Thousands of satellite images of Europa began to appear on the screen, displayed rapidly in chronological order, so that they created a rough stop-motion video, showing what appeared to be a thin ring of metallic debris forming around the moon near its equator. When these photos were magnified and enhanced, millions of construction robots became visible, crawling along orbital scaffolds and the skeletal hulls of the spacecraft they were building.

  It looked just like the Sobrukai homeworld during our mission last night, except that Europa’s surface was mostly white, instead of red. And instead of the purplish gas giant named Tau Ceti V looming behind it, it was the familiar cyclopean eye of Jupiter.

  The Europans were building an armada, just like the Sobrukai. But much closer to Earth. They had Foundry Ships orbiting their moon, cranking out fighters and drones—just like those I’d spotted above Sobrukai last night. The Europans had also towed several large asteroids and meteorites into safe orbits around their moon, and now hordes of those spider-like construction robots could be seen swarming over and burrowing into their surfaces, to mine them for metals and other raw materials. When an asteroid was all mined out, another would be towed into orbit.

  As the time-lapsed footage continued to play, flying through weeks, months, and years of incessant construction by these self-replicating machines, a small fleet of glittering spaceships began to form around Europa. It continued to grow until the alien war vessels grew so numerous they formed a Saturn-like ring that encircled the equator.

  As the asteroids were towed in and mined out, six massive Dreadnaught Spheres began to take shape in orbit above Europa. “Despite all of our ongoing efforts to negotiate a truce with the Europans, they continued to make their preparations for war, constructing drones that then went on to build other drones,” the voice-over explained. “We watched with growing concern as their numbers began to multiply exponentially right before our eyes, month after month, and then year after year.

  “In the mid-1980s, the Europans began to send scout ships to Earth,” Sagan continued. “Our military forces managed to capture and study several of the enemy’s spacecraft. That was when we discovered that they were all drones, which the Europans were controlling from hundreds of thousands of miles away, using some form of instantaneous quantum communication. For this reason, we still know almost nothing about the Europans’ biological makeup or physical appearance.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, feeling a strange combination of frustration and relief. I’d half expected Sagan to reveal that the Europans looked just like the anthropomorphic squid-like Sobrukai depicted in Armada. It was a relief to learn this was not the case, but equally frustrating to be told that, after four decades, we still didn’t know anything about our enemy’s biology.

  “However, after years of effort, our scientists were able to reverse-engineer the aliens’ quantum communication technology, along with certain facets of their ships’ propulsion and weapons systems. We have since used these newfound technologies to construct a global stockpile of our own defense drones, which we believe will give humanity a fighting chance against the invaders.”

  I heard myself let out an uneasy sigh. I’d been willing to suspend my disbelief for the EDA’s “we reverse-engineered the aliens’ technology in just a few years” explanation back when I’d thought it was just a fictional videogame backstory. But I definitely didn’t buy it now that the EDA was trying to pass it off as a historical fact—even if they were using Carl Sagan’s voice to do it. It seemed utterly impossible that the EDA had managed to reverse-engineer vastly superior communication, propulsion, and weapons technology in just a few years while concealing this endeavor from the whole world—let alone mass-produce it into millions of drones. And even if that was possible, why had our enemy made the task so easy for us? According to what we’d just been told, the Europans had not only let us capture several of their vessels, they’d then given us enough time to figure out how they worked, to build our own fleet of ships with the same capabilities. And by constructing their armada in orbit around their moon, in full view of our satellites, they’d basically given humanity a detailed video of what to expect when their attack came.

  There had to be some truth to what the EDA was telling us. The shuttle ride I’d just taken to get here was proof of that, as were my current surroundings. But I was sure there was more to this story than they were telling us. A lot more.

  “Gradually, it became evident to humanity’s leaders that we faced certain extinction if we didn’t set aside our differences and unite as one species to defend ourselves and our home. This prompted select members of the United Nations to form a secret global military coalition for that very purpose, known as the Earth Defense Alliance, in the event that our worst fears are one day realized, and the entire Europan armada disembarks for Earth.”

  The animated EDA logo reappeared on the screen.

  “Until then, we continue to work toward peace, while preparing for the possibility of war.”

  As Sagan finished the closing voice-over, the screen went dark and the film ended abruptly. Lex realized she was still clutching my forearm and let go of it. There were marks where she’d dug her nails into my skin, but I hadn’t even noticed. I’d been too busy having my whole perception of reality shattered into a million pieces.

  When the lights came up a few seconds later, they hit us with the really bad news.

  A TALL MAN in a heavily decorated EDA uniform mounted the small stage down below and walked to the podium at its center. When he reached it, his face appeared on the giant view screen behind him, and I gasped in unison with Lex and a chorus of others in the audience.

  It was Admiral Archibald Vance, the cyclopean EDA commander who gave players their mission briefings in both Armada and Terra Firma.

  I’d always assumed he was just an actor who had been hired to play that role, but it appeared I’d been wrong about that, too.

  The admiral rested his hands on the podium and cast a long appraising gaze over his audience.

  “Greetings, recruit candidates,” he said. “My name is Admiral Archibald Vance, and I’ve been a field commander in the Earth Defense Alliance for over a decade now. I’m sure many of you are surprised to learn that I’m a real person, and not a fictional character. But rest assured, I am real, and so is the Earth Defense Alliance.”

  There were scattered cheers and some muted laughter. The admiral waited for total silence before he continued.

  “You’ve all been summoned here today because we need your help. You people are among the most skilled and highly trained drone pilots in the world. The videogames you’ve each mastered, Terra Firma and Armada, are both actually combat training simulations created by the EDA to help us locate and train individuals like each of you—who possess the rare talents required to help us defend our planet from the impending Europan invasion.

  “As you just saw, our alien enemy’s existence has been kept a guarded secret since its initial discovery,” he went on. “This was done out of necessity, so that humanity would keep calm and carry on long enough for our leaders to organize and mount a defense against the invaders.” He slid his hands off the podium and scanned his audience again.

  “But we’ve finally run out of time. The day we’ve been dreading all these years is now at hand. And you people are the EDA’s most promising recruit candidates, from dozens of different countries all over the world,” he told us. “Which is why we’ve taken the precaution of relocating you here, to a secure location, before the truth of our circumstances is revealed to the entire world.”

  “Holy fucking shit,” Lex whispered beside me.

  “The briefing film you just saw was first prepared in the early 1990s,” Admiral Vance said. “We’ve updated the computer-generated imagery over the years, but its contents have changed very little. The EDA has always intended to release this film to the world when the threat of invasion could no longer be concealed. Sadly, that day is now at hand. After threatening us with extinction for over forty years, it appears the Europans have finally completed their preparations for war.”

  He gripped the edges of the podium, as if to steady himself. It made me realize that I was doing the same thing with the armrests of my chair.

  “Here is our satellite imagery from early yesterday morning.” A new high-resolution image of Europa appeared on the screen behind him. The armada we’d seen under construction in the canned video was now complete. The six Dreadnaught Spheres had flowered open to take on their deadly cargo, and their long spiral storage racks were nearly filled to capacity with over a billion individual drones, ready for transport and deployment.

  “This next image was taken just a few hours ago,” the admiral said as another image of Europa appeared on the screen. The band of gleaming alien construction ships that had been orbiting the icy moon was now gone—and so were the six massive Dreadnaught Spheres. And there was a giant circle burned in Europa’s southern hemisphere—in the exact same spot on the moon’s surface where the Icebreaker had aimed its melt laser during our assault on Sobrukai last night during the Armada mission.

  “Holy shit!” I shouted, and I wasn’t alone. “That mission was real?”

  “What do you mean?” Lex asked.

  Before I could answer, the admiral spoke again.

  “The EDA launched an attack on Europa last night,” he said. “Many of you Armada pilots took part in that mission, which was our one shot at destroying them before they launched their drones to destroy us. But the Icebreaker mission failed. And now their armada is on its way to Earth.”

  I couldn’t keep my doubts to myself any longer. “This story doesn’t make any damn sense,” I whispered to Lex. “If these aliens want to wipe us out, why wait forty years to attack? Why give us that long to figure out their technology and prepare to fight them off, when they could have wiped us out back in the seventies? Why wait?” I shook my head. “It didn’t make sense when it was backstory for the game, and it doesn’t make sense now either. I mean, why send a fleet of robotic drones? Why not hit us with a virus or a killer asteroid or—”

  “Christ, who the fuck cares, man?” Lex hissed back. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her attempt to take another sip from her already-empty flask with a trembling hand. Then she cursed and retightened its cap. “Maybe they live for thousands of years? Four decades might seem like a long weekend to them.” Her eyes narrowed at the glowing image on the screen. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? They’re obviously through waiting.”

  She turned her attention back to the admiral, and I tried to do the same.

  “This is the enemy fleet’s current position and trajectory,” Vance said, just as an animated map of our solar system appeared on the screen behind him. The current location of the Europan armada was indicated by a chain of three amoeba-shaped blobs, each one larger than the last. They were stretched out in a line between Jupiter and Earth, inching their way through the asteroid belt like an interplanetary wagon train.

  The Europan armada appeared to be approaching Earth in three separate attack waves. Their overall trajectory was indicated by a glowing yellow line that left no doubt as to their destination.

  “Oh my God,” Lex whispered. “They’re already more than halfway here.”

  She was right. The first wave was already approaching the asteroid belt out beyond Mars’ orbit.

  The display zoomed in on the vanguard—the blob in the lead—showing that it was comprised of a dense cloud of thousands of tiny green triangles swarming around a dark green circle in their midst—a Dreadnaught Sphere, surrounded by its fighter escort. The admiral then adjusted the tactical display to zoom in on the two even-larger blobs of ships trailing it. The second blob contained two Dreadnaught Spheres and twice as many Glaive Fighters escorting it. The third blob contained three Dreadnaught Spheres, and triple the number of fighters escorting them.

  The admiral used a laser pointer to highlight the three clusters of ships.

  “For reasons we still don’t understand, the enemy has divided its invasion force into three attack waves, each progressively larger than the last,” he said. “We estimate that each one of those Dreadnaught Spheres is carrying a payload of approximately one billion individual drones.”

  Even I was able to do arithmetic that simple. The admiral had just told us that there were six billion killer alien drones on their way here to wipe us out. This obviously wasn’t going to be a fair fight—not after that second wave got here.

  The admiral moved his laser pointer back to the arrow-shaped cluster of ships out in front. “If it continues on its current course at the same speed, the vanguard—this first wave of ships out front—will reach our lunar perimeter less than eight hours from now.”

  A digital countdown clock appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, showing the time remaining until the vanguard’s arrival: 07:54:07.

  A second later, my QComm beeped and its display lit up on my wrist, just as every other QComm in the auditorium did the same thing, creating a single loud beep that echoed through the crowd. I glanced down at my wrist and saw that the same invasion countdown clock now appeared on my QComm’s display, perfectly in sync with the one on the giant projection screen behind the admiral.

  07:54:05

  07:54:04

  07:54:03

  “Jesus,” Lex muttered, staring at the QComm strapped to her wrist, watching the seconds tick down. “Now I feel like Snake Plissken.”

  I snorted out a wholly inappropriate laugh that echoed through the silent auditorium before I quickly stifled it as the sea of faces below us turned to scowl in our general direction. Lex snickered, and I raised a finger to my lips and shushed her.

  “If we manage to survive the vanguard’s attack, the second wave of enemy drones will reach Earth approximately three hours later, with the final wave reaching us roughly three hours after that.”

  Every time he said the word vanguard, all I could think of was an old arcade game with that title. Vanguard was a great side-scrolling space shooter from the mid-1980s that I’d discovered in my father’s collection. In the game, when you reached the last of the game’s five increasingly difficult waves, you faced the final boss, known as “The Gond.” In my head, I was already imagining that the Gond and the Europan overlord looked more or less identical. Then I reminded myself there might not even be a Europan overlord—the briefing film said we still didn’t know anything about their biology or social structure. Maybe they didn’t even have a leader. Maybe they were a hive mind?

  When the admiral finished speaking and turned away from the screen, a rumble of anxious murmuring spread through the audience, gradually increasing in volume, until Vance finally motioned for silence.

  “You’re right to be alarmed,” he said. “A full-scale invasion of our planet is now under way, and our enemy has us vastly outnumbered. Thankfully, the odds aren’t nearly as hopeless as they seem. The Earth Defense Alliance has been preparing the world for this moment for decades, and when it begins, humanity will be ready to fight back and defend our home.”

  A desperate cheer went up as the Earth Defense Alliance crest reappeared on the screen, accompanied by another piece of music from John Williams’ score for Armada. As skeptical as I was about everything I’d just been told, hearing the music in that context gave me goose bumps.

  A hangar full of ADI-88 Interceptors appeared on the screen, and I felt my jaw go involuntarily slack. They looked exactly like the drones I’d piloted in Armada, down to the last detail. Another photo appeared, showing thousands of ATHIDs standing in formation under powerful floodlights in some secret concrete bunker. Finally, a photo of a single Sentinel mech was displayed, and I heard Lex mutter “whoa” under her breath. It looked just like one of the Sentinels in the game, and just as huge.

  “You’re looking at the real reason for the recent global financial crisis—all of human civilization’s technology, industry, and natural resources have been leveraged to the hilt in our effort to ensure that we have the firepower necessary to repel the invaders’ superior numbers and advanced weaponry. And now, at long last, our forces are ready for deployment.”

  More photos were displayed on the screen, showing thousands of real Interceptors, Sentinels, and ATHIDs stored in hidden locations around the world, waiting for battle. I felt an involuntary surge of pride for my species, and the technological miracles we had accomplished in an effort to ensure our own survival.

  “We have constructed millions of these drones and hidden them in strategic locations all over the globe,” the admiral continued. “When the invasion begins, civilian recruits around the world will be able to use their gaming platforms to take control of these stockpiled drone forces using the enemy’s instantaneous quantum communication link technology. This global network of military defense drones will be our only hope to even the odds that are stacked against us all.”

  The EDA crest appeared on the screen behind the admiral once again.

  “The Alliance’s international forces have already managed to thwart dozens of enemy scouting missions to Earth, and these engagements have helped us collect an enormous amount of data on their ships, weapons, and tactics,” he said. “And we’ve fed every ounce of that data into the Terra Firma and Armada training simulations, to ensure that they would be effective in preparing you to face real enemy drones in combat. So all of you people have been fighting a simulated version of this war for years.” He smiled grimly. “Now it’s time for the real thing.”

  He clasped his hands behind his back, and his expression softened. “I know how frightening all of this must be for some of you,” he said. “We can’t force you to risk your lives and join our ranks. But you should all know by now that you won’t be able to hide from this war by running back to your homes. And your friends and families won’t be able to hide from it either. No one anywhere on Earth can hide. These creatures, whatever they are, are coming to exterminate us all. If we don’t stop them, humanity will cease to exist.”