Mobius Research Station, Crotone, Red Zone 1
[3/6/2056]
They were pinned down in the bowels of the station, and beset by foes on all sides. Lewis clutched his service handgun, praying that he would not need to use it. He'd trained with the weapon, killed with it, and wasn't afraid to do so again, but if the technological horrors descending through the levels of Mobius Station could get through his defenders, he doubted a little 9mm round would do much against them.
A squad of McNeil's best soldiers had armed themselves with sonic weaponry from the armoury, bulky things that could liquefy a foe's organs in an instant. In their power armour, they cut a formidable silhouette; tall and impervious like medieval knights, prepared to lay down their lives in defence of their officers.
Lewis' own environment suit, worn over his uniform, was less impressive; little more than rubber coveralls and a full-face mask. It wasn't likely to stop a bullet, let alone a laser. Still, it was all the armoury had to spare, any bit of protection would be welcome if either the aerial bombardment or the pitched battle within caused a breach in the walls of the station.
They had no way of knowing how the battle in the air was unfolding. The swarm of strange aircraft had melted Mobius' antenna arrays to slag, so now its defenders were blind and deaf to the situation outside. Internal communications were still active, for now, though the picture they painted was not a pretty one.
"We're getting slaughtered down here," McNeil remarked as the power armoured soldiers gunned down a black-suited figure with a face full of red lenses. "We keep falling back any further and we're gonna fall right out the bottom of the base."
He was right, Lewis had to admit. The intruders had cut through every bulkhead and barricade the defenders had put in their way. At a certain point, they were bound to run out of bulwarks, and bodies.
"Sir, I think we need to fall back to the Nautilus," Lewis said.
A rumble passed through the many layers of the station, as if in answer. The edifice shrieked like a giant beast in pain, its struts and joints flexing under the strain of whatever blow had struck it.
McNeil's lined face was screwed up in fury. "That'd mean abandoning the Station," he growled.
"Sir, I don't think the station will be around much longer."
Another shudder shook the station, followed by a bang as a roofing panel slammed to ground in a shower of sparks.
"Point taken," he replied after a beat. "I don't mean to hand these bastards a beachhead on our doorstep though."
McNeil toggled a switch inside his helmet, and his voice rang out from speakers across the base.
"Mobius Research Station, this is General McNeil. I'm authorising a full evacuation of the Station, effective immediately."
A red emergency light flared over each doorway, and a klaxon began to sound, joining the cacophony of other alerts. All across the station, technical personnel would be scampering through corridors towards the snub-nosed little escape craft that sat waiting in their launch tubes, while the military contingent guarded their retreat.
McNeil toggled to a private channel, and spoke. Though his voice was muffled by his helmet, Lewis caught snatches of words - Phoenix Protocol. McNeil frowned behind his visor. He spoke again, and his frown deepened.
"EVA's offline," he told them. "We're gonna have to activate the failsafes manually. Alpha Squad, hold this level. We're gonna need to come back up, and I don't want to find the door slammed behind me. Lewis, Marino, you're with me. We're gonna go set off the fireworks."
McNeil was already halfway around the corner before the others leaped into motion. Lewis chased after him, drawing his sidearm from its holster. They thundered into a hallway stained crimson by dim emergency lighting, with the soldiers hot on their heels. The corridor terminated at a wide cargo elevator. Blinking lights on a panel to the right indicated the elevator was descending.
"EVA, shut down the elevator," McNeil ordered the station's AI. Hidden machinery whirred and protested as the lift ground to a halt. The lights ceased their blinking, suspended between floors.
A moment later, there was a shriek of tortured metal, and the elevator doors burst open, peeling apart like a zipper. Steel claws bent and tore the foot-thick metal like paper. The cylindrical barrel of a weapon was forced through the gap. Lewis dived for cover in an alcove as a beam of crimson light scythed across the corridor. One of the station officers was cut down, the front of her environment suit smouldering. The rubber had blackened and melted, flowing down to the deck plating in a viscous mess.
McNeil drew his sidearm and unloaded a clip, but the bullets sparked off whatever dark alloy the weapon was made off. The intruder continued to force the doors apart, the steel no match for its raw strength.
"Is there another way to the lower decks?" Lewis shouted over the sizzling of the energy weapons.
"Yeah!" McNeil called back from behind a support beam. "There's a stairway down through the support pylons that hold up the station." The elder General gritted his teeth, and sprinted across the hallway. More crimson lances flashed out at him, scoring deep gouges in the floor beneath his feet.
McNeil threw himself into the alcove beside Lewis. His face was flushed and sweaty.
"Been a while since I was in this kind of a firefight," he laughed.
A crash echoed through the corridor as the elevator door was wrenched off its rails. The hefty metal plate soared across the room and struck an unlucky infantryman, turning him into thick red paste. A parade of metallic thunks followed; footfalls of the interlopers.
The first of them came into view, like a vision from a nightmare. It stood nearly seven feet tall, striding on robotic legs that ended in a trio of splayed out claws like a bird of prey's. Its body was fleshy and pale, riddled with tumorous growths where prostheses had been grafted on. Its left hand had been replaced with a long-barrelled laser rifle, and in place of its right was a hand tipped with vicious claws. Its face was most fearsome of all. Sightless dead eyes stared out of a face mottled with the colours of death, while a cluster of photoreceptors protruding from its skull glowed red.
More like it poured through the breach. McNeil and Lewis peppered them with bullets, but most sparked off armour plating, and those that struck the pale, dead flesh of the cyborgs drew no blood. A blue shimmer through the air heralded the effect of the sonic weaponry. The cyborg's bloated flesh rippled as the wave passed through it, and its augmentations sparked, but to no seeming effect. The vanguard turned their many red eyes towards their foes, and unleashed another volley of laser light, cutting down a handful of the base's defenders. The survivors backpedalled down the corridor towards the Ops Centre. A bulkhead slammed shut between them and the implacably advancing cyborgs, who set about turning the door to slag.
McNeil grabbed Lewis by the shoulder, and hauled him through a hatch. Before them was a seemingly endless ladder, stepping down into the gloom. Curving walls of unpainted metal were illuminated by dim red emergency lighting. They were inside one of the colossal pylons on which Mobius Station rested.
The two men picked their way down the ladder, ears alert for any sound of their foes coming down the ladder behind them. Lewis' arms were aching by the time they reached the landing, a platform of metal grating bolted to the wall of the shaft. A stencilled sign above a hatch marked it as Sub-Level 01. Lewis put his shoulder to the door. Its rubber seal flexed and strained, but the heavy hatch creaked open once McNeil put his weight behind it too.
They emerged into a labyrinth of pipes and turbines. The floor was a rough metal grating, though whatever lay beneath was lost in seemingly endless darkness. A deep thrumming came from somewhere within the tangle of machinery, a vibration that Lewis felt in his guts. The heads-up-display on his visor began to flash with an immediately familiar trefoil symbol.
"We're in the reactor room," Lewis realised.
"Sure are." McNeil had already vanished behind a drum-shaped piece of machinery. Lewis hurried after him, footfalls ringing in the cavernous space.
They came to a torus of metal, surrounding a spherical structure of stainless steel, riddled with pipes and valves. Lewis thought it looked like a scaled-up version of the still he and his squadmates had been busted for building while stationed in the Virginian badlands. Slit windows around the circumference of the torus showed a churning mass of green liquid, which cast a sickly glow on the surrounding machinery. McNeil began turning a valve, releasing a hissing column of steam from the grates below. Lewis took the hint, and began moving around the vast machine in the opposite direction, loosening the valves. Soon, the air was thick with evaporating coolant.
"Yeah, that should do it," McNeil said as he loosened another valve. "We don't want it to go off while we're still on the station." The core had grown increasingly unstable as they worked, flaring with light unexpectedly. Tremors shook the reactor room, and a deep, rumbling hum was building inside the assembly.
McNeil tapped Lewis on the arm, and the two men retreated to the stairway. Lewis was uncomfortably aware of the condensation the evaporating coolant had left on his rubber gloves. He wasn't much of an engineer, and understood little and less of how Tiberium-fueled reactors functioned, but the deep, reptilian part of his brain that reared its head at perceived danger was disquieted.
Lewis poked his head into the stairwell, and nearly lost it as a laser beam seared the concrete wall just beside. He ducked back into the reactor room, cursing.
"Cyborgs, on the landing above us," he said.
"Looks like Alpha Squad got overrun," McNeil snarled. "Did you see how many there were?"
Lewis shook his head. "Two, maybe three?"
"I don't see us getting out any other way. You feeling brave, son?"
Looking into the grizzled, lined face of a man who had survived two world wars, and gone toe-to-toe with the madman messiah of a doomsday cult, Lewis felt comparatively inadequate, but all he said was; "Yes, sir."
McNeil nodded.
"Good man."
Lewis dived back through the hatchway, keeping his head low. Sizzling red beams cut through the dark confines of the stairwell, slagging the metal grate beneath his feet. He ran to the ladder, and slid down it. The slick coating of coolant on his gloves helped him pick up speed, but the ladder was still a straight path, and he was an easy target for the Cyborgs above. One beam sliced through a rung right above his head. He felt the reflected heat even through the visor of his helmet. Cursing, Lewis pushed off from the ladder, and hurtled through the air. For a moment he was suspended in pure freefall. Then the grating rushed up to meet him, slamming into his belly.
Lewis scrambled to grab onto the grating, digging his fingers into the gaps, and hauled himself to his feet. He hazarded a glance above. McNeil was following him, huffing as he leaped between platforms. Above, peering out of the dark, were the glowing red lenses of their pursuers. Lewis raised his sidearm and took a potshot at the source of the glare. Bullets sparked off the ladders, briefly illuminating the interior of the shaft. One must have struck true, as a gleaming red orb suddenly dimmed. An anguished howl, digitised and inhuman, followed the shot. McNeil dropped onto the platform beside him, and together they shouldered open the hatch to the next level, and dashed through-
-into nothing. A howling wind pushed them flat against the exterior hull of the station. They were on a narrow walkway, surrounding the lowest extremity of the colossal structure. Beside them, one mighty pylon like a tree trunk plunged down to the ground hundreds of metres below, to a surface like cracked glass. Overhead, stars burst as missiles struck their targets. Scything beams of energy answered them. The Nautilus was a black wedge against the distant horizon, illuminated by the flare of its engines, and the armaments arrayed against it. Dozens of autonomous drones streamed from its hangars, but most were shot down as soon as they cleared its vast shadow.
"Nautilus," Lewis called over the command channel. "Nautilus, do you read me? This is Commander Lewis. We are trapped on the outside of Mobius Station, on the lower levels, requesting immediate evac."
Only the wind answered him at first, uncaring and omnipresent. When it came, the reply was crackly, and riddled with static. "Copy, -one. Dispatc—- location."
Lewis could only cling to his tiny foothold and pray, as the winds howled and the battle raged overhead. McNeil slammed the hatch shut, and sealed it tight as the Cyborgs footsteps thundered from the other side.
A tiny dot broke free of the Nautilus, then separated into three dots flying in a wedge formation. They grew as they soared closer, resolving into the split-winged shape of VTOL Transports. A cluster of the silvery, piscine attackers soared after them, raking their hulls with fingers of light. One transport flared suddenly, and listed, billowing thick black smoke. A second beam struck the beleaguered aircraft, and it detonated in a cloud of vapour. The transports responded in kind, peppering the pursuing craft with counterfire. Tracers flared as they crossed the storm-wracked sky between the combatants. A wing of Orca Drones swept down to join the battle, and the pursuers peeled off to intercept them.
The two surviving transports came to a halt, hovering beside the narrow catwalk on which Lewis and McNeil stood. The nearest pivoted, presenting its aft to them. A hatch opened, and a ramp extended, jutting into open space. A masked and armour soldier stood within, hand extended. Without thinking, Lewis dove from the platform, and crashed onto the metal surface. The aircraft pitched, and for a gut wrenching instant he feared he was about to topple into the abyss, but then gloved hands were grabbing him, pulling him upright, and shepherding him inside.
The hatch slid closed, shutting out the chaos of the battle. Lewis fell back against the bulkhead of the troop bay as the transport accelerated. Once their climb leveled out, he was able to claw his way to the cockpit at the front of the craft. The Nautilus was growing rapidly behind the expansive canopy. McNeil shuffled up beside him, as the dark hangar bay of the larger ship engulfed their craft.
—
They were shepherded onto the command deck of the Nautilus, where Captain Barker stood, silhouetted by the storm that raged beyond the windows. The balding officer was shouting orders at his subordinates, undeterred by the cracks that had begun to form in the glass of his bridge, and the explosions that rocked the vessel.
"General," Barker greeted McNeil with a sharp nod. "I've tried to draw some bogies away from Mobius, but the damned things keep coming."
"We're overrun," McNeil replied, grimacing. "I've ordered the evacuation of Mobius Station, and set the reactor to detonate. We should put some ground between us and the station, soon."
Barker snapped an order at one of his underlings, and the deck shifted as the Nautilus changed heading. "We've picked up a few of your escape craft," he informed them. "The rest… well, I don't know if they're gonna find safe harbour anywhere."
"What do you mean, sir?" Lewis asked.
Barker's scowl deepened. "Word just came down from HighCom. The Madrid came under attack from Nod infiltrators somewhere over Red Zone 1. They lost contact with it, but now there are firefights breaking out all across the border with Blue Zone 1."
The captain waved a hand, and a map of Europe appeared in the air between them. The Blue Circle around the North Atlantic glimmered like a gem, showing the tracts of hospitable land GDI had clawed back from the implacable growth of Tiberium. Vast swathes of green covered the south-eastern part of the continent, spreading across the Mediterranean Basin and Eastern Europe, in the sprawl of corruption that was known as Red Zone 1. Red lights flashed at the places where those two regions met, forming a necklace of fiery rubies.
Lewis was aghast. This was exactly the sort of sudden escalation that had preceded the last Tiberium War. Were they looking down the barrel of another global conflict? Impossible. Nod is broken, just a serious of isolated cells with no coordination, he thought. But that was what we thought last time, too.
"Do you think it's a coordinated attack?" he asked.
McNeil nodded gravely. "Nod is a sleeping hydra, but when it awakens, all the heads come snapping."
"General Granger's ordered all units in the field to fall back, and defend the B-1 border," Barker continued. "But this bird won't make it that far. We took a pretty heavy beating, and the hull's sprung a dozen leaks. We've got little chance of making it through the ion storms to the north, and even less of surviving the climb to orbit."
"We need to find somewhere to regroup," McNeil mused.
"What about here?" Lewis pointed at a tiny patch of light blue on the southern edge of Europe, where it met the Mediterranean Basin.
"New Monaco," McNeil muttered. "It's still under construction, hasn't even got a full garrison."
"Exactly; it's not an important military site, so hopefully it'll have escaped Nod's notice, but it'll have enough facilities to repair the Nautilus and get back in the fight."
Barker grinned, and gave the orders to his bridge crew. Lewis noticed the middle-aged captain was missing several of his teeth. "New Monaco it is."
—
As the Nautilus retreated from the battlefield, the silvery aircraft swarmed around the abandoned Mobius Research Station. The last few escape craft lifted off from the flat top of the station, but they were all shot down in turn. A bright white flare beneath the structure illuminated the glassy surface of the crystal fields. The station shook, and shifted on its mighty pylons. The glow subsided, and was followed by a billowing cloud of fire which tore through the base like paper. The pylons buckled and cracked, and Mobius Station toppled. The fireball rose, consuming the cloud of craft swarming overhead. As it faded, streamers of thick, oily smoke rose, obscuring the Alien Tower which rose over all.