Author Note
Naruto was created by Kishimoto, and the UFO series was created by Mythos Games before being developed by a variety of studios, most recently 2K and Firaxis. This story is set in the Naruto universe, ten years before the start of the manga - a time when several interesting things were happening at once. The story draws from the XCOM canon of the first game (UFO Defense) and the first of the reboots (Enemy Unkown). The Naruto setting is broadly canon compliant at the start, with a minor change to the beginning of the Hyuga affair, but quickly becomes divergent with the arrival of XCOM personnel as the single point of departure.
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"Artifice stable."
"What's the ratio on that aperture?" Dr. Vodyanov asked, moving from computer to computer like a hummingbird, peering at screens over the shoulders of excited lab techs, occasionally pushing them aside to peck at a keyboard or swipe a touch-pad.
"Eight nanometres," came the reply from across the room, where another research scientist attended a large, skeletal steel hemisphere, which cradled a glowing pinprick of light.
"Forget Mars, if we can replicate their spatial shearing, we can take the fight right back to Alpha Centuri, Proxima, or wherever they're coming from," Dr. Vodyanov said, with a sinister smile, at the sight of which at least one lab technician shuddered and looked away.
"Dr. Vodyanov, I'm picking up unusual readings in the sonic range. Mid-frequency oscillations," said Michael Penrose, an elderly assistant, operating one of the consoles furthest from the apparatus. Mike caught a flash of red hair as the doctor swept across the room to stand beside him, looking down at the affronting variety of arcane visualizations dancing on his screens.
"Noise from the electromagnetic induction?" she asked.
"No, that's all accounted for. This pattern is unusually low entropy, it could be a signal," the man replied, sweeping his hand across a touch-pad, navigating a chain of computer menus. "Isolating and amplifying for the lab speakers."
The speakers at the corners of the room crackled into life, and a muffled sound could be heard beneath layers of static, like the sounds of screaming.
"That sounds like vocalisation, but where's it coming from?" Vodyanov asked, turning to face the the pinprick of azurite fire, hanging unsuspended in the skeletal artifice at the other side of the room.
"Check for local interference," a new voice said, heralding the arrival of a man in a business suit at the lab's swinging doors.
"Director Cross, so you finally decided my little project was worthy of your attention?" Vodyanov asked of the newcomer.
"Nada on local interference. Shielding is intact, this is not a terrestrial signal," Michael, the grey haired lab tech replied.
"Could it be coming from the other side?" Cross asked.
"The other side of what?" Vodyanov asked, derisively. "It's just a static field. It doesn't go anywhere by itself."
"Of the hole," Cross persisted, nodding at the pinprick of blue light. "That's what it is, isn't it? A hole in space?"
Dr. Vodyanov turned dismissively from the suited man, back to face the lab's central piece of equipment. "The Threat's interstellar engines use the gravitational shearing around an orphan space-time aperture to accelerate their ships to near-light speeds. There is no 'other side', it's a mathematical construct written out in focused elerium radiation fields."
Vodyanov had barely finished speaking when the screams crackling over the lab's speakers gave way to excited speech. Vodyanov's mouth drooped open as if to give an order, until she was interrupted by the word spilling across the audio stream.
"Is that Japanese?" she asked, almost to herself.
Cross darted to the lab's door and leaned outside, giving orders to the guards outside in quiet, rapid barks. "Call down to personnel, get me a tier-two sentry team." He moved to return to the lab, but faltered for a step, adding, "make sure they have Japanese in their language profile."
The guard outside gave a quick nod, before reaching for a radio as Cross returned to the room.
"Get Captain Shulz in here with an engineer team to check the EM shielding as well, I don't want to shut down the experiment because we picked up a stray TV broadcast," Vodyanov said to one of her own subordinates.
It took less than a minute for a pair of guards to arrive in the lab. One, a tall, chisel faced woman in matte black powered armour, the other a slight man with a shaved head, and a more form fitting light combat suit. They moved as one at a gesture from Cross and took up positions flanking the alloyed hemisphere.
They were barely in position before another group arrived in the lab and quickly went to work. Four engineers in overalls positioned themselves around the room, two drawing hand-held devices with arcane-looking antennas, a third plugging their hand-held into a cable jack set into the wall close to the ground. The fourth, ostensibly the leader of the group, approached Vodyanov.
"Doctor, heard you're having yet more problems with the fucking EM shielding in here," Maggie Shulz said, approaching the doctor. "It's a joke, I told them twice while we were installing it, grounding it to the base's main pin opens up all kinds of feedback paths."
"That may be, Captain. We certainly picked up something. Mike, can you play back the coherent vocalisations?" Vodyanov asked the grey haired lab tech. After a moment later the speakers began replaying the excited yells from earlier.
"What the fuck is that? Are they speaking?" Shulz asked, moving towards the apparatus and holding up her hand-held to the aperture enclosure.
"Girl- bitch- something- Huygens?" Vodyanov suggested as she listened to the excited shouts. "The feed is poor quality, nothing clear enough for a match in the cultural database. Shulz, my techs say there's no local interference, do you have an alternate hypothesis? Cross suggested the aperture might lead somewhere, which sounds preposterous to me, but you built it..."
Shulz grimaced thoughtfully. "We just put the emitters together, to your specs. Mathematically it's distinct from a wormhole, but none of us fucking understand what happens in the aperture. We just want to ride the distortion."
"The sound can't be coming from the aperture," Mark said, spinning in his chair to shine a self-satisfied smile at the pair. "We're still below ten nanometres, too small for sound waves of that frequency to propagate."
Vodyanov sighed and passed a rueful, if slightly disappointed smile around the lab.
A moment passed, and then there was a blinding flash of blue-white light. There was the enormous sound of reverberating feedback, and the skeletal hemisphere around the aperture suddenly bucked violently off the ground, oscillating backwards and forwards in madcap vibration. The front of the tall guard's power armour was black and smoking, and Shulz was on her back clutching her hands to her face.
"Shut it down!" Vodyanov tried to shout, but couldn't hear her own voice over the deep thrumming sound of reverberation. "Shut it down, shut it down!" she cried silently, feeling her throat becoming increasingly raw with each inaudible yell.
Spheres of light began popping throughout the room, adding rainbow hues to the maelstrom of sound, and leaving neatly sliced out spheres of empty space where they intersected solid objects.
There was a flash of light that completely filled Vodyanov's vision, and then there was darkness.