Sophia gazed out at the horizon and saw them converging on the target landing spot: the closed down interstate.
“Landing now,” she said.
“Keep thinning the ranks,” he said. “I’m going in to rescue COR.”
Revolution charged the Guards, firing the cylinder grenades right, left, and straight ahead. All they could do was try to dodge them. His speed increased: forty mph, forty-five mph, fifty mph, scrolled across his visor. And then he was in the thick of the crowd. The grenades had done all they could, now it was just about brute strength. And the armor gave him plenty. He was like a bull in Pamplona charging into a crowd of children.
They never stood a chance.
Bodies flung left and right. Revolution mused to himself that Arbor had set up these Guards as mere fodder. Probably hoping to wear the Suns down before they all had to face his big guns. Revolution just hoped that whatever secret defenses Bailey had built in to the Hall would kick in fast and be just as effective as his message had promised.
Finally, he reached the edge of the compound, having left a trail of broken Guardsmen behind him. A thin tree line separated him from the building itself. He stepped into the foliage...
...and saw movement in his peripheral vision. A new squadron of Guards rounding the corner of the building from behind, weapons drawn and clearly gunning for him.
“Fire!” a voice shouted.
The voice came from above him, and Revolution peered up to see the face of Clay Arbor in his Lithium armor grinning ear to ear.
Revolution stopped. A jolt of terror shot through him as the new squadron opened fire with luminescent rounds. They streaked by him as he dove for cover in the tree line. The glowing projectiles zoomed overhead as they loosed another round. But Revolution kept moving. He rolled and spun and leaped back to his feet. There was not much other choice than to confront the Guardsman. If he fled they could just pick him off, so he charged them.
The Minutemen, camped out on the street behind him, opened fire, trying to provide cover. The volley of fire they received back from the Guards’ laser-rifles ripped through anything they were taking cover behind. There was no cover.
Revolution heard the cries of dying men and women and knew the Minutemen could not last long against this kind of power.
Instantly, another round of fire came his way, and he did his best to dodge it, but a round pierced his shoulder—a glancing blow, but it sliced clear through—through TO-4 armor, through flesh, through bone. Another round caught the edge of his inner thigh, again ripping right through. Burning pain shot through his body, and he could instantly feel the painkillers swim into his bloodstream in response.
And to his utter horror, Revolution saw the Guards aim their rifles again, this time with no obstacles in their way, and too much of a distance between them and himself for the Revolution to have any hope of stopping them.
He knew this had been going all too well. He’d let himself get overconfident and now he was going to pay for that mistake with his life. He winced, braced for the shot, as the men pulled their triggers. They had stopped, planted their feet. The shots were aimed right at his head and—
A massive beam of blue energy shoomed from the sky, shaking the Earth with its ferocious power, and wiped the Guards out of existence.
Sophia.
The Guards in the front were just vaporized; the ones she had missed dove for cover. Revolution watched as she arced up into the sky and dove back at them for a second pass. They raised their rifles and fired, but Sophia was far too fast. She dodged them and let loose another deadly beam. The Guardsmen scattered, and by the time they finished hitting the ground, Sophia had swooped down and took out the rest.
CHAPTER 42
Michael Crustac opened his eyes. He had no idea where he was.
It was a small room. No windows. He wanted to turn, to see more of the room. He fought the machine he was attached to. But doing so required constant effort. Like trying to grab something in a dream, it remained just out of reach.
And then he heard the voice again. Much louder, much clearer.
“Michael,” the woman’s voice called. “Michael!”
The voice was coming from behind him. The direction he wanted to turn. Finally, he found a rush of will and the machine turned.
His jaw dropped. Or at least he felt like it should have. His muscles failed to respond.
Peering down he saw Fiona Fletcher. Unconscious and strapped to a hospital bed. She was dressed in a patient’s gown and tubes were attached to her arms, pumping anesthesia into her veins to keep her unconscious.
Instantly it hit him. The voice. It was hers. Fiona Fletcher had been calling to him! Some part of him must have known it because he had teleported to her. And it had nearly killed him to do so. “F-F-Fiona?” he called out, fighting the control the Krill programming had over his mind.
“Why did you do it?” Fiona’s voice asked.
He knew what she meant. The Krill program ordered him to resist this line of questioning. You need to get back to the Hall of Chambers. You need to eliminate the Philadelphia Police Commissioner, the program told him in his mind.
“No!” Crustac screamed. “I won’t do it!”
Crustac’s mind swam back to his previous life. The memories kept flooding back. His days as an Army Ranger. His rise through the ranks. His selection into the leadership of the Council Guard. He remembered the drone, the hurricane, his near death.
“Michael!” Fiona’s voice called to him again.
Crustac felt his strength return, his willpower revive. He stepped over to Fiona’s bedside.
“F-Fiona. You...must stop them. They will...kill...everyone.” Crustac shook his head. More control coming back. “They’ve taken this way too far,” he said clearly. “Von Cyprus, Arbor, Tarleton, Howke. They’ve all made me do things. Terrible things.”
“You can stop them, Commander.” It was Fiona’s voice, but she had not spoken. Her lips did not move. She was speaking to him in his head.
“No, It’s too late for me,” he told her. “I can feel them. Little cockroaches in my brain. Scheming, digging, trying to find a way to shut me down, regain control.”
Crustac walked the Krill over to the machine that was pumping the drugs into Fiona’s veins. “I’m going to shut them down.” He raised his arms and brought them down on the machine, rending the metal in a loud screech. Sparks flew, the steel ripped, and the machine split in two.
The flow of anesthesia stopped abruptly.
Crustac spun. Back to her bedside. “Promise me, you’ll stop them. We are on the edge...” And then he felt his mind slipping again. The cockroaches had found a way back in. Putting him back under their control. Cockroaches seated somewhere in New York City. In Freedom Rise. He shook his head, blinked. “On the edge of permanent fascism.”
In his head he heard the voices now of the three techs in New York. “Burn him,” one of them said.
Crustac concentrated as hard as he could. “You just need to unleash your power from the darkness.” Crustac leaned down and put one arm under her legs and the other under her back and lifted the frail teenager from her bed.
He swooned. His control was ebbing away. He had only seconds left. He pushed with his mind for all he was worth and a field of glowing energy grew around the two of them. Crustac could feel the luminescent energy burning through his nervous system. Blood gushed from his nose, ran from ears, trickled out the corners of his eyes.
Flash!
They were in the Fire Fly lab again. He scanned the room and breathed a deep sigh of relief. It was deserted. Finally a break!
But he was out of time. The bioluminescent circuits of the machine literally began to burn away the neurotransmitters of his brain, and the blood in his veins began to boil.
Crustac screamed out in pain. He dropped to one knee, nearly losing his grip on the still unconscious, very mortal teenager. With every ounce of remaining strength and humanity he had left, he lowered her t
o the floor and let her go.
And then, no longer in control of his body, he felt his blood burn into pure energy. The last conscious thought Michael Crustac ever had was a realization that the Krill program was focusing on returning to the Hall of Chambers. He peered down at Fiona and realized that before the Krill returned to Philadelphia it would murder Fiona Fletcher. He knew he needed to teleport away—and his world went black.
CHAPTER 43
Revolution turned and saw his great rival round the corner of the building, grinning with malice.
“Lithium, release the hostages,” he yelled to Clay Arbor. “Or we will take this place by force.”
“There’s no turning back now, sweetheart. I gave you a chance to change your mind, remember? Do you understand how much firepower I have behind me? End this now. Your revolution is over. This city is mine.”
Revolution said nothing, just stood his ground.
“We have our own Fire Fly now, did you know that?”
Revolution flinched inside his armor. The thought made his blood run cold. He hoped Arbor was bluffing. He knew firsthand how hard it was to find a Compatible. In all his years of searching he had only found Fiona.
“We call him the Krill. Rhymes with kill, if you know what I mean. Did a hell of a job on the mayor’s office. A shame his career had to be cut so short. Now, no one will ever know of his treachery. You lose again.”
“I haven’t lost yet!” And with that, Revolution fired a cylinder grenade at Arbor’s head.
The big man had little time to react. He raised his arms, crossed them over his face—and the explosion threw him to the ground. Arbor scrambled to rise, but Revolution leaped into the air and brought a tremendous thudding crack of an elbow smash down on the big man’s head, and he crunched to the ground once again.
Lithium responded by aiming both wrist-turret flamethrowers at Revolution’s head and firing.
Revolution’s faceplate snapped down over his ventilation system just before the powerful, lithium-charged beams lifted him off his feet and slammed him to the turf. But Revolution was ready; he dropped and rolled and was back up. And without a moment’s hesitation, he did something Arbor had never experienced before. He sent a gush of fire and energy right back at him. A taste of his own medicine.
Once he absorbed a blast, Revolution’s armor could release energy from anywhere. Usually he chose his hands for precise aim. This time, to really piss Arbor off, he unleashed the energy in a star pattern straight out of the bright red emblem on his chest. The blast slammed Arbor against the concrete wall of the compound. Cracks ran up its stone facade.
Revolution leaped forward, giving his adversary no rest. As he landed, spikes came jutting out from his forearms, and Revolution swung the right arm spike directly into Arbor’s titanium-plated midsection.
Arbor tried to dodge the blow, but of the two of them, Revolution was the most agile, the fastest. And though Arbor shifted his body and tried to turn, the wall behind him limited his motion. Revolution’s speed did the rest.
The spike’s near-indestructible metal smashed across the ultra-titanium encasement of the Lithium armor. And the armor dented. Revolution heard what sounded like a rib crack, and the big man howled in pain.
“Give up, Captain. I’ve brought an army to stop you.”
Arbor grunted and fired his jet-boots, hurling himself into the Dark Patriot. “It’s Colonel now. And your army’s outmatched!” he said as he slammed the Revolution across the turf.
Revolution rose and charged him again. Arbor responded in kind. The two great warriors sped toward each other at breakneck speed, the ground shuddering beneath them.
But at the last moment, Revolution leaped into the air with all his might, his servos screaming in his ears. Arbor could only watch as he sailed above his head.
As he did so, Revolution spun his body and reached out with his hands, latching onto Arbor’s neck in a sudden stranglehold. He let the big man’s own momentum and strength work for him as Lithium’s legs shot out from under him and his head snapped backwards. Revolution drove Arbor’s head into the ground.
Hard.
The big man roared with pain. Revolution grasped Arbor’s head and slammed it into the ground with all his might. Again and again and again. Arbor’s eyes rolled back in his head. One more slam ought to do it…
And a sudden flash of orange and the feeling of a blowtorch erupting in his stomach sent Revolution launching up into the air off of Arbor’s prone form.
The flamethrower.
Revolution landed on his feet, used the momentum to drop backwards and roll upright again. Stinging from the blow, but very much alert, he fired the absorbed energy of the blast back at Arbor, who was rising from his knees…
When a black blur whizzed by, and in a blink of his eyes, Arbor was gone. The blast of energy just dissipated harmlessly into the air.
“Velocity,” Revolution breathed.
At that very moment, his 360-degree helmet cams caught the flash of something above him, approaching fast, and he spun—just as one of Fiddler’s acid-filled mini-harpoons zinged past him. It stabbed into the concrete with a shrump!
The concrete bubbled.
Revolution peered up just in time to dodge another. He bolted for the safety of the compound’s wall where he would be out of their range, and just before he could make it, Fang appeared at the edge of the roof and fired a long white spike out of his wrist.
That’s new.
The white spear was fast and accurate. Revolution spun again, this time using his onboard tracking system to help the armor automate a response. Moving at incredible speed, he ducked the projectile’s sharp point and smacked the thing out the air with the back of his forearm as it sailed by.
And then he lunged forward, smashing into the concrete slab of the wall, and he felt it crumble and crack from the impact. But he was under the cover of the building’s edge now.
Lithium’s team obviously still had a few surprises up their sleeves, surprises that made them even more dangerous.
“Helius! Any sign of the others?” he asked her over the com.
“Aw, you just can’t live without us, can you, big guy?” came a disembodied voice that Revolution recognized as Rachel’s.
“Stealth?”
Sophia’s voice crackled over the com. “They’ve landed and are on the ground. Should be to your location anytime.”
“Yeah, just a few feet away, so try not to hurl anything at the wall,” an invisible Rachel said.
“Be careful, it’s going to get chaotic around here.”
“You mean it isn’t already? A girl could break a nail, what with all these bullets, bombs, and projectiles flying around. Swear to God, boys and their flying phalluses!”
Revolution scanned for Ward, Drayger, and the other Minutemen. “Are the others in place?” he asked her.
“Spider was in no shape to fly. Otherwise, we’re good.”
“All right then, we go in without him,” Revolution said. “You get clear until we get this under control.”
‘That could be never,” Rachel said. “I need to get in there and get to Crown.” Crown was Leslie’s agreed upon codename for the mission.
Revolution balked. He knew she was right, but sending Rachel into the thick of the Hall when a firefight was likely to break out inside was risky—and even if it didn’t break out, bullets would be flying somewhere, and invisibility wouldn’t protect her from gunfire.
“If I don’t try, what’s the point of me being here?” she said finally.
“Okay, but be careful. We’re going to need you for later,” he said.
“Well, I didn’t think you were keeping me around just for my ta-tas,” she said, her voice trailing away, making Revolution know she was on the move. Inside his armor, he smiled, despite himself.
“I didn’t need help!” Arbor roared at Veronica.
“I know,” she said defensively. “I’m just following the plan.”
“Ri
ght,” Arbor admitted. “The plan. Let’s get up there.”
Veronica zipped him through the building and up a back stairwell that led to the roof. In a matter of seconds they were up there, Veronica slowing only so she wouldn’t kill anyone on the way up.
“Rage, where the hell are you?” Arbor shouted over the com after they had settled near one of the giant smokestacks.
“Just coming up now. Tarleton is away.”
“About goddamn time! Get to the roof. The whole fuckin’ air force landed on I-95!”
Moments later, the Legion had assembled on the roof—parts still smoking and charred from Sophia’s previous assault. Below them, at ground level, a sniper waited at every window. Inside, one hundred heavily armed Guardsmen itched to belch forth from the building’s exits. They filled the expansive tavern from wall to wall.
On the roof, Arbor nodded toward the sunset. “All right, we’ve got four fronts,” Arbor said. “The side flanks will be open and easy pickings. On the street, they’ve got those walls and the cars to hide behind. And of course, Helius and Paul Ward will come from the air.”
“I wanna put a fucking dart though his bloody face,” Fiddler hissed.
“You’ll get your chance, but we focus on taking down their numbers. We thin the ranks of those Minutemen, and as for the Suns themselves, we go power first. Helius, Revolution, in that order.”
“They’re on the move,” Ray said, peering down at his RDSD.
the android added.
Arbor spun toward Veronica. “Soto, get into position. Ray, get below.”
Veronica bolted from the roof and in a mere matter of seconds was outside mingling among the Council Guard.
“The rest of us, we’ll stay up here for now and let the Guards and Soto soften them up.” Arbor winced from the pain in his ribs, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. “The mouse has smelled the cheese. Time to spring the trap.”
CHAPTER 44
When the last Sikorsky had touched down on the roadway. Lantern, Rachel, and Drayger had watched as the Minutemen piled out. Each Super Stallion had been crammed to over capacity with Minutemen.
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