Operation Inferno (12 page)

The ground shuddered. Dirt rained down the sinkhole walls.

What now? Ant lions? Scorpions?

A huge blue-black shape emerged from the darkness and mist. It was Felix’s rhinoceros beetle. Next to him was the ghost-green praying mantis. Bobby.

Ethan grinned.

Now
this was a fight.

Blue plasma heated and sparked between the rhinoceros beetle’s horned antennae.

“Hold it, Felix,” Ethan cried out over the radio. “In this tight space, you’ll roast us all. Go hand to hand, guys.”

“With pleasure,” Bobby replied. The bees moved, reacting a second before the Resisters.

The three pinning Ethan’s wasp stayed and started pulling him apart once more. The other bees closed in on Bobby and Felix.

It was as if these bees were listening in to Ethan’s encrypted radio transmission. It was a code the Ch’zar had never cracked before … but what if the Ch’zar had nabbed a survivor from the Seed Bank and knew everything they knew? Who could’ve survived the explosion that had destroyed the old Resister base? It’d leveled the entire mountain.

More pressing questions had to be answered first,
though. Like: how was Ethan going to stop these bees from dismembering his wasp?

His insect’s limbs creaked from the stress. His right forelimb pinged and popped. The hydraulic pressure inside was at the red line as Ethan tried to pull back. His forelimb was either going to be yanked out of the socket—or explode from the inside out!

He fired his laser, a continuous beam that drained his reserve energies, whipping the wasp’s stinger wildly.

The temperature in the cave jumped. Old vines that had fallen on the ground ignited. Flickering firelight made the rock walls look like the inside of a volcano.

On Ethan’s thermal imagers everything was tinged red.

The laser struck one bee in the head. It released the wasp, shaking its head, stunned.

Ethan had room to maneuver now. He pushed one bee off him so hard it slid on its back across the cavern.

He slammed the remaining bee on him into the wall.

Chunks of limestone fell around them. The bee was stuck tight in a bee-sized hole in the wall. It buzzed, helpless.

Meanwhile, Felix wrestled with a number of bees.
They piled onto the massive beetle. He shook them off like a dog shaking off water droplets after a bath. Bobby in his mantis tried to engage in hand to hand (or in this case, claw to claw) combat. He should have torn the smaller, weaker bees to shreds with the Crusher praying mantis, but because he’d never fought in an I.C.E. for real before, he was barely able to shove his opponents away.

Ethan had to help Felix and Bobby, but first, he’d deal with that other bee on him.

He turned to track the bee he’d pushed. It was on its feet and warily approaching him. Through the heat haze, Ethan noticed that one of its hind legs glowed slightly hotter than the others.

Was this the bee he’d hit first with his laser? The one that had lured him into this trap?

The anger he’d felt before came rushing back. But this time, it wasn’t the wasp’s insect rage … it was all Ethan.

Ethan lunged forward, launching in the air, and dive-tackled the bee.

They tumbled over and over, crashing through the wall and into a side tunnel. The wasp lashed out with its stinger, skewering one of the bee’s legs. Too bad there
was no energy left in the laser, or he could’ve fried the thing from the inside out.

The bee struck back. It scraped at the wasp’s main external camera, catching, and pulled the lens off. Ethan’s central viewscreen burst into static.

The wasp head-butted the bee and clamped its right forelimb in its jaws.

The bee buzzed like an alarm clock and struggled, wiggling so fast that Ethan couldn’t clamp his wasp’s jaws hard enough to sever the limb.

The bee furiously scrambled against the wasp’s abdomen, at a tiny section of its armor.

Ethan heard a pop down there. An armor plate? Unlikely. And even if it was armor, there were no vital systems down there.

He focused instead on curling his stinger around so he could thrust it into the bee’s heart.

The bee pushed—and they went tumbling in a deadly embrace, back and forth … until Ethan slammed the bee up against a rock wall. It was a good pin.

This thing was as good as dead.

The strange thing was, though, that the bee kept digging at the wasp’s abdomen … that one spot just to one side.

What was it trying to do? Tickle the wasp?

It didn’t matter. Ethan had the bee. Just about. One little shove and he’d have it in the right position to skewer it with the wasp’s stinger.

Ethan felt a heaviness in the wasp’s limbs. They grew sluggish.

He jiggled the controls, but it was like there was concrete hardening around the I.C.E.… and then it froze.

The wasp’s brain raged against this new restraining force. It couldn’t budge!

Had the bee stung
him
first? Some paralyzing toxin?

Ethan doubted it. He had the bee pinned. The enemy I.C.E. was as immobilized as his wasp.

The two giant insects glared at each other with unblinking eyes.

Ethan gulped.

Had it been able to sneak in a sting? That scraping on his wasp’s abdomen …

Ethan turned his starboard camera down to that spot. There was indeed an armor plate the size of Ethan’s hand missing. No, actually it was hinged. It was still there, just swung open.

Ethan recognized it. It was an access port for the
I.C.E.’s hydraulic fluid regulator. It had a supertricky catch, so complicated that even Ethan had never bothered with it. He’d always left it to the Seed Bank technicians.

It was open now, though.

Ethan angled his camera for a better view. To his horror he saw that a loop of hydraulic line had been pulled out—and severed. Red hydraulic fluid had gushed onto the dirt floor … there was only a dribble left coming out.

In a panic, Ethan checked his hydraulic pressure. Almost zero.

How had that thing known just where to disable the one system that’d lock the wasp’s limbs? Even Ethan wouldn’t have thought of that.

He reached for the radio to call Felix—and halted.

If these bees could overhear their transmissions like he suspected, he was just as likely to alert the nearby Ch’zar I.C.E.s in the jungle with a distress call.

He couldn’t wait. He had to get out while there was some pressure left in the hydraulics.

“Sorry,” he whispered to the wasp.

He felt a momentary stab of guilt for abandoning his I.C.E., but Ethan nonetheless hit the emergency hatch
release, and with the last little bit of hydraulic power (and a good shove from Ethan) the cockpit eased open.

Ethan dropped from the wasp and looked around the tunnel, wary of any approaching enemy I.C.E.s. He was toast if they caught him out in the open.

There was also the pinned bee to consider.

He had to get at
its
hydraulics, like it had done to him—before it got free.

He worked up his courage and took a step toward the two-ton bee.

Its cockpit opened.

Ethan instinctively raised his hands, ready to fight. All his combat training in the Resisters came rushing back … which he then promptly forgot.

He dropped his guard.

A girl clambered out of the bee.

It was Rebecca Mills, commander of Becka’s Bombers.

   15   
STANDOFF

E
THAN FACED
R
EBECCA
.

And it
was
Rebecca Mills. No one else had a shaved head with such superclose, precise lines on her neck and temples (not even Felix). No other girl he’d ever known had had flaming red hair like hers or a scar that ran from her chin, across her lips, to the tip of her nose either. She had such an intense glare she could’ve stared down Madison.

Ethan’s hands rose once more, balling into fists.

And there was no way Rebecca Mills could be here, except for one way: she was Ch’zar.

Ethan was only alive and here and himself because he’d had the absurd luck of having his parents’ letters that led him along a trail of clues to find Titan Base.

Rebecca and her crew, even if they’d had supplies, couldn’t have swapped their bumblebee bomber I.C.E.s for new ones and made it all the way to Central Mexico without being …

“Ch’zar …,” they said together.

She inched closer.

This explained, at least, how the Ch’zar had known all his moves and outfoxed him in the air. Rebecca had helped give Ethan his flight training.

Ethan stepped back—just in time to miss her right cross as her fist came speeding at his jaw. She followed up with a kick that
didn’t
miss his stomach.

All the air gushed out of his body, and he doubled over … but not before he connected his fist with her nose.

Rebecca staggered back. She shook her head, and droplets of blood went flying from her nose.

She snorted out red-streaked mucus. “I’m sorry they got you, Blackwood. You were the best of us. I thought you’d be the last to go.”

“Go?
Me?
” Ethan rubbed the ache out of his gut.
“I didn’t go anywhere, thank you very much, Rebecca.
You’re
the one they got.”

“I don’t think so,” she growled.

They glared at each other for three heartbeats. Rebecca’s laser-intense stare bore into him. Ethan looked her over, searching for a telltale sign … of what? That she was still human? Or that she was part of the Ch’zar?

But how did you prove you weren’t part of the Ch’zar Collective? Or the better question: how could you prove you were still all human?

It wasn’t like they handed out membership cards.

The sounds of combat—multi-ton insect scraping over multi-ton insect, crushing rock, and screeching metal—echoed through the tunnel.

Ethan and Rebecca looked worriedly around.

Felix and Bobby were still out there, fighting for their lives. He and Rebecca couldn’t just stand around and argue.

“So prove it,” Ethan told her. “Prove you’re human and tell your squadron to stand down.”

“
You
prove it, Blackwood,” she shot back. “And then you tell your people to stand down.”

This was so frustrating.

Ethan wished there was a way he could trust her. He wished there was a way to find out if she was with the Ch’zar or not.

If Emma were here, she’d be able to tell. Emma would just reach out with her mind and either hear the song of the Ch’zar Collective inside Rebecca or not.

Ethan could do that … if he wasn’t such a chicken. If he wasn’t so scared that every time he heard the song, he’d go a little deeper into it, and one day go so far he wouldn’t come back.

Not like there was a choice now.

So Ethan braced himself, reached out with his mind, and listened. He heard the pulses of anger and rage from the wasp and bee I.C.E.s, still wanting to tear at each other. But there was no choir of a million mental voices. No Ch’zar.

Rebecca was still Rebecca Mills.

“You’re you,” Ethan breathed.

She narrowed her eyes to slits. “How do you know that?”

“Look, I can just tell.”

“Well, I can’t,” she said, and her face darkened. “Why the heck do you think we’ve been playing cat and mouse with Sterling Squadron all this time? We
kept looking for a clue—some way to tell if you were you … or with them. Sure, we could see it was Sterling, but keeping the squadron flying is
exactly
the kind of trick the Ch’zar would pull if they were trying to lure any Resister survivors into the open. And there’s just too much at stake to take any chances!”

Ethan heard the tension, the paranoia, and the desperation in her voice.

How could he prove he was still human? And quick? Before Felix and the others hurt one another? He had to make the first move.

He touched the communication link in his flight suit’s collar, opening up the squadron channel.

“Back off,” Ethan told Felix and Bobby. “It’s Rebecca Mills and her bomber squadron in those bee I.C.E.s. So stop fighting! Zero in on my signal.”

“Okay, Blackwood,” Rebecca whispered, and slowly nodded. “We’ll try it your way.” She touched her collar. “You heard, people,” she said. “Stand down. Come to me.” She looked Ethan over once more. “But don’t let your guard down.”