XCOM 2- Resurrection

by Greg Keyes

  He crawled off the young man.

  “Are you okay?” he gasped, hardy able to hear his own voice.

  The man looked around, bewildered. “I think?” he said.

  “Run the other way,” Amar said. “Farther into the building. You tell anybody you see, stay away from here.”

  That was all he had time for, he knew. Lena was tugging at his arm, and together they ran out the door, where the Skyranger was waiting. Dux was firing his rocket launcher again at some target down the street. Nishimura and Chitto were laying down cover fire.

  A mag round skipped off the pavement, and another screamed by near his head. Across the street he saw something immense coming out of the shadows. It was like something from a nightmare, a nightmare inspired by the folktales his Malaysian grandfather had told of him. He only had a glimpse of it, but it looked like a cobra the size of a man.

  It couldn’t be real….

  Then it was out of sight, behind the Skyranger, and he and Lena were climbing into the ship. ADVENT troops were closing in from every direction, and it was definitely time to go. Chitto and Nishimura fired once more each and jumped in as well. Dux was right behind them, but as Lily kicked in the under jets, something wrapped around Dux’s ankle and yanked him back. He yelped and grabbed at the door, dropping his weapon. Amar threw himself on the floor and grabbed his wrists, trying desperately to pull him back.

  Dux wasn’t looking at him, but at whatever had a hold of him. His eyes were wide with terror and disbelief, but as he turned to look back at Amar, his face hardened and became grim, angry.

  Then something yanked him so hard that all of Amar’s strength and determination amounted to nothing. An infant could have done as well.

  And Dux was gone. The Skyranger lifted free.

  “Wait,” Nishimura shouted at Lily. “Dux! We have to go back for him.”

  As she started forward, mag rounds sang through the open door and punched through the hull.

  Amar realized everyone was looking at him, including Lily. His throat almost seized up. Nishimura started toward the door again, but he stopped her with his hand.

  “Close it,” he told Lily. “Get us out of here.”

  The Skyranger turned and accelerated toward the sky. The rattle of the weapons’ fire was like popcorn popping, and like popcorn it diminished, the seconds between each concussion drawing further apart, until the only noise was the roar of the engines.

  Amar regarded Nishimura. “Alejandra—” he began.

  “No, Chief,” she said. Her eyes were red. She had her helmet in her hands, resting on her lap. “You were right. I just lost it.”

  “That wasn’t ‘losing it,’” he said. “I would rather be in a squad that cared too much about me than too little. But it was just too late.”

  He thought he was saying the words just to comfort her, but the minute they came out of this mouth he realized he meant it. He couldn’t have said that a few months ago.

  Nishimura put her head down. “I just hope he went in style. Took another couple with him. He would have wanted that.”

  “He bought us a working Avenger,” Lily said. “That’s not nothing.”

  New Singapore dropped away behind them. Somewhere, ADVENT was probably scrambling gunboats to come after them. They still might not make it home.

  He turned his attention to Lena, whose gaze was fastened on the receding city.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  She turned to him and nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “You know what,” she said, and took his hand. After a few seconds, he gripped it back.

  CHAPTER 20

  AMAR WAS A little amazed at how much the Avenger had changed in the month or so since he had seen her. Not so much on the outside as on the inside. The first big surprise was that a hangar had already been cleared to house the Skyranger. It also contained the armory. Crew quarters fit for human beings had been constructed, and the tent city outside was vanishing as people moved into the ship.

  A bar and restaurant similar to the Rathskeller on the Elpis was up and functioning. A workshop and an engineering department had been built. Most of this had been done using decades-old technology, although some of it was powered using Elerium. The result was something that felt a lot more like home—a human environment in an alien skin.

  The “Enigma” chamber remained inaccessible, although it was unclear why. The elder Dr. Shen believed that once the power and computer systems were functioning, it would cease to be an issue.

  Some individual systems were already online, including life support, which circulated breathable, climate-controlled atmosphere throughout the vessel. Others had been added; a jamming field had been erected around the ship—if a patrol did find them, the field should be capable of preventing communications from the immediate area, giving them a chance to deal with the enemy and keep their location secret for at least a little longer.

  “We’re a long way from flying, however,” Dr. Shen told them. “Even after the computer is online, there are a number of parts we will have to either steal or fabricate.”

  He studied the item Amar and Lena had taken from New Singapore. It was a cylinder, flared slightly on both ends. Its metallic surface had a rainbow sheen, like titanium—except that the rainbow was always gradually shifting, like oil on water that something stirred now and then.

  “This, however,” Shen went on, “should work. I commend you all. I’m very sorry for the man you lost.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Amar said.

  “Well,” Dr. Shen said, “let’s see what we can do with this.”

  * * *

  The rains of the northeast monsoon were tailing off, and the weather was growing drier and cooler, making patrols and hikes to the watchtowers much more pleasant. Amar held a briefing on the contagion and instructed patrols on how to identify it.

  And things moved on. Lena was furiously busy the first few days after their return, but they both rose each morning before sunlight and shared a cup of coffee together. It wasn’t as good as the stuff in New Singapore or even the pot Captain Simmons had brewed, but it didn’t matter. The coffee wasn’t really the point.

  “When will you guys install the processor?” Amar asked on one such morning.

  “We already have,” she said. “We’re taking baby steps in terms of connecting it to the rest of the systems, in case we find something ugly. Or something else ugly, I should say. We’ve already disabled several internal defense systems. We want to be pretty sure what we’re turning on before we do it.”

  “That makes sense,” he said. But it made him itchy. There was only so long that they could sit here, grounded, using energy, bringing in supplies, before being noticed. Caution was all well and good, but there were mounting risk factors in moving too slowly as well.

  But there was no point in saying that. She knew it as well as he did.

  They listened as the cloud forest changed its score from night to day, and the sky brightened.

  “This is my favorite time of day,” she said softly.

  “Mine, too,” he replied.

  “I wish it lasted longer.”

  He took a little breath and let it out. “I’d like for it to last a lot longer,” he said.

  She peered at him over the brim of her coffee cup, sitting with her legs drawn up under her, looking beautiful in her ragged green fatigues and brown T-shirt.

  “What?” she said. “Like all day?”

  “Like from now on,” he replied.

  She pursed her lips and seemed about to say something, so he knew he had to get ahead of her.

  “I love you,” he said. “I was an idiot not to tell you before. I know I screwed things up. I know there aren’t always second chances. But—”

  “Hush,” she said. “Just …” A brittle little smile appeared on her face. She couldn’t quite meet his eyes.

  She set the coffee cup down. “The reason …” she began,
“the reason I went to the gene therapy center was because I suspected something, and I had to know if I was right.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything,” he said. “I think we’ve been through this.”

  “I believe I do need to tell you,” she replied. “You deserve to know.”

  He suddenly really didn’t want to know, but he didn’t say so. He just nodded and waited for her to gather herself and find whatever words she was looking for.

  “My cancer is back,” she said.

  He heard the words, but he couldn’t quite sort them out.

  “You said gene therapy had cured it,” he finally managed.

  “It had,” she sighed. “It did. I don’t know what went wrong. For all I know, it’s designed that way—if you stop the treatments it comes back, so you never want to leave the city.” She shrugged. “I was starting to feel sick, like before. So when we were in New Singapore, I went in for a diagnostic.”

  “Okay,” Amar breathed. “And you had it treated.”

  “No,” she said. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why?” he asked. “We were there, you were in, and you had the fake chip. It would have been easy.”

  Her smile was a little more genuine this time. “Would you have, if it had been you?”

  “I don’t know!” he exploded. “I’m not sick. I haven’t been sick. I’ve never thought about it.”

  “Let’s just skip all of that soul-searching,” she said. “You, Amar Tan, would not go into a gene therapy center to save your life. And neither will I. It was dangerous enough to get the checkup, but if they had done the therapy, they might have discovered my genome is already in the system. But even if that weren’t a problem …” She ran her fingers through her hair.

  “So that night, at the bar …” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I knew I was sick, and I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to enjoy myself. Yes, I miss a lot of things about living in the city. But I know I can never really go back there.”

  Amar felt himself becoming increasingly more desperate, but he tried to keep his tone level, to not show it.

  “Look,” he said. “We can go anywhere—New Madrid, New Providence, any city—and act like we’re coming in from the cold, just like we did before. You get cured; we leave. It’s that simple.”

  “No,” she said, “it isn’t. We’re lucky we got out last time, and someone died so we could do it. And that was for something important.”

  “Your life is important,” he said.

  “Amar, please understand. I’m not dead. I still have my life,” she said. “For the first time, I really have my life. I don’t know for how much longer, but however long it is, I want to spend it doing something important. Something my sister would have been proud of.” She looked at him directly. “Something you would be proud of.”

  He was having a hard time forming words.

  “Of course I’m proud of you,” he finally got out.

  “I was avoiding this conversation,” she said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t …” His throat caught. “Ah, wouldn’t tell me what you just did. But now that you have …”

  “Wait. You knew I was in love with you?”

  “Of course, dumbass,” she said.

  He stared at her for a moment, stunned.

  “Oh,” he said at last. “But you don’t—”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “God, you really are a numbskull.”

  “I’m starting to get that,” he said.

  “Yeah. Starting to.” She wiped the corners of her eyes with her palms and picked her coffee back up. He watched her, tried to see every detail, the golden stars in her green eyes, the small spray of freckles on her forehead.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking …” he said. “I’m thinking you say you don’t know how much longer you’ll live. I don’t know how long I’ve got either. Rider, Thomas, Toby, Dux—and a bunch before them—all gone in the blink of an eye. DeLao and Nishimura are the only people around who I’ve known for longer than a year. Odds are, next mission it’ll be me. So I wish … whatever time we have left … I wish we could spend it together.”

  She reached for his hand.

  “I can deal with that if you can,” she said.

  They were married the next day. They honeymooned farther up in the Ghats, where the air was cooler and thinner, and the Milky Way blazed like a white river in the sky.

  * * *

  The bridge of the Avenger was still a work in progress, but it was coming together. The ship’s original sensors and some new ones engineering had built channeled and displayed information from the small—the temperature and humidity outside, for instance—to the grand, such as a relay that sorted thousands of coded radio transmissions by subject and priority.

  By the way Sam was grinning, Amar figured there must be something else he’d been called up to see. He watched the analyst fiddle with some controls, and then took an involuntary step back as a column of blue light suddenly appeared in the middle of the room. Floating in the light was an image of Earth.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “This is the hologlobe,” Sam said. “Since we got the computer up and running, we’ve been able to do all sorts of cool things. This is one of them. We’ve wired in Vahlen’s old network and started adding our own tracking information. We’ve now officially got a command center for our operations.”

  “That’s pretty cool,” Amar had to admit.

  “I finally feel like I’m home,” Sam gushed on. “Exactly where I need to be. It’s all coming together, KB. You had a lot to do with that. You and … the others.”

  Amar didn’t have to ask who he meant by “the others.” The list was long, and growing longer.

  “When we first met,” Amar said, “you told us that you had found something worthy of their sacrifice. Do you still believe that?”

  “Even I had my doubts at times,” Sam admitted. “There were some pretty low moments, weren’t there? But I promise you, it’s going to pay off. We’ll be able to organize on a scale we could only dream of before. The computer is working now. We’ve got a way to strategize at the global level. Once we figure out how to get this thing off the ground—”

  “Yeah,” Amar said. “That tiny detail.”

  “We’ve been trying to find Vahlen,” Sam said. “We desperately need someone of her caliber in research. But no luck so far. She’s like a ghost.”

  Amar thought it was likely she was quite literally a ghost, at least if you believed in such things. So many miles of open ocean, with days of sailing to reach anywhere. ADVENT patrols had managed to find his tiny boat. Vahlen would have been in either a relatively large ship or a fleet of little ones. Unless…

  Unless the Elpis had a sister.

  The thought made him smile, but he dismissed the speculation as pointless. Vahlen either couldn’t be found, wasn’t around to be found—or didn’t want to be found. In any case, she wasn’t going to be on the team.

  Sam was still talking. “Anyway,” he said, “there are other candidates for a chief research scientist, good ones. We should have one soon.”

  “When you pick one out, we’ll go get them,” Amar said. “But thanks for showing me this. I’d like to catch up on the defensive systems later, but right now I’ve got a lunch date with my wife.”

  On his way to the bar he passed Dr. Shen in the hallway. He was fiddling with a computer pad and looked perturbed.

  “I just saw the hologlobe,” Amar told him. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” the old man said distractedly. “I’m sorry, Amar, no time to talk.”

  “I understand,” Amar said.

  Lena wasn’t in the bar, when he got there. He thought about going down to engineering to collect her, but if she was late, she usually had good reason to be.

  So he sat alone. A few tables over, Nishimura was having an animated conversation with a new recruit. DeLao was at the bar, flirting wi
th the bartender, a young woman from France whose other job was assistant mechanic on the Skyranger.

  Chitto walked in, saw him, and came over.

  “Got a minute, Chief?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Have a seat.”

  She looked around the bar. “Lot of new faces, huh?” she said.

  “I was just noticing that,” he said. There were now more people in the Avenger whose names he didn’t know than ones he did.

  “They look so damn young,” she said.

  He laughed. “I was thinking that, too,” he told her. “How old are you, Chitto?”

  “Twenty-four,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nishimura, she’s thirty. DeLao is around twenty-eight. I’m a year older than you. But we look like old-timers compared to some of these kids.”

  “It’s all in the clean living, I guess,” she said.

  “It wasn’t all that long ago that you were the rookie,” he said. “I thought you looked like a baby.”

  “I know I was pretty green,” she said. “I know you hated being stuck with me. But you hung in there for me, Chief. I appreciate that.”

  “So what’s on your mind?” he asked.

  She eyed him as if he was a little slow. “I just told you, Chief,” she said.

  “That’s it?”

  “It was big deal to me,” she said. “I just never felt like it was the right time to thank you. We were always in the middle of something, or you were busy with other things.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I was worried you were working up to quitting or something.”

  “Nah,” she said. “I don’t really have any other skills.”

  “Good,” he said, “because I’ve been thinking. DeLao already has his own squad. I offered Nishimura a command, but she turned it down. I’ve been thinking you could head up a recon unit. What do you think?”

  Her eyebrows lifted fractionally. He remembered when Thomas had had this same conversation with him, what seemed like years ago.

  “I think I’m not the leader type, Chief,” she said. “It was hard enough to learn to be in a unit. You may remember I kind of tended to do things my own way.”