Operation Inferno

Operation Inferno by Eric Nylund

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Authors: Eric Nylund
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his people.
    She must have picked up on his feelings, because she paused, sighed, and said, “Please, Lieutenant. It’s urgent.”
    “Yeah, sure,” Ethan said. “Felix, give them a hand. Emma? Madison? Show Rebecca’s people the way to the infirmary.”
    Madison and Emma saluted and immediatelymoved toward the flight deck exit, leading Rebecca’s people. Felix got Kristov and a half dozen other kids to help unload the luna moth carrier that Rebecca had ordered to rendezvous with their two squadrons en route back to Titan Base.
    “If I might suggest, Lieutenant,” Rebecca said, “you and I should lend a hand, too. I’ll explain more as we walk.”
    Ethan followed her to the luna moth carrier. The I.C.E. had seen some action. Half its silvery scales were scorched. The inside cargo space, big enough to drive a truck through, was stacked to the top with cylinders nine feet long, three feet across, and made of brushed aluminum. There was a small window on each cylinder. A tiny computer display had been epoxied next to each window, and the display winked with graphs and symbols Ethan didn’t recognize.
    He peered though a window, but it was frosted over on the inside. He went to touch it, but instinctively jerked his hand away from the intense cold.
    “Here.” Rebecca grabbed two hydraulically powered hand trucks. Each of the wheeled units could lift and roll a half ton of cargo. She rolled one dolly at Ethan. She then checked the displays of several cylinders,found one she was looking for, and slid her hand truck under one end and dragged it out a bit.
    Ethan wheeled his hand truck around and slipped the edge under the cylinder’s other end. Together they rolled the cylinder off the moth and onto the flight deck. The hand truck registered a weight of only two hundred pounds. Whatever was inside was a lot lighter than Ethan expected.
    But
what
exactly was he expecting?
    They followed the line of other Resisters wheeling cylinders off the flight deck and into tunnel 414. The base’s infirmary was near the flight deck. That made sense because that’s where you’d expect injuries to come in.
    Still,
close
on Titan Base meant a two-minute jog.
    “This place is huge,” Rebecca said, staring over her shoulder, back at the canyon-like walls of the flight bay.
    “You have
no
idea,” Ethan told her.
    “Well, I guess before you tell me about this base,” she said, “I owe you an explanation about us.” She nodded at the cylinder. “And them.”
    Them?
Ethan made a mental note. He bet it had something to do with her saying that there were more survivors … not alive … and not exactly dead either.
    “After we bombed the lead Ch’zar command carrier at the Seed Bank,” she said, still walking, “we got new orders from Colonel Winter.”
    With a chill, Ethan recalled how the colonel had ordered them to retreat, find a secret supply cache, and live to fight another day … while she then blew up the mountain containing the Seed Bank so the Ch’zar wouldn’t get them.
    Leaving the other Resisters behind had been one of the hardest things Ethan had ever done.
    He blinked back tears. “Yeah, I remember.”
    “She ordered us
back
to base.”
    Ethan almost tripped, he was so surprised. He caught himself on the hand truck. “But the Seed Bank—”
    “Yeah, blew up,” Rebecca said. Her frown deepened so lines etched her forehead. “It was a superclose call that we didn’t get blasted to atoms along with the rest of the mountain. We landed in an auxiliary hangar I didn’t even know existed. Dr. Irving met us there and told us they had all sorts of contingency plans. He said,
‘It was only a matter of time before the Ch’zar found us, my dear.’
Can you believe that?”
    “Wait … you saw Dr. Irving
alive
? Was that before the place went sky-high?”
    Rebecca stopped and took a deep breath. “It’s complicated. Let me finish, and you’ll understand everything when we get to the

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