The Suns of Liberty: Legion: A Superhero Novel Read Free Page A

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.
         She was barely five foot two, which disguised her
lethality. Her father had pounded martial arts training into her brother and
her from an early age, so not only did she carry a fusion reactor with her, she
could also engage in “nuclear karate.” In her early thirties, she was the
youngest of the Suns. She was also short-tempered, egotistical, and tough as
nails—with a Ph.D. in engineering to boot.
         Dr. Linh was an astronautical engineer as well as an
astronaut, though she’d never gotten the chance to go up. She had been a top
NASA engineer and, in more sane times, would have been one of history’s most
famous inventors. But the Council had sent gang assassins to murder her father
and to try to steal the Helium-3 engine she had invented with him. So she’d
become Helius instead. The elder Lihn had been the CEO of Lihn
Industries and a bit of an activist in San Francisco during the early gang wars
there. He had paid for that with his life.
         Surprising to many, she had declined to carry on the
company after his death. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, she had suited
up as Helius and secretly exacted her revenge on any and all Bay area crime
syndicates she could find. An indirect attack on the Freedom Council, since
they had long used gangs to do their dirty work. Now she fought the Council
directly as a member of the Suns of Liberty.
         Sophia had taken only a few weeks to learn to fly the
Stealth Hawk and, most importantly, to learn the protocols for putting the
vehicle into its advanced autopilot mode that allowed it to essentially fly
itself, according to certain defined parameters.
         The Revolution, on the other hand, sat uncomfortably
in the copilot’s seat. Fearless as he was, his one trepidation was flying. And
it seemed he was always flying.
         Revolution probed the street ahead with his telescopic
visors. “Lantern, do you have a lock on the getaway vehicle?”
         “Yes, they are in a city bus. The BPD are not following.”
         “Can you track it?”
         “Searching for a lock now,” Lantern said.
         Another hard dive and they were flying just above the
streetlights. Revolution cursed to himself.
         “General, no offense,” Sophia said, “but I’ve seen you
leap out of a helicopter with no parachute. How can you possibly be afraid to
fly?”
         For a reason that had to do more with habit than
anything else, the Revolution was referred to as “General” just as often as his
superhero moniker by the members of his team. To them, he was their field general.
         “I’m not afraid to fly, I just don’t like to.”
         “I’ve got it. Sending you the tracking now,” Lantern told them over their coms. “And we’ve caught a break, sir,” he
added. “The driver just put a location into his GPS. I have a firm lock on
their destination. Looks like the stash-room.”
         A remarkably detailed 3-D display of Boston
superimposed in the HUDs of the duo, and they could easily see the disguised
bus dressed up in digital red against the aqua blue of Lantern’s real-time scan
of the city. Then the locale of the stash-room beamed to life in a split-screen
image, complete with the highlighted path the getaway bus would take to get
there.
         “Good work, Lantern,” Revolution said.
         “Has anyone heard from Spider Wasp?” Sophia asked.
         “Paul Ward is still M.I.A,” Rachel Dodge spat
back. Rachel’s call sign was Stealth because she had the ability to turn
invisible, thanks to the world’s first and only fully functioning invisibility
cloak.
         “Call signs only, please,” the