Heart of the Storm, page 10
“We have destroyed the people’s homes,” I said.
“Of course,” she said. “Some people needed to be taught a lesson, needed to be brought into the new era. They needed an object lesson in collectivization, that there are no individual homes anymore, it's about the common good–”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. My ears were still cold, because it was freezing outside. Winter had settled hard on this province, and on China. “I mean we destroyed their homes to use the bricks for agriculture.” I looked up at her, tears coursing down my cheeks. “We destroyed their homes – and the people have nowhere to live.”
“Surely it can't be that many,” she scoffed.
“But it is,” I said. “Entire villages – leveled. Half or more of the homes – and the people are in the streets, in tents, in lean-tos, struggling for warmth.”
“They'll find warmth from their full bellies,” she said, shaking her head dismissively.
“They're starving,” I said, my voice rough and hoarse.
“What madness are you talking?” she stood, looking down at me. “This is a land of plenty.”
I shook my head slowly; I had not experienced shell shock from any of the battles I'd been in during the revolution, or before, when fighting the hated Japanese during their invasion. But the things I had seen on this journey...they shocked me. They terrified me.
“There is not plenty outside the city,” I said. “In every town I came to, the people are emaciated. They are skin and bones; I can see the ribs of the children, who are near naked because clothing is scarce. They barely have a blanket, or firewood–”
“Have you been listening to the lies of the counter-revolutionaries?” she asked, glaring down at me.
“I have seen it with my own eyes, Liu,” I said, rising to my feet. “We have destroyed houses for bricks, destroyed graveyards for their stones to build dams that don't hold water, removed the bodies of the long-dead–”
“I see no great loss there; few would have looked favorably upon the revolution.”
“The smell of death is everywhere upon them,” I said, taking up her hands in mine. “You cannot but smell it when you venture beyond the cities. Even here, every soul walks with their head down, their eyes avoiding ours. Only the party faithful are well fed, only those of us who stand closest to Mao or the local leaders avoid starvation, homelessness, and death. China is ruined. China is in ruins–”
“Stop,” she said, ripping her arms free of my grip with barely any effort. “Cease this treason,” she thundered, looking up at me with real fury in her eyes. “You know not of what you speak, and you speak foolishness.”
“I speak what I have seen,” I said. I leaned in closer to her. “They say it is worse elsewhere. That the forests are being destroyed because Mao says that nature is an enemy to be overcome. That–”
“I will hear no more of this,” she said, her gaze poisonous and pitiless. “I suggest you leave.” She pointed to the door.
“But...these are our quarters,” I said, unable to control my surprise.
“No,” she said. “They are mine. Yours should be in the local prison, and then the hangman's noose, should you not get your head cleared of these counter-revolutionary lies.” She walked to the door and threw it open, waiting there, for me to pass. “See yourself out. And do not trouble me, nor anyone else, with this foolishness again.”
I took a moment to realize she was quite serious; perhaps more serious than ever before. “Very well, then,” I said, and shuffled past her into the hall. “But I would tell you – you have not seen what I have seen–”
“And I would not care if I did,” she said, her chin high, almost pointing up at me, though I was taller than her. “In every revolution, there must come sacrifices. In every war, there are casualties. And we are at war, make no mistake. These are the prices we pay to live in a worker's paradise. I hope you see that – and soon.”
Without another word, I walked out. Her eyes followed me the entire way – pitiless, empty, and devoid of the warmth I had once known.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Fen Liu
“It's a Cooper's Hawk,” Hu Jianjun said, fat face appearing on the screen. “Indigenous to North America, and frequently seen in the company of Sienna Nealon.”
“There it is,” Fen Liu said, pointing at the screen where the current location of the hawk was displayed, in full color, albeit a little blurry. It circled a train yard, around a boxcar, keeping its eyes out for trouble, no doubt. “Give me infrared.”
“We have a drone coming in range now. It won't properly see through the metal,” Jianjun said, “at least not clearly.”
“Give me the best you have,” Liu said, staring at the metal boxcar that the bird seemed to be orbiting. The scene shifted to a slanted overhead view from the all-seeing satellite, and now they were tightly focused on the train yard. Three tracks ran parallel to each other, with a lone boxcar in the middle of them. Warehouses bordered the easternmost track, and a small switching house was the only feature to the other side. Open ground gave way to neighborhoods and rows of shops.
Suddenly the clear picture shifted to colored tones, the unmistakable color palette of infrared. A bright blur of orange diffused over the entire body of that middle boxcar was the only source of heat in the entire train yard.
“This drone is unarmed,” Jianjun said, “but we have three armed drones on the way. The first will be on station in less than five minutes, the last within seven.”
“What else can we deploy?” Fen Liu asked. This produced a round of uncomfortable shuffling.
“Most of our teleportation metas were killed,” Li Guoqiang said. “This hampers our ability to quickly deliver–”
“No excuses,” she said. “What can you deliver?”
“A platoon of metahuman soldiers can be there in less than five minutes,” Guoqiang said, jowls shaking. “The teleporter is homing in on the location now through–”
“Yes, I know how a teleportation meta finds their way to a new location,” Liu said. It involved opening small portals, key-hole sized, from the nearest location you had been to until you reached eyeshot of where you needed to be. It was generally a quick process, and it seemed likely that their teleporters would be in position in a matter of minutes. “What else can you bring in?”
“The new countermeasures are ready to be deployed,” Hu Jianjun said with a thin smile pasted on his fat, insufferable face.
That gave Fen Liu a slight rush. “Excellent,” she said, and was the closest to meaning it she had perhaps ever been. “Bring them in – and swiftly.” If she played this correctly, perhaps she'd be rid of this nagging problem of Sienna Nealon once and for all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Sienna
Iwas leaning, legs crossed, against the corrugated metal wall of the boxcar we'd taken shelter in, my arms crossed, listening to Zhen's story. He was little more than a faded specter in the corner of the car, shaded with darkness, the others standing around trading nervous looks. Except Wade; he seemed to be keeping his head down, looking through the thin slit of open door out into the rail yard, keeping a close watch and tight listen on anything going on out there. So far it was just distant conversations and the sounds of the city bleeding in through the metal walls.
“They don't know we're here,” I said. “You can relax a bit.”
“I don't relax in China,” Wade said, not even daring to look over at me. “Not after what happened to me last time I was in Hong Kong.”
I suppose an unscheduled stay in a Chinese prison facility makes one wary; I couldn't blame him for being overly cautious. I just didn't think it mattered that much. We had camo, after all, and the advantage of Fen Liu not knowing we were here. I shrugged, determined to leave him to his paranoia, and took a quick glimpse into Ricardo MonFalcon's mind: all clear, as expected. No people approaching us, no distant sirens heading in our direction, no sign of anything untoward at all.
“Tell me what happened next,” I said to Zhen. Lethe shifted uncomfortably where she sat. For her, Hades, Jian, and Wade, this had to be a boring sequence of non-events, me talking to an empty corner of the boxcar.
Zhen nodded, still shrouded in shadow, and opened his mouth to speak, drawing me back into his tale of the China that was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Zhen
Guangzhou
1959
It may not surprise you that the betrayal came, but it certainly surprised me.
Blood oozed from my mouth where the guards struck me in the face. My head ached, my vision swam from the strike to my very consciousness, and I was dragged, my knees against the carpet, as they pulled me out of the Communist Party headquarters.
The air was cold, and they took me out the back door, feet trailing behind me. They'd greeted me this way, showed me their favor with a rifle butt-strike to the face, enjoyed a few solid minutes of pummeling me with booted kicks to the ribs, the arms, the head. I could barely defend myself, only scarcely mitigate the pain they meant to cause.
And I ended up in the same place regardless; dragged out into the cold air, where Fen Liu was watching as they pulled me to my feet and bound me with rope against a wooden post.
“You are guilty of crimes against the revolution,” Fen Liu pronounced, her voice as dead as my heart.
“I deny them,” I said, coughing blood. “I deny them all.”
“Your denial is as empty and worthless as your head,” she said, and I heard the thunder of a shot; warm liquid spattered my hand, and I collapsed, the world darkening around me.
For then I was dead...and ended up here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sienna
“And I have been here ever since,” Zhen said, in that rail car, that thin voice from the shadows informing me of the grievance still binding him to this world. “And not a day has passed when I don't think of what she did to me.”
“You're not exactly shocking my socks off here,” I said, arms still crossed, contemplating what he'd just said. There just wasn't much to go on. “So you and her were stationed in Anshun? That's not much to go on.”
“I am telling you of her very character,” Zhen said, voice rising in outrage. “This is who she is. We were lovers, and she betrayed me for–”
“I have a feeling she's betrayed a lot of people, bub,” I said, trying to smile sympathetically. “Probably for a lot less reason than you gave her, too.”
“What I saw,” he said, voice becoming brittle, “was our dreams for China destroyed.”
“Yes,” I said, “because that's what happens during a Communist revolution. It's what happened in Russia. In China. In East Germany, in – you know what? Just look at anywhere that had a Communist revolution– or hell, a revolution at all – and you'll see this same shit happen. Unfathomable cruelty. Including to children. In Cambodia they killed a quarter of the population. Here you had the advantage of numbers and it racked up somewhere between sixty and a hundred million.”
“We didn't know what we were unleashing,” he said softly. “I only knew that things needed to change. The rural poor...they were in terrible conditions.”
I shook my head. “All I know is that a cursory study of history reveals you better be careful when asking for a revolution, because almost none of them turn out like America's, where everyone was better off afterwards. Usually you just trade one tyrannical elite for another, and start a cycle of bloodshed that doesn't end for many years – if ever.” I folded my arms in front of me. “Is there anything else?”
He looked up at me, couldn't meet my eyes, and shook his head.
“I'm going to inflict vengeance upon Fen Liu,” I said. “Will you trust me to do this, so you can rest?”
He looked up, just subtly, and nodded. Within a moment more, he faded away like smoke in the wind.
“Okay,” I said, looking around the train car, “that didn't really get us much.”
“It got us something,” Lethe said. “From what he said, Fen Liu decided to join the revolutionaries fairly early. Which begs a certain question: why?”
“Maybe she was a true believer in Communism,” Jian said.
“Maybe,” Lethe said. “I'm not sure that jibes with my memory of her. She's willing to fight, but she's hardly looking to trade away her life on a whim. If she was with the Communists, I think she expected to get something out of it.”
“And you think that something is power,” I said.
“That's my guess,” Lethe said. “I could be wrong. Just seems strange to believe a self-involved former god could become a selfless believer in a revolution that would strip her of everything she had.”
“Maybe just everything she had left,” Hades said. “It could be that the fall of the last emperor and the rise of the republic had already cost her dearly? That was when we gods were thrown out of official power in many nations.”
“If so,” I said, “then she may have joined the Communists out of revenge. The empire wasn't coming back, and if you've got a bitter enmity against the current regime, why not join the group that's bent on destroying them?”
Hades nodded. “'Many such cases,' as the extremely online might say.”
“Well, we're not going to solve this here,” I said. “We need to move on to the next stop – whatever that might be. Personally, I'm at a bit of a loss, other than maybe a drop-in at Anshun's Communist Party HQ. Sierra, can you give me directions to the local party HQ?” A pause, and there was no answer. “Sierra?”
Nothing came back to my query but silence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Fen Liu
“Jammers are deployed on the ground, and we are moving in,” Wei Zhang's voice came over the speaker in front of Fen Liu. She was watching on the screen, tempted to go but aware that she should stay. Her life was more valuable than these peons, after all, including Wei's. Sure, he was her lover, but she'd had many of those, and would surely have many more if he were to die today. Settling in, she watched the screen, and the glow of figures moving in to surround the boxcar in the center of the train yard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sienna
“Sierra seems to be offline,” I said, lifting my phone and hitting the pre-set number to dial her. The phone hung on the dialing screen, unable to complete the call and not bothering to even tell me there was a network problem.
Wade was beside me in an instant, dark clouds showing through his Chinese camouflage. “We're being jammed.” He was back at the door a heartbeat later. “Someone's put the entire area under emissions containment, blocking all signals in and out.” He glanced to look at me, to convey the seriousness. “We're about to get hit. We need to move.”
“Okay,” I said, and checked the GPS, forgetting that without signal, without internet, it was useless. It didn't even show me where I was, or a map of the area around us, it just stayed a gray grid, the little wheel spinning up in the top corner to indicate it was working but not succeeding at much of anything. “Shit.”
“I don't know this town,” Jian said, voicing rising in alarm.
“Without cell service, we can't call Taxi to get us out of here,” Lethe said.
“I'm becoming aware of the problems,” I said, trying to keep my voice under control. This was the issue with laying on an operation as quickly as we had; the single point of failure was our communications, since we were using them for everything. Sierra was handling target acquisition, navigation, and whatever else. Without her, we were useless for anything except face punching. And I didn't even have any faces handy to punch.
“We need to move,” I said, trying to narrow my focus, control the rising sense of unease within me. “We need knowledge of the ground–” I jolted upright. I'd just absorbed a local. Tapping into his screaming soul, suddenly I knew the lay of the land, including that there was a cargo depot only a short distance away. “Follow me.” I nodded at Wade, and he gingerly threw open the door, allowing me to step out and jump down to the gravel-covered earth below.
“Where are we going?” Lethe asked.
“Rail depot, then out of here,” I said. “Bottom line: we need to clear the area, because either they're looking for us, or something bad is about to go down in this place.”
“You think our antics at the electronic shop raised eyebrows?” Wade asked, keeping a weather eye on our surroundings. I didn't see any Chinese army guys in either direction from the boxcar opening, but that didn't mean there were none about. The world had a strangely subdued quality, quiet, like–
Like the power was off.
“Power's out,” Lethe said, her head slightly cocked.
She was right; the familiar hum of electricity was gone, though the low-key sounds of cars and buses and other internal combustion engines still ran. Anything going off AC/DC seemed to be offline, though, as evidenced by the elevated amount of honking in the distance.
“Do we know if China's train system is electric?” Wade asked, looking at Jian.
He just shrugged. “I have no idea. I do know that China's entire payment infrastructure is internet-based, though. Without their app, you can't pay for anything, and without internet–”
“No choo choo for you-you,” Hades said, drawing a host of frowns. “What? Too cutesy?”
“By half. Plan B, we steal a car,” I said.
“There are toll booths and checkpoints throughout China,” Wade said. By the way his camouflaged self stood, I knew he was cradling his rifle. “Probably requiring the same app.”
“Don't care,” I said. “I'll take the freedom of the roads and a wheel in our hands over a definite, straight-line route where we put our lives into someone else's hands any day.”
“Do you hear something?” Lethe asked, freezing in place.
