Operation Inferno (10 page)

E
THAN SAT INSIDE THE COCKPIT OF HIS WASP
, contoured seat hugging his back, hurtling over a green landscape at a dizzying, terrain-hugging three hundred feet.

He checked his fuel gauge for the tenth time in the last half hour.

Two-thirds full. Not ideal, but good enough.

Half was their turn-around point. It didn’t leave much extra for exploration … or combat.

He scanned the displays, port and starboard, fore and aft. His sprits rose.

Sterling Squadron was back in the air where they belonged. Madison had the point position in their formation with her dragonfly. The insect glimmered like an emerald in the sunlight. Felix had the rearguard station. His Big Blue rhinoceros beetle was the team’s anchor. Next to Felix flew Emma in her four-ton ladybug of death.

Angel’s black stealth wasp and Lee’s housefly orbited the group—zipping back and forth, up and down, always on the lookout for danger. Oliver’s sleek, tough silver cockroach and Kristov’s bloodred locust were on either side of Ethan’s wingtips.

The Crusher praying mantis rocketed along on the dorsal, or top, side of the formation. That gave Bobby the clearest view of the squadron, and made for the easiest maneuvering.

The mantis I.C.E. was Bobby’s now. He was doing good, but considering their speed and the fact that they were on average only separated by a body length, being only
good
could have serious consequences.

He wasn’t sure how Bobby would do in a real dogfight.

Ethan paused in his thoughts to consider how the word
dogfight
didn’t really apply when he was flying a three-ton insect.

At least up there, Ethan was with people he trusted, and things up in the air were clear-cut. When your enemies wanted to destroy you, you knew. You fought back.

Of course, there were complications, even up there.

Like: those mysterious unarmed bees they’d run into yesterday. Why the Ch’zar were apparently attacking their own factories. And—Ethan checked his fuel gauges again—the matter of the extra tanks.

In order to make it all the way to the Yucatán Peninsula in one go, they’d had to attach extra fuel tanks on the I.C.E.s. One was the size of his wasp’s abdomen. It was worse for Emma and Felix and their fuel-guzzling, heavily armored assault units. They’d burn through
three
extra tanks … two of which had been stashed on the route back.

With a hundred miles still to go, they had to keep them until they were nearly at the Ch’zar industrial sector.

Ethan was itching to get rid of the tanks, though. With the extra weight, maneuvering the wasp felt like flying though syrup, the controls were so sluggish.

And combat? Forget it. With the tanks on, they’d be toast.

“We’re almost there,” Emma said to him over a private, short-range radio channel. “Stop worrying about the extra weight. You should worry about what happens if one of us catches a stray laser beam or plasma bolt.
Boom!
We’re basically flying bombs, you know.…” She laughed.

“Ha-ha,” Ethan said. “Not funny, Emma.”

“Hey—just a reality check,” she said.

Ethan glanced back at her ladybug. She was right. One hit on these fuel tanks and they could all go up in a huge chain-reaction fireball.

A line of hills passed under their I.C.E.s as they flew over … and the jungle started to change. There were a few tracks cutting through the green dirt roads, a paved highway, and all traces of rainforest vanished—replaced by corrugated steel warehouses, churning factories, and an endless automatic conveyor system shuttling cargo.

“Go short-range encryption,” Ethan said, after setting the squadron’s radio channel to the low-power secret setting. This would reduce the risk of any enemy listening in.

“What is out here that the Ch’zar would build all this?” Bobby asked.

“There’s literally tons of lumber,” Emma offered.

“The Ch’zar don’t need
wood
,” Angel said. “Glance over at two o’clock, toward the sea.”

Ethan dialed up the magnification of his cockpit screen in that direction. There were the waves and whitecaps of the Gulf of Mexico … but there was also the edge of a crazily huge retaining wall that looked like
ten
Hoover Dams put together.

He probably hadn’t seen it from the satellite view before because he was looking straight down the thing. And to be truthful, he hadn’t been looking for a mile-long wall holding back a million tons of seawater.

Spiraling around on the dry side of this structure were roads and a hundred cranes and one of the deepest open pits Ethan had ever seen. It had to be some sort of mining operation.

“What are they looking for there?” Felix asked.

“Iridium and nickel,” Angel told them over the radio. “Platinum, too. Basically a bunch of rare metals. A long time ago, this giant meteor fell to Earth here. It was full of those metals. It also supposedly contributed to the extinction of the Cretaceous-era dinosaurs.”

Ethan flew on for a few heartbeats, flabbergasted.

Angel was the last person he’d expect to know that
stuff. How to light a trash can on fire? She was the person he’d ask. History and geology? No way.

“How do you know that?” Madison asked accusingly.

“I went to school,” Angel told her. “I studied. Duh!”

An explosion lit the horizon about five miles away. A pillar of flame rose into the sky, then diminished, and left a curling column of black smoke.

“Okay, people,” Ethan snapped. “Cut the chatter. We’ve got trouble.”

“More than you think, Lieutenant,” Madison said. “Incoming hostiles, high-speed inbound from nine o’clock. Seventy-five miles out.”

At the edge of Ethan’s radar screens contacts just appeared. A formation of a dozen Lance-class, hybrid-assault hornets.

Ethan glowered. They were tough fighters.

He quickly assessed the tactical options. Going down, they would find some cover. Probably too late to hide, though.

Ethan almost let go of his control and smacked his head. He was such an idiot!

“Disperse thirty feet and drop your tanks,” Ethan ordered the squadron. “Right now!”

He flipped the safety switch on the extra fuel tanks and engaged the
PURGE
icon.

The extra tank jettisoned and dropped away.

Eight tanks hit the ground. They crushed warehouses and flattened trucks … and not a single one of the tanks detonated.

Ethan guessed they were a lot safer than he’d imagined.

Eight? Wait, there were nine of them up there.

A moment later the last tank dropped. Angel’s wasp flashed its laser. A spot on her still-airborne tank turned molten.

It blew up just before impact … transforming in the blink of an eye into a huge ball of fire, and flattening three nearby warehouses.

That was a nice shot. Ethan was impressed with the destruction. The fuel must have flash-vaporized, somehow making a much bigger bang than he’d ever expect.

He was, though, going to have a long chat (again) with Angel about firing without orders.

“Move up to fifteen thousand feet,” Ethan ordered. “We’ll try to take the high ground in this fight.”

The squadron angled their jets down, and they rose straight up into the air. There was no cloud cover today.
That was good: they’d see anything coming at them. It was also bad: there’d be no cover up there once the shooting started.

Adrenaline surged through Ethan’s body. He shook a little. It was a familiar sensation. He also felt the wasp, eager to get to the action, blast with its laser, and tear the enemy apart.

He held them both back … experienced enough to know that the fighting would come to them. And when it did, they’d have an advantage being higher.

His displays lit with warning indicators as the hornets’ plasma emitters heated. Those Lance-class I.C.E.s packed a wallop.

“Try to save your afterburners,” he said over the radio. “We don’t have the fuel to burn. Concentrate laser fire on the leads, and then when they …”

His voice trailed off.

The hornets were
not
lining up for an attack run. They kept flying straight at the same elevation. It was almost as if they hadn’t seen Sterling Squadron in their way.

“Stand by,” Ethan said. “No one, and I mean
no
one, open fire until I give the order.”

Angel’s black wasp zipped in a little anxious circle,
but otherwise stayed hovering where she was supposed to.

Ethan watched, fascinated, as the hornets passed right under them … and kept going.

They did open fire—but at the ground.

A warehouse the size of a city block erupted into flames. The plasma splashed over the metal and heated it and melted huge gaping holes in the roof.

From the far side of the building, the walls burst open and six Leviathan superheavy assault scarab beetles took to the air. The fat insects banked, their golden armor separated, and missile pods popped open.

The hornets focused plasma fire on the starboard side of the scarabs’ formation. One of the beetles ignited like a magnesium flare and dropped to the ground.

The remainder of the scarabs fired. Their missiles detonated and wiped out half of the hornets in a flash of highly explosive thunder that left chitin armor fluttering in the air like confetti.

“Go winged flight,” Ethan told his squadron.

Their jets throttled down to a dull roar, cut out, and were replaced by the drone of insect wings.

“Move to three o’clock and increase altitude a thousand
feet,” he advised, and slowly edged from the battle, still watching the carnage.

“More hornets inbound fast,” Madison advised.

In response to this new threat, ant lion artillery unburied themselves from the ground, and the silver armored I.C.E.s launched salvos of anti-aircraft shells into the sky. The air was dotted with smoke puffs and deadly shrapnel.

But they were still taking no notice of Sterling Squadron. It was as if they were referees in this fight. It made no sense.

The hornets were more agile than the scarabs and ant lions. They could make short work of their enemy … if they could only get closer. But the beetles and ant lions were effectively using missiles and artillery to create a quarter-mile kill zone.

“Keep moving slowly,” Ethan whispered. “Let’s not get caught up in this … but see if you can find out what they’re fighting about. There has to be something here.”

Felix maneuvered his rhinoceros beetle closer to Angel’s wasp. She behaved, though, and moved off with the rest of them instead of engaging the Ch’zar.

Even ever-ready-for-a-fight Angel wasn’t crazy enough to dive into
that
mess.

So just why were they killing each other? Was there a clue here?

Ethan squinted. There were factories and refineries down there, trucks that had been lined up and were now scattered like toys ready to take cargo somewhere. Their fighting over a place and resources they already had made no sense.

His sister’s ladybug lagged behind and drifted out of the squadron’s formation.

He opened a private radio frequency to her. “Em?”

There was silence over the channel for three heartbeats, then she whispered, “Shhh, Ethan. Listen.”

He listened intently over the radio. There was static. His own pulse. Nothing else.

“Not like that,” Emma said. “Listen with your mind. To
them
.”

Shocked by the suggestion, he pulled back from the speaker.

“No way, Emma. I did that once in combat,” he said. “And the ant lion trying to eat us almost blasted a hole in my brain. I’d never try it with so many angry Ch’zar so close.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “That’s the
exact
reason why it does work. They’re all focused on each other.”

That made zero sense. The Collective didn’t focus on itself. It just was. A being composed of millions of minds. Emma was silent.

Ethan gave in and slowly opened his thoughts a bit … and heard nothing, so he opened his mind a bit more. Okay, there was his wasp’s mind, agitated they weren’t down there in the fight. That was expected.

Farther out he could hear the faint mental echoes of the alien Collective … but it was different than he’d remembered it. It wasn’t one thundering unified beat. There were
two
songs.

“You hear the different rhythms?” she asked.

“Yes. One’s accelerating into a full drumroll. The other is pounding deeper notes. It’s almost like they’re fighting each other, but in their minds.”

“No,” Emma corrected. “It’s like they’re trying to
kill
each other even in their minds.”

Below, fires raged. Hornet carcasses burned among wrecked machinery.

“They’re not trying,” he whispered. “They’re doing it.”

He spotted movement: one wounded ant lion leaking ichor dragged one of the cargo trucks in its massive jaws. There was another ant lion doing the same thing. They moved away from the battle.

“They’re after
stuff?
” he said. “Since when have the Ch’zar been interested in material goods?”

“Ethan?” Felix broke in over the squadron radio channel. “Any further orders, Lieutenant?”

Tension strained Felix’s voice. This had to be nerve-racking for the team. Just watching others fight. But they had to gather intelligence on what the enemy was doing. Rushing in now would be the wrong move.

“Let’s go higher,” Ethan said. “We’re going to follow those ant lions hauling materials south.”

“Roger that,” Felix said.

The squadron pulled into a flying wedge formation and shadowed the insects on the ground.

More ant lions, then black army ants, and even locusts joined the line moving south. They dragged and hauled cargo trucks, and in one case, a dozen ants worked together to pull along a huge industrial pump the size of a house.

They formed a column, a parade, and then a superhighway of giant insects.

Where were they taking all this stuff?

Ethan scanned the landscape from horizon to horizon. The day was bright and sunny. To the south, the factories vanished, and although there were roads, it was mostly jungle. The air was misty, probably a side effect of the lush, wet environment.