A/N Well, I haven't written in a while, so I'm trying this new story idea. Harrier, the Baltic is probably not going to continue, but if anyone wants to continue the story I am quite happy for them to do it. E-mail me at Jimmymac666x@hotmail.com. =) Anyway, back to this story, Command and Conquer, all related names, units and ideas are the sole property of Westwood Studios. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery they say, but anyway, read and review, and hopefully…enjoy!
Nightshade
A lone eagle soared above the warm desert, its wings outstretched in almost Christ like fashion, riding the thermals as its sharp eyes scanned the ground below for its prey, the small rodents that scurried around, hiding from the death that soared the skies above, immune, all powerful, the bringer of death to all those that dare risk scuttling along the exposed ground.
It spied its prey, small and almost indistinguishable on the ground, running along the sun drenched sands with a frantic pace. It watched for a second, the dipped its wing and dived down. The little desert creature never had a chance, a panicked squeak was the last sound it made as it was picked up and crushed in the eagle's mighty talons, paying the price for losing a game it never had a hope of winning.
The eagle soared back into the air; eyes peeled once more, scouring the ground with razor sharp vision. Its eyes spied another sight though, one meaningless to it, and sounds too that could even be heard up here, sounds of thunder and pain and flashes of orange and red light that shot up into the desert sky, almost like fiery geysers as they rose dramatically up to the heavens before dying away. The eagle simply turned away, heading east to a less disturbed place…
"Shit!" Yelled the soldier as he fired off his rifle into the melee below him. The sand sputtered in little thuds around him as the enemy returned fire, missing the last remaining G.I by inches as his own gun clicked as it finished its magazine. He desperately struggled to find a spare clip but his hand found nothing on his belt. His eyes widened in fear as the Russians drew closer, their fire becoming more accurate until a sharp agonising pain cut into the G.I's shoulder. He recoiled from the wound, dropping his rifle, and clutching his now bleeding and useless arm. His hand then moved to his pistol, pulling out the black gun in one last solid act of defiance. He brought the gun and shot indiscriminately at the approaching red shapes that the desert haze turned the Soviets into. He hit one in the head, right in the guy's left eye, sending a spray of red blood out the back of his skull. He fired again, hearing a yell of pain as another of the red shapes went down clutching its leg. Then there was one last bang. The G.I felt something hit his throat before he lost feeling in his body, a numb dullness replacing it as his view slowly turned black. He fell forward onto the floor and died without a sound.
The Russians surrounded the body. One reached down and removed the man's dog tags. He held the glittering metal up to the sun, reading the name and number slowly, before dropping it back on the body again. Even Russian's admire bravery, and they buried him there, under a cover of sand, and the metal dog tags were left too, held down by a carefully placed rock. Each of the Russians stood looking at the little rise in the sand, before they turned and headed north, away from the resting place of Private Samuel John.
The whine of the helicopter's rotor blades nearly drown out the radio in the cockpit, but the pilot received enough information to make a fairly decent landing. The heat rising from the ground made low level flying very risky, but there was a good pilot in the control seat and the wheels touched down without a problem.
The door on the left side of the Blackhawk was pulled back by a member of the ground crew, and out stepped a high-ranking officer onto the desert sand. His dark eyes surveyed the base around before he took out a pair of sunglasses and put them casually on. Several junior officers came up to him, saluted, and then preceded to inform the recently arrived man of various, almost trivial matters. He was the base's new commander, in charge of a forward attack base barely ten miles from the front lines. The camp served as a command and relay post, field hospital and repair bay, and the hub of all nearby Allied activity. The man lit a cigar as one of the younger officers went on about requesting new radio parts, before dismissing all of them with a flick of his hand.
The commander was the stereotypical Texan, big and with the build and charm of a grizzly tank. He walked over to the centre of the base, standing beneath a rather thin looking guard tower for some shade. He looked around him again, this time concentrating more on the various little details of the facility. Several IFV's were laying stripped down in the garages and repair bays, a dozen or so mechanics scurrying over them, trying to fix up combat wounds and repair sand damage to the engines and weapon systems. Two huge Chrono Miners trundled past him on their way to an ore field in the north, and a single Chrono Legionnaire sat at the base of a flagpole, idly fiddling with his weapon. There was distant gunfire to the west; the dull thuds shook the ground like small earth tremors. Three huge Grand Cannons, positioned on a ridge about half a mile away, answered in chorus, sending several heavy projectiles back in the direction of the earlier shots.
The commander took a pair of binoculars and stared out towards the front lines, a faint black line on the horizon. He couldn't see much as the haze disrupted his view, but he could pick up the occasional puff of sand and smoke, and three small bright flashes in the distance where the Grand Cannon's shells landed. The crack of a machine gun started up for a few seconds, and then quickly died down again after a moment or so.
The commander put his binoculars down, and turned. Then something caught his attention, a sort of weird shimmering in the haze in the corner of his eye. He turned back round, but the haze above the desert had returned to normal. He cautiously brought the binoculars back up to his eyes. Nothing. And yet… The commander was a superb soldier, and he knew when something was not right, to have a sixth sense that could detect things his other facilities couldn't. He put the binoculars down, and watched with his own eyes.
Then it appeared again, this time fairly distinctly. The haze was changing direction; it seemed to be being pushed aside, almost like water around the hull of an invisible boat. It wasn't some fluke wind. Experience taught him that.
And then everything turned to fire. The desert, base and people around the commander burst into flames, he himself felt a searing heat over his body, he fell agonisingly to the ground, with his skin feeling like it was burning. There was a shockwave of a terrible sound, as loud as thunder and made of screams and cries and grinding and screeches. The wind rushed pass his body with the strength of a tornado, blasting him off the ground and throwing him into the base of the guard tower, where he finally lost consciousness.
When he came to, he found he was alone. The sand entered his wounds, stinging like mad and causing severe pain when he moved. He got up achingly to his feet, and he gasped. The base was destroyed. Entirely and utterly, almost like a nuclear attack apart from the lack of a mushroom cloud overhead. He struggled even to breath; his uniform now just a few charred rags, and all around him lay burnt machinery, blackened corpses and levelled buildings. All around him was a smell of burnt meat, and the commander collapsed on his knees and vomited over the sand. He stayed in that position until the Soviets arrived.
A world away on a rainy afternoon in Denver, a military car pulled up into the Allies GHQ on the edge the city. Two men exited it, one the driver, and the other a Major, who immediately proceeded up the stone stairs and into the building. He passed several G.I's and a nasty looking guard dog, before arriving at the reception desk. He smiled at the young secretary, who scowled back at him.
"Name?" She asked distantly.
"Major Philip John, I'm here to see General McKinney."
"One second," she typed something into her computer, "yes, he is expecting you, his office is on the top floor, first on your left from the elevator."
"Thank you ma'am." Said John, glaring back at the secretary. He entered the elevator alone, and laid back against the side of the cab as it travelled up the floors. He stepped out of the top, and knocked on the first door. He waited a minute, but no answer came, and when he checked the door he discovered he had knocked on the men's bathroom. He looked around, checking no one saw that, and moved discreetly to the next door along, which thankfully was the correct one. He made a mental note to report the secretary. His knock was answered and he entered the office, browsing the pictures on the wall before accepting the General's offer of a chair. A brass model of a Grizzly tank lay on his desk, along with a pile of official looking documents, some lying alone, and others in "top secret" folders. The General leaned back, opening a small bottle of whisky and pouring both himself and his guest a generous amount in a pair of tumblers. John saluted mildly, the General laughed, and returned it.
"So sir, what was this thing you needed to discuss with me?"
"Ah, Major, welcome," he passed the Major one of the tumblers, "I have an assignment for you."
"Well, I assume its tough, difficult and dangerous, otherwise you wouldn't be sharing this."
"No, you are right," the General sighed heavily, "we've got a tough one alright."
"Go on."
"Well," said the General, "its very hard to explain without giving you some back ground info, here." The General passed one of the "top secret" folders to John. He scanned it through. There wasn't much, firstly an IR picture of the sky with a faint red streak across it, then a black and white photo of a charred forest, and lastly a simple intercepted transmission which said Deploy the Nightshade. John looked up at the General, whose face was now deep in though, a solemn expression on his face. "Major, I'll explain. Two months ago NORAD received this picture from an observatory in North Dakota. A single object, invisible to the naked eye and radar, passed through our upper atmosphere from space. Its passage through the atmosphere however, heated it up so much that its heat signature could be traced and plotted. Judging by its trajectory and speed we calculated it to land somewhere in Western Siberia. Now, despite the success of the KGB and Yuri's psychic corps, we still have one or two operating contacts in the outer regions of Russia. One of them was able to find and photograph the crash site, which is the photo you have there."
"What had happened?"
"We still don't know for sure, firstly we just dismissed it as a large meteorite coming down to earth. But several things were unusual. Firstly, as I've mentioned, the complete lack of the thing's radar signature. Anything big enough to cause that amount of damage when it hit should have lit up our radars like a Christmas tree. Secondly, the Russian military became heavily involved; massive amounts of equipment were poured into the region, normal civilian traffic was halted and many nearby settlements were evacuated. The authorities said that a satellite with a nuclear power generator aboard had crash-landed and they were trying to stop them getting radiation poisoning. Not a bad cover story, but there was no satellite. A few weeks later however, the military pulled out almost instantaneously.
Then nothing. Until yesterday. A forward listening post picked up that message ten minutes before it went offline. A spy plane found the wreckage of the facility this morning, along with several bases we had lost contact with. The soviets had overrun them with such speed and force it took us totally by surprise. They didn't even get a message out before they were hit. There was only one survivor, one of the base's commanders, horribly burnt and on the verge of death. He seemed to have been driven mad, and we could only get one or two pieces of information of him. Firstly, the attack was conducted instantly with a very powerful weapon that turned practically everything to fire. And secondly, the attacker he saw was invisible and hovering above the ground."
"What?"
"Invisible, and it appears capable of suspended flight above the surface."
"How could he see it if it was invisible?"
"The answer we got was that he saw it disrupt the haze, which seems weird, but he was adamant in what he said, and he won't take any other suggestion."
"I see, …" muttered John. He sat silently for a moment, tapping his fingers on the desk, and then he spoke again. "So what is the connection, or is it only a guess?"
"Kind of an informed guess, we know that several large amounts of top secret equipment was shunted between several sites, the last one sent several large containers to the Soviet occupied states in the south."
"Hmmm, so, getting back to the thing that crashed…. what do you believe it is?"
"We have two guesses, either it was a meteorite, made of a new, highly absorbent material, that the Russians have been able to successfully adapt to their own designs…or…"
"Or?"
"We have played with the idea of this being a piece of extra terrestrial technology."
"I understand." There was silence again. "So what is my mission?"
"Simply, you are to lead a combat scout party into the desert, and find out what Nightshade is…"
