Stolen, page 15
“Deaden all cameras and erase the film, Arche,” I said as Barron lifted his hand in my peripheral vision, extending it toward our troublemaker, who was rising from his position behind the desk.
He cocked his head at us, his will pushing against the illusion that Heidi was projecting, against the psychic force she was exerting into his mind. I'd been on the receiving end of those kind of tricks before, and it wasn't impossible for a meta to see through them, especially a strong-willed meta.
“Three,” Hayling said.
A white glow appeared over the soldier's shoulder as a portal expanded behind him. He seemed to sense it as it grew wide enough to encompass him, and he started to turn–
Taking advantage of the opening, I added to the psychic forces already pressing against him and blasted him with a full-force round of Warmind. His head snapped back as though he'd been punched, he opened his mouth to scream–
And I slammed into him, already going a hundred miles an hour in flight, carrying him over the threshold of the portal and into freefall.
“Closing the portal!” Barron said in my ear with a little extra mustard as I tumbled through the air, my foe clinging to my arm as we jetted out of a Chinese military base and into–
Well, gosh.
We were a few hundred feet over a desert, endless dunes in all directions. Whether it was the Sahara, Death Valley, Atacama, Gobi, or some other endless sand sea, I couldn't tell. But then I realized it was daylight, which put it in the Eastern Hemisphere, as I spun and fell, Hawkeyes clinging to me and dragging me down, the sun beating on us from overhead.
Sahara or Middle East, I realized. Because it was already late afternoon in China. Not that it mattered, since I had more pressing issues to deal with. Like a metahuman clinging to my arm, refusing to let go, and really throwing off my flight capability by swinging his body around wildly.
That was all right, though. I had my ways.
I funneled ice down my arm, causing Hawkeyes to scream and drop, seizing hold of my leg instead. I didn't want to destroy my Chinese uniform, but he was scrambling to keep me from shucking him off.
“Sienna, do you need assistance?” Barron's voice, slightly staticky, cut into my ear.
“Give me a minute to deal with Hawkeyes McJagoff,” I said, halting swiftly in midair and giving him a kick to the face that sent a shock down my leg. A damned Achilles, I could tell by the pain in the bottom of my foot. I hit him with the Warmind again, jarring him loose in time for my next kick to send him dropping.
He fell almost three hundred feet and landed in a puff of sand. When it cleared, I could see him glaring up at me, and he lifted a hand to point–
A green energy blast the diameter of a beer stein almost knocked me out of the air. I dodged it by inches, flying in a twist pattern, circling down. He saw me coming, aimed a blast at me that missed by inches, and as I turned to come around–
He rocketed away at a sprint that quickly turned him into a blur.
“Aw, hell,” I said. “He's multi-powered, and they include Achilles, energy projection, and Speedster abilities. At least.”
“Do you need assistance?” Barron asked, again, the staticky nature of his inquiry suggesting he was watching – or trying – through a pinhole portal, hopefully while the rest of my crew was proceeding on mission.
“Let me see if I can catch him first!” I shouted back. “He's moving around six hundred miles per hour, heading southwest – I think.” I glanced up at the sun. “Where am I, Charles?”
“You are in the magnificent dunes of Saudi Arabia, many kilometers from the nearest village.”
“Crap, he's heading southeast,” I said, now that I knew where the sun was positioned.
“Can you catch him?” Madison Gustafson asked, her soft voice breaking through the staticky connection.
“Yeah, I got this,” I said, pouring on the speed. “He may be able to run at several hundred miles per hour, and he may be near-invincible, but I can fly, and one of my few talents is finding creative ways to harm people.”
“Even those who shrug off punches and kicks?” Madison asked. “Because if an Achilles ran into you at Speedster velocity, I don't think there'd be a lot left of you.”
“But what was remaining would still be amazingly attractive,” I shot back, veering in low as the Speedster took a sharp curve to the south. “Dammit, he shifted directions and I almost overflew him.” A blazing green burst forced me even lower as he crested a hill, and then I sprung up higher so as not to get ambushed by being blind coming in hot behind him. Cagey bastard.
I didn't need to worry about him striking me out of the sky on the other side of the hill, though. He'd opted to veer right, and was now running as hard as he could in a straight line, firing with real determination at me in short bursts, like a laser machine gun.
Forced to drop to the deck and use the dunes as a natural barrier, blast after blast struck the sands around me, sending them exploding skyward as each hit struck home. This was real nape-of-the-earth flying, and I was running out of places to hide from his attack. Even directing a constant Warmind at him was causing diminishing returns, and cracking the gates of hell at him only forced him to veer to keep from being disintegrated by my (relatively) slow-moving wall of crimson energy.
“Two seconds, Sienna,” Barron's voice caught me by surprise. Because I had no idea what he was talking about. I caught a glimpse of Hawkeyes as I flew over another dune, and then–
A scream of pure agony echoed through the desert, and when I crested the next rise I beheld a shocking scene.
Hawkeyes was burning under a blanket of blue plasma, a tripwire of the stuff stretched across the road like a cerulean finish line tape. He was writhing and rolling, almost three hundred yards ahead of the line, where Madison Gustafson stood, dissolving her plasma with a wave of her glowing blue hands.
I pounced on Hawkeyes, whose knees were burned black where he'd hit her improvised tripwire. Coming down on him, I shoved my fingers up his nose and unleashed the pure fire of Gavrikov.
Less than ten seconds later, he finished writhing, though his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth were still smoking.
“You okay?” Madison asked, trotting up to me, her Chinese army uniform already showing signs of sweat. It was damned hot here in the Middle East.
“A little winded, in every sense of the word,” I said, looking around. “Did Barron drop you here?”
She flashed me a grin. “Figured it'd be easier to bring him down if you had some help with that 'invulnerable' skin of his.”
“Opening a portal now,” Barron said, and when I turned, one was appearing behind us that led straight into the hallway we'd left behind. Barron was by himself, looking side to side, as though we might be interrupted at any time. “Come on, then. Unless you fancy a stay in the Kingdom for a bit?”
“Just a sec,” Madison said, and threw a blanket of blue over my foe. He disappeared beneath it, dissolved into free-floating atoms by the time she made it vanish. “Just in case he had a GPS tracker on him, that ought to confuse things a bit.”
“Good thinking,” I said, stepping back through from Saudi Arabia into China (!). She followed, and Barron closed the portal, then hurried to open the door for us into the Chinese general's office. Even the illusion that we were male Chinese soldiers apparently didn't abrogate his responsibilities as a gentleman, at least in his eyes.
I stepped into the general's office, and behind a clearly illusory facade. The room was filled with a half dozen Chinese soldiers whose faces looked eminently familiar from the ID cards we'd procured fifteen tension-filled minutes ago.
The general did not even look up, so involved was he in writing something. “Yes, yes,” he said, words translated again by Heidi's gentle touch on my willing mind. “I'll see that these orders are issued immediately, general.” He had his hand up like he was talking on the phone, but there was no phone in it.
“Oh, and add his secretary to the transfer orders,” I said, still catching my breath. I gave myself a once-over; my Chinese Army uniform was a little scuffed. Lucky we'd stolen a whole pallet of them.
“Already done,” Heidi said, concentrating all her attention on the general. “He'll be a worthy addition to the team, I'm sure.”
“He'll be a worthy meal for the lizards, more like,” I said. “Team 2?”
“Almost done here,” Arche said over the comm system. “Heading toward the exit in thirty seconds or less. Just tidying up now, finishing a couple of minor details and...done. On our way out.”
“Copy that,” I said, taking my finger off my earpiece.
“Here are your orders,” the general said, affixing his signature to the papers that we'd brought. He offered them to Heidi, who took them, handed them to me. “Anything else?” the general asked.
“Not a thing I can think of,” I said, as Barron opened a pinhole portal behind us to the interior of our truck. There was no one visible out the back gate, and no sound, so he opened it wide enough for us to step through, and we did, with Heidi the last out.
“Enjoy the rest of your day, general,” Heidi said with a smile to the dazed general, whose eyes didn't seem focused on us at all. They seemed like he was looking at the wall.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” the general said, seemingly quite preoccupied. “I'll have to find another secretary, though...”
The portal dissolved as a group of Chinese soldiers appeared at the back tailgate. I recognized their faces from the IDs, and then I was suddenly inside their illusion, and could see the rest of the team staring back at me as Renard unbolted and lowered the tailgate. “Any problems?” he asked in that accent of his.
“Nothing a little teamwork couldn't fix,” I said, glancing at Madison. Barron was smiling at the corner of my peripheral vision.
“Then let's get out of here, shall we?” Jian asked over the comms. I could hear him already cranking up the truck, and the engine roared to life. “I don't need to get caught, I've spent enough time in Chinese prisons to last a lifetime.”
I did a mental count of everyone as they loaded up and Heidi egressed to join Jian in the cab. Finding my place on the bench, I pulled the orders and IDs from my pocket.
“Smooth, huh?” Madison asked, looking at the IDs and orders with me.
“It's amazing what you can accomplish when you've got a team like this behind you,” I said with a smile. Jian backed the truck out, and soon enough we were rattling down the road and out the gate, this next small step in our greater mission accomplished.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“The hurricane is making landfall tomorrow,” Reed said, eyes closed, from his place in the middle of the control center. “About noon is the earliest I can get it there.” Little beads of sweat were perched on his brow, and by the strain on his face, I could tell my brother hadn't slept in a couple days.
“Noon will be fine,” I said, running through the list in my head of all the things that needed to happen between then and now. “We can make noon work. We'll move into the Shenzhen safe house overnight, and ready the operation for tomorrow at...what? 1400?”
“Sure,” Reed said, one of the sweat beads breaking loose and running down his face. “Go with that.”
“You're moving to the next safe house now, right?” I asked. “Joining up with River and Hades?”
His eyelids fluttered. “And my fiancée, yes.”
“We'll make sure he gets out,” Abby said, looking up from her console. Jamal and J.J. were already gone, but Arche was in the corner. “They're waiting for us over there, and Taxi is incoming in the next five minutes or so.”
“The heat's going to get intense soon,” I said, looking at the news coverage, now split between the impending hurricane – only covered on non-Chinese channels – and the nuclear event in Changsha, which was still catching the full sturm und drang of all media, everywhere, except Europe, where they seemed to be taking a more measured approach to Chinese propaganda. My guess? The Chinese telepath force was busy trying to consolidate Russia and the United States into their new empire and they didn't have enough telepaths and empaths left to start working on Europe yet. Which was why we'd managed to hit two Chinese military bases without running into a single telepath to spoil our day.
But it was coming. Or more accurately...they were coming. All my efforts were probably going to seriously slow them down, though, because now they were going to have to remove telepaths and empaths from their conquered territories in order to defend the homeland. This was all a win for me, throwing more sabo in their gears.
Reed opened his eyes. “Okay. The hurricane is on autopilot for a few, but I'm starting to get real resistance from the few Chinese-affiliated Aeolus types.”
“If you're too weak to handle them–” I started to say, extra-snide.
“They're going to get run over,” Reed said with a smile. “Just letting you know what I'm up against.”
“Oh, I know what you're up against,” I said. “A billion plus people, and a lot of them now with powers. Lucky the Aeolus gene is not heavily present in Asian genetics.”
Arche lifted her head behind me, exchanging a look with Abby. “How goes it?”
“Everything's on track,” Abby said. “Ready for handoff?”
“Yes,” Arche said, fingers dancing lightning against the console. “Okay. I have control.”
“Then I'm out of here,” Abby said, snagging her bag from the floor where it lay. A white portal was already forming, Taxi's bleary eyes peering out at us from another safe house elsewhere in the world, another transit room wrapped in plastic to hide the details from prying eyes, or to catch snow and rain on the occasions when we visited such places. “C'mon, Reed. The others are waiting.”
My brother stirred, taking a couple shuffling steps over to me and leaning over to hug me. He felt warm, and smelled just a little ripe. “You should talk to the Byerlys about getting yourself a shower if you pop over to the South China Sea,” I said. “Maybe before you see Isabella.”
He straightened back up, a punchy, dead-tired look in his eyes. “I smell like this because of you, and you're wounding me this way?”
I shrugged. “Someone had to say it.”
“Come on, let's go, you lazy chuds,” came a voice from within the portal. River – Phlegethon, the hard-nosed assassin sister of Lethe, looked through with her scarred face and hard-as-steel eyes. “I'm paying Taxi by the minute for this overtime detail, every second you dick around is costing me thousands.”
“Soothe your tits,” Alannah Greene said from behind her, a clipboard in hand, hair in a messy bun. No one was sleeping much lately. “Come on, Reed-boy, you sweetass mofo. We got a bed waiting.”
“I'm engaged, you horny little hick,” my brother said, ducking his way into the portal. “And you're about twelve.”
Alannah pursed her lips so they paled, then blew air noiselessly between them. “I was really just telling you there's a place for you to sleep, not propositioning you – this time,” and her eyes flashed mischievously. “But I'm of age, your fiancée is way above it, and she ain't got to know. In case you change your mind.”
“Why doesn't anyone ever proposition me anymore?” Abby asked wistfully, stepping through the portal. “Not even J.J.”
“Because your boyfriend is so low T he probably couldn't get an erection with Jenna Jameson herself working on him,” Alannah said, checking something off on her clipboard. When done, she looked right at me. “You doing all right with your Inglorious Basterds, Sienna?”
“Five by five,” I said tiredly, and checked my watch.
“You think you're really gonna be able to pull this off?” she asked.
“I guess we'll see,” I said with a weary smile.
“Keep your head down when the moment comes,” Alannah said. “Since you ain't letting me ride out with you.”
“You have other business.”
“Pffft,” she said. “Who's gonna watch your back? I guaran-damn-tee you Kat Forrest ain't willing to give a Chinese soldier a prostate check with a root. I just hope them people are going to stay loyal to you when the poop starts hitting the whirling fan blades.”
“Guess we'll see,” I said.
“Guess you will,” Alannah said. “Hope the answer you get is to your liking. And also, survivable.”
“Take care, Sienna,” Reed said.
“See you guys on the other side of this,” I said. Taxi's portal closed, leaving me alone with Arche and my new squad, waiting in the nearly abandoned safe house for the next shoe to fall.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Fen Liu
Zhongnanhai, Beijing
“Hm,” Fen Liu said, contemplating all that she'd just seen. “And you are certain?”
The low-level tech flunky nodded, bowing his head on the final nod. “Absolutely certain. These are the IDs of soldiers currently stationed in Kamchatka, and the orders were cut just this afternoon by a general at our base outside Hangzhou. At the same time our Thors detected an attempt to install a backdoor Trojan into our system.” The flunky's eyes gleamed.
“And you think it is Sienna Nealon?” Fen Liu looked at the information scattered before her on the desk.
“As well as a new team,” Flunky said. “Probably using illusionists, and possibly a telepath.”
“Hangzhou ground base is a low priority post,” General Wei said. “There are no telepaths or empaths screening that location, and the one metahuman we had on site was transferred out by the general's own hand in the same set of orders.”
Fen Liu frowned. “Telepathic coercion?”
The general bowed his head to her. “We think so, yes.”
Fen Liu sat back in her chair, interlacing her fingers as she contemplated. “So Nealon has a telepath now.”
“And Rakshasas, in all probability,” Wei said. “Otherwise our soldiers would surely have seen her team move through the area – unless they're all Chinese.”
