“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.
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.
“God speed, 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—”
Milo’s Khan-quoting was drowned out by another series of massive explosions, followed by what sounded like a hailstorm of incoming enemy laser fire, and by the terrible hurricane-like howl of the Thunderdome being breached and depressurized, as its atmosphere—and everything else inside—was sucked up and out in the dark vacuum outside on the lunar surface. But the silence that followed was somehow even worse.