I cursed and took control of another ship, but before I could even launch it, the enemy ships had reached the surface and blasted their way into the base’s drone hangar.
When I fired the launch release on my drone, nothing happened, because the catapult mechanism had already been blasted in half. As the towers of unused drones around me began to crumble and collapse, my display flashed bright white.
At the same moment, I heard a thunderous, booming explosion up on the surface, followed by a shockwave that shook the Thunderdome violently.
I opened the canopy of my pod and stuck my head up, then looked around. One at a time, the others emerged, too.
“Damn,” my father said, far too calmly for my liking. “One of them breached the hangar’s defenses and self-destructed. The whole place went up, along with all of our remaining reserve drones.”
“What are we supposed to do now?” Debbie asked, echoing my own thoughts—though she sounded a lot calmer than I was currently feeling.
“The EDA is sending more Interceptors up from Earth,” Shin told us. “But they’re all going after the Disrupter. We’re probably on our own here now.”
He and my father exchanged a brief glance, before the general turned to address the rest of us.
“Everyone get back in your pods, now!” my father shouted. “Shin will give each of you control of one of the base’s laser sentry turrets. Try to keep as many of them from advancing down here to the op center for as long as you can! Hold them back, okay?”
Before he’d even finished speaking, he leaped down into one of the dual-ATHID control rigs he’d constructed and powered it on. He slipped his hands into its power gauntlets as the display screens arrayed around him all lit up simultaneously.
Another violent tremor shook the Thunderdome as we all scrambled back into our control pods. As I closed the canopy and settled back into my seat, a simplified HUD appeared on my screens, laid over a high-definition video feed from one of the base’s sentry turrets, along with a targeting reticle, a range finder, and a power meter for its laser cannon.
“Keep firing!” my father said. “Hold them back as long as you can!”
I picked off as many drones as I could, but they just kept on coming in a never-ending assault. Within a few minutes, the inevitable happened: a group of drones concentrated their laser fire on the hangar airlock long enough to break through the blast doors to the corridor beyond.
The enemy now had free run of the base.
“Breach! That’s a breach!” Shin shouted over the comm channel. “They’re inside the base! I can see them on levels five and six, and they’re already making their way down here! Mostly Spider Fighters—hundreds, maybe thousands of them!”
We all remained inside our control pods, each of us now taking control of an ATHID in different locations through the base. I don’t know about the others, but I was getting my ass kicked. Each time I took control of a new ATHID, it was torn apart by Spider Fighters even more quickly than the last.
“Okay,” my father said. “Abandon stations. We’re evacuating, right now! Chén, Whoadie, Zack! Do I have to pull you guys up out of there? Because I will! Come on! We’re leaving!”
I scrambled up out of my pod just in time to see my father make good on his promise. He reached down and grabbed Whoadie around the waist, then lifted her up out of her pod, away from the controls. My father passed her off to Debbie, then turned and prepared to do the same thing to Chén, who complied on his own at the last second—leaping up out of his pod like Superman, then snapping the general a salute as he landed on the deck in front of him.
“Sir, yes, sir!” Chén shouted.
Shin remained inside his pod. I ran over to check his pod display screens—he was operating a whole squadron of ATHIDs posted outside the turbo elevator shaft leading down to the Thunderdome. On the security camera feeds, we could see an angry horde of Spider Fighters in the process of breaking down the armored door that now separated them from our current location. Each time they slammed into it, we could hear the muted, repetitive clanking transmitted through the stone walls around us.
When he saw that Shin wasn’t leaving, Milo jumped back into his own pod, saying, “Shin and I will hold them off; then we’ll catch up with you!”
My father opened his mouth to protest, but another explosion shook the base, cutting him off. Graham shouted both their names over his shoulder and headed for the exit.
“You’re already wasting seconds, General,” Shin said. “Milo and I can hold them off a lot longer than the automated sentry systems. But if you don’t leave now, you’ll never make it!”
“Go ahead, sir,” Milo shouted over his own comm. “We got this.”
While he deliberated with my father, Shin was dragging the fingers of both of his hands across the screens in front of him, highlighting groups of drones and assigning them to attack certain enemies or defend certain sections of the base. I could see him struggling to effectively manage the base’s dwindling defensive resources—all while he was simultaneously controlling half a dozen ATHIDs, fighting alongside other infantry drones controlled by operators back on Earth who weren’t nearly as skilled or lethal.
Shin glanced over at Graham, then back at my father. Something unspoken passed between the three men. Then my father nodded, and his fingers began to dance across the control panels in front of him.
“I’m setting all of the unmanned sentry guns to auto-fire,” he said. Then he turned and ran toward the exit. “The rest of you follow me! Now! Hurry!”
He tapped the QComm on his wrist, and a hidden door opened in the curved stone wall, opposite the entrance, revealing a narrow staircase. The six of us sprinted down it just as another series of tremors rocked every level of the moon base.
The staircase led down to a large cube-shaped room with a pressurized hatch embedded in its stone floor. There was a rack of visored space helmets mounted on the wall, and my father ordered us each to put one on before donning one himself. After I put mine on, I felt the helmet retract in size slightly to form an airtight seal around my face, just below the chin line. Then a HUD appeared, superimposed on the interior of the visor, with atmospheric readings and a gauge for the small oxygen tanks mounted on its collar.
Once Graham made sure everyone had their helmets on properly, my father pressed his palm to the scanner beside the hatch, which hissed open, revealing the interior of a tube-shaped capsule about the size of a VW microbus, with ten passenger seats inside. Through the capsule’s porthole-like windows, we could see that it was nestled inside a spherical underground tunnel, like a bullet inside the barrel of a gun. Once we strapped ourselves in, my father smacked the red button mounted on the bulkhead and the capsule rocketed forward, pressing each of us back into our seats.
As our capsule hurtled through the darkened tunnel, we could hear Milo and Shin shouting a mix of insults and words of encouragement at each other over our QComms as the two of them continued to hold the Spider Fighters at bay.
“The base is completely overrun,” Shin told us over the comm. “Every level. They’re concentrating outside the Thunderdome now. They’ll break inside any second!”
“Get out of there!” my father shouted back. “We’ll send the capsule back for you!”
“Sorry, boss,” he replied, raising his voice over the sound of rending metal and laser fire. “It looks like we’re gonna have to make our last stand right here.” He said something else, but it was drowned out by an explosion.
All of the video feeds to the Thunderdome on our QComms went dead, but we could still hear audio.
“Godspeed, old friends,” Shin said a second later, shouting to be heard over the chaos unfolding around him.
My father tried to reply, but he couldn’t get any words out. He nodded; then I saw his face contort into a mask of pure anguish just before he buried his face in his hands.
“Hey, do me a favor, too, will you guys?” Milo added. “After we win this war, tell everyone back home in Philly that my last request was to have my old high school named after me, okay? My mom went there, too, and I think she’ll really like that. You hear me?”
I took my father’s QComm and answered for him.
“Yeah, Milo,” I answered. “Sure thing. We’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks, man!” he replied. “Kushmaster High School. I love it!” He laughed maniacally again, and I could hear that he was still relentlessly firing his laser turret. “Oh wait! One other thing! Tell them to erect a bronze statue of me in downtown Philly! Just like the one they made for Rocky! But make mine bigger than his, okay?”
Before I could reply, another explosion rocked the base, distorting the QComm’s audio channel. This explosion sounded far louder than the previous ones.
“Shit! Shit-shit-shit!” we heard Shin yell. “Here they come, Milo! Brace yourself!”
“Come get some!” I heard Milo shouting, his voice strangely gleeful. I could hear the sound of him rapidly firing his QComm’s wrist laser. “Who wants some? From hell’s heart I stab at thee, assholes! By Grabthar’s hammer, you shall—”