One day, Zack sees a ship outside his classroom window that resembles a Sobrukai Glaive from Armada, and returns home to look through his late father Xavier's notebooks about a conspiracy theory involving pop culture films (Star Wars, Flight of the Navigator, The Last Starfighter), novels (Ender's Game), and video games about alien invasions and military simulations.

Later, at the video game shop where Zack works part-time, his boss Ray surprises him with a fancy new controller for Armada as an early graduation gift.

He tries it out on one of the new special missions on Armada that involves attacking the home planet of the aliens using a weapon called the Icebreaker, but the Earth team fails.

Ray is one of the passengers, and he invites Zack to join him at a top-secret military facility in Nebraska, where he falls in love with a female recruit named Alexis "Lex" Larkin, who plays the similar game Terra Forma and later promises to take him on a date.

Although Zack is scolded by Admiral Archibald Vance for the action, he and top performing Armada players Whoadie, Debbie, Chen, and Milo are deployed to Moon Base Alpha, where he will be reporting to his father Xavier, who had faked his death in a factory accident to serve as an EDA general.

Zack and Xavier theorize that the entire Europan invasion is only a test to discover how Earth would respond to a civilization-ending threat, given that the aliens could have easily wiped them out at any time, but had let them have opportunities to fight back and win.

[13] Readers could play a web browser version of Phaëton (the faux-retro shooter game featured in the book) and the top scorer won an Oculus Rift.