But it was a rhetorical question. I knew exactly what he was doing.
He glanced up at the security camera mounted nearby—the one we were watching him on. He smiled, but he didn’t answer me. He just turned his makeshift spider-tank around and then used it to crash through the armored doors, into the command center itself. Several of the drone drivers had already climbed out of their pods and were now standing there in the middle of the room waiting for him.
Admiral Vance was standing in their midst, waiting, too.
The admiral ordered his men to open fire on my father as soon as he stumbled forward into the room, but only a few of them actually obeyed. The majority of them didn’t even raise their weapons, and most of those who did couldn’t seem to bring themselves to fire—not with General Xavier Lightman in their sights.
Then Vance started shooting, firing his nine-millimeter Beretta. First he took out the speakers on each of my father’s drones, silencing the music blaring out of them.
Then he turned his weapon on my father.
“You’re a damn fool,” he said, just before he opened fire on my father. Several of his men opened fire, too. Most of their shots were deflected by his shield of ATHIDs, but not all of them. A bullet grazed my father’s left leg.
He still didn’t stop coming, though.
He continued to lurch forward, piloting his makeshift ATHID spider-tank farther into the room, as more laser fire and bullets struck him and his drones, until he finally collapsed a few yards away from Admiral Vance, trapped inside the tangled wreckage of the four ATHIDs. That was when Vance finally spotted the power core overload countdowns ticking away on each of them. All of them had about ten seconds remaining.
“You guys all need to get out of here,” my father said.
The men turned and ran for the exit as fast as their legs would carry them. But Vance didn’t move.
“You better get going, too, Archie,” my father said. “Six seconds. Five …”
Vance shook his head and then ran to the exit before turning back.
“You’re a damn fool,” he said. “This won’t stop us from deploying the Icebreaker, you know.”
Then he turned and ran, and the op center doors hissed closed behind him.
“I know,” I heard my father mutter to himself. “I was just trying to delay you.” Then he laughed. “My son is going to stop you.”
Then my father’s four makeshift bomb all detonated in unison, and the video feed went black.
I screamed. I don’t know for how long.
When I finally got ahold of myself and returned to my senses, I checked the camera feeds from my three drones orbiting Europa. The squadron of EDA drones escorting the Icebreaker had broken formation. They were now drifting around the Icebreaker, which had discontinued its descent toward the moon.
At this very moment, I knew Admiral Vance and the other pilots who had been in control of the Icebreaker’s fighter escort were evacuating the Raven Rock installation. But I also knew that it would only be a matter of seconds before they reached a safe location and retook control of their drones and the Icebreaker. I probably had less than a minute before they started to come back online.
I left two Interceptors orbiting at a distance, took control of the third, and swooped in to attack the defenseless drones drifting helplessly in front of me.
I destroyed half of the Icebreaker’s fighter escort before I came to my senses and forgot about the rest to focus all of my fire on destroying the Icebreaker.
But I was still struggling to knock out its shields when Vance and his men seized control of their drones once again, from some new location—possibly using their QComms.
Suddenly, I found myself outnumbered and outgunned, locked into a dogfight with six Interceptors. As I moved to engage, the song “One Vision” by Queen cued up on my father’s old Raid the Arcade playlist. The song finally managed to put me in the zone.
I took out four of their ships in as many seconds, leaving only two Interceptors remaining—the ones piloted by Rostam and Viper Vance.
I went after Rostam first, recklessly ramming his drone with mine. The impact set his drone careening off at an oblique angle, right into the path of one of the Icebreaker’s automated sentry guns. It exploded in a collapsing fireball.
Now it was just me and Admiral Vance.