XCOM 2- Resurrection

by Greg Keyes

  “Sam,” Amar said, “make a break for the water, now. Maybe they won’t notice you amongst all the birds. It’ll be cold, but you might make it back to the Elpis. It’s a chance.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Go!” Amar barked. “You’re no help to us here.”

  Sam stared at him, then nodded.

  “I’ll make it,” he said.

  “The rest of you, tighten up. Stay behind the transports. Target the Chryssalids first. If anyone has a grenade left, wait until they come in groups. That’s going to be soon.”

  He watched the other transport come, wondering where it would land.

  And then, without any warning, the mountain exploded.

  In the first insane moment, he thought the volcano had chosen that moment to erupt, but—flash frozen in his mind—he saw a string of explosions too regular to be natural, hurling a thousand canisters skyward …

  “Into the water, now!” he yelled.

  As he turned to run, the canisters opened into blossoms of liquid flame. He saw the flying transport turning end over end, engulfed.

  The concussion slammed him face first into the brine, which was only waist deep at that point, but the bottom fell off quickly. He struggled to stay under, let the armor drag him down, as the bitter chill of the water stung his face.

  But then he felt blistering heat on his back and swam as best he could, trying to outrun the flame that was spreading on the surface.

  He came up for air and saw fire curling all around him. He took one hot breath and sank down again, pulling himself along the rocks on the bottom.

  The next time he surfaced, he was clear of the flames. The whole face of the mountain and most of the beach were burning like a torch.

  Without their thermal suits, they would have all been dead within minutes. Once clear of the flames, they tried to keep their hands and heads above water to avoid frostbite, but Amar was shivering almost uncontrollably by the time they finally found a bit of beach that wasn’t on fire.

  They huddled there, warmed by burning propellant and choking on fumes until the flames finally subsided.

  Aside from themselves, nothing on the island was moving.

  Amar wearily counted heads. They had lost Thomas and Toby, DeLao’s arm was half shot off, and Palepoi was wounded in the thigh. Statistically, not bad, but Thomas? Toby? To lose them was staggering.

  It was like his past was being erased. Thomas had recruited him.

  But he couldn’t get bogged down in that now.

  “We’re still alive,” Amar told the others. “We still have work to do. Drag yourselves up, and let’s get back to the Elpis.”

  DeLao groaned but pulled himself to his feet, and they started toward the ship.

  Amar glanced over at Chitto.

  “Why the hell haven’t you been using a rifle all along?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “When I signed up, they gave me a shotgun.”

  * * *

  When they reached the landing, they found Sam standing there. He looked up wearily.

  “Thank god,” he said. “I thought I was alone.”

  “What about the Elpis?” Amar asked.

  Sam shook his head. “I think she left without us,” he said.

  But Amar was studying the platform, which was now perforated by magnetic rifle fire.

  “I don’t think they left,” Lena said.

  She pointed out to sea. A few hundred meters out a patch of flotsam floated, heaving up and down on the swells.

  Amar stared at it, feeling numb. Behind him, the fire on the mountain had diminished to a few flickers amongst the rocks. In the sky above, a black cloud stretched southeast for as far as he could see.

  “We’ve got an hour or two before sundown,” Amar told them. “If we don’t find someplace to camp, we’re going to freeze to death.”

  “I may be okay with that,” DeLao said gloomily.

  * * *

  The only plants on the island were moss and lichens, and most of that was now gone, courtesy of Vahlen’s massive mining project. With nothing to make a shelter from, they had to sleep in a pile that night, sharing body heat. The next day they hiked back toward Wunderland.

  Thomas and Toby were pretty much cremated, but since they could, they took time to gather their remains and bury them in the talus at the base of the mountain.

  The doors to Wunderland had been blown open. The remains of the three ADVENT transports left were just outside, along with a lot of fried troopers and Chryssalids.

  Inside, everything had been torched. The labs were still smoldering, and the power was down.

  They found a handful of human bodies, but not enough to account for the population of the island. Hopefully, that was good news. Vahlen had avoided detection and capture for two decades. She must have had an escape plan.

  They searched the ruins, looking for anything they could use and not finding very much.

  “We can melt ice for water,” Sam told them that afternoon. “Judging by the number of sea birds, there must be a lot of fish out there. I don’t think survival will be a problem, although it won’t be fun.”

  “Can you build a radio?” Amar asked.

  Sam ran his fingers through his hair. “Vahlen did a pretty good job with the scorched earth bit,” he replied. “I might manage to make something with very limited range, like I did back when you found me. That’s not likely to do us much good.”

  “You’re all missing the point,” DeLao said. “The aliens sent out six transports full of goons that never came back. You think they’ll let that go?”

  “He’s right,” Amar said. “We need to find a hidey hole. If they don’t find us, they’ll assume we’re dead or we left. Vahlen had some way out. Let’s find it.”

  “What about her?” DeLao said, pointing at Lena.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with all of this,” she said. Her face was smudged, and the hair on one side of her head was badly singed. She still had the shotgun in her hands.

  Amar wanted to believe her, but even though he had shouted down DeLao earlier, he had his own doubts. She had been cozying up to him from the beginning, hadn’t she? First to lull him into letting his guard down so she could make her escape. Had she kissed him to distract him from the obvious truth, that she was a spy in their midst?

  But something about that didn’t make sense. If she really was an ADVENT plant, why the whole New City girl act? Why actively make them distrust her if her job was to infiltrate them and lead the jabbers to one of their bases?

  “Maybe it’s not her,” Sam said. “Or maybe it is, and she doesn’t know it.”

  “Yeah, or maybe it’s you,” DeLao said. “What the hell do we know about you?”

  “I know him,” Palepoi said, sounding a little irritated, his normally placid face set in a frown. “He’s been with Dr. Shen for a long time. He’s no traitor.”

  “Or Chitto,” DeLao went on. “She’s new. Why exactly did you join up, Chitto?”

  “To meet real winners like you,” she said. “Gotta find a husband somewhere, right?”

  “Stop this,” Sam said. “DeLao, stop it. Vahlen said something about the signal being wrong, about something using her own instruments to send the homing signal. Wrong how? What was she talking about?”

  Something suddenly clicked in Amar’s mind.

  “Lena’s implant,” he said.

  Everyone turned to look at him.

  “The smugglers took it out,” Sam said.

  “Maybe,” Amar said. “But … didn’t it feel like those guys gave up too easily?”

  “Toby dropped two of them in two seconds,” DeLao said.

  “Right,” Amar conceded. “Then they went a few rounds with us and took off. When has that ever happened?”

  “We had the drop on them, and they knew it,” DeLao countered. “It wasn’t worth staying.”

  “That’s how you or I might think,” Amar said. “But jabbers usually call for backup and keep fighting
. I thought it stank then, but it reeks now.”

  “Fine,” Nishimura said. “You’re saying they wanted us to find her.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Maybe they used her as a stalking horse from the beginning. They must have known she was leaving Gulf City and heading out into the settlements. Right, Lena?”

  “Of course I told them where I was going,” Lena said. “You’re supposed to register for travel.” A look of horror was slowly spreading across her face.

  “Right,” Sam said. “So they followed you to Greenville, and when the smugglers drugged you, ADVENT followed them to their depot. Maybe they had already cut your implant out, maybe not. Either way, ADVENT killed them. Then they put in a new implant. A different kind of implant, maybe a more advanced one built for long-range tracking. We showed up, they made it look like a fight, and then they left.”

  “And they’ve been tracking us ever since,” Lena said. “Oh my god.”

  “Hang on,” DeLao said. “I examined her. Sure they sewed her up, but I checked. There was no implant.”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Nishimura said.

  “Yes,” Lena said. “Yes, do it.”

  DeLao got his medical kit. He gave Lena a local and then cut through her scar, pulling the wound open and dabbing at it with a cloth to stanch the bleeding.

  “See?” he said. “No implant.”

  Instead of looking at her cut, Lena was staring at Amar.

  “Dig a little deeper,” he said.

  Lena paled further as DeLao cut further into her muscle tissue. After a minute, his eyebrows lifted.

  “Mierda,” he said.

  He changed out the scalpel for forceps and after a moment pulled something out. It was tiny, but as he pulled, long red strands as thin as hair came out behind it. Lena closed her eyes and began shaking, but she bore up until almost a half meter of the stuff emerged from her.

  “What the hell is that?” Sam asked.

  Amar studied the tiny bead from which the hairs protruded.

  “If I had to guess, I would say it’s biological. Maybe it amped up her nervous system so it could transmit a signal to Vahlen’s equipment. It’s really a question for Vahlen.”

  They debated trying to keep the thing for further study, but in the end the risk was too great. DeLao made some notes, and then they burned it and tossed the ashes into the ocean.

  CHAPTER 11

  NISHIMURA FOUND THE secret escape route, which was no longer quite so secret—the final blast that torched Vahlen’s complex had shifted the hidden panel and revealed a corridor and stairs beyond. Locked and loaded, they followed them up and emerged in the gigantic bowl of the caldera.

  But what they found was bad news—the hulks of five helicopters, as torched as anything on the beach. They could see a number of charred skeletons that must have been blown clear of the crash.

  DeLao sat down, rested his bandaged arm on his knee, and put his head down.

  “They didn’t make it,” Palepoi said, voicing the obvious.

  “Yeah,” DeLao said. “And now we have no way off of this island.”

  “Well,” Palepoi said. “That’s that, isn’t it?”

  It seemed so to Amar. He wasn’t sure how far the nearest inhabited land was, but he was willing to bet it was a long, long way. With luck, they could avoid the next patrol ADVENT sent out, but then what? The base had just been resupplied by the Elpis. How long before another supply ship came?

  Was there any other supply ship?

  Sam turned slowly toward them, his face stern. His slight body seemed to grow taller.

  “No,” Sam said. “That is not that. We’re alive, and we have information the resistance needs. So we do not give up. We hide. We survive. And we do the mission.”

  “How?” Amar asked.

  “You lead your troops,” Sam said. “Dig in someplace. Let me worry about the rest.”

  * * *

  Chitto went up to the rim of the caldera with the scoped rifle to watch for fliers while the rest of them went to work on closing up the once-secret door, in hopes of using the upward passage as a hiding place; the crater end of the tunnel could be easily disguised with packed snow.

  The problem was, they couldn’t shift the thing back. The metal door had warped in the intense heat; it wouldn’t slide or be shifted a centimeter in any direction.

  “We’re just going to have to blow it,” Sam finally said. “Collapse the tunnel.”

  “With grenades?”

  “I can make it work,” Sam said “I just need to place them right and rig a way to detonate them from a distance. Nishimura, give me a hand.”

  About an hour later, Sam and Nishimura emerged from the tunnel. Then, a muffled explosion blew a cloud of black dust out of the tunnel mouth. They waited for it to clear and then went cautiously back down to see the results.

  “Holy smokes,” Sam said, when they arrived. “That is not what I was going for.”

  The ceiling had indeed collapsed—and so had the floor.

  Amar’s earphone crackled.

  “I see something,” Chitto said. “Coming from the west, like last time.”

  “Okay,” Amar said. “This is it. Everyone in. Chitto, get down here, fast.”

  She did get there fast. She must have more or less skated down the crater wall.

  Once she was in, they collapsed the pile of snow and ice they had hacked up. They couldn’t make it smooth without leaving someone outside, but it was what it was. If anyone looked really close, they were screwed. They could only hope no one looked really close.

  When they were all in the passage, Sam called him back down.

  “I think I found something,” he said.

  * * *

  The explosion had opened a second tunnel beneath the first, and in fact the first three meters had been a trap door laminated with stone to make it appear natural. It didn’t lead up, but proceeded in a fairly level manner for maybe a hundred meters before widening into a large cavern. Most of it was filled with water, except for a walkway on their side and a floating dock. There was a small cabin cruiser tied up there, but there were six empty slips. The cavern wasn’t large enough for the Elpis, but you could fit a couple of decent-sized vessels in there, or seven small ones.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sam said.

  “But what about the helicopters?” Nishimura asked.

  “A ruse, obviously,” Sam said. “Misdirection.”

  “But the bodies …” DeLao protested.

  “Maybe they were dead already,” Amar said. “People killed in the attack. Or some of Vahlen’s specimens.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said. “It doesn’t bear a lot of thinking about. It looks like she did escape, by boat. Like us, she probably figured the ADVENT would think she was dead and call off the search.”

  And now they had a boat. Things were looking up. If the jabbers up there right now didn’t find them and kill them all, that is.

  He was still thinking that a few minutes later when a series of tremors shook the island.

  Sam laughed. “I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t search through the bodies,” he said.

  * * *

  After twenty-four hours had passed, Nishimura went out to check and reported no sign of ADVENT troops or transports in the area—living ones, anyway. One ruined flier lay on its side in the blast radius that had earlier been wrecked helicopters, along with the bits and pieces of ADVENT soldiers.

  That was the good news.

  Sam told them the bad news. He had found some charts in the boat.

  “We’re about 13,000 kilometers from where we need to be,” he told them. “That’s as the crow flies. And we’re not flying. What we have is a smallish boat.”

  “Where are we going again?” Amar asked.

  Sam looked uncomfortable for a moment and then shrugged. “You might as well know. If something happens to me, the rest of you will have to carry on. Our target is in India, in the Western Ghats.”

  “Wai
t one moment,” Nishimura said, her dark eyebrows crooked around a frown. “I’ve been looking at the charts, too. This boat has a range of a few hundred kilometers. You’re talking about going east. Cape Town is more than 5,000 kilometers away.”

  “Sure,” Sam agreed. “But there are islands between here and there, and some are marked as fuel depots.”

  “The nearest one I saw marked that way is around 2,500 kilometers,” Nishimura said. “Still way too far.”

  “What do you suggest then?” Sam asked.

  “South Georgia Island is a fuel depot, too. The Elpis stopped over there on the way down. It’s just under 800 kilometers from here. From there we can hop to the Malvinas and on to South America.”

  “That’s going the wrong direction, though,” Sam pointed out.

  “Cojudo!” Nishimura swore. “Don’t you get it? This mission is done. That target is out of our reach—and even if we could get there, the Shens are dead. God knows where Vahlen is headed. From the looks of it, she had better ships with longer range than this one. Without them, what are we going to do with a crashed alien ship?”

  “I know something about their technology,” Sam said. “And I have Vahlen’s data. Once we find the ship, we can attract others with the skills we need.”

  “But we won’t make it,” Nishimura said.

  “There’s plenty of fuel,” Sam said. “We can drag extra tanks behind us to increase our range.”

  “And if we meet a storm, we’ll go down like so many stones,” Nishimura said. “I intend to be of use to this resistance. I don’t intend to squander my life in a hopeless attempt to reach India from the South Atlantic in a glorified rowboat. When we had the Elpis, sure. Now we’re just lucky to be alive. So let’s take the information you have to someone who has the capability of using it.”

  “We can do it,” Sam said. “I know we can. And sailing west, the distances are better, but we would still have to take on extra fuel to reach the Malvinas.”

  “Not nearly as much,” Nishimura said. She lifted her chin and wagged a finger at him. “Wait a minute. You ran those numbers, too.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said, “I did.”

  “But you didn’t present going to South America as an option.”

  Sam sighed. “Is it just me?” he asked. “Is it just me who feels that when I close my eyes and try to sleep, I see Dixon, Sergei, all of those guys, Thomas, Toby, Dr. Shen—every night, more faces. Lily Shen, everyone on the Elpis. This was Shen’s dream, Nishimura. People died for this, believing we would carry on, finish, seize the lightning. There’s only one boat, and I know you guys can take it if you want to. But if you outvote me and retreat to South America, I won’t be with you. I’ll bloody swim to India if I have to.”