The Europan armada appeared to be approaching Earth in three separate attack waves. Their overall trajectory was indicated by a glowing yellow line that left no doubt as to their destination.
“Oh my God,” Lex whispered. “They’re already more than halfway here.”
She was right. The first wave was already approaching the asteroid belt out beyond Mars’ orbit.
The display zoomed in on the vanguard—the blob in the lead—showing that it was comprised of a dense cloud of thousands of tiny green triangles swarming around a dark green circle in their midst—a Dreadnaught Sphere, surrounded by its fighter escort. The admiral then adjusted the tactical display to zoom in on the two even-larger blobs of ships trailing it. The second blob contained two Dreadnaught Spheres and twice as many Glaive Fighters escorting it. The third blob contained three Dreadnaught Spheres, and triple the number of fighters escorting them.
The admiral used a laser pointer to highlight the three clusters of ships.
“For reasons we still don’t understand, the enemy has divided its invasion force into three attack waves, each progressively larger than the last,” he said. “We estimate that each one of those Dreadnaught Spheres is carrying a payload of approximately one billion individual drones.”
Even I was able to do arithmetic that simple. The admiral had just told us that there were six billion killer alien drones on their way here to wipe us out. This obviously wasn’t going to be a fair fight—not after that second wave got here.
The admiral moved his laser pointer back to the arrow-shaped cluster of ships out in front. “If it continues on its current course at the same speed, the vanguard—this first wave of ships out front—will reach our lunar perimeter less than eight hours from now.”
A digital countdown clock appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, showing the time remaining until the vanguard’s arrival: 07:54:07
A second later, my QComm beeped and its display lit up on my wrist, just as every other QComm in the auditorium did the same thing, creating a single loud beep that echoed through the crowd. I glanced down at my wrist and saw that the same invasion countdown clock now appeared on my QComm’s display, perfectly in sync with the one on the giant projection screen behind the admiral.
07:54:05
07:54:04
07:54:03
“Jesus,” Lex muttered, staring at the QComm strapped to her wrist, watching the seconds tick down. “Now I feel like Snake Plissken.”
I snorted out a wholly inappropriate laugh that echoed through the silent auditorium before I quickly stifled it as the sea of faces below us turned to scowl in our general direction. Lex snickered, and I raised a finger to my lips and shushed her.
“If we manage to survive the vanguard’s attack, the second wave of enemy drones will reach Earth approximately three hours later, with the final wave reaching us roughly three hours after that.”
Every time he said the word “vanguard,” all I could think of was an old Atari arcade game with that title. Vanguard was a great side-scrolling space shooter from the mid-1980s that I’d discovered in my father’s collection. In the game, when you reached the last of the game’s five increasingly difficult waves, you faced the final boss, known as “The Gond.” In my head, I was already imagining that the Gond and the Europan overlord looked more or less identical. Then I reminded myself there might not even be a Europan overlord—the briefing film said we still didn’t know anything about their biology or social structure. Maybe they didn’t even have a leader. Maybe they were a hive mind?
When the admiral finished speaking and turned away from the screen, a rumble of anxious murmuring spread through the audience, gradually increasing in volume, until Vance finally motioned for silence.
“You’re right to be alarmed,” he said. “A full-scale invasion of our planet is now underway, and our enemy has us vastly outnumbered. Thankfully, the odds aren’t nearly as hopeless as they seem. The Earth Defense Alliance has been preparing the world for this moment for decades, and when it begins, humanity will be ready to fight back and defend our home.”
A desperate cheer went up as the Earth Defense Alliance crest reappeared on the screen, accompanied by another piece of music from John Williams’ score for Armada. As skeptical as I was about everything I’d just been told, hearing the music in that context gave me goose bumps.