To my surprise, I managed to take out seven enemy ships in rapid succession, with precise, sustained bursts from my laser turret, before any of them even had time to take evasive action. Then the other ships on my HUD broke from their attack formations and scattered in all directions, all while firing back at me—or at where my Interceptor had been a millisecond earlier. Just as I’d planned, when my Interceptor passed directly through the center of the enemy’s symmetrical gauntlet, their ships were caught in their own crossfire for two or three glorious seconds, resulting in the destruction of at least a dozen more of their fighters. Then, as if controlled by some hive mind, they all ceased their friendly fire in unison, allowing my drone to escape and slip out the other side.

  I’d executed this maneuver hundreds of times in simulated Armada dogfights, and if I got the timing just right, it always worked like a charm, because the enemy ships reacted to it the same way every single time—the way videogame enemies often tend to do.

  But why would the same tactics work now, in the real world? If these were real alien attack drones, under the control of sentient beings living in the subsurface oceans of Europa, half a billion kilometers away, why would they fly and fight exactly like their videogame counterparts?

  How could Chaos Terrain have been able to simulate the enemy’s maneuvers and tactics with such a high level of precision and accuracy? That shouldn’t be possible, unless the Europan drones were being controlled by some form of artificial intelligence or some sort of linked hive mind, instead of being piloted by individual sentient beings.

  My Interceptor took a glancing hit to its shields and a warning klaxon sounded, drawing all of my attention back to the battle. The haptic feedback system in my chair vibrated to simulate the impact of the enemy plasma bolt against my shields, and I watched their strength indicator bar decrease by half. I highlighted another course on my tactical display and tapped the commit icon.

  “Affirmative,” TAC said calmly as the computer pulled us into a steep climb. On my HUD, I saw a long chain of enemy Glaives converge on my tail and arc upward to follow me.

  My laser turret had already drained most of my power core’s reserves, so I switched back to my sun guns, then swung my targeting reticle over the leader, taking careful aim. I closed one eye, took a breath, held it—and then fired. And fired again. And again. BOOM! KA-BOOM! BOOM! Three more Glaives exploded brilliantly in front of me, one after the other, just as I’d seen their videogame counterparts do countless time before, from the safety of my suburban bedroom, and I heard the words of a young Luke Skywalker echo in my mind: It’ll be just like Beggar’s Canyon back home.

  I nailed another Glaive, and then another. I was on fire. Everything about the way these Glaive Fighters were moving and attacking was familiar—in some ways, even predictable.

  And it still felt too easy. Like many fictional alien bad guys, the Sobrukai fighters I’d faced off against in Armada had always suffered from Stormtrooper Syndrome. They couldn’t aim for shit, and they were way too easy to kill. But those had been fictional aliens in a videogame. These were real extraterrestrial ships in a real-life battle. So why did the same tactics still work?

  I mouthed the lyrics to the Queen song playing on my headset as I blasted one Glaive after another right out of the sky. And another one gone, another one gone, another one bites the dust.

  I took out three more Glaives with a volley of plasma bolts, bringing my total kills up to seventeen. According to the mission timer on my HUD, my Interceptor had only been in the sky for seventy-three seconds.

  Then, just as I was beginning to feel invincible, my ship took a series of direct hits from behind and my shields failed completely. Warning indicators began to flash on my HUD as TAC put my Interceptor into an evasive barrel roll and we swooped in low over the base.

  The ground below was already littered with the burning, skeletal remains of hundreds of downed ATHIDs. I zeroed in on one that was legless and decapitated, but still flailing and firing its guns blindly at the sky. Then its operator finally activated the drone’s self-destruct sequence, and the detonation caused one of the flaming buildings nearby to collapse.

  A rapid series of piercing shrieks, each followed by what sounded like a brief thunderclap, erupted from the surround-sound speakers lining the walls, floor, and ceiling of my drone controller station. It was a sound I knew well from playing Armada—EDA surface-to-air cannons being fired. During the game’s online co-op missions, I’d learned to react to this sound by checking for friendly fire, because the players relegated to operating surface guns during these battles were usually those with the worst aim.

  I tilted my ship starboard and scanned the ground below, tracking the sound to its source. Several long, concealed trenches had opened in the terrain surrounding the farm on all sides. They were each lined with dozens of antiaircraft plasma cannons and surface-to-air laser turrets. Each one of them was already moving and firing in its own unique pattern, and I knew these guns must now be under the control of other Earth Defense Alliance recruits like me, who were also fighting for their lives from a darkened drone controller station somewhere deep underground.

  I reoriented my tactical display to a two-dimensional view, and it instantly reminded me of the classic arcade game Missile Command. Squadrons of Glaive Fighters were making repeated, swooping attacks on the armored blast doors set into the surface, diving toward them in tight groups of four and five, raining plasma bombs as they came—while also trying to evade the steady barrage of fire from the base’s surface guns, with only marginal success.

  The number of enemy ships was already beginning to dwindle, and they were coming under more fire every second, as an intermittent stream of reserve Interceptor drones continued to emerge from the grain silo launch tunnels and join the fight.

  Infantry reserves were beginning to arrive, too. New ATHIDs and Sentinels were pouring out of their underground bunkers in a steady stream, firing their weapons at the invaders as they came.

  My shields were coming back up now, so I deactivated the autopilot and nosed my Interceptor over into a spiraling dive, attempting to engage another squadron of Glaive Fighters as they arced down to make another carpet-bombing run on the already red-hot blast doors, which were now beginning to warp and buckle in their massive earthen frame, creating gaps along their edges that were growing wider every second. Soon, they’d be wide enough for a fighter to get inside—and that was all it would take.

  I adjusted my ship’s angle of approach and closed in on the Glaive squadron from above, swinging my targeting reticle over with their silhouettes on my HUD. I thumbed my weapons selector and armed my Interceptor’s Macross missile pod. But just as I was about to fire it, my targets stopped firing and accelerated their dive.

  For a split second I was certain all five of them were going to crash into one of the blast doors in some sort of kamikaze run. But then I realized that they weren’t going to impact on the doors. They were aiming for a spot several dozen yards away, near the center of the farm—near a cluster of our remaining infantry drones, which were already scattering to get out of their way.

  But the squadron slid to an abrupt halt just before impact, then began to hover a few feet above the ground. In the space of a few seconds, the five Glaive Fighters turned and rotated themselves into a star-shaped formation, so that their wingtips barely touched, linking themselves together in a circular chain. Then the curved, blade-like wings of the five Glaive Fighters began to interlock and merge with each other, rapidly combining and then reconfiguring to form a single giant humanoid robot, roughly the same size as one of our own Sentinels—like a makeshift Basilisk.

  The giant junkyard golem began to bound across the solitary paved road leading up to the isolated farm house façade, uprooting the line of utility poles adjacent to it, until the power lines snapped across its chest like Godzilla. Tines of electricity briefly erupted across its shambling torso, but that didn’t slow its progress. It kept on coming, as other Glaives began to combine and make landfall behind it.

  That was when I stopped feeling cocky, and started feeling afraid—terrified, really. None of the Sobrukai ships had ever exhibited behavior like this in Armada or Terra Firma. This was something new. Nearby squadrons of ATHIDs and Sentinels were already converging on the threat, scrambling to attack this new enemy in their midst.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I heard a female voice shout over the open comlink channel. It was Lex. “Since when did these things learn how to form into Voltron?”

  She said something else after that, but her voice was drowned out by the chainsaw-like roar of her Sentinel’s Gauss guns as she unloaded both of them at the thing.

  Hearing Lex’s voice seemed to remind all of the other drone operators that they had access to a comlink, too, because the public channel was suddenly flooded with overlapping voices. Several of them were ground troops screaming for more air support, as the giant five-Glaive mech thing began to wade through their comparatively Lilliputian ranks, strafing them with plasma bolts from the photon cannons that bristled on each of its armored limbs. Blue flame roared from the thrusters at its feet as it flexed its knees and leapt forward, propelling itself a hundred meters across the burning landscape, toward the base’s massive armored blast doors, which had both warped and buckled free of their frame, creating huge gaps along their edges—several of which looked wide enough to allow the giant alien mech to squeeze through and get inside.

  I scanned the wave of ATHIDs and Sentinels storming across the landscape below me. Each operator’s call sign was superimposed over the drone they were controlling on my HUD, but it still took me several seconds to locate Lex. She was power-leaping toward the newly assembled Glaive mechs, but her drone and those around her were fighting through a hail of plasma fire from above as the remaining Glaive squadrons swooped in to lay down cover fire for their comrades on the surface.

  I jinked my ship down and to the left, joining a line of Interceptors beginning an attack run on the remaining mass of Glaives. We rocketed straight into their midst, unloading everything we had at them. I nailed at least two enemy fighters myself and saw at least a dozen more get bull’s-eyed by my comrades in the space of as many seconds, but we lost several of our Interceptors during the charge.

  Down on the surface, I saw Lex’s Sentinel overtake the lead Glaive mech. The two towering opponents began to grapple with each other at the edge of the widest breach in the blast doors. The Sentinel executed an impressive move, spinning counterclockwise and bringing up one of its massive arms in a clothesline maneuver that knocked the enemy mech’s leg completely off of its hodgepodge torso. Lex power-jumped her Sentinel clear of it just before two other Sentinels unloaded on the immobilized metal beast. This barrage was joined by hundreds of ATHIDs who began to fire on it, too. Within seconds, the five-Glaive mech exploded, raining wreckage and debris down onto the smoking blast doors, which pinged and clanged as each piece impacted on it.

  I swung my Interceptor up and around again, intending to make another pass at the remaining Glaives. But then I scanned my HUD and saw that only five Glaive Fighters remained, a small cluster of green triangles on my tactical display moving into some kind of attack formation high above me.

  I angled my ship toward the remaining squadron, just in time to see them all simultaneously turn into a sharp dive, streaking straight down toward the base, as if they intended to make one final kamikaze run. But it looked to me like their angle was wrong—they weren’t diving toward the breach in the warped blast doors. Instead, they were descending toward the long row of Interceptor launch tunnels nearby—the ones that had been disguised as grain silos until a few minutes ago. Now most of that false exterior was burned and blasted away, leaving nothing but scarred armor plating underneath.

  The diving line of Glaive Fighters began to spread out, each one lining up with a different launch tunnel. And each of those tunnels—which, I suddenly realized, were all sitting wide open at their tops—led directly down into the drone reserve hangar. According to the diagram on my HUD, that hangar was deep inside the base, not too far from where I was currently sitting.

  They intended to make a final kamikaze run into the base, through the open mouths of those drone launch tunnels. The simulated alien invaders in Armada had never tried this move. How had the rocket scientists who designed this base not seen this massive hole in its defenses?

  Luckily, I happened to be there to save the day.

  I jammed my throttle forward and moved to swing in above them, firing my weapons before I was even within range. I got lucky and took two of them out. Then a few of the other Interceptors loitering nearby finally began to fire on them, too, taking out two more of the enemy ships just before they reached the open mouths of the launch tunnels.

  But the last remaining Glaive Fighter managed to get through, and I continued to pursue it as it rocketed downward, closing in on the row of launch silos jutting up from the charred and blackened earth like a row of skeletal fingers.

  “Attention, all Interceptor pilots, this is Palace Command,” Admiral Vance’s familiar voice barked over the comlink. “Disengage and cease fire! Do not attempt to pursue that ship into the launch tunnels! I repeat, disengage and cease fire! We have automatic security fail-safes in place that will—”

  I muted the admiral’s voice on my comlink.

  On my tactical display, I saw the wing of Interceptors trailing me break off and disengage, just as Vance had instructed, and for a brief second I almost did the same: The years I’d spent playing Armada had conditioned me to follow orders, and Vance’s orders in particular, because the game’s mechanics rewarded officer obedience.

  But that had been in a videogame, and this was real life, and the admiral’s last-minute order to break off my pursuit seemed like certain suicide. If I didn’t destroy this last remaining Glaive Fighter before it reached the other end of the launch tunnel, nothing would prevent it from overloading its power core inside the drone hangar. The detonation could cause the entire underground base to collapse in on itself, killing me and Lex and everyone else inside before any of us got our big chance to save the world. I wasn’t willing to take that risk—or to trust my life to the same moronically designed “automatic security fail-safe” that had just allowed this massive enemy breach in our defenses.

  So I made the snap decision to disobey a direct order and continued to pursue the kamikaze Glaive as it made its nosedive down through the silo’s open mouth and into the launch tunnel beyond it, ignoring the insistent, looping voice of Master Yoda in my head: Told you, I have! Regret this, you will!

  We both streaked farther through the narrow launch tunnel, like one bullet chasing another down the barrel of a gun, both headed the wrong direction. Just as I was about to open fire on the enemy ship again, it turned into a barrel roll and began to scrape the bladed edge of its right wingtip against the tunnel wall, and I pitched clockwise to dodge the shower of sparks it threw up in its wake. Once I righted myself, I managed to get the Glaive back in my sights for a moment, and I fired a short burst at it with my sun guns. But they glanced off its shields and it kept right on trucking. Meanwhile, overfiring my weapons had caused my drone to decelerate in speed, so the Glaive had increased its lead, making it even more difficult for me to get a bead on it. It reminded me of playing Space Invaders—the last alien alive was always the bitch of the bunch, and the hardest to kill, because it moved faster than all of the others. Was it just my imagination, or did this Glaive suddenly seem a whole lot harder to kill than all of its cannon-fodder brethren?

  I had to stop firing for a second to focus on keeping my Interceptor from crashing into the tunnel walls as I inched my speed back up, trying to get the enemy back in my sights. Its metal hull glinted up ahead as the pulsing collision lights embedded in the concrete walls of the shaft streaked past in a neon blur.

  The power in my Interceptor was nearly depleted. Soon, I would have to choose between firing and keeping up. I only had enough juice for a couple sun gun shots.

  As our two ships continued to hurtle downward in a diving chase, I saw the tunnel begin to broaden slightly, and I fired another burst from my sun guns. But it didn’t connect, and my cockiness now turned to panic, because the lone Glaive had just cleared the tunnel and come out the other side, zooming on into the cavernous drone hangar.

  I followed it inside, and then slammed on my Interceptor’s inertia brakes, because it appeared that I now had my enemy cornered. I continued firing plasma bolts at the Glaive, and shooting from a standstill drastically improved my aim. I scored two directs hits on its shields in rapid succession, causing them to flicker and then fail.

  The second the Glaive’s shields dropped, it slid to an instantaneous stop out ahead of me, near the hangar’s cavernous center. I’d seen Glaive Fighters and EDA Interceptors execute this maneuver countless times while playing Armada. I’d executed it plenty of times myself—the drone had just initiated its self-destruct sequence. Its reactor core would overload in approximately seven seconds.

  I fired a last volley of plasma bolts at the unprotected enemy ship, which was already vibrating from the buildup of power in its reactor core, and held my breath as they streaked toward it, silently praying to Crom that they would reach the Glaive and destroy it before it finished transforming itself into a weapon of mass destruction.

  Time seemed to stop. I caught a second-long glimpse of the hangar around us and noticed that it was still over half-full. Thousands of brand-new, unused Interceptors were nestled into belt-fed launch racks that lined the hangar’s curved reinforced concrete walls.

  I watched in slow motion as the shots I’d fired closed in on the Glaive’s quivering metal hull. They finally seemed to reach their mark at last, and I saw a blinding white flash across my cockpit’s wraparound screens.