He opened his mouth and then closed it a few times before he managed to form any words.
“It wasn’t like I had a choice, Son,” he said. “It had to be an explosion, so that the body couldn’t be identified. They buried a John Doe in my place.” He met my gaze. “I’m sorry. I was a kid myself, at the time. I didn’t really understand what I was agreeing to do—and to give up.”
We stood there staring at each other in silence for a moment; then my father’s QComm beeped. He glanced down at its display with a frown, then turned back to me.
“We need to get up to Operations and get you and other new arrivals briefed,” he said. “But we’ll have a chance to talk more in private later on, okay?”
I nodded mutely. I’d waited this long—and what choice did I really have?
My father removed a small silver object from his pocket. “Here,” he said, pressing it into the palm of my hand. “This is for you.”
I turned it over. It was a USB flash drive with an EDA emblem stamped on its casing.
“What’s on it?”
“Letters, mostly,” he said. “I wrote to you and your mom every single day I was up here.” I noticed that he was shifting his weight from one foot to another while he spoke—another of my own nervous tics. “I hope they help explain why I made the decision I did, and how hard it’s been for me to live with ever since.” He shrugged and turned away, still avoiding my gaze. “Sorry there are so many—you probably won’t have enough time to read them all.”
His voice faltered, and he turned away from me to hide his face. I glanced down at the flash drive, then closed my fist around it protectively, unnerved that so small an object could hold such priceless contents.
My father raised the QComm on his wrist and tapped a series of icons on its display. There was a metallic clank as a row of storage-compartment doors built into the underside of the shuttle’s fuselage slid open, revealing cube-shaped shipping containers. My father whispered a series of commands into his QComm, and a few seconds later, a team of four ATHIDs disengaged from a nearby charging rack and marched single-file over to the shuttle. Three of the drones began to unload the cargo, while the fourth climbed into the passenger cabin to retrieve our backpacks.
“Ready, Lieutenant?” my father asked, nodding toward the exit.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, slipping the flash drive into one of my uniform’s breast pockets so that it rested directly over my heart. Then, together, we continued to cross the hangar, and I finally widened my focus enough to take in the details of my surreal surroundings.
The Moon Base Alpha hangar bay was a breathtaking site. The curved walls of the armored dome around us were lined with hundreds of gleaming Interceptor drones arrayed in the belt-fed launch racks that would fire them out into space like bullets from a high-velocity gas-powered machine gun. These were the drones we had been brought up here to pilot, I realized. We would use these very ships to wage war with the enemy when they arrived here, just over five and a half hours from now.
In that moment, I felt like Luke Skywalker surveying a hangar full of A-, Y-, and X-Wing Fighters just before the Battle of Yavin. Or Captain Apollo, climbing into the cockpit of his Viper on the Galactica’s flight deck. Ender Wiggin arriving at Battle School. Or Alex Rogan, clutching his Star League uniform, staring wide-eyed at a hangar full of Gunstars.
But this wasn’t a fantasy. I wasn’t Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon or Ender Wiggin or anyone else. This was real life. My life. I, Zackary Ulysses Lightman, an eighteen-year-old kid from Beaverton, Oregon, newly recruited by the Earth Defense Alliance, had just been reunited with my long-lost father on the far side of the moon—and now, together, we were about to wage a desperate battle to prevent the destruction of Earth and save the human race from total annihilation.
If this were all just a dream, I wasn’t sure that I would want it to end.
But it was going to end, and soon—because there was an egg timer strapped to my forearm counting off exactly just how many more hours, minutes, and seconds remained until my rude awakening.
When my father reached the exit, he continued walking through the open airlock doors, into the tube-shaped access tunnel beyond, which—if the layout of this place was as identical to its virtual counterpart in Armada as it seemed—led beneath the lunar surface, to the adjacent Daedalus B crater, where the rest of the base was located.