On Ray’s monitor, dozens of Sobrukai troopships were descending from the sky. These massive, gunmetal gray octahedrons where what the enemy used to deploy their ground forces once they reached Earth’s orbit. Each one had automated sentry guns mounted all over its heavily armored hull, which was nearly invulnerable to laser fire. Of course, in typical videogame fashion, these ships had been engineered with a glaring weak spot: their engines were unshielded and vulnerable to attack—a fact I knew well from playing Armada. When one of these diamond-shaped troopships made landfall, it would impact with enough velocity to bury its lower half into the surface, like a giant spike. Then the pyramid-shaped top half would open like an enormous four-petaled metal flower, and the thousands of Sobrukai drones packed inside it would pour out, like an army of newborn insects bursting from a broken egg sac, intent on devouring everything in sight.
In the distance, a swarm of Sobrukai Glaive Fighters streaked across the sky, banking in unison to change course, like a school of piranha in search of prey. Viewed from above, the Glaive’s symmetrical fuselage resembled the blade of a double-headed axe, but seen edge-on, its profile distinctly resembled that of a flying saucer from an old sci-fi film—a detail that had worked its way into my earlier hallucination.
I’d destroyed countless Glaive Fighters during the three years I’d been playing Armada. Until now, I’d never found them especially frightening or ominous. But today, just seeing the background animations on Ray’s screen filled me with a sense of dread, as if the ships really were somehow a threat to everything I held dear and not a harmless collection of textured polygons rendered on a computer display.
Ray power-leaped his ATHID off of the burning rooftop and onto the back of a Sobrukai Basilisk, a reptilian-looking robot tank with laser cannons for eyes. Ray power-jumped into the air again, spinning his ATHID around 180 degrees just before he brought the huge metal Basilisk down with a single well-placed missile shot to its segmented abdomen. It exploded beneath him in a huge orange fireball, and Ray had to fire his ATHIDs jump jets again to land clear of it.
“Bravo, Sergeant,” I said, using his rank in the fictional Earth Defense Alliance.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” he replied. “That means a lot coming from you.”
He grinned and raised his right hand off of his mouse long enough to snap me a salute before refocusing on the battle.
According to the readouts on his HUD, his squadron had already lost all six of their hover tanks, and both of their Titans. They only had seven ATHIDs left in reserve, and the pulsing icons on his tactical map indicated these were stored inside a nearby EDA weapons cache that was already under attack by a swarm of Spider Fighters. Ray’s squadron was fighting a losing battle at this point. The city would fall to the Sobrukai any minute now. But as usual, Ray kept on fighting, even in the face of certain defeat. It was one of his most endearing qualities.
Ray was, by far, the best Terra Firma player I’d ever seen in person. A few months ago, he’d finally managed to earn membership in “The Thirty Dozen,” an elite clan of the best 360 players in the game. Since then, I’d seen him logged on to Terra Firma’s servers every day, playing one high-level mission after another. And since he wasn’t burdened with distractions like school or homework, Ray could devote his every waking moment to the game, so he’d logged more combat time than me, Cruz, and Diehl all put together.
“Son of a bitch!” Ray shouted, hitting the side of his monitor. I glanced over and saw that the Sobrukai were currently overrunning the surviving members of his squadron and exterminating the last of their drones. A few seconds after Ray’s last reserve ATHID was crushed between a Spider Fighter’s vise-like mandibles, the words mission failed flashed on his display, and then he was treated to a cut-scene animation of the Sobrukai’s forces destroying downtown Newark.
“Oh well,” he muttered, shoving another mouthful of Funyuns into his face as he pondered the city’s smoking ruins. “At least it’s only Newark, right? No big loss.”
He chuckled to himself as he wiped simulated-onion dust off his fingers and onto the legs of his jeans; then he gave me an excited grin.
“Hey, guess what came in today?” he asked. Then he produced a large box from underneath the counter and set it in front of me.
If I’d been a cartoon character, my eyes would have bulged out of their sockets.
It was a brand new Armada Interceptor Flight Control System—the most advanced (and expensive) videogame controller ever made.
“No way!” I whispered, examining the photos and stats printed on its glossy black box. “I thought these things weren’t supposed to hit the market until next month!”
“It looks like Chaos Terrain decided to ship them early,” he said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. “Want to unbox this bad boy?”