If everything went according to my father’s plan, we would be able to use our intranet connection at Starbase Ace to help him infiltrate the Raven Rock outpost during the chaos of the Disrupter attack.
If not, well—then he was going be totally hosed.
WHILE MY FATHER piloted his manned Interceptor to assault Raven Rock, where Vance’s team was located, I sat inside Starbase Ace piloting the three Interceptors my father had commandeered from the Icarus crater and sent off toward massive Jupiter, its tiny moon Europa—and the Icebreaker closing in on it.
Cruz and Diehl took control of four new ATHIDs from a nearby EDA drone cache and redeployed them in the Starbase Ace parking lot, to defend us during the second wave of the attack.
Lex was at Sapphire Station, and Ray was at Gila Mountain. Both were connected to the hard-line EDA intranet from inside their assigned drone controller pods—and both were already preparing to help my father execute his infiltration plan.
While Cruz and Diehl used their giant robots to help defend Starbase Ace from the incoming swarm of Spider Fighters and Basilisks, my mother, Debbie, and Whoadie all used WASP aerial drone quadcopters to defend the store from above.
Whoadie was fighting from an Armada sit-down arcade game located in the game room of her uncle Franklin’s bowling alley in New Orleans. Debbie was back home in Duluth, controlling her drone from her own living room while her three sons continued to stand guard outside their home by controlling EDA drones with an Xbox, a laptop, and a touchscreen tablet, respectively. We knew that Debbie and Whoadie would both lose control of their drones when the Disrupter switched on, but there was nothing we could do about that. They intended to help out for as long as they could.
While my friends kept the enemy drones at bay, I continued to pilot my drones toward Jupiter, trying to make it to Europa in time to stop the Icebreaker—while my father attempted to prevent Vance from launching the weapon before my ships even got there.
That was when we got word via a public EDA command broadcast that the second Disrupter was about to make landfall back here on Earth, in the unlikeliest of locations. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Instead of activating the Disrupter in a secluded spot like Antarctica, this time the aliens picked a far less subtle location—the national monument at Devils Tower, Wyoming. The same spot where humanity makes first contact with the alien visitors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. An “intergalactic game of Simon,” featuring those same five tones the Europans had used to bookend their cryptic transmissions to us.
“Oh, that’s not cool!” Diehl shouted, staring at a live video image of the Disrupter taken by an orbiting satellite. “Are these alien pricks openly mocking us now? Christ!”
WHEN THE DISRUPTER activated, the drones my friends were using to defend Starbase Ace were disabled and went limp or fell out of the sky—as did every untethered EDA drone around the world.
But the Europan drones continued to attack, closing in on Starbase Ace as if they somehow knew it was of strategic importance.
Lex, Ray, Debbie, and Whoadie all lost control of their drones as their links went dead. So did Cruz and Diehl, but they both ran outside and activated the hard-line controllers on two dormant ATHIDs. They detached the small Xbox-like game controller from each ATHID’s back and then ran back inside, unspooling their drones’ carbon-fiber-sheathed tether cables to their maximum length.
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.