XCOM 2- Resurrection

by Greg Keyes

  Lena didn’t say anything, but he remembered her little diatribe about easy and hard.

  So he did the harder thing and sent Nishimura.

  He watched her move stealthily through the tall grass.

  “Chitto, put that thing in your sights. The one in front.”

  He took out his field glasses and watched.

  Nishimura stopped about ten meters from the animals, which did not appear to see her. Their eyes looked glassy and dead, but they were nonetheless swaying, occasionally stamping their hooves.

  She took another few steps, and the nearest one charged her. He noticed its gait was odd, as if it were running on three legs.

  Nishimura bounced back, bringing her weapon up. Then she abruptly fell backward, vanishing in the grass.

  “Asu!” he heard her yelp. “Miercoles!”

  Chitto shot it. The boar exploded like a puffball mushroom, except that instead of a cloud of brown spores, the pig seemed to sublimate into a sparkling, rainbow cloud.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “Nishimura, get out of there.”

  “It’s okay, Chief,” she said. “I just tripped.”

  He suddenly smelled something very strange, something he had smelled only once before, the night when they had seen the ADVENT soldiers using flamethrowers.

  “Get back here, now!” he shouted.

  He saw her reappear and start running.

  “Contagion, do you think?” Lily asked.

  After all of their trekking in so-called contagion zones, Amar had seriously begun to doubt the existence of any real contagion. It seemed more likely that ADVENT just wanted people roped off into areas where they were more easily controlled, and that the “contagion” was just another fabrication, a tactic to suck more people into the New Cities. He figured the guys they had seen that night were probably burning a pile of corpses or something, covering up their crimes.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been wrong.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I think.”

  The other animals hadn’t moved, but now one did, limping up to stand where the one that Chitto had shot had been.

  “We should try to get a sample,” Lily said.

  “With all due respect, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Amar replied. “We’ve no idea how contagious it is. For all we know, we’re already infected. But if we’re not, I want to keep it that way. This mission has to come first.”

  “But if what we’re seeing is really the contagion—it’s the one thing we know the invaders really fear. It could be an important weapon to use against them.”

  “I will grant you that,” Amar said, “but still believe we should try to get very far from here as fast as possible.”

  “I am in charge of this mission,” she reminded him.

  “Sure,” he said. “Of this mission, not that one. Let someone else come study this some other time. Someone with the equipment to do so. We have nothing. No test tubes or petri dishes or whatever you need—we don’t have it.”

  Lily sighed and looked at the remaining animals with what he could only describe as longing.

  “Very well,” she said.

  * * *

  Lily walked up beside him later that day.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” Amar asked, equally startled and confused.

  “You were right,” she said. “I am … impatient. I don’t like to have time on my hands. When I see a problem or a puzzle, I want to solve it, right then, and I don’t always think through what the costs might be. My father says I’m like a rabbit, always dashing ahead. In New Kochi I dashed ahead, and people died. So, thank you for asking me to take a step back.”

  Amar nodded. “You’re welcome.”

  “You will probably be forced to do so again,” she admitted.

  “I know.”

  She laughed and swept her arm at the countryside. “How are you enjoying France?” she asked.

  “I was expecting cheese,” he replied. “So far, no cheese.”

  * * *

  Two more days brought them to their destination, an old airfield deep in the countryside. The strip was cracked and grown up around the edges, but the control tower still stood, along with several large hangars. From the tower, Amar could see the ruins of a city and the river they had been paralleling for most of the trip.

  They hadn’t seen any more signs of the contagion—if that was in fact what they had seen—but Amar urged vigilance. He checked his own skin every few hours at first, looking for anything that was remotely sparkly, but now he was down to once a day.

  In the overgrown hangar, they found what they had come for—a thick, stubby, powerful-looking aircraft. It had wings, but they were short, and from the look of it, the craft relied more on jet or rocket propulsion for its motivation.

  “I almost don’t believe it,” Lily said. “After all of these years. Once again, luck is with us.”

  “Some luck,” Amar said. “A squad from Le Mans confirmed it was here last year, and the word got back to Vahlen.”

  “Is that a Skyranger?” Nishimura asked, a bit of awe in her voice.

  “You’ve seen one before?” Lily asked.

  “My father carved a wooden one for me when I was a little girl,” Nishimura said. “He worked on it, you know.”

  “I didn’t,” Lily said.

  “On the design, anyway,” she said. “He was the propulsion engineer.” She cocked her head. “It looks a little different than my toy.”

  “Bigger, probably,” Chitto commented.

  Lily ignored Chitto’s quiet sarcasm. “The original Skyranger was shot down during the war,” she said. “This one was a prototype for the next model. Several were being built at different locations, but this is the only one we know survived. It was never finished. It has never been flown.”

  “What use is it then?” Dux asked. “Spare parts?”

  “No,” Lily said. “We’re going to finish it.”

  Amar walked around the flier, admiring it.

  “It can land and take off vertically,” Lily went on, “and in quite tight circumstances. And it will fit very nicely into the Avenger. The Avenger will serve as a mobile base, much as the Elpis does now. But we can’t very well fly something that size into a New City to extract a squad. We need something smaller.”

  “No more walking,” Chitto said. “Or pickup trucks.”

  “Exactly,” Lily said. “As handy as the Elpis has been for keeping the resistance going, it’s very slow. Our response time to global events is tallied in days, weeks, months, as you all know. We can now cut that down to hours.” She was almost twitching with anticipation. “Now if you don’t mind,” she said, “I’m eager to get busy working on this thing.”

  After setting up a perimeter and watch schedule, Amar began inspecting what was left of the airbase in hopes of finding something useful—weapons, food, and so forth—but it appeared the place had been looted long ago, probably by the same resistance fighters who had informed Vahlen about the Skyranger. After that, he organized forays into the empty suburbs of the nearby town, which didn’t turn up much either but did a little to ease the boredom. Lena and Lily were doing most of the work on the ship, which left the soldiers very little to do.

  A week passed, and heavy clouds brought cold rain and mist. By then they had set up a barracks in the building beneath the tower and managed to get an old radio working, so they had a little entertainment and news from the outside world. Most of the music was from before the invasion, but there was also radio theater, which mostly adapted movies and books from the old days, but lately new, original content was coming into favor.

  And most of what went out over the radio waves was more than it appeared to be. To get the news, you had to know what you were listening for. Anything important was couched in apparent nonsense, but if you knew the code it was decipherable. When the announcer said, for instance, that he would like to dedicate the next song to his dear old mother in New Paris—and then
the song itself mentioned Marseille—it meant that it was time for the resistance cell near Marseille to carry out whatever they had been planning. “Sister” on the other hand, currently referred to a settlement, so “To my ailing sister in Berlin” was a warning that New Berlin ADVENT was making a big push in the surrounding settlements—or a specific one, again indicated by something in the song.

  It was not a good system for conveying detailed information—that tended to happen in Morse code—but it helped to minimize radio traffic that the jabbers might be able to track. The broadcast network had been growing somewhat organically over the last decade or so, or at least so it was generally said. However, Amar was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t a more centralized, guiding hand behind that, just as the Elpis and Wunderland must have been receiving their funding from someone or some group of people.

  He was half-listening to the radio when Nishimura came in, wearing a rain poncho.

  “Chief,” she said, “there’s something you need to see.”

  * * *

  There were four of them: two boars, a dog, and a deer in a little cluster on the other side of the river. Under the overcast sky, they looked like they were covered in gray patches, but he was sure that if the sun had been out they would be scintillating like the ones they had come across earlier. Like those animals, these weren’t doing much, just sort of bobbing, facing in their direction.

  Amar felt cold in the pit of his belly.

  “Do you think they followed us?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Nishimura said. “Looks like they came from that direction, anyway.”

  “How can you say?” he asked. “They don’t seem to move.”

  “Well, they weren’t here yesterday,” she said. “Maybe they only move at night. Or early in the morning. Or midday. But unless they grew there, they came from someplace else.”

  “For all we know, they did grow there,” Amar said. “Or maybe it’s something in the soil. Step on it and you become infected or whatever.”

  “Should I shoot them?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Set up a tree stand back there and watch them. I want to know what they do.”

  The next morning the animals were all still right where they had been—except for one of the dogs, which now stood on their side of the river. In addition, a hedgehog and another dog had joined the balance on the farther side.

  A hedgehog, he thought. How could something be so ridiculous and so horrifying at the same time?

  Amar hurried back to base to find Lily Shen. He found her hard at work, digging around in the engine panels. They had brought a few tools with them, but fortunately the base had a machine shop that was still pretty well stocked with tools, so she had everything she needed—except maybe time.

  “How much longer before it’s ready?” he asked.

  “It’s coming along,” she replied. “Why, are we in a hurry? You think we’ve been spotted?”

  “Not by ADVENT,” he said. He explained about the animals while she continued tinkering.

  “That’s pretty curious,” she said.

  “I find terrifying a more apt word,” he replied.

  She shrugged. “Figure out what to do about it,” she said. “That’s your job. I’m busy doing mine.”

  After their conversation on the road, he was a little taken aback by her tone. But she was deep in this now, all of her resources focused on what she was doing. When she got like that, she didn’t take the time to be considerate or kind. That required mental energy she didn’t have to spare.

  “You told me that you saw ADVENT burning something in the contagion zone back home,” Lena said. “They probably know more about it than you do.”

  She made a good point. The one thing the old base had plenty of was fuel, stored in tanks underground. He wasn’t sure he could build a flamethrower that wouldn’t explode in his hands, and after a round table with the other soldiers, they decided it was probably better to make something like Molotov cocktails using detonators and cans filled with fuel.

  By the time they had a few of them rigged, three of the animals were on their side of the river.

  Dux pitched one of the cans. It hit the ground, bounced, and wobbled to a stop about a meter from the middle dog.

  “Nice throw,” Amar said.

  “Bocce champion of Rosedale, Ohio, two years in a row,” he said, grinning, running his thick fingers through his copper hair.

  The animals didn’t react to the presence of the can at all. Dux tossed another one, which almost bumped the first one. He took out the remote.

  “Let’s see about this,” he said.

  The can detonated very satisfactorily, spraying burning fuel in all directions. Amar flinched involuntarily and took a step back, remembering the immolation of Vahlen’s island.

  The animals continued to stand there, burning, until they collapsed into fuming piles. He didn’t see anything sparkly in the air.

  “Well,” Dux said, “that works.”

  “I guess,” Amar said. “What about the ones across the river?”

  “I dunno. Maybe we could build a catapult or something. I could use a rocket, but I hate to waste ordnance on something like this.”

  “No,” Amar agreed. “We’re a long way from an armory.”

  “Hey, Chief,” Chitto said, peering through her scope.

  “Yes?”

  “That stuff that’s on the animals? The crystals or whatever? It’s on a few of the trees, too. See? On the leaves?”

  Now that he was looking, he realized he didn’t need the rifle; he could see the shimmer when the wind blew.

  He glanced down at the ground around his feet, where dandelions were beginning to put out their seed heads. If the contagion could get into plants, could it hitchhike on their seeds? Or their pollen? Because if so, in a few days it would be everywhere.

  He watched the flames subside on the corpses. He hadn’t worried much about a little smoke being noticed; they hadn’t seen aircraft of any sort flyingover since their arrival. But if he had to set everything on fire? That would bring the ADVENT, fast.

  “Build your catapult,” he told Dux. “But don’t burn anything else unless you have to.”

  But they had to. The animals kept crossing the river, and they kept burning them. On the other side, the infection seemed to be spreading. It was like everything had a light layer of frost on it, and more and more animals joined the party.

  And here, as well as across the river, the dandelions were starting to open. He found some old filter masks in the machine shop and insisted everyone wear them. He doubted it would do any good, but it seemed better than nothing.

  * * *

  Two days later, at the two-week mark of their arrival at the airfield, Lily decided to put the Skyranger through a few tests. Amar felt unexpectedly excited when the running lights blinked on and the wheels on the landing gear began to turn. He found himself smiling broadly as the craft rolled out of the hangar. Like the elder Dr. Shen and Dr. Vahlen, it was a blast from the past, a reminder that humans had once been resourceful creators and inventors. And a promise that they could be again.

  Lena and Lily hadn’t just “fixed” the Skyranger—they had altered the design. The craft had two engines in the back—like a jet—but the wings were really just struts now, supporting two massive engines that could rotate. He watched as Lily tested the hydraulics, pointing the engines down—the position they would be in for touching down or taking off vertically—and back, where they would augment the rear jets once they were in full flight. A fifth under jet beneath the craft completed the Skyranger’s propulsion system.

  “There’s only so much I can do here,” Lily said. “I have other modifications in mind once we get back to the Avenger. Let’s fuel her up and run a few more diagnostics. Then I’ll take her up for a test flight.”

  “That’s it, then?” Nishimura asked. “We just get in and fly back?”

  “No,” Lily said. “We have one stop on the way.”


  “Miércoles,” Nishimura grunted. “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I’ll tell you about it while we’re fueling,” Lily said.

  Amar had been present when the trip was planned, so none of what Lily said was a surprise to him or Lena, but the others, it had been determined, hadn’t needed to know. If Amar and Lily were both killed, captured, or badly wounded, the whole thing was to be scratched anyway. But now it was time for everyone to know the next step.

  “We’ve figured out why we can’t turn the power back on in the Avenger,” Lily said. “The heart of the whole system is the computer. If we go back to the organic analogy, it’s the central nervous system, limbic system, and circulatory system all in one. While it’s not put together like one of our computers—in fact, we’re not sure how some of the pieces work—we have been able to parse out some of the functions. In doing so, we discovered severe damage to what for reasons of simplicity I’ll call its central processor, even though in some ways it’s more of an adapter. The memory and programs are all still there, intact, but there’s nothing to coordinate them. We have no hope of learning to build one of these things anytime soon. So we’re going to steal one.”

  “Where?”

  “New Singapore, probably,” Lily said.

  “One little stop,” Nishimura said, “halfway around the world.”

  By that time, the Skyranger was fueled. Lily and Lena began working through another checklist as Amar trudged down to the river with Dux to see what the latest in their contagion situation was. He was only about halfway there when Nishimura called him from the tower.

  “Incoming,” she said. “Two ADVENT transports bearing in from the northeast. From Paris, probably.”

  Perfect. Bloody hell.

  “Get everyone to the hangar and in position,” he shouted. “We may be taking that test flight all together.”

  “Chief, you better watch it,” Nishimura advised. “One of them is circling around your way.”

  Even better. They might have satellite intel. It was possible the ADVENT had been watching them for days.