Finally, he slowed to a stop. Small lights on his suit illuminated the water around him. He pulled out the RDSD again, and a faint blip appeared on its small screen. Hollis adjusted his visor so that his field of vision grew narrower but elongated. He spied deeper into the water. He could see five hundred yards into the digitally lit dark. He searched for the source of the signal. He found nothing.
PHASE TWO: REESTABLISH HEADQUARTERS
“It’s clear.” Rachel sounded sure.
The team had descended on the complex of buildings in the middle of what locals called “The Old War Zone.” It was a part of Boston where an organized resistance had been crushed by military and Council Guard troops during the last days of the Purge. Now it looked like a dusty, ruined ghost town. Revolution, Ward, Sophia, and Rachel led a team consisting of Hudson and some twenty-odd Minutemen—fifteen men and seven women, clad in dark brown pants, navy-blue shirts, and coats—into a dark hallway of a massive brick building that had been chosen as the new HQ. Rachel was glued to her RDSD.
The evacuation team had relocated the Fire Fly chamber to this site on the night of Fiona’s attack. Moving the chamber had been a colossal undertaking, pulled off just before the authorities had arrived at the old HQ to investigate the fire. Sophia had supervised the move and provided cover from the air. Lantern had monitored the location ever since.
On this night they had loaded themselves into SUVs and headed down to the site, carrying with them a large stash of arms to charge with luminescence. The luminized weapons would give them an advantage the Council troops could not match. If an invasion was indeed coming, they wanted to be as ready as they could be.
Halfway there, Lantern had shot them a message that he had lost communication with the advance team: a group of five engineers who had gone in to handle the preliminary setup of the chamber and boot up power in the old building. There was no indication of any movement around the site, Lantern had told them, so he had guessed that the Council was simply blocking signals in the area. Council locators might have detected some activity, he’d said, but Lantern doubted they had any details. Lantern was bouncing the signals off so many satellites that any data the Council intercepted would just look like small beacons put off by individual users pirating unregistered bandwidth. Nothing that they would bother with.
The local Council had been trying to track the individual members of the insurgency ever since Fiona destroyed the old HQ. At worst they’d think they’d found a Resistance member trying to get back in contact.
Still, Revolution wanted to take no chances. He, Rachel, Ward, and the Minutemen were not enough firepower. He told Sophia to fly in and meet them at the site, which she did. In fact, despite their head start, she beat them there.
The building was old, dank, and musty. Perfect, Revolution thought. He palmed an RDSD and flicked it on. The operation was of such importance and secrecy that Lantern had insisted on RDSD signals only. For reasons Revolution didn’t begin to understand, the device gave Lantern the best degree of control. Sending the feed to their HUDs or creating a digi-sphere cube was evidently just too risky with Council lurking around.
Once inside on the ground floor, Minutemen took to the stairs, climbing and descending into the dark building. The power was still out. What has the advance team been doing all this time? Revolution wondered. They fanned out across the structure.
“Let’s find those engineers first and make sure they’re okay,” Revolution told them.
Revolution glared down at his RDSD for a moment and frowned inside his helmet. “It's not working.” Rachel studied her screen. Same issue.
Across the building, all the Minutemen had the same problem. Each of the ten teams of two had a device. All ten were malfunctioning.
Hudson said into his wrist-com, “Sir, what does this mean? Should we continue?”
Revolution looked to Rachel for confirmation. She knew more about RDSD readings than anyone other than Lantern. Rachel nodded and shrugged. “Affirmative, but keep your eyes open,” he told him. The area had been rigged to interfere with locators, that much was now clear. Probably this whole neighborhood had been. Digital blocking signals swept invisibly through the air and the ground. Designed specifically to block RDSD-type signals. This meant the Council was doing more than just watching the area. And that meant danger.
Hollis had zipped out to sea. Several miles. Deep water. He stared at his own RDSD. A broad smile spread across his face. He'd found them. Of course, this was good news and it was bad news...
What he saw on his screen was both scary and fortunate. It was moving fast and gave off the strangest signal Hollis had ever seen. He typed a message to Lantern in the RDSD's small keyboard—not easy to do in a wet suit and with bulky gloves while kicking for buoyancy. So he adjusted his thrusters so that he could match the flow of the current around him. This allowed Hollis to simply float in place. He finished the message, put the RDSD away, brought his body vertical to the seafloor far below, and fired his thrusters full power, rocketing deeper into the black.
PHASE THREE: ACTIVATE THE MINUTEMEN
Lantern and Bailey sat on their Harley-Davidson Vision 5000 motorcycles in the shadows of the Old North Church on an empty, curfewed State Street. They were powerful but small machines. All pipe and seat, hard angles in the metal. Lantern had on his full gear, his helmet barking an entire universe of data to him from multiple sources, including his immediate surroundings; Hollis under the water; Revolution and the rest of the Suns in the War Zone; and a dozen other major readings. Bailey was there mostly for protection, but he was also in charge.
The Council had activated their own version of a digi-sphere cube over all of Boston. It was much weaker, less precise, and far more glitchy than Lantern's, but it nonetheless meant the Suns had to do things a certain way in order for Lantern to keep them hidden. And activating the Minutemen had to be done by hand, as Bailey had put it when Lantern had explained it to him. Suddenly, all of Lantern's attention was drawn to Hunley's feed. A message typed across it.
“Good work, Hunley,” Lantern said out loud.
“What is it, L?” Bailey gave nearly everyone a nickname: “L” for Lantern, “Wings” for Ward, “Rach” for Rachel, “Blue” for Sophia, and it was rumored he was the guy that had named Hollis “Hunley” and called the Revolution “the General” for the first time. Even for a straight shooter like Lantern, he just took it in stride.
“Amphibian attack force, sir. On its way. Time to warn the others.” Lantern sent the signal to the Revolution, but instantly it bounced back. He tried again. “Something's blocking me.” Bailey swung off the bike and strolled over toward him.
“I can’t reach the General without trying to break through the firewall. The Council’s serious about keeping out all signals from the War Zone,” Lantern told him after a moment.
“Well, if we’ve got that coming toward us”—meaning the amphibians—“we can't wait,” said Bailey. “You'll just have to keep trying. You can walk and chew gum at the same time, right?” Bailey smiled as he strapped on the helmet he'd been holding and straddled the bike. It hadn’t been a question.
They gunned the 5000s down State Street.
Lantern and Bailey hit West Broadway in minutes, flying near top speed. Lantern jammed a button on the bike's angular front chassis, and a communicator shot out beams of light into targeted structures along the street. They were millisecond microbursts, just enough of a signal to do the trick. The beam could travel miles. But Lantern took no chances; he and Bailey would hit only homes that were in line of sight, minimizing the chances that the signals could activate any early warning systems the Council might have planted.
Inside Donald and Cynthia Caper's house, the ray of light beamed through the wall like it wasn't there. It struck a small device placed near the window. The device beeped to life. Father and daughter lumbered into the room and shut it off. They grabbed up weapons and headed for the door. A clock above the door read midnight. The two loo
ked into each other's eyes and stepped out into the cold Boston wind. Lantern and Bailey were already miles away.
Ward was uneasy. He couldn't help but notice the cell numbers accompanying the small rooms they were passing by. It had become very clear to him what this building had been used for in the past. “Have I mentioned how stoked I am to be back in another prison?”
Revolution's snowy locator screen began to clear up. He stopped at the end of the hall, a large door in front of them, and Rachel peered over at the device. On the other side of the door the scan showed the large, open cavern of the main cell house where the general prison population would have been held. In the center was a bridge that spanned the entire room. On either side were walkways that ran past the cells. Floor to ceiling, there were seven stories of cells.
“Looks clear,” Revolution said to Rachel. Revolution swung open the big door to a large, cavernous void of black. Revolution and Rachel shared a glance. At first they saw and heard nothing but black and the echo of the door. The room smelled of metal and plastic.
More echoes.
And then they saw the smoke as their eyes adjusted. Or was it fog? “Go to night vision,” Revolution barked. They did, and visibility actually worsened. They scanned every spectrum view Lantern had loaded into their visors, but nothing worked. Even with the pure digital scan from the RDSD, all they picked up was the fog—this time in virtual bits, like so much snow on a TV screen.
“What the hell is this?” Sophia asked.
“I have no idea,” Rachel said.
“Isn’t this supposed to be your area of expertise?” Sophia shot back at Rachel.
“Don’t start with me,” Rachel said through clenched teeth.
Kendrick Ray knew. In fact, it was X-Ray’s newest toy. A nano-fog that carried small digital signals within each particle capable of blocking every known visual signal. The human eye couldn’t see through it, but neither could any other kind of eye.
“What the hell is that?” Revolution asked. Something was emerging into view in the small screen of the RDSD. Something huge.
Rachel stared at her RDSD, completely transfixed by what she saw. The large signal began to split and multiply. The five engineers. But then she noticed something else. “That can't be right. That's way too many signals.” She adjusted the reading every way she knew, and then, finally, it cleared up. She froze in horror. “Shit!” She stared up at Revolution, fear in her eyes. “We're not alone.”
Across the large void, a group with lights was coming toward them. They could see them now because the fog was lifting. Rachel recognized the energy signature immediately.
Oh fuck. “It’s Lithium,” she said.
CHAPTER 53
They were now halfway across the bridge that hung in the center of the open-air, multilayered cell house of the prison. Above them and below them, doors from the stairwells began to open. Council Guardsmen streamed out.
Three floors above and three floors below, seven in total. The Suns were on the middle, fourth floor. Council Guard fanned out on the second and sixth floors, weapons trained on the Suns.
They were trapped. Surrounded in three dimensions.
“We can end this right now. No one has to die,” Clay Arbor shouted at them. “If you stop right now, you can avoid what’s coming. You can avoid a war.”
“Just tell us where our people are,” Revolution said in a tight, low, controlled voice. His HUD switched to night vision, and he could see it all as bright as day.
Arbor tried again. “Join us. I can offer you immunity. I’ll tell them you’re not a threat. That you’re on our side now. You’re little team is impressive, sweetheart, but look around you. Do you really want this, day after day? Surrounded on all sides? Never knowing where to turn?”
“Where are my people?” Revolution demanded again, anger in his voice.
Arbor snorted a laugh. “Oh, they’re all right, sweetheart. Don’t you worry about them. I’d worry about myself, I were you.” As Arbor spoke, the Guards cocked their weapons, and the sound reverberated across the cavernous room. This had all been planned.
And just as Arbor was about to ask them to surrender, more doors opened and out spilled the Minutemen. Their entrance had been delayed by their more thorough check of the building. Now they entered like commandos, taking up positions, aiming their weapons. The winding hallways of the old prison were such that teams from each side, Minutemen and Guards, ended up on both ends of the cell house, despite the fact they had started at opposite sides of the building. Minutemen on the odd levels, the Council Guard on the even floors.
On each RDSD, Minutemen showed up as blue figures, Council Guard as red. The enemies stood above and below in the pitch black. Directly in front of the Suns were Arbor, X-Ray, and the small band of Guards they had with them. They could all see each other on their RDSDs and in the ghostly green of night vision. They’d walked right into a mutual trap. Clay Arbor’s eyes widened when he saw the Minutemen, and he took one step back.
Ward was freaking out. “Above us, below us! Everywhere!” he whispered, the fear vibrating his voice.
“Stay calm,” Revolution whispered back.
Both sides fanned out across the cell house, weapons drawn. Rifle laser sights streaking across the dark, crossing and blending. Enemies everywhere. Somehow the Council had set them up, but Revolution also had the feeling that they had not known how many Minutemen were along for the ride. Both sides had tricked the other. Still, the Council's ability to conceal its operations from Lantern was growing. And that was troubling.
“Jesus Christ, this is insane! We're all sitting ducks!” Ward whispered.
Revolution positioned himself in front of his team. Ward could take a rifle blast unless it hit him in the face, Sophia could take a few too, but her neck was exposed, and Rachel had no protection. “Just stay calm—Helius, don't!” Sophia put her arms down. One more second and she would have ignited her bracelets. “No provocations,” he said.
Above and below, the Minutemen, missing years of training, spun and aimed at phantoms in the dark. At laser-scope lights lancing through the black. At any and everything, because it all felt like a threat. It all felt like it could kill you right now. The only way to see the enemy was to look at an RDSD, but that meant taking your eyes off of the scope lights and where they were aiming. The fear-drenched Minutemen raised and lowered their weapons in panic, not knowing where to aim, who might shoot, from which direction death might burst.
It was madness.
“If you don’t want a war, you’d better turn back now!” Arbor said.
Revolution’s mind was reeling. Arbor was right about one thing. A firefight at this close of range, in this small of a space, with all these guns, would be a bloodbath. He needed to find a way out of this. Otherwise, death awaited them all.
And then it happened. From somewhere among the ranks of the nerve-addled Minutemen...
A single shot.
It came up from the lower levels. The scariest place to be. The red-hot metal zinged off the steel of the banister one level below the Suns and ricocheted its way up. It all happened so fast and with so many distractions that no one, other than the shooter, knew who had fired. The only thing anyone knew was the only thing they all felt in common:
They were all under attack.
The black was engulfed in daylight as all forty-plus rifles opened fire.
“Hudson, get your men out!” Revolution said into his com. There was no response. Cutting through the black like a meteor shower, the volley of gunfire consumed the open space. Bullets rained from everywhere, up and down, below, behind. Everywhere.
Arbor and X-Ray watched the mêlée. Arbor motioned to his companions, and they backed out toward the door on their side. Arbor fired his flamethrower into the level above him as Minutemen took aim at his chest. Bullets clanged off everything they touched that wasn’t flesh. And then the unthinkable happened...
A glowing bullet fired from the rifle of a Council G
uardsman zipped past Revolution’s head. It had come from below and to his right. He spun to see it rip through a Minuteman a floor above him. A huge hole, illuminated by the impact, opened up in the man’s chest, and he fell. Somersaulting over the banister into the black.
A wave of laser projectiles blasted at the Suns from two floors below them and to their right. The luminescent bullets sliced through everything: concrete, steel, flesh. The Revolution watched them zing past him in horror. Even his suit would be little protection. For now, at least, the Guards seemed focused on taking out the Minutemen. This gave them a small chance to escape, but only at the expense of the lives of the Minutemen. Instinctively, he moved back toward the hallway from which they had entered the cell house, but Sophia balked.
“We have to go forward! The chamber is forward!” she yelled.
Revolution knew she was right. Getting to the chamber was more important than ever now that the Council had these weapons. The problem was that the door on the other end was still twice as far away from them as the door they had come through.
“How the hell did they get those?” Ward yelled, meaning the bullets. None of them knew the answer.
“All right. We go forward,” Revolution said. Just as the body of another Minuteman plummeted past them from an upper floor. Revolution looked at Rachel. “Stay behind me,” he told her. “Helius,” he said, turning to Sophia, “give us cover from the left!”
“Hell yes,” she said, and let loose a blistering barrage of energy blasts at the Council Guard to their left.
“Stay between us,” Revolution said to Ward and Rachel. They stepped behind him just as a hail of bullets rained down. Revolution could feel bullets pinging off his armor. Every impact sent a familiar jolt of pain through him. They were high-powered rounds, like those from the X-1s. The painkillers began swimming in his bloodstream. And then one of the luminescent shells zinged past his face. Illuminating his armor in the dark. Too close.
The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution Page 26