Operation Inferno (4 page)

He considered breaking radio silence, sending a coded signal to Angel and Madison, but decided against it. That could reveal his position to the Ch’zar. Maybe get them all captured.

They could reach those enemy fliers before they got to his scouts—but they’d have to
move
.

“Lock jet and prime afterburners,” Ethan commanded.

Exoskeleton segments withdrew on his port and starboard sides. Jet engines spun up and
thunked
in place.

Acceleration squished Ethan into his seat.

The flight computer projected it would take only a few minutes to intercept the targets.

He double-checked the wasp’s laser stinger. It held a 90 percent charge. Not perfect, but good enough.

He cycled through the hydraulic system on his status board. He didn’t want any surprises if he went hand-to-hand combat. All green.

Ethan’s hand hovered of its own accord over a small hexagonal panel. It was covered with Ch’zar icons that glowed brighter the closer he came to them.

He and Emma had somehow gotten the ability to decipher Ch’zar icons. The weird alien dot-and-dash hieroglyphics and geometric shapes just suddenly clicked in their minds.

His finger itched to press one icon. It translated loosely as
Exoskeleton Destiny Overdrive
.

Dr. Irving had once told Ethan that the Ch’zar had the technology to make the molecules in I.C.E. armor superdense. It might make the wasp invincible in a fight. He bet it’d cost lots of energy, though.

Odd that the Resister techs or trainers had never mentioned the feature. Maybe it didn’t work. Or maybe they didn’t understand it completely.

Ethan decided not to mess with it now.

He checked the squadron’s status once more. Green across the board.

He smiled.

Four veteran Resister pilots who’d kicked the Ch’zar Collective’s butts versus just a few units—what looked like
unarmed
Ch’zar units, no less.

This wasn’t even going to be a contest.

Still, if they were so helpless, why was the enemy dead set on an intercept course with Angel and Madison?

Something didn’t add up.

He glanced at his navigation screen. Seven minutes to contact.

A big cumulonimbus cloud loomed ahead. It looked like a black anvil floating in the sky. There was no time to go around.

Ethan led the way. He plowed straight inside. His cameras went gray. His radar started bouncing mirror images all over his screens.

Must have been the static charge inside the cloud.

He and his wingmates emerged in a clear space—

And ran smack into the middle of the enemy squadron of bees.

Flashes and blurred colors made a jumble of his
displays, disorienting Ethan for a split second as he fumbled at the controls.

A bee clipped him and sent the wasp spinning.

Those bees hadn’t gone after Angel and Madison. Somehow they’d fooled Ethan’s sensors.

This ambush was for them!

   4   
BIGGEST THREAT

E
THAN WRESTLED WITH THE CONTROLS TO HALT
the gut-jarring tumble. He did it. Then he blinked, trying to stop his head from spinning, too … and trying to find a target to blast.

His computer displays were full of bees—appearing and vanishing in iron-gray cloud cover. The enemy seemed to be everywhere at once, way more than the original seven he’d seen on the satellite image back at base.

How was that possible?

It didn’t matter. He had to start fighting before it was over for him.

He moved toward the closest bee, laser-firing rings locking on his combat screen.

A proximity warning blared.

Ethan instinctively pulled back on the controls.

A three-ton bee flashed right where he would have been a microsecond later.

The cloud moved. Dense mist surrounded him. His visuals were down to a hundred feet.

His heart pounded so hard he thought it’d jump out of his chest.

Why would seven unarmed bees take on four combat I.C.E.s? It was suicide.

Not that the Ch’zar cared about individual deaths. Maybe they were there to slow the Resisters down while reinforcements showed up.

Or there could be more. Lots more.

Ethan decided to blow them all to smithereens. Get within short-range radio distance of Angel and Madison—and get them all out of there, fast. They could figure it all out later.

“Engage at will!” Ethan shouted over the squad channel. “Just be careful because—”

His wasp got slammed from the underside. Ethan’s teeth clacked shut.

The wasp had grabbed at something, but it bounced off and was already out of reach.

Another bee rocketed at him out of the swirling clouds, afterburners blazing.

Ethan cut his own afterburners.

The bee missed and vanished into the mist.

If Ethan hadn’t stopped, that thing would have collided with him. And at those speeds it would’ve ripped his wings off.

These guys were crazy. And good.

Meanwhile, Felix blasted every bee within range. His plasma vaporized clouds around him in a quarter-mile swath—but he still kept missing!

Ethan couldn’t believe it. Sure, Felix had missed before. But never multiple targets clustered at this short of a range.

The bees moved like they could defy the laws of physics. They jinked back and forth and barrel-rolled to one side a split second before the class-C particle emitter antennae of the rhinoceros beetle ignited the air.

Paul’s Crusher praying mantis chased after the color-speckled bees, desperately trying to snatch one
out of the air. He was running one down, getting closer and closer … but also getting farther from the rest of the squadron.

“Paul, break, and get back here,” Ethan ordered. “They’re setting you up.”

The praying mantis hovered.

Paul probably chewed back some insult, but he must have realized that Ethan was right—that he was headed into a trap—because he circled back.

Ethan upped his estimation of the bees.

With a chill, he realized that luring the Resisters’ I.C.E.s away from one another in this cloud cover was what
he
would have done.

Emma’s ladybug let loose a salvo of rocket-propelled grenades. They
whoosh
ed at a bee harassing her I.C.E.

The bee hit its afterburners trying to outpace the explosives.
Good luck
, Ethan thought.

Flashes erupted from the bee’s hind legs, where pollen sacks would have normally been.

They were decoy flares. Dr. Irving had explained them once to Ethan. He’d said he’d been experimenting with
old
technologies for Resister I.C.E.s. The heat from the burning magnesium confused targeting sensors.

Every rocket-propelled grenade exploded harmlessly in the air.

The bee got away clean.

Ethan didn’t want to think what this meant, but he couldn’t help it. Did the Ch’zar have Dr. Irving?

No. He refused to believe it.

Dr. Irving died at the Seed Bank.

But how else to explain the Ch’zar’s new tactics?

“Group on me,” Ethan ordered. “Full defensive posture.”

Paul’s mantis, Felix’s rhinoceros beetle, and Emma’s ladybug moved to Ethan and hovered in a tight wedge, each facing a different direction.

The bees were still out of visual range, hiding in the churning clouds, where Ethan’s radar was bouncing back a few dozen images all over the place. Without visuals, he had to depend on his instruments … which couldn’t be trusted.

“What are we doing here?” Paul growled. “We’re sitting ducks.”

“Madison and Angel,” Ethan told him. “We need to keep these bees distracted and off them until they’re safe.”

“I’m more worried about
us
being safe,” Paul muttered.

“What the heck
are
those things?” Felix asked. The beetle’s huge wings were a blur of thunder and turbulence. “One bounced off your wasp, Ethan. Not a scratch on its shell.”

“Not
what
,” Emma said. “
Who
. They’re not fighting like Ch’zar. They’re erratic, fighting like, well, humans.”

“If they are humans, uncontrolled humans,” Paul said, “then why are they trying to kill us?”

“Cut the chatter,” Ethan said. “I have to figure this out.”

He scanned the billowing vapors surrounding them. Inside the cloud, tendrils of mist swirled. Ethan found it hypnotic.

There could have been any number of bees waiting for them to break their defensive formation.

“If we run,” Ethan murmured to himself, “then they’ll pick us off. We won’t even see them coming.”

“So remove the clouds,” Emma said.

From her impatient tone, Ethan could almost hear the “duh” she left out of her statement.

Emma’s ladybug launched two salvos of rocket-propelled
grenades. The air flashed and clouds boiled away in front of her, clearing a space five hundred feet wide.

“Nice!” Felix cried. He charged his beetle’s plasma emitter antennae and let loose a column of superheated ionized gas.

The cotton puff clouds disappeared so fast it looked as if they leaped out of the way to avoid getting scalded.

Ethan added his stinger’s laser heat to the offensive, painting the wall of iron gray ahead of him. More cloud vapors curled and vanished.

There was a cluster of five bees at five o’clock and a thousand feet higher. A perfect attack position.

Felix saw them, too. His beetle turned and launched a bolt of plasma.

The bees disappeared farther back in the cloud cover.

“Do we go after them?” Emma asked.

“Ethan? Lieutenant?” Madison’s voice squawked over the squadron channel. “What’s going on? What are you guys doing out here?”

Far on the edge of his radar, Ethan saw dragonfly and wasp silhouettes on an intercept course.

“Didn’t you see them?” Paul asked.

“See who?” Angel replied. “You guys are the only thing on the radar for two hundred miles.”

“Form up on us,” Ethan ordered. “Go radio silent.”

There was a grumble from Angel … but then the channel was quiet.

Ethan dove lower to get out of the cloud. The squadron followed him.

All of Ethan’s pilot instincts told him to stay and finish the fight. But now was not the right time to engage an unknown enemy whose technologies baffled them.

He had to get back to the base and think …

Because Sterling Squadron was no longer the biggest threat in the air.

   5   
OPEN YOUR EYES