I cleared my throat. “AVA?” I said. “Are you there?”
I expected to hear the default synthesized female voice respond, but to my surprise the system had also imported my customized Armada sound profile, so I heard a familiar sound bite from Flight of the Navigator instead.
“Compliance!” my AVA computer said, using its familiar digitized version of Paul Reubens’ faux computer voice. “How may I assist you, Lieutenant Lightman?”
“Engage autopilot,” I said, tapping the screen of my tactical display. I dragged my finger across it, indicating an S-shaped trajectory through the highest concentration of enemy fighters. “Take me right into the middle of that mess. You fly; I’ll shoot.”
“Compliance!”
Now that I was in a real battle, my Flight of the Navigator sound profile seemed inappropriate and distracting, so I switched back to the default female, which—fun fact—had been recorded by the actress Candice Bergen. Chaos Terrain had spared no expense.
With the autopilot engaged, I changed my controller configurations so that my throttle and flight stick now functioned as dual-joystick multiaxis firing controls for the Interceptor’s omnidirectional laser turret. As I did so, the turret’s three-dimensional targeting system activated, highlighting the enemy ships around me in an ever-widening spiral of overlapping red targeting brackets.
“Hello, fish,” I whispered, reciting an old incantation. “Welcome to my barrel.”
AVA piloted my Interceptor along the corkscrewing arc I’d laid out, plunging it directly into the enemy’s chaotic midst. A swirling whorl of highlight targets appeared on my HUD overlay. I cranked my music up even louder, took a bead on one of the leaders, and opened fire.
To my surprise, I managed to take out seven enemy ships in rapid succession, with precise, sustained bursts from my laser turret, before any of them even had time to take evasive action. Then the other ships on my HUD broke from their attack formations and scattered in all directions, all while firing back at me—or at where my Interceptor had been a millisecond earlier. Just as I’d planned, when my Interceptor passed directly through the center of the enemy’s symmetrical gauntlet, their ships were caught in their own crossfire for two or three glorious seconds, resulting in the destruction of at least a dozen more of their fighters. Then, as if controlled by some hive mind, they all ceased their friendly fire in unison, allowing my drone to escape and slip out the other side.
I’d executed this maneuver hundreds of times in simulated Armada dogfights, and if I got the timing just right, it always worked like a charm, because the enemy ships reacted to it the same way every single time—the way videogame enemies often tend to do.
But why would the same tactics work now, in the real world? If these were real alien attack drones, under the control of sentient beings living in subsurface oceans of Europa, half a billion kilometers away, why would they fly and fight exactly like their videogame counterparts?
How could Chaos Terrain have been able to simulate the enemy’s maneuvers and tactics with such a high level of precision and accuracy? That shouldn’t be possible, unless the Europan drones were being controlled by some form of artificial intelligence or some sort of linked hive mind, instead of being piloted by individual sentient beings.
My Interceptor took a glancing hit to its shields and a warning klaxon sounded, drawing all of my attention back to the battle. The haptic feedback system in my chair vibrated to simulate the impact of the enemy plasma bolt against my shields, and I watched their strength indicator bar decrease by half. I highlighted another course on my tactical display and tapped the Commit icon.
“Affirmative,” AVA said calmly as the computer pulled us into a steep climb. On my HUD, I saw a long chain of enemy Glaives converge on my tail and arc upward to follow me.
My laser turret had already drained most of my power core’s reserves, so I switched back to my sun guns, then swung my targeting reticle over the leader, taking careful aim. I closed one eye, took a breath, held it—and then fired. And fired again. And again. BOOM! KA-BOOM! BOOM! Three more Glaives exploded brilliantly in front of me, one after the other, just as I’d seen their videogame counterparts do countless time before, from the safety of my suburban bedroom, and I heard the words of a young Luke Skywalker echo in my mind: It’ll be just like Beggar’s Canyon back home.