Armada (20 page)

Milo seemed genuinely surprised. “I may have missed that part of the briefing,” he said. Then, under her withering glare, he added, “I have ADD! My mind wanders during long meetings!” For the first time, I detected genuine fear in his voice. “Are the odds really that bad? The admiral never said—”

“What?” Debbie asked, interrupting him. “That we're probably doomed? Why would he say that out loud?” She turned to look out the window. “He doesn't need to. It's obvious. I mean, how desperate must the odds be if
we're
the Alliance's best hope? We're a bunch of gamer geeks, not soldiers.”

“Yes we are!” Milo replied. “We all just enlisted, remember?” He shook his head at her. “Come on, lady—can't you try and be a little more positive? This isn't over yet. We can still win this thing!”

Debbie studied him for a moment before she replied. “Don't you get it, Milo? No matter who wins, millions of people are going to die when the fighting starts a few hours from now.”

He waved a hand at her dismissively. “Oh, grow some balls! If killing these alien dipshits is half as easy as it is in the game, we're gonna kick their European asses!”

“
Europan,
Milo,” I said. “You. Rope. An. Not European.”

“Whatever the fuck you wanna call them,” he sighed. “You know what I mean.”

“I hate to say it,” Whoadie said. “But I agree with Milo. If we beat them in the game, we can beat them in real life.” She looked around at the three of us hopefully. “After all, we are the best of the best, right?”

Before his QComm even had time to finish translating for him, Chén jumped to his feet and shouted “Right!” with a raised fist. Then he bared his teeth and shouted something that sounded like “Sheng-lee!”

His QComm repeated the word in synthesized English: “Victory!”

Whoadie grinned and raised a fist of her own, then repeated after Chén, shouting “Sheng-lee!” at nearly the same volume.

“Hell yeah!” Milo shouted, throwing up a pair of heavy-metal horns. “Sheng-lee!”

Debbie glanced at me, waiting to see if I would take up their battle cry, too. Privately, I shared her grim appraisal of our chances. But feigning optimism seemed like it would be better for everyone's morale—including my own.

I raised a fist like the others, then, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, I repeated their cry of “Sheng-lee!” I nudged Debbie with my elbow, and she sighed in resignation.

“Sheng-lee!” she echoed, halfheartedly pumping her fist in the air. “Woo.”

Chén grinned at all of us, leaned forward, and stretched out his right hand, with his palm facing down. Whoadie smiled back and stacked her hand on top of his; then Milo, Debbie, and I each did the same thing. Then, in unison, we all shouted “Sheng-lee!” one more time.

A second later, we heard Captain Meadows' voice on the intercom again, announcing that we were on final approach to Moon Base Alpha. This seemed to make us self-conscious, and we all quickly withdrew our hands.

The shuttle banked sharply, and the moon's cratered surface suddenly filled the portside windows as we rocketed into orbit. I caught a brief glimpse of the Tycho impact crater as we zoomed over it on our way around to the far side, which was mostly in shadow. This hemisphere of the moon always faced away from Earth, so it was the first time any of us were seeing it with our own eyes. The surface was marred by a few small blackened regions, which looked like burn marks, but there were no ocean-sized dark patches or “seas” like those that marred the moon's more familiar hemisphere. The landscape here on the far side of the moon was far more uniform in color and appearance, but that didn't make it seem any more inviting.

As we sailed over the cratered and barren lunar surface, I was struck by a brief vision of Earth after the coming conflict. The battle had left our world ravaged and dead, as devoid of life and color as its own moon, its oceans and atmosphere burned away, its mighty cities replaced with impact craters, and the whole of its once-beautiful surface scorched black by the fire of war.

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands before looking back down at the lunar surface.

The sun was low in the sky, causing the more prominent craters to cast long shadows that stretched out across the pockmarked surface like crooked black fingers. Far below, an enormous bowl-shaped crater slid into view, and the sight sent a chill cascading down my spine. I recognized this place. I was looking down at the crater Daedalus, the secret location of Moon Base Alpha. I'd known this was our destination, but I still hadn't been able to convince myself that it really existed until that moment, when I saw it with my own eyes.

The large crater, Daedalus, had a much smaller, steeper crater named Daedalus B immediately adjacent to it, and a third, even smaller crater adjacent to that, known as Daedalus C. The lips of all three craters touched, and when viewed from directly above, their outlines somewhat resembled the shape of a pocket watch, with Daedalus B standing in for the small round knob on top, and Daedalus C serving as the even smaller chain ring attached to it. These three craters immediately stood out from the thousands of others on the lunar surface because even at this distance, they all contained obvious evidence of human construction.

The walls of the big crater had been smoothed out and curved into a perfect bowl shape to create a dish antenna for an enormous radio telescope. Its design was similar to that of the Arecibo Observatory in the mountains of Puerto Rico, but several hundred times larger. The two smaller craters each had an armored sphere nestled inside, like a golf ball sitting atop a shot glass. They were made of armored metal plating that had been painted gray to match the lunar surface.

“Moon Base Alpha!” Chén shouted as he spotted it, too. Then he began to talk excitedly in Mandarin as he pointed out things down on the surface. The others craned their necks to see out the nearest window, and they each gasped at their first glimpse of our destination.

“There it is!” Whoadie said, bouncing in her seat. “It's really there. It's really real!”

Moon Base Alpha was a familiar sight to all of us, because we'd flown our Interceptors into and out of a simulated version of it hundreds of times while playing
Armada
. Our shuttle was even approaching along the same trajectory, giving me a strange sense of déjà vu.

As we made our final approach, the dome at top of the smaller sphere split apart into equal segments, like an orange, and retracted far enough to permit our shuttle entrance. As soon as we descended inside the dome, its armored segments slammed back together above us, sealing the hangar bay once again, which essentially functioned like a giant airlock. Its design had always reminded me of the docking bay of the fictional Clavius Base featured in
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Now I found myself wondering if the EDA had borrowed elements from Stanley Kubrick's design. After all, stranger things had obviously happened—and were still happening right now.

Our shuttle touched down on the hangar floor a moment later, and when the engines cut out, an abrupt silence filled the cabin. The others were all pressed to the windows, but I couldn't look. I just sat there frozen in my seat, paralyzed by oscillating waves of anticipation and dread.

Meadows' ATHID emerged from the cockpit and used one of its clawed hands to slap a large green button on the bulkhead. The safety bars around our seats retracted up into the ceiling as the doors opened with a hiss.

“Leave your gear and follow me,” Meadows told us over the drone's comm speaker. Then the ATHID turned and exited the shuttle, motioning for us to follow.

Whoadie immediately unbuckled her harness and literally jumped out of her seat. She was already running when her feet hit the floor.

“I can't believe we're on the moon!” she said in childlike wonder, stretching her arms out wide as she leapt through the shuttle's open hatchway. I saw her sprint off and noticed that she didn't bounce as she ran, the way the Apollo astronauts always did in footage of the moon landings, which meant the gravity up here was somehow being altered to match that of Earth.

Chén struggled to get free of his own harness, then scrambled outside after Whoadie. It took Milo slightly longer to extricate himself, but then he exited the shuttle, too, grinning like a little kid on Christmas morning, leaving Debbie and me alone in the passenger cabin. She unbuckled her safety harness and turned in her seat to face me.

“You ready to head out there, Zack?”

I started to nod, but ended up shaking my head.

“I've spent my whole life fantasizing about this moment,” I told her. “And now … I think I'm too terrified to even go out there.”

“It'll be all right,” she said. “He's probably just as nervous about meeting you. Maybe even a little more.”

Meadows' ATHID stuck its head back into the cabin, with his telepresence monitor now deployed. He smiled at Debbie through the screen, then rotated his drone's head to address me.

“The general is right outside in the hangar bay, waiting to meet you, Lieutenant.” He turned to Debbie. “He asked me to escort you and the other new arrivals down to Operations, so that he and the lieutenant can have a few minutes in private. They'll join us there shortly.”

“Of course,” Debbie said, standing up. She brushed a lock of hair off my forehead, then squeezed my shoulder and gave me another smile. “See you in a few minutes, okay?”

I nodded. “Thanks, Debbie.”

She gave me one last smile before she departed with Meadows' ATHID.

I sat there alone inside the cabin for a few seconds, summoning my courage. Then I thumbed the release latch on my safety harness and shrugged it off as I slowly got to my feet.

When I finally stepped outside, he was right there, waiting for me.

H
e was just a few yards away from me, standing at rigid attention in a uniform just like the one I now wore. My father, Xavier Ulysses Lightman. Living and breathing.

And smiling.

He was smiling at me—with my own smile, on an older version of my face. The man standing in front of me could have passed for my time-traveling future self, come back to warn me of our shared destiny.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Meadows' ATHID escort Debbie through a pair of armored doors at the opposite end of the hangar. Chén, Milo, and Whoadie were waiting for them just inside the tunnel on the other side, along with an EDA officer I didn't recognize, who had a Japanese flag on his uniform. The entire group gaped at us through the open airlock doors until the doors slammed shut again a second later with a dull boom that echoed through the vast hangar.

I was only vaguely aware of their departure, or of my new surroundings, because all of my senses were now acutely focused on my father. The paternal ghost whose absence had haunted my entire adolescence now stood before me, miraculously resurrected. I found myself staring at a drop of sweat that had formed on his brow, and then watching as it rolled down the side of his face, as if this detail were proof this was really happening. It made me think of a scene in the original
Total Recall—
another movie I knew by heart because he'd once owned a copy on VHS.

I took a long look at him, while he did the same to me. As I drank in the details of my long-lost father's face, my first-hand familiarity with his features made it easy for me to detect the fear he was trying to conceal.

He looked older than I'd expected—but that was probably because he'd never been older than nineteen in every photo of him I'd ever seen. I think part of me was also subconsciously hoping that when I saw him, it would appear that he hadn't aged at all, because the EDA had frozen him in carbonite or subjected him to light-speed time dilation to keep him young for the coming war. No such luck. He would be thirty-seven now, the same age as my mother—but unlike her, he looked a decade older than his real age, instead of a decade younger. He still appeared to be in excellent physical condition, but his once dark hair was now shot through with gray, and there were prominent crow's-feet around his eyes, which were the same exact shade of blue as my own. A hardened weariness seemed to permeate his features, and I wondered if I was getting a glimpse of what my face would look like, if I somehow lived to be his age.

I was still wondering that when I realized he was already moving toward me, closing the narrow distance between us, and then his arms were suddenly wrapped around me.

A dam ruptured somewhere in my chest, and a torrent of feelings came rushing out of me all at once. I buried my face against his chest, and this triggered a long-dormant sense memory: the sensation of my father holding me just like this, when I was still an infant. It may have even been my memory of the very last time he'd held me, before he'd vanished from my life forever.

No, not forever, I told myself. Until right now.

“I'm so happy to see you, Zack,” he whispered, with a slight tremor in his voice. “And I'm sorry—so sorry for leaving you and your mother. I never imagined that I would be gone for so long.”

Each word he spoke made my heart swell, until it felt as if it might burst. In one breath, my father had just said all of things I'd always dreamed of hearing him tell me, back when I'd still allowed myself to fantasize about him still being alive. And I was too overwhelmed to respond. Part of me was still sure that all of this was some sort of precarious dream, and that if I said or did the wrong thing, I would wake up now, at the worst possible time.

I tried again to speak, to tell him I'd been dreaming of this moment my entire life. But I still couldn't find my voice. My father seemed to take my continued silence as a negative sign. He let go of me and stepped back; then he began to study my face, trying to decipher whatever dazed expression he saw there.

“I've been waiting eighteen years to tell you all of that, Zack,” he said quietly. “I've practiced saying it in my head a million times. I hope I got it right. I hope I didn't screw it up.”

Absurdly, I found myself wishing that my mother were here, so she could introduce me to this complete stranger who was wearing my face.

“You didn't,” I finally managed to say, nearly inaudible. Then I cleared my throat and tried again. “You didn't screw it up,” I said cautiously. “I'm happy to see you, too.”

My father exhaled.

“I'm relieved to hear that,” he said. “I wasn't sure you would be.” He smiled nervously. “You have every right to be angry, and I know you've got a temper, so—”

He stopped speaking when he saw my smile vanish. Then he winced and contorted his brow—the exact same way I always did when I said something and instantly regretted it.

“How could you possibly know if I've ‘got a temper'?” I asked, the anger rising in my voice like mercury. My father laughed involuntarily at the irony of my response, but it was lost on me, and his reaction only made me feel even more hurt and pissed off. Somehow, all of the excitement and euphoria I'd felt upon meeting him had dissipated in the span of a few seconds. “What makes you think you know anything about me at all?”

“I'm sorry, Zack,” he said. “But I'm your new commanding officer. I read over your EDA recruit profile, and it contains all of your civilian school and police records.”

“All of my private psych evaluation results, too, I'll bet.”

He nodded. “The EDA finds out everything they can about potential recruits.”

I nodded. “Did my ‘recruit profile' mention that my anger-management issues might be linked to the tragic death of my father in a shit-factory explosion when I was ten months old?”

The question clearly hurt him, but I couldn't help but twist the knife a little farther.

“What do you think it was like for me, growing up believing that's how my father died?” I asked. “And having everyone in the whole town believe it, too? Were you trying to ruin my life? Couldn't you have pretended to die in a fucking car accident or something instead?”

He opened his mouth and then closed it a few times before he managed to form any words.

“It wasn't like I had a choice, Son,” he said. “It had to be an explosion, so that the body couldn't be identified. They buried a John Doe in my place.” He met my gaze. “I'm sorry. I was a kid myself, at the time. I didn't really understand what I was agreeing to do—and to give up.”

We stood there staring at each other in silence for a moment; then my father's QComm beeped. He glanced down at its display with a frown, then turned back to me.

“We need to get up to Operations and get you and other new arrivals briefed,” he said. “But we'll have a chance to talk more in private later on, okay?”

I nodded mutely. I'd waited this long—and what choice did I really have?

My father removed a small silver object from his pocket. “Here,” he said, pressing it into the palm of my hand. “This is for you.”

I turned it over. It was a USB flash drive with an EDA emblem stamped on its casing.

“What's on it?”

“Letters, mostly,” he said. “I wrote to you and your mom every single day I was up here.” I noticed that he was shifting his weight from one foot to another while he spoke—another of my own nervous tics. “I hope they help explain why I made the decision I did, and how hard it's been for me to live with ever since.” He shrugged and turned away, still avoiding my gaze. “Sorry there are so many—you probably won't have enough time to read them all.”

His voice faltered, and he turned away from me to hide his face. I glanced down at the flash drive, then closed my fist around it protectively, unnerved that so small an object could hold such priceless contents.

My father raised the QComm on his wrist and tapped a series of icons on its display. There was a metallic clank as a row of storage-compartment doors built into the underside of the shuttle's fuselage slid open, revealing cube-shaped shipping containers. My father whispered a series of commands into his QComm, and a few seconds later, a team of four ATHIDs disengaged from a nearby charging rack and marched single-file over to the shuttle. Three of the drones began to unload the cargo, while the fourth climbed into the passenger cabin to retrieve our backpacks.

“Ready, Lieutenant?” my father asked, nodding toward the exit.

“Yes, sir,” I replied, slipping the flash drive into one of my uniform's breast pockets so that it rested directly over my heart. Then, together, we continued to cross the hangar, and I finally widened my focus enough to take in the details of my surreal surroundings.

The Moon Base Alpha hangar bay was a breathtaking site. The curved walls of the armored dome around us were lined with hundreds of gleaming Interceptor drones arrayed in the belt-fed launch racks that would fire them out into space like bullets from a high-velocity gas-powered machine gun. These were the drones we had been brought up here to pilot, I realized. We would use these very ships to wage war with the enemy when they arrived here, just over five and a half hours from now.

In that moment, I felt like Luke Skywalker surveying a hangar full of A-, Y-, and X-Wing Fighters just before the Battle of Yavin. Or Captain Apollo, climbing into the cockpit of his Viper on the
Galactica
's flight deck. Ender Wiggin arriving at Battle School. Or Alex Rogan, clutching his Star League uniform, staring wide-eyed at a hangar full of Gunstars.

But this wasn't a fantasy. I wasn't Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon or Ender Wiggin or anyone else. This was real life. My life. I, Zackary Ulysses Lightman, an eighteen-year-old kid from Beaverton, Oregon, newly recruited by the Earth Defense Alliance, had just been reunited with my long-lost father on the far side of the moon—and now, together, we were about to wage a desperate battle to prevent the destruction of Earth and save the human race from total annihilation.

If this were all just a dream, I wasn't sure that I would want it to end.

But it
was
going to end, and soon—because there was an egg timer strapped to my forearm counting off exactly just how many more hours, minutes, and seconds remained until my rude awakening.

When my father reached the exit, he continued walking through the open airlock doors, into the tube-shaped access tunnel beyond, which—if the layout of this place was as identical to its virtual counterpart in
Armada
as it seemed
—
led beneath the lunar surface, to the adjacent Daedalus B crater, where the rest of the base was located.

But I stopped just shy of the exit, and turned back to take another look at the thousands of Interceptors racked into the curved dome wall around me, and at the automated drone-assembly plants at its far end, their matter compilers and nanobots working even now to construct more ADI-88s—which they would probably never have time to finish, if what Vance had told me about the aliens' speed was true. I winced as another wave of shame washed over me at the memory of my colossal screwup at Crystal Palace, and the hangar full of drones it had cost us.

But then I recalled one of the final images from the EDA briefing film, of the Europan armada, a massive deadly ring of warships encircling the icy moon, all now headed toward Earth.

Those drones we lost at Crystal Palace wouldn't have made any difference. Nor would all of the drones here, or those stockpiled back on Earth.

My father saw me lingering inside the hangar and ran back to fetch me. “What's wrong, Zack?”

I laughed out loud at the absurdity of his question.

“What's wrong?” I repeated. “Gee, let me think now …”

“We need to get moving, Lieutenant,” he said. “There isn't much time.”

But I didn't move. My father waited.

I turned to study his face, then asked him the question I needed to ask: “How badly outnumbered are we going to be? Once the entire armada arrives?”

“So badly it's not really even worth thinking about,” he said immediately, without even pausing to consider his answer. And the lack of concern in his tone pissed me off all over again.

“Then why the hell did you bring me up here?” I asked. “So that you could have a quick father-son playdate before we both die horribly?” I jerked a thumb at the shuttle. “If we're doomed, just tell me right now. I'd rather fly that thing back home and die with my mother. She's all alone now, you realize?”

My father looked as if I'd just gutted him, and I felt a pang of regret—but it was mingled with a twisted sense of satisfaction. It felt good to hurt his feelings—it was payback for the way his choices had irrevocably damaged my own.

It took my father a moment to respond. When he did, his tone of voice had hardened.

“I didn't ‘bring' you up here, Lieutenant. You voluntarily enlisted as a solider in the Earth Defense Alliance. You don't get to run home now just because you're scared. Trust me.”