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Armada Page 53
Author: Ernest Cline

“De nada.”

I asked her to show me how to do the file transfer trick myself. When she was done, I managed to successfully send her a copy of my father’s Raid the Arcade mix.

She scrolled through the track list for a few seconds, smiling and nodding.

“Hey, wanna hear some good news?” she asked.

“Yes please!” I said. “More than I probably ever have in my life.”

“I think I’m going to be assigned to help defend Moon Base Alpha from down here,” she said. “You know, provided they don’t attack Earth first. We’ve been running MBA defense sims nonstop since I arrived.”

I smiled—something I wouldn’t have thought possible a few seconds earlier.

“So you’re going to have my back, eh?”

She nodded. “Just give me the QComm ID number on your drone controller station,” she said. “I figured out a hack that will allow me to use it to pinpoint your location, and tell me which drone you’re operating during combat.”

“When did you have time to do that?”

“I’ve been sitting here all day, exploring the QComm network between training sims,” she said. “The EDA set it up a lot like a traditional computer network, which made it really easy to figure out and use—that’s probably why they did it that way. So what’s your QCLID?”

“My what?”

“Your Quantum Communicator Link Identification number?”

I stared at the icons that ringed the edge of my display screen and shrugged.

“I have no idea.”

She grinned at me and rolled her eyes. “See that gear icon at the top right of your display? Those are your drone controller station settings.”

“Right,” I said, tapping it with my finger. “I knew that.”

She helped me navigate through menu screens until I located the twelve-digit-long numeric code she needed and read it off to her.

“Got it,” she said, as her fingers danced across one of the touchscreens in front of her. “Now I can keep an eye on you.”

“I feel much better now,” I said. And I did, too.

“You should,” she said. “I’ve got the skills to pay the bills.” She winked at me—all smooth, like a movie star. “And I’m going to make sure you keep all of your pieces in one piece,” she said. “Until I get a piece. Get me, soldier?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I believe I do.”

Then I saluted, and it made her laugh—but a few seconds in, it somehow turned into a strangled sob.

“Fuck, I’m scared, Zack,” she said. She bit her lower lip—to stop it from trembling, I think.

“I’m scared, too,” I said, suddenly unable to meet her eyes—even through a screen. “My whole life, I always imagined fighting off an alien invasion would be some epic adventure. That it would be like the movies—humanity would triumph in the end.”

“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” she said. “The pod people always win. That’s the smart way to invade—not this Independence Day/Pacific Rim–job crap.”

Her words brought me back to my conversation with my father, and the doubt he’d managed to instill in me during the course of it. Was he right? Would the Icebreaker save humanity, or only seal our doom?

“I don’t want to die for nothing, Zack,” Lex said, looking determined now. “Do you think there’s a chance we can stop them? All of them? That humans can survive this?”

I nodded my head way too enthusiastically.

“Yes!” I answered, way too quickly. “We have to.” I stopped my head from nodding. “Do, or do not, there is no try, and all that stuff.”

She laughed and gave me a smile.

“I’m really glad we met, Zack,” she said. She was twisting her fingers into knots in her lap. “I just wish …”

“Me too, Lex.”

She took a deep breath. “ ‘I must not fear,’ ” she recited. “ ‘Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.’ ”

I laughed and picked up the quote where she’d left off. “ ‘I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.’ ”

“ ‘And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path,’ ” she continued. “ ‘Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.’ ”

She exhaled slowly; then we shared a smile.

“If the world doesn’t end tonight, and we’re both still alive tomorrow, then I’m taking you out on a date,” she said. “Deal?”

“Deal.”

0H14M49S REMAINING.

MY FATHER FINISHED his preparations at the command center and climbed down into his own drone controller pod, which was adjacent to mine. Then the eight of us sat there, each alone in our stations, watching the last fifteen minutes elapse on the countdown clock.

The general still looked as if he was trying to recover from the emotional strain of speaking with my mom. I didn’t want to ask what he and my mother had talked about. But I still wanted to say something to him, to try to make peace while there was still time.

I climbed out of my pod and grabbed my EDA backpack, which was resting nearby on the floor. My father’s old jacket was still stuffed inside, and I pulled it out and handed it to him.

When my father saw the jacket, he grinned wide and spent a minute looking over each and every patch. When he was finished, he leaned over and hugged me.

“Thank you,” he said. “But how is it possible that you have this with you?”

“I was wearing it this morning when they came to recruit me.”

He laughed. “Seriously?”

I nodded. He flipped the jacket around and put it on.

“Still fits!” he said, admiring the patches running down each of its sleeves. “I used to wear this when I would hit the local arcades. I thought it brought me good luck.” He laughed. “I also thought it made me look like a badass.” He shook his head. “Your old man was kind of a dork.” He took the jacket off and tried to hand it back to me.

“I bet it looks a lot better on you,” he said. “Let me see.”

I shook my head. “No way. You earned all those patches. You should wear it.”

He nodded and slipped it back on.

“Thank you, Zack.”

“Don’t mention it.”

By the time I walked back over to my own pod, there were only five minutes remaining on the clock.

And then four minutes. Then three. Two. One.

I dropped down into my pilot seat, and the pod’s canopy slid closed above me.

“ ‘All things are ready, if our minds be so,’ ” I heard Whoadie whisper over the comm.

Just then, my QComm made its wireless link to the pod’s surround-sound system, and the next track on my Raid the Arcade playlist began to blare out of its speakers: “Rock You Like a Hurricane” by the Scorpions.

I bobbed my head in time with its opening machine-gun guitar riff as the last few seconds on the countdown clock ticked away.

When it finally hit zero, a klaxon began to wail, and a RED ALERT indicator began to flash on my HUD.

My tactical display lit up, informing me that our remote sensors had just detected the first sign of the Europan vanguard, emerging from the asteroid belt out beyond the orbit of Mars. They were really hauling ass. The Dreadnaught Sphere in the lead was already closing in on the red planet, surrounded on all sides by a phalanx of Glaives.

“Here they come!” Milo cried over the comlink. “They’re coming! See ’em?”

“Yes, Milo,” Debbie replied. “Our eyes work, too. We see them.”

“There’s a lot of them,” Whoadie added. “An awful lot.”

“The ones we don’t stop will be knocking on our front door in a few minutes, so take out as many as you can before they get here,” my father ordered over the comlink. “Your drone assignments are linked and locked! Pilots, prepare to launch!”

“Wolverines!” Milo shouted. Then he let out a long, whooping war cry into his comlink, which somehow mixed in perfectly with the war cry the Scorpions were already blasting into my eardrums.

On my display, the distance between Earth and the approaching enemy vanguard continued to shrink rapidly, and I could feel my pulse begin to rise.

“Stay frosty, everyone,” my father said. “And may the Force be with you.”

“May the Force be with us,” Shin repeated, with no hint of irony in his voice.

“May the Force be with us!” Graham echoed over the comlink. Debbie and Milo each echoed the sentiment, followed by Chén, who said it in Mandarin.

“Yuan li yu ni tong tzai.”

The sincerity in Chén’s voice finally convinced me to join in. I keyed my mic and carefully repeated after him. “Yuan li yu ni tong tzai.”

Chén laughed and said something else. The somewhat imperfect English translation popped up on my HUD: “We are coming here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and we have no more bubblegum!”

I laughed out loud, and for several more seconds I couldn’t stop laughing. I’d only just learned the term “gallows humor” a few months earlier, from a book we’d been assigned in American Literature about the Civil War. At the time, it wasn’t a type of humor I thought I would ever be in a position to experience. But now, as hearing Chén belt out Roddy Piper’s battle cry from They Live in Chinese struck me as one of the funniest things I’d ever heard in my life, I understood the concept perfectly.

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