Operation Inferno (21 page)

Ethan felt a dread building inside him. The robots’ one big advantage was overwhelming speed and surprise. They weren’t going to last long in a stand-up fight.

This wasn’t good.

The last camera on the rooftops in the Industrial Sector showed that even the ants were ganging up on them, too. All the enemy I.C.E.s were working together
against
the robots. The ants completed the defensive line by taking up a position in front of the locusts and scarab beetles. They held the robots back while the I.C.E.s with ranged weapons blasted them to smithereens.

Ethan had counted on the different sides in this
new Ch’zar civil war staying on their sides, fighting each other. Faced with this new robot threat, though, it seemed they were smart enough to set aside those differences.

“Lieutenant!” Rebecca cried over the radio. “My bees near you are getting at least a
hundred
radar pings. They can’t deflect so much energy.”

“That can’t be right,” Ethan protested. “There’s nothing out here.”

He scanned his forward viewscreen.

They had ten miles to go.

Below, it was all railroad tracks, multilane roads, whirring conveyor belt systems, and a thousand (relatively harmless) industrial robots stacking cargo containers.

The wasp’s weapon-lock warning system blared, indicating multiple rocket-propelled grenade laser targeting sites on it exoskeleton.

And then he spotted what was pinging them, now targeting them …

A hundred locusts took wing ten miles ahead near the base of the beanstalk, a great cloud of death and destruction rising to meet the Resisters.

   25   
PUNCH A HOLE

O
NLY SECONDS UNTIL CONTACT
.

Ethan couldn’t take his eyes off the hundred locusts in front of them, a buzz of purple wings blurring the atmosphere that spiraled toward the squadron.

His mind, though, hit its afterburners—sped forward to
think
a way out of this mess.

Shiva-class locusts were a heavy assault unit in the Ch’zar’s arsenal. These black-and-purple beasts were lethal in close combat. Their jaws were their main weapons, designed to counter I.C.E. armor. It was an anti-I.C.E. unit if there ever was one.

In hand-to-hand combat, they were even a match for the Crusher mantis. They also carried two pods on their hind legs that launched grenades. They liked to use them at short ranges to stun and soften up their prey, and then close in for the kill.

Weaknesses? Did ugliness count? No, more than that, they weren’t as agile in the air as Kristov’s bloodred species. They had no long-range weapons. At these speeds their grenade launchers wouldn’t be that effective.

Ethan might have actually gotten a lucky break, because it looked like Sterling spooked them. If they’d spotted the squadron and had a moment to think about it, the locusts might have waited and ambushed them as they passed over. Their leaps into the air followed by bouts of insect wrestling were a devastating tactic.

Of course, his “lucky break” was relative. The locusts still outnumbered Sterling ten to one. And every second the squadron spent defending itself was more time for Ch’zar reinforcements to show up.

“Ethan?” Emma whispered over a private channel. “What are your orders?”

“Stand by for orders,” he said over the squadron channel.

The calm in his voice shocked him. It sounded like
another person than the real Ethan Blackwood, who was screaming inside.

He flicked to his aft-camera view.

He glimpsed farther back into the Industrial Sector … and that brought his turbocharged thinking to a screeching halt.

Every enemy I.C.E. among the factories and warehouses that could fly had taken to the air. They made a black wall of death that moved toward Ethan like a thundercloud. Locusts, scarabs, wasps, hornets, and mosquitoes—there had to be ten thousand bugs coming after Sterling Squadron.

There was no strategy that’d save him and his squad from
that
.

He snapped out of his panic.

Surviving wasn’t the goal here. The strange thing was that Ethan was no longer afraid. He had one clear goal: punch a hole though the locusts ahead so he could get to the beanstalk elevator.

There was
no
going back.

“Okay, listen up,” Ethan said over the radio. “There’s only time to say this once. Go jet flight. Madison, Lee, land on Big Blue and attach. You’re going to help Emma go faster and maneuver.”

Lee’s housefly and Madison’s dragonfly immediately zipped over to the beetle. The dragonfly perched atop its shell on the starboard side. Lee landed and clamped on to the port side.

Jet engines popped out in every Sterling Squadron I.C.E. and blossomed with fire, the flames focusing to blue-white intensity.

The firm hand of acceleration pushed Ethan into the contoured rest in his cockpit.

“Paul, you stick with me. We’re going to ride shotgun with Emma and take out any locusts that get close to her.”

“Roger that,” Paul said, and the mantis drifted closer.

Ethan felt like he’d made the right call to bring Paul. It wasn’t the mantis’s strength that made him feel that way either. He knew Paul was a fighter (sometimes fighting Ethan), but Paul wouldn’t let him down now that they were betting everything on this mission.

Ethan had the wasp curl its stinger laser to point forward, wrapping around the bomb. He hoped the heat didn’t set the thing off.

“The rest of you scatter and fight, but keep up. We have to get to the beanstalk at any cost.”

Green status lights flashed on his computer screen from the squadron.

Ethan was so grateful for every single one of them. They’d followed his orders. They’d fought for him. They’d even gone to the brig for mutiny. And now, entering this battle … well, Ethan couldn’t have asked for better pilots, or better friends.

Laser targeting rings danced over the wasp’s forward screen. There were so many inbound targets it drove his automatic targeting system nuts.

He turned it off. What was the point? The air was so thick with enemies … he could fire anywhere and hit something.

He shot and blasted a locust full in the face with a ruby-red lance of light.

The enemy I.C.E. seized, tumbled sideways, and crashed into three of its wingmates. Not fatal damage, but the four units fell to the ground and were out of the fight.

The rhinoceros beetle’s horns sparked, and its particle cannon blasted three locusts in a wide arc. Their heavy armor shrugged off the superheated plasma, but that’s not where Emma had aimed the center of her
beam. She got their wings, singed the rainbow membranes, and then they ignited. The three locusts impacted a water tank and disappeared.

Then Sterling and the central mass of the incoming locust wave met.

Ethan blasted everything that moved in front of him—the laser on continuous fire mode.

Multiple grenades detonated around the wasp.

Ethan slammed back and forth, and black dots swam in his vision.

The wasp flipped.

Ethan’s pilot training kicked in. He unthinkingly grabbed the controls and got the wasp back to level flight before they tumbled out of control and hit the ground.

Alarms blared. Ethan saw that the wasp’s abdomen armor had an inch-wide crack from stinger to chest, leaking green-gray goo.

Lee and Madison pushed the rhinoceros beetle in a right bank to avoid getting plastered by five inbound locusts on a suicide crash course. That put the beetle in the path of a radio tower—and the three I.C.E.s ignited afterburners to miss it.

They didn’t. Big Blue was just too big, and the insect clipped the steel structure at three hundred miles an hour.

The tower shattered into steel splinters and sparks. The three conjoined I.C.E.s spun once, twice, and then Lee and Madison got them straightened.

Kristov, Angel, and Oliver rolled and banked, letting loose rocket-propelled grenade and laser fire. They did their jobs, grabbing the bulk of the locusts’ attention. These were foes willing to play their deadly game.

Each Resister pilot had at least ten enemy units chasing after them.

They were great pilots, but even great pilots could only last so long with those odds.

It worked, though. No more locusts targeted the beetle.

Ethan blinked and jerked the wasp’s controls, dodged a locust that had made a run straight at him. Its snapping jaws missed by inches.

He wished he could jettison his bomb and
really
fly.

But they were through. He, Madison, Lee, and Emma had made it past the locusts’ first attack wave.

Ethan exhaled. His hands trembled.

He glanced at the aft-camera viewscreen. The locusts banked and headed back their way. Unencumbered by huge and heavy bombs, they’d catch up in no time.

“Ethan.” Kristov’s voice cut through a static-filled radio channel. “I have a locked hydraulic control. I can barely steer my bug!”

Ethan focused a camera on his position.

The bloodred insect was still in the air. Good.

But it was on a course up and away from the battle, thick smoke trailing from its port jet engine, and Kristov had four locusts on his tail. That was not good.

What was going to happen next played out in Ethan’s head. Kristov would get hit and die. Angel and Oliver would stick it out, dogfighting until the same happened to them.

And the rest of the squad? There was no way to outrun or outmaneuver the locusts to get close to the beanstalk elevator.

They were
all
going to die trying.

Ethan had to drop these bombs
now
to even have a one in a million fighting chance to survive.

Drop the bombs?

Yes … that was exactly what he was going to do!

   26   
PATH OF FIRE AND BLOOD

E
THAN FLIPPED ON THE SQUADRON CHANNEL
. “Listen, everyone. New plan. Angel, Oliver, catch up Kristov, get those locusts off him, then follow him on his present course.”

“That’s away from the battle,” Oliver said. “Away from you guys!”

“Trust me,” Ethan said. “It’s going to work.”

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” Kristov whispered. He sounded ashamed, as if his I.C.E. locking up was his fault.