"I'm not entirely sure," Commander Kinkade said icily, "how many times I have to repeat myself. XCOM is in control of the situation."
The dark-suited man enshrouded on the screen somehow managed to convey a strong sense of menace and mistrust - despite the lighting forcing him into a facial expression range equal to that of rather empathic rock.
"Commander," he began, "although you have certainly done this organization proud with your efforts in keeping Earth free of the alien invaders, the Hyperwave Beacon Satellite Network has detected a small fleet of what appear to be battleships - although these are larger than the Ethereal ones." Somehow he managed an even deeper basso profundo, and with it, even more menace. "Much larger."
"Yes, yes, very well!" Kinkade said quickly. "I'll take care of it!" He leaned away from the viewscreen and heaved a sigh, running one hand through his hair. After a call from the Council he always did get rather nostalgic about the good old days when they just gave him money to buy guns. And, of course, brilliant men and women to build... better... guns...
Sitting up straight, Kinkade put in a group call to Nathan Shen and Elizabeth Vahlen. "Listen up," he began seriously, "we haven't got a lot of time - at most a day or so. There's no way the new cruisers in the shipyards will be space-worthy, let alone battle-ready, by the time these Vankans get here." "Vulcans, sir," interrupted Nathan, "and if I may..."
"You may not," Kinkade growled. "What you may do is work out a way we can beat ten of those vessels the Ashes engaged earlier, except better armed and better equipped, because as our lovely Vulcan guest told us, that was a science starship and these will be full fledged cruisers." "It's impossible!" Shen responded. "There's no way in hell that we can put together some superweapon that can take them all out like that!" "We don't have to," Dr. Vahlen said quietly. Both Commander Kinkade and Nathan Shen gave a puzzled glance toward their viewscreens. "That's not how we fought the last war, is it, Commander?" she said. "No. We have their technology, and given time, perhaps, we could improve on it enough to face them in open combat. But time is what we have none of, so we must engage them in a... different way. Tell me, Commander, as a man who has experienced both, which is worse: to take a plasma rifle round directly to the chestplate, or to be swarmed by insects?"
Kinkade winced. He remembered all too well the time spent in South America, and no sooner had he gone through the requisite flashbacks than - his eyes widened, and an unsettling smile spread across his face.
"Nathan," he said conversationally, "how many Firestorms do we have?"
Nate Shen frowned. Unlike his father, he was not a very imaginative person, and it took him a while to pick up on subtleties. "In total?" he asked. "Around fifteen hundred active ones, five hundred of which have the final Fusion Lance upgrade. The rest just have the EMP Cannons. We've got another thousand in storage, but they're just equipped with the single Plasma Cannon."
"Nathan, son," Kinkade continued, in a gleeful manner that was entirely inappropriate for his rank, "how many pilots do we have?"
"I can answer that," said Dr. Vahlen cheerfully, "plenty and more to spare. The problem in the Ethereal War was always one of materiel, never one of manpower. Trust me, Commander..." Here she paused as Nathan finally realized what they were discussing and make an exclamation of surprise. "... You'll have all the men you need."
"But," Shen spluttered, "they're fighter craft! Not meant for combat outside the atmosphere!"
"Will it affect their engines?" Kinkade asked worriedly.
"No," Shen conceded, "but - I mean, space combat, engaging starships with fighter craft... Besides, we'd lose all opportunity to study them!"
"We still have some of the old Avenger transports from a few years back," the doctor said brightly, "and surely there's one or two XCOM squads who still have some spirit!"
"They all do," Kinkade said hurriedly, "I made sure of it." This time it was Shen and Vahlen who gave him an odd look. "What?" he said, a defensive expression on his face. "You think I'd let those loonies loose on the world after what they'd been through? Four years of war with never a day going by where you weren't being rushed from one combat to the next, and the next, and the hospital if you were an unlucky bastard who only got wounded instead of dying outright. Never a week going by where someone on your squad didn't die, someone you were friends with." He looked at Vahlen and Shen. "Shen, you know..." he said quietly. "You know. You joined up the last year of the war, didn't you?"
"I had come of age," the young man said firmly. "It was my responsibility to come to the field of combat."
"You don't know what the old guard are like," said Kinkade softly. "They're - insane. The C Squad, less so than the others, perhaps... Maybe with a little bit of time, they could have been re-integrated into society, but the B Squad were all pure sadists, and the A Squad are nothing more than dogs on a chain. It... pains me to release them."
Dr. Vahlen had bowed her head, not wanting to interrupt the Commander's reminiscing. When he had stayed silent for a few seconds she raised it again and quietly said, "I'll get to work on re-fitting the Avenger troop transports with boarding protocol. No matter how fast I work, though, I'll never have ten ready in time. Five, perhaps, if we're lucky."
Kinkade nodded his head. "I'll send the protocols to unfreeze five squads, then. Let's see how the Vulcans are at shipboard combat."
The XCOM Ant Farm had sat in an increasingly defunct state ever since the end of the war. With the Ethereal temple ship gone, there was no more need to hide underground, and the skeleton crew left behind to maintain the place had long since stolen off to some long-awaited shore leave.
Upon receiving the protocols from the XCOM Commander, the stasis chambers that had kept the XCOM squads in a state of suspended animation until they were needed again - deactivated.
It was quiet down there, barring the tap of boots on the metal floors and a soft scraping sound as gloves wiped off dust from unused weapons and armor. None of the squads spoke to each other - they didn't yet know when they had been woken, and to them it didn't much matter so long as there were more aliens to shoot at.
One commonality that all shared, even the A Squad, was a careful distance from a squad all in black. There are some monsters that even dogs stay away from.