The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (24 page)

The Sikorsky rose, soaring into
the night sky, still in stealth mode, and angled away at high speed. By the
time they took off, a few onlookers had braved their way to the shoreline to
get a better look. The loud cracking and snapping of the center sections of the
massive ships giving way and sinking into the depths had caused a commotion. In
short, the operation had gone nearly flawlessly.

Nearly.

CHAPTER
39

A
n
alarm on the cockpit squealed to life, and Bailey leaned back and barked at
them, “X-1s! On our tail! I can keep those helos off us for a while, but I’m
gonna need backup!” Revolution spun back to see four attack copters thundering
toward them, closing the gap fast. Revolution wondered how Lantern hadn't seen
them coming.

“I got this!” Sophia yelled,
sliding open the bay door and falling out. Her boot propulsors ignited, and she
blasted toward the Apaches.

Revolution motioned to Ward. “Fly
me up!”

“Okay, but—” Ward started to ask
him what the plan was when Revolution threw himself out of the Sikorsky after
Sophia. “Holy shit!” Ward yelled and followed him out the door—didn't even
think about it this time before he was in free fall.
Holy shit!

Rachel struggled to yank the door
shut against the air current as the three of them fell away from the craft.
Ward dove toward Revolution, who was in actual free fall, with no way to fly.
Ward blasted his jets and caught up to him but mistimed his approach, smacking
into him with a thud. The impact was like hitting a bus. It took Ward's breath,
and for a moment he panicked as he saw the ground rising up fast. His brain was
jumbled. He couldn't think. This was nothing like flying reconnaissance over
rooftops. This took timing and precision and a whole host of aerial skills Ward
had yet to develop.

“Paul. Pull up, please,”
Revolution said calmly. Ward was seeing stars, and it took him far too long to
regain control of his senses. He pulled hard, attempting to arc back skyward,
but Revolution’s weight was too much. They were turning upward too slowly. The
ground rose up fast below them. Twenty feet to impact. Ward pulled harder, and
Revolution tried to help. They turned skyward just as Revolution's boots gouged
into the soft earth of the shoreline. Ward heard Revolution grunt from the
impact as dirt sprayed into both of their faces. But Ward had managed to hang
on to him. They were headed up.

“I thought you said you hated to
fly?” Ward said with a grin.

Revolution said nothing.

“Now what?” Ward asked.

“Go straight up!”

Ward opened the jets full force
and zipped vertical.

Meanwhile, Sophia had continued
blasting toward the X-1s, which opened fire. She responded with a burst of
power and flew beneath their artillery. The streaks of the projectiles skimmed
just above her as she dove. The rounds were close enough to hear and smell.
Deadly whistle and acrid metal. The copters circled back to take her out.
Sophia smiled. Just what she wanted. She’d drawn their fire. Now she just had
to survive it.

Ward rocketed the Revolution far
above Sophia and the X-1s. Revolution peered down and yelled to Ward, “Drop
me!”

“What?”

“Drop me! Do it now!” He knew
Sophia could not hold out forever.

“I don't think —” Revolution
slammed an elbow into Ward ribs, cutting off his words, and Ward was sent careening
away like a missile out of control. Revolution was in free fall again. Three
thousand feet above the Earth. His cape snapped rigid. He steadied his body and
glided toward Sophia, who was arcing back up at him with the X-1s hot on her
tail.

Revolution barked into her
helmet-com. “Helius. Look up. Do you see me?”

“Yes,” she said after a few
seconds.

“Shoot me. One blast only,
please.”

Sophia paused for a second, but
only a second, and then followed the order.
You asked for it.
She fired
a blue beam of her H3 energy right into Revolution. The blast engulfed him and
flung him back up into the night sky. But soon enough his momentum stalled and
he was back into free fall...

Below him, Sophia felt the metal
zing past her again. The X-1s had her locked on. She needed to take them out
now
.
In midair, she turned and blasted the two inner birds out of the sky. The X-1s
exploded in spectacular fiery starbursts.

Two down. She knew the other two
birds would have to fly clear of the dangerous debris field. This gave her a
second to relax, check on the General. She peered up into the sky...

But the two X-1s that remained
banked away from the explosions and then they were back on her. They set their
aim. She was in the center of their crosshairs. Completely unaware. No chance
to escape. The pilots squeezed their triggers…

Just as two blue streaks of energy
ripped the X-1s apart from above.

Revolution watched as the H3
energy released from his arms and destroyed the Apaches below—just a
millisecond before the pilots’ fingers hit their triggers. The shockwave the
blasts produced slammed into him, and again he was sent spinning across the
sky. “Paul, if you're still up here, a little help would be
wonderful.”    

Ward heard the eerie calm in
Revolution’s voice. Either the man really didn’t fear dying at all, or he was
the rare individual who got calmer in the face of his fear. He’d said he didn’t
like to fly. For everyone else on the planet that meant you
feared
it.
What the hell did it mean for the Revolution? Maybe he actually welcomed death.
Ward put that out of his mind and replied back.

“I'm coming in above you at
your...ten o'clock,” Ward said, a little peeved at being smacked in the ribs,
but he’d seen the whole thing go down. He had to learn to follow orders better.
Clearly.

Revolution peered up and saw him.
He shifted his body and let his cape snap rigid again. In a matter of seconds
he was gliding at high speed, angled to the ground. Left to his own, he would
have died gracefully, colliding with the Earth like a plane with no landing
gear. But Ward eased in on top of him, and Revolution let the cape relax. Ward
embraced him and lifted the arc of his flight, and soon the two men were
trailing the bright blue exhaust of Helius back to the escape chopper.

The Harbor Incident, as it was called, became
national news. And after a few days, the new Suns of Liberty took credit for
it. The Revolution was implicated. As was Spider Wasp and Helius. Other unknown
accomplices were also mentioned in the Media Corp reporting.

The Suns became instant
celebrities. WORLD’S FIRST SUPER TEAM! one headline blared. Followed with
But
Are They Friends or Foes?
Media Corp touted the superteam angle in its
headlines because it sold copies, drove hits on the Net, and increased revenue
flow. The reader was always set straight in the body of the piece: the Suns
were terrorists.

Speculation was rampant on who the
other members of the Suns really were, and that too sold copies. Little-known
members of the hero movement found themselves giving crowded press conferences
to disavow membership. Or risk being hauled in by the Council Guard. Libertine
held a press conference. So did the Lady Rage. Heroes no one had heard of were
famous for a day.

“Sun-spotting” became a favorite
public pastime, rivaling Elvis, Bigfoot, and UFO sightings. Members were seen
everywhere no matter how small the town or how far away it was from Boston. The
Suns of Liberty were the top-rated news item for weeks.

As more weeks passed, press
coverage died down, and the Suns started to believe that the Council might not
retaliate.

They were wrong.

The Chairman had already wanted to
strike a blow. Now he knew he had to.

At precisely midnight on a cool late September
evening, four power plants in South Boston exploded simultaneously. The flames
rode high into the skies in fantastic clouds of hell. Two Media Corp crews just
happened to be near enough to get live footage. Purely coincidence, of course.

The old power grid had been
replaced about twenty years before with these four major power plants. The Four
Corners, as they were collectively called, generated about seventy-five percent
of the power in South Boston's working-class neighborhoods.

All four plants had skeleton crews
of about thirty that night. The death toll for all four explosions was only
two. Sixty-seven were injured. All four plants were complete losses. The four
plants were holding unprecedented coordinated fire drills at the very moment
they were bombed.
Even Chairman Sage has a conscience
, Revolution had
surmised. Bailey had seen bombings up close many times. He knew these had been
done with military precision of the highest caliber. They were not the work of
amateurs, as was claimed in the press.

Immediately, the authorities descended
on the scene. Some might say
too
quickly. Despite the hour, Boston's
police, Council Guard, and military personnel were more than capable of
coordinating a response to the attack. Within minutes media reports announced
who had perpetrated the heinous act of terrorism: The Suns of Liberty. This
time they had gone too far, the reporters and authorities said. They were no
longer content to just go after the Council. Now they were coming after you.

Of course, it wasn't true. Opinion
polls revealed the public did not believe the Suns were responsible. But as
weeks rolled on with still no power in the Heights, polls showed that Americans
did buy into the idea that local officials had not been able to fix the massive
damage at the plants due to the unruly streets of Boston. The Suns knew that
the truth was that the Council was just delaying the repairs. The Council
imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in South Boston to “maintain order.” And while
Bostonians opposed it by wide margins, a thin majority of Americans supported
it.

For the next two months, the
material conditions of living in South Boston became increasingly miserable.
The calculated strategy was to undermine public support for the Resistance in
the heart of the movement itself. In the local papers, whose print circulation
boomed during the power outage, the notion that nothing but misery can come
from supporting the Resistance was aired with regularity. It would have been a
compelling narrative were it not for the fact that most Bostonians did not believe
the Suns were responsible for the bombings. Nor did they appreciate the obvious
propaganda coming out of Media Corp.

The problem with playing it
straight most of the time in the mainstream media was that when the Chairman
decided to take control and make a media blitz against a policy or person or,
in this case, the entire Resistance, it became too obvious what he was up to.
Bostonians were onto him. And while a small percentage was swayed by the
campaign, a much larger portion of the public hardened their views that the
Council itself was behind their suffering. This data was, of course, never
released to the public. 

SOUTH BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

TWO MONTHS LATER

Inside Ward's apartment, dust covered much of the
furniture. The clutter was worse than normal. Ward was depressed. After the
Harbor Incident and the Council’s retaliation for it, the Revolution, Leslie,
and the people in COR decided their big move would be to...do nothing. They put
together their superteam and then just sat around. Or at least that’s how it
felt to Ward.

What they said they were doing was
recruiting Minutemen volunteers, improving the suits and weapons of the Suns’
team members. Allowing time for Revolution, Leslie, and Bailey to put their
heads together, come up with a plan. Leslie was said to be working on a
solution to their energy issues in South Boston. Revolution seemed obsessed
about her work. 

All Ward knew was that misery was
everywhere in South Boston. The Council refused to fix the power plants. They
blamed the lack of progress on the extensive destruction and the unruly
streets. But the truth was, the quarantine was to blame for the rise in crime
right along with the rise in desperation. And that’s just how the Council
wanted it. It was punishment, and it was aimed at stoking dissent on the
streets against the Suns of Liberty. So why weren’t the Suns doing something
about it?

The strategy made no sense to him.

Ward sat at his window looking out
at the desolate, run-down city. The weather had turned colder. Cars sat
abandoned. Businesses shuttered. Discarded newspapers whipped in the winter
wind. A line of soldiers was stationed on the outskirts of the quarantine area,
making sure no one left.
Boston hasn’t been saved. It’s worse than ever.

Ward‘s eyes were sullen,
regretful, and he hadn't shaved in days. He slid one of his darts from a small
canister and pricked it into his wrist. A smile of relief washed over him. He
sank to the floor. Alison crawled over to him. She rested her head in his lap.
She opened her hand, and a dart rolled out and rattled across the floor. She
smiled numbly and closed her eyes.

CHAPTER
40

A
miniature sun burned in front of Dr. Leslie Gibbons. A large, pulsating orb of
bioluminescent energy where, just seconds before, there had been only a void of
air. It floated just on the other side of the tall glass wall of the Fire Fly
chamber. The energy pulsed and rotated inside the orb in a yellow-green
radiance of power. The hum it emitted filled the room. Leslie punched
coordinates into the computer as she measured its output.

Behind her Revolution watched in
awe. “It’s working!” he breathed. His eyes were large behind his helmet. Even
for him this was something to behold. Leslie had run these tests many times
before, but she'd never gotten a fully formed orb to sustain itself for longer
than a few seconds.