Sterling Squadron (19 page)

He could’ve killed them all. It would’ve been easy.

But what good was that?

The adults weren’t to blame. It was the Ch’zar. Even if he had destroyed every adult here, the aliens would have a hundred thousand more to take their place.

The wasp towered over Felix.

With one precisely controlled slash, he severed the straps holding his friend.

Sweat covered Felix’s face and he trembled.

They’d probably tried to make him talk and done terrible things to him.

Ethan’s heart twisted and tightened.

“Took you long enough,” Felix whispered. His eyelids fluttered as he struggled through the pain to stay awake.

Ethan popped the cockpit hatch and climbed out to help his friend.

“Sorry I’m late,” Ethan replied. “Looks like you were taking it easy anyway.”

Felix chuckled and winced. “You got out? All of you?”

“Yeah, more than we started with, even,” Ethan whispered. “Can you fly? I have your beetle close. The moth carried it, just a quick jump outside the city.”

Felix let out a long exhale and his eyes eased shut.

Ethan noticed that bruises covered Felix’s body. His leg hadn’t been set. Beads of sweat covered his face.

Ethan panicked and shook Felix. “Stay with me. Don’t …”

He couldn’t say,
“Don’t die.”

If Felix died, Ethan didn’t know what he’d do.

Go crazy? Let his wasp rampage and kill everything? Sit here, cry, and give up?

Felix’s eyes fluttered open. With a gasp and a grunt, he grabbed Ethan’s hand and pulled himself up. “Guess I can’t lie around here slacking any longer,” he whispered.

Ethan took Felix’s arm, looped it around his neck, and helped him sit.

He glanced up at the star-filled sky through the ruined hospital, blinking away the tears that had started to prick his eyes. There was no way he could let Felix see him cry.

“We have to move fast,” he told Felix. “When Ch’zar reinforcements come, we can’t get caught in the open.”

“I can move,” Felix told him, grimacing in pain. “And fight, if I have to. That’s not what I’m worried about.” He looked Ethan square in the eye.

A chill shuddered through Ethan.

He knew what Felix meant.

Sure, they’d fought Ch’zar patrols, infiltrated Fiesta City and the Sterling School, rescued a half-dozen kids—even Ethan’s sister—and outsmarted the enemy at every turn so far.

But now they had to go back to the Seed Bank and face the greatest danger of this mission: Felix’s mother, Colonel Winter.

  24  

ETHAN TOOK POINT AS THEY APPROACHED
the Seed Bank, even ahead of Madison’s scouting dragonfly.

He’d insisted.

It didn’t matter who had the highest rank anymore. Ethan led this group. It’d been his crazy idea to go. He was responsible for them all. If the Seed Bank decided to shoot them out of the air for desertion, disobeying orders, and treason, he was going to be the one they blasted first.

Madison’s sleek green blur of a dragonfly was behind him, somehow looking annoyed that it had to fly so slowly. Felix trailed her, his enormous rhinoceros beetle steady
despite its pilot being crippled. Paul’s praying mantis looped around the luna moth carrier. The mantis’s head darted back and forth, searching for enemies to tear apart.

The screens in Ethan’s cockpit went dead.

On his center screen flashed:

Ethan fidgeted in the suddenly dark and claustrophobic cockpit. There were no radio transmissions allowed during the mandatory blackout period.

He was alone with his worries.

How many seconds would he have in which to explain everything before Colonel Winter had him arrested? Or shot? Would he even have time to tell her that his plan had worked?

The cockpit’s cameras snapped back on.

Blue landing lights spiraled through the tunnel head, guiding his wasp into the heart of the mountain where the Seed Bank nestled.

Deeper and deeper the wasp descended until the ultraviolet-tinged glow of the hangar’s lights flashed ahead. Poised at the tunnel mouth, two machine guns pointed into the tunnel. They were the big fifty-millimeters that fired depleted uranium rounds. The Resisters mounted
them on the Behemoth-class centipede crawlers to take out Ch’zar ant lions.

What were those guns doing here?

They tracked the wasp … but held their fire.

Ethan, his heart practically stopped, passed over them and landed.

The wasp fluttered its wings once and settled down.

Those guns were new. Had the Resisters installed the heavy weapons because of
them
?

The other I.C.E. suits in his group landed in a line next to his wasp. The luna moth carrier touched down as light as a feather but still sent shudders through the metal deck from its incredible weight.

Standing alongside him might be the last thing Madison, Felix, and Paul would do as Resister pilots. Ethan was proud to call them his friends (well, maybe that feeling didn’t apply to Paul).

Ethan expected a bunch of guards to be there, ready to take them away at gunpoint.

But that wasn’t happening. Yet.

In the hangar were technicians, officers, a dozen other pilots, and, yeah, even a few guards with sidearms, but they were prepping I.C.E. suits, moving supplies and ammunition, filling out paperwork, all 100 percent serious.

Hardly
anyone
noticed them.

A set of elevator doors parted.

Colonel Winter, Dr. Irving, and three adult officers stepped off. Colonel Winter pointed at Ethan’s group and strode toward them.

Ethan quickly went through his shutdown checklist. He engaged the safeties on the wasp’s laser and put the insect brain into hibernation mode. He wasn’t about to let some tech get flattened or burned to a crisp because he was a sloppy pilot.

He punched the cockpit release and climbed out.

Ethan patted his wasp for the last time, took a deep breath, and went to meet his fate.

Madison helped Felix struggle out of his beetle’s cockpit. He gritted his teeth from the pain of his broken leg and other injuries. Paul looked at them and then at Ethan. His expression flickered from anger, to resolve, and then finally to something close to admiration—not like they were friends or anything, but at least maybe they weren’t mortal enemies anymore.

Technicians approached their I.C.E. suits and attached biomonitors. One tech pulled the flight recorders and disappeared into the elevator.

“The starboard wing,” Ethan told one tech (
starboard
referred to the right-hand side of a ship or plane). “The leading edge took a hit.”

The technician scowled at the hasty caterpillar patch job and nodded.

Ethan then joined his crew to face Colonel Winter.

But she, Dr. Irving, and her senior staff had stopped at the luna moth carrier, helping the kids from Sterling clamber out. She directed doctors to check them, covered them in blankets, and helped hand out self-heating field rations and cartons of milk.

Dr. Irving caught Ethan’s confused gaze, cocked a bushy white eyebrow, and waved him over.

“Let’s get this over with,” Ethan whispered. He looped Felix’s arm around his shoulder and they hobbled forward.

Officers stood aside for them; some glared while a few raised their eyebrows. The Resister pilots their age stopped their duties and looked at Ethan, stunned and awed that they had the bravado to approach the colonel.

Who would willingly march up to get court-martialed?

Only complete idiots.

“I’m relieved you made it back safe,” Colonel Winter said to the gathered Sterling kids. She spoke in the warmest tone Ethan had ever heard from her. That had to be a trick of some sort.

“I’m sure you were briefed on our situation, recent history, and our mission,” the colonel continued. “You undoubtedly have
more
questions. We will answer them,
but first we must make certain you’re unharmed. Please be patient and go with Dr. Irving.”

The Sterling kids gawked with wonder and terror at the hundreds of I.C.E. suits, the soldiers with guns, and then glanced back at Ethan.

Emma smiled at him.

She must have sensed something was wrong, because it was an uneasy, “Are we
really
safe?” smile.

He smiled back at her and the rest of them as best he could.

He wasn’t sure what was going to happen next, but he couldn’t let
them
know that.

Dr. Irving came up to Emma. “This is your sister, Ethan?”

“Yes, sir,” Ethan replied. “Emma, this is Dr. Gordon Irving. He’s a … friend.”

Was he?

He stared into the doctor’s eyes.

He liked the old man. He was Madison’s grandfather. Maybe the founder of the Seed Bank. But he worked with Colonel Winter, who seemed happy to throw kids into her brig until they grew up. Could he trust the doctor with his sister and the other kids he’d risked everything to save?

Dr. Irving gave Ethan the tiniest nod. If Ethan had blinked, he’d have missed it.

Something was going on here beyond him and his team rescuing the Sterling kids.

“I’ll catch up to you soon,” Ethan told Emma. “I promise.”

Emma still looked worried, but she relaxed a notch.

He told all the kids, “It’s okay. We made it. You’re safe.”

At least they were safe in one way: No matter what the colonel did to them, their minds would still be their own—not controlled by the Ch’zar Collective and sealed inside an enemy I.C.E. suit. That was the most important thing.

Emma, Carl, and Lee followed Dr. Irving and Colonel Winter’s senior staff to the elevators.

The Sterling School troublemakers, though, Angel, Kristov, and Oliver, lingered.

They glared at Colonel Winter. Maybe they’d never trust an authority figure like her, or maybe they sensed that Ethan was up to his neck in hot water and needed help. They looked ready to fight … if he gave them the word.

Ethan wouldn’t let them get dragged into his troubles.

“We’re good here,” he told them.

Angel sighed and swallowed her gum, seeming disappointed there wasn’t going to be another fight, but she suddenly looked exhausted, too.

She and her friends reluctantly went to Dr. Irving as he held the elevator for them.

Colonel Winter then focused her full attention on Ethan and his crew with a hawklike gaze. She tapped the tablet computer in her hand twice and said, “Good work, you four.”

Ethan felt as if she’d slapped him in the face with a steel gauntlet.

He blinked and croaked out a whispered, “Pardon me, ma’am?”

She ignored him and glanced at Felix’s bent leg. “Broken?”

“Yes, Colonel,” Felix said, managing to stand straighter and look tough. “Just a simple fracture. Nothing serious this time.”

The colonel touched his cheek. It was the same gesture Ethan’s mom would have done if he’d skinned his knee. It was a touch only a loving mother could give her child.

She stepped back and she was Colonel Winter again, Felix’s commanding officer.

“We’ll get you patched up in no time.” She turned her tablet computer around so they could see the screen. “Which is fortunate because there’s still work to be done.”

Ethan
still
wasn’t understanding. Was this a dream?

He squinted at the colonel’s tablet, expecting it to be
the official order for their courts-martial and summary executions.

It wasn’t.

On-screen was a map. There were the same enemy bug icons that he and Madison had seen on Dr. Irving’s computer. There were dozens of them, each standing for hundreds of individual Ch’zar units. Arrows showed direction of movement and speed. They crisscrossed over the eastern side of the United States—Alabama, Kentucky, all the way up to Maine, and over the entire Appalachian Mountains.

Like he had with the board game in Sterling’s Tactics 101 class, Ethan instantly got the rules and implications of this map.

It was a superlarge-scale search-and-destroy mission.

That wouldn’t have been possible before, but now the enemy had the vast numbers to carry out such a brute-force operation.