The Suns of Liberty: Legion: A Superhero Novel (2 page)

In the Not-Too-Distant Future...

CHAPTER 1

BOSTON
,
MASSACHUSETTS
.

09:55AM

“I
found it, sir.”

     “Say again, Lantern? I didn’t catch that,” the Revolution
said as he fell fifty feet off the landing skids of a helicopter. Straight
through the roof of a Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority bus as it roared
down Cambridge Street. Ripping through the metal, crashing down into the seats,
slamming into two of the passengers. Not dead, but they definitely weren’t getting
up.

     Two down, two dozen to go... “Say again?” he repeated,
not knowing if the man they called
Lantern
had spoken again, unable to
hear through the wrenching screech of the metal he had just blasted through. 

     “I found it. I found the chamber.”

     This time the Revolution heard him clearly in his
helmet-com.

     A digital feed from Lantern blinked to life and played
back over Revolution’s Heads-Up Display (or HUD), superimposed over his
eyesight. The recorded signal was specially designed for its original viewer,
Lantern. It showed a massive skyscraper with multicolored digital feeds pulsing
out of its walls, all indicating the various sources of energy and communication
emanating from the giant structure. The building he was looking at was called Freedom
Rise
,
and it was home to the Freedom Council.

     And then, all of those signals went completely
berserk. The signals seemed to sizzle in midair; static filled the entire
screen.

     Revolution could see that Lantern had scanned through
two dozen settings before finding a way around the Council’s electronic
shielding that was concealing the source of the disturbance. Eventually,
Lantern had discovered that source: the entire building became backlit in a
chartreuse
glow. On Lantern’s scan, that color meant only one thing: the Council had just
fired up the Fire Fly Chamber. 

     The most dangerous weapon on Earth.

     As the Revolution’s HUD cleared, the interior of the
bus—his current reality—returned. He was faced with a dozen armed men on either
side of him. Surrounding him. They were dressed in uniforms that reminded
Revolution of a SWAT team. Though his helmet concealed it from the men, inside
he smiled. They thought they had him outnumbered.

     They were wrong...

Moments Earlier...

09:30AM

A
city bus pulled up in front of the First National Bank of Boston and out piled
a team of men who looked almost exactly like a SWAT team.

     They weren’t.

     The men streamed into the bank lobby, weapons drawn.
Sleek and deadly. The man in charge was larger, stockier than the rest. Big
Bruiser Gunzy. The main enforcer for Boston’s notorious Marconi Crime Syndicate.

     A few customers near the door turned and gawked at
them.

     He had to move now.

     He drew out a small metal cylinder with buttons
running along the top edge. “Shields on,” he said to his men. They flipped
switches on their gear.

     Bruiser hit a button on the cylinder and strode
through the doors into the large main room of the bank, just as the entire building
was plunged into darkness.

     “Freeze!” he screamed at the patrons and the tellers.

     Everyone did as they were told.

     “Lights!” yelled Bruiser. Some of his men broke open
intensely bright glow sticks that lit up the entire room as they tossed them
about; others had smaller sticks they kept with them.”Twenty-five seconds!” he
yelled as he checked the stopwatch on his wrist.

     A challenge—the men scattered.

     Mission protocol. Well rehearsed.

     They fanned out in front of the bank’s registers.

     “Yes, ladies and gentlemen,
that
was an EMP:
Electromagnetic pulse. And
this
is a stickup. Twenty-first-century
style. Anyone moves and I’ll kill you where you stand. Guaranteed.”

     The men at the registers placed small devices in front
of the cash-counting machines and switched them on.  Small green lights scanned
out onto the registers, and the apparently fried machines sprung back to life.
On their counters, the bank’s reserve accounts began shrinking from one billion
dollars at each register, twenty in all, to zero.

     “Decoders, do your thing! Ten seconds!”

     A security guard close enough to one of the registers
could see what was happening, realized the grave significance, and tried to
draw his weapon. But Bruiser saw him from the start. Before the guard could
even draw his pistol, Bruiser fired the small weapon that was concealed in his
right hand. A bullet ripped a bright red hole in the center of the guard’s
forehead, and he crumpled to the floor.         

     The patrons all screamed...

     Bruiser let the screams fade to whimpers.

     “Guaranteed,” Bruiser said with a chuckle, whipping
his head around and bowing slightly as if he were an actor on stage and the
bank’s patrons his adoring audience.

     ...Just as the counters on the registers all reached
zero.

     “Time!” Bruiser yelled as he glared over at his Decoders.
“Let’s go!”

     And out they went. The entire operation took less than
a minute.

     They filed back into the bus and roared off the curb.
Into the heart of Boston’s afternoon traffic.

But
little did they know their every move was being watched. By a man scaling a skyscraper—

    
In New York City.

CHAPTER 2

NEW YORK
.

09:35AM

T
he
man called Lantern adjusted his foothold. His
eight-hundred-foot-high
foothold.
His real name was Diego Alvarez, but no one called him that anymore. As far as
the rest of the world outside of his team was concerned, Diego Alvarez died ten
years ago.

     Clad in a brown leather bomber jacket and dark jeans,
he wore a helmet that looked like a cross between something a motorcycle rider
and an astronaut would wear. The helmet was quite possibly the most sophisticated
visual scanning device on the planet.

     He was wedged into the concrete ridges that formed the
stylized gothic exterior of the
American International
Building
at 70 Pine Street. Far enough away from, but within sight of, the towering Freedom
Rise: the headquarters of the Freedom Council.          

     As usual, he was multitasking.

     He was standing on two steel-bladed mountaineering
pitons that were used to scale rocky ridges of mountain slopes but also worked
extremely well for scaling the outer skin of a concrete skyscraper. A third
piton was lodged into concrete directly behind him and was attached to a safety
harness that was clasped to his waist.
American International
had been
originally constructed in 1932 and the limestone exterior, so common for
buildings of the day, was ideal for the brand of pitons Lantern was using.

     His perch was precarious, not to mention the stabbing
spear-points of pain shooting up his not-yet-healed broken right leg. He said a
silent prayer for the armor-cast that kept his leg protected, stable, and
almost as movable as normal. He’d snapped the leg in two places during a fall
from a cliff back in Boston three months ago. Something he was trying hard not
to think about at the moment.

     He’d never had a fear of heights, but he’d recently
discovered that falling is not much fun. Right now, he needed a direct line of
sight to his target in order to penetrate the firewalls of the most sophisticated
digital defenses on the planet.

     That was his first priority...

     Second on his list was Boston: stopping the city’s
last remaining gang of mobsters from executing their most important heist to
date. Twenty billion in untraceable digital reserves straight from Boston’s largest account with the International Banking Consortium.

     Considering that the IBC was the Freedom Council’s
creation and that ultimately it was Council money he was, in a roundabout way,
protecting, the Council ought to be thanking him. That, of course, would never
happen, he knew.

     “They did it, sir. The whole thing went down in less
than a minute.” Lantern paused, dreading what he had to say next. “And I’m
afraid we have a casualty.” He knew the boss would not be pleased to hear about
the death of the security guard happening right under their noses.

     Lantern was relieved by the response he got back.

    
“Good work,”
the Revolution’s voice said on the
other end of the line.
“Let me know what else you see.”

     Lantern just smiled.
Seeing
was his thing.

BOSTON
,
MASSACHUSETTS
.

09:45AM

The
Revolution and Sophia Linh sat in the cockpit of the U.S. Air Force’s latest
marvel: a Sikorsky UH-1200 Stealth Hawk helicopter, dubbed
StealthHawk-1
.
Dark, sleek, and angular. Invisible to radar. One half of a generous gift from
sympathetic officers at Hanscom Air Force base in the days just after the
Council’s evacuation of Boston (
StealthHawk-2
still sat in a hangar bay
on standby). No doubt a group loyal to John Bailey’s far-reaching Special Division
S-1of the CIA, better known as SHADOW. Bailey had been the second-in-command of
the Suns of Liberty, behind the Revolution, and had gone by the call sign
Saratoga
.
He was one of the many who had given his life to free Boston.

     A scarlet cape was draped across the Revolution’s
back. Body armor of bold blue. Sleek metal snug tightly to his body, with
grooves and curves built into the steel. Prominent shoulder plates lay under
the spots where the cloak attached. A red star on the chest, covering his solar
plexus, and another across his forehead. Boots, forearms, gloves shining royal
red in the dancing afternoon sunlight. A silver-white belt with a blue star on
the buckle was clamped around his waist. The only part of his body that was
visible was his eyes, protected by thick, clear eye shields. Over the mouth and
nose section of his helmet was a vented system that both allowed air in freely
and filtered it. All of it made of a nearly indestructible titanium alloy called
TO-4.

     No one knew his true identity. The last man to know
had been the man who had created him. And he had died long ago.

     At first, the symbolism of the armor, the costume, had
been a hard sell for the man who would become the Revolution. He'd needed convincing.
But the Freedom Council was a creature of media birth. So must be its
adversary.

     It would take something that would make an immediate impact
to compete with the twenty-four-seven power of the Media Corp propaganda
machine. A superhero would make that immediate impact. People had always
yearned for a superhero. So he had become one.

     He had chosen to end his personal life. He had given
up being a normal human being a long time ago.

     One life ends, another begins.

      
He had no friends, no family left. He devoted himself to
the cause. There was only one catch. To be the Revolution, he knew he would
have to be willing to die…and to kill. Had to be ready to make the decisions
few could ever make. The decisions of a perpetual soldier.

     The only thing he had left that meant anything to him
was his country. His duty. And he would see them through to the bitter end, no
matter the cost. The ancients had believed that the greatest life lived was
that which ended in a glorious death. He could only hope that his glory would
be the restoration of the Republic.  

     Other Americans had paid with their lives to secure
freedom. Was it really so strange, the choice he had made?  To be a
soldier, a public servant? That’s all he was.

     And now he had enlisted help for his one-man war. The
Suns of Liberty were born. If a war was to be waged in the name of the people,
they would have to wage it. If the Republic was to be saved, it would fall to
them to do the saving.

     Sophia banked the Sikorsky hard right and the duo
descended from the cloud bank in a steep dive. They dropped down to the
rooftops of Boston’s skyscrapers. Down into the steel canyon of the streets.

     Sophia’s code name was
Helius
. She wore a shiny,
rounded, black glider's helmet that came to a point in the back; a face shield
covered her down to the chin and was bright-blue reflective. She could see out,
but no one could see in. Bright-blue bracelets that matched the face shield
were built into the arms of her all-black flight suit. The bracelets were actually
fusion weapons of enormous power. She painted quite the contrast sitting next
to the bold red and blue of the Revolution.