The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (37 page)

A shadow spread over the Revolution’s prone form. Something
about the loss of the light made him open his eyes. He squinted to see Lithium
staring down at him. The big man yanked Revolution to his feet, slammed him
against the wall, and jammed a wrist-flame-turret into a slit in Revolution's
mouth grill.

Revolution was too tired and
beat-up to react. He could have simply closed off his face grill, but Arbor
beat him to it. Now it just grinded, trying to snap shut, titanium against
titanium. “I could kill you right now. Burn you to a crisp. Turn that suit into
an incinerator,” Arbor said.

Revolution brought his remaining
wrist spike up to the exposed section of Arbor's throat just beneath his chin.
The big man flashed a defiant smile. They had reached a standoff. “I've never
understood you,” Arbor said against the steel of the spike. “I don't know who
you are. But I know one thing. I know you were a soldier. I can smell it on
you. And soldiers follow orders.”

“You're a soldier, and you took an
oath to defend the Constitution,” Revolution said.

“I took an oath to defend my
country,” Arbor said. “There's a difference.”

“Not supposed to be.”

“You can't win this,” Arbor said.
“It's time to fall in line.”

“When tyrants rise up, some of us
have to stand against them. No matter the cost.”

Arbor laughed. “You think you’re a
patriot, but you’re just another traitor,” he said.

Revolution stiffened. He peered
into Clay Arbor's eyes and spoke as deliberately as the pain raging through his
body would allow. “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Then
he stumbled. His knees trembled and started to give. He steadied himself
against the wall.

Arbor leered at him for a moment,
taking in his weakened state. He thought about all the ways that he could
finally defeat his rival. Finally show the world who was the greater of two
great titans. A broad smirk spread across his face, the familiar toothy grin.
The big man just shook his head and…

Walked away.

Revolution slid down the wall to
the ground. Relief washed over his tired, aching form. He watched Clay Arbor stroll
off. He wondered why he'd left him. Maybe there was good in Lithium after all.
Maybe he just didn't want to win this way, without knowing he'd won on his own.
Revolution tried to get back up but stumbled back into the wall. And then a
crackle in his helmet startled him. “General,” the voice said, “are you there?”

Revolution recognized the familiar
voice. “Lantern!” He grunted, “Yes, I'm here.”

“Saratoga didn't make it. And
Hunley hasn’t reported.” Lantern’s voice sounded thin, strained.

Lantern’s com was open to all of
them, and Revolution heard a gasp, but no one said a word. He could feel the
weight of this news hitting them. Revolution laid his head back against the
concrete. The pain still surging through his body, fighting against the
medication swishing through his veins. “Understood...”

“And there's another thing. In his
last message, Hunley reported an amphibian attack force, but there's nothing in
the harbor and I can't see anything in the city either.”

“Which means either he was wrong,
or...” Revolution said.

“It's cloaked from me somehow.
Either way, be careful out there.”

Revolution tried to answer him,
but the pain stinging him from his arm took his breath and he could feel more
drugs entering his bloodstream in response.

“I'm ready to broadcast,” Lantern
said. “Should we still do it?”

Revolution closed his eyes,
wrapping his mind around the level of the losses they had suffered this night.
“Do it. Send the goddamn thing.”

In Lake Tahoe, the TV suddenly faded to snow, and
an image of Revolution appeared on the screen in front of one of Leslie's
luminescent engines they’d come to call an Orb. It burned just above and behind
him, forming a fiery halo. Fiona watched her former obsession with mixed
emotions.

“Mr. Chairman, we both knew
this night would come. We both knew that despite your rhetoric and your facade
of neutrality, you maintain your power through fear and force. When
corporations become more powerful than governments, democracy dies. Corporate
rule is nothing if not taxation without representation. The Freedom Council is
just the ultimate expression. And tonight we're taking you down.

“Behind me is the thing you
cannot control. True renewable, nonpolluting energy for all. It is the key to
our future and the end of yours.”
Revolution leaned closer to the camera,
and despite herself, Fiona felt familiar heartstrings stir. She knew he was
turning on his charm.
“In the name of the people. In the name of the true
government. And in the name of the United States of America. We are The Suns of
Liberty, and the
Republic
will rise again.”

The image faded away just in time
for Fiona and Becky to hear the screams of the Minutemen as the Man-O-War swept
more of them to their deaths on-screen. The Media Corp camera crew was covering
the chaos live and hadn’t noticed Revolution’s brief interruption of the
coverage. Nor could they hear their producer above the roar of the machine as
he screamed at them over their headsets.

Fiona shrunk into Becky's arms.
Scared, horrified. Tears ran down her cheeks. She knew why this was happening.
She
had caused it
. She had caused it all and now innocent people were dying.
People who'd had nothing to do with the betrayal or her imprisonment in the
black matter. She heaved hard, heavy sobs into Becky's chest, and Becky could
do nothing but stroke the girl's hair and hold her. “I know. I know,” Becky
told her. 

Fiona raised her head. Her eyes
blazed with energy and anger. The Council had killed her parents. The Council
made her an orphan. They were the ones who put her in the hands of the
Revolution, who had betrayed her. She had yet to get her revenge on him, but it
was the Council that was the true enemy.

Truthfully, Fiona felt betrayed by
both sides, but on this night there was no question who the aggressor really
was. Good people were dying because of actions she had taken. But they were
actions started by the Council. Ten years ago. The Council had set this whole
thing in motion. But she, and she alone, had the power to stop it. She lumbered
off the couch, dazed, thoughts swirling in her head so fast she could hardly
keep up with them. Becky was still watching the screen in horror.

“It's going to kill them all,”
Becky said. And just as she did, the Man-O-War sent another sweep of its great
tendrils toward another wave of Minutemen, slicing many in half, lifting others
in its terrible wake. Flinging them hundreds of yards to splatter against the
steel grids of the city's skyline. Their screams permeated her living room.

Fiona peered down at her hands,
and they began to glow. Fresh tears welled in the teen's eyes. They dropped
from her face, spilling brightly onto the carpet, and Becky was reminded of the
day they met. 

“I have to stop it,” Fiona said,
and before Becky could even react, the blinding flash came and Fiona was gone.
Becky's eyes trailed back to her TV, and Fiona materialized on-screen right in
front of the camera.

For a moment, Becky forgot to
breathe.

CHAPTER
58

W
ard's
unconscious body lay sprawled across the concrete of the roof. Blood had pooled
near his face, running down his cheeks from a wound on his head under the
flight helmet. A shadow spread over his body and stopped. Fiddler, the gang
leader of the Brown Recluse, the murderer of Ward's little boy all those years
ago, and now the Spider Wasp's most hated enemy, stood above him with a
menacing smile on his lips. Fiddler pointed his acid harpoon at Ward's face and
pulled the trigger—

Or he was about to...

Instead, something startled him,
and he gaped upwards, eyes wide. He smiled. “Shit!  Scared the hell outta
me! You were right, though.” Fiddler re-aimed the acid pistol at Ward's face.
“Here he is. Got the shit kicked out of him, just like you said. Easy
pickins'.”

Fiddler went to squeeze the
trigger again, but this time something bright blasted his eyesight. It was
white and piercing—the kind of thing one spins away from as fast as possible.
Yet Fiddler was oddly compelled to look right at it. He screamed with the
realization of what was about to happen to him. “No, wait, don't!”

But it was too late. His pupils
dilated grotesquely, taking up the whole of his corneas. He collapsed to the
ground.

Clay Arbor just sneered at his
comatose body. “Asshole.”

Police officers rushed the roof.
Arbor pointed at Fiddler. “Take that one into custody. Let's get him on camera.
Downstairs, in the street.” Arbor peered back over at Paul Ward, the Spider
Wasp. He saw his fingers twitch. A good sign. He hesitated a moment and then
told the boys in blue, “And leave the other be.”

As they started to turn back for
the door, the young officer accompanying Arbor said, “Sir, I know it’s your
call, but won’t you get in trouble for not bringing in Spider Wasp?”

“That one?” Arbor asked with a
chuckle. “That one’s just an actor.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Council does it all the
time. Trust me, I know.” Arbor patted the officer on the shoulder and strolled
past him. The young man followed him through the door and off the roof.

“Why the hell would they do that?”

“Beats me kid.” Clay Arbor was grinning
ear to ear. “Beats me.”

The others hauled Fiddler away and
left Ward alone on the roof.

Revolution moaned against the wall, in pain. His
arm felt like it was trapped in burning cinders. The drugs were still trying to
numb it. He thought about the one Sun he hadn't seen all night, not that that
was surprising, but he wanted to know that she was still alive. “Stealth, where
are you? Are you still with us?” he said into his com.

“Yes, I'm here. Trying to find how
they're controlling this thing. The mechanism is on the inside, I can tell you
that. I don't think it has an external controller, but I'm still looking.”

“Good. Get it done. Hudson, if you
can hear me, get your people out of here.” 

Rachel chose her words carefully.
“I don't think Hudson is able to answer.”

Revolution closed his eyes. He
wasn't thinking clearly. His mind was shrouded. Had he seen Hudson die? 
He tried to shake the cobwebs out. He held his head in his hands—a futile
gesture for a man wrapped in titanium—and his arm sent jolts of pain ripping
through him. But then he glanced up and knew he was losing his mind. Lantern
was standing over him, looking right at him.

“You're not real,” Revolution
said. “I wish you were, but you're not.” He looked away and then looked back,
expecting the mirage to be gone, but it was still there. Except something was
wrong. Revolution's vision cleared. But still something was wrong. The drugs in
his bloodstream washed the fog out of his mind, and still Lantern was not at
all right. He was…
Transparent.

“Lantern?” Revolution asked.

And that was when the Revolution’s
apparition spoke back at him. “It's just a holograph. I call it my
Hollow
,
remember, sir? You've seen it before.”

“Oh yes,” Revolution said, his
mind finally snapping into place. “Don't see how that helps right now,
though...”

The Hollow spoke directly to him
with a voice as audible and clear as if Diego Alvarez were standing right in
front of him. “Then let me be your eyes. Sending you an eyes-on signal right
now.” The Hollow turned and floated into the sky.

The Hollow flew straight into the
Man-O-War and slipped inside it. Revolution's view screen activated, and a view
from inside the Man-O-War faded to life, superimposed over his actual vision.
“I'm inside. You have visual?” Lantern asked, or the Hollow asked. Somebody
asked. The hell if Revolution knew where the voice was actually coming from.

“Yes, I've got it.” The viewfinder
scanned the cavernous inner dome. It was remarkably empty and simple inside. It
reminded Revolution of the inside of a drone aircraft. The guidance system was
near the top, but outfitted with layer after layer of redundancies and
self-repairing capabilities, no doubt.

Cables ran from that complex to
the multitude of tentacles, more than fifty in all, and back down to another
set of machines that were probably the redundancies for the arms. And all of it
was being controlled by the pulsating engine of Fire Fly technology towering
from top to bottom at the heart of the machine. It was converting everything,
both inside and out, to luminescence. Meaning that even if they could get
inside of the machine, none of the working parts were vulnerable to any weapon
they had.

Revolution could rip away on the
thing with what remained of his whip, but he would be burned alive inside the
Man-O-War before he could do any damage. The engine itself was essentially a
long tube of energy. And what Revolution noticed after a moment, as the Hollow
continued to scan, was that it kept pulsing red to white.

Leslie had mentioned something about
the luminescent spectrum, and the obscure memory was screaming at him,
competing with the wooziness of blood loss from his tattered arm. White was the
most powerful level on it, she had told him, followed by red and then the
chartreuse
shade of the Fire Fly herself. But Scott and Leslie had always favored the
yellow-green level because it was the most stable, the most dependable. The
most like the visible radiation from the sun—the source of nearly all light on
Earth. White was almost too powerful. Dangerous, unstable.

Revolution slammed his fist into
the concrete as the memory and the data flooded back to him. It was like a wave
hitting him. He rose with renewed vigor.