Armada by Ernest Cline

in space, it would just begin to drift helplessly through the void while you waited for the power cells to recharge enough for your thrusters to come back online, praying that an enemy ship didn’t pick you off first—which it almost always did.
    The enemy Glaive Fighters had blaster turrets mounted on each of their wingtips that could rotate in any direction, giving them an almost unlimited field of fire. But my Interceptor’s plasma cannons (aka “sun guns”) and Macross missiles were both forward-firing weapons, so my target needed to be in front of me if I was going to be able to hit it. My ship had a laser turret, however, that was able to fire in any direction, but unlike my sun guns, the turret used up a lot of power and had to be used sparingly.
    Our ships were also each equipped with a self-destruct mechanism, which also served as a weapon of last resort. As long as your drone had even a tiny bit of power remaining, you could detonate its reactor core in an explosion that could vaporize everything within a tenth of a kilometer. If you timed it right, you could take out nearly a dozen enemy ships at once with this tactic. Unfortunately, the enemy also had the ability to detonate their power cores—and they didn’t care about taking out friendlies when they did it. A lot of players didn’t either, of course. For some, it was their only real strategy. The only major downside to pulling this self-destruct move was that it meant you would miss at least part of the battle, because before you could fly back out to rejoin the fight, you had to wait to take control of another drone back inside the hangar, and then wait for it to reach the front of the launch queue—all of which could take up to a minute or more, depending on how fast the enemy was dropping our drones.
    A klaxon began to sound as the hangar’s belt-fed launch rack whirred into action and began to deploy the Interceptors slotted ahead of mine one after the other, firing them out of the belly of the Doolittle like bullets from a machine gun.
    â€œHuzzah!” I heard Dealio say. “Now I finally get to kill some aliens!”
    â€œNot if you get waxed before you fire a single shot,” Cruz said. “Like last time.”
    â€œI told you, my Internet connection went out!” Dealio shouted.
    â€œDude, we heard you cursing on the comm after you got killed,” I reminded him.
    â€œThat proves nothing,” he said cheerfully. Then he shouted, “Cry havoc!”
    When neither of us followed suit, he cleared his throat loudly over the comm.
    â€œUh, why didn’t either of you cry havoc with me just now?” he asked. “You bitches best be crying me some havoc! You want to jinx us?”
    â€œSorry, Dealio,” I said. Then, as loud as I could, I shouted, “Cry Havoc!”
    â€œI’ll leaving the crying to you guys,” Cruz said, before muttering his own personal pre-throw-down mantra to himself. “Led’s-do-dis.”
    I cracked my knuckles, then pressed play on the best “ass-kicking track” on my father’s old Raid the Arcade mix. As the opening bass line of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” began to thud over my helmet’s built-in headphones, I felt myself begin to slip into the zone.
    The song’s machine gun beat was a perfect match for the timing and rhythm of the enemy’s ships, in nearly every kind of mission. (“We Will Rock You” worked really well for me during shooting gallery scenarios like this one, too.) When Freddy Mercury’s vocals kicked in a few seconds later, I cranked up the volume in my headset—apparently loud enough for my microphone to pick it up.
    â€œOh, great,” Cruz said. “Sounds like DJ Geriatric is spinning again tonight. What a surprise.”
    â€œIf it’s too loud, you’re too old, Kvothe,” I shot back. “Why don’t you mute me and put on the