The Suns of Liberty: Legion: A Superhero Novel (17 page)

     He stepped back into the Sikorsky’s bay, pressed the
button, and the bay door slid open. The wind rushed in hard. He snatched up the
side webbing at the door just to avoid being thrown back into the copter, or
worse, out the bay door. His leg screamed in pain as he braced himself. This
was going to be harder than he thought.

     Lantern stared down at the landing skids and said a
small, silent prayer. He unholstered the i-hook gun from the belt high on his
waist, aimed the gun at the skid, and fired. The hook wrapped around the metal
and locked on. An unbreakable magnetized microfiber magnetic hold. 

     Lantern leapt from the copter out into the wide-open
sky.

     Falling. The cord on the gun unspooled a good fifty
feet, until he was safely away from both sets of rotors. He jammed the trigger
down again and the cable jolted to a stop. His body jolted too, and once again
his leg sent bolts of electric pain riveting through his body. Lantern cried
out in agony. He could already feel his arms trembling from the strain of it
all. And he hadn’t even gotten to the hard part.

     He was now dangling from a rapidly ascending
helicopter traveling into the lower stratosphere. The wind pounding him was
tremendous. He could barely breathe. Each intake of air seemed to get ripped
out of his lungs the second he breathed it. Ice stabbed his nostrils. And each
second sent another bolt of pain down through his tormented leg. His body
wanted to spin like a top, and he had to fight to stay still. He had to do this
fast.

     He pulled out the second i-hook gun from the belt low
on his waist, aimed it at Ward, and fired.

     The shot wasn’t even close.

     The force of the wind sent the cable spiraling
downward, far too low, missing Ward by a mile. Quickly he hit the trigger again
and the cable snapped back up at him. The tremendous wind whipped it back in a
blur. He lunged away just as the steel cable zoomed past his head, missing it by
centimeters. He let out a breath, but the cable shot back again with fantastic
speed—aiming for his face. His black helmet would provide no protection. The
cable would slice straight through. He lunged backwards just as the i-hook
cable zipped by him and jammed into the firing chamber. Another inch and the line
might have sliced off his face.

    
Note to self: under these conditions, recoiling an
i-hook equals bad idea!

     He fired again. This time he aimed well above Ward,
trying his best to take into consideration the rate of rise and the force of
the wind battering the cable. He was a man of calculation and precision. He
could do this!

     He missed again.

     Much closer, but the shot still fell below Ward,
missing him by a good ten feet. Lantern reached down to press the button to
unlatch the gun from the belt, to let the i-hook just fall to the Earth, no
longer able to stop Ward from rising to certain death.

     But just before his finger came down on the button, he
heard a
smack!
And snapped his head up to see...

     I-hooks get their name from the microprocessors that
are attached to nearly every part of the “hook” and cable. In most cases they
can instantly scan an area and anticipate the target surface before they reach it
and adjust how they attach themselves.

     With nothing else in the range of the shot, the hook’s
A.I. found what Lantern was aiming for.

     A single strand of the cable shot upwards and latched
itself onto the boot of Ward’s suit with a
slap
. It barely made contact,
but it was just enough. The rest of the cable glopped onto that single strand
and inch-walked its way up to Ward’s leg, wrapping around it.

     Lantern retracted the slack from the second gun, now
coiled around Ward’s leg, while at the same time releasing the first gun’s hold
on the helicopter’s landing skid. The cable from the skid spooled out of the
gun, effectively letting the second i-hook pull him across the wind-blasted
forty yards—straight to Ward. Lantern reached out, grabbed his friend, pulled
him close, and released the trigger on the i-hook.

     The slack from the skid snapped taut again.  

     Lantern took a moment to just close his eyes and
breathe. His leg was burning with a pain he couldn’t even describe. He opened
his eyes and peered out at the storm clouds of Hurricane Ana. Dark and roiling
on the horizon. He was not letting any bad omens beat him today. He didn’t care
how ominous they looked from a distance.

     Ward was still out. But he was breathing. Lantern
adjusted his hold on the unconscious professor, grabbing him as tightly as he
could. Inside his helmet, Lantern took over Ward’s system and shut down his
wings.

     Next, Lantern hit the recoil button on the first gun,
and the cable coiled back into the shooting chamber, pulling him and Ward
across the sky and right up onto the Sikorsky’s landing skids. With all his
might, Lantern pushed Ward’s limp body up into the chopper’s bay and then
pulled himself in as well, all the time fighting the enormous drag of the wind.
It took everything he had.

     The two Suns piled onto each other, and Lantern
reached up with his last ounce of strength and jammed the auto-close button of
the bay door—and the door slammed shut. He rolled off Ward, let out a howl of
pain and exhaustion...and passed out.

     With no one to guide it, the Sikorsky roared toward
the deadly edge of space.

CHAPTER 18

L
antern
woke with a start. He leaped to his feet. Panic gripped him. The cockpit was
dark as night.

     Scrambling back into the cockpit, he peered into the
heavens. Literally. The black of space was everywhere now. An alarm on the dash
began screaming—signaling that the aircraft would stall if it rose any higher.

     Lantern plunged back into the pilot’s seat and
programmed a controlled dive. The Sikorsky lurched and rolled and the nose
pointed toward the Earth. He felt his stomach crawl into his throat as the bird
dove toward the ground. He re-buckled his harness to keep from falling into the
cockpit windshield and heard Ward’s body slide and thump back in the bay. He
felt a rush of guilt for not securing him to something. But there had simply
been no time.

     And then he thought of Helius. An electric shock of
fear raced through him.

    
The Hollow!

     In his haste to rescue Ward he’d never even tuned into
the Hollow’s feed. And he dreaded what he might see. Was she even still alive? In
his helmet, he scanned the sky for Sophia and the Hollow. Finally he found her.
The H3 energy had enveloped her like a cocoon. A bright-blue comet streaking
toward heaven. A small black figure wrapped inside. She was seconds from the
edge. Ninety thousand feet above the Earth, blasting through the stratosphere. Far
above where he could take the Sikorsky. The pressure, the thin air, and the
frigid temps might have already killed her for all he knew. At that height, the
air could literally boil human blood. Her suit was tough, but not built for
this. Could it handle it?

     The Hollow was
flying
right beside her, waiting
for instructions.

     She was too close to the edge of the atmosphere to use
the suit’s auto-directional controls like he had before. Lantern might well fly
her right out of the atmosphere. Any miscalculation on his part could kill her.
If she wasn’t already dead.

     He peered about trying to think of something he could
do. There had to be something here that would give him an idea. His eyes
scanned past the missile launch buttons.

     No. That was crazy.

     It had worked once before, though.

     He recalled warning the others of the coming invasion
from Boston Harbor by sending a digital message through the heat-seeking signal
of a missile, three months prior.  

     This time he wouldn’t have that option. Sophia was
unconscious.

     He could detonate one of the Sikorsky’s Hellfire
missiles in the upper atmosphere and hope the concussive wave would jolt her
awake. But it might not work at all, and then he would be out of time.

     The easiest thing was for the Hollow to simply shut
down her thrusters. The problem with that was that any heat shield and pressure
bubble the propulsors might be providing her—possibly keeping her alive in the
frigid temps, thin air, and crushing pressure of the upper atmosphere—would
shut down as well.

     He was out of options. At least shutting her down
would stop her from blasting through the stratosphere, into the mesosphere, past
the hellish thermosphere, and out into the lethal vacuum of space.

     He sent the command to the Hollow.

     Sophia’s thrusters sputtered, then fell silent. And she
began to slow.

     But the edge of the atmosphere was closing fast.

     Closer.

     Closer.

     Gravity did its thing not a second too soon, and she began
plummeting back down toward the Earth. Flipping and flopping. Out of control.

     Now Lantern’s challenge was to stop her from killing
herself in the fall. At this height, she might well break the sound barrier—not
a problem in and of itself. Kind of cool actually.  But without conscious
control of her limbs, she might well break something else—her neck in the free
fall. Or she could lock into a flat spin, head over feet, with all her blood
pooling in her extremities. Blood on the brain, blindness, or exploding
eyeballs could be the result, all likely ending in her death.

     Not cool. Not cool at all.

     As an astronaut, Sophia was well aware of all these
risks, but how well she had built her suit to compensate for them, he had no
idea.

     It was then that Lantern finally caught a break.

Sophia
opened her eyes.

     The world came back to her spinning and violent. As
she remembered the bomb blast, adrenaline shot through her body. The boot-jets
ignited and she launched herself skyward.

     Only she was already in the sky.

     She’d expected to see the pavement, rising fast. But
instead she saw New York State laid out below her.

     And it fooled her.

     She’d mistaken the blurry landscape for far-off
skyscrapers. A second later she realized her mistake—and breathed a deep sigh
of relief. Her suit was icy and her face was numb, but other than a pounding
headache, she seemed healthy.

     “General? Lantern? Anybody? Are you out there?” she
asked over the com.

    
“Gracias a Dios,”
Lantern said back solemnly.
“I’m
behind you, two o’clock.”

     Lantern and Sophia met halfway, and he opened the bay
doors for her so that she could fly straight in. Once inside, she tended to
Ward, who had finally regained consciousness, and tried her best to thaw out.

     “That was a blast, huh?” Ward said weakly. Sophia
groaned at his joke. “I miss anything important?”

     Lantern considered killing him, but of course, said
nothing. They had more important work ahead of them anyway.

     They’d still not heard from the Revolution.

That’s
because atop the spire of the Chrysler Building, Revolution’s com had gone out.
The blast must have damaged it. Regardless, there was little he could do but
wait.

     Even if he climbed down—which the variable magnetic
properties of his armor would allow him to do—he would have nowhere to go.
Council Guard would be everywhere, just waiting to confront him. So he stayed
in place and watched the horizon.

     Finally, he saw them. A small black dot growing larger. 
There was no sound. Even when he focused the parabolic microphones on the Sikorsky,
there was nothing.

     Revolution climbed up the spire halfway to allow
Lantern to see him, his bold blue armor glimmering in the sunlight, his red
cloak billowing in the wind.

     It was unnecessary. Lantern had never lost track of his
location in the digi-sphere. So he’d known where he was, just not
how
he
was.

     The Sikorsky hovered up next to him as close as it
could get.

     “Hey, mighty Kong, you wanna ride?” Ward asked.

     The man in the metal leaped into the aircraft’s bay.  

     “Can you see Stealth?” Revolution asked once he was in
the cockpit.

     “I can’t see anything. They’re blocking me
completely,” Lantern growled.

     Revolution gazed at his group. They were all beat up
and exhausted. They were in no shape for another round. But they couldn’t leave
Rachel behind. Not without a fight, anyway.

     “All right then. We go straight in and find her. We
stay together and we kill anything that gets in our way.” He looked at Ward “Or
put it to sleep, if we can.”