The Suns of Liberty: Legion: A Superhero Novel (21 page)

     As the frustration in the room mounted, so did the
impatience with Lantern’s absence from the proceedings. He was the person most
able to give them options. Options none of the rest of them could imagine.
Every moment they waited could mean Rachel was going through hell. Or worse.

     Finally, Leslie had said what everyone else was
thinking—and at that very moment, the doors to the Situation Room flew open and
Lantern came bursting in. “I found her! She’s on the move. In New Jersey.”

     Lantern took his place at the table and triggered a
digital readout at its center. “Just a few moments ago Rachel’s nano-tracers
registered on the digi-sphere.”

     “What’s a digi-sphere?” Drayger said sheepishly.

     “You’re looking at it,” Ward said.

     “How come
she
gets nano-tracers?” Sophia asked
pointedly.

     “You’ve all got them,” Lantern said.

      “They were sprayed into your uniforms a month ago,”
Leslie said. “They work their way into your skin over time. By now they are in
your system.”

     Ward grimaced and looked down at himself.

     “They’re not harmful,” Leslie said.

     “As far as you
know
,” Ward replied, scanning
his arms as if he was searching for lice. “Any long-term trials?”

     “Each has a unique signal that only I can trace,”
Lantern said. “Stealth’s signal was blocked at Freedom Rise and during most of her
journey to Jersey, but now it’s come online.”

Moments earlier...

Rachel
had been thrown into the van, her hands slip-cuffed behind her. A clunky metal
collar had been fastened around her neck. She’d never seen anything quite like
the device. It reminded her of those white plastic collars they put on pets to
keep them from licking a wound after surgery. Given that Kendrick “X-Ray” Ray
had been the one to put it on her, she surmised it was probably some kind of
cloaking device designed to keep the Suns from knowing her location. She could
only hope that Lantern would be able to beat it.

     And if that wasn’t what it was, she sure as hell
wasn’t going to be anybody’s “pet,” if that’s what they had in mind.

     Her lip was swollen and bloodied, but Clay Arbor had
been surprisingly easy on her. It was almost as if there wasn’t really any information
he wanted to get from her. Or was he just leaving the dirty work to others?

     They had removed her cloak, leaving her clad in only
her tight white midriff-bearing tee, black leather pants, and fashionable
hiking boots. The Guards who had been assigned to watch her were doing just
that.

     That’s about all they were doing.

     Clad in only their dress uniforms instead of the
normal battle armor the Guard usually wore—a sign they did not consider her a
physical threat—they’d ogled her from the moment their superior had left them
for the van’s passenger seat. Every now and then one would whisper something
and they would all smirk and snicker.

     And then return to leering. Even the one female.

     Of course, that meant they were on her turf.

     Rachel knew she needed to get the collar-thing off in
case it was cloaking her location from Lantern. She also wanted to get to her
cloak—though in a moving van, going invisible was not going to be all that
useful. It was lying on the floor of the van between her and the lustful eyes
of the half dozen Guards.

     John Bailey had taught her a useful technique for
situations like this, a long time ago.
Use whatever advantage you’ve got.

     Whatever she did, she would need to get out of the cuffs
first. She did her best to try to wriggle out of them—but she had to be
careful. With practically every eye in the vehicle trained on her, she had to
try small movements—and make sure the Guards kept looking at any part of her
body other than her hands. She pulled her shoulders back, seeming to stretch
from her awkward position. When she did so, her tight, white half-shirt rose,
and the Guards eyes locked on her.

     One of them actually started sweating.

     Her wrists were thin, but the cuffs were formfitting
and very tight. She could feel the circulation leaving her hands the more she
struggled.

     One of the Guards finally noticed what she was really
up to. “Hey, just what do you think you’re doing?”

     Rachel froze. Her guilty eyes went noticeably wide.

     “Stand up,” he told her, lust still burned across his
face.

     She stood, clearly terrified.

     “Turn around.”

     She turned, thinking she really needed to get out of
these fucking cuffs and get that cloak on, glancing at it out the corner of her
eyes. They all saw what she was eyeing.

     “Oh, no you don’t.” The Guard swaggered up behind her,
his mouth right against her ear. “It’s our job to watch you, little piggy. It’s
a long ride to where we’re going. With a body like yours, I bet you’ve taken a
lot of long rides, haven’t you?”

     “I can certainly think of several ways I’d like to
screw you, if that’s what you mean,” Rachel said with a throaty menace that
threw the man for a moment.

     The Guard laughed finally and put his hands on her
bare waist. The skin was warm and smooth. He began to slide his hands up, and
he could feel Rachel’s breathing quicken. He stopped before he reached the base
of her half-shirt.

     He turned to the others. “She seems like she’s hiding
something. I think it’s time for a strip search,” he said, nodding for them to
give him a hand.

     Four Guards rose and came over. They made quick work of
cutting through her slip-cuffs. They then went to pull her shirt off, and
Rachel turned, mortified, so that none of them could see her nakedness. The
Guards laughed, including the woman.

    
Traitor.
She would give her an extra kick in
the teeth as soon as she got the chance.

     They lifted her shirt, and she did not resist, but it wouldn’t
pull over the bulky collar. “Take that damn thing off,” said the first Guard,
eyeing the collar.

     “We’re not supposed to,” said the female Guard.

     “We’ll put it right back on,” said the first Guard.

     Someone unclasped the collar and it was pulled from
her neck.

And
it was at that exact moment that Lantern, three hundred miles away, caught the
signal from her nano-tracers, no longer blocked by the collar. And once the
block was removed, Lantern was also able to figure out what its digital signal
had been.

     They could put the collar back on but it wouldn’t
matter. Now he knew how to read past it.

     The digi-sphere was a three-dimensional recording.
Lantern used the various spy satellites constantly passing overhead as relays
for his signals. And he stored the recordings for later viewing. So, even
though the collar Rachel was wearing was designed to block things like the
nano-tracers by creating a blank or digital static in their place, Lantern
could still find her.

     By playing back the moments before Rachel’s signal appeared
on his recording, he could identify the precise digital signature that disappeared,
isolate it, and lock onto it should it appear again. The very effort to conceal
her would now reveal a gap that shouldn’t be there. Lantern then broke down the
digital content of that gap, programmed his scan to find the signature, and
then when it appeared again, he would know it was Rachel.  

Dumbasses.
Flash ‘em a little boob and they lose their minds.

     They forced her arms over her head. She knew what was
coming next. As soon as she felt hands brush against her shirt, but before they
could slip beneath it, she made her move.

     She kicked her boot straight up and caught the Guard
standing behind her in his groin. He crumpled and fell backwards, and she drew
her arms straight down, bending at the elbows, and the boney points slammed
into the throats of the two Guards at her sides.

    
Who says skinny girls can’t fucking fight?

     Of course, CIA operative field training in
anti-interrogation and self-defense didn’t hurt either.

     She could tell from the sound one of the Guards made
that it had been the woman Guard, so she glanced over and gave her an extra
elbow straight into the nose. Blood gushed. And Rachel’s elbow burst with pins
and needles.

     Whoever had named it the
funny bone
was a total
fucking idiot.

     The last two Guards tackled her to the ground, and she
felt the air leave her lungs. This was going to be the test of her strategy.

     “Goddamn bitch!” the first Guard yelled, and Rachel
looked up just in time to see the guy she had kicked in the balls pull back his
leg to crush her face. She didn’t have the strength to stop him; her lungs were
on fire, her arm was numb. She waited for the blow.

     “Hey!” screamed a voice from the front of the van.
“Cut that shit out! Dr. V. wants her unharmed.”

     The kicking Guard nearly fell over, but he stopped
himself in mid-kick. “Yes, sir,” he said with hate seething out of his throat.

     Passed the test. Rachel let her false persona fall
away.

     The Guards all backed away from her as she managed to
pull her shirt back down They’d seen more than enough of her for one night. Not
that she minded that shit. They were all probably too stupid to realize that
she’d gotten a bigger thrill out of that than they had.

    
Dumbasses.

     That’s when she noticed that they were forgetting
about the collar. This was working out even better than she’d hoped.

     But no sooner had she realized that than the woman
Guard doubled back, grabbed the collar up, put a pistol to Rachel’s head, and
told one of the others to come over and refasten it to her neck.

     The guy in charge from the front seat leaned back and
grinned at the imbecile she’d kicked in the balls. “Nice work, by the way,” the
leader teased.

     “Screw you. She’s tougher than she looks.”

    
You have no idea.
She’d probably just signed
their death warrants, she’d gotten an ego boost from their lustful idiocy, and she
got to elbow that bitch in the fucking face. For being a captive, she was kind
of having fun.  

     They left her alone for the rest of the ride. Night
had fallen outside, and talk turned to the worsening weather. The hurricane was
getting closer. The wind had picked up, and even in the large van, Rachel could
feel the driver fighting the increasingly powerful gusts.

     By the time they arrived at their destination, a driving
rain was pounding the van. Rachel was shoved out of the doors and plunked down into
ankle-high water—making her thankful for her boots. The rain was blinding. All
she could really tell was that she was in a large yard with high bright lights
illuminating a tall modern-looking steel building. She was shoved forward into
a doorway. Her world went black as someone threw a hood over her head and
jostled her down the hall.

Presently
, in Boston...

Ward
took a deep breath. “Trenton, New Jersey, is in the direct path of Hurricane
Ana,” he said. His words were like those of a condemned man.

     “Yes, it is,” said the Revolution. “A very fortunate
turn of events.”

     Ward groaned. “Yeah, I feel blessed.”

     “He’s being serious,” Leslie said. She’d already given
her consent to the plan. Given that it was a direct response to an action
already approved by COR, she’d decided there was no need for the Members to
approve the issue—a decision that could easily come back to haunt her, given
how unhappy they were over New York. The line between her own authority and
that of the Revolution was fuzzy at best. The same could be said for the line
between herself and COR. Failure would bring charges of abuse of power aimed at
both of them. They were probably risking everything.

     “Uh, come again?” Ward couldn’t see the angle on that
one. A hurricane complicated Rachel’s rescue immensely, no two ways about it.

     “It will give us a strategic advantage. No one will
expect an assault in the middle of a hurricane,” Revolution said.

     “Hold on a minute,” Ward said. “Can we really handle
that? I mean, I know we’re superheroes and all, whatever that means, but come
on. We’re not
superheroes!
”

     “You and Sophia will fly Ben and myself in, and
Lantern will lead the way with the Hollow,” the Revolution said. Then he turned
to Drayger. “Your device works best when there is an outside stimuli to focus
the fear on, correct?”

     “Yeah, that’s the basic idea. It’s always better to
scare an already scared person.”

     “There are few things scarier than a hurricane that’s
headed right for you,” Leslie said, catching on. “Especially these freak storms
we’ve been having the last few years.”