“What the hell?” my father said. “Where did you ladies come from?”
“Dad, this is my friend Captain Alexis Larkin,” I said. “We met at Crystal Palace. She figured out how to jailbreak the QComm operating software. I asked her to set things up so they could all listen in on the conference call. She also installed software on our QComms to prevent the EDA from remotely disabling them.”
My father raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Outstanding, Captain. Thank you!”
“You’re welcome, General!” she said, returning his salute.
He froze, seeming lost in thought for moment. “Is there any chance you can tell me what Admiral Vance’s location was when he broke in on the call?”
She nodded. “He’s in Pennsylvania. At an EDA base code-named ‘Raven Rock.’ ”
My father grinned and then saluted her. She returned it.
Diehl leaned in over my left shoulder, holding Cruz on his laptop screen. “We want in on this operation, too!”
My father studied the faces arrayed before him in silence.
“So what’s the plan, General?” I asked.
WE RALLIED AT Starbase Ace.
I drove Cruz and Diehl there in my car, and we pulled up in front of the store just a few minutes before my mother arrived in her own car. My father wasn’t with her.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked. “What happened?”
“He drove separately,” she replied, before pointing up at the sky overhead. A second later, my Interceptor swooped into view. My father brought the ship in for a perfect landing in the strip mall’s crumbling parking lot and ran over to greet us. After my mother and I each gave him a quick hug, I introduced him to Cruz and Diehl, who had watched his arrival in awestruck silence.
I unlocked the store and led everyone inside. When my father saw the store shelves, lined with high-end Armada and Terra Firma flight controllers, he broke into a broad smile.
“This is perfect!” he said as he began to grab items off the shelves and hand them to each of us. “I need each of you to build the best rig you can, as fast as you can.”
The moment I finished setting up a makeshift drone controller pod for myself in the store’s War Room, my father called me back into the tiny, cluttered room that served as Ray’s office. He was ransacking the place.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
He nodded at the QComm on his wrist. It displayed a map of the local neighborhood, with an EDA icon hovering over the location of Starbase Ace.
“There’s a secret access node for the EDA’s hard-line fiber-optic intranet hidden somewhere at this location,” he said. “But I can’t find it.”
I remembered something Ray had told me during our shuttle ride to Crystal Palace. That Glaive Fighter I’d seen outside my classroom window—he’d said it was a scout ship conducting surveillance on the EDA’s hard-line intranet. When I’d spotted it hovering over Beaverton, it had probably been in the process of scanning the “secret” intranet access node hidden here in the store.
But if the Europans knew about the EDA’s backup intranet, why hadn’t they bothered to destroy or disable it before they invaded?
Because their actions have never made any sort of tactical sense, I thought. Why start now?
My father continued to tear through the office. He began to pull books off a nearby shelf one at a time, then suddenly raked the remaining ones off with his arm in frustration. “It’ll be concealed behind an armored access panel—like a safe? Any ideas?”
I shook my head. “We don’t have a safe,” I said. “We never needed one.” I held up my QComm. “But I’ve got Ray’s number.”
“Be careful what you say,” he warned. “Vance could be monitoring your QComm.”
“Not anymore,” I told him. “After Vance broke in on my conference call with the Armistice Council, Lex helped me turn on my QComm’s hidden security mode—the same feature that Vance uses to prevent his own QComm from being monitored.”
“Captain Larkin appears to be something of a genius, doesn’t she?”
I caught him studying my face for a reaction, and blushed involuntarily. I nodded in reply, then pulled up my contacts and tapped the last name listed there: Ray Habashaw. His face instantly appeared on my display. His name, rank, and current location appeared across the bottom—he was at an EDA base in Arizona called Gila Mountain.
“Zack!” he shouted. “Where are you? Are you okay?” He lowered his voice and moved his QComm camera a bit too close to his mouth. “I heard you and your father went missing in action after you took out the Disrupter. I was afraid you bought it.”
I shook my head and tilted my QComm so that he could see my current location.
“You’re back at the store?” he said, brightening first, then scowling at the sight of his office. “What the hell, man? Who are you letting ransack the place? Looters?”
I shook my head, then positioned the QComm so that Ray could see my father, too. His eyes widened.
“General Lightman,” he said, awkwardly saluting his QComm. “It’s an honor, sir.”
My father returned the salute.
“The honor is all mine, Sergeant,” he said. “I owe you a huge debt for watching over my boy while I was gone. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, blushing visibly.
“Ray, we don’t have much time,” I said. “We need to access the EDA intranet node hidden here in the store. It’s an emergency.”
Ray only hesitated for a split second. “Behind the UFO poster on the back wall.”
I turned and located the one he was talking about—a framed reprint of Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” poster from The X-Files. I took it down, revealing what appeared to be a small titanium safe embedded in the brick wall behind it, with a keypad at its center.
“The combination is 1-1-3-8-2-1-1-2,” Ray said.
My father grinned and punched in the numbers. The lock disengaged, and he opened the door. The only thing behind it was a row of ten Ethernet cable ports—just like those on the back of our cable router at home.
“Thank you!” my father said. He turned to me. “You guys got RJ45 cable here?”
I nodded. “On the wall opposite the register!”
He ran out, and I looked back at Ray on my QComm.
“Thanks, Ray,” I said. “But now I have to ask you for another favor. A big one.”
“You better make it quick, pal,” he said. “The second wave is minutes away.”
I gave him the short version of the story. It still took way too long. Thankfully, Ray took even less convincing than Lex or my other friends. Once I finished telling him everything my father had told me, he paused for a few moments, then nodded.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
AS SOON AS we got our makeshift drone controller rigs connected to the hard-line intranet node back in Ray’s office, my father laid out the plan. Cruz, Diehl, my mother, and I all watched my father’s chalk talk there in the store, while Lex, Whoadie, and Debbie listened over their QComms.
I wasn’t a fan of several aspects of his plan, but there was no time to argue, or to come up with another solution.
My father wished everyone good luck. Then the others stayed inside while my mother and I walked outside to bid him farewell.
“What if you can’t delay the Icebreaker long enough for me to get there?” I asked, once we were far enough outside that my friends wouldn’t hear his answer.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He grabbed me and pulled me into a fierce embrace.
“I love you, Son,” he said. “Thank you for helping me do this. Thank you for believing in me. You’ll never know how much—how much that means.”
He kissed my forehead, then walked over to say goodbye to my mother. She wasn’t crying—she’d put on her bravest face, for both of us.
They spoke to each other briefly, but I stayed out of earshot. I don’t know what they said to each other. But my mother nodded before she kissed him goodbye, and he smiled at her.
Then he turned and climbed inside my damaged Interceptor, and my mother and I watched as he flew off, bound for the Raven Rock command center. After his ship had vanished over the horizon in a blur, we continued to stare up at the sky for a few more fearful moments, dreading what we knew would soon descend from it. Then we ran back inside the store and prepared to carry out our own part of the mission.
THE SECOND WAVE arrived just minutes after my father departed, and a swarm of Glaive and Wyvern Fighters descended from the sky to attack Portland and the surrounding suburbs. Our drone reserves were heavily diminished, and consequently we were far more outnumbered than we had been during the first wave. But the EDA’s civilian gamer forces continued to put up a valiant fight, and a fierce battle raged in the streets of the city and in the sky above while we carried out our mission inside the store.
During his chalk talk, my father had explained how the EDA’s hard-line intranet worked. It was an underground fiber-optic cable network directly linking all of its drone controller outposts together, creating a Disrupter-proof communications system that the Alliance had prepared in anticipation of the invasion. It would allow the EDA to keep communications open between its command outposts, and allow drone operators to help defend other installations remotely while the Disrupter was active, via hardwired defense turrets and tethered drones.