XCOM 2- Resurrection

by Greg Keyes

  “May I join you?”

  He saw Lena’s silhouette against the night sky.

  “Sure,” he said.

  She sat cross-legged beside him. “I never really saw the stars in Gulf City,” she said, looking up. “There’s always light. But this … this is gorgeous.”

  “You should see them from the high desert or the mountains,” he said. “With air so thin and dry—it’s almost like being in space.”

  “I would like to see that,” she said. “Although it’s hard to imagine them being brighter than this. Do you know the constellations?”

  “Yes, some of them. I grew up just north of the equator. From there you can see all of the constellations in the Northern Hemisphere and most of the southern ones. We’re starting to lose the northern stars.”

  “Do you mean we’re in the Southern Hemisphere?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve been going south since we got clear of the gulf, and now it’s starting to get cold.”

  “Where do you think we’re going? Antarctica?”

  “I don’t know the specific destination any more than you do,” he said. “But we’re pretty far south, from what I can tell.”

  She looked back up at the stars. “I wonder which one they came from,” she said. “The aliens.”

  Oddly, he hadn’t thought about that since he was a kid. She was right; they had come from somewhere, and there was a chance at any given moment that he was looking at the homeland of their oppressors.

  “Lena,” he sighed, “you really know how to kill a mood.”

  She laughed, and he realized that it was the first time he’d heard her do so. He liked the sound of it. He remembered his conversation with Thomas, about how he never joked anymore.

  Maybe his switch was resetting.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Not the first time I’ve been accused of that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Before you showed up, my mood was about to take a bad turn anyway. I was thinking about a friend of mine.”

  “The woman who was killed rescuing Sam?”

  “That’s a good guess,” he said. “Who told you about that?”

  “DeLao. He said you were taking it pretty hard.”

  “I think I’m taking it just fine,” he said.

  First Thomas, now DeLao. Were they all talking about this?

  “We were close,” he admitted.

  “Were you lovers?”

  For a moment he was flat-out stunned.

  “What kind of question is that?” he asked. “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Auugggh,” she said. “There I go again. I thought … I guess I thought you might want to talk about it.” She paused. “And I guess I’m curious. About you.”

  What did that mean? he wondered. Her face was faint in the starlight, difficult to read. But she felt closer somehow. She was still sitting on the deck, and he was still lying down. Was she leaning over him?

  “Curious about what?” he asked.

  “Like, what’s your real name? It can’t be KB. That’s just your pirate name.”

  “Amar,” he said. “My mother named me Amar.”

  “I like it,” she said. “What does it mean?”

  He felt a faint smile on his face. “It can mean either tranquility or strife,” he said.

  “Kind of a conflicted name,” she said.

  “I suppose,” he said. “What does ‘Lena’ mean?”

  “I have no idea,” she replied. “I’m named after my great-grandmother. But I like your name. It suits you.”

  She laid down beside him, and her hand fell so it was just touching his. Something akin to an electric jolt shocked through his entire body. For a moment he felt like he couldn’t breathe.

  She didn’t move her hand, and after a moment her fingers moved to twine with his, and without really thinking, he gripped back.

  They stayed like that, silently, for a long moment. Then she rolled onto her side so that she was facing him. Her face was very close, and he could feel the warmth of her breath.

  “No,” he said. “Rider and I weren’t lovers. Maybe in another world, if we had met on a dance floor instead of downrange. But being that kind of involved with someone in your squad … it isn’t a good idea. It can make you sloppy.”

  For a moment he saw her eyes clearly, bright stars shining in a nebula. Then she laid back down and returned her gaze to the stars.

  “I see,” she said. “Yes, I can see how it might.”

  She sounded disappointed, and he knew he was, and in that moment he wanted to go back to before he’d said anything.

  Instead he just uncurled his fingers from hers.

  * * *

  Three days later, Thomas called them together.

  “Tomorrow morning,” she informed them. “O-four hundred, full gear. We’re going ashore.”

  He noticed she had shaved her bangs again.

  * * *

  “I feel so pretty,” DeLao said, examining himself in his new armor. Mostly new, anyway. They had all been measured for new stuff, but if they had, say, a chest plate still in decent shape, Shen just worked it in.

  Their supplies weren’t unlimited, but even more to the point, the three weeks they had spent at sea—as long as it had seemed—still wasn’t that much time in which to fabricate full suits of armor, not with the scale of the engineering equipment and personnel present on the Elpis. Still, Amar had to agree they were at least 60 percent spiffier than before.

  And a little safer.

  * * *

  The Elpis surfaced under an overcast sky. It was bitterly cold, and Amar was happy Shen had given them insulated body suits to go beneath their armor.

  The ship lay off the lee side of an island that was the single most uninviting place he had ever seen. A truncated volcanic cone formed its core, and most of it was covered in snow and ice. What wasn’t frozen over looked mostly like black gravel. The overall impression was that of a really filthy snowball, dropped from a height into a cold blue sea. From what he could see, the island was tiny, no more than a few kilometers in diameter.

  A few elephant seals reclined on the stony beach, and maybe half a million birds, most of which were penguins of some kind. The smell of them was unbelievable, enough to bring tears to his eyes.

  “What’s she doing?” DeLao wondered. Amar saw Lena emerging from the hatch, just behind Sam. She had on a parka and flak jacket, but she didn’t appear to be armed.

  “Dr. Shen—the older one—asked if we could take her along,” Thomas said. “So I don’t want to hear anything else about it.”

  “Fine,” DeLao grumbled. Their body suits had parka-style hoods. DeLao had his on but was wearing his Red Devils cap over it.

  “Antarctica?” Toby wondered aloud, taking in the island through the scope on his rifle.

  “Or pretty close,” Amar said.

  “There’s nothing here,” Toby muttered.

  “That’s the point,” Sam said. He glanced around at the party, which included the usual squad minus Dux, who was a great deal better but not yet ready for combat. Carrying the rocket launcher in his place was a massive man named Aleki Palepoi. His face was soft, kind-looking, and didn’t really seem to fit his size. One of his arms and half of his chest were covered in complex blackwork tattoos.

  “We shouldn’t see any action here,” Sam told them. “But better safe than sorry.”

  “I don’t know,” Nishimura said. “Those penguins look pretty suspicious. If they start glowing, shoot to kill.”

  “And the smell,” Amar said. “That can’t be of this world.”

  “It’s called guano,” DeLao said. “You’d best get used to it.”

  “All the time I’ve spent with you,” Amar said, “you’d think I would be used to it.”

  The nose of the Elpis was edged over a metal platform built up from the shore. They climbed down and in a few moments were standing on the desolate shingle.

  Sam seemed to be looking for somethi
ng, and Thomas didn’t say anything about going anywhere, so they milled around a little. The birds and seals watched them, and some of the former even waddled over, near enough for him to kick one if he wanted to, but the birds didn’t seem at all concerned that he would.

  “Heads up,” Nishimura said.

  Across the beach, three vehicles were moving toward them, parting the sea of penguins. As they drew nearer, Amar saw two of them were jeeps and the third a large flatbed truck. The latter pulled up as near the sub as possible, and the crew of the Elpis began lowering crates onto the bed with one of the two cranes the ship sported.

  The jeeps were for them. Once the truck was loaded, they piled in and started out along the beach.

  The drivers seemed human enough and eager to talk. Amar’s was named Eduardo and had a lot of questions about what was going on elsewhere in the world. The island was too far away from any place, he said, to receive the usual radio programs.

  Amar filled him in when he could, but Eduardo mostly wanted to know about Argentina, and Amar had never been there. He remembered a few things from the radio—there had been a riot in one of the settlements, and they were doing okay in the underground football league.

  Amar revised his estimate of the island to about five kilometers at its widest, and was just starting to wonder if they were going to circumnavigate it when the vehicles took a right turn toward the volcano.

  At first, he could not imagine what their destination was: The mountain was far too steep to drive up.

  But as they came nearer he saw that what he had initially taken to be part of the icy mountainside was actually a metal wall painted a matte white. As they approached, it began to rise, revealing the cavern behind it.

  “Welcome to Wunderland,” Eduardo said.

  CHAPTER 9

  WUNDERLAND WAS A series of manmade caverns and tunnels carved into the andesite rock of the volcano. Scatters of crystals winked from dark gray stone, reflecting the overhead lights. A petite blond woman named Marisol took the squad off Eduardo’s hands and escorted them through the complex, which seemed to be mostly living quarters, laboratories, and little else.

  “We get our power from the volcano,” Marisol explained.

  “It’s active, you mean?” Thomas said.

  “Yes, although we don’t expect a major eruption anytime soon. It blew out a little ash back in the 1960s, I think. I like to hike in the caldera. It’s warm enough you don’t have to wear a coat, some days.”

  “That sounds great,” Amar said. “Do you also enjoy surfing on tsunamis?”

  “We’ll have plenty of warning before it erupts,” she assured them. “Ah, here we are.”

  They had entered a largish round room filled with banks of screens and controls. Most of them were dark, but about half of them seemed to be showing real-time images of the New Cities. Others had various projections of global maps depicting patterns, some constantly shifting, some relatively stable. They might have been network maps of some sort.

  “So,” someone said. “Dr. Shen has finally come up for air.”

  The speaker was a woman in perhaps her sixties, her auburn hair shot with silver.

  “Dr. Vahlen,” Sam said. “So nice to meet you in person.”

  “The pleasure is mine,” she replied.

  The name wouldn’t have meant anything to Amar a month ago, but that was before he had spent three weeks reviewing XCOM history and tactics. Just as Shen had been the chief engineer of the organization, Vahlen had been the top scientist. Like the rest of the XCOM leadership, she had been presumed dead. But here she was, tunneled into a volcano in the South Atlantic. That, like the building of the Elpis, couldn’t have been too cheap. This was starting to feel bigger and bigger.

  “I suppose it was too much to ask the old man to come here himself,” she said.

  “He wanted to,” Sam said. “I managed to talk him out of it.”

  She studied Sam with a slight air of distaste. “I see,” she finally said. “Well, his communications were quite the tease. I have been quite agitated, not knowing what you have discovered, what brings you here to me. So sit down; tell me why you’ve come all this way and what I can do for you.”

  She ushered them to a round table. One of her assistants brought glasses and a pitcher of water as Sam explained about the downed spaceship. Amar noticed that Lena didn’t seem all that surprised—although she had been left out of the initial conversation, after three weeks in a tin can it was hard for anything so big to remain secret.

  Vahlen listened patiently, nodding now and then but otherwise not showing much of what was going on behind her gray eyes.

  When Sam concluded speaking, she nodded again and tapped the table with her finger, then rose and began slowly strolling about the room.

  “It’s very odd,” she said. “Dr. Shen was always quite … Well, I won’t say timid … but rather conservative in his outlook. This plan of his is bold, perhaps even reckless. I wonder what has changed him so.”

  “I think the war shifted his perspective,” Sam said. “And I think Lily—”

  “His daughter is with him?” she interrupted, seeming surprised. “That would make a difference, I suppose. He’s very lucky to have found her. But she must be an adult now.”

  “Yes,” Sam said. “She is. And she’s Dr. Shen’s primary assistant.”

  Vahlen was silent for a moment before continuing, and when she did, it was on an entirely different subject.

  “We have not been idle here,” she said. “I’ve been studying their technology as best I can, from what scraps of it come to me, and by monitoring their communications, their movements, the locations of their power nexuses. I have a great deal of information about their aircraft, which has been languishing to no purpose. It was always our relationship, you know, that I would dream of things and he would build them. Usually these things were a little less than what I conceived of, but he was competent. I would be more than pleased to analyze the data you’ve brought, Sam, and to make copies of everything relevant I’ve collected over the years.”

  She leaned forward and became a little more intense. “But there is something I want in trade. Come with me, please.”

  She led them down through the maze of tunnels until they reached another room, which held a great deal of equipment that Amar did not recognize, and a few bits he did, such as the autopsy table. And as he turned his gaze around the room, he began to notice other things—like the large cylinders filled with some sort of liquid—and the body parts in them. Most were unrecognizable. Some looked alien, and a few human.

  “My location has kept me secure,” she said. “Most of what I have learned about their technology I’ve learned remotely. But it has been difficult to acquire specimens. Shen wants his ship, and yes, I will help with that. But you understand, this war will not be won with machines. It is their biotech we must master—and surpass.”

  She led them to a wall with a bank of large drawers, like those Amar had once seen in a morgue. She selected one and pulled it open.

  “Here,” she said.

  Amar’s first instinct was to reach for his sidearm—but then he saw the thing wasn’t moving and was enclosed in what looked like glass, although it was glowing faintly green.

  “Is it dead?” Thomas asked.

  “Cryosleep,” Vahlen said. “I prefer live specimens. So much more can be learned.”

  Her tone of voice was clinical, but there was something in her expression that suggested something more passionate.

  Amar studied the thing. Like the ADVENT soldiers, it had a certain amount of humanity in its appearance—but less. The proportions weren’t quite right: Its arms and legs were too long, its head a little too big, and its eyes even larger.

  “Bloody hell,” he breathed.

  “Quite striking, isn’t it?” Vahlen said. “All life on Earth is built from the same genetic code. Under such circumstances, genetic manipulation is relatively easy—genes from a tomato can easily be spliced
, for instance, into a human genome. But the aliens have a radically different code—or codes, rather. Sectoids and Chryssalids, for instance, are from very different places, genetically—and probably cosmographically. And yet they’ve somehow made these incompatible systems work together to create something new. What you see here is a human-alien hybrid.”

  “Like the ADVENT soldiers,” Thomas said.

  “Precisely. But this specimen has been preserved here for ten years. From what I can make out from their propaganda, they now seem much more human. They’re making progress. But toward what? For what reason? These are the questions we should be asking.”

  She slid the drawer shut. “Tell Shen I need more specimens, alive if possible. That is what I require if I render him my … machine knowledge.” She studied their faces as if to make certain they understood.

  “I’m sure we can work something out,” Sam said.

  “Of course,” Vahlen replied. Her eyes narrowed a bit. “There is another thing,” she said. “This so-called ‘contagion.’ What do you know of it?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” Sam said. “I’ve wondered if it’s not just part of their propaganda.”

  “Have you?” Vahlen said. A faint smile appeared on her face, almost a smirk. “I see. Well, if you learn otherwise, I would be interested in what you find. In the meantime, please avail yourselves of my hospitality. Perhaps you would enjoy a hike in the caldera? It’s lovely this time of year.”

  As they began to stand, she looked them over again.

  “Which of you is Lena Bishop?” she asked.

  “I am,” Lena volunteered.

  “A moment with you alone, please?”

  * * *

  Amar opted not to walk in the volcano. One of the staff members invited him to view their substantial library of preinvasion movies and television shows, and he decided that was probably a good use of his downtime. Chitto sat with him for a while but seemed to be mostly bored, and left after an hour or two.

  Lena replaced her an hour later. “I’ve never seen this,” she said after a moment, watching a situation comedy about people who worked together.

  “You’re not allowed to,” he said. “They don’t want anyone to be reminded of what things were like before they showed up.”