Sterling Squadron (23 page)

Under those bandages was a surprise Ethan had to hide from his team for just a bit longer.

Felix and Paul then noticed Ethan’s wasp.

Felix’s eyes widened and Paul’s mouth dropped open. The boys jogged to the I.C.E. suit. They stared long and hard at the silver bar lieutenant insignia on the wasp’s black head cowl.

They spotted Ethan and marched over to him.

Ethan shifted uneasily. “Hey, guys. How’d you sleep?”

“What’s with the LT bar?” Paul demanded. His eyes locked onto the lieutenant insignia on Ethan’s collar. “That’s not possible.”

Ethan reached to fold over his collar but halted. This wasn’t something he should be ashamed of.

Felix shook his head, blinking, as if he’d taken a punch to his face. “It’s possible,” he said to Paul. “They just never
have
.”

“No kid gets to be an officer,” Paul whispered. “If you know that officer stuff—the codes, the security protocols—and you go outside, the Ch’zar could get you and know all that stuff, too!”

Paul was right. Ethan had never seen any kid with a rank higher than staff sergeant. And only a small fraction of the adult Resisters even got to be officers.

Felix and Paul exchanged confused glances, waiting for him to explain.

This must be what Dr. Irving had warned him about: show nothing but confidence to the people you command.

“Dr. Irving and Colonel Winter approved the promotion,” he simply told them.

Paul’s lips tightened into a thin white line.

Ethan figured that Paul getting reinstated as a mere private while Ethan got this huge promotion must feel
like a knife stabbed into his back—painful, and just out of his reach.

“I get it,” Felix said, nodding slowly and breaking the tense silence. “You’ve put together operations no one else here would’ve dared. And you giving orders simplifies things, because you’ve always got good ideas in the field, but, no offense …” Felix looked at the floor, embarrassed and unable to finish.

What he was trying to say was that Ethan didn’t have the technical and practical experience to get things done in the field. No argument there from Ethan. There were a hundred I.C.E. systems Ethan wasn’t familiar with, he didn’t know proper first aid, and there were a million other things he figured a
real
Resister officer should know.

But they’d put Ethan in charge. He had to lead.

“That’s why I’ll need the best NCO here to make my crazy plans fly,” Ethan said diplomatically, “which would be you, Sergeant.”

Felix looked up.

An understanding passed between the two boys: Ethan would figure out the strategy, and Felix would do all the real work to get it done.

“Yeah, that ought to work,” Felix whispered. He straightened and seemed relieved to not have to make the larger decisions and be responsible for everyone’s lives.

“Great,” Paul muttered. “Whatever. So you’re the strategic wizard. You’ve been right about everything so far.” Sarcasm dripped from his words. “I just don’t have to like it, unless that’s an order … sir.”

“Feel however you like, Hicks,” Ethan told him. “Just make sure you follow orders today. Our lives are going to depend on you.”

Paul considered these words and finally nodded.

Just like that, the tension between the three boys evaporated.

Ethan felt a new tension take its place, though. A taut chain of military command settled into place. Paul may have almost no respect for authority, but he had
some
.

All Ethan had to do now was prove that he could lead them.

That
terrified him a million times more than anything Paul could say or do to him.

“Resisters!” Colonel Winter called out, and strode across the deck.

They snapped to attention, eyes tracking her as she stopped next to Ethan.

“Here’s the current situation, people,” she said. “Lights.”

The overhead floodlights dimmed. For a heartbeat, the only illumination was from the blue landing lights.
It made everyone look like ghosts, and it creeped Ethan out.

Holographic lasers painted the air. A model of eastern America came into focus. The view zoomed to the central Blue Ridge Mountains, with wavy lines indicating elevations.

Twitching red dots swarmed through valleys and over peaks: Ch’zar insect icons—centipedes indicating ground units and hornets indicating aerial units. There were hundreds of them. Ethan guessed those represented even
more
individual enemy I.C.E. units.

He swallowed. This was bad.

The Resister pilots shuffled.

Ethan felt the fear in the hangar build and the air tremble with tension.

“Our battle plan is simple and will be executed in two phases,” Colonel Winter said, striding among holographic mountains like a giant.

She sounded confident, so much so that the churning in Ethan’s stomach eased.

He wished he could be like that for his people. How did you
not
show fear when facing impossible odds like this?

“We are outnumbered,” she told the Resisters, “but that’s nothing new.”

She smiled at them, the first time Ethan had seen her smile. It was a terrible, predatory grin.

Ethan was glad the colonel was on their side. The thought of
her
mind being added to the Ch’zar Collective chilled him to the core.

“The Ch’zar’s mission is to find the Seed Bank,” she said. “To do this, they must spread themselves over a huge region. This is a vulnerability we will exploit.”

She stepped to the middle of the map.

“A command post coordinates these Ch’zar.” She tapped an icon larger than the others.

It expanded into an elongated hive covered with hundreds of jointed exoskeleton limbs, artillery cannons, missile launch tubes, and tiled hexagonal armor plates. It floated among the clouds like a living zeppelin battle cruiser.

“Dr. Irving hypothesizes that with so many units in the field,” she continued, “they need a mental ‘booster’ to direct their collective intelligence in this campaign.”

Ethan gaped. The data floating next to the hologram indicated the command hive was two miles wide.

“Becka’s bomber squadron will begin by saturation shelling of enemy ground units here”—she pointed to the Cumberland River Valley—“on a concentration of ant lion heavy armor.”

She paused, turned, and somehow made eye contact with them all.

“This will get their attention,” Colonel Winter said.

The pilots of Becka’s Bombers chuckled.

“The rest of our pilots will cover the bombers as they drop into the Shawnee National Forest. We have temporarily disabled enemy satellite coverage of that region. A secret cache of bombs is hidden there for the bombers to reload. We believe the Ch’zar command hive and the balance of their high-speed units will shift position and pursue.”

On the map, red arrows indicated the probable movement of the command hive and other units.

“As they give chase,” she continued, “their air units will separate and spread out. Our squadrons will turn, reengage, and destroy them.”

The Resister pilots nodded, seeing the strength of her strategy.

Ethan saw it, too. It was a good plan. He’d used this tactic to string out Ch’zar units a half-dozen times before.

“Our goal is to reduce their numbers so they will abandon their search mission before they locate the Seed Bank. If we crush them today, they will not try this again for a very long time.”

Several Resisters clapped at this, and some shouted their enthusiasm.

Ethan saw her plan unfold in his mind: Resister bombers blowing up ground units, the Ch’zar command hive moving after them, the other Resisters mopping up the pursuing air units.

Something was wrong, though. It felt … off.

The colonel snapped her fingers. The overhead lights flared and washed the map away.

“Next, there is an organizational change.”

She stepped behind Ethan and set her hands on his shoulders.

He did his very best not to flinch (and mostly succeeded). However, the hornets and butterflies in his stomach returned. He knew what was coming.

Ethan understood this gesture: the colonel was establishing
his
authority—literally standing behind him, backing him up.

“I’d like to present
Lieutenant
Blackwood,” she declared.

Everyone—right down to the little kids who carried tools for the techs—stared at him.

Most pilots were stunned motionless. Others smiled because they’d heard rumors of Ethan’s exploits. A few, though, shook their heads, only knowing Ethan Blackwood as the screwup neighborhood kid who’d nearly flunked flight training.

“Lieutenant Blackwood has field control of this operation,”
the colonel said. “What this means is that while the Seed Bank retains strategic control from C and C, and squadron leaders still direct their people as they see fit, the lieutenant is our intermediate. He has the authority to modify C and C’s orders based on moment-to-moment battle conditions.”

She let that sink in.

What this meant was that Ethan was in charge out there today.

Even in the best-case scenario, it took time for Seed Bank officers to analyze a report and issue order updates.

In an aerial dogfight, even a few seconds could mean life and death.

Rebecca Mills from Becka’s Bombers, Jack Figgin of the Black and Blue Hawks, and the other team leaders of the smaller strike teams all locked eyes with Ethan.

Colonel Winter must have briefed them already and made them accept his promotion (or at least not openly complain about it) because no one protested.

“Squadron leaders,” the colonel said, “get your people ready.” She snapped off a crisp salute. “Good hunting to you all.”

They saluted back.

Chaos erupted in the hangar as pilots swarmed to their suits and squadron leaders.

Ethan plowed through the crowds, deflected questions, and tromped to his wasp.

Next to his I.C.E. suit, the other insects in his group stood in a line. His team pushed their way toward them and gathered around Ethan.

“Lieutenant?”
Emma said, grinning, and tried to punch him in the shoulder.

Ethan took a step back so she couldn’t. He had to be a leader, someone you took seriously … not the sort of guy you punched in the shoulder.

Madison didn’t comment. She just kept staring at the new rank insignia on his collar.

These people were family, like Emma. They were his friends, like Madison and Felix. One was his enemy, Paul. But most of them he hardly knew, the kids from Sterling: Angel, Kristov, Oliver, Carl, and Lee.

He’d have to give them orders today, maybe orders that would get them killed.

He wasn’t sure he could do it.

They had a million questions. They were scared. He could see that. Nothing he
said
would change that.

They all needed something more than words.

Ethan signaled the technicians, and they ripped the bandages off his team’s I.C.E. suits.

Underneath, bonded onto the insects’ armor, was a
black triangle patch. Along its edges ran white zigzags. In the center was a bronze fist. That fist clutched the top of a large silver S.

“Our squadron’s insignia,” Ethan told them. “The resistors on the sides honor Madison’s lost brother, who came up with the idea to use the electrical resistor as a symbol, and for all the other lost pilots.”

Madison inhaled sharply and blinked away tears.

“The fist,” Ethan continued, “is because we’re strong and don’t back down when we have to fight.”

Angel seemed to like
that
, and her face brightened.

“The
S
stands for ‘Sterling’ because that’s where half of us came from and because that word means something else, like a sterling character. It means excellence.”

His people gazed at their squadron patch, and the weight of responsibility upon them seemed to lessen—that, or they seemed stronger and able to bear that responsibility better now with a proper symbol to inspire them.

“That’s us,” Ethan told them. “Sterling Squadron.”

Paul stared at the patch, the doubt and sadness as he remembered Sterling crystallizing into determination on his face. “Good choice, Lieutenant,” he whispered.

Ethan wanted to tell them how much he admired them—especially his sister and the rest of the Sterling
kids, for getting slammed through flight training and, now, having the guts to get into I.C.E. suits and fight. He was proud of Madison and Felix for sticking with him no matter what. He was even thankful for Paul putting aside their differences to fight for the common good.

He didn’t get the chance, though. Alarm Klaxons blared throughout the hangar.

“That’s it!” Felix cried. “The scramble alert. Everyone mount up. Flight check and we’re airborne in three minutes.”

They saluted Ethan.

His
squadron saluted
him
.

Ethan saluted back. He gathered his courage and told them, “Let’s go kick their butts.”

  29