XCOM: Terror from the Breach

by Of Questionable Veracity

If XCOM existed when the Breach opened, how might that have happened? Probably differently to how I picture it, I can but try. Playing pretty fast and loose with which version of XCOM this actually follows on from, but in broad strokes assume the invasion happened and was defeated. I'll see if I can do XCOM justice, I guess.

2. Chapter 2

You would think that an attack with a single, known point of entry would be considerably easier to handle than a space-borne invasion with aggressor able and willing to swoop in anywhere they want, anytime they want. You would think so, but you would be wrong.

We knew where the Breach was, yes, but that did not turn out to be helpful. Knowing where an inter-dimensional rift in the very fabric of space and time is located is no use to anyone if you cannot work out a way to actually interact with it. This we found out very quickly.

First things first we needed to try and get some understanding of what it actually was. Initial impressions were sketchy and deeper analysis and sensor-sweeps only gave us a bunch of anomalous, unusual energy readings that didn't really tell us anything we could use. Eventually though we figured out what it was. Roughly. A wormhole, from us here to there – 'there' in this case being somewhere we had no idea about.

Our first attempts at actually probing the Breach and trying to send something through were all failures. Everything was destroyed the instant it made contact. So then we tried blowing up the Breach, because why not? It seemed worth a shot. That also did not work – whatever the Breach was made of turned out to be indestructible, at least by any means we had. We didn't really linger on this option, as we felt it would simply be doing more harm than good and it may have gone badly wrong for us anyway. Best to be cautious, we felt.

Besides, is a portal really made of anything, really? This is why I'm not in the science division, I suppose.

So we tried to contain the Breach. We dumped a whole lot of rocks and debris on it, tried to bury it. Didn't work. We built a coffin around it, all sheet-steel and reinforced concrete – Chernobyl style. Did not work. We tried another coffin, this time with Alloy in it. Also didn't work. Whenever there was a Breach event the thing just destroyed whatever we'd put around it.

In the end we just tried to make the best of the situation we were given. We deployed sensor-buoys and listening posts and autonomous sweeper-drones around the Breach, monitored it directly, brought in people to try and work out if there was any pattern to the events when it opened – basically we kept a very, very close eye on it. Anytime anything came out we killed it. Or we tried to, at least. Turned out even three-hundred foot, eight-thousand ton monsters could disappear in the ocean if they really wanted to.

Most got spotted right off. We noticed the Breach opening, we tagged them as they left, we followed them and we killed them. Those were the good days. Every so often though one slipped the net. Maybe they learnt where the buoys were, maybe they got lucky – it didn't matter. Here and there one would simply vanish only to pop up miles away, ready to clamber up onto land and start making problems for the nice, ordinary people going about their day.

At that point there were a few who wanted to start building walls.

Those people had always been there, really, but back when we were winning no-one paid them any attention. The idea of actually trying to build coastline-spanning walls was laughable. Three-hundred foot plus for however many miles? How much material would that need? Do you go entirely around or only what might be considered 'at risk' places? Who decides that? What was to stop a Kaiju just climbing over it? Or going through it? It was patently absurd. Besides, walls don't kill things, and dead things cause fewer problems.

No. Jaegers might be a bit ridiculous but they really were the best approach. The only solution, in fact. Once the novelty of having our very own giant monsters wore off they just became another piece of equipment like anything else. A solution to a problem, a weapon in our arsenal. It really came down to the quality of pilots at the end of the day anyway, like it always did, and the quality of the teams supporting them. As an organisation we got very, very good at monster slaying.

Of course, we haven't even touched on the part where things started to go really wrong. Some people probably would have felt better hiding at that point.