Titan Base (16 page)

EMMA WHEELED ETHAN OUT OF THE HOSPITAL
room on his gurney.

They’d quickly ransacked the place before they left but hadn’t found anything labeled (in human words or Ch’zar icons) as antiradiation medicine. Angel was cooked if they failed to find something to help her.

Ethan squirmed on the gurney, uncomfortable and anxious in the half-buckled restraints that Emma had re-attached around his wrists and the surgical mask half smothering his face.

“Lie still,” she told him. “You’re supposed to be knocked out from the drugs.”

Ethan couldn’t help it: he
had
to peek through his nearly closed eyes.

The gurney trundled down a corridor lined with blue tiles, past tiny rooms filled with other kids. They were crammed in, two to a bed, hooked up to IVs, and sleeping … or more accurately, they’d been drugged into comas.

These had to be the “sick” Santa Blanca kids Bobby had told him about. They were supposed to have been shipped out to the hospital in Haven Heart, but apparently, unknown to any of the kids left behind, that hospital was a prison located right under the town.

The Ch’zar had taken the kids who had seen I.C.E. suits battle, kids who had suspected there was something strange going on with their parents, kids who were learning the truth, and removed them from the population. They were accelerating the puberty process and would absorb their minds.

Ethan felt sick.

He wasn’t doing this to them. It wasn’t
his
fault.

In a way, though, it was.

If he’d never come back to rescue Emma and burned down the school, none of this would be happening now.

No. He couldn’t think that way.

These kids would get absorbed no matter what. If not now, then in a few years.

Ethan wanted to jump up, rip out their IVs, and help them all escape.

He might’ve tried, too, if the place hadn’t been full of adults.

Grown-ups crowded the corridors. They wore hospital lab coats. They all seemed to have to be somewhere in a big hurry. No one spoke a word. They tracked him and Emma as they wheeled past, as if they suspected there was something “off” with them, but they didn’t stop them.

Ethan realized that he was holding his breath.

He very slowly exhaled through the mask.

One big gasp would’ve let everyone know that Ethan Blackwood, supposed-to-be-comatose Ethan Blackwood, was very much awake.

And if they were caught now, Ethan and Emma would be sedated, and he knew this time he wouldn’t wake up.

Emma shoved the gurney onto an elevator. Three adults crammed in with them.

Ethan froze. All they had to do was take a careful look at him to see that he was sweating—something a person in a coma
wouldn’t
be doing either.

He couldn’t help it.

And to top it off, Ethan now had to go to the bathroom.

Despite all that, he kept one of his eyes slightly open.

The elevator was glass, and as they rose, he saw a huge cavern beyond.

Within the great open space, giant industrial robots with multiple arms moved cargo containers, stacking them like toy blocks. There were rows of I.C.E. locusts on a runway. Their wings buzzed experimentally, and to Ethan it looked as if they were itching to take off and get into battle. Crawling along the cave’s walls were black ants the size of cars.

This place was a hive, and it looked like it was waking up, getting ready for something.

But what? The Ch’zar had the “information leak” in Santa Blanca more or less under control. They weren’t gearing up to destroy an entire city just because Bobby and a few of his Grizzlies teammates were on the loose.

Ethan had read in school how army ants would move out in a huge swarm and destroy
everything
in their path.

He steeled himself, suppressing the shudder he felt coming.

Before he unleashed a colossal shiver, the elevator pinged. Emma must’ve sensed Ethan was about to blow it, because she rammed the gurney through, just as the elevator doors started to close. They left the three adults behind.

“No one’s here,” Emma whispered.

“How do you know?”

“I can feel them in my head … stronger when they’re closer.”

Ethan shivered finally—head to toe.

“There.” Emma pointed down a tunnel that wormed into the shadows. Its walls were rough, and the occasional bare lightbulb revealed a dirt floor. “It leads back to the sewers, and out.”

Ethan shucked off his loose restraints, jumped off the gurney, and started down the corridor.

“But,” Emma said behind him, “you’re not going to like it.”

Ethan didn’t stop. Whatever was down there couldn’t be worse than the hospital, all those mind-control doctors and the kids about to lose themselves.

He was so wrong.

The tunnel spilled into another enormous cavern, this one with stalactites and stalagmites that looked like they were poised to snap shut.

Ethan halted, his mouth open. He exhaled a tiny squeak.

Lined up in rows, some piled together in heaps, others disassembled and laid out like a jigsaw puzzle, were I.C.E. units—black and red ants, locusts, orange-and-white rhinoceros beetles, honeybees, dozens of mosquitoes, half a
centipede, and even a circus-tent-sized wing of a monarch butterfly.

None of these bugs twitched a single antenna. In fact, most of them—all of them, Ethan saw—were partially taken apart.

There were wound spools of silk thread, riveted sections of ceramic exoskeleton, tangles of hydraulic lines, blinking LED indicators, pistons, jet engine fan blades that looked like metal daisies, radar dishes, segmented eyes, machine guns, and ruby-tipped lasers.

It was so quiet that Ethan only heard his heart pounding.

He wondered what had happened to the few Ch’zar I.C.E.s that had had human pilots. Had they been saved?

“Repair bay?” Emma whispered, stepping closer to his side.

“More like a graveyard,” Ethan whispered back.

Along the far wall, his gaze landed on titanic limbs that looked like the pointed fingers of a fairy-tale giant. In the weird bioluminescent half-light cast by the glowworms creeping along the ground, he saw that the limbs glimmered silver gray.

It was one of those terrible ant lions.

No … not
an
ant lion … 
the
ant lion.

The monster’s maw was wide open, spirals of teeth
exposed, scarred and charred with jagged carbonized lines that Ethan had etched with a sparking electrical cable.

In a trance, Ethan moved toward the beast he’d slain.

He felt as if he just
had
to see the thing again.

In any other circumstances, he would’ve run away, but he couldn’t feel anything living from its mind. Just a few hours ago it had screamed directly into Ethan’s brain. Now the lack of any mental activity was so thick about it that it seemed like a hole in space instead of a solid object.

Ethan crept within five feet of the ant lion. Its abdomen armor plate had been hinged open, and the heart and stomach organs (part tissue, part metal, and part plastic) had been removed and set upon the floor. A bundle of optical cables had been dragged out from the inside, too, and hooked up to a black twelve-sided shape about a foot across. This device was covered with the strange Ch’zar dot-and-dash icons.

Emma reached out. “There are thoughts,” she said, “moving. It’s like they’re being transferred from the ant lion and stored in that thing.”

Ethan stopped.

Thoughts? Why would the Ch’zar need to transfer those? They were all mentally linked, unless the electrical damage had somehow fried part of the insect’s brain.

In a flash, Ethan got an idea.

He had a feeling this might be superdangerous but also superimportant.

“This is our chance to
spy
on them,” he told Emma. “And do it without a deep dive into their Collective mind. We have a piece of what they know
right here
!”

Emma and Ethan looked around the cavern to see if there was any movement, but there was nothing.

They stepped closer to the broken I.C.E.

Emma reached out. Her left hand hovered over the black device. The icons lit with pink- and blue-ice-colored lights. Emma inhaled sharply and with her right hand grasped Ethan’s hand.

The mental link was sudden and sharp.

Ethan sensed everything Emma was sensing, streaming from that black box and the connection to the ant lion’s damaged nerve bundle.

There came flashes of emotion so primitive no words could describe them. They were more violent than the murderous thoughts Ethan had picked up from his wasp. It was more brutality than he could imagine.

Sensations burst through. First, smells: the plastic odor of hydraulic fluid; the sugary, salty tang of the slime in the reserve fuel tanks; blood, smoke, and ozone.

Next came sounds: a fragment of the Ch’zar hive mind song … so many voices and not all of them human.

Ethan recoiled, but Emma held his hand firmly, and his mind snapped back to the connection.

And last came visions: hatching from a giant egg and climbing out with uncertain legs; taking wobbly steps on the sandy floor of the nursery cave; eating and fighting and clambering over the hundreds of other juvenile ant lions; firing artillery with thunderous reports at a diving wasp I.C.E. as it swooped down, snatched a train car, and smashed it into a mountainside (that had been Ethan at the Geo Transit Tunnel!); scrabbling through a forest, knocking over trees, and digging through smoldering wreckage.

Ethan recognized this last scene as showing the remains of the Ch’zar command zeppelin that Sterling Squadron and the other Resister pilots had destroyed. The Ch’zar had come
so
close to finding the Seed Bank.

Then the image of a distant mountainside that Ethan had never seen before. The ant lion had so fully camouflaged itself in the surrounding rocks and foliage that it couldn’t even see its own limbs. There was motion on the mountain, and then a stream of wasps and hornets emerged from a hidden tunnel.

The Ch’zar didn’t use that hornet breed. Those were Resister I.C.E.s.

Ethan pulled away from Emma.

She broke contact, too, and turned, astonished, to Ethan.

“That was Jack Figgin’s squadron,” Emma whispered. “The Black and Blue Hawks.”

“I know,” Ethan told her. “The Ch’zar have seen the Seed Bank entrance.” He felt the blood drain from his face. “They know where our base is.”

   
18
   
MEDICINE

ETHAN AND EMMA BOTH STOOD THERE, STUNNED
.

Ethan’s head spun. The Seed Bank’s location was the
one
secret the Ch’zar were never supposed to find out … because if they did, they could destroy the last fortress of free humanity.

He glanced at his sister. She twisted the end of her braid into a knot of worry.

“They couldn’t know,” she whispered. “They would’ve attacked already.”

“I wouldn’t,” Ethan said slowly. “Not after the pasting we gave them the last time they got close. I’d wait, regroup,
and be one hundred percent sure that I had enough force to make the next battle totally lopsided.”

There was a moment of silence between them.

Ethan couldn’t believe this, even though he’d “seen” it himself. It was his worst nightmare.

“Do you think that’s why they’re here? In these caverns?” Emma asked. “So many enemy I.C.E.s”—her eyes unfocused—“lying in wait, hidden under the neighborhoods?”

Ethan could see it in his mind, laid out as if it were a map. If he were the Ch’zar, he’d gradually build up his forces in secret and ring the Seed Bank. Then he’d spring, not giving an enemy that had beaten and outsmarted him so many times before
any
chance to escape the trap.

“We have to warn Colonel Winter and Dr. Irving,” he said.

“Is there time?” Emma asked with a tremble in her voice.

“There has to be.”

He started toward the far tunnel, the one that Emma had told him led to the sewers and outside, but then halted.

“Wait,” he said. “There’s one more thing. This is a repair bay, right?”

“Sure,” Emma said, “but we’ve got to—”