Titan Base (7 page)

Ethan really wanted to use the blue flare and call for help. But Paul would only try to fly in and end up getting the I.C.E.s blasted by the city’s missile-defense system.

No. The priority had to be to warn the Seed Bank and not to send more Resister pilots here to their deaths.

He aimed the signal flare into the sky and pulled the cord.

A tremendous
whooosh
exploded from the end of the flare. Two balls of fire shot a mile into the air. Tiny
parachutes deployed at the top of their trajectories and the fire hung there—brilliant and completely obvious even in full daylight.

He scanned the skies for any sign of a sleek dragonfly streaking away at supersonic speeds. Nothing.

Ethan hoped Madison had followed orders. He sighed, wondering if he’d ever see her again.

He blinked and refocused.

Every robot stopped and tracked the flares with their antennae, and then followed their twin smoky trails … right back to where Ethan stood.

His blood turned cold.

The robots swiveled and sped toward him.

Ethan shook off his mental vapor lock, tossed the spent flare tube, and ran for his life.

His boots pounded over metal paving stones worn smooth by countless wheel tracks. He jumped a five-foot gap in the road onto an ascending ramp.

He glanced down into that gap. It stretched as far as he could see into the gloom, revealing a huge undercity filled with churning machines, giant gears, smoking factories, and conveyor belts.

That would have been a long, long fall.

Ethan turned and sprinted up the path. His legs burned from the effort.

Dozens of robots followed to the edge—one plowed into the back of the pack and sent the lead mechanical man tumbling over and into the gap.

They reversed and backtracked, looking for another way onto the ramp he was on.

That gave Ethan a moment. He got to a platform with an obelisk monument. It was a shard of crystal that towered ten feet tall, covered with delicate mathematical equations.

He turned and scanned the city.

Felix and Emma were on a balcony three stories up.

Felix waved to him, then pointed emphatically to the left.

Ethan looked back, trying to see what Felix was pointing at, but sunlight reflected off the dome two levels down and blinded him.

He raised his hands to shield his eyes from the glare … and found it wasn’t glare from the sun.

A cluster of robots had gathered by that dome. The bright reflection was the light of their plasma beam weapons building charge behind their helmets.

Ethan’s combat reflexes kicked in.

He jumped and rolled behind the obelisk.

Multiple plasma bursts hit where he’d been standing like an idiot a split second before. Heat splashed and
melted the steel subsurface and left a cooling molten crater.

White-hot panic shot through him.

These robots weren’t trying to wing him and bring him in alive. They wanted to burn him to cinders!

Ethan darted up the ramp and into the shadows on the far side of a skyscraper. Scalloped columns rose around him like a redwood forest. They’d give him some cover. He weaved back and forth, running, and spotted Felix and Emma just ahead.

Felix still carried Angel, who was now limp in his arms.

Ethan jogged up to them. “Is she okay?”

Felix tensed and shifted Angel’s weight. “I can’t tell,” he said. “She passed out. She’s breathing, but still bleeding, too, Ethan.”

Ethan’s instinct was to help her, get his first-aid kit and patch her up. But they had to find a safe place first. Otherwise, they’d end up stabilizing Angel only to all get blasted.

“Was there any place back that way to hide?” Ethan asked.

“Hide, yes,” Felix told him, “but they’re dead ends.”

There was no way Ethan was getting backed into a corner.

“We saw another path,” Emma said. She reached up to nervously twist her braid but then stopped herself. “It goes
up and through the city center. I think we could find a way into one of those big towers. At least from the top we’d be able to see what’s coming after us.”

Ethan laid out the tactical situation in his mind.

New Taos was a maze of steel and crystal. Skyscrapers in the center. Caves and factories underground. The Resisters were surrounded by an enemy who knew the terrain better than they did.

Felix was great at hand-to-hand combat, and Ethan and his sister were okay with the boot-camp training they’d received. The three of them combined, though, wouldn’t be a match for even
one
of the hydraulically powered robots … and there were
hundreds
rolling around this city looking to blast them to atoms.

Unlike combat in the air, where Ethan felt he had countless ways to fight and move, his options down here were limited. None of them good.

He moved to Angel and brushed the bangs away from her closed eyes. She was breathing, but her skin was cold. He didn’t like it.

They had to find a place to rest and take care of her fast.

Ethan nodded at Emma. “We’ll go with your plan,” he told her. “Maybe up high we can spot a way out.”

Emma led them up a new path that wound around
the side of the skyscraper. “There was a wide balcony way up there,” she said, starting to pant. “I thought I saw doorways into the building.”

Ethan and Felix followed her up the ramp, which had no handrails. He glanced over his shoulder as they climbed higher.

From this height, New Taos looked like a platter of jewels. It was dazzling. And completely dead.

Ethan wondered what the place had been like before the Ch’zar—before the human war had turned this desert into a radioactive wasteland.

How could the people here have had so much and then thrown it all away?

They ran as fast as they could, but the steep ramp and the spent adrenaline took their toll. Ethan pumped his legs to keep going. His muscles burned and trembled. It had to be harder for Felix who, even as strong as he was, had to carry Angel.

They were all huffing and puffing as the incline leveled out to a twenty-foot-wide ledge that encircled the top of the skyscraper. They were a quarter mile up.

Ethan scanned the desert around the city. There were no vapor trails in the air. No sign of the rest of Sterling Squadron leaving the region.

There should’ve been something.

“We … can … rest … now,” Emma said, totally out of breath and looking ready to collapse. She bent over for a moment, then stood and staggered toward arches that she’d thought were doors. She halted and her head dropped in dejection.

Beyond the arches weren’t doors … but more wall.

Ethan stared.

No. There were seams in the center of the arches like maybe they were elevator doors.

Felix saw it, too. “There has to be a control panel here to open them,” he said.

As if by magic, the moment he said that the doors slid apart.

Robots rolled out.

Dozens of mechanical creatures wheeled onto the balcony and surrounded them.

Ethan, Felix, and Emma went back to back. Felix clutched Angel closer to him protectively. Ethan and Emma looked at one another. There was no regret or fear in Emma’s eyes—just a fierce determination that this couldn’t be the end for them.

Ethan felt the same way. It couldn’t end like this.

Or if it
was
the end for them, they’d go down fighting.

Together Ethan and Emma raised their hands, curled their fingers into fists, and braced.

   
7
   
BEFORE YOU GET SQUISHED

ETHAN RAISED ONE FIST TO SHIELD HIS EYES
from the blinding illumination of the charging particle beams.

His lips pulled back in a snarl, but inside he trembled.

He’d faced particle beams before—even without an I.C.E.—but never so many energy beams trained on him at once.

There was nowhere to jump to, and, worse, there was no way to save his team.

He’d failed. He’d blown the mission. He’d let everyone in the Resistance down. His best friend … 
the new recruits … his sister … they’d all depended on him.

The quavering fear inside him stilled and heated into anger: at himself.

The air rumbled and shook like thunder, like the atmosphere was going to explode around him—which might not be far from the truth when all that particle beam energy blasted him.

Instead, that thunder just got louder and louder.

It wasn’t coming from the robots, because they swiveled around, aiming their antennae, trying to locate the source of the noise.

Emma and Felix took a step toward the ramp, but Ethan held up a hand, indicating they should wait. He had a feeling about this … and running away, well, how could they outrun those wheeled robots? They’d get picked off. One, two, three—
blammo
!

A claw gripped the edge of the balcony. It was four feet long, curved like a scythe, and ghostly green.

“No way,” Emma breathed.

A titanic praying mantis climbed onto the ledge. Paul Hicks in his “Crusher” I.C.E.

Felix whooped.

The mantis swept aside three robots with one rake of
its forelimb—with so much force their steel arms wrenched and pulled out of the sockets and sent metallic bits arcing into the sky.

Ethan’s snarl turned into a grin.

He had no clue how Paul had gotten here without getting blasted by the city’s missile-defense system, but at the moment, he didn’t care.

A housefly that weighed two tons zipped in and hovered next to the mantis. It touched down with a thud that shuddered the platform. The fly plowed into the nearest robot, throwing it so hard at the nearby robots it took off their heads and sent them skittering like soccer balls.

Emma had to dodge as one almost struck her in the chest.

The remaining robots scattered. They ignored their human opponents and re-formed to lay down overlapping fire at the I.C.E.s with their particle beams.

Two robots shot at the mantis. Paul took a direct hit on the thorax, and the exoskeleton heated, pitted, and started to melt.

The praying mantis jumped into the air, more energy beams arcing after it, but it dove low and the platform blocked their shots. Sparks fountained where the beams hit the metal and boiled away a gap in the ledge.

Lee’s fly darted into the sky, zigging and zagging faster than any of the robot’s beams could track him.

The robots crowded to the edge of the platform to get a better shot. More rolled out of the open elevator doorways and did the same.

They still completely ignored Ethan, Emma, and Felix.

And why not? They were no threat.

If they were ever going to run away, now was the time.

Ethan hesitated. He bristled at the notion that he was helpless. He couldn’t run out in the middle of a fight—even if every opponent here outweighed him ten times over. If a few more particle beams hit Paul, he’d be too damaged to fly.

Ethan tightened his fists and charged. Emma caught on and sprinted alongside him.

They plowed into a robot in the crowd near the platform’s edge—with just enough momentum to tip it over. It bumped four more, and those robots clung to six others for balance, and all eleven of the mechanical men toppled over the edge.

Emma and Ethan did a quick high five.

But then a ring of robots turned to face them.

Before they could tear Ethan and Emma apart, though,
the platform rumbled once more. Several tons of blood-red locust and silver cockroach hovered up and over the edge.

Between the two gigantic insects, they carried Felix’s rhinoceros beetle, Angel’s black stealth wasp, Emma’s killer ladybug, and to Ethan’s complete joy … his wasp.

They dropped the inert I.C.E.s onto the platform—crushing the robots under them.

Paul’s praying mantis and Lee’s housefly dove back in and blasted the remaining mechanical men with laser fire.

Grenade launchers popped open from the sides of Oliver’s cockroach. There were six dull thumps, and six rocket-propelled grenades corkscrewed through the air into the open elevator doorways.

Explosions knocked Ethan onto his butt.

The elevators blew to smithereens, collapsing the side of the building. No more robots would be coming out that way.