Armada (31 page)

He would drown down here, if he hadn't already.

I powered on every external light my ship had, and then the internal ones, too, just for good measure, but I was still only able to see five or six feet into the murky waters, and there was nothing there, nothing—and the deeper I went, the muddier the water.

I stared helplessly at my blank scopes, trying desperately not to assume the worst, but doing just that.

Could Fate possibly be so cruel as to take my father away from me, on the very same day I'd found him? I didn't like the answer my subconscious spat back at me, of course. But it was my fault for asking, really. I should've known better.

Warnings began to flash on my HUD, telling me that my hull was leaking and that I would need to surface now, or risk having my engine and life-support systems fail.

But I didn't surface. I kept on looking for him, even though it was pointless.

He couldn't vanish on me again, not now. Not before I had a chance to tell him what I'd seen during the battle. What he'd shown me.

He was right; I was wrong. I understood that now. If he would just come back, I would tell him, I would help him, I would do whatever he wanted. He didn't need to punish me like this—by letting me get to know him and learn to love him, only to break my heart all over again.

A voice in my head was saying,
At least he died for what he believed.
But that only made me feel worse, because it didn't ring true.

I knew what was happening up there, above the water's surface. As soon as my father destroyed the Disrupter, all of the Earth Defensive Alliance's quantum communication links would've instantly came back online, everywhere around the world. Now all of the Earth Defense Alliance civilian recruits were back in the fight, controlling the millions of drones stockpiled around every heavily populated area in the world.

Thanks to my dad, humanity had a fighting chance for survival once again. He'd given everything to save the world.

But I didn't care about the world just then.

The world could go to hell and take everyone and everything with it, if only that meant I could have my father back.

I swung my Interceptor across the darkness of the ocean floor, peering into the emptiness, ignoring the increasingly loud warnings from my AVA computer telling me to surface, and to do it now, or I would die, too.

Because that sounded fine to me. Just fine.

S
itting there in the darkness, I found myself thinking about Lex. I wondered where she was, and if she was still alive.

Then I remembered my conversation with her, and the QComm hacks she'd shown me. My father's QComm number was on my contact list. If he had the device in his flight suit and if he hadn't powered it off, I might be able to use that to find his escape pod.

Feeling a sudden burst of hope, I fumbled my QComm out and pulled up my short contact list. Then I repeated the steps Lex had shown me to perform her “remote location hack.” It involved pressing several icons on my display in rapid order, like the old Konami code. It took me several tries to get it right, because my hands were shaking and the hull-integrity and leak warnings from my AVA computer kept frazzling my nerves.

Finally, a GPS program appeared on my QComm's display. My QComm appeared as a green dot—and my father's appeared right on top of it, as a flashing red dot. I rotated the display to show our relative depths.

My father's pod was directly below me!

I blindly circled my ship around in a corkscrew, using my QComm to close in on him. As I pulled up to avoid the tangled wreckage of two Glaive Fighters, I felt a jolt and heard a loud crack as my father's escape pod appeared out of the watery darkness outside, slamming right up against my cockpit canopy. As the two acrylic domes collided, I caught a horrifying glimpse of his limp and lifeless face, just a few inches away from mine.

Once I'd stopped screaming, I maneuvered my Interceptor around his pod and activated its retrieval arm. A second later, its magnetic seals locked into place with a thud and the arm retracted, fusing my father's escape pod to the underside of my ship's hull.

My AVA computer linked to the pod's occupant diagnostics, and my father's vitals appeared on my HUD. He wasn't dead! He was merely unconscious, and the computer calculated a sixty-seven percent chance that he had suffered a concussion. He was also bleeding from a deep laceration on his scalp. A dialog box popped up on one of my cockpit screens, providing me with a running list of the treatment and drugs that the pod was administering to its occupant. A video window popped up on my display, showing my father's unconscious form from the shoulders up, and I winced as the pod dosed him with a cocktail of painkillers via a needle gun mounted on one of its many robotic arms. I hoped to hell the drugs in that pod didn't have an expiration date.

I watched the drone work on him for a few more seconds; then I finally snapped out of my daze and gunned my ship's throttle, blasting up out of the ocean, then on up in the clouds above, still flooring the gas.

My AVA computer informed me that my passenger needed medical attention immediately, and the autopilot set a course for my ship to the nearest EDA med center, at the southern tip of South America.

I ignored it.

Instead, I flew us home.

As I guided my Interceptor over Portland's charred and smoking skyline, I felt tears come to my eyes. Here was my first glimpse of the devastation the vanguard's attack had caused on our cities, and it was as bad as I'd feared. The whole city looked like a scene out of
Deep Impact
or
World War Z
. Every street, road, and highway leading out of Portland was clogged with all manner of vehicles, none of them moving. Pillars of black smoke rose from half a dozen fires all over the city, and the sky was filled with news helicopters and small-engine, fixed-wing aircraft, most of which appeared to be fleeing inland.

I tuned my QComm to one of the big cable news networks, so that I could listen in to the broadcast—and heard the last thing I expected.

“In addition to the Earth Defense Alliance's decisive victory in Pakistan,” one male news anchor was saying, “news of dozens of other victories are pouring in from other cities around the world. The tide began to turn after the aliens' surprise attacks on Shanghai and Cairo—”

I frowned and switched to another network, showing live coverage from New York City. The Big Apple looked just like it did in every apocalyptic disaster movie I'd ever seen. The skyline was a smoking ruin, and the streets of Manhattan had been flooded by a tsunami created by one of the many artificial earthquakes resulting from the attacks.

“—dozens of epic battles were raging over the city just moments ago, but as you can see, the skies are clear,” another newscaster reported. “The EDA's army of civilian-operated drones has won another decisive victory here. Humanity has successfully defended itself against the first wave of the invaders' attack. We managed to fight them all off—it's incredible!”

The beautiful female anchor beside him nodded enthusiastically.

“In every engagement we've had with the enemy so far, it has become obvious that humans are naturally more adept at combat than the creatures who are operating all of these invading ships and drones,” she said. “In every battle they seemed to have us outmatched, but despite their vastly superior numbers and technology, the Europans appear to lack our reflexes and natural predatory instincts—”

I switched newsfeeds again and saw Admiral Vance, addressing the troops via his handheld QComm, wearing his trademark expression of grim resolve. The man looked downright heroic.

“—but even though we managed to fight off the first wave of the invasion, we suffered heavy losses in the process,” Admiral Vance said. “The enemy didn't lose a soul—just equipment. And two-thirds of their forces are still en route to Earth.” He paused to let this sink in, then continued. “The
second wave
of their attack will reach us just over two hours from now, and we need all of you to be ready.”

Just as he finished making that statement, a new countdown clock appeared on my QComm display—just over two and half hours to go until the second wave arrived, bringing twice as much devastation as the first.

I switched to another channel, and then another, but it was the same war propaganda on every station. Newscasters of every nationality were claiming victory and imploring their viewers not to give up, to hunker down and keep on fighting, because there was still hope—we could still win this.

I put my QComm away, wishing that I could bring myself to rally to the Earth Defense Alliance's global battle cry. But it was obvious to me that our remaining forces wouldn't be able to withstand another assault of equal magnitude, much less two more attacks, delivered by a force of double and then triple the size of the first wave.

I tried to forget about the news, and thought again of my father's heroic act of self-sacrifice, performed in the wake of Chén's kamikaze run. It shouldn't have worked. But it had—just as my father had predicted it would.

I shouldn't need any more convincing—and, I decided right then, I didn't.

“I'm sorry I doubted you, Dad,” I said to him over the comlink, while I stared at his unconscious face on my monitor, his eyes closed and his forehead caked with dried blood. “And I'm sorry I couldn't bring myself to call you ‘Dad' before now, too, okay? Do you hear me? Do you, Dad?”

His eyes stayed closed, and he remained perfectly still—the ship's inertia-cancellation field kept him from even being jostled slightly, even though we were flying through Earth's atmosphere fast enough to set the ship on fire.

“You were right and I was wrong, okay?” I told him, raising my voice, as if that would help him to hear me. “And I'd really like it if you would wake up now, so that I can tell you that in person. Would you do that for me?”

“Please?” I said. “General? Xavier?”

When he didn't answer, I tried again.

“Dad?”

But he still didn't respond.

He was dead to the world.

I flew him straight to the hospital in south Beaverton where my mother worked, but when I swooped down looking for a spot to land, I saw that all the roads surrounding it were jammed with abandoned vehicles and frightened people. If I landed my Interceptor nearby it would draw all kinds of attention, and it was doubtful I'd be able to take off again.

I was circling back over the city, looking for a quiet place to set down, when I spotted my high school down below. There were only a few cars still parked in the student lot, and mine was one of them. I could also make out the burn marks on the school's front lawn left by the EDA shuttle when Ray had arrived to pick me up this morning—a whole lifetime ago.

I considered landing my ship in the lot right next to my car, but then I thought better of leaving it parked out in the open. A few seconds later, I spotted the perfect parking spot.

I swung around and flew back over the school, but this time I strafed the roof of the gym with laser fire. Then I made another pass and strafed it again, until the whole roof collapsed. Once the dust settled, I lowered my Interceptor down into the gym, concealing it perfectly from view, except from directly above.

The school superintendent was going to be pissed about the damage, but he could bill me.

I was sure someone must have spotted my ship during its brief descent, or heard the noise I'd made. But when I climbed out of my cockpit and ran back outside the gym to take a quick look around, I didn't see anyone rushing toward the building to investigate. I figured that the people who weren't too busy fleeing the city or looting were probably inside their homes, glued to their TV and computers screens, waiting for news.

I sent my mother a text message, asking her to meet us at home with a first aid kit, as soon as possible. Then I pulled my car around, up to the gymnasium's exit. I ran back inside, opened up my father's escape pod, and—staggering under his weight—carried him out to my car.

The jolt of pain he must've felt when I finally managed to flip him into the back seat brought him to a state of semiconsciousness.

“RedJive, standing by!” he said drunkenly, slurring his words. He blinked a few times and looked around the car, his eyes widening in recognition.

“Hey, I know this car. This is my old Omni! This shit heap still runs?”

I couldn't speak for a moment. I was too overjoyed to see his eyes open.

“Yeah, it still runs,” I finally managed to say. “But just barely.” As I gently removed his jacket, I noticed there was blood on some of its patches. I balled the jacket up and shoved it under his head for a pillow. “Try to stay still, okay? Just rest. We'll be home soon.”

“Wow, really?” he said, smiling faintly. “I've never been home.”

Luckily my house was only a couple of miles from school, and most of the streets were still passable. I only had to make one detour, to get around a five-car accident blocking an intersection. During the trip, my father drooled and mumbled in the passenger seat, obviously riding high on whatever pain meds the escape pod's emergency systems had injected into his bloodstream.

As I turned down our street and saw our empty driveway, I clenched my teeth in disappointment. My mom wasn't here.

I was still helping my father out of the car when I heard an engine behind me and turned to see my mom's car pulling in. I made a second's worth of eye contact with her through the windshield, saw her eyes widen as she recognized me—and then she was leaping out of her car and running to mine, covering her mouth with her long fingers.

My father opened his eyes in the passenger seat beside me as she peered in.

He didn't speak. He just stared at her, as if paralyzed. I put a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, getting out of the car. “I'm home. We're home.”

She took me in her arms and crushed her face against my shoulder as tightly as she could. When she finally let go, she turned back to look at my father, still inside the car. “Xavier?” she said. “Is that really you?”

Somehow he managed to pull himself up out of the car, onto his feet.

Then he took a step toward her, and she threw her arms around him. He buried his face in her hair, inhaling deeply.

As I watched them embrace, there on the front lawn, my heart swelled until I thought it might burst.

I heard barking, and a second later, Muffit burst out of his doggie door. The old Beagle barked and bounded down the front steps and across the front lawn, moving faster than he had in years.

“Muffit!” my father cried, breaking off his embrace with my mother to greet the ancient dog, just a second before Muffit somehow summoned the strength to bound into my kneeling father's lap.

“Oh, it's so good to see you, boy!” he said as Muffit showered his face with kisses. “I missed you, boy! Did you miss me?”

Muffit barked happily in reply, then continued to shower my dad with saliva. It had never once occurred to me to wonder whether our dog remembered my father—after all, Muffit had been just a puppy when he disappeared.

My father began to laugh under the beagle's barrage of kisses—but then he glanced over at my mother and me and suddenly broke down and began to sob. He turned away and tried to hide his face by burying it in Muffit's graying coat. My mother put her arms around both of them, and I saw that there were tears running down her cheeks, too—and I knew they were the same sort now welling up in my own eyes. Tears of joy.