Kicking the Hornet's Nest

When we last left off...

Carville and Brock forced the Muton Elite to flee the governor’s mansion in Olympia, which caused its avatar in the sim to go limp and cease being a threat to AJ and Fayth. This victory was not without a steep cost, however. When the Elite activated an alien transport system, Carville saw the electricity arcing on the ground, and recognized it from descriptions Douglas had made about the CRSE units they’d faced in the past. Carville also noted that the Elite moved a bit, but the electricity did not, so he made a last-ditch effort to try and knock the beast out of the target area, hoping this might keep it in the battle so he and Brock could put it down for good.

What Carville didn’t account for in his hasty plan was how much, exactly, Mutons weigh, and this Elite was a particularly beefy example of their species. With a full head of steam, the Master Sergeant may have hit like a Mack truck, but the Elite took it like a sturdy oak tree slammed into by a kid on a bike. Then the lightning zapped, and both disappeared.

Douglas was somehow able to detect spikes of psionic energy when Carville was transported with the Elite, while Lillian in Bunker November’s tracking station was able to detect a nearby UFO. Fayth was briefly able to contact Carville over his alien communicator (affectionately called “the doodad” by those two), and confirmed that he was alive, but in a dire situation of vague and unknown nature; the transmissions were extremely scratchy and broken, and then his comms went silent entirely. At this time, Lillian determined that the UFO was losing speed and altitude and appeared to have crash-landed in the heart of downtown Aberdeen, which had been the center of a massive chryssalid hive.

This might not be so bad; it was assumed that all the bugs pulled up stakes and rampaged east toward Elma in search of warm bodies to impregnate. Carville might just be stranded in the middle of a ruined city, holed up on a UFO by himself. This, of course, is by no means an awesome place to find oneself, and though it was better than the alternative (stranded in the middle of a chitinous hellscape), the folks back home didn’t want to tarry long before making the attempt to extract their man. After all, part of the Ranger Creed is to never leave a man behind...

Fayth called up the entirety of the Ranger’s first squad, along with assault team regulars Brock and AJ. The nearly full might of task force Menace was thrown into the field, numbers be damned! They didn’t care if the aliens sensed they were coming on this one. With one of their own held on their ship, they should know better by now. Humans are a stubborn and vengeful lot, that way. And besides, some of the rescuers suspected from personal experience that if Carville had any life left in him at all, he was going to be one hell of a distraction in his own right, and would surely help keep the aliens’ eyes off the prize when the cavalry came a callin’...

On approach to Aberdeen, the city was desolate, and appeared devoid of signs of life from the vantage point of those in the saucer. Fayth, dressed in her full combat kit and wearing Carville’s oversized uniform jacket draped around her smaller frame piloted the Firestorm. She helped figure out a plan of attack with AJ, Brock and Lt. Spiers, who insisted on leading his Rangers for this mission. Spiers had served with Carville for several years, now, and was not about to stay behind for this bit of action. He understood Fayth’s motivation, here.

Before getting in too deep, AJ requested drone support and recon of the target area. True to form, Douglas was waiting quietly in the wings until called upon. He offered his services and reconnoitered the AO with one unit from his flotilla of Droneys. What he discovered did not settle the nerves of anyone on task force Menace.

There was a crashed UFO, sure. That much they had expected. A decent sized one, too. It looked to be what was classified as a “harvester,” or a medical ship, the likes of which they had seen before in London after the team had been captured in Brazil, and more recently in their own backyard. A ship of this type had been used as the foundation of Alien Base-02, just a few miles south of Elma, where much of the recent drama and action had kicked off.

What they had not expected was a closing swarm of chryssalids staging their own assault of the craft. They had not really expected to find any of them at all, let alone a small horde attacking their creators, and the aliens digging in around the perimeter of the UFO attempting to fend them off. Douglas, through the eyes of his drone, was able to see sectoid engineers attempting to effect repairs while other grays and a few mutons were dug in and engaging the bugs, with support from several point-defense weapons mounted on the craft’s hull. As Douglas carried out his recon, one of the hardpoints stopped firing for unknown reasons.

The UFO had crashed in the parking lot of a bank. Nearby were the city hall and police station, while across the street was a library and a multi-level parking structure. Douglas also noted smoke leaking from somewhere atop the UFO. AJ and brock teamed up and approached the UFO via the bank’s roof. The bulk of the Ranger squad approached on the ground, skirting around the edge of the bank toward the UFO. Fayth teamed up with Spiers, and they dropped onto the roof of the parking structure. They would make their way down to street level from there and make entry by whichever route was cleared first while being in a position of elevation that allowed them to provide fire support to either entry team.

Immediately, these chryssalids proved themselves to be more evolved and formidable than ones X-Com had encountered in the past. Some were larger than they were used to seeing, they were quicker, and deadlier. Their implanted eggs hatched faster, as well. Instead of taking the days that they were used to being afforded, members of the team encountered fresh alien husks that had been burst open to release a gestating chryssalid. This meant that the incubation time had shortened from days to minutes. Upon discovering this, Fayth realized that her current position—removed from the bulk of her team—was untenable. If anyone got implanted, she might need to be on site and at their side to stand any chance of saving them. With that thought in mind, she and Spiers accelerated their advance, and made their way to form up with one of the entry teams.

Maneuvering in the vicinity was extremely treacherous and horrifying thanks to what chryssalids leave behind in their wake. Fayth opened fire on a bug leaping to ambush her while she descended the stairs from the parking garage’s roof, but it turned out only to be the translucent, desiccated shell of one that had molted sometime in the past. When AJ and Brock leapt from the roof of the bank to the UFO, a sectoid corpse near them burst open to reveal a fresh bug dripping with gore. They managed to boot it off the roof, where it tore into one of the Rangers before they put the screeching horror down. Fayth and Spiers ran to the cries of the wounded, only to have a manhole cover burst open ahead of them, where a spindly arm swiped at them in passing. They made it to the bank lobby, where the Rangers had taken cover and set up firing positions while AJ and Brock found a breach in the UFO’s outer hull and made entry into the darkness below.

After patching up the wounded Ranger, Fayth and Spiers made their way through the bank upstairs toward the roof access, planning to follow AJ and Brock down and catch up with them. Meanwhile, they crept through the alien ship, which was oddly familiar; they recognized the layout of the cursed place. This gave them something of a perceived advantage, but to capitalize on it, they would have to survive the encounter with the chryssalid that leapt out at them!

The monster was wickedly fast, and its arms were a blur of razor-sharp claws and piercing spines. It threw out flurries of swipes at both of the men, wearing them down and eventually knocking them out. With the X-Com troopers immobilized—even for a moment—it took advantage of the situation and stabbed each of them with its ovipositor. Then, it wandered off in the direction from which they’d come. It was content to let the eggs it had planted finish the job and add to its ranks.

It eventually reached the bridge of the ship, where Fayth and Spiers were making entry. It got a lucky swipe in at Spiers, slicing his neck and jaw, almost decapitating him in one swipe. Fayth blasted it with fire from her SCAR, drawing its attention long enough to allow AJ and Brock, who were back on their feet by now, to regroup and pour fire into the weaker carapace of its back, finally ending it. Bloodied and shaken, this part of the team was together again, where Fayth was able to get to work on both of them to extract the bug eggs before they transformed them. When this task was completed—and the sample recovered for later testing—the group stalked the halls of the vessel in search of their man.

Passage through the ship was like mucking through an abattoir. The bugs had certainly wreaked their ghastly havoc here, but something else had gone on, as well. A human something. They found scattered 7.62 NATO shell casings from Carville’s SCAR-H rifle. They found an intersection where an M67 fragmentation grenade had been set off. They found tiny holes punched through the alien alloy of the walls, brittle now with the craft’s power supply offline. Emergency lights dimly lit most of the halls. Through the bullet holes here and there, they could see occasional glimpses of ambient light, and jumped when this illumination was briefly blocked by a shadow passing on the other side.

At one of these instances, AJ thought he heard a particular noise on the other side of a wall and dared to tap out “AJ” in morse code. He was answered with morse for the letter “C.” The former Army captain peered through one of the bullet holes where he found Carville attempting to peer right back at him.

“Oh, Sweet Jesus titty-fuck, am I glad to see you guys!” he gushed in amazement and exultation. They rapidly closed in on their target, and decorum be damned, Carville rushed to embrace his fiancée and hugged her like he never thought he was going to get a chance to do again. Once the team was whole again and the PDAs were taken care of, Carville gave them a brief rundown of what had happened and the situation as he knew it, then he revealed the most horrifying news of all, at least to Fayth’s ears: That he had been implanted by one of the chryssalids roaming the halls.

“What the FUCK!” was her reply. “Why the fuck didn’t you lead with that?” she asked as she veritably threw him to the floor to begin extracting the egg. God knows how many seconds she had left to sever the ovum’s central neural bundle before the thing explosively spread through his tissues, rapidly converting his meat and bones into the stuff of nightmares. Nightmares she was sure to have for many days to come, even if she was successful.

With Fayth occupied treating her man, and Spiers watching over her, AJ and Brock made their way down to the power plant. AJ set demolition charges to blow the elerium cores of this bitch when they exfiltrated. With that task complete, they all bounced, regrouped with the rest of the Rangers, and were picked up by the Firestorm. They created some distance from the UFO, but not so much that the radio pulse from AJ’s detonator wouldn’t reach. He hit the switch, genuinely curious what the effect of the explosion would be like. Hopefully, it wasn’t something like Trinity or Castle-Bravo...

It certainly was impressive, but nothing that threatened them in the safety of their own ship. The crashed UFO was swallowed in a bulging flash of light, and effectively disintegrated, throwing out a shockwave on the street that flattened and shredded almost all the bugs within at least a city block. The rumble of the explosion seemed to draw the attention of something else, several blocks away. On the ship’s monitors, people saw an absolutely gigantic chryssalid peer out from behind the corner of a two-story building. It must have stood at least fifteen feet tall! They tried to blast at it with the ship’s plasma cannons, and it took the hit, then fled. Task force Menace had had enough of Aberdeen and it’s skittering, clicking denizens. They were beaten and bleeding and needed to get back home.

After kicking the hornet’s nest to save one of their own, they would all need several days of medical care and bedrest before they could be declared fit for duty again. While Menace is on the bench, the bunker’s second assault team, Rampage—led by SSG Charles Hoff—would see to the defense of the region. Sergeant Hoff still has a certain bone to pick with the aliens after they mind-controlled him on Tiger Mountain during Operation Torchlight.