The Suns of Liberty (Book 2): Revolution (7 page)

Those struck fell immediately.
Many were ripped apart. They didn't stand a chance.

The crowd screamed in horror and
scattered in every direction. Nowhere was safe.

Like swarming ants they turned and
fled in the opposite direction of the air birds, toward the closed-off end of
the square...

They rushed away like the tide,
leaving the dead lying in their wake, sprawled across the street like so many
fallen leaves. 

The shooter, cloaked in the crowd,
didn't back down. He kept blasting, staying covered, slipping away with the
mass of people. Spraying the air wildly.

The pilots scanned for the gunman,
but there was simply no way to spot him. The pilot in Apache Two shouted, “Sir,
I can't see the shooter! Can anyone see the shooter?”

Night Hawk knew the rules of
engagement, and this had gone on too long. He’d been given a direct order to
clear the street. His squad had been fired upon, and however ill-advised, one
of his number had fired back—with no reduction in hostility. He had no choice
but to give the order.
If the street runs red, they've got no one to blame
but themselves
, he thought.

“Don't need to. Heat your flames.”

The pilots switched to live ammo.
They prepared to move the crowd, no matter the consequence. They knew then they
were going to have casualties. It wouldn't just be Nine taking lives tonight.
The mission parameters were clear. The crowd must be dispersed and their own squadron
defended.

Protocol demanded that they fire
to stop the shooter—and that meant firing into the thickest part of the
crowd...

“Open fire!”

The aircrafts swooped down.
Bullets tracked the street, from their six to twelve o'clock positions, chasing
and striking the crowd. People fled down the street, a desperate stampede with
nowhere to escape to.

Later, analysts would lament that
while the pilots had orders to clear State Street, they had inadvertently
herded them to the very part of the Square from which there was no exit. The
crush of people had created a human blockade.

They were trapped. With the
copters coming.

It all happened dizzyingly fast.

The Revolution was caught off guard.
Upping the ante like this was an unusual move for Council Guard. But then
again, he'd never seen civilians fire on them before either.

He scanned the crowd. They were
stampeding for the narrow end of the square. The copters were shooting their
red-hot metal behind the crowd. As they zoomed closer, their bullets sprayed
into the mass of people and the air again turned crimson. Screams erupted from
the throng, as those nearby knelt to attend to those who were struck—and then
were struck themselves.

And that was just the warning. The
real attack was still coming.

The X-1s circled back. Engines
blasting. Their guns read
locked and aimed
in Revolution’s Heads-Up
Display, or HUD: the digital readout that scanned across the eye shields inside
his helmet.

It was all unfolding at a
blood-chilling pace. The Apaches were catching up with the thickest patch of
the crowd. Soon they would open fire again. He could time it. Seen it in combat
many times. It was now or never. Only one move had any hope of saving the civilians. 

The Revolution leapt from the
rooftop. He sailed into the far path of the copters.

He fell three hundred feet
straight down. A death dive from atop a skyscraper. From a thought command his
cape snapped rigid, slowing his descent and bringing his legs back under him.

The fall took forever.

Once again he slammed onto his
feet, onto the solid concrete of the street. He landed hard and fell to one
knee. Head down, concealing the intense wave of pain that washed over him.

His scarlet cloak draped lightly
over his form. Bioindicators from his armor sent a rapid response of the drug
ketorolac tromethamine into his bloodstream to moderate the pain. Its effect
was immediate. He rose to face the choppers. Held out his arms. Defenseless.
Daring them to strike.

Night Hawk didn't see him immediately. His focus
was on the crowd, on disrupting the shooter. Night Hawk knew the local Council
reps were fed up with the resistance. They were ready to send a message. That
message sizzled out via his 800-rounds-per-minute gunship turrets. Had he
wanted to, he could have killed them all. He was showing great restraint. They
all were.

“Commander, do you see that?” The
pilot in Apache Four had stopped firing. He was peering straight ahead at the
Revolution landing in the square.

“That's not him, is it?” another
ventured.

Two hundred miles away, Chairman Sage sat glued to
his wall of televisions. He watched as one of his own reporters breathlessly
recounted the coming standoff. The camera swiveled from the Revolution to the
copters and back again.

Sage had seen enough. He was no
longer amused. The last few seconds had descended into abject horror—and it had
happened so fast.

There was no choice now but to
intervene.

It had not been his call to send
in the choppers. That had happened on the local level, a decision made by the
local Council. But he was damn sure going to make the call to end all this. The
Chairman thought-commanded a number to be dialed. A ring echoed across the
room's sound system.

Inside Apache One, Night Hawk took aim. The target
in front of him was holding back the evacuation. And that meant the target was
going down. Orders were orders.

It didn't matter who the target
was.

The Revolution saw the Apaches closing in on him.
They opened fire. Scarlet streaks of artillery danced in front of him, inching
closer, ripping up the asphalt, marching straight for him. Fifty feet and
closing. He felt a rush of panic overtake him. Even if the bullets couldn't
puncture the armor, would their many impacts knock him unconscious? 

It was unlikely. The odds of it
ran through his mind. But there were a dozen choppers coming. Their bullets
were far more powerful than the battalion he had faced all those years ago. If
they all fired at once, those odds would improve. The numbers again raced
through his brain. It would take a lucky shot. Still, a dozen X-1s...

He brushed off a shiver.
A
vision of being captive.
His identity revealed. The symbol of resistance
reduced to a real, living, breathing human being. With all the associated flaws
and foibles. This was his nightmare. He must either stop this massacre or die
trying.

Fragments of gravel sprayed him.
The artillery impacts ripped into the street. It was just another moment...

CHAPTER
10

A
board
Apache One, Night Hawk targeted the red star on Revolution's chest as his
wingmen strafed the street, hoping to scare him off. No dice. Night Hawk’s guns
locked on. He prepared to fire. Just as his finger squeezed the trigger, a
crackle in his headset. Night Hawk's eyes lit up. There was no mistaking the
voice in his ear, and as Night Hawk replied, his tone was absolute.

“Yes, sir, I understand.”  He
leaned into the com and shot a firm directive into the static. “Cease fire.
Return to base.” 

The diving birds split and forked off above the
Revolution. They zoomed past him on either side. The frightened crowd cowered
behind him. 

As fast as they had attacked, the
rat-a-tat-tat
of their propellers echoed away, leaving only an eerie silence. Revolution lowered
his eyes to the street. Bodies and body parts were scattered in a sea of red
gore.

Too many dead to count. 

Revolution wandered into the
horrific mass of human ruins. He stopped at the feet of a couple that seemed
familiar to him. He had noticed them earlier as he’d scanned the crowd. Their
blood-soaked placard lay torn between them. He knelt and closed the woman's
eyes. He turned her head from the unnaturally twisted position in which it had
come to rest. As he did so a sickening pulse of blood from a gaping hole in her
skull gushed over his armored fingers.

He wiped the blood from his hands
with his already scarlet cloak. He rose, taking in the full scene. Bodies
dotted the far expanse of the square. Mothers and sons. Fathers and daughters.

“A massacre.”   

Far above, in a circling Media
Corp chopper, a cameraman leaned out the bay door, trying to keep his lens
trained on Revolution. It was time to blend into the crowd. For a while the
brilliant colors of the armor stood out and, no doubt, made it easy for the
cameraman. But soon, the red, white, and blue of the throng provided virtual
camouflage. The Revolution slipped away. As usual.

The Chairman slumped back into the cushions of the
recliner, unable to take his eyes off the screen.

A million scenarios rushed through
his brain.

But there was only one way to deal
with this. Those goddamn pilots had forced his hand. Even a man as powerful as
the Chairman couldn't control everything. Not the protocol set for  the
pilots, not the orders the trigger-happy local Council leaders in Boston had
set for the pilots—having lost their patience dealing with the insurgency day
in and day out. Understandable really, but it meant they had to be watched
constantly. They were always out for blood. Should have seen tonight coming.

This level of violence was sure to
have the insurgents howling. Pressure would be applied to rein in the Council
Guard and momentum would turn against the Council. How far would that pendulum
swing? He couldn’t afford to learn that.

It all went back to the beginning.
The Council had long debated the wisdom of two master approaches to their
opposition: The Iron Fist or the Velvet Glove. The Iron Fist had its
supporters, but the Velvet Glove was where the smart money was. The Purge had
represented the Iron Fist, and it had been as brief as humanly possible, even
though elements of it lasted for years. It had been an unfortunate yet
necessary evil.

Since then, relative calm, growing
stability, and a “new normal” had crept into the country. All were the work of
the Velvet Glove: a media-driven, ideological battle that ceded ground without
surrendering the fight. The Velvet Glove allowed the Revolution to exist in
order to show how benevolent the Council truly was.

Not that it was official Council
policy to protect him—it wasn’t. But he was only one man. His presence meant
minimal threat for maximum show of restraint. It was all about public
perception.

The Iron Fisters, on the other
hand, would have loved nothing more than to crush the Revolution and his
resistance. But the raw use of power like that only showed weakness. The Purge
was a moment of weakness when the Council had to eliminate its greatest foes.
True power is not having to use it.

But now, in the aftermath of this
bloodbath, as Media Corp itself beamed the images across the world, a feeding
frenzy was starting. Social media networks were already exploding with talk of
the massacre. The Chairman watched it all happen in real time. He had access to
everything. He could snoop in anywhere he wanted. And he could see past his
small screens to the
big picture
: the power of the Velvet Glove was
already draining away. Nothing was going to stop it. Could it be that the
Velvet Glove lay dead and bleeding on State Street along with the others?

There was no choice now.

The decision had made itself. He
would call General Cleeson in the morning and find out about the weapon. A
supersecret concoction so
need-to-know-only
that even he had no details on
what it actually was. Only that it was unstoppable.

Plausible deniability.

Sometime back, word had come up
through the ranks that Council scientists were developing an ultimate weapon.
Sage had green-lit it to keep in his pocket in case the Council ever needed a
trump card. Plausible deniability required he know as little as possible. So he
received periodic updates about a weapon he had never seen, that could do
things he did not know. Sage hoped he would never have to find out. Never have
to use it.

And that's exactly how it should
be. The man running the science division was not only smart, he was also savvy.
He kept the info locked down, just as Sage had asked.

But now, it was the last best
option. If the weapon could take out the insurgency with one blow, a temporary
return to the Iron Fist would be worth it. Just one devastating lightning
strike, then back to the status quo. No more resistance, no more opposition, no
more Revolution. Sometimes you have to cut your losses. There was no choice
now.

CHAPTER
11

A
group of patrol cars, lights flashing, surrounded the entrance of First Federal
Bank of Boston. A group of onlookers and reporters were being held back to a
safe distance. The summer sun beamed down, baking sweat out of muggy foreheads.

The large glass bank doors swung
open. A mountain of a man rushed out with confident strides. His name was
Lithium—a barrel-chested, late forties, bodybuilder type, clad in armor that
was part Robocop, part infantry man—and he exited the bank in a gush of
strength.

His armor was essentially an
Army-green flak jacket set over dark steel—the best stuff they made. The
padding was all over his body. Soft spots at the joints allowed him a great
degree of freedom of movement, which the big man needed. He was as strong as an
ox, but like a lot of men who were all muscle, he gained that strength at the
expense of flexibility.

Flopped over his powerful frame
was the unconscious body of a thug. The bank had just been robbed. Or at least
the thug had tried to rob it. But one scumbag up against the man known as
Lithium wasn't even a contest. The nightly news was there to broadcast that
fact to the entire nation, not just Boston.