Sterling Squadron (26 page)

He stretched out his wasp’s forelimbs to Emma’s ladybug and the rhinoceros beetle. “Let’s link up and do this.”

Emma hesitated and then reached out with her ladybug. Felix took her “hands” and then Ethan’s. The insects had tiny barbed hooks on their limbs that interlocked like Velcro.

Ethan wished he could hug his sister and shake Felix’s hand, for real, just once more.

But, of course, they had to stay in their suits.

Jet engines popped from his wasp’s sides and flared to life. Larger engine intakes and exhaust ports
thunk
ed open on the ladybug and the rhinoceros beetle and roared with thunder.

Their wings buzzed and then locked in place as their combined jet thrust overcame their inertia. They propelled toward the Ch’zar command hive.

Acceleration squished Ethan into the back of his cockpit, the skin on his face stretched and his vision blurred.

He held on tight to the controls and steered toward the fast-growing target on his central screen.

Head-on, the armored floating hive looked like a giant bull’s-eye.

“Brace for impact,” he said, “in sixty seconds.…”

  32  

IT WAS LIKE RIDING A ROCKET—ONE OF
those models Ethan and his sister had loved to shoot off last year.

Back in Santa Blanca, they’d built rockets. Ethan had made the boosters with his junior chemistry set. Emma had constructed the body and fins from epoxy and cardboard tubes. Together they launched them up into the clouds. Some they never found (and Ethan imagined they’d gone into orbit). It was great!

Until they’d accidentally shot one into their neighbor’s open garage.

He and Emma had been marched before the School Board of Ethical Behaviors. Ethan had thought that’d be the worst trouble he’d ever get into.

Boy, had he been wrong.

Ethan called over his command channel, “Jack, take your squadron and hit the nose of that hive with everything you’ve got! Everyone else destroy the tail!”

His pilots were brilliant. It was as if they all woke up and
really
started fighting. They blasted the enemy I.C.E. units dogfighting them and sped toward their new targets.

Jack’s squadron hit the nose with particle beams and missiles. So much raw destruction poured out of the insects that they almost looked like they were on fire.

The brand-new pilots of Sterling Squadron—Angel, Kristov, Carl, Lee, and Oliver—zoomed toward the back and let loose with lasers, ripping to shreds the last enemy I.C.E. suits that got in their way.

The Ch’zar hive also woke up, though.

Laser cannons suddenly bristled from the hive’s surface and heated.

Resister pilots rolled to avoid the beams, but Ethan spotted at least one of his units flame out and plummet to the ground.

The artillery mounted on the top of the hive swiveled, tracked Ethan, Emma, and Felix, and fired at them!

Plumes of smoke curled from the artillery muzzles. Blurred shells, friction-heated and red-hot, hurled straight toward them.

Ethan felt a huge explosion tear through his body.

He was dead.

Or at least that’s what he thought for a split second.

On the radio, Emma yelled over the shell-rattling noise, “Mach one!”

That was a sonic boom—
their
sonic boom! They’d broken the sound barrier.

Ethan jammed his afterburners to maximum, dumping all his fuel into one cataclysmic thrust.

The good news was that they were going so fast they’d be impossible to track and hit.

The bad news was they were going so fast they were going to slam into the enemy hive at supersonic speeds.

Felix shouted, “Your wasp’s armor can’t survive the impact. Get off, Ethan!”

Ethan had three more seconds of fuel to contribute to their forward thrust.

“Not yet!” he shouted back.

“Yes, now,” Felix said, and his rhinoceros beetle shoved Ethan. “You have to lead everyone.”

Emma pushed him off, too.

Before Ethan could get a grip, he tore free and
tumbled into the air … reaching helplessly after his sister and his friend.

They were gone.

His wasp spun so fast it felt as if it were going to fly apart.

He hit the emergency controls and snapped the wasp’s wings flat against its body. He pulled back and got the head up, using the bug’s aerodynamic surfaces to stabilize his tumble.

Emma and Felix were already miles away. Ethan’s afterburners and them jettisoning him had effectively given them a huge push forward—straight toward the nose of the Ch’zar hive.

There, the armored plates were pockmarked, smoldering from fresh laser fire, and in a few spots falling off. The Resisters had done a good job.

Would it be enough?

Emma’s ladybug and Felix’s beetle hit.

And vanished.

There were no explosions. No fireballs.

One moment they rocketed toward the hive—the next there was a crater, curled inward, its edges white-hot and boiling.

“They’re inside!” Ethan cried, and whooped. “All
Resisters, pull back and prepare to repel massive Ch’zar reinforcements.”

His wasp hurtled past the hive, his momentum still too great to control with wings alone.

The side of the command hive bulged, and a jet of fire flared from one small tear.

That had to be Emma and Felix, shooting missiles and beams at the enemy hive—
from the inside
.

Which meant they were still alive!

Ethan exhaled, relieved; then he thought of another possibility and his insides turned icy cold. Or it meant they’d hit something their suits couldn’t punch through … and all their onboard missiles had detonated at once.

Dents popped out over the Ch’zar hive’s skin, bubbling toward the tail section as if someone were making popcorn in there, beating the inner surfaces with rapid-fire impacts.

Ethan suddenly hit the sound barrier with a teeth-grinding decelerating jerk.

His velocity gauge shuddered at seven hundred miles an hour. He snapped his wings open and banked back to get a better look.

Explosions ripped through the tiny tears in the hive’s skin. Fire and lightning arced across the structure. The tail
detonated and house-sized chunks of metal and exoskeleton spun through the sky. Clouds of oily smoke streamed out.

The hive tilted and drifted to the ground.

“Emma!” he cried over radio. “Felix! Report.”

Static flooded their radio channels.

“Madison, come in,” Ethan said. “Do you see anything up there?”

High above the battle, Madison’s dragonfly circled. “There were too many objects falling from the hive for me to pick out any single units,” she said. “No emergency transponder signals either. I’m sorry, Blackwood. I can’t tell if they’re alive or …”

Madison choked up. She couldn’t say it.

Ethan imagined Emma and Felix caught inside that Ch’zar hive.

He watched the hive hit the ground, deflate, and collapse. Pillars of fire erupted and sent spirals of superheated gas skyward that turned into a storm of sparks and thick black smoke.

They’d burn if they were in there.

Or just maybe they’d punched all the way through and made it out, where they could be lying broken and bleeding among the scattered debris.

“One more thing,” Madison said. “Every enemy unit within a hundred miles is closing on your position.”

“Great,” he murmured.

“Resisters,” he called over his command channel. “This is it. We have to win. No matter what.”

“Roger that,” Jack replied. “Hawk Squadron ready.”

“Sterling Squadron itching to tear them apart, sir,” Paul said.

Other voices chimed in over the radio:
“Good to go, sir.… We’ll stomp ’em flat, Lieutenant.… They don’t stand a chance!… Just getting warmed up here, Blackwood.”

“Regroup on my wasp,” he said.

The Resister’s I.C.E. suits swarmed around him. They were battered, leaking ichor, weapons depleted, and antennae broken, but right now Ethan thought the hideous giant bugs were the most beautiful things in the world.

So many feelings churned inside him.

Fear mostly.

But pride, too, for the Resister pilots.

He was worried for Emma and Felix … for all of them, really.

Mostly, though, Ethan was resolute. They couldn’t lose this. If they did, they’d
become
the enemy. He
wouldn’t let that happen. Forget the odds. He’d go down swinging—even die rather than lose himself to the aliens who’d taken his world.

The enemy flew in from every direction, so many I.C.E. units that the skies looked misty, then overcast, then solid black. They came over the mountains, up from the forests, and spiraling from the river valleys: locusts, mosquitoes, bees, praying mantises, beetles, assassin bugs, damselflies, and dragonflies.

Instead of engaging the Resisters, though, they dove down to the wounded Ch’zar command hive.

They dug through the wreckage—many enemy bugs catching fire in the process—but they searched and ripped through the hull of the downed structure.

Ethan couldn’t believe it. What were they doing?

“Stand by, Resisters,” Ethan whispered.

Facing overwhelming numbers, a hundred Ch’zar fliers for every one of them, even fight-happy Angel didn’t dare budge out of formation.

What could be so important to get off that hive that the Ch’zar would order their
own
units to burn alive to do it? When every Ch’zar knew everything the others knew? No single individual in the Ch’zar Collective was
that
important.

Or were they?

What if a Ch’zar—a
real
Ch’zar, one of the aliens who actually had come to Earth—was on that thing?

Maybe the Ch’zar were willing to throw away their human slaves, but he bet they’d do anything to save themselves.

That had to be it.

And Ethan knew how he could draw more of the enemy bugs to their doom.

“Becka,” he whispered. “Move your bombers in, line up, and blast that thing to smithereens! Nothing fancy—just get down there fast. Everyone else, follow and cover them.”

“Roger that, Lieutenant,” she said.

The bomber bumblebees rolled and dove.

Ethan fell alongside them with the rest of the Resisters. Any enemy unit that even looked up, they flashed with lasers, launched missiles, and blasted before they took to the air.

The bombers released their payloads only a thousand feet over the hive carrier—the big blockbusters and dozens of the smaller incendiary bombs from their “pollen” sacs.

They pulled out of the dive.

Ethan had a hard time, having used up his jet fuel. He had wings, and that was it, to stay aloft.

Flashes and fire splashed over the ground. Napalm and lightning-bright thermite blanketed the hive. Everything was incinerated.

Ethan wobbled and faltered at five hundred feet.

The external temperature read over 650 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. It was getting too toasty inside the cockpit to even touch the controls.

Ethan rolled out of the rising pillar of boiling heat before he was roasted alive.

Below him, a huge swath of the Daniel Boone National Forest blazed.

A few sagging struts of the carrier hive’s exoskeleton stuck up but were slowly melting to slag. Enemy insects still dug through wreckage on the ground, on fire, limbs burning and turning to ash, so focused on their task that they didn’t even realize they were getting cooked.

More enemy bugs landed and kept searching … and dying.

Ethan watched, astonished.

He felt sick, remembering that it wasn’t only the enemy down there in those I.C.E. suits, but also human slaves. Ex-Sterling kids.

If there had been a real Ch’zar in the fire, he was glad. They’d killed one of the
real
enemy today. Maybe they’d think twice about fighting the Resistance again.

That thought nearly struck him dumb.

Did that mean they’d
won
?

He was still alive. Still Ethan Blackwood.

He shook. Tears blurred his eyes and poured down his cheeks.

Then he remembered Felix and Emma and fumbled for the radio.

Felix’s voice crackled over the radio first. “Ethan! Lieutenant!”