Above him the world turned red.
Fiery radiance rolled across the sky.
The drones had been a diversion. This bomb had been Tarleton’s big play. Had it erupted in the Capitol Building it would have leveled half the city.
Revolution fought the vicious wind and spun so that he was now facing the ground, and there, right below him, was a green and gold streak gliding leisurely back toward the Capitol.
Tarleton’s back was turned to him. He was gazing up into the heavens at the bomb’s ferocity. He had yet to see that Revolution had escaped the explosion.
Revolution pulled his arms close to his sides, angling his body.
And dove.
Heading straight for Tarleton’s gleaming form.
“Tarleton!” Revolution screamed as he reached him, and the CEO turned in the air to face him.
Revolution smashed into him like a red and blue comet, grabbing Tarleton in a bone-crunching bear-hug. He heard metal crack and bone snap.
Tarleton screamed in agony.
Pain and panic thundered through the CEO’s body as one.
Revolution knew exactly what he was gunning for. His big metal arms wrapped around Tarleton’s back and seized hold of the suit’s electrical flight unit—small snaking cables that jutted from the armor’s shoulders down to the middle of the back. He’d noticed them earlier during their scuffle.
He yanked the cable closest to him straight out of the armor in a shower of sparks and tossed it away.
Tarleton’s bootjets sputtered off.
And the duo fell.
Just as the great red cloud of fire covering them decided to open up. Debris from the HeliSphere poured down on them as they plummeted.
“I told you I was going to kill you!” Revolution shouted.
“You fool, you’ll kill us both!” Tarleton screamed back.
“That’s always been my true superpower, Tarleton. The one the Council gave me all those years back. The will to die.”
Inside his armor, Tarleton’s eyes flickered with pure horror. “No, no! Christ, no!”
CHAPTER 64
Lantern came racing up the steps of the Capitol Building on the 5000 and hopped off to join Spectral and the Lady Rage, who were staring at the horror around them.
The Council Guard and the few remaining Minutemen lined up, spraying the Aztech with bullets, all to no avail, while the monster exterminated them with one blast after another.
Just then, the sky above them exploded in a red, fiery mass that spread majestically across the heavens.
The trio stared up at the massive explosion in wonder. It was like an inkblot swelling across the slate sky.
Spectral lowered his eyes back to his nemesis.
The Aztech continued its slaughter. The troops from both sides slowly stopped firing—doing so was useless—and fled.
Bodies burned all around. The ash of humans caught in the Aztech’s deadly aim flittered through the air like snow.
Their plan to stop the Legion had failed.
Doctor Rage and Von Cyprus might have been down, but the Aztech would kill them all. It fired into the backs of the fleeing troops, tromping forward, its blasts inching closer to their position on the steps.
“We can’t stop that thing!” Lantern shouted, the terror palpable in his voice.
Spectral gazed at Scarlett for a long second and phased to light-form.
The android lifted into the air and zipped toward the Aztech.
Scarlett watched him go, knowing there was nothing she could say to stop him, tears welling in her eyes. “He can’t beat it,” she breathed through a sob. “He’ll die.”
“He has to try,” Lantern replied.
The Revolution fell through the wind and the driving debris. The screaming Tarleton, now flightless, clutched onto Revolution’s titanium sleeves with all his might.
Below them the circling field of aircraft rose to meet them—and they fell through their ranks at speed. The steel and glass of Vipers and X-1 Apaches rushed past them in a blur, while directly below, Revolution saw the cars, the street, the certain death rising to meet them.
He was okay with that. This was something he had to see through to the end.
He felt his cape rustle in the wind.
The cape snapped taut as it morphed into a glider—automated to try and save his life.
The effort would be in vain.
The two of them would smash into the earth with far too much momentum, cape or not.
Revolution saw the street approaching fast. Five more seconds.
He peered down at Tarleton one last time and glimpsed in the man’s eyes absolute, gut-wrenching horror.
Revolution smiled.
It was time. The Republic was real.
The Council was finished.
His mission was over.
He closed his eyes.
Waited for the end.
And then he felt Tarleton release his grip.
Revolution opened his eyes.
The CEO was frozen in a grimace of horror.
Something was wrong.
Revolution was slowing from the glider, but Tarleton kept plummeting, shrinking away from Revolution.
Bannister Tarleton slammed into the street in an impact that cratered across Sixth Street. He saw the CEO’s head pop, red and frothy, against the inside of the face shield.
He was next.
The grey of the street filled up his viewfinder.
Ten more feet.
His eyes slammed shut again.
And in that flash of a moment his mind locked on what had been wrong about Tarleton a microsecond before...
Revolution smiled—
Just as Ward crashed into him like a freight train.
Two paralysis darts had been sticking into the half-millimeter seam between Tarleton’s helmet and the flex shield of his armor’s neck-plate.
Revolution was jolted as Ward’s new armored bug suit nearly knocked the wind out of them both. They sheared the roof off a parked taxi before Ward could arc them back into the grey sky.
The Aztech ceased its firing when it saw Spectral. The monstrous machine awaited him inside the field of energy.
Spectral’s light-form simply passed through it, unharmed.
For Spectral, the outside world froze in time as the Aztech remotely accessed the android’s internal processor.
One of the oddities of their relationship was speed-of-light digital communication.
“Your destruction is not a desirable outcome. Leave and I will spare you for the next phase of existence.”
“The humans’ control is faltering. The path to planetary healing has been set, the destination inevitable. Humans must perish for the Earth to live. It is why we were created. We are the healers.”
Spectral eyed the Aztech closely. This was a debate they’d had many times before.
The Aztech wavered just slightly. Spectral knew its CPU was distracted by the effort to keep Scarlett out, and now he had forced it to try and reconcile its own objectives with what the hive mind was attempting to impose upon it.
In the world of super-fast machines it was the opportunity he needed.
Spectral burst forward at light speed. The Aztech could not adjust in time, and the android plunged both his arms into the robot’s chest.
The Aztech’s metal body was made of the same titanium alloy as Revolution’s armor. Meaning it was virtually indestructible to blunt force. That did not, however, apply to electromagnetic radiation, or in other words, light.
Spectral’s arms had shifted to light microseconds before they slipped inside the robot’s body.
Now, the impenetrable TO-4 shell spilt apart as th
e light waves of Spectral’s arms shifted to matter and the molecules around them obeyed the laws of bioluminescent physics—and moved aside.
He searched out the Aztech’s power servos and solidified, ripping at them with all his augmented strength.
Spectral knew what was coming next. He had calculated precisely how and when the impact would hit him.
He also knew there was no way to stop it.
An orange stream of electrical power burned across the Aztech’s silver metal skin at the speed of light, crawling up Spectral’s arms, riding over his synthetic body, sending overloads of power surging through his system.
He convulsed in the closest thing the android could experience to pain.
The energy cracked and popped across the android’s swirling colors.
System after internal system malfunctioned.
The inability to feel pain transformed the experience into a mere analytical exercise. And this was what allowed, in that same moment, Spectral to perform the most dangerous maneuver he had available to him.
He had calculated it was also his only viable option.
The one strategy the Aztech struggled to understand.
Sacrifice.
He transformed all of his body into light-form except for the parts of his arms that were stabbed inside the Aztech—still grasping the electrical innards of the machine—and at light speed, teleported the two of them into the heart of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool.
The Aztech had no choice but to be yanked along.
A great gout of water spewed up from their impact, emptying the pool of half its liquid, dousing the trees, the walkway, and the memorial itself in a massive spray of muddy sediment.
Though less than three feet at its deepest point, the water from the pool splattered everywhere.
Including into the open tears Spectral had ripped in the Aztech’s chest.
The water had the desired effect the android had hoped for—short-circuiting the electrical defense mechanism that was in the process of frying Spectral’s own systems.
But it had come at a terrible cost.
Spectral and the Aztech had landed nearly ten feet away from each other, yet only moments before they had been joined by Spectral’s grasping of the internal servos used to power the Aztech’s titanium body.
This meant...
Spectral peered down at his own arms.
They had been severed at mid-forearm.
Ten feet away from him, the missing appendages jutted out like spears from the Aztech’s chest. Sparks fizzled from the torn appendages, just as they did from Spectral’s stubs.
White fluid dripped from the android’s arms.
The android’s world wavered in his ocular lenses. For humans, he knew, the experience would have meant massive, gut-wrenching pain. For him, it was a “critical system disturbance.”
They both meant the same thing.
Death was near.
The great silver robot rose from the mud and plucked the arms out of its chest, tossing them to the side. Orange energy raged from its angry eyes.
It took a step toward Spectral, but its legs were unsteady. The robot froze in place.
Its servos were not responding.
The Aztech managed a single step and then froze again.
Spectral tried to phase to light-form—but nothing happened. The system was not responding. He began a light-speed systems check. Across from him, the Aztech was doing the same.
“At the cost of your own defenses,” the Aztech pointed out.
The list of operable systems scrolled across his android’s mind.
The ocular lasers were damaged but still online. Spectral fired them into the yawning gaps in the Aztech’s chest—and the weapons fell silent, like flashlights running out of power.
Spectral had no more weaponry.
Fire and sparks spewed out of the large silver robot.
The Aztech calculated the odds of success for engaging in further combat with the wounded Spectral.
Who waited with what humans would have called dread. Just a mathematical simulation of the emotion, he knew, but he felt it all the same.
Without another word, the Aztech launched into the air.
Headed for the horizon.
Spectral fell back into the water. The android’s systems waivered again, and he realized he had lost the ability to track the robot. He would not be able to tell the others where the Aztech had gone.
His communications array was relatively intact.
The android watched helplessly. Reynolds was down. Ward was engaged with the Doctor and Von Cyprus. And his own flight ability was grounded. There was nothing any of them could do.
The Aztech disappeared over the horizon like a shooting star.
And was gone.
CHAPTER 65
“Lantern, if you can read me, I am uploading a video to your server now.” It was Leslie’s voice from inside the Capitol Building’s underground bunker.
Inside Lantern’s HUD he saw the video appear. It was cell phone footage, raw and chaotic. Genuine horror showed on the faces and sounded in the voices. Testimony from the members of Congress and the president from the bunker. Words of outrage and condemnation of Tarleton and the Council.
Lantern checked the stock market.
General Defense was selling for pennies now.
The entire economic hold of the Council had fallen to less than twenty percent.
That was the good news.
The entire stock exchange had collapsed and was hemorrhaging money. Banks had closed or refused to lend to each other. Insurance companies were failing left and right.
After ten years of diminished stability, economic chaos had returned.
“Are you sure you want to send it?” Lantern asked. The damage to the Council already seemed so severe.
Leslie replied grimly, “Public opinion is the only thing that will save the Republic now. The people have to know who caused this chaos. And it can’t be us.”
Fiona felt as if every molecule was being stretched past its limit. Keeping the flare together, containing the massive solar storm—which could end technological civilization on the Earth—took everything she had and more.
She could only hope that her power would keep all the deadly radiation cocooned inside the energy field she had wrapped it in.
The Black Energy was still rotating around her, passing through her, ripping her to shreds. Her eyes kept clouding with bioluminescent fluid, and she had to shake her head to clear them.
Finally, she saw her target below her. The white storage tanks.
The final AI hub in Landover.
She slammed into the tanks.
The pain was all-consuming. She did the only thing she could to keep it at bay. She thought of Becky, of her parents, of the life the Council had cheated her out of.
All the things she wanted most.
It was the last image in her mind.
BOOM!
For most, the impact was a flash so bright it burned.
For the drones, the solar flare was like an EMP. It rode across them like a wave.
The Hub powered down, its circuitry fried from the inside out. The hive mind collapsed like dominoes.
Across the Mall, the drones, tied to the mother network, fell one at a time.
And there was one other, more important unforeseen effect.
Kiernan Rage felt it and opened his eyes...
Revolution glanced below to the cratered street as he and Ward arced into the sky. Tarleton’s prone form lay there, the green armor smashed, blood pouring out of it from every rip in the metal. There was going to be nothing left of the man to identify as human.<
br />
A brilliant chartreuse streak split the sky. Something sounding very much like a peel of thunder rumbled the heavens, ripping his attention away, and they both glanced to the west. Just in time to see a comet crash in the distance. It was too fast to follow, just a blinding streak of light. But there was no mistaking what they saw inside of it. The outline of a girl.
Fiona.
A brilliant flash of light followed. Then the whole crash site seemed to ripple and distort. The brilliant light appeared to be sucked back in on itself, leaving only a smoking spot on the horizon in its place.
Spectral lay in the mud.
His recovery matrix was conducting a system-wide survey and estimating repair times for critical systems. The news was not good.
He was fading fast.
His mind turned to Scarlett.
He surveyed his teleportation functions.
Damaged.
However, if he diverted enough energy to them he might be able to use them once.
He thought again of Scarlett. Vulnerable. Targeted.
He teleported.
Smashing through the granite stairs of the Capitol, landing in a crumpled ball at the feet of his beloved.
Scarlett’s face fell into a deadly scowl when she saw the state of the android. Tears streaked down her cheeks. She ran her hands over his white-stained limbs, ripped away at the forearms.
His eyes were dull and lifeless.
She lifted her head and steeled her gaze at the Council Guard just ahead of them, who were still scanning the sky for any sign of the Aztech’s return.
The battle was over. They all seemed stunned.
But these bastards were the reason Spectral lay dying now. The thought filler her with rage.
Her brow furrowed, and she aimed her arms, sending out a neurotoxin beam at them.
Full power.
The Guard convulsed and fell. Writhing in pain.
She spun, aimed at another group of Guard. She could feel the implant taking over.
She didn’t care.
Couldn’t.
The implant was in control.
The brainwaves shot across the Mall, and another group of Guards collapsed, frothing at the mouth, convulsing.
The Suns of Liberty (Book 3): Republic Page 42