We were only in low-Earth orbit for a minute. I kept waiting for the gravity to cut out, right up until the shuttle reached its apogee. No such luck. I still felt no indication that we were even moving—not even when we began to fall back to Earth and the blackness outside my window returned to a deep, dark blue and continued to grow lighter in hue every second until daylight flooded in again.
We sliced down through another dense layer of clouds, and suddenly the ground was rushing upward in a terrifying blur of speed. But then, in the space of a few seconds, we decelerated to a dead stop. I felt momentarily nauseous, but only because my eyes and my body were sending my brain conflicting information about whether or not I was in motion.
When I recovered a second later, I looked back out the window. Directly below us was a large white ranch house flanked by several barns and outbuildings and a long row of tower grain silos topped with steel domes that glinted in the morning sun, like rockets waiting to be launched. The farm was surrounded on all sides by a vast green sea of fields and rolling green hills and prairies, broken only by a single dirt road that snaked away across the northern horizon. I also spotted three other EDA shuttles drifting in the sky around us, all descending on a course similar to our own.
As our shuttle continued its descent, one of the plowed fields adjacent to the farm collapsed in on itself, like a perfectly rectangular sinkhole, then split in two and slid apart, like two massive elevator doors set into the earth. They revealed an enormous circular shaft leading deep underground—like an empty missile silo, but much larger in diameter. The blue runway lights that lined its curved concrete walls pulsed in sequence as they receded into the depths below, guiding our shuttle down into the darkness.
“The EDA has bases like this one hidden all over the world,” Ray said. “Some are in remote, unpopulated areas like this one. But we also have hidden drone caches and control bunkers located throughout every major city.”
“Just like in Armada,” I said. “And Terra Firma.”
Ray nodded. “Everything is hidden in plain sight.” He pointed below us. “Those outbuildings actually conceal the entrance of an underground infantry drone bunker. And those grain silos are camouflaged Interceptor launch tunnels. Amazing, eh? It’s astounding how much the EDA has accomplished while working in secret all these years.”
I nodded, still trying to rein in my conflicting emotions. Everything I’d ever been told or taught about the state of the world had been a lie. I’d grown up believing that despite our aspirations, humans were still just a bunch of bipedal apes, divided in arbitrary tribes that were constantly at war over their ruined planet’s dwindling natural resources. I’d always assumed that our future would end up looking more like Mad Max than Star Trek. But now I was forced to see our rampant fossil fuel consumption—and our seeming disregard for its effect on our already-changing climate—in an entirely new light. We hadn’t used up all of our oil and ravaged our planet in a mindless pursuit of consumerism, but in preparation for a dark day that most of us hadn’t even known was coming.
Even humanity’s lack of concern for its rampant overpopulation problem now a made a terrible kind of sense. What difference did it make if our planet was capable of supporting all seven billion of us in the long term when a far greater threat to our numbers was waiting in the wings? And despite the overwhelming odds, humanity had done what was necessary to ensure its own survival. It filled me with a strange new sense of pride in my own species. We weren’t a bunch of primitive monkeys teetering on the brink of self-destruction after all—this appeared to be an altogether different kind of destruction we were teetering on the brink of.
Our shuttle was racing down the tunnel now, blurring the lights embedded in its walls into strobing neon bands as we plunged deep underground.
When we reached the bottom of the shaft a few seconds later, it widened into an enormous subterranean hangar, with a large circular runway that was now spread out below us. Our shuttle landed at its northern edge, joining a long line of identical EDA tactical shuttles parked along the runway’s glowing perimeter.
As soon as the doors slid open, Ray unbuckled his harness, jumped out onto the runway, and motioned for me to follow. My fingers fumbled with the latch of my safety harness for a few seconds; then I finally slipped free of it. After I tested my legs to make sure they were both still working, I climbed outside to join Ray. The pilot and the other two EDA agents remained on board. Like an idiot, I awkwardly waved goodbye to them just before the shuttle doors closed again with a pneumatic hiss.