He gripped the edges of the podium, as if to steady himself. It made me realize that I was doing the same thing with the armrests of my chair.
“Here is our satellite imagery from early yesterday morning.” A new high-resolution image of Europa appeared on the screen behind him. The armada we’d seen under construction in the canned video was now complete. The six Dreadnaught Spheres had flowered open to take on their deadly cargo, and their long spiral storage racks were nearly filled to capacity with over a billion individual drones, ready for transport and deployment.
“This next image was taken just a few hours ago,” the admiral said as another image of Europa appeared on the screen. The band of gleaming alien construction ships that had been orbiting the icy moon was now gone—and so were the six massive Dreadnaught Spheres. And there was a giant circle burned in Europa’s southern hemisphere—in the exact same spot on the moon’s surface where the Icebreaker had aimed its melt laser during our assault on Sobrukai last night during the Armada mission.
“Holy shit!” I shouted, and I wasn’t alone. “That mission was real?”
“What do you mean?” Lex asked.
Before I could answer, the admiral spoke again.
“The EDA launched an attack on Europa last night,” he said. “Many of you Armada pilots took part in that mission, which was our one shot at destroying them before they launched their drones to destroy us. But the Icebreaker mission failed. And now their armada is on its way to Earth.”
I couldn’t keep my doubts to myself any longer. “This story doesn’t make any damn sense,” I whispered to Lex. “If these aliens want to wipe us out, why wait forty years to attack? Why give us that long to figure out their technology and prepare to fight them off, when they could have wiped us out back in the seventies? Why wait?” I shook my head. “It didn’t make sense when it was backstory for the game, and it doesn’t make sense now either. I mean, why send a fleet of robotic drones? Why not hit us with a virus or a killer asteroid or—”
“Christ, who the fuck cares, man?” Lex hissed back. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her attempt to take another sip from her already-empty flask with a trembling hand. Then she cursed and retightened its cap. “Maybe they live for thousands of years? Four decades might seem like a long weekend to them.” Her eyes narrowed at the glowing image on the screen. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? They’re obviously through waiting.”
She turned her attention back to the admiral, and I tried to do the same.
“This is the enemy fleet’s current position and trajectory,” Vance said, just as an animated map of our solar system appeared on the screen behind him. The current location of the Europan armada was indicated by a chain of three amoeba-shaped blobs, each one larger than the last. They were stretched out in a line between Jupiter and Earth, inching their way through the asteroid belt like an interplanetary wagon train.
The Europan armada appeared to be approaching Earth in three separate attack waves. Their overall trajectory was indicated by a glowing yellow line that left no doubt as to their destination.
“Oh my God,” Lex whispered. “They’re already more than halfway here.”
She was right. The first wave was already approaching the asteroid belt out beyond Mars’ orbit.
The display zoomed in on the vanguard—the blob in the lead—showing that it was comprised of a dense cloud of thousands of tiny green triangles swarming around a dark green circle in their midst—a Dreadnaught Sphere, surrounded by its fighter escort. The admiral then adjusted the tactical display to zoom in on the two even-larger blobs of ships trailing it. The second blob contained two Dreadnaught Spheres and twice as many Glaive Fighters escorting it. The third blob contained three Dreadnaught Spheres, and triple the number of fighters escorting them.
The admiral used a laser pointer to highlight the three clusters of ships.
“For reasons we still don’t understand, the enemy has divided its invasion force into three attack waves, each progressively larger than the last,” he said. “We estimate that each one of those Dreadnaught Spheres is carrying a payload of approximately one billion individual drones.”
Even I was able to do arithmetic that simple. The admiral had just told us that there were six billion killer alien drones on their way here to wipe us out. This obviously wasn’t going to be a fair fight—not after that second wave got here.
The admiral moved his laser pointer back to the arrow-shaped cluster of ships out in front. “If it continues on its current course at the same speed, the vanguard—this first wave of ships out front—will reach our lunar perimeter less than eight hours from now.”
A digital countdown clock appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, showing the time remaining until the vanguard’s arrival: 07:54:07.
A second later, my QComm beeped and its display lit up on my wrist, just as every other QComm in the auditorium did the same thing, creating a single loud beep that echoed through the crowd. I glanced down at my wrist and saw that the same invasion countdown clock now appeared on my QComm’s display, perfectly in sync with the one on the giant projection screen behind the admiral.
07:54:05
07:54:04
07:54:03
“Jesus,” Lex muttered, staring at the QComm strapped to her wrist, watching the seconds tick down. “Now I feel like Snake Plissken.”
I snorted out a wholly inappropriate laugh that echoed through the silent auditorium before I quickly stifled it as the sea of faces below us turned to scowl in our general direction. Lex snickered, and I raised a finger to my lips and shushed her.
“If we manage to survive the vanguard’s attack, the second wave of enemy drones will reach Earth approximately three hours later, with the final wave reaching us roughly three hours after that.”
Every time he said the word vanguard, all I could think of was an old arcade game with that title. Vanguard was a great side-scrolling space shooter from the mid-1980s that I’d discovered in my father’s collection. In the game, when you reached the last of the game’s five increasingly difficult waves, you faced the final boss, known as “The Gond.” In my head, I was already imagining that the Gond and the Europan overlord looked more or less identical. Then I reminded myself there might not even be a Europan overlord—the briefing film said we still didn’t know anything about their biology or social structure. Maybe they didn’t even have a leader. Maybe they were a hive mind?
When the admiral finished speaking and turned away from the screen, a rumble of anxious murmuring spread through the audience, gradually increasing in volume, until Vance finally motioned for silence.
“You’re right to be alarmed,” he said. “A full-scale invasion of our planet is now under way, and our enemy has us vastly outnumbered. Thankfully, the odds aren’t nearly as hopeless as they seem. The Earth Defense Alliance has been preparing the world for this moment for decades, and when it begins, humanity will be ready to fight back and defend our home.”
A desperate cheer went up as the Earth Defense Alliance crest reappeared on the screen, accompanied by another piece of music from John Williams’ score for Armada. As skeptical as I was about everything I’d just been told, hearing the music in that context gave me goose bumps.
A hangar full of ADI-88 Interceptors appeared on the screen, and I felt my jaw go involuntarily slack. They looked exactly like the drones I’d piloted in Armada, down to the last detail. Another photo appeared, showing thousands of ATHIDs standing in formation under powerful floodlights in some secret concrete bunker. Finally, a photo of a single Sentinel mech was displayed, and I heard Lex mutter “whoa” under her breath. It looked just like one of the Sentinels in the game, and just as huge.
“You’re looking at the real reason for the recent global financial crisis—all of human civilization’s technology, industry, and natural resources have been leveraged to the hilt in our effort to ensure that we have the firepower necessary to repel the invaders’ superior numbers and advanced weaponry. And now, at long last, our forces are ready for deployment.”
More photos were displayed on the screen, showing thousands of real Interceptors, Sentinels, and ATHIDs stored in hidden locations around the world, waiting for battle. I felt an involuntary surge of pride for my species, and the technological miracles we had accomplished in an effort to ensure our own survival.
“We have constructed millions of these drones and hidden them in strategic locations all over the globe,” the admiral continued. “When the invasion begins, civilian recruits around the world will be able to use their gaming platforms to take control of these stockpiled drone forces using the enemy’s instantaneous quantum communication link technology. This global network of military defense drones will be our only hope to even the odds that are stacked against us all.”
The EDA crest appeared on the screen behind the admiral once again.
“The Alliance’s international forces have already managed to thwart dozens of enemy scouting missions to Earth, and these engagements have helped us collect an enormous amount of data on their ships, weapons, and tactics,” he said. “And we’ve fed every ounce of that data into the Terra Firma and Armada training simulations, to ensure that they would be effective in preparing you to face real enemy drones in combat. So all of you people have been fighting a simulated version of this war for years.” He smiled grimly. “Now it’s time for the real thing.”