Then, to my horror, I watched as he set the power cells on all four of his ATHIDs to manual overload. In a panic, I asked Lex to patch my voice through to him.
“I already did,” she said. “He can hear you right now.”
“Dad, what are you doing?” I screamed.
But it was a rhetorical question. I knew exactly what he was doing.
He glanced up at the security camera mounted nearby—the one we were watching him on. He smiled, but he didn’t answer me. He just turned his makeshift spider-tank around and then used it to crash through the armored doors, into the command center itself. Several of the drone drivers had already climbed out of their pods and were now standing there in the middle of the room waiting for him—including one I recognized, Captain Dagh, aka Rostam, the teenage officer who had asked for my autograph. He looked completely starstruck in my father’s presence.
Admiral Vance was standing in their midst, waiting, too.
The admiral ordered his men to open fire on my father as soon as he stumbled forward into the room, but only a few of them actually obeyed. The majority of them—including Rostam—didn’t even raise their weapons, and most of those who did couldn’t seem to bring themselves to fire—not with General Xavier Lightman in their sights.
Then Vance started shooting, firing his nine-millimeter Beretta. First he took out the speakers on each of my father’s drones, silencing the music blaring out of them.
Then he turned his weapon on my father. I saw Rostam avert his gaze.
“You’re a damn fool,” Vance said, just before he opened fire on my father. Several of his men opened fire, too. Most of their shots were deflected by his shield of ATHIDs, but not all of them. A bullet grazed my father’s left leg.
He still didn’t stop coming, though.
He continued to lurch forward, piloting his makeshift ATHID spider-tank farther into the room, as more laser fire and bullets struck him and his drones, until he finally collapsed a few yards away from Admiral Vance, trapped inside the tangled wreckage of the four ATHIDs. That was when Vance finally spotted the power core overload countdowns ticking away on each of them. All of them had about ten seconds remaining.
“You guys all need to get out of here,” my father said.
Rostam and the other men turned and ran for the exit as fast as their legs would carry them. But Vance didn’t move.
“You better get going, too, Archie,” my father said. “Six seconds. Five …”
Vance shook his head and then ran to the exit before turning back.
“This was pointless!” he said. “This won’t stop us from deploying the Icebreaker, you know.”
Then he turned and ran, and the op center doors hissed closed behind him.
“I know,” I heard my father mutter to himself. “I was just trying to delay you.” Then he laughed. “My son is going to stop you.”
Then my father’s four makeshift bombs all detonated in unison, and the video feed went black.
I SCREAMED. I don’t know for how long.
When I finally got ahold of myself and returned to my senses, I checked the camera feeds from my three drones orbiting Europa. The squadron of EDA drones escorting the Icebreaker had broken formation. They were now drifting around the Icebreaker, which had discontinued its descent toward the moon.
At this very moment, I knew Admiral Vance and the other pilots who had been in control of the Icebreaker’s fighter escort were evacuating the Raven Rock installation. But I also knew that it would only be a matter of seconds before they reached a safe location and retook control of their drones and the Icebreaker. I probably had less than a minute before they started to come back online.
I left two Interceptors orbiting at a distance, took control of the third, and swooped in to attack the defenseless drones drifting helplessly in front of me.
I destroyed half of the Icebreaker’s fighter escort before I came to my senses and forgot about the rest to focus all of my fire on destroying the Icebreaker.
But I was still struggling to knock out its shields when Vance and his men seized control of their drones once again, from some new location—possibly using their QComms.
Suddenly, I found myself outnumbered and outgunned, locked into a dogfight with six Interceptors. As I moved to engage, the song “One Vision” by Queen cued up on my father’s old Raid the Arcade playlist. That finally managed to put me in the zone.
I took out four of their ships in as many seconds, leaving only two Interceptors remaining—the ones piloted by Rostam and Viper Vance.
I went after Rostam first, recklessly ramming his drone with mine. The impact set his drone careening off at an oblique angle, right into the path of one of the Icebreaker’s automated sentry guns. It exploded in a collapsing fireball.
Now it was just me and Admiral Vance.
The two of us were now locked in a fierce duel around the Icebreaker as it hovered above Europa. Muffled through my headphones, I could hear the chaotic sounds of real-world combat somewhere close by—and they were growing ever closer. Spider Fighters had surrounded Starbase Ace. Cruz, Diehl, and my mother were fighting to keep them at bay, and a Basilisk was closing in on the store.
Then, at the last minute, Whoadie swooped down out of the sky in her own manned Interceptor. When the Disrupter had activated and she’d lost control of her drone, she’d decided to jump back into her prototype Interceptor and had hauled ass here from New Orleans to help us. She took out the Basilisk on her first pass with a shot right between the eyes, then swung around again and strafed the Spider Fighters, allowing me to focus my attention back on my duel with Admiral Vance, halfway across the solar system.
I knew that Vance had flown on my father’s wing at Moon Base Alpha—but he turned out to be even better than I expected.
Before I knew what had happened, Vance had swung around on my tail and blasted my Interceptor to pieces.
Then he turned and continued to escort the Icebreaker to its target. But Vance didn’t know that I still had those two last Interceptors in reserve, waiting in a holding pattern nearby.
I took control of another ship and went after Vance. I managed to strafe him with a barrage of plasma bolts, but his shields held and his ship remained undamaged.
He killed me again. He was really good. Almost as good as my father, but not quite.
I took control of my last ship, and once again intercepted Vance and the Icebreaker—just as it came within firing range of Europa’s surface. It was now or never.
I pushed aside my grief and paralyzing rage and focused on what I wanted now, more than anything else in this life—to make my father proud of me, and to make certain that his sacrifice had not been in vain.
I firewalled my Interceptor’s throttle and locked horns with Vance’s drone, which was still flying in a protective pattern around the Icebreaker. But his ship’s power core was running low now, while I had a fresh ship with a full charge.
There was no time now for subtlety. I put my fighter into a dive and came straight at him with all guns blazing while he did the same, the two of us playing an outer-space variation on a game of chicken, unloading all of our weapons at one another simultaneously.
A split second before we collided, his depleted shields failed—but mine held, allowing me to destroy his ship with a well-placed plasma bolt. It incinerated his ship, just as mine flew straight through the ensuing fireball.
I didn’t stop to celebrate. I swooped down to take out the Icebreaker, too—just seconds before it launched its nukes at Europa’s surface.
“Don’t do it, kid!” Vance screamed over the comlink channel, now powerless to stop me. “If you do this, you’ll be personally responsible for the extinction of the entire human race.”
I went ahead and did it anyway.
When I fired a last burst from my sun guns, the Icebreaker went up in a brilliant, soundless explosion of light.
THAT WAS ALL it took.
In that one moment, it appeared that I had negotiated a cease-fire. The news was already coming in over all of the EDA comlink channels. All around the world, the alien drones and ships had just suddenly deactivated, allowing themselves to be easily destroyed.
I sat there, listening to the news the war was over, trying to make myself believe it. Then, just as I was about to disengage from my Interceptor and remove my helmet, I saw the surface of Europa crack open beneath me, breaking apart like an eggshell as a giant chrome orb rose out of the hidden ocean below, ripping a massive, circular hole in the surface ice as it zoomed up into orbit and began to hover in space directly in front of my ship. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the object was actually an icosahedron, with twenty symmetrical, faceted sides—a “twenty-sider,” Shin would have probably called it.
The icosahedron hovered in front of my ship. Then it began to speak to me.
“I am the Emissary,” it said. “I am an intelligent machine created by a galactic community of peaceful civilizations known as the Sodality.”
The Emissary quickly explained to me that there were never actually any extraterrestrial beings living on Europa at all. Only microbial life had evolved in the moon’s subsurface ocean. No intelligent beings—indigenous or otherwise—had ever lived there.
“Then who built the armada that just attacked Earth?” I asked. I felt like a character in someone else’s dream. “Who have we been fighting this entire time?”