The scandal surrounding the violence that had broken out in Boston three months prior had only grown since. Even Media Corp had not been able to stop the tide of outrage that had flooded through social media sites. Sage had decided to put an end to it all. He stepped to the podium to reiterate the words he had spoken only moments before to a far more important crowd.
“The Freedom Council greatly regrets the incident in Boston three months ago,” he began. “We thank the young woman, Fiona Fletcher, wherever she may be, for her remarkable intervention in that matter. The Council has put the full weight of the United States government behind finalizing the report on why the Man-O-War weapon malfunctioned. No effort will be spared in getting answers. As contrition for the Council’s role in the horrific events, I am stepping down as Chairman of the Council, effective immediately. I am also stepping down as CEO of Media Corp. My good friend, advisor, and constant confidant, William Howke, will replace me in both those roles. Thank you.”
And with that, he bounded away from the microphones and toward the clear path Council security had made for him to his waiting limo and his wife, Marguerite, inside. He was satisfied that those words would calm the market and wind down some of the more heated speculation about a change in direction for the Council.
Everyone had expected this. It had already been announced, and Sage had already lost a no-confidence vote on his leadership as CEO of Media Corp. The writing was all over the walls and part of the ceiling too. Still, the reporters stood in shocked silence. This was really happening.
All stood silent except one. Blake Lane shouted as loud as she could, “What about Boston? Why did the Council evacuate Boston? Is it true the Council is no longer in control there? Some are claiming you ordered the Man-O-War to attack. Is that true?” Blake Lane knew the answers to her questions—after all she lived in Boston and ran the nation’s premiere Resistance newspaper. So well known that Sage himself had been unable to shut her down. Or worse.
She also knew that the giant mechanical jellyfish they’d sent to Boston hadn’t malfunctioned at all. It had been sent to put down the Resistance with brutal force.
Sage instantly shot a glance at her filled with pure, unadulterated hatred. At that moment Blake realized just how badly wounded he was by the events in Boston. Was he hurt badly enough to throw caution to the wind and have her killed?
He glanced over at the Council Guardsmen who awaited his instruction. Just one nod from him and she could disappear forever. For just a moment Blake Lane let herself feel fear.
Sage waved them off and vanished inside the limo.
Blake breathed a sigh of relief. The editor-in-chief of the nation’s premier Resistance newspaper, Common Sense, would live another day...
Inside Freedom Rise, William Howke had called the first meeting of his Freedom Council to order. Unlike Thomas Sage, who had nearly always controlled the conversation from the start, Howke let a debate commence. Unsurprisingly, the issue still on everyone’s mind was the Fire Fly.
“We’ve got to do something about the fucking Fletcher girl!”
They all broke into chatter. Howke simply watched them all. He was sizing them up in his mind. He’d heard Sage talk about the other twenty-four many times, but this was the first time he had seen them in action. In this secretive, privileged chamber, these titans of industry often revealed their true selves, Sage had told him. Now those true selves were on display.
It was odd to be the newbie and yet also the leader.
“We know where she is.” An icy voice broke through the chatter, and they all stopped on cue. It broke Howke from his internal strategizing as well. Bannister Tarleton, model-handsome yet with a hawkish face punctuated by piercing blue eyes, peered about the table. His gaze focused finally on Howke. “We should drop an ICBM on her.”
“Jesus, Bannister,” someone said from the other end of the table.
They sat in silence for a moment. No one knew what to say to that. It was so extreme, so out of place.
Howke stood suddenly. “Mr. Tarleton’s right.” This brought audible gasps.
“He is?” someone exclaimed.
“A missile strike would send just the right message: we can hit her, we can hurt her. A nuclear strike is too strong, to be sure...” Howke’s face turned rigid and his speech became staccato—the sign that he was excited. “But a strike into the heart of her perfect little world...” He was not as media friendly as was the telegenic Thomas Sage, one reason Howke would be relying on the handsome, if trigger-happy, Mr. Tarleton for public relations. A good reason to throw Tarleton this bone. “Yes, I think I like it, yes.”
Howke took a deep breath as they all watched him. Now was the time to lay out his plan. “You see, for too long we’ve debated and divided ourselves among those who favored the Velvet Glove and those who favored the Iron Fist.” Tarleton, two seats down from Howke on his right, bristled with energy at the very mention of the term. To him, the Iron Fist represented more than just aggression, it meant winning. “Tom favored the former. Boston has shown that alone won’t work. But it also showed us the limits of the Iron Fist. We need to use the best of both approaches. We’re all worried about our stock prices.”
This elicited a wave of mumbles down the table from the other twenty-four. “The IBC raises all our interest rates as our stock prices fall!” someone shouted above the din.
“Yes they do,” Howke agreed. “I have a plan to stabilize the situation. I’ve been busy in this transition period. First, I am stepping up production at our New Jersey facility. In fact, we’ve already done so. You’ll be happy to know that Dr. Von Cyprus has already given us our first great success.”
An image suddenly flashed to life on a holographic screen in the center of the table. It was multi-dimensional, so that no matter where you sat at the table you had a crystal-clear view of the image.
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the USS Delaware. A fully robotic all-terrain battle station.”
The image that had sizzled to life in front of them was truly awesome. It was a flying armada all built into one machine. It was an enormous battleship, cargo jet, armored tank and aircraft carrier…all pooled into one. Its fat body was reminiscent of a large metal blimp, but it had wide wings on the side.
“What you see here is a vehicle that can move on the land, in the air, on or underwater. It is entirely unmanned and contains an army of robotic, weaponized drones, all completely under remote command. It is our first completely mobile, robotic military base.”
“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 som
eone 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
The 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.
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