Command & Conquer: Under the Shadow
Chapter 20: Enemy Unknown
Lieutenant General Robert Parnell
July 2, 2047
Near Phoenix, Arizona, Yellow Zone Y-6
Parnell's lunches typically revolved around many topics, but today there was only one subject to discuss.
Victory: with Temple Prime destroyed by an Ion Cannon strike and subsequent, apocalyptic liquid Tiberium explosion, Kane and tens of thousands of GDI personnel dead by this final act of terrorism. It was the terrible finale to the Third Tiberium War and an all-too familiar echo to Parnell.
"At least we won," Allen restarted the conversation, setting his empty plate aside.
"Some victory," Sandoval immediately replied, tensing up. "What was the revised tally, ten million people dead? All that in a single explosion? Not to mention the entire strike force, plus fifty thousand more personnel across the Zone."
Parnell remembered when he saw the explosion in South Australia, fearing that he had just become an officer without a unit. It was something of a miracle that most of his battalion survived, being out of the immediate blast radius and with ready access to armored vehicles to shelter them from fallout. Something most people and personnel in Sarajevo didn't have.
"So you're saying we shouldn't have fired the Ion Cannon?" Allen sat back, miffed at Sandoval's reaction.
"We can say all we want in retrospect, but what's done is done," Parnell noted. He couldn't fault the Battle Commander at Sarajevo, only feel sympathy for him. Given a direct order from Director Boyle, Parnell would've done the same. But to lose his entire strike force, too? The commander there had committed his entire force to assault Temple Prime, breaching the walls with two divisions' worth of armor and infantry. Not a single one survived the explosion, estimated at least five times more powerful than South Australia's.
"Linda, a penny for your thoughts?" Allen asked. Ever since Parnell and Vachon had reached some kind of command understanding, Allen had also started referring to her by her first name. It was a big step for them all.
"Well," she started, leaving her fork at the edge of her mouth. "I can't imagine what he's thinking right now. As the commander, his unit's lives are his responsibility. And now… now he barely has a unit."
"On the first note, I have to disagree," Allen said. "After all, Director Boyle ordered the Ion Cannon strike. You know, I heard Granger was against it, wanted to smoke Kane out the old fashioned way."
"How?" Johnsrud snorted. "By storming Temple Prime with Commandos? We could send half of our entire special forces in there and they would never come out alive. Plus, there's probably tunnels just in case Kane got cold feet and ran for it. Which our 'Field Marshal' Parker might've done."
"Don't remind me," Parnell grumbled. They all knew Parker had been down there in 'Temple Parker'. How had they not dug up his body while combing through the wreckage, or why he hadn't made a reappearance yet, Parnell couldn't understand. Maybe he was alive and laying low, but with Nod regional forces rapidly fracturing, the enemy leader couldn't possibly stay low for long lest he lose everything. "We still have the recovery teams."
"It's been a week since the base fell and the teams have already dug up the dormitories and command centers." Johnsrud shrugged. "I don't think we're going to find him, dead or alive."
"Dead or alive?" Allen sighed. "Well, Nod is breaking to pieces. We've got truces and ceasefires all over the region, and I imagine we'll have some kind of permanent peace deal hammered out by the end of summer. At this point, it doesn't matter if the Field Marshal escaped. Not with Kane out of the picture, too."
"It doesn't matter..." Parnell repeated, not entirely convinced. There was one thing that he and General Granger absolutely agreed upon: so long there was an ounce of Tiberium left on Earth, Nod was a threat, no matter how many of their leaders were dead, missing, or behind bars.
"When do you think we're going to Australia?" Sandoval changed the topic.
"I say one week, tops," Johnsrud opined. "If Command already sent half of our Firehawks, we can't be far behind."
That continent couldn't catch a break, it seemed. First, Parnell had gotten half of it accidentally destroyed thirteen years ago, then Nod's best general set up shop in Ayers Rock, and finally, GDI and Nod had waged war all over with their best troops since March. It was a miracle anyone still wanted to live there, given that there were likely more unexploded ordnance than humans at this point, especially with Mitchell doing his best to cull the Nod population. So the generals' conversation continued, discussing the other matters about their planet.
Some millions of miles away, another force took interest in their planet, too.
Across his fifty years, Parnell had a few moments that he would remember in crystal detail for the rest of his life: holding his newborn son for the first time, the beginning of the Second Tiberium War, hearing the news of his father's passing. This day, he would remember filling out paperwork as he took in the scent of strong coffee, unwashed body odor, and bitter anti-contaminants swirling around his command post's main room as Sandoval burst in, squeezing through the not-yet fully opened sliding doors.
"Sir, something big is going on," Sandoval stammered.
"Really specific there. What exactly is going on?" Parnell asked without looking over.
To Parnell's left, Johnsrud suddenly sat up, his wrist tac-pad lighting up. "Shit, InOps is freaking the hell out. I'm getting alerts from every monitoring station!" he said.
"What are you two going on about?" Parnell said, finally turning around and getting up. The paperwork would have to wait, which almost relieved him.
"New report coming in from Vandenberg Space Command!" Sandoval spat out. "They say the Ion Cannon has just been activated!"
"Activated?!" Parnell went from bored to floored. "Who the fuck authorized that?" The first thought in his mind was whether he was about to be responsible for a Philadelphia-type disaster. As it turned out, that would have been far preferable to what happened next.
"Director Boyle, authenticated less than a minute ago! The Ion Cannon is engaging targets in Earth orbit!"
"What? Earth orbit? What the hell is going on? Do we have a rogue satellite? Did Nod launch an ICBM? They shouldn't be able to..." Parnell trailed off, realizing that whatever was happening, it would most definitely involve him and his corps. Forget moving abroad, he needed all of the Ninth's divisions combat ready immediately, and instantly sent out a general alert to that effect.
"Can someone bring up a video?" Allen asked, the most useful thing to ask for.
"Working on it," Sandoval replied. "...Got one! Sat Four, coming right up."
A view from a GDI recon satellite, linked to a nearby Ion Cannon, popped into central view, showing the orbital weapon turning away from Earth and fire away at some… things. Parnell wasn't sure how to describe them, especially as the ion beam splashed against them and they broke into much smaller craft that fell towards Earth. It was over in less than ten seconds; the Ion Cannon still faced outwards towards space, no trace of the completely unknown targets still in view.
"Let me replay that," Sandoval said. It didn't clear up much. Parnell only caught a glimpse of the Ion Cannon's original target, a large black-purple object larger than the Ion Cannon, if not the late Philadelphia space station, while the smaller craft that separated from the main ship were roughly the size of a MCV, if Parnell had to guess.
"That's no satellite or missile," Vachon said. Parnell agreed with that obvious assessment. "But it doesn't look… human."
"Then what is it?" Allen said.
"Someone get me a link to the Pentagon now," Parnell ordered. "Someone has to know what's going on."
It was an agonizing wait for the Pentagon, that ten-second video of the Ion Cannon firing looping three times in Parnell's mind. Its target was no satellite or missile. It didn't appear human. Then what was it? When an upset bald man appeared on the nearest video screen, Parnell felt a surge of relief.
"General Granger?" Parnell realized. "Tell me what the hell is going on over there. My region's Ion Cannon was just fired on Director Boyle's authority."
"Not only yours, Parnell." Granger left no time for pleasantries. "Boyle just activated the entire Southern Hemisphere Ion Cannon grid too, engaging multiple extraterrestrial craft first detected in deep space. After the Ion Cannon attack, the craft separated into multiple smaller units and made landfall all over the world."
Extraterrestrial craft. Aliens. Honest to God aliens.
"You're telling me that Director Boyle just opened fire on alien spacecraft? And now those alien craft are landing on Earth?"
"Yes, I am."
"Oh, for fuck's sake…"
With the noon sun a comfortable distance above San Diego, Connor Liang could best appreciate the window view from the twentieth floor of his apartment. Here, he had an excellent view of the bay, and the wide, blue-chrome skyline of the city. Many of the buildings were less than fifteen years old and were built with the splendid wealth that Tiberium harvesting offered.
"Hi, Connor," a warm voice tickled Liang's back.
"Arden." He turned around instantly, looking at his long-term girlfriend, paying particularly close attention to how loosely her nightgown hung around her. They'd stayed up extremely late binge-watching the latest Korean drama show, and only had woken up minutes ago. "You look great."
She walked right up to him and sat her head on his shoulder. "God, it's good to have you back," she said. "I keep saying that, don't I?"
"Please do." Connor leaned in closer, and only then spotted several emergency lights on the streets outside – not from civilian police cars, but military police APCs, just like those at the airport's first hours of war. Why were they out?
Some dozen miles away, Anthony Gardner heard the alarms, and counted that was the seventh time someone had tried to escape. For all the trouble he'd been through during the San Diego Insurrection, GDI prison was a lot less problematic than he'd thought it'd be.
"Idiots," he told his solitary confinement cell. It didn't reply, and he leaned back in defeat, as resigned as he could be. He'd gotten stuck here by offing a fellow prisoner in his sleep. It wasn't exactly a quick or clean kill, which was why he'd been caught.
Then again, Gardner's preferred weapon was a long rifle, not a scrappy prison shiv; his squadmate Sheridan had taught him how to make the latter. Still, as far as he knew, no more dumb bastards were left alive to turn his family's letters into toilet paper. And the GDI guards were polite enough to let him keep the remaining letters in the cell, giving him that much solace.
Trying to ignore the alarms, Gardner shifted to the far side of the wall and shut his eyes. Whatever was happening, he hoped it wouldn't interfere with his lunch.
Back in San Diego, Seoyun Park took a deep breath and tried not to think of strangling the man next to her. It was hard, though.
"Almost there!" her physical therapist clapped his hands, his energy flooding the hospital room. Ever since losing her legs to that Avatar, she'd been through a grueling regimen trying to restore her ability to walk with two shiny new prosthetics, nerve-linked to make them feel as natural as possible. Despite frequent help from her therapist, a prosthetist, and other medical staff, it'd taken months for her to walk again – but at least she was walking.
"Thank God," she said, walking past a set of parallel bars while keeping her hands in the air. Countless hours of balance and weight shift training had led to this moment.
With that milestone came so many other possibilities. Reentering active service was incredibly unlikely, but she could certainly see her old platoon again. Maybe she could go mountain climbing with them. At the very least, she'd be able to walk up to them personally and give them all a bear hug. They deserved as much.
"Awesome job!" her therapist said. "How does the treadmill sound now?"
"Oh, great." She wanted to say something meaner, but one, that would have been rude to her therapist, and two, she saw something unnaturally flickering in the far sky. A long-dormant combat instinct suddenly awoke, sending a surge of nervous energy as she focused on the incoming object.
Liang looked further and frowned, his attention shifting from Arden's warm grip to a little blip in the sky, coming from the west.
"There," he said. "Low in the sky, eleven o'clock. Do you see that?"
Arden's grip disappeared as she rose. "Yes… that shape? What is that? Some kind of military aircraft?"
"It's not something I recognize," he replied. "It might be experimental, like an Area 51 kind of thing."
"But why around here? They wouldn't bother a city like this unless they have to."
"I don't know." He'd heard enough rumors about Area 51, but the approaching ship couldn't have been in his wildest dreams. For one, it had moved extraordinarily fast, resolving from a blip to something the size of a Kodiak command ship in seconds. Secondly, it looked vaguely like a lobster, if lobsters were spikier and dark violet-black in color. Several pulsing lights adorned its front, blinking in seemingly random patterns. Strangest of all, Liang could swear he could hear the thing, despite it being at least twenty kilometers away and competing with San Diego's ambience. The sounds it made creeped between the apartment's floors and through his skin: a series of uplifting, vaguely underwater sounds that could have been asking questions. It could have been curiosity, or perhaps analysis.
The ship continued its vigil for a few moments, as more dark ships began to appear – some identical to the first lobster-ship, some a little larger and much bulkier.
"Do you hear those sounds, Arden?" Liang carefully asked.
"I do," she confirmed. "Is it coming from those ships?"
"I think so. And before you ask, I don't know why either."
Then the ships fired, and all of their questions vanished.
Park's combat instincts had come back in full force as a massive explosion rocked the entire hospital. The blip she had seen a minute ago had broken line of sight from her, and Park hoped whatever it was, it wouldn't be her problem, but that clearly wasn't the case.
"We're under attack!" another recuperating soldier shouted as she ran to the window, trying to figure out what was happening. Whatever was going on, she had to be prepared to move – but she figured she could spare a moment to figure out exactly what was the problem: accident, Nod terrorism, or something else.
What she saw beggared belief. Giant flying warships hovered over the city. Most of them were launching disc-shaped projectiles below. The warships were accompanied by at least two dozen much smaller craft that fired white-hot energy blasts, focusing on the tallest, closest buildings to them – one of which began collapsing in front of Park's eyes, vanishing within seconds, without a chance for anybody to possibly escape.
"Holy shit…" someone close to her whispered.
Park assumed the ships belonged to Nod. Who else would attack San Diego? But the scale of destruction they inflicted with every strike was astounding. If they had such powerful weapons, why wait until now, after Temple Prime fell?
Her rhetorical questions disappeared with a concrete threat: the warships began to split from their close formation into a starburst. One of them began heading straight for the hospital, its front resembling a gaping predator's maw, only instead of teeth it produced searing discs that ate away at steel, glass and concrete as if they weren't even there.
"Everyone, get out of here!" Park cried out, her lieutenant's instincts surging back. Several soldiers immediately followed her to the elevators or stairs, but a few stayed behind, too shocked to move. The ride down was remarkably quiet, but right as the doors opened to the first floor, the lights briefly flickered out. Park willed herself to move faster, her metal legs suddenly no obstacle to total panic.
Moments after she stumbled outside, a fresh wave of plasma discs, each the size of a car, melted away the top three floors and all forty-five people that remained inside. An identical second wave caused the entire hospital to collapse, burying or incinerating a further two hundred eighty.
All of their fates would be listed as "unknown, presumed dead."
The prison was in a state of utter mayhem. Prisoners fought guards and each other with equal fervor. Some ran around in a random panic, others in a shocked stupor, either because of their unexpected freedom or contraband drugs.
Gardner was having none of that petty fighting or idling: he was beelining straight for the motor pool. He could drive a Reckoner reasonably well, and there was no reason why a GDI vehicle would be any different.
As he ran, he shouted for his squad, but didn't see or hear them. Since his transfer to solitary, he hadn't so much heard a peep from them. For all he knew, they'd been transferred around too, or perhaps slain in revenge for his knifing. Experience had taught Gardner that the talk of Nod being one big brotherhood was just that: talk. When it came down to the wire, personal vendettas and basic survival ruled supreme.
The whine of incoming aircraft caused him to turn around in surprise. Four sleek, ray-shaped craft were bearing down on the prison, firing at the power plants. They reminded him of the Banshees from TW2, but they were faster and more maneuverable than anything he was aware of. As long as they focused on GDI and not him, he didn't really mind, though.
He did mind when their strafing run reached the motor pool and turned the nearest ten vehicles into flaming wrecks, sending terrible gouts of smoke into the air and forcing Gardner to hit the dirt. He expected the strange aircraft to strike again but a GDI AA Battery suddenly opened fire, filling the sky with tungsten and giving him the chance to run for the closest vehicle intact – a heavy-duty cargo truck.
It wasn't fast, but Gardner was going to take any motorized transport he could get. He eagerly hopped in, dryly chuckling at the fact the doors were left unlocked, and managed to get the engine started when a gust of air warned him someone else was opening the door. He spun around to see three other former prisoners standing close.
"Nice job getting the truck," the lead man said, climbing into the passenger seat with a scowl on his thin face. "I'll give you one chance to get out."
"Go to hell, rat fucker," Gardner replied, but his heart sank as the man drew a knife, a wickedly clean meat slicer, and his two followers began to close in.
"You're fucking dead." The lead man might've said more if an expression of shocked pain didn't flare across his face as something hit him from behind. Gardner instantly punched his would-be killer and yanked the knife away, finishing him with a slash across the neck, deep enough to splash the seats with bright arterial blood.
He expected to fight the other two men, but instead he heard two more screams of pain. Gardner blinked to see his old squadmate Sheridan pulling out bloody shivs from the back two. Hewitt was fiddling with a riot shotgun, sliding in a fresh bean bag round from a kit almost certainly looted from a fallen GDI guard as four other squadmates walked up too, clutching a wide assortment of weapons.
"Need a hand, sir?" Sheridan asked. Gardner grunted in agreement, and together they tossed out the mortally wounded prisoner next to his two fellows, leaving all three to die on the burning pavement as the squad crammed inside the truck and made good on their escape.
Along with the remaining one thousand two hundred and four detainees of the Otay Mesa Prison, their fates would be listed as "unknown, presumed dead."
"What's going on, Connor?" Arden whispered as they hurried down the stairs.
He clutched Arden's hand tighter, trying to comfort her but probably hurting her more as he ran for the garage. A thousand thoughts competed for his consciousness.
This can't be happening. This IS happening. Whatever the fuck "this" is.
What the fuck is happening here?
This isn't Nod. I fought Nod's worst in Malmstrom.
The apartment complex's garage was at minimal capacity, with most people out for work. Arden, however, had taken the day off to spend more time with him; some substitute teacher would be handling her eighth-grade science lessons instead. He didn't know if that teacher or the kids were safe, and also didn't care.
When he reached Arden's car, Liang practically threw the door open. As they stumbled inside, hyperventilating, he tried to inject some calm with direct orders.
"Arden, I've got a radio in the glovebox. Turn it on and tune it to channel A76 – that's B-11's emergency broadcast channel."
She did so, though her hands were shaking the whole time. The looping broadcast didn't help much, though.
"Announcement from San Diego GDI Military Command: a massive ion storm is approaching the Blue Zone. Please find the nearest storm shelter and shelter in place until otherwise directed."
Whatever was happening sure as hell wasn't an ion storm, but Liang figured that hunkering underground wasn't the worst thing for civilians to do. The first problem being he wasn't a civilian, and the second problem being he didn't have a unit to command.
"Okay, switch to channel K19. To listen in, my code is 26-03-12."
By then, Liang was already out driving on the streets, where hundreds of people ran around, either in confusion or looking for a storm shelter. In the distance, buildings kept exploding every second, but a shred of Liang's combat sense noted that the destruction was getting closer to him, and fast. Arden tuned to the channel, but what came was worse than anything Liang could have anticipated.
"Fuck, fuck-! Get away from the- Noo-!" The transmission filled with the sound of buzzing, ripping, screaming, and then static silence. Arden switched the radio off. Liang wanted to ask what, how, why, but instead shifted all his focus on driving. With an learned aggression only possible from combat, he managed to stay ahead of rapidly-forming traffic jams and narrowly avoid striking pedestrians, even as he saw, from the periphery of his vision, more of the flying warships in the sky.
The roar of Firehawks and Orcas briefly filled the air, and for a moment, Liang felt a surge of hope. With his view broken up by the skyline and obscured by increasing smoke, he didn't see how the GDI aircraft were immediately set upon and slaughtered, the aliens' focus suddenly redirected towards the only force giving them any trouble.
Liang's only warning was when a Firehawk smashed into a skyscraper, streaking bits of flaming fuel and shrapnel across the street, cutting down several people mid-stride, and narrowly avoiding Liang's car. He couldn't tell what had brought down the Firehawk, but knew anything capable of that was fully capable of killing him too.
"We have to get out of here!" Arden cried out.
"I fucking know!" Liang snapped, his temper lost minutes ago.
"No, I mean out of the car! There's a storm shelter here!"
At that, Liang unlocked the doors and practically jumped out, Arden following a second later. The car didn't even come to a full stop, not that it needed to as a manta-ray like aircraft, roughly the size of a Firehawk, swooped by and blasted it, causing the entire vehicle to burst into flames. He ran, ran like he never had before, throwing people aside like a maniac, clearing a path for him and Arden to reach the subway-like entrance to the storm shelter.
When he was less than five meters away, something landed right in front of him: a beetle-like creature nearly the size of a small car, with three glowing eyes arranged in a vertical line. Liang had no idea what it was, but he had his GD50 pistol out and firing in a heartbeat. Its head convulsed with every hit from the monstrous handgun, and fell still after seven direct hits, the entirety of the GD50's magazine. A man would've been slain after one hit, destroyed after three. What was that thing made of?
Not that he could reflect on it. Arden pulled him towards the storm shelter entrance and he rapidly followed, his better survival instincts encouraging him to head indoors rather than stay outside and fight something he had no conception of.
Less than twenty seconds after they'd entered, a stray plasma bolt brought down the entire shelter entrance, crushing twelve people still trying to enter. A security camera recorded their last moments, screams hidden by crushing concrete, then a glitch caused the overburdened San Diego administrative system to assume the entirety of the shelter was compromised.
The fate of every citizen, including Arden Han and Connor Liang, who had entered the shelter, not just the crushed twelve, would be listed "unknown, presumed dead."
Among all the news for the past few hours, there was one video that kept replaying in Parnell's mind. It originated from a live-streaming camera on Cowles Mountain, the highest point within San Diego. While the camera was shut off during most of the war to deny Nod a potential source of intelligence, it had finally been turned back on after the victory at Phoenix.
At approximately 13:00 local time, a squadron of black flying warships arrived from the west – backtrace analysis suggested parts of the six original alien spacecraft attacked by Boyle's Ion Cannon volley had ditched in the Pacific Ocean, and these warships emerged from the wreckage, like mythological monsters. Holding position from a few minutes as additional warships began to arrive at other cities along the B-11 Blue Zone coast, they commenced a coordinated, devastating, and completely indiscriminate attack.
Everything they hit – cars, buildings, roads, aircraft, humans – either exploded or disintegrated. There was no pattern to their assault, just random destruction on an insane scale. A GDI or Nod force attacking in such a manner would be reprimanded for gross inefficiency, but the aliens were so devastating, it didn't matter. They destroyed the San Diego airport and a dozen office buildings, power plants and schools, suburban neighborhoods alongside Firehawk squadrons.
In an hour, his hometown, the city he had kept in what little of his heart was left, was unrecognizable. Smoke had long blanketed the mountain camera but occasional explosion flashes still rippled through, as if in a thunderstorm: but this was no thunderstorm, this was San Diego, the pride and joy of Blue Zone 11. Not since the final minutes in South Australia had he felt so helpless.
Why? Parnell wanted to ask. He'd fought his heart out for this Blue Zone, defended it for the longest night of his life when the war began, moving thousands of soldiers like pawns and gambling their lives on inscrutable rolls of dice that often landed with snake eyes. He'd then pushed into the heart of his old nation – into Nod's, losing thousands more for the sake of a better future that was always uncertain at best. Now that was gone.
"Fuck…" Parnell said, but the curse had none of its typical relieving effect. Amidst the horror, he tried to claw back a little control by analyzing the situation in San Diego from a tactical perspective, but it was no better. On transportation and logistics, the foundation of GDI's prized strategic mobility, every highway and road leading out was cluttered end-to-end with cars, trucks, bikes, and other vehicles. Every airport and GDI Airfield were rendered inoperational, along with most rail and subway lines – though strangely enough, a single light rail line had remained undisturbed, and at least a thousand people had escaped on the last few trains out as the rest of San Diego burned. Indeed, even he couldn't fail to notice the luggage, personal items, and fresh corpses scattered wholesale around the cutoff routes of escape.
The rest of California fared little better. With the slaughter of San Diego and other cities, regional GDI resistance had all but collapsed. Some combat-capable units remained in the Blue Zone, but an alarmingly high percentage had stopped reporting: whether from officers going AWOL or simply because they were wiped out, Parnell didn't know.
The opening attack on Camp Pendleton, his various sieges of the Yellow Zone strongholds, even the insanity of the Second Tiberium War and Firestorm Crisis could not compare to what Parnell saw now. He wasn't looking at his hometown – he was looking at the end of the world. He wanted to scream, or die, or maybe both.
The door to his room creaked open, and a lone woman walked inside. Parnell ignored her at first, but she walked right up to him and sat down next to him. She didn't say anything for a minute.
"Are you alright, Parnell?" she quietly asked.
"Vachon?" Parnell finally faced her. "What are you doing here?"
"We need to talk," she told him.
"About?"
"You've been here for hours. You need to rest."
"Excuse me?"
"The corps needs its commander. You should get some sleep right away. I can handle the minor details while you're out."
"Maybe…" Parnell trailed off. As tired as he was, he could tell Vachon wasn't quite done yet.
"Do you want to, uh… say something?" she said.
He did: this was fucking insane. Parnell couldn't express his sheer disbelief at the insanity of everything. Even the Firestorm Crisis was explainable enough: Nod meddling with sentient AI and cyborgs too much for anybody's good. But this? Literal aliens with no agenda other than total destruction, which they unfortunately excelled at? Hadn't Parnell seen enough of this shit? Hadn't the whole planet had its fill of wanton violence?
"I'm sick of this shit," he said out loud. Hopefully none – well, no more than one – of his soldiers were listening. "Sick of all these impossible situations thrown at me. Why doesn't the world give them to McNeil, he laps that shit up. I don't. I'm fucking tired."
"Sometimes, me too," Vachon admitted.
That was news. "You, Vachon? You, Miss Perfect General, tired of war?"
She laughed. A slight, barely noticeably, but definite laugh, yet one tinged with self-loathing.
"Is that what you thought of me? I can only blame myself for that. That's who I always needed everyone else to see me as. Perfect general, perfect girl." She crumpled against her chair, shaking her head, looking smaller than Parnell could ever recall of her. "Vancouver was just hit. All I heard was a ground force materialized out of nowhere and destroyed the garrison in an hour. They're tearing apart the rest of the city now."
"Your family…" Parnell didn't need to say more.
"My parents. Lots of old friends. All still inside…" Vachon clasped her hands together, as if trying to warm herself up. "What about yours?"
"My kiddo's in there," Parnell said slowly, fighting back a tear. It had been so long since he'd last seen his son; now he might never see him again. What chances did he have of surviving? Parnell had taught him how to shoot, at least, but Thomas would need a lot more than that to survive in the Armageddon that was now San Diego. And though he still barely talked to his ex-wife, he had to feel some concern for her too.
There was the matter of his wounded personnel, too. He was proud that he'd evacuated them to San Diego and the rest of the Blue Zone so quickly after conquering Phoenix, and now they were in a deathtrap.
This was unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. A joke, perhaps, but a sick, twisted, joke. The two sat in silence for a minute, immersed in thought, now a little more understanding of each other. A steady knock on the door broke the silence.
"Can I come in?" came a voice from the other side.
"Johnsrud?" Parnell said. "Please."
The silver-haired spook sized them up briefly before joining them at the table, keying in his own authorization codes to access additional satellite imagery.
"San Diego isn't quite lost," Johnsrud said.
"What do you mean?" Parnell replied, an element of hope returning.
"Satellite recon and SIGINT confirmed that we have holdouts. The aliens have taken the city, but don't appear to be rooting out resistance as thoroughly as we would."
"Explain."
"Here, here, and here." Johnsrud pointed in quick succession at sits around the city. "Those are all confirmed GDI forces, probably no more than squads or individual vehicles. As of now, they're still moving about relatively freely, and there aren't any obvious communication problems with them, nothing like the radio jammers we put in place when we took Phoenix and Vegas."
Parnell took a deep breath. "These aliens don't fight wars like we do," he said.
"Doesn't seem like it, Parnell. I've found a similar pattern in other occupied zones, such as Stuttgart, Munich, Kagoshima, and London. When they take cities, they leave a lot of survivors. Mopping up doesn't seem like their modus operandi."
Parnell leaned back, a familiar sense of control returning to him. "Then I need to get in contact with our holdouts. Anything they've learned about the aliens is invaluable."
And maybe my family's still out there, he thought. Maybe… maybe we can survive this. Hell, maybe we can win.
Author's Note: Under the Shadow is back. Hope you enjoyed this chapter, and stay tuned!
