The Suns of Liberty: Legion: A Superhero Novel (6 page)

     “What do you plan to use it for?” someone asked.

     “Right now, it will just guard the corridor to the New Jersey facility. We have big plans for our Science Division there and we do not want
any incursions. You see, for the second part of my plan, New Jersey is
critical.” Howke paused, took a breath, and laid it on them. “We are going to
form a team. Our own Suns of Liberty.”

     Again, there were gasps across the room.

     “You are all familiar with Captain Clay Arbor, the man
we all call Lithium.” Lithium’s costumed image burned to life in front of
them—dressed like a commando, his uniform was actually titanium armor. “Lithium
is getting a promotion, and he’s going to lead a team we’ll call the Legion. We
are recruiting members now.”

     “Who, besides Arbor, are its members?”

     “I can tell you this team is going to be stronger and
better than the Suns.”  Howke looked out at them, purpose burning in his eyes.
“We’ll beat them at their own game.”  

     “We don’t have anything that can compete with the
fucking Fletcher girl, Bill, and you know it!”
A challenge.

     Howke did not like to be challenged. He wasn’t as
smooth as Sage had been. He had to keep his anger swallowed down. “That’s where
you’re wrong!” he spat, more forcefully than he’d intended. He took a deep
breath, lowered his voice, and added, “Here is part three. They’ve been making
great strides with the chamber we recovered in Boston. They have not been able
to recreate the Fletcher girl or someone like her. Instead, they created
something better.”  Chartreuse light flickered on their faces as they watched a
new image dance before them. Slowly, wide grins spread across their faces.

     “Yes, I think this is going to be a considerably
better year than the last.”

CHAPTER 6

T
he
sleek, black stealth fighter streaked across the California sky.

     The pilot, First Lieutenant Veronica Soto, plotted her
course to Lake Tahoe, calculated her flight time, and set a countdown for the
release of a single GBU-65/B Massive Ordnance Air Burst—a thermobaric,
GPS-guided smart bomb—on the designated target. She called it
the Mother
Fucker
for short.

     The bomb would blast its target with the equivalent of
fifty tons of TNT. It was like a small nuclear weapon. The flight would take
her thirty minutes from Edwards Air Force base.

     Operation FLY SWAT was under way.

     She flew a single-pilot B-12 Spirit Stealth Bomber,
the most sophisticated stealth aircraft in the Air Force armada.

     She would need it. Her target was the most dangerous
enemy on Earth. A single individual.

     A seventeen-year-old girl named Fiona Fletcher.

     The Fire Fly.

     “Seventeen for a few more minutes, anyway,” the lieutenant
smirked to herself.

     Of course, assassinating an American citizen on
American soil was hardly a popular thing to do. The Council had the authority,
since they had pretty much given themselves the authority to do anything they
wanted ten years ago. But they still had to proceed with some caution.

     The plan was to report the bombing as a case of
domestic terrorism carried out a by a pro-Council militia taking revenge on the
Fletcher girl for the events in Boston a few months back. Media Corp would repeat
the story until people either believed it or knew not to contradict it. That’s
how things had always worked. And that was the point.

     It worked.

It
was Fiona’s eighteenth birthday. And she was putting on a show. She loved two
things above all others: science and dancing. Right now, she was doing both.

     But mostly she was dancing.

     She twirled and bowed, shimmied and posed. At once
graceful and seductive, she stretched her body, threw her head back, reached her
arms behind her, and then she flipped, feet over her head, head over feet, her
long hair splaying out behind her. But her feet were not touching the ground.
Not during her leap, not before it, and not after it.

     She was in midair.

     Her long lithe body, her naturally tanned skin, long
blonde hair, gorgeous young face, were all enveloped in radiant energy. She
glowed in the immense power of her bioluminescence. Yellow-green. Only the
whites of her eyes and the pink of her lips, which bloomed like a cherry
blossom against the chartreuse glow, remained unaffected.

     Her movements would have been graceful enough being performed
by a regular girl on a regular stage. But as the Fire Fly, her motions were
breathtaking. She glided through the air like a time-lapse photo of light. Hundreds
of feet off the ground.

     Had she wanted to, she could have transformed into
pure light. Had she wanted to, she could have burned Lake Tahoe to a desert, or
boiled the water away, reducing it to a muddy crater.

     She danced in the air high above the hilltop on which
Becky Collins watched her. Becky was athletic, thirty-seven, blonde, and for
the past six months, the de facto guardian of the most powerful human being on
the planet.

     Below where Becky stood, and certainly below Fiona,
was a large open field, the grass trampled down, and in many spots, barren
entirely. It was filled with onlookers feeling blessed that they got to see the
Fire Fly at all, let alone to watch her dance on her eighteenth birthday. Fiona
had become the biggest news story in the world, bigger even than the Suns of
Liberty themselves, whom most of the world associated her with now anyways.

     Few knew the truth.

     She’d just as soon kill the Revolution than join his
team. He had betrayed her, tricked her. Turned her into this thing. Not that
being the Fire Fly didn’t come with some pretty cool privileges.

     She had invited the group of girls with whom she had
become the closest to a special event. No one, including Becky, knew exactly
what to expect.

     Fiona had built a large open-air stone “Palace” out of
the pink and brown granite from the Sierra Nevada. Large pillars and deep pools
of shimmering water made up its inner sanctum.

     The ability to mold and reshape even the hardest stone
and steel was breathtaking to Becky. Fiona’s remarkable powers had given her such
ability, an ability she executed with intricate precision. And now they
owned
a miniature palace built into the hillside.

     Now, if Becky could just get Fiona to remodel her kitchen!

     In the past several weeks, Fiona had grown especially
close to a girl Becky knew only as Diana, but whom Fiona had nicknamed Arcadia. A tall, beautiful brunette who was Fiona’s own age, and shared a passion for dance
as well.

     As Becky looked on, Fiona picked ‘Arcadia’ out of the
crowd, swooped down, and, holding her tightly, lifted her into the sky. At the
same time, with a single sweep of her hand, Fiona created a solid field of
sparkling energy below them. A dance floor of bioluminescence. She gently
lowered Arcadia down onto the energy field, and after a moment, the girl found
her footing.

     Becky felt her jaw clinch as she watched the duo. She
retreated back behind a rock formation, left over from Fiona’s excavations of
the hillside. She didn’t want to be seen as she watched them. She couldn’t say
why that mattered to her.

     It just did. 

     They danced. Arcadia was good. Very good. After a
moment, she was matching Fiona, move for move. Mimicking her every motion.
Becky brooded. To her, it seemed the girls Fiona had been inviting up into the
Palace were slowly but surely molding themselves into little carbon copies of
the now famous Fire Fly. Her personality, her likes and dislikes, everything.      

     It was creepy.

     And Fiona herself had changed over these last three
months.  The quiet, distrustful young girl Becky had found shivering in the
woods, naked and betrayed by those she thought had loved her, had transformed
into a more flamboyant, witty, and confident young woman.

     And yet, the fight with the Man-O-War had taken a very
strange toll on her. When Fiona had first explained to Becky how she had defeated
the Man-O-War, Becky thought her solution had been ingenious. She’d not
realized that there could be long-term side effects for the girl.

     Fiona had explained that she had thought back to her
initial transformation into the Fire Fly. The Revolution had tricked her into
entering the Fire Fly chamber alone—the machine that had killed everyone else
it had been tried on—and then he had turned it on. She, too, thought she would
be killed. But instead of death, the machine had forced a different change on
her. She’d had no choice but to let the machine’s energy be absorbed into her.
To become one with it.

     When she faced the Man-O-War, she tried a similar
strategy. She had absorbed the giant machine into her own internal sphere of
energy. At least that’s how Fiona had described it. It had pierced her
pulsating skin, entered her energized organs, and been consumed by them. And
just as she had been transformed into the Fire Fly by absorbing bioluminescence,
the process of absorbing Man-O-War had also changed her. She was less
emotional, more calculating, overly logical. She could be cold as ice. Snarky
teenager and calculating machine. It was quite a combination to behold.

     But she was also using her powers to help others.
Becky was proud of what she had done in Boston. Proud that she was helping
these girls. “I am their North Magnetic. They come because they feel betrayed,”
Fiona had told her when she first started to reach out to the thousands who
made the trek to Tahoe every week.  

     But Becky couldn’t help but fear for what Fiona did on
her missions to help the girls that she chose to help. She had the power to end
a human life at the flick of her finger, and Becky feared that was exactly what
she was doing. There were already reports of that kind trickling in from all
across the country. They could just have been paranoia from those who feared
the Fire Fly rather than worshipped her, but Becky knew firsthand how powerful
Fiona really was. It was a power she was not sure anyone should have, let alone
an emotionally vulnerable seventeen-year-old girl. 

     And as the dance ended, Becky knew Fiona would choose
another girl to help.

     It was like she had becomes some kind of faith healer.
What made Becky especially uncomfortable was the fact that there were hundreds,
maybe thousands of people below them at any one time, waiting, hoping to be
called up. But inevitably, Fiona would send out for a young girl close to her
own age. And then, she would “do her thing.” Which meant teleporting to
wherever the girl told her the trouble was happening. And Fiona would “take
care” of it.

     Becky had tried to intervene, but Fiona wasn’t
listening these days. In the last three months, since the events in Boston, she had become the most famous girl on the planet. Becky no longer carried the same
weight with her. She wouldn’t have known what to tell Fiona to do about the
throngs of desperate people, anyway.  But she was pretty sure that just picking
young girls that reminded Fiona of herself was probably not the best approach.

Today,
Arcadia was allowed to choose one person, a girl from the throng below, and
bring her into the Palace. She chose a small, mousey girl with dirty blonde
hair named Kristen. She told Fiona, in her shy, quiet voice, that her little
sister had been kidnapped by “thugs” and they were threatening to kill her
unless her older brother paid them back the money he owed or agreed to do
“jobs” for them.

     These were the kinds of things people brought to
Fiona.

     “Do you have a picture?” Fiona asked the girl.

     “Yes. They said you would want addresses too.”

     Fiona took them from the girl and scanned them. Then
she lifted her head slightly, concentrating. “Just a sec,” she said. Fiona
detached an invisible part of her essence and sent it teleporting to Cleveland.
She was not sure how she did this. It was second nature, though difficult.

     In her mind she could see it all. The street the girl
was speaking of, the house. She could travel inside, map out the rooms, see
where she needed to go. She spotted the girl’s sister, along with many others,
in the house. Drugs, guns, trash everywhere. The place was wretched.

     In one room, a young tattooed man was handcuffed to a
steel pipe that had been built into a concrete wall undoubtedly for the purpose
of holding someone indefinitely. He was naked and looked to have been beaten
unconscious.

     Fiona snapped back. “I see her.”

     The girl squealed in delight and Arcadia shot Fiona a
knowing grin.

     Fiona did not grin back.

     “There’s not much time. I need to go now,” Fiona said
just as Becky interrupted the group.

     “Fiona, its Elders again. The town council has met.
They voted to sue if we don’t move the Palace,” Becky said.