A voice in my head was saying, At least he died for what he believed. But that only made me feel worse, because it didn’t ring true.
I knew what was happening up there, above the water’s surface. As soon as my father destroyed the Disrupter, all of the Earth Defensive Alliance’s quantum communication links would’ve instantly came back online, everywhere around the world. Now all of the Earth Defense Alliance civilian recruits were back in the fight, controlling the millions of drones stockpiled around every heavily populated area in the world.
Thanks to my dad, humanity had a fighting chance for survival once again. He’d given everything to save the world.
But I didn’t care about the world just then.
The world could go to hell and take everyone and everything with it, if only that meant I could have my father back.
I swung my Interceptor across the darkness of the ocean floor, peering into the emptiness, ignoring the increasingly loud warnings from my AVA computer telling me to surface, and to do it now, or I would die, too.
Because that sounded fine to me. Just fine.
Sitting there in the darkness, I found myself thinking about Lex. I wondered where she was, and if she was still alive.
Then I remembered my conversation with her, and the QComm hacks she’d shown me. My father’s QComm number was on my contact list. If he had the device in his flight suit and if he hadn’t powered it off, I might be able to use that to find his escape pod.
Feeling a sudden burst of hope, I fumbled my QComm out and pulled up my short contact list. Then I repeated the steps Lex had shown me to perform her “remote location hack.” It involved pressing several icons on my display in rapid order, like the old Konami code. It took me several tries to get it right, because my hands were shaking and the hull-integrity and leak warnings from my AVA computer kept frazzling my nerves.
Finally, a GPS program appeared on my QComm’s display. My QComm appeared as a green dot—and my father’s appeared right on top of it, as a flashing red dot. I rotated the display to show our relative depths.
My father’s pod was directly below me!
I blindly circled my ship around in a corkscrew, using my QComm to close in on him. As I pulled up to avoid the tangled wreckage of two Glaive Fighters, I felt a jolt and heard a loud crack as my father’s escape pod appeared out of the watery darkness outside, slamming right up against my cockpit canopy. As the two acrylic domes collided, I caught a horrifying glimpse of his limp and lifeless face, just a few inches away from mine.
Once I’d stopped screaming, I maneuvered my Interceptor around his pod and activated its retrieval arm. A second later, its magnetic seals locked into place with a thud and the arm retracted, fusing my father’s escape pod to the underside of my ship’s hull.
My AVA computer linked to the pod’s occupant diagnostics, and my father’s vitals appeared on my HUD. He wasn’t dead! He was merely unconscious, and the computer calculated a sixty-seven percent chance that he had suffered a concussion. He was also bleeding from a deep laceration on his scalp. A dialog box popped up on one of my cockpit screens, providing me with a running list of the treatment and drugs that the pod was administering to its occupant. A video window popped up on my display, showing my father’s unconscious form from the shoulders up, and I winced as the pod dosed him with a cocktail of painkillers via a needle gun mounted on one of its many robotic arms. I hoped to hell the drugs in that pod didn’t have an expiration date.
I watched the drone work on him for a few more seconds; then I finally snapped out of my daze and gunned my ship’s throttle, blasting up out of the ocean, then on up in the clouds above, still flooring the gas.
My AVA computer informed me that my passenger needed medical attention immediately, and the autopilot set a course for my ship to the nearest EDA med center, at the southern tip of South America.
I ignored it.
Instead, I flew us home.
As I guided my Interceptor over Portland’s charred and smoking skyline, I felt tears come to my eyes. Here was my first glimpse of the devastation the vanguard’s attack had caused on our cities, and it was as bad as I’d feared. The whole city looked like a scene out of Deep Impact or World War Z. Every street, road, and highway leading out of Portland was clogged with all manner of vehicles, none of them moving. Pillars of black smoke rose from half a dozen fires all over the city, and the sky was filled with news helicopters and small-engine, fixed-wing aircraft, most of which appeared to be fleeing inland.
I tuned my QComm to one of the big cable news networks, so that I could listen in to the broadcast—and heard the last thing I expected.