Sterling Squadron (18 page)

She was nuts. She’d fight
anything, anywhere
.

Which gave Ethan just the idea he needed.

He jumped onto a railing between the sidewalk and the lawn. He literally stood out from the crowd. No teacher or student could miss him.

“Listen up!” Ethan shouted. “This is an extra credit exercise for P.E.! FIGHT—teachers versus students!”

Every Sterling kid turned to him and their mouths dropped open.

The teachers froze in their tracks as the Ch’zar hive mind tried to figure this out.

No one for sure knew what to make of him. He wore teachers’ sweats but could no way pass for an adult.

“READY … SET … GO!” Ethan screamed.

For a heartbeat, no one moved.

Then the crazy, gum-chewing girl warbled a war cry. She grabbed a clump of sod from the lawn and side-armed it right into the face of a teacher!

The teacher went down, sputtering and scraping mud from his eyes.

Everyone shouted and started chucking dirt clods and books. Students screamed and tackled teachers. A dozen clung on to one athletic suit and toppled it.

It was complete hysteria.

Ethan had started a riot!

A rock
spang
ed off the wall near his head. He ducked and shoved his way back to his crew. They stood back-to-back
and kicked and punched anyone who came hear them.

“The gate,” Ethan mouthed at Paul over the noise.

Paul flashed him a glare like he’d just done the most stupid thing in the universe, but nodded and ran down the covered sidewalk.

Ethan moved after him, Madison alongside him as wingman, and they cleared a path for Lee, Carl, and Emma.

He kept a careful eye on those athletic suits.

They were everywhere—on the sidewalks, lawns, and a few on the rooftops as spotters—but none came for them. They couldn’t. The entire school had become one mass battle of wild, yelling students.

The Sterling kids grabbed, punched, and pulled the hair of every teacher who had bossed them around. They even attacked more of the athletic suits. Kids jumped onto their frames, took the lances out of their hands, and started using the weapons against them!

Ethan and his crew stayed close to the walls and kept moving forward.

Shadows flashed overhead—shapes that zoomed above the cloud cover.

Ch’zar I.C.E. suits. Firefly reconnaissance. Maybe a Thunderbolt-class locust.

Would the Ch’zar use brute force to stop this? The Sterling kids would see the I.C.E. armor and freak out for sure. They’d panic and scatter … or maybe even start an all-out war.

Ethan had to get out
now
.

The path ahead was clear. They sprinted for the gate.

That was when Ethan noticed they’d picked up three more in their group.

One, of course, was the crazy girl who chewed gum, another was the dark-skinned boy who Ethan had bested in tactics class, and the third was the bruiser from the same class who could have given Felix a match in a wrestling contest.

Ethan let them straggle along. He’d take
any
help he could get at this point—even from that not-so-mentally-stable girl.

Ethan got to the front gate and climbed over.

His crew followed, as did more Sterling kids.

It seemed like half the school climbed over the gates and walls and spilled into Fiesta City. The troublemakers broke windows, set fires, and got chased by more teachers tromping after them in athletic suits.

Ethan ran past arcades, pizza parlors, through the carnival midway, and eventually tumbled down the bank of
the dry riverbed on the outskirts of town. He took cover in the lengthening afternoon shadows.

Overhead insect wings thrummed, pausing and circling, but then headed into the city.

Ethan exhaled.

Next to him, Madison panted, as did Paul. Carl and Lee looked green, but also relieved to be far from Sterling. Emma’s face was lined with concern as she kept looking around, listening, and waiting for the Ch’zar to land and take them back.

The three “normal” Sterling kids, though, looked expectantly at Ethan.

The gum-chewing girl sidled up to him and took his arm. “So, what now?” she asked. “Blow up the dormitories?”

Emma pulled the girl away. “Don’t get near my brother,” she said.

Madison looked like she was about to back Emma up, quite possibly with a roundhouse kick to the Sterling girl’s head!

“It’s okay,” Ethan said, raising his hands between the girls.

They couldn’t afford a fight here.

“I’m Kristov,” the big Sterling kid told him. His nose
was flattened, broken and set that way. “The brainy guy is Oliver, and the girl with the bad haircut who can’t keep her mouth shut is Angel. You’re trying to escape. Can we come?”

He held out a huge hand for Ethan to shake.

Ethan took it, wondering if he’d regret it later.

“We’re not
trying
to escape,” Ethan said. “We
are
escaping. You’re welcome to come—but you may not like what you’re getting into.”

Ethan led them down the dry riverbed, sticking to the shadows. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “a crazy, impossible story about Earth, an invasion, why you’re here, and why we came to break you out. Then I’m going to prove it’s all true.”

He led them into the cave where they’d stashed their I.C.E. suits.

  23  

ETHAN BUZZED OVER FIESTA CITY AT TWO
hundred miles an hour. It was dusk and the carnival lights flashed on with a million colors.

His wasp painted laser fire over the top of the roller coaster where Ch’zar recon firefly units perched, camouflaged among the glowing strobe lights.

The tiny bugs burst into flames.

Paul’s praying mantis slammed into the red-hot tracks. He tipped the structure over onto two Thunderbolt-class locusts on the ground with a tremendous
SCREEECH
, squishing them flat.

“Hurry up,” Madison piped over the radio. She circled overhead in her dragonfly. “That stirred up the nest. Two dozen units inbound to our position. Locusts. Fast-intercept wasps, too.”

“Good,” Ethan replied. “Stick to the plan. We’ll meet you at the rendezvous point.”

“Roger that,” Paul replied, sounding doubtful.

“Good luck,” Madison said. She hesitated like she wanted to tell him more, but then just added, “Over and out.”

The plan. One in a series of desperate schemes today. How long would Ethan’s luck hold? The plan was this: they’d make trouble in Fiesta City and get the Ch’zar to chase Paul and Madison as they fled.

That was the
easy
part.

Ethan’s job was to then sneak in and rescue Felix … where a million things could go wrong.

First, he had to wrestle with his wasp’s mind, cool the insect’s instinct to go on a killing spree and destroy everything in Fiesta City.

He tapped the dark purple controls and put his wasp into stealth mode.

Ethan flew low, in the shadows, his wings whisper quiet.

None of the firefly recon units overhead followed.

So far, so good.

Not so good was what had happened fifteen minutes before.

Ethan had told Kristov, Oliver, and Angel the story of the Ch’zar invading Earth. He explained how they used a form of mind control that only worked on the adults and how they raised kids in perfect neighborhoods … until they grew up and got added to the collective alien intelligence.

Carl, Lee, and Emma had already seen enough to piece together the truth. That’s why they’d been stuck in Ward Zero.

The three normal Sterling kids had
no
clue, though, and didn’t believe Ethan.

Until they were face to face with the Resistance’s I.C.E. suits.

Then all six kids freaked out. Who wouldn’t?

Ethan had almost fainted the first time he’d seen the giant insects.

Carl and Oliver had run at the sight of them, although Madison had stopped them before they got too far. Emma had been transfixed with terror.

But Ethan then showed them that the I.C.E. suits were tame, really half machine, and he opened his wasp’s cockpit to show them the interior.

After a few minutes, Madison had had to peel Angel away from her dragonfly.

Ethan promised them they’d get the training to fly suits like these, but first he had to rescue Felix.

The Resisters didn’t leave their people behind.

They ushered the Sterling kids into the assault carrier moth and set its autopilot to move away when it got dark.

Madison and Paul would shake their pursuers and catch up to provide an escort.

He hoped.

Emma and the others in that moth depended on everything about his plan going right.

Ethan let out a long sigh.

They
all
depended on him and his plans. What if he was wrong?

He directed his wasp to land on the Sterling chemistry lab’s roof. The insect’s gold-and-black stripes were good camouflage in the fading shadows.

He waited and watched the last glow of the sunset fade.

The campus below was deserted. The Sterling students had moved into Fiesta City. Fires burned there.

Ethan felt sorry for the kids. They’d lose this battle. The Ch’zar would send as many adults or I.C.E. units to capture them as they needed. And then what? Would the
Ch’zar put them back in school after this? Would they chemically trigger puberty and force them into the hive mind?

Ethan wished he could save them all.

One day everyone would be free of the Ch’zar. Right now, though, he had to make some hard choices. The first being how to infiltrate and assault Ward Zero and get Felix out alive.

He jumped off the roof and silently buzzed over to the hospital. The complex was ringed with a dozen teachers in athletic suits.

But no I.C.E. units. That was a lucky break.

Ethan attacked.

He landed on one suit, crunching its steel frame, pinning the teacher inside. Two more athletic suits whirled and raised their lances.

The wasp was faster.

It lashed out with its forelimbs, ripping mechanical arms and legs off, leaving the teachers inside stunned, their suits spurting hydraulic fluid.

A half-dozen more sprinted toward Ethan.

Laser fire took them out at the knees before they crossed half the distance.

He had to find Felix before I.C.E. reinforcements arrived.

Thanks to the Ch’zar telepathic hive mind, they all knew he was here.

He reached for the cockpit release. Ethan would search this hospital room by room to find Felix. Assuming Felix was even here.

Ethan felt the wasp’s impatience at his indecision. The insect wanted to fight, to rip things apart and kill. Inside his wasp’s mind were images of them attacking an enemy wasp’s nest—tearing, ripping, biting the larva inside, eating things.

Ethan mentally backed off. It was supergross.

But not entirely a bad idea.

Not the eating part, though. Ick. He’d forgotten that his wasp was built to destroy rival insect nests. And with that superdense molecular surface that Dr. Irving had told him about, concrete and brick were as weak as tissue paper to the wasp.

He leaped to the hospital’s roof.

The wasp grasped tiles with its barbed forelimbs and raked up. Wooden beams and drywall and air ducts tore away.

Underneath were the student rooms, all empty, so Ethan pulled up more roof, using the wasp’s wings to boost his lifting power. He ripped away an entire corner,
crashed through room after room, cinder blocks crumbling like Styrofoam under the wasp’s incredible strength.

Ethan demolished the second floor, and he started on the ground level, tearing the concrete walls apart.

He found the kitchen, the generator room, more student dormitories, and a few adults, who scattered before the wasp.

Finally he got to a room with white-tiled walls where Felix lay strapped to a gurney.

Felix struggled against his bonds. Adults stood around him. They held syringes and one even had a scalpel in hand.

What were they doing to him?

The wasp’s anger flooded Ethan’s brain.

He fought it, gaining control to hold back at the last moment before the wasp could pick up the adults and squish them. Instead, the insect merely swatted them aside.