I'm not a slouch when it comes to combat. Far from it. I had dodged snipers in Appalachia, killed suicide bombers in Armenia, and pissed my pants under artillery bombardment in the South China Sea.
But, as expected, they weren't particularly interested in that, they had enough warm bodies to throw at the problem as is, or robots for the matter. I was wanted because of my psychiatrist credentials (ladies.. Get you a shrink that can make you think).
Yu Hunwa had taken hostages. Mainland Chinese hostages, but I didn't hold that against them, certainly not to the extent that I was willing to let them die when I could at least try to help. So when it turned out they wanted me to act as a negotiator, something I had in fact been trained for, I could only say yes. (Leaving aside that the UN were paying me to do so and there would be some nasty recriminations if I said no)
After some further mediation by Dan, who promised to bring the weight of Californian diplomacy to bear if the Chinese overstepped their already nonexistent welcome, another batch of Chinese MPs and commandos assembled at the docks.
If you guys have seen the classic X-Men movies, you might recall that attempts at apprehending that metallokinetic known as Magneto usually involved sending troops armed with non-metal equipment, including their firearms. While there were ceramic and plastic alternatives, the fact that we'd be entering a ship made almost entirely of metal made that moot.
They did rearm themselves with more nonlethal weaponry, they seemed serious about the whole "taking him alive" thing.
Propositions to flood the ship with nerve agents were shot down by the Taiwanese, since there was a risk of civilians still being trapped on board.
We're past the Russian opera house days, thankfully, and reversal agents are readily available for the same, but only if you can reach the poor unfortunates trapped or hiding somewhere out of the way. It might have been the first choice if the Chinese MPs could get away with it, but no matter their protestations, New Taipei was in fact a distinct and independent polity under international law, and there would be consequences for the rodeo they'd run so far.
I explained to them that I had been drinking, and with an understanding look, both the Major and the Mayor fished out their personal stock of ADH enzyme tablets. For genetic reasons, people of East Asian descent were less resistant to the effects of alcohol by default, and the bar certainly stocked some if I had the time to grab them. Not wanting to offend either party, I took a couple from each to make up the dose.
Feeling my mind go from moderately tipsy to something approximating sobriety, I asked Major Kaicheng if he'd brought metahuman support and received a contrite no.
They'd had the bulk of their forces deployed in the ever unquiet Xinjiang, or on what was left of Taiwan for the matter. They were doing their best to retask some, but as of this moment the government was more inclined to throw baselines into the grinder than retask their strategic deterrents like Dragon Level (龙等级) operatives (lower class 5s or upper 4s).
On the higher end, the majority were outright classified, though I had heard of them experimenting with using a high level metahuman with incredibly "truth" enforcing abilities in their own judicial system. They usually kept their cards close to their chest, at least outside of their own contribution to the JTF Fleet or the Metahuman Task Force in AC.
"Hey, Adat. I'm joining in on the other end alright? I'll do my best to make sure you don't get shafted in there. " Dan told me, now in apparel at least partially reminiscent of a suit.
"I appreciate it. I don't think they're going to burn me, they're on thin ice with the UN as is." I told him. I should have prefaced this with a 'likely', because in a vacuum, a mere mid-level bureaucrat moonlighting as a shrink was nowhere near as important as as a Class 4 in their eyes (nor mine for the matter).
I put on body armor, but nothing powered. Weapons were moot, because he'd shown no interest in killing civilians (non-mainland) as of yet, and I don't think I look particularly Chinese. I did my best to look presentable, quickly lasering off my increasingly unkempt beard. I missed Anjana, she'd have been on my case about it a week back.
I was just about prepped when we got word that the Chinese, despite my protestations to the contrary, were going to send more MPs in first.
God fucking dammit. Their primary psychologist was dead, and their secondary was one of the hostages, I'm sure both of them had already done their fair share of yelling at this blatantly unproductive course of action, but I still did my best to dissuade them. My advice fell on deaf ears.
The CCP (Reformed) had sent over a fancy new toy that their higher ups were eager to see in the field, some kind of Crafter gizmo that had the ability to nullify metahuman powers. The squad of troops responsible for deploying it didn't look happy in the least about it. They had the stares of dead men walking, only waiting to be lowered into the coffin. But they were disciplined, and suited up before picking up the device and heading to another VTOL.
I watched them leave, the lonely helicopter beating the air into submission as it approached the vessel. It wasn't immediately obvious whether or not he was attempting to attack them, but I assume the field might be preventing it.
The CMP were extremely protective about their new toy, and didn't share the video feed from their new team, I stood on deck, watching it hover above the ship, now gently listing with smoke rising from the gaping scars on its sides.
A rope was dropped, and about half the team fast-roped down, while the more enhanced cyborgs or those in exoskeletons simply jumped down the 20 or so feet to the deck. The device was lowered far more gently.
I watched them enter, and as I had expected all along, the moment the heli left the device's limited radius, it was pummeled by an invisible force, slamming hard into the ocean in a spray of sea water. It might even have been survivable, but only if they'd packed scuba gear.
The callous bastards had sent a manned chopper.
The Major stared on, face nominally impassive, but I could tell even he wasn't happy with the higher ups calling the shots from Beijing.
It took me a moment to realize the distant thumps were gunfire, dampened as they were coming from the bowels of the ship. The Major closed his eyes, murmuring a soft prayer for the dead. Soon, there was nothing but silence, the lonely ship now floating in the impromptu harbor formed by all the others evacuating to a nominally safe distance. Nobody spoke but the irreverent gulls, content to squawk and shit all over everything. Even the dolphins had run for the open ocean.
"Dr. Sen. It's on you now." The Major told me. I sighed, and mentally handed the Mayor an info package containing all the things I'd been meaning to say to Anjana, but had been too picky about the wording to send quite yet. Foolish of me, because soon, she'd be leaving faster than my messages could follow.
I stepped out onto the deck, where an unmanned boat was waiting for me. The water was deep and murky, if there were evac subs lurking underneath, I couldn't see them.
Several Taiwanese drones had preceded my advance, broadcasting a message saying an unarmed negotiator was approaching. Yu Hunwa didn't blast these ones out of the sky, so he presumably got the memo.
I sailed smoothly across the open water, salt spray ruining my attempt at arranging my hair. I hadn't entirely let myself go since what happened a few months back, but it was close.
I wondered if she felt much the same as I did, lost in a sea of black instead of blue. It was lonely out there, while her voyage wouldn't take the minimum 4 years to AC that traveling at the mere speed of light would take, it was still the better part of a year. Most of it spent out of the Solar System, where teleporter infrastructure was scarce. They'd almost finished staging the next set of wormholes, somewhere far enough it wasn't trivial for the aliens to swat them out of existence. Not far enough in my eyes, since I knew she'd inevitably end up on the front lines.
I missed her a lot, you know? I still woke up every day, half convinced that she had never left. The fact that I kept her side of the duvet untucked just the way she'd liked it didn't help. It took a bit of wrangling to get the cleaning bot we'd both been so happy about buying to leave it alone, but I'd managed it nonetheless.
We'd met when I had been discharged from the USAF (Army, not the Chairforce), when I'd been more than a little lost as the world was changing faster than I could handle. She'd been in med school too, but had developed her powers early enough that she didn't have any qualms about just dropping the whole thing and leaning into her gift.
Even back then, the writing was on the cards, and the need for human doctors had gone from a nice-to-have to a luxury, except for unusual circumstances. A teleporter of her grade was utterly wasted there.
She'd saved lives. Not mine, that would be a little too melodramatic of me, but she gave me a brand new and precious reason to live.
To say our romance was whirlwind was to severely understate it for once. I smiled, temporarily lost to the world, as I recalled the great lengths I'd gone to to hide all the individual letters that made up "Will you marry me?" as I lead her on a scavenger hunt across the globe.
She'd groaned when I finally pointed them all out on my dinky old cellphone, before punching my chest and then embracing me in a hug that made my heart ache to recall. Of course, she might have just been huddling for warmth, since at that moment we'd been standing on the very peak of Mount Everest, scaring the bejesus out of a pair of Indonesian climbers when we'd first apparated out of thin air. Got a nasty fine from the Nepalese government too, but with how much she made, it was nothing at all.
Man, I really missed not having to pay for Ubers for several years. She'd always done her hair while I waited impatiently, tapping my feet, before getting up, grabbing my wrist and teleporting me right to where I was working before departing, only after a smoldering kiss. Always made it to work right on the clock too.
I wish I had maintained this train of thought as the vessel loomed ever larger, but a sudden realization of what I was doing made me retch, and I narrowly refrained from emptying my stomach into the waves. Was my attempt at getting this man to surrender to the draft any better than what the the FedUS bastards who took her did?
They'd held me hostage, black bagged me and showed her my unconscious form on camera. That's what made her come in, catching a teleporter who didn't want you to was never easy, let alone someone as powerful as Anjana.
I knew that if Yu Hunwa's wife was alive, she'd have been the bait too. I think he'd have accepted that, if it meant she'd live.
We can't all get what we want.
----------------------------------------
The boat gently pulled up at the ship's dock, the gently insistent beeping shocking me out of my reverie.
"Agent Adat here. I'm boarding the vessel." I said hopping onto the platform. The hatch was open, likely someone fleeing who had been too terrified to take the time to close it. Due to the ship's list, the peaks of the waves were splashing in. I lowered myself into the vessel, to find the entrance half flooded.
I waited for a moment to see if any acknowledgement from my handlers was forthcoming, but my lace told me I'd lost signal.
I advanced into the low-lying level of the ship, relieved that the electricity was working. I felt something bump into my leg as I tried to figure out which way the stairwell was. It was a body, clad in the muted colors of the CMP, floating face down. I stepped over it and ascended to the next level.
The ship was quiet, or as quiet as it could be with the splashing of waves on the hull as metal creaked and groaned from the structural damage it had sustained. I crept down one of the corridors, keeping an eye out of for any signs of life.
I found a survivor at the other end of a long and utilitarian hallway. He noticed me first, but his effort at hailing me was more of a gurgling moan than anything resembling speech.
Another MP, he'd been skewered by a large metal shard and impaled to the wall behind him, raised up just high enough that he had to stand on tip-toe before he could rest even a little of his body weight on the floor. He wasn't wearing his helmet anymore, and it lay discarded on the floor, stained with the same pink foam that dribbled from his mouth. He tried to speak to me again, but I shushed him gently, and moved closer to inspect the damage.
He wasn't going to make it. The shard had gone right through his chest, ruining one of his lungs and lacerating the other. More blood foamed at the edges of the wound. He'd done even more damage to himself in his struggle to get his feet back on the ground, dragging the shard up in the process. I tried pulling it out of the wall, to no avail. His eyes followed me as I tried to see if he had any other means of communication, such as a lace, but he lacked one altogether.
I stared at him for a moment, the ghostly ship still creaking louder than the wheeze that was his breathing. He kept looking down, and I saw that he was indicating his service weapon, on the floor well out of his reach.
I hit him with morphine. His eyes rolled back into his head less from the bliss and more the momentary relief from the agony. He still didn't stop trying to indicate the gun.
I sighed. I didn't see a better outcome for him either, unless I let him bleed out or euthanized him myself. I picked up the gun and placed it in his hand, and he nodded his head and shed tears that I thought were probably from gratitude. I still told him to hang on and use the gun for self defense, more as a fig leaf for my own conscience than as anything either of us believed. He nodded, and I left him. I'd barely ascended to the next level when a gunshot disturbed the unquiet peace.
The upper level was abandoned, the next another charnel house. Severed limbs, and enough blood to make the floor slick. I had to clamber over a pile of the corpses of some of the dead, in plainclothes this time, as they had made a dash for another hatch and had it fused solid before their faces.
It was a large ship, and it took me some time to clear most of it to my satisfaction. There was only one place left to check, and I steeled myself up before proceeding.
He knew I was coming, the hatch opened on its own accord, and I stepped through into a room that had likely been some kind of community center.
Hu Junya sat alone, in one of those old white plastic chairs that had been ubiquitous for half a century or more. He was brewing tea, gently immersing tea leaves as water boiled away. I could still tell that his calm demeanor was a facade, his hands were shaking, and eventually, he gave up on using his own efforts and set a spoon to stirring with his powers.
The hostages were in the background, mostly unharmed, but wrapped in metal chains that dangled from the wall. They perked up at my appearance, but they were gagged and could only struggle ineffectually in their restraints.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
"You're not Chinese. What do you want from me?" He said, standing up and approaching me till we stood a dozen feet apart.
"I'm Dr. Adat Sen, and I work for the UN. The Mayor sent me, they're stalling the CMP. But for now, I just want to talk to you." I told him.
He nodded grimly. "You know who I am. Tell the dogs from the mainland that they're not going to take me. If they try again, I'm going to kill them, I'm going to kill every single last one of them."
The ship shook slightly, his power manifesting, I felt it change course, the guiding computer overwhelmed and unable to maintain the bearing of the rudders. In a corner of the room, something began steaming, turning red hot. I looked closer and realized it was the containment device the previous team had deployed, now lying abandoned.
"I'm not going to lie to you, even if you kill those people you've taken captive, they're not going to stop. They're going to send more men, they're going to send drones, and then other people with powers. There's no way out. They might send an army, take hostages of their own. I just want to help you figure this out, and find a solution that doesn't make the bad worse."
He smiled bitterly, and the prisoners in the background stopped struggling as whatever little hope they had was dashed. They'd been delusional to even think otherwise.
"They've taken everything from me. My love, my life, my homeland is a charred ruin that smokes to this very day. If they think they can make me another of their puppets, I will make them regret it."
"They're going to hurt the people that you love. I know your son is out there." The moment I said this, there was a tearing sound and the hull next to us tore apart, finally giving way to a view of the horizon, where the Moon hung low, uncaring of how incongruous it was for it to lurk about during the daytime.
"Have they hurt him? Did they even dare touch him?" He demanded, voice cracking with anger. One of the captives, who I recognized as the junior psychologist in the initial infiltration team, let you a muffled cry for help as the chains drew themselves tighter.
"No. Not that I know of. Mr. Yu, it's not as bad up there, it really isn't." I was right, the Chinese government incentivized a great deal of its colonial ventures by offering its citizens more freedom amongst the stars. Millions had taken them up on the offer.
He sighed, the chains relaxed, and the cup of tea levitated itself to his hands.
"Do you think they'll hurt him if I refuse to comply?" He asked, closing his eyes to savor the aroma, as he set one to brew for me.
I wanted to say no. I really did. He must have realized my hesitation, because there was another screech of metal contorting into shape, and a partition separated us from the hostages.
"No- maybe. I can petition the UN, or ask a Lunar micronation to offer him citizenship." I muttered, unwilling to lie to this man I so empathized with.
"You could have just said yes, they can't hear you anymore. Look at where hoping for the UN to bail us out got us, look at what's left of my homeland." His hands shook again, spilling tea on the floor. I picked up the mop this time, it was made of plain plastic and out of the realm of his abilities.
"Do you suggest I stand down? I'm not saying I'm going to listen, but I still want to hear it."
I took an unassuming metal mug from him. "There's what I'm supposed to say as a UN agent responsible for keeping the peace, and what I really feel. But before I even get into the latter, what's the point? There's nowhere to run."
"Isn't there?"
I didn't shriek like a little girl when a head floated up through the floor beneath us, though I did stamp at it ineffectually. Hu Junya skewered the thing with metal spikes, narrowly avoiding my legs, but they did nothing as the translucent man slowly kept on rising, until he stood there, naked yet grinning, as we stepped back and appraised him.
"Who the fuck are you?" Hu Junya and I asked in synchrony. More of a reflex on my part, because I immediately recognized the cunt.
Sorry, The Cunt was an altogether different character, this was The Ghost, or plain old Ghost. Even back in the day, he'd been a notorious nuisance, and a thorn in the side of governments around the world.
Metahuman names had a rather weird correlation to their powers. To be expected, to a degree, they didn't name any idiot with more muscle than average "Superman", but a pithy and simple name often went to the most deserving.
And Ghost, well he lived up to his. The slippery little shit was incorporeal, utterly immune to any physics he didn't want to affect him. Guns, bombs, nerve gas, he ignored all of it and just kept on floating through walls, into women's lavatories, the Oscars, and more concerningly, government blacksites where they definitely did their best to try and kill him, often with other metahumans.
I'd run into him a few times in the years since this happened, there was a memorable incident where they shut down ATLAS for a day because he'd drifted up there to be a fly on the wall, and caused a full lockdown. Eventually, he got bored and buggered off elsewhere, but it had been deeply funny to see all the security staff and resident Metas do their best to annoy him into leaving. They shone lasers at his eyes, blasted him with music, and those mostly worked, because while they couldn't hurt him without his consent, he could be bothered through his sensory channels if he left those open. In response, he left an ethereal shit on the then Director's desk, which proceeded to produce a very non-ethereal stink for weeks.
But enough about the future.
"I'm a spooky little ghost and I'm here with a message, old man." Ghost said, shaking his skinny bald head disdainfully at the proceedings.
We stared at him as he paused, cleared his throat a few times, and then doubled over in agony as his eyes blazed with violet light.
"Ghost? Transmitting?" While it was Ghost's voice, the change in pitch and his accompanying mannerisms suggested that a woman was in control.
"Lima Charlie." I replied on his behalf.
"And who the hell are you? Ah, some UN nerd. Piss off, would you." She replied, making Ghost stand in a confrontational posture. I wasn't afraid of him, his ethereal form made hurting others rather difficult, although not impossible, which is why he was classed as a nuisance rather than an existential threat.
"Dr. Sen is a guest, who I happen to trust. He can stay unless I deem otherwise." Hu Junya said. I nodded to express my gratitude.
"Right. You don't have much time. They sent the Blue Man as a delaying action, he's supposed to psychoanalyze you for a bit, ideally convince you to stand down, but more likely, buy time till they get telepaths and heavy hitters here. I can already see them spooling up birds in the South China Sea."
"I don't know anything about that, but she could be right." I replied, unwilling to lie. I had a decent idea of my own capabilities, but it would have been very foolish of the Chinese to leave it all in my hands.
"You think I don't know? I don't know what to do.. I'm not going to hurt you, Dr. Sen, I doubt you wanted to be here." He said, getting up and pacing around, as the hovering Ghost rotated disconcertingly to follow him. I curiously poked at him, and as expected, couldn't feel anything even when my hands were deep enough to tickle his prostate. I stuck my head in, saw the contents of his last meal, and brought it right back out.
"Who are you people?" He asked curiously.
"We go by many names, but what you need to know about is that we're metahumans like you, and we're free. Nobody has a hold on us, not the UN, Turing, the Soviets, Chinese, or any other government. We just want to live our lives, and fuck anyone who wants to stop us." She said through Ghost, and then, with another flash of purple light, conjured a scene of Earth and everything around it.
A telepath? With sensory powers? I stared at the luminous globe, and was awed by the sheer amount of detail. Even zooming in, every city and town was clear and obvious, and I could swear that I could just barely make out aircraft and satellites in if I squinted.
"We're up there, in the stars. And we can take you with us."
"Is she telling the truth?" Hu Junya asked me earnestly, putting me on the spot. I'd heard rumors about rogue metahumans, even now, when the dust had settled from the absolute insanity surrounding the early 30s, when metahuman fuckery precipitated, amongst other things, the US Secessions, the Chinese Winter of Red Rice and White Bamboo, the Indo-Pak Limited Exchange, and no end of other incidents that left our planetbound civilization reeling. Well, not just the planet, given that several thousand people in the early Mars and Lunar colonies perished in the process.
"I've heard rumors. Are you Lumen, perchance?" I asked.
Ghost smiled, and then was enveloped in more numinous light, until the figure of a woman was superimposed upon him. There were other shades in the background, a motley collection of people. A woman with a visor, and spindly fingers that seemed to pluck at unseen instruments, or rather akin to a spider skittering across hot tiles. Another, hidden behind the fluttering of butterflies that frizzled and melted when they streamed too close to the Reality Anchor, the machine now lighting up the room in red and melting a hole in the floor that Hu Junya absentmindedly shored up. A boy, or half of him, his internal organs visible as if he was a sagittal slice of an MRI image.
"I've always been fond of that name. Yes, we bring light to those who need it. We're the flame that flickers in the dark. But when needed, we burn to the ground any who would cage us."
"I am interested. But only if you help me save my son." Hu Junya said, clenching his mug, which distorted with force beyond that of his hands.
"You can save him. It's always been within you. Come, you no longer need to hold back."
The spectre surrounding Ghost stepped forward, revealing his slightly glazed eyes, and walked forward to where the agitated man stood, now crushing the metal into shards that bit into his hands and dripped blood onto the floor. She smiled gently and touched his forehead. Their was a spark, a thrum of power, as if an engine had its rate limiters blown and now threatened to rip itself out of its restraints. The ship groaned in earnest, metal rippling as waves of force twisted crystalline lattices. I gasped in agony, likely due to its effects on the metal in my lace and other implants, and was too distracted to process events for a good few seconds, coming to to see Hu Junya gasping on the floor, crying tears that seemed to sparkle like burnished copper.
"I can do that? But-, but-" He stammered, almost weeping.
"There's no time. They know. You have to leave, and now. Follow the thread, we'll be waiting for you. As a courtesy, we've got people heading for your family on Earth, if only they'll come with them. As for your son, take to the stars. We'll find you."
She vanished with a fizzle, leaving a stunned Ghost gently drifting away, no longer consciously anchored to the ship.
He came back to his senses with half his body out of the ship. "Oh fuck dude. They're not happy. I'm going to leave, if you don't mind, I don't want to get tanned." He piroutted lazily and dived into the floor, just about the same time as a burst of gunfire perforated the ship, followed by an explosion that threw me off my feet and against the wall hard enough to bruise.
I didn't have time to nurse my wounds, because with the gaps opened up in the vessel, so came electromagnetic waves, and thus several hundred push notifications for X, Google Nimbus, and more worryingly, from the UN.
WARNING
WARNING
UNSCHEDULED EMERGENCE EVENT TYPE [REDACTED]
Submit X-RAY clearance for details
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
YOU HAVE 2 MINUTES AND 23 SECONDS TO SEEK SHELTER
YOUR NEAREST SHELTER IS- ERROR
YOUR CHANCE OF SURVIVAL IS- ERROR
And then a burst of EMP scrambled my lace, or at least reset it in a manner that was highly noncondusive to the continued integrity of my gray matter.
It was still a primitive model, barely clinging on to my meninges and only throwing a few tendrils deeper into my frontal and occipital lobes. I could function without it, or so I told myself as I wretched, wiping away blood from my nose and ears.
Bullets and shrapnel hovered in place in front of us, before melting into globules. Not all of them, from the gurgling death cries of the hostages, and the smell of sizzling flesh, voided bowels and fresh blood that suffused the air. How much of that blood came from my own nose, I didn't have time to investigate. The only reason I wasn't dead was a statue standing before me, blocking the worst of it.
A statue?
Hu Junya had changed. Metamorphosized. An unremarkable elderly man of the type usually seen doing Tai chi in parks had become an entity of copper and gold, with blood of mercury that dripped from the hundreds of wounds on his his exterior. Good for him that he'd become something that wasn't trivially put down with autocannon fire, because by god were the Chinese trying.
He spoke to me, words lost in a hail of everything that the world was throwing at us, and from the tiny bit of the exterior I could see from where he sheltered me, there was fire on the waves.
His wounds knitted themselves, leaving a kintsugi pattern that tightened into recognizable human features. And he was angry.
With a roar of collapsing metal, he willed, and a force propelled me down, not that I had been in any hurry to get back on my feet. The ship, a name I'd never bothered to learn then or later, cried out with a voice of metal fatigue and unexpected structural stress as it lifted off the water, and took flight.
I'd seen video of it all later. It was beautiful.
Hu Junya leaned into the powers of apotheosis, turning metal into an extension of his will. It shored up the holes, and more steel, lead and depleted uranium hurled at us was halted in its tracks and merged into a whipple shield that surrounded the mauled craft.
We accelerated, hard, leaving kiloliters of water streaming in our wake and propellers chopping through thinning air.
I could hear now, or at least the ringing in my ears had turned into a distant orchestra of wailing flutes.
"I'm going to be flying now. I can hardly spare the time to deal with interlopers aboard, care to see to them for me, Dr. Sen?"
His voice was mellifluous, vocal chords of brass turning mere speech into song. Discordant, because you expected an 8-foot tall metal golem to sound a little more bassy, but I wasn't there to be a vocal coach.
Instead, I nodded, and grabbed one of the many guns from the spiked hedgehog of floating weaponry he'd brought before me. I wasn't going down without a fight, no matter how little it meant.
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