Stolen, page 24
She was at the top. No one was above her.
And now the ladder she'd spent so very many years climbing was simply...
Gone. It was gone, in a haze of black smoke and a hole in the ground, the burnt smell wafting out of the portal the charred scent of defeat. An acidic flavor welled in Fen Liu's mouth, like she'd eaten ash.
“How?” Liu's voice cracked. She turned her head to look and saw one of Nealon's associates – Madison Gustafson – shuddering as she draped blankets of plasma over the writhing mass of the last of her metahuman soldiers. They dissolved in a haze of their own, screams and moans cut off as the plasma turned living flesh into mere air and a burnt stink that subsided in mere seconds. “Why?”
“You wanted a war with Sienna Nealon,” Nealon said, staring at her through the glass mask with steely eyes. “Now you got it. This is war with me.” She reached out and grabbed Fen Liu by the lapel–
“Sienna, look out!” someone screamed as a yellow and red-clad man slammed into them, knocking Fen Liu free from the succubus's grasp. She hit the ground but rolled out of it, dexterous enough to know how to avoid hurt.
Hao had thrown himself over the catwalk and was standing between Nealon and Liu, and if there was a better sign it was time for Liu to exit, she didn't know what it was. With not even a glance back at the developing fight, Liu threw herself around a corner as a hail of bullets from a hundred or more Chinese rifles ripped loose in the courtyard, spearing toward Hao – and her.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Sienna
That bastard Captain China caught me monologuing, and I deserved the rocking he gave me when he knocked Fen Liu out of my grasp. I sprang out of it in a roll, determined to do two things–
One, quickly end stupid Captain China in his spandex bullshit, with his glass-spotted face.
Two, drag Fen Liu back in here and make her answer for the condition of my friends, all of whom looked like they were roughly two seconds from keeling over dead from starvation and exhaustion.
“Barron,” I said, feeling my eyes narrow as I stared at Captain China, his red and yellow spandex cut through with countless bullet holes, “start getting these people out of here. Renard–”
“I am already on the business of settling the army's hash,” he said, waving his hands. The metal ceiling parted, ripping cleanly open, and up he went, balanced on his metal shoes, sun shining back down now that Reed had dispelled the storm. As a parting gift, he waved a hand at Captain China, whose gas mask was ripped free, pulling him off balance in the process. The sound of helicopter blades whipping outside gave me an idea.
“Get Liu,” I said to the others in my party. Grabbing the stumbling Captain China, I carried him up through the hole Renard had just made in the ceiling. He was clenching his lips tight, probably in fear of the suppressant gas that was still saturating the air in Shenzhen. He was right to worry; I estimated he'd be able to hold out for a minute, maybe five, before he had to take a breath, and then suffer depowering.
But he had a lot of pain and humiliation to experience first.
Before I was even outside, I could hear the sound of machine guns firing, mostly from the choppers that were buzzing around the prison, but some from the land-based troops just beyond the perimeter. Spying the nearest chopper and keeping my speed up so the likelihood I'd get perforated by a bullet was low, I reared back with Captain China in one hand–
And pitched him as hard as I could at the nearest Z-19 attack helicopter. It was black and looked a little like the Huey Cobras America had used in the Vietnam war, but clearly upgraded, with some fancy stealth-looking black plating.
The chopper tried to dodge; of course they did, who wants to get hit by a human being? But they did so by pitching down, trying to head for the ground, and thus presenting their spinning blades directly at me – and, by extension, Captain China.
He struck the blades and I saw what happened when the invulnerable skin of an Achilles met steel moving at 400 RPM. I'd say it wasn't pretty, but I'd be lying.
Sparks flew from the contact, and the blades failed, albeit not dramatically – at least at first. What was dramatic was how hard Captain China got hit. Even his invulnerable skin didn't translate into perfect immunity from the laws of physics.
Captain China went flying, and the helicopter dropped, the rotors catastrophically damaged and unable to hold the helicopter upright. A moment later, the tail began to spin 'round, the rear blade no longer working to hold it steady, and the Z-19 went spiraling toward the ground below, crashing in front of the prison complex.
But by then, I'd already shot across the sky, grabbed Captain China, and was in the middle of my next pitch.
He was dazed and unable to resist, as I threw him into the blades of twenty-two Z-19s in a row. About ten into my circuit, I saw his eyes just spinning, blood seeping out from beneath the ducts, the impacts damaging him in some not-so-subtle way.
Needless to say, I did not stop until every single Chinese chopper was either down or fleeing. With my last throw, I could feel the softness already setting in on Captain China's skin. He moaned as I caught him the last time, and I heard the crack of some of his bones, the suppressant taking effect.
When I threw him into the last set of blades, it was no longer an Achilles versus helicopter matchup. He was just a man, same as any other, inside and out. And I saw both as the blades did their work. The helo still spun in, though not as solidly as before. I added a fireball and an ice spear just to make sure it didn't rise again, and bid farewell to the splattered gore that was Captain China, confident in the knowledge that my friend Shin'ichi Akiyama had been well and truly avenged.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
Fen Liu
She didn't have much time, and she didn't need much time. Sprinting around the corner and up the stairs to the second level catwalk, she was already shouting into her earpiece. “Get me out of here!” in Mandarin.
Coming around the corner, the sound of two dozen heavy footfalls coming in behind her, she threw herself into the control center to find a portal already open. On the other side, her bunker, and her personal teleporter, waiting.
With a last smile, Fen Liu threw herself in, ignoring the shouts of the technicians she left behind. “Seal it!” she shouted once she was inside. It closed on the faces of her enemies, still wearing their gas masks like alien intruders.
With a drawn, painful breath, Fen Liu assessed her injuries. “Do you need help, Madam Premier?” her teleporter asked.
“Yes,” Fen Liu said, breathing heavily, but not accepting the proffered hand. “But not from you. And not for that.”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
Sienna
Renard had already finished with the ground forces by the time I got done. Another Chinese division had bitten the dust unceremoniously, their guns turned on themselves, their tanks smashed and splintered, vaporized with their own attempted artillery bombardment, followed by the unceremonious destruction of their artillery regiments.
Oh, and there were about fifty Chinese military ships crumpled like smashed soda cans and washed ashore, the work of the Byerly family, doing their level best to shove this war so far up the Chinese military's ass that they'd be tasting defeat for generations to come.
“Might be a few isolated snipers still out there,” Renard said, hovering over the prison complex with me. “Tough to tell at this distance, but it could get interesting if we decide to remain.”
“We're sure the Shenzhen bomb was taken?” I asked. Not Renard – the earwig.
“We got it,” Heidi answered. “I read it in Fen Liu's mind and passed it on. Sorry I didn't warn you about Captain Spandex; I must have missed him in the static of all those screaming, dying people.” She didn't sound pleased, either about the screaming and dying, or missing the guy who jumped me.
“No sweat,” I said. “Fen Liu make a clean getaway?”
“As you wished,” Tara Hays cut in, sounding a little hacked off. “I don't understand it, though – you went through all this trouble to slice up her military, decapitate her generals, take away her nukes, her chem weapons, her capacity to build more – yet you let her go running off into the sunset knowing she's still in charge of Russia and the US of A.”
“Yeah,” I said, already on my way back down to rejoin them. “It's because there's a billion plus people in China, Hays. Cutting the head off the whole snake? Means the snake dies. You get upheaval, destruction – all that bad stuff.” I shook my head, wind blowing through my hair as I drifted, Renard beside me, back through the sundered roof into the quiet prison, where my team was waiting before a white-ringed portal.
“But now her empire has to strike back, doesn't it?” Hays asked. I could hear her plain, even through the muffling of the gas mask. “She's not just going to surrender, is she?”
“No,” I said, thinking of all that remained to be done. America was still under the thumb of Nicole Muller, after all, and Russia was occupied by the Chinese military. Two seemingly insurmountable tasks, but ones that might just be surmountable now that we'd wrecked so much of China's military infrastructure. “But she's going to have a hell of a fight on her hands to hold onto it after what we've done.” I felt a smirk coming on. “In fact, you might just say we shifted the momentum of the war. Killing her...I don't think it would have won it. Someone else would have taken over, maybe someone better...but possibly someone worse, more fanatical.”
“We should probably make our exodus while we still can,” Barron said. My prisoners were already gone, too smart to stay.
But my new team? They were still waiting, every last one of them, and only started filing through the portal when they saw me and Renard return.
“After you,” June Randall said, waiting to be the last one back in.
I paused in the portal. “You made a difference today, June. Really, you did.”
“Gassing one guy isn't a difference,” she said, looking slightly pained.
“Gassing one guy wasn't the plan,” I said, offering her a knowing smirk. “Using your powers to make them remove their gas masks so we could suppress them – because your gas is too small to be filtered – that was the plan. In case we needed it.”
“Oh,” she said, seemingly stunned for a moment. Then she broke into a wide smile, as the portal closed before us.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
I came through the portal and out of the transit room into a different place, different safe house...
...And a party in progress.
“Woooooooo!” Scott Byerly shouted as I walked in, a huge beer stein in one hand, Scarlet Sahara smiling blithely, her ass clutched in the other. “Here comes the general!”
Scarlet clamped a hand on his mouth. “Leave the singing to me, sweetheart. You ain't got the voice for it.” She had a drink in hand and raised it to me, though.
“Hell yeah, girl!” Alannah Greene shouted from the back of the warehouse-like room. She definitely sounded like she had a drink in hand. “We knocked them bitches flat! Like prepubescent girl flat, mofos!”
“Well done, Sienna,” someone said, catching my arm lightly as I came in. It was Cassidy Ellis; dirty, smelly, thinner than I would have believed possible, but Cassidy nonetheless. She smiled at me. “I wouldn't have suspected that my freedom would hang on you, but...you did it.”
“Some of us knew she would,” Harry said, hanging out a few feet away, leaning heavily on his mother. “We just didn't...y'know...realize we'd be so heavily involved in 'it.' Or we would not have had that one beer in that particular bar on that last bender that turned into the worst six months of my life.”
“Yet, sweetheart,” Kat said, keeping a firm hand on him so he didn't topple over. “There's still room to go down from here.”
“Hell, yeah, going down is tight,” Guy Friday said from about ten feet away from me. He was – I don't know why – still swole. And had two big beers in his hand. Who was going to tell him no? He'd just helped smash through the Zhongnanhai.
Lethe emerged out of the crowd, Hades, Odin, and River trailing a few steps behind. She looked me up and down with a cool, casual regard, as if inspecting me for damage. “Looks like everything went to plan on your side.”
“Except I let Fen Liu get away,” I said. “Which was sort of the plan...but I can't shake the feeling I might regret letting that snake go.” I tried to look around for Wade without being too obvious about it, but probably failed because I was short and didn't want to levitate to pull it off. “Any casualties?”
“A couple of gunshot wounds, already healed,” Odin rumbled. I must have given him a look of doubt or surprise because he added, “When you send a war party with us at the head, you get all the experience to get the job done with minimal casualties...at least on your side.”
“They did not,” Hades said, “see us coming.”
“And now I've got a whole bunch more nukes to unleash wherever we please,” River said, a little too sing-songy for the subject matter. I felt like I was cringing inside. And on the surface.
“Where's the conquering heroine?” My brother's voice boomed over the crowd, and he hobbled over, held up at least in part by Isabella Perugini, her slender hand on his waist, his around her shoulder. He looked like he'd been through the wringer – not literally, sweat coated his every surface of shirt and pants he wore, and when he saw me it was like the last tension went out of his body. “Oh, good. Now I can sleep. And probably dream about hurricane-force winds.”
“You got the storm dispelled okay?” I asked.
“And maybe blew away a dozen or so Chinese Aeoluses,” he said, voice straining a bit. “They should have done super serum, but alas.”
I shrugged. “You live, you learn.”
“Then they didn't learn,” Reed said. “Philip Byerly caught them about twenty feet off the surface of the ocean after I flung them down. Drowned them all.”
“Whew, we are exhibiting no mercy today,” I said, glancing back at the core team I'd just taken into the lion's den in Shenzhen. They were watching me, still clumped together. I took my voice meta-low and said, “We, uh...gunned down and vaporized a significant number of Chinese metahuman troops.”
Reed just stared blankly at me. “...And?”
I almost chuckled, but I felt kinda pained. “I guess I was hoping you'd grant me some moral absolution, or cluck at me and say, 'You shouldn't have done that, Sienna.'” I tried to make my voice deep like his.
He just sighed like he was taking his first breath of the day. “I don't have it in me, and I think this situation is pretty clearly kill or be killed. You just happen to have done the killing before they could. It's not like you went wild on a bunch of civilians, right?”
“Nope,” I said. “No civilian casualties, so far as I know.”
“Then all's fair...” And his voice drifted off. “Isabella? I think I need to go to bed.”
“You think?” she asked. “I know it. Let us go. Perhaps a shower first, if you do not pass out on the way, for you smell like the inside of an old Fiat taxi in Calabria in midsummer.”
“And here I thought I smelled like that French cheese you like so much,” Reed said.
“Can confirm,” I said, patting my brother lightly on the shoulder, so as not to get his funk on me. “Perhaps without quite the level of specificity your fiancée offered. Sleep, Reed,” I called after him as she helped haul him away. Turning back to find Lethe at my shoulder, I tried to stifle my surprise. “Oh, hey. Anything else to report?”
“I'm your grandmother, not your sergeant,” she said, a bit stiffly, “but...yes, two things. One, salute your team. And two...” And here she looked around before speaking, to make sure only I would hear her message, “...Wade is in one of the rooms down the hall, having a bite to eat. He doesn't look so good, Sienna. None of them do. Zollers is maybe the worst – he's being actively looked after by Brenda.”
“Thanks. Yeah,” I said. “I could have killed Fen Liu.”
“So you mentioned,” Lethe said.
I gave her a sidelong look. “Do you think I messed up by allowing her to live?”
Lethe stared straight ahead, well past me, and deep in thought. “I think you did the right thing for the people of China, in the short term at least, by not ripping off the head of their government and leaving a giant sucking power vacuum to be filled by the first scumbag that jumps into the void.” Now she turned to look right at me, and her blue eyes seemed to be piercing nearly through me. “But that doesn't mean you might not regret it later.”
“Yeah,” I said, my stomach rumbling. “I had a feeling you'd say something like that.”
“Because I'm a font of wisdom?”
“Because you're dedicated to pissing in my Corn Flakes.”
She gave me a light smack on the shoulder – okay, not that light, she was still the OG Valkyrie – and vanished into the crowd with a mighty hoot that echoed through the room like some ancient barbarian call of victory. Which...it probably was.
Kat gave me a nod from across the room; she was hauling Harry away, and he gave me a little wave. I guess he was going to have to recuperate too. I'd catch up with him later, I was sure.
I awkwardly made my way back to my new team, the ones who stormed the gates of hell with me. They stood in a little semi-circle, eyeing the crowd, the party-in-progress, seemingly unsure if they fit in, or how.
“This is quite the shindig, Nealon,” June Randall said, eyeing her way around the room. Lotta familiar faces; Augustus and Jamal were in the far corner, the latter already waving at Arche.
