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"I'm just a normal boy, that sank when I fell overboard,
My ship would leave the country, but I'd rather swim ashore..."
~Blue October, "Into the Ocean"
Chapter Seventy: Quicksand
"Welcome back, Menace." Gallant had to pause then: Firebrand gleefully hit the switch to close the bay doors, and the world was growling sound for a long minute as the motors whined and metal ground inexorably toward collision.
"No complications on the ground in Kentucky?" Bradford managed to pick up before him, and Gallant quietly stewed.
"No, sir." Cameron offloaded the enormous...thing slung over his shoulder onto a waiting gurney.
The thud of its head hitting metal was very audible.
"What...is it?" Aileen Quinn all but poked it with her pocketknife, only hesitating when Tygan almost physically threw himself in the way.
"It's valuable. It's something the Elders would never have dreamed of letting us take." He touched one of its enveloped hands, wonder in his eyes. "It's a similar suit to the one we found the Commander in."
"Is it someone else they've kept on ice?" Gallant eyed the suit warily. "Do we need to perform emergency surgery?"
"No. Whatever's in there isn't producing any life signs." Shen checked her tablet as ROV-R hovered at the enormous suit's shoulder, humming gently. "Biological makeup...I can't tell anything else from the surface like this."
"Kang, Nui." Gallant jerked his head. "Take it down to the labs. No: the SHADOW Chamber. Right, Doctor?"
"Indeed." Tygan still didn't release its hand. "I'll begin preparations for a full analysis as soon as I get down there–"
"My God, man: finish your work on Project Verdun first." Gallant swatted him lightly on the arm. "And stop fondling the merchandise. It's getting creepy in here."
"What?" Tygan jumped. "Oh. Of course, Commander. My apologies."
"Anyone who's wounded, report to the medbay. You should all know the drill by now." Gallant glanced at Mox's arm. "Did our friends give you first aid, or did you do it yourself?"
"A mix of both, Commander." Mox shrugged. "I will survive."
"Pity." Gallant nodded at Dragunova. "My condolences."
"Now, now." Bradford chuckled, and the rest with him. Why not? Everyone was alive, after a mission harder than many...laughter was easy when there was no one to mourn.
For once.
"Anything else?" Gallant leaned on his cane, doing his best impression of an overly interested pre-algebra teacher. "Old friends?"
"Kipler." Jane pushed past Liang with her shoulder, brim of her cap tugged low. "Ran into him in the administrative complex."
"Did you?" Though they got the same words out at the same time, there was a world of difference between Tygan's eager surprise...and Gallant's hungry growl.
"And?" Bradford split the difference fairly well by keeping things professionally cold.
"Dead." Jane turned for the far door, reaching up to pull out her hairband.
"Oh." Tygan's eyes glazed. "I suppose...it was probably for the best."
"Damn right." Gallant didn't bother trying to console him. "Get any information out of him first?"
Jane stopped. The way she turned...it was almost hesitant, like she was afraid to look him in the eyes.
Funny, since her own were covered by a shocking sheet-ice wall of cold composure that cut off any trace of the connection they'd had just the previous night.
"No." Gallant hadn't thought it had been possible for her voice to be chillier than her gaze, but he'd been wrong.
"Major?"
"Excuse me, Commander. It's been a long day." And without another word, she turned back for the companionway door and started off.
Gallant could only stare until the darkness enveloped her.
"It's food. I promise." Julie pushed the much-too-big-for-its-contents plate back a little more firmly. "Cross my heart and all that good stuff."
The boy eyed her dubiously, and the plate too. He didn't take it from her.
"Is it the food, or is it me?" Julie sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to parse the issue through. "Do you not like it? It's all we've got. I made it myself."
Nothing.
"Do you hurt?" Julie set the plate down–sooner or later, he'd eat, right? There were other things to worry about for now. She pointed at his foot, swathed in bandages. "Do I need to change those? Refresh the nanobots? More painkillers?"
His big eyes blinked seriously. Julie bit her lip.
"I can't help take care of you if you don't talk to me." She tried another tack. "Is it me? I'm not going to hurt you. I found you, remember? I'm your friend. I'm your..." She couldn't quite bring herself to claim the title. "I'm your friend."
Blink. He fiddled with the neckline of his shirt.
"Here." Julie pushed the plate his way again, fighting a burning deep in her chest that didn't owe its origins to her own arsenal of injuries. "Just eat something. You must be hungry."
Beep!
"Oh. Come in!" Julie smiled sheepishly up at the doorway when it hissed open. "Hi. I'm so sorry I wasn't there to greet you. I knew you were okay, so..."
"It's fine." Sylvie poked her way inside. "Has he said anything?"
"No. If he didn't scream so loud, I'd wonder if he was mute." Julie brushed her hair back, and had to pause halfway through to cough, clutching her chest. "God."
"You hurt." Sylvie settled on the floor beside her, and the boy regarded her with the same big, curious eyes. She gently touched Julie's shoulder, and something about her icy fingers was very welcome.
"A little. I'm fine." Julie couldn't help coughing again.
Sylvie eyed her for a moment. Then, she reached into her pocket. "Here."
"Huh?" Julie blinked when her girlfriend popped out a little plastic-wrapped... "Is that one of my brownies?"
"Non. I made this one myself." Sylvie tossed it to herself, then offered it...to the boy. "Est-ce que tu le veux?"
Blink. But he did slowly reach out, so that was something.
"I do not think he speaks French." Sylvie let him take the brownie. Julie scowled.
"He hasn't eaten food yet and you're giving him chocolate–"
"He will be healthier if he eats chocolate instead of nothing." Sylvie shrugged. "Baby steps, ma amore, baby steps."
"Amore, huh?" She'd butchered the pronunciation, but Julie still got a tingle out of repeating the word. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you liked me."
"Lies. Slander. You are an ugly American blight." Sylvie nudged the plate over toward the boy as soon as he finished disappearing the brownie. "Eat."
Blink. He tilted his head...and froze when Sylvie popped another brownie out between her fingers. He reached for it with both hands.
"After." Sylvie pushed the plate a little more firmly, literally setting the brownie on the other side. "Food first."
"You are a genius." Julie scrambled to take notes when the boy pulled the plate closer, dubiously considering its load. Literally: she whipped out her notepad and started scribbling. "I am shit at this whole child thing."
"I had a niece."
"Oh." Julie heard the past tense, but held off from pushing the topic. "Sylvie..."
"Yes?" She slipped her arm around Julie's waist.
"I don't..." Julie watched the little boy hesitantly eating, and her shoulders fell almost without her realizing it. "I don't think this is going to be easy."
Sylvie said nothing. Julie closed her eyes, fighting another round of pained coughs. She leaned her head on Sylvie's shoulder, folding her hands in her lap and listening to her girlfriend's heart beat and breath come in and out.
When her eyes eventually opened, much later, she was tucked in bed at one end of the psi-cubicle and the boy in his little cot at the other.
And her head was still nested on Sylvie's chest.
"Upon initial examination, the suit appears similar in design to the one in which Commander Gallant was recovered. See Surgery Thirteen notes."
Richard Tygan paused to adjust the SHADOW Chamber lighting, and also to key on his datapad. He didn't adjust the recording application, just sent some preliminary requests for various tools and supplies.
Illuminated in the dark, purple-tinted space, the recovered Advent Stasis Suit loomed on a gurney.
"With Project Verdun primarily in Chief Shen's hands, I feel free to turn my attentions to this new, more edifying project." Tygan laid out his autopsy tools very neatly, pursing his lips as he considered where to begin. "Side note: due to my personal familiarity with Doctor Kipler's work, and knowing he was present at the facility from which this sample was recovered, I will be making assumptions as I proceed as to developmental decisions. Whatever conclusions I draw from these assumptions need necessarily be examined extremely closely."
He paused to wipe at the orange visor covering whatever face the specimen possessed. "This marks the official beginning of the research notes for the project henceforth codenamed 'Golem'. Myself, Dr. R. Tygan, is the only present examiner, though I have notified Chief Shen's department of the potential I might request her expertise."
A challenge, this: what had Kipler made for the Elders? Had he picked up on the work of someone else, or had his tenure with XCOM been a pause in a much longer project?
Tygan's eyes flicked to the far end of the chamber. The janitorial staff had been through with a fine-tooth comb–possibly literally–and they swore there was no biological material left to contaminate any research conducted here. That didn't change anything, and Tygan still swore he could see the faint bloodstains on the wall and decking.
His bloodstains.
Post-traumatic stress. He didn't need to be the son of a psychologist to put that one together, noting how his heart skipped a beat and warmth flushed out through his breast just at the sight and thought. Anxiety, triggered by external stimuli. Irrational.
He took a deep breath, averting his eyes. Just thinking of Kipler was enough to bring back memories, both good and bad. The obvious scientific solution was to stop thinking about him, but this project required a degree of consideration that would certainly trigger future episodes.
Which was a problem that could be dealt with as it erupted. For now...
"Within the confines of the Stasis Suit we recovered from the so-called Forge facility, we are detecting a humanoid organism of some form. Is this a new breed of Advent soldier? Perhaps a new alien being, one that has until now managed to avoid capture or observation by Resistance soldiers entirely?" Tygan plucked up his face shield, checking its strap and deliberately working out the kinks and twists that offended his sensibilities. "There was a considerable level of security in place to protect this specimen, so it is clearly a very important alien asset. It will take a very thorough analysis to determine why."
He slipped his mask into place. "And so, I shall begin."
"Are you busy?"
"Huh?" Aileen glanced up from her datapad, held in her lap where she nestled on her bunk. "Oh. Hi, Irish."
"Well?" Jane leaned in the doorway, her own datapad in hand. "Because I could use a favor. It's important."
"Huh." Aileen eyed her. "What's eating you?"
"It's complex." And Jane had no intention of going further. "Long story short, I'm trying to access this file on our mainframe, but there's a section that's hidden behind a security gate. I need to get past the gate and read the rest of it."
"Have you talked to Central or Tygan? I'm sure they could give you file access."
"I..." Jane hesitated. "Well..."
"...you don't want them to know about this, do you?" Aileen raised a golden eyebrow. "Are you sneaking around behind the Commander's back?"
"Look, can you help or not?" Jane cleared her throat gently. "It's important."
"I don't know." She blew air through her teeth. "I just don't...I don't like the idea of–"
"Please, Aileen." Jane pocketed her datapad to clasp her hands. "It's very important to me. Just this once...please. I'll owe you."
"You..." Finally, Aileen sighed. "You're a bloody cheat, you know that? I'd feel like such a bitch saying no to all that." She opened her drawer.
"Thank you!" Jane had to scramble, then, because Aileen tossed a little computer chip her way.
"You know how to use a slicer, right? That functions the same way." Aileen didn't look happy with her decision, but she didn't ask for the chip back either. "It's a fire and forget tool. You use it, you trash the card and pray the Commander doesn't go rooting through your rubbish bin."
"You're the best. But you knew that." Jane hesitated. "And...if Bradford or Gallant comes around..."
"Jane, I won't lie for you, not to them. But right now, I don't really know what you're doing, so I probably won't have to. And I won't go out of my way to tell them things they don't directly ask about." Her eyes seemed very dark, very full of misgivings. "Just...be careful, okay?
Jane nodded, just a little. "Thank you."
"Get out of here." Aileen returned to her datapad. "Go be furtive somewhere else. Don't drag me down with you, yeah?"
"Sure." Jane backed out of her friend's room, clutching the hacking chip close. "Have a good evening."
She fairly flew back across the barracks for her own quarters, nearly shoving Fatima out of the way when she didn't move fast enough for Jane's tastes. She raced inside, hit the door switch, and then activated the lock too on general principles. Heart racing, she dropped onto her bed and fished out her datapad. With shaking fingers, she thrust the hacking chip into the proper port.
Connection established, the device told her in block red letters. 2:00 Remaining. The countdown did its thing, and while it worked, Jane returned to examining what portions of the document she did have access to.
"Commander Andrews-Gallant, Edward M." Jane whistled through her teeth. "No wonder he stuck with his dad's name. Makes him sound like a superhero."
His personnel file–a combination of US Army data and notes from Bradford and the Shadow Man on his tenure at XCOM–contained no real surprises. Jane already knew about his meteoric rise prior to deployment in Iraq, about the ambush that crippled him and ended his career, and about his transfer to Area 51 and the Project. She winced, reading some of the anecdotes about his time before the Armed Services Committee–on which panel his own father had sat, so the hearing on the disaster in Iraq must have been painful for everyone involved. The years hadn't done much to temper his snark and his acid, at least not until Switzerland. He'd started to improve then...
Hacking finished. That message cut Jane's thoughts off very abruptly. Access granted.
"Thank God." She waved the prompt away, then scrolled to the security-sealed section she hadn't been able to access. Everything else on Gallant's personnel file was there for the reading, and even what few parts were classified, her own ID as a member of the Commander's inner circle had been enough to bypass.
But not this: not the segment containing Tygan and Gallant's personal notes on his time as an Advent captive. The segment that would prove Kipler a goddamn backstabbing liar, out to do nothing more than drive a wedge between her and Gallant.
Or...
"No turning back now, Jane." Uneasy, she pulled the chip from her datapad, already making plans to throw it over the side next time she was on deck. "You've come this far."
Undoubtedly true. She took a deep breath.
And she opened the secure files.
"The containment field?"
"Active."
"Thanks, Julian." Lily Shen pulled her goggles down over her eyes, playing with the settings. "The alert?"
"The levels immediately above and below Engineering have both been cleared of nonessential personnel."
"How high are the odds of a catastrophic fuckup?"
"Forty-two percent."
"Nice, an even number. That means fifty-eight percent chance of success, which means it's in the bag." Lily beamed, and wider when Julian didn't clap back. Most likely he wasn't going to dignify her with a response, but it was always possible he thought she was right.
"All right. Let's see what all this science and R&D has cooked up." Lily finished with her goggles, cracked her knuckles, and glanced down the clear bay space. "Range is fifty meters."
It felt odd. The handle was molded, not stocky, and the all-alloy construction was cool and smooth under her fingers. The internal power cell hummed faintly, and something in the little thrum made it feel almost...alive.
"Advent's version seems to function on the knife's edge between power and safety. This seems to be why the main Advent infantry continue to use magnetic weapons: it wouldn't do Angelis much good if her grunts blew themselves up every five minutes. Only the soldiers with extensive training and genetic predisposition for plasma rifle operation are trusted with them." Lily scowled, checking the sights. "I'll need to see how many recovered scopes we have in storage...the default on this thing is terrible."
"The design is a nearly-perfect mimic of Advent's muton-issue weapons." Julian hummed for a minute. "This might explain why our soldiers have such a high chance of survival when under fire."
"Where have you been?" Lily shivered, unable to make any more light of the idea. She thought of David, she thought of Mariah, she thought of MacLeod and Sophie Weber and...and...
Her eyes went to the wall, and the dark stains spread over her decking.
ROV-R buzzed distantly, in a very dog-like inquisitive manner. The plasma rifle felt very heavy in Lily's hands: much heavier than its unnatural alloy construction could account for.
"...Jiaying..." She closed her eyes, wincing as the titanic, world-breaking report of magnetic gunshots echoed in her darkness again.
"Lily."
"Huh?" She blinked. "Oh. Sorry."
Julian's red face remained, as always, inscrutable. "The test."
"Yes. The test." Lily shook her head to clear it, and purposely moved on from the splotch at the corner of her world. She put her back to it, trying to act like she didn't very well know what sin hung on her shoulders.
She sighted in as best she could down the sleek, curved, very ethereal design, pressing the slim stock into her shoulder. She hit the safety, and the power cell thrummed louder, warming up in preparation.
What others saw intellectually or on drawings, Lily saw in her mind's eye: The cell warmed up, the lenses slid into position from their protective shells...energy projected, forming a sealant that forced the ball of boiling plasma searing in the weapon's heart to race forward and not out to the sides...
Well, there was a fifty-eight percent chance of that, at least.
Lily hit the trigger.
Green energy blasted out in a brilliant searchlight-beam, shooting right across Engineering and boring into the wooden mockup of a First War muton where it braced against several full containers of scrap and refuse–
And it exploded. Not the target: that just disintegrated, immolating in a sudden blast of plasma energy. No, the containers blew apart, melting and vomiting their multi-ton contents in a surge of devastation that scattered over half of the workshop all at once. Smoke blasted outward from the impact point.
"Jesus!" Lily covered her nose, staggering as the acrid stink of red-hot metal and crackling, burning wood hit her like a hammerblow. The overpressure from the plasma detonation made her stumble even harder, and she barely caught herself on the arm of the SPARK II, sitting dormant in the corner.
"Luminescence from ignited atmospheric particles lingers for several seconds after the initial blast." Julian paused, possibly to run numbers. "There is a seventy-nine point two percent chance that our soldiers will be forced to change positions after each shot, or risk the enemy tracing the fire back to its source."
"Our people can deal with it." Lily stared wondrously at the weapon in her hands. "That shot could have disemboweled a muton."
"The likelihood of that shot terminating a muton struck in approximately the same position as the image on the target wood is ninety-four point–"
"Good God." Whatever the point-something was, it wasn't big enough for Lily to care. "Ninety-four..." Her lips twitched. "Oh, Angelis won't be happy when she finds out about this, will she?"
"I had high hopes for the Resistance under your leadership, Commander, but you have outdone yourself."
"Thanks." Gallant leaned back in his chair, fingers steeped. "How are our unwelcome guests handling the Warlock?"
"They are certainly not pleased at the loss of one of the Chosen, but panic has not yet overtaken them. I believe Angelis is rallying the Elders around this new alliance forming between the Hunter and the Assassin. To hear her tell it, eliminating the Warlock has only made his surviving siblings all the more dangerous." Shadow Man leaned forward over his desk, at the other end of the call. "I fear she may be right."
"If so, we'll handle them." Gallant didn't blink. "Keep me informed of any new developments."
"Of course. Good luck, Commander."
"Still doesn't believe in good-bye, does he?" Gallant chuckled as the screen fully blacked out. "Bit of a tightwad, I say."
"He's not bad. From what I can tell, he got in at the beginning, when Advent was still getting off the ground." Bradford, poised in the far doorway, shrugged. "Took a big personal risk about it, too. We've got more to worry about than a man on a screen."
"Man? More like a silhouette." Gallant frowned, checking the notifications that had accrued during his conversation. "Huh."
"What?" Bradford tilted his head. "Something from that little man running the Black Market?"
"No." Gallant bypassed Shen's report on Project Verdun, and Tygan's on the start of Golem, to open up the security blip flashing red on his taskbar. "This says there was an unauthorized access of a classified document."
"Really?" Bradford frowned. "From where?"
"Uh..." Gallant was no one's definition of a 2035 computer expert, so it took him a minute and a few muttered curses directed at whoever the aliens' equivalent of Bill Gates was to sort through the UI. "A mobile source: a datapad, most likely. Whoever it is covered their tracks with a slicer chip."
"How upstanding of them. Probably just a prank, sir: someone trying to set off an alert for shits and giggles. My money's on Firebrand."
"Maybe." Gallant frowned. "The access came a few hours ago...the computer picked it up in a routine data check as soon as the slicer's cover program wore off."
"I'll talk to Quinn. She's our main Specialist, so she's the point woman on slicers and such." Bradford paused. "What file was our mystery friend looking at? That might help point us in the right direction."
"...mine." Gallant stared at the innocent-looking text that implied some far from innocent things. "My personnel file, John. The restricted section...our notes on my time with Advent."
"...why?" Bradford inhaled sharply. "Oh, God. It has to just be someone pranking around. It has to."
"The user spent...close to an hour with the page open." A weight dropped in Gallant's gut. "Whoever it is...they read it through at least once. They saw all of Tygan's commentary...what I've scribbled down of my own recollections..."
"Shit." Bradford swallowed. "We'll get ahead of it. Morale isn't fragile enough to come apart from a revelation like that, not if we can keep a straight face and nothing goes wrong for ten minutes while we–"
Beep! Beep! Beep!
"Oh, what now?" Bradford clutched his buzz-cut hair. Gallant hesitantly tapped his screen.
"It's a communiqué from Geist. Something about a contact of his." Gallant looked up slowly. "And it's marked emergency."
Author's Note 70: Bad News, Guys
I wish I'd thought to show the same cutscene from the game when we got our first mag-weapons, but having failed to do that, I like my take on it here. I think it brings the gameplay into the narrative in a fun way, and serves as a connecting point between VC and XCOM 2 proper. I also wish I'd used Shadow Man more in previous chapters, but there isn't a great deal to do with him, since he's such a disconnected figure from the main plot of the fic.
This is hard for me to finally admit and write, but I chose a very, very bad time to resume VC. A combination of health issues, scheduling problems, and general life BS has walloped me pretty hard from all sides lately, and I can barely keep my head above water even without VC. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to put the project on hiatus, and I don't know for how long. Real life can be a pain, and I'm really sorry to leave things at a cliffhanger like this. Unfortunately, I either have to put everything else in my life aside to bulldoze about 10 chapters in a week, or put VC aside so I can handle the rest of it. I will return, I can promise you that, and I hope it won't be too long...but I just can't keep up the pace this fic demands of me at the current time.
Until I return, Vigilo Confido.