Before he could answer, I pointed at the two men seated beside him. “Who are those two clowns? For that matter, who the hell are you, asshole! Huh?”
“Okay, okay!” Ray said, throwing up his hands. “I’ll try to answer your questions—but first you need to take a deep breath and calm down a little bit, all right?”
“Fuck calming down!” I shouted, straining against my safety harness. “And fuck you, too, Ray, you lying sack of shit! Tell me what’s going on, or I’ll lose it, I swear!”
“Okay,” he said in a soothing voice. “But first, I need you to breathe, Zack.”
He studied my face anxiously. I realized then that I did not, in fact, appear to be breathing. So I took a deep, gasping breath, then exhaled slowly. I felt a little better then, and my breathing began to normalize. Ray nodded, satisfied.
“Good,” he said. “Thank you. Now go ahead and ask your questions again, one at a time, and I’ll do my best to answer them, if I can.”
“Where the hell did this shuttle come from? Who built it?”
“Isn’t that obvious?” he said. “The Earth Defense Alliance built it.” He nodded at his two companions. “And to answer your earlier question, these two men are EDA field agents, here to ensure your safe transport.”
“No way,” I said. “There’s no way the EDA can be real.”
“It’s real,” he said. “The Earth Defense Alliance is a top-secret global military coalition formed over four decades ago.”
“Formed to do what? To ‘defend Earth,’ I suppose?”
He nodded. “Hence the name.”
“To defend it from what?” I wanted to hear him say it. Out loud.
“From an alien invasion.”
I studied Ray’s face for any hint of irony, but his expression was now gravely serious. I glanced at his two companions to gauge their reaction, but they didn’t even seem to be listening to our conversation. Both of them had taken out smartphones and were studying their displays.
I looked back at Ray. “An alien invasion? By who? The Sobrukai? Evil humanoid squids from Tau Ceti? You’re gonna tell me they’re real, too?”
“No, not exactly,” he said. “The Sobrukai are fictional, invented by Chaos Terrain to serve as the alien antagonists in their videogames. But, as you’re probably now realizing, Armada and Terra Firma aren’t just games. They are simulators designed for a very specific purpose—to train citizens all over this planet to operate the drones that will defend it.”
“Defend it from who? You just said the Sobrukai aren’t real. …”
“They aren’t,” he said. “But they’re standins for a real alien threat, whose existence had to be kept secret until now to prevent global panic.” He gave me an odd smile. “The name Sobrukai is actually a play on the word sobriquet, which is just a fancy term for nickname. Sneaky, eh?”
A terrible thought occurred to me. “Yesterday morning, I was sure I saw a Glaive Fighter. …”
“That was the real deal,” he said. “You spotted a real enemy scout ship. EDA intel says a bunch of them have been spotted over the past twenty-four hours, all over the world. We think they’re conducting surveillance on all of our hard-line intranet nodes—”
“But it looked exactly like a Sobrukai Glaive!”
“Of course it did,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Chaos Terrain modeled all of the Sobrukai’s forces after our real enemy. They re-created their ships and drones as accurately as possible inside the sim—in the games. To make them as realistic as possible.”
“So these aliens, they really have Glaive Fighters? And Wyverns—”
“And Dreadnaught Spheres, Spider Fighters, Basilisks—they all really exist,” he said. “Chaos Terrain made up those names, but everything else about the enemy’s drones in Armada is completely accurate. Their appearance, weaponry, maneuverability, tactics, and strategy—all were based on direct observations of our real enemy’s forces and technology, made during our previous engagements with them.”
“Previous engagements?” I asked. “How long have we been fighting them? Where are they from? What do they look like? When did they make First Contact? If—”
He held up a hand to cut me off, sensing the hysteria creeping back into my voice.
“I can’t tell you any of that yet,” he said. “The information we’ve gathered on the enemy is still classified.” He checked his watch. “But not for very much longer. You’ll be fully briefed as soon as we reach Nebraska.”
“Nebraska,” I said. “What’s in Nebraska?”
“A top-secret Earth Defense Alliance base.”
I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it again. Then I repeated this process a few more times, until I actually managed to form words again.