Operation Inferno (23 page)

Ethan had a special bond with his wasp that had grown stronger with every flight and fight. Felix must have developed a similarly strong attachment with his I.C.E.

The connection between Ethan and the beetle
was
there, but it was weak.

He would have to be right on top of it to guarantee he could release the bombs.

So Ethan was going to have to ride it all the way to the drop point … and this time outrun the combined supersonic pressure waves of
three
detonations.

   28   
ETHAN AND THE BEANSTALK

T
HE ORBITAL ELEVATOR BEANSTALK LOOMED
before Ethan and filled his entire forward view. The thing was a vast mechanical city unto itself crawling with robots and railways and conveyor belts and whirling gyroscopes the size of houses.

It must have taken the Ch’zar decades to put it together.

And he was going to take it all down.

Or try to.

Could he? Yes.

He thought so. Maybe.

Why then did Ethan suddenly feel like an impostor of the real Ethan Blackwood? Like he was a little kid playing at being the lieutenant of an elite squadron, fighting the bad guys? All make-believe?

He swallowed and forced himself to remember to breathe.

Ethan felt the fear creeping up his spine and taking over. Yeah, it was the fear of dying—he was practically used to that—but more, it was the fear of coming so far, sacrificing Paul … and failing.

He steeled himself. He wasn’t about to chicken out now.

Ethan closed the gap between himself and the beetle, clamped onto its back, and ignited the wasp’s afterburners. The two I.C.E.s accelerated.

There—just ahead. A red circle with crosshairs painted on his display. Twenty-two seconds by his navigation computer’s calculation. It was the drop point Dr. Irving had selected.

The spot was where the gently curving base turned and angled near vertical.

Dr. Irving had assured Ethan that destroying this section would give them “
the greatest probability for structural damage
.”

Funny that Dr. Irving hadn’t said it would
definitely
bring the beanstalk down.

Time for doubt, though, was far behind Ethan now.

Fifteen seconds to the drop.

Ethan pulled up on his controls, and the wasp and beetle sluggishly climbed. Every foot of altitude he could get would be another fraction of a second it took the bombs to drop … and that much more time for him to escape the blast.

Eight seconds.

At four hundred forty feet missile-lock warnings started. The tick I.C.E. single-shot missile launchers on the beanstalk had him in their sights.

Missile-launch alarms screamed.

Let them come.

Three seconds.

Two.

One.

Ethan touched the beetle’s mind and ordered her to release the bombs.

The three modified fuel tanks tumbled away.

Ethan let go of the rhinoceros beetle.

Goodbye, old friend of my friend
, he thought to Felix’s I.C.E.

Ethan pulled up and rolled starboard—missing the side of the beanstalk by mere feet.

He twisted out of the roll, righted, and tucked the wasp’s legs to make it a tiny bit sleeker. He had to squeeze out every ounce of speed so they wouldn’t get roasted alive.

He snapped the aft-camera view to the cockpit’s main screen.

The rhinoceros beetle plowed into the side of the beanstalk and cratered the steel construct. The missiles that had launched from the tower’s defenses followed, impacted, and detonated, leaving a mushroom of fire and a blackened smoldering scar.

But compared to the rest of the massive structure, it was an insignificant pinprick.

Ethan then spotted the fuel bombs, spinning end over end, and plummeting toward the curved slope of the stalk.

They hit.

A flash.

Ethan glimpsed a half-circle halo of vaporized jet fuel hugging the beanstalk—

That ignited with a lightning-bright blast.

The air rippled outward from the explosion. The
shock wave was a rapidly expanding sphere—a white wall of supersonic, supercompressed air that could crush titanium like wet tissue paper.

Meanwhile, the steel and carbon fibers that made up the beanstalk sheered inward at the blast site, a gash that neatly severed the stalk a third of the way across. A hundred feet to either side of this the metal continued to shatter and rumple.

Up the beanstalk tower, Ethan saw the explosive impulse travel like it was a rope some giant had flicked. Steel struts and carbon-nanofiber cables snapped like rotten string.

All this took but a single heartbeat.

The gaping slash expanded and now severed half the stalk, and the white-hot metal edges continued to peel back.

Along the length of the beanstalk, following the initial pressure wave, a firestorm raged, sucked up through the central column. Steel heated and melted. Carbonfiber cables glowed like the filament in a lightbulb and disintegrated.

… And cracks appeared everywhere up and down the tower.

The entire beanstalk, to Ethan’s delight, ever so slightly started to twist.

They just might have pulled this off …

Ethan’s attention snapped from the beanstalk to the air—specifically the tidal wave of pressure about to swat him and his wasp.

He tucked in the I.C.E.’s wings and legs, curled into a ball, and gritted his teeth—

It felt like they’d run into a wall at Mach 2.

Blackout.

Ethan’s senses returned, but jumbled.

There was a glimpse of his cockpit as every display and dial shattered. The wasp’s exoskeleton armor crackled and snapped. Internal organs and hydraulics popped. He heard the insect’s primitive war scream in his mind as it wrapped around the cockpit tighter to protect him.

Ethan came to lying beside the wasp.

The bent cockpit frame had completely burst out of the insect. Ichor pooled about the broken wasp. Its jaws and one wing still reflexively twitched.

Ethan rolled over, winced from what had to be
several busted ribs, and wobbling, got to his feet. He’d also broken his arm, but for the moment, it was thankfully numb.

He touched the wasp’s head.

Only two tiny sparks of emotion burned within the primitive insect mind. First and foremost was a deep satisfaction at having caused so much carnage. And second, and almost an afterthought, it was happy to see that Ethan had survived.

The sparks faded, flickered out, and it was dead.

“Rest,” Ethan whispered to it.

Maybe the wasp had finally gotten what it wanted: one huge mass of destruction and bloodshed.

He’d miss it. Ugly, terrifying, alien … and yet there had been some sort of weird bond between them.

He got dizzy, felt like slumping to the ground, but he took a deep breath and steadied himself.

Ethan looked around and saw he was halfway up a slight hill that rose above the jungle. Two ancient Mayan step pyramids stood nearby, half covered with vines. The air smelled of burning metal and a faint salty ocean tang.

The wasp had crash-landed and made a long impact scar that plowed through the jungle for a mile before
it hit this hill and skidded to a halt. Most of the jungle was flattened by the pressure wave.

Ethan trudged uphill, each step more painful than the last, to get a better look at what they’d done.

Overhead he heard the buzz of insect wings. He squinted and spotted a giant fly and dragonfly. He waved at them with his one good hand.

The two I.C.E.s descended and landed on the hilltop.

He walked faster to meet them, no longer caring how much it hurt to move.

Emma climbed free of the dragonfly’s embrace. Her hair, usually tightly braided and perfectly neat, was a total frizz-ball. Being whipped along at over a hundred miles an hour would do that to a person.

Madison and Lee opened their cockpits and dropped out. They all ran to meet Ethan.

There was a tremendous groan, though, and they all stopped and turned to see what it was.

It was the Del Sol Equatorial Orbital Elevator.

It hung in the air, moaning, metal shrieking and sparking. The ground-zero section of the stalk was completely severed.

Ethan could see
through
the gap in the beanstalk. There was nothing holding it up.

The entire length of the tower slowly twisted, shedding steel supports, cargo tubes, and threadlike carbon cables.

How was it defying gravity?

Ethan then figured it was because the beanstalk elevator ran all the way up into space, where gravity was weak. At the other end, for practical purposes, it
was
floating.

The part down there still had to weigh millions of tons. That had to drag it down.

It was as if the structure’s buoyancy was a dream, and Ethan’s realization that Earth had it locked in an embrace of gravity had woken it up … because at that moment, the beanstalk did indeed fall.

They watched speechless as miles and miles of the orbital elevator tilted in what seemed slow motion, then picked up speed. The base crumbled as the mass of the tower settled atop it. Huge clouds of dust and fire erupted.

The beanstalk fell over then, hit the ground in an accelerating line of obliteration, crushing railways, warehouses, and factories.

The higher parts of the tower picked up more speed, having farther to fall, and started an earthquake
as it smashed into the ground as it continued toward the Gulf of Mexico.

It hit the great Ch’zar open-pit mining operation on the edge of the sea. It pulverized the massive dam there. Plumes of steam shot up a thousand feet.

The ocean then swept into the Industrial Sector and washed away every building and ground I.C.E.

The destruction was total.

The enemy wouldn’t be building anything there for a long time, if ever.

Ethan gingerly took Madison’s hand in his. It was soft, but hard underneath with the muscle and callouses of a veteran pilot.

She squeezed. He squeezed back and held on.

The airborne Ch’zar I.C.E.s scattered, confused and directionless.

Bits of the beanstalk continued to rain down. They must have been falling from the highest part of the structure because air friction heated them into fireballs that streaked across the sky in a spectacular display.

Fireworks for their victory … and to honor what it had cost.

“So,” Emma asked, “I guess we won, huh?”

“For now,” Ethan said. He looked at Madison.

Her sharp green eyes locked with his. “Nothing is going to be the same, is it?” she said.

“Everything has changed,” Ethan replied.

The destruction of the Del Sol Equatorial Orbital Elevator resulted in a complete halt to production of the Yucatán Industrial Sector and to closing of the Ch’zar’s main way to move materials into space.

It also caused major damage to the Ch’zar station in Earth orbit that was attached to the elevator. This dealt a devastating blow to the largest Ch’zar faction (designated hereafter as RED).

The other two Ch’zar factions (designated GREEN and BLUE) combined forces and used the confusion to strike against RED. Via the hijacked satellite network we watched a major space battle in which RED’s almost
completed mothership crash-landed on the moon with heavy damage.

Presently all three Ch’zar factions have resumed mutual hostilities.

Meanwhile, on Earth, major Ch’zar versus Ch’zar battles wage around manufacturing centers and the remaining three smaller orbital elevators. Enemy I.C.E. losses are in the hundreds of thousand of units.

Recon flights of Resistance scout I.C.E.s have been, so far, universally ignored by the enemy.

Repeated attempts to locate the Crusher praying mantis I.C.E. and its pilot, Private Paul Hicks, have proved futile. It is presumed that he went down or was immediately destroyed by the thermobaric device ignitions and resulting superpressured blast wave. The region is difficult to search due to the massive amount of beanstalk debris and flood tides that now cover the area.