Heart of the Storm, page 21
“Speaking of not-terrible openings,” Wade said, looking at me. I felt a brief flash of absolute horror as I was certain he was going to make a dirty joke. About me. Then he spoke, and the moment passed. “We need to figure out where Fen Liu is, so we can actually go after her. Do you have that information, Sierra?”
“I have that information,” Zhang said.
“Ooh, time to settle bets,” Lethe said. “Is she hiding in her ancestral village?”
Zhang frowned. “I don't know where she's from. But wherever that is, she's not there – she's in the harbor in Hong Kong. Aboard one of our Shang Class nuclear submarines, waiting on the bottom, as quiet as you can imagine.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Fen Liu
She stood up from her chair with enough force it would have overturned it–
If it weren't bolted to the deck. As it was, the metal squealed, welds complaining about the force applied.
She pressed a button beside her, activating the direct line to Sun Yue, her personal teleporter. When a sleepy voice answered with a grunt, she spoke quickly. “Be prepared to evacuate me to the secondary location. Station yourself outside my door immediately.”
Fen Liu did not wait for acknowledgment. She was already back to her computer, trying to send messages, to make contact with her government.
To salvage what she could of this rapidly spiraling situation.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
Sienna
“She will run,” Zhang said.
“I estimate that if attacked directly,” Sierra said, “Fen Liu will run with a 98.2% probability.”
“She has a personal teleportation meta,” Zhang said. “She waits on her at all times. If she gets so much as a whiff of your scent, she'll be gone – and I have no idea where. Doubtless she has plans within plans for where to flee if pressed.”
“She's a survivor,” Lethe said. “She'll pull out all the stops to live another day.”
I sighed. That was going to present a problem. “Sierra...get me Taxi on the phone, please?”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Fen Liu
She was on her fifth connection attempt with the Minister of Defense Guoqiang when a message beeped through on her computer. The Minister:
Video communications down. We have detected Sienna Nealon in Hong Kong, on the waterfront.
Fen Liu almost bolted forward bringing her face closer to the screen. Hong Kong? That was so near to her she could practically spit and hit Nealon from here.
Coincidence?
Surely not.
Bomb her to smithereens, Fen Liu typed without a moment's thought or hesitation. If Hong Kong was destroyed along with her, that would be a strategic misfortune.
But if she somehow found her way onto the submarine and killed Fen Liu...that would be rather worse.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
Sienna
“The moment they acquire you as a target, they will use teleportation metas to create a portal and drop a bomb.”
I sighed, still standing underneath the cool sun, the mountainous altitude taking away the bite of heat I'd felt yesterday in the Guangzhou night. Sierra's pronouncement struck me as more than dire warning; it struck me as another truth I'd need to overcome. “Guangzhou all over again,” I muttered. “How are they doing it?”
“Like you did in Russia to our forces,” Zhang said. “Teleportation metas open a portal under a bomb, it drops and hits the ground.” He made an explosion sound while moving his hands for effect. “What's not clear about it?”
“For one, are they operating from multiple depots?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “Her number of teleportation metas is extremely limited; they can only operate one depot.”
I smiled. “All her teleportation metas in one depot, and it's just filled with bombs. Did she not hear how that ended for us?”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
Fen Liu
The picture was snowy, but had resolved into a surveillance camera video of Sienna Nealon floating toward the waterfront of Hong Kong, her hands extended out from her body, lightning dancing from one hand and flames burning from the other. She wasn't attacking anyone, but people were fleeing before her. Even the police.
The message bubble moved on Fen Liu's screen: Bomb dropping in 3...2...1...
Fen Liu waited. Waited. And waited.
And waited.
Nealon simply continued to drift across the earth.
Then turned, looked right at the camera...
...and smiled.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
Sienna
“Yeah, bomb's not a problem,” Wade said with great confidence, the sun forcing him to squint only a little. “I have full Magneto powers now. As soon as it starts to drop...” He made a whooshing sound, and flicked his fingers.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
Fen Liu
Explosion reported at our bomb depot in Hunan.
The message came through as Fen Liu watched Nealon continue to drift across the docks, drawing ever closer. Could she get to the sub, though? All the way on the bottom of the harbor?
A motion beside Nealon drew Liu's eye; there was a man. Jeremy James Wade, if her eyes did not deceive her. The husband. She should have killed him in Shenzhen when she had the chance. But alas, using him as bait had seemed the wiser course.
Now it looked like foolishness. But perhaps this could still be salvaged. They hadn't yet reached her, after all. She reached for the button to call the bridge. “Take us off the bottom,” she ordered. “Get us out of here – fastest possible speed.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
Sienna
“Also, let's not forget I'm a Poseidon now,” Wade said with a smirk. “So if you need to get to a sub at the bottom of Hong Kong harbor, I can not only snag that sucker and drag it to the surface to keep it from getting away, I can also make you a direct path to it through the water.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Fen Liu
The deck shook beneath her feet, and Fen Liu caught herself on the edge of the desk with lightning reflexes.
It was not the feeling of the ship lurching to life, no; the whine of the engines was still present in a subtle hum through the deck plates.
No, it was the feeling that they'd somehow stopped, a lurch that indicated a total lack of forward momentum. Her palm pressed against the cool metal of the desk, and she clicked the button to call the bridge. “Report.”
“We're not moving!” came the excitable voice at the other end. “Our engines are at full power and we are stationary!”
Fen Liu glanced to the monitor; Sienna Nealon was no longer visible.
Switching to the button on the other side, she pressed it swiftly: “Teleport me out of here now.”
The white glow of a portal began to appear, the aperture growing wider by the second.
Fen Liu did not hesitate; adjusting her body to the slant of the submarine deck, she sprinted for it. Leaping through headfirst, she landed in a roll and came up in a crouch–
To find she was not where she intended to be. Not at all.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
Sienna
“Okay,” I said, “so we can catch the sub, and even enter it – but she'll run.” The sun overhead provided just the slightest warmth against the cool air in the mountains. “How do we stop her?”
“That's simple enough,” Taxi said, drawing my eye; he'd arrived partway through the planning session. “You have an invisible man,” he inclined his head to Mr. Tac, “who knows the layout of the sub. Between the two of us, we can get right to her teleportation meta – provided they're not in the room with Fen Liu?”
Zhang shook his head. “She does not suffer interruptions to her privacy. Her teleporter is stationed in the next cabin.”
The small man's eyes gleamed. “If we have a distraction, he and I can sneak aboard and replace the teleporter. When she calls, I'll open a passage – right to wherever you want.”
I smiled. “Right to where I'll be waiting.” My smile faded. “Except I want a place where if she somehow unleashes total destruction, it won't hurt anybody. Maybe I should get her out of China.”
Jian spoke for almost the first time since we'd begun. And he actually was wearing clothes, thankfully. “It needs to be somewhere that the people of China can see it. It needs to be on our home ground. And we need to be involved somehow.”
“This is a pretty populous country,” Wade said, gesturing to the woods around us. “Even if we picked somewhere like here, there are houses not far away.”
“You need a big, empty space?” Lethe smirked; Hades behind her, wore a similar expression. “I know just the place.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
Fen Liu
“Welcome to Thunderdome.”
She found herself on the bare concrete floor of a building that seemed, at best, half-completed. Open windows lay in front of her only a dozen feet or so, sunlight shining in through them onto puddles of rain. The air bore a musty scent, mildew having had its way with this building.
Outside, she could see other buildings, similarly lacking completion. It didn't take her more than a second or two to realize where she was, in general, at least.
“You subverted my teleporter,” she said, turning slowly. There was no interior lights in this building; unsurprising, really–
It was, after all, one of China's cities of the future.
“And brought you here,” Sienna Nealon said. She was little more than a silhouette against the bright blue sky, shadowed in the darkness deeper within the building. “Where we can finally be alone.”
“You might regret that,” Fen Liu said.
“That's what they all say.”
She nodded; smiled politely at Nealon–
And then bolted for the open windows behind her, and the sky beyond.
“Yeah, you're not getting away,” Nealon said, rocketing past her in flight. She swept into the sky beyond. “And no suiciding out of this, either. You take your medicine like a big girl, Fen–” She reached a hand out for Fen–
But Liu was already changing even as she reached the last few meters of the floor. Her clothing was shredding as her body grew, spines emerging from her flesh, neck elongating, a vestigial tailbone becoming less vestigial and more tail–
And then she was in the sky, her wings extended, taking flight in a way she had not in...so many years.
It was familiar.
It was natural.
And it felt damned good.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
Sienna
Well, shit.
She turned into a Chinese dragon the moment she leaped out of the building. We'd been on about the fourteenth floor, and I'd been anticipating her either trying to jet or trying to splat, either way avoiding the hell out of me. She didn't seem crazy, didn't seem suicidal, but she also didn't move blurry fast with flight speed like me or any other Gavrikov. She ran like a meta, leapt like one, and then...
...Turned into a long-bodied dragon. Like a snake with jagged red scales, and, surprisingly for the Chinese dragons I'd seen represented, she did have wings, which she employed the moment she hit sky, flapping and flying. She wasn't all that dissimilar to how I looked, actually, when I became a Quetlzcoatl, though her coloration was quite different.
No matter how jaded you are, watching your opponent turn from a small-boned Chinese lady into a dragon the size of a six-story building is breathtaking.
She didn't slow down as she approached the building across the way, and slammed into the concrete, bursting the facade and sending a huge section of it tumbling down into the abandoned streets below.
“If this is the way you want to play the game,” I said, “I'm open to it.”
And I started to change, my clothes tearing away to reveal scales, and my skull growing into the shape of my very own dragon...
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
Wade
Iwas on the ground in the abandoned city, watching Sienna turn into a dragon overhead to match the one Fen Liu had become. She fluttered along as soon as she finished crashing into the building and delivering tons of concrete rubble to the street a couple hundred yards away from me.
But that was all fine. All anticipated. All within possible parameters.
Which made what she did next all the more alarming.
CHAPTER NINETY
Sienna
Isaw her flutter as I changed, and knew for certain she couldn't fly supersonic. That she was constrained by her dragon form rather than empowered by it, as I – sometimes – was.
My transformation complete, I shot toward her, billowing flames from my mouth (because my limbs were but stubs now, and I was a freaking dragon, what do you expect?).
But Fen Liu just absorbed it along her flank like it was nothing, heat diffusing along her scales as though I'd merely breathed air on her.
“Fine,” I said, my voice a low rumble befitting my appearance, “we'll do it the fun way.”
I smashed into her and we tumbled through a building, shredding exterior walls and pummeling load-bearing girders and concrete posts with our weight. I never like to ask a lady her weight, but Fen Liu had to have gone from about one hundred and thirty pounds, soaking wet, to six or eight tons. I was about the same (not like I ever stepped on the scale as a dragon) and so we burst through the center of that building like it was tissue paper and we were a strong wind.
The building collapsed above the thirteenth floor as we came tumbling out the other side. I was wrapping myself up in her, like a python about to squeeze some prey to death. She made a deep, grunting sound, and I knew I had her.
Then she flashed a bright blue, and I screamed, yelped, and let her go as quickly as possible.
Where red scales had been before, now superheated plasma glowed cerulean on her entire exterior. She snaked around in a tight circle to face me, her tongue lisping out, similarly coated in burning plasma.
There was not a square inch of her I could touch. And this was not a dragon power, at least not that I knew of.
This was something else entirely.
And in that moment I knew...
...Fen Liu had taken the metahuman boosters.
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
Wade
Fen Liu glared a lethal blue, like a turquoise sun, as I sped a hundred feet off the street and two blocks away, trying to keep watch on what was going on with Sienna while she rumbled with the Chinese premier.
“Shit,” I whispered, because I knew that plasma was one of the few powers that Sienna lacked a proper countermeasure for.
CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
Sienna
Agout of blue plasma billowed toward me and it took all my Gavrikov flight speed to go into a hard dive and avoid it. It consumed the building behind me, washing through concrete facade like acid through flesh. The top of the building started to collapse and come down on me.
I swept a street over and felt heat burn across my back as plasma missed me by mere feet – which, when you're several stories tall, is not as small a margin as when you're 5'4”.
There was only one good weapon in the Sienna arsenal for dealing with plasma types, and I turned my snake body around in a bending U-turn to unleash it–
Fen Liu, chasing me, took the sonic blast I screamed toward her head on. She'd been following with all her speed, and her control was not such that she could turn on a dime. It washed across her like a rush of wind–
And the plasma running across her scales barely even fluttered.
“Ooooh, shit,” I said, and dodged sideways at warp speed. I slammed my way through a concrete building that hurt far, far too much for the momentary escape it provided, and came out the other side feeling every bit of the impact.
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
Wade
In a battle of dragons, I didn't dare get too close. A puff of blue plasma from Fen Liu and I'd be dissolved into free-floating atoms. And if I got in Sienna's way at her current stature, she might not even notice me as she smashed me to paste.
Running through my new suite of powers in my head, I tried to figure out which ones might be of some assistance:
Purple beam. If I could land it, it might do some damage to Fen Liu. But the farther out, the less accurate I would be with it.
Green lasers – those could work. Again, if I could get close enough. From a distance, I might end up hitting Sienna.
Same with the Thor powers. Sparking Fen Liu might not even break through the dragon's skin. Hell, given she was not touching the earth or anything else grounded, it'd probably just flow through her harmlessly.
Magneto powers could do something – if I could find something big enough to throw at her to make a dent, or push it through the plasma field protecting her. Otherwise anything I shot at her would be reduced to particles before it touched her.
And that was it – unless I could somehow douse her as a Poseidon, cover her over with water. But a quick look around revealed no rivers close by. Which made sense; this was a new city, not an old one. Old cities were founded by rivers. New ones they'd probably found wherever they felt like they wanted to build.
