Heart of the storm, p.1
Heart of the Storm, page 1
HEART OF THE STORM
THE GIRL IN THE BOX
BOOK 58
ROBERT J. CRANE
Ostiagard Press
Heart of the Storm
The Girl in the Box, Book 58
Robert J. Crane
copyright © 2024 Ostiagard Press
1st Edition.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Epilogue
Teaser
Author’s Note
Other Works by Robert J. Crane
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
The storm was passing.
Fen Liu could hear it, faintly, in the distance, the warm pattering of falling rain. She lay in bed, her most recent lover warm against her side, and she stared at the ceiling.
She was, arguably, the most powerful woman in the world. Her chief problem was that the other contender for that title wanted her dead. She, not wanting to be dead, thus found herself with quite the conundrum.
Kill or be killed. That was the situation. The faint aroma of her own sweat, mingled with that of her lover, the faded scent of his hair shampoo and the soap on his skin filled her nostrils as she lay in the dark, tangled in the sheets.
These were the hard hours. The ones where she questioned herself, her choices. And Fen Liu had made hard choices. As Premier of China, she'd nearly gotten her hands on Russia, America, and even Europe. Africa was still mostly in her grasp, as was vast swaths of the Middle East and larger Asia. Certainly it was more of a hegemonic grasp, an economic one, than the direct control she might have preferred, but if push came to shove, she felt certain that they would throw in with her rather than America.
America. She snorted, a sound deep in her throat that came out with perhaps more revulsion than she'd intended. A fading superpower, drunk on its nihilism, lost in its own pleasure-seeking foolishness, unsure of itself. Too terrified to be an honest empire, too decadent to break out of its impotence. It was in a death spiral, and Fen Liu was content to let it crash down. She'd seen empires rise and fall. China, through multiple dynasties. The Mongol Empire. The British.
And like a storm, she'd weathered them all. In the ones that had come in contact with her corner of the world, she'd managed to either ingratiate herself or ride their wave to its crest. She'd even managed to make herself a consort to Genghis Khan for a time. A run as the empress Wu Zetian notwithstanding, she'd been, to borrow the silly American phrase, always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Until the Chinese Communist Party.
For over seventy years now she'd been patient, and at the last party congress, that patience had finally paid off. Now she found herself in the proper chair when the music stopped. It was not the same as it had been in the days of dynasties, of empire, but then things never did stay the same for very long. They changed, and Fen Liu changed with them. That was the secret to her success. If something was not working, there was no reason to keep doing it.
And that had been the imperial system once America made its rise, and Britain began its fall.
Now it was a world of “power to the people.” But Fen Liu didn't believe in power to the people or any of that other foolishness. People were sheep, and meant to be ruled over by gods. They bumped around through their petty everyday lives, unable to orchestrate anything more than a mediocre existence. That was no way to live, and she certainly had no intention of living that way. These people needed a strong, guiding hand.
The Chinese Communist Party had provided that guiding hand. Now her hand guided the party.
Her lover shifted beside her. Wei Zhang was dark-haired, handsome, his face a mask of innocence in his sleep. Which almost made her chuckle, for he was hardly innocent while awake. He stirred beside her, making a slight groaning sound at her hand brushing his side, stroking him. His eyes fluttered, and she could see the dark irises peering at her in the low light.
“Unable to sleep again?” he asked, apparently unvexed by her waking him. Or too clever to show anger.
She turned over and laced her fingers together, placing her chin atop her hands, and her hands resting on his chest so she could admire his handsome face. “It has become an ordeal of late.”
“Too much responsibility on your shoulders.” He stretched without disturbing her hands, muscles flexing beneath her. They felt good. Warm. Pleasant. “Too many worries clouding your mind.”
“What was it Sienna Nealon called you?” She stared at him as she asked.
He shifted uncomfortably beneath her hands. He always became uncomfortable when she referenced his failure in Los Angeles. “Mr. Tac.”
“An odd sobriquet.”
“I think she was drunk a great deal of the time when we battled,” he said. “And I was clad in all black. She seemed to associate me with a member of one of their SWAT teams, with their tactical gear, and shortened it from there.”
“Strange girl,” Fen Liu said. “And a disastrous choice to be inheritor of that much power.”
Wei Zhang made a disgusted noise in his throat. “Incubi and succubi are appalling. Disgusting creatures.”
Liu found herself unable to control her smirk. “You have quite the provincial attitude.”
“Conventional attitude, you mean,” he said. “Traditional metahumans have always despised their kind, and for good reason. Who wants to see their souls imprisoned in another being solely to forward their desire for power? We move away from that tradition at our own peril – obviously.”
She flexed her fingertips, providing a very light tickle to his chest, only enough to make him jolt slightly. “That is foolishness, the attitude of the prey, not the predator. Anyone serious about power would view the succubus or incubus as the ultimate aspiration. They can gather power from their enemies easily while you or I are forced to kill ours with little other reward but their disposal.” She rolled off him, onto her back, and stared up at the ceiling, listening.
He listened, too. “The storm is raging.”
She smiled in the dark. “It is already waning, and it
“But they have the ability to do quite a bit of damage before they do,” he said, brushing fingers lightly against her belly.
She tried to decide whether she welcomed his attentions, or would shut them down. As she often did when they were not her own idea. “I will weather this storm,” she said, gently slapping his probing hand, which had found its way to cup her breast, “as I have so many others.” For soon enough, Sienna Nealon would be forced to move on to other things, other crises, and Fen Liu would wait, and Fen Liu would endure until Sienna Nealon – and the world – forgot all about her. Then she would rise again.
For that was what she did best.
CHAPTER ONE
War. What is it good for? asks famous philosopher Edwin Starr. Absolutely nothing, he postulates.
Me? I have a different answer. War has many uses. But the key I was interested in at this point?
Settling shit.
“We have another one coming in,” chirped the overly cheery voice of Sierra, stirring me where I lay on a cot in a subbasement of the White House.
I wasn't sleeping. I didn't sleep, per se. Not lately. But I did lie down, so as to avoid the angry carping of my brother and other concerned parties. “You have to sleep,” these well-meaning people would tell me.
Nah, I didn't need sleep. There was a war going on. The least-fought war in history, lately.
And I was right on the front lines.
Floating up off my cot, I let my feet touch the floor. “Where's it coming from?”
“Central China,” Sierra's slightly computer-generated version of my mother's voice came from an ear bud lately buried in my ear canal. “I'm trying to narrow it down.”
“Stay on it,” I said, the concrete bunker walls flashing past as I accelerated into a hard flight. I paused long enough to wrench the big, metal door to my storage room open, then I blurred past a half-dozen waiting parties in various states of wakefulness, snapping all of them to it in an instant.
“Holy shit,” Alannah Greene said, getting on her feet in about a quarter of a second as I shot past. Her eyes had snapped from barely open when she saw me leave my little hidey-hole. “Another one coming in?”
“Yep,” I said, and she started following me like a kite, along with a half-dozen others. Bodyguards, you might call them. Babysitters, I would have said.
“What's the point of origin?” shouted Jeremy James Wade – my nominal husband, breaking into a sprint and passing Alannah in the hall.
“Central China,” I said, coming to a stop just outside the White House Situation Room. Because we definitely had a situation.
But one did not just blast through into the White House Situation Room. Two Secret Service agents were standing outside the door, scowling. There was form. There were protocols.
And I was living my life in violation of about...oh, all of them.
“It's a war,” I said, giving the one on my right a scowl in return. The Secret Service and I had reached an uneasy accord in the three months since I'd arrived here, helping to retake the White House from Nicole Muller, and one that was about to come to an end.
Muller had connived and murdered her way into the presidency with the assistance of China, who had subverted every single member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate along the way. Mind control was used for some of it, the power of telepaths and empaths weaponized and brought to bear. Some of it was done with plain old bribery. And some didn't need much incentive at all; campaign contributions and a pat on the head sufficed.
Either way, it had left me with a hell of a mess – every single member of the legislature under arrest, the president under arrest, the VP, the cabinet – well, you get the point. China had been thorough in their efforts to capture the United States government. They'd studied our succession plan well, and gone to work with a clear eye toward making sure they'd be in power here – and no one else would be.
Which meant that, for the first time since Edith Wilson decided to go ahead and make herself President of the United States while her husband ailed in a vegetative state from which he'd never recover (couldn't happen to a nicer racist), someone – some woman – was running the country without a mandate from the people, without being elected, without even being appointed and approved by the legislature, without ever receiving a single vote.
Yeah.
That'd be me.
And I was just about done with this shit.
“Your time's about up,” John Miller, Secret Service agent, lummox, and the man currently scowling at me, said.
“And it can't happen quick enough, frankly,” I said, flashing him two middle fingers. “I told you, I'm happy to step aside as soon as the special election happens.” Which was Tuesday. It was currently Sunday. “Until then, would you like this doddering giant of a country to continue plodding along without a leader in the face of an ongoing war with the world's other superpower? Or are you gonna let me in so I can deal with the incoming?”
He didn't answer, just kept scowling. But after a moment, he reached down – with metahuman speed – and popped the door handle, opening the Situation Room for me.
“Thanks, doorman,” I said, “I appreciate the invite to VIP. I'll definitely be doing bottle service tonight, and your tip will reflect that.”
His face reddened, a vein popped out in his forehead. Miller was an officious dick. I wasn't going to miss him.
“Give me what we got,” I said, sweeping into the Situation Room and hesitating only for a moment before plunking my ass into the chair at the head of the table. A dozen monitors surrounded one main screen, with scrawls of text and pictures flashing upon them, showing the state of the world. Such as it was.
A world at war. Such as it was (the world and the war).
“I have traced the incoming to Shaanxi,” Sierra's voice piped over the loudspeakers above. My bodyguard crew filed in, filling in seats where there were some available. Because there weren't that many available.
“She's working faster than any of the rest of us,” Jamal Coleman said, his eyes blurry. He didn't look like he'd been sleeping either. Probably because he hadn't. “But there's no doing this from outside the Chinese internet.”
“How's it getting out, then?” I asked, adjusting myself in the chair usually reserved for the President of the United States. Well, I'd been availing myself of all the accoutrements of the office – at least the ones, unlike the Oval Office, that weren't presently exposed to the weather.
“Internet nodes elsewhere on the planet,” Jamal said. Sierra must have been too busy crunching data to answer. “Just like all their cyber attacks.”
And there had been oh-so-many cyber attacks. One of the major gas pipelines had been shut down after it had nearly blown up. Sewage processing for Portland had been out for six weeks. (Most of its residents hadn't noticed much difference.) Half the Eastern seaboard had spent the last month plunged into darkness mingled with lawlessness. The National Guard was hard at work restoring order – such as it was. As it turned out, when you cut the power, you cut the civilizational cord with it. And people were only a few missed meals away from barbarism.
And thanks to China's drugs, a lot of those people were now blessed with metahuman powers. Things were not going well in American cities at present.
Who was in charge of all this chaos?
Oh, right. My ass was the one plunked in the chair of the nominal president, even though I'd sworn no oath and didn't even qualify for the office.
“The message is breaking through now,” Sierra said. “It appears to be only that – a message, not a cyberattack.”
“Let it through, then, I guess,” I said, and a moment later, a face flashed onto the main screen of the Situation Room.
Fen fucking Liu.
Her skin was porcelain soft, her hair perfectly black and short, a few wrinkles giving gravitas to her smooth features. There was a flashing intelligence in her eyes, too much brainpower there to ever be counted as some dullard. She was thin, she was lithe, she was lethal, as evidenced by her attacks on America–
And on me.
There was a smoking crater in west Texas that had my great-grandmother's ashes spread all over it. That account was directly chargeable to Fen Liu.
And I was still all-in on making her pay for it.
“People of America,” she said in a soft, reasonable voice. So reasonable. So soft. “I am Fen Liu, the Premier of China, speaking to you again to once more beg you to consider peace.”
