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 his old jacket, he grinned hugely 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 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 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!”