Graham ignored him and continued to shadow me with an enthusiastic smile as I wandered around the control center, like a kid showing off his room. A short distance away, I spotted a large drum kit, two electric guitars, and three mic stands, flanked on either side by a stack of amplifiers. I wandered over to examine the gear.

  “What, do you guys have a band or something?” I asked.

  “Indeed, we do,” Graham said proudly. “We call ourselves ‘The Bishop of Battle.’ It’s the name of—”

  “The short film starring Emilio Estevez?” I finished for him. “From the Nightmares horror anthology?”

  My father and both his friends blinked at me in surprise as goofy grins spread across each of their faces.

  I grinned back, then nodded at my father. “I saw it when I was working my way through all of your old VHS tapes. It—”

  I cut myself off when I realized how revealing my last statement had been. But none of them noticed. They were all still beaming at me for getting their band name.

  “I like this kid, Xavier,” Shin said.

  My father nodded. “Yeah, so do I.”

  “We can play some pretty decent Van Halen covers,” Graham continued. “Maybe we’ll jam for you guys later?”

  “Sure,” I said uncertainly. “That would be cool.”

  I glanced back over at my father, but he was staring at his feet and shaking his head in embarrassment. “We’re not going to play for them, Graham, I told you,” he muttered. “Aliens are invading in a few hours, remember?”

  “What better reason to rock out one last time?” Graham replied, throwing up two sets of devil horns.

  I stepped over to the edge of the nearest drone controller station pit and peeked in. There was an OUT OF ORDER sign Scotch-taped to its tactical display.

  “What happened to this one?” I asked.

  “Graham spilled Coke Zero on it, that’s what,” Shin said. “Cost the war effort millions.”

  “Stop trying to pin that on me,” Graham grumbled back. “You left your sandals lying around and I tripped over them. Those millions are on you, Shin-bone.”

  Graham laughed, but when I laughed, too, he scowled at me.

  “What’s so bloody funny, kid?” he said. “I fried one drone pod—that’s nothing compared to the zillions of dollars in drones we lost this morning, thanks to your little stunt!”

  Shin nodded, and they both continued to scowl at me for a few more seconds before they both burst into laughter.

  “I’m joking, lad,” Graham said, still laughing. “I must’ve watched the video clip of you chasing that Glaive into the base fifty times so far today! Priceless, that was!”

  Shin shook his head. “How did you stop Viper from murdering you for that?”

  “Maybe he realized I’m already a dead man, so there was no point?”

  My father frowned at me and seemed about to say something, but Shin changed the subject before he could.

  “Care for some snackage, Lieutenant?” he asked. “Your favorite snacks were listed in each of your EDA profiles, so we stocked up on all of them. You’re a Lucky Charms man, right? Dry, with no milk? We laid in a few dozen boxes for you, see?”

  He pointed over at one of the unoccupied pods across the room, where half a dozen boxes of my favorite breakfast cereal sat stacked up like crates of ammunition. The other new recruits had an assortment of snacks and beverages laid out on the floor around their sunken pods, too. Stacks of nacho cheese Combos and Slim Jims were scattered around Milo’s pod, along with a small mountain of Diet Mountain Dew. There were bags of cheddar jalapeño Cheetos and a row of two-liter bottles of Hawaiian Punch laid out for Whoadie, bags of multicolored Skittles for Debbie, and beside Chén’s pod, dozens of silver energy drink cans with QI LI printed on the side, surrounded by writing in Chinese.

  “How did our favorite snacks end up in our EDA profiles?” I asked Shin. But it was Graham who answered.

  “The EDA knows everything about everyone, kid,” he said. “Your food and beverage preferences weren’t the only things being recorded while you were playing Armada and Terra Firma, trust me. Your pulse rate, blood pressure, sweat content—the EDA makes the CIA and the NSA look like the PTA.”

  “Great,” I said. “The government has been spying on all of us our whole lives, but at least we get to have our favorite snacks. Bonus.”

  To my surprise, my father grinned at my remark. Just then the other new arrivals emerged from their pods, and he went over to greet them. Chén snapped to attention when he saw my father approach, and the others scrambled to follow suit.

  “At ease, recruits,” my father said as he walked over to them. “Welcome to Moon Base Alpha. I’m General Xavier Lightman, your new CO. I apologize for keeping you waiting.”

  He scanned their faces, waiting for a response, but my new friends all seemed too starstruck to speak. My father walked over to stand in front of Milo, who was grinning like he was about to meet one of his favorite movie stars, his earlier disdain apparently forgotten.

  “You’re Milo Dobson, right? Better known as Kushmaster5000?”

  Milo nodded imperceptibly, caught in the throes of some sort of gamer fanboy aneurysm.

  “It’s an honor to finally meet you in person, Lieutenant Dobson,” my father told him. He turned to the others. “It’s an honor to meet all of you. Whoadie, CrazyJi. AtomicMom.” He shook hands with each of them in turn, then nodded at me. “And, of course, IronBeagle. You’re five of the most gifted pilots I’ve ever seen in action. We’re privileged to have you here.”

  The others smiled and their faces flushed with pride—and mine may have a bit, as well.

  “Thank you, sir!” Chén said, carefully repeating his QComm’s translation.

  “Yeah, thanks, General!” Milo said, finally recovering from his stroke of paralysis. “I mean, holy shit—that’s a huge compliment, coming from RedJive himself! You’re the best of the best of the best, sir! I’ve been studying your moves for years—we all have.”

  My father seemed genuinely embarrassed by this praise.

  “You’re giving me way too much credit,” he said. Then he pointed to his two comrades. “Shin and Graham were both heavily involved with your simulator training, too. I’m sure you’ll recognize their call signs. Shin uses the handle MaxJenius, and Graham—”

  “My call sign is Withnailed,” Graham finished. “Though these two rarely use it.”

  “We prefer to call him ‘Limes’ instead,” Shin said. “It’s short for ‘limey.’ He hates it.”

  Graham nodded. “Indeed I do.”

  We all smiled in recognition at their familiar call signs. MaxJenius and Withnailed were both mainstays in the top-five pilot rankings, too. Since the first year the game was launched, they had both alternated between second and third place, right below RedJive.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, General Lightman,” Debbie said. “But when are you going to tell us why the EDA sent us up here?” She glanced over at Shin and Graham. “Why couldn’t we just remain back on Earth with the other recruits?”

  My father exchanged a strange smile with his two friends, then nodded at Debbie.

  “I was just about to brief all of you on that subject,” he said.

  Graham smiled; then he motioned to a row of low, padded leather bench seats behind us. “You guys might want to be sitting down when you hear this,” he said, before sitting down himself. Milo and Debbie joined him, but Chén, Whoadie, and I remained on our feet.

  My father waved his hand at the view screen covering the domed ceiling, and the image arrayed across it changed. We were no longer looking at a live feed of the lunar landscape outside the base, but at an animated three-dimensional graphic of our solar system, with the spinning planet Earth in the foreground and the moon lazily orbiting it at a distance, both surrounded by a series of concentric rings indicating the orbital paths of the other planets. My father made another gesture at the screen and the animation of our solar system began to speed up, making the planets zoom around the sun like a pack of race cars, each on a separate track.

  “One of the things you weren’t told during your enlistment briefing is that this isn’t the first time the Europans have sent ships to Earth to attack us,” the General said. “Over the past four decades, they’ve done it exactly thirty-seven times.”

  On the domed screen, the celestial clockwork of our solar system continued to spin forward until the orbits of Earth and Jupiter aligned, bringing the two planets into their closest annual proximity. Then, as the orbit of Jupiter’s moon Europa brought it as close as possible to Earth, the animation froze.

  “Every 398.9 days, a celestial event known as the Jovian Opposition occurs,” the general explained, “when the sun and Jupiter are both on opposite sides of Earth, and Europa is at its closest proximity to us. Ever since our first contact with them, the Europans have used that proximity to send a small detachment of ships to Earth, to conduct surveillance, test our defenses, and abduct live human specimens for study.”

  He tapped his QComm display, and an image of Moon Base Alpha appeared on the screen, seen from above, nestled into the Daedalus crater.

  “Once the Europans began to send scouting missions to Earth, the EDA decided to construct a secret defense base here on the far side of the moon,” the general said. “It was originally intended to function as a long-range surveillance and communications outpost. But when it finally became operational in September of 1988, and a permanent human presence was established here, the enemy’s tactics changed. When the next Jovian Opposition arrived, the Europans didn’t send their detachment of scout ships directly to Earth. This time they came here to Moon Base Alpha first—and attacked it.”

  Video footage began to play on the domed view screen, showing a large formation of Glaive Fighters streaking down from the starry blackness of the lunar sky to descend on the tiny moon base nestled in the crater below, as Interceptors began to launch out of the base’s hangar and fly up to meet them, setting off a massive aerial battle.

  “We managed to fight them off, but just barely,” he said. “It took nearly a full year to repair the damage. And when the next Jovian Opposition arrived, the Europans attacked again, this time with an even larger force, to match the increased size of Moon Base Alpha’s defenses. And once again, our forces were barely a match for them.”

  “The same thing happened again the next year,” Graham said. “And the year after that.”

  “Each year, they sent even more drones to assault the base,” Shin said. “And every year, we increased our defenses here in anticipation of their next attack.”

  My father nodded. “This escalation continued for over a decade, until the Europans changed the game on us again last year, by unveiling a new weapon—one you’ve all encountered before during your Armada training. The Disrupter.”

  A collective groan escaped the new recruits. On the view screen, we watched as a cluster of enemy ships appeared, descending toward Moon Base Alpha in perfect formation, creating an image that momentarily resembled a screenshot of the game Space Invaders.

  A wire-frame diagram of a spinning dodecahedron appeared adjacent to it on the view screen, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  “The Disrupter appears to function by coupling itself to a large celestial body, like a planet or moon.” On the view screen, an animation showed a spinning chrome dodecahedron making landfall on Earth and then firing a beam of red energy into the planet’s core. “The device then harnesses the planet’s magnetic field, using it to generate a spherical field that disrupts all quantum communications inside it.”

  “All of the EDA’s drones have backup radio-control units,” Shin added. “Unfortunately the Disrupter interferes with normal radio communications, too, so they’re useless.”

  On the view screen, the emerald green Disrupter began to generate a transparent sphere of red energy that enveloped the entire planet Earth, along with its entire atmosphere—causing the EDA’s drones to fall out of the sky. But the moon was outside of the Disrupter’s range—as was the secret EDA defense base on its far side.

  “The quantum-disruption effect only works if the transmitting and receiving ends of a link are both contained inside its spherical field,” the general said. “If either the drone or its operator are located outside of the disruption field, the quantum link is completely unaffected and remains intact. If the enemy manages to couple their Disrupter to the Earth, only the EDA personnel stationed up here on the moon—that’s us—will still be able to control the drones we have stockpiled back on Earth, and vice versa.”

  My father flipped away from the wire-frame animation and back to the footage of the enemy fighters, revealing a large, onyx-colored dodecahedron—a dark, multifaceted jewel spinning in their midst. The object pulsed rapidly in color from jet black to molten red along its illuminated angular seams.

  “Just before the Europans attacked this base during the last Opposition, they activated the Disrupter, coupling it to the moon’s magnetic field, which is relatively weak compared to that of Earth.”

  As he spoke, the pulsing dodecahedron fired a red beam of energy into the moon’s core. It began to generate a spherical field of energy around itself, which increased rapidly in diameter until it completely covered Moon Base Alpha, along with large patches of the moon’s surface, which I knew from our briefing was in a pattern that matched the moon’s inherent magnetic field.

  “When the Disrupter switched on, it knocked out our ability to control drones from here inside the base,” my father explained. “But all of the EDA drone pilots located back on Earth were unaffected, because they were outside the disruption field.”

  Shin pulled a different graphic up on the screen, showing Earth and its nearby moon, the far side of which was covered by the Disrupter’s transparent field, which was enormous, but not large enough to envelop both the moon and Earth at the same time.

  “The enemy’s drones continued to function for the same reason,” my father said. “Their operators were back on Europa, hundreds of thousands of miles outside the disruption field.”

  Shin nodded. “This base has a backup hard-line intranet,” he said. “So we were still able to defend the base using the surface guns, and with tethered backup drones, which were all hardwired and thus unaffected by the Disrupter.”

  On the screen, footage showed sentry guns all over the exterior of the base powering on and returning fire as the enemy Glaive and Wyvern Fighters kept right on attacking, raining down a steady barrage of laser fire and plasma bolts on the base defenses. Down on the surface, a few dozen tethered ATHIDs and Warmechs also continued to defend the base, unspooling their fiber-optic tether cables behind them, which drastically limited their mobility, effectiveness, and range.

  “The EDA sent several squadrons of reinforcement Interceptors up here from Earth,” he explained. “And with their help, we were eventually able to destroy the Disrupter. But the base was badly damaged, and we barely survived the attack.”

  “Is a real Disrupter as difficult to destroy as the ones in the game?” Chén asked via his QComm.

  Shin, Graham, and my father all nodded.

  “Then how did you guys manage to take it down?” I asked.

  Shin and Graham both grinned, as if they’d been waiting for this question.

  “ ‘It takes two, to make a thing go right,’ ” Shin recited, smiling cryptically.

  Graham nodded, then added, “ ‘It takes two to make it out of sight.’ ”

  They looked as if they were about to recite more of the song’s lyrics, but my father shook his head slightly and they both fell silent, waiting for him to continue.

  “Some people think we got lucky,” my father said, glancing at Shin. “Personally, I think the Europans allowed us to destroy it.”

  “Why would they do that?” Debbie asked.

  “Good question,” my father said. “Here, watch the footage and decide for yourself.”

  He tapped his QComm again, and another grainy video clip began to play on the view screen.

  “This footage was shot from one of Moon Base Alpha’s surface surveillance cameras,” Shin said. “Approximately twenty-three minutes into their attack. All quantum and radio communication is still being jammed by the Disrupter. Most of the base, and nearly all of its surface defenses, have been destroyed by this point.”

  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 on 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 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.”