“He was just saying that for dramatic effect,” I said. “I’m sure we’ll be able to replay it—just like with the Disrupter scenarios.”
“You better be right,” Diehl said. “Because there’s no way in hell we’re going to pull this mission off on our first try—or our second or third, either. They’ve got six Dreadnaught Spheres! Each one loaded with over a billion killer alien drones—and a Disrupter to boot!”
“They won’t activate one of their Disrupters here,” Cruz pointed out. “It wouldn’t have any effect. For a quantum link to be disrupted, both the transmitting and receiving ends have to be inside the sphere.” That was the reason the EDA had drones and humans stationed on the far side of the moon.
“With no Disrupter to worry about, this should be doable,” I said. “All we have to do is protect that Icebreaker for three minutes. No problemo.”
“No problem?” Cruz repeated. “Really? You think so?”
“Yeah. We just—you know—create a blockade.”
“With what?” Cruz said. “Did you check the mission stats? Our carrier only brought two hundred drones along! The admiral failed to mention that.”
“Maybe he did it when you two were snoring?” I suggested.
“Like I said before, this is yet another example of unbalanced, poorly thought out gameplay,” he continued. “The devs at Chaos Terrain are trying to piss us off now. We’re gonna get slaughtered—again!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Diehl said. “How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?”
I laughed. Before Cruz could reply, we realized that Admiral Vance was bringing his chalk talk to a close.
“Good luck, pilots. Everyone down here on Earth is counting on you.”
He snapped us a farewell salute, and his image winked out on the view screen, once again replaced by the Earth Defense Alliance crest.
Then, while the mission loaded, we were all treated to a familiar cut scene showing our squadron of heroic-looking, slightly out-of-focus EDA pilots sprinting out the briefing room’s exit, down a brightly lit access corridor, and on into the Moon Base Alpha Drone Operations Control Center, a large circular room with dozens of oval hatchways embedded in the floor, spaced only a few meters apart—each containing a drone controller pod. Their hatches hissed open, revealing simulated Interceptor cockpits—each one a pilot seat surrounded by an array of controls and readouts, along with a wraparound view screen shaped like a cockpit canopy window.
The cut scene ended, and my perspective shifted back to my avatar’s POV—only now I was sitting inside my own drone controller pod.
A second later, the hatch hissed closed above me just as all of the control panels around me lit up, as did the wraparound view screen. This created a second layer of simulation—the illusion that I was now sitting inside an ADI-88 Aerospace Drone Interceptor, powered up and waiting in its coiled launch rack in the Doolittle’s drone hangar.
I reached out to blindly place my hands on the new controllers in front of me, adjusting their placement to match the layout of my virtual cockpit inside the game. Then I took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, trying to relax. This was usually the best part of my day, when I got to escape my suburban existence for a few hours and become a crack fighter pilot duking it out with evil alien invaders.
But tonight, I didn’t feel like I was escaping anything. I felt anxious. Excited. Righteous. Maybe even a little bloodthirsty.
Like I was going to war.
THE GOGGLES INSIDE my new Armada VR helmet provided me with an immersive 360-degree view from inside my drone’s simulated cockpit. Looking out through its wraparound canopy, I could see the Doolittle’s drone launch hangar. I glanced left and then right, taking in the row of identical Interceptors lined up on either side of me, gleaming under the hangar dome’s floodlights, ready for launch.
My heads-up display appeared, superimposed over my wraparound view out of the cockpit, providing readouts of my starship’s flight, weapon, and communication systems, along with radar, sensor, and navigation data.
I cleared my throat and addressed TAC, my ship’s Tactical Avionics Computer. TAC served as a virtual copilot, managing my ship’s navigation, weapons, and communication systems and providing me with verbal status updates. TAC could also give novice pilots helpful on-the-fly recommendations on how to improve their maneuvering techniques and weapon usage, but I’d disabled that feature long ago.
“TAC, prepare all systems for launch,” I said.
“Compliance!” TAC chirped brightly. At the default setting, the computer spoke in a perpetually calm, synthesized female voice that I found unnerving in the heat of battle. So I’d installed several other custom sound profiles, including one called Trimaxion, which gave it the voice of the ship’s computer in Flight of the Navigator. It made my ship’s voice sound like Pee-wee Herman yelling through a vocoder, but this amused me and kept me on my toes.
Each Interceptor’s thrusters, weapons, and shields were powered by a fusion reactor that constantly recharged its drone’s power cells. But it did so at a very slow rate, so you needed to use your power sparingly during battle—otherwise you’d end up floating through space, a sitting duck with a dead stick.
It was easy to run out of juice during the heat of combat, because every time you moved or fired your weapons it used up some of your power, and whenever your shields took a direct hit, that drained your power cells, too. When they started to get too low, your drone would lose its shields first, then its weapons, and finally its thrusters. Then your drone would crash and burn—or, if you were lucky enough to be fighting in space, it would just begin to drift helplessly through the void while you waited for the power cells to recharge enough for your thrusters to come back online, praying that an enemy ship didn’t pick you off first—which it almost always did.
The enemy Glaive Fighters had blaster turrets mounted on each of their wingtips that could rotate in any direction, giving them an almost unlimited field of fire. But my Interceptor’s plasma cannons (aka “sun guns”) and Macross missiles were both forward-firing weapons, so my target needed to be in front of me if I was going to be able to hit it. My ship had a laser turret, however, that was able to fire in any direction, but unlike my sun guns, the turret used up a lot of power and had to be used sparingly.
Our ships were also each equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, which also served as a weapon of last resort. As long as your drone had even a tiny bit of power remaining, you could detonate its reactor core in an explosion that could vaporize everything within a tenth of a kilometer. If you timed it right, you could take out nearly a dozen enemy ships at once with this tactic. Unfortunately, the enemy also had the ability to detonate their power cores—and they didn’t care about taking out friendlies when they did it. A lot of players didn’t either, of course. For some, it was their only real strategy. The only major downside to pulling this self-destruct move was that it meant you would miss at least part of the battle, because before you could fly back out to rejoin the fight, you had to wait to take control of another drone back inside the hangar, and then wait for it to reach the front of the launch queue—all of which could take up to a minute or more, depending on how fast the enemy was dropping our drones.
A klaxon began to sound as the hangar’s belt-fed launch rack whirred into action and began to deploy the Interceptors slotted ahead of mine one after the other, firing them out of the belly of the Doolittle like bullets from a machine gun.
“Huzzah!” I heard Dealio say. “Now I finally get to kill some aliens!”
“Not if you get waxed before you fire a single shot,” Cruz said. “Like last time.”
“I told you, my Internet connection went out!” Dealio shouted.
“Dude, we heard you cursing on the comm after you got killed,” I reminded him.
“That proves nothing,” he said cheerfully. Then he shouted, “Cry havoc!”
When neither of us followed suit, he cleared his throat loudly over the comm.
“Uh, why didn’t either of you cry havoc with me just now?” he asked. “You bitches best be crying me some havoc! You want to jinx us?”
“Sorry, Dealio,” I said. Then, as loud as I could, I shouted, “Cry havoc!”
“I’ll leaving the crying to you guys,” Cruz said, before muttering his own personal pre-throw-down mantra to himself. “Led’s-do-dis.”
I cracked my knuckles, then pressed play on the best “ass-kicking track” on my father’s old Raid the Arcade mix. As the opening bass line of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” began to thud over my helmet’s built-in headphones, I felt myself begin to slip into the zone.
The song’s machine gun beat was a perfect match for the timing and rhythm of the enemy’s ships, in nearly every kind of mission. (“We Will Rock You” worked really well for me during shooting gallery scenarios like this one, too.) When Freddie Mercury’s vocals kicked in a few seconds later, I cranked up the volume in my headset—apparently loud enough for my microphone to pick it up.