The Suns of Liberty: Legion: A Superhero Novel (16 page)

    
“Say hello to the cameras,”
boomed Clay Arbor’s
voice across the room.

     Revolution breathed a sigh of relief—it wasn’t the
chamber. But then what the hell was Lithium doing speaking to them over an
intercom? He could only think of a few reasons for that. Revolution scanned the
ceiling and found the camera. A tiny dot recessed into the paneling. “No...” he
said. Understanding now what was happening.

     Another setup.

    
“You were right about one thing. You are done here,
sweetheart.”

     “
Sir, it’s a bomb!”
Lantern yelled over the com.

     “What?”

     But then Revolution realized what Lantern meant.

     The chamber was a fake shell covering some kind of
explosive device. Their only hope was that it was not too powerful for his
armor; otherwise, he could not protect the others. He screamed at them over the
com, “Get behind me, don’t—

     BOOM!

     The unit exploded in a starburst of light and flame.
Revolution tried to expand his body, block the blast from reaching Ward and
Sophia. The bulk of the energy absorbed into his armor, but the blast took him
off his feet. The trio shattered the windows behind them.

     And lost consciousness.

     The three most famous Suns of Liberty were flung out
into the bright, wide-open New York sky.

CHAPTER 17

T
he
blast shook the foundations of Freedom Rise.

     A large plume of smoke and flame erupted from the side
of the building. People all over New York felt the impact and scanned the sky
in terror. Old memories still lingered in the collective mind of America’s greatest city. Others feared the hurricane had struck early.

     Later, rooftop security and cityscape cams would
capture the moment of the blast. Some would even show the three figures being
hurled out the shattered windows one hundred stories above the ground.

     The three Suns fell to their deaths in a spray of
shimmering glass with no one able to help. No one watching.

     Almost no one.

Lantern
reacted immediately. He’d been fooled and allowed his team to be ambushed in
the heart of the enemy, but there was no way he was going to let them all die.

     As they fell, Lantern’s Hollow materialized above
them, diving at the same rate of descent at which the three were falling.

     The ground was rapidly approaching. He had only a matter
of seconds.

     The Hollow sent a digital signal into Ward’s and
Sophia’s armor that effectively took control of their suits. It was an
emergency protocol he’d been told never to use.

     Almost never.

     With only seconds to spare, any kind of complicated command
would be impossible to program. Fortunately, he only needed both suits to do
one thing.

     Go up.

     The blasters on Sophia’s boot-jets and the engines on
Ward’s wings ignited and launched them skyward. Lantern wanted to breathe a
sigh of relief, but the hard part was still to come.

     The Revolution couldn’t fly.

     But he could release stored-up energy. Like that from
a bomb blast.

     His body was spinning as he fell; the hard,
unforgiving concrete of Sixth Avenue awaited him below. If he crashed into the ground,
the armor would survive, but the Revolution’s human body would be minced
tomatoes inside it.

     Lantern would have to time this perfectly. The easiest
way for the Revolution’s armor to release stored-up energy was straight out in
front of him. With the chaotic spin his body was in, Lantern knew he would have
only one shot at timing the release of energy from the bomb blast with the
front of his torso facing the ground.

     But this was downtown NYC.

     The street below the Revolution was crowded with cars.
The blast he was about to unleash would undoubtedly kill anyone who was in its
path. And looking at the massive traffic jam on Sixth Avenue caused by all the
commotion at Freedom Rise, Lantern knew there were going to be plenty of people
in its path. The cars weren’t even moving.

     For a moment he thought of simply letting him hit.

     What would Revolution want him to do?

     Sacrifice civilians or save him?

     He knew the answer to that. Sometimes it seemed like
the Revolution almost welcomed his own death. A not-unheard-of attitude for a
soldier. But it was not Lantern’s call to let the leader of the movement die
when he knew he had a chance to save him. And he was a leader who was needed.
What was it the General had told him so many times before?

    
“In war there are casualties.”
Sometimes it was
just unavoidable.

     He waited.

     Revolution kept spinning. He was falling faster than
Lantern had calculated. There was no more time. The Hollow sent the signal.

     Revolution’s armor could control the release of
absorbed energy in several ways. First, it could release it from virtually
anywhere: hands, chest, full body. Second, it could choose to narrow the beam
of released energy or it could widen it. Lantern had only seconds to choose.

     He set it for chest release, narrow. A bright orange
blast of energy erupted from Revolution’s armor. It fired out at a sixty-degree
angle, incinerating half a dozen vehicles before it met the roadway. The narrow
beam sent back a concentrated shockwave of energy that struck the Revolution,
jolting him back up into the air, but at a sixty-degree angle. The release of
energy acted like a jet engine, launching him high into the sky.

     The Hollow, floating in the air just above the roadway,
turned and sent a beam of light from its “helmet” that calculated the path that
Revolution’s careening body would take. The line shot across the sky, and
Lantern blanched when he saw it. At his current trajectory he was going to rip
right through the top of the Chrysler Building          

     Lantern had another problem.

     Ward and Sophia were climbing rapidly. He would have
to stop them, and soon. If they ripped through the atmosphere, they would die. 
Either from freezing to death in the thin air or suffocating in the deadly vacuum
of space. Helius, at least, had the power to go that far. 

     One thing at a time.

Revolution’s
eyes popped open.

     He was hyperaware. It was as if his entire brain had
been stimulated at once. Like nothing he’d ever felt before. It was more than
just waking up hurtling through space. He’d had the unfortunate experience of
doing that before. 

     No, this was something else. As he snapped his head
around, sizing up his situation, he realized it was this something else that
had just saved his life. He wondered if Lantern had found a way to send a jolt
of electricity into his suit to wake him up. Not a bad idea, actually. He would
have Leslie take a look at that later.

     If there was a later...

     The world zoomed by in a blur of speed. He needed to
slow down.

     His cape snapped rigid. He rolled his body, pushing
the cape’s glider so that he angled his trajectory, rising sharply and veering
right. He would just miss the Chrysler Building’s steel tower. So, for the moment,
no more being smashed like a bug. But that still didn’t solve the problem of
how he was going to stop.

     He shot through the sky.

     The Chrysler was on him now. A mere fifteen feet away.
One idea came to mind.

     He fired his i-hook above him and toward the
Chrysler’s steel spire. The cable looped around it with five separating
fingers, each attaching themselves with magnetized microfibers.

     The cable snapped taut. The force of it jerked the
Revolution off his flight path and up toward the building’s metal skin. He let
out a bit more slack and angled his body again to let the wind catch his cloak.
Slowly, he pulled in the i-hook’s slack. This had the desired effect of reeling
him around the tower at the same time that it began to slow his speed. 

     Spinning, spinning, until—

     The cable ran out.

     He slammed into the side of the building with a clang.
Even with his reduced speed the impact took the air from his lungs, and he
nearly forgot to employ the last of his hastily developed plan.

     He began to slide.

     Vertigo gripped him.

     He sent a command to magnetize the outer skin of his
armor just before he lost his wits, and all at once—he stopped. He was safe.
Now if he could just breathe again.

Lantern
was flying like a bat out of hell. The Sikorsky
Stealthhawk-1
chopper
shot across the Manhattan skyline making almost no sound. Blocked completely
from every radar system in the world.

     Except his own, of course.

     He’d programmed the Sikorsky’s heading to the Chrysler
Building and maxed out the throttle speed. The autopilot was doing the rest. Bailey’s
little toy was a godsend. He just hoped he could reach the General in time.

     The Chrysler Building came into view.

     Next, he saw the Revolution hurtling toward it,
unconscious and out of control. The jet engine of the absorbed bomb blast
finally running its course, falling silent.

     As Lantern watched, Revolution righted himself, his
cape snapped rigid, and he was gliding. Lantern waited and nearly called to him
on the com, but at that very moment the question he was about to ask was
answered when he saw Revolution’s i-hook shoot out from his wrist.

     Lantern breathed a deep sigh of relief, but he had no
time to waste. He typed a new coordinate into the Sikorsky:
straight up.

     The Sikorsky lurched and Lantern was tossed in his
seat, straining against his harness. Pain shot through his injured leg. What
the hell was the bird doing?

     The helicopter slowed and for a second Lantern thought
he’d put in the wrong code and that the whole thing was going to stall.

     Actually, the autopilot was doing its best not to
stall. The Sikorsky began a gradual shift to a dramatic vertical lift. It was
like throwing a car into reverse. What Bailey would have called an
effective
translational lift
. Unfortunately, it was not as fast as Lantern had
hoped. 

     It still took his stomach.

     Somewhere above him, Sophia was climbing at a rate Lantern
would never be able to catch. He realized that there was nothing he could do to
save Helius directly. His throat tightened at the thought, but he quickly
recovered. He’d have to send the Hollow and hope for the best. The Hollow launched
skyward at his command, scanning the digi-sphere for Sophia’s signal.

     Lantern ran a separate scan of the sky trying to find
Ward—and did.

     He locked in on his moving coordinates.

     A few seconds more and he had an algorithm that compensated
for Ward’s rise into the atmosphere.

     He punched the numbers into the Sikorsky and hoped the
autopilot would understand.

     It did. The rotors whirred to life to compensate,
pitching the copter forward to catch up with Ward.

     It only took a few moments and
Stealthhawk-1
came level with Ward, still closing on his position. Lantern put it back into a
vertical rise and locked the Sikorsky onto Ward’s airspeed. The bird zoomed up
to catch him. Ward was about one hundred yards in front of him now. He could
see him shooting up into the heavens. Midnight-blue suit, brilliant orange
wings—all just a blur. The Sikorsky caught up to him and locked on to his
airspeed, matching him pace for pace.

     He manually edged the copter closer to him, watching a
readout of distance to target: eighty yards. Seventy, sixty, fifty, forty yards.
That was close enough.

     Less than half a football field’s distance from one
another, rising into the thin upper atmosphere together.

     Lantern looked through the cockpit window into the sky
above, and he could begin to see the blackness of space.

     It was now or never.

     He unlatched his harness and leaped out of his seat,
hobbling on his still healing broken leg, stiff from sitting for so long. He
snatched up a parachute and strapped it onto his dark-brown leather-clad back—just
in case. He darted over to the equipment crate just behind the copilot’s seat
and ripped open the top, grabbing up two i-hook gun-belts, and trying not to
think too much about what he was committing himself to.

     He’d had crazier plans. Hadn’t he?

     He snapped the belt around his waist. The intelli-hook
gun-belt was simply a gun that fired an i-hook attached to one hundred meters
of cable. The gun was itself attached to the belt by about a meter of cable.
Then Lantern strapped a second gun-belt onto his belly above the first belt. It
was an awkward thing to wear. They were both heavy and bulky and weighing him
down. But it was all he could think to do.