My father tapped another icon, and all eight cockpit canopies slid open. As I ran over to the nearest Interceptor, a panel slid open in the aft side of its hull and a metal stepladder unfolded to the stone floor at my feet with a metallic clang. I heard the same sound three more times in rapid succession on either side of me, as Debbie, Whoadie, and Chén each approached a ship.
It was the first time I’d been inside a real cockpit of any kind—much less that of an interplanetary spacecraft. But it didn’t feel like the first time. The controller setup inside was identical to those in the drone command pods, and those hadn’t been all that different from the simple plastic flight stick and throttle rig I’d been using in my bedroom for years.
Sitting in our open cockpits, we were now at eye level with my father, who remained behind the command console on the elevated command platform in front of us, so I was able to see the array of display screens in front of him.
“When these ships are in flight, each of them is enclosed in a spherical no-inertia field,” he said. “So flying these ships from inside won’t seem any different than piloting them remotely. Except for one thing, of course—if you get shot down piloting one of these, you won’t be able to take control of another drone. Because you’ll be dead.”
When he saw our reactions to this statement, he showed us their main safety feature. “Don’t worry. The cockpit module inside each of these ships is actually a self-contained ejection pod. It’s supposed to deploy automatically in the event of a direct hit, like airbags.”
“Supposed to?” I said.
“These ships are all prototypes,” he said. “I don’t think they got much testing.” My father’s hands continued to fly across the control panel. From my vantage point in the cockpit, I could see the control screen over his shoulder, and it seemed that he was pulling up the flight plans for the three remaining Interceptors—the ones we were about to leave behind. He pulled a wrinkled piece of paper from his pocket, consulted it, and began typing, as if he was punching in a route for the unmanned Interceptors, using the paper as a reference. Then he began to access a series of hardware configuration menus I’d never seen before.
When my father finished working at the bunker’s command console, he powered it off, ran down the metal catwalk, and jumped into the cockpit of his own Interceptor, sliding down into the leather pilot seat like a kid sliding down a banister.
The canopies of our five cockpits slid closed with a pressurized hiss, our engines screamed in my ears as they powered up to full readiness—and then the small hangar itself depressurized and its armored doors slid open above, revealing a rectangular swath of the starry lunar sky.
We blasted out of the crater and rocketed around the moon’s opposite side, and fragile Earth became visible to us once again, hovering in the blackness ahead.
Over the comm channel, I heard my father gasp at the sight—one he hadn’t seen with his own eyes in an entire lifetime. My lifetime.
“There it is,” he said softly. “Home sweet home. Man, I really missed it.”
I’d missed it, too, I realized. And I’d been gone less than a day.
As our five ships moved into formation and turned homeward, toward Earth, I checked my scope and saw that the three unmanned Interceptors were heading in the opposite direction, out into space, toward whatever destination my father had programmed into them.
I turned my gaze back to Earth and watched it begin to grow in size as we approached, until its blue curve completely filled the view outside of my spacecraft.
My father sent a tactical map to the display screens inside our cockpits. “They’re dividing their forces in half again,” my father said over the comm. “See?”
He was right. Half of the vanguard’s remaining forces appeared to be descending on mainland China, while the other half continued to escort the Disrupter, which was heading off in a different direction, along with the alien drones that had survived the assault on Moon Base Alpha.
“Command thinks the Disrupter is probably going to make landfall somewhere along the Antarctic Peninsula. They’re sending every Interceptor they can spare to try and take it down. The rest of our aerospace forces are currently defending Shanghai.”
“Shanghai!” Chén repeated, followed by something in his native tongue. A second later, my QComm translated: “My family lives just outside the city limits. But my sister is stationed at a drone operations base in the center of downtown. I have to go help her!”
“No, we have to go after the Disrupter,” my father said. “They’ll activate it as soon as they reach the surface, and then only manned ships like these will continue to function. All the EDA’s drones will fall out of the sky.”
“What about the conventional air force?” Debbie asked. “Can’t they help?”