Heart of the Storm, page 12
Except in marksmanship, I guess. They'd done a fair job there.
I aimed for center mass on people because I'd learned to shoot when I was human, and my heart ran at a vastly accelerated rate, and my muscles were less strong and less under my control.
But I could shoot precisely when I had to. I could put a shot on a rat's ear at fifty paces if I had to.
Now I just had to do it, over and over, until I ran out of bullets or they ran out of drones.
Shit.
I lifted my rifle and fired without thinking, aiming for the bulge at the bottom of the nearest drone. It blew up at first impact, on the second shot, confirming my suspicions that that was where the munitions package was located. It was only six inches from another drone, and that one took a piece of shrapnel through a rotor and went into a spin. I didn't care where it landed since this wasn't a crowded street; to me it was just one less target to deal with later.
They started sweeping in, and I felt a rush of adrenaline. Any one of them blowing up beside me meant curtains for Jeremy James Wade. And not the gently wafting kind, either, but the big, velvet ones that signal the show has come to a definitive end. Either that, or after intermission I'd wake up in a Chinese prison again.
I'd pick the curtains, thanks.
My rifle ran dry of ammo. I was scoring hits but not fast enough; the drones were sweeping in wide all around, in a perimeter, from behind the rail depot. I walked as I shot, trying to keep steady but batting them out of the sky with control that kept the fury rising in my soul and the bile rising in my throat at bay. This was all training; I wanted to shout, to scream them down the way Sienna might do, with a sonic battering ram of a voice.
Unfortunately, all I had was a purple beam to work with, and it was what I had to switch to, because reloading in the midst of a storm of exploding drones was not a valid option.
I let my rifle drop on its sling, and the buttstock hammered me about two inches shy of the crotch, thankfully, rather than a direct impact. Even with meta durability, getting thumped in the boys is no picnic.
Throwing out both my hands, I started blasting away with the purple beams that I'd acquired many years ago from Croftsburg. The drones started to swarm, and I realized a couple things.
One, I was not going to be getting out of here at all if I didn't do so soon.
Two, I didn't have the powers to cope with this mess. I needed a lot more power to be able to deal with drone swarms.
Which was why when I heard shouts in Mandarin coming from just behind the rail depot, I experienced that rare simultaneous welling of hope and fear.
The drones had self-segregated into two packs, one of which had been heading my way. The divide was becoming more obvious by the second, as I destroyed the last of the ones coming for me, and the rest continued along a different path.
Toward the depot.
Toward Sienna.
“Shit, shit, shit!” I shouted, hurriedly reloading my rifle as I sprinted in her direction. The number of drones I'd just dealt with had been paltry; maybe twelve to twenty. They'd come at me fast, fast enough I'd missed a fair number of shots even with my enhanced reflexes and control.
The pack that was drifting toward Sienna – and I do mean drifting, like they were floating along, waiting to acquire target before diving like hellbombers – was composed of hundreds of drones. They almost blotted out the skyline of Anshun beyond, turning it into a field of whirring, mechanical bots like a cloud covering the blue sky.
And I had no easy way to stop them before they swooped in for the kill.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Lethe
She didn't stop until she reached the end of the park, where it met a road and a market. They'd dodged between stalls, and even ducked through two different shops, shifted camouflage, and could no longer hear anything but the faintest sounds of gunfire in the distance.
“What now?” Hades asked. He was winded, of course. They hadn't exactly walked at a golfing pace, and he was an old man, and forever damaged by the wound that Persephone had given him.
“Now,” Lethe said, locking eyes with a man smoking a cigarette on the hood of his car, “I get us some transportation.”
“Go on, then,” he said, averting his eyes as he stood in the shadows. “Don't mind me; I never care to watch my daughter do these things.”
“No,” she said, “you just like to know that they're done.” Picking up his phone, she fiddled with it for a second before she sashayed her way over to the man smoking the cigarette, and stuck out her hand, asking for it. When she'd switched her camo, she'd made sure to pick a comely appearance rather than one of the more matronly ones that would simply blend.
He said something in Mandarin, and offered her the cig. She took it, taking hold of his hand gently, seductively, something she struggled with. Sienna struggled with it, too; her first instinct would have been to break the hand, but this was where thousands of years of experience came into play.
Lethe just smoked the cigarette, smiling at him the whole time, keeping his hand in hers.
About fifteen seconds later, she owned him.
“He's still alive,” Hades said, crawling into the back seat of the Chinese-made car. The brand name eluded her; it wasn't pretty, but according to the man's memory, it was well-maintained.
“Of course,” Lethe said tautly. The man – named Chen Guang – walked rigidly to the driver's side and got in. “Chen has volunteered to be our driver. We should treat him with the utmost courtesy.”
“Oh, well, then thank you, Chen,” Hades said obligingly.
“Of course you are welcome,” Chen said in broken English. “It is an honor to be able to chauffeur a star like Hugo Weaving around my humble hometown. I can't believe you're actually going to be filming The Matrix 5 here!”
Hades raised an eyebrow, but Lethe just shrugged. She'd shut off his camo before approaching Chen. And it worked, didn't it? Let him believe whatever he wanted. Honestly, Hades did look a bit like Hugo Weaving, though it was something of a stretch.
“Where should we start?” Chen asked.
“Perhaps the rail yard?” Hades asked. “We did leave a couple members of our scouting crew down there, after all.”
Lethe glared at him through her camo mask, but finally nodded. “Very well. But if we determine that there's nothing to be done, that they've got everything in hand, we should keep moving to our next destination.”
“Of course,” Hades said, almost channeling the spirit of Hugo Weaving. “Tell me, Chen, which movie of mine are you a fan of?”
“Oh,” Chen said, “I like them all. But I especially like The Dark Knight. You were excellent in that.”
“Ah,” said Hades, just a touch sourly. Did her father realize that Hugo Weaving wasn't even in that movie? It seemed so, surprisingly. But he didn't correct the young man, and they just continued to motor along the quiet side street of Anshun, toward the sound of gunfire ahead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Wei Zhang
Wei Zhang liked to keep invisible whenever possible, especially when he was heading into action.
And action was certainly what was happening in the Anshun rail yard.
Around the depot, the sound of gunfire died off. His task force was circling in one direction, he planned to go in the other. To sneak in, to find the vulnerability and exploit the flank.
To catch the enemy from behind.
He came around the edge of the building cautiously. This was the side that ran against a rail, a train stretching before him with its boxcar doors thrown wide. Beyond, he saw flashes of purple lashing out at the sky, and the sound of explosions. Drones being popped, surely.
Mr. Sienna Nealon, hard at work.
Where was Nealon herself, though? He only feared the husband marginally, for his powers were short in supply. Nealon, though, she had a seemingly endless font to draw on. It was the only thing that made her special, the thing that made her most dangerous.
“Nealon is down, we believe,” General Guoqiang's voice piped into his earwig. “Aerial surveillance indicates – well, we see a wounded leg through a hole in the wall on the east side of the depot. Moving drones closer to confirm.”
Zhang did not copy that. He didn't dare speak aloud, not even meta-low. Instead he crept along the side of the train, following the flashes of purple. He had a job to do, after all, in the name of Fen Liu – kill Sienna Nealon.
If Nealon truly was down, her husband was her last line of defense. Taking him out would be a simple matter; gun to the back of the head, knife to the spine, whatever was more effective. Or even just disabling him and letting the drones finish the job while he moved on to Nealon.
All viable courses of action.
Zhang crept ever closer, trying to see which of them would prove most viable, his footsteps nearly silent against the asphalt loading platform of the depot.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Wade
Iwas hustling forward, whacking every single one of those mini quadcopter abominations out of the sky with endless bursts of purple while I reloaded my rifle one-handed. I hoped, prayed that they would not deign to notice me, but would continue to cautiously descend to ID Sienna so they could kill her. I was aiming low, getting the ones closest to completing that mission so they wouldn't start swarming, not yet.
Imagining some massive crew of Chinese drone operators in some dimly lit room, all operating their drones and wondering why they kept going offline was of only a small source of amusement to me as I kept whacking them from the sky in droves. The gun reloaded, I lifted my other hand and kept up a continuous beam of purple and swept it about. Each time it touched one, it exploded and spun out or dove into one of its fellow drones or just fell from the sky and blew up harmlessly on the concrete platform below.
Still they kept coming in seemingly endless waves, like a damned brood of cicadas, and I felt sweat beads pop out on my forehead as the strain of using this much power got to me.
I was fighting a losing battle and I knew it, making the barest dent in the drone swarm. This was the future of warfare; an endless onslaught of implacable enemies without a face. They would come at you forever, or as long as the military budget of your opposing force continued to pay for them. Dozens, hundreds of them lay in fragments across the depot pavement, yet still I saw no end.
They were inches away from bobbing low enough to see what I could now see – Sienna splayed out on her back, blood pumping out of a bare leg where an explosion had ripped her up. Her eyes were closed, and I knew she was in trouble, even if she wasn't fatally wounded.
I had to get to her, had to drag her out of there, away from the endless drone air force, away from prying eyes of Chinese surveillance.
All it took was a first step, a lunge toward her, and I felt something slash into the back of my head; a thin dagger rip that carved a line diagonally from the top of my spine across the void between head and shoulder to land there and gash across the scapula and arm.
I staggered forward and spun, trying to see who or what had wounded me, but all I could see was the outline of an invisible knife blade tinged with blood.
Mine.
It hovered in the air, mere inches from me, and then lunged at me again with fluid grace, chasing me back, looking for the kill shot, as the hourglass for saving Sienna ran out grain by grain.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Wei Zhang
Asteady pace.
That's what Mr. Wade had been moving at. Easy. Predictable.
Which is why when Zhang had lunged, he was certain he'd pinpointed the location where the blade would impact, could see it perforating at the base of the spine, severing the cord, and causing death.
Unfortunately, Wade increased his pace just before Zhang's lunge, and thus the blade did not find its home in his spine, but cut a mere gash along the back of his neck and then across his back as he spun.
Zhang did not panic; he was still invisible, after all. He held the knife out from his body as though it were a dirty diaper, and took a step to his right, to fool Wade, make him think that Zhang was still in front of him, when really he was a couple steps to Wade's left.
Wade triggered off a burst of purple energy that passed right through where Zhang had been standing a moment before, and it made him grin. Zhang slammed into him from the other side with upraised knee and an elbow, driving the latter into Wade's head while the former cracked his ribs and sent him rolling.
Zhang threw aside the knife. He had no more need for it now that it was sullied and visible. He let it clatter to the concrete and steadied himself, circling to the side, planning to follow up with another flanking strike, this time to Wade's back.
This time he would not miss.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Wade
Getting attacked by an invisible man when you're already dealing with an endless drone swarm and an approaching Chinese army just drove home the point again about all being fair in love and war. Because this sucked, it was unfair, and yet complaining about it was for pussies.
I froze as I landed, really feeling the strike to the ribs. The blow to the head was no picnic, either – it hazed my vision, caused it to swim a bit – but when I came up the rib breakage made me guard, made me grimace against the searing feeling, like someone had slipped a red-hot poker into my chest cavity.
This left me on one knee, waiting for the invisible man to strike again, or the drone swarm to get its shit together and target me again, or the army I could hear around the corner of the rail depot to turn said corner and start plugging me with lead or metahuman energy beams.
But it also left me listening.
And it was hard to hear things over the sounds of about a bajillion quadcopters turning only forty feet away, and an army of a hundred or so, muffled around that concrete building, and a city beyond with all its attendant horn honking and hum and all that other shit.
But I heard the scrape of a shoe on concrete and I whirled, because it was right there.
I lashed out with a foot, going low and spinning in a kick that I threw my whole momentum behind. I'd gone through a (brief, embarrassing) breakdancing phase in my teenage years, and everything I'd learned about spin I put into that kick.
And I made contact – hard – with someone's ankle.
The crack was satisfying, though not as satisfying as if it had been my assailant's head. He let out a cry of agony, and thudded to the ground, sending a small wave of dust flying out from his point of impact. I doubted he was seriously hurt from the landing, but I knew I'd broken his damned foot, and that was all I needed.
I turned and bolted for it, firing a burst of purple energy blind at the point of his landing, not caring whether it hit.
Sure, I could have leapt on him, wrestled him for control of a weapon, or just poured fire into the area around him via rifle and purple beam until I was sure he was well and truly dead.
That would have been a matter of seconds. Five. Ten. Maybe fifteen, even.
I had no time for that.
Or rather – Sienna had no time for that.
I ran like hell itself was on my heels, slipping on the rubble as I leapt into the Sienna-sized hole in the concrete wall, turning and firing as I did so. I caused a chain reaction that brought down a half dozen drones just outside, seizing Sienna's hand and feeling my backpacks jiggle unevenly as I landed.
Running like hell was going to be the theme for now, and I was all about the theme. I dragged Sienna across the concrete floor behind a ceiling-high stack of wooden boxes that were dotted with Mandarin labeling spray-painted across them. Through two turns I carried her, until I heard a door open in the distance, behind one of the stacks I'd just passed.
I stopped, listening.
One, I heard Sienna's breathing. It was a little more ragged than I would have preferred, but every second she was breathing meant she was one second closer to her body fixing the damage inflicted on her.
Two, I heard the chatter of undisciplined, dipshit soldiers. Oh, they tried to keep quiet, but they were intent on searching the warehouse, and they didn't have the experience to do so silently.
Three, I heard the distant sound of quadcopters entering the building, a whump-whump-whump of their little blades turning as they started to sweep in cautiously, still seeking their prey.
A warehouse.
Metahumans.
Kill drones.
And me.
If I hadn't been in something of a hostage situation, this might just have been the sort of occasion to put a smile on my face.
CHAPTER FORTY
Zhang
“Hurry, you idiots,” Zhang said, grimacing, his ankle shattered beyond immediate repair. A combat medic was looking at him now, deciding what to do.
And all the while, Mr. Wade was escaping deeper in the darkness of the rail depot with Sienna Nealon, who was – for the moment – incapacitated.
Zhang put his hand up to his ear. “We need to send in everything right now. Before she can recover, or it will become much more difficult.”
Fen Liu's answer came a moment later. “Agreed. Commit everything. Flood the zone, as they say.”
“Yes, Premier,” General Guoqiang answered.
Zhang sat there sweating, in pain, and looked to the medic. “Wrap it, and get me a walking stick. And hurry!” He didn't bother to bellow the last bit like some overly emotional American. In a more reserved society, the meaning was plain. The medic flinched, and got immediately to work as asked.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Wade
It was just me and Sienna, who was unconscious, alone in a train depot/warehouse filled with crates of Chinese products, and rapidly filling with suicide quadcopter drones and Chinese metahuman soldiers bent on killing us both.
