I smiled and held up my QComm. All the names I’d just lifted from Finn Arbogast’s phone were listed there. I scrolled down to highlight the one labeled Armistice Council Members—Conference.
“He already gave me all the help I need,” I said.
“You hacked his future phone?” Diehl said. “How? You can barely use apps!”
“If you must know,” I said, “that super-hot mech driver I met at Crystal Palace showed me how to do it. She also kissed me, FYI.”
“Really?” Cruz said, laughing. “Is she from Canada? The Niagara Falls area, perhaps?”
“I want to know if they boned in zero gravity,” Diehl said. “Spill it, Lightman.”
I ignored their questions and called my father on his QComm. It rang and rang. As I continued to let it ring, I grabbed Diehl’s phone off his desk to dial my mother’s number—only to discover that it was already programmed into his contacts as “Pamela Lightman.”
“Why do you have my mom’s number saved in your phone?”
“Oh, you know why, Stifler,” Cruz muttered from his video window, his voice dripping with innuendo—this was his version of “that’s what she said.”
“I’ve had your mom’s number in my phone since I was twelve, psycho!” Diehl said. “You have my mom’s number in your phone, too. Get over yourself.”
I nodded, then shook my head vigorously. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, man.”
I put his phone to my other ear. My mother’s number rang and rang, too, while my father’s continued to ring in the other. A minute passed. Neither of them picked up. Probably not good. I wondered if my dad’s condition had gotten worse and she’d decided to take him to a hospital after all.
After Crom knows how many rings, I finally gave up and canceled both calls. Then I pulled up Arbogast’s contact for the Armistice Council again and tried to make a decision.
I badly wanted to have my father on the line before I called them: The Armistice Council would be made up of world-renowned scientists or EDA commanders or both, and they probably wouldn’t listen to some eighteen-year-old kid. But there was a good chance my father was unconscious, and the clock was ticking down. What choice did I have?
I summoned my courage and tapped the Armistice Council contact on my QComm. I watched as the device dialed five different numbers all at once and then connected all of them simultaneously. Then my QComm switched into “conference mode,” and my display screen was divided into five separate windows, each containing live video of a different person, each of whom appeared to be in a separate location.
There were four men and one woman, and all of them looked familiar to me, but I only recognized two of them by name—the two men whose faces appeared in the last two video windows on my screen. The first was Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the second was Dr. Stephen Hawking, slumped in his motorized wheelchair. I heard Cruz and Diehl gasp behind me just as my own jaw dropped open like a castle drawbridge.
Dr. Hawking spoke up first. I saw the familiar heads-up display for an ATHID on the computer monitor behind him—it appeared that Dr. Hawking had been helping defend Cambridge from its alien siege when he answered the call.
He spoke using his famous computer-generated voice, which now, ironically, reminded me of Chén’s translator instead of the other way around.
“Who are you?” he asked. “And how did you get this number?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but no words came out. I’d just recalled the names of the other three scientists on the call—I’d seen each of them interviewed on countless science programs and documentaries. The Asian gentleman was Dr. Michio Kaku, and the other two people were famous SETI researchers, Dr. Seth Shostak and Dr. Jill Tarter. I recognized Tarter because she was a former colleague of Carl Sagan’s, and she’d served as the primary inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the film Contact.
I was on the phone with five of the world’s most prominent scientists, and they were all waiting for me to say something.
“Doctor Hawking asked you a question,” Dr. Tyson said, rolling his eyes slightly. “This is not a good time to be wasting our time.”
I shook my head, and forced my voice into action.
“I’m sorry, sir, of course,” I said, clearing my throat. “My name is Zack Lightman. I was stationed at Moon Base Alpha with my father, General Xavier Lightman, until it was hit—and the fate of human civilization depends on what I have to tell you.”
They all stared at me, waiting.
I told them, as quickly and succinctly as I could, everything my father had told me, along with what I’d seen for myself in our last Disrupter battle.
To my shock, none of them hung up on me. So I kept on talking until I had told them everything—and probably a few things more than once. I also used my QComm to transfer the data my father had obtained from Arbogast, including all of the raw Envoy mission footage and the transmissions we’d received from the Europans. It only took a few seconds before they were each scanning the data on their own QComms.
“Some of the things you’ve just told us are extremely unsettling,” Dr. Tyson said. “But unfortunately, they’re not entirely surprising. Since it was first formed, this council has encountered a fair amount of secrecy and military bureaucracy in our dealings with the Earth Defense Alliance command—especially pertaining to the release of classified information about the Europans. We were never given unrestricted access to that data.”
“Lieutenant, would you mind if we put you on hold a moment?” Dr. Tarter asked. “So that we can discuss the information you’ve just given us in private?”
“Sure,” I said, glancing at the countdown clock in the corner of my display, now ticking off the remaining minutes until the second wave attacked. “Take all the time you need. It’s not like the world is about to end.”
I don’t think they even heard my snarky reply, because they put me on hold before I’d finished making it. Their video stream windows froze and grayed themselves out. I also noticed tiny arrow icons linking their five video windows, to indicate that they were all still talking to each other on the call while I was temporarily excluded. That was when Cruz caught a glimpse of my QComm screen, which was now divided into over half a dozen windows, each with a different person’s face, just like the opening of The Brady Bunch—so he decided to belt out an impromptu parody of the opening line of the show’s theme song: “This is the story, of an alien invasion, by some fuckheads from Europa who are—”
That was all he managed to get out before Diehl snapped his laptop shut, cutting him off. He winced at me apologetically.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “The council has me on hold.”
Diehl exhaled and reopened his laptop. Cruz was still singing away.
“All of them have tentacles, like their mother! The youngest one in curls!”
Diehl laughed. Cruz laughed. I laughed.
Gallows humor.
AS WE SAT there waiting, my QComm rang, startling me so much that I nearly dropped it. My display informed me that, in addition to the five other calls on hold, I had a new incoming call—from my father.
I hit the answer icon, and my father face’s appeared in another video window, along with the five grayed-out ones.
He was smiling—an unbridled, rapturous smile, even bigger than the one he’d been wearing when we first met. I half expected to see an animated bluebird alight on one of his shoulders before he broke into song. My eyes went to the gash on his forehead, which my mother had bandaged, and I wondered if his uncharacteristically upbeat mood was somehow due to his head injury. After a few seconds he managed to force the smile down—but his mouth snapped back into a goofy grin a second later. He shrugged, as if to say I just can’t hide how I feel inside.
That was when I finally noticed that the wallpaper in my mother’s bedroom was visible behind him, and I suddenly understood—and immediately wished I could pull and somehow yank the knowledge back out of my brain. No wonder my parents hadn’t answered their phones earlier. They’d been too busy boning each other like teenagers.
“Zack!” my father said, way too brightly. “How are you doing, Son?”
I wanted to reach through the phone and strangle him—then I stopped to wonder why. It’s not like it was their first time, right? And hey, the world was probably about to end. Half the people on the planet were probably going at it right now, just like everyone up on the goddamn moon! Everyone was jumping at their last chance to jump one another. And if anyone deserved a moment of happiness, it was my father, who had just risked his life for the zillionth time to prevent the extinction of the human race.
If I’d still been my old Bruce Banner self, I would have Hulked right the fuck out on him, then and there. But I didn’t. I smiled back at him.
“Hey, Dad. I’m on hold with all five members of the Armistice Council,” I said. “I just told them everything—to the best of my ability, anyway.”
He laughed, assuming I was making a joke. But then his smile abruptly vanished.
“Wait,” he said. “Are you being serious with me right now?”