Eagles Over Earth
Chapter 4: Trivial Difference
March 15, 2020
En route to Cairo, Egypt
"They let GDI take over everything?" Michael McNeil asked, thumbing the striking eagle emblem on his shoulder. "They really said their constitution was void?"
"Yes. And that's how the government of Spain was absorbed," Navarro concluded. "Making it the fourth country to surrender its sovereignty to the United Nations in name, and GDI in effect. Making yours truly a GDI citizen."
McNeil nodded, processing the modern history lesson Navarro had delivered over the course of their three-hour supersonic flight to Egypt. With little else to discuss, she'd covered everything from the Tiberium World War to the anti-piracy convention of 2017, often emphasizing how powerful GDI was, and how much more powerful it could become. McNeil had never fully appreciated how far the Global Defense Initiative had come in the past twenty-five years - it wasn't much older than him, yet it had made a permanent mark on world history. Would he?
"Ever thought about becoming a teacher?" McNeil asked as the former coast of Mediterranean Sea passed below, the sea nearly completely transmuted by Tiberium. The Skyranger was fitted with weighty ablative ceramic tiles whenever they flew over Tiberium-heavy zones like the Med; the tiles would be ejected sometime before they landed to avoid contaminating the base.
"Professor," Navarro replied. "I don't want to be a teacher. I want to be a professor."
"There's a difference?"
"The pay and prestige. It's like a lieutenant versus a general."
He considered the analogy, then his mind drifted to his own future plans. What did he want to do? Career service was the obvious choice, given the background of his adopted parents and his mentors, General Solomon chief among them. "General Michael McNeil" had a great ring to it, too.
"What about you, Jun?" McNeil asked their latest squad member. "Career ideas?"
Jun Li, a scout sniper and a native of China, had an answer immediately. "Something with chemistry. I like the practical problem solving of it and I would like that for a long-term career. Maybe I'll discover the cure to Tiberium, right? Assuming we survive, of course."
"Let's assume we all will," McNeil assured. He glanced at Kwan, who simply frowned. "That includes you too, Kwan."
"It's not very likely. Just so we're all clear." She was always an honest person, McNeil remembered, remembering her mention of the 'worst that could happen' and 'a glancing hit' from their first mission. Despite the cynicism, it was good to see her fully recovered and on the team again. But five minutes before they were due to land, they received an alarming update.
"Central to Strike One, be advised, human soldiers have been sighted around the abduction site."
"Strike One, Central, acknowledged." McNeil sat straight up at Bradford's warning. "Can't you tell them to get out of the way?"
"They're not government forces," Bradford replied. "We've already confirmed that the Egyptian government isn't involved here."
"Then who are they?"
"We're trying to determine that. Until then, only engage human forces in self-defense. You are still cleared to engage any aliens on sight. Central out."
The rest of the squad had heard the conversation, and they exchanged nervous glances across the enclosed troop bay.
"Non-government soldiers?" Jun tilted his head. "In our AO?"
"Whoever they are, if they get in our way…" Navarro said.
"We'll try to de-escalate first." McNeil offered. What would happen if deescalation failed was left unsaid. The most likely answer lay in their hands, thirty-round magazines and all. As the Skyranger touched down for landing, every squad member placed a Tiberium filter over their nose. McNeil wondered if his Nod enhancements gave him resistance to Tiberium poisoning, then decided he'd rather not find out - not least because that could expose his secret to the rest of XCOM. Vahlen had agreed to not let anyone else know, and he figured the Commander of XCOM, of all people, could keep a secret too.
"I can see blossom trees in the area," their pilot warned them. The mutated trees were one of the primary vectors of Tiberium, spewing little particulates of the crystal to infect other plant life and root within the ground. Even their filters, advertised as "99.4% effective", wouldn't keep the fragments out for long. "Stay clear, guys."
The ramp lowered with a pneumatic hiss and the four of them hurried out into a small, partially demolished apartment complex heavily fenced off. Perhaps the demolition would have been finished were it not for the blossom trees that lined a nearby sidewalk - their roots must have come into contact with underground Tiberium and mutated. All it took was a single tree, and an entire neighborhood might be condemned before harvesters could clean up the mess.
"This whole place needs a quarantine," Jun suggested, briefly setting his targeting laser on a body lying on the tree, partially crystallized by the Tiberium. Nobody wanted to ask how he had ended up there.
"Not just the Tiberium." McNeil pointed out a group of people cocooned by the green filaments, near the so-called 'fog pods' that were seeded across other abduction sites. It was the same horror he had seen at his previous missions, but he hadn't had the stomach to ask what had happened to those people. It looked little better than the Tiberium assimilation on full display close by, aside from the fact that some of the cocooned people were twitching.
"That's disgusting," Navarro voiced. It was her first time seeing this - there hadn't been any of those victims at the Meld mission site. "They were all trying to get away! Look at them! And is that… a child?"
"Navarro, we'll have to get used to it." There was Kwan, cheering up the squad as only she could. Well, maybe Parnell too, though he'd been temporarily benched for his outburst at Torres over the Seeker strangling and friendly fire incident. "Come on."
They creeped forwards, careful not to expose themselves more than absolutely necessary. But advancing among the cocooned people, some noticeably smaller, and keeping an eye out for Tiberium outgrowths was taking its toll. Navarro began taking more and more halting breaths, shaking her head at the horrors every several paces.
"You all right?" Jun gently asked as Navarro groaned at an adult and child who were practically wrapped together, their heads nearly touching.
"I'm okay," she said, convincing nobody. "I'm okay."
McNeil looked back at the green abduction stuff and the closest blossom trees, ignoring the bodies around both, instead curious at the interactions between the two alien green substances. To his untrained eye, the green substances appeared to be repelling each other, like opposite magnets. He wasn't sure what to make of it, and put his attention back front.
The next matter that caught his squad's attention was a line of orange blood - Sectoid blood - in the corner of the building complex, where a living room might have once been. That it was a line was the weird thing - it wasn't the blood splatters of a ballistic or fragmentation wound.
"The trail ends too quickly," Jun said from the back. "Someone carried the corpse away. Probably multiple people, and recently."
"Must be our NGO friends," Kwan said.
Despite the circumstances, McNeil stifled a laugh. "I don't think that's the kind of NGO we're dealing with, Kwan."
"What do you mean?"
"Found a body!" Navarro shouted, a dozen meters forward. "He was… destroyed. Oh, Jesus."
McNeil dashed over to get a look while Kwan and Jun went back to reconnoitering the building. From the chest down, the body had been wearing heavy metallic armor, covering his arms, legs, and chest. But no trace of head or helmet remained - he had taken a plasma headshot, leaving little but a cauterized stump at his neck.
"Thoughts?" McNeil crouched next to the man, filled with worry at the implication and his own non-response to the sheer horror of the dead man. Perhaps it was because he didn't know him, not in the way he knew Aerts and saw him blown apart. The anonymous were easier to forget.
"Not government, and definitely not GDI." Navarro said, trying to avert her gaze at the cauterized neck. "Citizen militia? Criminal gang?" she further suggested.
"They're wearing extremely heavy armor for a militia faction," McNeil noted. "And that rifle over there - isn't that a modern M16? Gangs in Egypt don't have M16s."
A series of automatic gunfire, followed by equally unmistakable plasma fire a few hundred feet away, threw everyone into combat mode. Then the long whoosh of a rocket sounded, followed by a rattling explosion outside.
"Holy shit!" several soldiers screamed at once.
McNeil was comfortably certain that militia didn't pack M16s or rocket launchers. With that, process of elimination decreed that there was only one faction the dead man could belong to: the Brotherhood of Nod. Though soundly defeated in the Tiberium War and scattered across the world, its dozen-plus successor factions still presented a serious threat, through lawlessness, terrorism, and reckless Tiberium proliferation. The Egyptian government officially claimed that Nod did not exist in the country, but McNeil didn't believe that for even a moment.
"Strike One, there are alien readings to the east!" Bradford chipped in. "Be advised, thermal readings also suggest human individuals are present there too. We weren't picking them up earlier - stay on alert!"
"Roger that." Weren't picking them up before? Did these 'human individuals' have stealth devices or something? Sticking close to each other, Kwan was first to report their extraterrestrial enemy.
"Contact, one Sectoid!" she reported, the alien cowering next to a shrapnel-ridden wall, plainly exposed to the GDI squad. The bottom half of a Sectoid body lay nearby, too, bent and poking out of a crater just about the right size of an RPG blast.
"Strike One, terminate!" the Commander sharply ordered.
With its back turned, the alien was an easy target. Jun fired a single shot from his sniper rifle, and its head blew apart in a dense cloud of orange. As the alien fell, a distant shriek signaled that another Sectoid died at almost the same time.
"Who's there?" a man shouted from the same area McNeil heard the other Sectoid die. From his voice, he couldn't have been more than a few hundred feet away.
"Cover me," McNeil said to his squad, then turned to the source of the shout. "Hey!" he yelled, trying to remain calm. "Friendly here! I'm coming out!"
McNeil walked out slowly, beyond the demolition site, keeping his assault rifle lowered towards the side. He was dealing with people, he reminded himself, people who were fighting aliens. Okay, they were also likely Nod, possibly the same breed of fanatics that had killed his birth parents and started the Tiberium War, but also -
The first thing McNeil processed about the man in front of him was the similarity to the beheaded soldier from earlier. The man wore heavy dark-gray body armor, with several red accents on the shoulder straps. He was armed with a modern M-16 derivative rifle with an underbarrel grenade launcher. And his helmet, resembling the German Stahlhelm, contained a familiar emblem: a scorpion's tail nestled within a chamfered triangle.
"Nod?!" McNeil thought aloud. The dead man was one thing, but a real, living Nod soldier was another.
"GDI!" the Nod soldier growled.
Back in the Tiberium War, that exchanged identification would have been enough for both sides to start shooting. But McNeil instead kept his rifle lowered and blurted out the first thing on his mind.
"We're here for the aliens! Not you!"
In one of the dumbest things he had done yet, McNeil proceeded to take off his helmet, exposing himself in an alien and Tiberium-infested environment for diplomacy's sake. Though at the very least, his Tiberium filter was still attached as a secondary mask.
"McNeil. What are you doing?" Kwan not-whispered towards him as he stood completely defenseless against a member of GDI's nemesis.
"Are you trying to get killed?" Navarro added. "By everything?"
He wasn't, and to his immense surprise, the Nod soldier followed suit in removing his helmet - not that the result was any friendlier. He looked no older than McNeil, but his youthful face was drawn by a permanent brutality, from his curled frown to an icy glint in the man's eyes, giving the impression of someone more comfortable with violence than breathing.
"I'm Michael McNeil, GDI Special Forces," McNeil told him, giving XCOM's official cover. "As I said, we're here for the aliens, not you. We mean you no trouble. What's your name, soldier?"
"Slavik. Of the Brotherhood," the Nod soldier curtly replied with a voice as heartless as his rifle. "You're fighting the aliens?"
"Me and my squad. You are too, right?"
"It's the only reason I haven't killed you yet. Do you have anything else to say?"
"No. Do you?" McNeil hadn't thought that far ahead. He was mostly surprised to still be standing and breathing, doubly so when he noticed a few other Nod soldiers take aim at him. Two emerged right behind Slavik, practically walking out from his shadow, while McNeil caught sight of a sniper on the roof of a nearby office building, a laser sight slowly and deliberately settling on McNeil's forehead.
"No. Now get out of my sight before I change my mind."
McNeil put his helmet back on and slowly stepped away, never taking his eyes off the Nod formation. Slavik motioned for his squad to fall back, and they practically disappeared into the night. McNeil could have sworn they were never even there to begin with, so complete was their vanishing.
"McNeil, what the hell?" Navarro grabbed him. "They could have shot you!"
"You had my back, didn't you?"
"Don't worry, I did," Jun chipped in. "I had Slavik's face zeroed in. If he'd sneezed at you, I would've blown his brains out."
"See?" McNeil grinned at their sniper. "That's what I'm talking about."
Kwan shook her head. "Just because we're all going to die doesn't mean you need to get yourself killed now."
Later that day, as his soldiers went through yet another training session against the aliens, storming a wooden mock-up crashed UFO, their Commander watched on in silence. He could issue all the orders he wanted, but his soldiers would have to execute them.
McNeil tossed a grenade through the UFO 'door' and moved in with Navarro, right as Jun and Parnell fired their rifles into the entry, trying to kill the orange humanoid designated an "Outsider". But while Parnell landed some hits, Jun completely missed and the Outsider fired on McNeil. McNeil toppled, "dead", before Jun could fire a second shot, shattering the simulated alien a little too late.
"Halt exercise!" the Commander called, shaking his head. That was their fifth simulated UFO assault, and they had yet to complete one without casualties. A missed shot there or an errant rocket here, and somebody would die. There was simply no margin of error, and his troops picked themselves back up, taking a brief break until their next simulation. It was utterly exhausting for them, but the Commander knew they could handle it. As he had, when he was a soldier and young.
Swirling in his old war memories, the Commander departed the training ground towards the situation room, a condensed command center showing XCOM assets across the world and news of the alien invasion. He could monitor the status of every soldier, pilot, guard, and janitor on base, or check up on XCOM's burgeoning satellite network. It even included an accounting ledger, not that he paid much attention to it - he always had more pressing matters than spreadsheets. This hour's issue was an emergency meeting with his bosses, something nobody was happy to have but necessary all the same.
"What do you have to report, Commander?" the GDI Council spokesman asked in a clear, deep voice, his bald face almost completely obscured by poor lighting.
"At the abduction site I responded to today, my forces encountered Nod personnel. My own recovery teams found nothing after squad extraction, which would imply that Nod secured all relevant artifacts."
"Continue."
"The Nod personnel encountered, both live and dead, were heavily armed and armored with comparable equipment to my team. Signal intercepts analyzed later also suggested that this unit swore loyalty to Kane - ending major communications with 'Kane lives in death'."
"Kane is dead, Commander," the spokesman immediately replied. "We are more interested in your belief that Nod was able to secure alien technology."
"I'll reserve my judgment on Kane," the commander replied. "But yes, as I mentioned, my recovery teams were unable to retrieve anything of value. Everything - alien corpses, weapon fragments, Meld - must be assumed to be in Nod's hands."
He didn't need to explain how problematic it was. It was difficult enough persuading GDI member nations to share their alien research and materials with XCOM. It would obviously be impossible with Nod. And if Nod acquired additional alien technology, they could start a second Tiberium War.
Yet as the representatives digested his warning, the Commander had some hope. The GDI Council was born in the desperate days of the Tiberium War and nurtured in the ever-worsening Tiberium environmental emergency. Typical civilian councils might have dithered and disagreed during major crises, failing to unite behind a cause until it was too late. This one was apt to preemptively crush any threat and jump at any solution. Nothing else could save humanity… or, to the very cynical, increase the Council's power over national governments reluctant to surrender sovereignty to an international unit.
After a minute, the spokesman had the Council's verdict.
"Understand, Commander, that we have already high-placed assets within Nod that have reduced much of its possible danger," he began. "That there remain… Independent factions are not surprising. However, we agree that Nod cannot be allowed to exploit alien technology, and that XCOM is our best-placed force to prevent this outcome."
The Commander nodded and the spokesman went on.
"You are hereby authorized to conduct limited covert operations against Nod factions confirmed to be in possession of alien technology. We are prepared to activate additional assets to support you."
The Commander appreciated their swift consensus but didn't miss how they had ignored his warning about Kane. He wasn't going to let them drop the subject so easily.
"And what about Kane?" he pressed. "What if he is alive and has loyalists?"
"The faction you encountered has nothing more than fanaticism and martyr worship. Kane is no longer GDI's priority. It is certainly not your priority."
"I see," the Commander interjected, keeping his irritation noticeable. Just because Kane's headquarters had been hit by an Ion Cannon strike at the end of the Tiberium War didn't mean the slippery, messianic bastard couldn't have escaped, somehow.
"Your primary objective remains the same: the defeat of the alien invasion. Do not let Nod distract you."
"Very well." The Council closed the feed, and the Commander leaned back, mindful of his limited victory - emphasis on limited. He had fought in the Tiberium War to destroy Nod, but if they really were back - if Kane was back - it was up to this generation of special forces to take them down, too.
Author's Note: As some of you predicted, Nod will replace EXALT as a behind-the-scenes competitor to XCOM in this story. But what exactly is Nod trying to gain from the alien invasion, and how will XCOM under GDI respond? Stay tuned to find out!