Warnings began to flash on my HUD, telling me that my hull was leaking and that I would need to surface now, or risk having my engine and life-support systems fail.
But I didn’t surface. I kept on looking for him, even though it was pointless.
He couldn’t vanish on me again, not now. Not before I had a chance to tell him what I’d seen during the battle. What he’d shown me.
He was right; I was wrong. I understood that now. If he would just come back, I would tell him, I would help him, I would do whatever he wanted. He didn’t need to punish me like this—by letting me get to know him and learn to love him, only to break my heart all over again.
A voice in my head was saying, At least he died for what he believed. But that only made me feel worse, because it didn’t ring true.
I knew what was happening up there, above the water’s surface. As soon as my father destroyed the Disrupter, all of the Earth Defensive Alliance’s quantum communication links would’ve instantly come back online, everywhere around the world. Now all of the Earth Defense Alliance civilian recruits were back in the fight, controlling the millions of drones stockpiled around every heavily populated area in the world.
Thanks to my dad, humanity had a fighting chance for survival once again. He’d given everything to save the world.
But I didn’t care about the world just then.
The world could go to hell and take everyone and everything with it, if only that meant I could have my father back.
I swung my Interceptor across the darkness of the ocean floor, peering into the emptiness, ignoring the increasingly loud warnings from my TAC telling me to surface, and to do it now, or I would die, too.
Because that sounded fine to me. Just fine.
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
—H. G. Wells
SITTING THERE IN the darkness, waiting for it all to just end, I found myself thinking about Lex. I wondered where she was, and if she was still alive.
Then I remembered my conversation with her, and the QComm hacks she’d shown me. My father’s QComm number was on my contact list. If he had the device in his flight suit and if he hadn’t powered it off, I might be able to use that to find his escape pod.
Feeling a sudden burst of hope, I fumbled my QComm out and pulled up my short contact list. Then I repeated the steps Lex had shown me to perform her “remote location hack.” It involved pressing several icons on my display in rapid order, like the old Konami code. It took me several tries to get it right, because my hands were shaking and the hull-integrity and leak warnings from my computer kept frazzling my nerves.
Finally, a GPS program appeared on my QComm’s display. My QComm appeared as a green dot—and my father’s appeared right on top of it, as a flashing red dot. I rotated the display to show our relative depths.
My father’s pod was directly below me!
I blindly circled my ship around in a corkscrew, using my QComm to close in on him. As I pulled up to avoid the tangled wreckage of two Glaive Fighters, I felt a jolt and heard a loud crack as my father’s escape pod appeared out of the watery darkness outside, slamming right up against my cockpit canopy. As the two acrylic domes collided, I caught a horrifying glimpse of his limp and lifeless face, just a few inches away from mine.
It was covered in blood.
Once I’d stopped screaming, I maneuvered my Interceptor around his pod and activated its retrieval arm. A second later, its magnetic seals locked into place with a thud and the arm retracted, fusing my father’s escape pod to the underside of my ship’s hull.
My computer linked to the pod’s occupant diagnostics, and my father’s vitals appeared on my HUD. He wasn’t dead! He was merely unconscious, and the computer calculated a sixty-seven percent chance that he had suffered a concussion. He was also bleeding from a deep laceration on his scalp. A dialog box popped up on one of my cockpit screens, providing me with a running list of the treatment and drugs that the pod was administering to its occupant. A video window popped up on my display, showing my father’s unconscious form from the shoulders up, and I winced as the pod dosed him with a cocktail of painkillers via a needle gun mounted on one of its many robotic arms. I hoped to hell the drugs in that pod didn’t have an expiration date.
I watched the drone work on him for a few more seconds; then I finally snapped out of my daze and gunned my ship’s throttle, blasting up out of the ocean, then on up into the clouds above, still flooring the gas.
My computer informed me that my passenger needed medical attention immediately, and the autopilot set a course for my ship to the nearest EDA med center, at the southern tip of South America.
I ignored it.
Instead, I flew us home.
AS I GUIDED my Interceptor over Portland’s charred and smoking skyline, I felt tears come to my eyes. Here was my first glimpse of the devastation the vanguard’s attack had caused on our cities, and it was as bad as I’d feared. The whole city looked like a scene out of Deep Impact or World War Z. Every street, road, and highway leading out of Portland was clogged with all manner of vehicles, none of them moving. Pillars of black smoke rose from half a dozen fires all over the city, and the sky was filled with news helicopters and small-engine, fixed-wing aircraft, most of which appeared to be fleeing inland.
I tuned my QComm to one of the big cable news networks, so that I could listen in to the broadcast—and heard the last thing I expected.
“In addition to the Earth Defense Alliance’s decisive victory in Pakistan,” one male news anchor was saying, “news of dozens of other victories are pouring in from other cities around the world. The tide began to turn after the aliens’ surprise attacks on Shanghai and Cairo—”
I frowned and switched to another network, showing live coverage from New York City. The Big Apple looked just like it did in every apocalyptic disaster movie I’d ever seen. The skyline was a smoking ruin, and the streets of Manhattan had been flooded by a tsunami created by one of the many artificial earthquakes resulting from the attacks.
“—dozens of epic battles were raging over the city just moments ago, but as you can see, the skies are clear,” another newscaster reported. “The EDA’s army of civilian-operated drones has won another decisive victory here. Humanity has successfully defended itself against the first wave of the invaders’ attack. We managed to fight them all off—it’s incredible!”
The beautiful female anchor beside him nodded enthusiastically.
“In every engagement we’ve had with the enemy so far, it has become obvious that humans are naturally more adept at combat than the creatures who are operating all of these invading ships and drones,” she said. “In every battle they seemed to have us outmatched, but despite their vastly superior numbers and technology, the Europans appear to lack our reflexes and natural predatory instincts—”
I switched newsfeeds again and saw Admiral Vance, addressing the troops via his handheld QComm, wearing his trademark expression of grim resolve. The man looked downright heroic.
“—but even though we managed to fight off the first wave of the invasion, we suffered heavy losses in the process,” Admiral Vance said. “The enemy didn’t lose a soul—just equipment. And two-thirds of their forces are still en route to Earth.” He paused to let this sink in, then continued. “The second wave of their attack will reach us just over two hours from now, and we need all of you to be ready.”
Just as he finished making that statement, a new countdown clock appeared on my QComm display—just over two and a half hours to go until the second wave arrived, bringing twice as much devastation as the first.
I switched to another channel, and then another, but it was the same war propaganda on every station. Newscasters of every nationality were claiming victory and imploring their viewers not to give up, to hunker down and keep on fighting, because there was still hope—we could still win this.
I put my QComm away, wishing that I could bring myself to rally to the Earth Defense Alliance’s global battle cry. But it was obvious to me that our remaining forces wouldn’t be able to withstand another assault of equal magnitude, much less two more attacks, delivered by a force of double and then triple the size of the first wave.
I tried to forget about the news, and thought again of my father’s heroic act of self-sacrifice, performed in the wake of Chén’s kamikaze run. It shouldn’t have worked. But it had—just as my father had predicted it would.
I shouldn’t need any more convincing—and, I decided right then, I didn’t.
“I’m sorry I doubted you, Dad,” I said to him over the comlink, while I stared at his unconscious face on my monitor, his eyes closed and his forehead caked with dried blood. “And I’m sorry I couldn’t bring myself to call you ‘Dad’ before now, too, okay? Do you hear me? Do you, Dad?”
His eyes stayed closed, and he remained perfectly still—the ship’s inertia-cancellation field kept him from even being jostled slightly, even though we were flying through Earth’s atmosphere fast enough to set the ship on fire.
“You were right and I was wrong, okay?” I told him, raising my voice, as if that would help him to hear me. “And I’d really like it if you would wake up now, so that I can tell you that in person. Would you do that for me?