Armada (13 page)

“They better make good on their promise to unlock these things,” she said. “I don't want my grandma to get too worried about me. She tends to do that if I don't call her every day—” Lex dialed a number on the QComm from memory, but a red
X
appeared on the display, along with a message that said, “Access to Civilian Networks Locked.”

“We'll see about that,” she muttered, scowling at the QComm before she slid it into her pocket.

“Are you and your grandma close?” I asked, just to hear her talk some more.

She nodded. “My folks both died in a car crash when I was little. My grandpa had already passed, so my grandma raised me by herself.” She met my gaze. “How about you, Zack? Anyone back at home you're worried about? Anybody who'll be worried about you?”

I nodded. “My mom.” I pictured her face. “She's a nurse. It's just the two of us.”

Lex nodded, as if I'd explained everything. We both fell silent for a moment. I suddenly found myself wishing Cruz and Diehl were there with me. The insanity of this experience would have been much easier to handle with my two best friends around.

But even though the Mikes were skilled at both
Terra Firma
and
Armada,
their rankings apparently weren't high enough in either game to merit an invitation to these strange proceedings.

“Lex?”

“Zack?”

“Do you play
Terra Firma
and
Armada
?”

“T.F.”

“How good are you at it?” I asked. “Are you one of the Thirty Dozen?”

She nodded. “I'm currently ranked seventeenth place,” she said, far too nonchalantly. “But I've been as high as fifteenth. Those standings fluctuate a lot.”

I whistled low, impressed. “Damn, woman,” I said. “What's your call sign?”

“Lexecutioner,” she said. “It's a portmanteau. What's yours?”

“IronBeagle,” I told her, wincing at how dorky it sounded in my ears. “It's a—”

“It's fantastic!” she said. “I love that flick, as cheesy as it is. And my grandma used to play that
Snoopy vs the Red Baron
album every Christmas.”

I did a double-take at her. No one had ever gotten the
Iron Eagle
/
Peanuts
mash-up in my call sign without me first having to explain it to them—including Cruz and Diehl. I felt a strong urge to reach out and touch her shoulder, to confirm that she was real.

“You're not in the Thirty Dozen, otherwise I'd recognize your call sign,” she said. “You must play
Armada?
”

I nodded, trying to hide my disappointment. “Not your game?”

She shook her head. “Flight simulators give me vertigo. I prefer to throw down with my feet on the ground.” She pointed a thumb at herself. “You put me at the controls of a giant battle mech, I will crush my enemies and see them driven before me.”

I grinned. “What about the lamentations of their women?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, chuckling. “Their women lamentate all over the place. That goes without saying, doesn't it?”

We both laughed loudly, drawing annoyed stares from those seated within earshot. We appeared to be the only two people in that auditorium who were in a laughing mood—which made us laugh even louder.

When we regained our composure, Lex upended her flask and let the last few drops inside fall onto her outstretched tongue. Then she screwed the cap back on and stowed the flask in her jeans.

“ ‘I've lost R2,' ” she quoted, before mimicking the little blue droid's famous whistling sigh. This time, I was the one who snorted out an unexpected laugh.

“So spill it, Star Lord,” she said. “What's your player ranking?”

“My
Terra Firma
ranking is too abysmal to say out loud,” I said, laying on the false modesty with a trowel. “But in the
Armada
rankings I'm currently sixth.”

Her eyes widened, and she swiveled her head around to stare at me.

“Sixth place?” she repeated. “In
the world
? No bullshit?”

I crossed my heart, but did not hope to die.

“That's some serious bill-paying skillage,” she said. “Color me impressed, Zack-Zack Lightman.”

“Color me flattered, Miss Larkin,” I replied. “But you'd be a lot less impressed if you'd ever seen me play
Terra Firma
. I'm okay in an ATHID, but I can't drive a Sentinel to save my ass. I always end up stomping on a tenement full of civilians; then I get demoted back to the infantry.”

“Doh! Collateral
and
property damage! You like to double down, eh?”

Before I could answer, the lights in the auditorium dimmed and a hush fell over the audience. I felt Lex grab my forearm and squeeze it tightly enough to cut off my circulation. I stared straight ahead, clutching the armrests of my seat, trembling with a lifetime's worth of accumulated anticipation as the screen in front of us was illuminated.

Then they showed us the most disturbing government training film in history.

A
n animated Earth Defense Alliance logo appeared on the screen, with the capital
E
and
D
in
EDA
morphing into a transparent shield that encircled a spinning blue Earth. The negative space between the legs of the stylized capital
A
formed the domed head of a Sentinel mech, while the space at the
A
's center contained a lidded cyclopean eye, which I knew was meant to represent Moon Base Alpha, the secret Earth Defense Alliance installation on the far side of the moon. I wondered why the real EDA had chosen to include Moon Base Alpha in the crest, since the base itself obviously couldn't be real. Then I reminded myself—just a few hours ago, I'd thought the same exact thing about the EDA itself.

The EDA crest faded, and ominous music swelled on the soundtrack. It was the opening track of the orchestral score for
Armada,
composed by none other than John Williams. When the London Symphony Orchestra's string section kicked in, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I reminded myself that this was real life.

I reminded myself to keep breathing.

On the screen, an early NASA probe drifted into the shot, hurtling through the starry void. It looked like an old backyard satellite dish with three long outdoor TV antennas bolted to its base at right angles. I recognized it as one of the twin
Pioneer 10
and
Pioneer 11
spacecraft, the first two probes NASA sent to survey our outer solar system. They were launched in the early 1970s, so I knew the footage we were seeing had to be computer generated.

The camera swung around behind the spacecraft, revealing that it was fast approaching Jupiter. As the gas giant loomed on the screen, a voice began to speak over the music on the soundtrack. Lex and I both gasped with recognition, along with a chorus of others in the auditorium. We all recognized the voice instantly, even though its owner had been dead for nearly twenty years.

It was Carl Sagan.

And the first words he spoke contradicted nearly everything I'd ever been told about our current understanding of the universe.

“In 1973, NASA discovered the first evidence of a nonterrestrial intelligence, right here in our very own solar system, when the
Pioneer 10
spacecraft sent back the first close-up image of Europa, Jupiter's fourth-largest moon. It was received and decoded at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on December 3rd at 7:26 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.”

It was immediately obvious to me why the EDA had recruited Dr. Sagan to narrate this film. Sagan's assured and familiar baritone imbued each word he spoke with the weight of cold, hard scientific fact—which was incredibly unsettling, because Sagan had been a driving force in humanity's search for extraterrestrial intelligence since the 1960s. If NASA had discovered aliens back in 1973 and Sagan had helped conceal it from the world for the rest of his life, he must have had an incredibly compelling reason for doing so—but for the life of me, I couldn't imagine what it could have been.

Maybe the EDA had somehow edited or simulated Sagan's voice for this film? Or maybe they had blackmailed him into doing it? Shit, for all I knew, the EDA might have a secret lab beneath the Pentagon filled with Axlotl Tanks, where they mass-produced Sagan and Einstein clones around the clock like Honda Accords.

Then a video image of Dr. Sagan himself appeared on the screen, and I stopped wondering whether it was really his voice. The footage was clearly from the '70s: Sagan looked younger than he did in the original
Cosmos
miniseries. He was standing in a crowded JPL control room with a dozen or so shaggy-looking scientists, all of whom were clustered around a tiny black-and-white TV monitor, watching anxiously as humanity's first close-up photo of Europa slowly appeared on it, a single line of pixels at a time. The right half of the Jovian moon lay in shadow, but the hemisphere on the left was currently in full sunlight, and some faint surface features were already visible there, despite the image's low resolution.

As the download approached completion and the rest of Europa's surface gradually became visible, Sagan and the other scientists began to study the image with an increasing air of confusion and alarm. When the last row of pixels formed and the complete image appeared on the monitor, it revealed that an enormous section of Europa's icy surface was covered with a giant swastika.

Frightened whispers and murmured expletives swept through the auditorium. Beside me, I heard Lex whisper, “
What the fuck?
”

I nodded in agreement. This was undoubtedly the most unsettling history lesson I'd ever been subjected to—and I couldn't imagine what could be coming next.

“That first close-up image revealed the existence of an enormous symbol etched onto the Jovian moon's surface,” Sagan's voice calmly explained. “An equilateral cross with all four of its arms bent at perfect right angles—known here on Earth as a swastika—was clearly visible in the southern hemisphere, covering an area of over a million square kilometers. The swastika was so large, in fact, that it appeared slightly warped in that first Pioneer photo, due to the curvature of the moon's surface.

“The discovery of this symbol was immediately recognized by NASA scientists as the first concrete evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence. However, the excitement over this landmark discovery was eclipsed by the debate over the symbol's potential meaning. For thousands of year the swastika had been used by peaceful cultures around the world as both an ornamental symbol and a good luck charm, until it was adopted by the Nazi Party in 1920, and the atrocities they subsequently committed forever transformed it into an icon of humanity at its absolute worst.”

“Yeah, why didn't they slap a yin-yang symbol on Europa instead?” Lex whispered beside me, slurring her speech a bit. “That would've
blown NASA's mind.
”

I shushed her, and she let out a short hysterical laugh, then seemed to regain her composure. We both returned our attention to the screen.

“We had no way of knowing whether or not the beings who had defaced Europa were aware of the meaning the symbol held for us,” Sagan's voice continued. “Until we had more information, all we could do was speculate about the symbol's origin and meaning. Our nation's political and military leaders made the decision to conceal it from the world, fearing that news of its existence would create a panic that might plunge our entire civilization into religious, political, and economic chaos. President Richard Nixon issued a secret executive order that NASA's dark discovery on Europa would remain a highly classified national secret until it could be studied further.”

Now I understood why Dr. Sagan and the other JPL scientists had gone along with the government's cover-up. The alternative would have been to tell the fragile citizens of Planet Earth that they'd just discovered a giant Nazi Post-it note orbiting Jupiter. If Walter Cronkite had dropped a bomb like that on the evening news back in 1973, human civilization would have gone collectively apeshit. Planning another mission to Europa under those circumstances would have been problematic—maybe even impossible.

But there were still a lot of things about this story that bothered me. For one, the details of NASA's discovery on Europa were giving me a strange sense of déjà vu. It took me a moment to figure out why

Since the late '70s, the official word on Europa from our scientists had been that it was one of the most promising
potential
habitats for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, due the vast ocean of liquid water beneath its surface. As a result, Europa had been a popular setting with science fiction writers ever since. I could think of at least half a dozen stories that involved the discovery of alien life on Europa—most notably the Arthur C. Clarke novel
2010,
his sequel to
2001: A Space Odyssey
. Peter Hyams had directed an excellent film adaptation of
2010
back in the '80s, and the movie version ended with a highly advanced alien intelligence using HAL-9000 to send humanity a mass-text message warning us to stay the hell away from Europa.

Attempt no landing there.

There was also something familiar about an alien first-contact message that contained a swastika. After racking my brain for what seemed like an eternity, I realized the answer was staring me in the face—Carl Sagan himself had written a similar scenario into his first and only science fiction novel,
Contact
. In Sagan's story, SETI researchers receive a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence that contains a copy of the first television broadcast from Earth the aliens ever intercepted, which turns out to be footage of Adolf Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. One of the most memorable moments in both the book and the film adaptation occurs when the SETI scientists decode the first frame of the alien video transmission and discover that it contains a close-up image of a Nazi swastika.

The events unfolding on the screen in front of me were different from the tales of first contact described in either
2010
or
Contact,
granted—but surely those similarities couldn't be mere coincidence?

Like Sagan, Clarke had been a NASA insider. It made sense that he too had learned of
Pioneer 10
's discovery on Europa and agreed to take part in the cover-up. But then why had both men subsequently hidden kernels of the top-secret truth in their bestselling science fiction novels? And why had the EDA let them get away with it? Especially considering that both of their novels were then adapted into blockbuster films that had exposed this classified information to a global audience?

As it occurred to me that I'd probably just answered my own question, several high-resolution images of Europa began to appear on the screen, showing its surface in much greater detail. Up close, the moon looked like a dirty snowball crisscrossed with reddish orange cracks and streaks that were thousands of kilometers long. The giant black swastika stood out in stark relief against the moon's surface.

“When
Pioneer 11
reached Jupiter a year later in December of 1974,” Sagan's voice-over continued, “its course was adjusted to make a close flyby of Europa, and it sent back much clearer images of the moon and its surface anomaly, putting to rest any lingering suspicions that the earlier
Pioneer 10
image had been faked in some way. By this time, NASA was already rushing the construction of a new top-secret probe designed to travel to Europa and land on its surface to study the swastika anomaly up close, and hopefully collect enough data to ascertain its origin or purpose. NASA dubbed this spacecraft the
Envoy I,
and it reached Europa on the 9th of July, 1976—the day humanity made its first direct contact with an alien intelligence.”

I had never been so glued to a movie screen in my life.

A shot of the
Envoy I
—or rather, another CGI simulation—appeared on the screen, showing the probe as it maneuvered into orbit around Europa, with majestic Jupiter looming behind it. It looked like a larger, less streamlined version of the two
Voyager
spacecraft NASA launched the following year, with giant fuel tanks and a lander cobbled onto its frame.

As the spacecraft passed over the huge black symbol, the orbiter deployed its landing module and it began to descend toward the frozen surface.

The image cut to what appeared to be actual video footage shot by the
Envoy
lander's on-board camera during its final approach.

Seen directly from above and in full sunlight, the giant swastika on Europa's surface appeared to consist of nothing more than long bands of discolored ice. The blackened sections of ice still reflected sunlight, and aside from the change in its color, there appeared to be no disruption in the pattern of striated cracks and frozen ridges covering the moon's surface. It looked like someone had slapped the solar system's largest swastika stencil on the side of Europa and then hit it with a Star Destroyer–sized can of black acrylic spray paint.

“The
Envoy
lander set down near the southernmost tip of the anomaly, near what would later become known as the Thera Macula region,” Sagan's voice-over continued, just as the lander completed its controlled descent and touched down on the surface, with its landing gear straddling the border between the swastika's edge and the unblemished ice beside it.

To my shock, a familiar gold disc was attached to the base of the lander. It looked identical to the famous gold records NASA had attached to both of its Voyager spacecraft.

“A twelve-inch gold-plated copper disk was attached to the
Envoy
lander,” Sagan explained. “This phonograph record was encoded with sound recordings and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, to serve as a token of peace from our species.”