Shin shook his head. “How did you stop Viper from murdering you for that?”
“Maybe he realized I’m already a dead man, so there was no point?”
My father frowned at me and seemed about to say something, but Shin changed the subject before he could.
“Care for some snackage, Lieutenant?” he asked. “Your favorite snacks were listed in each of your EDA profiles, so we stocked up on all of them. You’re a Lucky Charms man, right? Dry, with no milk? We laid in a few dozen boxes for you, see?”
He pointed over at one of the unoccupied pods across the room, where half a dozen boxes of my favorite breakfast cereal sat stacked up like crates of ammunition. The other new recruits had an assortment of snacks and beverages laid out on the floor around their sunken pods, too. Stacks of nacho cheese Combos and Slim Jims were scattered around Milo’s pod, along with a small mountain of Diet Mountain Dew. There were bags of cheddar jalapeño Cheetos and a row of two-liter bottles of Hawaiian Punch laid out for Whoadie, bags of multicolored Skittles for Debbie, and beside Chén’s pod, dozens of silver energy drink cans with QI LI printed on the side, surrounded by writing in Chinese.
“How did our favorite snacks end up in our EDA profiles?” I asked Shin. But it was Graham who answered.
“The EDA knows everything about everyone, kid,” he said. “Your food and beverage preferences weren’t the only things being recorded while you were playing Armada and Terra Firma, trust me. Your pulse rate, blood pressure, sweat content—the EDA makes the CIA and the NSA look like the PTA.”
“Great,” I said. “The government has been spying on all of us our whole lives, but at least we get to have our favorite snacks. Bonus.”
To my surprise, my father grinned at my remark. Just then the other new arrivals emerged from their pods, and he went over to greet them. Chén snapped to attention when he saw my father approach, and the others scrambled to follow suit.
“At ease, recruits,” my father said as he walked over to them. “Welcome to Moon Base Alpha. I’m General Xavier Lightman, your new CO. I apologize for keeping you waiting.”
He scanned their faces, waiting for a response, but my new friends all seemed too starstruck to speak. My father walked over to stand in front of Milo, who was grinning like he was about to meet one of his favorite movie stars, his earlier disdain apparently forgotten.
“You’re Milo Dobson, right? Better known as Kushmaster5000?”
Milo nodded imperceptibly, caught in the throes of some sort of gamer fanboy aneurysm.
“It’s an honor to finally meet you in person, Lieutenant Dobson,” my father told him. He turned to the others. “It’s an honor to meet all of you. Whoadie, CrazyJi. AtomicMom.” He shook hands with each of them in turn, then nodded at me. “And, of course, IronBeagle. You’re five of the most gifted pilots I’ve ever seen in action. We’re privileged to have you here.”
The others smiled and their faces flushed with pride—and mine may have a bit, as well.
“Thank you, sir!” Chén said, carefully repeating his QComm’s translation.
“Yeah, thanks, General!” Milo said, finally recovering from his stroke of paralysis. “I mean, holy shit—that’s a huge compliment, coming from RedJive himself! You’re the best of the best of the best, sir! I’ve been studying your moves for years—we all have.”
My father seemed genuinely embarrassed by this praise.
“You’re giving me way too much credit,” he said. Then he pointed to his two comrades. “Shin and Graham were both heavily involved with your simulator training, too. I’m sure you’ll recognize their call signs. Shin uses the handle MaxJenius, and Graham—”
“My call sign is Withnailed,” Graham finished. “Though these two rarely use it.”
“We prefer to call him ‘Limes’ instead,” Shin said. “It’s short for ‘limey.’ He hates it.”
Graham nodded. “Indeed I do.”
We all smiled in recognition at their familiar call signs. MaxJenius and Withnailed were both mainstays in the top-five pilot rankings, too. Since the first year the game was launched, they had both alternated between second and third place, right below RedJive.
“I don’t mean to be rude, General Lightman,” Debbie said. “But when are you going to tell us why the EDA sent us up here?” She glanced over at Shin and Graham. “Why couldn’t we just remain back on Earth with the other recruits?”
My father exchanged a strange smile with his two friends, then nodded at Debbie.
“I was just about to brief all of you on that subject,” he said.
Graham smiled; then he motioned to a row of low, padded leather bench seats behind us. “You guys might want to be sitting down when you hear this,” he said, before sitting down himself. Milo and Debbie joined him, but Chén, Whoadie, and I remained on our feet.
My father waved his hand at the view screen covering the domed ceiling, and the image arrayed across it changed. We were no longer looking at a live feed of the lunar landscape outside the base, but at an animated three-dimensional graphic of our solar system, with the spinning planet Earth in the foreground and the moon lazily orbiting it at a distance, both surrounded by a series of concentric rings indicating the orbital paths of the other planets. My father made another gesture at the screen and the animation of our solar system began to speed up, making the planets zoom around the sun like a pack of race cars, each on a separate track.
“One of the things you weren’t told during your enlistment briefing is that this isn’t the first time the Europans have sent ships to Earth to attack us,” the General said. “Over the past four decades, they’ve done it exactly thirty-seven times.”
On the domed screen, the celestial clockwork of our solar system continued to spin forward until the orbits of Earth and Jupiter aligned, bringing the two planets into their closest annual proximity. Then, as the orbit of Jupiter’s moon Europa brought it as close as possible to Earth, the animation froze.
“Every 398.9 days, a celestial event known as the Jovian Opposition occurs,” the general explained, “when the sun and Jupiter are both on opposite sides of Earth, and Europa is at its closest proximity to us. Ever since our first contact with them, the Europans have used that proximity to send a small detachment of ships to Earth, to conduct surveillance, test our defenses, and abduct live human specimens for study.”
He tapped his QComm display, and an image of Moon Base Alpha appeared on the screen, seen from above, nestled into the Daedalus crater.
“Once the Europans began to send scouting missions to Earth, the EDA decided to construct a secret defense base here on the far side of the moon,” the general said. “It was originally intended to function as a long-range surveillance and communications outpost. But when it finally became operational in September of 1988, and a permanent human presence was established here, the enemy’s tactics changed. When the next Jovian Opposition arrived, the Europans didn’t send their detachment of scout ships directly to Earth. This time they came here to Moon Base Alpha first—and attacked it.”
Video footage began to play on the domed view screen, showing a large formation of Glaive Fighters streaking down from the starry blackness of the lunar sky to descend on the tiny moon base nestled in the crater below, as Interceptors began to launch out of the base’s hangar and fly up to meet them, setting off a massive aerial battle.
“We managed to fight them off, but just barely,” he said. “It took nearly a full year to repair the damage. And when the next Jovian Opposition arrived, the Europans attacked again, this time with an even larger force, to match the increased size of Moon Base Alpha’s defenses. And once again, our forces were barely a match for them.”
“The same thing happened again the next year,” Graham said. “And the year after that.”
“Each year, they sent even more drones to assault the base,” Shin said. “And every year, we increased our defenses here in anticipation of their next attack.”
My father nodded. “This escalation continued for over a decade, until the Europans changed the game on us again last year, by unveiling a new weapon—one you’ve all encountered before during your Armada training. The Disrupter.”
A collective groan escaped the new recruits. On the view screen, we watched as a cluster of enemy ships appeared, descending toward Moon Base Alpha in perfect formation, creating an image that momentarily resembled a screenshot of the game Space Invaders.
A wire-frame diagram of a spinning dodecahedron appeared adjacent to it on the view screen, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“The Disrupter appears to function by coupling itself to a large celestial body, like a planet or moon.” On the view screen, an animation showed a spinning chrome dodecahedron making landfall on Earth and then firing a beam of red energy into the planet’s core. “The device then harnesses the planet’s magnetic field, using it to generate a spherical field that disrupts all quantum communications inside it.”
“All of the EDA’s drones have backup radio-control units,” Shin added. “Unfortunately the Disrupter interferes with normal radio communications, too, so they’re useless.”