Ethan braced himself. He couldn't stop shaking from the adrenaline thundering through his body.

He was pretty sure he was about to die.

Surrounded by a faster, deadlier enemy and outnumbered--it qualified for "sitting duck" status.

"More incoming missiles!" Madison screamed over the radio. "I now count forty."

These weren't like any Ch'zar missiles Ethan had ever seen. There were no organic parts. In fact, they reminded Ethan of the model rockets he and his sister used to launch. They had rivets and gleaming aluminum hulls, even serial numbers painted on their sides. The one major difference? These rockets were thirty feet long and exploded on contact.

Ethan felt smothered inside his cockpit--a closet-like space with blinking indicators, "breathing" air vents, radar screens, and camera displays that tracked missile vapor trails screwing through the air toward his position.

He piloted one of the most advanced fighting craft ever devised: a three-ton mechanical insect hybrid called an insectoid combat exoskeleton (I.C.E. for short). Its armor shrugged off bullets, fire, and crash landings. Its stinger laser could fry through a foot of titanium alloy steel.

If that weren't enough, flying in a wedge formation off his wingtips were the other eight I.C.E.s that made up Sterling Squadron. Together they'd fought off armies and aerial attack groups.

But nothing like this.

These missiles had appeared out of nowhere--all closing in on his team at supersonic speeds.

From his vantage point of thirty thousand feet, the attack pattern looked like a gigantic flower blossoming among the fluffy clouds. It was easy to forget it was actually several tons of high-explosive ordnance moving at Mach speeds.

A few missiles . . . he could've dodged, or even survived a direct hit.

But they could never outmaneuver so many. And he couldn't outrun a missile. Even if he could, there was nowhere to run. The missiles had them surrounded in a rapidly shrinking circle.

It was a perfect trap.

What really bugged Ethan, though, was that there were no alien Ch'zar units in radar range that could have aimed and fired the stupid things.

Of course, there shouldn't be any Ch'zar out here. This was the middle of a restricted radiation zone, what used to be the southwestern region of the United States. The aliens didn't come out here, because they were smart. That radiation killed you quick.

"Ethan," Felix whispered over a private radio channel. "What do we do?"

Ethan snapped out of it. His thoughts had spiraled out of control.

"Get your head in the game, Blackwood," he told himself.

"Didn't catch that last," Felix said. "Repeat, Lieutenant?"

"Never mind," Ethan growled, angry about freezing up.

He felt the brain of his wasp I.C.E. through a telepathic link. The insect wanted to fly and fight and engage the enemy.

Not this time. That'd just get them all blown up.

Ethan took stock of the battlefield.

The opposing side had forty missiles. They outnumbered Ethan and his team. They had superior acceleration.

On his side were nine I.C.E. units with an arsenal of lasers, bombs, particle cannons, and strength enough to tear through steel like it was tissue paper.

What else? Lots of airspace to fly . . . but in a quickly shrinking circle of death.

Thirty thousand feet below were red rock and sand.

Ethan examined the map on his display. There were latitude and longitude numbers, ground elevation lines, clouds with arrows indicating wind direction, blinking radar contacts, and patterns of undulating green--cool mint that intensified in spots to that fluorescent "puke" green you found on poison warning labels.

That meant radiation.

The fainter green parts were trails of airborne radioactive dust. The bright spots were sources. Superdeadly.

"I got it," Ethan told Felix.

Ethan opened a radio channel with his squadron. "Heat your jets and prime afterburners. Ready on my mark. Follow me in and keep tight."

Sterling Squadron's I.C.E.s hovered close to Ethan's wasp--Felix's gigantic blue rhinoceros beetle, Lee's blur of a housefly, Madison's glittering emerald dragonfly, Ethan's sister Emma's lethal ladybug, Angel's black wasp, Paul's praying mantis, Oliver's mirror-silver cockroach, and Kristov's blood-red locust.

Armored chitin shifted and jet engines fired with extra power in the collective continuous rumble of a hurricane.

The intense noise reassured Ethan.

They had power. They had speed.

But he'd better be right about this, or they would all be dead, too.

Angel's Nightmare-class black wasp veered close to Madison's dragonfly. The move was aggressive--it looked like Angel was going to pounce on Madison! There'd been some serious hate between those two ever since they'd laid eyes on each other at Sterling. Ethan had no clue why.

At the last second, the black wasp reversed its wings. There was some buffeting back and forth between the two I.C.E.s, and then the wasp swatted at the dragonfly. The dragonfly darted away.

"Hey!" Ethan yelled over the radio. "The enemy is out there, you two. Cool it. That's an order!"

Of all the wrong times to fight each other.

Since the Sterling Reform School kids had been added to the group, friction between them and the "old" Resisters had been running hotter than a solar flare.

Madison's and Angel's I.C.E.s settled into formation.

Ethan hissed out his frustration and turned back to the maps on his side displays, tabbing through elevations, trying to get a sense of how the clouds and radioactivity drifted in all three dimensions. He calibrated the screens to wide-view mode--ten miles across so the missiles made a ring around the screens' edges.

The radiation rose ten thousand feet into the air, then bent, wavered, and dissipated in the prevailing winds. It reminded him of movies he'd seen of kelp forests in the ocean. He saw a pattern to it . . . as long as the winds didn't shift.

The missiles were only a few miles away now.

Ethan's heart raced.

His mind slowed.

He took a deep breath.