The Suns of Liberty: Legion: A Superhero Novel (13 page)

     “All in favor?” Neither she nor Revolution raised
their hands. Twenty-three members did. Not a majority. Now if only they could
avoid enough members from abstaining. Leslie glanced quickly at Revolution,
who, again, hadn’t moved. “All opposed?” Twenty-six members raised their hands.
No one abstained.

     A bare majority opposed the compromise.

     Again, neither she nor Revolution raised their hands.

     It was their custom not to vote unless they had to.
Leslie was the chair of the committee, and tradition dictated that she not vote
unless needed to break a tie. The Revolution felt strongly he should not
over-use the voting privileges he’d been granted since he was the one
non-elected member of COR.

     “The motion is not agreed to,” Leslie said, trying her
best not to sound relieved.

     The gentlewoman from Georgia rose.

     Leslie braced for impact.

     “Given the failure of the compromise,” the gentlewoman
said, her disappointment obvious in her voice, “I would like to fully support
this declaration. It is important that this Congress take bold steps, whatever
direction we go. I would have preferred the former path. But I will travel with
you on this one instead if that is our judgment.”

     She returned to her seat. No one said a word. The main
battles had already taken place in the Living Quarters. Just as Leslie was
about to again call for a vote, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, the oldest
member of the Congress, rose slowly to his feet. He peered about the circle
with the grace of age and wisdom. His voice was gravely with time, but his tone
was as sharp as a knife.

     “Maybe it is my residence here in this city, as
caretaker of this very facility,” he said, “but I feel we must consider what we
are doing. We are painting a target on our backs. On our heads! I urge you not
to take this course.” Slowly, he too returned to his seat.

     The room returned to silence.

     “Would someone like to call for a vote on moving ahead
on this declaration of liberty, then?” Leslie asked.

     “Yes, I so move,” said the gentlewoman from Georgia.

     “Is there a second?” Leslie asked. Again there was.
“All in favor?” Neither she nor Revolution raised their hands. Twenty-seven members
did. A majority. Twenty voted against and three abstained or did not vote,
including herself and of course the Revolution.

     Leslie pulled up a new folder and opened it, bringing
the next proposal out before her. “The next order of business is a somewhat
different proposal,” she said as she prepared now to propose attacking Freedom
Rise itself. 

Back
in Boston, they awaited word. When finally it came, Lantern entered the
Situation Room to tell them all. It had been another close vote, he told them.

     Twenty-six for the attack, twenty-three against.

     Sophia, in command in the Revolution’s absence, got
them up. Got them training, working the plan. The plan was to be swift; the
plan was to be precise. A surgical strike into the heart of the Council’s tidy
little world.

     Now official, in a matter of days they would be headed
off to New York to attack the most heavily protected fortress in the world.

CHAPTER 14

NEW YORK CITY

FREEDOM RISE

K
endrick
Ray scowled. “Have they said whether they’re in or not?” Arbor grimaced at Ray.
“I don’t think they really have a choice.”

     “Which means neither do we, huh?”

     Arbor frowned and scanned the door in front of him.
“I’ve been assigned to units I didn’t want before, haven’t you, sweetheart?
We’ll get through it.” And somehow he’d manage not to kill the bastards. Somehow.

     Ray looked at the door and then back at the big man
and said, “Just think of them as expendable, excisable.” He patted the big guy
on the shoulder and strolled away, grinning.

     “More like cannon fodder,” Arbor breathed, and he
opened the door.

     It was your basic interrogation room. Empty, other
than a single table with three chairs. On the other side of the table sat
Fiddler and Fang. Fiddler, midthirties, athletic build, and decked out in brown
armor that had the violin-like markings of a Brown Recluse spider on its chest.

     Arbor didn’t take his chair.

     “Like my new duds?” Fiddler asked. But it wasn’t
really a question. Sounded a hell of a lot more like a threat.

     He raised a helmet up from his lap and set it on the
table. It was similar to the signature ski mask Fiddler used to wear. A combination
of a hideous spider face and high-tech armor.

     Fiddler had been the notorious leader of the Brown
Recluse gang that had terrorized Boston for years. And for the last ten of
those years with Council cooperation. What really offended Arbor about Fiddler
was his complete lack of principles. He turned on his own people at the drop of
a hat, was probably a psychopath, and had no respect for the chain of command.

     Three months ago, in the chaos of the battle of Boston and the Man-O-War, Lithium had turned the tables on the gang leader and brought
Fiddler in himself. Since then, he had languished in prison next to his main
enforcer, Fang, who sat beside him now.

     Arbor smiled as he thought about it.

     Fang, early thirties, was a huge, muscle-bound brute
with a shaved head and not much to speak of in the brain department. He was
clad in civilian clothes, just a muscle shirt and jeans, which for a guy the
size of Fang—even larger than Clay Arbor himself—was intimidating enough.

     But what had Arbor really worried were the acid-filled
harpoons that adorned both sleeves of Fiddler’s new battle armor. Armor that
could have only come from Von Cyprus and his merry band of science freaks.
Arbor felt a very familiar feeling of rage building up inside of him.

     Nothing had changed. The Council still left him as the
last to know everything. Even who the members of his own team were. Even if
some of them would undoubtedly want to kill him!

     “Just sit there and shut the hell up,” Arbor spat. “I
got no love for either of you. But we all got our orders, don’t we?”

     “Actually,” Fiddler said, rising from his chair, “I
don’t follow orders. I give them. So, if you’re going be leading
me
,
you’d bloody well better prove your up to it, old man.”

     “Sit the fuck back down.”

     “No, I don’t think so. Last time we met, you suckered
me like a little girl. Not this time.” Fiddler shrugged and nodded. “You take
me down fair and square, then we’ll think about joining your little costume
party. Otherwise, you can just dump us right back in the Four Seasons where we
were. Cause I’m a bloody god in there.”

     Arbor’s eyes narrowed in fury.

     “Oh, you didn’t think about that, did you? Prison is a
bleeding vacation for me, mate. I already own that place.”

     “Why the hell do you talk like an Englishman, you
pretentious little shit? You’re from Bean Town, dumbass. Now sit the
fuck
back down!”

     Fiddler reached down, snatched up his helmet, and
snapped it on. “No. We’re doing this, and guess what? You can go ahead and
twinkle your little flashlight. I’ve got that covered.” He tapped the visors on
his helmet.

     “Aw, dis gonna be good,” grunted Fang in his own thick
Boston accent.     

     “You really don’t want to do this, sweetheart,” Arbor
said, readying himself as Fiddler stepped from around the corner of the table.

     “No, I really do.”

     Fiddler raised his right arm with lightning speed and
fired the acid dart from the armor’s sleeve cannon. As soon as it launched, a
new dart loaded, ready to fire.

     The dart shot out directly at Arbor’s face—

     And he simply raised his arm into the path of the
projectile and let it stab into his armor with a clunk.

     The armor began to sizzle. The acid dripped off his
arm onto the floor. The concrete bubbled.

     Fiddler’s eyes widened. The acid was taking far too
long to burn through the big man’s armor. He’d clearly not anticipated that.

     Arbor yanked out the dart and tossed it across the
room.

     He flashed a smile at Fiddler.

     And charged. 

     He seized the gang leader by the neck, his armored
fingers squeezing against the inferior metal of Fiddler’s armor. Arbor slammed
him against the far wall. And smiling his big toothy grin at the grimacing thug,
he held his sizzling arm against Fiddler's own forearm.

     The acid began eating into the armor, eating through
it. Fiddler struggled, but Arbor had his other arm now too.

     Fiddler’s eyes were huge. Arbor could see him
wondering how the acid hadn’t gotten to him when it was burning away Fiddler’s
own skin already. Fiddler howled in pain as the acid scorched his skin. The big
man held him in place, grinning.

     Fiddler screamed.

     Arbor’s face fell. “You're the piece of shit that’s
stinking up my life right now. But I ain't got time to mess with you.  Trust
me, that time will come, and when it does, I'm gonna cut you up with my knife
and wash you into the sewer with a goddamn hose. You got that?”

     Fiddler crumpled to floor, holding his mutilated
forearm, the skin completely gone, the fascia starting to bubble. Arbor winced
from the acid sizzling on his own skin—and then smirked.

     “Now, get yourself cleaned up, you're making me sick.
We’ve got work to do, not a lot of time, and I ain’t about to hear excuses. You
don’t get leave time around here, sweetheart.” Arbor spun back toward Fang, who
had risen from his chair but wisely not moved another inch. “I ain’t gonna send
you back to prison. Either of you challenge my leadership again, I’ll send you
to your fucking graves.”

CHAPTER 15

NEW YORK CITY

TWO DAYS LATER

F
reedom
Rise rose above the New York skyline like a metallic
Mount Doom
. It
stood out among the other skyscrapers in its ominous magnitude. Whether this
was by design or simply an effect of the psychological weight of the mission
before them, none of them knew.

     Some said Freedom Rise resembled a marriage of the Eifel
Tower and the Empire State Building. Ward was thinking it looked more like the
building from that now ancient movie
Metropolis
, which he’d watched a
few weeks back.

     The Suns glided forward, preparing to attack the most
heavily guarded non-military structure in the world. The ice-cold wind blasted
at them as they flew toward the towering edifice. Sophia rocketed forward,
blasters ready. Ward had his hands full—of the Revolution. He bear hugged him
as they flew.

     “Lantern, can we see inside yet?” Revolution asked.

    
“Still blocked, sir.”

     Far across the city and twenty thousand feet above the
ground, Lantern monitored them from aboard the
StealthHawk-1
. On the
horizon he saw the dark storm clouds of Hurricane Ana, the first storm of the
spring, scheduled to hit the area in twenty-four hours.

     He hoped it wasn’t a bad omen.

     Sophia charged her bracelets. And grinned over at the
Revolution. The rest of them might have been apprehensive about this attack,
but she relished it. Every time she put on the black flight suit and became
Helius, she thought about her family, about her father. Maybe it wasn’t healthy
to devote your life to revenge, but if the revenge was channeled into a project
to help others, to build something positive, she figured it was okay. The
Council might not have pulled the trigger that killed her father, but they’d
paid the bills that sent the hit man. She stared ahead at the monstrous
building. She really hoped the Guards inside were going to resist. Revolution
had made it very clear that they were to keep fatalities to a minimum, but
damage to the building was acceptable.

     And Sophia was hoping for
maximum acceptance
.

     “All right, Helius, ring the doorbell for us,” Revolution
said.

     In their visors, Lantern’s guided blasting path glowed
digital red across the face of the skyscraper. Sophia only needed to keep her
energy rays on those lines and she would open up a direct path to the Fire Fly
chamber.

     The sapphire energy beamed out from her bracelets. She
blasted the glass windows along Lantern’s guides and they erupted in a shower of
glass and concrete.

     Revolution applied his telescope-vision but could see
nothing but darkness inside a blasted-out wall. “Looks like she got the inner
wall too, but it’s dark in there. She may have taken out the power.”