Isolation by Dan Wells Read Free Book Online Page B

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