I nailed another Glaive, and then another. I was on fire. Everything about the way these Glaive Fighters were moving and attacking was familiar—in some ways, even predictable.
And it still felt too easy. Like many fictional alien bad guys, the Sobrukai fighters I’d faced off against in Armada had always suffered from Stormtrooper Syndrome. They couldn’t aim for shit, and they were way too easy to kill. But those had been fictional aliens in a videogame. These were real extraterrestrial ships in a real-life battle. So why did the same tactics still work?
I mouthed the lyrics to the Queen song playing on my headset as I blasted one Glaive after another right out of the sky. And another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust.
I took out three more Glaives with a volley of photon bolts, bringing my total kills up to seventeen. According to the mission timer on my HUD, my Interceptor had only been in the sky for seventy-three seconds.
Then, just as I was beginning to feel invincible, my ship took a series of direct hits from behind and my shields failed completely. Warning indicators began to flash on my HUD as AVA put my Interceptor into an evasive barrel roll and we swooped in low over the base.
The ground below was already littered with the burning, skeletal remains of hundreds of downed ATHIDs. I zeroed in on one that was legless and decapitated, but still flailing and firing its guns blindly at the sky. Then its operator finally activated the drone’s self-destruct sequence, and the detonation caused one of the flaming buildings nearby to collapse.
A rapid series of piercing shrieks, each followed by what sounded like a brief thunderclap, erupted from the surround-sound speakers lining the walls, floor, and ceiling of my drone controller station. It was a sound I knew well from playing Armada—EDA surface-to-air cannons being fired. During the game’s online co-op missions, I’d learned to react to this sound by checking for friendly fire, because the players relegated to operating surface guns during these battles were usually those with the worst aim.
I tilted my ship starboard and scanned the ground below, tracking the sound to its source. Several long, concealed trenches had opened in the terrain surrounding the farm on all sides. They were each lined with dozens of antiaircraft plasma cannons and surface-to-air laser turrets. Each one of them was already moving and firing in its own unique pattern, and I knew these guns must now be under the control of other Earth Defense Alliance recruits like me, who were also fighting for their lives from a darkened Drone controller station deep underground.
I reoriented my tactical display to a two-dimensional view, and it instantly reminded me of the classic arcade game Missile Command. Squadrons of Glaive Fighters were making repeated, swooping attacks on the armored blast doors set into the surface, diving toward it in tight groups of four and five, raining plasma bombs as they came—while also trying to evade the steady barrage of fire from the base’s surface guns, with only marginal success.
The number of enemy ships was already beginning to dwindle, and they were coming under more fire every second, as an intermittent stream of reserve Interceptor drones continued to emerge from the grain silo launch tunnels and join the fight.
Infantry reserves were beginning to arrive, too. New ATHIDs and Sentinels were pouring out of their underground bunkers in a steady stream, firing their weapons at the invaders as they came.
My shields were coming back up now, so I deactivated the autopilot and nosed my Interceptor over into a spiraling dive, attempting to engage another squadron of Glaive Fighters as they arced down to make another carpet-bombing run on the already red-hot blast doors, which were now beginning to warp and buckle in their massive earthen frame, creating gaps along their edges that were growing wider every second. Soon, they’d be wide enough for a fighter to get inside—and that was all it would take.
I adjusted my ship’s angle of approach and closed in on the Glaive squadron from above, swinging my targeting reticle over with their silhouettes on my HUD. I thumbed my weapons selector and armed my Interceptor’s Macross missile pod. But just as I was about to fire it, my targets stopped firing and accelerated their dive.