Armada: A novel by the author of Ready Player One

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

The icosahedron hovered in front of my ship. Then it began to speak to me. “I am the Emissary,” it said. “I am an intelligent machine created by a galactic community of peaceful civilizations known as the Sodality.”

“The Test reveals things about a species that cannot be ascertained any other way—what your Earth scientists refer to as an ‘emergent property.’ ”

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?

One of the few perks of driving an ancient, rusted-out shit wagon was that it took real effort to make it look any less aesthetically pleasing than it already was.

“I built the Armada,” it said. “And this entire time you were fighting against yourselves.

Maybe that was part of their test—to find out if humans are willing to make a heroic sacrifice to save their comrades? To see if our species actually behaves the way we portray ourselves in our books and movies and games?” He stood back up and began to pace, faster and faster. “They could be testing us to see if humanity lacks the courage of its co

“Yeah, I wish we could skip this storyline crap,” Cruz said. “Bor-ing.” “See, this is exactly why you two always get killed within the first two minutes,” I said. “You never pay attention during the admiral’s briefing.” “No, we always get killed because of you, Leeroy Jenkins!” “I’ve asked you repeatedly to stop calling me that.”

“For reasons we still don’t understand, the enemy has divided its invasion force into three attack waves, each progressively larger than the last,” he said.