DISCLAIMER: Relatively standard stuff. Existing character types (specifically the alien races), certain vehicles and buildings, and so forth are properties of Microprose. As the characters are original, the characters are my property, and so's the story (but plot for events belongs to Microprose), hence ownership and copyright of them belongs to me. Contact me at domino@netaccess.com.au if you want permission to use anything I've written for whatnot purposes.
X-COM:
Enemy Unknown
by
Raymond Cooper
** Strange Attractors **
The gravel pit looked like something out of a low-budget science fiction television show. Just something about it, the way the low clumps of mist clung to the rocks as Corporal Peters swung his Heckler & Koch MP-5 from left to right and back again, seemed to suggest back blue-screening effects and cardboard monsters that looked much better on the screen than on the set, without the filtering gaze of cameras.
Off to his left, Sergeant Donaldson raised his hand to his mouthpiece, spoke something quietly into his comlink, then turned to his left, waved another pair of people up. The troops, culled from the British Special Air Service, American Delta Force, Israeli Mossad and Russian GRU, were dressed in standard SAS battle gear, kevlar body suits shaded in greys and blues to blend into the background, fade from sight.
From normal sight.
The Corporal Jake Peters knew only as Yuri went down screaming. Peters blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to clear the green tinge from them. Flashblinded. He hadn't even seen the origin point of the shot. But the green ball, trailing green streamers behind it as it flew along its path, had cut right through the kevlar and other assorted ceramics and buried itself in the flesh underneath. It hadn't ruptured from his back, but one of the first things Peters saw as his sight returned was Yuri on his stomach, a dark, blistering burn mark the size of a soccer ball on his back - residual energies from the shot had torn the uniform all the way through. Some slight element of shock must have set in, because Peters hadn't been aware of turning around while waiting for his sight to clear. He turned back to check where his fellow troops were.
And found the Sergeant had moved them forwards, firing into a bank of mist. Peters raised his weapon to fire in that general direction, but instead saw movement in the corner of his eye. Only the fact he'd turned from the direction everyone else was facing while blinded had placed him in the position to see what seemed to be a small greyish thing, scuttling just over the lip of a nearby pile of rocks. The weapon it had in its hands was long, two bevelled, vaguely rectangular, boxes mushed together not quite right. It was an off-blue colour, and the way the creature sighted along it, pointing at the Sergeant who was once more calling into his mouthpiece for reinforcements, Peters judged it was going to try and disable the force by taking out its head.
A quick flick of a thumb-switch, and the MP-5 went into semi-automatic mode. 3 shots would be fired each time his finger caressed the trigger. And right now, the weapon levelled just in front of his cheek, Peters pulled the trigger twice.
The weapon stuttered, the silenced shots finding their mark up on the rise. The creature jerked backwards, the slugs tearing through its bulbous skull. But the creature didn't want to stay down. Although it had been thrown backwards, it quickly sat upright, and groped for the weapon again. Another half-dozen shots brought it down, for good this time.
Peters then turned his attention towards the rest of the squad. An element of two operatives moved forward while another two elements covered. Peters moved forward himself, taking up his position beside his partner, and from the slight rise he now found himself on, he too could see where the original burst of fire had come from.
As the mist cleared slightly in front of him, he could see, very clearly, the form of a silvery, flattened disc. Like something out of Independence Day, or Mars Attacks! or even Earth vs The Flying Saucers. Steam hissed from around it, and it didn't appear to be open, but there were a number of fallen creatures around it.
From the places they lay, Peters assumed they had been trying to hold the item for retreival, but didn't know for certain.
The comm chatter in his helmet started up again.
"They didn't want us to have it, sir." That was Donaldson. Peters knew the Sergeant's voice anywhere.
"They never do, Sergeant. Is it damaged?" The overall commander of X-com: Base Europa, the origin of the X-Com facilities. Colonel Harrison Lefont. Technically, he should have been a Commander, but he had kept his original army designation when he'd 'officially' retired and unofficially headed up the X-Com operation. He sounded tired, distant, and yet he was parked two hundred metres back in the base's only modified Sukhoi Su-61X Skyranger. Peters guessed it was a combination of the number of missions the unit had been performing of late (three in two weeks now!) and bureaucratic disasters that plagued the unit that was causing the distance with the Colonel; he certainly hadn't been getting much sleep.
Or so Peters had heard. He'd only been forwarded to Europa a week earlier, from the Special Air Service operating in Australia, and this was his first mission. So far, it was almost routine to his training back home, if one subtracted the little grey things - he refused to call them aliens - and added in men in black balaclavas.
Also, a quick glance back at Yuri told Peters that these creatures had a little more in the way of firepower than the terrorists and criminals he'd been trained to fight. The dozen bullets to the head had told him they also either had thicker skulls, or some kind of skin-tight body armour that appeared more effective than the kevlar composite he was wearing at this moment.
"Nossir," the Sergeant replied. "Have the other teams reported in?"
"Area's clear," Lefont returned. "The transport ship that dropped them off took off before our Interceptors could reach them. Blasted Greys."
"So, they insert a commando team - for what? Why'd they drop this thing in the first place? Is it a bomb?"
Peters stared at the silvery disc. It seemed to capture his attention. All of a sudden, he had a powerful feeling something was inside, trying to get out. Locked into the joined discoid tight. Wanting out. But he didn't know how to get her out. Her? some part of his mind asked. But by now, his body seemed to be operating on a dream-like plane, on automatic. He drifted forward, knowing he should say something, but not. No one noticed his movements, as their gaze was turned outward, still watching, waiting to see if any more creatures came at them. A hand reached out, passed lightly over the top. Peters watched it in quiet awe as the disc seemed to light up. Once more, the comms exploded into life.
"Donaldson! What the hell's going on?"
"Dunno, sir, finding - PETERS! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" Donaldson slapped Peters hand away from the disc, and the former SAS operative stumbled back, shocked, blinking rapidly as his mind was returned to him. The top of the disc hissed, rotated once, then slid along what must have been an internal rail to reveal a young, very human, female.
She appeared to be young, Peters realised, but wasn't. Her eyes when they opened, oriental, a deep chocolate that could eat one's soul, seemed to age her considerably. He also realised she was rather short, with dark hair framing an elfin face. She seemed pale, though, and Peters assumed that had to be shock - surely being kidnapped by those creatures wasn't one of the most comforting things that could happen to a young person.
Donaldson's weapon swung from Peters to cover the young woman. He, too, seemed transfixed by her for a moment, but snapped back to work quickly. "Right! Don't move!" he snapped. The woman stopped moving. "Name! Place of residence!"
The young woman looked at him for a moment, then shrugged, a little worriedly. "Can I see someone in authority, please? I have something important to tell him."
******
Lefont stared in through the one-way glass. The young woman inside continued to stare out, directly at him. It was most unnerving, he decided, as he walked from side to side of the window, her eyes tracking him ceaselessly.
Around her, doctors in isolation gear busied themselves, making sure the new arrival wasn't some kind of new alien weapon - someone carrying biological toxins, or an alien in disguise - before they cleared her for Lefont to talk to. They'd been at it for a few hours now, and the supercomputers put aside for medical use were running overtime, ignoring all other uses for them, as they checked and rechecked genetic information received from the woman.
Lefont had decided she looked to be less than twenty, yet her eyes captured something he defined as showing someone much, much older. Someone who had seen the world to the end and back again. Occasionally, he felt a brief sensation of dislocation, as if he was separated from his body, and at those times, he thought he could hear someone knocking on a door. At least, that's what it sounded like. But it sounded like a wooden door, and there were no wooden doors on base.
This was Europa, after all - home of the next generation of military organisations. X-Com had made this base, shoring up mine workings under a small town called Beckenswood with rooms of metals, plastics and ceramics. X-Com existed for one purpose, and only one purpose: to stop what seemed to be an invasion of Earth by extra terrestrials.
Aliens.
So far, X-Com had only noted one type, with a secondary life form no one was yet sure about - it could have been a robotic servitor-type mechanoid, or a kind of powered armour - and while Lefont was outwardly hoping that would be the extent of it, he knew deep down that there would be more coming. Every race has specifics to its engineering and architecture - certain things are almost racial. Heights of doors and ceilings, types of weapons, standardised equipment. And yet, the alien invasion force had what X-Com-hired researchers said were at least four major influences in their architecture alone. More were suggested in the recovered equipment, but until the final research facilities were completed, Lefont wasn't having anyone do more than look at the retreival items.
One race would be hard enough to beat. Two more difficult. Four, damned near impossible. The amount of industry a single space-faring species could call upon to fuel a war effort was staggering. But combining four? Lefont also privately hoped that he was wrong, that the evidence of at least four races meant that one single race had taken influences from the others, just as the modern world today owed its roots to Rome, Greece, Egypt, and two dozen other ancient civilisations.
He paced to the isolation lab's airlock when he saw the senior doctor head for it, and waited for decontamination protocols to be enacted. Once the doctor was through the door, though, Lefont wanted to know the results of the testing.
"Well, she's human," the doctor, an older man by the name of Singh, mused. "Very much so. The DNA is strong. And without the... the 'dead links' one usually finds in a human."
"Dead links?" Lefont asked.
"Evolutionary baggage that'd died out, long ago. A gene for fur, or claws, sharp teeth, whatever, that's been turned off by the relentless march of mutation." Singh shrugged.
"So... is she human, or just posing?"
"The computers say human." But Singh shrugged. "I'd reserve judgment myself. But you seem safe. I guess she knew where you were, judging by the way she kept staring at the mirror."
Lefont nodded, and entered the isolab, the other physician standing in the back of the room, in case she was needed. The woman on the examination table stared at him from her seated position, chocolate eyes boring into him. He heard yet another knock on a wooden door as this woman focussed her gaze on him, and she waited. But obviously, she didn't get the desired response, because she sunk back into herself.
"We need to know your name," Lefont began, "so we can return you to where you came from."
"My name... is... unpronouncible," the woman sighed.
"Try me," Lefont smiled. "I've been stationed in Japan before."
The woman produced a series of whistles and clicks, and cocked her head to one shoulder, staring at Lefont as if to say, 'well, I *did* tell you...'.
Lefont shrugged. "We need to be able to identify you." Pause. Hesitancy. "We could... always try running you through global DNA banks, see if we can find a match...?"
The woman shrugged. "You won't find a match there, either." Another knock on a wooden door.
Lefont looked around, annoyed, wondering if someone was playing a practical joke on him. When he turned back, the woman was staring at him again, yet this time confused. "Your race... isn't telepathic," she stated.
"My...?" Alien. She had to be. Regardless of the opinion of the computers. Lefont had suspected, but had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Now he knew for certain. His hand grabbed at his waist, unsnapping his pistol's holster, and he brought up the small automatic pistol in one smooth, easy movement.
The woman shook her head, unconcerned. "I apologise for startling you. It took... a while to understand your language. As you might guess, I was supposed to arrive somewhere much different." She waved a hand over her oriental features. "Yet I am glad I arrived here. What little I have seen... you are the people I am looking for."
"You won't find anything here but death," Lefont said, finger on the trigger. Yet something about her made the action seem unnecessary. She wasn't putting up a fight, there had been no biological contaminant warnings from the computers, and while she suggested the ability to read and control minds, she didn't appear to be. But that could be a problem. What if she could fool someone into thinking she wasn't controlling them when in fact she was...?
"I apologise again," the woman said, ducking her head again. "In my culture, telepathy is as common as your speech. It *is* our speech, our communication. I... was not aware that it was no so here."
"You came here and did no research?" Lefont couldn't help but ask.
"It was... a rather hurriedly-assembled trip," the woman replied. "Yet you still have a problem with me having no name. Very well. How about Sefeliim?"
Lefont couldn't pick any meaning to it. "Is there any reason -?"
"Your culture has references to a group of good beings, known as seraphim, that descend from the skies? I am using that as a root."
Cunning. A skilled infiltraitor might pick such a name thinking that religious groups might at least appear less hostile if the name was similar to that of something that was a force for God. Or perhaps she just liked the sound of a word she'd heard at random, and threw in a couple of random syllables to only alter the sound of the word slightly. "You don't know we're not telepathic, yet you pick out obscure religious references to base your name on?"
Sefeliim shrugged. "Some humans apparently think they're telepathic, according to thoughts I've heard. Most others don't think about it. And apart from you seeming to be so rude by ignoring my repeated requests for a talk," the knocking explained, Lefont realised, "I had no idea you humans weren't telepathic. I just thought you either didn't understand me, or were being deliberately rude."
"You controlled one of my troopers -"
"Escape pods can't be opened from the inside. Not that class, anyway," she shrugged. "And I did need one of you to get me out. I asked, no reply. I know why now."
She seemed... unconcerned with the situation she found herself in. Like it didn't touch her in any way. Maybe she knew something he didn't, was going to pull a metaphorical rabbit out of a hat. But if she could read minds, and had been until now - heck, he only had her word she wasn't reading his right now - then she knew what the general feeling about aliens. Lefont wondered whether she could control the whole of the base's population at once. He shivered. Currently, that was only just under thirty people... not necessarily a huge task for someone who could possibly be the equivalent to a giant in a kindergarten's sandpit.
She was still staring at him, obviously waiting for some kind of reply. Her body language didn't seem to be terribly unfamiliar - possibly, while mindraping everyone she'd come into contact with, she'd been picking up bits and pieces from here and there. And the reason she was so unfamiliar with it was she was using most of it for the first time.
But what could he say? He couldn't read her like she could him. Not even physically, her body language was as yet too alien for him to be able to decipher most of it. And what he could understand was likely faked.
"What do I do with you?" he wondered, aloud. He started, not realising he'd spoken until she cocked her head slightly to one side. Carefully, he felt through his brain, seeing if he could feel her there. But no, he couldn't actually feel anything different. It wasn't like when he was hearing the knocking, not like it was an almost physical thing. So he guessed for the moment, she was either not in his head, or was keeping very low-key.
"You could always ask me questions?" she replied, eventually.
"Where do you come from?" She pointed upwards. "But where up there?" A slow shrug, measured out, making sure she had the right action.
"Far away, I think." She slowly shook her head, becoming more confident of the gesture as she made it. "But I don't know. Where is here? Are we still in the ?"
"What?" Lefont asked, not quite sure he had heard that right. She'd spoken - if one could call it that - in a series of clicks and he was certain, an undertone of a warbling whistle.
"I'm sorry. I, uh, don't have the correct words." Her language was a lot less stilted than it had been, that was for sure. And she was gaining confidence in her human-style body language, too. "Do you have star charts?"
This was X-Com. The Extra-Terrestrial Combat Unit. They were in a secret war against aliens, trying to shoot down UFOs from another planet. Of course they had star charts. Lefont led her to a computer terminal, called them up from the public access database, so there was no chance of her finding anything classified in any searches she might make. He brought up the basic local chart first, showed her how to manoeuvre the map screen around in any of the three dimensions.
She sat there for some time, frowning. Occasionally, she'd move the map around, but then, eventually, she shrugged and leaned back from the terminal. "I recognise none of these. The spectral classes of many of the stars are the same as some I know... as well as mass measurements... yet... none are in known configurations."
"They move over time, you know," Lefont suggested, unhelpfully as it turned out as she fixed him with a baleful eye.
"I do know this." She drew herself up. "I may be a socialogist, but everyone on had... oh dear... words not working again. We'll call it... T'leth. I... think that's the correect sound in your language... does it make any sense?" Lefont shook his head. "Ah, well. Everyone who was on Upper Primary Staff was required to know where we were at all times. Hence, we learnt a lot of stellar information. And my people, we soak up information like sponges." She tapped the side of her head. "Enlarged memory centres, you see. T'leth was a colony vessel, supermassive in size. Some 400 billion tonnes, in your measurement system."
"What happened to it?"
Sefeliim's eyes took on a misty look, gazing backwards in time. "There was a catastrophic failure in our primary navigation systems. Solar flare from a minor G-type star... yours, I believe. We were locked on course to swing around a gas giant and slingshot out of the system before the flare hit... but with navigation gone, we had no way of setting up for the final approach. So we... guessed it."
"And?"
"By the time we got basic navigation back up, the vessel was locked on course. We couldn't change it. We were heading for a primitive planet, seemingly no technology, seemingly no intelligent life. And crashed. Oh, an expeditionary ship was launched, moments before the crash... I was on that ship. Locked into stasis shortly after the crash. Like, a few minutes. And that was all I knew until I was awoken. I think mistakenly. There were people on the ship I woke on... that weren't my people. Telepathic, so I announced myself. And the ship went quiet. Then alarms started screaming, and I jumped into the enarest escape vessel I could to get away." She locked eyes with Lefont, deep, dark eyes that promised greater depths to her soul than Lefont could imagine. "Like I said, a hurriedly-assembled trip."
By now, Lefont had some nasty ideas. "Do me a favour, and move out of the way." Sefeliim did, and Lefont took her place. He tapped in some numbers, and waited while the computer churned through alterations to stellar positioning. "This might not be completely accurate," he said, leaning back so the woman could look at the screen, "but it's based on the best predictions our computers can manage, with what we know about stellar drift and galactic drift. Do any of these configurations look familiar?"
Sefeliim stared at the monitor with intensity. She scrolled through the map, looking, checking, obviously dredging things up from memory. As she worked, she murmured, "I'm so sorry for the devastation we must have caused on impact. But I didn't see anything down here when we came close... no signs of technology, no signs of... well, intelligent life. So it must have been a few years ago, or more than our navigational systems were malfunctioning."
She isolated a binary star system. "This is home. We live on the fifth planet out from this star." She tapped one.
"Zeta 2 Reticuli," Lefont read, musing before eyeing the woman again. "So, what... what do you really look like? How much of a mask is this body of yours?"
"It's... detailed. Complicated. Needless to say, I can't retake my original body without a lot of preparation. Else I might do some major damage." She shrugged, and held a hand up, about four feet off the floor. "Yet, I am about this tall. My eyes... are larger, slanted as they are now, darker. No hair. Four fingers and no... whatever this is." She waggled her thumb. "It's very useful, though... and we're a light shade of brown. Kind of like this colour." She stroked the skin on her arm, and looked thoughtful. "I've answered your questions, as best as I can. Can you answer mine? Where's our colony ship? We've got millions of people onboard who have to know we've been enslaved... surely these slavers can't have reanimated everyone..."
"I've got one more question to ask, uh, Sefeliim," Lefont said, slowly. "Did those star configurations on that map look familiar to you?"
"Oh yes," she replied, nodding emphatically. "A few light years out in some cases... but yes. Why?"
"There's a reason... that you detected no sign of us here when your ship crashed. When it did hit the Earth, it wiped out some 80% of all life on the planet, 97% of all species. The climate changed for what could have been hundreds of years."
"And your race... it came out of that period of climatical change? Assumed dominance then?"
"Oh no," Lefont replied. "My race was still about this big." He held his hands up, with about the length of a mid-sized rat between them. "That was a very long time ago. Your ship hit the Earth about 64 million years ago."
******
Mars.
Cold, dead place. Red oxides line the surface, evidence of a huge cometary strike that devastated the small world only a few thousand years earlier. But life does exist on this red and pink planet, if one knows where to look.
The place is Cydonia. A ruined face stares up from the ground, lighting constructs around it. Ruined buildings, remnants of the city that once stood here, dot the landscape. Yet, from inside some of these near-destroyed facilities, life exists.
Aliens, much as Sefeliim had described, walked along darkened corridors, entertaining no thoughts of their own. Language undecipherable blared from hidden speakers.
Through all this, in his command office, high above the Central Command chamber, Nefflim watches his fellow Sectoids scurry about, carrying out operations as the highly efficient species he knows his people to be. With emotions and thoughts removed, they, like so many other races, are incredibly hard-working. A virtual slave-labour force. Nefflim takes no particular pride in this, though. His mind is reserved for more... important matters than musing on the fate of the race he was entrusted with, oh so long ago.
On his workstation was a message, relayed in from Carrier Iota-1, before it had left Earth orbit. It appeared a stasis pod from the original colony ship crew had been reactivated by accident - a power surge caused by the human's prototype SDI systems put in place some years before. The member of the Upper Primary who had been awakened... well, Nefflim knew her, too. Unadapted. Uncontrolled. A rogue unit. And she hadn't been recovered. She could be very dangerous to him and his forces. Very dangerous indeed.
Thoughts alien to his head probed for memories of the creature he once called his sister. Dug, found what it needed, withdrew to allow him to continue to work.
Hmm. A Sectoid working for the fledgling X-Com agency. Nefflim would have to step up the planned operations on Earth. To this end, he began composing plans in his head, revising schedules. The take-over of Earth, the recovery of the molecular control system, and the reactivation of the T'leth mothership... all would be accelerated. The invasion must succeed.
Or the Sectoid race... and it's controllers...would cease to exist.
X-COM:
Enemy Unknown
by
Raymond Cooper
** Strange Attractors **
The gravel pit looked like something out of a low-budget science fiction television show. Just something about it, the way the low clumps of mist clung to the rocks as Corporal Peters swung his Heckler & Koch MP-5 from left to right and back again, seemed to suggest back blue-screening effects and cardboard monsters that looked much better on the screen than on the set, without the filtering gaze of cameras.
Off to his left, Sergeant Donaldson raised his hand to his mouthpiece, spoke something quietly into his comlink, then turned to his left, waved another pair of people up. The troops, culled from the British Special Air Service, American Delta Force, Israeli Mossad and Russian GRU, were dressed in standard SAS battle gear, kevlar body suits shaded in greys and blues to blend into the background, fade from sight.
From normal sight.
The Corporal Jake Peters knew only as Yuri went down screaming. Peters blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to clear the green tinge from them. Flashblinded. He hadn't even seen the origin point of the shot. But the green ball, trailing green streamers behind it as it flew along its path, had cut right through the kevlar and other assorted ceramics and buried itself in the flesh underneath. It hadn't ruptured from his back, but one of the first things Peters saw as his sight returned was Yuri on his stomach, a dark, blistering burn mark the size of a soccer ball on his back - residual energies from the shot had torn the uniform all the way through. Some slight element of shock must have set in, because Peters hadn't been aware of turning around while waiting for his sight to clear. He turned back to check where his fellow troops were.
And found the Sergeant had moved them forwards, firing into a bank of mist. Peters raised his weapon to fire in that general direction, but instead saw movement in the corner of his eye. Only the fact he'd turned from the direction everyone else was facing while blinded had placed him in the position to see what seemed to be a small greyish thing, scuttling just over the lip of a nearby pile of rocks. The weapon it had in its hands was long, two bevelled, vaguely rectangular, boxes mushed together not quite right. It was an off-blue colour, and the way the creature sighted along it, pointing at the Sergeant who was once more calling into his mouthpiece for reinforcements, Peters judged it was going to try and disable the force by taking out its head.
A quick flick of a thumb-switch, and the MP-5 went into semi-automatic mode. 3 shots would be fired each time his finger caressed the trigger. And right now, the weapon levelled just in front of his cheek, Peters pulled the trigger twice.
The weapon stuttered, the silenced shots finding their mark up on the rise. The creature jerked backwards, the slugs tearing through its bulbous skull. But the creature didn't want to stay down. Although it had been thrown backwards, it quickly sat upright, and groped for the weapon again. Another half-dozen shots brought it down, for good this time.
Peters then turned his attention towards the rest of the squad. An element of two operatives moved forward while another two elements covered. Peters moved forward himself, taking up his position beside his partner, and from the slight rise he now found himself on, he too could see where the original burst of fire had come from.
As the mist cleared slightly in front of him, he could see, very clearly, the form of a silvery, flattened disc. Like something out of Independence Day, or Mars Attacks! or even Earth vs The Flying Saucers. Steam hissed from around it, and it didn't appear to be open, but there were a number of fallen creatures around it.
From the places they lay, Peters assumed they had been trying to hold the item for retreival, but didn't know for certain.
The comm chatter in his helmet started up again.
"They didn't want us to have it, sir." That was Donaldson. Peters knew the Sergeant's voice anywhere.
"They never do, Sergeant. Is it damaged?" The overall commander of X-com: Base Europa, the origin of the X-Com facilities. Colonel Harrison Lefont. Technically, he should have been a Commander, but he had kept his original army designation when he'd 'officially' retired and unofficially headed up the X-Com operation. He sounded tired, distant, and yet he was parked two hundred metres back in the base's only modified Sukhoi Su-61X Skyranger. Peters guessed it was a combination of the number of missions the unit had been performing of late (three in two weeks now!) and bureaucratic disasters that plagued the unit that was causing the distance with the Colonel; he certainly hadn't been getting much sleep.
Or so Peters had heard. He'd only been forwarded to Europa a week earlier, from the Special Air Service operating in Australia, and this was his first mission. So far, it was almost routine to his training back home, if one subtracted the little grey things - he refused to call them aliens - and added in men in black balaclavas.
Also, a quick glance back at Yuri told Peters that these creatures had a little more in the way of firepower than the terrorists and criminals he'd been trained to fight. The dozen bullets to the head had told him they also either had thicker skulls, or some kind of skin-tight body armour that appeared more effective than the kevlar composite he was wearing at this moment.
"Nossir," the Sergeant replied. "Have the other teams reported in?"
"Area's clear," Lefont returned. "The transport ship that dropped them off took off before our Interceptors could reach them. Blasted Greys."
"So, they insert a commando team - for what? Why'd they drop this thing in the first place? Is it a bomb?"
Peters stared at the silvery disc. It seemed to capture his attention. All of a sudden, he had a powerful feeling something was inside, trying to get out. Locked into the joined discoid tight. Wanting out. But he didn't know how to get her out. Her? some part of his mind asked. But by now, his body seemed to be operating on a dream-like plane, on automatic. He drifted forward, knowing he should say something, but not. No one noticed his movements, as their gaze was turned outward, still watching, waiting to see if any more creatures came at them. A hand reached out, passed lightly over the top. Peters watched it in quiet awe as the disc seemed to light up. Once more, the comms exploded into life.
"Donaldson! What the hell's going on?"
"Dunno, sir, finding - PETERS! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?" Donaldson slapped Peters hand away from the disc, and the former SAS operative stumbled back, shocked, blinking rapidly as his mind was returned to him. The top of the disc hissed, rotated once, then slid along what must have been an internal rail to reveal a young, very human, female.
She appeared to be young, Peters realised, but wasn't. Her eyes when they opened, oriental, a deep chocolate that could eat one's soul, seemed to age her considerably. He also realised she was rather short, with dark hair framing an elfin face. She seemed pale, though, and Peters assumed that had to be shock - surely being kidnapped by those creatures wasn't one of the most comforting things that could happen to a young person.
Donaldson's weapon swung from Peters to cover the young woman. He, too, seemed transfixed by her for a moment, but snapped back to work quickly. "Right! Don't move!" he snapped. The woman stopped moving. "Name! Place of residence!"
The young woman looked at him for a moment, then shrugged, a little worriedly. "Can I see someone in authority, please? I have something important to tell him."
******
Lefont stared in through the one-way glass. The young woman inside continued to stare out, directly at him. It was most unnerving, he decided, as he walked from side to side of the window, her eyes tracking him ceaselessly.
Around her, doctors in isolation gear busied themselves, making sure the new arrival wasn't some kind of new alien weapon - someone carrying biological toxins, or an alien in disguise - before they cleared her for Lefont to talk to. They'd been at it for a few hours now, and the supercomputers put aside for medical use were running overtime, ignoring all other uses for them, as they checked and rechecked genetic information received from the woman.
Lefont had decided she looked to be less than twenty, yet her eyes captured something he defined as showing someone much, much older. Someone who had seen the world to the end and back again. Occasionally, he felt a brief sensation of dislocation, as if he was separated from his body, and at those times, he thought he could hear someone knocking on a door. At least, that's what it sounded like. But it sounded like a wooden door, and there were no wooden doors on base.
This was Europa, after all - home of the next generation of military organisations. X-Com had made this base, shoring up mine workings under a small town called Beckenswood with rooms of metals, plastics and ceramics. X-Com existed for one purpose, and only one purpose: to stop what seemed to be an invasion of Earth by extra terrestrials.
Aliens.
So far, X-Com had only noted one type, with a secondary life form no one was yet sure about - it could have been a robotic servitor-type mechanoid, or a kind of powered armour - and while Lefont was outwardly hoping that would be the extent of it, he knew deep down that there would be more coming. Every race has specifics to its engineering and architecture - certain things are almost racial. Heights of doors and ceilings, types of weapons, standardised equipment. And yet, the alien invasion force had what X-Com-hired researchers said were at least four major influences in their architecture alone. More were suggested in the recovered equipment, but until the final research facilities were completed, Lefont wasn't having anyone do more than look at the retreival items.
One race would be hard enough to beat. Two more difficult. Four, damned near impossible. The amount of industry a single space-faring species could call upon to fuel a war effort was staggering. But combining four? Lefont also privately hoped that he was wrong, that the evidence of at least four races meant that one single race had taken influences from the others, just as the modern world today owed its roots to Rome, Greece, Egypt, and two dozen other ancient civilisations.
He paced to the isolation lab's airlock when he saw the senior doctor head for it, and waited for decontamination protocols to be enacted. Once the doctor was through the door, though, Lefont wanted to know the results of the testing.
"Well, she's human," the doctor, an older man by the name of Singh, mused. "Very much so. The DNA is strong. And without the... the 'dead links' one usually finds in a human."
"Dead links?" Lefont asked.
"Evolutionary baggage that'd died out, long ago. A gene for fur, or claws, sharp teeth, whatever, that's been turned off by the relentless march of mutation." Singh shrugged.
"So... is she human, or just posing?"
"The computers say human." But Singh shrugged. "I'd reserve judgment myself. But you seem safe. I guess she knew where you were, judging by the way she kept staring at the mirror."
Lefont nodded, and entered the isolab, the other physician standing in the back of the room, in case she was needed. The woman on the examination table stared at him from her seated position, chocolate eyes boring into him. He heard yet another knock on a wooden door as this woman focussed her gaze on him, and she waited. But obviously, she didn't get the desired response, because she sunk back into herself.
"We need to know your name," Lefont began, "so we can return you to where you came from."
"My name... is... unpronouncible," the woman sighed.
"Try me," Lefont smiled. "I've been stationed in Japan before."
The woman produced a series of whistles and clicks, and cocked her head to one shoulder, staring at Lefont as if to say, 'well, I *did* tell you...'.
Lefont shrugged. "We need to be able to identify you." Pause. Hesitancy. "We could... always try running you through global DNA banks, see if we can find a match...?"
The woman shrugged. "You won't find a match there, either." Another knock on a wooden door.
Lefont looked around, annoyed, wondering if someone was playing a practical joke on him. When he turned back, the woman was staring at him again, yet this time confused. "Your race... isn't telepathic," she stated.
"My...?" Alien. She had to be. Regardless of the opinion of the computers. Lefont had suspected, but had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Now he knew for certain. His hand grabbed at his waist, unsnapping his pistol's holster, and he brought up the small automatic pistol in one smooth, easy movement.
The woman shook her head, unconcerned. "I apologise for startling you. It took... a while to understand your language. As you might guess, I was supposed to arrive somewhere much different." She waved a hand over her oriental features. "Yet I am glad I arrived here. What little I have seen... you are the people I am looking for."
"You won't find anything here but death," Lefont said, finger on the trigger. Yet something about her made the action seem unnecessary. She wasn't putting up a fight, there had been no biological contaminant warnings from the computers, and while she suggested the ability to read and control minds, she didn't appear to be. But that could be a problem. What if she could fool someone into thinking she wasn't controlling them when in fact she was...?
"I apologise again," the woman said, ducking her head again. "In my culture, telepathy is as common as your speech. It *is* our speech, our communication. I... was not aware that it was no so here."
"You came here and did no research?" Lefont couldn't help but ask.
"It was... a rather hurriedly-assembled trip," the woman replied. "Yet you still have a problem with me having no name. Very well. How about Sefeliim?"
Lefont couldn't pick any meaning to it. "Is there any reason -?"
"Your culture has references to a group of good beings, known as seraphim, that descend from the skies? I am using that as a root."
Cunning. A skilled infiltraitor might pick such a name thinking that religious groups might at least appear less hostile if the name was similar to that of something that was a force for God. Or perhaps she just liked the sound of a word she'd heard at random, and threw in a couple of random syllables to only alter the sound of the word slightly. "You don't know we're not telepathic, yet you pick out obscure religious references to base your name on?"
Sefeliim shrugged. "Some humans apparently think they're telepathic, according to thoughts I've heard. Most others don't think about it. And apart from you seeming to be so rude by ignoring my repeated requests for a talk," the knocking explained, Lefont realised, "I had no idea you humans weren't telepathic. I just thought you either didn't understand me, or were being deliberately rude."
"You controlled one of my troopers -"
"Escape pods can't be opened from the inside. Not that class, anyway," she shrugged. "And I did need one of you to get me out. I asked, no reply. I know why now."
She seemed... unconcerned with the situation she found herself in. Like it didn't touch her in any way. Maybe she knew something he didn't, was going to pull a metaphorical rabbit out of a hat. But if she could read minds, and had been until now - heck, he only had her word she wasn't reading his right now - then she knew what the general feeling about aliens. Lefont wondered whether she could control the whole of the base's population at once. He shivered. Currently, that was only just under thirty people... not necessarily a huge task for someone who could possibly be the equivalent to a giant in a kindergarten's sandpit.
She was still staring at him, obviously waiting for some kind of reply. Her body language didn't seem to be terribly unfamiliar - possibly, while mindraping everyone she'd come into contact with, she'd been picking up bits and pieces from here and there. And the reason she was so unfamiliar with it was she was using most of it for the first time.
But what could he say? He couldn't read her like she could him. Not even physically, her body language was as yet too alien for him to be able to decipher most of it. And what he could understand was likely faked.
"What do I do with you?" he wondered, aloud. He started, not realising he'd spoken until she cocked her head slightly to one side. Carefully, he felt through his brain, seeing if he could feel her there. But no, he couldn't actually feel anything different. It wasn't like when he was hearing the knocking, not like it was an almost physical thing. So he guessed for the moment, she was either not in his head, or was keeping very low-key.
"You could always ask me questions?" she replied, eventually.
"Where do you come from?" She pointed upwards. "But where up there?" A slow shrug, measured out, making sure she had the right action.
"Far away, I think." She slowly shook her head, becoming more confident of the gesture as she made it. "But I don't know. Where is here? Are we still in the ?"
"What?" Lefont asked, not quite sure he had heard that right. She'd spoken - if one could call it that - in a series of clicks and he was certain, an undertone of a warbling whistle.
"I'm sorry. I, uh, don't have the correct words." Her language was a lot less stilted than it had been, that was for sure. And she was gaining confidence in her human-style body language, too. "Do you have star charts?"
This was X-Com. The Extra-Terrestrial Combat Unit. They were in a secret war against aliens, trying to shoot down UFOs from another planet. Of course they had star charts. Lefont led her to a computer terminal, called them up from the public access database, so there was no chance of her finding anything classified in any searches she might make. He brought up the basic local chart first, showed her how to manoeuvre the map screen around in any of the three dimensions.
She sat there for some time, frowning. Occasionally, she'd move the map around, but then, eventually, she shrugged and leaned back from the terminal. "I recognise none of these. The spectral classes of many of the stars are the same as some I know... as well as mass measurements... yet... none are in known configurations."
"They move over time, you know," Lefont suggested, unhelpfully as it turned out as she fixed him with a baleful eye.
"I do know this." She drew herself up. "I may be a socialogist, but everyone on had... oh dear... words not working again. We'll call it... T'leth. I... think that's the correect sound in your language... does it make any sense?" Lefont shook his head. "Ah, well. Everyone who was on Upper Primary Staff was required to know where we were at all times. Hence, we learnt a lot of stellar information. And my people, we soak up information like sponges." She tapped the side of her head. "Enlarged memory centres, you see. T'leth was a colony vessel, supermassive in size. Some 400 billion tonnes, in your measurement system."
"What happened to it?"
Sefeliim's eyes took on a misty look, gazing backwards in time. "There was a catastrophic failure in our primary navigation systems. Solar flare from a minor G-type star... yours, I believe. We were locked on course to swing around a gas giant and slingshot out of the system before the flare hit... but with navigation gone, we had no way of setting up for the final approach. So we... guessed it."
"And?"
"By the time we got basic navigation back up, the vessel was locked on course. We couldn't change it. We were heading for a primitive planet, seemingly no technology, seemingly no intelligent life. And crashed. Oh, an expeditionary ship was launched, moments before the crash... I was on that ship. Locked into stasis shortly after the crash. Like, a few minutes. And that was all I knew until I was awoken. I think mistakenly. There were people on the ship I woke on... that weren't my people. Telepathic, so I announced myself. And the ship went quiet. Then alarms started screaming, and I jumped into the enarest escape vessel I could to get away." She locked eyes with Lefont, deep, dark eyes that promised greater depths to her soul than Lefont could imagine. "Like I said, a hurriedly-assembled trip."
By now, Lefont had some nasty ideas. "Do me a favour, and move out of the way." Sefeliim did, and Lefont took her place. He tapped in some numbers, and waited while the computer churned through alterations to stellar positioning. "This might not be completely accurate," he said, leaning back so the woman could look at the screen, "but it's based on the best predictions our computers can manage, with what we know about stellar drift and galactic drift. Do any of these configurations look familiar?"
Sefeliim stared at the monitor with intensity. She scrolled through the map, looking, checking, obviously dredging things up from memory. As she worked, she murmured, "I'm so sorry for the devastation we must have caused on impact. But I didn't see anything down here when we came close... no signs of technology, no signs of... well, intelligent life. So it must have been a few years ago, or more than our navigational systems were malfunctioning."
She isolated a binary star system. "This is home. We live on the fifth planet out from this star." She tapped one.
"Zeta 2 Reticuli," Lefont read, musing before eyeing the woman again. "So, what... what do you really look like? How much of a mask is this body of yours?"
"It's... detailed. Complicated. Needless to say, I can't retake my original body without a lot of preparation. Else I might do some major damage." She shrugged, and held a hand up, about four feet off the floor. "Yet, I am about this tall. My eyes... are larger, slanted as they are now, darker. No hair. Four fingers and no... whatever this is." She waggled her thumb. "It's very useful, though... and we're a light shade of brown. Kind of like this colour." She stroked the skin on her arm, and looked thoughtful. "I've answered your questions, as best as I can. Can you answer mine? Where's our colony ship? We've got millions of people onboard who have to know we've been enslaved... surely these slavers can't have reanimated everyone..."
"I've got one more question to ask, uh, Sefeliim," Lefont said, slowly. "Did those star configurations on that map look familiar to you?"
"Oh yes," she replied, nodding emphatically. "A few light years out in some cases... but yes. Why?"
"There's a reason... that you detected no sign of us here when your ship crashed. When it did hit the Earth, it wiped out some 80% of all life on the planet, 97% of all species. The climate changed for what could have been hundreds of years."
"And your race... it came out of that period of climatical change? Assumed dominance then?"
"Oh no," Lefont replied. "My race was still about this big." He held his hands up, with about the length of a mid-sized rat between them. "That was a very long time ago. Your ship hit the Earth about 64 million years ago."
******
Mars.
Cold, dead place. Red oxides line the surface, evidence of a huge cometary strike that devastated the small world only a few thousand years earlier. But life does exist on this red and pink planet, if one knows where to look.
The place is Cydonia. A ruined face stares up from the ground, lighting constructs around it. Ruined buildings, remnants of the city that once stood here, dot the landscape. Yet, from inside some of these near-destroyed facilities, life exists.
Aliens, much as Sefeliim had described, walked along darkened corridors, entertaining no thoughts of their own. Language undecipherable blared from hidden speakers.
Through all this, in his command office, high above the Central Command chamber, Nefflim watches his fellow Sectoids scurry about, carrying out operations as the highly efficient species he knows his people to be. With emotions and thoughts removed, they, like so many other races, are incredibly hard-working. A virtual slave-labour force. Nefflim takes no particular pride in this, though. His mind is reserved for more... important matters than musing on the fate of the race he was entrusted with, oh so long ago.
On his workstation was a message, relayed in from Carrier Iota-1, before it had left Earth orbit. It appeared a stasis pod from the original colony ship crew had been reactivated by accident - a power surge caused by the human's prototype SDI systems put in place some years before. The member of the Upper Primary who had been awakened... well, Nefflim knew her, too. Unadapted. Uncontrolled. A rogue unit. And she hadn't been recovered. She could be very dangerous to him and his forces. Very dangerous indeed.
Thoughts alien to his head probed for memories of the creature he once called his sister. Dug, found what it needed, withdrew to allow him to continue to work.
Hmm. A Sectoid working for the fledgling X-Com agency. Nefflim would have to step up the planned operations on Earth. To this end, he began composing plans in his head, revising schedules. The take-over of Earth, the recovery of the molecular control system, and the reactivation of the T'leth mothership... all would be accelerated. The invasion must succeed.
Or the Sectoid race... and it's controllers...would cease to exist.
