“Hey, that’s mine!” I said, hating how much I sounded like an angry child.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “And it’s a very cool jacket—no argument. But wearing it into this briefing won’t help you make the best first impression.”
He stuffed the jacket into my backpack and forced the zipper closed, then put the pack back on my shoulders.
“Those elevators will take you down to the briefing auditorium,” he said, pointing behind me. “Just follow those other recruit candidates.”
I glanced across the lobby, over at the recruits forming a line at the elevators. Then I turned back to face Ray. “When will I see you again?”
“I’m not sure, pal,” he said, meeting my gaze. “Things are happening very fast now. I’m departing on another shuttle in just a few minutes.”
“Why?” I asked. “Where are they sending you?”
“To help defend the Big Apple,” he said. “I’m one of the Thirty Dozen, remember?” He smiled and straightened his posture, then his lapels. “I’ve been assigned to the EDA’s First Armored Drone Battalion,” he said. “We’ll be defending the Eastern Seaboard. So I’ll be down here fighting them on the ground while you’re up there, fighting them in the sky.”
We stood there in silence for a moment; then Ray stuck out his hand. I hesitated for a moment, but then I shook it. In spite of everything, I still didn’t want Ray to leave. He was the only familiar face in this place. While I was fumbling for a way to say goodbye to him without expressing any hint of forgiveness, Ray surprised me by throwing his arms around me in a fierce bear hug. Then I surprised myself by hugging him back, just as tightly.
“You’ve got a gift, Zack,” he said, stepping back. “You really can make a difference in this war. Remember that, okay? No matter how frightening things get these next few hours …”
I nodded, but didn’t reply. I had absolutely no idea how to respond to that—or to anything that was happening right now. I wasn’t a soldier. I was just a kid from the suburbs who played a shitload of videogames. I wasn’t prepared to fight an interplanetary war! At the moment, I didn’t feel prepared for much of anything—not even to say goodbye to Ray.
“Okay, let’s not make a scene,” Ray said. “Take care of yourself for me, okay? And—” His voice caught. He cleared his throat and went on. “And when this is all over, let’s make a pact to meet back at Starbase Ace. We’ll order some Thai Fighter takeout and swap war stories. Deal?”
“Deal,” I said around the lump rising in my throat.
Ray saluted me, and I saluted him back, even though I felt like a kid playing soldier.
“The Force will be with you,” Ray said, giving my shoulder one last squeeze. “Always.”
That was it. He turned and walked off, disappearing back the way we came. I stood for a moment, staring after him; then I glanced back over at the bank of elevators, where my fellow “Elite Recruit Candidates” continued to form an anxious queue.
I FILED ONTO an elevator with fifteen other recruits. They varied drastically in age, gender, and ethnicity, but all of them wore a variation of the same dazed expression, which I knew was probably also mirrored on my own face.
As the elevator descended, we all stood there in silence, staring at the ceiling, our shoes, or at the closed doors in front of us—anything to avoid making eye contact. I wondered where each of them had been and what they’d been doing earlier that morning, when an Earth Defense Alliance shuttle had appeared out of nowhere to shatter their notion of reality, yank them out of their lives, and bring them here.
I also found myself wondering if I’d ever played Terra Firma or Armada with any of these people. It seemed possible—even probable. Hell, for all I knew, one of the people beside me could be the famed RedJive, in the flesh.
The elevator car had no floor indicator or control panel, just a single down arrow that lit up and beeped about twice every second as the car descended deeper and deeper belowground. I counted over twenty of those beeps before the doors finally opened again.
We stepped off the elevator into a large circular lobby that was already clogged with a procession of disoriented recruit candidates like ourselves. Most were dressed in their normal street clothes like me, but for a wide variety of different climates. I also spotted people in business suits, fast food uniforms, surgical scrubs, and one dazed-looking middle-aged woman who was wearing a wedding dress and still clutching her bridal bouquet.
A line of EDA soldiers stationed around the lobby herded everyone through a long row of doors, into the adjacent sunken auditorium. As I filed into it with the others, I swiveled my head around to survey the layout. The enormous bowl-shaped auditorium had stadium-style seating that faced an enormous curved projection screen, making it look more like an IMAX theater than a top-secret underground briefing room. But the ceiling was a different story—it was a long, sloping grid of concrete waffle slabs, each reinforced with shock-absorption springs at its center. Like the rest of the base, the auditorium looked as if it had been built to withstand a direct nuclear blast on the surface above.
I swept my gaze around the auditorium, trying to decide where I should sit. At the foot of the giant screen, I noticed a low rectangular stage with a podium at its center. The first thirty or so rows in front of it were already filled with nervous recruits, and a steady stream of new ones were filing in and filling up the rows behind them, one after another, the way we did at school assemblies. But a few dozen less conformist (or more antisocial) individuals had chosen to sit much farther back, either by themselves or in scattered small groups.
I began to climb the nearest staircase, heading for the least populated seats in the upper third of the auditorium. Once I reached the nosebleed section, I began to look for a sufficiently isolated seat—then I froze in midstep.
She was just off to my right, sitting all alone in a deserted row near the back, taking brazen pulls from a chrome hip flask painted to look like R2-D2. Even seated, I could tell she must be a few inches taller than me. Her pale, alabaster skin contrasted sharply with her dark clothing—black combat boots, black jeans, and a black tank top (which didn’t fully conceal the black bra she was wearing underneath). She had a spiky wave of black hair that was buzzed down one side and chin-length on the other. But the real kicker was her tattoos, on each arm: on the left was a beautiful seminude rendering of the comic book heroine Tank Girl, adorned in postapocalyptic rock lingerie and smooching an M16. On her right bicep, in stylized capital letters, were the words EL RIESGO SIEMPRE VIVE.
Seeing her was almost as jarring as when I’d first glimpsed that Glaive Fighter the previous afternoon. I had fallen for Ellen gradually, over a period of months. But this—this was like taking a lightning bolt from Mjolnir straight to the forehead.
I was still wondering if I had the courage to go sit near her when I realized I was already moving in that direction, as fast as my feet would carry me. As I climbed the stairs, it occurred to me that my emotions were probably not to be trusted under these heightened circumstances, but that thought was lost amid the influx of hormones flooding my brain as I made my way to the center of the row where she was sitting. I tried to convince myself that she looked like she could use some company—even though everything about her demeanor indicated the opposite.
When I reached her seat, she ignored me, leaving me standing there waiting for her to acknowledge my existence. As she continued to stare at her lap, I looked down at what was holding her attention and saw that she’d cracked open her QComm and had its electronic innards arrayed on her thighs, like she was performing an autopsy on the device—which I figured she was, since it seemed doubtful she would ever be able to put it back together.
But then she began to do just that, reassembling the QComm in seconds, with the speed and dexterity of a Marine field-stripping a weapon. When she finished putting it back together, she powered it on and watched the operating system reboot.
Then she finally raised her eyes to meet mine. I pointed to the seat beside her.
“Is it okay if I sit here?”
I know it’s hard to believe, but I improvised this opening line right on the spot.
She gave me a quick once-over before answering.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m having a private conversation with my droid. Isn’t that right, R2?” She raised her flask to her lips again, then waved it at the sea of empty seats spread out below us. “Why don’t you go find another female of the species to mack on?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Vasquez.” I nodded at her flask. “I’m just here to bum some of your booze.”
She laughed, and I felt a sharp pain in the center of my chest. She glanced down at her El Riesgo Siempre Vive tattoo, clearly impressed that I knew its origin.
“All right,” she said with an amused sigh. “Have a seat, baby face.”
“Thanks, Grandma.” I took the seat next to her and propped my feet up on the seat back in front of me, like she was doing.
“Did you just call me ‘Grandma’?”
“Yeah, because just you called me ‘baby face.’ And it wounded my masculine pride.”