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"We're going down, down, in an earlier round,
And sugar, we're going down swinging!"
~Fall Out Boy, "Sugar We're Going Down Swinging"
Chapter Sixty-eight: The Forge
"Alright, assholes!" Firebrand stood in at the hangar bay doors as hydraulics hissed. "Sound off!"
"Menace Six, ready." That was Major Kelly, poised at the head. Pratal Mox waited patiently while Dragunova and Sylvie announced their status.
"Menace Three, ready." He checked his bullpup and its modifications, then his parachute. Something about it felt off, but he'd never used one before, so...
"Comm check."
"Roger that, Commander." Did Jane seem a little different? Mox glanced at Dragunova, but she was preoccupied with finishing her cigarette before dropping. Jane inhaled sharply as the bay opened, and wind blasted into the hangar. Liang yelped when it tugged at her hair, and she caught Cameron's arm to keep herself steady.
"Breach the facility and locate what's happened to the material from Switzerland. Terminate any hostile forces that delay you or attempt to compromise your extraction. There's Resistance forces two clicks north, just inside the Kentucky border. They'll lay false trails and cover your withdrawal up toward Covington, where we'll pick you up tonight."
"Affirmative." Mox strode for the lowered bay door. Clouds passed by below: clouds white and fluffy that masked any sight of what might be awaiting on the ground. Mox hesitated.
"It looks like a long way down." That was Liang, a little green around the gills.
"Very." Mox resisted the urge to tug at his collar. "But we have a mission." He cleared his throat. "Ready to...to drop on your order, Commander."
"Remember, stay tight in the drop. The wind's picking up, and if you don't pay attention, it'll scatter you to the hills. Regroup as soon as you come down and begin infiltrating as quietly as possible. You're under comm silence from the moment you jump until things go loud." Bradford paused. "Drop in ten."
"Sir!" Jane hurried to the edge, and she waved the rest of the team up. Sylvie eyed the empty air distrustfully, and Cameron awkwardly patted her shoulder.
"It's just gravity, dimwits." Firebrand beamed. "I laugh at it all the time."
"You have a plane." Liang couldn't meet her eyes. Mox nodded wordlessly.
"Eight. Seven. Six." Bradford counted slowly, but it sounded very fast. Mox glanced at Dragunova again, taking a last drag on her cigarette before flicking it over the edge and yanking her mask and hood into place.
"Five. Four."
Mox swallowed. What would they find down there? Had the man he'd once been enjoyed skydiving? Maybe long-forgotten skill would lift him up like a breeze and put him into place.
"Three."
"We're going to die." Liang shivered when Dragunova punched her arm. That answered that.
"Two."
"Stand by." Jane double-checked her gun strap. Mox's heart beat vicious, flat, and angry in his chest. This was suicide. This was insanity.
"One."
The world hung in limbo: breathless limbo for one abjectly terrifying moment.
It was Gallant who broke it. "Deploy."
Skirmishers were many things, but they weren't cowards. Afraid or not, Mox didn't hesitate to fling himself into open air alongside everyone else.
Even if he squeezed his eyes shut when he did it.
His stomach flew into his mouth. The roar of the wind and the engines overpowered everything, echoing all through his world. He had to fight not to curl into a ball and quiver, instead tucking his arms and legs in for speed and diving head-first along with his team for the ground far below. His parachute rattled on his back.
"Whoa!" He punched through a cloud, and it moistened his armor from head to toe. The wind was so loud...Mox's breathing rang in his helmet, but nothing else. His heart wasn't beating like a running chryssalid anymore, but it was still wild and jumpy.
Maybe this wouldn't be–
His parachute strap snapped.
"Shit. Shit!" Gallant clutched the railing, eyeing the icons of the dropping paratroopers. "Mox's chute is reading a malfunction. Shen!"
"I make mistakes, Commander!" Horror filled her eyes up wide. "Oh no. Oh, no..."
"Movement." A tech highlighted it, and Gallant's eyes narrowed.
"Liang. She's shifting toward him." Slowly, he nodded. "They're doubling up."
"That'll throw them well out of formation with the group. Especially with these winds rising."
"It also keeps Mox alive, John, and I'll take that as a win." Gallant nodded firmly. "Maintain comm silence."
Bradford's lips thinned. "Outrider won't like that."
"Outrider will live with it. Right now, I need her focused on the mission."
"Headwinds are picking up, Commander." Tygan scowled at his computer. "Major Kelly is drifting."
"Perfect." Gallant's heartbeat jumped. "Toward Mox?"
"Away." Shen didn't look happy. "Dragunova, Sylvie, and Cameron are still locked on the original DZ. It doesn't look like they notice."
"Fucking wonderful. Julian?"
"Calculating." The AI's face remained, as always, inscrutable. "Projected trajectories for Major Kelly and the others are complete."
"Accuracy?" Oh, those red lines didn't look good.
"Ninety-four point two percent."
"Should we warn them, sir?" Bradford reached for his comm. "Jane can still close up with the others."
"No. Maintain comm silence. She's going to come down on the far side of the facility, but it doesn't look like the specs show much in the way of defenses. Hopefully everyone can keep it quiet and regroup at the designated points." Gallant swallowed. "Let's just pray no one else's chute breaks."
It took every ounce of Jane's self-control not to whoop with wild, childlike glee.
"Yes!" She kept it under her breath–not that it mattered, with the wind as wild as it was–but she couldn't keep from spitting exultation and joy into the breeze. Was this what it felt like to be free? It reminded her of roller coasters in her half-remembered childhood, in the days before Advent and conformity. She wanted to flip head over heels, laughing all the while.
With some effort, she knuckled the urge under. This wasn't 2013, and she wasn't nine years old. She had a mission, and at no point in the briefing had Bradford said anything about spazzing out and backflipping during freefall.
She plunged through the clouds, arms tucked in tight. Below, the Tennessee countryside splayed out like a carpet festooned with LEGO models that resembled Advent structures.
A lot of them.
Looks like two main areas, separated by some kind of river. Why do they need the water? This wasn't 1600, so power was out unless Advent had gone green and dumped Elerium cells in the crapper in favor of hydroelectricity. A waste disposal system? Why not put in a pipe? If it had been meant for defense, the compound would have sat on the bank with defenses facing into the stream, not crouched across it protectively.
"Aliens are weird." More words no one would ever hear but the God Jane didn't believe in. She craned her neck, trying to get as detailed a look as she could at the main courtyard area off to the left. "Wasn't that the LZ?"
Nothing for it: the wind was pushing her north across the river, and Jane wasn't half skydiver enough to redirect herself.
Altitude? She glanced to the number displayed on the inside of her contact lens. Almost.
Her gaze settled on what very much looked like an anti-air plasma launcher. Sweat, now: if that thing came online and locked onto her, she'd have just enough time to see the green before she boiled alive. How good were Advent's targeting computers? Fatima had sworn that she'd done HALO insertions with the Furies many times, but what if...what if this, if that...
Jane's breath came in short, and she fished for her ripcord, throat very dry. The ground seemed an awful lot bigger than it had a moment earlier. Was this how birds felt when Bradford slammed the Avenger into them?
The altitude number turned green.
"Thank God!" Jane yanked hard, and her parachute exploded out behind her. She yelped, her entire body jerking and twitching in a very vicious way as the canopy caught air. She clutched the strings, feet hanging over open ground that was probably just clear enough that she wouldn't break her legs landing. Great. More things to worry about.
"There we go!" She came down harder than the movies made it look, but she still managed to stay on her feet. The chute didn't topple gently, and Jane hissed a curse when the wind picked up, shoving her a good meter backward. She hit the release, and her parachute blossomed away on a quest for liberty.
Jane had her shard gun out in an instant, and she used it to scour the surround. The perimeter wall was behind her, and the river ahead...
"No hostiles." No one could hear her, and not just because her comm was still silenced. Jane's lips thinned. "And...no friendlies either." She couldn't see any other chutes in the sky. "Did they even land on this side of the water?"
God knew: God and Edward Gallant. Neither was going to speak into her ear at this particular moment.
"Well, Jane, you're on your own." Slowly, she started for the nearest low-slung structure, gun at the ready. "Where is everyone else?"
"Where are we?" Cameron disconnected his parachute before it could take him home to Canada, and he quickly scanned the surrounding area, rifle at the ready. "Low walls...a couple buildings..."
"I think we landed in the actual DZ." Sylvie, a hand on her amp, held position at his right side. She bit her lip. "I do not see Major Kelly, or Mox."
"Or Liang." Cameron stifled a surge of sudden worry. "Or–"
"I see you, so that's close enough."
"Outrider!" Cameron lowered his rifle as she seemed to materialize from the undergrowth. "That's a relief. We're at fifty percent strength."
"Better than twelve percent, at least." Sylvie studied the river line, and then the buildings along its shore. "I believe that is the administrative complex on the far bank."
"Probably." Cameron frowned. "I don't see any other parachutes. I hope the others are around here somewhere."
"Nothing for it." Dragunova checked her temnotic rifle, then waved the others into line behind her. "We'll work our way outward from here, looking for anyone who came down in the vicinity. Mox won't be far. Then we'll–"
Cameron saw it first.
"Get down!" He seized Dragunova and hauled her into the dirt midstride. She swore–and then boiling plasma ripped through the air right where her head had been.
"Mutons!" Then Sylvie yelped and ducked for cover, arms over her head. Emerald energy bolts slammed into the ground and the greenery, igniting bushes and trails of grass and leaving the charred reek of boiled elerium in the air behind them.
"I suppose I owe you twice now." And then Dragunova scrambled up, and by the time Cameron could get to his hands and knees, she'd vanished like a ghost.
"Mutons?" He popped his head up, drawing his sidearm. He took a potshot at the first flash of motion from the other end of the main yard, and an alien bellow was his reward. Yes, those were mutons: at least two of them, possibly three, along with some troopers and–
"Fuck!" Cameron flung himself away as a berserker lunged straight through a tree and at his position, big meaty fists falling like meteor strikes. The earth shook, and he scrambled backward, trying to avoid blows that would have crunched him inside and out alike. He fired one-handed, pouring red mag-rounds into the berserker's exposed muscle tissue until his pistol clicked dry.
The beast just roared.
"Back off!" Sylvie shot her hand out, and purple like her eyes shot out in a lance. The berserker staggered, clutching its head and its boiled, charred skin, howling so loud Cameron wished to cover his ears. Unfortunately, he needed both hands to reload, and he raced to finish the chore with shaking fingers before the alien could pulverize him for good this time–
Bang!
"...I guess we're even." Cameron sprang to his feet almost before the berserker had finished collapsing, a hole neatly drilled in its eye. He glanced back down the tracer's path, but he couldn't even seen Dragunova.
But...
"Great!" Cameron brought his rifle up, and his first shot popped the head off of a stun lancer running up from behind. "Sylvie!"
"Merde!" And her rifle came out, spitting tracers that forced the rest of the infantry rush to dive for cover. Cameron pressed himself up against a towering security pole, wincing when muton rounds ate chunks out of it from one side, and scattered mag-projectiles came in from the other.
"Fucking...lovely." He clutched his rifle with white knuckles. "I hope the others are having better luck."
General Din Dourde, helmet under her arm, hurried through the Forge hallways as soldiers rushed out, grabbing guns from the racks along the walls. She paused to claim one herself, purely as a precaution.
"Sir!" She hit the access switch to the Hunter's chambers. "Sir, we're under attack."
"Well, get out from under the damn thing, then." He paused to growl some unkind human epitaphs. "This old motion sensing technology was terrible! The music is catchy, but I just can't get the moves right."
"Um." Dourde knew better than to ask what on earth he was talking about. "Sir, it appears XCOM dissidents have landed in the main parade ground. There's a firefight in progress."
"Tell me, General: what does protocol dictate?"
"We..." Instinctive, her knowledge of that: she was just uncertain how he'd react. "Protocol is to dispatch the garrison immediately to contain the threat."
"Isolate them with local elements. Reinforce the manufacturing floor with anyone you can get your hands on. This is a diversion while another team sneaks inside." The Hunter scowled. "Wait. The local officers didn't wait for orders, did they?"
"No, sir. Every unit on its feet is rushing for the parade ground."
"Those sons of bitches." The Hunter removed the white controller's strap from his wrist.
The way he laid it down was somehow very threatening.
"Fine." He reached over his shoulder, and out came the Darklance. "See to the battle outside, General: I'll protect the Clean Room myself."
"Oof!"
"Ow!" Liang kept her feet, but Mox crashed on his back, hissing through his teeth. He rubbed his head, stomach still whirling and churning.
"That...was not a perfect deployment." He hit the release on his grapnel, and it disconnected from Liang's armor. She paused to release her parachute, while Mox threw what was left of his into the river. "I am not pleased by Chief Shen's work."
"Take it up with her." Liang adjusted her black face wrappings, hoisting up her mag-cannon. "Where the hell is everyone else?"
"I..." Mox frowned. "I don't see them." He studied the large black building ahead, crouched protectively like an angry shell. "That must be the Forge's main building."
"Fits with the specs." Liang spared a glance left, then right. "I swear I hear gunfire."
"I..." Mox frowned, straining his ears. "I believe I hear it too. I cannot tell where it is coming from."
"God." Liang's eyes glinted with something like fear. "I hope Cameron doesn't do anything stupid."
"Yes." It wasn't the sharpshooter Mox thought of. He checked his heavily modified bullpup, then started forward. "Come. Someone inside will know where this fight is raging."
Apparently that made enough sense for her, because the Grenadier took up position at Mox's flank. Together, they scurried across the open ground and over to the low fencing protecting the compound's pathways. No APCs or hovertanks cruised past, so Mox darted over to the wall, followed a moment later by his still-human companion.
"Door." Liang took point, settling in on the right side of the first little white entryway they found. Mox took the left, scanning over Liang's shoulder and half-expecting vipers or sectoids to come rushing out at any moment.
"Go!" Liang hit the access, and Mox burst in, gun up.
He froze in the doorway.
Red lights. Red lights, and red wall panels on black and gray, each one lined with pods marked with Elder sigils. Control panels sat empty while an alarm blared, calling all personnel to safety bunkers.
"Mox?"
Two hallways shot away from the main room, each one eternal and lean. So many pods...black metal decking, marred with the odd alien footprint in dust and dirt. The halls curved at the end, joining well out of Mox's sight.
He knew that, after all. He'd been here before.
"This is...this place..."
"Mox, move!" Liang shouldered him aside, gun at the ready as she scanned the room. "Clear. What's the matter with you?"
"I was...this is where I..." Mox took a hesitant step, reaching out for one of the pods. "I was changed here."
"Changed?" Liang frowned. "This is a genetic enhancement facility, then."
"It must be." Mox shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. "The terminal."
"Got it." Liang quickly accessed the computer, bypassing the encryption with a quick and dirty slicer chip. Mox waited impatiently while she typed. "Schematics are showing something called the Clean Room, back down those corridors. It's got the highest level security clearance."
"Sounds like a plan." Mox started that way, going slow until Liang could catch up. "Did you pull the access code?"
"No, but I have a key." She produced it, too, and dropped it into her launcher. "Clear up."
Chuff! A moment later, the plasma grenade clattered down against the wall, presumably in the right spot. Mox ducked behind a desk.
Ka-boom!
"Donut?" Two voices at once, one panicky and the other confused. Mox popped up, and his laser sight picked through the smoke of the plasma detonation to find first the trooper staggering amidst a white, surgically clean backdrop.
He squeezed the trigger.
"And you!" Liang's mag-cannon went off, and a white MEC staggered under the heavy assault of EMP-cored Bluescreen munitions. Its arm went dead, then its leg, and when it collapsed, its head burst with an electrical pulse that scorched the floor for half a meter in all directions. Liang released the trigger only when the thing's micro-missile launcher fell off, dumping its warheads to roll merrily around the room.
"Mor balaten!" A stun lancer vaulted through the hole in the wall, baton out...and yelped when Mox caught it with his grapple.
"Get over here!" He yanked the soldier hard, snapping his ripjack forward to drive into his chest. Electricity arced, making the puppet thrash. Whether wrist blades had cut his heart in half or the pulse had stopped it, either way, he crumpled.
"Scorpion main, huh?" Liang paused to reload.
"Honestly, I am partial to Raiden. But the opportunity was too good to pass up."
"God, we're bringing your humanity back, one pop culture reference at a time." Liang's cheeks broadened under her wrappings.
Together, they entered the Clean Room, weapons still at the ready in case someone was playing dead. Mox kicked the trooper's corpse, but that got no reaction. Not inclined to take chances, he picked her head up and used his ripjack to cut her throat. Liang paused to fish the MEC's CPU out and crunch it under her heel.
"What is..." Mox passed rows of computer equipment, festooned with genetic sampling information and jars full of Advent chips. He barely noticed when his ripjack blades brushed against one, flicking it onto the floor hard enough it shattered. Chips scattered across the plating below his feet.
"Canisters. Pods." Liang hesitated behind him. "You all right, Mox?"
"I do not..." He bypassed the large white pod in the center of the room, slowly crossing to one of the row of darker ones in the back. "Something about this place is very familiar."
"You said you were changed here."
"Here. Right here." Mox glanced over his shoulder, and the view did indeed line up with his memory. He reached out, fingers gently brushing the firm alloy plate. "I must have come here after enlisting with–"
The pod hissed. Mox froze when it slid open from both sides, nearly silent. Inside was a glass tube.
And inside that...
"What in the fucking world..." Liang nearly dropped her gun. "That's...that's..."
"That is..." For the first time in his life, logic failed Mox. He could only stare, rippling with dawning comprehension that turned his stomach. "That is an Advent soldier. Half of one."
"Those nanobots." Liang's cheeks must have turned very green, if Mox could see a tint of its reflection in the exposed skin around her eyes. "They're tearing her apart."
"No." It couldn't be...but it all made sense. Everything made sense now.
"They're not taking her apart." Mox touched the glass again, and the reflection of his helmet fell over the half-completed soldier's head. "They're manufacturing her."
"Wait." Liang sucked in a long breath. "Oh, God. No wonder they just...they just keep coming..."
"Manufactured." Mox couldn't breath. "I was never...I was never human..."
Built. Built and assembled like the tool he was, from the requisite parts...he'd always known he was a puppet before his liberation, but how literal that metaphor truly was...
He didn't even hear the bang: just Liang crying out.
"What?" Slow, his turn. Shock still boiled in his system. "Lieutenant!" He started for her, where she slumped over the desks by the white pod, eyes glazed. "What happened–"
"I did." Mox froze when a dark shape emerged from the shadows, purple eyes full of malice and a pistol leveled in one hand. "So, now you know the truth. Tell me...does it make you feel better?"
"Eat this!" Cameron threw, and he'd always had an excellent throwing arm. The plasma grenade whirled through the air, coming down hard in the Advent infantry's midst. They shouted and scrambled for cover, and Cameron ducked with hands over his head.
Boom! Boom! It wasn't just the grenade, no: he'd chosen his target carefully. The purifier next to the blast went up too, and the combined force detonated some Advent bigwig's car. Shrapnel flew in a massive swarm, cutting through dozens of unlucky foot soldiers and flinging them six ways from Sunday. Cameron brought his rifle up, and he picked two off when they exposed themselves at the wrong moment.
"Va te faire cuire le cul!" Whatever that meant, Sylvie was emphatic about it. She shrieked, unloading all her amp's power into her palm like it was going out of style and then pitching it in much the same fashion as Cameron's grenade. Violet energy spiraled in a helix of hate, vortexing over the mutons and their minions on the far end of the courtyard.
"Shit!" Cameron covered his head when the vortex imploded, and Sylvie's eyes seared again. Purple tendrils shot from her hand like puppet-strings, burrowing into the ears of her unfortunate victims. They screamed, clutching their temples as their eyes turned indigo and their movements jerky, and Cameron nearly whooped. "That's what I'm talking about, Paris!"
"I am from Nice!" The veins in her face glowed and pulsed purple, and when she brought her otherworldly, almost Warlock-esque glare to bear on Cameron, he nearly quailed. "Not Paris!"
"Okay!" He threw his hands up, while her captured thralls turned on the rest of the Advent garrison, turning the flanking engagement into a wild civil war. "Sorry! Don't void rift me!"
"Incoming!" Dragunova appeared for only a moment, firing from her position in a guard tower. Could she fly? Cameron hadn't seen her clamber up, but there she was anyway. "Big incoming!"
"Big?" Cameron ducked behind the still-growling corpse of the berserker. "Another one of these?" He checked his rifle. "We can take her."
"It could be bigger." Sylvie paused to fire a burst, and an alien screamed almost piteously.
"Bigger? Bigger than a berserker?" Cameron scoffed. "They don't get bigger than–"
The river burst upward, and brown water sprayed over the battlefield, Sylvie yelped, and Cameron ducked behind an overturned car for better protection.
"...oh." His eyes fixed on the cause of the disturbance: an enormous tanklike cube, emblazoned with Advent sigils and festooned with nasty-looking cannons. It all glowed red with hateful power lines, even as water fell in enormous sheets from its joints and armor plate, raining back into the river and over the bank, turning the sand to mush that its massive three-toed feet crushed with every step.
And that was before the sectopod rose to its full towering height, opening its chest cavity to reveal a charged red energy cannon.
"...fuck." Cameron inhaled as it turned to bear right on him. "Fuck."
Something was going on over on the other side of the river. What it was, Jane didn't know. It sounded nasty.
"First things first." She scanned the hallway she found herself in, gun at the ready. "Which building is this? I need a map."
Nothing so far had helped. No one was around, except for a pair of troopers she'd caught from behind and dealt with in true XCOM fashion. Everything was written in alien wingdings. If only Mox had come down with her...then again, no one could fight like Mox. If things were going to shit on the far bank, there was no one Jane trusted to take care of her team more, except maybe Dragunova. Lucky her, she could count on both.
The lighting was terrible. It was as if whoever was in here was afraid to draw attention from anyone out and about. She'd had to click the light strapped to her shard gun on several minutes ago, and if that didn't say a lot, she didn't know what would.
Alarms blared faintly, and Jane supposed some of the stairs she'd ignored lead down to VIP bunkers. Certainly the facility staff had to be somewhere, and the odds of the infiltration hitting on the same day as the Annual Advent Taco Fiesta were low.
Her footfalls echoed in the still hallways. Sweat trickled down Jane's cheek. This was fuel for paranoia: terrible lights, no sound but her own breathing...was that the Assassin, lurking behind that corner? No, it was just a statue of an Elder. The Hunter, lunging from the darkness? No, that was just a door sliding closed. There was no one here but...
...but her and whoever had just closed that door.
Jane hurried over. She checked her shard gun, checked her cap, checked that her sword was loose in its sheath...
She wished, for a long moment, for David to be standing on the other side of the door, mag-cannon ready to cover her as she dived in. Her heart twinged painfully.
Jane elbowed the door panel, and it hissed open.
No one shouted anything about donuts or butts. No one said a word, as a matter of fact. Wary, Jane pushed inside, turning the pool of light projecting from her gun around the room. It revealed a computer, and she started that way, continuing to scan over a holoboard, some old-fashioned books on a shelf, sheafs of paperwork–
"Oh." Her stomach knotted as the light turned onto a figure, trying to melt back into the darkest corners of the office. But it wasn't fear that twisted her up; not terror that made her grip on the gun tighten and her teeth grind softly together. "Well, well. Long time, no see...Doctor Kipler."
Author's Note 68: Soylent Green is Advent!?
I'm surprised that I've never heard any dialogue line from Betos about the Forge. Granted, I don't spend a lot of time chilling in the Avenger, so maybe it exists and I missed it, but I would think the truth about the Skirmisher's creation would be an immense whammy. Yes, I took that bit of symbolism with Mox's helmet from Arkham Knight. Writing is theft, and never think anything else: take what's good, make your own mark on it, and never look back or feel guilty.
Also, just three words: TACTICAL LEGACY PACK. My body is ready. I hope those interquel missions don't clash too harshly with my backstory...
Until then, Vigilo Confido.