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"The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love."

~Hubert Humphrey

Chapter Five: Stumbles

"Commander-"

Edward Gallant turned his shoulder, cane hammering the companionway floor. He passed a rookie whose armor proclaimed him "Cameron Rogers", and something in the man's eyes gave the game away.

Something like disdain.

"Sir-"

"Don't you have a fucking job to do, Central?" Gallant hesitated when he came to the next fork in the path, and he regretted exfiltrating from the command center before Julie Richardson had a chance to reattach herself to him. Still, Gallant felt confident turning right would get him where he needed to go, so that's what he did.

"Commander-"

"If you could go and do it, that would be nice." Gallant thundered on to the next corner, teeth gritted as he thought of the firefight.

"Damn it, Edward, stop moving!" Bradford reached out and caught his shoulder the instant Cameron Rogers was out of sight.

"Hands off, Central!" Gallant spun, and though he wavered on his feet, he pushed the end of his cane into Bradford's chest. "What's your fucking problem?"

"Sir...you've been in stasis for years...things have changed."

"Yeah." Gallant's eye twitched. "And I just made a goddamn fool of myself in front of the entire organization. What was it I always used to complain about, with Van Doorn and the other clowns who tried muscling their influence into my project?"

"Sir-"

"You picked the wrong man, John." Again Gallant turned, wishing his cane drove into an alien throat rather than onto the alloy floor. The ringing, while pleasant, wasn't as satisfying as a squelch and a scream.

"Tactics are different, and Advent and the aliens work different now. You're getting used to the changes."

"Why?" Gallant scoffed, but he didn't stop, forcing bedraggled Bradford to hurry along after him. It gave the Commander a bit of perverse pleasure to, in his crippled state, be the one setting the pace for someone who was supposedly a real soldier. "You seem to know how this all works well enough. You've been leading the organization for the twenty years I was locked away. Why can't you just keep it up, eh?"

"Because I'm not half the commander you are. It'll be Germany all over again, sooner or later."

"That's about what today looked like." Gallant discovered an elevator, and he hit the button with aplomb. "You picked the wrong man, John."

Quiet hung in the musty companionway. Gallant glared, while Bradford put his hands on his hips, shifting back and forth as he visibly hunted for words.

"I can't believe that," he finally insisted. "I can't. If that's true, we've already lost."

"I seem to be doing a bang-up job of making sure we do."

"Do you remember what you always told the staff, every time the aliens wrecked one of our teams?" Bradford asked quietly. "Every time Malin Larsen got her squad shot out from around her for the umpteenth time, crawling back into Big Sky with gritted teeth and a middle finger for the aliens trying to take her down too?"

Gallant watched the elevator open, but he made no move to enter. "Everyone stumbles. Everyone falls."

"And the rest?" Bradford asked. "The great men and women of history are the ones who get back up again."

"Lives hang in the balance. It's a miracle no one died today."

"But no one did," Bradford insisted. "And that's on you just as much as everything else. You put faith in Kelly and White, and they didn't let you down. Maybe they don't see it that way, not yet, but in the end people will remember that it was so hard on them only because you made sure Nunez was going to survive."

Gallant let out a long breath. "Damn it, Air Force. You just can't let me wallow, can you?"

"Never been my strong suit." Bradford leaned past Gallant, and he tapped one of the buttons on the elevator control panel. "Get in."

"Where are you sending me?" Gallant did follow orders though, hurrying to lean on the far corner.

"You need to see Shen. After recovering the converter-"

"Right." Gallant shivered. "Shen..."

"I'll be on the bridge," Bradford advised, as the doors began to slide shut. "First right, then first left."

"Right, left."

Thump! The elevator began to descend, and Gallant leaned on his cane to keep his footing.

Watching that firefight...knowing those soldiers were only there because their commander had made a mistake...

Gallant eyed his reflection in the alien alloys of the far wall. He eyed the cane, eyed the bend in his leg and the half-cocked posture that marked him. He eyed the tired eyes and scraggly hair, and when he took an experimental step, he eyed the limp, like every step put his right foot into an invisible pothole.

"How the mighty have fallen." His lip curled as he thought of what had once been: the broad-shouldered, straight-standing soldier whom everyone had talked about as if he were the next big thing in the US Army. The next Knox, or Meade, or Grant or Pershing or Patton.

The one they'd watched and whispered about behind his back, after the ambush and his crippling. The one they'd bundled off in the dead of night to Groom Lake for a meeting with the Shadow Man.

"Desk job. Stupid, crap-ass desk job to get the useless fuck out of the way." Gallant chuckled, but he wasn't by any means cheerful. "If only I'd known."

The elevator came to a halt. Gallant inhaled, trying to draw himself up like the old Captain Gallant had done, every time he'd gone marching out to brief his command.

"Shen," he muttered, with a tingle of raw anticipation. "Shen."

"Specialist?" Aileen Quinn didn't seem entirely certain whether to jump for joy or find someone to slap with her scoring pad. "What the hell does a Specialist do?"

"GREMLINs," Jane Kelly pointed out, from her opposite seat in the bar booth. She took a hefty swig from her bottle. "Medical and hacking stuff."

"This is because I treated Nunez," Aileen swore. "They're sticking me in as a medic because one time, I took care of a wounded fellow."

"How is he?" Jane asked. She shuddered, thinking of how bloody he'd been on the trip back to base. "He didn't look good."

"Prognosis is good," Aileen assured her. "And he got scored. He isn't awake to look yet, but..."

"You didn't." Jane shook her head. "You did not peek."

"Sharpshooter. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me: he missed half his shots. What about that screams 'this man is a crack shot' to you?"

"Maybe it's the other way around," Jane mused. "Maybe they want to give him more range training because of how badly he needs it."

"Then there's you." Aileen examined Jane critically. "Corporal Kelly, huh?"

"Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?" Jane took another long drink. "Only had to nearly die a couple times to get there."

"I guess I'm here to patch you up while you work on your next promotion, then."

Jane raised her bottle. "That's what a girlfriend is for." She hesitated. "Did you...did you get a look at him?"

"Who?" Aileen tilted her head. "The Commander?"

"Yeah." Jane's eye twitched. "He got us split up, and White and I..."

"Yeah." Aileen didn't look very happy. "Central said Gallant was the best."

"Central was wrong. I could have done better."

"As I recall, you're the one who started shooting," Aileen pointed out. "We made mistakes, too."

"But I couldn't see the whole picture. I did what was best on my side, not knowing what it looked like on yours." Jane sighed. "I thought you and Nunez would wrap up over there and come in to flank the sectoid if he gave me and White trouble."

"I'm sorry-"

"Don't be sorry! It's not your fault you weren't in a position to help." Jane pushed her drink from one hand to the other. "We lost people getting Gallant out of Paris."

"We did." Aileen glanced to the memorial up at the far end of the bar. "I knew Peter, a little."

"I wish I did." Jane took off her cap, throwing it on the tabletop without looking. "I was only here for a day or two after escaping Ireland. Then Central and I were off to France. I think I saw Ramirez in passing...she might have shown me to my quarters." Jane took another drink. "They're gone. Bam. Just like that."

"Ramirez had kids," Aileen murmured. "Two of them, in a haven out in Mexico. They're with their father."

"Do they know?"

"I imagine Central sent a message personally." The Specialist went for her own drink then, and silence fell.

"We're damn lucky," Jane finally murmured. "Damn lucky. Nunez is alive, I'm alive, you're alive and White too...no one died."

"Maybe the Commander really is-"

"You're the one who saved Nunez. White and I were the ones who took down the sectoid and the Advent force on the right." Jane shook her head. "He didn't do a damn thing that mattered, except get us into more trouble."

Aileen sighed. "Maybe you're right. Still-"

Beep! Beep! That was the tell-tale tone of her communicator, and the Specialist sighed as she reached up to tap the device in her ear.

"Quinn." She frowned, listening. "All right. Sure, I'm on my way. No, it's not a bother."

"Friend?" Jane asked, as Aileen threw back the rest of her drink.

"Richardson. She wants to see my GREMLIN. Wants to know what I'm going to name it." Aileen threw her bottle, and it soared across the room and straight into the refuse bin. "Nothing but net!"

"You go, girl!" Jane chuckled. "You've got a throwing arm. Practice with grenades much?"

"Sometimes a girl needs to make something go boom," Aileen confirmed, with a little grin. "I don't mean to desert you, Jane: you're welcome to come along if you'd like."

"I'd rather drink," she confessed. "Go on! Leave me. I'll just suffer alone."

"With an attitude like that, you'd name your GREMLIN 'Whiskey'."

"Well, I do have a sword to name." Jane rolled her eyes. "And Glamdring is already taken."

"But you're the only Ranger-"

"Trust me, I asked. I can't do it." She waved, insistently. "Go on, Aileen. I'm fine. I'll see you tomorrow for range drill."

"Don't die," the other Irishwoman encouraged, before patting Jane on the shoulder and starting off. Jane chuckled...

...but her mirth rapidly died off.

"Don't die." She turned those two words over, tasting them. They stung and slithered, charred like ash and soot as they worked their way over her tongue.

Jane Kelly rose, reclaiming her cap and taking her empty bottle.

Obsidian wasn't on the memorial. Jane tried to put a picture of him over one of the yet-empty spaces, but her imagination wasn't quite up to the task. He would have been glowering, at least: he always glowered. Glowered and loomed...until he saw a stray cat in the boondocks, away from Advent's ban on domestic animals. Obsidian had loved cats, and he was so gentle with them...

James would have been smiling. James was a smiler to begin with, who took little outside of the aliens seriously. Jane had enjoyed needling him, because he always clapped right back. Nothing dampened his spirits, not low supplies or battle injuries or even running from viper trackers. James believed in the power of his own heart and mind over his fear and misery, and Jane missed that self-certain joy a little more every day.

There wouldn't have even been a picture of Irina. She tried her best to avoid them: the paranoid Russian was convinced that pictures would make her easier to track down. If there had been anything, it would have been her with a scarf wrapped around her face, doing her best to shield her eyes with her long golden hair.

Jane threw her bottle aside, and it landed on the floor two feet left of the bin. She didn't care enough to retrieve it.

Another, she thought, turning to the bar and the rookie on tending duty. She raised her hand, seeking his attention through the little throng of technicians and engineering personnel.

And paused. Jane frowned in silence, hand half-raised, as she took in the lone figure at the far corner of the bar, tucked away and hiding.

She was walking before she was certain of why.

"So, it's you." White drained his shot, slamming the glass down hard. "Fighting Irish herself."

"Celebrating?" Jane asked. She glanced to the pip on his uniform. "I see you got scored."

"Big guns, big booms." White scoffed. "I don't know any more about grenades than you, but that's what Central saw when he looked at me."

"Guess we've got one of everything. Quinn's a Specialist."

"Bloody lovely." He glared at Jane out of the corner of his eye. "You got a problem, doll?"

Jane hesitated. "I..."

"Spit it out. I ain't got all day." He waved for the bartender's attention. "Oi. I'll take-"

"Let me!" Jane paused as both White and the bartender glanced her way. "Well, you did kind of save my arse in the firefight. Figure I owe you one."

"Well..." White blinked, but then he covered it with a shrug. "Ain't never turned down a free one."

"Great. My tab. I'll take another as well." Jane gently eased to a seat at the stool next to his. "Do you mind?"

"Doubt you'd care one way or the other." He waited until he had his next amber shot, and swirled it around for a moment. "Nunez is damn lucky to be alive."

"I know it." Jane accepted her bottle, and she took a little sip. "We're all damn lucky."

"I didn't think we'd all make it back," the Grenadier growled. "Last time I went up against those bastards..."

"Yeah?" Jane tapped her fingers on the bar. "You've lost someone?"

"What's your problem? Curious?" White scoffed. "You wouldn't understand."

"I've had two teams shot out from around me." Jane took another drink. "We called ourselves the Warriors, back in Ireland. We weren't XCOM-affiliated...just a little local cell pissing off aliens the old-fashioned way."

"Yeah. That's about me, too." White nodded to the memorial. "You ain't gonna see my friends up there."

"Mine either. We just took a job to help, that's all." Jane chuckled, but it wasn't mirthful. "We grabbed the alien X4 charges. That's what we used in Paris, to take out one of the Advent patrols. Big boom." She mimed, nearly losing her grip on the cool, slick bottle in the process. "Got everyone killed in the process...except for me."

"I'm sorry." He sounded honest. Jane sighed.

"Yeah. I still see them, sometimes. Can't stop thinking about them."

"That's me as well," White muttered. "I hear the screaming and the mag-fire."

"Yeah."

They sat in silence for a moment. Jane drank, and the Grenadier contemplated the bar, eyes hard.

"We haven't formally met," Jane finally said. She thrust out her free hand. "Jane Kelly."

"David White." He took it, and she approved of how he didn't show any mercy in his grip just because she was a woman. "You ever fought an Advent MEC?"

"No."

"Well, there was this one time in shanty-town south of Darwin..."

ENGINEERING, the door proclaimed in loud print. Gallant hit the access button under the orange stripe bisecting the alien-designed portal, and it opened with a hiss of pneumatics.

"And I thought the old base was techy." His cane came down on harsher metal floors, and Gallant scowled when he saw latticework stairs, like overlarge mesh. He thanked God and whoever had built the damn thing for the thoughtful railing on his left, and held his cane at waist-level as he started the climb.

"-with some of the parts from your old engine," a woman muttered, from up the stairs. Gallant frowned. She sounded familiar, yet not: like someone he'd met in a dream, long ago. "Should fix the stabilization issue." Something banged. "Come on, Rover! It'll work."

"Rover?" Gallant wondered, as he made it up the last step. He had about a second to take in scattered toolboxes, hammers and wrenches scattered over a desk and a curling semicircular worktable nestled in the far corner. His eyes flicked to camera feeds, either for security or monitoring, and then some kind of automated assembly device working on a robotic drone.

Then, of course, his eyes widened when another such drone shot from the desk and straight at him, buzzing and humming like a wasp the size of a pug.

"Commander!" warned the woman behind the desk, a wrench in hand.

"What the-" Gallant ducked, and the...thing rocketed over his shoulder, soaring out over the open space by the door. He stared as it did a full orbit of the room, finally coming down to settle behind the woman's shoulder.

"What the hell is that?" Gallant finally demanded.

"This? This is Rov-R," the woman explained. "Sorry about that. Getting our tech to talk to theirs is harder than you'd think."

"Okay." Gallant drove his cane down, trying not to glare apprehensively at the little dive-bomber. Instead, he took in the woman: short, with Asian features and soft eyes, framed with short-cut brown hair. Her outfit was the practical style of a mechanic, all vest and gloves and pants festooned with pockets. Gallant spent a moment examining the odd fist-sigil shield tattooed on her right bicep. "Bradford said Shen was down here."

"Oh...you were probably expecting my father. In all that's happened, I'm guessing Central didn't tell you yet." She stood to attention. "Lily Shen: Chief Engineer, at your service, sir. We met once-"

"We did." Gallant frowned. "You were...your father brought you to the base as things went bad. Said it was the safest place."

"When the aliens attacked, Bradford got the two of us out. He tried to save you, too."

"Is your father here?" Gallant didn't want to be rude, but...

"He's..." Shen's eyes darkened. "He's gone."

"Oh. I'm..." Gallant battled another seething, searing wave of loss as it rippled out through his veins. "I'm sorry."

"Me too." Shen managed a smile. "Dad gave everything he had to get us this far. This entire ship is his life's work."

"Ship?" Gallant wondered. Shen nodded.

"I know he would have loved to show you around the place himself," she assured him. "Dad used to talk about you a lot."

"About how I lost the war?"

"No!" Shen shook her head. "He was in awe of you. He said you were the only one who could win this for us, if you only had the chance."

"Yeah...well, I'm not holding my breath." Gallant did take one, though, and straightened his spine. "Very well, Chief. What do you have for me?"

"The converter's installed. The Avenger is up and running." She gestured to her little assembly devices. "I know it may not look it, but from here I can fabricate virtually anything you and Tygan come up with. I've already started working on medical supplies and flash-bang grenades for our soldiers. If Tygan and his staff can get some of their new projects together, I have a few prototypes I can present soon."

"Good. I think we're going to need all the unfair advantages we can get."

"Oh, I specialize in the unfair." Shen smiled. "It was an honor to finally-"

Bang!

"Whoa!" Gallant stumbled as Rov-R let out an electric pulse, twitching and hanging in the air.

"What the..." Shen stared. "Rov-R?"

"What the hell is it doing?" Gallant demanded, as the robot flew over to Shen's computers. It twitched and it beeped, still crackling with electricity, and-

"He's...he's accessing the data..." Shen took a half-step that way as her monitors all flashed with unusual signals. Gallant raised his cane.

"Here. Knock it down-"

"Wait!"

"Shen, getting some unusual interference up here." That was Bradford, and Gallant could only faintly hear his voice from the engineer's earpiece."Seems to be hitting us across the board."

"Working on it," Shen pledged, before taking a step toward Rov-R. She reached out, as if comforting a spooked horse.

"What's it doing? What's going on?" Gallant eyed flickering lights and crackling electricity. "Shen?"

"Someone triggered his remote uplink," she muttered. "But that's not possible. No one knows these systems."

"Just stop it!" Gallant ordered. "I don't like this-"

Shen touched the drone.

"Shen!" Bradford cried, as Rov-R spasmed in the air. "Shen, power levels just spiked!"

The lights flickered. Shen yelped as they went out abruptly, plunging Engineering into darkness.

Darkness except for the glow of Shen's four monitors, and that symbol on all of them. Even as Gallant and Shen watched, it turned from red...to blue.

Bellator en Machina, read the shield sigil on screen.

"That's not...that's not..." Gallant choked, clutching his heart and thankful for his medication. "That can't be!"

"...Dad?" Shen demanded.

Author's Note 5: Timelines and Outlines

The odds of getting the Lost Towers transmission before even hearing about the Blacksite are somewhere between zero and zero. This wasn't the original outline for this scene, but I realized I needed a good "ending wham line" and the transmission actually worked really well. You can rest assured I adjusted a lot of my mission orders after this.

Which brings us to the point of mission orders: since I'm transcribing a game heavy on missions, my outline looks a little different than most of my writing projects. Being the author of close to 20 books, I have the art of outlines down to a rambling, personalized science...but this presented a new challenge. Instead of merely chapter-by-chapter breakdowns and a character ledger, I wrote down every single mission type in XCOM 2, then decided how many of which I wanted to include, why, where they should go, what additional factors take place(Ruler aliens, Chosen appearances, etc) and assembled what is for all intents and purposes a second full outline on that alone.

We won't be running Lost Towers immediately, though. There's something else that I want to take care of first, in the name of expanding the steady cast and providing a little time for Shen and Tygan to do some gear development. We'll talk about research and engineering next time.

Until then, Vigilo Confido.