Operation Inferno (14 page)

An object rose from the fog … impossible to see clearly.

Madison gasped and hurled herself at the thing. Her motion dispersed the mist, revealing Dr. Irving, sitting up, puzzled, but nonetheless returning
Madison’s hug. He rocked her back and forth as she wept with joy.

Dr. Irving then spotted Ethan and grinned. “Ah, Lieutenant Blackwood. Somehow I knew you and my granddaughter would be the first faces I saw when I woke up.”

   17   
THE START OF WRONG

I
T WAS A TEAR-FILLED REUNION
. F
ELIX AND HIS
mother, Colonel Winter, jettisoned proper military protocol and actually
hugged
in front of everyone. Madison couldn’t stop sobbing—or smiling her crooked smile. Even Ethan had tears on his cheeks and a goofy grin.

The Sterling Academy recruits and Rebecca’s team all high-fived.

Bobby and the Santa Blanca kids, though, kept apart from the celebration and stared warily at the new adults among them.

Colonel Winter looked exactly as Ethan had last seen her: dark hair streaked white down the center, blue uniform with a pistol strapped to one hip … and, as she detached from hugging her son, as cold and hard as an iceberg.

Everyone listened as she explained that they had always feared the Ch’zar might one day overrun the Seed Bank. There were contingency plans. They had cryogenic sleep tubes ready so that they could be placed inside in a state of suspended animation, then moved aboveground without risk of having their minds absorbed by the Ch’zar. Rebecca and her squadron were recalled at the last moment to sneak those cryo tubes past the aliens.

In addition, Dr. Irving had hidden supply depots of Resister technology, prototypes, and backups of their plans to fight the aliens in a dozen secret locations … so they could destroy the Seed Bank with little effect on the Resistance effort.

The destruction part of their plan was accomplished by simultaneously overloading the base’s fusion reactors. They literally set off a dozen nuclear bombs to cover their tracks.

And of course,
none of this
had ever been revealed to active Resisters kids in case they were caught by the Ch’zar.

In all, fifty officers, eighty-eight technicians and scientists, and over thirty-eight kids too young for active duty had been evacuated. That was
almost
everyone from the Seed Bank.

There was a moment of silence for those who didn’t make it … a few technicians who’d manned the base until the last moment … all the farm animals … and Jack Figgin’s squadron, who’d died during the battle over the Seed Bank that day.

Naturally, the colonel and her senior staff immediately wanted a debriefing on Titan Base.

Ethan told her the truth about his parents’ letters to Emma and him, and how they’d discovered the secret coordinates within them to this base. He did, though, leave out any possible explanations of
why
his parents had known about the base. He also left out the part about the picture he and his sister had found waiting for them here.

That part of the story felt like a private family matter.

As he did his best to explain everything, the colonel
and the other officers frowned and asked more probing questions.

Where were the original base inhabitants? Were any records left? Why didn’t the Ch’zar know of the place? How did they so easily hack into the entire Ch’zar satellite network? Why were the robots on the lower decks out of control?

Ethan had no answers for them.

The colonel, her senior officers, and Dr. Irving then camped out in the base’s Command Center, essentially taking the place over.

What else had he expected? They
were
the senior officers. They had more experience. They were supposed to be in charge, weren’t they?

But they weren’t including Ethan in their heated discussions and plans. He was there to answer their occasional questions, but otherwise he’d been told to keep his mouth shut.

Ethan felt a splinter of doubt stab inside him. Something was wrong with this entire scenario.…

If it hadn’t been for him and his team no one would have ever found Titan Base. Rebecca would be low on supplies and still looking for a place to revive the adults—if the Ch’zar hadn’t found her first.

The colonel and her staff kept flipping through the various views of the world, always coming back to the huge Ch’zar civil war raging on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Dr. Irving was off by himself, consulting data on a dozen smaller computer screens.

Ethan couldn’t take it anymore. When the colonel and her officers were deep in some strategic debate, he edged over to the doctor.

Dr. Irving was so engrossed in his computer screens he didn’t notice Ethan.

So Ethan cleared his throat.

The doctor turned, and the wrinkles of concentration etched onto his face smoothed. “Ah, Ethan, good, good. This base, while I have never heard of it, seems to be similar to installations under my command in the previous war. Same computers, languages, and systems. Still … I have questions about this satellite configuration.”

“Doctor, I’m happy to answer any questions you have,” Ethan said, his frustration creeping into his voice, “but can you answer a few of
mine
?”

The doctor cocked his head, startled. “Of course, young man. We’ve been waiting for this event all our
lives. But I forget, you wouldn’t even know about it. Personally, I thought it would take at least two more generations, another fifty years, before it started.”

Ethan glanced at the doctor’s computers to see if he could puzzle out what he meant.

The displays showed the same things he’d already seen: the miles and miles of factories in Central America and bugs fighting bugs.

There was one thing different. Ethan had seen it before, but it was new here. On one screen were the old Ch’zar population growth projections he and Madison had stumbled across a month ago. They showed the aliens’ explosive expansion.

“They are preparing to swarm,” Dr. Irving told Ethan. He took off his smudged reading glasses and polished them on the hem of his white lab coat.

“Like a hive of bees?”

“A close analogy, but missing a critical variation.” Dr. Irving stood and went on in a lecturing tone of voice. “For
Apis mellifera
, or the common honeybee, when the hive population reaches a certain upper limit, and the food and weather conditions are favorable, the hive may shed a part of its population, which is given a new
queen or queen egg. This portion then leaves the hive and relocates to establish a new colony. Thus, more beehives are in the world.”

Ethan spotted the monitor directly behind Dr. Irving.

He held his breath. On it was a view of the moon, highly magnified. The indicators showed Ethan that the doctor had turned one of the Ch’zar’s satellites around and pointed it into space.

It wasn’t the moon, though, that both fascinated and horrified Ethan. Floating over the moon was the Ch’zar mothership.

Back when Ethan had first learned the truth about the aliens, Coach Norman had showed him a hologram of the alien spaceship. It was one-eighth the size of the moon, spiked and warty, with large areas of wide hexagons that made it look like an insect eye. But this ship was different than the image he’d seen that first time. That ship had been only partially constructed with open sections. This one looked almost done.

Worse … there were
two more
ships in orbit around the moon.

Those weren’t quite the same as the first. One had hundreds of spikes. The other was perfectly smooth,
not a single hexagonal plate. And these were only about two-thirds finished.

Seeing the ships made all the wrong Ethan had felt that afternoon seem like nothing. He swallowed the scream building inside him.

“The Ch’zar,” he whispered. “Th-they’re getting ready to swarm?”

“Indeed,” Dr. Irving replied. “With one critical difference.”

The doctor turned back to his monitors, removed his reading glasses, and used them to tap on one screen for emphasis. It showed an aerial view of the Yucatán factories burning, ant lion artillery blasting waves of locusts out of the air, red army ants sneaking in and overwhelming ant lions, and heavy moth bombers destroying
both
sides from a high-altitude run.

“This swarm apparently has a new rule. Only the strongest shall survive. While the Ch’zar population may be large enough to sustain three motherships, it appears they are having a ‘disagreement’ over the division of available resources to construct them.

“This may explain one long-standing mystery,” Dr. Irving said as he gazed up and away, remembering something. “When the Ch’zar first arrived here, their
original mothership had been heavily damaged. Some of us thought so much that it would never make another interstellar journey. We always surmised it was from a collision or other mishap. Now, it seems there may have been a civil war prior to their departure from their previous host planet. It may be their natural cycle.”

Ethan stared at the battle, not knowing what he should be feeling. He was petrified by the destruction and violence—but also a little happy to see the Ch’zar killing each another—and there was something else: that feeling of
wrongness
that had been growing inside him since the adults woke up was solidifying into something he could almost make sense of.

“I hoped I would live to see this,” Colonel Winter said. She stared at displays, nodding her approval.

Ethan jumped. She’d walked up without him having heard her boots clipping over the metal deck.

He saluted her. “Ma’am … why?”

“Because, Lieutenant, they are leaving,” she said. “Fighting or not fighting, they’ve gotten what they wanted, and they are going.” She took in a deep breath and then exhaled, looking pleased. “We’ll finally be able to rebuild Earth.”

That sounded like a good thing to him. So, why
then had the colonel’s explanation only made him feel worse?

Dr. Irving set a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “You see, while we have trained you and the other Resisters to fight, it was never our ultimate goal to win. No. It would be foolish to fight to win against such a strong opponent. Instead, Ethan, our ultimate strategy has been to
outlast
the Ch’zar until they left.”

Ethan turned to face the adults, shrugging off Dr. Irving’s hand. “What if they don’t go? What if only one of the motherships leaves and the other two stay … to finish their ships or just to dig in on Earth permanently?”

Colonel Winter’s happiness faded. “That is a possibility, but again, Lieutenant, there is little we can do at this point.”

“Or,” Ethan whispered, now caught up in his thoughts and ignoring the colonel, “what if they do all leave?”

It finally dawned on him what he was feeling: fear, dread, and a building sense of responsibility that he had to do something about the Ch’zar once and for all.

“What if they leave and colonize
more
worlds?” Ethan asked. “They’ll do what they did to Earth and humanity to another planet. To another people. If we
don’t stop them here and now, the Ch’zar will take over the whole galaxy!”

“Ethan …,” Dr. Irving said, and glanced at the colonel. “You may be right, but the bulk of Ch’zar battle forces are concentrated near the Yucatán factories and the Del Sol Equatorial Orbital Elevator. It is their manufacturing and supply line into low-Earth orbit and their motherships. Even if we had a hundred, a thousand I.C.E.s and pilots, they would still outnumber us a thousand to one.”

Ethan shook his head. “There has to be a way.”

“There is,” Colonel Winter told him. “We wait. Let the aliens fight and kill each other. Let them leave. Then we will pick up the pieces.”

Ethan kept shaking his head. “But we have to try something. There’s more at stake than us and Earth.”

All traces of understanding drained from the colonel’s icy blue-gray eyes. “I commend your noble sentiments, Lieutenant, but there will be no more discussion on the matter. I want you to round up your people. We have to address the issue of these rogue robots on the lower levels.”

A million possible plans swirled around in Ethan’s head. “Ma’am, I—”