The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution

by Michael Ivan Lowell

  Revolution was too tired and beat-up to react. He could have simply closed off his face grill, but Arbor beat him to it. Now it just grinded, trying to snap shut, titanium against titanium. “I could kill you right now. Burn you to a crisp. Turn that suit into an incinerator,” Arbor said.

  Revolution brought his remaining wrist spike up to the exposed section of Arbor's throat just beneath his chin. The big man flashed a defiant smile. They had reached a standoff. “I've never understood you,” Arbor said against the steel of the spike. “I don't know who you are. But I know one thing. I know you were a soldier. I can smell it on you. And soldiers follow orders.”

  “You're a soldier, and you took an oath to defend the Constitution,” Revolution said.

  “I took an oath to defend my country,” Arbor said. “There's a difference.”

  “Not supposed to be.”

  “You can't win this,” Arbor said. “It's time to fall in line.”

  “When tyrants rise up, some of us have to stand against them. No matter the cost.”

  Arbor laughed. “You think you’re a patriot, but you’re just another traitor,” he said.

  Revolution stiffened. He peered into Clay Arbor's eyes and spoke as deliberately as the pain raging through his body would allow. “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Then he stumbled. His knees trembled and started to give. He steadied himself against the wall.

  Arbor leered at him for a moment, taking in his weakened state. He thought about all the ways that he could finally defeat his rival. Finally show the world who was the greater of two great titans. A broad smirk spread across his face, the familiar toothy grin. The big man just shook his head and…

  Walked away.

  Revolution slid down the wall to the ground. Relief washed over his tired, aching form. He watched Clay Arbor stroll off. He wondered why he'd left him. Maybe there was good in Lithium after all. Maybe he just didn't want to win this way, without knowing he'd won on his own. Revolution tried to get back up but stumbled back into the wall. And then a crackle in his helmet startled him. “General,” the voice said, “are you there?”

  Revolution recognized the familiar voice. “Lantern!” He grunted, “Yes, I'm here.”

  “Saratoga didn't make it. And Hunley hasn’t reported.” Lantern’s voice sounded thin, strained.

  Lantern’s com was open to all of them, and Revolution heard a gasp, but no one said a word. He could feel the weight of this news hitting them. Revolution laid his head back against the concrete. The pain still surging through his body, fighting against the medication swishing through his veins. “Understood...”

  “And there's another thing. In his last message, Hunley reported an amphibian attack force, but there's nothing in the harbor and I can't see anything in the city either.”

  “Which means either he was wrong, or...” Revolution said.

  “It's cloaked from me somehow. Either way, be careful out there.”

  Revolution tried to answer him, but the pain stinging him from his arm took his breath and he could feel more drugs entering his bloodstream in response.

  “I'm ready to broadcast,” Lantern said. “Should we still do it?”

  Revolution closed his eyes, wrapping his mind around the level of the losses they had suffered this night. “Do it. Send the goddamn thing.”

  In Lake Tahoe, the TV suddenly faded to snow, and an image of Revolution appeared on the screen in front of one of Leslie's luminescent engines they’d come to call an Orb. It burned just above and behind him, forming a fiery halo. Fiona watched her former obsession with mixed emotions.

  “Mr. Chairman, we both knew this night would come. We both knew that despite your rhetoric and your facade of neutrality, you maintain your power through fear and force. When corporations become more powerful than governments, democracy dies. Corporate rule is nothing if not taxation without representation. The Freedom Council is just the ultimate expression. And tonight we're taking you down.

  “Behind me is the thing you cannot control. True renewable, nonpolluting energy for all. It is the key to our future and the end of yours.” Revolution leaned closer to the camera, and despite herself, Fiona felt familiar heartstrings stir. She knew he was turning on his charm. “In the name of the people. In the name of the true government. And in the name of the United States of America. We are The Suns of Liberty, and the Republic will rise again.”

  The image faded away just in time for Fiona and Becky to hear the screams of the Minutemen as the Man-O-War swept more of them to their deaths on-screen. The Media Corp camera crew was covering the chaos live and hadn’t noticed Revolution’s brief interruption of the coverage. Nor could they hear their producer above the roar of the machine as he screamed at them over their headsets.

  Fiona shrunk into Becky's arms. Scared, horrified. Tears ran down her cheeks. She knew why this was happening. She had caused it. She had caused it all and now innocent people were dying. People who'd had nothing to do with the betrayal or her imprisonment in the black matter. She heaved hard, heavy sobs into Becky's chest, and Becky could do nothing but stroke the girl's hair and hold her. “I know. I know,” Becky told her.

  Fiona raised her head. Her eyes blazed with energy and anger. The Council had killed her parents. The Council made her an orphan. They were the ones who put her in the hands of the Revolution, who had betrayed her. She had yet to get her revenge on him, but it was the Council that was the true enemy.

  Truthfully, Fiona felt betrayed by both sides, but on this night there was no question who the aggressor really was. Good people were dying because of actions she had taken. But they were actions started by the Council. Ten years ago. The Council had set this whole thing in motion. But she, and she alone, had the power to stop it. She lumbered off the couch, dazed, thoughts swirling in her head so fast she could hardly keep up with them. Becky was still watching the screen in horror.

  “It's going to kill them all,” Becky said. And just as she did, the Man-O-War sent another sweep of its great tendrils toward another wave of Minutemen, slicing many in half, lifting others in its terrible wake. Flinging them hundreds of yards to splatter against the steel grids of the city's skyline. Their screams permeated her living room.

  Fiona peered down at her hands, and they began to glow. Fresh tears welled in the teen's eyes. They dropped from her face, spilling brightly onto the carpet, and Becky was reminded of the day they met.

  “I have to stop it,” Fiona said, and before Becky could even react, the blinding flash came and Fiona was gone. Becky's eyes trailed back to her TV, and Fiona materialized on-screen right in front of the camera.

  For a moment, Becky forgot to breathe.

  CHAPTER 58

  Ward's unconscious body lay sprawled across the concrete of the roof. Blood had pooled near his face, running down his cheeks from a wound on his head under the flight helmet. A shadow spread over his body and stopped. Fiddler, the gang leader of the Brown Recluse, the murderer of Ward's little boy all those years ago, and now the Spider Wasp's most hated enemy, stood above him with a menacing smile on his lips. Fiddler pointed his acid harpoon at Ward's face and pulled the trigger—

  Or he was about to...

  Instead, something startled him, and he gaped upwards, eyes wide. He smiled. “Shit! Scared the hell outta me! You were right, though.” Fiddler re-aimed the acid pistol at Ward's face. “Here he is. Got the shit kicked out of him, just like you said. Easy pickins'.”

  Fiddler went to squeeze the trigger again, but this time something bright blasted his eyesight. It was white and piercing—the kind of thing one spins away from as fast as possible. Yet Fiddler was oddly compelled to look right at it. He screamed with the realization of what was about to happen to him. “No, wait, don't!”

  But it was too late. His pupils dilated grotesquely, taking up the whole of his corneas. He collapsed to the ground.

  Clay Arbor just sneered at his comatose body. “Asshole.”

  Police o
fficers rushed the roof. Arbor pointed at Fiddler. “Take that one into custody. Let's get him on camera. Downstairs, in the street.” Arbor peered back over at Paul Ward, the Spider Wasp. He saw his fingers twitch. A good sign. He hesitated a moment and then told the boys in blue, “And leave the other be.”

  As they started to turn back for the door, the young officer accompanying Arbor said, “Sir, I know it’s your call, but won’t you get in trouble for not bringing in Spider Wasp?”

  “That one?” Arbor asked with a chuckle. “That one’s just an actor.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Council does it all the time. Trust me, I know.” Arbor patted the officer on the shoulder and strolled past him. The young man followed him through the door and off the roof.

  “Why the hell would they do that?”

  “Beats me kid.” Clay Arbor was grinning ear to ear. “Beats me.”

  The others hauled Fiddler away and left Ward alone on the roof.

  Revolution moaned against the wall, in pain. His arm felt like it was trapped in burning cinders. The drugs were still trying to numb it. He thought about the one Sun he hadn't seen all night, not that that was surprising, but he wanted to know that she was still alive. “Stealth, where are you? Are you still with us?” he said into his com.

  “Yes, I'm here. Trying to find how they're controlling this thing. The mechanism is on the inside, I can tell you that. I don't think it has an external controller, but I'm still looking.”

  “Good. Get it done. Hudson, if you can hear me, get your people out of here.”

  Rachel chose her words carefully. “I don't think Hudson is able to answer.”

  Revolution closed his eyes. He wasn't thinking clearly. His mind was shrouded. Had he seen Hudson die? He tried to shake the cobwebs out. He held his head in his hands—a futile gesture for a man wrapped in titanium—and his arm sent jolts of pain ripping through him. But then he glanced up and knew he was losing his mind. Lantern was standing over him, looking right at him.

  “You're not real,” Revolution said. “I wish you were, but you're not.” He looked away and then looked back, expecting the mirage to be gone, but it was still there. Except something was wrong. Revolution's vision cleared. But still something was wrong. The drugs in his bloodstream washed the fog out of his mind, and still Lantern was not at all right. He was…Transparent.

  “Lantern?” Revolution asked.

  And that was when the Revolution’s apparition spoke back at him. “It's just a holograph. I call it my Hollow, remember, sir? You've seen it before.”

  “Oh yes,” Revolution said, his mind finally snapping into place. “Don't see how that helps right now, though...”

  The Hollow spoke directly to him with a voice as audible and clear as if Diego Alvarez were standing right in front of him. “Then let me be your eyes. Sending you an eyes-on signal right now.” The Hollow turned and floated into the sky.

  The Hollow flew straight into the Man-O-War and slipped inside it. Revolution's view screen activated, and a view from inside the Man-O-War faded to life, superimposed over his actual vision. “I'm inside. You have visual?” Lantern asked, or the Hollow asked. Somebody asked. The hell if Revolution knew where the voice was actually coming from.

  “Yes, I've got it.” The viewfinder scanned the cavernous inner dome. It was remarkably empty and simple inside. It reminded Revolution of the inside of a drone aircraft. The guidance system was near the top, but outfitted with layer after layer of redundancies and self-repairing capabilities, no doubt.

  Cables ran from that complex to the multitude of tentacles, more than fifty in all, and back down to another set of machines that were probably the redundancies for the arms. And all of it was being controlled by the pulsating engine of Fire Fly technology towering from top to bottom at the heart of the machine. It was converting everything, both inside and out, to luminescence. Meaning that even if they could get inside of the machine, none of the working parts were vulnerable to any weapon they had.

  Revolution could rip away on the thing with what remained of his whip, but he would be burned alive inside the Man-O-War before he could do any damage. The engine itself was essentially a long tube of energy. And what Revolution noticed after a moment, as the Hollow continued to scan, was that it kept pulsing red to white.

  Leslie had mentioned something about the luminescent spectrum, and the obscure memory was screaming at him, competing with the wooziness of blood loss from his tattered arm. White was the most powerful level on it, she had told him, followed by red and then the chartreuse shade of the Fire Fly herself. But Scott and Leslie had always favored the yellow-green level because it was the most stable, the most dependable. The most like the visible radiation from the sun—the source of nearly all light on Earth. White was almost too powerful. Dangerous, unstable.

  Revolution slammed his fist into the concrete as the memory and the data flooded back to him. It was like a wave hitting him. He rose with renewed vigor.

  “Stop there!” he yelled as the Hollow's eyes scanned over the energy tube again. “That's its control center. The power's pulsing off the spectrum. If we can force it to overheat, it might just rip apart.” It was clear to him. This machine may have existed for a long time, but the Council's use of bioluminescence had not. They'd only acquired the capability since Fiona's attack, and they had not had time to test the most basic element—the machine's limits. Undoubtedly because they thought nothing could stop it.

  Inside the great machine, the Hollow asked, “How do we do that?”

  And that sent reality crashing back in on the Revolution. Overheating was all theory. No way to put the theory into practice. Maybe the Council had been right. Maybe it was unstoppable. “I don't know,” he said meekly.

  “I do.”

  Revolution spun and cleared his visors to see…

  The Fire Fly.

  Floating above him, her power pulsing off of her. “Fiona!” Revolution shouted. He didn't know if he should be overjoyed or ready to die, but his voice jumped with excitement anyway. And Fiona nodded to him. Then she telescoped directly in front of the massive machine.

  CHAPTER 59

  Rachel placed the small metal cylinder on the steel panel above her head. The magnet mechanism secured to the chassis with a thunk.

  She froze.

  That had been louder than she'd intended. She was crouched below a semitrailer, and of course, she was invisible. Rachel relaxed. The sounds from State Street were drowning out any small noise she might make—and these trailers were empty of people anyway. They were essentially giant radio receivers.

  Rachel turned the cylinder's front dial and locked it in place. Then she punched two minutes into the small timer on the bottom and clicked the engage button down. Rachel scanned the empty street and, seeing no one, pulled herself out from under the trailer and strolled down Federal Street. She hauled out her RDSD and pressed a button. Underneath the semitrailer the metal cylinder's counter moved to 1:59 and began a countdown.

  Rachel pulled up a photograph of her friend John Bailey on the small device, and tears filled her eyes. She wanted to collapse. She wanted to just sit and cry for her friend. They had known each other for a decade. Both CIA, both in the secret fraternity of Agency insiders who had rebelled. She wanted to sit and cry, but she couldn't. In fact, looking at the counter ticking away at the upper right of the RDSD, she knew she had to quicken her pace. She had a job to do, so she did it.

  She spoke into her com, the emotion still quivering in her voice. “Lantern, are you there?”

  “Yes, Stealth, I'm here.”

  Rachel swept a strand of her invisible hair out of her invisible face and stiffened her invisible spine. The confidence returned to her voice, and in the strange psyche that is Rachel Dodge, so did the little girl's voice.

  “Let me describe what you are going to do for me.” Across the com, Revolution and Lantern could hear the jumpy staccato of her voice, like she was moving fast. In fact, s
he was running. She kept her eye on the timer as she trotted with urgency down Federal Street toward State. “I'm a girl that really likes massages. Hot oil, mind you, not lotion. Got that, Lantern?” She looked back to gauge her distance.

  “Uh...Stealth, what?”

  “Of course, massages are done in the nude. I just can’t wait to see the equipment you have under that helmet of yours.”

  Lantern lay flat on his back in a small grassy patch of the giant dusty clearing, trying not to think about the pain screaming from his leg. He'd broken it in at least two places that he could tell. “General, this is highly inappropriate.”

  On Federal Street, this brought a smile to Rachel's face. She'd always gotten underneath that man's beautiful skin. If she couldn't get under those tight pants of his, this was the next best thing. She heard Revolution intervene. “Yes, Stealth, is there a point coming?”

  “Well, Lantern will have a point when he gives me that massage, but yeah. I'd say you boys owe me big-time. Ask L to pinpoint the signal on those MagCharges you gave me.”

  MagCharges were the small metal cylinders Rachel had placed on the semis. Three of them on three semis parked conspicuously up Federal Street, one after the other. They sent out traceable signals—if you knew their encoded frequency. They could be programmed with great flexibility, making them very hard for anyone not having the code to detect.

  Of course, they were also powerful explosives. Revolution had given Rachel four of them to use on tanks or other heavy artillery. She'd found a better use for them.

  “Go ahead, Lantern,” Revolution said.

  Inside his helmet, Lantern scanned the State Street area and found their signal. “Got it. I have three of them lined up on Federal Street. Just a few blocks from your location,” he said to the Revolution.

  “Three...two...one...” Rachel smiled and crouched on the sidewalk, ducking behind a large concrete pillar. She had reached the intersection of Federal and High Streets. Behind her…