Read Sterling Squadron for Free Online Page B

materialized in midair, in full color, rivers and coastlines animated. Each red dot was a beach ball–sized sphere.
    Ethan walked around the larger map and recognized several of the bug outlines. They were Ch’zar I.C.E. suits: the red-and-black assault wasps; the mosquitoes he’d fought in simulation; even Thunderbolt-class locusts.
    He shuddered seeing that last one. A giant locust had almost torn off his arm at the Battle of Santa Blanca.
    Ethan spotted one number on the bottom of the map. It was a date, two years ago.
    He frowned. Dr. Irving had said
numbers
. Plural.
    “Maybe if you zoom in more,” he suggested to Madison.
    She typed in commands.
    A red insect symbol enlarged and split into a dozen. Next to each of those were numbers: 8, 5, 12 …
    “Coordinates?”
    “They’re not latitude or longitude,” Madison said. She stood up and strolled over to Ethan and the map.
    The rotten feeling in Ethan’s stomach finally, maybe, made sense. “What if they are just numbers,” he whispered. “The number of Ch’zar units?”
    Madison looked back and forth, and frowned as sheadded them up. “That can’t be. There are too many of them.”
    The date on the map popped to today’s date.
    The numbers next to the insect symbols jumped—13, 9, 25 …
    The date rolled over one month, two months, three months into the future.
    The numbers grew at an alarming rate—53 … 178 and 213 …
    Suddenly Ethan felt nothing. He was numb. In shock.
    By Christmas there could be
tens of thousands
of Ch’zar to fight.
    Once before, he’d seen satellite images of the world and positions of these Ch’zar units … only then he’d guessed they were outnumbered ten or, at worst, a hundred to one.
    Never
this
many.
    Ethan imagined the sky covered with an endless carpet of black flying bugs, shaking the earth with their collective droning.
    If they had any idea where the Resisters’ Seed Bank base was, the last free-willed humans on the planet would be toast.
    “How many do we have to fight them?” Ethan whispered. “I mean here. Resisters.”
    Madison was in a trance, her eyes full of the reflection of the map.
    He gave her a shove. She snapped out of it, shot him an irritated glare, and one delicate hand involuntarily curled into a fist.
    “We are
so
dead,” she said. “We only have twenty-seven flight-ready pilots.”
    She looked angry and brave, but underneath, Ethan could see she was scared out of her mind.
    Like him.
    “Wait a second,” Ethan said. “Just twenty-seven? I’ve seen hundreds of I.C.E. suits in the hangars.”
    “Don’t be so thick, Blackwood. There are hundreds of
suits
. That’s never been our problem. There’re just so many of us born underground and free. And only about a third of the kids here have the mental strength to control the insect mind in an I.C.E. unit.”
    Ethan turned back to the map and lost himself in the sea of red bug symbols and numbers.
    Even if they flew perfect missions against the enemy, had kill ratios of a hundred to one, they’d be vastly, enormously,
fatally
outnumbered.
    “I’m beginning to rethink you,” Madison muttered, looking at him through slitted eyes.
    “What does
that
mean?”
    “It means that even though you’re a total pain, Blackwood, we could use a dozen more numskull, super-stubborn neighborhood kids like you to fight for us.”
    “I thought Dr. Irving said I was the only one from a neighborhood to ever get an I.C.E. suit to fly.”
    She didn’t answer, staring at the map as if some new fact might pop up that would change the odds.
    “What about Paul?” Ethan asked. “Colonel Winter said she should have ‘left him where they found him.’ What’d she mean by that?”
    Madison faced Ethan, confusion crinkling her nose. “That’s right. Paul isn’t from the Seed Bank. No one said where he was from. It was this big secret. But we all stopped asking when we saw how he could fly.”
    They looked at each other—then at the computer