Titan Base (2 page)

Dr. Irving turned and started down the hallway.

The elevator doors closed, and Ethan was left alone with his thoughts.

He was sure Dr. Irving meant those words as comfort … but they had just the opposite effect.

Ethan tugged at his uniform’s collar, trying to loosen the single silver lieutenant’s bar imprinted there.

It felt like Dr. Irving and Colonel Winter had somehow made the tiny insignia of command weigh fifty pounds.

BACKGROUND:
My pilots are on edge. A month ago, half of them were imprisoned in the Sterling Reform School and thought the world was a safe place, a place full
of rules for them to break and, well, not this world—swarming with aliens that conquered Earth, giant insect combat suits, and mind-controlled parents. There’s friction between the Sterling recruits (especially Angel) and the native Resisters. I need to somehow make them work together.

For the “older” Resisters (Madison, Felix, and Paul), the stakes are even higher because the Ch’zar came close to finding our base—aka the Seed Bank. If they
do
find it, we’ll have a fight on our hands we won’t be able to win.

I have to keep my cool (or at least look that way for the rest of the squadron). Is that what a leader is supposed to do? I’m not sure.

Giving orders is different from getting them. I can calculate the right velocity to make a pinpoint landing or determine which formation will maximize damage to an enemy line. But how do I figure out all these “people” problems?

MISSION OBJECTIVE:
Find a new site for a Resister base. It has to be a place where the Ch’zar would never look. We’re about to go on our seventh scouting sortie, following Dr. Irving’s leads, this one in the ruins of a city called New Taos.

NOTES:
No luck on previous scouting missions. No enemy contact either, thank goodness. After the pasting we gave the Ch’zar in our last battle, I think we won’t see them for a long time. The biggest danger in this mission might be boredom.

   
1
   
NOT MODEL ROCKETS

ETHAN BRACED HIMSELF. HE COULDN
’
T STOP
shaking from the adrenaline thundering through his body.

He was pretty sure he was about to die.

Surrounded by a faster, deadlier enemy and outnumbered—it qualified for “sitting duck” status.

“
More
incoming missiles!” Madison screamed over the radio. “I now count forty.”

These weren’t like any Ch’zar missiles Ethan had ever seen. There were no organic parts. In fact, they reminded Ethan of the model rockets he and his sister used to launch. They had rivets and gleaming aluminum hulls, even serial numbers painted on their sides. The one major
difference?
These
rockets were thirty feet long and exploded on contact.

Ethan felt smothered inside his cockpit—a closet-like space with blinking indicators, “breathing” air vents, radar screens, and camera displays that tracked missile vapor trails screwing through the air toward his position.

He piloted one of the most advanced fighting craft ever devised: a three-ton mechanical insect hybrid called an insectoid combat exoskeleton (I.C.E. for short). Its armor shrugged off bullets, fire, and crash landings. Its stinger laser could fry through a foot of titanium alloy steel.

If that weren’t enough, flying in a wedge formation off his wingtips were the other eight I.C.E.s that made up Sterling Squadron. Together they’d fought off armies and aerial attack groups.

But nothing like this.

These missiles had appeared out of
nowhere
—all closing in on his team at supersonic speeds.

From his vantage point of thirty thousand feet, the attack pattern looked like a gigantic flower blossoming among the fluffy clouds. It was easy to forget it was actually several tons of high-explosive ordnance moving at Mach speeds.

A few missiles … he could’ve dodged, or even survived a direct hit.

But they could never outmaneuver so many. And he couldn’t outrun a missile. Even if he could, there was nowhere
to
run. The missiles had them surrounded in a rapidly shrinking circle.

It was a perfect trap.

What really bugged Ethan, though, was that there were no alien Ch’zar units in radar range that could have aimed and fired the stupid things.

Of course, there shouldn’t be any Ch’zar out here. This was the middle of a restricted radiation zone, what used to be the southwestern region of the United States. The aliens didn’t come out here, because they were smart. That radiation killed you quick.

“Ethan,” Felix whispered over a private radio channel. “What do we do?”

Ethan snapped out of it. His thoughts had spiraled out of control.

“Get your head in the game, Blackwood,” he told himself.

“Didn’t catch that last,” Felix said. “Repeat, Lieutenant?”

“Never mind,” Ethan growled, angry about freezing up.

He felt the brain of his wasp I.C.E. through a telepathic link. The insect wanted to fly and fight and engage the enemy.

Not this time. That’d just get them all blown up.

Ethan took stock of the battlefield.

The opposing side had forty missiles. They outnumbered Ethan and his team. They had superior acceleration.

On his side were nine I.C.E. units with an arsenal of lasers, bombs, particle cannons, and strength enough to tear through steel like it was tissue paper.

What else? Lots of airspace to fly … but in a quickly shrinking circle of death.

Thirty thousand feet below were red rock and sand.

Ethan examined the map on his display. There were latitude and longitude numbers, ground elevation lines, clouds with arrows indicating wind direction, blinking radar contacts, and patterns of undulating green—cool mint that intensified in spots to that fluorescent “puke” green you found on poison warning labels.

That meant radiation.

The fainter green parts were trails of airborne radioactive dust. The bright spots were sources. Superdeadly.

“I got it,” Ethan told Felix.

Ethan opened a radio channel with his squadron. “Heat your jets and prime afterburners. Ready on my mark. Follow me in and keep tight.”

Sterling Squadron’s I.C.E.s hovered close to Ethan’s wasp—Felix’s gigantic blue rhinoceros beetle, Lee’s blur of a housefly, Madison’s glittering emerald dragonfly,
Ethan’s sister Emma’s lethal ladybug, Angel’s black wasp, Paul’s praying mantis, Oliver’s mirror-silver cockroach, and Kristov’s blood-red locust.

Armored chitin shifted and jet engines fired with extra power in the collective continuous rumble of a hurricane.

The intense noise reassured Ethan.

They had power. They had speed.

But he’d better be right about this, or they would all be dead, too.

Angel’s Nightmare-class black wasp veered close to Madison’s dragonfly. The move was aggressive—it looked like Angel was going to pounce on Madison! There’d been some serious hate between those two ever since they’d laid eyes on each other at Sterling. Ethan had no clue why.

At the last second, the black wasp reversed its wings. There was some buffeting back and forth between the two I.C.E.s, and then the wasp swatted at the dragonfly. The dragonfly darted away.

“Hey!” Ethan yelled over the radio. “The enemy is out
there
, you two. Cool it. That’s an order!”

Of all the wrong times to fight each other.

Since the Sterling Reform School kids had been added to the group, friction between them and the “old” Resisters had been running hotter than a solar flare.

Madison’s and Angel’s I.C.E.s settled into formation.

Ethan hissed out his frustration and turned back to the maps on his side displays, tabbing through elevations, trying to get a sense of how the clouds and radioactivity drifted in all three dimensions. He calibrated the screens to wide-view mode—ten miles across so the missiles made a ring around the screens’ edges.

The radiation rose ten thousand feet into the air, then bent, wavered, and dissipated in the prevailing winds. It reminded him of movies he’d seen of kelp forests in the ocean. He saw a pattern to it … as long as the winds didn’t shift.

The missiles were only a few miles away now.

Ethan’s heart raced.

His mind slowed.

He took a deep breath.

“Prime for maximum thruster burn,” he whispered to his squad. “Ready … set … go!”

Ethan commanded his wasp to plunge, kicking on jets and afterburners. They plummeted straight toward the ground, breaking the sound barrier with a titanic air-shredding blast.

He tore his gaze from the central display (mesmerized by the ground rushing to meet him) and glanced at his rear-facing camera.

Sterling Squadron was behind him. The other eight
I.C.E.s—all in a tight line with no more than five feet between each.

And behind them, all forty missiles corkscrewed into a hairpin turn and dove, right on their tails.

Just as Ethan had hoped.

His gaze darted to the map of the air currents and radiation.

At three thousand feet he pulled up and rolled over and around a massive radiation plume—but he’d cut it too close!

Alarms sounded inside the cockpit that jangled Ethan’s already frayed nerves. The radiation counter strapped to his wrist clicked and whined.

Dr. Irving had warned them about the radiation out here. It was a variety that could be carried by dust.

To protect them, Resistance technicians had sprayed their I.C.E.s with a dust-repellent plastic that would last for a few days. The pilots, meanwhile, had new flight suits and had been given supplements to temporarily boost their radiation tolerance.

Dr. Irving had also given them wristwatch/radiation counters and warned them:
“Once the counter gets to the red line dosage, there’s nothing that can be done for you.”

Meaning: Hit the red line on that counter and you’re dead.

The needle on Ethan’s radiation counter trembled at 15 percent of maximum exposure.

Ethan’s hands went sweaty. He tightened his grip on the controls and the wasp rocketed up and out of danger.

The clicking eased and stopped.

Ethan tingled, his face went numb, and his vision fuzzed.

Too much acceleration. Even with the cushioning gel in the cockpit, he couldn’t take much more of this.

He glanced back.

His squadron was still behind him.

So were the missiles, closer now, all funneled into a wedge—a gigantic arrowhead of gleaming steel, belching smoke and thunder.

The winds shifted and a huge upwelling of radiation blossomed on-screen.

Ethan dove, almost scraping the ground (and splattered a few saguaro cactuses that happened to get in the way into mush).

His vision pinpointed as he and the wasp dodged around the radioactive dust, rock outcroppings, and sand dunes.

The missiles tracked the squadron, closing on a course that was the shortest distance between two points—in this case, cutting
through
airspace filled with radiation.