Operation Inferno (20 page)

Ethan motioned for everyone to gather around him.

“We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” Ethan told them, “to execute what Colonel Winter has named Operation Inferno. The sun’s coming up in a few minutes, and we need to be in the air and flying due east into it. Rebecca, is your squadron ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Rebecca said. “Half will be with you, two more high in the sky, and the rest scattered at midlevel
altitudes, all camouflaged and reporting strategic updates.”

“Good,” Ethan said. “The rest of you know the plan, and the recent changes?”

They all nodded. The squadron (except Paul) looked nervous and twitchy.

Ethan didn’t waver as he met their gazes. He didn’t let them see any of the fear bubbling inside him. He couldn’t. They needed him to be resolute and sure they could win this fight today.

It was the least he could do for them … considering they might not all be coming back.

“Mount up then,” Ethan said. “Wait for Emma to get airborne and we’ll form up around Big Blue. Good flying and good hunting, Sterling!”

His people gave each other high fives, a few hugs, and then they broke and ran to their I.C.E.s.

Emma stayed behind to punch Ethan in the shoulder, but he stepped out of the way, and for once, she missed.

“Ha, you’re learning,” she said. “I’ll get you next time, Lieutenant.” Then she jogged to the beetle and clambered into the open cockpit.

The entire squadron got into their I.C.E.s, warming up joints and wings, in their preflight checks.

Everyone but Madison, who stood by her dragonfly, its armor reflecting a green glow onto her features. She spared a long glance at Ethan.

He waved at her, not sure what else to do, and she waved back. Madison then sighed and climbed inside her waiting I.C.E.

Ethan stepped into his wasp and sealed the cockpit. He was glad
and
not so glad that he didn’t have to deal with puberty and the rest of the stuff that went with it. Not yet anyway.

He cleared his head and ran though his preflight check, including priming the self-destruct in case he was captured.

The wasp told him that it was ready and eager to get out there and fight.

Ethan knew that this time, it was going to get its wish.

The rhinoceros beetle took off, hovered, and sent dust clouds billowing into the air. Emma gingerly plucked up one, two, and then three of the fuel bombs with the I.C.E.’s six legs. Big Blue had to increase its wing power just to stay five feet off the ground.

Paul’s praying mantis snatched up a bomb and maneuvered next to the beetle.

Ethan fluttered the wasp’s wings, took off, and grabbed the last fuel bomb. He cradled it close to the wasp’s abdomen.

It was scary to think how much force was contained in this thing. And
super
scary to know, if he dropped it, there’d be a flash and then he and his squadron would be blasted to flattened cinders.

He, Emma, and Paul rose into the air.

Kristov’s bloodred locust took up position on their starboard side. Oliver in his silver cockroach was on their port side. Madison flitted to a location in front of them, darting back and forth. Lee and his nimble housefly had rearguard. And over them flew Angel in her black wasp.

The squadron was limited to the beetle’s top speed. Carrying all that weight, this wasn’t going to be a supersonic-buzz bomb run. It had to be slow and sure.

They got to three hundred feet and headed east, building speed.

Now over the jungle’s tree line, Ethan saw that the war still raged in the Industrial Sector. Ant lion artillery peppered the air near clouds of hornets. Fire burned
everywhere. Scattered explosions flared like a Fourth of July fireworks show. A hundred smoke pillars rose black into the sky. They looked like pictures Ethan had seen of wavering underwater kelp forests.

The Ch’zar were still trying to kill each other for these last resources. Good. Maybe they’d ignore a few innocent-looking I.C.E.s in the air not bothering anyone.

“Rebecca, status?” Ethan asked over the radio.

“Camouflaged bees are in the air,” she replied. “I’ve got four in randomly shifting positions near your formation. They’re already bouncing radar pings from air and ground units. So far, successfully. Just don’t count on that lasting forever, Lieutenant.”

“Understood,” Ethan replied. “Proceed with the next phase of Operation Inferno.”

“Relaying orders to the boys now,” Rebecca told him. “Give ’em heck, guys.”

   24   
TIDE OF BATTLE

O
N HIS VIEWSCREEN
, E
THAN WATCHED ALMOST
seventeen thousand robots roll out of the clearing, toppling over the trees that had been precut. They were a massive horde of wheels and sparking weapons and glistening camera lenses.

The robot army trampled every plant as they headed for the nearby six-lane highway used by the Ch’zar trucks. Once their rubber tires hit the asphalt, the robots really took off—accelerating to fifty miles an hour.

Ethan switched to his forward camera. It was twenty miles to their target—a landscape of factories, warehouses,
oil refineries, and toxic-waste lakes, crisscrossed with a network of roads, railways, and conveyor belts. It didn’t look like the Earth he knew. It looked more like a mechanized world.

“Level out at five hundred feet,” he ordered over the radio.

That was high enough to clear the smokestacks and towers. It was low enough to zip over any ground-based enemy units. Ethan and his squad would flash over their heads too fast to make good targets.

Their formation hit five hundred feet and together they gradually accelerated forward.

Ethan checked on the robots.

On-screen he saw the first wave hit the outskirts of the Industrial Sector. There was a battle in progress between fifty red army ant I.C.E.s, each the size of a milk truck, versus six Shiva-class locusts.

It was an even match because that type of combat locust had heavy armor and grenade launchers that they could fire at point-blank range. The ants had sheer numbers working in their favor.

The two sides were locked in close combat when the robots found them.

At first, the Ch’zar I.C.E.s ignored them … that is,
until the robots fired sonic- and rail gun–rifles at them. The sound bursts cracked ant and heavy locust armor alike. The magnetically accelerated bullets from the rail guns
spang
ed off the I.C.E.s, but as the sonic weapons cracked their armor, the bullets got through and a half dozen ants and even one locust dropped.

Ethan hadn’t been sure they’d be able to do it. He was glad he’d been wrong.

The ants and locusts then realized there was a third force to deal with. They turned to face the robots.

But it was too late.

There were now a hundred robots speeding to them from roads and platforms around the warehouses. They opened fire and rained destruction onto the I.C.E.s … and left only cracked armor bits and pulped insect guts.

Yuck.

It was weird, because the robots looked so tiny compared to the Ch’zar I.C.E.s. And Ethan knew he looked just as tiny compared to the robots.

“So far, so good,” he said, and turned his attention back to Sterling Squadron.

The formation had built up speed to sixty miles an hour—wing power only, of course. They’d save the jets
for a time when they might need them … if they were willing to trade stealth for power.

Below, nestled into asphalt and concrete mounds, were the telltale silver glints of dug-in ant lion artillery. Lots of them. Ethan saw dozens, if not hundreds, of the things.

But they were not reacting to the squadron’s approach. Yet.

He instinctively wanted to pour on the speed. Or drop lower so the enemy would have even less reaction time to spot them, aim, and fire. But any lower and they’d have to dodge smokestacks and towers.

The wasp’s agility carrying the full extra fuel tank wasn’t good. Ethan doubted he could do anything fancy like a roll or high-g combat turn.

“Emma,” he asked, “how’s the maneuverability of the beetle?”

“Like driving a truck on rails,” she said. “Underwater. If I had five miles I think I could probably make a thirty-degree turn.”

“Roger that.”

So they were on a straight-line approach. He hoped the Ch’zar never figured that out. It’d make aiming simple.

Ethan had an urge to rip off his gloves and bite his nails—something he hadn’t done since he was a little kid.

He checked back on the robots and got three separate video feeds from Rebecca’s bee units in the air over the region.

Thousands of robots poured through the Industrial Sector. From the first view at three thousand feet they looked like a glittering metallic tide sweeping in and crashing over grounded hornet I.C.E.s, locusts, and army ants. There were sparks and the flares of flamethrowers.

Nothing seemed to slow the mechanized blitzkrieg.

The second view was from five hundred feet. A cluster of flamethrower-carrying ’bots had cornered a cluster of a hundred army ants. The ants tried to burrow into the ground, but the robots closed ranks and fried the bugs in an ever-shrinking circle of fiery death.

The last view was from a rooftop. Ethan watched his robots going hand to hand with a locust. He thought that was pretty stupid because the I.C.E. just shrugged off their attacks as it snipped off their heads with its jaws. With so many robots on the creature, though, they did manage to slow it down, a bit … and then Ethan saw why they were attacking an I.C.E. like this.

A team of six robots came wheeling out of a warehouse towing a huge cylinder of liquid nitrogen. They opened the nozzle and sprayed the locust—freezing it solid.

One rail-gun blast and the I.C.E. shattered!

Ethan breathed a sigh of relief. That was sure to get the Ch’zar’s attention and hopefully draw all eyes to the robots … and away from him and his team.

Sterling Squadron had accelerated to a full hundred miles an hour now and the landscape below zipped by.

It was strange, but Ethan no longer saw any ant lion artillery.

The Ch’zar might not want that much firepower too close to their main pipeline into space. Still … to have
no
defenses seemed overly confident, especially for the Ch’zar, who planned things out to the last detail.

Angel darted back and forth out of her overwatch position, coming close to Madison. Was she playing tag or chicken with Madison? Was she crazy?

Yes. But it wouldn’t have been a bona fide Sterling Squadron mission unless it had at least
one
of his pilots doing something reckless and dumb.

“Station keeping, people,” Ethan growled over the radio.

Angel must have heard the steel in his tone, because she immediately flitted back into her spot.

“The beetle’s topping out,” Emma reported. “Speed at one hundred twelve miles an hour. Unless I use jets, that’s it.”

“Roger,” Ethan replied. “Everyone set throttle controls to one-one-two.”

Their formation settled into a smooth wedge of uniform speed. If it weren’t for the ground rushing past as Ethan looked to either side, it would have almost seemed like he was floating in one place.

A bit over a hundred miles an hour wasn’t a
bad
speed. It just wasn’t the Mach 3 he wished they were rocketing at the beanstalk elevator. Every second they delayed gave the enemy one more second to spot, and annihilate, them.

He checked on the robots.

From the high-altitude view he saw that the in-rushing robots had stopped. Ground explosions flashed along a straight line on the ground, and his ’bots weren’t getting past it.

He switched to the view from a few hundred feet.

Hundreds of his robots advanced only to get blasted
into twisted limbs, spewing hydraulic lines and flat, flaming tires that wobbled and rolled away.

On the other side of the explosions sat I.C.E. locusts. They’d formed up and launched one grenade after the other. Behind them flashed the golden armor of Leviathan-class superheavy assault scarab beetles. The scarabs stood tall and shot over the locusts with particle-beam cannons, melting a dozen robots with each swath.

The souped-up maintenance robots weren’t armored to withstand that kind of firepower.