The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (33 page)

PHASE TWO: REESTABLISH
HEADQUARTERS

“It’s clear.” Rachel sounded sure.

The team had descended on the
complex of buildings in the middle of what locals called “The Old War Zone.” It
was a part of Boston where an organized resistance had been crushed by military
and Council Guard troops during the last days of the Purge. Now it looked like
a dusty, ruined ghost town. Revolution, Ward, Sophia, and Rachel led a team
consisting of Hudson and some twenty-odd Minutemen—fifteen men and seven women,
clad in dark brown pants, navy-blue shirts, and coats—into a dark hallway of a
massive brick building that had been chosen as the new HQ. Rachel was glued to
her RDSD.

The evacuation team had relocated
the Fire Fly chamber to this site on the night of Fiona’s attack. Moving the
chamber had been a colossal undertaking, pulled off just before the authorities
had arrived at the old HQ to investigate the fire. Sophia had supervised the
move and provided cover from the air. Lantern had monitored the location ever
since.

On this night they had loaded
themselves into SUVs and headed down to the site, carrying with them a large
stash of arms to charge with luminescence. The luminized weapons would give
them an advantage the Council troops could not match. If an invasion was indeed
coming, they wanted to be as ready as they could be.

Halfway there, Lantern had shot
them a message that he had lost communication with the advance team: a group of
five engineers who had gone in to handle the preliminary setup of the chamber
and boot up power in the old building. There was no indication of any movement
around the site, Lantern had told them, so he had guessed that the Council was
simply blocking signals in the area. Council locators might have detected some
activity, he’d said, but Lantern doubted they had any details. Lantern was
bouncing the signals off so many satellites that any data the Council
intercepted would just look like small beacons put off by individual users
pirating unregistered bandwidth. Nothing that they would bother with.

The local Council had been trying
to track the individual members of the insurgency ever since Fiona destroyed
the old HQ. At worst they’d think they’d found a Resistance member trying to
get back in contact.

Still, Revolution wanted to take
no chances. He, Rachel, Ward, and the Minutemen were not enough firepower. He
told Sophia to fly in and meet them at the site, which she did. In fact, despite
their head start, she beat them there.  

The building was old, dank, and
musty.
Perfect,
Revolution thought. He palmed an RDSD and flicked it on.
The operation was of such importance and secrecy that Lantern had insisted on RDSD
signals only. For reasons Revolution didn’t begin to understand, the device
gave Lantern the best degree of control. Sending the feed to their HUDs or
creating a digi-sphere cube was evidently just too risky with Council lurking
around.

Once inside on the ground floor,
Minutemen took to the stairs, climbing and descending into the dark building.
The power was still out.
What has the advance team been doing all this time?
Revolution wondered. They fanned out across the structure.

“Let’s find those engineers first
and make sure they’re okay,” Revolution told them.

Revolution glared down at his RDSD
for a moment and frowned inside his helmet. “It's not working.” Rachel studied
her screen. Same issue.

Across the building, all the
Minutemen had the same problem. Each of the ten teams of two had a device. All
ten were malfunctioning.

Hudson said into his wrist-com,
“Sir, what does this mean?  Should we continue?”

Revolution looked to Rachel for
confirmation. She knew more about RDSD readings than anyone other than Lantern.
Rachel nodded and shrugged. “Affirmative, but keep your eyes open,” he told
him. The area had been rigged to interfere with locators, that much was now
clear. Probably this whole neighborhood had been. Digital blocking signals
swept invisibly through the air and the ground. Designed specifically to block
RDSD-type signals. This meant the Council was doing more than just watching the
area. And that meant danger.

Hollis had zipped out to sea. Several miles. Deep water.
He stared at his own RDSD. A broad smile spread across his face. He'd found
them. Of course, this was good news and it was bad news...

What he saw on his screen was both
scary and fortunate. It was moving fast and gave off the strangest signal Hollis
had ever seen. He typed a message to Lantern in the RDSD's small keyboard—not
easy to do in a wet suit and with bulky gloves while kicking for buoyancy. So
he adjusted his thrusters so that he could match the flow of the current around
him. This allowed Hollis to simply float in place. He finished the message, put
the RDSD away, brought his body vertical to the seafloor far below, and fired
his thrusters full power, rocketing deeper into the black.

PHASE THREE: ACTIVATE THE
MINUTEMEN

Lantern and Bailey sat on their Harley-Davidson
Vision 5000 motorcycles in the shadows of the Old North Church on an empty,
curfewed State Street. They were powerful but small machines. All pipe and
seat, hard angles in the metal. Lantern had on his full gear, his helmet barking
an entire universe of data to him from multiple sources, including his
immediate surroundings; Hollis under the water; Revolution and the rest of the
Suns in the War Zone; and a dozen other major readings. Bailey was there mostly
for protection, but he was also in charge.

The Council had activated their
own version of a digi-sphere cube over all of Boston. It was much weaker, less
precise, and far more glitchy than Lantern's, but it nonetheless meant the Suns
had to do things a certain way in order for Lantern to keep them hidden. And
activating the Minutemen had to be done by hand, as Bailey had put it when
Lantern had explained it to him. Suddenly, all of Lantern's attention was drawn
to Hunley's feed. A message typed across it.

“Good work, Hunley,” Lantern said
out loud.

“What is it, L?” Bailey gave
nearly everyone a nickname: “L” for Lantern, “Wings” for Ward, “Rach” for
Rachel, “Blue” for Sophia, and it was rumored he was the guy that had named
Hollis “Hunley” and called the Revolution “the General” for the first time.
Even for a straight shooter like Lantern, he just took it in stride.

“Amphibian attack force, sir. On
its way. Time to warn the others.” Lantern sent the signal to the Revolution,
but instantly it bounced back. He tried again. “Something's blocking me.”
Bailey swung off the bike and strolled over toward him.

“I can’t reach the General without
trying to break through the firewall. The Council’s serious about keeping out
all signals from the War Zone,” Lantern told him after a moment.

“Well, if we’ve got that coming
toward us”—meaning the amphibians—“we can't wait,” said Bailey. “You'll just
have to keep trying. You can walk and chew gum at the same time, right?” Bailey
smiled as he strapped on the helmet he'd been holding and straddled the bike.
It hadn’t been a question.

They gunned the 5000s down State
Street.

Lantern and Bailey hit West
Broadway in minutes, flying near top speed. Lantern jammed a button on the
bike's angular front chassis, and a communicator shot out beams of light into
targeted structures along the street. They were millisecond microbursts, just
enough of a signal to do the trick. The beam could travel miles. But Lantern
took no chances; he and Bailey would hit only homes that were in line of sight,
minimizing the chances that the signals could activate any early warning
systems the Council might have planted.

Inside Donald and Cynthia Caper's
house, the ray of light beamed through the wall like it wasn't there. It struck
a small device placed near the window. The device beeped to life. Father and
daughter lumbered into the room and shut it off. They grabbed up weapons and
headed for the door. A clock above the door read midnight. The two looked into
each other's eyes and stepped out into the cold Boston wind. Lantern and Bailey
were already miles away.

Ward was uneasy. He couldn't help but notice the
cell numbers accompanying the small rooms they were passing by. It had become
very clear to him what this building had been used for in the past. “Have I
mentioned how stoked I am to be back in another prison?”

Revolution's snowy locator screen
began to clear up. He stopped at the end of the hall, a large door in front of
them, and Rachel peered over at the device. On the other side of the door the
scan showed the large, open cavern of the main cell house where the general
prison population would have been held. In the center was a bridge that spanned
the entire room. On either side were walkways that ran past the cells. Floor to
ceiling, there were seven stories of cells.

“Looks clear,” Revolution said to
Rachel. Revolution swung open the big door to a large, cavernous void of black.
Revolution and Rachel shared a glance. At first they saw and heard nothing but
black and the echo of the door. The room smelled of metal and plastic.

More echoes.

And then they saw the smoke as
their eyes adjusted. Or was it fog? “Go to night vision,” Revolution barked.
They did, and visibility actually worsened. They scanned every spectrum view
Lantern had loaded into their visors, but nothing worked. Even with the pure
digital scan from the RDSD, all they picked up was the fog—this time in virtual
bits, like so much snow on a TV screen.

“What the hell is this?” Sophia
asked.

“I have no idea,” Rachel said.

“Isn’t this supposed to be your
area of expertise?” Sophia shot back at Rachel.

“Don’t start with me,” Rachel said
through clenched teeth. 

Kendrick Ray knew. In fact, it was
X-Ray’s newest toy. A nano-fog that carried small digital signals within each
particle capable of blocking every known visual signal. The human eye couldn’t
see through it, but neither could any other kind of eye.

“What the hell is
that?
”
Revolution asked. Something was emerging into view in the small screen of the
RDSD. Something huge.

Rachel stared at her RDSD,
completely transfixed by what she saw. The large signal began to split and
multiply.
The five engineers
. But then she noticed something else. “That
can't be right. That's way too many signals.” She adjusted the reading every
way she knew, and then, finally, it cleared up. She froze in horror. “Shit!”
She stared up at Revolution, fear in her eyes. “We're not alone.”

Across the large void, a group
with lights was coming toward them. They could see them now because the fog was
lifting. Rachel recognized the energy signature immediately.

Oh fuck.
“It’s Lithium,”
she said.

CHAPTER
53

T
hey
were now halfway across the bridge that hung in the center of the open-air,
multilayered cell house of the prison. Above them and below them, doors from
the stairwells began to open. Council Guardsmen streamed out.

Three floors above and three
floors below, seven in total. The Suns were on the middle,
fourth
floor.
Council Guard fanned out on the second and sixth floors, weapons trained on the
Suns.

They were trapped. Surrounded in
three dimensions.

“
W
e can end this right now. No one has to die
,
”
Clay Arbor shouted at them. “If you stop right now, you
can avoid what’s coming. You can avoid a war.”

“Just tell us where our people
are,” Revolution said in a tight, low, controlled voice. His HUD switched to
night vision, and he could see it all as bright as day.

Arbor tried again. “Join us. I can
offer you immunity. I’ll tell them you’re not a threat. That you’re on our side
now. You’re little team is impressive, sweetheart, but look around you. Do you
really want this, day after day? Surrounded on all sides? Never knowing where
to turn?”

“Where are my people?” Revolution
demanded again, anger in his voice.

Arbor snorted a laugh. “Oh,
they’re all right, sweetheart. Don’t you worry about them. I’d worry about
myself, I were you.” As Arbor spoke, the Guards cocked their weapons, and the
sound reverberated across the cavernous room. This had all been planned. 

And just as Arbor was about to ask
them to surrender, more doors opened and out spilled the Minutemen. Their
entrance had been delayed by their more thorough check of the building. Now
they entered like commandos, taking up positions, aiming their weapons. The
winding hallways of the old prison were such that teams from each side,
Minutemen and Guards, ended up on both ends of the cell house, despite the fact
they had started at opposite sides of the building. Minutemen on the odd
levels, the Council Guard on the even floors.

On each RDSD, Minutemen showed up
as blue figures, Council Guard as red. The enemies stood above and below in the
pitch black. Directly in front of the Suns were Arbor, X-Ray, and the small
band of Guards they had with them. They could all see each other on their RDSDs
and in the ghostly green of night vision. They’d walked right into a mutual
trap. Clay Arbor’s eyes widened when he saw the Minutemen, and he took one step
back.

Ward was freaking out. “Above us,
below us! Everywhere!” he whispered, the fear vibrating his voice.

“Stay calm,” Revolution whispered
back.

Both sides fanned out across the
cell house, weapons drawn. Rifle laser sights streaking across the dark,
crossing and blending. Enemies everywhere. Somehow the Council had set them up,
but Revolution also had the feeling that they had not known how many Minutemen
were along for the ride. Both sides had tricked the other. Still, the Council's
ability to conceal its operations from Lantern was growing. And that was
troubling.