“Zack!” he shouted. “Where are you? Are you okay?” He lowered his voice and moved his QComm camera a bit too close to his mouth. “I heard you and your father went missing in action after you took out the Disrupter. I was afraid you bought it.”
I shook my head and tilted my QComm so that he could see my current location.
“You’re back at the store?” he said, brightening first, then scowling at the sight of his office. “What the hell, man? Who are you letting ransack the place? Looters?”
I shook my head, then positioned the QComm so that Ray could see my father, too. His eyes widened.
“General Lightman,” he said, awkwardly saluting his QComm. “It’s an honor, sir.”
My father returned the salute.
“The honor is all mine, Sergeant,” he said. “I owe you a huge debt for watching over my boy while I was gone. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, blushing visibly.
“Ray, we don’t have much time,” I said. “We need to access the EDA intranet node hidden here in the store. It’s an emergency.”
Ray only hesitated for split second. “Behind the UFO poster on the back wall.”
I turned and located the one he was talking about—a framed reprint of Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” poster from The X-Files. I took it down, revealing what appeared to be a small titanium safe embedded in the brick wall behind it, with a keypad at its center.
“The combination is 1-1-3-8-2-1-1-2,” Ray said.
My father grinned and punched in the numbers. The lock disengaged, and he opened the door. The only thing behind it was a row of ten Ethernet cable ports—just like those on the back of our cable router at home.
“Thank you!” my father said. He turned to me. “You guys got RJ45 cable here?”
I nodded. “On the wall opposite the register!”
He ran out, and I looked back at Ray on my QComm.
“Thanks, Ray,” I said. “But now I have to ask you for another favor. A big one.”
“You better make it quick, pal,” he said. “The second wave is minutes away.”
I gave him the short version of the story. It still took way too long. Thankfully, Ray took even less convincing than Lex or my other friends. Once I finished telling him everything my father had told me, he paused for a few moments, then nodded.
“Tell me what you need,” he said.
As soon as we got our makeshift drone controller rigs connected to the hard-line intranet node back in Ray’s office, my father laid out the plan. Cruz, Diehl, my mother, and I all watched my father’s chalk talk there in the store, while Lex, Whoadie, and Debbie listened over their QComms.
I wasn’t a fan of several aspects of his plan, but there was no time to argue, or to come up with another solution.
My father wished everyone good luck. Then the others stayed inside while my mother and I walked outside to bid him farewell.
“What if you can’t delay the Icebreaker long enough for me to get there?” I asked, once we were far enough outside that my friends wouldn’t hear his answer.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He grabbed me and pulled me into a fierce embrace.
“I love you, Son,” he said. “Thank you for helping me do this. Thank you for believing in me. You’ll never know how much—how much that means.”
He kissed my forehead, then walked over to say goodbye to my mother. She wasn’t crying—she’d put on her bravest face, for both of us.
They spoke to each other briefly, but I stayed out of earshot. I don’t know what they said to each other. But my mother nodded before she kissed him goodbye, and he smiled at her.
Then he turned and climbed inside my damaged Interceptor, and my mother and I watched as he flew off, bound for the Raven Rock command center.
The second wave attacked just minutes after my father departed, and a swarm of Glaive and Wyvern Fighters descended from the sky to attack Portland and the surrounding suburbs. Our drone reserves were heavily diminished, and consequently we were far more outnumbered than we had been during the first wave. But the EDA’s civilian gamer forces continued to put up a valiant fight, and a fierce battle raged in the streets of the city and in the sky above while we carried out our mission inside the store.
During his chalk talk, my father had explained how the EDA’s hardline intranet worked. It was an underground fiber-optic cable network directly linking all of its drone controller outposts together, creating a Disrupter-proof communications system that the Alliance had prepared in anticipation of the invasion. It would allow the EDA to keep communications open between its command outposts, and allow drone operators to help defend other installations remotely while the Disrupter was active, via hardwired defense turrets and tethered drones.
If everything went according to my father’s plan, we would be able to use our intranet connection at Starbase Ace to help him infiltrate the Raven Rock outpost during the chaos of the Disrupter attack.