Operation Inferno (16 page)

“And Felix?” Ethan whispered.

The colonel’s face tuned to stone.

“Each and every pilot, as well as the new Santa
Blanca refugees, refused to take orders from anyone but their squadron commander—after they somehow learned of your predicament. I had no choice but to throw them all in the brig, to cool off … before I press official charges.”

When she said
cool off
, the colonel took in a deep breath and blasted out the exhale, as if admitting that
she
was the one who needed to cool off.

Ethan pondered it all, and after a moment of silence, said, “Shouldn’t we be fighting the real enemy instead of fighting amongst ourselves?”

The colonel blinked and stared at Ethan, then stared through Ethan for a time—then refocused on him. “That is exactly what I came to speak with you about. You need to reason with them, Ethan. We are in this together. They must stand down.”

“Stand down …?” Ethan whispered.

Those two words stuck in his head. They felt like a key that had been inserted into his brain and that was slowly turning, unlocking a treasure chest of memories.

Where had he heard
stand down
before? It was so close. Something connected with …

“The robots,” he said.

The colonel looked confused.

But Ethan had it now. The other pieces of how it
had
to work all clicked into place.

He had to stand he was so excited.

“I know how to win,” he told the colonel. He smacked a fist into his palm. “Win so big the Ch’zar will
never
recover.”

She eyed Ethan like he’d lost his mind. “I don’t think you appreciate the position you and your people are in.”

Ethan forced himself to calm down. He sat.

She was right. He had to win one battle at a time. First he had to forge a truce between the free-willed human adults and the kids.

“I understand our position, ma’am. I will talk to my people as you suggest. I need to actually talk to
everyone
, though.” Ethan’s words then came in a great rush: “I need to explain my plan to stop the Ch’zar once and for all.… I want you to hear me out—really hear me out. All of your staff, too—and especially Dr. Irving, he’s the key to the first part—and after you hear …”

He took in a gulp of air, and slowed. “After I’ve explained it all, if you think it’s crazy or not worth the risk, then I’ll do as you’ve ordered. I’ll tell the squadron that we’re going to stand down and let the Ch’zar leave.”

She still looked at him, unblinking.

Ethan couldn’t tell what she was thinking. That’d he’d snapped? That she better order a quick, improvised firing squad to assemble on the flight deck?

He detected a tiny flicker in her gray-blue eyes. Not warmth, but maybe … some microscopic acknowledgment that he wasn’t a complete idiot.

“We will hear you out then, Mr. Blackwood,” she said. “When you’re a bit older, I think I’m going to enjoy playing poker with you.”

   19   
CRAZIEST AND BEST PLAN EVER

E
VERYONE GATHERED ON THE CENTRAL STAGE
of Titan Base’s Command and Control Center.

Ethan’s entire squadron was there. There were the original Resisters: Felix, Madison, and even Paul. There were the Sterling recruits: Lee, Oliver, Kristov, Angel, and of course, his sister, Emma. There were also Bobby, Sara, Leo, and the other kids recused from Santa Blanca.

They had gravitated to one side of the circular platform, with hostile glares, arms crossed.

Facing them was Colonel Winter, her stare unblinking,
cold steel; Dr. Irving, looking wise and in control and a little apologetic; along with the senior staff, adult technicians, and the younger kids brought from the Seed Bank who had no clue what was going on.

Between these two groups, in neutral territory, stood Rebecca and her bomber squadron. She kept glancing back and forth between the groups, with what looked like a hopeful smile.

Ethan had found out from Felix that Rebecca hadn’t disobeyed orders like everyone in Sterling had … but she had expressed her disappointment with them to Colonel Winter.

This was Ethan’s chance to prove to the adults that he wasn’t crazy—or at least, that his plan wasn’t—and that they could just maybe win the war with the Ch’zar if they listened to him.

He was in the middle of the Command Center stage. The spotlights overhead that usually focused on various computer stations were now all trained on him.

It was hot. He tried not to sweat in his flight suit in front of everyone, but it was pointless. Even if he’d stood in the Antarctic, Ethan would have been sweating.

Everything was riding on this. On him.

“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Colonel Winter said, loud enough for all to hear. “We’d like to see this plan you have.”

There was no sarcasm, not a hint of disapproval in her voice, but Ethan nonetheless heard something … dangerous.

“The plan,” Ethan said. He stopped. His mouth was suddenly as dry as beef jerky. He swallowed and tried again. “The plan has a lot of parts,” he said, “so I’ll ask everyone to be patient until I can go over the entire thing.”

The colonel nodded.

Okay. She was going to let him do this. He’d half expected her to change her mind and turn this into a court-martial.

Ethan strode to a computer station and tapped in a command. The live images of the three Ch’zar spaceships near the moon appeared on the huge wall. The ships looked like magnified images of spiky, weird pollen grains he’d seen in his fifth-grade science books. Only these pollen grains were four hundred miles across.

There were many gasps from the crowd. Not everyone there, especially the little kids, had seen the alien ships before.

“There are three Ch’zar ships being built,” Ethan explained. “The big, more finished one was constructed from what we think was left of the original ship that came to Earth fifty years ago. As Dr. Irving explained to me, this shipbuilding is a swarming behavior of the alien insect collective. But as they’re running out of resources on Earth, it looks like the three ships are now fighting over the last materials they’ll need to make the long trip to a new solar system. The two weaker and smaller sides are against the larger, stronger one … which still looks like it’s going to win.”

On-screen, tiny flashes and fireballs appeared in the space between the massive vessels.

Ethan adjusted the controls and pulled back from the extreme long view, until Earth appeared as a slice of blue and white whirls at the edge of the screen.

“We’re going to change the balance of power between these sides,” he said.

A line came into view, running from the clouds of Earth up until it vanished into the black. Ethan zoomed in. As he got closer, the thickness of the line, which at first appeared to be like a fine thread, showed itself to actually be a hundred feet across with sealed elevator pods flashing up and down at high speed. On every
mile-long girder clung a huge black dung beetle, huddled close to the structure, missile pods bristling outward.

“This is the Del Sol Equatorial Orbital Elevator,” he said, “sometimes called the beanstalk. It’s the enemy’s major lifting mechanism to get things into space. Dr. Irving tells me this one structure moves eighty percent of Earth’s stolen resources into space for the Ch’zar. Currently it’s controlled by the guys with the one big ship.”

Dr. Irving looked over his glasses at the image. “Quite true on all counts,” he said.

“We’re going to blow that space elevator up,” Ethan confidently told everyone. “That’ll give the two weaker sides a chance to regroup to fight the bigger ship before it can be finished. The Ch’zar may cause more damage to themselves than we ever could.”

There were shouts and cheers from Sterling Squadron, looks of utter disbelief from the adult side, and Rebecca looked too stunned to react … until she slowly raised a hand to ask a question.

Ethan held up both arms for quiet and pointed at Rebecca.

“Lieutenant,” she said, “I don’t mean this to sound like I’m not behind you.…” She took a long look
around at everyone and scratched the side of her closely shorn hair. “But there are two things that’ll stop us. The Resistance has looked at that target before. Higher on the beanstalk there are hundreds of Vampire-class tick I.C.E. single-shot missile launchers. It’s the only place the Ch’zar have medium-range missiles deployed. That makes the only approach near ground level. And even at maximum speed, my bombers would never make it through the surrounding industrial sector. There’s too much ant lion artillery.”

Sterling Squadron’s cheers died to silence at this. They all respected Rebecca.

“I know,” Ethan replied. “I’ll show you in a moment how we’re going to get past their defenses. But what’s the other thing you think could stop us? You said there were two?”

“Well …” Rebecca’s gaze dropped, and she chewed her scarred lip. “We don’t have any bombs left, sir. In the last battle at the Seed Bank we used up the heavy ones. And without majorly big bombs you’re not going to be able to take out the beanstalk. It’s just too well built.”

The rest of her bomber squadron, experts in blowing stuff up, nodded in total agreement.

Ethan allowed himself a tiny smile and then quickly wiped it off his face.

“That’s not a problem,” Ethan told her, and tapped a button. “This is video from our last recon mission.”

A new, shaky image projected onto the Command Center wall. It showed the Yucatán factories and warehouses from three thousand feet.

A tiny shadow fell over one warehouse. A split second later, a pulse of light flashed across the scene and lanced the object casting the shadow as it came into view.

The blur of an object erupted into a huge sheet of fire that boiled over the buildings, then exploded, flattening three of the structures into smoldering shrapnel.

There was a collective intake of breath at the impressive carnage.

“That was only a partly filled extra fuel tank dropped on our recon mission,” Ethan said. “Angel decided, uh … as an experiment, to laser-detonate the thing, and that’s what happened. I think we’d get an even better explosion with a full tank.”

“Air-fuel bombs,” Dr. Irving stated with a deep nod. “Such devices were used in the last human war. They were usually considered too dangerous for conventional
operations. They were, however, extraordinarily powerful. I think the yield of these fuel-tank bombs could be significantly boosted with an internal explosive to disperse the fuel over a larger area.”

Colonel Winter raised her eyebrows at Dr. Irving.

“It’s true,” he told her. “Three or four should be sufficient, if properly placed, to demolish the orbital elevator.”

Rebecca’s pilots whispered excitedly to one another.

“Getting to the beanstalk elevator is the next part of the plan,” Ethan told everyone. “Like Rebecca said: there’s too much ant lion artillery to make a bombing run at the tower … unless we counter with an army of our own.”

The crowd murmured, but all fell quiet as Ethan tapped in a new command on his computer.

On the wall screen, security video appeared, grainy black and white and distorted along the edges. Ethan, Emma, Angel, and Bobby appeared for a second in the frame—running for their lives. A pack of wheeled maintenance robots raced after them.

The camera changed and showed those robots pounding and ripping through a steel wall near a security door to get at Ethan and his friends.

“Four or five of these robots, armed with weapons such as rivet guns or plasma welders, would be a match for a Ch’zar I.C.E.,” Ethan stated. “With enough of them, we’d have a great diversionary force.”

He tapped once more on the computer keyboard.

“Excuse me,” the colonel said.

She looked a bit too smug for Ethan’s liking. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Aren’t these the same robots that tried to
kill
your team? What makes you think they will target the Ch’zar?”

Many on Sterling Squadron, especially Bobby and Emma, looked especially concerned at this. Who could blame them? They’d almost gotten pulped by the rolling death machines.

“Because, Colonel,” Ethan replied, “I believe we have a way to control the robots.”