Lost in Lansing/Brock Hawk Down
Lost in Lansing/Brock Hawk Down
Fayth and her team faced a fork in the road: Two courses of action were presented, but only one could be given X-Com’s full attention. The first was a request by Dean Vickers to help him and Ian Church establish resistance comms in Lansing, Michigan, which has been overrun by a new alien catastrophe, the Lost. The second path that opened up involved attempting to secure a downed UFO that may hold technologies to help Fayth’s litter of construction drones. One goal may help X-Com and the resistance in a direct and evident way by allowing the Elma Resistance to contact two more bunkers in North America. The other objective is more personal to Fayth and benefits the war effort only as much as her drones can.
Naturally, Fayth and her inner circle put a higher priority on the situation in Lansing. Fayth didn’t want to abandon the other mission entirely, though. She enlisted the aid of two members of the team who also had close ties to the drones—Brock and Dr. Emily Halter, their veterinarian—and sent them off to Bunker Alpha at Area 51 to see if they could recruit a strike team to capture the downed UFO. Brock had also requested to take Alamo with him in case a friendly construction drone might help coax any others on the scene to switch sides. Dr. Halter was eager to go and help, but terrified of what she was getting herself into. She was reassured that Brock would keep her safe, and she clung to that notion like a bit of flotsam in the open seas of her fear.
On the way to Lansing, Fayth took the opportunity to use the Firestorm’s advanced sensors that could pick up human life signs to gather some intel on population centers they passed over or nearby. Smaller communities showed expected attrition rates, but larger urban areas appeared almost devoid of life. When they approached the AO, Fayth saw the same human devastation in Lansing, too, and learned that while the Lost may have once been human, they no longer showed up on the Firestorm’s scanners. Fayth was also approached by a frantic Slick, who was at his wit’s end because his power armor was on the fritz, and he was afraid she would send him out in the field without it. She did not, though, and allowed him to stay on the saucer to give him a chance to fix it.
With most of Rampage still on the mend after the battle of Olympia, Fayth left them and the Ranger replacement pool at the bunker and brought Menace and Trample in the saucer. Trample provided ship security, and Lt. Easton hopped into the pilot seat to keep the engines running. The team set out from the outskirts of town with Menace and met up with Vickers and Church, and from there they headed on foot through the suburbs toward downtown, where the old communications gear was set up in a dusty sub-basement underneath City Hall.
As the group crept through the once-affluent residential neighborhoods, they saw no signs of life. The houses here had been expensive and well-kempt in the before-times, but now they stood empty and barren, their landscaped yards overgrown and the grass wooly and gone to seed. Some doors stood open or battered down, some windows broken. A few houses looked untouched, but somehow seemed more dangerous than the others for it. Occasionally, a lot or two was nothing more than a long-cold, blackened wreck; a pit in the ground where a meteor had landed on January 26th and blasted splinters of two-by-fours, bricks, HardiePlank siding and shards of gypsum all over the neighborhood, the latter having months ago turned into smears of gritty, white paste after exposure to the elements.
The houses, overgrown with creeping vines and caked with a thin layer of dried, dusty film that had originated in Siberia, finally gave way to the first sign of commerce: a gas station and convenience store marked this transition from where people once lived and where they once did business. This locale also yielded X-Com’s first sign of life...or something like it.
Near the fuel pumps, two human figures stood. One leaned against a pump, the other a few feet away propped itself up against a stanchion supporting the canopy. Dr. Rhys volunteered to advance and attempt to silently neutralize the subjects with the strength of his cybernetic hand. Under cover of the midnight darkness, lit only by the stars and a thin sliver of moonlight, the frightened Aussie slowly approached and snapped the neck of one, briefly catching its dead-eyed opprobrium as the head twisted when he set the corpse quietly to the ground. He moved to the next, still and unaware of his presence, and repeated the process. He looked back to his mates and gave a thumbs-up, then his eyes scanned back to the dark interior of the convenience store, where he saw several humanoid shadows in the windows looking right at him.
This gave Rhys a bit of a startle, but the figures did not react to his presence. After formulating a plan, they made an auditory distraction to test some of the parameters of what these formerly human monstrosities would do in certain situations. At AJ’s direction, Carville loaded his white phosphorous grenade into the EGLM of his SCAR and lobbed it at a distant vehicle. The chemical warhead exploded and set the pickup truck ablaze. The Lost poured out of the store and made their way toward the sound, surrounding the truck, but not throwing themselves into the flames. They seemed to recoil from the heat and were repulsed only somewhat by the light. They wanted to get away from it, but the furious raging of the conflagration caused the metal of the truck to pop and ting, and the sound kept drawing them back. They moved on, spreading out a bit so as not to be such a noisy single unit.
Further into town, the buildings were denser, and multi-storied. Shops and stores on the ground floors, apartments, storage or offices further up. Abandoned vehicles littered the streets which weren’t as empty as the team would have liked. To take care of this issue, Dr. Rhys attempted to repeat his success at the gas station and crept up on one of the Lost standing near a broken-down truck. Unfortunately in the dark, he wasn’t as aware of his surroundings as he could have been, and didn’t notice the long, heavy jack handle propped up against the truck’s body, and knocked it down. AJ, right behind him, attempted to catch it before it clattered and clanged to the ground but stumbled in his haste. The fight that didn’t need to happen was on.
The Lost were easy enough to dispatch. The issue they soon discovered was that, as a group, they were like unto a hydra. When the Lost were shot down, the sound of fighting them inevitably drew more to the fray. And if they couldn’t get at a target, they would emit a chilling death howl that triggered more of their number to wake from hibernation. It didn’t take long to realize that this wasn’t a fight worth winning, and the group fled the scene, giving no more care to stealth. They ran all the way back to the Firestorm, dragging along a huge, shambling mob in their wake like a squad of Pied Pipers. Given advance warning, Trample had set up outside in firing lines, and when Menace reached them, they all turned on the horde and cut it down. Removed from the urban center, there were no more Lost here to coax out of the woodwork.
With a lesson learned, they changed their plan and flew silently in style to the target area. Sgt. Carville led a fire team to escort Vickers and Church, and they fast roped onto the target building, working their way down. Hundreds of Lost littered the streets below, like a tableau of a normal day frozen in time and covered with dust. Nearby was one of the phone-booth sized pods that had been found in Elma, one of the sources of the Lost phenomenon.
Also arriving on the scene was a new group: Men in bulky red and white armor. They wore boxy helmets, and the sputtering blue pilot lights of flamethrowers lit their way. One of them seemed to be in charge, and even wore a cape. Who were these jokers? Could these be the Purifiers that Vickers had mentioned in his situation briefing? Whoever they were, they also had a couple of assault drones on their side. AJ took a precision shot and brought one of the flying discs down, but the other swooped beneath the Firestorm where Fayth could not track it with the ship’s weapons. AJ and Rhys attempted to lean over the edge of the cargo ramp to see if they could spot it but were unable to.
Fayth had the advantage of omnidirectional vision outside of the saucer, able to peer out in all directions through a phased array of sensors over the entirety of the saucer’s skin. She saw the drone swoop underneath, pivot and nail the underside of her ship with it’s railgun, which caused a hull breach and made a small blind spot in her view, like a batch of dead pixels on a monitor. Those railguns packed a punch! Lacking any direct offensive capability against the thing, Fayth, who had taken the pilot seat back from Easton, decided to treat this gnat like it deserved, and used her ship like a giant boot, dropping down to try and crush it between the belly of her ship and the roof of the building below.
AJ and Rhys, dangling over the edge of the ramp, saw the flat roof of city hall rushing up to meet them and barely scrabbled back before impact. The entire building shook. Fayth had to rise back up to determine if her efforts were successful, and immediately found they were not, as the drone instantly shot her ship again. She repeated the process and smoke-checked it but didn’t have to lift the ship up again to determine if she was successful; after giving the Firestorm a little vindictive twist to grind the drone some more, the top floor of the building collapsed beneath the vessel, instead, much to the horrified consternation of the Rangers inside.
On the street below, the Purifiers were no threat to the saucer or the people on it. They were cutting down the Lost in droves with their flamers. One was mobbed by a group of the withered foes. Since they had some time to kill while Vickers and Church got the comms gear up and running, AJ figured the Purifiers could only help them keep the Lost out of their agents’ hair, so ensuring their continued success seemed like a net positive. He began taking pot-shots at the Lost, himself, and encouraged others to do so, as well.
After a while of this, one of the Purifiers did something unusual: He stopped torching the mob for a moment and took one hand from his flamer to hold it up in the direction of the saucer and its visible crew and... gave them a thumbs-up! No one had expected that, since it was hinted that these Purifiers were totally a Collective-inspired group. The soldier on the street then went back to torching the Lost.
Vickers and Church eventually got the cold war-era equipment up and running, and exfil’d the building with the Rangers. Fayth made pick up on her team and they bebopped out of there, quickly tired of Lansing and its dusty throngs. Once inside and headed away, Vickers requested permission to come to the bridge, and presented Fayth the fruits of their labor: a briefcase containing an interface to utilize the comms they had activated. He offered her the opportunity to switch it on and make the first call to test the thing out. She did so, and contacted Bunker Alpha, to check on the progress of Brock and his ragtag group assaulting the crashed UFO.
She found that things in SoCal were not as idyllic as she had hoped. Area 51’s fireteam Paladin had landed at the site and engaged the enemy but were shortly interrupted by another force! This must have been the reaction force sent by those who had originally shot the UFO down, and they had begun fighting X-Com over the spoils. Fighting, and winning. It was reported that Brock had forced Alamo to get Dr. Halter to safety. She and the surviving members of Paladin escaped in the Red Menace. The hostile forces captured Brock and were currently en route back to their base, heading northeast.
The urge was strong to immediately intercept them, but AJ correctly pointed out that the craft Brock was on was only travelling a few hundred kilometers an hour. The Firestorm was almost ten times as fast. Fayth could unleash the full might of her force on the crash site and catch up to the kidnappers long before they reached their destination. With renewed resolve and a sudden grudge to settle, Fayth put the hammer down and engaged.
