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 him, 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 the things I’d always dreamed of hearing him tell me, back when I’d still allowed myself to fan tasize 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 the 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, 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.