Sterling Squadron (6 page)

“Yes, sir,” Ethan said. “All done. If that’s all, I’ll go. I’m supposed to get down to the semisolid waste reclamation center to flush the system.” Ethan grimaced and tried not to gag thinking about it.

Dr. Irving waved him closer. He poured a cup of milk from a chilled thermos. “Can you take a break?”

Ethan cleaned his hands on his coveralls and gladly accepted the cup. He drank. It was cold and clean and made him forget, for a moment, his troubles.

He wiped the milk mustache off his face. “Thanks.”

Ethan didn’t want to leave. It was a relief to be around someone who wasn’t mad at him.

“Do you have time for a question?”

Dr. Irving said, “Of course.”

“There’s one thing I don’t get about the I.C.E. suits.…”

This was the understatement of the century.

There were a gazillion things Ethan didn’t understand. How could insects grow so big? How did the pilot-bug mental connection work? How did manufactured things
like lasers and missiles and mechanical jet engines fit alongside organic things like muscles and insect organs?

One thing, though,
really
bothered him.

“When I’m in a suit …” Ethan faltered. He’d reminded himself he might
never
be in an I.C.E. suit again. He swallowed and went on. “I can punch through steel. I can take missiles and bombs exploding at point-blank range. How is that possible?”

Dr. Irving nodded in appreciation. “Clever to ask
that
question. That Ch’zar technology is the key to the entire I.C.E. system.”

He closed the program he’d been working on. A password-protection shield splashed across the monitor. Dr. Irving quickly typed on his keyboard.

Ethan wasn’t
supposed
to be looking, but he was standing right there … and his eyes just happened to be on the keyboard.

Dr. Irving typed
StormFalcon
.

The password shield vanished.

Ethan blushed. He shouldn’t have seen that. He knew it was wrong. He didn’t say anything, though. He didn’t want Dr. Irving to be mad at him like everyone else.

On-screen, hundreds of spheres appeared and jostled into an ordered pattern.

“We only partially understand this technology,” Dr. Irving explained. “The Ch’zar can change the density of the insect’s exoskeleton.”

The spheres on the computer squeezed together supertight.

“It takes enormous energies,” Dr. Irving said, “but under life-threatening stress, or if a pilot is strong enough to mentally coax his bug to induce this transformation, a layer of insect armor only molecules thick can become a thousand times harder than diamond. It is tougher than yards of solid titanium. A teaspoon of such material would be so heavy, it would take our most powerful hydraulics to budge it an inch.”

Ethan stared, fascinated.

No wonder he could rip through steel and stone as if it were wet tissue paper when he was inside an I.C.E. suit.

“You seem interested in the science,” Dr. Irving said.

Ethan brightened. “I won blue ribbons at my school science fair—one for a robotic arm and one for the biology of the nerve. This stuff is light-years ahead of that. Yeah, you bet I’m interested!”

Ethan imagined himself designing new suits, insects that flew or burrowed or swam underwater. Could he make one that rocketed into outer space?

“I could use a bright assistant.” Dr. Irving tapped his lower lip. “Perhaps in a few years, though.” A serious look darkened his wrinkled face.

Ethan sighed and understood.

“In a few years” meant after Ethan had reached puberty … when he wouldn’t be flying outside anymore.

If
he was going to ever fly again after the incident with Paul.

There was a very real chance Ethan would never breathe fresh air again or feel the sun on his face.

As if he could read Ethan’s thoughts, Dr. Irving said, “I could speak to Colonel Winter on your behalf.”

He reached for the communication handset on his desk. Before he touched it, it buzzed.

The call code “099” glowed on the handset’s display. It came from the base’s Command and Control Center.

Dr. Irving frowned at it. He waved Ethan back and took the call.

“This is Dr. Irving. Yes, it is that dire.”

He tapped on his keyboard.

The window showing the superdense molecules winked off. A new window opened. Dr. Irving glanced over his shoulder at Ethan and made another “back up, please” motion.

Ethan stepped away a respectful distance, but not before he glimpsed a map with red dots. It was the map that had been in Colonel Winter’s office. The same one Dr. Irving and the other adult officers had stood around muttering things about “dire consequences” and “fallback contingencies.”

Ethan was no military strategist, but even he knew this couldn’t be good.

“There are no errors,” Dr. Irving said into the handset. “Yes, I’ll be right up.”

Dr. Irving shut down his computer and stood. “I’m sorry, my boy. I’ve been summoned. We’ll talk about biology and you helping me another day.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ethan wanted to remind Dr. Irving that he promised to talk to the colonel on his behalf, but for once the doctor looked every bit his age, his skin ashen, the sparkle in his eyes now a glassy sheen.

He smiled at Ethan, but it was a weak attempt to cover up his worry.

Something was seriously wrong here.

Dr. Irving left the laboratory as Madison walked in.

She almost bumped into him. They exchanged a few hushed words, he hugged her, and then he hurried on his way.

Seeing them side by side, Ethan noticed the same wicked intelligence reflect in their eyes. And that hug … they had to be related. Could he be her grandfather? Everyone else at the Seed Bank had grown up together and knew who was related to who. Not knowing simple, stupid things like that just made Ethan feel awkward … and like an outsider.

Madison glanced around the lab and her green eyes landed on Ethan. She scowled. “Blackwood. Just who I was looking for.”

“What now?” Ethan said.

“The shower room is overflowing.” Madison strolled over and snorted a laugh. “You need to get down there and clean it out.”

Madison’s nose was a smidge crooked and her hair was wild (spiked and sticking straight up today). There was something other than her weirdo looks, though, that made Ethan feel butterflies in his stomach when she was near.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Me not flying and being on toilet duty is no joke, Madison.”

“I know. Our roster was down a
bunch
of pilots with the flu already before you and Paul had to out-boy each other for Stupid of the Year award and get grounded.”

She thought he was a pilot like Paul? Not a trainee? That was news to him.

Ethan didn’t get her. How she could be mean one second and almost sweet the next. It reminded Ethan that the strangest alien species on Earth wasn’t the Ch’zar—it was girls.

“Felix said he was going to try to talk to the colonel about it.” Madison shook her head. “I don’t know, though. She’s really mad. You messed up pretty good.”

“
I
messed up?”

She shrugged. “Well, Paul did … mostly. But you let him trick you into that race. What were you thinking?”

He hadn’t been. Thinking, that is. He’d let his anger get the best of him.

But he didn’t say
that
to Madison.

She sat on Dr. Irving’s desk, leaned closer, and whispered, “Just get over it, will you? Something else is going on I wanted to talk to you about. Every officer on base shuts up whenever one of us gets near them.”

“I know.”

Ethan had seen that. And something was superwrong if it made Dr. Irving as worried as the rest of them.

He glanced over to the computer. “I think, though, I can find out what.”

He sat and his fingers hovered over the keyboard.

Madison rolled her eyes. “Sure, what do you have to lose? Get thrown in the brig with Paul for
spying
. Not that it’s going to do you any good. I’ve been trying for years to figure the password to my grandfather’s comp—”

Ethan tapped in
StormFalcon
.

The computer screen flickered to life.

A map of the world covered with red dots came into focus.

Madison’s and Ethan’s mouths fell open at what they saw.

  7  

ETHAN AND MADISON STARED AT THE MAP
on the computer screen. North America had glowing green outlines and the oceans burned with crisp blue edges. Red dots were
everywhere
, though, like the continent had the measles. The dots clustered mostly near lakes and rivers and valleys and a few places in the deserts.

There were none up in the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, or the Appalachian Mountains (where the Seed Bank was hidden).

That made Ethan feel … safer.

He shut his open mouth.

Those dots were bad news. He didn’t know why, but his brain churned just staring at them.

Madison leaned over his shoulder and whispered, “Is that what I think it is?”

“A map?”

“Duh!” She whacked him on the side of the head. “I can see that. I meant— Hey! How’d you get that password?”

Ethan ignored her question. There was no need to get into that right now.

“Dr. Irving said his numbers were right.” Ethan continued to study the map. “I don’t see numbers.”

On the bottom of the screen was a menu.

He tapped a control to zoom in.

The image moved to the Florida coast, where there was an enormous cluster of red dots next to Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades. As the image grew, the tiny dots resolved in greater detail and looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Only they weren’t.

Ethan leaned forward. They were the outlines of insects.

Madison pushed him out of the seat and took over. “Let me drive, rookie.” She typed in commands.

The gigantic holographic projector in the lab lit up.

The map on the computer materialized in midair, in full color, rivers and coastlines animated. Each red dot was a beach ball–sized sphere.

Ethan walked around the larger map and recognized several of the bug outlines. They were Ch’zar I.C.E. suits: the red-and-black assault wasps; the mosquitoes he’d fought in simulation; even Thunderbolt-class locusts.

He shuddered seeing that last one. A giant locust had almost torn off his arm at the Battle of Santa Blanca.

Ethan spotted one number on the bottom of the map. It was a date, two years ago.

He frowned. Dr. Irving had said
numbers
. Plural.

“Maybe if you zoom in more,” he suggested to Madison.

She typed in commands.

A red insect symbol enlarged and split into a dozen. Next to each of those were numbers: 8, 5, 12 …

“Coordinates?”

“They’re not latitude or longitude,” Madison said. She stood up and strolled over to Ethan and the map.

The rotten feeling in Ethan’s stomach finally, maybe, made sense. “What if they are just numbers,” he whispered. “The number of Ch’zar units?”

Madison looked back and forth, and frowned as she
added them up. “That can’t be. There are too many of them.”

The date on the map popped to today’s date.

The numbers next to the insect symbols jumped—13, 9, 25 …

The date rolled over one month, two months, three months into the future.

The numbers grew at an alarming rate—53 … 178 and 213 …

Suddenly Ethan felt nothing. He was numb. In shock.

By Christmas there could be
tens of thousands
of Ch’zar to fight.

Once before, he’d seen satellite images of the world and positions of these Ch’zar units … only then he’d guessed they were outnumbered ten or, at worst, a hundred to one.

Never
this
many.

Ethan imagined the sky covered with an endless carpet of black flying bugs, shaking the earth with their collective droning.

If they had any idea where the Resisters’ Seed Bank base was, the last free-willed humans on the planet would be toast.

“How many do we have to fight them?” Ethan whispered. “I mean here. Resisters.”