As difficult as it had been for me to grow up without knowing my father, I now realized that the years we’d spent apart had been even more difficult for him. For the past seventeen years, I’d been living an idyllic life in the suburbs with mom, surrounded by friends and all of the comforts of home. My father had spent those years here, in this desolate place on the far side of the moon, all alone, and for all he knew, completely forgotten by his loved ones.
Finally I got curious and jumped ahead to the collection of video messages he’d recorded. I clicked on the most recent one, dated less than a week ago. The timestamp said it was just after two o’clock in the morning, by MBA time.
My father was sitting in a large dark room—larger than his quarters. It was some part of the base I didn’t recognize. His unshaven face was just inches from his QComm, and his paranoid, bloodshot eyes filled half of the video frame. As he sat there in the dark, rambling into his QComm’s video camera, he looked and sounded just like a raving, straitjacketed asylum patient—more specifically, a lot like Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys.
“There’s something I have to do,” he said. “Something I can’t tell you about, until I see you in person. But I don’t know if Vance will really honor my request and station you up here with me—if he doesn’t, I need you to know something.”
He stared into the camera lens, seeming to search for the right words.
“What if figuring out the aliens’ true motives is the only way to beat them?” He shrugged and glanced away. “Or at least survive them? At this point, I think surviving might be humanity’s best-case scenario.” He looked back into the lens. “I hope all of this makes sense to you, if and when you actually ever get to see it. If you do—please forgive me, Son. For everything. And no matter what people call me—no matter what they say about my own actions, I want you to know that I did what I felt I had to do—to protect you and your mom, and everyone else back on Earth. Please know that I did what I did because I didn’t think I had any other choice. If you’re still alive to see this message, you’ll know I made the right one.”
He stared expectantly at the camera for a few more seconds, as if he actually expected someone to respond. Then he tapped the screen in front of him, and his image winked out.
I yanked out the flash drive and pocketed it. Then I knelt to grab my EDA rucksack. My old canvas backpack was stuffed inside, along with my father’s old patch-covered leather jacket. I slung the pack over my shoulder, then continued out the exit.
I walked down the empty corridor to my father’s quarters. The door hissed open for me automatically as soon as I came within range of its retinal scanner, and I saw my father sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, strapped into an Armada Interceptor Flight Control System like the one I had at home. He was wearing VR goggles and a pair of noise-canceling headphones, and didn’t appear to notice me come in. I could tell that he was playing an Armada practice mission with Shin and Milo, because he kept saying their call signs, followed by his trademark RedJive catch-phrase, which he uttered each time he blasted one of his opponents’ ships to virtual smithereens.
“You’re welcome. You’re welcome. Oh, and you’re quite welcome, too.”
I cleared my throat loudly, and he pulled off his goggles and headphones.
I held up his flash drive. He nodded and stood up. Then he glanced over his shoulder at the nearest security camera before turning back at me.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I know a place we can talk in private.”
My father led me through a maze of dimly lit corridors, then onto a turbo elevator. It whisked us upward, to the base’s top level, and the doors opened on the observation deck. I now noticed that the transparent dome overhead was the exact same size as the domed ceiling down in the Thunderdome, and it offered the same exact view. I glanced around until I located the camera array suspended from the dome’s armored frame, which captured the 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape in high-definition and projected it on the Thunderdome’s concrete ceiling, deep beneath the moon’s rocky mantle.