Why would real aliens behave exactly like videogame simulations of themselves?
The question kept trying to worm its way into my thoughts, but I wouldn’t let it. I focused on the bliss of battle instead.
Our Interceptors were getting picked off fast, but the first of our reinforcement drones was already arriving. Each time one of our drones was destroyed, its operator took control of another Interceptor inside the reserve hangar at Moon Base Alpha and flew back to rejoin battle as quickly as they could. Thankfully the trip back to the battlefront was growing shorter every second, because the vanguard was still moving forward, still closing in on Earth. We were losing ships fast.
If it hadn’t been obvious before, it definitely was now—we were fighting a war of attrition. We weren’t going to be able to stop the vanguard. Not by a long shot. The vanguard was moving too fast, and it was mowing down everything we put in its path.
We were only going to make a small dent in their forces before they reached Earth—if that.
I took out seven enemy ships before my first drone got waxed.
The handful of minutes it took my second drone to get “back in the shit” seemed to stretch on for hours. Once I finally reached the enemy’s ever-encroaching front line and reengaged with the vanguard, I got nailed by an overloading Glaive reactor core on my way in and got blasted to bits once again—this time without scoring a single enemy kill.
As my third Interceptor rocketed out of the drone hangar, a warning began to flash on my HUD, informing me that the enemy was already closing in on the far side of the moon.
A second later, I saw them falling toward me, straight out of the black lunar sky above, thousands upon thousands of them, filling the horizon.
“The vanguard is splitting up!” my father said over the intercom. “Dividing itself in two. It looks like the half containing the Disrupter is headed for Earth.”
“And the other half is headed here,” Shin added.
I checked my tactical display—they were right. The vanguard had split itself in two, like an amoeba, creating two torpedo-shaped clusters of roughly equal size. One cluster had the Disrupter dodecahedron at its center. The other was closing in on us.
On my tactical display, the deluge of green triangles began to rain down on the base, like lava erupting from some Olympian volcano anchored in the stars above.
“Moon Base Alpha is under attack!” my computer helpfully informed me. “Warning!”
An ear-splitting klaxon began to wail over the base intercom.
“Knock, knock!” Graham shouted over comm. “Our guests have arrived! And they never seemed this pissed off on any of their previous visits. Check the topside feeds!”
I flipped off my VR goggles for a moment and tapped a small security camera icon on my QComm. A dozen thumbnail windows filled its display, each showing a different camera feed from the base. The exterior of the base was crawling with enemy drones, so covered by attackers that it looked like some otherworldly anthill being invaded by a neighboring colony of metal insects. In the background, other drone dispersal dropships continued to make landfall, opening up like metal flowers as they hit the lunar surface, allowing thousands of spider-fighters and basilisks to pour out and join the swelling army of alien drones already descending on the base.
“Welcome Wagon activated!” my father announced. The base’s automated sentry guns sprang to life and began to unload a steady barrage at the hundreds of Glaive Fighters descending on the base like angry hornets.
The Fighters’ first volley of plasma bombs detonated against the base’s defense shields. The explosion erupted and crackled across the shield’s transparent surface as its energy was deflected back out into space, creating a dazzling light show across the display over our heads, briefly lighting up the darkened Thunderdome. The accompanying transfer of energy shook the entire base, and the lunar surface beneath it.
As the moonquake—my first—subsided, I had to resist a panicked urge to scramble up out of my control pod and run to safety—wherever the hell that might be.
Instead, I gripped my flight stick even more tightly, pulled my newly launched reserve Interceptor into a steep climb, and firewalled the throttle, blasting straight upward into the deluge of Glaive Fighters descending toward me. Other drones were launching and forming up below me, adding their fire to mine.
I took out five more enemy fighters. Then a sixth, and a seventh. My comrades were doing equally well. I heard Debbie mutter “Easy-as-can-beezy” to herself over the comm.
Then, just as I was swinging my crosshairs over my next target, a hail of enemy laser fire finally converged on my drone from several different angles, and it was blasted to smithereens.