At her feet, Spectral’s vision slowly faded back on and saw what was happening.
She was beyond being able to hear him.
Spectral had no power to stop her. He couldn’t phase to light and back. Otherwise, a hand barely materialized inside her leg would pinch her out of her state.
He peered over at the dying Guardsmen.
And teleported to them.
The effort was too much. It required a siphoning of the energy he was using for self-repair.
On shaky legs he stood, directly in the path of Scarlett’s deadly brain waves.
Her gaze narrowed on him. And she realized…
The shock of what she was doing ran through her like an electric current.
She clenched her temples, her eyes slamming shut as if a freight train were rummaging through her brain.
The implant, seeking, killing, yearning for blood...
Spectral teleported again, nearly out of power, collapsing at her feet.
She fell to her knees, sobbing. Wrapping her slender arms around his battle-scarred body. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she sobbed.
She was back under control.
The Guardsmen began to stabilize, having been only seconds away from death.
At that moment, a brilliant light flashed across the eastern sky. Ripping through the clouds, brighter than anything else in the heavens, an orange comet slicing through the fabric of the firmament.
Inside it, glowing brighter than the brilliance around her, was the sparkling figure of a woman.
Kiernan Rage smiled and rose to his knees. He’d been dreaming of a brilliant flash of light in the sky. The paralysis serum was still circulating through his body. But the army of nanobots he’d injected himself with long ago were busy cleansing his blood stream.
He glanced over at his captor as more nanobots swarmed over the inhibitor chip in his brain.
The moment he had waited for had arrived.
No more cage to keep the nanobots in check. No more Von Cyprus. No more hive mind.
The chip deactivated.
Von Cyprus was still prone on the balcony floor. He would stay this way for hours, unless the Doctor revived him.
The Doctor lifted his head to the smoke-filled sky and breathed in what oxygen he could. Then he knelt down beside Von Cyprus. The brilliant infidel deserved to die. The thought was tempting. He dreamed of all the ways he could kill him.
But the infidel might yet prove useful. He would need worthy flesh-slaves for the coming Tribulation.
He placed a hand on the scientist’s arm and concentrated.
Unseen by the human eye, a flood of the microscopic robots escaped the pores of the Doctor’s fingers and flooded into those of Von Cyprus’s arm.
After a few moments, Von Cyprus opened his eyes and stood.
“You brought me back.”
“I did.”
Von Cyprus was stunned. “The hive mind is more powerful than I’d imagined.”
The Doctor grinned.
Von Cyprus noted that the Doctor wasn’t actually looking at him. Instead, he was staring intently into the distance. The battlefield seemed quiet, Von Cyprus thought. He checked his sleeves. They were still operational. More good news.
It was time to finish off the traitors.
“Alright, Doctor, bring the busses back in for another round.” Von Cyprus aimed his sleeves into the ranks of the noticeably decimated and disorientated Minutemen and fired.
But the sleeves just clicked at his command.
Nothing emitted.
No black lightning.
No laser-guided precision targeting system.
Nothing.
He glanced over at Rage, and the Doctor was still just grinning, gazing out into the battlefield.
“It is time for this charade to come to an end,” Rage said. The Doctor closed his eyes.
“Rage, what the hell are you doing?” Von Cyprus shouted. “Where the hell is the Aztech?” The scientist couldn’t see it anywhere.
The bastard just stood there grinning.
Von Cyprus sent a neurological command to shock the shit out of the old lunatic.
But again, nothing happened.
Rage peered over at Von Cyprus, his eyes gleaming with purpose. “Your temporary control over me is at an end.”
“What?” Von Cyprus pointed his sleeves at the Doctor and tried to reboot them.
They powered down and then powered back up, so he pointed them at the Doctor and tried to fire them, but again, they did nothing.
The lunatic had control of them!
Rage smirked at him for a second and turned away, unconcerned.
He raised his face to the sky, smiling broadly, closing his eyes as if he were letting healing waters run all over him. His arms outstretched at his sides, palms open in what looked like some kind of religious offering. “This world will end in fire and blood, and only the worthy will live to see the new day,” Rage proclaimed.
Von Cyprus fought desperately to get the sleeves to reboot, but Rage’s hold on the sleeves was unrelenting.
“For a millennium man has looked to the heavens for his gods.” Rage turned, stared right into the scientist’s eyes, and stepped closer to Von Cyprus. Stalking forward.
“Those gods are dead. We are the new gods. We are shaping the world in our own image.”
Rage stepped even closer.
“And in that new world, I am the god of everything!”
He lifted his arms, staring into the smoke-filled, aircraft-laden heavens. Von Cyprus had no idea what the lunatic was seeing when he gazed up there, but it sure didn’t seem to be a sky full of jets and helicopters.
He seemed to be gazing upon the face of God himself.
And then Von Cyprus blanched as that sky full of jet fighters and attack copters, some two hundred in total—
Began to fall.
Roderick Reynolds rolled over, wishing he could writhe in pain, but the suit wouldn’t let him. It was still trying to reboot. Jameson’s simulated voice barking half orders in fits and starts inside his HUD. He was on his back in the middle of the cracked pavement. His eyes were fixed on the smoke-filled sky and the many jets that crisscrossed above him.
Maybe that’s why he saw it first.
The planes began to fall.
So did the Apaches.
All of them.
Not just falling.
Racing toward the earth at top speed.
His suit rebooted and blinked to life. Reynolds willed himself to rise to his feet, the servos lifting him when his legs couldn’t.
He gaped up at the rapidly approaching layer of dive-bombing metal, still high in the sky, and knew he had to do something.
The Doctor had to be in control of them, he surmised. All these pilots, well over one hundred of them, would not decide to kamikaze into the ground all at once by their own free will.
He launched into the air—rising, rising—until he met the first wave of falling metal.
Firing full blast at everything he could hit. If he could blow it up before it could hit the ground, maybe he could save lives.
It was a horrible calculus to have to make. He knew there were still pilots in many of the Vipers, trying in vain to steer the jets to safety. But there were so many jets.
They were everywhere.
The sky was raining jetfighters.
He increased his speed and felt the molecules of the suit tighten. He lowered his head, aimed his shoulders, and rammed straight through everything in his path.
None of it would be enough, he knew.
Revolution and Ward zoomed across the sky, still staring off at Fiona’s impact site. Revolution was about to inquire across the com about the status of the Aztech—he noted it was nowhere to be seen—when the air around them seemed to crest like a wave.
Ward was lifted in the air. He struggled to right them.
The hell was that? Revolution scanned abo
ut, but he saw nothing.
A sick feeling roiled in his stomach, just the same.
Then he looked up.
To see a Viper screaming for them at top speed.
Ward saw it too and rolled them left, spinning out of the way by inches.
And that’s when they both noticed...
The whole sky was falling.
Aircraft dive-bombed from everywhere.
“Remind me again what you told me when we first met? Don’t need a partner, huh?” Ward teased as they zigzagged through the swarm of falling jets.
“This has to be the Doctor!” Revolution said.
Ward turned serious. “I need to set you down somewhere safe and go find Rachel.”
Rage glared over at Von Cyprus, eyes burning with righteous fury. “Do you feel the sudden urge to repent? Does the rush of truth now burn your soul like the ragged remnants of the afterbirth that you and your kind truly are? Look into the depths of my magnitude and weep. For I am the Truth, I am the Tribulation, reborn.”
The first of the jets crashed into the ground like a comet from hell.
Engines thrusting at full power, weapons hot, detonating on impact.
It exploded in a mighty fireball that rose back into the sky.
The ground shook.
The heat wave it created rolled across the plaza.
Dozens more followed. Stabbing into the Mall and surrounding neighborhoods in geysers of fire and showers of shrapnel.
Screams and panic flooded in from everywhere. Horror rained down—with no regard to whether its victims were Council Guard or Minutemen or civilians—spreading death, flame, and chaos everywhere at once.
Von Cyprus dove for cover on the balcony of the tower, covering his head. Death was raining from the sky.
CHAPTER 66
The android strained to speak.
As they peered up, the horrific realization of what was happening moved over them.
Lantern snapped to action, calculating the falling trajectory of the aircrafts.
His AI highlighted all those on collision paths with them, with the mass of people in Mall, with the Capitol, and the White House, all in digital red.
He thought about the Smithsonian—so much priceless history was housed in these buildings, how could they protect them all? They would just have to save what they could. Diverting the jets from the museums would mean sending them into the heart of the Minutemen and Council Guard. They couldn’t do that either. There were no good options.
He looked back to the trajectories. “Can you stop them from falling?” he shouted to Scarlett.
She swallowed hard. “I can’t control them! I’m not my father!”
“They aren’t falling,” Lantern breathed with realization. “He’s flying them straight down. Full power for maximum carnage.”
Spectral’s head spun toward her.
Scarlett turned white. She peered up at the raining metal sky. “So many,” she breathed.
Scarlett raised her hands.
Scarlett went plane by plane, trying to stop them in an effort more heroic than achievable.
Ward had only seconds. He grimaced, juiced the wings, and zoomed through the broken windows of the Post Office Tower at maximum speed. Rachel gazed up in time to see him tackle her—
Just as a C150 cargo plane pulverized the tower, ripping it off its base and shattering it across the street below.
“I just keep saving people today,” he said. “Guess you owe me a favor, huh?” he teased seductively.
Rachel was gasping for breath, and Ward realized he’d knocked the wind out of her. He gazed into her eyes and told her calmly, “You’re okay. Your diaphragm is contracting. Just take deep breaths. Like this.” He smiled and breathed with her. Breath for breath.
“Just look at me. Trust that I can do it,” he said as they slalomed through the falling jets and rose into the sky, far above the horror on the ground. Ward stopped once they passed above the planes but before the air got too thin.
“Just breathe,” he told her.
Rachel half-smiled, clinging to him tightly.
When she could speak again, she smirked at him and said, “You really know how to sweep a girl off her feet, doncha?”
Ward nodded. “I’d really like to make you a member of the Mile-High Club,” he said to her, watching to make sure her breathing was back to normal. “But this might not be the best time.”
Rachel smirked. “First of all, we’re not a mile high. And second, I’ve been a member of that club for a loooong, loooong time, Bugboy.”
Ward wasn’t sure how to take that.
“Then again, I’ve never fucked a superhero before. Let alone one that could fly.”
Ward chuckled.
But Rachel was staring below them now, her face drawn, her chin quivering.
She could raise or drop her defenses on a dime, he knew. And she was done flirting.
It was time for business.
The scene below was hard to fathom.
A blitzkrieg in the middle of Washington.
“Let’s go be heroes,” he said.
And they dove from the sky into the pool of infernos below.
Within thirty seconds the National Mall had gone from a war zone to a giant, burning impact crater. The ground shook with the force of constant tremors. The smell of jet fuel, fire, and death filled every nostril. The pounding bellow of explosions muffled everything else.
A sudden roar split through the chaotic cacophony and filled Von Cyprus’s ears.
He was running across the Mall, desperate to escape the carnage wrought by the Doctor.
He flinched, peering up to see the awesome sight of a Viper 700 diving at full speed right at him, rendered silent by the crushing noise all around, until just now.
It seemed impossibly huge, slicing in from the burning tree line, jet trails still streaming.
The scientist dove to the ground as the jet engines roared above him and the earth rattled with a force that shook his bones.
The explosion ruptured his eardrums. Heat seared him; he felt his flesh bubble. He screamed in pain and rolled in the dirt.
But he was not on fire. The explosion had been twenty yards away. Still, his left side was red and bleeding. His jacket and trousers singed and burned away in random spots.
He was desperate to get the sleeves working.
Rage was gone.
Maybe they would work now.
The sleeves just clicked. The Doctor still had them.
He was around here somewhere.
Von Cyprus stood and peered around quickly, but the smoke was heavy now.
Fury racked him. In his shock at the initial jet crashes, he’d let the elder Rage slip away.
By the time he’d returned to his senses, the Doctor was gone.
Von Cyprus struggled to walk.
The stench of jet fuel and smoke was overwhelming. Out of the blackness people were running, some on fire, some covered in blood.
No more divisions, no more armies.
Just survivors and victims.
Council Guard and Minutemen alike scattered everywhere.
Like ants avoiding a volcano.
“Ray! Ray, come in!” he shouted into the com. But there was nothing but static and screaming on the line.
“Hey!” he shouted to one bleeding Guardsman as he rushed by, “have you seen Rage?” The Guardsman just glanced his way blankly.
Had the man even seen him?
Peopl
e were everywhere. Some running, others sauntering aimlessly, clearly in shock.
He screamed to them, but they all just ignored him.
He froze in the middle of the chaos as the realization hit him.
The Council Guard was decimated.
The Aztech had escaped.
Rage was on the loose.
The sleeves suddenly powered up. He felt the energy course though them.
That meant only one thing.
Kiernan Rage had left the area.
Von Cyprus charged the sleeves, aimed them at the burning Viper twenty yards away, its flames still stinging his flesh.
And fired.
Black lightning rode the precision-guided beam down to the Viper, sizzling along the entire length of the burning carcass, widening the beam until it engulfed the jet from top to bottom, left to right.
The plane and its deadly wreckage burned away into oblivion.
In that moment he realized he could save thousands of lives.
He couldn’t stop all the jets from hitting, but he could pick many of them out of the sky and he could contain their damage once on the ground.
The Council would never be able to survive this. Once it was learned that the Doctor had caused it. Once it was learned that he was supposed to control the Doctor and that he had been ordered to do so by Tarleton, the Council would fall.
In fact, it already had.
There was no one left to give him orders.
This was his decision to make.
A crossroads of sorts.
He gaped at the horror of the area. It was as dark as twilight. Black and grey smoke rose everywhere, creating a blanket over the sky. Where there wasn’t smoke, flames could be seen licking through. They were spreading.
Von Cyprus scanned the scene one last time.
And took off running.
Revolution trudged through the damage, helping anyone he could. In his parabolic hearing, screaming sirens blared as hundreds of emergency vehicles streamed into the burning city.
In his HUD, he saw the news coverage of thousands of protestors overtaking Council headquarters all across the country. The officials inside did not resist. They simply came out with their hands up.
He had unleashed the people.
Protestors stormed police precincts and prisons, demanding the release of all Resistance members who had been jailed during the Purge. Long, tense standoffs had given way to streams of former Resistance members surging into the waiting arms of loved ones and jubilant crowds.
The Suns of Liberty (Book 3): Republic Page 43