Armada

My father shook his head. “No they don’t,” he said. “Once people find out about the invasion, chaos will spread like wildfire. Civilization will start to break down.”

Graham made a derisive sound. “The EDA knows people will be more likely to stand their ground and fight if they don’t have time to turn tail and run for the hills.”

I looked at my father. He briefly met my gaze, then glanced over at Debbie, who was staring down at the countdown clock on her QComm. It was superimposed over a photo she’d set as her display background—three smiling, dark-haired boys resting their chins on the edge of a swimming pool in the bright sunshine.

“Handsome boys,” Graham said.

“Thank you,” she replied. “I’m worried about them.” Then she reached out and covered the countdown clock with her finger so she could still see her sons’ faces.

“What about you two?” Debbie asked, addressing Shin and Graham. “Is the EDA going to let you contact your families, too?”

“I’m a bit nervous about that, actually,” Graham said. “Me mum is still alive, but she thinks I died back in the nineties. My father had already passed by the time I was recruited, so I left her all alone—and she’s been alone ever since. The EDA has taken care of her financially, of course, but emotionally, well, what can one do?”

Graham blinked a few times, then swallowed hard.

“I hope she still recognizes me,” he said. “And if she does, I hope the sight of me doesn’t give her a coronary—that is, if the PM’s address doesn’t do that first.” He shook his head. “The poor old girl is in her sixties now.”

I wasn’t all that worried about how my own mother would react to the news our planet was being invaded. She had always been the picture of calm in the face of crisis. She seemed to thrive on it. But when she found out my father was still alive, well—that was another story.

“And you, Shin?” Debbie asked quietly. “Do you have any family, dear?”

Shin’s smile faded slightly. “Unfortunately, my parents both passed away years ago. About halfway through my tour of duty up here. So I never got to say goodbye to them, which was extremely painful at the time.” Then his expression brightened, and he reached over and gave my father’s shoulder a squeeze before slapping him on the back. “But my friend Xavier here had already gone through the same thing, and he helped me get through it. He lost his folks, too, a few—”

Shin cut himself off, then shot a nervous glance over at me and then my father, who was again staring intently at the tablecloth.

“Anyway,” Shin said, forging ahead, “right now I’m just thankful they got to live out their lives peacefully, and that they’re not around for … what’s about to happen.”

Everyone around the table nodded, save for my father, who seemed to be slowly turning to stone. Shin seemed to sense this, and he turned to me.

“How you doing, Zack?” he said. “You holding up okay?”

I nodded. Then I shook my head. Then I shrugged and shook my head again.

“Don’t look so worried,” Shin said. “The general forgot to mention one thing during his little pep talk earlier.” He gave me a conspiratorial smile. “We have a secret weapon—the greatest drone pilot who ever lived.” He jerked a thumb at my father. “Did you know that your old man has shot down over three hundred enemy ships? He currently holds the EDA record.”

“Your father has also been awarded the Medal of Honor three times, by three different presidents,” Shin said. “Bet you didn’t know that, did you?” He shook his head at my father. “He’s too modest to even tell his own son.”

“Seriously?” I asked him. “Three Medals of Honor?”

My father nodded, closing his eyes to his embarrassment—the same way I did when I received compliments.

“They were classified Medals of Honor,” my father said. “It’s not like anyone will ever find out about them.”

“I just did,” I said. “Mom will, too, when I get a chance to tell her.”

He gave me a half-smile, then dropped his eyes again.

My mother would be proud of him, but that might not be enough, and he knew it. I could see it in the defeated look that flashed across his face whenever I mentioned her. My father knew as well as I did that all of his noble motivations and heroic sacrifices might not be enough to win her forgiveness—or even her understanding—for what he’d done to us. Not in the limited amount of time she would have to do so. I still wasn’t sure if I had forgiven him.

I glanced over at my father. I knew he wasn’t planning to call my mother, but I’d do it for him, if I had to. I wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say to her, after disappearing for seventeen years—I didn’t know what I was going to say when we spoke, and I’d just seen her earlier that morning—or if she’d be willing to listen. But I had to try.

When Whoadie finished eating a moment later, she got up from the table and went over to the observation window, then spent a moment staring down at the radio dish nestled inside the enormous crater far below. “What did you say that thing was again?” she asked.

“That’s the Daedalus Observatory,” Shin said, with a tinge of pride in his voice. “It’s the largest radio telescope ever built—by humans, at least.”

“We built it to talk to the aliens?” Whoadie asked.

Shin nodded. “This crater is near the center of the moon’s far side, so this location is completely shielded from all of the radio interference created by humans, which makes it an ideal place to send and receive radio transmissions without them being monitored back on Earth.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, the Europans have never been interested in talking.”

“One of the first acts of the EDA,” Graham said, “was to create an internal task force called the Armistice Council, made up of a bunch of prominent scientists, including Carl Sagan—”

“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said, interrupting him. “How did they get Carl Sagan to keep the Europans a secret for so long?”

“He knew the news could create a worldwide panic and upend our civilization,” my father said. “He only agreed to remain silent on the condition that the EDA give him the funding necessary to educate the world’s population and try to prepare them for the news that humanity is not alone. That was how he got funding for his Cosmos television series.”

Shin nodded. “Unfortunately, Dr. Sagan passed away before things really began to escalate with the Europans.”

“The Armistice Council kept on trying to establish peace talks after he died,” Graham added, “but the squids never sent a single reply.”

“Squids?” I repeated. “I thought we didn’t know anything about the Europans’ biology?”

“That’s the official story, all right,” Graham said, adopting a conspiratorial tone. “But trust me, mate—they’re squids. The brass knows a lot more about our enemy than they let on—they always have.” He glanced at Shin, then at my father, then back at me.

“What are you talking about?” Milo asked. “The Europeans declared war on us, for no reason!”

Everyone had given up on correcting Milo every time he referred to the Europans as Europeans—even poor Graham, who actually was European.

“That’s the official story, all right,” Graham said. “But does it make any sense? Think it through. If the Europans had attacked us ten or twenty or even thirty years ago, we never would have been able to stop them.”

I sat bolt upright, then glanced at my father. But his eyes were locked on Graham.

“We couldn’t even have stopped an asteroid or a meteor from wiping us out back then, much less an angry alien species with vastly superior weaponry and technology,” Graham continued. “They had the upper hand from the start, so why didn’t they use it? Instead, they basically just handed us their technology and then gave us all the time in the world to reverse-engineer it. Then they gave us even more time to build a huge stockpile of millions of drones to defend ourselves against the drones they were building.”

It was more than a little disturbing to hear Graham vocalize many of the same questions that had been eating away at me ever since the EDA briefing.

“And they built all of their ships and drones in orbit above Europa, in plain view of Galileo’s cameras! There’s no way they weren’t aware that we were watching them. They wanted us to see! It was like they were running a nonstop, year-round episode of How It’s Made by Aliens.”

Graham noticed that Shin was now making a screw-loose gesture with his index finger and flipped him the bird as he kept on talking.

“The Europans had this huge advantage over us, but then they slowly, gradually lessened it on purpose, instead of just slaughtering us over a weekend. Why? Why send a small group of scout ships every year, year after year, to study us, mutilate our cattle, and attack our secret moon base?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “But they weren’t really even serious attacks. They never try to destroy the entire base or kill everyone inside during their annual Jovian Opposition assaults. Instead, they always do just enough damage to prove that they could destroy the whole base if they wanted to. Then they leave without actually doing it. Why?”