Recruitment Drive, part III
XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Recaps
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Game #21 11/07/14
Day 23
Recruitment Drive, part III
Our daring heroes close in on the Pacific Science Center. It is make it or break it time for their rescue mission. The State Patrol's effort at corralling the Chryssalids is almost finished. Once that is complete, if the Troopers pull back, the terror beasts' attention will surely be drawn elsewhere. They will scour the area for signs of life to kill and devour...or worse.
They take stock of their enemies' tactical positioning. At first glance, the situation seemed quite dire based on sheer numbers. When these numbers are laid out on a map, impossibility begins to melt away into the form of hope. They gather their resources, finally choose a plan of action, wait for an opening, and move!
The plan involves coasting a bus down Queen Anne toward the Science center. AJ had recovered a "Tiki Torch" avoidance beacon for Marie to study. She learned that its operation was relatively basic, and using the alien "tricorder" recovered from the lizardman hacker back at KAI headquarters in Olympia, found she was able to interface remotely with the beacons. With Marie on the bus, she deactivates a several-block long line of the chryssalid fence as they roll silently past. Hopefully, this will allow some of the chryssalids to break containment and wander somewhere other than right at them in the middle of the rescue operation.
Doug uses his assault drone to blast a hole in the wall of the PSC where Dean Vickers and the scientists are laying low. His pulse missile hits an internal structural member, though, which leaves an insufficiently large breach. Sacrificing the last of his two missiles, he hits it again, making a suitable hole.
Meanwhile, the bus nears the intersection that leads to the PSC. Brock drops the bus into gear and gives it a rolling start. The engine roars to life. The team is in the thick of it now, and they have shed their cloak of stealth. They have crossed the Rubicon. The next few moments will lead either to success or failure and death.
One squad of troopers stands it their way as they barrel down the street. In the lead humvee, AJ drives ahead of the bus, and calls for Carville on the SAW to open fire. He catches three of the troopers in a burst, killing all of them. Ian Church leans out the door of the bus and opens up with his automatic shotgun, splattering the last trooper on the other side of the street all across the fresh snow. The bus pulls into position by the breach. Marie hops out to help meet the scientists and try and guide them onto the bus in an orderly fashion. She has been working a lot on her hair and makeup in the last hour or so (and probably stuffing tissues in her bra) to make sure the scientists have a friendly, pretty face meeting them. As this tactic seemed to work so well on their first egghead hunt, she figures that it can't possibly fail here!
Fayth jumps out of the bus with her lizardman detector in hand. The group insists that all of the eggheads get scanned. Marie wants to go into the building to help guide the eggheads and keep them from panicking. Fayth points out that Marie needs to stay at the bus and scan people going for the middle door; they need both of them open to get all 50 scientists on board as quickly as possible. The two women begin to debate logistics as Ian Church yells at them, "Shouldn't you have figured this shit out before we got here? Jesus Christ!" He then jumps off the bus and dashes into the building screaming directives at the scientists like a drill instructor. Properly chastened, Marie mans her post, and dutifully scans eggheads as machinegun fire rips off down the street.
AJ revs the engine of his humvee, and guns it toward the State Patrol team further east on Denny Way. A chryssalid is nearby with them, and it barrels in their direction. Carville opens up on it, and manages to keep his stream of fire tightly focused. Nearly two dozen bullets slam home, shattering the beast's carapace before it can get close enough to pose a threat. AJ has a tear gas round chambered in the M203 in Carville's rifle. He launches this at the WSP cruiser down the street as a trooper is jumping into it, knocking him out of the fight. The other three troopers rush them on foot, moving from cover to cover. As one crosses an intersection, a railgun round from the south nails the trooper, spinning him into a bloody pirouette. Carville keeps pouring on the fire, and the patrol is turned into mincemeat. Luckily, Marie is around the corner of a building about a block away, and can't see any of this.
Ian Church sees several chryssalids approaching from the north, and calls out for AJ to lob an HE round north and west of their location. AJ doesn't understand why, but he complies. The distant explosion draws the attention of two of the three monsters, and leads them out of the containment area through the deactivated fence.
The last of the scientists are getting loaded into the bus. Church is back out on the sidewalk, and he is the only thing standing between the chryssalid closing in and Marie and Fayth behind him. Church draws its attention by blasting it with his shotgun, which only angers it. It stabs him in the leg with a pincer. Doug nails it with the railgun on his assault drone, but tags a limb, which doesn't knock it out of the fight. He also forgets that the railgun has a small explosive effect, and peppers Church with shrapnel on accident. Fayth overcomes the terrifying presence of the creature and rushes to Church's aid, pulling him away from the monster and hauling him off to (relative) safety in the bus.
Marie finds herself alone on the sidewalk with a very angry chryssalid that has lost all of its other targets. It rockets toward her, scrabbling murderously. Marie holds her ground and does not panic. From within the bus, dozens of scientists see her slam the Tiki Torch on the ground like Gandalf holding a Balrog at bay. The chryssalid recoils from it before it can wrap her in stab wounds. Marie trusts the tech; she doesn't flinch. The eggheads see her as some kind of battle goddess, so cool she probably pees ice.
From the hum-drum-vee behind the bus, Peter Kjelstad sees the beast attempting to carve up his little girl. He leans out the door with his rifle and burns a mag into its back. With a heaping helping of luck, several shots hit, and punch through the thing's weak rear carapace. With the chryssalid staggering from myriad wounds, Doug delivers the coup de grace with the drone's shotgun needler. Brock revs the engine and prepares to take off, once Fayth finds out from the scientists if everyone is on board. Vickers jumps into the hum-drum-vee while Mr. Kjelstad drives off at AJ's direction to grab the trooper he gassed earlier (a present to mollify Marie).
One of the scientists frantically tells Fayth that Dr. Kristoff is missing. They lost her nearby on their final approach to the Science Center, and before they could go out to try and find her, the WSP started showing up with their pet monsters. Her last known location was not far away. Fayth relays the info to AJ and Carville, and the three set out to find Kristoff while Brock throws the bus in gear and high-tails it out of there.
AJ finds Kristoff's tracks in the snow. She had been slowly moving toward the science center, but has collapsed, severely wounded, in an alley. They get her in the humvee, and the entire convoy rolls out before the rest of the troopers and chryssalids can organize and respond. As the convoy makes its getaway, Carville sees a VTOL craft heading their way from the south, the direction of the Columbia Center Tower and the Westin Hotel--strongholds of the Red Hand. When Doug hears about this, he spots it with the assault drone that is flying escort over the bus. He sees an open loading ramp on the tail of the transport craft. Inside is a power armor trooper with a machine gun hosing a target on the ground far behind them. As the VTOL draws near, it slews around. Fearing that the gunner is going to target them, Doug draws a bead on one of the craft's engines, but holds his fire.
Flying backwards, the aircraft releases a barrage of rockets in the direction of the PSC, probably to deter pursuit. The Red Hand forces pace the convoy for a short distance, then fall back and peel off when they are safely away from the scene. The team isn't sure what to make of this intervention, but are certainly glad they don't have to fight the Red Hand today.
Meanwhile, Fayth is trying to save Dr. Kristoff's life. She cleans her abdominal wound as best she can in the back of the bouncing humvee, only to find that Kristoff has been implanted with a chryssalid ovum. She realizes it is only a matter of time before the egg fully latches onto her nervous system, and from there, it is only a matter of days before a new chryssalid bursts out of her after feeding from her flesh and guts. They arrange for the Skyranger to airlift her and Kristoff, and get back to Elma as soon as possible. Fayth will need every minute she can get if she hopes to end this without having to kill the woman.
Fayth gets her patient into surgery at Bunker November. The surgery is touch-and-go, but with the help of Naomi and Dr. Carbonelle, she is able to sever the egg's hold on Kristoff's spine and remove it. In a last fit of aggression, the detached egg squirms and flails in an attempt to find a new host, trying to latch on to Fayth's gloved hand! She peels off the glove, cocooning it in latex and throws it onto the floor. She covers it with a stainless steel instrument pan and Lt. Spiers (providing security during the operation), provides a foot to pin the cover down and keeps it from wriggling away. The specimen is gathered up by Carbonelle and taken to the ACF.
After this harrowing encounter, Fayth's nerves are shot, and she completely blows trying to stitch her patient up. Luckily, Naomi takes over for her before she can eviscerate anything, and Fayth departs to scrub down. And scrub, and scrub, and scrub.
The convoy rolls in to Elma, and Marie takes on the task of wrangling the scientists, finding them temporary housing and getting them food. She is obsessed with feeding them eggs, which is a lot better faire than what they've had lately, so they don't argue with her compulsion. AJ goes to check in with his wife (he doesn't want to get yelled at for not coming to see her first!) and find out how the surgery went. By this time Naomi is cleaning up alongside Fayth, who is still cleaning where the filthy alien parasite tried to touch her, having nearly scrubbed her hands bloody by this time. Fayth leaves AJ to talk to his wife in private, and goes to her litter of construction drones in the hangar bay. She kicks the soccer ball around with them for a while to de-stress after the awfulness she witnessed in the operating room.
After a while, she leaves Thunder, Flash and Alamo, and decides to check in at the ACF, which brings her past the ready room. Through the observation window she sees Vickers and Church meeting with Marie's mother. Fayth begins to roll her eyes, probably thinking "Of course these Covenant guys would have a confab with her!" But then, she notices that it doesn't look like a friendly discussion. Vickers' body language indicates he is agitated. Fayth, who is evidently kind of a nosy-Rosie, decides to duck down beneath the window and eavesdrop. She tests the door to see if it is locked, and tries to crack it open to better hear what all the yelling is about.
What she hears is a full-on dressing-down, dished out by Dean Vickers and aimed at Mrs. Kjelstad. He rips her up one side and down the other for her failure to communicate her plans not only with he and Church, but with her own agents sent into the field, who almost shot Church when he tried to make contact with them.
At this point, Fayth has a flash of insight, and instead of trying to remember all this juicy shit and feebly regurgitating it later, she turns on her communicator, and transmits it to the rest of her team. They are provided a fly's ear perspective to the remainder of the ass-chewing, where Vickers emphatically points out that her behavior is not becoming of the Custodian of a Bunker, and that whatever issues she has with her people, she had better damn well get over it. He reminds her that X-Com needs them, but at this point, "Those people out there" do not need her. With the yelling and venom coming to a close, Fayth scurries off before she can be spotted snooping.
The next day, Fayth schedules a surgery with the captured trooper to discover if the NOI can be safely removed. The night before, Doug had noted some skullduggery from Dean Vickers in the form of surreptitiously drugging the trooper. Fayth runs a tox-screen and finds traces of sedative in the man's system, and a very precise injection mark that she'd have never spotted if Doug hadn't told her where to look. She also learns from the Ranger providing security that Vickers had tried to check on the prisoner earlier this morning, but was turned away because he doesn't have clearance yet. Fayth realizes that based on the levels of sedative in the tox-screen, the time of Vickers' visit would have coincided with the time that the sedatives would have been wearing off. As she wheels the man into surgery, it dawns on her that the sleeping trooper may be playing possum. He tries to grab her, but he is firmly restrained to the gurney, and the Ranger holds him down until Fayth can put hum under. After a dicey procedure, she manages to remove the implant, and finds that the trooper seems to be fine except for missing the last couple weeks spent with the implant in his head. The team now realizes that Marie is going to be even more difficult to deal with when they propose killing mind-controlled humans. Some of the team (we won't name names here) may have even hoped that the operation was a failure...because shooting zombies is a much easier moral dilemma than shooting people who can possibly be saved if they aren't riddled with bullets in the name of safety and expediency.
Fayth confides in Carville, and asks a favor of him. She tells him about the NOI, and requests that if she is ever put in that position, if there is no way of getting it out of her head, she asks him to put her down. Seeing the effect of the NOI close up, she can't abide the thought that some alien might use her body to kill her friends and family. Carville reluctantly agrees, but who can tell if he really means it? He has grown quite fond of this girl, and the thought of losing her brings back awful memories from his own past...memories that he has not yet been brave enough to share with Fayth.
