Sterling Squadron (21 page)

It was a four-ton ladybug.

“
Coccinella septempunctata
, the seven-spotted ladybug,” Madison explained. “It’s the same species Colonel Winter flew when she was a pilot. It’s an assault-scout hybrid. Fairly fast, although still subsonic, with twin class-E particle cannons and multiple individually targeting missile pods. Formidable.”

“And cute,” Emma breathed.

She reached out to touch it, hesitated, but finally found the courage to run a finger over its glass-smooth shell.

She turned to Ethan, grinning. “So, when can I fly him?”

  26  

ETHAN’S LASER BLASTED THREE MOSQUITOES
as they hovered in a tight ball of a formation. His wasp overran their position, scattering the rest as he rocketed to where he’d last seen Emma’s ladybug.

The air was a tangle of missile vapor trails, blurred locust wings, and spirals of red sparks left from Emma’s class-E particle beam.

His sister was nowhere to be seen.

“Emma, report!” he cried over the radio.

There was an explosion ahead—a puffball of flames and spinning shrapnel and insect limbs.

Emma’s ladybug emerged without a scratch on its glistening red armor.

“I’m okay, little brother,” she shouted back over the radio.

Her ladybug waggled its antennae his way.

The four-ton beetle was compact and too smooth for an enemy to easily grab. That thing could get deep behind enemy formations and
kill
its way out.

Ethan had to fix his thinking, though, because it wasn’t
just
the bug. It was Emma, his sister—the careful, studious, prissy one, the girl who’d a month ago only worried about grades and the prom and boys—piloting as if she were born to it.

She was good. Really good.

Madison called her the best natural pilot she’d ever seen.

Better than him?

That shouldn’t matter. Ethan wasn’t jealous … just concerned (and annoyed) that his sister might be getting in over her head.

Especially since they were in the middle of an
ambush
!

Okay, sure, this was today’s
simulated
flight practice after their aerodynamics lecture, but the new recruits still should have been taking it seriously.

Everyone was burned out, though. It’d been a grueling week of nonstop drills, physical training, and homework.

The Sterling kids got five hours of sleep a night before they crawled back into their I.C.E. suits and repeated the process the next day. They were exhausted and getting on each other’s nerves.

That went
double
for their instructors.

Ethan, Madison, Felix, and Paul had run out of patience with the new trainees about three days ago.

“Watch out!” Madison screamed over the radio.

Laser fire crisscrossed the smoke-filled air in front of Ethan’s wasp.

Stupid. Daydreaming in the middle of a battle drill.

Buzzing mosquitoes filled his cockpit’s screens.

It was the half-dozen remaining Thunderbolt-class locusts out there, though, that were the real threat. They were strong enough to tear any one of their I.C.E. suits apart.

Three of the giant grasshopper-like terrors flew straight at Angel.

She’d picked an all-black wasp, Nightmare-class, to train in. The black wasp had superior stealth systems and maneuverability, but lighter armor than Ethan’s standard Infiltrator wasp.

Ethan imagined the airspace in his head. It was complicated. Any unit could move up, down, right, left, or diagonal. It was nothing like the game in Sterling’s Tactics 101 class. A few key ideas, though, still applied. Like the Resister pilots were too far apart to support one another.

Ethan opened a channel to Felix. “We have to regroup.”

Felix clicked over to the squadron channel. “All units pull back,” he said.

There was no debate about who led them. Felix was the ranking pilot. Colonel Winter had reinstated him back to a full sergeant, while she’d only made Paul a corporal (reminding him how lucky he was to be out of the brig).

Something inside Ethan, though, wanted to lead. Felix was a great pilot, his friend, but Ethan always seemed to be thinking two steps ahead of him.

At the same time, Ethan was relieved
not
to be in charge. He had only a fraction of the experience and airtime, and a squadron leader was responsible for everyone’s life.

Oliver, Kristov, Paul, Carl, and Lee zoomed back to their position. Madison and Emma teamed up and dove down to their level. Felix’s midnight-blue beetle took a spot on Ethan’s starboard wing.

Angel, though, couldn’t help herself. She was spoiling
for a fight. Her black wasp charged the three enemy locusts.

“No!” Ethan shouted to her.

“I got these,” she called back. There was a distinct
pop
of bubblegum over the radio. The suicidal confidence in her voice was unnerving.

The jets on Paul’s praying mantis flared and he raced ahead. “I’ll cover her,” he said.

“Don’t,” Felix called.

It was too late. Paul blazed toward crazy Angel, just a couple of miles from her position.

One of the locusts veered toward him.

Paul’s praying mantis was quicker, snatching it right out of the air.

The locust, though, aimed for the mantis’s wing. It snared a membrane and ripped it to shreds.

The two tumbled toward the ground.

Angel dove. “Hang on, Paul!” she screamed.

The two remaining locusts slammed into her black wasp. Together they fell in a ferocious ball of wrestling insect limbs and biting mandibles.

“I can’t believe this!” Madison cried over the radio. “What a bunch of
idiots
!”

“Cut the chatter,” Felix shouted. “We’ve got to save them. Follow me.”

His rhinoceros beetle plummeted after them.

Ethan sighed. Couldn’t Felix see it was too late? That the other Ch’zar circled above them, waiting for them to dive? From the higher altitude, they’d have a huge advantage.

The squadron was doomed. It was so obvious.

But Ethan couldn’t let Felix go off alone, so, even though this was stupid, he rocketed after his friend. Orders were orders.

On the wasp’s rear monitors, he spotted Madison, Emma, and the rest of the squadron charge after them.

Felix’s heavy beetle fell the fastest. He kicked on his afterburners and actually caught up to Angel’s black wasp as she struggled with her attackers.

The rhinoceros beetle pried off one enemy and shot at point-blank range with a particle beam, blasting it into insect confetti.

Half a mile beneath them, Paul’s mantis smashed into the rocky slope of the Appalachian Mountains and blossomed into a fireball.

“Just great,” Ethan muttered.

Felix and Angel hit the ground a moment later, exploded, and oily smoke plumed up from their scattered wreckage.

Ethan shook his head as, just as he’d predicted, the
mosquitoes dropped aerial bombs and rained laser fire down on what was left of the training squadron.

More locusts appeared from the clouds and zoomed in.

They’d make sure that any escaping pilots got dragged down. They’d sacrifice themselves without a thought. In theory, one Resister pilot was worth ten of them. A full Resister squadron should’ve been able to outthink and outfight a hundred Ch’zar.

Not today, apparently.

Oliver’s heavily armored cockroach went spiraling down in flames. Madison hit her afterburners, and her dragonfly tried to climb out of the death trap. Emma struggled to stay airborne as bombs exploded around her ladybug I.C.E. Stunned, she dropped like a stone. Carl chased after her in his superagile crane fly in a valiant, but futile, attempt to save her life.

Ethan banked to engage the locusts closing on him.

Something ripped off his port-side wing.

He didn’t have time to see what, because a bomb exploded in his face.

All monitors in his cockpit went blank.

“That’s it!” Felix shouted. “I’m calling today’s simulation.”

Ethan’s screens flickered to life, indicators popped from red to green, and the cockpit hatch hissed open.

He blinked. Coming out of the simulated dream state of an I.C.E. suit always took him a few moments, like waking from a dream—or in this case, a nightmare.

The other pilots emerged from their armor and stumbled onto the simulation flight deck.

Angel tore off her black gloves, wadded them, and threw them onto the ground in frustration. “This is dumb,” she declared. “It’s not even real!”

“Good thing, too,” Madison said, her voice dripping with acid, “or you would’ve been splattered on the ground, burned to a crisp,
and
you would’ve got the rest of us killed!”

The two girls glared at each other. Madison’s hands balled into fists. Angel bared her teeth like a wild animal.

Felix stepped between them, clutching his data pad in one hand like a shield. He had a slight limp, but his leg had otherwise been healed by those caterpillar bandages.

The Sterling kids gathered on one side, the Resisters on the other. Emma stood with Felix, in the middle, somehow not belonging to either group yet.

This was bad—worse even than botching today’s simulation. The Ch’zar were predicted to find the Seed Bank in the next seventy-two hours. The Sterling kids and Resister pilots weren’t supposed be two
separate
groups. They had to be
one
team.

Boots clipped on the flight deck behind Ethan.

He knew the stride. He turned and faced the unwavering gaze of Colonel Winter.

“I believe that is enough ‘training’ for one day,” she said, somehow making
training
sound like
disaster
.

The kids stepped back from one another, their anger and frustration chilling in the presence of their commanding officer. Even the Sterling troublemakers backed down.

“I’m ordering everyone to get dinner and a mandatory eight hours of sleep,” she said.

Angel and Madison grumbled but eventually shut up.

“Yes, ma’am,” Felix said. “Come on, people.” He gestured toward the exit. “Food. Sleep. It’ll do everyone good.”

They started to move off.

Felix sighed and glanced back at his mother, and the strength seemed to drain from his body.

Colonel Winter nodded at him, and some strength returned to Felix … but not all of it.

Emma hung her head and slunk off with Felix and the others.

Ethan had to cheer her up. His sister could be the glue that held them together—a Sterling refugee, almost a Resister, and maybe a better natural pilot than himself.

“A moment, Mr. Blackwood,” the colonel said.

Ethan halted and his heart clenched. What was she going to chew him out for
now
?

“I’ve read the instructors’ reports, seen the trainees’ grades, and viewed the flight records,” she said. “They’re almost ready.”

Ethan’s mouth dropped open. “Almost ready? How can you say that? Tonight’s simulation was a total washout, ma’am.”

“True,” she said, “but they’re ‘almost ready,’ because they
have to be
. Tomorrow morning we launch a counter-assault before the Ch’zar get any closer. It will be our last chance to keep the Seed Bank hidden.”

Tomorrow morning? Ethan gulped.

“There’s no way they’ll be ready.”

Colonel Winter studied Ethan. Her iron-gray eyes never wavered, but he thought, for a microsecond, he detected a flicker of sympathy and understanding.

“Whether you know it or not, these pilots look up to
you
,” she said. “You are the unacknowledged leader of this group and their inspiration. If you can’t pull them together, they
will
fail tomorrow. They will die.”

She held his gaze and her eyes bored into his.

Ethan struggled to find the courage not to look away
and definitely not let the prickling sensation in his eyes become full-blown tears.

“Get it done, Blackwood,” she whispered, then turned on her heels and strode off.

Ethan stood there feeling helpless, suddenly holding the fate of every human on Earth in his hands.

  27