If not, well—then he was going be totally hosed.
While my father piloted his manned Interceptor to assault Raven Rock, where Vance’s team was located, I sat inside Starbase Ace piloting the three Interceptors my father had commandeered from the Icarus crater and sent off toward massive Jupiter, its tiny moon Europa—and the Icebreaker closing in on it.
Cruz and Diehl took control of four new ATHIDs from a nearby EDA drone cache and redeployed them in the Starbase Ace parking lot, to defend us during the second wave of the attack.
Lex was at Sapphire Station, and Ray was at Gila Mountain. Both were connected to the hardline EDA intranet from inside their assigned drone controller pods—and both were already preparing to help my father execute his infiltration plan.
While Cruz and Diehl used their giant robots to help defend Starbase Ace from the incoming swarm of Spider Fighters and Basilisks, my mother, Debbie, and Whoadie all used WASP aerial drone quadcopters to defend the store from above.
Whoadie was fighting from an Armada sit-down arcade game located in the game room of her Uncle Franklin’s bowling alley in New Orleans. Debbie was back home in Duluth, controlling her drone from her own living room while her three sons continued to stand guard outside their home by controlling EDA drones with an Xbox, a laptop, and a touchscreen tablet, respectively. We knew that Debbie and Whoadie would both lose control of their drones when the Disrupter switched on, but there was nothing we could do about that. They intended to help out for as long as they could.
While my friends kept the enemy drones at bay, I continued to pilot my drones toward Jupiter, trying to make it to Europa in time to stop the Icebreaker—while my father attempted to prevent Vance from launching the weapon before my ships even got there.
That was when we got word via a public EDA command broadcast that the second Disrupter was about to make landfall. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Instead of activating the Disrupter in a secluded location like Antarctica, this time the aliens picked a far less subtle location—the national monument at Devils Tower, Wyoming. The same spot where humanity makes first contact with the alien visitors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. An “intergalactic game of Simon,” my dad had called it. Featuring those same five tones the Europans had used to bookend their cryptic transmissions to us.
“Oh, that’s not cool!” Diehl shouted, staring at a live video image of the Disrupter taken by an orbiting satellite. “Are these alien pricks openly mocking us now? Christ!”
When the Disrupter activated, the drones my friends were using to defend Starbase Ace were disabled and went limp or fell out of the sky—as did every untethered EDA drone around the world.
But the Europan drones continued to attack, closing in on Starbase Ace as if they somehow knew it was of strategic importance.
Lex, Ray, Debbie, and Whoadie all lost control of their drones as their links went dead. So did Cruz and Diehl, but they both ran outside and activated the hardline controllers on two dormant ATHIDs. They detached the small Xbox-like game controller from each ATHID’s back and then ran back inside, unspooling their drones’ carbon-fiber-sheathed tether cables to their maximum length.
My mother, always cool during a crisis, ran over to guard the door behind me with an aluminum baseball bat, apparently with the intention of using it to fight off any aliens that attempted to get past her. I took off my QComm, strapped it onto her right wrist, and showed her how to fire its built-in laser. She tossed her bat aside, then aimed the device at the floor and activated its beam for a split second—long enough to burn a hole in the carpet and the concrete foundation beneath.
“I got this,” she said, smiling with satisfaction. Then she aimed her new weapon back at the door, continuing to stand guard over me.
I focused my attention back on the array of monitors and controllers spread out around me. The three Interceptors my father had launched from the Icarus crater were finally closing in on Europa.
Even though I was located inside the Disrupter’s cancellation field, these three ships were millions of miles outside of it, so my quantum communication link to them was unaffected. And so, unfortunately, were the EDA’s links to the Icebreaker and its fighter escort, under the control of Vance and his underlings at Raven Rock.