Eagles Over Earth
A XCOM and Command & Conquer Crossover
Chapter 1: Blackout
March 1, 2020
Concordia, Kansas, United States of America
Michael McNeil took a deep breath, trying to ignore a headache that had come out of nowhere, the rumbling aircraft he sat in, and the three other people also on a top-secret mission to investigate extraterrestrial activity.
Extraterrestrial activity. The phrase ran through McNeil's mind again and again. The last time "extraterrestrial activity" occurred, it spawned a radioactive crystalline substance – Tiberium – that converted anything it touched into more Tiberium, contaminating much of the world since its arrival in 1995. Shortly after, a horrendous world war to control Tiberium got his parents killed when he was just an infant.
What could happen this time? Another Tiberium-type element to ruin Earth? Something even worse? But here, there was no family, only four very strung out and stressed soldiers in an oversized transport bay. McNeil hadn't known that Orca Skyrangers, high-tech, low-visibility supersonic transports, existed until hours ago; now he was sitting in one to investigate more unknowns.
"You're still nervous?" asked Arthur Aerts, who sat to McNeil's right. The bearded Israeli had become fast friends with the whole team, always asking the right questions to get a conversation started. He reminded McNeil a bit of his older brother, in fact.
"Of course I am," McNeil said, looking up at Aerts' relaxed face. "And you aren't?"
"Not really." He shrugged. "What's the worst that could happen?"
Aerts didn't look concerned in the slightest, despite receiving the same briefing as the rest of them: a small town in Kansas had gone completely dark, with no outbound communications from civilians, local authorities, or the police squad sent in from a neighboring town. Choppy satellite surveillance suggested something was moving down there, but Central Command needed eyes on the ground to confirm precisely what. Eyes that McNeil and his present company would provide, the "worst that could happen" aside.
"We all die," said the sole woman in the group, Mihi Kwan, hailing from Korea's Marine Corps. Leave it to her to say out loud what everyone else wanted to keep in their heads. McNeil flinched at the thought of his untimely death, briefly picturing a white headstone at Arlington inscribed with his name, rank, and an eagle emblem, without so much as a medal or commendation to show for his short life. But it sounded like Kwan wouldn't mind herself there.
"I already filled out my will," said Aerts, beaming. "So did all of you, right?"
"What?" McNeil's head ached a little more. "I did not."
"Shame." Aerts leaned back and closed his eyes.
"I still can't believe this." That was Robert Parnell, McNeil's bunkmate, a lanky, unshaven lieutenant from California who smelled like he'd fallen in a compost bin. McNeil needed to have a word with Parnell about hygiene after this was over. "I'm supposed to be commanding Abrams tanks but instead I'm a trooper ordered to find aliens. Why am I – why are we – here?"
Anyone could have asked the same question. McNeil had been hauled to an incognito "XCOM Project" base days ago and told to acquaint himself, soon meeting nine other soldiers with the same story. All of them hailed from the Global Defense Initiative, the world's premier peacekeeping organization, and none of them had any idea why they were there. Even support staff like the engineers and cooks either couldn't or wouldn't tell the soldiers what exactly their purpose was. So they'd spent the three days together training with experimental rifles and body armors, before suddenly being commanded to investigate this town in Kansas. Perhaps after this mission, they might get some real answers.
"Remember, Parnell, the worst that can happen is we all die," Kwan reminded him.
"I really needed to hear that, Kwan. Thanks for your assurance." Parnell, in the brief time McNeil had to know him, could always be counted on to deliver helpful commentary.
"You're very welcome," she said, with no apparent insincerity.
So McNeil's colleagues were an oddly cheerful Israeli commando, a nihilistic Korean marine, and an irritable American armor officer. Then there was him, a very confused and worried special forces soldier - having been raised by GDI officers all over the world, he never considered himself a national citizen of anywhere. McNeil's unease grew worse by the minute.
When the aircraft began slowing down and the internal lights flashed green, everyone's heartbeats began to race in unison. Even Aerts narrowed his eyes and straightened up. The trembling of the vertical landing quickly spread to the four-soldier team as the Orca Skyranger hit the pavement with a jolt. Before the back door of the supersonic transport aircraft fully opened, the squad was up and ready, McNeil and Aerts leading the way.
The mission site was a small single-story fast food restaurant, with a large parking lot surrounding the property. A warehouse sat to the west; a gas station to the east. Of all the places to fight one's first battle, McNeil would have never expected a burger joint. He had received extensive GDI training across every conceivable environment, from desert to arctic, plains to urban, but something about suburban America didn't feel right. It wasn't a place to fight a war.
Then again, maybe he wouldn't be fighting at all today. Maybe everything was a huge false alarm or a very elaborate training drill, and then McNeil would be dismissed and go back to his unit, pretending like this never happened. Something told him that was the preferred outcome for everyone here.
"HQ to Strike-One, report," their commander called in, the first time he had talked to the squad since they'd departed base. "Any contacts?"
"Strike-One, negative, the whole street appears abandoned," Aerts reported back. As squad leader, he would be doing most of the talking to the commander. The whole squad carefully inched together through the windy, cloudy night, a crescent moon peeking out every couple of moments.
"Understood. Move forwards to cover."
The squad quickly took cover behind two cars, a white sedan and a red minivan. Both vehicles appeared in normal condition, no damage visible; the minivan had a bumper sticker with "Concordia Panthers".
"HQ to Strike-One, are there any civilians present?" their commander asked next.
With his better view of the environment, McNeil wanted to answer "It's complicated". Two civilians lay face down only a few feet away from the minivan he crouched behind, and around eight others lying more distant. From their posture, they might have been trying to get inside the car or the restaurant. But they obviously hadn't made it, and all were covered with a filamentous green substance. McNeil tensed up further. Nothing about it seemed right or natural.
"There are ten people. None conscious," Aerts reported. "There's also some type of green substance covering them. I'll need a closer look to confirm its composition."
'Covering' wasn't the right word, McNeil thought. More like cocooning. Like an insect in a spider's web. Like something trapped by a predator.
"Is it Tiberium?" the Commander asked. The question that would decide whether this was the normal kind of extraterrestrial activity or the new, unknown, and still extremely dangerous kind. "Move up and scan it."
"On it." Aerts moved ahead.
McNeil wouldn't have bothered. Tiberium crystallized anything in contact with it. As bad as these people looked, they were merely covered with this green substance, not slowly turning into it. Plus, the fact that some of the victims were twitching: if the substance was Tiberium, they'd be long dead after that much exposure, turned into more of the alien crystal and due for immediate disposal into a quarantine zone.
"Negative, not Tiberium," Aerts confirmed, taking a deep, slow breath. "It's something else."
"Well shit," Parnell groaned.
"Lovely," McNeil grumbled. Tiberium was nasty but a known variable.
"Understood," the commander calmly replied. "Move forward, up to the structure. McNeil, double-time it."
McNeil sprinted to the front entrance, taking a brief moment to catch his breath. Reaching for a handle, he found the doors bolted shut. As he pulled again, a haunting call, vaguely birdlike, whistled in the soft wind.
"You hear that shit?" Parnell hissed over comms, pulling out a disc grenade. The prototype weapons could be 'launched' much farther than standard hand grenades without sacrificing explosive power.
"I do," McNeil said, aiming his assault rifle forward. Looking forward, he noticed odd gray cylindrical objects with an ambient green core scattered around the street, emitting the same shade of light as the alien substance. The source of the stuff? Possibly. Hopefully McNeil wouldn't have to get close and find out.
"McNeil, Parnell," the Commander said. "Get around the restaurant. Aerts, Kwan, hold position."
His heart beating faster than a Humvee at top speed, McNeil followed his commander's directive, approaching the edge of the restaurant as Parnell followed right behind. Reaching the very edge, all eyes on the ground and back at base staring with McNeil, he took a deep breath and peeked around the corner, where drive-by fast food would have been served on any other day.
Instead, within spitting distance, lay humanity's first confirmed alien contact.
It was a squat, ugly thing, a grey humanoid no more than five feet tall. It had massive dark eyes but no mouth, and its belly was grotesquely swollen like those of starving children, with an orange light coming from its chest. Something on its right wrist glowed green the same way exotic laser weapons glowed red - screaming danger. The worst part about it, however, was the fact that McNeil counted two more, and the moment he made eye contact, all of them immediately scampered on all fours to the nearest source of cover, behind parked cars, letting out more chittering.
"Contact!" he shouted into comms, ducking behind the corner. "Three unknowns, north of my position! They're scattering!"
"I saw them too!" Parnell confirmed, nervousness pitching his voice up. "What the hell do they-?"
Any question about the unknowns' intent dissipated when a burst of green projectiles sailed past McNeil, making him instinctively wince at the searing flashes of heat that accompanied them. If that was what a miss felt like, he didn't want to consider a hit.
"Strike One, weapons free! Destroy the enemy!" Command's order rang in his ears.
McNeil needed to hear nothing else. He burst out of cover, lined up his sights on one of the unknowns, crouching behind a car bumper, and pulled the trigger, delivering humanity's opening shot against the aliens.
Miss. His four-shot burst blew out the windows but left the alien unharmed. Spitting out a long stream of curses, McNeil was forced to duck again as another burst of green flew by. One of the shots hit his cover, and incredibly, the concrete corner bubbled as it was partially vaporized. Holy shit! he thought. Any doubts about the potency of his enemies' weapons dissipated with the gaseous concrete.
"One down!" Aerts barked after a sharp burst of gunfire, his sanguine coolness replaced by icy professionalism as he scored the first kill.
"They're falling back!" Kwan shouted, laying down suppressive fire on the other two. For a person apparently unconcerned with death, she was doing her best to stay alive.
"McNeil, Parnell, cover us! Kwan, you and me, move up!" Aerts ordered, and the whole squad obeyed. Firing quick, controlled bursts, the two men forwards covered their colleagues' advance. Another burst of green nearly hit McNeil, the projectiles singing his helmet - barely. Not that the human soldiers were going to let such an attack go unanswered.
"Grenade out!" Parnell shouted, hurling a disc grenade with all his might. Alien flesh and blood mixed with smoke made for a spectacular scene as the little creature's body went sailing into the air. Two down, one to go. The one in question retreated into the night, breaking for cover even as Kwan managed a grazing hit on its thin frame.
"Forward! Move it up!" Aerts shouted. Like any good leader, he led the way, sprinting past McNeil's partially melted corner to the next, a distance all of twenty meters. It wasn't much in retrospect, but in the heat of the moment, those twenty meters looked like the longest distance a human could possibly cross. But Aerts did and McNeil followed, pushing himself faster, eager to catch up with his squad leader.
Only to see the last alien next. It hadn't retreated as far as they'd believed. In fact, it'd taken cover behind the same corner Aerts was trying to reach. Before anyone could stop, it raised its little weapon and fired at point-blank range into Aerts.
"Man down! I repeat, man down!" McNeil cried out as his squad leader toppled over, as if every muscle in his body had lost power. It took everything in McNeil's training to not fall too, astounded at Aerts' instantaneous end.
"What the fuck?!" Parnell screamed in a much higher pitch than normal. "Was that Aerts? Aerts, you there?!"
"Shut up, Parnell!" Kwan yelled back. "Kill the aliens first!"
Aliens? Plural? A fresh creepy chittering sounded in the air – Kwan was right.
"Grenades, everyone!" Command ordered, ignoring a certain science officer's suggestion to exercise restraint on the use of explosives.
McNeil and Kwan - Parnell had used his grenade already - were more than happy to oblige their commander's order, hurling conventional but still deadly frag grenades where the aliens made to retreat. Two more bodies blew out into the air; the creatures must have been remarkably light to be propelled so far.
In less than a minute, the firefight was over. Kwan tagged another alien, knocking its bulbous head off, while Parnell recovered from his brief panicky outburst to finish the last straggler with two shots to the center mass.
McNeil kicked an alien's bleeding head and headed for his fallen squad leader. Aerts' sprawled body had never been completely out of anyone's vision during the final skirmish. He didn't want to look, but knew he had to.
Aerts' entire center mass was gone, as if a bomb had detonated in his chest: nothing remained of his ribcage, lungs, or heart. Everything around where those organs had been was completely blackened. Some barely-identifiable remains of his throat and intestines were visible, at the edges of the impact point.
McNeil remembered how his adopted parents, GDI officers who fought in the Tiberium World War, warned he would never forget his first corpse. They were completely right.
"Jesus Christ," Parnell gasped from McNeil's side. "That … thing fucked him."
"He must have taken a serious hit," Kwan muttered.
"How do you know?"
Kwan crumpled, though Parnell was able to catch her just in time. McNeil only then noticed the completely charred remnants of her right kneepad and pants. The leg below didn't look much better – a strip of it glinted bone-white in the dim moonlight.
"Glancing hit," she struggled to say, and as much McNeil wanted to wince in horror at her injury, he knew her self-assessment was right. A direct hit like the one Aerts took surely would have been fatal.
"Are you okay?" Parnell said.
"I'll live, I think."
"Let's get back to base," McNeil said. "There's nothing else left here."
As Parnell hoisted their wounded comrade up, McNeil was left to stew in his troubled thoughts. "Extraterrestrial activity". Aerts dead. Kwan wounded. Even as the team reached their transport and flew off, the whole town soon to be secured by a massive GDI force, McNeil could guess this was far from over. It wasn't only the shrouded body of Aerts, secured to the floor of the Skyranger, or the slow, halting breathing of Kwan, her leg tightly bandaged. Matching eyes with Parnell, neither of the soldiers needed to say a word. Somehow, they knew a long war awaited them all.
Author's Note: Hello readers! Welcome to Eagles Over Earth, this site's very first XCOM/C&C crossover! If you enjoyed, please follow, favorite, and review - and stay tuned for the next chapter!