Under the Shadow: Unleashed
May 9, 2047
Flagstaff, Arizona, Yellow Zone Y-6
Parnell hated saying goodbyes. Most of the goodbyes he remembered were bitter experiences: goodbye to Australia after the Disaster, goodbye to his ex-wife after an acrid divorce, goodbye to peace with the start of the Third Tiberium War. This goodbye wasn't going to be better, despite Parnell understanding the circumstances better than he ever had. Still, he couldn't run from the inevitable. So he faced Mitchell in the eye and grasped his mentor's hand, giving the tightest grip possible.
"Mitch." Parnell wasn't known for his expressive emotions, but an uncomfortable heaviness had set into his chest. "We'll miss you."
"You won't need to, Parnell," Mitchell said. "You'll do well without me."
"And you'll kick Kilian's ass."
"Keep the poker table stocked for me."
"Right. I'd appreciate you sharing your four-star pay."
The elder Talons general smiled, his V-35 Ox already idling on the tarmac. Two Firehawks were making slow rounds over the airport, to escort him for the long trip ahead.
Parnell's other staff were all present, too. Even Vachon looked a little saddened to see Mitchell depart, but they all knew Mitchell couldn't have stayed around with them for the rest of the war. He was a damn good general, and GDI had finally assigned him to lead the assault on Ayers Rock, Nod's largest stronghold in Australia and HQ of their second-most notorious leader. If anyone could break the stalemate, it was him. Once he stepped foot in Australia, he'd earn his long-overdue fourth star and bring Kilian Qatar to justice, either in full or in pieces. Parnell personally hoped it was the latter. The Steel Talons had died on that godforsaken continent, but here was a chance for revenge.
After Mitchell went onboard, the V-35 took its time taxiing down the runway and lifting up, its Firehawk escorts entering formation the moment it fully left the ground. The officers on the ground spent a few minutes watching the aircraft depart, lingering a little after they disappeared into the western horizon.
Then, all eyes went back to Parnell.
"All right," Parnell said, speaking as much to himself as the others. "Let's get back to work."
The departure over, they walked into the Command Post, Mitchell's seat already removed from their usual briefing table. Parnell was in sole command now. No questions, no hesitation, no glancing back and forth between two Steel Talons officers. Just him.
"What's the latest, Johnsrud?" he started the impromptu meeting.
His InOps officer remained as professional as ever. "Biggest news is that the Nod armor division we've been tracking seems to have settled down within striking range."
Parnell eased into his seat. Nod conventional forces in the AO were stretched thin, and this armored division was one of the most dangerous units left. If he could crush it, he'd have a much freer hand to conquer the last Nod bases in the Yellow Zone.
"Show me." Parnell ordered. Johnsrud obliged, pulling up a regional map, showing GDI and Nod strike forces scattered throughout. The Nod armor unit, marked with a flashing red circle, had stopped about sixty miles from Parnell's current field headquarters in Flagstaff, Arizona, a self-described "free city" until GDI had set up shop.
"That's only a two-hour drive from here," Parnell noted.
"Why would they stop?" Vachon asked.
"Out of fuel? Waiting for reinforcements?" Johnsrud posisted. "It could be anything, but we have a window of opportunity to strike them."
"Well I'll be damned," Parnell declared. "This is exactly what I've been waiting for."
"I would be careful about that," Vachon noted.
"Oh my God." Parnell groaned out loud. As far as he could tell, this was a perfect battle for the veteran crews of the 30th Armored. A Predator could take on three Scorpions and win; a Mammoth could crush an Avatar in single combat. Against an equal number of Nod armor, left in the open for now, he should have had no problem destroying them.
Could the force be bait, as Vachon seemed to imply? Perhaps, but an armored division would be incredibly costly bait. Surely Nod still had a few militia divisions worth sacrificing rather than nearly one thousand of their high-end vehicles. Alternatively, perhaps Parnell had pushed them so far that they were really willing to lose an entire armor division - he was little over a hundred miles from their main fortress in Phoenix, after all. Whatever. If they wanted to bleed, he was happy to oblige. His tanks could fight out of damn near any ambush, regardless.
After all, the Nod force was lying in perfect tank country, unburdened by civilians or cities. Few raging rivers or towering mountains would block his vehicles' movement. Like the fields of Europe where modern armor saw its birth, the wasteland deserts of Arizona would become another model battlefield.
"Ready the divisions!" Parnell decided. "We head out tomorrow."
The next day…
"What do you think of the view, Sergeant?"
"Limited." First Sergeant Torsten Konig answered his new commander honestly. In the weapons station of the Mammoth Mark II, with only some limited view slits of the ground fifteen meters below, Konig had to settle with imagining most of the environment outside. Not that it was difficult, as Arizona was primarily the standard Yellow Zone desert of empty residences, Tiberium fields, and dust. Lots of dust.
With the Mammoth repaired and needing crew to replace the losses at Laguna AFB, from the same battle that had nearly killed General Vachon, Konig had finally been called to man the walker, and took the role of gunnery chief, directing the walker's formidable weapons. He was happy to be here, and though he missed his old platoon - his crew Muller and Tjaden, fellow Sergeants McGough, Kwan, and LT Baqai - the Mammoth's crew were damn good too. Every man was a Steel Talons veteran, from their first chaotic deployments in South America through their final actions in Australia. All of them had continued to serve during the interwar years even after the Talons were officially disbanded.
If only we'd all fought a little harder back then, Konig mused. Maybe we wouldn't be fighting this war.
But he, and he suspected everyone else in the Mammoth, secretly enjoyed war a bit. Or if not enjoyed, then at least was engaged and energized by it. The fight at Lake Havasu against the insurrection there was a mere warm up. Today they would get a complete marathon of war, supporting a full-division effort against an equally sized Nod force. It seemed that the Nod force had some prepared defenses, but in between the division's veteran crews and ample fire support, they were expected to break the Nod line and wipe out the enemy.
Captain Beren walked over to Konig's station, the British officer freshly pulled from retirement to command the walker again. He'd fought the Core Defender back in the day, with the Firestorm Task Force and all. Having squared against such a monster, normal Nod units hardly scared him.
"I sometimes forget how little we can see," he commented. "All good, Konig?"
"All good."
The exchange over, Beren gave a firm punch to Konig's back and went to check on the rest of the crew as the walker took step by steady step towards the imminent warzone. On a tactical map, Konig could track the movement of the Division, Predators and APCs moving in standard formations across the relatively flat terrain of the old Hopi Reservation. Nearly five miles away, several abandoned Tiberium Spikes and Silos suggested that somebody had tried to make a fortune harvesting the local Tiberium fields. Judging from the rusty vehicle wrecks all around the harvesting structures, this somebody had also found out that Tiberium was just as effective at ruining fortunes as making them.
It didn't take very long before the periphery of their radars became awash with red and the first long-range shots were traded between Juggernaut and Specter artillery. The rumble of indirect fire shook their walker's armored frame, barely fazing the veteran crew.
"It's time, gentlemen." Beren announced over the intercom. "To your stations."
Radars and integrated intel from friendly units reported hundreds of Nod vehicles and infantry units, ranging from omnipresent Militants to heavily upgraded Scorpions, many of them deeply entrenched. This was going to be a tough fight.
"Prioritize the Scorpions," Konig commanded his gun crew. Operating a Mammoth was more akin to manning a warship, Konig thought, considering the small team he had under his command and caliber of its railguns. Dias and Lemos, his gunners, both hailing from Portugal, grunted in acknowledgement. Neither spoke particularly great English but their grunts and marksmanship skills tended to speak enough.
"Fire one." The first railgun sabot emptied, and a Scorpion seven thousand meters away went up in flames.
"Fire two." Another enemy tank, even further away, died.
Of course they still took more than their fair share of fire. Being the tallest GDI unit on the battlefield meant that every Nod tank with half a brain could aim at them if nothing else was available. And while little could reliably penetrate their frontal plating, even the heaviest of armor could be shattered by a high enough volume of fire.
"Fire one. Fire two." Konig ordered the next round of sabots. But instead of exploding, the targets simply disappeared in brief flashes of light.
"What was that?" Captain Beren snapped, apparently noticing their failure to destroy anything.
"Holograms." Konig realized, spitting to the side in disgust. "Nod has decoy holograms."
"Noted. Try to engage only confirmed targets."
"Acknowledged," Konig testily replied.
Four harsh, successive impacts landed across the top of the Mammoth. Konig nearly fell to his feet as a flight of Vertigos, already fading from radar, zipped by. But the last one didn't re-stealth fast enough as Lemos nailed it with a pair of SAMs. The stealth bomber didn't immediately crash, staying aloft for several moments, but it still lost altitude quickly, sliding to a rough, smoking stop about a kilometer away.
"Good kill," he curtly told his gunner, getting back to his feet. The Vertigo bombs hadn't penetrated the Mammoth's topside armor.
Step by step, they maintained the assault's momentum. There was tremendous resistance, of course, but Konig remained confident. As powerful as the Mammoth was, the battle would not be won from up here: it would be won by the hundreds of tanks and thousands of soldiers advancing alongside them. It would be won by the likes of Konig's old platoon. And he knew they could - they would win.
Nod was well prepared. Of course they were. They had chosen this battlefield.
But GDI would own it.
Parnell wondered if this was America's largest tank battle ever. He had often read about the ferocious armored conflicts of the Second World War. Here was a battle on the other side of the Atlantic that would make the history books, too. Admittedly, it wasn't some tactical masterpiece of Napoleonic maneuver. Parnell had simply launched a three-front assault over fifteen miles, aiming to envelop and crush the Nod division. He'd committed the entire division - Mammoth and Predator Tanks, plus the West Coast's most elite mechanized infantry - plus various supporting air elements to this fight.
As they had dozens of times across the world, Predators and Scorpions locked their horns of 150mm and 90mm cannons, of railguns and Spitfire lasers. Many men and women who had lived through other days of steel fury lost their lives in this latest clash. He could track the progress of his forces by the lines of destroyed vehicles, GDI and Nod, that they left behind.
His Mammoth was anchoring the assault well, as it always would. Most Nod forces didn't even bother attacking the mighty walker, trying to pick off the comparatively weaker Predators instead, but that left the Mammoth free to wreak havoc.
These Nod troops were fine soldiers, Parnell could grudgingly admit. They had built resilient defenses and held out under severe pressure. Careful placement of Decoy Army holograms diverted precious time and attention. Hidden Laser Turrets and even the occasional Obelisk of Light - just how had Nod cloaked those monstrous towers, of all things? - were inflicting worrying losses. Still, he was making acceptable, if not optimal progress. Mindful of the high number of Nod armor left, he ordered his Juggernauts to switch to armor-piercing rounds, figuring he needed all the anti tank firepower he could get.
Yet it seemed for every step, Nod threw up another anti-tank trap, revealed another set of land mines, uncovered another hidden Beam Cannon that would zap a vehicle and scoot away before anyone could retaliate. Parnell could see the mounting losses on his command HUD. But he was close to breaking the Nod line. It would be worth it. It had to be.
"I'm not sure we can maintain this attack." Vachon commented, ever the devil on his shoulder.
"I'm no McNeil," he snapped back, remembering Vachon's previous boss and wondering if that gave her unrealistic expectations for the typical GDI battle commander. Not everyone could personally raid Kane's Cairo temple.
"Yes, you've made that abundantly clear."
Parnell made a guttural growl and then shut up. They still had a battle to win, but he would remember that jab. The next minutes saw plenty more GDI blood splattered and burned across the ground. Parnell kept his division pushing, ever-so-closer to that margin of victory.
He was so engrossed in the central push he didn't notice Vachon take a broader look at the battlefield, then issue a series of orders on her own to a battalion on the south flank pushed to breaking point, both from Nod pressure and Parnell siphoning units from it to reinforce the main push. It took over five minutes for Parnell to look beyond and realize exactly what his second in command had done.
"Vachon, what did you do?" he said, slowly, unbelieving that even Vachon could so openly defy him.
"That battalion needed to be withdrawn. They were about to be annihilated."
"Except you're putting everything else at risk!" Parnell switched between two views, one a snapshot of the battlefield before Vachon moved them, the other of the present with the battalion absent from its position. "They were holding a salient!" he pointed, speaking faster now.
"Which they couldn't hold for long anyways," she replied, but Parnell noticed her voice halting as she inspected the two snapshots of the broader battlefield.
In those five minutes, Nod had seized on the advantage. Fresh Scorpions and Reckoners pushed ahead, eager to fill in the space. Shadow Teams rushed in to exploit the breach, sniping officers and directing Specter artillery strikes. And a squad of Avatars de-cloaked and assaulted the salient, throwing the few GDI defenders left into disarray.
For the first time since San Diego, Parnell was on the defensive. The Nod counterattack poured through against his south flank, their prior caution gone to the rising winds of the Yellow Zone. The vanguard force proved every bit as resilient as their GDI foes.
"Those are reserves. Those have to be reserves." Parnell said, not remembering any intelligence about such a formidable secondary force in the area.
"They're in a position to surround us," Vachon noted, as if her sloppy move hadn't put them in that position. Whether said reserves would have made a breakthrough eventually was a moot point now.
"Not yet they're not," he growled. He began to divert his forces, shifting more forces to stop the new threat while trying to keep his main push moving. But if the Nod forces shouldering the burden for the main push matched his troops, it seemed this regiment-sized attack group were even superior, or at least had the firepower to swat back his limited reinforcements. Those twin-laser Avatars in particular, were extraordinarily dangerous. Not even Mammoth Tanks could survive their fire for long, and his Mammoth Mark II was too far away to help.
He sent a squadron of Orcas with some Hammerhead support to knock out the Avatars, but three Stealth Tanks stopped the aerial strike cold. Then a squadron of laser-armed Venoms swept the GDI air group completely. The counterstroke, a one-two punch, could have come straight from a West Point manual.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Parnell fumed under his breath. This Nod commander - Parker, surely, these distinctly GDI tactics being used against him stank of the traitor's hand - was countering everything he had. He couldn't keep throwing forces in piecemeal: either he committed to the main attack and prayed the Nod reserve didn't tear apart his back line, or withdraw to cut his losses. Except… the idea of withdrawing under fire...
Without warning, his nightmares returned, those of a rising green cloud, of half a base and continent abandoned and doomed to die as it disappeared from view. The dying screams of soldiers incinerated by Flame Tanks and Purifiers. Endless meetings in the dark with bureaucrats, councillors, and superiors who grilled him and kept the ghosts nearby. He had overseen a catastrophic failure before. Today, it was happening again.
"Parnell?" someone asked. He didn't know who. He was too distracted, too scared. He saw the battle play out in his mind: his entire division surrounded, cut off, their morale plummeting, everything going to hell. Perhaps the division would be destroyed entirely, the 30th stricken from records and swept into the dustbins of history as Nod filled POW camps and mass graves full of GDI tankers.
"Parnell!" his staff was shaking him, and his eyes flashed open. "What's our plan?"
He didn't really have a choice, did he? That's what he told himself in South Australia. It sounded so much more pathetic now.
"Withdraw," he said, regret filling his mind. "We have to withdraw."
"Withdrawing? The division is withdrawing?" Konig asked Captain Beren.
"The order came in ten seconds ago. All units are to withdraw immediately!"
"Well…" Konig didn't need to elaborate. They were inside a vehicle with a top speed of thirty kilometres an hour. 'Withdrawing' wasn't something they could really accomplish, not while under duress. If they wanted to fly out, they'd have to call in their Orca Dropship, but with the amount of Venoms and Attack Bikes still roving around, it would never survive.
"New orders for us… ah." Captain Beren paused. "We're not withdrawing."
Konig nodded. "Understood." We'll die fighting. We'll die well. He looked back upon the battlefield. It reminded him of Australia, the same barren, Tiberium-stricken lands. The only complex life here was actively trying to kill each other. Well, he was inside a Mammoth Mark II, the best killing machine on the continent.
"Targets!" he barked. "Give us targets!"
A Beam Cannon - confirmed to be the real thing - was highlighted, and a fresh salvo of railgun sabots from Lemos fire split a Beam Cannon in two.
"Back to it, gunners! Keep fucking shooting!" Konig encouraged in the only way he was comfortable with. "Give our men some time!"
Indeed, Nod was doing their best gunning down the retreating GDI troops. Amidst a scrap yard of GDI ruins and wrecks, Beren directed the Mammoth constantly forwards, presenting a tantalizing target. Slowly but surely, Nod's fire shifted to the last advancing armor on the field. What little remained of their newly applied paint peeled instantly, then the first layer of steel plates began to buckle and fry.
Stealth Tanks fired their quick volleys and disappeared before Konig could lock onto them. Beam Cannons combined their lasers, gouging deeper and deeper into their armor. Vertigos were detected on approach, their powerful armor piercing bombs a possible death knell for the damaged walker. Leading the Nod charge were a team of Avatars, fearlessly striding forwards against an enemy more than five times their size.
"Can't track that Stealth Tank!" Lemos complained.
"Ignore it!" Konig snapped. "We're not running out of targets!"
So instead Lemos took out another Scorpion, only for it to vanish in a flash of light. Another wasted shot on a decoy.
Before Konig could find someone to criticize, another Vertigo bomb strike sent spalls across the hall, little bits of metal from the Mammoth's own interior turned into micro-shrapnel from the force of the blast. Despite the sweltering hot temperature inside, partially thanks to broken air conditioning, the whole crew wore body armor - which saved their lives.
"Schiesse," Konig spat out, wiping his hands across some bloody marks across his face and arms, the Kevlar torn by the fragmentation. Lemos gave a thumbs up and Dias nodded his head to indicate their survival, too, though both were bleeding from the head, blood mixing with the men's ample sweat.
"Everyone all right?" Beren's voice echoed in the hull.
"Weapons crew is good," Konig called for his team.
"There's a broadcast over all channels. Appears to be of Nod origin," their comms officer reported.
"Ignore it," Beren snapped. "If they want to mock us, we'll keep killing them. If they want us to surrender, we'll also keep killing them."
Konig savagely grinned. Then the grin disappeared with some news.
"Missile tubes are empty."
Their dual missile tubes had been loaded with thirty-two SAMs - and the Mammoth had used all of them. Konig would've been impressed if he wasn't about to die. The bad news came pouring in throughout the next minute.
"Railgun one is disabled," Lemos reported.
"Blast!" Beren said. "What else we got, weapons crew?"
"Railgun two is fine." Konig noted. "Keep firing."
They claimed a Reckoner next, coring the Nod APC, stopping the speeding vehicle cold. Konig could guess the fate of its crew.
"Railgun two is out of ammunition." Lemos called right after.
"Can we switch ammo from railgun one to two?" Konig asked, mildly embarrassed that he didn't know the answer. Then again, this was his first real battle with the Mammoth.
"Not without a loading crane," Dias said.
"Fine. We still have the cannon. Kill their soldiers if you can."
There were plenty: a squad, running out in the open towards a wrecked Scorpion. A burst of fire killed three. Konig ignored the rest and found another full squad, taking cover behind a destroyed APC. The Mammoth's cannon blew right through the APC's already-compromised armor and destroyed all eight militants where they stood. Then a hissing laser scythed through the front, and with that came a last notification from their EVA.
"Frontal cannon disabled."
The Mammoth had been de-fanged. With that, Konig opened the gun lockers to prepare for a final stand, handing out pistols and submachine guns to his team. He knew damn well how to use them and from the hard looks on their faces so did everyone else. Still, though its main guns had fallen silent for the last time, the pilot kept the walker creaking forwards, daring some final laser or shell to knock it down, a shot that might spare another GDI life.
"Damn good showing, today, gentlemen," Beren sighed. "See you in Valhalla."
"It's been an honor!" the comms officer shouted back. Konig suddenly remembered he never got the man's name. But it was too late now.
An Avatar aimed two arms forwards, and fired two blue-hot lasers at the front leg. The Mammoth finally began to fall, and Konig hoped it had all been enough. He didn't want to die for nothing. The last thing he saw was the ground rushing towards him, and then his view went dark.
"Repeat that, will you?" Parnell asked, though he knew what the answer was.
"We took over forty percent vehicle losses," Allen, his operations chief, said. "Including the Mammoth."
"And personnel?"
"Twenty-three percent."
Parnell took another long sip from his thermos and groaned as he sat in the V-35 that served as their emergency transport. While vehicles were replaceable, that 23% personnel wasn't composed of privates and marching bands. Those were all good soldiers, many ex-Steel Talons, including some who had fought since TW2. In other words, the closest thing to irreplaceable. And under his command, they were decimated.
All that for a trap. The largest land battle in North America since the beginning of the war - as if Nod would really let themselves be placed in such a disadvantageous situation. Parnell had thought his forces could smash their way through any trap. They had executed the battle exactly as they were ordered to, after all. But he had made a grave mistake by attacking so aggressively. If it weren't for the holding action by the Mammoth and some other units it would have been even worse.
Ants on a sidewalk. He thought about the metaphor for a moment, the metaphor that had assuaged him well for the past two decades. Ants did what they were told and died by the millions for it, making anything worth it so long the colony survived. No different from soldiers, right?
He pushed the thought away for now and drank more of his caffeinated tea. It didn't make him feel any better. Philosophy aside, he'd been beaten, by a traitorous ex-GDI commander no less. Parnell didn't know if that hurt or assuaged him. Hurt, he figured. That's why he was on a V-35 fleeing the battlefield, lest some Vertigo or Specter blow his forward command post to hell like they almost did at the beginning of the war.
Mitchell had probably settled into Australia by now. The first news he'd receive would be of a catastrophic defeat suffered by Parnell. History repeating itself.
The next few minutes of their ride was silent except for the roaring of the Ox's engines. It would be another thirty minutes before they landed at their original base at Flagstaff, but no one knew if they could hold onto the city now. From the sheer tension he felt, Parnell suddenly stood up, keeping his feet firmly on the transport bay's floor.
"What is it, Parnell?" Vachon asked, not in a friendly way.
"What are you asking for?" he snapped back, fiercer than he intended. What the hell, he thought. I've got things to say to her anyways. "Spit it out."
"You lost. You have to admit it."
"Just me?!" Parnell spun around. "You withdrew that battalion, holding a salient, without telling me in advance!"
"That tactical withdrawal forestalled the disaster." Vachon stood her ground. "At least I bought us some time; otherwise that Nod reserve might've broken through without warning."
Any other day, Parnell might have given up the pointless argument. But he had enough of retreating for today.
"NO!" he roared. "Don't strut like this fuckup was all my doing. Partially, yes, since I'm the damn CO, and those were my troops down there. But you - you fucked this up too. Your command doesn't work without communication, Vachon! I'm sometimes an asshole but you better stop being a bitch." Parnell didn't notice his hand shaking as he pointed a furious finger at his second in command. "I don't know if we would have won, but we wouldn't have lost so badly."
Vachon bared her teeth and began to say something, but Parnell beat her to it.
"I'm no McNeil," he bitterly echoed. "Neither are you!"
A flash of shame struck Vachon's face, and she shrank into her seat. Parnell took a few more breaths, wanting to say more but realizing it wouldn't serve any real purpose. Sure, he might feel a little better tearing into her ego, or outright smacking her, but they had just suffered a devastating defeat and the enemy had the upper hand for the first time in months. This was perhaps the worst time to split his command further.
It took a few minutes for him to collect himself. He still seethed, but he was a lieutenant general for a reason. Deep lines across his face and crimson veins in his eyes were already setting in, but he brushed off the physical discomfort. It was going to be a long, long several days, assuming he survived.
"What comes next?" he asked, settling himself back in, ignoring Vachon as she stared at her boots. For all her coolness under fire, Parnell's fury was something else entirely.
"Don't ask me. We don't have the initiative, Robert," Allen pointed out. "That damn Nod marshal does."
"True. What do you think Parker is going to do next?" Parnell paused, realizing there was a better way to think of this. "I should ask what a GDI commander do now."
And there was his answer.
"He'll attack with everything he's got."
Two hundred miles away...
Connor Liang stared out a field of Tiberium stretching at least one hundred acres, glowing the same green that afflicted his sister. His sister, long thought dead and now… a Nod commander? A dangerously competent and high ranking one at that, one that nearly overran his battalion?
Though he had changed plenty, too. For one, Liang was a Colonel now, commanding a regiment of fifteen hundred rather than a battalion of four hundred. There were many, many differences between the ranks. For one, he could not build personal relationships with captains and lieutenants like he had before. Captain Caldwell, the only officer survivor of San Diego, was a footnote to him now. Now he delegated orders to battalions, called up Lieutenant Colonels and informed them what they had to do. He even gained an aide-de-camp. Which didn't seem quite right, because Liang sometimes felt young enough to be an officer's aide himself.
On the plus side, Taslimi and Kama remained with Liang, still as XO and senior enlisted respectively, having been promoted alongside him. He'd be completely lost without them. With them, he was perhaps eighty percent lost. Still, Garrison had elected to trust in him. His regiment didn't necessarily have that choice but he had to do his best for them, too. Though his mission - scouting the Yellow Zone in advance of the main GDI army and raiding targets of opportunity - surely came first.
"This is new for us," Taslimi commented. "Yellow Zone recon work?"
"I hate it already," Liang admitted. "Being alone like this." Through the faint green-tinted visor of his Tiberium Field Suit, the specialist battle armor produced almost exclusively for ZOCOM personnel, he observed the Tiberium field a little longer before heading back indoors to his Construction Yard.
His regiment would stay on the move, as nomadic as a ZOCOM unit could be. With their APCs and Rigs, plus several pre-supplied forward operating bases, the regiment could cover hundreds of square kilometers in a day, scouting the perennially dangerous Yellow Zone. In case of emergency, Command had also pre-approved orbital artillery strikes on his authority, as the regiment was far out of range of Juggernauts or naval cruise missiles.
After Tiberium decontamination, he walked to his office, all but empty save for his command console and bed. There was nothing left to do for the day, at least for him, so he settled on his bed and tried to sleep. Then, Taslimi barged in, a twisted frown on his face.
"What's going on?" Liang asked, sitting up from his bed.
"You should hear this." Taslimi said, holding up a radio. "There's an all-frequency broadcast originating from the top Nod commander - that ex-GDI man, Parker."
"Uh-huh. Show me." Taslimi obliged, tuning to the voice of a stern old man.
"The Butcher of Las Vegas is on the run, my soldiers. Hunt him and his puppets down. Burn them all like he burned our cities."
The two digested the speech for a short while.
"Is it true?" Liang asked, fearing the answer.
"GDI Command has a message for us, too. Come to the command center."
"This better be good news." Liang got up with a nervous grunt.
It was not.
Following a tremendous ground battle that ended hours ago, the 30th Armored Division was rendered combat ineffective. In other words, the one unit that could conceivably break them out of a tight spot was out of the picture. Garrison had warned them of this exact scenario, the scenario that had doomed the entire Central African reclamation operation, and now could doom Liang's regiment too. He might end up taking the record for the shortest lived full Colonel in ZOCOM history.
"Now what?" Taslimi asked as soon as they closed the line.
"Let's try not to fuck up," Liang said, instantly regretting his unprofessionalism.
Taslimi winced. "Liang."
"Sorry." He'd been in an overall worse mood since the Lake Havasu Insurrection. Perhaps understandable, but definitely inexcusable. "Okay. What I mean to say is that we still need support. We'll never survive like this, completely alone."
"Help isn't coming from Parnell. Who else? The Forgotten?"
"The Forgotten?" Liang thought about it. While the vast majority of mutants had exiled themselves to Red Zones in 2043, following the beginning of the Third Tiberium War, some were migrating back to Yellow Zones. Whether to scavenge ample war material or something else, nobody knew, but Liang couldn't ignore them. "What do you think?"
"I don't trust them one bit. I don't even hate them. It's just that our interests and theirs rarely are the same."
"True. Except we want to both survive," Liang pointed out. "We can work something out."
"What do you want from them?"
"Intelligence. We can share."
"Just an exchange of intel?"
"Yes. Nothing too sensitive, just enough to stay out of each other's way and hopefully not blunder into any Nod forces. It's not much, but we don't need much. I don't want to call this an alliance. It'd barely be a ceasefire."
"I like that. The regiment could get behind that."
"Okay. I'll meet the local leaders in person."
"Incognito, I assume?"
"Absolutely. I'll get a group together."
Before they split, Taslimi put a hand on Liang's shoulder. Liang expectantly waited for his best friend to say something important.
"Don't tell them about the armor division's defeat. They don't need to know."
"Obviously. Come on, I'm not that incompetent, am I?"
Taslimi simply laughed and let Liang go. As he walked to the vehicle bay, he remembered the first person he saw killed, a man in a white T-shirt running from GDI MPs at the San Diego airport. His first casualty of TW3. He'd seen many others die, but he couldn't forget that man.
Why now?, he wondered to himself. Especially when I'm a Colonel and I can't afford to care as much.
His imagination didn't answer, only replaying the miserable scene over and over again. A man dead by GDI's harsh hand and his own inability to follow instructions. More guilty than the ghosts of Las Vegas, certainly.
Liang took a standard APC and two Zone Shatterers, the little group resembling a reclamation team rather than an officer's convoy, while Taslimi commanded the regiment in his stead. It wasn't a long drive to the nearest Forgotten camp, nestled within a dried-up lake bed, its water long transmuted to Tiberium or evaporated. The incognito group arrived at a checkpoint not too dissimilar to the last one that stopped Liang in his last pre-war reclamation operation, manned by a scraggly group of Forgotten soldiers.
"I'm Colonel Liang, a GDI officer. I want to speak to your leadership."
"Hand over your weapon first," the lead Forgotten, presumably their squad leader, said. He wore an odd mixture of GDI and Nod body armor - rifleman helmet, light infantry chestplate, and Black Hand boots. Several Tiberium shards sprang from an open wound in his neck.
"Of course." Liang got out of the APC and offered his GD-50 pistol, the one that the GDI Commando gave him, over to the Forgotten squad leader. The Commando hadn't asked for it back, and Liang didn't have the time to track him down with his hasty redeployment to the Yellow Zone.
The Forgotten squad leader took the pistol. "You are trusting," he said.
"It's one of my better qualities."
"That's dangerous."
"War is dangerous."
The mutant simply grunted, and escorted the little group on foot towards the camp. It was built off the remains of a TW2 era GDI base, likely abandoned after the closures of 2043. But Liang had seen plenty of abandoned buildings and bases before. What shocked him most were the mutants themselves, who numbered in the hundreds.
These people were ruined. There was no other way to describe it. Walking among a community of them, he shuddered constantly. He didn't even look at their faces, but the raging Tiberium shards strewn across their chests and legs and arms and everywhere made him clammy and cold. Some errant thoughts invaded his mind, pulling his imagination to see similar green eruptions across himself, slowly dying to yet also enhanced by a crystal that was destroying Earth.
They reached a short man, just over five feet tall, standing in the open with two seven-foot tall bodyguards. It'd be a laughable sight were it not for the considerable respect every Forgotten showed to the short man. This was their leader.
"You sought me," the short man said, keeping his chin held high. "I am Nikander."
"Colonel Connor Liang, ZOCOM Ninth Regiment."
"You are young for a Colonel," Nikander observed.
Liang ignored the fact. "Will you hear me out?"
"I shall." Nikander motioned inside a dilapidated TW2-era GDI barracks, crusted with a little bit of the same Tiberium that afflicted its residents. "Please, come with me."
"What should we do, sir?" one of Liang's riflemen asked him.
"Stay outside. If they give you trouble, call me and I'll be there. If they give me trouble, I'll call you."
"Yes, sir." They stepped back out and stood at the low ready as Liang entered the structure, mindful to take short breaths even through his Field Suit helmet. Going through hallways he had never walked through in person, they reached the barracks' living quarters, saddled with rusty, faintly glowing bunks. Liang would need to spend several hours in a decontamination unit once he got back.
The two sat down from across each other and Liang decided to start.
"I am not asking for an alliance between us," he began. "Or trust, necessarily."
"You are not ambitious, are you?" Nikander slightly smiled.
"I might be trusting, but that doesn't mean I grasp for straws. I know your knowledge of the land is considerable, but there's intelligence that GDI spy satellites and recon can acquire that you can't. Intelligence I have access to."
Taslimi would approve of everything Liang said so far. But there was another reason he was talking to the Forgotten leader one-on-one, well out of earshot from his soldiers and officers.
Before Liang could make his real proposal, Nikander fell backwards, gasping for breath. Liang stood up and clenched his fists, cursing his self-inflicted lack of weapons as the two Forgotten bodyguards - huge tattooed men, holding what looked like salvaged heavy machine guns - stormed in.
Oddly, they made no move towards Liang, despite him being the obvious culprit for anything bad happening to their leader. Instead, they merely grabbed Nikander's arms as he briefly convulsed, relaxing after several long moments. The bodyguards left as abruptly as they came, still making no aggressive motions towards Liang, apparently certain he was innocent.
"What happened to you?" he asked. "Are you alright, Nikander?"
"I am all right," he said, taking deep breaths before looking at Liang in the eye. "I believe you know your history. Do you know Tratos?"
"Your universally accepted leader, until Nod assassinated him during the Firestorm."
"True, and yet, much more. Tiberium harbored his mind more than any other, and perhaps why he had the gift of future-sight."
"His... future sight? You're talking about precognition. The ability to see the future, psychic powers." Liang had heard the rumors, wild as they sounded.
"Yes. He had the greatest gift, a singularly powerful vision, but there are those who can peer glimpses where he gazed skies. Those like me. That is why my people follow me, you see. I am not the strongest nor wisest of us. But my counsel has avoided enough tragedies for them to trust me. Enough, I emphasize, not all."
"Okay, so you say you have this future-sight," Liang said, skeptical as he was about precognition. "And you just had a vision of the future."
Nikander chuckled, an odd noise since his lungs were contaminated. "I sensed that you seek your family. Your violent separation and lasting scars haunt you."
Liang was less skeptical now. "What else did you see?"
"A single confrontation. Then, you will see eye-to-eye for the first and last time, yet that will not be the end of your story. It will not be the end for any of us… No. Oh no."
"What…?"
"I think… I hope, I have seen something wrong. But for you, for you today -" Nikander looked at him directly - "You said you have information of your own, to offer first?"
"Yes." Liang's heart was skipping beats, but he tried to focus on the deal at hand. "I have the authority to share anything standard-level classification. Visual scans from satellites, whatever my sniper teams turn up, that kind of thing."
"I will gladly accept your help. It is not easy avoiding Nod. They often think us weak, and it takes much to prove them wrong. And for you… I know what you want from us. From me, especially."
That did it.
"We have a deal." Liang nodded, taking a deep breath. "So help me find my sister. Help me find Matilda Liang."
ZOCOM Red Zone Technology
Since the establishment of GDI's Zone Operations Command in 2038, the development of technologies operable in Tiberium-contaminated environments has greatly accelerated, spurred on the dual demands of reclamation projects and the unnatural spread of the crystal.
Harmonic resonance, first used offensively by the Disruptor Tanks of TW2, has been nearly perfected into an anti-Tiberium weapon, able to molecularly break down the largest of Tiberium formations within hours. ZOCOM uses modified Shatterers capable of overloading their sonic emitters to fire supercharged blasts in order to destroy especially resilient Tiberium patches. A-15D ZOCOM Orcas are also outfitted with special sonic grenade launchers in lieu of their standard weapons, providing field commanders with another alternative to Shatterers for the heavy-duty reclamation role...
Tiberium Field Suits represent the latest in personal protective equipment. Derived from standard infantry composite armor, which itself was based on late 20th century tank armor, Field Suits combine a scale-like layer of Tiberium-resistant ceramic with interwoven Kevlar-X fabrics, providing excellent protection against Tiberium exposure and shrapnel alike without being too cumbersome. Additional developments by ZOCOM have also yielded relatively lightweight ceramic armors for aircraft, offering similarly increased survivability for ZOCOM's elite pilots...
Continuing development in the fields of Tiberium refining, sonic weaponry, and other fields is expected to ensure the continued cutting edge of ZOCOM.
From the GDI Archives
Author's Note: Is it boring for GDI to win all of the time? I figured so, so here we have Parnell's most serious defeat since Australia. With his prized armor division rendered combat ineffective and a major Nod counterattack imminent, will GDI hold onto their hard-fought gains in North America?
As for Liang, we properly meet the Forgotten, giving this ZOCOM officer a fresh perspective on the Yellow/Red Zone life. I noticed that in stories like this GDI tends to ally with the Forgotten a lot, but Liang would rather keep his distance for now. In the meantime, he's using his newfound authority to keep looking for his sister Matilda - stay tuned for what happens next!