On the view screen, the smoking ruins of the moon base were visible in the background, its orb-shaped exterior crawling with spider-like alien drones skittering across its armored metal skin and burrowing into it with lasers. In the foreground, just beyond the lip of the Daedalus crater, was the mammoth Disrupter dodecahedron, spinning fiercely just above the lunar surface as it blasted its pulsing red coupler beam down into the moon’s magnetic core. In the velvet black lunar sky above, hundreds of Interceptors were launching an assault of the Disrupter’s shield, firing on it from as many different angles.
“As you’ll recall from your training, the Disrupter only has one weakness,” Shin said. “A steady barrage of laser fire and plasma bolts will bring down its shields, but the Disrupter’s power core is so large that it recovers far more rapidly than any of the enemy’s other drones. Its shields only drop for about three seconds, then come right back up at full strength.”
“And three seconds isn’t long enough to destroy it,” Milo said. “At least it never was in the game. That’s why no one has ever taken down a Disrupter. Not even the Flying Circus.”
“Look!” Shin pointed at the screen. “Here he comes, to save the day!”
On the screen, a lone EDA mech appeared, power-leaping across the lunar surface, fearlessly charging toward the pillar of blinding red light created by the Disrupter’s transparent coupler beam.
“Old Viper Vance!” Graham shook his head in admiration. “Watch him go!”
“Admiral Vance is controlling that mech?” Whoadie asked.
“Yes,” my father said. “But he was a still just a general back then. He used to be in command of Moon Base Alpha. I took over his post when he got promoted to admiral—in part, for the act of bravery we’re watching now.”
“Although Viper used to do crazy shit like this all the time,” Shin added. “That guy was fearless.”
“I’m sure he still is,” my father said quietly, his eyes still on the screen.
We continued to watch the silent footage of General Vance’s charge toward the Disrupter, wondering what would happen when he closed the remaining distance to it.
“How is he controlling that mech, with the Disrupter still in operation?” I wondered aloud, still studying the footage intently. “He’s moving too fast to have a tether, isn’t he?”
My father nodded. “You’re right, he is,” he said. “Tethered drones were always too slow and too vulnerable for Vance’s liking.” He nodded at the screen. “He’s piloting that mech from inside it. There’s a cockpit embedded in its torso, just above its power core—which Viper is setting to overload right … about … now.”
On the screen, Vance’s mech came within arm’s reach of the coupler beam and then suddenly went limp and fell to the surface like giant metal rag doll, throwing up a cloud of dust.
“He set his mech to self-destruct from inside it?” Milo said disbelievingly. “Did the old man have a death wish?”
Shin and Graham nodded; then Shin motioned to my father.
“I used to think he and General Lightman here both did.”
I pointed up at the screen. “But he isn’t going to have time to eject.”
My father nodded. “Vance’s escape pod launch system was damaged during his charge. So now he’s trapped there next to his own time bomb.”
I had already started counting down the seven seconds it would take for his power-core overload sequence to complete, but I’d only hit five when two more mechs appeared, running up from the bottom of the video frame. Laser and plasma fire rained down on them from the dogfight still raging in the dark sky above the burning, half-destroyed moon base. Then I heard a familiar classic rock song blasting over Vance’s comm—a song from my father’s Raid the Arcade mix: “Black Betty” by Ram Jam.
“That’s one of our nicknames for a Disrupter now,” Shin said, nodding at the spinning black dodecahedron on the screen. “A Black Betty. Or a ‘ten-sider.’ ”
I continued to study the view screen. As the two Titan Warmechs bounded toward the motionless one containing Vance, they moved in a strange sort of unison, almost like a pair of synchronized swimmers. They both seemed to dodge and zigzag perfectly again and again, just in time to avoid being obliterated, always in forward motion, seemingly oblivious to the geysers of rock and moon dust erupting all around—and sometimes directly ahead of—them.
Shin paused the video. “Your father is operating both of those mechs. Simultaneously. He’s inside the one on the left, and it’s connected to the mech on the right via a short fiber-optic tether, inside a titanium-reinforced cable stretching between them.”
“Shin would know,” my father said, never taking his eyes off the screen. “He finished helping me rig them together about ten minutes before this footage was shot.”
Shin pressed Play again, and my eyes were drawn back to the screen. I watched his two mechs lumber forward, unloading their sun guns and laser cannons into the Disrupter’s massive spherical shield as they passed underneath its mammoth spinning form and the coupler array at its southern pole.
Then the mech my father was in reached Vance’s mech, ripped its escape pod free—with Vance inside—and tucked it under his arm like a football.