“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said, interrupting him. “How did they get Carl Sagan to keep the Europans a secret for so long?”
“He knew the news could create a worldwide panic and upend our civilization,” my father said. “He only agreed to remain silent on the condition that the EDA give him the funding necessary to educate the world’s population and try to prepare them for the news that humanity is not alone. That was how he got funding for his Cosmos television series.”
Shin nodded. “Unfortunately, Dr. Sagan passed away before things really began to escalate with the Europans.”
“The Armistice Council kept on trying to establish peace talks after he died,” Graham added, “but the squids never sent a single reply.”
“Squids?” I repeated. “I thought we didn’t know anything about the Europans’ biology?”
“That’s the official story, all right,” Graham said, adopting a conspiratorial tone. “But trust me, mate—they’re squids. The brass knows a lot more about our enemy than they let on—they always have.” He glanced at Shin, then at my father, then back at me.
“What are you talking about?” Milo asked. “The Europeans declared war on us, for no reason!”
Everyone had given up on correcting Milo every time he referred to the Europans as Europeans—even poor Graham, who actually was European.
“That’s the official story, all right,” Graham said. “But does it make any sense? Think it through. If the Europans had attacked us ten or twenty or even thirty years ago, we never would have been able to stop them.”
I sat bolt upright, then glanced at my father. But his eyes were locked on Graham.
“We couldn’t even have stopped an asteroid or a meteor from wiping us out back then, much less an angry alien species with vastly superior weaponry and technology,” Graham continued. “They had the upper hand from the start, so why didn’t they use it? Instead, they basically just handed us their technology and then gave us all the time in the world to reverse-engineer it. Then they gave us even more time to build a huge stockpile of millions of drones to defend ourselves against the drones they were building.”
It was more than a little disturbing to hear Graham vocalize many of the same questions that had been eating away at me ever since the EDA briefing.
“And they built all of their ships and drones in orbit above Europa, in plain view of Galileo’s cameras! There’s no way they weren’t aware that we were watching them. They wanted us to see! It was like they were running a nonstop, year-round episode of How It’s Made by Aliens.”
Graham noticed that Shin was now making a screw-loose gesture with his index finger and flipped him the bird as he kept on talking.
“The Europans had this huge advantage over us, but then they slowly, gradually lessened it on purpose, instead of just slaughtering us over a weekend. Why? Why send a small group of scout ships every year, year after year, to study us, mutilate our cattle, and attack our secret moon base?” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “But they weren’t really even serious attacks. They never try to destroy the entire base or kill everyone inside during their annual Jovian Opposition assaults. Instead, they always do just enough damage to prove that they could destroy the whole base if they wanted to. Then they leave without actually doing it. Why?”
Shin interrupted him again. “Are you gonna let him spout this nonsense in front of the new recruits?” he asked my father. “Right before the attack? He’ll demoralize them!”
My fellow recruits did indeed seem shaken by Graham’s speech. As was I—but for a different reason. Everything he’d laid out matched my own suspicions with eerie accuracy, but I didn’t want to hear it. Shin was right: Worrying about abstractions and unanswerable questions just hours before the fight of our lives was a pointless—even harmful—distraction.
“You can’t stop the signal, pal!” Graham said. “I’ve also heard, from several reliable sources, that one of their scout ships crashed in Florida in the late eighties, only it wasn’t a drone. They recovered it with two dead Europan pilots, floating inside a pressurized fishbowl cockpit. Word is we’ve still got the bodies on ice in a bunker five miles beneath Wright Patterson Air Force Base.”
“He’s just repeating old rumors,” Shin said. “Alliance gossip—bullshit stories that have been circulating through the ranks for decades. There’s no evidence to support any of it!”
“That’s not true and you know it, Shin-bone!” Graham said. “Why do you think the Sobrukai were designed to be aquatic extremophiles in the Chaos Terrain games? Because that’s how the Europans really look, man!” He turned to address me and the other new arrivals. “The Sobrukai overlord’s design was based on the biology of the real Europans. They just scaried him up for the public.”