You can find his novels The Suns of Liberty: Revolution and The Suns of Liberty: Legion at online retailers everywhere. The third book in the series, The Suns of Liberty: Republic, is scheduled to be released later this Fall.
Michael can be found online at www.michaelivanlowell.com, on Facebook, Goodreads, or on Twitter as MichaelILowell and of course, at the Pen & Cape Society.
WHEN INJUSTICE BECOMES LAW, RESISTANCE BECOMES DUTY.
The Second Great Depression
In the future, misery scars the land. Democracy is dead. Corporations take control through what they cynically call the Freedom Council. They have the police, the courts, the military, the gangs. They are everywhere. They protect their wealth by any means necessary.
A Man Who Stands Against Armies
But one man rises to stand in their way. A one man army. A perpetual soldier. His name is The Revolution and he's the world's first superhero.
The Suns of Liberty
Inspired by his rebellion, the Suns of Liberty, a team of unique heroes, each with their own special skill, are born. They will restore the American republic.
Or die trying.
* * *
In the Not-Too-Distant Future . . .
The sleek, black stealth fighter streaked across the California sky.
The pilot, First Lieutenant Veronica Soto, plotted her course to Lake Tahoe, calculated her flight time, and set a countdown for the release of a single GBU-65/B Massive Ordnance Air Burst—a thermobaric, GPS-guided smart bomb—on the designated target. She called it the Mother Fucker for short.
The bomb would blast its target with the equivalent of fifty tons of TNT. It was like a small nuclear weapon. The flight would take her thirty minutes from Edwards Air Force base.
Operation FLY SWAT was under way.
She flew a single-pilot B-12 Spirit Stealth Bomber, the most sophisticated stealth aircraft in the Air Force armada.
She would need it. Her target was the most dangerous enemy on Earth. A single individual.
A seventeen-year-old girl named Fiona Fletcher.
The Fire Fly.
“Seventeen for a few more minutes, anyway,” the lieutenant smirked to herself.
Of course, assassinating an American citizen on American soil was hardly a popular thing to do. The Council had the authority, since they had pretty much given themselves the authority to do anything they wanted ten years ago. The CEO’s of the twenty-five largest corporations in America now had the power to write any legislation they wanted and carried a veto over the other three branches of government. All in the name of fighting the good fight. But they still had to proceed with some caution.
The plan was to report the bombing as a case of domestic terrorism carried out a by a pro-Council militia taking revenge on the Fletcher girl for the events in Boston a few months back. Media Corp would repeat the story until people either believed it or knew not to contradict it. That’s how things had always worked. And that was the point.
It worked.
* * *
It was Fiona’s eighteenth birthday. And she was putting on a show. She loved two things above all others: science and dancing. Right now, she was doing both.
But mostly she was dancing.
She twirled and bowed, shimmied and posed. At once graceful and seductive, she stretched her body, threw her head back, reached her arms behind her, and then she flipped, feet over her head, head over feet, her long hair splaying out behind her. But her feet were not touching the ground. Not during her leap, not before it, and not after it.
She was in midair.
Her long lithe body, her naturally tanned skin, long blonde hair, gorgeous young face, were all enveloped in radiant energy. She glowed in the immense power of her bioluminescence. Yellow-green. Only the whites of her eyes and the pink of her lips, which bloomed like a cherry blossom against the chartreuse glow, remained unaffected.
Her movements would have been graceful enough being performed by a regular girl on a regular stage. But as the Fire Fly, her motions were breathtaking. She glided through the air like a time-lapse photo of light. Hundreds of feet off the ground.
Had she wanted to, she could have transformed into pure light. Had she wanted to, she could have burned Lake Tahoe to a desert, or boiled the water away, reducing it to a muddy crater.
She danced in the air high above the hilltop on which Becky Collins watched her. Becky was athletic, thirty-seven, blonde, and for the past six months, the de facto guardian of the most powerful human being on the planet.
Below where Becky stood, and certainly below Fiona, was a large open field, the grass trampled down, and in many spots, barren entirely. It was filled with onlookers feeling blessed that they got to see the Fire Fly at all, let alone to watch her dance on her eighteenth birthday. Fiona had become the biggest news story in the world, bigger even than the Suns of Liberty themselves, whom most of the world associated her with now anyways.
Few knew the truth.
She’d just as soon kill the Revolution than join his team. He had betrayed her, tricked her. Turned her into this thing. Not that being the Fire Fly didn’t come with some pretty cool privileges.
She had invited the group of girls with whom she had become the closest to a special event. No one, including Becky, knew exactly what to expect.
Fiona had built a large open-air stone “Palace” out of the pink and brown granite from the Sierra Nevada. Large pillars and deep pools of shimmering water made up its inner sanctum.
The ability to mold and reshape even the hardest stone and steel was breathtaking to Becky. Fiona’s remarkable powers had given her such ability, an ability she executed with intricate precision. And now they owned a miniature palace built into the hillside.
Now, if Becky could just get Fiona to remodel her kitchen!
In the past several weeks, Fiona had grown especially close to a girl Becky knew only as Diana, but whom Fiona had nicknamed Arcadia. A tall, beautiful brunette who was Fiona’s own age, and shared a passion for dance as well.
As Becky looked on, Fiona picked ‘Arcadia’ out of the crowd, swooped down, and, holding her tightly, lifted her into the sky. At the same time, with a single sweep of her hand, Fiona created a solid field of sparkling energy below them. A dance floor of bioluminescence. She gently lowered Arcadia down onto the energy field, and after a moment, the girl found her footing.
Becky felt her jaw clinch as she watched the duo. She retreated back behind a rock formation, left over from Fiona’s excavations of the hillside. She didn’t want to be seen as she watched them. She couldn’t say why that mattered to her.
It just did.
They danced. Arcadia was good. Very good. After a moment, she was matching Fiona, move for move. Mimicking her every motion. Becky brooded. To her, it seemed the girls Fiona had been inviting up into the Palace were slowly but surely molding themselves into little carbon copies of the now famous Fire Fly. Her personality, her likes and dislikes, everything.
It was creepy.
And Fiona herself had changed over these last three months. The quiet, distrustful young girl Becky had found shivering in the woods, naked and betrayed by those she thought had loved her, had transformed into a more flamboyant, witty, and confident young woman.
And yet, the fight with the giant robot called the Man-O-War—that had very nearly destroyed Boston—had taken a very strange toll on her. When Fiona had first explained to Becky how she had defeated the Man-O-War, Becky thought her solution had been ingenious. She’d not realized that there could be long-term side effects for the girl.
Fiona had explained that she had thought back to her initial transformation into the Fire Fly. The Revolution had tricked her into entering the Fire Fly chamber alone—the machine that had killed everyone else it had been tried on—and then he had turned it on. She, too, thought she would be killed. But instead of death, the machine had forced a different change on her. She’d had no choice but to let the machine’s energy be abso
rbed into her. To become one with it.
When she faced the Man-O-War, she tried a similar strategy. She had absorbed the giant machine into her own internal sphere of energy. At least that’s how Fiona had described it. It had pierced her pulsating skin, entered her energized organs, and been consumed by them. And just as she had been transformed into the Fire Fly by absorbing bioluminescence, the process of absorbing Man-O-War had also changed her. She was less emotional, more calculating, overly logical. She could be cold as ice. Snarky teenager and calculating machine. It was quite a combination to behold.
But she was also using her powers to help others. Becky was proud of what she had done in Boston. Proud that she was helping these girls. “I am their North Magnetic. They come because they feel betrayed,” Fiona had told her when she first started to reach out to the thousands who made the trek to Tahoe every week.
But Becky couldn’t help but fear for what Fiona did on her missions to help the girls that she chose to help. She had the power to end a human life at the flick of her finger, and Becky feared that was exactly what she was doing. There were already reports of that kind trickling in from all across the country. They could just have been paranoia from those who feared the Fire Fly rather than worshipped her, but Becky knew firsthand how powerful Fiona really was. It was a power she was not sure anyone should have, let alone an emotionally vulnerable seventeen-year-old girl.
And as the dance ended, Becky knew Fiona would choose another girl to help.
It was like she had become some kind of faith healer. What made Becky especially uncomfortable was the fact that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people below them at any one time, waiting, hoping to be called up. But inevitably, Fiona would send out for a young girl close to her own age. And then, she would “do her thing.” Which meant teleporting to wherever the girl told her the trouble was happening. And Fiona would “take care” of it.
Becky had tried to intervene, but Fiona wasn’t listening these days. In the last three months, since the events in Boston, she had become the most famous girl on the planet. Becky no longer carried the same weight with her. She wouldn’t have known what to tell Fiona to do about the throngs of desperate people, anyway. But she was pretty sure that just picking young girls that reminded Fiona of herself was probably not the best approach.
* * *
Today, Arcadia was allowed to choose one person, a girl from the throng below, and bring her into the Palace. She chose a small, mousey girl with dirty blonde hair named Kristen. She told Fiona, in her shy, quiet voice, that her little sister had been kidnapped by “thugs” and they were threatening to kill her unless her older brother paid them back the money he owed or agreed to do “jobs” for them.
These were the kinds of things people brought to Fiona.
“Do you have a picture?” Fiona asked the girl.
“Yes. They said you would want addresses too.”
Fiona took them from the girl and scanned them. Then she lifted her head slightly, concentrating. “Just a sec,” she said. Fiona detached an invisible part of her essence and sent it teleporting to Cleveland. She was not sure how she did this. It was second nature, though difficult.
In her mind she could see it all. The street the girl was speaking of, the house. She could travel inside, map out the rooms, see where she needed to go. She spotted the girl’s sister, along with many others, in the house. Drugs, guns, trash everywhere. The place was wretched.
In one room, a young tattooed man was handcuffed to a steel pipe that had been built into a concrete wall undoubtedly for the purpose of holding someone indefinitely. He was naked and looked to have been beaten unconscious.
Fiona snapped back. “I see her.”
The girl squealed in delight and Arcadia shot Fiona a knowing grin.
Fiona did not grin back.
“There’s not much time. I need to go now,” Fiona said just as Becky interrupted the group.
“Fiona, its Elders again. The town council has met. They voted to sue if we don’t move the Palace,” Becky said.
“So let them. We’ve just as much right to be here as they do.”
And with that—flash!—she was gone. In fact, by the time Becky finished letting out her sigh of frustration, Fiona was already in Cleveland.
* * *
The house in Cleveland was in an older neighborhood that had once been an upper-middle-class section of town. Now it was old and dilapidated. The house itself was a classic two-story A-frame, with a big porch and a swing. Or at least what used to be a swing. It had long since broken from its chains, and the rotting carcass was left crumbling on the porch.
Fiona had materialized, glowing in the chartreuse power of the Fire Fly, on the front walk that led to the stairs. If anyone noticed her, they made no fuss. She marched to the front door and passed through.
A millisecond before she moved her molecules through the door, she disappeared. It was so fast it appeared she just passed through, like a ghost. But in order for her to pass through solid objects, she had to phase into the end of the luminescent spectrum that corresponded to x-radiation. The kind of light that is invisible to the human eye. It had taken her a while to get the hang of it. Windows and the places visible light could go were still so much easier. But she was getting better at the ghost thing.
On the other side of the door she materialized but remained invisible. She passed through the small entryway and hung a left through the front living area, into a long hallway. She passed the concrete room where the naked man was chained to the wall. And finally she got to the back den where three members of the gang were hanging out and Kimberly Connors was being held.
The three were taking turns playing video games, smoking pot, and watching the girl. One was fat, one was tall, and one was just plain ugly. None of them looked like guys you’d want to bring home to mom. They all had shaved heads, and a swastika flag hung on one wall right next to an old flag of the Confederacy.
The very sight of it boiled anger through Fiona’s mind. She had no tolerance for intolerance.
Fiona strolled into the room and flashed to life in front of them.
“Oh shit!” the tallest one yelled. All three lunged for their pistols. From the terrified expressions on their faces, they knew exactly who she was and probably what she was capable of.
Well, some of what I’m capable of, she thought.
“Let the girl go,” Fiona said. “Or I will boil your eyeballs in your brains.” Wow. That was impressive. And on the fly too. Anger can make you pretty creative, she thought.
The three moved as one. They all simultaneously moved their pistols to aim at Kimberly’s head.
Didn’t see that coming. Who knew these potheads would have discipline and coordination?
“Fuck you, man! You can’t take us all down. I heard you move at the speed of sound or some shit, right? But not with all three of us you can’t.”
“Yeah,” added the fat one .“You might stop one of us, but you ain’t stopping us all.”
Time for new tactics. “I really like what you’ve done with the place. What style were you going for? Early dipshit?”
The three geniuses glanced at each other, confused, and then the taller of the three blinked and his face turned red. He started to speak but Fiona cut him off.
“I tell you what, since this is my birthday and I’m feeling generous, I’m gonna give you three fine gentlemen a break.”
And with that she was gone.
“Don’t fucking move!” the tall one breathed to the others. “Not ‘til we know the bitch has gone.” Kimberly just whimpered. The first sound she had made since Fiona had entered the house.
And Fiona heard it of course, because by now she was standing right behind the three thugs. Invisible.
She held out her hands and fired a beam from each. From her right hand, where she had more control, she split the beam so that it penetrated the backs of two of the thugs. With her left, she sent a single, more powerful beam into t
he heart of the taller, more mouthy asshole.
And then she turned up the heat. And materialized.
Not only did the beams burn instantaneous holes in the three men’s chest, but they were also focused on the three guns the thugs held. To get the angle right for all three, it took a great deal of concentration. The effect was to incinerate the guns the instant she incinerated their hearts. That way, even if the men’s reflex reaction in their death throes was to squeeze their triggers, the guns would be burned to oblivion before they could do it.
Blood, tissue, and other gore exploded from the gaping holes left in the men’s chests and from their severed wrists, which were burned away along with their weapons. It sloshed all over Kimberly, who screamed in mortal terror. She collapsed to the floor and scampered toward the corner of the room, terrified even of Fiona.
“I’m the Fire Fly, Kimberly. Your sister sent me here to save you. You’re okay now.”
Kimberly peered up at Fiona through her blood-stained face and meekly breathed, “Really?”
“Really.” Fiona looked down at the thugs, blood pooling around their bodies. “Becky’s not going to be happy about this. But I think they look better that way, don’t you?” Fiona frowned at the gory corpses. “And its light speed, dumb ass. I move at light speed.”
Kimberly started to cry again.
“Be right back.”
She flashed into the room with the young man. He was badly hurt, and she saw fresh wounds that were still bleeding. Fiona instantly cauterized all his cuts, which also brought him back to consciousness.
She’d seen enough gang signs in Boston to know a gang-related tattoo when she saw one. The Resistance had been obsessed with tracking them, convinced the gangs in Boston worked for the Freedom Council. Many gangs used colors, others used body art. In Boston they tended to use both. “You in a gang, Romeo?” Fiona asked him.
The Good Fight Page 11