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"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
~Alan Turing
Chapter Eleven: The Lost Tower
"Two minutes," Firebrand warned. Jane Kelly took a breath.
"All right," she said, reaching up to pull herself to her feet. "We don't know what we're going to find down wherever this is. Do we, Chief?"
"Just the source of this transmission." Shen checked her rifle over, and Jane at least appreciated that she seemed to know what she was doing with it.
Of course they had a VIP with them. Of bloody course. Because this mystery insertion wasn't worrisome enough as it was. Jane bristled at the unfairness of her life.
At least she had Aileen, and at least she had David. Mendoza, the jury was out on in terms of effectiveness...but then there was Elena, and the Reaper's quiet, arms-folded, glowering presence in the rear of the drop bay was immensely comforting to a corporal worried about her op doing far more damage to the Resistance than she could have ever imagined, all because Shen wanted to get out of her garage for a stroll.
"Right. This transmission." Jane took a deep breath. "Everyone stay tight. No one get separated from the group. And for God's sake, don't do stupid things while you're down there! If there's Advent, or...or Lost..." She trailed off.
"The odds of that are low." Shen rose. "Lost aren't smart enough to operate computer systems sophisticated enough to mimic Dad's signals."
"How do you know?" Jane wondered.
"Ninety seconds."
"What's the plan?" Aileen asked, waving to Nessie as she stood up. The GREMLIN buzzed over her shoulder like a football-sized hummingbird, which was disconcerting at the best of times.
And somehow, Rov-R was even worse.
"We'll have to decide points of entry when we see what kind of facility we're talking about," Jane decided. "If they've got transmission equipment like this, there's no way it's some imbecile in a low-grav van." She glanced to her squadmates. "Aileen, David, you're with me. Mendoza, Outrider, I want you holding the back, and keeping Chief Shen out of trouble."
"Excuse me?" The engineer looked quite off-put by that. "I know how to shoot. I survived on my own well enough before coming to the Avenger-"
"Yeah, but you're my team's bloody responsibility," Jane snapped. "So if I say you need nursemaids, Lily, you need bloody nursemaids."
"Forty seconds."Firebrand paused. "Got a real nice view of the place coming up. Some kind of tower."
"I'm hardly a deadweight," Shen snapped. She glared, and Jane glared right back.
"I sure as hell hope not." The Irishwoman's eye twitched. "So you'll stay in the rear with Mendoza and Outrider until I damn well say otherwise."
"Listen," Mendoza started, raising his hands while Elena rolled her eyes. "Amigas-"
"I don't have to answer to you." Shen loomed, which amused Jane since she was a little bit taller than her would-be intimidator. "You're well below me on the food chain...corporal."
"Yeah?" Jane's lip curled as she turned for the door. "On the Avenger, maybe. You're on my team and my op now, wrench wench."
"Call me wench to my face," Shen ordered. Jane paused.
"Ask nicely and maybe I-"
"Ladies!" Firebrand made sure to chime the drop warning rather more loudly than usual. "Don't make me come back there, now." She paused, as if to let that sink in. "Facility's coming up on the right. Drop in ten."
"Roger that, Firebrand." David caught Jane's shoulder when she half-turned for the irritating engineer. "Leave it, Jane."
"Don't touch me!" She ripped her arm free, but with David between her and Shen, and Aileen and Mendoza hurriedly taking place at the opening end of the drop bay, Jane decided the big Australian might have a point. Grudgingly, she returned her attention to the deployment lines, falling from their overhead housing toward the ground below. She spared a glance for their destination-
"...madre de dios," Mendoza whispered. Jane stared.
"You can say that again," she allowed, as she beheld a tower that must have been a hundred stories high, rising from the smog in a sheltered valley. It glistened red and gold in the morning light, and it seemed to thrum with energy, the air around its metal sheen shimmering with heat haze. "You can say that all day."
"How did no one notice this place?" Commander Edward Gallant demanded, glaring at the representation of the facility in his holodisplay. "It's bigger than a muton's-"
"It's nestled between those mountains," Bradford pointed out. "It could have some kind of passive cloaking system as well. Something that the transmission disrupted."
"Or," Doctor Tygan suggested, from a position at Central's side, "it could be related to that."
"To what?" Gallant waited while the science officer pointed. He frowned. "That's an..."
"Menace, this is Central." Bradford inhaled. "I don't know if you saw it, but there's an Advent symbol on the tower's south face. Proceed with caution."
"Roger that, Central." Firebrand left it there, and Gallant supposed she was concentrating as she brought the dropship into position over a large platform low on the tower. He waited as the blinking lights showing each member of the team slid out from the Skyranger's bay, fanning out as soon as their boots hit cracked white pavement.
"Right, then." Gallant leaned forward. "Let's see what we have to work with."
"This place is...old." Carlos Mendoza led the approach, rifle up and ready. He eyed rust-crusted railings and moss-breached pavement, smelling musty oil and dust in the air a little stronger with every step. "Very old."
"It looks nice," Chief Shen mused, as she followed him through what might at one time have been a garden. Plants still lived here, but they'd spread beyond their natural habitat, and now pried their way into the hard ground and over railings that now served as vine racks. "It's peaceful."
"For now." Elena Dragunova checked her Vektor. "The stairs are up ahead. It looks like there's a door and some windows up top."
"I see." Jane waved to Aileen and David, not sparing Shen or Mendoza a glance. "Come on. We'll push in and see what we find."
"Got it." Mendoza waited for the Grenadier, Specialist and Ranger to push past him onto the stairs. He checked his rifle, reaching up to check that he still had his sword hanging comfortably over his shoulder.
"Jerk," Shen muttered, and Mendoza pretended both that he hadn't heard and he hadn't noticed her glaring at the back of Jane's head. Instead, he took up position in David's wake, hurrying up the stairs and hoping the VIP didn't do anything too stupid. They hardly needed extra complications, not when they barely knew what they were getting into to start with.
"I wonder if we'll see that Chosen again," he mused. "Here's hoping not."
"She is dangerous, but not as frightening as the Hunter who stalks my kind." Elena took position in the rear, trailing Shen and glancing around with yellow-glowing eyes. "He can strike you dead from two thousand meters, before you even know he's there."
"Can he?" Interest sparked, paired with cold anger. "Does he use a mag-rifle, by any chance?"
Elena paused. "Da. Why?"
Mendoza clutched his rifle tightly. "No reason. Just curious." He picked up the pace, taking the stairs two at a time as he followed the point team.
"No life signs," Aileen reported after a moment, in her thick Sligo brogue. "The place seems dark."
"Door ahead," David chimed in. "I'll-"
"Let me." Jane approached, and Mendoza thought there was a little smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth as she picked up her foot and kicked the door off its hinges. It flew with a bang, crashing wide open and hanging forlornly in the opening for a moment before gravity won a battle with rusted metal, finally snapping the housing for its last hinge.
"Move." Then the Ranger went in, with her two partners on her heels. Mendoza paused by the door, inhaling an even deeper whiff of musty oil.
"From the looks of it...we're the first people to come here in a long time." Shen looked unhappy, regarding the cracked tiles and pavement, and the encroaching moss wrapped over the railings and up the tower's flanks. "Why would Advent just abandon this place?"
"Advent doesn't abandon anything," Elena growled. She examined the door through her scope for a moment. "No heat signatures inside. Everything's cold."
"Then let's see what kind of trouble the others have gotten into," Mendoza suggested. He led the way into the breach, Shen and Elena coming in at his flanks.
That was excessive, it thought. The door was unlocked.
It observed as the operatives entered through the new opening, pushing through the dimly-lit facility. It eagerly awaited the moment where the first of them would bang their ankle on something hidden in the gloom, even pausing to calculate the exact probability it would happen within the next few minutes. People banging their shins on things seemed amusing.
It paused to consider faces. It ran them through its database, and quickly identified Jane Kelly the Resistance operative, Carlos Mendoza, the one who got away...that was David White, the blandest, most unremarkable soldier XCOM could have found. And Aileen Quinn, wanted on half the Advent network, with good reason. The fifth member of the team, it couldn't place, and that annoyed it. Reapers were so difficult to deal with.
But then there was Number Six, and if it had had a face, it would have smiled.
"Well..." Mendoza blinked, taking in the dim facility. "This place is massive."
"You couldn't tell from the outside?" David examined the towering cranes and dormant belts, pushed in side-by-side with half-finished projects hanging from them. "We've got some kind of MECs here."
"Maybe," Jane hedged. "Under all that rust...I think they're MECs, but maybe not."
"Probably the facility's original defensive complement," Central guessed. "Are they active?"
"Not at the moment." Mendoza eyed one suspiciously, keeping his gun trained on it. "Their armor looks thin enough we could breach it anyway."
"This looks like an assembly plant," Aileen mused, examining the dim floor and the dust-coated machines.
"Probably where Advent's been getting their robots." Jane nodded. "It's all automated. Pretty advanced stuff."
"Sure...for about twenty years ago." Shen scoffed. "If this was where Advent's been building their MECs, they'd have run out long ago."
"Well, who asked you?" Jane snapped. Mendoza sighed.
"Amigas..."
"And so the prodigal child returns." Lights flashed on with that one sentence, stinging the Ranger's eyes hard enough he covered them with an arm. The team seemed in little better shape, even Shen, who ducked behind a pillar as flourescent bulbs in the ceiling flared to life, illuminating every corner of the production floor. "I see Father's pride in your abilities was not entirely unfounded." The voice echoed from the ceiling and the walls, and when Mendoza spun with gun upraised, he found no convenient target. The voice seemed coolly amused. "I'm so glad you could join me."
"What the hell was that?" Gallant demanded.
"Working on it!" Bradford leaned over one of the techs' panels. "Get me scanners. Who's down there?"
"Sir, we're trying...we can't get a fix." The tech worked feverishly on his keyboard for a moment. "It's like he's...he's bouncing across the entire facility!"
"How is that possible?" Gallant demanded. "Encryption?"
"Maybe," Tygan allowed. "Or maybe a teleporting psionic."
"Teleporting psionics." Gallant sighed. "Teleporting psionics."
"Commander?" Tygan frowned.
"Nothing." Gallant's eye twitched. "I just miss the days where my biggest concerns were little gray bug aliens, that's all."
"Sir!" Another tech waved for Gallant's attention, and Bradford turned as well. "Commander, power just spiked across the entire facility!"
"Avenger, the assembly floor just came online!" Aileen Quinn reported. "Machinery is moving-" She broke off, grunting, and Gallant watched her icon shift to the side, sliding across the floor for a good ten feet.
"Control arm," Elena reported a moment later. "She's fine."
"Power's only increasing," the tech reported. "And...I've got movement! Lots of movement!"
Gallant clenched his teeth. "It's a trap."
"Menace, this is Avenger!" Central's voice intensified. "Get out of there! Now!"
"Roger that, Avenger!" Jane turned for the door. "Come on! It's not worth-"
"I'm afraid I cannot let you do that," the ceiling warned. Jane ignored it, sprinting for the opening-
Whoosh!
Dark metal rose, and Jane skidded to a halt as it locked into place with the ceiling above the doorway, forming a solid barrier that cut off her view of the outside. The blockage covered the windows, covered the doorway...
"Blast shield," Shen observed, as Jane rammed her shoulder into it. "You're wasting your time. Advent-level construction won't come down easily, even left without maintenance."
"Then what the hell do you suggest we do, genius?" Jane demanded. She turned and looked over the room, with its wildly moving conveyor belts and swinging assembly arms. "We're trapped in here-"
"It looks like there's a service elevator at the other end." Shen pointed, and Jane stared in stupefied incomprehension.
"Across the sea of wild murder machines-"
"I think I can seize control of the elevator and we can ride it up further into the facility," Shen finished. Jane's jaw hung open.
"You want...you want to go further in-"
"We have to find the source of the transmission. The mission hasn't changed." She glared. "And besides, we can evac from the roof if we go up high enough."
"Or," Jane suggested, "David here can blow a goddamn hole in that blast shield with his grenade launcher-"
"Advent armor won't come down to a fragmentation warhead," Shen snapped. "How thick are you, really?"
"Amigas..." Mendoza was still playing peacemaker. Jane supposed she couldn't take issue with that, even as she resigned herself to...to...funny. She didn't exactly know what the punishment for punching the chief engineer in the face was off the top of her head.
So this is for science above all-
"Contact!" Elena's Vektor roared, and all thoughts of justice for Lily Shen's arrogance abruptly vanished. "Those MECs are moving!"
"What?" Jane spun...and the Reaper was right. She was so right, because almost a dozen derelict MECs twitched before Jane's eyes, taking faltering steps and raising miniguns that might or might not fire as advertised. Their eyes burned red, and their armor was rusted and brown but no less thick for it.
"Open fire!" Aileen cried, and then her rifle erupted. Her shots skated off their armor in a flash of sparks, but when Mendoza joined in the barrage, their target succumbed under the pressure. David's own minigun roared, deafening Jane as the reports echoed around the assembly floor, but he ripped one of the derelicts to shreds for it. Elena's rifle cracked in the mess, but her shots could only blow out ocular sensors and hit joints...which she did with abandon, reducing her targets to blinded, shambling wrecks that could barely take proper aim.
Boom! Jane's shotgun roared, and she hurled buckshot through rusted plating. Internal circuitry hissed and exploded, and the thing stumbled, crashing down on its hands and knee while oil leaked. Valiantly, it tried to rise, and the Ranger hurried to work the pump. Clickity-boom!
"My apologies," the ceiling continued, its voice echoing over the raging roar of gunfire. "We don't get much in the way of maintenance out here. Still..." it might have chuckled. "I believe they will be more than sufficient for the task at hand."
"What task?" Jane cried. She blasted another MEC. "Murdering us all?"
"Jane!" Aileen's rifle paused as she ducked to reload. Heavy bullets flew in from a line of firing MECs, and the Ranger had to cover her head beside her friend. Aileen caught her arm. "Jane, what the hell are we doing?"
"We're getting some unusual readings from the levels above you," Central chimed in. "Whoever this is, I'm betting that's where you'll find him."
"Above us-"
"You know what we have to do!" Shen snapped, before popping up to fire. Jane swore at the engineer's suicidal bravery, before rising to add her shotgun fire to the mix in the hopes of ensuring she didn't have to deal with the VIP committing suicide. MECs blew apart, but Jane screamed when a shot tugged her baseball cap off her head, nearly flinging it to the far end of the room. She scrambled for it on hands and knees, trying to reload as soon as she put the holed hat back in its pride of place.
"Those MECs..."
"Staying here is not an option," Elena warned, before firing again. "There are many more coming up the elevators flanking the room. We must do whatever it is we intend to do, and quickly."
Jane stewed, as she finished shoving her last cartridge into place. She inhaled, glancing from Aileen to Elena to Mendoza and David clustered further to the right...
Damn it.
"David, Elena, cover us!" Jane popped up to one knee, and her shotgun roared. She missed, but the MEC twitched, and its next shots were well off-target, which was enough for her. "Mendoza, you're on me! Shen, Aileen, follow us to the far end of the room!"
"Roger that!" David rose, and his machinegun ripped into the MECs blocking the path. They flinched and stumbled, and Jane mustered her courage.
"Go!" she cried, not sparing Shen a glance before she vaulted the rail down to the assembly floor.
Bullets whizzed by her head. They sprayed over the far wall, blowing sparks and chunks of masonry and wood with every impact. Most came from MECs, but Jane winced when she saw an honest-to-God Advent turret overlooking the room, laying down fire with impunity. The Ranger kept her head down, zig-zagging at a full sprint for the far end of the room, praying every step of the way.
Boom! More reflex than anything, but she took a shot on the go, breaking a MEC's leg into pieces. The machine staggered, and then Mendoza's rifle ripped a beehive pattern of holes across the thing's chest.
"You should be proud, Lily," the man over the PA observed, while Jane slid into cover behind a half-completed MEC's open frame. Bullets pinged off rusted metal, and she screamed, ducking low and wincing as she heard two sets of heavy, angry footsteps draw closer. "There are so few alive today who could have deciphered my encryption."
Crack! The incoming fire loosened up. Crack!
"Go!" Elena shouted. Jane blinked, then sprang to her feet, staying as low as possible as the two blinded MECs shot wildly, their visual sensors ruined by precise Vektor shots. The Ranger added her shotgun to the mix in passing, and the boom and the thunder of recoil was enough to shred one MEC's head and send its remains collapsing to the floor.
"I estimated only a 13.095 percent probability you would have located this facility," the man continued. Jane almost didn't care, because as he rambled, her foot hit the first of the stairs at the far end of the room, and she tore up to the low control consoles for the service elevator, crouching and unloading the rest of her magazine in rapid-fire. Even over the successive boom-clickity-booms of her shotgun in action, Jane heard the hateful voice echoing through the room. "In the first year of broadcast, that is."
"Of course!" Shen vaulted up the stairs, rolling into place at the second console, just across the walkway from Jane. "Of course he's talking to me."
"Aileen?" Jane demanded.
"I'm here!" She burst up the stairs, sliding into place by Jane's side. "Where the hell is Mendoza?"
"He's..." Shen paused. "Down there! Pinned behind the crane!"
"We're moving up," David warned Jane. "Cover us!"
"Right...right!" Jane's shotgun roared, and Aileen and Shen's rifles too. "There's more MECs, coming up the access tunnels on the sides-"
"You were but a child when I was taken away," the PA continued, careless as Elena and David started their mad dash, heedless of Mendoza covering his face while bullets from a half-dozen attackers kept him pinned down. "The pain Father must have felt at my loss...I can hardly imagine. Still!" He paused. "We shall continue his legacy, Lily. Together."
"I'm sure I would have-" Shen waved to Rov-R, and the GREMLIN soared out into the assembly floor. Shen's rifle cracked, and she battered one of Mendoza's attackers mercilessly. "I would remember having a psychotic brother. Dad would have said something." Her lip curled. "Give this up already!"
Jane shivered when he laughed, low and sinister.
Boom! Rov-R released a pulse of crackling electric energy, and it vaulted over three of Mendoza's attackers. All of them collapsed, even as Elena appeared at the top of the stairs, with David hard on her heels.
"Mendoza!" Jane fired her last shot, and when it blew one of the MECs away, she leaned over the railing. The other Ranger paused as David and Aileen turned their fire on his remaining attackers, then turned and bolted for the rail, not daring to risk the dash up the stairs with more MECs flying out from service elevators on all sides. They even fell from above with titanic booms, firing as they dropped and forcing Shen to yelp and dive for new cover. Mendoza jumped, and though Jane's arm lit up when he caught hers, she pulled and he walked his way up the wall.
"While you both worked on your precious Avenger, I was left here," the intercom growled. "Left to toil! But did I resent it? Did I waver? No! I did my duty to Father!" He paused, as if seething. "You were the flawed child. I was the ideal; the best of Father. Pure, undiluted like you. I am the true legacy of Raymond Shen."
"I knew your father for years, Lily," Central chimed in, while Jane pulled Mendoza the rest of the way over the rail. "This guy's trying to get in your head. He's lying."
"Now what?" Jane demanded. Shen sat very still, brow furrowed.
"Wait..."
"Shen!" Jane slammed new ammunition into place, and then she added her outgoing fire to Elena and David's. "The lift, woman!"
"What?" Shen jumped. "Oh! Rov-R!" She waved, and her GREMLIN obediently beeped and soared for the control panel at the far end of the room. Jane set her teeth as the MECs paused, regrouping with new reinforcements, eyes pulsing red.
"I don't like this," Mendoza muttered, as more and more scarlet flashed. "I really don't like this."
"Door protocols are coming open," Shen notified, tapping on her wrist computer. "Should only be a moment-"
The MECs lunged. Jane jumped.
"Fire! Fire!" She proceeded to put action to words, and for a moment all five members of the team opened up, blasting the oncoming wave with their full combined firepower. Two MECs went down before they returned fire, and then bullets ripped at metal and masonry around the strike team, little lead projectiles flying with death on their tips. Jane winced as hot wind buffeted her, screaming when a shot nicked her arm, and then another cut the side of her neck. She clutched the wound, and her glove came away stained scarlet.
"Got it!" Shen backpedaled for the lift, firing on the move, and Jane almost sighed in relief when she saw the doors sliding open.
"Go!" she cried. "Aileen, David, you first!" She waited as Shen and her two companions took up positions in the cramped lift, then waved. "Elena!"
"What about you?" Outrider demanded. She didn't pause, just hustling for the lift and away from the incoming fire with only a single parting shot. It was a good one, though: smashing right into a scarlet MEC's ocular sensors.
"Our apologies for any inconveniences in the transport system," the intercom assured them, as another crapton of MECs appeared from the room's flanks, and a matching set fell from the ceiling on anti-grav boot jets. "Support units are en route to assist you. Remember...'Only together can we build a better tomorrow'."
"Don't worry about me!" Jane fired. "Mendoza, go!"
"Corporal-"
"Go, dumbass!" Jane worriedly noted she had two shots left, and the idea of reloading under an army's worth of fire, while retreating, was laughable. "Run!"
He did, with a snarl and an oath in his language. Jane mustered her courage, ignoring all her companions' entreaties to follow them.
Fire! she told herself. She snapped up, leveling her shotgun at what proved to be close to a dozen MECs, all taking aim in the same heartbeat. Boom!
Miss. Somehow, she hit nothing, and Jane's eyes widened. Guns as large as she herself took aim, and the Ranger elected to go down fighting.
She squeezed the trigger.
A MEC operates on an alien alloy-contained power cell driven by refined elerium, he mused, in the span of a heartbeat or less. An elerium core is highly unstable. Not quite a plasma grenade, but much less...contained.
That wasn't new to his musings. After all, he'd made the Roc Protocol based on this exact calculation. Idly, in the time it took for Jane Kelly's buckshot to spray out from her shotgun barrel and make the journey perhaps fifty yards to MEC-Q45H7, he opened up a ballistics simulation.
He ran fifteen hundred calculations before the heavy rounds had even come within feet of Q45H7's rusted plating.
In three, Kelly's rounds deflected off the armor.
In one, the rounds ruined Q45H7's assault weapon but did not inflict critical damage.
In two, the unit was disabled but reparable.
In fourteen hundred and ninety-four, the rounds breached Q45H7's elerium core and caused a catastrophic reaction.
He patiently waited for the show.
KA-BOOM!
"What the fuck-"
Jane's vocabulary failed her, and her throat went raw as she shrieked. Smoke and red light blew outward in a tremendous detonation that shook the ceiling, sending whirling automated assembly equipment flipping across the floor. An entire MEC vaporized in a heartbeat, and the six clustered around it were blown to spare parts and rust in a great brown cloud, disemboweled by a thousand degrees and a shockwave that a berserker's furious fists would have been proud of. The other five flew, and two broke to fragments from the impact of their flight and landing, while the other three barely managed to make contained landings, staggering for safety with sparks flying and rips and rends across their armor.
Jane's shrill scream echoed over the blast as she, too, was picked up and hurled like a kitten, straight back for the lift.
"Gotcha!" Arms formed a brace for her as she landed, and Jane felt her savior tumble to his knees. Someone snatched her shotgun from the ground while Jane's world was still spinning, and then...
"That's it!" Shen cried. She hit a button on her computer, and the doors slid closed. Jane shook as she felt the lift twitch.
"You all right?" David demanded. He laid Jane in a corner, and she waited, coughing, while he checked her over. "You look all right. Just a bit cut up."
"D...David..." Jane rubbed the back of her neck. "Thanks."
"She's all right," Aileen reported, earpiece active. She paused to slide a fresh magazine into place. "Central?"
"Sensors are at full power," Bradford reported."Still no life signs."
"You won't find any."
All eyes turned to Shen. Jane narrowed hers, looking at the unnaturally-still way the engineer stood.
"You know something."
"I...I know what this thing is."
"Very good, Lily!" The intercom apparently had a speaker here in the lift, and Jane yelped. "But I am no mere thing. I am the last legacy of the late Raymond Shen."
"What is it?" Jane demanded. "Advent? An old friend?"
"It's..." Shen glanced around, until she finally settled her gaze on a ceiling corner. Jane glanced, and she swallowed when she saw a camera, watching them with impunity. "I remember. Dad was trying to upgrade the AI from the old base to be something more like us. But it...but you weren't like this, not back then." She swallowed.
"He called you...Julian."
Author's Note 11: Elevate Yourself
So, unfortunately, the growing length of this chapter forced me to axe the amazingly creative and very fun "send one soldier at a time up" element from the actual level. There's no sarcasm here: I wanted to use it. But this is already the single longest chapter of the fic so far, and I would like it to be at least somewhat reasonably sized.(EDIT after writing a few of the next ones: Haha this isn't long at all.)
The Lost Towers mission is amazing. I love it to death, to the point where I regret the "integrated content" option in War of the Chosen precludes the mission itself. I love what it did for the Alien Hunters DLC(more on that later in the fic) and overall, the ability to build SPARKs from the get-go is a win, but that doesn't mean I don't wish they could have made the necessary changes and let me play Lost Towers. Or at least allow me to integrate the Alien Hunters content in the new fashion and play original LT.
Until next time, Vigilo Confido.