The two of us were now locked in a fierce duel around the Icebreaker as it hovered above Europa. Muffled through my headphones, I could hear the chaotic sounds of real-world combat somewhere close by—and they were growing ever closer. Spider Fighters had surrounded Starbase Ace. Cruz, Diehl, and my mother were fighting to keep them at bay, and a Basilisk was closing in on the store.
Then, at the last minute, Whoadie swooped down out of the sky in her own manned Interceptor. When the Disrupter had activated and she’d lost control of her drone, she’d decided to jump back in her prototype Interceptor and had hauled ass here from New Orleans to help us. She took out the Basilisk on her first pass with a shot right between the eyes, then swung around again and strafed the Spider Fighters, allowing me to focus my attention back on my duel with Admiral Vance, halfway across the solar system.
I knew that Vance had flown on my father’s wing at Moon Base Alpha—but he turned out to be even better than I expected.
Before I knew what had happened, Vance had swung around on my tail and blasted my Interceptor to pieces.
Then he turned and continued to escort the Icebreaker to its target. But Vance didn’t know that I still had those two last Interceptors in reserve, waiting in a holding pattern nearby.
I took control of another ship and went after Vance. I managed to strafe him with a barrage of plasma bolts, but his shields held and his ship remained undamaged.
He killed me again. He was really good. Almost as good as my father, but not quite.
I took control of my last ship, and once again intercepted Vance and the Icebreaker—just as it came within firing range of Europa’s surface. It was now or never.
I pushed aside my grief and paralyzing rage and focused on what I wanted now, more than anything else in this life—to make my father proud of me, and to make certain that his sacrifice had not been made in vain.
I firewalled my Interceptor’s throttle and locked horns with Vance’s drone, which was still flying in a protective pattern around the Icebreaker. But his ship’s power core was running low now, while I had a fresh ship with a full charge.
There was no time now for subtlety. I put my fighter into a dive and came straight at him with all guns blazing while he did the same, the two of us playing an outer-space variation on a game of chicken, unloading all of our weapons at one another simultaneously.
A split second before we collided, his depleted shields failed—but mine held, allowing me to destroy his ship with a well-placed plasma bolt. It incinerated his ship, just as mine flew straight through the ensuing fireball.
I didn’t stop to celebrate. I swooped down to take out the Icebreaker, too—just seconds before it launched its nukes at Europa’s surface.
“Don’t do it, kid!” Vance screamed over the comlink channel, now powerless to stop me. “If you do this, you’ll be personally responsible for the extinction of the entire human race.”
I went ahead and did it anyway.
When I fired a last burst from my sun guns, the Icebreaker went up in a brilliant, soundless explosion of light.
That was all it took.
In that one moment, it appeared that I had negotiated a cease-fire. The news was already coming in over all of the EDA comlink channels. All around the world, the alien drones and ships had just suddenly deactivated, allowing themselves to be easily destroyed.
I sat there, listening to the news the war was over, trying to make myself believe it. Then, just as I was about to disengage from my Interceptor and remove my helmet, I saw the surface of Europa crack open beneath me, breaking apart like an eggshell as a giant chrome orb rose out of the hidden ocean below, ripping a massive, circular hole in the surface ice as it zoomed up into orbit and began to hover in space directly in front of my ship. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the object was actually an icosahedron, with twenty symmetrical, faceted sides—a “twenty-sider,” Shin would have probably called it.
The icosahedron hovered in front of my ship. Then it began to speak to me.
“I am the Emissary,” it said. “I am an intelligent machine created by a galactic community of peaceful civilizations known as the Sodality.”
The Emissary then explained to me that there were never actually any extraterrestrial beings living on Europa at all! Only microbial life had evolved in the moon’s subsurface ocean. No intelligent beings—indigenous or otherwise—had ever lived there.
“Then who built the armada that just attacked Earth?” I asked. I felt like a character in someone else’s dream. “Who have we been fighting this entire time?”