The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (23 page)

Sophia dove out, and Ward saw the
night turn cobalt as the concussion of her propulsors pounded in his chest. His
exit would be considerably less dramatic. He grabbed the sides of the bay door
and leaned out...

And panicked.

All he could see was black. He
couldn't see the ground, or the sky, just black. He could feel the roar of the
propellers above him. His heart was thumping in his chest. Sweat began to roll
down his forehead.
Shit, if I'm this scared by just jumping out of an
aircraft, what the hell good am I gonna be taking out a destroyer?
Ward
took one last glance over at Revolution, who gave him a reassuring nod, told
himself it was going to be just like hang gliding, and dove from the diving
board. He piled out so close to the chopper he nearly clipped the landing gear.
He could feel the sweat on his skin, running down his cheeks, taste it in his mouth.
He hit full ignition on his jets immediately and was jolted out into the black
night.

Ward marveled at Sophia. She
hadn't even hesitated. And she was
so fast
. She was already just a small
blue dot on the horizon.

It was the only thing that told
him where the sky was. He had let himself get completely disoriented.

And then his visors gleamed to
life. A brand-new Heads-Up Display, a new toy courtesy of Lantern. Every
structure he saw now had a digital outline. The ground, the sea, the buildings,
even Helius—and labeled as such. The black no longer mattered.
He's a light
in the darkness
, Leslie had said. How right she had been. His nerves began
to calm. He thought back to Lantern's instructions about the mission.

They all sat in the situation room,
now outfitted for the Suns. Leslie was there as well. A great round table
befitting a superteam had replaced the original furniture. Video and computer
monitors still lined the outer walls. Their own miniature version of COR at the
Boston HQ. The energy in the room was electric. They were proud to be there.
None of them missed the historic significance of this first meeting. Though
that wasn’t how it had started. They had just assembled because that was what
they needed to do. COR wanted the operation to happen fast, and so they had
hurried into the conference room. But looking around, they had realized the
Suns of Liberty were a reality. Ward felt like they were about rescue the city.
The others had even loftier ambitions.

Revolution had explained the
goals of the mission and then handed the logistical portion of the meeting over
to Lantern. Lantern had explained that he was creating a virtual environment on
top of the destroyers. “The scan is a three-dimensional cube,” Lantern said.
“You'll be able to see your part of the scan when you fly through it.” He
glanced at Hollis. “Or swim through it, as the case may be.” On the room's four
screens a three-dimensional cube floated all around the animated graphics of
the three destroyers, encompassing them. He explained that the entire team
would be equipped with Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) either in their helmets or in
specially designed glasses he had made for Rachel and Bailey. Bailey's chopper
would be in complete stealth mode. Until the guards on duty could hear it, they
would have no idea it was coming.

It had been the most Ward had
heard Lantern say at one time.

Ward zoomed toward the harbor and
the destroyers. This was a far cry from the jobs he’d done with Alison, but he
felt ready to play his part now. He caught up to Sophia after she had slowed
her propulsors.

“I guess you're up,” she said to
him over his helmet-com.

Shit.
“I guess so,” Ward
said. He glided forward at low speed, his engines very quiet. In his HUD, the
Guardsmen on the first ship suddenly glowed red. Lantern could not have made
them easier to find if he'd painted them all in neon. This just kept getting
better.

Ward flew low over the ship and
opened fire. Even at his low rate of speed he hit the six Guardsmen in a matter
of seconds. They were each on a different part of the ship, so none of them
knew the others had been struck. In the span of one heartbeat, they all fell
unconscious.

Below the waves, Hollis rocketed
toward the destroyers’ massive hulls. He’d needed no adjustment to his HUD from
Lantern other than the inclusion of the digi-sphere cube. Once he entered
range, the cube sprang to life in his visors. Everything he needed to see was
brought to life in the see-through three-dimensional display. Lantern had also
outlined the exact paths to follow. Hollis zipped up to the first ship and
stopped. He was floating fifty feet below the hull. He yanked a small gun-like
device from his belt and aimed it at the digital lines that were drawn for him
in his HUD. The gun opened fire. A red high-powered welding laser began eating
into the bottom of the ship.

Bailey brought the Sikorsky in
with no lights. He could see everything in his glasses display. The landing was
perfect. They piled out of the chopper just on the far side of the first ship.
By this time, Ward had disabled the Guards on the second destroyer as well, and
the crew of the third ship was too far away to hear the Sikorsky as anything
other than random noise from the city. Revolution, Bailey, and Rachel dashed
for the destroyers.

Up top, Ward took out the crew of
the last ship. But he failed to notice, just as he shot his dart into the final
Guardsman, that the man had pressed a button on his phone. As Ward circled back
around looking for Sophia, he also failed to notice the automated gun turret
that was now taking aim at him with deadly accurate robotic eyes. Lantern's HUD
system couldn't
see
it either. Even Lantern wasn't perfect.

Sophia rocketed forward, and in a
matter of seconds she was over the first ship. The HUD lit up her targets: the
large surveillance antennae that rested atop each ship. Her bracelets blazed,
and she blasted them at the indicated points. The great spires ripped off their
moorings and lanced into the shallow water below. Of the ship's six antennae,
four stuck in the mud like makeshift television towers.

She zipped on to the second ship.
And then it happened...

The first to be hit was Ward. The
gun that was targeting him shot out a metal net. It was designed to ensnare and
disable small aircraft, but it worked wonders on Ward's jetpack. He lost
control as interference signals beaming off the net made his
directional-control system go crazy. The net was supposed to guide aircraft out
to sea and down them in the waves for later recovery. But Ward was so small
that the net’s AI assumed it had yet to snare its target. So instead of banking
off toward the harbor, it pushed him skyward. Up he rose into the night sky.
His suit was supposed to be able to deflect the kind of signals emitting from
the net, and after a moment, it did. Unfortunately, it had the effect of
stopping Ward’s skyward climb, and turned it into an Earthward plummet. Ward
was now hurtling through space with large jagged spires of metal from the
ships’ antennae directly below him.

Sophia looked on in horror as Ward
plunged toward a tower of razor-sharp steel. She raised her bracelets and aimed
at the spire directly below him. But just before she could shoot, a net snapped
around her and jolted her down toward the ground. She screamed out, “Fuuuuuuck!”
and blasted the net full force with her propulsors. The net disintegrated, no
match for fusion energy. Sophia regained control and gaped back up at Ward.

He was seconds away from
collision. She fired the bracelets, and the explosion took out the spire just
as he hit it, the blast sending him spinning off toward the sea, still out of
control. Sophia turned her blasters on the gun turret, which was set to unleash
a new wave of the metallic nets, and pulverized it. The Council had not seen
fit to equip the destroyers with adequate defenses, believing the destroyers
themselves would be sufficient deterrence.

Ward hit the water headfirst. His
spine screamed in protest. What would have been lethal velocity became mere
pain, thanks to the new and improved flight suit made by Leslie's design team.
The blast from Sophia’s H3 beam, however, had taken his breath away. He had
time for one big gulp of air before he hit the waves, and he lost half of that
in the impact. He sunk like a rock and was still snagged in the heavy metal
net. As Ward sank to the bottom, his HUD became useless. There was nothing for
it to lock onto. He was not Hollis. Lantern had not outfitted his gear for
water. His lungs began to ache as the surface grew distant...

“Hunley, come in, this is Helius!
Can you hear me?”

“Well yeah, you're kinda yellin'
at me, ya know.” Under the water, Hunley's helmet-com was much louder than the
others.

“It's Paul, he's in the water.”

“I'm a little busy. I'm sure the
professor can swim.” Hollis was just completing the last cut of the hull on the
first ship. The steel was thick and difficult to cut. It took great
concentration to keep the laser on its digital path. The boats could stay
afloat even without their center sections, due to their unique design, but only
if Hollis followed Lantern's guides with precision. And Revolution had been
adamant about creating an unmistakable spectacle in the middle of the harbor.
All the important electronics were contained inside the sections Hollis was
cutting away. Everyone in Boston would know these big boats were just there to
spy on them. That had been Revolution’s goal and why Hollis had to succeed at
hollowing them out from below.

A great, thudding crack broke
above him. He hit his thrusters full power and zipped out from under the
massive hull just as the center two-thirds of it broke away and plummeted to
the bottom of the harbor. The swell of sea water it churned up forced Hollis to
fight against it. It also caused a ripple in his audio. He could hear Sophia
screaming at him but couldn't make out a single word.”Say again?”

“He's drowning!”

Hollis spun. His scanners read the
area around him but saw nothing. “I don't see him.”

“Look down,” Sophia said, dread in
her voice.

And then he saw. One hundred feet
down and sinking fast. Ward was three hundred yards away. Hollis zoomed at him
full speed. He crossed the space in twenty seconds. Snagged Ward, plopped an
emergency oxygen mask on his face, and rocketed him up to the surface. The
speed and the pressure made Ward feel like his lungs were going to rip out of
his chest—on fire. The oxygen mask had the same accelerated hyperbaric
abilities as Hunley's suit to decompress Ward's blood and lungs, but not as
effectively. Hollis broke the surface and went airborne. Ward gasped for a
breath before they smacked back down into the water, and he gulped in seawater.
Hollis had him back up and out of the waves as Ward gasped and choked for air,
spitting ocean out of his nose and mouth. A howitzer was going off in his head
and chest.

“Oh man,” Ward coughed, “let’s not
do that again.” Ward spat seawater, mangling his words. The heavy net still
clinging to him, pulling at him.

“Well, every man needs to be
baptized, Professor. But some are baptized by fire. You ready for yours?”
Hollis was grinning, and Ward just looked at him like he was crazy. “Hold your
breath, son,” and with that Hollis dunked him back down under the water. The
Master Diver let Ward go, and for a moment the professor panicked all over
again, pain from his lungs still shooting through him. But Hollis reached out
and grabbed the net, pulling it away from Ward's body. He yanked out the
welding laser and cut a long vertical slit in the net, allowing Ward to pull
himself free and swim to the surface.

“Oh my God, thanks. Thank you so
much!” Ward yelled to him after they had surfaced.

“Well, you're not the first fish
I've cut out of a net, Paul.” The Master Diver grinned at him. And then Hollis
was back under the waves.

Revolution and Bailey had reached the
first ship early on, and using i-hooks, they pulled down the entry ramp,
allowing an invisible Rachel to climb on board. They did this for each
destroyer. Rachel used her RDSD to download as much information as she could
without being seen or detected. This would be the Suns of Liberty’s coming-out
party, but Revolution still didn’t want the Council to know she or Lantern
existed. She found the data that Lantern was unable to retrieve remotely. The
ship’s main cabin, which was actually just a bank of mainframe computers, was
surrounded by a layer of digital interference. A shield that had blocked
Lantern’s prying eyes. She used the RDSD to soak up all the data the ships had
produced. They would soon know what the Council knew and when they knew it. 

Bailey moved swiftly across each
boat and tied up the unconscious crew to the side rail of each ship. They
didn't want them sinking to the bottom of the ocean, too. He was very careful
to make sure the video cameras on each ship got good close-up glossies of his
mug. There would be no question that it was CIA Special Division Director John
Bailey on that ship, tearing it apart right next to public enemy number one,
the Revolution. Bailey’s only regret was not being able to be there when they
realized it was him.

The Revolution, for his part,
charged on board after Rachel was well away and sprinted across the ship,
ripping out every large gun turret and tossing them into the ocean. The hollow
fake decoys were made of a lightweight aluminum that actually floated in the
water. When the Revolution was done with one ship he simply charged across the
bow and leapt across to the next destroyer, yanking out their fake gunnery and
tossing them into the harbor and staying a step ahead of Hollis, who was
rapidly cutting away below. When Revolution was done, the harbor was littered
with the discarded weaponry.

They had made a mess of the ships.
As the five reboarded their Sikorsky, the three battleships lay with their
center sections missing. All of their “guns” floating in the water around them.
And large antennae spires jutting out in front of them like some macabre
gateway to the sea. Sophia had doused them in a liquid igniter the Army was
calling Everlight: a nonburning fire that could last for hours. A staple of the
troops in the ongoing African Conflict. The spires stood like giant torches in
the bay. The bizarre display would guarantee news coverage. It would become
obvious to everyone that these were not regular destroyers. A little
investigation would reveal they were actually high-tech devices that were being
used to spy on Bostonians—Blake Lane would aid in that with an exclusive
exposé. The Chairman would deny it and spin it, of course, but the evidence
would be there for all to see who bothered to look.