Armada by Ernest Cline Read Free Book Online

conquer one that was already inhabited—especially one inhabited by billions of nuke-wielding apes who generally don’t cotton to strangers being on their land. No, the Sobrukai just had to have Earth for some reason, and they were determined to Kill All Humans before they took possession. Luckily for us, like so many made-up evil alien invaders before them, the Sobrukai also seemed intent on exterminating us as slowly and inefficiently as possible. Instead of just wiping out humanity with a meteor or a killer virus or a few old-fashioned long-range nuclear weapons, the squids had opted to wage prolonged World War II–style air and ground war against us—while somehow allowing all of their advanced weapons, propulsion, and communications technology to fall into their primitive enemy’s hands.
    In both Armada and Terra Firma , you played a human recruit in the Earth Defense Alliance, tasked with using a variety of ground-based combat drones to fight off the invasion. Each drone in the EDA’s arsenal was designed to serve as a direct match for a similar type of drone used by the alien enemy.
    Terra Firma focused on humanity’s ground war against the Sobrukai after their drones had reached Earth. Armada was an aerospace combat sim released the following year, allowing players to remotely control humanity’s global stockpile of defense drones, and use them to battle the Sobrukai invaders out in space and over the besieged cities of Earth. Since their release, Terra Firma and Armada had become two of the most popular multiplayer action games in the world. I’d played TF religiously when it came out—until Chaos Terrain released Armada the following year, and then it had become my primary videogame obsession. I still played Terra Firma with Cruz and Diehl a few times a week—usually in return for them agreeing to play an Armada mission with me.
    Ray also frequently coerced me into playing TF with him here at work, so my infantry drone skills were still sharp. This was essential, because in Terra Firma, the size and power of the drones you were allowed to control during each mission was based on your overall combat skill rating. Newbie players were only authorized to operate the smallest and cheapest combat drones in the EDA’s arsenal. Once you increased in rank and skill, you were allowed to pilot increasingly bigger and more advanced drones—Spartan hover tanks, Nautiloid attack submarines, and the EDA’s largest and most impressive weapon, the Titan Warmech—a giant humanoid robot that looked like something out of an old Saturday morning cartoon.
    Ray happened to be controlling a Warmech at that very moment, and he was in trouble. I watched as a horde of alien Spider Fighters closed in on him. His mech finally succumbed to the incoming barrage of laser fire and toppled backward into a large tenement building, demolishing it. He and I both winced—in Terra Firma, players got penalized for all of the property damage caused by their drones in combat—intentional or otherwise.
    Although the game’s backstory embraced a lot of tired alien invasion tropes, it subverted many of them, too. For example, the Sobrukai weren’t actually invading Earth in person—they were using drones to do it. And humanity had constructed its own stockpile of drones to repel them. So all of the aerospace fighters, mechs, tanks, subs, and ground troops used by both sides were remotely controlled war machines—each one operated by an alien or human who was physically located somewhere far from the battlefield.
    From a purely tactical standpoint, using drones made a hell of a lot more sense than using manned (or aliened) ships and vehicles to wage an interplanetary war. Why risk the lives of your best pilots by sending them into combat? Now whenever I watched a Star Wars film, I found myself wondering how the Empire had the technology to make long-distance holographic phone