Down on the surface, I saw Lex’s Sentinel overtake the lead Glaive mech. The two towering opponents began to grapple with each other at the edge of the widest breach in the blast doors. The Sentinel executed an impressive move, spinning counterclockwise and bringing up one of its massive arms in a clothesline maneuver that knocked the enemy mech’s leg completely off of its hodgepodge torso. Lex power-jumped her Sentinel clear of it just before two other Sentinels unloaded on the immobilized metal beast. This barrage was joined by hundreds of ATHIDs who began to fire on it, too. Within seconds, the five-Glaive mech exploded, raining wreckage and debris down onto the smoking blast doors, which pinged and clanged as each piece impacted on it.
I swung my Interceptor up and around again, intending to make another pass at the remaining Glaives. But then I scanned my HUD and saw that only five Glaive Fighters remained, a small cluster of green triangles on my tactical display moving into some kind of attack formation high above me.
I angled my ship toward the remaining squadron, just in time to see them all simultaneously turn into a sharp dive, streaking straight down toward the base, as if they intended to make one final kamikaze run. But it looked to me like their angle was wrong—they weren’t diving toward the breach in the warped blast doors. Instead, they were descending toward the long row of Interceptor launch tunnels nearby—the ones that had been disguised as grain silos until a few minutes ago. Now most of that false exterior was burned and blasted away, leaving nothing but scarred armor plating underneath.
The diving line of Glaive Fighters began to spread out, each one lining up with a different launch tunnel. And each of those tunnels—which, I suddenly realized, were all sitting wide open at their tops—led directly down into the drone reserve hangar. According to the diagram on my HUD, that hangar was deep inside the base, not too far from where I was currently sitting.
They intended to make a final kamikaze run into the base, through the open mouths of those drone launch tunnels. The simulated alien invaders in Armada had never tried this move. How had the rocket scientists who designed this base not seen this massive hole in its defenses?
Luckily, I happened to be there to save the day.
I jammed my throttle forward and moved to swing in above them, firing my weapons before I was even within range. I got lucky and took two of them out. Then a few of the other Interceptors loitering nearby finally began to fire on them, too, taking out two more of the enemy ships just before they reached the open mouths of the launch tunnels.
But the last remaining Glaive Fighter managed to get through, and I continued to pursue it as it rocketed downward, closing in on the row of launch silos jutting up from the charred and blackened earth like a row of skeletal fingers.
“Attention, all Interceptor pilots, this is Palace Command,” Admiral Vance’s familiar voice barked over the comlink. “Disengage and cease fire! Do not attempt to pursue that ship into the launch tunnels! I repeat, disengage and cease fire! We have automatic security fail-safes in place that will—”
I muted the admiral’s voice on my comlink.
On my tactical display, I saw the wing of Interceptors trailing me break off and disengage, just as Vance had instructed, and for a brief second I almost did the same: The years I’d spent playing Armada had conditioned me to follow orders, and Vance’s orders in particular, because the game’s mechanics rewarded officer obedience.
But that had been in a videogame, and this was real life, and the admiral’s last-minute order to break off my pursuit seemed like certain suicide. If I didn’t destroy this last remaining Glaive Fighter before it reached the other end of the launch tunnel, nothing would prevent it from overloading its power core inside the drone hangar. The detonation could cause the entire underground base to collapse in on itself, killing me and Lex and everyone else inside before any of us got our big chance to save the world. I wasn’t willing to take that risk—or to trust my life to the same moronically designed “automatic security fail-safe” that had just allowed this massive enemy breach in our defenses.
So I made the snap decision to disobey a direct order and continued to pursue the kamikaze Glaive as it made its nosedive down through the silo’s open mouth and into the launch tunnel beyond it, ignoring the insistent, looping voice of Master Yoda in my head: Told you, I have! Regret this, you will!
We both streaked farther through the narrow launch tunnel, like one bullet chasing another down the barrel of a gun, both headed the wrong direction. Just as I was about to open fire on the enemy ship again, it turned into a barrel roll and began to scrape the bladed edge of its right wingtip against the tunnel wall, and I pitched clockwise to dodge the shower of sparks it threw up in its wake. Once I righted myself, I managed to get the Glaive back in my sights for a moment, and I fired a short burst at it with my sun guns. But they glanced off its shields and it kept right on trucking. Meanwhile, overfiring my weapons had caused my drone to decelerate in speed, so the Glaive had increased its lead, making it even more difficult for me to get a bead on it. It reminded me of playing Space Invaders—the last alien alive was always the bitch of the bunch, and the hardest to kill, because it moved faster than all of the others. Was it just my imagination, or did this Glaive suddenly seem a whole lot harder to kill than all of its cannon-fodder brethren?
I had to stop firing for a second to focus on keeping my Interceptor from crashing into the tunnel walls as I inched my speed back up, trying to get the enemy back in my sights. Its metal hull glinted up ahead as the pulsing collision lights embedded in the concrete walls of the shaft streaked past in a neon blur.
The power in my Interceptor was nearly depleted. Soon, I would have to choose between firing and keeping up. I only had enough juice for a couple sun gun shots.
As our two ships continued to hurtle downward in a diving chase, I saw the tunnel begin to broaden slightly, and I fired another burst from my sun guns. But it didn’t connect, and my cockiness now turned to panic, because the lone Glaive had just cleared the tunnel and come out the other side, zooming on into the cavernous drone hangar.
I followed it inside, and then slammed on my Interceptor’s inertia brakes, because it appeared that I now had my enemy cornered. I continued firing plasma bolts at the Glaive, and shooting from a standstill drastically improved my aim. I scored two directs hits on its shields in rapid succession, causing them to flicker and then fail.
The second the Glaive’s shields dropped, it slid to an instantaneous stop out ahead of me, near the hangar’s cavernous center. I’d seen Glaive Fighters and EDA Interceptors execute this maneuver countless times while playing Armada. I’d executed it plenty of times myself—the drone had just initiated its self-destruct sequence. Its reactor core would overload in approximately seven seconds.
I fired a last volley of plasma bolts at the unprotected enemy ship, which was already vibrating from the buildup of power in its reactor core, and held my breath as they streaked toward it, silently praying to Crom that they would reach the Glaive and destroy it before it finished transforming itself into a weapon of mass destruction.
Time seemed to stop. I caught a second-long glimpse of the hangar around us and noticed that it was still over half-full. Thousands of brand-new, unused Interceptors were nestled into belt-fed launch racks that lined the hangar’s curved reinforced concrete walls.
I watched in slow motion as the shots I’d fired closed in on the Glaive’s quivering metal hull. They finally seemed to reach their mark at last, and I saw a blinding white flash across my cockpit’s wraparound screens.
Then they all went black, and my entire drone controller station powered down, throwing the tiny room into total darkness. Somewhere above me, I heard the muffled atomic boom of a power core detonation, followed by a horrible rumbling that could only be several levels of the base collapsing in on each other.
I don’t know how long I sat there in the pitch-black darkness, listening to the aftermath of my mistake. But at some point the door of my controller station hissed open, and a terrible flood of light poured in, momentarily blinding me. As my eyesight slowly returned, I saw a female silhouette resolve in the doorway. Lex was standing there, with one hand cocked on her hip.
“Did you see what happened?” she said, shaking her head. “Some moron Interceptor pilot chased that last Glaive Fighter into one of the launch tunnels, right before the whole hangar went up.”
I nodded and got to my feet unsteadily; then I stepped out of my control pod, feeling almost as if I’d just emerged from a real Interceptor—and a real battle. Which, of course, I had.
“I’m still not even sure what happened up there,” I lied.
“We’d already won,” she said. “We’d just destroyed all but one of their drones—but then somehow the last Glaive Fighter got inside the drone hangar before it self-destructed,” she said. “Somebody screwed up.”
When I didn’t respond, she studied my face for a moment.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she said. “Didn’t you hear Admiral Vance screaming at you to break off over the comlink? Everyone else sure did!”
She pursed her lips and gave me two thumbs-up.
Before I could begin to formulate my defense, my QComm beeped and vibrated against my forearm; then its display began flashing red to get my attention. A text message appeared, ordering me to report to Admiral Vance in the command center. An interactive map of the base below it appeared, and a green path lit up, leading from my current location in the drone controller hub out into the corridor outside, then down to another bank of elevators.