Eagles Over Earth
Chapter 2: A Close Second
March 3, 2020
Classified Location, United States of America
The first funeral Michael McNeil ever attended remained in his mind long after its conclusion.
First, the name, ceremoniously called three times and answered with silence three times. Only then did the Commander strike the fallen's name from their roll. With that, Arthur Aerts was officially dead.
Next came two people to fold a GDI battle flag, cloaking the golden eagle on the casket of their fallen comrade in arms. McNeil and Parnell had rehearsed for several hours before the funeral itself, to ensure they made no mistake draping the flag over Aerts' coffin. Though they had known the man for less than a week, he was no less than a brother to them. Then the casket was interred; thanks to the secretive nature of XCOM, Aerts' body could not be sent back to his family.
Sometimes, McNeil couldn't quite remember his face, unless McNeil was staring at the picture plastered on the memorial wall. But the ID picture barely resembled Aerts: his face sternly calm, as expected of any GDI commando posing for official pictures, nothing like the man full of life and humor even as the squad descended into the dark unknown. In combat, he had been the epitome of a GDI soldier, leading his squad, showing no fear, and fighting from the front. And then he was killed in an instant by an enemy, one totally indecipherable yet horrendously deadly. It took all of McNeil's self-control to not burst out screaming at the thought of it.
The same enemy hadn't only taken Aerts' life. Kwan was still recovering in the medbay. Thankfully, doctors had been able to save her leg, and she was scheduled for intense physical therapy. In less than a week she would be back on her feet, and in two at the very most, able to go back on missions.
Speaking of medicine, McNeil was late for something - a medical checkup by the chief scientist of XCOM. Like most things in XCOM, it was an unusual arrangement but made sense. Dr. Vahlen had a medical degree, among others, and was fully qualified to deliver clinical care. Presumably, with limited staff and the secretive nature of the organization, everyone had to do double duty if possible. Walking through sliding automatic doors, McNeil took in the remarkably clean room, noting several certificates lined up on the wall.
"Dr. Vahlen." McNeil respectfully addressed the German chief scientist.
"Lieutenant McNeil," she replied with a strong accent. "Thank you for coming."
"Right. So what's on the agenda today?"
"Several physical examinations. I promise this will not take too long."
It took nearly an hour. McNeil was subject to a battery of tests, everything from the most banal of height and weight checks to several devices he didn't know existed and decided must have been repurposed torture devices. He didn't dare ask Dr. Vahlen what their purpose was, seeing as the doctor's face remained one of intense interest throughout. If he'd asked, he'd probably lose an eye, tooth, or both.
At the end of the hour and after many more needles, Vahlen finally spoke audibly, several clipped sentences in German. Having moved around the world many times as an adopted military brat, McNeil managed to understand a little. It was something like, "no one's mentioned this to me" and "most interesting thing I've seen all year". He had to wonder what the hell that meant.
"Do you have any questions for me?" she suddenly asked in English.
There were several but McNeil decided to only ask one for now. "Is there anything that will affect my performance?"
"Nothing at all, Lieutenant. Thank you, again."
Had McNeil lingered for long, he might've noticed how carefully Vahlen studied the ten pages she'd compiled, before marking the whole document as high priority intelligence for delivery to the highest levels of GDI Command. But he jogged over to the Barracks, intent on getting to bed as soon as possible. The funeral and exam had exhausted him. When he entered the barracks, only one man was still awake.
"Welcome back," Parnell said, putting down a thick hardcover book on the floor. McNeil caught a flash of the title - "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" - before Parnell switched off his lamp. "You had a physical exam, right?"
"If you have the option, make sure Dr. Vahlen doesn't give it."
Parnell laughed, but it wasn't a sincere laugh. More like a release of pain. McNeil didn't need to ask from what.
"Parnell, you holding up...?" McNeil asked, leaving the question to drift in the stagnant air as he climbed up top and threw a standard white blanket over himself.
"I don't know," Parnell said with a groan. "Aerts was torn apart. Kwan was lucky not to have her leg blown right off…. and all that on our first combat mission."
"You afraid?"
Parnell let off a soft, but harsh, laugh. "There'll be more missions and more aliens. More types of aliens too, I'm certain. GDI isn't limited to riflemen, and no intelligent civilizations would restrict themselves either. So, they might deploy their equivalent of tanks and artillery against us next. Or blow us off the face of Earth with exotic WMDs."
For a man who was, at best, incidentally aware of shaving and showering, Parnell was extremely articulate.
"So, you're saying we should be afraid," McNeil suggested.
"McNeil, put everything together and it points to you, me, and everyone else in this base dying soon. But I don't plan on leaving. I don't think anyone else is, either. We know the aliens are up to no good, so we'll stick it to the aliens and battle to the bitter end. Whether that takes a day or a decade, let history know I was among the first to fight."
"That's our human strength," McNeil offered a little deep thinking of his own. "No matter what, we fight."
Parnell grunted, hopefully in agreement. "Good talk, McNeil. Until tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
Tomorrow began uneventfully by McNeil's standards, with a morning of live fire training against mock-up aliens. McNeil and Parnell worked as a duo, with two new faces: Francisca Navarro and Beatrice Torres, a riflewoman and combat medic respectively. Navarro, as befitting her occupation, was outfitted the same as McNeil - experimental X-9 rifle, hand grenades, and tan body armor. Torres was as heavily armed as anyone else - everyone agreed that the aliens likely didn't follow human laws of war.
Speaking of the aliens, XCOM had established a name for the little grey humanoids: "Sectoid." McNeil liked it. It was an ugly name for an ugly creature. He'd already shot and blown up six dummies in training and looked forward to killing more real ones. Stretching his arms and legs out on a bench post-training, McNeil didn't hear Navarro approach him.
"McNeil," she said, her Catalan accent drawing his attention.
"Yeah, Navarro?" McNeil eased aside to make room for her on the bench.
"What are the aliens really like?" Navarro asked.
Before McNeil could speak, his new friend answered first. "Freaky as fuck," Parnell said, wiping sweat off his brow as he walked over. "You might have seen the pictures but they don't tell half the story. They make this weird chittering sound when they're alerted. I'll never forget it."
"They're weak, at least," McNeil added. "One burst to the center mass and they're dead."
"Or a grenade," Parnell added. "That tends to kill them instantly."
"Or a grenade."
Navarro nodded. "Did you hear Dr. Vahlen wants us to use fewer grenades?"
"What?" McNeil spat out. He already wasn't a fan of Vahlen for her "not too long" checkups, but this was something worse.
"I heard her telling the commander that grenades can destroy the aliens' equipment, which could be recovered for research."
"Fuck that." Parnell was adamant. "I'll use whatever weapon works."
They shared a few more minutes of conversation, about rifles and body armor and XCOM's culture of secrecy, before the base alarm began to ring.
"That's for us?" Navarro sat up, straight as a meter stick.
"Sure is," McNeil answered.
The squad roster was already posted. McNeil as squad leader, with Parnell, Torres, and Navarro on mission too. The other soldiers who hadn't yet gone on a mission voiced frustrations, but McNeil was pleased that he and Parnell were together again. And having just trained with Navarro and Torres, he figured it would be as good a team as any.
There was only one issue. He was squad leader, Strike One. One look over his shoulder towards the morgue and he remembered why he held the leadership position unlike someone eminently more qualified.
The four of them, once fully geared up with their standard assortment of rifles, armor, and grenades, assembled in front of the Orca Skyranger as the loading bay door opened, the large VTOL aircraft well parked to fit inside the underground hangar.
"Here we go," Parnell said, taking his old place inside the transport.
"Any last tips?" Navarro asked as she eased herself into Kwan's old seat. Torres followed her in to take McNeil's previous seat.
"Yeah, one more," Parnell said. "Make sure to kill them all."
McNeil came in last, hoping their new squadmates would be up to the very dangerous task ahead. He'd been giving a truncated briefing: alien forces sighted in another small American town, witnesses reported seeing multiple canisters of unknown purpose, civilians already evacuated. Officially, it had been evacuated due to Tiberium contamination, and McNeil's team were the "inspectors" to contain it. Well, McNeil reasoned it wasn't entirely inaccurate. They were certainly going to do some inspecting and some containing of threats today.
But the canisters - now that was something McNeil was curious about. A security camera clip appeared to show a grey-silver cylinder, an obviously inhuman design, but the footage was too grainy to reveal anything else. His formal mission objectives were relayed to him on route, and they were as short as they were simple.
"Objectives: Neutralize all hostile targets. Locate and secure the canisters for analysis at HQ."
McNeil ran those sentences many times through his head, and repeated them out loud to the annoyance of everyone else, on their one-hour flight. At least he got everyone even more excited to leave: the moment the Skyranger landed and the doors opened, the squad charged down the ramp into an open intersection, rifles expectantly raised forward. Nothing greeted them, and their first burst of adrenaline went unneeded.
"Clear," McNeil confirmed. "Move it up."
Several empty cars and trucks lay about the area, and the squad sought cover behind these first. McNeil knew the people of this town had been evacuated, but it was hard not to feel nervous at all the abandoned vehicles littered about. Whatever the people had seen or been told, it was enough for them to ditch their vehicles en masse. Immediately ahead of them was a building that, normally, would've relaxed McNeil.
"What kind of building is that?" Torres asked.
"It's an ice cream parlor," Parnell said.
"I've never seen one before," Torres said. "What's an ice cream parlor?"
Torres hailed from Mexico, if McNeil remembered right. There probably weren't a lot of ice cream parlors there, especially with Tiberium making more than half the country uninhabitable. The alien invasion probably wouldn't help.
"It's a restaurant, but only for ice cream," Navarro explained.
"That sounds like fun."
"It is."
It was a little comforting to McNeil, knowing there was still some trace of normalcy during an alien invasion. Maybe when this mission was over, they could get some ice cream at base. McNeil didn't know any of the chefs yet, but he figured with a few minutes of conversation they'd be well on the way to becoming friends.
Enough about ice cream, Mack, McNeil chided himself. We're Oscar Mike. He faced himself forwards again and found something decidedly more interesting than an ice cream parlor.
"Strike One to Command, eyes on a canister," he reported. "It's right in front of us."
It was large: two meters tall and silver in color, seeping orange light. It felt oddly enthralling, emanating an almost friendly glow in a way Tiberium and the other alien materials decidedly lacked.
"Approach it," the Commander cooly ordered.
"You think it's a bomb, McNeil?" Parnell called.
"A bomb that size? We'd be in range before we landed. Torres, go for it."
"Moving up," Torres confirmed, reaching it in a quick sprint. Before McNeil could order her further, Torres placed a hand on the side, causing the canister to open up and reveal a luminous orange crystal within. "Oh mierda!" she shrieked.
"Careful!" Navarro said for everyone as Torres ran away and slid back behind a car, panting heavily as everyone trained their rifles on the crystal. "Is it a bomb?!"
"Can't be," McNeil muttered. "Better not be," he corrected himself.
For a solid ten seconds, the four soldiers kept their weapons trained on the crystalline alien material, waiting and perhaps hoping for some kind of reaction. When nothing happened, McNeil received a sharp order in his ear to advance, and send someone else to take cover behind the canister to test whether it really was dangerous. For that, he picked Navarro, who dragged her feet a little too obviously.
"Feel anything, Navarro?" McNeil asked once she reached it.
"I feel all of you staring at me like I'm going to die awfully."
"Anything besides that?"
"No," the riflewoman admitted. "So it can't be Tiberium, at least."
"That narrows it down," Parnell grumbled. "It's not a bomb, and it's not Tiberium."
McNeil ended the conversation with a disapproving grunt and told the team to focus. They carefully inched around the canister and began to approach the parlor itself. It was the longest ten-meter walk of their lives, alternating between looking out for aliens in the dark and staring back at the canister. Just because Navarro hadn't exploded or been poisoned from standing next to it for ten seconds didn't mean it was completely safe.
When Parnell creeped up to a door, a long chittering rang in the air, the sound of birds dragged through hell nine times.
"Command to Strike One, all weapons authorized," their Commander called.
"Affirmative." McNeil flicked his safety off and reminded himself where his grenade was. Everyone strained their eyes to see the enemy - then Torres saw them first.
"Contact!" she yelled. "Two Sectoids!"
McNeil only caught a glimpse of the two as they ran for cover, and didn't have the time to shoot them down, but confirmed they at least looked as ugly as ever. One ducked behind a corner of the ice cream parlor and the other smashed a window to get inside the parlor itself.
"Grenades!" McNeil ordered, priming his own disc grenade. 'Blow them to bits!"
After four satisfying explosions and two bursts of yellow blood, McNeil felt confident enough to move forward. He ordered Navarro to follow him too, and sure enough, they found the aliens' mangled corpses, their bodies torn apart against the XCOM squad's explosive opening.
They got as far as to celebrate with a few smiles before more of chittering sounded in the air, instantly throwing the squad back into a state of maximum alertness.
"Where are they?!" Torres said.
"Parnell, Navarro, stay on overwatch! Something twitches, blow it away! Torres, with me!" McNeil was shouting everything now.
In retrospect, telling the sole medic of the team to advance with him was probably not the best of ideas. But McNeil saw her as an equal, and so the two found the next group, hunched over behind the parlor, visible behind the glass windows.
For an instant, McNeil locked eyes with one - his green against its pupiless orange. Later, he would ask himself, and be asked, if he saw anything in those alien eyes. He would decide no, and that scared him most. There was no hatred and no soul in those eyes. It was the same look one would get looking at a tank's viewports or a rifle's scope. At most, you would catch your own reflection, warped and discolored. At worst, you were looking at the thing about to kill you, and that thing had no regrets - indeed, it couldn't have regrets. Did its wielder have any? Well, that was impossible to tell from looking at the weapon.
The Sectoids scattered, and McNeil chose to finish his run rather than risk taking a shot in the open. But the report of two rifles indicated his overwatching squadmates were ready. One was hit several times, spasming with every impact, but the other fled into the dark.
"Got mine!" Parnell called, with a little evil laugh.
"Negative damage!" Navarro hissed something in Spanish next. McNeil could guess what that meant. Torres finished her run - right up to a familiar looking object.
"There's another silver canister!" Torres called. Then the Sectoid opened up on her.
"Stay where you are!" McNeil hoped that alien material covered her well. The last alien was firing rapidly, sending a constant stream of suppressive fire against Torres. Evidently she'd touched the canister, since the canister's orange crystal was exposed too, bathing the medic in its warm orange glow as she was lit up by green plasma too.
McNeil snapped off a burst of his own, but the alien was behind exceptional cover. It'd take him too long to kill it on his own, but he had a full squad, and the alien didn't.
"Parnell! Navarro! Flank it!" he sharply ordered.
"On it!" Parnell hollered back.
"Yes sir!" Navarro yelled.
McNeil slapped a new magazine into his rifle and began suppressing the alien himself, noting with smug pride that the fire directed at Torres slackened. Was it fear that stalled his enemy's accuracy? Or a more primitive self-preservation? Perhaps even programmed code, a scripted reaction to danger?
McNeil went through most of his magazine, and attracted several wide shots from the alien before a long, steady burst of rifle fire echoed through the town, followed by several pistol shots.
"Who was that?" he said.
"It's me!" Navarro called, stepping out. "I got it," she confirmed, reloading both her weapons. A little excessive violence, perhaps, but McNeil took no chances with the aliens. Then again, at least they didn't get back up from fatal wounds.
"I'm getting ice cream for this," Torres declared, taking deep breaths as she stared at the plasma burns blighting her surroundings. She'd seen, if not experienced the same way Parnell and McNeil had, how badly Kwan was hit and how Aerts was torn apart, and it was clear the experience of coming under fire had rattled her.
"However much you want," McNeil assured her.
They swept the rest of the town, but turned up nothing. It seemed those four were it. When the XCOM squad stormed the last house and confirmed the total absence of extraterrestrial life throughout, McNeil slammed the door back shut so hard it fell right off its hinges.
"Whoops," he muttered, looking at the most substantive property damage inflicted since their firefight at the parlor. Kudos to him for working out, at least.
"I'm sure our recovery teams can screw it back," Torres suggested. "It'll be like nothing happened."
"They'll probably attach it backwards," Parnell offered his opinion.
Better to argue about screwed doors than bring people back in bags, McNeil imagined. They still carefully walked back to the Skyranger, mindful of last-minute surprises, but to their relief they reached their transport, its loading bay door invitingly open.
"Flawless, Strike One," his Commander's voice sounded as they walked inside. "You all did damn good."
"Thank you, sir."
"Keep up the good work." The link died, but McNeil let out a relieved breath. The praise felt good. Damn good. His first mission, and his squad had come out alive, killed every alien, and recovered some very important looking artifacts.
"What's giving you that wide grin, McNeil?" Parnell chuckled.
"Seeing you all alive, you dumb bastard."
Parnell laughed and sat back. "Yeah, I like us better that way."
Author's Note: Welcome back to Eagles Over Earth! Hope I haven't kept you all waiting too long. If you know anything about McNeil's backstory, you should have an idea for what Vahlen is so interested in, which'll be quite relevant once they figure out what Meld is and how to use it. Also, bonus points for figuring out what the title of this chapter refers to. (Hint: it's a Tib Sun quote.)
Speaking of, for fans of the Tiberian universe, be sure to check out my other Command and Conquer story, Under the Shadow - it's a Tiberium Wars fanfiction covering new ground and original characters, and if you liked this story, you'll love UtS too!