As our two ships continued to hurtle downward in a diving chase, I saw the tunnel begin to broaden slightly, and I fired another burst from my sun guns. But it didn’t connect, and my cockiness now turned to panic, because the lone Glaive had just cleared the tunnel and come out the other side, zooming on into the cavernous drone hangar.
I followed it inside, and then slammed on my Interceptor’s inertia brakes, because it appeared that I now had my enemy cornered. I continued firing plasma bolts at the Glaive, and shooting from a standstill drastically improved my aim. I scored two directs hits on its shields in rapid succession, causing them to flicker and then fail.
The second the Glaive’s shields dropped, it slid to an instantaneous stop out ahead of me, near the hangar’s cavernous center. I’d seen Glaive Fighters and EDA Interceptors execute this maneuver countless times while playing Armada. I’d executed it plenty of times myself—the drone had just initiated its self-destruct sequence. Its reactor core would overload in approximately seven seconds.
I fired a last volley of plasma bolts at the unprotected enemy ship, which was already vibrating from the buildup of power in its reactor core, and held my breath as they streaked toward it, silently praying to Crom that they would reach the Glaive and destroy it before it finished transforming itself into a weapon of mass destruction.
Time seemed to stop. I caught a second-long glimpse of the hangar around us and noticed that it was still over half-full. Thousands of brand-new, unused Interceptors were nestled into belt-fed launch racks that lined the hangar’s curved reinforced concrete walls.
I watched in slow motion as the shots I’d fired closed in on the Glaive’s quivering metal hull. They finally seemed to reach their mark at last, and I saw a blinding white flash across my cockpit’s wraparound screens.
Then they all went black, and my entire drone controller station powered down, throwing the tiny room in total darkness. Somewhere above me, I heard the muffled atomic boom of a power core detonation, followed by a horrible rumbling that could only be several levels of the base collapsing in on each other.
I don’t know how long I sat there in the pitch-black darkness, listening to the aftermath of my mistake. But at some point the door of my controller station hissed open, and a terrible flood of light poured in, momentarily blinding me. As my eyesight slowly returned, I saw a female silhouette resolve in the doorway. Lex was standing there, with one hand cocked on her hip.
“Did you see what happened?” she said, shaking her head. “Some moron Interceptor pilot chased that last Glaive Fighter into one of the launch tunnels, right before the whole hangar went up.”
I nodded and got to my feet unsteadily; then I stepped out of my control pod, feeling almost as if I’d just emerged from a real Interceptor—and a real battle. Which, of course, I had.
“I’m still not even sure what happened up there,” I lied.
“We’d already won,” she said. “We’d just destroyed all but one of their drones—but then somehow the last Glaive Fighter got inside the drone hangar before it self-destructed,” she said. “Somebody screwed up.”
When I didn’t respond, she studied my face for a moment.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she said. “Didn’t you hear Admiral Vance screaming at you to break off over the comlink? Everyone else sure did!”
She pursed her lips and gave me two thumbs-up.
Before I could begin to formulate my defense, my QComm beeped and vibrated against my forearm; then its display began flashing red to get my attention. A text message appeared, ordering me to report to Admiral Vance in the command center. An interactive map of the base below it appeared, and a green path lit up, leading from my current location in the drone controller hub out into the corridor outside, then down to another bank of elevators.
Just as I finished reading the message, that synthesized female voice spoke over the base PA system. “Lieutenant Zack Lightman. You are ordered to report to Admiral Vance in the command center on level three immediately.”
As Lex stepped aside to clear my path, she softly sang, “You’re in trouble.”
The three-dimensional map on my QComm took me on a circuitous multilevel route through the base. It seemed to be detouring me around the sections most heavily damaged by the hangar explosion, but I still saw signs of its aftermath everywhere.
As I made my way down half-collapsed corridors filled with smoke and sparking electrical fires, several ATHID emergency response teams marched past me, coming the other direction. I also saw a few of my fellow drone operators, many of them covered in dust or ash. Some shuffled along like zombies, while others ran past me in hysterics. At every turn, I expected to see a corpse—someone who had died because of me.