Titan Base (3 page)

In pilot training, Ethan had been given quick courses on physics, mostly aerodynamics, but also biology and electronics, and in particular how radiation messed up electronics like tracking and sensor systems.

The lead missile wobbled.

One prematurely detonated.

A third crashed into the missile behind it.

Dozens more piled into them, tumbling along the ground end over end, forty supercharged firecrackers exploding with flashes and glittering shrapnel.

Ethan would have whooped with joy if he hadn’t been ready to pass out from spent adrenaline and the punishment of high-g acceleration.

He eased back his throttle and exhaled.

The wasp settled in the shade of a small mesa without being commanded to do so.

Sterling Squadron followed him.

Ethan let his wasp ground. He sensed it was uncharacteristically tired, too. Maybe the radiation?

He glanced at his wrist with dismay. The radiation counter marked 20 percent of the way to a maximum dosage. It wouldn’t go back down until he got specialized medical attention at the Seed Bank base.

Ethan hit the outer door release. Armored sections
hissed away from the I.C.E.’s abdomen and he practically fell out of the cockpit.

It was broiling hot outside. He felt like passing out. Around him an ocean of sand dunes wavered with mirages.

His wasp scooched farther into the shade.

Lee climbed out of his housefly I.C.E., his normally wild black hair sweat-plastered to his head. Kristov clenched and unclenched his huge fists (mostly to keep them from shaking too much). Angel dropped out of her black wasp, looking like she did this every day and it was no big deal. Paul got out of his “Crusher” praying mantis, and his scarred face was grim. Madison exited her dragonfly and shot a glare at Angel that was hotter than any laser beam. Felix and Emma marched side by side straight toward Ethan.

“That was close,” Emma said. She took a wisp of black hair that’d escaped her braid and chewed the end. Her nervous habit. It was gross.

“Those missiles didn’t look like Ch’zar,” Felix said.

He’d shaved stripes into the side of his close-cropped hair before this mission—for luck, he’d said.

“Yeah,” Ethan agreed. “I never saw one enemy I.C.E. on-screen.”

Madison started toward Angel, her lips pursed, her
hands balled into fists. Madison was a martial arts expert and deadly fast. It looked like she was going to tear Angel in half for that stunt in the air.

As the two of them faced off, they looked like opposites to Ethan: Madison, with her long blond hair, completely serious, and Angel, her short dark hair cut at a weird slant over her eyes, never serious.

Madison abruptly halted in her tracks. She gazed at the sky and slowly turned in a circle.

“We didn’t see any Ch’zar in the air shooting missiles,” she told Ethan, “because those missiles weren’t fired from the air.”

She pointed at the dozens of vapor trails in the sky.

Ethan traced the lines back to ground level. “Surface-to-air missiles?” he said. He’d never seen the Ch’zar use them. They favored ant lion artillery. He clambered on top of a rock to get a better look.

Exhaust trails made a fading circle, three miles wide in the sky. The center where the missiles had been launched was only a mile from their current position.

Ethan squinted. Through the mirage-wavering heat, he saw towers and domes, intact and gleaming gold under the desert sun.

It was the city they were looking for. Maybe not as dead and abandoned as they’d thought.

   
2
   
A FORCE DIVIDED

ETHAN STARED AT THE DISTANT CITY, HIS MOUTH
open.

Ruby-red spires rose a half mile into the sky, so delicate they seemed to float. There were geodesic domes that shimmered golden in the hot air, and inside those domes were trees and waterfalls and even wisps of rainbow-tinged fog. Slender sky bridges arched between the tallest towers, with rows of glimmering green lights on their lengths. Crows circled the place, riding the thermal currents.

It wasn’t like the other pre-Ch’zar human city, Knucklebone Canyon, Ethan had seen near Mexico. That
place had been toppled over, half concrete rubble, half rusted steel girders—like a bomb had gone off in the middle of it (and considering it’d been destroyed in World War IV, that’s probably what
did
happen).

But this place was perfect. Every surface and window was a polished mirror. It looked like the cover of one of the science-fiction comics Ethan used to read at Barker’s Drugstore in Santa Blanca.

Felix and Emma got onto the rock next to him.

“Wow,” Felix said, squinting and scratching his head.

The other Sterling pilots clambered up as well.

“That can’t be,” Paul whispered, frowning.

“Why not?” Kristov asked, and turned, almost knocking skinny Paul off the rock, he was so large.

“Because,” Madison told him, “that’s a
human
city, stupid. One from before the Ch’zar came. It can’t be intact … or inhabited. The aliens disassembled most human cities for scrap metal and parts.”

“Maybe this place is too radioactive,” Felix said. He folded his big arms over his chest.

“But if the Ch’zar can’t survive here,” Oliver whispered, “then that means humans can’t either, right?”

They were all quiet a moment.

Emma snorted. “Well,
someone
has to be home,” she said. “Someone, or something, fired those missiles at us.”

That last comment snapped Ethan back.

He had a mission to carry out: find a new base for the Resisters.

Maybe this city was it. Emma was right, though. Someone—Ch’zar or human—
had
fired missiles at them from the place. That meant a potential enemy.

“It has to be the radiation,” he told his team. “I mean, why the city is still in one piece. This desert has so many hot spots and radioactive dust plumes, no one in their right mind would come here.”

Angel let her bangs fall over her eyes. “Except us,” she murmured.

Ethan glanced at the radiation counter on his wrist. Was it his imagination or had it ticked up a notch closer to the red line? No. Still at 20 percent of a lethal dosage. Still, too much.

Ethan hopped off the rock. He returned to the I.C.E.s clustered in the shadow of the small mesa. The insects had the sense to stay out of the direct sun.

His team gathered around him.

Ethan wiped the sweat off his face and looked at his squadron. They were scared. He could practically feel the fear trembling in the air.

Ch’zar they could fight. Dodge missiles even, no problem. But the radiation around them was invisible. Too
much exposure and no medicine in the world would save them. None of them knew how to fight
that
.

Except, whatever lived in that city seemed to be okay with the radiation. Unless they were all dead, too … like this was a ghost city.

Despite the desert heat, a shudder jangled down Ethan’s back.

Everyone in the squadron was looking to him for answers.

He didn’t have any, but Ethan knew they were depending on him. And he knew, scared or not, they were ready to follow orders.

That is, everyone except possibly Angel.

She flipped her hair from her face and popped her gum like she didn’t care. Maybe she
did
care and her act of “not caring” was her way of dealing with it.

Madison watched Ethan as he looked at Angel, and then Madison’s gaze turned to the girl as well, and her eyes narrowed to slits.

That was one more lethal danger out here—those two might kill each other before the Ch’zar could get them.

Ethan had to solve that problem. Fast.

“I’m taking a small team to scout the city,” he said.

He nodded to his sister and his best friend and then
pinned the most troublesome of the Sterling school kids with a stare. “Emma, Felix, and Angel, you’re with me,” he said. “Everyone else stays here.”

“What?” Paul cried, and his hands flew up in a gesture of outrage. “There’s no way I’m staying here with these guys—babysitting!”

Kristov clenched his jaw and moved toward Paul.

Madison stepped between them. “Cool it, you idiots. The lieutenant’s given his orders.”

She shot Ethan a venomous look that said,
You better explain fast or there’ll be mutiny … starting with me
.

“Madison has to stay,” Ethan explained, “in case we need to get a message to the Seed Bank. Her dragonfly has the best chance to get past any missiles or the Ch’zar if they show up—and out of the radiation zone that’s blocking long-range radio transmissions.”

“So why leave the rest of us?” Oliver said, pushing up his glasses, trying and failing to hide his disappointment.

“Worst-case scenario,” Ethan told him. “If there’s trouble, the rest of you have to help Madison get a message back to base.”

Paul counted out four fingers. “Makes sense. But me, Lee, Oliver, and Kristov, that’s four. You only need three for a flight team. Why the extra?”

Ethan nodded to the giant insects nestled in the shade. “I’ll need one of you to stay and guard our I.C.E.s, because we’re going in on foot.”

Paul didn’t look happy at this, but then a mischievous grin flickered over his face before he could hide it.

“Under no circumstances are you to fly the I.C.E.s toward that city, Paul. That’s an order. Got it?”

Paul grimaced, making the scars on his face pucker, but he nodded.

“If we fly in,” Ethan went on, “we risk whatever fired those missiles spotting the I.C.E.s and shooting us down.”

“So, we’re walking in instead and getting blown up without our combat suits?” Angel asked.

“I don’t think so,” Felix told her. “Birds are flying around the city. No one’s shooting
them
down. On foot, we should be small enough to sneak in without getting noticed.”

Angel looked the big guy up and down, and then shrugged.

Ethan waited for more questions, but no one said anything. His people might not like his orders, but they believed in him. He wished he had half the confidence in himself that they seemed to have.

He wanted to sit down and rest, because it felt like the heat was hammering on them, even in the shade. Ethan couldn’t look weak, though, in front of his squadron. He
fidgeted with the collar of his flight suit. That silver lieutenant’s bar seemed to dig into his neck no matter what he did.

“Okay, grab your gear,” he ordered.

Felix, Emma, and Angel marched to their I.C.E.s.

He went to his wasp. The hairs on the gigantic insect’s gold-and-black-striped armor bristled as he neared, sensing his presence. Its never-blinking eyes tracked him as he approached.

Madison followed Ethan. “You need a hand?”

“Sure.”

Ethan took off his flight gloves and pressed his palm to the external cargo panel. A section of the wasp’s exoskeleton hissed and hinged aside. Inside was a small space with a backpack containing field rations, a medical kit, water, survival gear, a radio (useless except at short range in this radiation zone), and signal flares.

There was also another small pack that held the precious things he couldn’t leave behind, no matter how dangerous this mission might be. First, there were three chocolate and hazelnut ration bars he’d liberated from the Seed Bank’s mess. They were his favorites (probably a half-melted mess in this heat, though). Second was the leather band Madison had given him. It had an electrical resistor sewn on. It was the symbol every Resister pilot
carried. It had been Madison’s brother’s … before he had his mind taken over by the Ch’zar. It had been a huge gift to give Ethan, and it meant that he had been accepted as one of them. Third, and most precious to him, was the goodbye note his parents had left him back in Santa Blanca. It’d been folded into neat quarters. He’d read it so many times, the corners were worn round.

He’d never see his parents again. The note was his only connection to them.

He grabbed an extra water bottle and drank the whole thing—partly because he was parched, partly because there was a lump of homesickness in his throat.

“Your orders stink,” Madison told him with a huff. “Don’t worry. I’ll follow them, but we’d be better off
without
Angel.”