Armada

My father tapped another icon, and five of the eight cockpit canopies slid open. As I ran over to the nearest Interceptor, a panel slid open in the aft side of its hull and a metal stepladder unfolded to the stone floor at my feet with a metallic clang. I heard the same sound three more times in rapid succession on either side of me, as Debbie, Whoadie, and Chén each approached a ship.

It was the first time I’d been inside a real cockpit of any kind—much less that of an interplanetary spacecraft. But it didn’t feel like the first time. The controller setup inside was identical to those in the drone command pods, and those hadn’t been all that different from the simple plastic flight stick and throttle rig I’d been using in my bedroom for years.

Sitting in our open cockpits, we were now at eye level with my father, who remained behind the command console on the elevated command platform in front of us, so I was able to see the array of display screens in front of him.

“When these ships are in flight, each of them is enclosed in a spherical no-inertia field,” he said. “So flying these ships from inside won’t seem any different than piloting them remotely. Except for one thing, of course—if you get shot down piloting one of these, you won’t be able to take control of another drone. Because you’ll be dead.”

When he saw our reactions to this statement, he showed us their main safety feature. “Don’t worry. The cockpit module inside each of these ships is actually a self-contained ejection pod. It’s supposed to deploy automatically in the event of a direct hit, like airbags.”

“Supposed to?” I said.

“These ships are all prototypes,” he said. “I don’t think they got much testing.” My father’s hands continued to fly across the control panel. From my vantage point in the cockpit, I could see the control screen over his shoulder, and it seemed that he was pulling up the flight plans for the three remaining Interceptors—the ones we were about to leave behind. He pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket, consulted it, and began typing, as if he was punching in a route for the unmanned Interceptors, using the paper as a reference. Then he began to access a series of hardware configuration menus I’d never seen before.

When my father finished working at the bunker’s command console, he powered it off, ran down the metal catwalk, and jumped into the cockpit of his own Interceptor, sliding down into the leather pilot seat like a kid sliding down a banister.

The canopies of our five cockpits slid closed with a pressurized hiss, our engines screamed in my ears as they powered up to full readiness—and then the small hangar itself depressurized and its armored doors slid open above, revealing a rectangular swath of the starry lunar sky.

We blasted out of the crater and rocketed around the moon’s opposite side, and the fragile Earth became visible to us once again, hovering in the blackness ahead.

Over the comm channel, I heard my father gasp at the sight—one he hadn’t seen with his own eyes in an entire lifetime. My lifetime.

“There it is,” he said softly. “Home sweet home. Man, I really missed it.”

I’d missed it, too, I realized. And I’d been gone less than a day.

As our five ships moved into formation and turned homeward, toward Earth, I checked my scope and saw that the three unmanned Interceptors were heading in the opposite direction, out into space, toward whatever destination my father had programmed into them.

I turned my gaze back to Earth and watched it begin to grow in size as we approached, until its blue curve completely filled the view outside of my spacecraft.

My father sent a tactical map to the display screens inside our cockpits. “They’re dividing their forces in half again,” my father said over the comm. “See?”

He was right. Half of the vanguard’s remaining forces appeared to be descending on mainland China, while the other half continued to escort the Disrupter, which was heading off in a different direction, along with the alien drones that had survived the assault on Moon Base Alpha.

“Command thinks the Disrupter is probably going to make landfall somewhere along the Antarctic Peninsula. They’re sending every Interceptor they can spare to try and take it down. The rest of our aerospace forces are currently defending Shanghai.”

“Shanghai!” Chén repeated, followed by something in his native tongue. A second later, my QComm translated: “My family lives just outside the city limits. But my sister is stationed at a drone operations base in the center of downtown. I have to go help her!”

“No, we have to go after the Disrupter,” my father said. “They’ll activate it as soon as they reach the surface, and then only manned ships like these will continue to function. All the EDA’s drones will fall out of the sky.”

“What about the conventional air force?” Debbie asked. “Can’t they help?”

“They’ll try,” he said. “But the Disrupter knocks out all wireless and radio communications, too. It alters Earth’s magnetic field and plays havoc with GPS satellites, too. Our conventional aircraft will all be flying blind. And they might as well be going up against Godzilla. Conventional fighters won’t stand a chance. It’s up to us.”

Just as my father finished his sentence, we received word that the Disrupter had already made landfall, before our ships even reached the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

But the Europans didn’t activate their ultimate weapon then, even though they could have.

For some reason, they waited.

They waited until the five of us got there to switch it on.

WHEN OUR TINY squadron of five Interceptors reached the Disrupter’s last known position, just off the Antarctic Peninsula, the battle was kind of hard to miss. The massive black dodecahedron hovered just above the landscape like a floating mountain, spinning like a top as it finally activated its pulsing coupler beam and fired down into the melting ice below. The powerful beam sheared away huge chunks of glacier and sent them plunging into the icy water.

The clear blue arctic sky around the Disrupter was a chaotic cloud, packed with thousands upon thousands of enemy fighters locked in fierce aerial combat with an even greater number of Interceptor and WASP drones, all swarming and diving to strafe the transparent deflector shield that surrounded the skin of the spinning Disrupter in their midst. The Disrupter’s protective shield was already beginning to pulse and flicker on my HUD, indicating that it would soon fail. Of course, when it did, there was still the escort of Glaive Fighters orbiting around it, dogfighting a steady onslaught of gamer-controlled drones.

Fusion reactor detonations kept firing off every few seconds like popcorn, further weakening the shield. It flickered and pulsed more rapidly, and I thought the timing of our arrival just might turn out to be perfect.

Then the Disrupter activated itself.

Every one of our thousands of drones froze, and then, in unison, they began to drop out of the sky like pieces of leaden ash.

Meanwhile, of course, the thousands of alien fighters kept flying, unaffected—with their operators safely back on Europa and out of the Disrupter’s range, its field had no effect on them.

A few seconds after their links went dead, the EDA drones’ emergency fail-safes activated and their autopilots kicked in, attempting to right the drones and land them safely on the nearest patch of ground—or in this case, the crumbling ice shelf. Most of the drones I saw got picked off by enemy fire before they could make it to the ground safely, and most of the others crashed into the ocean or the ice and were lost.

In a blink, the Disrupter had rendered every single drone in the Earth Defense Alliance’s entire global arsenal inoperable.

I knew the same thing must be happening at that same moment over Shanghai, Karachi, Melbourne, and everywhere else around the world as the millions of videogame-trained civilians who had been waging drone warfare against the alien invaders from their laptops and game consoles just a few seconds earlier now found themselves staring at a “Quantum Link Lost” error message.

Earth’s mighty gamer army was out of commission, unable to do anything now but sit and wait for the end.

I saw a few other manned Interceptors continue to attack the Disrupter, along with several squadrons of conventional military fighter aircraft. But they were now vastly outnumbered, in addition to being outgunned, and they were getting massacred.

The sky surrounding the Disrupter now contained only enemy ships—an unopposed swarm of Glaives and Wyverns. The now-dormant ATHIDs and Sentinels standing on the ice shelf below were being picked off like beer cans by the Spider Fighters and Basilisks marching on them from all sides.

Our five Interceptors continued to dive into the heart of the enemy’s forces as a few other stray manned Interceptors formed up just ahead of me, on my father’s wing—only to get blasted to smithereens a few seconds later, lighting up the sky on either side of him. But my father piloted his ship through the onslaught, untouched—and so did I. Miraculously unharmed.

I pitched into a barrel roll as I flew through the flaming debris, silently cursing my father. He’d planted the seeds of doubt in my head, and now I suddenly saw evidence to support his theory everywhere I looked: My father, my friends, and I continued to streak and loop through the chaos, effortlessly blasting enemy fighters out of the sky one after the other while laser fire and plasma bolts streaked past us on all sides—just like we used to when we played Armada together.