Titan Base (8 page)

Ethan’s ears rang and blood trickled from his nose … but he was still grinning.

He faintly heard a sonic boom over the ringing and buzzing in his skull. Ethan turned and spotted ten miles away the signature “flower bloom” exploding cloud pattern of a subsonic-to-supersonic transition—and a torpedo-like insect on an inbound trajectory at Mach speeds.

Ethan felt his heart beat faster, imagining Madison’s emerald dragonfly. The prettiest, the fastest thing in the air.

Almost
the fastest.

Two dozen city-defense missiles raced after her, their exhaust trails leaving gray-white smears in the sky as they closed on Madison’s position.

A position that was rapidly approaching the city.

And this skyscraper!

“Well, Lieutenant?” boomed Paul’s voice from his mantis’s external loudspeaker. “Get inside your suit before you get squished!”

   
8
   
OVER THE LETHAL LINE

THE WASP’S COCKPIT HISSED OPEN AS THE INSECT
seemed to invite Ethan in.

Ethan started for it, smelling the strange yet familiar burning fat, honey, and plastic scent of the cushioning gel—then he remembered Angel.

She was still out cold.

He doubled back and helped Felix get her to the black wasp. The insect glared down at them with those unnerving all-black segmented eyes, its stinger twitched, and then its cockpit hatch opened.

Ethan and Felix slid Angel inside.

The biomonitors in the cockpit flickered as Angel’s
brain waves synched with the insect’s mind. There was just enough contact to start the I.C.E.’s autopilot. Ethan tapped the “follow leader” icon. He took in a deep breath, held it, and then also tapped the “capture-destruct” command.

Ethan sealed her inside.

Felix and Ethan darted to their suits.

Emma was already inside her ladybug and in the air, all four tons of “cute” killer insect hovering and humming with power.

Ethan stepped into his I.C.E. The hydraulics sealed the instant his foot cleared the threshold of the cockpit. Colored lights and hexagonal displays flashed to life. Far from making Ethan feel claustrophobic, this felt natural to him, like a second skin … like he was part of this thing now. Weird.

More than that, he felt the blood-warm connection to the wasp’s primitive mind. It was ready to dive back in—fly and fight, rend and kill.

Ethan held it back and sensed disappointment.

There’d be no hand-to-hand combat with those missiles.

He took to the air and heated the stinger laser.

Ethan was happy to be in the air once more. There was nothing like the freedom of flying.

Unfortunately, his moment of happiness faded … 
because Angel might be dying, because his entire team might end up getting killed in the act of rescuing him.

Ethan’s attention turned back to his cockpit displays: Madison’s dragonfly still rocketed straight for the city.

She was a green blur … a vapor trail streak … and on her tail were two dozen silver missiles, more than enough firepower to blast her dragonfly into exoskeleton shrapnel.

Ethan tried to line up a shot with his laser, but the distance was still too far, the missiles inbound too fast to get a lock. He’d be just as likely to hit Madison.

Madison, though, seemed to have another idea.

She dove, accelerating directly toward the tallest skyscraper in the center of the city. Her approach was so low she had to weave between buildings.

In response, the missiles veered away and fanned outward, far away from where they could do harm to New Taos. It was as if they knew better.

Except one.

It must have had a lock on her heat signature or enough radiation damage to its circuits to fail on that abort order—because it stayed on Madison until its tail fin grazed a walkway, sending it tumbling into a red glass tower.

The missile detonated into a ball of fire, shattered crystal, and glittering destruction. Fractures ran down the tower all the way to its base. The structure slowly tipped
and then tottered and fell, smashing through bridges, obelisks, and domes on its way. A huge plume of dust geysered into the air.

Meanwhile, the missiles that had veered away exploded harmlessly high over the desert.

Ethan got it. Whatever computer intelligence ran this city wasn’t just following preprogrammed instructions. It was smart enough to improvise and
not
blow itself up. Mostly.

Maybe that’d give his squadron a chance to escape.

If they flew out of here now, and missiles were fired at them, the squadron could always double back and threaten New Taos.

He
knew that … but would the city’s controlling computer?

There was only one way to find out.

Ethan opened the squad’s short-range radio channel. “Form up behind me and get ready on your afterburners,” he told them.

He nervously tapped his fuel indicator: down to a third of a tank. He’d burned up way too much in combat to easily get back to the Seed Bank. Well, he’d worry about that later … if it mattered.

Behind him, the I.C.E.s of Sterling Squadron clustered, filling the air with the thrum of insect wingbeats.

He clutched his controls. The wasp’s jet engines popped out and growled with power. He poured on the speed, accelerating to four hundred miles an hour.

On his rear-facing camera, he watched the towers of New Taos get smaller and smaller.

Ten miles … twenty … and then thirty.

If the city’s missile-defense system were going to blast them out of the sky again, it would’ve fired by now.

Maybe the city was happy to see them leave.

Ethan sure was.

New Taos had to be designated a restricted zone. No Resister could ever come back. And there was no way they could use the place as a base.

As a source of information, though, it had been a treasure trove, a glimpse of what humanity was before the Ch’zar, and sadly a glimpse of the brutal nature of human war, too.

The data crystal he’d grabbed in the library was still in his pack. Maybe it had some of the answers the Resisters wanted. Maybe it had some of the answers about his parents … and what was that Project Prometheus the librarian had mentioned?

Paul broke in on the squad channel. “Madison? Why’d you double back? You had specific orders.”

“You had orders, too,” she snapped. “I didn’t see
you
stick to them.”

“Yeah, well, technically I did,” Paul said with his usual impervious confidence. “Ethan said not to
fly
to the city. I
walked
the I.C.E.s across the desert—started an hour after he left. Don’t worry, Ethan,” he said, “I let the sun heat them up to the same temperature as the desert. It was a snap. They never saw us coming on their thermals.”

Ethan keyed his radio to chew Paul out—then changed his mind.

Paul
had
technically followed Ethan’s orders, but he hadn’t followed the intent of those orders, which was to stay safe and provide backup should Madison need it.

Considering, though, that Paul had saved their lives, Ethan let it drop this time.

Was that part of being a leader, too? Or should he discipline Paul? If he didn’t, would everyone in the squadron end up doing whatever they wanted?

Apparently Madison wasn’t about to let it drop.

“You’re not as cool or smart as you think, Paul Hicks,” she told him. “All the I.C.E.s you marched across the desert picked up ambient radiation from the dust. You guys are lighting up the Ch’zar satellite images like a Christmas tree!”

A cold dread spread from Ethan’s center.

He brought up the long-range view—pictures transmitted via a hacked signal from the Ch’zar satellite network in low–Earth orbit. Their I.C.E.s looked like tiny lightning bugs on the map. They were the same color as the radiation signatures he’d seen near New Taos, although not quite at those lethal intensities.

“If
we
can see that radiation on the Ch’zar satellite network,” Madison said with icy seriousness, “so can the
enemy
, you moron!”

Ethan suddenly felt like he had a target painted on his back.

He opened a private channel to Felix. “We need to get the suits scrubbed. I just hope they aren’t
internally
contaminated.”

“Even an external scrub won’t be easy,” Felix replied. “It takes more than water, Ethan. We need special soaps and rinses to remove radioactive particles from the exoskeletons.”

Ethan had been afraid of that. He remembered something, though, about radiation, about cleaning it up, too. Just at the edge of his recollection.

The black stealth wasp suddenly broke formation and dove.

“What is she doing
now
?” Madison said, strangling that last word so it was more growl than language.

“Angel!” Ethan shouted over the radio. “Stay in formation!”

“Something’s wrong,” Emma piped in.

Maybe so, but Ethan had had it with Angel. She was completely unpredictable and a liability to the rest of the team. The instant they got back to base, he was placing her under arrest.

The black wasp landed in a boggy meadow, sinking into the mud to its first leg joint. The cockpit opened, and the insect disgorged Angel’s unconscious body and then shuffled away from her as if it had a bad taste and had spit it out.

“That’s just what happened to Roger,” Madison whispered, horrified, over the radio.

Roger was Madison’s brother. He’d hit puberty while on mission and his mind had been absorbed into the Ch’zar Collective. His wasp had rejected his controlled mind and had ejected him from its cockpit.

Just like this.

Ethan landed, jumped out of his I.C.E., and rushed to Angel.

Madison’s dragonfly landed, too, but her suit didn’t open. Instead, her dragonfly’s laser pincers targeted Angel.

“Take it easy!” Ethan told Madison.

He knelt next to Angel. She was out cold. Still breathing, though.

Could the Ch’zar take over an unconscious mind?

Emma and Felix landed in the field. They exited their suits and ran to him. Paul, Lee, Oliver, and Kristov touched down and crowded by them, too.

Emma took Angel’s wrist to check her pulse. She gasped as she stared at Angel’s radiation counter.

Ethan’s heart skipped a beat.

The counter’s indicator was five ticks
past
the fatal dosage line.

“It must have happened in the junkyard,” Emma whispered as the color drained from her face. “When the robots were after her, I bet she stumbled into a hot spot.”

Kristov looked helpless and wrung his hands.

“That’s why the wasp rejected her,” Felix said. “Her body is like poison inside the suit.”

Despite all the crazy stuff she’d done, despite that he’d just promised himself he’d throw her in the Seed Bank brig when they got back, Ethan would have done anything to save her.

But Angel was going to die.

Madison finally slipped out of her dragonfly. She came
over and glanced at Angel, Emma, and the radiation counter. The anger vanished from her pointed features.

“I’m sorry,” Madison said. “There’s one more piece of bad news, Lieutenant.”

“It can wait,” Ethan said a little too abruptly. “We can’t fly Angel back to the base, so we need to get a message to them. Madison, open an encrypted channel to Colonel Winter.”

“We can’t,” Madison said. “That’s what I was about to tell you. I’ve been trying to contact the Seed Bank since New Taos. The Ch’zar have jammed all frequencies—even the emergency bands.”

“They’ve never been able to do that before,” Felix said, standing and frowning.

“I know,” Madison whispered. “Either they’re targeting the Seed Bank transceivers or they’re burning enough power to blank the entire region.”

Ethan chewed his lip. He just
had
to talk to Dr. Irving.

He was on his own, though.

There must be another way to help Angel—something out here he could use to slow the radiation poisoning in her and get it off their suits.

Ethan dug into his flight suit and pulled out the map. He zoomed out so he could see the southeastern portion of North America. With less than a quarter tank of jet fuel
left in their I.C.E.s, they didn’t have much range at decent speed.