Operation Inferno (5 page)

E
THAN STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF
T
ITAN
B
ASE
’
S
stadium-like Command Center. He toweled off the last of the acceleration gel from his flight suit. The stuff kept him from getting battered and bruised (mostly) at high-g maneuvers in combat but was a real mess.

And it was hard to look dignified and in control covered in goo.

Standing at various computer stations and sitting in ultramodern curved chairs was everyone in the entire squadron, along with Bobby and the other Santa Blanca refugees.

Well,
almost
all of them were here.

Lee and Oliver were on the radio, listening in. They were still hiking back from deep within the subbasements of Titan Base, where they’d been repairing the satellite relay.

Ethan tapped the intercom system. “You guys hear us okay?”

“Loud and clear,” Lee said.

“No problem,” Oliver said. He was breathing hard from the fast pace they were setting to get back.

“So let’s run over it once more,” Ethan said. “We’re probably missing something important.”

Paul shook his head as if Ethan was a complete idiot, but this time he said nothing. Instead, he turned his back to Ethan and took in the 360-degree viewscreen.

“Angel and Madison left at sunrise,” Felix told them all, starting off the recap.

“What did you see on the way out to the satellite dishes?” Ethan asked.

Madison opened her mouth to speak—but Angel jumped in first.

“There wasn’t much in the air,” Angel said. She shook her angular bangs from her eyes. “I mean, there was an I.C.E. or two, a mosquito spotter and a heavy
lifting beetle, but no combat squadrons. I wanted to pick off that pesky mosquito, but—”

Madison interrupted her, shooting her a dirty look. “We followed stealth protocols to the letter, sir.” Madison then stepped in front of Angel to address Ethan directly. She crossed her arms over her chest. “And didn’t break radio silence until we saw you. There was no way we were spotted.”

Angel made a mocking strangulation gesture behind Madison.

Madison whirled around and almost caught her.

Madison and Angel. He and Paul. Why were they at each other’s throats?

Ethan felt the lines of tension drawing tight between them all. It was as if this ginormous room
still
wasn’t big enough to contain the bad feelings.

How would Colonel Winter have handled this?

Probably by throwing them all in the brig to cool off for a few weeks. Or a few months.

Not a bad idea … if only Ethan didn’t need every pilot he had to save the human race from the Ch’zar.

“Go on,” Ethan prompted Madison.

“The Ch’zar have more ground units out than I’ve ever seen.” Madison’s forehead crinkled as she
remembered. “It wasn’t like it was an attack. They weren’t marching anywhere. It’s like the northern Appalachian Mountains where we’ve seen them mining. Hundreds of those industrial robots scooping up rock and ore and who knows what else and feeding it all into those huge walking smelter factories.”

Ethan remembered seeing the Ch’zar mining the first day he’d learned the truth about the aliens controlling his life in Santa Blanca. Eight-legged robots had been tearing apart a mountainside. Mobile factories melted that ore on the spot. The metal was then shipped to a massive beanstalk elevator that carried the material into space.

In orbit, the Ch’zar were supposed to be building more spaceships. It was one of the reasons they’d come to planets like Earth. They needed raw materials to multiply.

Ethan imagined a swarm of army ants covering and devouring some helpless animal.

He shuddered.

Emma moved to the Command Center display controls. “We can scan the nearby regions,” she said. “Look for some pattern to their actions.”

“Hey, guys?” Lee’s voice crackled over the intercom.
“Felix? Can you pick up your blueprints? Level twenty-three. Corridor G-422, cross section L? Uh … we’re hearing some funny noises.”

Lee was trying to sound calm, but Ethan heard the tightening in his voice. He nodded to Felix to check it out. Something was going on down there.

“One sec,” Felix said. He crossed to a table and shuffled through the blueprints of the base. He found the one he was looking for and smoothed it flat.

“What kinds of noises are you hearing?” Ethan asked.

“Something moving …,” Lee whispered over the intercom. “Getting closer. Like hissing hydraulics. Or pistons.”

Felix ran his finger over the blueprint, tracing corridors, a look of intense concentration on his face. He brightened and looked up. “Relax, Lee,” he said. “There’s a steam cooling system nearby. It’s linked to the fusion reactors we turned on.”

“Maybe …,” Lee said. “Wait. It stopped.” He laughed. “It’s so creepy down here. You can psych yourself out, I guess.”

“Keep moving,” Ethan told him. “We’ll check it out later. The two of you just get up here ASAP.”

“Roger that, sir,” Lee said.

Ethan didn’t like the unlit, rusty, musty corridors of Titan. There could be
anything
down there. Long-dormant I.C.E.s. Leaking radioactive coolant. Ghosts.

The whole place felt like the haunted house they’d had at his school’s Halloween carnival.

“Okay,” he said, breaking the spell. “Emma, you said you had a plan?”

“I sure do.” She snapped her fingers and spun a control. The world map on the walls separated into pieces. “We each search a section,” she explained. “We need to gather data across the entire planet. We have to think
big
, like the Collective mind of the Ch’zar, to have a chance of figuring out what they’re up to.”

Ethan frowned. Not because he didn’t agree, though. Back at the Seed Bank this was how Dr. Irving had projected the Ch’zar explosive population growth. But the Seed Bank had had a supercomputer churning away at that data. It was going to take them hours, if not days,
if
they were lucky enough to figure out what the enemy was up to.

“It’s a stupid plan,” Paul said, tossing his hands up in frustration. “We should go back out, the whole squadron this time, and grab one of those bees. See what makes them tick. See who, or what, is inside, too.”

Emma was icy cool. She glanced at Ethan, and he got her message. Now was not the time to blow up. He was in command and had to set an example.

But didn’t he also have to set an example when people were jerks, too?

Ethan took a deep breath. “Neither idea is bad,” he said to Paul and Emma. “Let’s find out what we can here first, though. Maybe we’ll catch a lucky break. If nothing else, we might see where those new bees are coming from.”

Emma, Felix, and the others nodded at this.

Except Paul. He sneered, drawing the scars on his cheek tight.

“You’re just chicken,” Paul said, and jabbed a finger at Ethan.

Everyone stared at Paul and then Ethan.

Even Felix was speechless.

“I’m not chicken,” Ethan said in an even tone. “But, yes, I am scared. You’d have to be a moron not to be.”

Two weeks ago, Ethan would have gotten angry, taken Paul’s bait, and rushed into battle to prove his courage (like he had with a stupid race through Knucklebone Canyon).

Ethan had learned, though, that courage only took him so far.

“We’re in a war where we’re outnumbered literally a million to one,” Ethan told everyone. “We can’t afford one downed I.C.E. or a single pilot or support crew out of the fight. This war can only be won by us being smarter than the enemy.”

He turned to Paul and looked right through him as if he weren’t there. “And that starts here. Now”—Ethan gestured to the maps—“by opening our eyes.”

“I’m not staying cooped up in here,” Paul said, so softly that Ethan barely heard him. “No one can stop me from flying when I—”

The intercom squawked.

Over a wash of static, Lee’s voice was pitched to a panic. “Lieutenant! We see them now. There are too many. They’re moving after us. They’re—”

The channel went dead.

   6   
NIGHTMARES IN THE DARK

E
THAN CUT THROUGH THE DARKNESS WITH HIS
flashlight. It had a huge reflector the size of a dinner plate and threw a cone of illumination brighter than the sun down the corridor.

The light was blocked by pipes and conduits that lined the walls, though. It made the tunnel look like it was covered with black spiderwebs. As powerful as the flashlight was, the passage was so big and so long that the bright light faded into murk after a hundred feet.

And beyond that, it was pitch-black again.

Ethan was with Emma, Bobby, and Angel in the
passage. There were several other groups converging on Lee and Oliver’s last position. There were so many tunnels, air ducts, and passages down the twenty-third subbasement of Titan Base, and Lee and Oliver could be running down any of them. Or they could be still at cross section L of corridor G-422, where their last radio transmission had gone … dead.

Ethan gulped. He held up a hand, indicating that they hold.

He strained to hear. Something. Anything.

Next to him, Angel even stopped smacking her gum (she’d discovered crates of the stuff in the base’s food vaults).

Water dripped from a pipe overhead. There was a distant hiss of steam. A clang along the wall sounded and faded back to silence.

But no voices. Not one scream for help.

Lee had said he’d heard hissing hydraulics or pistons.

There was only one other thing Ethan heard: his own heart thumping away in his chest.

He’d been through enough battles to know why. He was scared out of his mind. Aerial combat with mechanized monsters? No problem. A world invaded by aliens? He had that covered.

But being buried deep underground, surrounded by darkness—his mind was filling with the nightmares from every scary story he’d heard as a kid. He couldn’t stop thinking of zombies and ghosts.

He clicked on his radio’s
SEND
button twice. That was a status request from the other groups. Seven double clicks came back over the radio. No one said a word. It was the signal they’d agreed to ahead of time. A double click meant a-okay. Only if there were trouble or if they found Lee and Oliver would they break radio silence. If it was Ch’zar down here, he didn’t want them listening in on his squadron’s frequencies.

Ethan motioned Bobby closer. He pointed his finger at his own eyes, like he was going to poke them out, and then pointed at his palm.

Bobby nodded and got out his map. He folded it and turned it around, found where they were, and showed Ethan.

There were two more turns along this access tunnel, and then a straight section for a thousand feet that dumped into corridor G-422, cross section L.

What if Lee and Oliver were seriously injured? What if this were a practical joke? No way.

Ethan vowed not to think of every possibility. He
just had to keep moving. Find his people. And get them all out of this creepy place in one piece.

He motioned for his team to move ahead. They crept forward, silent.

Ethan hefted the crowbar in one hand. It was heavy, he bet deadly, if it ever cracked someone in the head. But against the growing fears in his mind … it felt like a toothpick. He wished he could’ve gotten an I.C.E. into these tunnels without wrecking the entire place.

Emma marched on his left. She carried a portable plasma welder torch that could slice though titanium like butter, nervously clicking the safety catch on the trigger.

Angel was on his right. She twirled a rivet gun on her finger like a gunslinger. The thing shot bolts of high-carbon steel with deadly accuracy. Meant to repair I.C.E.s, it was maybe
too
dangerous in
her
hands. She saw Ethan watching her and flashed him an evil grin.

Bobby had a length of heavy chain. It was simple. He looked confident with the improvised weapon.

Back at the Command Center when they’d heard Lee and Oliver in trouble, Ethan had quickly given orders—split up and converge from all directions. He’d
considered going down in one mob, but they’d just get in one another’s way in these tunnels if there was a fight.