Operation Inferno (22 page)

How could he know that even if he was in top
fighting shape for the battle, it wasn’t going to matter anymore?

“Emma, Lee, Madison, you guys hit your afterburners, dump all the fuel you can, and build up as much speed as possible.”

“It’s not going to be much,” Madison replied, “but okay.”

Their engines flared to life, and they slowly pulled ahead of Ethan’s wasp and Paul in the praying mantis.

“What are
we
doing?” Paul asked.

“Hanging back,” Ethan said. “Gaining a bit of height … and then on my mark, we’re dropping these bombs.”

There was a long pause over the channel, and finally Paul said, “Yeah, I get it. The locusts chasing us get barbecued. That may be the first order you’ve given, Blackwood, that I actually agree with.”

“We just have to make sure we outrun the blast zone,” Ethan said.

“Ha, then I’ll race you.”

Ethan smiled. Somehow he just knew that Paul with his impossible bravado would make a game out of the most dangerous thing they’d ever tried.

The wasp and mantis arced up to five hundred feet.

Radar pings and missile-lock warnings sounded in the cockpit. Ethan immediately dove to four hundred feet. Paul followed.

The warning cut out.

Those alarms had to have been triggered by the hundred or so Vampire-class tick I.C.E. single-shot missile launchers clinging to the beanstalk. They were there to prevent an easy high-altitude attack.

This was as high as he dared to go. It would make for tricky timing.

Ethan knew that Emma, Lee, and Madison had to be far enough ahead to survive the blast. The locusts had to be close enough to get caught inside the blast. For Paul and him, though, it was going to be too close to call whether they’d get out uncharred.

He stared at his fore and aft viewscreens. The blue beetle was a blob of midnight against a gray morning sky. The pursuing locusts were a wall of swirling, swarming purple dots, getting closer every moment.

He glanced at his radar screen.

The locusts were closing fast. Emma wasn’t flying a quarter of their speed.

He watched, waited, and held his breath, until the locusts were in range with their grenade launchers.

“Now!” Ethan cried. “Bombs away!”

The wasp and mantis dropped their bombs.

His I.C.E. popped up like the cork from a champagne bottle. Free of the extra weight, the wasp was its lighter, nimbler self again.

Ethan hit his afterburners and rocketed away, screaming for joy (or in terror, he wasn’t sure).

A split second later, the mantis’s engines roared with thunder.

Ethan urged his wasp to go faster while he watched the fuel-tank bombs fall behind them. Something that heavy took only two heartbeats to fall the four hundred feet—and then the tanks crashed upon crisscrossing railroad tracks.

For the briefest instant, he thought he saw the first explosion and the outer shell of the tanks shatter. The fuel inside puffed into twin clouds that enveloped acres of trucks and towers and yards of stacked cargo containers.

The secondary explosive ignited the fuel cloud with a magnesium-bright flash.

It was hard to see anything after that.

Ethan blinked and blinked until the spots in his vision vanished.

The aft viewscreen was filled with a wall of fire, rushing out in all directions at the speed of sound—engulfing and flattening steel containers, towers, industrial robots, everything, anything caught in its path.

There was no way he’d hit Mach 1 in time, no way his wasp was going to outrun the pressure wave.

That meant the crack in his I.C.E.’s abdomen armor would get torn open. And his wings … they’d get ripped off.

“Wings!” he shouted to Paul. “Tuck them in. Curl up. Protect yourself!”

This was a tricky thing for any pilot—even Paul. You had to angle jets just right
while
commanding your I.C.E. to perform a midair wing-folding-under-shell maneuver.

Ethan’s wasp was annoyed at the order, but it obeyed.

Its wings crinkled like some weird organic origami, then tucked under its exoskeleton shell—and then it curled protectively about its wounded abdomen.

The firestorm slammed into them.

Ethan lost all control. Half his cameras went dead.

He blacked out—

And came back, bruised, blood streaming from his nose, ears ringing from what sounded like every alarm in the I.C.E. cockpit screaming at once.

His hands moved first, finding the flight control and trying to right the I.C.E. from a full tumbling spin. The wasp instinctively loosened its wings from under its shell to help stabilize. That did the trick … otherwise they would have crashed.

Ethan saw one furiously blinking red warning light. The external exoskeleton temperature. It was past the red line, but thankfully dropping fast.

They’d nearly been broiled alive.

He sighed and keyed the radio. “That was too close. Look’s like I won the race this time, though, Paul.”

There was no answer.

Ethan scanned the aft viewscreen.

Every tower, container, and robot for a half mile had been flattened, pulverized to paste. Past that lay a vast wasteland of melted, smoldering metal wreckage. There wasn’t a single pursuing locust left in the air.

They’d done it! Now Emma had a clear run to the beanstalk elevator.

Icy dread then filled Ethan … because there was no praying mantis in the air either. No transponder ping appeared on his detector.

The mantis hadn’t survived the blast.

Paul Hicks was gone.

   27   
ABANDON SHIP

E
THAN
’
S EMOTIONS TURNED BRITTLE AND SHARP
and it felt like they cut him inside.

He’d felt like this before when he’d seen Emma taken from Santa Blanca by the Ch’zar, and when he’d watched the Seed Bank detonate and thought everyone had died.

Paul was dead. It was his fault.

No—he wouldn’t go there. Not now. Not if it meant messing up Operation Inferno any more than it already was.

The wasp moved fast, quickly closing the distance
to the rhinoceros beetle, dragonfly, and housefly trio as they rocketed toward the beanstalk.

The orbital beanstalk elevator curved up gently, starting a mile from the center of its base. Calling it a mere elevator was a mistake. This thing was bigger than any human structure Ethan had ever seen or read about before. Even staring straight at it, it was almost impossible to sense the right scale, to grasp that it must have taken millions of tons of steel and carbon-fiber cables to build the base and tower. The main truck soared into the sky until it faded and vanished from sight. It carried a dozen railcar-sized tubes simultaneously up and down—flashing along the skeletal interior with multicolored lights.

It was more
superhighway into space
than a simple
elevator
.

As Ethan approached the other Sterling pilots, Lee shouted over the radio, “That was the
biggest
explosion I’ve ever seen. Way to go, guys!”

“Where’s Paul?” Emma asked.

Ethan didn’t answer.

The silence over the radio that followed was all Ethan needed to hear to know they understood.

“We’re ready to do our part, Ethan,” Madison finally
whispered, her voice thick with grief. “Whatever it takes.”

Ethan glanced at his aft camera once more, hoping he’d made some colossal mistake and that the Crusher green praying mantis would be zooming after them, somehow having survived.

But it wasn’t there.

He did, though, see beyond the smoldering crater left by the fuel bombs, the other hundred thousand Ch’zar I.C.E.s still coming for them.

Ethan wanted to tell his wingmates something to inspire them in this terrible moment. All he managed was, “We’ve got to finish this. It’s a clear run to the drop point.”

Emma then spoke softly over the channel, “I have to do this—alone, Ethan. I know you’re my brother, and technically in charge, but there’s nothing you can do to change the laws of physics. If the mantis didn’t outrun that explosion … neither will Big Blue. She’s too heavy, too slow. But … I—I’ll take her in.”

Ethan let these facts sink in.

Emma was right (she always was right). Even boosted with the four of them, he couldn’t see the beetle building the speed needed to outrun the blast wave.

On the other hand, maybe the beetle didn’t have to outrun it. The beetle’s armor might be heavy enough to withstand the outer edge of the pressure wave.

He switched his computer to view the squadron I.C.E.s’ flight status. Kristov’s, Angel’s, and Oliver’s I.C.E.s were out of range, but the outline and internal systems of his wasp, the dragonfly, the rhinoceros beetle, and the housefly flashed on-screen.

His heart sank.

The beetle’s exoskeleton was cracked in three spots, worse even than his wasp. A few grenade strikes would have grounded the I.C.E.

That settled it. Emma
wasn’t
going on this bombing run.

“No one else is dying today,” Ethan announced. “Here’s what we have to do. First, Emma, set Big Blue’s autopilot to keep this course. Next, I want you to override the cockpit door and force it open. Madison, Lee, you get ready to catch her when she falls out.

“What?” Emma cried. “I’m not abandoning ship! I’ll finish what I started.”

“I’ll guide the beetle to the target,” Ethan told her. “You’re right. The beetle won’t survive the blast, but that doesn’t mean
you
have to die along with her.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you die for me,” she protested.

“Listen, Em. I have a—”

“A plan?” she said. “I just bet you do. But I’m not an idiot. Even one of your plans won’t change the facts.”

“I don’t have to,” Ethan said. “I’ll be guiding the beetle in with my command override. I’ll have her on a long tether, so I’ll be able to break and outrun the explosion. I’ve done it once before with an even shorter head start. I can do it. Just believe in me.”

There was a long pause. The radio crackled with static.

The four Resister I.C.E.s jetted toward the beanstalk. The structure had grown so it filled half the forward viewscreen.

They were running out of time.

“And if I don’t go along with your latest, greatest plan?” Emma asked sarcastically.

“I’ll use my command authority,” he said, “override the beetle’s controls, spring the cockpit hatch, and eject you myself.”

“You would,” Emma muttered. “Fine. But if you get yourself killed … I’ll murder you, Ethan Blackwood.”

Ethan smiled. His sister would never change.

“Madison, Lee,” he ordered, “take up position.”

The dragonfly and housefly let go of the beetle’s back, dropped fifty feet, and hovered to port and starboard under the beetle.

“And please, don’t miss,” Emma said.

“
No way
that’s happening,” Madison replied.

“Okay,” Emma breathed. “Ready … set …”

The beetle’s underbelly cracked and hissed. The wind caught the slightly ajar hatch and whipped it wide open.

There was a spray of cockpit acceleration gel and Emma fell—struggling, swimming, and tumbling through the air—and then Madison’s dragonfly daintily snatched her.

The emerald I.C.E. arced up and away from Ethan and the beetle. Lee followed on her port wingtip as escort.

“I just wanted to tell you …,” Madison started, then stopped herself from saying more. “I mean,” she went on, “good luck and come back in one piece, Ethan. Please.”

“I will,” he said.

But Ethan had a funny feeling that he’d just lied to her.

He checked his command override and linked to the beetle. There. He had it. It’d be easy to fly the I.C.E. remotely.

What he hadn’t told Emma or the others was that his command override was meant only for basic flight functions, not the fine motor control needed to move her legs and cleanly release all three bombs at once.

For that he had to use his mind.

He’d commanded his wasp before at a distance. He was sure he could do the same with Felix’s rhinoceros beetle.

He reached out with his thoughts and felt the beetle’s slow, sluggish insect brain pulsing. While it recognized Ethan and his command authority, it also pushed back, expecting and wanting its own pilot, Felix.