“And you believe the only way to prevent that is for us to recall the Icebreaker and declare a cease-fire?” Tyson asked. “After these beings have already attacked us and killed millions of innocent people?”

  “If we continue to escalate this pointless conflict with them, they’re going to exterminate all of us in a few hours anyway,” he said. “Admiral Vance is wrong. Launching the Icebreaker at Europa won’t stop the second or third wave of their armada from attacking us—quite the opposite. It will seal their decision to destroy us!”

  “He’s right,” I said. “We have to take this chance. Humanity has nothing to lose—nothing we’re not going to lose anyway. We can go down fighting, but we’ll still end up extinct.”

  Dr. Tyson nodded. “Unfortunately, it may already be too late for us to convince the EDA command to act on this information,” he said. “Admiral Vance still isn’t answering our calls, and the second wave of the attack is only minutes away.”

  “The Icebreaker will be within firing range just a few minutes after that,” Shostak added. “Perhaps the Europans timed it that way?”

  “Don’t bother contacting Admiral Vance,” my father said. “He won’t listen.”

  “You’re damn right, I won’t,” Admiral Vance said as his face appeared in a video window alongside the half dozen others on the call.

  I blinked in surprise. Apparently Vance knew a few QComm tricks of his own.

  “I’ve listened to about as much of this treasonous talk as I can stomach,” he said, and reached up and tapped his QComm screen several times in rapid succession. One by one, each member of the Armistice Council was disconnected from the conference call. When he was done, only my father and I remained on the line with him. His haggard face grew to fill half my display, scowling at us in crystal-clear high-definition.

  “Don’t bother trying to call the council back,” he told us. “I’ve just locked all of their QComms, so don’t hold your breath for them to call you either.”

  My father didn’t respond right away. He just glared at his old comrade in silence over the video link for a long moment.

  “How long have you known about that weaponized Envoy lander, Archie?” my dad finally asked. “How long have you known that we’re the ones who started this war?”

  “I found out when they put me in charge,” he said. “And by then, it no longer mattered. And it most definitely does not matter now.” He paused. “Whether or not they lured us into this war is irrelevant at this point. Can’t you see that, Xavier? We’re fighting for the survival of our species! Informing the world that humanity may have accidentally incited this conflict wouldn’t help the situation.”

  “Accidentally?” I said. “Nixon had NASA send a nuke as our first olive branch, Dr. Strangelove!”

  “You and your son need to give up on this nonsense, General,” Vance said. “I need you both back on the front lines, right now, before the second wave makes landfall.”

  My dad shook his head. “No, Archie,” he said. “We’re done fighting. Both of us.”

  Vance frowned. “Funny. I never pegged you for a deserter—or a coward.”

  “The Europans know about the Icebreaker, Admiral,” my father said. “They have to. Their technology is slightly more advanced than ours. You noticed that, right?”

  Vance snorted. “If they’ve spotted the Icebreaker, why haven’t they destroyed it?”

  “Because they’re waiting to see if you’ll actually use it, you obtuse prick!” my father shouted back. “That’s the whole reason they’re attacking us in waves instead of all at once! Don’t you see? They’re testing us!” He lowered his voice. “Archie, listen to me, man. This is how we survive. They’re giving us a chance to reconsider—to think all of this through, instead of blindly retaliating, just like we’ve always done in the past!”

  “We’ve had this argument before, X.” Vance shook his head. “Many times. You know I’m not going to risk the survival of the human species on some big fat maybe that you cooked up because you’ve seen too many old movies.” He pointed up. “Those things—whatever they are—have already killed millions of innocent human beings, and I’m not going to recall our last chance to destroy them before they destroy us. I don’t care who else you’ve convinced of your asinine fairy tale. The decision is made.”

  “Archie,” my father repeated, struggling to remain calm, “I’m telling you right now, if you launch those nukes at their home, you’re ensuring the destruction of ours!”

  Vance studied him for a moment, then tapped his wristwatch.

  “I guess we’ll find out who’s right in about twenty-three minutes,” he replied. Before my father could reply, Vance hung up, leaving the two of us alone on the line together. My father’s face enlarged to fill my whole QComm display. He looked utterly defeated for a second. But then he broke into a broad smile.

  “Oh well,” he said. “I guess this means we go to Plan B.”

  I shook my head. “Remind me what Plan B was again?”

  “You and I stop the Icebreaker all by ourselves.”

  Before I could reply, a single tone sounded, and three other video windows popped back up on our displays as Lex, Whoadie, and Debbie all joined our call simultaneously, each from a different location.

  “Hey, fellas,” Lex said. “Count me in.”

  “Me, too!” added Debbie, just before Whoadie shouted, “And me three!”

  “What the hell?” my father said. “Where did you ladies come from?”

  “Dad, this is my friend Captain Alexis Larkin,” I said. “We met at Crystal Palace. She figured out how to jailbreak the QComm operating software. I asked her to set things up so they could all listen in on the conference call. She also installed software on our QComms to prevent the EDA from remotely disabling them.”

  My father raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Outstanding, Captain. Thank you!”

  “You’re welcome, General!” she said, returning his salute.

  He froze, seeming lost in thought for moment. “Is there any chance you can tell me what Admiral Vance’s location was when he broke in on the call?”

  She nodded. “He’s in Pennsylvania. At an EDA base code-named ‘Raven Rock.’ ”

  My father grinned and then saluted her. She returned it.

  Diehl leaned in over my left shoulder, holding Cruz on his laptop screen. “We want in on this operation, too!”

  My father studied the faces arrayed before him in silence.

  “So what’s the plan, General?” I asked.

  WE RALLIED AT Starbase Ace.

  I drove Cruz and Diehl there in my car, and we pulled up in front of the store just a few minutes before my mother arrived in her own car. My father wasn’t with her.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. “What happened?”

  “He drove separately,” she replied, before pointing up at the sky overhead. A second later, my Interceptor swooped into view. My father brought the ship in for a perfect landing in the strip mall’s crumbling parking lot and ran over to greet us. After my mother and I each gave him a quick hug, I introduced him to Cruz and Diehl, who had watched his arrival in awestruck silence.

  I unlocked the store and led everyone inside. When my father saw the store shelves, lined with high-end Armada and Terra Firma flight controllers, he broke into a broad smile.

  “This is perfect!” he said as he began to grab items off the shelves and hand them to each of us. “I need each of you to build the best rig you can, as fast as you can.”

  The moment I finished setting up a makeshift drone controller pod for myself in the store’s War Room, my father called me back into the tiny, cluttered room that served as Ray’s office. He was ransacking the place.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  He nodded at the QComm on his wrist. It displayed a map of the local neighborhood, with an EDA icon hovering over the location of Starbase Ace.

  “There’s a secret access node for the EDA’s hard-line fiber-optic intranet hidden somewhere at this location,” he said. “But I can’t find it.”

  I remembered something Ray had told me during our shuttle ride to Crystal Palace. That Glaive Fighter I’d seen outside my classroom window—he’d said it was a scout ship conducting surveillance on the EDA’s hard-line intranet. When I’d spotted it hovering over Beaverton, it had probably been in the process of scanning the “secret” intranet access node hidden here in the store.

  But if the Europans knew about the EDA’s backup intranet, why hadn’t they bothered to destroy or disable it before they invaded?

  Because their actions have never made any sort of tactical sense, I thought. Why start now?

  My father continued to tear through the office. He began to pull books off a nearby shelf one at a time, then suddenly raked the remaining ones off with his arm in frustration. “It’ll be concealed behind an armored access panel—like a safe? Any ideas?”

  I shook my head. “We don’t have a safe,” I said. “We never needed one.” I held up my QComm. “But I’ve got Ray’s number.”

  “Be careful what you say,” he warned. “Vance could be monitoring your QComm.”

  “Not anymore,” I told him. “After Vance broke in on my conference call with the Armistice Council, Lex helped me turn on my QComm’s hidden security mode—the same feature that Vance uses to prevent his own QComm from being monitored.”

  “Captain Larkin appears to be something of a genius, doesn’t she?”

  I caught him studying my face for a reaction, and blushed involuntarily. I nodded in reply, then pulled up my contacts and tapped the last name listed there: Ray Habashaw. His face instantly appeared on my display. His name, rank, and current location appeared across the bottom—he was at an EDA base in Arizona called Gila Mountain.

  “Zack!” he shouted. “Where are you? Are you okay?” He lowered his voice and moved his QComm camera a bit too close to his mouth. “I heard you and your father went missing in action after you took out the Disrupter. I was afraid you bought it.”

  I shook my head and tilted my QComm so that he could see my current location.

  “You’re back at the store?” he said, brightening first, then scowling at the sight of his office. “What the hell, man? Who are you letting ransack the place? Looters?”

  I shook my head, then positioned the QComm so that Ray could see my father, too. His eyes widened.

  “General Lightman,” he said, awkwardly saluting his QComm. “It’s an honor, sir.”

  My father returned the salute.

  “The honor is all mine, Sergeant,” he said. “I owe you a huge debt for watching over my boy while I was gone. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, blushing visibly.

  “Ray, we don’t have much time,” I said. “We need to access the EDA intranet node hidden here in the store. It’s an emergency.”

  Ray only hesitated for a split second. “Behind the UFO poster on the back wall.”

  I turned and located the one he was talking about—a framed reprint of Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” poster from The X-Files. I took it down, revealing what appeared to be a small titanium safe embedded in the brick wall behind it, with a keypad at its center.

  “The combination is 1-1-3-8-2-1-1-2,” Ray said.

  My father grinned and punched in the numbers. The lock disengaged, and he opened the door. The only thing behind it was a row of ten Ethernet cable ports—just like those on the back of our cable router at home.

  “Thank you!” my father said. He turned to me. “You guys got RJ45 cable here?”

  I nodded. “On the wall opposite the register!”

  He ran out, and I looked back at Ray on my QComm.

  “Thanks, Ray,” I said. “But now I have to ask you for another favor. A big one.”

  “You better make it quick, pal,” he said. “The second wave is minutes away.”

  I gave him the short version of the story. It still took way too long. Thankfully, Ray took even less convincing than Lex or my other friends. Once I finished telling him everything my father had told me, he paused for a few moments, then nodded.

  “Tell me what you need,” he said.

  AS SOON AS we got our makeshift drone controller rigs connected to the hard-line intranet node back in Ray’s office, my father laid out the plan. Cruz, Diehl, my mother, and I all watched my father’s chalk talk there in the store, while Lex, Whoadie, and Debbie listened over their QComms.

  I wasn’t a fan of several aspects of his plan, but there was no time to argue, or to come up with another solution.

  My father wished everyone good luck. Then the others stayed inside while my mother and I walked outside to bid him farewell.

  “What if you can’t delay the Icebreaker long enough for me to get there?” I asked, once we were far enough outside that my friends wouldn’t hear his answer.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He grabbed me and pulled me into a fierce embrace.

  “I love you, Son,” he said. “Thank you for helping me do this. Thank you for believing in me. You’ll never know how much—how much that means.”

  He kissed my forehead, then walked over to say goodbye to my mother. She wasn’t crying—she’d put on her bravest face, for both of us.

  They spoke to each other briefly, but I stayed out of earshot. I don’t know what they said to each other. But my mother nodded before she kissed him goodbye, and he smiled at her.

  Then he turned and climbed inside my damaged Interceptor, and my mother and I watched as he flew off, bound for the Raven Rock command center. After his ship had vanished over the horizon in a blur, we continued to stare up at the sky for a few more fearful moments, dreading what we knew would soon descend from it. Then we ran back inside the store and prepared to carry out our own part of the mission.

  THE SECOND WAVE arrived just minutes after my father departed, and a swarm of Glaive and Wyvern Fighters descended from the sky to attack Portland and the surrounding suburbs. Our drone reserves were heavily diminished, and consequently we were far more outnumbered than we had been during the first wave. But the EDA’s civilian gamer forces continued to put up a valiant fight, and a fierce battle raged in the streets of the city and in the sky above while we carried out our mission inside the store.

  During his chalk talk, my father had explained how the EDA’s hard-line intranet worked. It was an underground fiber-optic cable network directly linking all of its drone controller outposts together, creating a Disrupter-proof communications system that the Alliance had prepared in anticipation of the invasion. It would allow the EDA to keep communications open between its command outposts, and allow drone operators to help defend other installations remotely while the Disrupter was active, via hardwired defense turrets and tethered drones.

  If everything went according to my father’s plan, we would be able to use our intranet connection at Starbase Ace to help him infiltrate the Raven Rock outpost during the chaos of the Disrupter attack.

  If not, well—then he was going be totally hosed.

  WHILE MY FATHER piloted his manned Interceptor to assault Raven Rock, where Vance’s team was located, I sat inside Starbase Ace piloting the three Interceptors my father had commandeered from the Icarus crater and sent off toward massive Jupiter, its tiny moon Europa—and the Icebreaker closing in on it.

  Cruz and Diehl took control of four new ATHIDs from a nearby EDA drone cache and redeployed them in the Starbase Ace parking lot, to defend us during the second wave of the attack.

  Lex was at Sapphire Station, and Ray was at Gila Mountain. Both were connected to the hard-line EDA intranet from inside their assigned drone controller pods—and both were already preparing to help my father execute his infiltration plan.

  While Cruz and Diehl used their giant robots to help defend Starbase Ace from the incoming swarm of Spider Fighters and Basilisks, my mother, Debbie, and Whoadie all used WASP aerial drone quadcopters to defend the store from above.

  Whoadie was fighting from an Armada sit-down arcade game located in the game room of her uncle Franklin’s bowling alley in New Orleans. Debbie was back home in Duluth, controlling her drone from her own living room while her three sons continued to stand guard outside their home by controlling EDA drones with an Xbox, a laptop, and a touchscreen tablet, respectively. We knew that Debbie and Whoadie would both lose control of their drones when the Disrupter switched on, but there was nothing we could do about that. They intended to help out for as long as they could.

  While my friends kept the enemy drones at bay, I continued to pilot my drones toward Jupiter, trying to make it to Europa in time to stop the Icebreaker—while my father attempted to prevent Vance from launching the weapon before my ships even got there.

  That was when we got word via a public EDA command broadcast that the second Disrupter was about to make landfall back here on Earth, in the unlikeliest of locations. At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Instead of activating the Disrupter in a secluded spot like Antarctica, this time the aliens picked a far less subtle location—the national monument at Devils Tower, Wyoming. The same spot where humanity makes first contact with the alien visitors in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. An “intergalactic game of Simon,” featuring those same five tones the Europans had used to bookend their cryptic transmissions to us.

  “Oh, that’s not cool!” Diehl shouted, staring at a live video image of the Disrupter taken by an orbiting satellite. “Are these alien pricks openly mocking us now? Christ!”

  WHEN THE DISRUPTER activated, the drones my friends were using to defend Starbase Ace were disabled and went limp or fell out of the sky—as did every untethered EDA drone around the world.

  But the Europan drones continued to attack, closing in on Starbase Ace as if they somehow knew it was of strategic importance.

  Lex, Ray, Debbie, and Whoadie all lost control of their drones as their links went dead. So did Cruz and Diehl, but they both ran outside and activated the hard-line controllers on two dormant ATHIDs. They detached the small Xbox-like game controller from each ATHID’s back and then ran back inside, unspooling their drones’ carbon-fiber-sheathed tether cables to their maximum length.