Operation Inferno (11 page)

Then he saw it: a line that ran from Earth up to the sky. It went up and up until it faded and vanished in the distance … even on his display’s extreme magnification.

“That’s the Ch’zar’s equatorial orbital beanstalk,” Madison announced over the radio. “It’s kind of a long elevator they use to get stuff to their mothership in space.”

Ethan marveled at the size and engineering. He’d seen one beanstalk near Santa Blanca the first night he learned the truth. That one had been much, much smaller.

It was, though, where the mass of insects cannibalizing their own factories was headed.

As he tried to puzzle this out there was a flash of silver in Ethan’s peripheral vision.

He checked all his monitors. Nothing.

Still, he hadn’t imagined it. He had seen something … 
where there should have been nothing out there with them at two thousand feet.

He looked again, forcing himself not to blink.

There. Almost completely blended into the sky: it was one of those weird bees they’d encountered before.

This one perfectly mirrored their flight path.

Sneaky little creep!

As Ethan kept looking he saw there wasn’t one … but two … and then five … and then a dozen of the enemy craft out there, following them three hundred feet off his port wingtip.

   13   
AMBUSHED ANYWAY

E
THAN DIDN
’
T MOVE
. N
OT A MUSCLE
. N
OT A
twitch.

Those bees had outsmarted and outflown him and Sterling Squadron last time … and here they’d snuck right up next to his team, and they hadn’t even noticed! If it hadn’t been for a lucky odd reflection, he’d still be flying clueless.

Okay. He took a deep breath.

It wasn’t as if these bees could read his mind. They didn’t have X-ray vision to see into Ethan’s cockpit and figure out what his next move was going to be.

They were I.C.E.s—supercamouflaged and using some new technologies—but armor plates, flesh and blood, and just as destructible as any other bug.

Once he figured out how to fight them, that was.

On a hunch, Ethan switched his displays to the infrared spectrum. There were a couple of faint red smudges, but no jet exhaust signatures from those bees. Their jets weren’t deployed.

That could give Ethan an advantage, assuming his squadron’s jet fuel held out.

He tapped his screen twice to call up the drawing pallet. He drew a circle around the nearest bee, then the others he could make out. He wrote in block letters next to the circled bees:
WAIT
.

Ethan gave the “go silent” command over the squadron channel and then transmitted a picture of what was on his screen.

He hoped Angel and the others kept their cool, waiting for his lead, and didn’t start blasting away!

He held his breath.

Good. They all stayed flying in formation as if nothing was going on.

Seven radio clicks returned, signaling that his team had indeed received his nonverbal message and understood.

Ethan considered his options. The best seemed to be action. Ambush these ambushers!

On-screen he circled the closest bee a few times and then the next closest pair. He numbered them and wrote:

He sent that over the short-range encrypted squadron channel.

They’d only get one shot to take out as many bees as possible before they scattered. After that it was going to be tricky to pick them out again from the surrounding sky.

He slowly heated his laser to combat readiness.

Inside his gloves his palms were slick with sweat.

He gripped the controls tighter and snapped the wasp’s wings forward to turn and blast the enemy with his laser.

The bees darted out of his line of fire—moving a split second before he’d committed to battle.

Ethan didn’t have a clear shot. He fired anyway. The laser missed the bee’s abdomen, but grazed one of its trailing legs.

That wouldn’t slow the thing down. It did, though, heat the exoskeleton by a few hundred degrees and make it flare on his infrared thermal display like a slice of sunshine against the sky.

“Where’d they all go?” Bobby cried over the radio.

Ethan spared a split-second glance. The other bees were gone. They were so well camouflaged they might as well have been invisible.

Except for the one Ethan had tagged with his laser.

He could still see it, for now, but it was cooling, getting dimmer on his infrared display even as he watched.

“Come on,” he said. “Turn on your thermals. You can see one. Follow me—quick.”

He chased after the enemy bug.

And
again
it guessed his maneuver, and barrel-rolled in the other direction.

How did they know? This guy was good.

Ethan rolled into an inverted dive. He used his jets. The acceleration crushed him into his seat. He banked into the correct angle to catch the bee. The distance between them was closing fast.

On his rear-facing displays, though, Ethan saw that he’d left the rest of his squadron behind as they oriented and turned to catch up. It would take a few seconds for them to get to where he was. And a few seconds in aerial combat could make all the difference.

He couldn’t wait for them. He had to go for it.

Part of him knew this wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

On the other hand, wasn’t it just as stupid
not
to take advantage of his luck? Nab this nearly invisible enemy while he could see it?

The thing’s fading thermal glow was almost at ground level now. Ethan rocketed after it.

The bee was so low it brushed the tree line. Branches and leaves flew into the wasp, bouncing harmlessly off, but Ethan almost instinctively yanked up on the controls … which would’ve given that thing more maneuvering room.

It was exactly what he would have done in its place.

The bee swayed and rolled back and forth, so Ethan couldn’t get a weapon’s lock. He opened fire anyway, hoping for another lucky strike.

The laser missed, but Ethan kept firing wildly. He hit the trees and set them on fire.

His laser then sliced across one of the bee’s wings, right at the shoulder joint, and it smoldered.

The wing seized.

The bee plummeted into the jungle.

Trees shattered into matchstick kindle.

“Yes!” Ethan cried. “Gotcha.”

“Hey,” Emma called over a private radio frequency. “Wait for us, hothead. I mean, Lieutenant. We lost the rest of those bees. They could be anywhere.”

But Ethan ignored his sister and banked hard, circled back, and landed … Or rather he was going to land, but there could be no landing where the bee had crashed.

There was a huge sinkhole whose edges were tangled with vines and clinging trees. It was three hundred feet across.

Ethan couldn’t see the bee or its heat signature down in the pit.

He scanned the nearby jungle. The impact trail of the bee had shattered trees and left skid marks right to and over the edge of the hole. The enemy I.C.E. had to be down there.

He should wait for the others. But he just knew if the bee was still alive, it was thinking of a way to outsmart
him once again. He had to make sure it was out of the fight.

“Watch the airspace over me,” he ordered on the squadron channel. “The enemy might have doubled back and still be flying. Watch for the faint thermal on the infrareds. Felix, Bobby, follow me down when you catch up.”

“Roger that,” Felix replied.

Ethan plunged into the sinkhole.

Thorny vines and flowering orchids covered the walls. The plants stopped a hundred feet down, though, as shadows swallowed everything. Bats whirled around him, startled.

Ethan hit his external lights and played them along the walls. They were limestone, cream and rust-colored and melted from a century of erosion.

Four hundred feet and the wasp touched the sinkhole’s floor. A small river only a few feet deep ran across the cavern. There were three tunnels with streams that fed the larger river. Mist curled up into the air.

There was an obvious impact crater, and a dragging trail across wet sand into one of the tunnels.

So, that bee
was
down there. It couldn’t have gotten far. He had it.

Which was exactly when ice water filled Ethan’s veins … because he realized that the darkness around him was moving. Faint blue and white smudges circled him, which were easier to see now against the pure black.

He was surrounded by the entire enemy I.C.E. bee squadron.

   14   
WRESTLING

E
THAN FROZE
.

His wasp didn’t. White-hot anger flared in its insect brain. It knew exactly what to do.

Ethan let his mind connect deeper with the wasp’s and they moved as one—

Pouncing on the closest bee. The wasp pinned the bee, forelimbs to forelimbs, legs to legs.

Camouflaged or not, the bee was still there, solid enough for the wasp to bite at the exposed wings. He tore one of the diamond-hard surfaces from its motorized gimbal with a sparking screech.

The bee struggled and buzzed, but there was no way Ethan and the wasp were letting it get away.

The rest of the bees had other ideas.

They all jumped on the wasp, pulled and tugged and yanked until
its
limbs were stretched wide. They nipped at the unarmored joints.

Fire lanced through Ethan’s arms and legs, pain flashing though the wasp’s mental connection.

He screamed. Not in fear. He and the wasp were shouting in rage.

The wasp snapped out with its jaws biting back—caught one of the bees’ legs and snipped it off.

Two of the bees actually backed off.

Ethan shook off the wasp’s blood rage.

Ch’zar didn’t do that. They weren’t afraid to be hurt or die.

And why was he so angry at them? For some reason this didn’t feel like fighting Ch’zar. If felt … it kind of felt like the worst time he and Emma had fought. Like it was personal. But that was crazy. Why would he feel like that?