The Suns of Liberty (Book 1): Legion

by Michael Ivan Lowell

  The wise guys leapt into the open doorway they had just ambled through and could feel the heat of the flames roar overhead, shrapnel ripping into them.

  “Told you I had a bomb,” the Hollow said. And then blinked away. The holograph was gone.

  In New York City, still affixed to the side of the skyscraper, fighting the frigid high winds, Lantern smiled and turned his attention back to Freedom Rise.

  Back in the Counting Room at Marconi’s stash-house, the blast threw everyone to the floor and knocked over the tables. Flames and energy rushed into the room. Cash scattered everywhere. Smoke, dust, and currency filled the air. When it cleared, the men lay bloodied and moaning, choking from the smoke. A few tried to pick themselves up. Someone bolted to the door and swung it open, hoping for air. The dust and smoke billowed out the opening in the roof, and the room began to clear. They were all gasping for the clean air when someone said, “What the hell is that?”

  Those who could looked in the direction the guy was pointing, which was up and through the gaping hole in the roof of the now demolished Weapons Room. In the grey sky, a small dark object was diving straight toward them.

  Finally, someone yelled, “Spider Wasp!”

  Above the smoking stash-house of the Marconi crime syndicate, Paul Ward made a final calculation as he dove. Ward was clad in a tight blue body suit of hard plastic-looking metal material. So dark it looked black. He’d gotten the color from his old antique Toyota Celica he'd fixed up a few years back. They’d called the color “midnight blue” back then.

  On his back was a set of large orange wings, spread out wide, flat against his back. Long vertical lines that ran down their length gave them a slight “accordion” look. They were an ingenious cross between insect wings and a miniature jet. The wings were powered by a non-explosive chemical combination of hydrogen and oxygen. As long as the circulating hydrogen supply didn't leak, oxygen in the atmosphere was enough to power the engines. Oxygen was the input and oxygen was the output. The wings gave him unlimited flying time.

  The dark-blue helmet he wore on his head was formed to fit and had a bit of a gladiator curve to the back of it where it met his shoulders. His eyes were covered by a protective orange lens; his mouth was exposed. He called it his bug suit.

  He raised his arms in front of him and took aim. Large cuffs on his sleeves whirred to life as they rotated like the canister of a machine gun. All he had to do was think about it—and the Neural Transmitter, implanted at the base of his brain, did the rest.

  Thwap! Thwap! Thwap!

  Darts zipped out from the rotating canisters and struck the men as they tried to scramble for cover.

  There had been ten of them. In one pass he’d hit all ten.

  Within a single heartbeat they collapsed. The paralysis serum shot through their veins, hastened by the blood accelerators. All the darts needed to hit was a capillary just below the surface of the skin and the accelerators would take it to the heart in a single beat. The Marconi crime syndicate was history.

  Ward took the honors of calling it in, and the boys in blue, now working in full cooperation with the Suns of Liberty, headed out to the locale. The city’s last gang had fallen.

  Well, not quite. Ward had one more target left.

  The bus began to slow, the engine stalled. At first, Bruiser had the audacity to look confused. And then he realized that the EMP had taken out the engine. Revolution hadn’t moved, so he was out too, Bruiser surmised.

  Okay, so a little miscalculation there, but nothing too bad. They could always call the stash-house for a new vehicle. There was a whole second unit of goons at the stash-house, after all. Mr. Marconi would never have to know about this little mishap, Bruiser hoped.

  “Find out who he is before that suit reboots or whatever it does,” he told his men.

  Six men went to grab him, and suddenly Revolution sprang to life. He tossed them away like ragdolls. They slammed into the sides of the bus, shattering the windows, and one them actually crashed through, out into the street.

  Traffic swerved around the stalled bus. The thrown man crunched on to the street. Vehicles narrowly veered by him. He sighed.

  He had bigger problems anyway...

  Sophia.

  He stood up to run and slammed right into Helius, who was glowing—with fusion power radiating all around her. She had covered her body in a protective shielding of Helium-3 power. The woman basically had a nuclear reactor on her back. It was like running into a steel wall—that was on fire and hit you back.

  In other words, it hurt.

  To make matters worse for him, just as the man started to be repelled off of her, she slugged him for good measure. If he’d had full control of his senses he would have noticed the uppercut didn’t even fully connect. It was augmented by the fusion force field covering Sophia’s gloved fist.

  Such was the power of Helius. She was, in some ways, the Suns’ most powerful member.

  The force of the blow lifted the man up off of his feet. His legs splayed and arms trailing out in front of him, he slammed back up against the bus, denting the metal from the impact. He slumped into the street.

  One more down.

  Inside the bus, Revolution was taking them down one at a time. His arm was throbbing from the injuries he’d suffered three months ago when a large chunk of it had been literally ripped out. His suit was sending a massive rush of pain killers into his blood stream, numbing the pain as best as possible. But his arm still felt as if it were burning in a pit of cinders.

  Fortunately, the small aisle between the rows of seats made his task easier than normal. His would-be attackers could come from behind or in front of him, but his 360-degree onboard camera lens saw it all, and he simply smashed them with his fists or elbows. One blow took them out and sent them flying across the seats.

  The remaining three men, including Bruiser himself, fled out the bus door—

  Only to be met by Sophia. Who blasted them with a gust of blue energy that erupted out of her bracelets. The bracelets pulsed with light as the energy coursed through them, then fell dark again. “Set my phasers to stun, General, but those guys are still gonna be out for hours,” she said with obvious delight, a gleam in her eye. Had she wanted to she could have burned them to oblivion.

  Sometimes, Revolution wondered if she liked this job a little too much.

  CHAPTER 4

  “They want a war, we’ll give ‘em a fuckin’ war!” Marconi yelled. “And why the hell can’t we talk to anybody?” he screamed as he slung his useless cell phone across the room. It slammed against the wall, the cover spiraling off into the far corner of the room.

  The six grown men standing in the plush penthouse office at the top of the high-rise apartments that Marconi’s men controlled all cowered at the temper of their famously violent boss. The shortest of the six, so high-strung he simply couldn’t help but answer, was the only one to blurt out even a peep.

  “Something’s blocking us, sir!” Nerves said.

  “Yeah, no shit! Now go find out what the hell it is!”

  The men turned, eager to leave the room—

  “Wait a minute. Let me tell you something, boys. You’s boys scared? You’s scared they gonna take us down?”

  Marconi rose and walked over to Nerves and unceremoniously shoved the barrel of his Glock into Nerves’s mouth. “They ain’t gonna take us down. You know how I know?”

  Nobody said a word. Marconi hadn’t risen through the ranks of criminality because he was a genius. He’d risen on the strength of his brutality. And they all knew it.

  “Cause they need us. They need rats like us. To get in the sewer and do the dirty work. The dirty work the clean people won’t lower they pretty, prissy asses to do! We carry the shit for them! So that those motherfuckers can keep their precious little innocent hands clean!”

  Marconi looked straight into Nerves’s eyes. “Now you’re scared, aren’t ya? Cause you know I’ll do it. I’ll pull this trigger.”

>   BOOM!

  Marconi had only yelled the word, but Nerves had nearly soiled himself. Marconi laughed like a man possessed. Then his face fell deadly serious and he looked at all of them one at a time, the Glock still planted firmly in the little man’s mouth.

  “Now, let me ask you’s. Would you’s rather die out there on the street with dignity, with purpose, knowing you gave everything for the lives of your brothers, your sisters, your little bitch mamas? Or would you’s want to die like a cock-a-roach smashed under my heel just cause you pissed me off by being scared? Out there you got a chance.”

  Marconi took the gun out of the poor man’s mouth. “Look at that! He ain’t shakin’ like a leaf no more! How ‘bout that?” Marconi cackled like he was going to piss his pants. The others all laughed with him.

  Even Nerves laughed. And it was true. He wasn’t shaking anymore. None of them were. Marconi’s words had sunk in...in a manner of speaking—if they all seemed brave, they might get out of this room alive.

  “Now go out there and give those motherfuckers hell!”

  The men barreled out of the room, ready to kill...in order to survive.

  Marconi stalked back to his desk, grabbed up his scotch, and downed it in one motion. He let it burn going down—

  He stopped dead in his tracks.

  His cell phone.

  Back on his desk.

  The cover was back on it. But he’d had his eyes on all of the men the whole time. How the hell had it gotten there? None of his bodyguards had come in, had they? He’d tossed it all the way across the room. They would have had to cross his field of vision to pick it up, let alone also pick up the cover, put it together, and then lay it back on his desk.

  “The fuck?” he exclaimed. And sent the phone hurtling across the room again. It smashed against the wall, the cover spinning off to the other side of the office. “There. That’s better.”

  Suddenly the curtains behind him covering his large ceiling-to-floor window opened about a foot.

  The sudden movement in the quiet office made Marconi jump straight out of his chair. “Shit! What the hell’s going on ‘round here?” He approached the curtains and checked the window. He felt for a draft but there was nothing. The window was shut tight. There was no knot or anything that looked out of place on the curtain’s cord that might have caused it to open.

  Everything was just as it should have been. Marconi rubbed his fingers though his thinning hair and turned back around.

  What he saw made him pull his Glock out again.

  The cell phone was back on the desk—cover and all.

  “Who’s there?” he yelled.

  “Who’s asking?” said a female voice. It was a teasing voice. A she-devil!

  Marconi screamed. He spun, aiming the gun anywhere, everywhere. Where the fuck was she?

  “What are you?” he screamed.

  Paul Ward was standing in the doorway now, entertained by Rachel’s invisible antics, which he’d been watching by peeking through the crack in the barely opened door.

  The two goons who were supposed to be guarding the suite lay just behind Ward’s boots, darts jutting out of their legs.

  Marconi was so distracted he hadn’t even noticed Ward enter.

  “She’s actually a hot, hot woman.”

  Marconi turned in a panic and fired at Ward. The bullet hit dead center of his chest and bounced off, lodging itself in the wall beside him. Ward winced, but kept his cool.

  “She’s invisible,” Ward said. He took a tone as if he were talking to a child, “That means you can’t see her,” he said, pretending to be bored. “I-n-v-i-s-i-b-l-e,” he said again, slowly. “Oh, do I need to spell it for you?” he said in mock pity.

  Doors on either side of the room burst open and two of Marconi’s machine-gun-bearing thugs piled in.

  Ward was ready for them.

  He fired two darts that hit the men right in the chest. But they both pulled their triggers. The bullets slammed into Ward and he stumbled backwards. The violence of the gunfire had been so shocking, so loud, so...

  Nothing.

  He’d barely felt the bullets.

  He figured he’d have bruises, but Leslie hadn’t been kidding about her new armor upgrades. He turned his grimace back to a smile as the two thugs collapsed to the floor.

  Ward strode toward Marconi. “It’s a new day, fella. Brains over brawn, I’m afraid. You’ve ruled this city through terror and might. And you just got taken down by a nerd with a pocket protector and his super sexy girlfriend.”

  With that Ward shifted the dart canisters. He could feel them slither under his wrist, and he fired straight into Marconi’s bicep. The serenity dart hit home. A dumb smile spread across the godfather’s face.

  “Stealth...” Ward said.

  And she appeared. Right next to Marconi. The hood from her invisibility cloak still covered most of her face, but her full blood-red lips glistened out of the shadows as did her angular chin and strands of her silky brown hair—enough for Marconi to tell she was a knockout. She opened her black leather cloak with a delicious gesture and showed Marconi’s slipping mind the tight white top, tan bare midriff, and form-fitting miniskirt she was wearing.

  “Suck it,” she said in a little girl’s voice with a bit of throaty menace thrown in for good measure.

  Ward knew that the effects of the drug would combine with the sight of Rachel’s centerfold body to give Marconi a healthy dose of priapism: a persistent and painful erection that would, in this case, manifest itself during a conscious but comatose, drug-induced state. That’s how Ward’s medical books would have listed it anyway.

  A raging woody just before he went all “Woodstock” is what Rachel would have called it.

  It was an evil thing to do, Ward knew, as it would stay with Marconi for the duration of the drug’s effects. Which, given the dosage Ward had just injected into him, would be at least half the day.

  Ward snickered at the thought.

  He’d worked on the trazodone chemical base of his serenity serum for years to try to stop the effect from occurring, but had been unsuccessful. Trazodone is an antidepressant that had long been known to cause sexual side effects like priapism. Now, he wondered why he’d not seen it as a side benefit...

  “Girlfriend, huh?” Rachel said.

  Ward smiled at her and shrugged. “Hey, a guy can dream.”

  The arrest of Boston’s last gang brought an enormous surge in public support for the Suns from the people of Boston. Spontaneous celebrations broke out in the streets of working-class Southie.

  Gang activity, long a begrudging local tradition, had grown to be such a nuisance during the depression that it had long since lost any element of romance it might have held for the denizens.

  The mayor and police commissioner jointly sponsored a Suns of Liberty Appreciation Day soon after, and the Revolution, Ward, and Sophia each received keys to the city.

  Much to the irritation of many members of Boston’s Finest.

  CHAPTER 5

  NEW YORK CITY

  William Howke had a tall, looming presence with a vulture-like face. He was taller, in fact, than Thomas Sage as the two men passed each other at the podium.

  Sage looked tired. Where he had once been suave and debonair, Boston had taken its toll on him. He looked out one last time as the Chairman of the Freedom Council. A council he had created. Before him was a crowd of dignitaries. Included were members of the Council itself, members of Congress, and a few CEOs from big client firms under the thumb of the Council—and, of course, the Media Corp camera that was exclusively covering the event live for the world. He ran a nervous hand through his black slicked-back hair, waved a final good-bye, and slipped out the side door.

  And was gone.

  The historical significance of the moment was lost on no one. The only chairman the Freedom Council had ever known in its ten years of existence was no more. The room fell dead quiet. They all wondered the same thing:

  Ho
w would this affect their stock price?

  After the worst of the Second Great Depression had abated, the out-of-control financial markets had been reined in. New rules were established that limited risky investing. So, in a way, the stock market was not as important to American capitalism as it had been before. Instead, Thomas Sage had engineered not only the rise of the Freedom Council, but also the formation of the IBC: the International Banking Consortium.

  The IBC was the main funder of the U.S. and especially the twenty-five member companies of the Council. But access to those very favorable loans were contingent on a company’s capitalization, or in other words, their stock price.

  It had meant that once you got a seat on the Council you gained advantages that your competition could not match: access to cheap money. Connections. Legal and policy control. So Sage’s departure was eyed nervously by everyone on the Council.

  As his successor, William Howke, watched Sage file past the others seated at the grand tables in this grand ballroom, Howke was thinking of how badly the Council needed a distraction. They needed a story in the press that would make the fall of Thomas Sage fade from the headlines. And Howke knew just what to do... It had hit him the night he watched the events in Boston unfold three months ago.

  A team...

  Thomas Sage stepped out into a frenzied throng of reporters. Light bulbs flashed, questions flew. He approached a bank of microphones set up with the Media Corp logo plastered all over them. The world’s media were finally allowed to get a glimpse of him on this historical day. Of course, the breaking story of the day—that today was the final day of his chairmanship—had already been broken by his own company. Former company, he had to remind himself.

  This second press statement was just a bone they were throwing to the rest of the media players.