He shot through the sky.
The Chrysler was on him now. A mere fifteen feet away. One idea came to mind.
He fired his i-hook above him and toward the Chrysler’s steel spire. The cable looped around it with five separating fingers, each attaching themselves with magnetized microfibers.
The cable snapped taut. The force of it jerked the Revolution off his flight path and up toward the building’s metal skin. He let out a bit more slack and angled his body again to let the wind catch his cloak. Slowly, he pulled in the i-hook’s slack. This had the desired effect of reeling him around the tower at the same time that it began to slow his speed.
Spinning, spinning, until—
The cable ran out.
He slammed into the side of the building with a clang. Even with his reduced speed the impact took the air from his lungs, and he nearly forgot to employ the last of his hastily developed plan.
He began to slide.
Vertigo gripped him.
He sent a command to magnetize the outer skin of his armor just before he lost his wits, and all at once—he stopped. He was safe. Now if he could just breathe again.
Lantern was flying like a bat out of hell. The Sikorsky Stealthhawk-1 chopper shot across the Manhattan skyline making almost no sound. Blocked completely from every radar system in the world.
Except his own, of course.
He’d programmed the Sikorsky’s heading to the Chrysler Building and maxed out the throttle speed. The autopilot was doing the rest. Bailey’s little toy was a godsend. He just hoped he could reach the General in time.
The Chrysler Building came into view.
Next, he saw the Revolution hurtling toward it, unconscious and out of control. The jet engine of the absorbed bomb blast finally running its course, falling silent.
As Lantern watched, Revolution righted himself, his cape snapped rigid, and he was gliding. Lantern waited and nearly called to him on the com, but at that very moment the question he was about to ask was answered when he saw Revolution’s i-hook shoot out from his wrist.
Lantern breathed a deep sigh of relief, but he had no time to waste. He typed a new coordinate into the Sikorsky: straight up.
The Sikorsky lurched and Lantern was tossed in his seat, straining against his harness. Pain shot through his injured leg. What the hell was the bird doing?
The helicopter slowed and for a second Lantern thought he’d put in the wrong code and that the whole thing was going to stall.
Actually, the autopilot was doing its best not to stall. The Sikorsky began a gradual shift to a dramatic vertical lift. It was like throwing a car into reverse. What Bailey would have called an effective translational lift. Unfortunately, it was not as fast as Lantern had hoped.
It still took his stomach.
Somewhere above him, Sophia was climbing at a rate Lantern would never be able to catch. He realized that there was nothing he could do to save Helius directly. His throat tightened at the thought, but he quickly recovered. He’d have to send the Hollow and hope for the best. The Hollow launched skyward at his command, scanning the digi-sphere for Sophia’s signal.
Lantern ran a separate scan of the sky trying to find Ward—and did.
He locked in on his moving coordinates.
A few seconds more and he had an algorithm that compensated for Ward’s rise into the atmosphere.
He punched the numbers into the Sikorsky and hoped the autopilot would understand.
It did. The rotors whirred to life to compensate, pitching the copter forward to catch up with Ward.
It only took a few moments and Stealthhawk-1 came level with Ward, still closing on his position. Lantern put it back into a vertical rise and locked the Sikorsky onto Ward’s airspeed. The bird zoomed up to catch him. Ward was about one hundred yards in front of him now. He could see him shooting up into the heavens. Midnight-blue suit, brilliant orange wings—all just a blur. The Sikorsky caught up to him and locked on to his airspeed, matching him pace for pace.
He manually edged the copter closer to him, watching a readout of distance to target: eighty yards. Seventy, sixty, fifty, forty yards. That was close enough.
Less than half a football field’s distance from one another, rising into the thin upper atmosphere together.
Lantern looked through the cockpit window into the sky above, and he could begin to see the blackness of space.
It was now or never.
He unlatched his harness and leaped out of his seat, hobbling on his still healing broken leg, stiff from sitting for so long. He snatched up a parachute and strapped it onto his dark-brown leather-clad back—just in case. He darted over to the equipment crate just behind the copilot’s seat and ripped open the top, grabbing up two i-hook gun-belts, and trying not to think too much about what he was committing himself to.
He’d had crazier plans. Hadn’t he?
He snapped the belt around his waist. The intelli-hook gun-belt was simply a gun that fired an i-hook attached to one hundred meters of cable. The gun was itself attached to the belt by about a meter of cable. Then Lantern strapped a second gun-belt onto his belly above the first belt. It was an awkward thing to wear. They were both heavy and bulky and weighing him down. But it was all he could think to do.
He stepped back into the Sikorsky’s bay, pressed the button, and the bay door slid open. The wind rushed in hard. He snatched up the side webbing at the door just to avoid being thrown back into the copter, or worse, out the bay door. His leg screamed in pain as he braced himself. This was going to be harder than he thought.
Lantern stared down at the landing skids and said a small, silent prayer. He unholstered the i-hook gun from the belt high on his waist, aimed the gun at the skid, and fired. The hook wrapped around the metal and locked on. An unbreakable magnetized microfiber magnetic hold.
Lantern leapt from the copter out into the wide-open sky.
Falling. The cord on the gun unspooled a good fifty feet, until he was safely away from both sets of rotors. He jammed the trigger down again and the cable jolted to a stop. His body jolted too, and once again his leg sent bolts of electric pain riveting through his body. Lantern cried out in agony. He could already feel his arms trembling from the strain of it all. And he hadn’t even gotten to the hard part.
He was now dangling from a rapidly ascending helicopter traveling into the lower stratosphere. The wind pounding him was tremendous. He could barely breathe. Each intake of air seemed to get ripped out of his lungs the second he breathed it. Ice stabbed his nostrils. And each second sent another bolt of pain down through his tormented leg. His body wanted to spin like a top, and he had to fight to stay still. He had to do this fast.
He pulled out the second i-hook gun from the belt low on his waist, aimed it at Ward, and fired.
The shot wasn’t even close.
The force of the wind sent the cable spiraling downward, far too low, missing Ward by a mile. Quickly he hit the trigger again and the cable snapped back up at him. The tremendous wind whipped it back in a blur. He lunged away just as the steel cable zoomed past his head, missing it by centimeters. He let out a breath, but the cable shot back again with fantastic speed—aiming for his face. His black helmet would provide no protection. The cable would slice straight through. He lunged backwards just as the i-hook cable zipped by him and jammed into the firing chamber. Another inch and the line might have sliced off his face.
Note to self: under these conditions, recoiling an i-hook equals bad idea!
He fired again. This time he aimed well above Ward, trying his best to take into consideration the rate of rise and the force of the wind battering the cable. He was a man of calculation and precision. He could do this!
He missed again.
Much closer, but the shot still fell below Ward, missing him by a good ten feet. Lantern reached down to press the button to unlatch the gun from the belt, to let the i-hook just fall to the Earth, no longer able to stop Ward from rising to certain death.
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But just before his finger came down on the button, he heard a smack! And snapped his head up to see...
I-hooks get their name from the microprocessors that are attached to nearly every part of the “hook” and cable. In most cases they can instantly scan an area and anticipate the target surface before they reach it and adjust how they attach themselves.
With nothing else in the range of the shot, the hook’s A.I. found what Lantern was aiming for.
A single strand of the cable shot upwards and latched itself onto the boot of Ward’s suit with a slap. It barely made contact, but it was just enough. The rest of the cable glopped onto that single strand and inch-walked its way up to Ward’s leg, wrapping around it.
Lantern retracted the slack from the second gun, now coiled around Ward’s leg, while at the same time releasing the first gun’s hold on the helicopter’s landing skid. The cable from the skid spooled out of the gun, effectively letting the second i-hook pull him across the wind-blasted forty yards—straight to Ward. Lantern reached out, grabbed his friend, pulled him close, and released the trigger on the i-hook.
The slack from the skid snapped taut again.
Lantern took a moment to just close his eyes and breathe. His leg was burning with a pain he couldn’t even describe. He opened his eyes and peered out at the storm clouds of Hurricane Ana. Dark and roiling on the horizon. He was not letting any bad omens beat him today. He didn’t care how ominous they looked from a distance.
Ward was still out. But he was breathing. Lantern adjusted his hold on the unconscious professor, grabbing him as tightly as he could. Inside his helmet, Lantern took over Ward’s system and shut down his wings.
Next, Lantern hit the recoil button on the first gun, and the cable coiled back into the shooting chamber, pulling him and Ward across the sky and right up onto the Sikorsky’s landing skids. With all his might, Lantern pushed Ward’s limp body up into the chopper’s bay and then pulled himself in as well, all the time fighting the enormous drag of the wind. It took everything he had.
The two Suns piled onto each other, and Lantern reached up with his last ounce of strength and jammed the auto-close button of the bay door—and the door slammed shut. He rolled off Ward, let out a howl of pain and exhaustion...and passed out.
With no one to guide it, the Sikorsky roared toward the deadly edge of space.
CHAPTER 18
Lantern woke with a start. He leaped to his feet. Panic gripped him. The cockpit was dark as night.
Scrambling back into the cockpit, he peered into the heavens. Literally. The black of space was everywhere now. An alarm on the dash began screaming—signaling that the aircraft would stall if it rose any higher.
Lantern plunged back into the pilot’s seat and programmed a controlled dive. The Sikorsky lurched and rolled and the nose pointed toward the Earth. He felt his stomach crawl into his throat as the bird dove toward the ground. He re-buckled his harness to keep from falling into the cockpit windshield and heard Ward’s body slide and thump back in the bay. He felt a rush of guilt for not securing him to something. But there had simply been no time.
And then he thought of Helius. An electric shock of fear raced through him.
The Hollow!
In his haste to rescue Ward he’d never even tuned into the Hollow’s feed. And he dreaded what he might see. Was she even still alive? In his helmet, he scanned the sky for Sophia and the Hollow. Finally he found her. The H3 energy had enveloped her like a cocoon. A bright-blue comet streaking toward heaven. A small black figure wrapped inside. She was seconds from the edge. Ninety thousand feet above the Earth, blasting through the stratosphere. Far above where he could take the Sikorsky. The pressure, the thin air, and the frigid temps might have already killed her for all he knew. At that height, the air could literally boil human blood. Her suit was tough, but not built for this. Could it handle it?
The Hollow was flying right beside her, waiting for instructions.
She was too close to the edge of the atmosphere to use the suit’s auto-directional controls like he had before. Lantern might well fly her right out of the atmosphere. Any miscalculation on his part could kill her. If she wasn’t already dead.
He peered about trying to think of something he could do. There had to be something here that would give him an idea. His eyes scanned past the missile launch buttons.
No. That was crazy.
It had worked once before, though.
He recalled warning the others of the coming invasion from Boston Harbor by sending a digital message through the heat-seeking signal of a missile, three months prior.
This time he wouldn’t have that option. Sophia was unconscious.
He could detonate one of the Sikorsky’s Hellfire missiles in the upper atmosphere and hope the concussive wave would jolt her awake. But it might not work at all, and then he would be out of time.
The easiest thing was for the Hollow to simply shut down her thrusters. The problem with that was that any heat shield and pressure bubble the propulsors might be providing her—possibly keeping her alive in the frigid temps, thin air, and crushing pressure of the upper atmosphere—would shut down as well.
He was out of options. At least shutting her down would stop her from blasting through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere, past the hellish thermosphere, and out into the lethal vacuum of space.
He sent the command to the Hollow.
Sophia’s thrusters sputtered, then fell silent. And she began to slow.
But the edge of the atmosphere was closing fast.
Closer.
Closer.
Gravity did its thing not a second too soon, and she began plummeting back down toward the Earth. Flipping and flopping. Out of control.
Now Lantern’s challenge was to stop her from killing herself in the fall. At this height, she might well break the sound barrier—not a problem in and of itself. Kind of cool actually. But without conscious control of her limbs, she might well break something else—her neck in the free fall. Or she could lock into a flat spin, head over feet, with all her blood pooling in her extremities. Blood on the brain, blindness, or exploding eyeballs could be the result, all likely ending in her death.
Not cool. Not cool at all.
As an astronaut, Sophia was well aware of all these risks, but how well she had built her suit to compensate for them, he had no idea.
It was then that Lantern finally caught a break.
Sophia opened her eyes.
The world came back to her spinning and violent. As she remembered the bomb blast, adrenaline shot through her body. The boot-jets ignited and she launched herself skyward.
Only she was already in the sky.
She’d expected to see the pavement, rising fast. But instead she saw New York State laid out below her.
And it fooled her.
She’d mistaken the blurry landscape for far-off skyscrapers. A second later she realized her mistake—and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Her suit was icy and her face was numb, but other than a pounding headache, she seemed healthy.
“General? Lantern? Anybody? Are you out there?” she asked over the com.
“Gracias a Dios,” Lantern said back solemnly. “I’m behind you, two o’clock.”
Lantern and Sophia met halfway, and he opened the bay doors for her so that she could fly straight in. Once inside, she tended to Ward, who had finally regained consciousness, and tried her best to thaw out.
“That was a blast, huh?” Ward said weakly. Sophia groaned at his joke. “I miss anything important?”
Lantern considered killing him, but of course, said nothing. They had more important work ahead of them anyway.
They’d still not heard from the Revolution.
That’s because atop the spire of the Chrysler Building, Revolution’s com had gone out. The blast must have damaged it. Regardless, there was little he could do but wait.
Even if he climbed down—which the variable magnetic properties of his ar
mor would allow him to do—he would have nowhere to go. Council Guard would be everywhere, just waiting to confront him. So he stayed in place and watched the horizon.
Finally, he saw them. A small black dot growing larger. There was no sound. Even when he focused the parabolic microphones on the Sikorsky, there was nothing.
Revolution climbed up the spire halfway to allow Lantern to see him, his bold blue armor glimmering in the sunlight, his red cloak billowing in the wind.
It was unnecessary. Lantern had never lost track of his location in the digi-sphere. So he’d known where he was, just not how he was.
The Sikorsky hovered up next to him as close as it could get.
“Hey, mighty Kong, you wanna ride?” Ward asked.
The man in the metal leaped into the aircraft’s bay.
“Can you see Stealth?” Revolution asked once he was in the cockpit.
“I can’t see anything. They’re blocking me completely,” Lantern growled.
Revolution gazed at his group. They were all beat up and exhausted. They were in no shape for another round. But they couldn’t leave Rachel behind. Not without a fight, anyway.
“All right then. We go straight in and find her. We stay together and we kill anything that gets in our way.” He looked at Ward “Or put it to sleep, if we can.”
Lantern banked the Sikorsky back toward Freedom Rise, and at that very moment his jaw dropped. “God help us.”
CHAPTER 19
Swarming out of the top of Freedom Rise from a massive door that had been concealed near the top of its majestic spire were dozens of the pterodactyl drones. Twenty-five, fifty, one hundred—zoomed out from the spire. They circled the building, creating a protective zone.
“Uh Rev, what do you suggest we do about that?” Ward said.
“How many Disabling Darts do you have left?” Revolution asked him.
“Less than fifty,” Ward said.
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