Isolation Read Online Free PDF Page A

ones we’re fighting right now, so it may as well be. If they’d just given us what we wanted, no one would be fighting anyone.”
    “What do we want?” asked Heron. The instructors had been very tight-lipped thus far about the nature of the war—about the nature of the entire world, for that matter. She knew the training facility like the back of her hand, but virtually nothing of what lay beyond. If he was in the mood to talk about it, she intended to learn everything she could.
    “We want what everybody wants,” said Latimer. “Natural resources. In this case, resources are literally what everybody wants, and there’s not enough to go around. Let’s back up a bit to give you the full context: The most valuable resource in the world is energy, and energy traditionally comes from oil, which traditionally comes from here.” He waved his hand and the people disappeared, replaced by a menu Heron hadn’t seen before. She had just enough time to read the folder names before he chose one and the list disappeared: Australia, Images, Indonesia, Japan, Maps, NADI, Russia, and Theta. He chose “Maps” and selected a world map. It filled the room in gently glowing 3-D.
    “Here,” he said, pointing at a yellow patch at the junction of two landmasses. “This is called the Middle East.”
    Heron had never seen a world map before and drank in the new information hungrily. “Why is it called the Middle East?”
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Latimer. “It’s all gone now—one of those little countries attacked another one with a nuclear device and wiped the entire region clean. No people, no buildings, no oil. There’s oil all over the world, really, but the Middle East was like a convenience store; when it closed shop, the world freaked out. Something we needed to survive was gone forever, in the blink of an eye. The next few months was a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, with every nation scrambling to grab as much of what was left as it possibly could: Russia grabbed Norway, Brazil grabbed Venezuela—none of these names mean anything to you, and you’ll learn the details later, but suffice it to say that the world’s political powers became very suddenly and selfishly concerned with ‘having enough,’ which almost immediately translated to ‘having more than anyone else.’ China was arguably the greediest, and invaded Russia at its earliest opportunity. Once they had that taken care of, they turned their eyes to us.”
    Heron studied the map. “Where are we?”
    “Here,” said Latimer, stepping forward and gesturing to the Western Hemisphere. “America and Canada had their oil reserves up here, in the north, and plenty of other resources as well, uncomfortably close to China and their new holdings in Russia, which made a landgrab almost inevitable. And we don’t take kindly to grabby strangers.”
    The map was faintly labeled, and she saw that the area he was describing was collectively known as North America. She looked down at her uniform, and the patch above the left breast pocket: NADI . “That’s what this stands for, isn’t it? North American . . . Department . . .”
    “North American Defense Initiative,” said Latimer. “NADI is a military alliance, formed to keep the Chinese off our lawn.”
    “So we’re defending against an invasion?”
    “Actually, China is. NADI worked so well as a deterrent that China decided its best course of action was to turtle—tuck its head down, hold on to everything it had, and ride it out. With so much of Russia and Southeast Asia already under their control, they had a wildly disproportionate chunk of the world’s resources, so they didn’t really need to waste any of it trying to get ours. They closed off all foreign trade, all international relations, all everything. They don’t buy our stuff, and most importantly, they don’t sell theirs to us.”
    “The Isolation War,” said Heron, putting the pieces together. “They want to stay isolated,