Sewer cleaning

[chiasaur11]

So, apparently I wrote this a couple months back, and reading over it again, it didn't seem to be awful, and it might briefly entertain some of the folks here. Hope the consensus agrees. Fair deal of language that would be improper in polite company, as a heads up.

 

 

 

 

It has been common, in recent days, to consider the Alien War ended after the success of the Cydonia Assault Group. This would be a grave error. Although no further forces survived to claim the Earth, there were still thousands of the Starspawn hidden in their underground bases, crashed craft outside of X-com detection range, and even in the sewers and slums of the Terra's major cities. The campaign to exterminate the last traces of the invaders continued for months after the official cessation of hostilities. Even as X-Com was being reduced to its current skeletal state, the brave men and women that composed it were continuing to serve in silence. Those silent hours may have been the finest.

 

 

Wilkins, Adam. "The First Contact War, Volume 3: Aftermath and Reconstruction". First published by Random house in 2018. Excerpts reprinted with permission.

 

A great writer once said "Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get."

 

Although X-Com is not an organization often accused of being overly intellectual, the sentiment still held. Of course, the language may have lost a little of the luster in the transition, but whatever "WE'RE FUCKED! THE CAPTAIN'S DEAD, THE TANK'S DOWN, AND THEY'VE GOT THE GODDAMN BUGS OUT! WE ARE GETTING THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" lost in poetry or suitability for polite company, it gained in sheer emphatic desperation.

 

Captain Virgil Stoppard ( No relation) had gained a good deal more familiarity with the second phrase than the first. A fifteen month veteran of the alien conflict, he had seen enough good men (and for that matter, bad and indifferent men) die in utterly horrible ways to ensure he heard every conceivable variant of "We're all going to die". At the moment, however, he was engaging in one of the less lethal activities required of an X-Com officer.

 

"Okay. How much we got left?"

"Not much, chief. Lost the last HWP in that Muton base cleanup in Siberia last week, we don't have enough plasma rifle clips for another full scale operation, the UN is still dogging us to hand over the power suits for the E-115..."

" Tell them to go fuck themselves."

"Put it a little more diplomatically, but I covered it. Never had your gift for the caustic. Heavy plasmas should hold out until the end of the month if we keep 'em restricted to the officers, and yours truly managed to get the heavy lasers from Delta. Thus ends the good news."

"That's good news? Shit. Rob, you're kidding."

"No such luck, boss. We got... an incident. Moscow. And it sounds right up your alley."

"Please don't say..."

"So, some bums stumbling around Moscow, look a little odd. And trying to kill passersby, which kinda exacerbates the weird bit. Well, civvies called in Ivan, Ivan did his buddy buddy bit and called us in, and the gutshot bums called in Chryssalids to keep the game fair."

"Fuck."

"Upside, the initial batch went down without hitting epidemic. Downside, they're in the sewers. And you're still the man to go to for that sort of problem. Well..."

"If they don't risk a damn poster-boy after the war's done with."

"About the size of it. How many of these things you dealt with anyway? Know you hit London, and the New York one. Dozen others stopped before they reached massive crisis, assume you were in some of them. Any highlights I missed?"

"Paris. Catacombs. Fucking Paris. "

"Remind me to ask sometime. Always wanted to develop a depression based drinking habit. Anyway, they need you and anyone you got who's any good at tunnel fighting. And we probably should make sure the thing is completely contained. Ivan's the one thing still backing us at the Council, and we need all the help we can get. Heh. We win, and all that changes is the funding. "

"Ha."

"Well, and we lose half of the best troopers we got to funding meetings, goodwill tours, movie projects, and the like. Heck, I got a letter from some kid about a school project, and I only had, what, three drops before Commander Andianov hit martian soil. Anyway, luck."

 

In well under an hour, a Skyranger was on its way to Moscow. Fourteen troopers, generally, would have been considered an inadequate response to a possible Chryssalid outbreak. In a better funded time, Captain Stoppard might have considered it suicide. However, the current circumstances forced a number of adjustments, and to be fair, it is generally better to have an empty seat on the Skyranger on the way out than on the way back, let alone a seat filled with a hideous alien abomination whose only desire is to lay eggs in human flesh.

 

The crew was armed as well as could be expected, given the circumstances. A few plasma rifles, some lasers, a heavy plasma. The officers even managed power armor, an increasingly rare sight as war slowly dragged its way to peace. (This trend reached its lowest ebb in the 2040s, with only 15 suits of flying armor of any kind in service.)

 

As for the men and women using the technology?

 

Most were cut more from their Captain's mold than the more gregarious attitude seen in his quartermaster. The majority, by a minor coincidence, were men, generally eastern European. More importantly than any of those concerns, however, was a simple fact. All had managed to survive at least one mission involving Chryssalids, and all had some idea of tunnel fighting. It would be fair to say those skills are not common to all individuals throughout history, even those who survived a term of service with X-Com. Of this group, only a handful were worth noting beyond the standard description.

 

Most obviously, the Captain, the aforementioned Stoppard. He was nowhere near a record holder regarding length of service, kills, or any of the most obvious measuring boards for greatness common to X-Com. He may have been the sole survivor of disaster slightly more often, or even a good deal more often, than average, or he may have faced more Chryssalids than any service record had a right to, but there his most significant accomplishments end. Generally, he was merely an above average soldier, and an average commanding office. But when it came to Chryssalids, he was a savant.

 

Next to him was Grigory Belov, a blue on blue just waiting to happen. Not that long ago, he'd been a fairly promising squaddie, the sort who manages a couple missions before the all bu inevitable blaze of glory ending. That was before Paris. Seven transports went out. Survivors fit in one. Belov took it worse than most. Now, the normal procedure, even in a group such as X-Com that put basic safety concerns so far below the international standard as to boggle the mind, would have at least gone through with basic psychological testing before returning him to the field. Unfortunately, Paris was only the latest in a string of disasters that month, and agents with field experience were in short enough supply that Belov was shoved back in the field. Since then, Belov had been slowly, steadily losing his remaining grip on sanity. If Chryssalid hunts generally required an ounce more subtlety than "SHOOT EVERYTHING" once the action proper started, his inclusion would have been truly remarkable idiocy. In the current scenario, it was an almost passable decision.

 

The group's sole heavy plasma went to one Sgt. Roger Williams, generally a specialist in anti Muton ops. Still, he was a survivor of more than a couple of bug hunts, and one of the better sharpshooters on the team. Almost made up for the fact he wouldn't shut up.

 

Rounding out the notables was one... well, nobody bothered to ask her name. She didn't bother to tell it either, so it worked out. The first psi specialist to be assigned to the base, Stoppard had assumed the total lack of small talk was a virtue common to every psychic in X-Com. A three minute meeting with Captain Nadir shortly after the victory on Cydonia destroyed that pleasant illusion forever. It seemed the Spook was incredibly disinclined towards chit-chat due to a personal preference rather than some rare and terrible mental power. Well, if you can crush the mind of hardened veterans and alien war machines from a quarter mile away, you can afford a little eccentricity.

 

The medic (Kolotov) and the rest, as mentioned, were generally even less remarkable than those described, X-Com grunts dealt another poor hand. They would do their duty, presumably, and that was enough.

 

Having met the central players, it seems a courtesy to cut to the action and ignore the utter awkwardness of the flight. Suffice it to say, thirteen individuals who consider five words an unusually massive sentence and one individual who insists on filling any protracted silence with meaningless chatter make for an awkward situation, and the thought of imminent death in a manner worse than any individual had been forced to experience prior to the alien conflict would only amplify the awkwardness.

 

"Five minutes. Grab your gear. Sewer. Any questions?"

"How long until we all die? Because, look, giving my all for X-com sounded good on the brochure, sounded good for months, but now that we won? I'm just thinking that I might be able to start considering safer hobbies. Russian Roulette with an automatic, say. Of course, if this is a suicideier mission than usual, I might as well cancel the magazine subscriptions. "

"Ten Seconds, Williams. Shut your damn mouth.:

"That long? Captain, I knew you were an optimist when I transferred here, but holy crap that's Pollyanna territory."

"One. Second."

"Right, right. Got it. Sorry. Plan?"

"You hold the entrance with the Russian defense staff. Belov and I? Point. Lasers next. Snipers? Guard our backs, and Spook does her shit."

"And I bail if I get the word and the whole place gets blown to hell. Sounds simple. Likely to piss Ivan off something fierce if it all goes wrong, but still simple."

 

With that, the majority of the team headed into the bowels of the Moscow sewers. The environment was not the world's most hospitable at the best of times, being filled with dead ends, falls, flooded passages, and worst of all, tourists. Adding Chryssalids tends to make every other problem worse. Facing an enemy in a mostly unknown environment, with no knowledge of positioning, numbers, or equipment could, charitably, be classified as suicidal. It could honestly be classified as classic X-Com. As side alleys were checked, graffiti was commented on over the power armor radio links, and paranoia mounted, Captain Stoppard's mind began to drift. Running like hell back in Paris to find somebody, anybody else alive. Hearing civvies scream in London and being able to do exactly jack/shit to save them. The successful escort to the NY evac site. Most X-Com troopers eventually develop a special hatred for one group of aliens or another, and a firm instance that, screw training manuals, brass, and whoever else disagrees, that one damn species is the nastiest creature out there. Stoppard, however, had been around long enough to understand that attitude was a bit idiotic. Hell, he'd met troopers who'd take on Ethereals with smoke grenades to avoid Reaper duty. His personal hatred of Chryssalids was just that. A personal problem. A rather long-standing one admittedly.

 

Well, it made sense. His first day on duty was a mission that turned out to be a Chryssalid hunt. It also turned out to be the death of everyone else, and a persistent source of nightmares. Got knocked out towards the beginning. Woke up to find everyone dead and a chittering insect-thing staring him in the face. Laser pistol saved his life long enough to get back to the evac craft. Nobody else got out, Stoppard gained a longstanding hatred for bugs and sleep, and the pilot got a section eight. Typical X-Com happy ending.

 

Then a screech in the dark ended the reverie.

 

Something was out there. Well, something was being unnecessarily vague. Considering the details of the assignment the something in question was obviously Chryssalids, and they probably would be attacking before too long. Well, this wasn't the team's first time out. Just form up, and ready mass fire, and it should all work out.

 

Or it would have, had Belov picked a more opportune time to snap.

 

It took five seconds for all hell to break loose. Chryssalids emerged from every shadow, one of the snipers died to friendly fire, and Belov was running off into the dark like a man possessed. All cohesion was gone, as a wall of jet black carapace and gleaming smiles cut the Captain off from his command. Stoppard ran.

 

A Chryssalid has an estimated average land speed of thirty eight miles per hour under ideal conditions. The human land speed record is a little shy of thirty. In a straight run, even an unburdened sprinter with a notable head start is fated to become a walking hatchery fairly quickly. The direct route, to put it bluntly, is death. The obvious question is how anyone lived to tell about it.

 

The slightly less obvious answer? Chryssalids are built for the direct sprint rather than more complicated maneuvers. They can go for longer distances, and around obstructions, but they are not anywhere near as efficient at these tasks. Add in rather weak climbing skills and weaker minds, and evading a Chryssalid becomes a possible, if improbable task, assuming one is skilled in finding or creating obstructions.

 

Stoppard, like most survivors of Chryssalid attacks, was. A few shots from a laser pistol cave in part of a ceiling. A grenade cuts a hole in a wall.

 

Shoddy construction brings half the place down on top of you. And then you can't do anything as the swarm comes around.

 

Someone was in a nearby tunnel trying the same running and hiding Stoppard had been pursuing. Probably Belov, from the screaming. For a minute, it sounded like he might make it. Every shot was followed by a matching death rattle. The clattering of the claws on the ground never passes midway up the passage. And then?

 

A clattering from the other direction. The poor bastard in the tunnel was getting flanked. And, unfortunately, didn't seem to realize it in his panic. The critter was even taking it slow. Maybe an old one, or a broken leg. Probably, to a panicked and paranoid mind, the thing was just relishing its opportunity. Felt like an eternity waiting for it to down another comrade in arms. The noises were the standard ones. Excited cry, armor being rended by the claws, injection of the eggs, and moaning. A lot of moaning in the tunnels, really. And a lot less running.

 

And then, of course, the roof broke a little more, and the shock of a face-full of rubble jolted Virgil into comparatively blissful oblivion.

 

He awoke, for the second time in his life, to a Chryssalid's smile. Instinct moved his arm to his pistol. Or tried. The gun had, unsurprisingly, been dropped in when he went cold. Digging through the rubble would normally be an irritation with only potentially fatal results. At the current juncture, it was an idiot's dream. An egg injected idiot incubating chryssalid larva. Of course, there didn't seem to be many better options. And the only thing that came to mind...

 

What the hell. He was dead anyway.

 

And a power armored fist made an impact in a Chryssalid face. It followed the initial impact by bursting through the other side covered in blood and viscera. Presumably, that would settle the current matter. At bare minimum, that should buy enough time to assess the situation.

 

The situation? Well, Stoppard considered, it was essentially that he was fucked. Alone, in the middle of a Russian sewer probably scheduled for a nuking, surrounded by Chryssalids was textbook fucked. Hell, the only reason he was alive was he'd gotten a 'lid with a weak enough skull that a trick that had only been confirmed to work once could save his ass. X-Commers don't tend to get that lucky twice.

 

And then he caught a thought that didn't seem his, if only due to a conspicuous absence of the terms "fucked" "Screwed" and "Fucking screwed". Paying closer attention, seemed like a check to see if he was alive.

 

Could be an alien, but Snakes didn't pull that kind of crap, in his experience. And generally Sectoids spent less time with formalities before having you start ventilating buddies or, assuming you could fight that off, reducing you to a terrified whimpering shell. Needed a couple weeks in the mental ward last time he'd ran into those things. Which meant this was a friendly, and paying some attention might not be a bad idea.

 

"Captain."

Sounded like the Spook. No "How you been." No "Thank god you're alive." Just a simple confirmation and then, business.

"Regrouping. Found the nest. Bring explosives."

And a mental image of the meetup spot. Not even a listing of the other survivors, which probably meant there weren't many.

 

Well, at least there was a nest the bugs were clustering around. Take that out, the rest tend to come home for mass firing. If there's a team left at the end of it, then it's just a waiting game to cull the few who were away when you made the base go boom.

 

Unfortunately, Belov had the detpacks. In a tunnel that had been crawling with chryssalids not that long ago.

 

Fuck.

 

The plan was simple. Find the dropped high explosives, find the meet up, and go into the hive to blow it to hell, then sit tight and shoot every creature coming down the hall.

 

Every plan was a one way ticket to a closed casket funeral, sure, but it was a simple ticket. Well, best get moving.

 

First, of course, he'd want his pistol. A quick dig in the rubble managed to find it. Old, battered, but still as deadly and reliable as the day some asshole in a labcoat handed it to him. Probably should have traded up at some point but here he was. After all, the pistol had its good points. Decent firepower, almost no kick, enough juice built in to last a month of continuous field work...

 

And it's quite possibly the fastest firing handgun known to man. If it can hurt something, it probably can unload enough light in it to kill it before it could even turn around. On the other hand, some aliens, as it turned out, could shrug off the thing like it was nothing. Found that out the hard way.

 

Still, 'lids die to it, and that was more than good enough for now. Stoppard did try to be a practical man, even if his thought process tended to wax philosophical if given half a chance. Perils of extended survival in X-Com. You start to wonder why you made it, better men didn't. Almost...

 

The captain caught himself. Find the explosives, then take it from there. Should be right next door.

 

Pistol made an opening in the wall. And, lucky day, not a single 'lid to be seen. Just got to check where Belov went down...

 

And then moaning. Stoppard's mind raced. Shitshitshitshit... Should call the whole horde on him if he didn't hurry and shut it up. Got to find it fast, or, well, what happened to Belov happens to him.

 

And then, turning, he found the source of the noise. Pinned under the rubble, Belov himself. Or what was left of him. The whole thing worked out pretty neat. One burst silenced the moaning, settled a score with an officer who paniced, killed a 'lid, and meant Stoppard could recover the explosives in peace. If only they all could be that...

 

Holy hell. Stoppard realized what he was thinking with a bit of a shock. Shooting something that used to be a friend, or at least a coworker, dead was now the easy part of the job? Chryssalid duty had been going on a damn sight too long. Well, no sense in wasting time. Grab the bombs, run to the meet up point. And, from that clattering, don't be slow about it.

 

It took him five minutes to find the meet up point. Five minutes of checking every corner for Chryssalids, walking slow when it seemed that nothing had heard him, running like hell when it felt like something had. And from the looks on the faces of the others, they'd had it just as bad. Well, everyone's face but the spook. That would require human emotions out of her. God bless that face. Otherwise, you might think something was wrong.

 

A quick headcount revealed three others left standing. The Spook, Kolotov (the medic), and Grigori, one of the two guys with a heavy laser. Stoppard asked the obvious question.

 

"So, we're it? Fuck."

 

Kolotov, the most talkative of the bunch (read as, the only one who found ten word sentences something other than an abomination) replied.

 

"Well, from what we could find, Williams is still on the surface, but... something came up. Safe to say he won't be down here. Everyone else is, equally safe to say, dead or worse."

 

"Fuck."

 

"So, we make the delivery, run, and then let them come to us, right? "

 

"No."

 

"Captain?"

 

And it all seemed simple. He'd been fighting for too long. Given enough time, what happened to Belov would happen to him. Here, there was a chance to end it all with some dignity, and without getting anyone else killed. Elegant, simple. And it prevents anyone else from dying in his place.

 

"WE do nothing. I make the delivery, and send out some flares to draw the horde. YOU make sure not a single one of those things gets out of here alive, then make sure nobody gets trigger happy with the Avalanches. Clear?"

 

"Yes sir."

 

And at least he had a team with enough sense not to back talk. Well, Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, one in the valley of Death.

 

They'd cover him on the way in, of course. But once in the hive, he'd have to find a good spot, drop far too many explosives, ring the dinner bell, and hope he could hold out long enough to die human.

 

No sense in delaying.

 

The first dash was almost easy. None of the things managed to get close before the sniper or the spook dealt with them. And then Stoppard was in. Tunnel after tunnel, filled with things best not glanced at, all the while hoping to keep out of sight just long enough to find a good spot to blow the whole place to hell. Couldn't have been more than a couple minutes. Didn't feel like less than a couple hours. But, finally, a decent spot presented itself.

 

Charges set. And now, all that was left was to pick some music to end the world to. Make it loud enough, all the 'lids come running to clean the nest. Beyond that, it didn't matter. Hell, yelling would probably do it. But when a man dies, (or, presumably, a woman, although this particular case does not provide nearly as many good examples) he (or, presumably, she in the relevant cases) likes to assume his (her) death has some meaning, even in an outfit like X-Com where death is quicker than breathing. A soundtrack to death would be a small, futile monument to having lived at all.

 

Stoppard quickly cycled through the rather small selection he'd bothered to load into the suit's sound system. Technically non-standard, but the little modifications tended to spread. Some old punk and metal, more for general morale than any personal preference. Wagner, Battle Hymn of the Republic (no idea how that got there.), O Fortuna.

 

No. All too victorious. Maybe once, but it was all too damn heroic for a suicide that, by some divine hand, would do a bit more good than harm. Ah. Adagio for Strings. Sappy, maybe. Not normally prime listening. But it sounded like music to die to. Hit the button. Play it loud.

 

And hold back the horde while trying not to get misty like a damn pansy. A man only dies once. Best to do it with some dignity.

 

Bodies piled up steadily. The music played. And then? The whole thing blazed to white. And the last thing Stoppard could think was how the timing didn't match at all to the music.

 

Then, darkness.

 

The darkness lasted a very long time.

 

Vague sounds. Dreams, maybe, the last thoughts of a dying brain. "Done here, then. Hell of a fireworks show" "Decommissioned? What the hell is going on up there, Rob?" "Consider this a swan song, then." "Can anyone get me my kit? Got a man dying here."

 

And then, Stoppard awoke in a very familiar position. Pinned under heavy objects, a smiling face coming into view. Almost readied his pistol.

 

Then he noticed. It was human this time. Hell, it almost looked like the spook.

 

Must be the last dreams of a dying man, then. Couldn't think of anything that would get the Spook to smile.

[Thorondor]

Good job, Williams. Now get the friggin hell offa my face and hit the damned de-cont shower...

 

Jeeez, Mary'n'Joseph, how you goddamn stink!!

 

::

 

A bit verbose in banter here and there, chia, but winding its way to a worthwhile closing.

[Bomb Bloke]

[The Veteran]

Awesome dude, nice work! Maybe it'll get some interest back in the fanfics here, still plenty of people active to write in them hint hint

[Space Voyager]

https://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b348/SpaceVoyager/Smiley/xtreme.gif

 

I had to Google things like blue on blue and section eight, wasn't familiar with the terms. But the great story demanded to be understood in full! Really liked this story.

 

Please check your archives, you might find more! https://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b348/SpaceVoyager/Smiley/popcorn.gif