Armada a novel, p.34
Armada: A Novel, page 34
My mother, always cool during a crisis, ran over to guard the door behind me with an aluminum baseball bat, apparently with the intention of using it to fight off any killer alien robots that attempted to get past her. I took off my QComm, strapped it onto her right wrist, and showed her how to fire its built-in laser. She tossed her bat aside, then aimed the device at the floor and activated its beam for a split second—long enough to burn a hole in the carpet and the concrete foundation beneath.
“I got this,” she said, smiling with satisfaction. Then she aimed her new weapon back at the door, continuing to stand guard over me.
I focused my attention back on the array of monitors and controllers spread out around me. The three Interceptors my father had launched from the Icarus crater were finally closing in on Europa.
Even though I was located inside the Disrupter’s cancellation field, these three ships were millions of miles outside of it, so my quantum communication link to them was unaffected. And so, unfortunately, were the EDA’s links to the Icebreaker and its fighter escort, under the control of Vance and his underlings at Raven Rock.
I took control of the lead Interceptor, and through its cameras I could see the Icebreaker closing in on the icy moon, surrounded by its escort of two dozen drone Interceptors. I knew that those ships were under the control of the best pilots the EDA had available, and that would almost certainly include Viper and Rostam, who were both listed above me in the Armada pilot rankings for a very good reason—they were better than me.
Even with three ships, there was no way I could take them all on at once, no matter how badly I wanted to. So instead, I did as my father had instructed. I sat tight, out of sight, and waited for him to even the odds.
WHEN HE REACHED Raven Rock, my father circled high over the base, waiting until the moment the enemy activated the Disrupter. He knew exactly when it happened, because the EDA fighters and drones protecting the installation down below deactivated instantaneously.
I also lost the audio and video feeds from inside his cockpit, but a few seconds later Lex executed some further computer wizardry, and a live video image of my father’s ship reappeared at the edge of my HUD. The feed appeared to be from one of the base’s external security cameras, fed back to us through the hard-line intranet.
With the base’s defenses momentarily disabled, my father had turned his Interceptor into a steep dive, and now he appeared to be making a suicide run at the base’s armored blast doors, which were still very much closed.
As he raced toward the base, I realized he was aiming for one of the drone launch tunnels, just as I had earlier during my colossal screwup at Crystal Palace. But here, instead of being disguised as grain silos, the launch tunnel openings were camouflaged as rock formations embedded in the mountainside.
I sat in Starbase Ace, watching his progress over the base’s network of security cameras. Once his ship was inside the Raven Rock drone hangar, my father set it to hover on autopilot, then used his ship’s laser turret to cut a large hole in the ceiling. He raised his Interceptor up to the opening, opened his cockpit canopy, and jumped out, scrambling into the dust-filled level above the hangar ceiling.
Then he drew his sidearm and took off running, even deeper into the base.
I EXPECTED THE corridors to be empty, or filled with inert drones. But when the Disrupter activated, some of the base’s internal hard-wired defense turrets had remained operational, along with a few dozen tethered ATHIDs, all controlled by operators linked to them through the EDA’s hard-line intranet. They were already converging on my father’s position, under orders to stop him at all costs.
If it hadn’t been for Lex and Ray, he wouldn’t have had a chance. Thankfully, Lex was already inside the EDA’s security firewall, so she was able to access the base security system to guide my father and use it to help him avoid or evade as many of the tethered ATHIDs as she could while throwing up blast doors around his route to keep defenders away. Meanwhile, Ray used his own hard-line network access to seize control of the laser defense turrets positioned along my dad’s route and used them to blast a path through the drones stationed ahead of him.
But just when there seemed to be no stopping him—they stopped him. His luck ran out, and a pack of tethered ATHIDs got the jump on him. He managed to take them all out, but not before a stray plasma bolt hit him in the chest, and he went down.
I watched helplessly as he struggled to get back on his feet, but he couldn’t. So he began to crawl.
He pulled himself down the corridor, until he reached a charging dock where five dormant ATHIDs were stored. He opened up the maintenance access panels one at a time and entered a long code on each one, and then all four of them powered up. My father detached the tethered controllers from each drone and used them to command the four ATHIDs to lift his injured body off the ground. Then he had them interlace their eight arms and legs around his body, forming something that looked sort of like a walking spider tank. This contraption lifted him up and continued to carry him forward.
He rode inside as he blasted his way farther into the base, firing four sets of ATHID weapons as he came.
He also hijacked all of their external speakers, and then used them to play a song I recognized immediately from his old Raid the Arcade mix—“Run’s House” by Run-D.M.C.
“Archie really hates hip-hop,” we heard him say. “I bet this will throw him off balance. Like ‘Ride of the Valkyries’!”
He cranked the song up to an earsplitting volume. I could see him mouthing the lyrics as he continued to fight his way toward Vance, lumbering forward like a Terminator that was never going to stop until it had completed its final mission.
My father piloted his makeshift tank down one last corridor, then finally arrived at his destination—a pair of armored doors labeled RAVEN ROCK DRONE OPERATIONS COMMAND CENTER.
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?”
“I built the Armada,” it said. “And this entire time you were fighting against yourselves.
“The Sodality has been monitoring your species’ radio and television broadcasts for as long as you’ve been transmitting them into space. But we didn’t begin to take a special interest in humanity until 1945, when you created your first nuclear weapon and then used it for warfare against your own kind. At that time, we used all of that data we had collected to create a detailed profile of your species and ascertain its evolutionary strengths and weaknesses. In 1969, when your species became technologically advanced enough to reach another world, in this case your own moon, you became a potential threat to the other members of the Sodality. And that was when I was sent here, to deliver the Test.”
“So it was a test, after all?” I said. “What for?”
“A test that we use to gauge whether or not your species is capable of existing peacefully within the Sodality,” the Envoy said. “It was initiated when your probe first discovered the swastika on Europa’s surface. We selected a symbol that your culture most associates with war and death, and then we re-created an enormous replica of that symbol on the nearest celestial body in your solar system with conditions capable of harboring intelligent life.
“We knew your discovery of such a symbol would eventually prompt you to send another probe down to the surface to investigate its origin,” the Emissary said. “As soon as your probe landed on Europa, the next phase of the test began. I simulated a standard first-contact scenario for your species, in which a cultural misunderstanding leads to a declaration of war.”
The machine’s declaration didn’t ring true to my ears, but I was in no mental condition to start a debate.
“You built all of those drones yourself?” I said. “And you controlled them in combat?”
“Affirmative.”
“So this entire time, it was just you?” I said. “One artificially intelligent supercomputer pretending to be a hostile alien race for the purpose of testing humanity’s character?”
“In very simple terms, yes. That is accurate.” The machine paused. “It was your time to be tested. The Sodality found it necessary to ascertain how your species would handle a common first-contact scenario with a neighboring civilization. As I said, it was a test. The Test.”
“Your ‘test’ killed millions of innocent people,” I said through clenched teeth. “Including several of my friends. And my father.”
