The explosion’s energy dispersed across the Disrupter’s deflector shield—and then it flickered and failed. The transparent blue shield around the Disrupter had vanished, leaving its faceted skin exposed to attack.
Of course, by the time I saw this, it was already too late for me to do anything about it. Even if I’d been willing to overload my own ship’s power core, to join Chén in his kamikaze run, there wasn’t enough time for me to react now. The shield would only be down for three and a half more seconds. You had to be both psychic and suicidal to get the timing right, and at that moment, I was neither.
My father, however, appeared to be both.
Because he was still streaking toward the Disrupter, right on Chén’s tail. He had seen the rash decision Chén had made, and then immediately made one of his own.
“Are you nuts?” I shouted. “The shield won’t be down long enough!”
“It will, Son,” he said. “Because they’re watching, and they want my heroic gambit to work. Just like I told you. Watch—I need you to see this.”
“I don’t want to see anything, you fucking asshole!” I screamed. “Eject, now! You can’t do this to me!” I said, voice cracking. “Not again!”
My father’s ship righted itself, but didn’t change course.
“I love you, Son. And I’m sorry. Tell your mom—”
Time slowed down to a crawl. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I finally thought to begin counting—one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three, one thousand four.
The Disrupter’s shield remained down. Was I counting too fast?
On my tactical display, my father’s ship closed the remaining distance to the still-exposed Disrupter like a bullet streaking toward a bull’s-eye, as the Glaive Fighters closed in, firing on him from all sides—all of them conveniently missing our hero.
Stormtrooper Syndrome, I thought to myself absurdly. These guys couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a fucking boat.
A split second before my father’s ship self-destructed, I saw the armored shell slide down over his cockpit canopy as it had Debbie’s, transforming it into a sealed escape pod. The pod fell like a stone, plunging into the churning ocean below—just as his power core imploded and the whole world went white.
Somehow I had enough presence of mind to jam my flight stick forward, diving my own ship into the ocean below just as the overlapping blast waves emanating from the massive explosions above slammed against the surface, throwing up steam and making the sea boil and evaporate.
My tactical display showed me what was happening on the surface. My father’s reactor core detonation had torn apart the unprotected Disrupter, and its faceted skin exploded into a cloud of triangular debris that blanketed the ocean surface, mingling with pieces of human and alien spacecraft. I could hear the largest pieces of debris as they thudded again the watery ceiling above me, like dirt raining down on a coffin lid.
It was completely quiet down there, beneath the waves, floating inside my watertight space ship as I gazed up at the fiery apocalypse erupting above the surface. The silence was so total that for a moment I wasn’t sure if I was alive or dead. Then I heard the panicked cadence of my own breathing and realized that yes, I was indeed alive, at least for the moment.
But I wasn’t sure about my father. I wasn’t getting a signal from his pod’s emergency beacon, and the scopes in my ship’s sensor package were useless—the ocean was so littered with the wreckage of hundreds of drone Interceptors, Glaives, and conventional fighter aircraft that picking out a single escape pod from the detritus was impossible.
He would drown down here, if he hadn’t already.
I powered on every external light my ship had, and then the internal ones, too, just for good measure, but I was still only able to see five or six feet into the murky waters, and there was nothing there, nothing—and the deeper I went, the muddier the water.
I stared helplessly at my blank scopes, trying desperately not to assume the worst, but doing just that.
Could Fate possibly be so cruel as to take my father away from me, on the very same day I’d found him? I didn’t like the answer my subconscious spat back at me, of course. But it was my fault for asking, really. I should’ve known better.
Warnings began to flash on my HUD, telling me that my hull was leaking and that I would need to surface now, or risk having my engine and life-support systems fail.
But I didn’t surface. I kept on looking for him, even though it was pointless.
He couldn’t vanish on me again, not now. Not before I had a chance to tell him what I’d seen during the battle. What he’d shown me.
He was right; I was wrong. I understood that now. If he would just come back, I would tell him, I would help him, I would do whatever he wanted. He didn’t need to punish me like this—by letting me get to know him and learn to love him, only to break my heart all over again.