XENOPEDIA: Alien Raids

Well Commander, as the old saying goes: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern. And, indeed, now that a third forward outpost has gone completely dark, I can with reasonable confidence say that this represents a new trend in the enemy's strategy. All three instances were quite peculiar: No bodies (human or otherwise) left behind. Indeed, other than scattered bullet holes and errant blood stains, all evidence or would-be evidence was erased. Security cameras wiped, computers and all other equipment of any significance destroyed with a thermal charge, and - of course - no xenonaut survivors to debrief.

It's made for something of an annoying puzzle. We can only guess at who the culprits are. Most suspect it to be the handiwork of those so-called "Witches" who robbed our race of most of its nuclear warheads before the bombardment. Personally, I am skeptical of this. We haven't had a single sighting of those aliens since the very raids that gained them their notoriety. It's pure speculation, but I think that those aliens are a scarce resource for our foe, to be used only on targets of great strategic significance. Small logistics and detection outposts like the ones that have been getting hit do not strike me as the sort of target our foe would risk such a valuable asset on. However, it's also clear that they are not just mindlessly throwing their grunts at these targets. Whichever beings are conducting this new offensive are professionals.

I'll leave the tactics to you, but whatever you do I would ask that you do it quickly, as the sooner we have corpses to study, the sooner my team and I can scrape together some countermeasures.


Forward Supply Outpost XO-47, Central Siberia

0300

Xenonaut Lieutenant Ospanov fidgeted nervously in his armor (a cheaper "halfplate" model, for second line use). Even if the entire outpost wasn't on red alert, he'd still have cause to be nervous. Even an organization is secretive as the xenonauts wasn't immune to that ever-present human institution called the rumor mill. And the rumors were pretty straightforward these days: someone was hunting down support bases. Of course, Ospanov didn't need rumors to tell him that. The reason being that his superiors had oh so helpfully informed him that his base was being used as bait and he was to expect an alien attack.

Supposedly, reinforcements were on the way. Of course alien dropships were faster than Xenonaut helicopters, so odds were still good that the reinforcements would arrive to find another empty outpost.

Ospanov took a deep breath in his best attempt at steadying himself. It didn't matter. None of that mattered. The only thing he or anyone here could do was try to keep that from happening. To that end, the base's relatively meager air defenses - consisting of a single SAM battery and three Xenonaut variants of the Phalanx CIW - were on high alert and every single one of the outposts three dozen personnel were armed, armored, and occupying fighting positions around the facility.

The first indication anyone had that the enemy had arrived came from the SAM battery. It abruptly swiveled and emptied its entire firing complement at whatever target it had detected (Xenonaut SAM batteries, being designed to fight aliens rather than flimsy human aircraft, were not stingy with their fire power when they detected targets). A brief flash of brilliant green lit up the sky as alien laser defenses opened up on the missile. Lieutenant Ospanov watched the blinding display through his helmet's protective eye slots, and grew dismayed after the green flashed a second time and he still hadn't seen any explosions. SAMs were a well known to be something of a crapshoot when targeting aliens due to their vulnerability to the UFOs defensive laser arrays, but they still got lucky sometimes. Unfortunately, it seemed luck was in short supply today.

The phalanxes swiveled next, sending a stream of tracers into the sky, targeting not the UFOs but rather the missiles they had just launched. Before the Xenonauts could dive for cover, the weapons struck. Fortunately for the outpost's occupants, the targets were the defensive guns rather than the humans they protected. The guns were destroyed, and the sound of alien dropships drawing near and loitering. In the base's small control room, Lieutenant Ospanov rushed to flip a large switch, turning on the outpost's flood lights.

In the newly illuminated night, armored and decidedly inhuman figures descended from the drop ships. They didn't repel, instead they simply stepped out of the vehicle, and what was no doubt some manner of mass effect device inside the dropship slowed their descent to a safe pace. They descended two at a time from two dropships. They wore on odd sort of collared armor, with elongated helmets and armored boots with visible toes (of which their were only two) and strange protrusions at various points on their limbs. Mercifully, they lacked the obviously feminine forms that were described in the many reports of the greatly feared "witches" which had raided mankind's proverbial nuclear pantry not so long ago. It was a relief to confirm that they weren't the dreaded she-beasts, but Ospanov had still never seen anything like them in the many briefings and handbooks he was subjected to, so either they were a new species or just one that he had not been briefed on yet.

Here's hoping I live long enough to write a report on them.

He watched the aliens as they rapidly disembarked, taking up firing positions in a manner that they had obviously been drilled extensively in, and his confidence that he'd live to write that report waned. MAF guns were a scarce resource, and there were none to be found at a remote supply outpost. Which meant he had to maximize his limited firepower as much as he could. He waited for the aliens to finish disembarking, then he clicked his radio to signal his troops. Two high explosive rockets shot out from a firing position and tore into the alien formation. The rockets would have little effect on the dropships (if they even got through the laser defenses) but alien infantry was a different story. The aliens did not panic, instead they simply spread out their formation, ignoring the wounded for the moment as they opened fire at various points on the building that could conceivably be used as a firing position. While they provided this cover, their supporting dropships laid waste to the source of the rockets, tearing chunks out of the building. Lieutenant Ospanov hoped that the rocketeers had had the chance to change positions. The heavy fire from his troops assault rifles and hastily erected machine gun emplacements claimed a few more alien lives, but their air support forced them into cover, allowing the alien advance to continue.

Strange that they don't just wipe us out with air power. Of course, it's even stranger that they would both to show up in person at all when they could just pulverize us from orbit.

Obviously, the aliens were here for something, but the Lieutenant had no idea what they could possibly want with a warehouse full of miscellaneous Xenonaut supplies. The aliens rushed to escape the open ground they'd landed on and into the relatively small grounds of the base. They had breached the main building and were clearing it room by room, or at least that's the impression Ospanov was getting from the chaos he was hearing on the radio.

Where the hell are our reinforcements?

His thoughts were interrupted by the door to his makeshift command center being blown open. A brief battle ensued, M16 fire and alien rifle fire making a deafening racket. Ospanov took cover with his aide behind a turned over desk. He prayed wildly with his weapon for cover as she poked her head out to take an aimed shot. She got a round through her forehead for her trouble. Ospanov had barely had time to turn and look at the ruined face of her fallen form before his entire body convulsed in agony. He writhed on the ground for what felt like hours but was in reality seconds. He looked deliriously up at one of the aliens standing over him. It raised one of its three fingered hands, and a glowing orange gauntlet appeared around it. Ospanov saw a flash of red lightning, and then nothing.


Flying at the speeds the "Foxtrot" was capable of was always an exhilarating experience for Xenonauts Lieutenant Zhao Yong. Every time he climbed into the cockpit, he was going to go faster than any other human being had in the history of aviation, with the exception of the handful of other Xenonaut pilots who had flown a Mig-32-I. Being able to fly such a magnificent aircraft was reward enough on its own. Being able to kill some of the reprehensible alien filth that had glassed Chengdu and killed his entire family was just a bonus.

He knew there were two UFOs waiting for him, and was unbothered by this fact. There was a lot of planet to cover and not enough planes to cover it. Couple that with the fact that no other plane could hope to keep up with them, and it meant that more often than not Foxtrot pilots found themselves outnumbered. Zhao had six missiles, there were two targets, so he allocated three for each of them. The state-of-the-art (for humans, anyway) instruments and targeting system mounted on the plane meant that finding, selecting, and launching at his targets was a matter of seconds. The missiles were away, and Zhao immediately changed course and accelerated diagonally away as fast as he could push his plane. It didn't matter if he had missed or not, because there was nothing more he could do either way: he was out of missiles. Still, he couldn't help but watch on his instruments, and he also couldn't help but to give out a whooping yell of triumph when his instruments reported he'd splashed both targets.


Lieutenant Ospanov awoke to the sound of machine gun fire and what felt like the worst hangover he'd ever experienced. He was surprised to find himself huddle together with a handful of his xenonauts. They were tucked away in the corner of one of the rooms in the main building of his outpost, while the sounds of fighting echoed in. In his deteriorated state, it took Ospanov a minute to realize that his hands were bound with restraints of some kind.

They took us captive?

It made more sense than any other motivation he could think of. There wasn't anything at the outpost that would be of value to the aliens. It was just a hastily erected supply base. It existed to be a staging point for xenonaut operations in the region, and to provide somewhere for xenonaut planes to make an emergency landing if they happened to be in range (although if that happened, command apparently required the base to immediately be dismantled and shipped elsewhere for "security reasons"). He'd often considered that the aliens might bomb it if they found it, but Ospanov had never imagined they'd go to the trouble of actually seizing it with infantry. Of course, he'd also never imagined that the Xenonauts would almost immediately show up to seize it right back.

But it still wasn't fast enough, my dead troops can attest to that.

The sounds of fighting grew from loud to deafening, and Ospanov could only assume that the xenonauts were closing the net on the besieged aliens. His suspicions were confirmed when several of the aliens burst into the room, eliciting screams of surprise from the handful of human captives that were conscious. The aliens fired back out of the door, but one of them turned and approached the humans. Ospanov tensed up in terror, and prepared to spring into action, though he knew it would do little good. Fortunately, he was spared the trouble when a massive hole appeared on the aliens helmet and a small shower of blue gore was sprayed all over the captives. The alien collapsed to the ground, and a team of xenonauts cleared the room behind him. One of them approached Ospanov, tilting his visor up to peer at him curiously. He spoke, his voice muffled slightly by the bevor protecting his throat and lower face.

"Are you alright, lieutenant?"

Ospanov was very far from an English expert, but he was reasonably confident that it was an American addressing him.

How ironic, to be speaking as a comrade with a man from a country that had been dancing on the edge nuclear war with my own homeland less than a year ago.

Ospanov coughed and made a gallant (but mostly unsuccessful) attempt to stand. He glanced at the cratered head of the fallen alien, and saw a flashback to the cratered head of his aide. It was as close to justice as a man could expect to get in a world turned upside down. He glanced at the xenonaut who'd asked the question.

"I'll be just fine once I've made my report to command, son."


XENOPEDIA: Alien Autopsy - "Commando"

It isn't every day that I have the pleasure of getting a new alien species under my knife, and I must that this is one of the more truly 'alien' creature that I've cut open thus far. The race of hard-shelled blue-blooded aliens - uncreatively dubbed 'commando' by those who fought it - appears to have been adapted for an environment significantly different than our own. Their flesh - particularly the harder outer carapace - is laced with metals and other elements that you wouldn't find anywhere in our own flesh, thulium being the most prevalent of these unusual elements. The tissue that contains these elements is as a result quite resistant to radiation, but still far from immune. If they walked into a nuclear reactor, they'd still die, it would just take longer. As for the shell itself, while it is more robust than human skin it is still cut easily enough by my scalpel, and they certainly died easily enough to our bullets, so its actualy contribution to the overall 'toughness' of the creature is relatively negligible.

It's possible that these are intentional genetic modifications applied to the commandos (some kind of attempt to create a soldier that can fight during a nuclear war?), but what really makes Commandos stand out, even from their fellow aliens, is not their bodies but their DNA. While they, like every species we've encountered so far, still use DNA as their genetic storage chemical, they are very noticeably different in one key way: the chirality is reversed. The short version of what that means is that their DNA is backwards. This many implications, the most important one being that they are almost certainly unable to digest organic matter whose genetic chirality does not match their own. In other words, they likely need to have their own, separate food supply from the other invaders. A potential logistical weakpoint? Some food for tactical thought.

XENOPEDIA: 'Commando' Dropships

From what we've been able to put together from the wreckage and the recollections of survivors, the dropships used by the commandos were cut from a different cloth than the usual alien craft, much like the commandos themselves. Whereas the typical alien craft seem more like 'normal' utility shuttles of some manner, these dropships have built-in armaments and noticeably stronger shields and defenses. We are fortunate that our Foxtrot pilot got the jump on the pair who attacked our outpost. The fact that we've only seen these two of examples of this craft suggests to me that they are a relatively scarce resource. For the sake of our troops, I hope I am right, as if we have to engage them in a less advantageous scenario, we can expect casualties.

XENOPEDIA: Alien Commando Raids II

The report of Lieutenant Ospanov and the other survivors suggests that the purpose of the enemy's new campaign of raids was more simple than what we might have suspected: they wanted prisoners. The only reasonable motivation that comes to mind for this is a search for intel. Leaving aside the worrying implications of what might have been revealed by any captives taken in the previous raids, there is a far more immediate revelation that this implies: the enemy knows that we, or at least an organization dedicated to fighting them, exists. While we've long-since heightened our security precautions in our air campaign since the enemy's devastating bombardment, there are still many potential security breaches-

An alarm blared throughout the base, and Dr. Brown looked up from the report he was typing. Occam's razor suggested it was a drill, but the pit in his gut suggested otherwise. He got up and made his way to the command center, dodging scurrying xenonauts. He entered the room, and the Commander's face gave him his answer. Still, he felt the need to ask.

"What is it?"

The Commander turned to him, frowning. "Our 'scopes detected the enemy maneuvering for a high orbital bombardment."

"Do we have an estimation target?" Brown asked, despite knowing the answer already.

The Commander's frown evolved into a grimace. "This facility."


Boy this chapter was a pain to get out. Pacing is clunkier than I was hoping but it's been in development hell for so long that I've finally just pulled the trigger. That little bit at the end with the xenopedia entry getting interrupted was the nucleus for this chapter. It was such a neat little to me that I just had to include it. Next chapter, we get this story's version of the base raid mission!

As always, thank you very much for reading.