Winning?

This was wrong. Everything was wrong.

The S-2 Firestar class interceptor flew on as easily as it ever had. Its fusion power supply was good for incredibly long flights even at hyperlight velocities. Its weapons and armor were cooling from the horrific beating that it had taken in the battle, but that was nothing compared to the beating that the pilot's psyche had taken.

"They cannot all be gone." Lieutenant Commander Samuel Rogers, call-sign 'Buck' was rarely shaken. He had earned his call-sign in battle with hordes of unrelenting foes, always pushing on and accomplishing the mission no matter the odds. "Sure, the others were too close to the enemy base, they were caught in the blast, but the MacArthur was well outside that and their drives were intact! They cannot be gone!"

His force had come into this battle with four other small fighter ships and one bomber class ship all carried into an alternate dimension by a capital class starship. Now? His sensors did not lie. There was nothing anywhere close to him. He was in interstellar space. He shook his head and started his nav system on finding out where he was. That might take a while. He was no astronomer except as it was required by his duty but he did know about interstellar distances and how much space was actually out there in outer space. Lots.

The battle had not gone well. Everyone had known the risks. Or so they had thought. They had the weapon to do the job and had deployed every available ship to cover said weapon while it was sent on its way. It had been a suicide mission from the get-go and everyone had known that. Every one of the crews accepted that. After so long fighting a losing war it had been so incredible to finally have a chance to win! To strike back at the enemies who came form nowhere and vanished just as quickly after wreaking such havoc. For decades, alien forces had struck and vanished, leaving X-Com to clean up the messes they had left all across the Frontier. Rogers had been one of many orphaned by the horrible assaults and for many? Hope had fled entirely.

Then, like a bolt from the blue, hope had come back.

A new Commander had taken the reins and galvanized the dispirited and disorganized X-Com space forces back into a powerful fighting force. New pilots, new training, new weapons and technology had all allowed the once almost useless fliers a new chance. Fliers who had gone out to fight even without any chance at all of winning and often come back limping. If they had come back at all. Rogers had been recruited due to his psy ability, something he had cursed many times in his life, but had then found a use for. The unknown was always the worst. How could one fight the unknowable? Once then enemy were known, the battle became a lot less lopsided. Still dangerous, to be sure, but always…

His sensors pinged and he stiffened. Another craft showed on his screen. Not a human one! He didn't need the battle computer's warning klaxon to know what he faced. As soon as he saw it, he felt the tickle across his mind that heralded the most powerful of the alien enemies. Ethereals were not even close to the most physically powerful of the enemies that humanity had faced during the long wars that X-Com had fought. They didn't need to be. Mutons, Sectoids and all of the other alien forms that the premier human defense organization had fought were dangerous, no question, but the Ethereals who led them, who acted as battlefield commanders, were an order of magnitude worse. A Muton could kill you. Would kill you if given the chance. An Ethereal would warp your mind, turn you against your comrades. You wouldn't see anything at all wrong with turning your weapons against comrades you had fought beside and bled beside for years. No one would ever know how many X-Com personnel had been lost to such. So many teams had simply vanished in the maelstrom of the never ending war, almost certainly many of them to such fates. Rogers knew of three instances where a trusted wingman had shot his or her wingleader after being hit by bolts from the psionic aliens. He had blown one of those out of space himself. He had known that girl, had feelings for that girl and she had nearly killed him. She hadn't and then he had taken vengeance for his wing leader. Then he had found the Ethereal who had taken control of his wingmate and killed it.

That was why he had been recruited. Why he had been trained. Why he had worked so hard to perfect his abilities. He did not bother to respond as his communication system lit up. The enemy did love to taunt. Instead, he shunted power from his shields to his weapons. In any other situation, such would be utter madness. No human manufacture could possibly hope to repel energy fire of the magnitude that the aliens threw. But Ethereals did not use plasma cannon. He smiled grimly as space lit up in ways that only a psionic person would see. The bolts hit his ship, passed through his shields and armor as if they did not even exist, hit his brain and did nothing. His mind was his fortress and he had trained to defend it. The bolts barely made his mind shields flicker. He felt the sudden knowledge, the consternation, the sudden fear from the other as it realized what it had attacked. He savored it. He dearly loved when he felt their fear.

"Nice try, you alien scum." Rogers snapped as he activated his own weapons. The four tracking tracer cannon flared, beams of white light following the now fleeing alien craft as it tried to evade his fire. Futile. Even the insanely fast and agile small saucers that the aliens preferred could not outrun speed of light weaponry. "Die!"

The enhanced beams tore through the alien craft like a hot knife through butter. Its shields flared for a moment and then failed even as it evaded harder, breaking the beams' lock for a moment. Only for a moment and Rogers had not been idle. His eyes were hard under his space suit's visor as a chime sounded and a flick of a finger sent a missile arrowing towards the doomed alien. It's shields came back up but Rogers' guns had a lock again and fired, the white beams tracking the saucer's evasive action. A green flash heralded the shields failing just in time for the missile to hit the dark metal hull. Rogers' smile was a cold thing as a scream sounded across his mind. A scream that cut out as the beams that continued to flay the doomed alien ship found the reactor and turned it and the luckless Ethereal commanding it into a miniature sun.

"That is four." Rogers said into the sudden silence in his mind. "One more Ethereal and I am an ace."

He didn't bother counting any other enemy craft. He never had. Only Ethereals. Only the kind of alien that had come with no warning and turned his colony into a slaughterhouse. It hadn't had to raise a weapon, it had turned everyone against each other, then it had left. His mind shied away from the memories. He hadn't had any idea why or how he had survived, but then X-Com had come, found him alone among the ruins and taken him to a new life. To vengeance.

Rogers' hands moved in trained patterns as he sat back in his seat, recovering from the expenditure of energy. Defending was always easier than attacking. No matter his desires, he could not use his abilities as the Ethereals could so easily at range. He burned to strike them down, fry their minds as soon as he saw them or felt their tendrils encroach on his mind. It was what he lived to do. But he was only human and had limits. He would recover his expended energy quickly. He always recovered and he would fight. He was X-Com after all.

But now? He was alone.

The pilot reverted to his training. He reset his shields. A quick check showed all of his energy weapons still functional. He only had two missiles left however and in most situations, he would be looking to return to base by now. The supra-light drive that X-Com used would allow him to transit even interstellar distances quickly, but it needed a frame of reference to find its destination. The nav computer was still trying without success to find out where he was. If he tried to jump without information, he would probably wind up even more lost. Hyperspace was yet another reality that was barely accessible from this one, a tiny reality, so he was highly unlikely to hit anything while in that, but accelerating or decelerating from the speed required was another story. He had seen both X-Com and alien craft destroyed when they hit things going that fast. Shields and armor were irrelevant when you started talking about decent fractions of the speed of light. Inertia was as much a pain in the ass as gravity could be.

To pass the time, he replayed the battle in his head. The task force had jumped in, taking the enemy by surprise. That was the only explanation for only seeing a dozen enemy ships arrayed around the base. It had been exactly where the eggheads had said it would be. No one had ever been able to find an alien base larger than a mid-size staging area in human space because there hadn't been one. They were not based in Rogers' reality. They had their assault forces coming from another dimension. Getting there had been a royal pain in the butt, but for once, the battle had almost entirely gone X-Com's way.

The MacArthur, by plan, had remained far enough from the battle to stay intact while the fighters had swarmed. Her modified drive systems were the only way to get in and out of the aliens' reality, and she had been their only way home. Only a few alien ships had managed to get past the X-Com screen and strafe the capital ship. Those few had fallen prey to upgraded defenses. Ordinarily, alien ships simply danced around human design weaponry. The few weapons that could hit them rarely did any damage, but X-Com had always worked hard to find ways to adapt, to overcome. The bits and pieces they recovered from battle zones had always been analyzed to a fair-thee-well.

Rogers had no need to know much of the history of humanity out among the stars, but he did know that humanity had left Earth in response to an assault by extraterrestrials. The X-Com Council had decided that having all of their eggs in one basket was bad idea. Rogers knew what as egg was, even though he had never seen a chicken except in pictures. It simply made sense not to have all of humanity in the same place. The problem was, when humanity spread out? The aliens attacking them had followed. For a time, it had seemed that humanity had a chance to grow out here in the Deep Black, but then the enemy had returned and all hell had broken loose. Rogers was no historian, but he did know his enemy. They always came back. It was always at least a tactical surprise when they did and always, humanity played catch up.

This time, however? The aliens had been the ones taken by surprise and seven alien ships had died in the first few moments of the fight. X-Com's missiles had gotten a lot better. That left five alien ships versus three fighters and a bomber. Even odds for the first time in a long, long time. Especially since the alien base hadn't seemed to have any weapons! That had made no sense at all, except that it was huge. It was drawing energy from a star! The X-Com ship probably could have shot heir weapons at it for a month without causing serious harm. Movies aside, most who built such huge structures didn't build them with vulnerabilities. No Trench Runs would be possible for such a base.

Not that X-Com needed to.

Two of the aliens had gone for the MacArthur and only three had engaged the X-Com fighters. It had quickly become a furball, alien and human ships firing and dodging across spaces that would have been continental back on Earth. Two of Rogers' wingmen had perished, but so had two of the aliens. Their sensors had lit up with enemy reinforcements, but then Commander Deering's 'Lucky Strike' had been in range. She had fired her payload and turned to run like hell.

Just like that, the battle had ended. The remaining two enemy fighters who were close had torn after the Nova Bomb missile that the Commander had launched, utterly ignoring the human ships but they were far out of range. The Commander's normally plodding Avenger II bomber was torn up to be even even slower and the other fighter was a mess as well. Rogers' ship had been whole and he had ignored a direct order from the Commander to leave her and the other, to flee. He would be put on report for insubordination.

He hoped so anyway.

Deering hadn't made it. He had seen her ship caught up in the wave front for the nova they had caused. Nothing human made would be able to withstand such. The other damaged ship, Captain Kerasimov's Lightning II, had simply disappeared from his scopes. Battle damage? Caught by debris or aliens coming just a bit too slow to stop the Nova Bomb? Impossible to say. Rogers had been pushing his Firestar's engines to the max, trying to make it to the MacArthur whose drives had been powering up when he had sudden been elsewhere.

Here. Wherever here was.

A 'ping' came from his nav system and he heaved a sigh of relief as it started to scroll data. But what he saw made him stiffen. It made no sense.

"Earth?" The pilot asked nobody as he stared at the very familiar solar system on his screen.

Four planets inside an asteroid belt, five outside. Four gas giants. All completely familiar from his earliest teachings. All impossible. From the readings, he was just inside the orbit of Pluto, not that the wildly erratic orbit made any sense to any but astronomers. Of course he knew what Earth was, every X-Com troop did. But they had gone too far to go back. The nav data to get the humans where they had gone had been one way and erased itself when they had arrived to keep any other hostiles from being able to track them back to humanity's birthplace. They couldn't go back. But he had.

"Oh, shit."

For a moment, the pilot just sat there, stunned out of his mind. Then his brain kicked off again. X-Com had procedures for everything. They had to have something about this. Anything! All he really remembered about Earth was that most of humanity hadn't had a clue what had happened. It had all been a secret war. Hidden in the shadows. There had been some data that the fleet had received while in transit that said that humanity had been attacked again, from under the seas. He started a computer search for what to do. He had no idea what to do. If Earth was under attack…

Rogers went still as his sensors went nuts. ECM and radar were both reporting unknown craft approaching. But… They were not alien types the computer knew. Two ships were approaching slowly. Slowly by space speed scales anyway. They were clearly cautious. Then one came into his visual range and Rogers stiffened anew. That was not a human design! It was far too angular and silver! He snarled as he activated his weapons. He aimed at the one he could see and-

They were gone!

"What the fuck?" Rogers wasn't a very profane man normally, but this situation had thrown him for a loop. He checked his radar, but nothing showed. He spun his ship on its axis, checking his 'six' in ancient human fighter pilot parlance and nothing. They had been there! Now they were not!

"Okay. Great. New aliens." Rogers said very softly as his systems chimed for attention. He smiled a bit grimly as he saw a list appear! X-Com had planned for this! He had to assume he was under observation, so he plotted a jump to the closest star to Earth. Then he would jump back and see how much damage he could cause. It was what he did. He would have to make contact, but carefully. He smiled as he saw that X-Com had even planned for that. Doing so would not be easy, but he would manage. He was X-Com. He would kill any alien he saw and Earth would be free.

Very close by in cosmic terms

Both of the non human pilots stared as the clearly human design warship accelerated and then vanished into a form of recognizable supra light travel. Hyperspace. The pilot obviously could not detect their cloaked ships and that was a good thing. Both Sectoids looked at one another on their screens and as one, both winced. They knew the insignia but… The mind they had both sensed added to the very short fight they had detected said volumes. None of what that data said was good.

The Lady will not be pleased. Came from one, the one who had gotten closest to the human craft.

No one will be. The other Sectoid replied as the pair shifted course back towards their assigned patrol pattern. We need to report this. Let X-Com deal with it.

Can they? Came from the other. That ship is capable of interstellar flight. It is nothing humans in this system made and from what we scanned, its weapons are a match for anything the Elders made. If that pilot is as hostile as he seems, no one in this system will be safe. No one.

You know he will be hostile. Came from the first. He was going to shoot. We did not even have a chance to hail him. The Lady will not be happy.

A ship that can fly anywhere, has weaponry better than ours and a pilot who has no reason to trust anyone here? No one will be happy. Not even X-Com.