Sterling Squadron (10 page)

BREAKING PAUL OUT OF JAIL, JAMMING
their suits’ transponder signals so they’d be harder to track, and sneaking off base—that was easy.

Ethan had even been ready for some secret recall code programmed into their suits that the officers could trigger and fly them back to base.

What he hadn’t been prepared for, though, was to fly right into a swarm of Ch’zar Ranger-class reconnaissance honeybees the split second after their view screens turned on after the mandatory Security Protocol 003 blackout.

The all-steel insects had blackened barbs riveted to their limbs and particle-beam focusing antennae.

A swarm of ten units scattered before them.

They must’ve been just as surprised as Ethan that four Resister pilots had flown straight into their V formation.

Green energy beams blasted Ethan’s wasp.

Overheat warnings blared on half his systems.

Before he was literally broiled inside his suit, Ethan dove to escape the barrage. He arced up, rolled, and banked to reengage the enemy.

His cockpit cameras tried to track every target, but the screens were a jumble of buzzing wings, blurred bodies, and the blue flash of a high-energy weapon. Ethan couldn’t even tell who was shooting at whom. It was too much to follow.

He wanted to jump right back into battle (or maybe it was his connection to his wasp’s “killer” brain), but Ethan had to slow down, take it all in, and figure out the right strategy.

He wasn’t about to die three minutes into his mission.

There were bees everywhere.

They had the advantage of numbers. All they had to do was refocus their formation, isolate one of Ethan’s squadron, and take them out one by one.

“Madison,” Ethan said over the radio. “Fly
through
the
center as they regroup. Shoot anything that moves. Paul, Felix, fall back and let her string them out.”

“Who put you in charge?” Paul shouted back.

“Just do it,” Madison said.

She kicked on her afterburners and her emerald-green dragonfly left a bloom of white vapor as it went supersonic.

Madison plowed through the regrouping bees.

Her lasers flashed. Three of the enemy insects dropped, metal bodies smoldering and wings singed.

She left the bees struggling to stay airborne in her turbulence.

They turned and pursued … or tried to.

Madison’s dragonfly was the fastest thing in the air.

“Go now!” Ethan shouted to Paul and Felix. “Hit them with everything you’ve got while they’re separated.”

Ethan had almost forgotten about the luna moth assault carrier! He looked for it on his radar. He didn’t find it, but he
did
see the three bees chasing after
something
.

The assault carrier’s shadowy stealth surfaces prevented radar lock-ons, but its autopilot was limited. It was only programmed to fly straight away from danger.

The bees must have a visual on it.

Meanwhile, Felix’s rhinoceros beetle fired its heavy
particle beam—a lightning-bright white-blue bolt of energy that blasted bees into smoldering bits of shrapnel. Paul’s praying mantis grabbed one straggler bee and then another, and smashed them together, and in a show of unnecessary violence, the mantis bit off one bee’s head.

Ethan rocketed after the vulnerable luna moth.

He closed and fired his laser at the nearest bee. The beam sliced through where the wing joined the carapace. It tumbled out of control and plummeted to the ground.

The other two bees slowed, turned, and fired at him.

A particle beam splashed over his chest.

The cockpit got hot. It was hard to breathe. Air vents screamed and tried to cool the interior. A hydraulic pressure gauge exploded and showered the cockpit with metal and glass bits, cutting Ethan’s cheek.

He couldn’t stop. Ethan couldn’t let them get to the moth. That was the only way they were going to rescue the Sterling kids.

He tapped his afterburners and crashed into one of the bees.

His wasp wrestled with the bee. Ton for ton, it was a match for him—and just as ferocious.

The second bee latched on to him. It grabbed one of his wings.

That was bad.

If they tore a wing off, there was nothing he could do to stay in the air.

The wasp slashed out with its barbed forelegs. Its laser shot uselessly into the air. Nothing worked! The bees were just out of reach.

Ethan rolled and wobbled but couldn’t shake them.

This wasn’t like any simulation he’d run in the last few weeks. Ethan felt panic rise through his chest. He wanted to scream.

A ghostly translucent green covered one camera.

It was Paul.

His praying mantis repositioned, grabbed one of the bees with its hooked forelimbs, and tore the bee in half.

The last bee flew off.

Felix instantly blasted it into smoldering blobs of molten metal. He’d lined up the perfect shot with his heavy particle beam.

The praying mantis clung to the back of Ethan’s wasp.

“Now we’re even, Blackwood,” Paul said over the radio, and shoved the wasp away.

The wasp’s instinct to engage the praying mantis and fight it to the death flooded Ethan’s mind.

He took a deep breath and forced that urge into the dark recesses of the insect’s mind.

At least, he hoped it was
just
the wasp’s mind and not his.

Ethan wiped the blood off his face with a shaking hand. He took a second to regain his bearings and fly level.

There was a weird shudder in the wasp’s right wing. He didn’t like that.

Madison whispered over the radio, “Long-range radar picking up more enemy patrols. I’ve never seen so many, so close.”

“Go terrain-level flight,” Felix said in his no-nonsense command voice. “Exit the region. Something probably saw the explosions. Maintain radio silence until further notice.”

The five I.C.E. units dove in formation and accelerated over the treetops.

The shudder in Ethan’s wing settled into a minor but persistent rattle.

Of course, at five hundred miles an hour, a little rattle could end up ripping his hull into confetti.

He kept quiet.

Stopping for repairs would put the entire team, and the mission, at risk.

There was no stopping now. There was no going back.

  12  

THEY FLEW DOWN FROM THE APPALACHIAN
Mountains, over rolling green fields in Tennessee, and then thundered across Texas grasslands and deserts.

Ruins studded the horizon to the south: rusting skyscrapers and cracked crystal spires.

What mysteries lay buried in the graveyard of human civilization? Ethan wanted to explore what the world had been like before the Ch’zar, but Knucklebone Canyon had almost crumbled on top of him and Paul, and it’d been infested with those black widows. Just thinking about those spiders made Ethan’s skin crawl.

He flew on.

Maybe after this mission, after they’d beaten back the Ch’zar, he could explore … 
if
there was anything left there to find.

A map of the next region flashed on-screen. Green circles dotted the Arizona and Nevada desert. It wasn’t a friendly green either. It was the vile fluorescent green of skull-and-crossbones poison warning labels.

Ethan’s radio link blinked amber. It was receiving an encrypted short-range signal. He tapped it to decode and accept.

“We’re approaching radiation zones,” Felix said over the radio. “The Ch’zar cleaned up a bunch of them. Some, though, are too hot for even them to touch.”

Ethan was about to ask why the Ch’zar had bombed the world. Hadn’t they used mind control fifty years ago to take over?

Then he got it:
they
hadn’t bombed anyone.

Humans had done it to each other.

Felix and Madison had once told Ethan about World War IV, when people had almost annihilated each other, right before the Ch’zar came.

What would have happened if the aliens hadn’t shown up? Would the entire world be a radioactive cinder?

Paul marked a spot on their map with an X.

“Fiesta City,” he said over the radio. “That’s our destination.”

Ethan zoomed in on the satellite image.

There were lakes and parks and a city grid. It was an oasis in the vast desert.

He turned on his external cameras and magnified.

Was that a Ferris wheel lit against the setting sun? There were strings of flashing carnival lights. Neon was everywhere. He wasn’t sure what all the crazy lights were about. He had a feeling this place wouldn’t be like his Santa Blanca neighborhood.

“I thought we were looking for Sterling Reform School,” Ethan said to Paul.

“It’s in the middle of the city,” Paul replied. His usual anger was gone, and there was a hint of fear in his voice.

“Fireflies patrolling the region,” Madison said, interrupting. “They run like clockwork. We’ll only be able to approach within six miles before they’ll detect us.”

“There’s a dry riverbed south of the city,” Paul said. “There are eroded overhangs. One should be big enough to hide our suits.”

“Madison, scout it out,” Felix said. “We need to make repairs … and talk.”

Madison’s dragonfly zipped into the dry river channel and disappeared. A moment later she said, “Found one.”

They followed her down and banked along the contours of the dry river. Ethan spotted a shadow-filled undercut that concealed a cave the size of a house.

He landed and clambered out of his cockpit. It was good to breathe fresh air again.

Ethan couldn’t enjoy it, though, because he had to check that wing rattle. He ran a hand over his wasp’s gold armor. Tiny insect hairs bristled at his touch.

Flashes of ripping into enemy bugs and shooting its stinger laser filled Ethan’s mind. The wasp didn’t want to be done fighting.

Ethan tried to calm the insect, wishing it was a little less hostile.

Maybe it had to be that way. It had been born and bred to fight. Those instincts kept them both alive in the air. But was that all there was for the creature? Ethan actually felt sorry for the insect.

He found the damage on the wasp’s wing. There was just a nick in the chitin-ceramic alloy. If it wasn’t fixed, though, it’d become a tear, and the wing could eventually rip off in flight.

Felix came over and gave Ethan a towel-sized yellow bandage. It had red stripes … and it rippled.

Ethan recoiled.

It was one of those flat caterpillar things. It was alive. It squirmed as he took it.

One had been slapped on him when his leg had been punctured. The thing cleaned and repaired the wound, but it was gross.

“These have cartilage protein binders to fix that nick,” Felix told him. He laced his thick fingers together to demonstrate.

Ethan nodded and smoothed the bandage over the wing. The caterpillar stuck with a wet smacking noise and wiggled into place.

The wasp shifted, annoyed at the creature’s presence.

“I know exactly how you feel,” he said to his wasp.

Ethan glanced up and saw Madison inspecting her dragonfly. Her bodysuit rippled with the same camouflage greens of the insect. She lovingly ran her hands over its shell and patted it as if it were a pet. She had an entirely different relationship with her I.C.E. suit.

Madison … Ethan honestly didn’t know what to think about her. She’d filed that failing flight assessment to Colonel Winter, but then she’d added those mitigating remarks. And then she’d had their suits fueled, charged, and loaded with field supplies. She
must
have believed in Ethan.

He owed her.

Madison looked up, flipped her hair out of her face (the gelled spikes had lost their stiffness on the flight out here), and glared at Ethan as if she could feel him thinking about her.

Ethan’s face burned and he turned away.

Meanwhile, Felix directed the giant luna moth assault carrier, one hand on its thorax, so it sat between the other I.C.E. suits and the mouth of the overhang. The moth’s stealth surfaces would deflect any signals from those firefly patrols.

Felix turned to them. “Okay, let’s figure out our plan.”

“You’re not in charge of this mission,
Corporal
,” Paul said. He cocked his head and seemed to be waiting for Felix to step aside.