said Heron. “I was designed to be a killer. You engineered me, from the genetic level, to be a heartless, analytical machine, ready to kill or sacrifice anyone to get the job done. I was made this way: What’s your excuse?”
“We are at war,” said the voice, “a war we must win at all costs; you know that—”
“What I want you to do,” said Heron softly, “is think long and hard about this. You made us to kill and conquer, and we are doing it better than you ever anticipated. Far better than you could ever do yourselves. You are no match for us. Do not make us your enemy.” She stared into the darkness, and a wicked smile crept into the corners of her lips. “Confirm.”
There was no answer but a muffled click, and the line went dead.
TURN THE PAGE TO READ THE FIRST CHAPTER OF
FRAGMENTS
BOOK TWO IN THE PARTIALS SEQUENCE
CHAPTER 1
“Raise a glass,” said Hector, “to the best officer in New America.”
The room filled with the clink of glasses and the roar of a hundred voices. “Cornwell! Cornwell!” The men tipped their mugs and bottles and drained them in gurgling unison, then slammed them down or even threw them at the floor when the booze within was gone. Samm watched in silence, adjusting his spotting scope almost imperceptibly. The window was murky, but he could still see the soldiers grin and grimace as they slapped one another on the back, laughed at ribald jokes, and tried not to look at the colonel. The link would be telling them everything about him anyway.
Hidden in the trees on the far side of the valley, well outside the effective range of the link, Samm had no such luxury.
He twisted the knob on his tripod, swiveling the microphone barely a fraction of a millimeter to the left. At this distance even a small change of angle swept the sound across a vast portion of the room. Voices blurred through his earbuds, snatches of words and conversations in a quick aural smear, and then
he was listening to another voice, just as familiar as Hector’s—it was Adrian, Samm’s old sergeant.
“. . . never knew what hit them,” Adrian was saying. “The enemy line shattered, exactly as planned, but for the first few minutes that made it all the more dangerous. The enemy became disoriented, firing in all directions at once, and we were pinned down too fiercely to reinforce him. Cornwell held the corner through the whole thing, never flinching, and all the time the Watchdog was howling and howling; it nearly deafened us. All the Watchdogs were loyal, but not like that one. It was like he worshipped Cornwell. That was the last major battle we saw in Wuhan, and a couple of days later the city was ours.”
Samm remembered that battle. Wuhan was taken almost sixteen years ago to the day, in March 2061, one of the last cities to fall in the Isolation War. But it had been Samm’s first enemy engagement; even now he could remember the sounds, the smells, the taste of the gunpowder sharp in the air. His head buzzed with the memory, and phantom link data coursed through his brain, just enough to stir his adrenaline. Instincts and training surfaced almost immediately, heightening Samm’s awareness as he crouched on the darkened hillside, prepping him for a battle that existed only in his mind. This was followed by an opposite reaction—a calming wave of familiarity. He hadn’t linked to anyone in days, and the sudden feeling, real or not, was almost painfully comfortable. He closed his eyes and held on to it, concentrating on the memories, willing himself to feel them again, stronger, but after a few fleeting moments they slipped away. He was alone. He opened his eyes and looked back through the scope.
The men had brought out the food now, wide metal trays heaped high with steaming pork. Herds of wild pigs were common enough in Connecticut, but mostly in the deep forest away from Partial settlements. They must have hunted pretty far afield for a feast like this. Samm’s stomach rumbled at the sight of it, but he didn’t move.
Far away the soldiers stiffened, only slightly but all in unison, warned by the link about something Samm could only guess at. The colonel, he thought, and twisted his scope to look at Cornwell: He was as bad as ever, cadaverous and rotten, but his chest still rose and fell, and there didn’t seem to be anything immediately wrong. A twinge of pain, perhaps. The men in the room were ignoring it, and Samm chose to do the same. It wasn’t time yet, it seemed, and the party continued. He listened in on another conversation, more reminiscing about the old days in the Isolation War, and here and there a story about the Revolution, but nothing that fired Samm’s memory as profoundly as the sergeant’s story had. Eventually the sight of the pork ribs and the sound of chewing became too much, and Samm carefully dug a plastic bag of beef jerky from his pack. It was a pale imitation of the juicy ribs his former comrades were enjoying, but it was something. He turned his eyes back to the scope and found Major Wallace right as he stood up to speak.
“Lieutenant Colonel Richard Cornwell is unable to speak to you today, but I’m honored to say a few words on his behalf.” Wallace moved slowly, not just his walk but his gestures, his speech—every motion was measured and deliberate. He looked as young as Samm, like an eighteen-year-old human, but in real time he was nearing twenty—the expiration date. In another few months, maybe only a few weeks, he’d start to decay just like Cornwell. Samm felt cold and pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders.
The party grew as quiet as Samm, and Wallace’s voice carried powerfully through the hall, echoing tinnily in Samm’s earbuds. “I’ve had the honor of serving with the colonel my entire life; he pulled me out of the growth tank himself, and he put me through boot camp. He’s a better man than most I’ve met, and a good leader to all of his men. We don’t have fathers, but I’d like to think that if we did, mine would be something like Richard Cornwell.”
He paused, and Samm shook his head. Cornwell was their father, in every sense but the strictly biological. He had taught them, led them, protected them, done everything a father was supposed to do. Everything Samm would never do. He tweaked the zoom on the spotting scope, pushing in as close on the major’s face as he could. There were no tears, but his eyes were gaunt and tired.
“We were made to die,” said the major. “To kill and then to die. Our lives have but two purposes, and we finished the first one sixteen years ago. Sometimes I think the cruelest part wasn’t the expiration date, but the sixteen years we had to wait to find out about it. The youngest of you have it worst, because you’ll be the last to go. We were born in war, and we earned our glory, and now we sit in a fading room and watch each other die.”
The roomful of Partials stiffened again, harder this time, some jumping to their feet. Samm swung his scope wildly, looking for the colonel, but the tight zoom on the major’s face made him lose his bearings and he searched helplessly for a few panicked seconds, listening to shouts of “The colonel!” and “It’s time!” Finally Samm pulled back, reset the scope, and zoomed in again from nearly a full mile away. He found the colonel’s bed, in a place of honor at the front of the room, and watched as the old man shook and coughed, flecks of black blood dribbling from the corners of his mouth. He looked like a corpse already, his cells degenerating, his body rotting away almost visibly as Samm and the other soldiers watched. He sputtered, grimaced, hacked, and lay still. The room was silent.
Samm watched, stone faced, as the soldiers prepared the final death rite: Without speaking a word the windows were thrown open, the curtains cleared, the fans turned on. Humans met death with crying, with speeches, with wailing and gnashing of teeth. The Partials met it as only Partials could: through the link. Their bodies were designed for the battlefield: When they died they released a burst of data to warn their fellow soldiers of danger, and when they felt it those soldiers would release more data of their own to spread the word. The fans churned at the air, blowing that data out into that world so that everyone would link it and know that a great man had died.
Samm waited, tense, feeling the breezes blow back and forth across his face. He wanted it, and he didn’t; it was both connection and pain, community and sadness. It was depressing how often those two came together these days. He watched the leaves flutter on the trees below him in the valley, watched the branches sway gently as the wind brushed past them. The data never came.
He was too far away.
Samm packed up his scope and the directional microphone, stowing them in his pack with their small solar battery. He searched the site twice, making sure he’d left nothing behind—the plastic bag of food was back in his satchel, the earbuds were stowed in his pack, his rifle was slung over his shoulder. Even the marks of the tripod in the dirt he kicked smooth with his boot. There was no evidence he had ever been here.
He looked one last time at his colonel’s funeral, pulled on his gas mask, and slipped back into exile. There was no room in that warehouse for deserters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Wells is the author of Partials, as well as the John Cleaver series. Find out more at www.fearfulsymmetry.net.
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COPYRIGHT
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Isolation
Copyright © 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers
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