X-Com Chronicles: Twilight

[Skonar]

Props to FullAuto, for inspiring in me the concept that X-Com's internal structure is not nearly so straightforward as we think. (The whole Agents thread, etc.)

 

 

 

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X-Com Chronicles - Twilight

 

 

 

1. --- Somewhere over continental Europe, SR77X-01 en route to ground contact 334, June 3rd 2000, 03:12.

 

 

 

There could be no hesitation. In and out. That was the way it had to be. Peter Conners understood this all too well. In this war there were already too many lives lost. The whole war was commando. A kind of desperate guerilla war, where fleeting contact happened first in the skies, then on the ground in tiny commando raids.

 

The modified Skyranger, designated by the 'X' in its model number of SR77X, with its passenger compartment clattering back and forth, didn't even exist in the murky recesses of the GEOSCAPE command and control network. This mission was an experiment, and a carefully controlled one at that. No one could know. The risks were too great as it was in the first place.

 

Budget funds were sinking faster and faster into conventional responses to the war effort. A thousand code-name only projects and efforts had already been cancelled. 'Tidebreaker', 'Gearhead', 'Enforcer', 'Shakeman', 'Mirage', 'Hallowed', 'Polar', all of them and the hopes they represented thrown away like garbage. Critical efforts, every one of them. Peter knew. He'd been there when the funds dried up at Gearhead, saw them file away the powered armour programme because of power problems. He'd undergone testing at Mirage, trying to understand the stranger psychological effects of being in the presence of the invaders, only to have the money for it bleed away as soon as one researcher started testing with ESP cards.

 

The money went into guns, the new lasers, poured away into recruitments. There wasn't enough for everything. X-Com - the organisation, as Peter thought of it - couldn't centralise its knowledge. Couldn't find proper organisation in anything but the fight, putting the invaders into freezer bags and filing them away, as though that'd make them dissappear.

 

That was why there could be no hesitation. Why it had to be fast, clean. Why the money being funnelled away into this single Skyranger, a valuable asset in conventional war, was being hidden away. Why there was no registration. This was going to be a gamble, and Peter wasn't comfortable with the way the dice were weighted against him.

 

 

 

He'd never even heard the code-phrase uttered once, even after his transfer out of the small 'civilian intelligence' department at the Houston base and into the base underneath the Swiss Alps. He went deeper even then, into the labs underneath, past coded vault and coded vault, only to find another smaller base of operations, seemingly built there for the protection offered by that other base, well built and efficiently battling along.

 

He'd worked there as an agent, shadowy fiend slinking along the sides of human society, quietly probing, finding out who was willing to do what, who knew the enormity of everything happening to the human race in those closing years of 1999. The organisation as a whole had only turned up once after a full year of operation, misrepresented and misunderstood. 'Men in Grey', claimed the tabloids. 'Appearing from nowhere, abduction victims report being rescued by these MIGs, in a reverse from their brethren, the Men In Black.' It was layer upon layer of deceit and caution. Half the militaries of the world had their blinders on.

 

Even there, at the black heart of it all, it had been a whisper. One of the men working the signal interceptions had spoken to him, 'go find Captain Trewitt.' That man had been an agent in similar capacity, merely working a far tougher piece of turf than the unsuspecting streets and byways of Europe.

 

The offer had been straightforward enough. 'It's just like Mirage and Gearhead, with a little extra. Interested?' The offer hadn't made any sense. One had been trying to understand something entirely unknown, the other trying to develop and test theoretical equipment. The two projects had been lightyears apart in philosophies.

 

Once, what seemed a million years ago, Peter used to have barbecues with his family. Used to appreciate rock music. It all went downhill from there. A young hopeful with the FBI, rapidly pulled into the hostage rescue unit to help with scouting locations. Then sidelined away from that. Again and again. Further and further away from the light.

 

He had said yes. 'Project Twilight', was the response from Trewitt. 'Pack your bags.'

 

Twilight. Huh. Now he couldn't see the light anymore, just a vague reflection of it on the horizon.

 

 

 

Peter Conners was only a little apprehensive. The suit he wore, a near-black camouflage, made him almost invisible in the night. The handgun he had with him had no markings and no serial numbers, a boxy silencer that reduced the passage of 5.7mm slugs forged from tungsten and steel into something less than a whisper. The gold-edged card he had snug in a static-free pouch was less certain, a device built to secure information systems. Alien information systems.

 

Here was something almost approaching clarity, but only for those who understood and knew. A society. An alien society, one proven to exist by the bodies in frozen rows in covert storage facilities. Immeasurably superior in every way to the human race. People thought they understood, abductions and sightings. The reality of it was harder to understand. Most sightings were not of alien craft. An alien craft could blend in with the sky as seamlessly as a rock blended into a quarry. If a person had been abducted, in all likelihood they would never know.

 

In the most famous case an abductee didn't know she'd had a dog, and from the pressure of neighbours began to seek help. Investigating X-Com Agents had unearthed this from the real Men In Black, who had coldly noted that the ASPCA had found no terriers, but that ashes and burns were found nearby. The followup X-Com investigation had, at length, discovered ultrasound images of something not quite human within the woman. The woman herself? Still listed missing by the authorities, but Conners had heard from one of the few confidants he had within the ultracovert structure of investigations that there was a packet of ash sitting on a shelf in a hallway in Washington, marked 'Interview Completed' with a nondescript reference number.

 

This entire business, working in the Shadows, was dangerous. It was a bright burning flame, and you were likely to get burned.

 

Somewhere ahead of the modified Skyranger, there was an alien craft that was still set down on the ground. Maybe the occupants were having a leak, Peter Mirthfully reflected. Perhaps they'd set down on the ground, as though pulling off a highway, and were still waiting for their little brother to finish business. But like always, the X-Com soldiers that knew it was there were going to descend on the craft like the wrath of god, trying to find something worthwhile. Like always, the aliens would see, start to cycle whatever powersources they used into heat, try to get away. But they wouldn't be fast enough. This time, though, when they saw that assault Skyranger, armour panels riveted to the sides to protect it from damage from alien weaponry, and they did whatever it was to erase their semi-organic computer's memory, destroying even the characters of their alphabet, they'd get an error message. Maybe it would flash red, if the aliens had come to associate that colour with potentially lethal problems. Maybe they'd be able to fix it, erase everything anyway. Peter didn't know.

 

All that Peter Conners knew was that he had fifteen minutes or less to secure the little gold-edged card into the alien craft's systems, to sneak inside in the first place. To escape before the wrath of god slammed down on that small ship, and god's own eyes to recognise him, and so for the bureaucrats to recognise Project Twilight, and to once more seal away one of the few good chances for X-Com to gain any kind of ground, in this strange Guerilla war.

 

 

 

2.--- Somewhere over continental Europe, SR77X-01 making dropoff at ground contact 334, June 3rd 2000, 03:28.

 

 

 

The co-pilot struggled through the corridor connecting the cargo area of the Skyranger to the cockpit, bulky headset clamped over his ears. He staggered to the back of the craft, linked his safety harness to one of the clamps on the roof. He fumbled with the intercom cable for a moment, and got it plugged into one of the seat backs.

 

"Lieutenant Conners, we are approaching your drop zone. Is your rappelling harness secure?"

 

Peter made a show of plucking at the nylon straps of the rappel harness, a businesslike dull green, except for a hastily rigged tear away panel in the front.

 

The co-pilot nodded, and glanced up at the winch arrangement on the roof's cargo rails. Electric motor and all, with a long arm folded in on itself.

 

Skyrangers were bulky, small craft. Originally built for special operations work that required transglobal transportation and insertion, there were several inherent disadvantages to the frame. Its aerodynamics were fine at speeds slightly past Mach 1, but the tiny and boxy plane simply wasn't built for subsonic speeds. Unfortunately, the engine noise related stealth modifications were ineffective approaching the speed of sound. As a result, if you had to go in quietly, the airframe itself had to become your enemy.

 

"Alright. Lets get you hooked up. Less time we spend in the area, the better for you."

 

Peter scowled, but nodded in agreement. He pulled his own headset off, and was immediately assaulted by the sounds the aircraft seemed to suck into itself rather than let escape into the air around the craft. The crashing whine of air bleeding into the complex vent system of the Skyranger was almost as bad as playing around in a firing range without ear protection. He stood up, clamping his hands around his head as he approached the co-pilot and the winch.

 

The co-pilot wordlessly held out the tensile wire, ending in a loop.. Peter hesitated, but braved the deafening noise and accepted it, pausing to lock carabiners on his safety harness to the loop.

 

He slapped his hands back over his ears, grimaced at the co-pilot as the Skyranger's speed dropped abruptly, shaking the unarmoured airframe more than Peter liked. Skyrangers had infamous design flaws. When switching through to VTOL mode, pouring thrust from the engines from the various belly-mounted vents, the plane had to be within ten degrees or so of being perfectly level. If it wasn't, the craft would flip over, tumble through the air like a brick with bottle rockets strapped to one side. Not pretty. More than once it'd happened to an assault squad, coming in too fast, too low, too close to the enemy. A couple of good hits from the plasma weapons could do it. For all its bulk, a Skyranger was a fragile thing in the air.

 

The screaming of thrust rattled through the airframe, and abruptly the ride became smooth as molten glass. The co-pilot said something, lost to the noise, and the internal lights glimmered out, one by one. The co-pilot punched out at the cargo ramp button, and the back of the Skyranger's internal wall tilted away and down, locking in the turbulent night air.

 

Christ! Peter's breath caught in his throat. The treetops below were skipping side to side in the craft's engine wash, far too close for comfort.

 

The co-pilot extended the winch arm, far out and past the back of the Skyranger's delta wing tail. A thumbs up signal, as he placed one gloved hand on the cabling, looped it around the pulley.

 

Peter Conners hesitated, pulling on nightvision goggles and flicking them on, before stepping off the edge of the cargo ramp, to hang freely four meters over the bucking treetops.

 

 

 

3. --- Southern German Forest, Immergr