“They’ll try,” he said. “But the Disrupter knocks out all wireless and radio communications, too. It alters Earth’s magnetic field and plays havoc with GPS satellites, too. Our conventional aircraft will all be flying blind. And they might as well be going up against Godzilla. Conventional fighters won’t stand a chance. It’s up to us.”
Just as my father finished his sentence, we received word that the Disrupter had already made landfall, before our ships even reached the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.
But the Europans didn’t activate their ultimate weapon then, even though they could have.
For some reason, they waited.
They waited until the five of us got there to switch it on.
When our tiny squadron of five Interceptors reached the Disrupter’s last known position, just off the Antarctic Peninsula, the battle was kind of hard to miss. The massive black dodecahedron hovered just above the landscape like a floating mountain, spinning like a top as it finally activated its pulsing coupler beam and fired down into the melting ice below. The powerful beam sheared away huge chunks of glacier and sent them plunging into the icy water below.
The clear blue arctic sky around the Disrupter was a chaotic cloud, packed with thousands upon thousands of enemy fighters locked in fierce aerial combat with an even greater number of Interceptor and WASP drones, all swarming and diving to strafe the transparent deflector shield that surrounded the skin of the spinning Disrupter in their midst. The Disrupter’s protective shield was already beginning to pulse and flicker on my HUD, indicating that it would soon fail. Of course, when it did, there was still the escort of Glaive Fighters orbiting around it, dogfighting a steady onslaught of gamer-controlled drones.
Fusion reactor detonations kept firing off every few seconds like popcorn, further weakening the shield. It flickered and pulsed more rapidly, and I thought the timing of our arrival just might turn out to be perfect.
Then the Disrupter activated itself.
Every one of our thousands of drones froze, and then, in unison, they began to drop out of the sky like pieces of leaden ash.
Meanwhile, of course, the thousands of alien fighters kept flying, unaffected—with their operators safely back on the Europa and out of the Disrupter’s range, its field had no effect on them.
A few seconds after their links went dead, the EDA drones’ emergency fail-safes activated and their autopilots kicked in, attempting to right the drones and land them safely on the nearest patch of ground—or in this case, the crumbling ice shelf. Most of the drones I saw got picked off by enemy fire before they could make it to the ground safely, and most of the others crashed into the ocean or the ice and were lost.
In a blink, the Disrupter had rendered every single drone in the Earth Defense Alliance’s entire global arsenal inoperable.
I knew the same thing must be happening at that same moment over Shanghai, Karachi, and everywhere else around the world as the millions of video-game-trained civilians who had been waging drone warfare against the alien invaders from their laptops and game consoles just a few seconds earlier now found themselves staring at a “Quantum Link Lost” error message.
Earth’s mighty gamer army was out of commission, unable to do anything now but sit and wait for the end.
I saw a few other manned Interceptors continue to attack the Disrupter, along with several squadrons of conventional military fighter aircraft. But they were now vastly outnumbered, in addition to being outgunned, and they were getting massacred.
The sky surrounding the Disrupter now contained only enemy ships—an unopposed swarm of Glaives and Wyverns. The now-dormant ATHIDs and Sentinels standing on the ice shelf below were being picked off like beer cans by the Spider Fighters and Basilisks marching on them from all sides.
Our five Interceptors continued to dive into the heart of the enemy’s forces as a few other stray manned Interceptors formed up just ahead of me, on my father’s wing—only to get blasted to smithereens a few seconds later, lighting up the sky on either side of him. But my father piloted his ship through the onslaught, untouched—and so did I. Miraculously unharmed.
I pitched into a barrel roll as I flew through the flaming debris, silently cursing my father. He’d planted the seeds of doubt in my head, and now I suddenly saw evidence to support his theory everywhere I looked: My father, my friends, and I continued to streak and loop through the chaos, effortlessly blasting enemy fighters out of the sky one after the other while laser fire and plasma bolts streaked past us on all sides—just like we used to when we played Armada together.