Heart of the Storm, page 14
Couldn't run. A wall collapsed somewhere behind me, and the sound of voices in Mandarin heralded the arrival of at least a platoon of reinforcements.
So I guess it was time to fight. I tried to smile through the grimace, wondering if I was about to make my last stand. The burn in my hand completed, and another soul entered my harem. Power? I asked, thinking I'd probably draw another of those damned useless Hercules.
Magneto, the answer came back.
And suddenly my grimace became a full-on smile.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Zhang
“Our troops are flooding in the other side now,” Colonel Chang said, pointing to the rolling cargo depot doors, now open. “Two hundred soldiers, all empowered. More coming through the portals now.”
“Barely adequate,” Zhang said, hobbling forward on a makeshift cane. He needed a cast, but unfortunately this was all he had until he could get a Persephone – rare in the Chinese army and gene pool – to heal him. He'd put out a call, but they seemed to be in short supply. Foolishness. Still, one was on the way, but from a unit not yet in Anshun. That had required a change in portal locations, which had necessitated a different army coming next.
Still, it was easier than trying to bring in manpower without the teleporters.
“Swarm them with everything you have,” Fen Liu said over the headphones. “The only way to win against Sienna Nealon is to overwhelm her.”
“Either that or take her by deceit,” Zhang said.
“If she dies, the West's will to fight us dies with her,” Fen Liu said tautly, “and we live to see another generation born and die. So make her dead!”
“Yes, ma'am,” Zhang said tightly, and hobbled his way forward to direct the battle. He was listening to the renewed chatter of gunfire now that he'd gotten the fools to stop shooting at one another. Hopefully this time they were shooting at the right person, he hoped. But his hopes surged, then faded when the chatter of rifle fire suddenly died.
And then the screaming began.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Wade
There was so much metal in the room, and I could feel it in my mind, and almost at the tip of my fingers.
So I gave it a little pull, and listened to the gunfire stop as QBZ-95 rifle triggers slipped away from soldiers' fingers.
That made me grin even harder, so I decided to push this time–
And listened to rifle buttstocks land in the breadbasket of every soldier who'd just been firing them.
I was lying in the glow of the Aurora somewhere at the end of the room, watching the light flicker like a strobe as the meta – wherever they were – got jerked around on the end of their rifle sling by my wild pulls and pushes. I suspected similar dance moves were being duplicated all across the warehouse, though I couldn't see the results from them as easily as the Aurora, the light dancing all around from the source.
Pushing and pulling the guns I had hold of was an exercise in fun. It was low effort, high reward, as I jerked triggers just as often as I twisted the weapons. Staccato, singular gunshots and occasional rips of multiples thundered through the warehouse as Chinese soldiers screamed, presumably catching unfriendly fire from the rifles of their fellows. I cast off the dead body that had given this precious gift, and continued to make the puppets dance at the end of their slings while I floated back to upright, trying to decide on my next move.
“You son of a whore!” A Chinese soldier came around the corner, slightly off-balance from a metal belt buckle at his waist. I guess I'd gone easy on such a small piece of metal, focusing harder on the bigger assemblies of the rifles and pistols. He raised a hand–
And I realized he was wearing a small amount of metal there. A wristwatch.
I jerked his arm sideways, pushing his elbow as a blast of purple came out, destroying the crates beside him. At the same time, I pulled his belt buckle forward and he slid, boots losing traction.
His eyes were wide as he was pulled right into my hand, which was about twice its usual size as I swole up with Hercules power. Why?
Because I could.
I took his power and his life, not necessarily in that order, and now I had full purple blast beam. I put it to immediate use, unleashing it through a stack of crates to target a squad of soldiers that had cut loose their metal bindings. They were moving so fast that all it took was a delicate sweep of my hand to rip through all four – and send the crates tumbling down in another chaotic mess.
“Welcome to the slaughterhouse!” I shouted in Mandarin, surely drawing every ear in the place. I fired another blast of purple at random, and it tore through a stack of crates and drew screams from the squad on the other side. I swept my hand left and right, using the beam like a lawnmower to chop down crates and Red Army soldiers in a great cutting swath.
I heard movement behind me and spun, conjuring lightning and loosing it in a bolt the size of a telephone pole into some poor bastard who was coming around the corner in one hell of a hurry, an energy blade clutched in a high guard above him. It arced through him and then ran through four or five people behind him, drawing screams. I picked up a crate with extra Hercules strength and charged it up into a bomb, hurling at the light source behind me – a roll-up door, I was pretty sure. I heard a bang, screams, and the door came crashing down along with a dozen concrete blocks as that section of the building partially collapsed.
A swarm of drones came flying over the nearest wall of crates, and I flung eight nets in three seconds to trap them against the crates. They exploded, sending shards of wood flying and toppling the crates. I caught a few splinters, including one just above my left eye that blinded me with a sudden rush of blood.
Shit. I tried to blink it clear, but no dice. There was a constant flow rolling down my face; capillaries bled a lot, and they'd certainly nicked one with that.
This was how I would lose, I realized. It would be a thousand cuts – and then a sudden coup de grace when they rushed in at the end. The numbers were against me, Sienna was still injured, out of the fight, hopefully still safely hidden.
I would die an inch at a time, and then she would die, and then, someday, China would come west again, either by force or by coercion, and we wouldn't be there to defend it.
All these thoughts flashed through my head as I jerked half a hundred triggers throughout the warehouse again and listened to the satisfying sound of screams and chaos. I poured lasers of green and beams of purple into the places where I knew clusters of soldiers were waiting, destroying my cover all the while. When drones came sweeping over me, I batted them down with light webs, with laser blasts, with magnetic pushes (though most of their components were plastic, enough was metal I could screw with them).
I had no plan to escape, no ideas for how to get out of this mess. The minute I stopped firing and smashing and blowing shit up and knocking down drones, they'd overwhelm me. Then they'd find Sienna.
This was me, boxed into a corner. No way out, just a fight to the death with enough guys that eventually they were going to kill me. If I just grabbed Sienna–
One of the crates in front of me exploded with red eyebeams, and I jumped sideways, barely missing them. They cut their way through the cover above my head and showered me with more splinters. They bit into the back of my head, into the meat at the back of my neck and in my trapezius muscles, and my right hand went numb. Whether it was the break in my wrist finally taking full effect or brand spanking new nerve damage, I couldn't say. And it didn't really matter right now.
The bad guys were closing in, and I flung a charged-up piece of wood blindly, and listened to the screams as it went off in range of at least a couple Chinese soldiers. The beams swept above me again, smashing away more cover and leaving me with but nine inches of shattered wood above me before I'd be exposed. Likely on the next sweeping pass of the eyebeams.
Something thumped next to me, and I turned my bleeding face, raised my hand, ready to strike–
A hand as hard as iron and yet somehow still soft caught my wrist, and I found myself looking into familiar blue eyes, almost next to mine.
“Well, well, well,” Sienna said, flat on her belly, about six inches from me, “looks like somebody's been getting into trouble without me.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Sienna
Ididn't expect to wake up in one piece, let alone still alive and uncaptured, but I did. I came out of my bout of unconsciousness with a jolt, smashing a wooden crate that rested beside me, pains all over my body letting me know that not only was I still alive, I was still banged up as hell.
Wolfe, I thought, pulling the old bastard's last remnants to front of mind. Shards of explosives popped out of the places on my body where they'd buried themselves, and then the wounds sealed themselves up.
My ears were ringing, but I could hear gunshots, and screaming. Light shone in on me, but not daylight. It felt weird, artificial in some way, not like fluorescence, but almost like moonlight. Screams filled the air, too, in the middle distance, maybe thirty, forty, up to a hundred feet away. A whole lot of them, too, which suggested...
I had help. Someone who'd hidden me here to recover while they took on...oh, the whole Chinese army.
Lethe, I figured. Maybe Hades. Maybe some combination of both.
Popping my head up, I immediately popped it back down because six bullets strafed the crate next to my head, missing me about eight inches.
Oooookay. I guessed since I was in an active warzone, I'd need to keep close to the ground.
Electricity crackled, and the sound of some energy beam ripping through crates suggested a direction for me to travel. Shoving over a stack of crates, I flew low to the ground through several aisles to find a red eyebeam ripping up a wall of crates.
I was in the rail depot, I realized. The one I'd been fighting outside before whatever explosion had turned my opponent into a cloud of blood and bone and then tried to do the same to me. The whirr of not-too-distant engines suggested drones were still in attendance.
But I found my savior, and it was not quite who I expected.
Wade fired off a blast of green, ripping in half a squad of Chinese soldiers, then fired off a purple beam, then electricity, all at an insanely fast pace. He was moving more quickly than I'd ever seen him move, faster than ought to have been possible for him.
Unless.
I hit the ground beside him, and caught his wrist before he managed to take my head off through sheer panicked reaction. Give the man this much: the flicker of recognition in his eyes came quickly, and thankfully a shot that would take my head off did not. “Well, well, well,” I said, “looks like somebody's been getting into trouble without me.”
“I would have gotten in trouble with you,” he said, turning and directing his hand toward the origin point of the red eyebeams and then setting off a blast of green that caused the red to cut right off, “but you were taking a nap.”
“I'll have you know that I was following a time-honored tradition of soap opera characters,” I said, trying to sound outraged, “and entered a coma. Which clearly didn't take.”
“Now that you're awake,” he said, grasping a piece of crate and imparting a blue glow to it before tossing it in the direction of the Chinese soldiers, “shall we proceed to get the hell out of here?”
“Problem with that,” I said. “I'd suggest flight, but you can't–”
He subtly lifted off the ground, and grinned at me. “I can now.”
I felt my eyes narrow as I stared at him. “How many Chinese soldiers did you drain while I was out, exactly?”
“A lot,” he said. “A whole heap of a lot.” Turning his hands skyward, he blasted the ceiling with concentrated beams of purple energy. “We should probably talk about that later, though, maybe when we're not up to our asses in Red Army metas.”
“Oh, we will definitely be talking about it then,” I said. “Can you go supersonic?”
“Anything you can do,” he said with a quicksilver grin. “Well...I can do some of it, anyway.”
“Come on, then,” I said, nodding at the ceiling he'd blasted away and seizing one of his hands. “Supersonic on two. One–”
“Two,” he said, and we were off, our twin sonic booms rattling the walls of the depot as we launched up and out of that place. We curved up and out of the depot, holding hands tightly as I steered us north, away from the growing numbers of the Chinese army as quickly as we could go.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Lethe
“That does not look good,” Chen said, craning his neck to peer through the windshield as another explosion rocked the car, this one like a sonic boom.
Lethe frowned...and concurred, though she didn't say so. She was looking through a perimeter of Chinese soldiers that seemed to be endlessly flooding out of one of the side streets ahead, which had been cordoned off by armed and uniformed soldiers.
“I'm sure it's just a training exercise,” Hades said with his usual aplomb. He was peering, too, though, and Lethe heard the concern lacing his voice.
Then she caught movement in the sky, and breathed a small sigh of relief. Two figures, holding hands, and jetting away. They were gone in a couple seconds; she barely saw the flash of dark hair, but there it was.
Sienna had made it out. Wade, too, unless she missed her guess.
“We should get out of here before our intentions are mistaken,” Lethe said.
“Yes,” Hades said, clapping his hands together. “I agree.” She could tell by his relief that he'd seen it, too.
There was no easy way to rendezvous with Sienna and Wade, nor to track down Jian – wherever he was. That put them in a bit of a precarious position: hiding out far, far behind enemy lines, in a country where they were being actively searched for.
“Whatever you say.” Chen shifted the car into reverse. “Where should we go?”
“Take us somewhere that doesn't have many people,” Lethe said.
Chen thought about it for a moment. “I know a place like that. Like an abandoned place for the movie?”
“Yes, exactly,” Lethe said. “A quiet place.”
“Done,” he said. “I will take you somewhere like that. Now, tell me something – what was it like working with Christian Bale?”
Lethe snuck a look at Hades. His eyes rolled slightly in annoyance, but he seemed to be steeling himself to give a congenial answer, which arrived directly: “He's a fine person as long as you stay out of his sight line during a take.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Fen Liu
She wasn't staring at the face of Zhang, but she could imagine him, hearing his voice over the open line. Frustration dripped through it. “They both flew away. Wade managed to absorb some of the men we sent in after them.”
Fen Liu leaned her head forward; her neck was a tense bevy of knots, and Zhang was not here to help unwind them. “This is the problem with Nealon. You think you have her over a cliff and yet somehow she manages to claw her way back with the thinnest threads of luck.”
“Indeed,” Zhang said. “Wade broke my ankle, or else I might have gone in myself. All I could think to do was throw our forces at her, hoping to overwhelm them, but it seems my gambit did not pay off.”
“No,” Fen Liu said. “And yet I cannot fault you for your approach on this occasion, however badly it might have ended. Overwhelming her with main force seems the only way to kill Nealon, unless you can stab her in the neck or shoot her in the head. If we still had nuclear weapons, I would consider turning them loose on her, then blaming her for the destruction.” She paused. “Hm.”
“I will find a way to do it,” Zhang said, sensing the delay meant, perhaps, some judgment of him and his conduct here. “If it costs me my life, I will see her dead.”
“I may have to hold you to that,” Fen Liu said archly. But she must have been joking.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Jian
He ran and ran, and found a safe, quiet place to hide beneath a car parked outside an apartment building. It wasn't so busy here, wasn't so chaotic, and he found himself catching his breath.
Something about what had happened – about the shouts in Mandarin, the noises of battle, it had brought everything back for him. He'd been in the prison camp again, back where he'd started. His breath had caught in his lungs, his chest had felt maddeningly constricted, and he'd been so terrified he could do nothing but run. If he'd had the mental function – if his brain had let up on the instruction to RUN, RUN WITHOUT CEASING – he would have turned into a bird and flown away.
But he couldn't. Couldn't think, couldn't do anything but run, and now, hide. He lay beneath the car, shuddering in revulsion at his cowardice. Paralyzed by his terror of a regime that could reduce him, a man, into a quivering mess, not even a human being. He remained a cat, and perhaps he always would from here out, hidden under a car, forever and ever.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Sienna
We stopped our flight in a forest, atop a forbidding, rocky mountainscape where not a soul could be seen for miles around. Landing, our boots crunching on the gravel-strewn soil, I realized my hand was still in Wade's and we shared a look.
He flushed, and pulled his away. “Sorry,” he said.
I didn't try to hold on. “It's fine,” I said. “We had to get away, and it wouldn't pay for us to get separated.” Unstated: like the others, because I'd effectively just abandoned three people without transport in the middle of Fen Liu's China.
The air up here was mostly fresh, with a little tang of pollution very unlike the US these days. This is what happens when you outsource all your manufacturing to a country with much less stringent environmental laws. “You think we'll be okay up here for a little bit?”
