Aquizzer led his squad into the hot zone. They had exited their Biotransport, jogged down a long hallway, taken a right, taken a left, and found themselves face to face with the laser grid that protected the dimension gate generator.
Captain Aquizzer wasted no time. He hurled his vortex mine into the pit, only to see it vaporized by the alien laser grid.
“Alright people,” he stated over his coms, “We need to bring down that grid so we can kill off the gates.”
But it was not that easy.
The battle began the second his Vortex mine was vaporized and lasted a period of time Aquizzer could not comprehend. In the end he was not sure of the status of his fellow agents. He knew some had died, he knew some had retreated. He looked around at his friends, well aware that some lacked the protective shields they had when the mission began.
For the most part the mission was standard. Achieve a prerimiter, cover your allies, and gun down any alien who had the nerve to fire a shot or even show their ugly face.
All was going fine when he got the orders. As it turned out, there was no easy access to the pit. Nirur had taken it on himself to destroy the laser gates from above. Every squad was to give him the cover he needed.
Aquizzer did so. He ordered his squad forward. Ordered them to fire randomly into the pit. Ordered them to pick up alien weapons when theirs ran dry. Ordered his units to stand their ground and draw fire away from Nirur.
Nirur. He entered Aquizzer’s field of vision briefly. He took up position on the rim of the crater, aimed his captured Devastator cannon, and fired a perfect shot into the side of a laser defense pod.
Nirur didn’t even take a moment to celebrate his shot. He simply moved on to the next, destroyed it and moved to the next.
Every shot was perfect.
As Nirur’s finger squeezed the trigger and as the bolt of Devastor fire hurled towards the last pod a voice came over the communication relays.
“Bound back.” It said plainly.
“That is it! Aquizzer ordered. It is over, everyone out!” Aquizzer shouted to his squad.
If the battle was pure chaos, the retreat had to border on
double-plus chaos. Everyone in Aquizzer’s squad headed for the exit except two and as he looked at those two, he put it all together.
The voice on the relay was Max Clone. He had every intention of staying until the end, of dying here, in this shit hole of an alien dimension. The second man was Shadowgranger who had the ground blown out from under him and was now stranded in a pit.
Both men were screaming. Max was reveling in his position of dying and dealing the death blow to the aliens. Shadow wanted to get the fuck out and see his family once more. Aquizzar could help neither. Already alarm bells were sounding in his head. The battle was over, it was time to go.
He turned and ran to his craft, away from the polar opposite screams and towards Bio-STS.
The hand picked pilot of Bio-Mercury was counting down the seconds. The Dimension Gate Generator building had given a tail tale shake when it was disabled; the agents under his protection had little more than 20 more seconds to make it to his craft.
He did not count them as they arrived, focusing all his attention on the 30 seconds between buildings disable and gate collapse. When the seconds expired he took to the air and pointed himself at a gate.
Sergeant Haspen entered the cockpit as the craft began to gain altitude. He watched silently as the approached the gate. The corners of his lips began to turn up as they drew closer to the Dimension Gate.
And then, when they seemed to be in the middle of the gate’s pyramid of presence, Haspen let out a cheer.
And as he did so, all at once, the gate flicked out of existence and the craft was pointed at nothingness.
Haspen’s cheer turned to a scream.
Before the curse even escaped his lips, Montogomery’s combat center went into overdrive.
“We’ve lost the signal,” one Intelligence officer stated at the same instant a second Intelligence officer stated “The North East gate is down.”
“Is it down, or did it just change positions?” Montgomery demanded. It would be a hell of a coincidence, but the gates did shift around. He wanted to make sure this time it was gone for good.
“Not shifted sir; down.” The man could hardly contain his excitement. Inside of combat control a nameless Intelligence officer got to make the announcement. “The gates are starting to collapse! They have done it! The war is over!”
A spontaneous cheer rose and for a second everyone forgot the death and destruction that lead to this point. For a second there was no bankrupt government and corrupt enemy corporations. And for that one glorious second there were no agents trapped in a hostile dimension.
Montogmery cut the revelry short. “Enough,” he spat, on the edge of shouting. “The war isn’t over until the last of our men come home. “ Revelry was instantly turned to silence. “I want to know if any other gates fall as soon as the fall. Beyond that I want silence.”
The void of sound clung to every surface. Intelligence agents dared not breathe. Finally one spoke.
“The east gate is down, sir”
Involuntarily Montgomery sprang to his feet.
East gate, that leaves two, west and central.
As his thought concluded he found himself in the center of the command center, more than a dozen feet from where he sat a moment ago. Not content to simply stand his legs had decided to pace. He realized, as he glanced around briefly, that every eye was on him. Generally speaking, this was the time for a High Commander to stand firm and set an example but Montgomery simply could not muster the courage. Instead he paced back and forth, his jaw muscles tensing and releasing with the worry over his agents.
“Central is down,” a disembodied, squeaky voice stated shakily.
Montgomery found the source and glared at it. “How. Long.” He stated plainly.
The announcement that the third gate had fallen came from an attractive young woman behind a bank of screens. She stammered under the weight of Montgomery’s gaze, trying to make it clear she did not understand the question. She failed to make it clear. Instead she managed a series of squeaks and shrills that sounded more like a muted captured rabbit than a human making a statement. To her rescue came an equally attractive young man.
“Roughly 120 seconds between gate collapses,” he stated. The High Commander shifted his gaze; it bore down on the man. And then, as if reading his mind the male intelligence officer offered “One gate is still active.”
Montgomery’s gaze tore apart his subordinate for several seconds before shifting to the clock. He set a mental note of the time and then once again took up his involuntary pacing.
Back and forth he walked, glancing at the clock every so often.
Surely it had been 2 minutes by now he would think, only to find 10 seconds had passed since the last time he had looked. After an eternity all eyes focused on the man watching the last gate, the west gate, and it became quite silence as the clock ticked up.
100 seconds.
110 seconds.
115 seconds.
Montgomery abruptly stopped pacing, walked over to the man’s console, and leaned in close.
The pilot of Bio-Gemini was tending to the wounded Bulldogger when the building shook.
oh fuck the man thought. He abandoned his wounded comrade and hurried to the front of his craft. He was not even half way through the takeoff procedure when the squad commander hit him between the shoulder blades.
“That is all of us,” Jay Cin shouted. “Sean is dead, get us home.”
The pilot abandoned his procedures and pushed the craft into flight mode too soon. The engines, robbed of a proper warm up, failed a hundred feet above the ground and the craft slammed awkwardly into the alien terrain.
Jay found himself flat on his stomach, starring at a leg that was bending in the completely wrong direction. For a split second he wasn’t exactly sure where he was, but everything had come back to him in a flood. Jay and his squadmates had done their part.
Their pilot had failed them.
The man was slamming buttons on his console, fruitlessly trying to get the craft in the air and through the gate but it was over. Jay had no idea how the pilot had failed, but the pilot had failed. Jay Cin took his knife out of its case, balanced him self on his one good leg, glared at the pilot, and in very sharp, very biting phrases stated. “You killed us all.”
Jay Cin then rammed his combat knife through the pilots heart, slit his wrists, and layed down to sleep.
120.
Silence. A lone gate.
130.
Silence. A lone gate.
200
Lone gate.
240
Still the gate.
Every dimension gate in MegaPrimus had collapsed. Every gate other than the western gate.
300. A full 5 minutes. Two and a half times longer than each gate before. Montgomery licked his lips, tore his gaze from the western gate observation console, and returned to his desk.
All of X-Com was in uncharted territory. If you shut down the gates from the alien dimension, how long does it take the gates to disappear on the human side? Would they ever disappear if something was in transition?
360. 6 minutes after the first gate fell.
“Martian, Hardy, I want you up here. Everyone else is dismissed.”
No one moved so Montgomery was forced to offer the cliché “That is an order.” The room cleared, leaving the three men around a large horizontal display of MegaPrimus.
“What do you think,” Montgomery started in, “is there a chance the gate hasn’t closed because our agents are in it?”
His two chief scientists took a long time to answer. They gazed at the miniature MegaPrimus without really seeing the city. Both were deep in thought.
“I am sorry,” Martin offered first, “but I have no idea. It could mean anything. It could mean we failed, it could mean we succeeded but some of our units are coming back. It could simply mean anything.”
Hardy nodded, “I agree sir. We won’t know anything until tomorrow morning.” When Montgomery raised an eye brow Hardy continued. “every time we have sent crafts to the alien dimension, they always arrive and return at midnight the next day. We should have our answers roughly 13 hours from now.”
Thirteen hours! My god! He would have no idea of his friends’ fate for 13 hours! The voices screamed in Montgomery’s brain but this time he held them at bay. His pacing was bad enough; he was not going to make it worse.
“In that case,” he said, “I will see you in 12.”
Montgomery spent the next two hours pacing the empty Command and Control room, willing the day to advance faster. By 8 PM he was forced to admit it was futile and resigned himself to sip vodka and wait.
He had assigned and escort squad to the gate. They would be taking off at 23:30 tonight. “When our comrades come through you are to make sure no craft other than X-Com Craft greets them. Shoot down anything else.” He had explained in no uncertain terms. He had dismissed their request to launch now. “We know when the transports will return, no need to draw attention to them.” He had stated even while the lack of activity was eating him alive.
After an eternity the time came. Intelligence offers were put back in the CnC and the escort Annhilators were launched. X-Com was ready to receive the heroes.
It was 11:59. Montgomery was doing an old timey earth countdown, like the ones that used to lead up to space flight before it was routine.
3, 2, 1.
His eyes flicked from his watch to the gate. It flashed brilliantly causing him to cover his eyes. When he finally regained the ability to focus the gate seemed to be splitting itself into two and then reforming over and over again.
Finally, with a loud clap like thunder, a Bio-transport shot out of the gate. The craft descended rapidly but appeared under control. It skipped across the road; the disruptor shield absorbing most of the collision.
It skidded to a stop and two Annihilators swooped down to cover the unit. Before the security squad had a chance to exit the Annihilators, an agent poked his head out of the Bio-Transport looking dazed but flashing a “thumbs up”. This time it was Montgomery who cheered and on his unintentional queue, CnC arrupted into applause.
Before the cheers concluded, a second Bio trains shot out of the gate on a perpendicular path to the first. It too crashed into the concrete highway, rupturing its shield in the process.
This time there were no cheers. Everyone watched the gate waiting for the other to Bio-Transports to come through. They never did.
It is over Nathan thought as he emailed the final report. The last mission was horrible. Two transports were stuck forever in the desolate alien dimension. Out of the 23 units sent in only 9 returned alive.
X-Com was being gutted now. The bankrupt government was liquating the agency. It wasn’t even a month after the war ended and everyone seemed to have already forgotten.
But that seemed to be the lot of X-Com. For the next 10 or 20 or 30 years it would be a neglected agency, surviving on scraps. Then, seemingly out of no where, the aliens would return and with them, funding.
Then there would be an arms race. X-Com would try to catch up on decades of advanced technology while the aliens would focus on enslaving humanity. The winner would decide the fate of two worlds. But Montgomery knew how it would end. Even in the face of overwhelming odds X-Com would come out on top.
X-Com always did.
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Topic: Complete: Let’s Play Ironman/Superhuman X-Com Apocalypse! (Read 119963 times)