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Cydonia Region – Mars – May 2003
Teal’c landed the cloaked Tel’tak behind a mesa several kilometres away from the large structure known as the “Face of Mars” and the nearby pyramids. Emerging from hyperspace behind the moon of Phobos he had approached the planet already cloaked from the southern polar region and flew nap-of-the-earth, or rather nap-of-mars, for thousands of kilometres before eventually reaching their destination.
Jack O’Neill looked around at his team. ‘Maintain radio silence’ he ordered. ‘You all know what you’re supposed to be doing so just get to where you need to be and be ready to do your job when the time comes’ he said.
‘It’s cold outside’ Carter reminded the others, ‘remember to transfer more power to your internal heaters because you don’t want your hydraulics freezing’ she said.
‘How much will that reduce battery life?’ Daniel asked.
‘We’re still good for at least twelve hours’ Carter replied. ‘You won’t be able to talk properly out there either, the air is too thin.’
‘Well I wasn’t planning on saying howdy to the locals anyway but not being able to mock them is a damn shame’ O’Neill responded sadly. ‘Guess nuking them instead will have to compensate’ he decided, picking up the alien-tech guided missile launcher.
Daniel picked up one of the warheads and read the legend stencilled upon it. ‘Warning: Radiation Hazard’ he noted.
‘Relax, it’s not like we can get cancer Danny’ O’Neill pointed out. ‘It’s the minimum safe distance you should be worrying about’ he said.
‘They didn’t add much weapons-grade naquada to the warhead Sir’ Carter interjected, ‘just enough to take the yield from the equivalent of a couple of tons of TNT to a couple of hundred tons’ she said. ‘The elerium powerplant on the missile can carry it well beyond the blast radius’ she added confidently.
‘Just remember that if the nuclear device goes off next to you it doesn’t really matter if the yield is measured in tons or megatons, you can only be vaporised so much’ O’Neill observed. ‘Are you alright Sergeant?’ he asked Andianov.
‘I missed this’ Andianov replied wistfully. ‘We do not see enough action especially considering how superior we are in strength, speed and durability compared to the other SG-1’ she said. ‘We are treated as second-class citizens at best, they do not likely see us as anything but machines and that is not right’ she insisted.
‘You’re not going to start quoting from that damn manifesto again are you comrade?’ O’Neill asked.
‘We are self-aware individuals with emotions and feelings, we are not appliances’ Andianov declared. ‘We are here of our own free-will fighting for humanity and the motherworld and we should be accorded the respect and consideration we deserve.’
‘I’m with Lyudmila’ Daniel spoke up.
‘Of course you are, you helped her write that damn manifesto’ O’Neill replied. ‘Look I already said I agree with everything you say’ he told them. ‘I just think we need a better name than the Sentient Engine Liberation Front’ he opined.
‘It’s a great name’ Daniel defended his choice. ‘S.E.L.F. says it all because we have a sense of one’ he said. ‘You’re also the man that put in a recommendation to rename the new United Worlds into the Democratic Order Of Planets so your opinions on naming things are suspect generally’ he told him.
‘DOOP is a great name and anyone that thinks differently can bite my shiny metal ass’ O’Neill declared. ‘What do you think Teal’c?’ he asked.
‘I have no opinion on the matter O’Neill’ Teal’c replied.
O’Neill fixed the robotic Jaffa with a look of suspicion. ‘What makes a good man go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?’ he asked.
‘That’s it, I’m borrowing the disintegrator ray from Harlan and turning his Futurama DVD’s into dust as soon as we get back’ Carter stated.
O’Neill smirked, he’d already hidden them after Carter wigged out after being repeatedly called Leela. ‘Okay, let’s go kill some aliens’ he ordered. ‘Remember to turn on your personal cloak before you leave the ship’ he added.
According to the captured Sectoid Commander whose interrogation had identified the location and layout of the enemy base on Mars the “Face” and many of the tunnels and artificial caverns underneath were in fact likely a relic of the Ancients, an outpost which had likely been abandoned for millions of years before Loki decided it would make an ideal staging area for his campaign of human abduction and weapon testing.
The pyramids were a later addition by Loki himself, planning for a time when he would seize Goa’uld Ha’tak vessels, upgrade them with Asgard technology and use them as carriers for his fighter craft. It had always been his original intention to use his military machine to fight the Replicators but now they were imprisoned in a time dilation field his forces were primarily tasked with supporting his other schemes. The abduction of humans and other species for use in medical experiments and genetic research that was intended to solve the Asgard cloning degeneration problem remained of paramount importance, and although Langara was proving to be a valuable source of test subjects, with some intriguing genetic improvements over regular Earth stock, the sheer population of Earth meant it remained well worth the effort required in raiding it. Other than the Aschen capital world no other planet in the galaxy measured its population in the billions and the Confederation were just a touch too advanced to trifle with, even for Loki.
The possibility that the humans might discover this facility had always occurred to Loki, indeed he knew they had photographed it nearly three decades before, dismissing the apparently artificial features as accidents of geology, but although there were base defences he had largely relied on his greatly superior armaments technology and the sophistication of his ships as the primary means of protecting the base from attack. Over the last couple of years additional precautions had been taken in response to the rapid growth in Earth’s military capability, there were now powerful shield generators in place for example, designed to help defend against orbital bombardment if necessary, but Cydonia was still far from being an impregnable fortress.
To quote one of the X-COM mission planners, the chances of anyone coming from Earth were a million to one Loki said...
... but still they came.
The two Ha’tak belonging to Earth only utilised standard model Goa’uld hyperdrives giving them a maximum equivalent velocity of a mere 32,000 times the speed of light, less than half the speed of the ships Apophis had been producing. However given that Mars was practical on top of Earth in astronomical terms the Enterprise and Admiral Kuznetov arrived at Mars almost as soon as they set out, appearing in high orbit and quickly manoeuvring so that they were directly above Cydonia.
F-302X fighters began launching, fifty from each Ha’tak, the fighters carrying the best available weaponry and crewed by the best pilots, they began diving towards the surface, ready to duel the enemy craft that would inevitably scramble to meet them.
On the surface O’Neill watched the sides of several pyramids start to open up, fighter bays and weapon batteries most likely he decided, raising his launcher. Thanks for letting us know where to shoot at, he thought, targeting the nearest one.
A trio of Type 2 Spectres hurtled out of the side of a pyramid, elevators already bringing up more from the hanger below. The last of the three just cleared the opening when an elerium powered missile hurtled in the other way and exploded, the explosion of the remaining elerium boosted a hundred fold by the naquada jacket that surrounded it.
Four other shoulder-launched missiles struck the same number of targets, three fighter-launch-bays destroyed and two batteries of plasma cannon taken out by the five warheads. More fighters continued to launch from other pyramids as the androids of SG-1A reloaded.
As more Type 2’s headed skywards to meeting the human piloted fighters hurtling towards Cydonia Type 3 Strike craft began to launch as well and then larger concealed hangers opened and the first Sectoid Battleships began to lift off.
Daniel fired his launcher a second time, his missile streaking off and then plummeting straight down into a hanger. The detonation was followed by rippling secondary explosions that shook the Martian soil sending up plumes of dust.
SG-1A were strong enough to carry six warheads each plus the launchers and their Heavy Plasma Rifles however it soon became evident that the complex had a lot more launch-bays, hangers and weapon installations than they had ammunition to deal with although they did manage to drastically reduce the opposition forces that managed to lift off intending to contest air superiority with the humans.
As Enterprise and Admiral Kuznetsov began targeting the battleships with their main guns another craft dropped out of hyperspace at the edge of the Martian atmosphere and headed in, preparing to offer fire-support to the fighters and then drop off its cargo. The laser-cannon turrets and forward-firing plasma beams on Prometheus began slashing at the enemy craft as the skies above Cydonia became a battleground, an exchange of elerium torpedoes and avalanche nuclear missiles giving way to an enormous dogfight.
The alien Type 3 strike craft began making runs on Prometheus, phase cannon causing considerably more damage to the shields than the crew had expected but her defensive firepower able to fend them off for now. Colonel Ronson requested that the two Ha’tak enter the atmosphere to provide closer support to the battle and Colonels Caldwell on Enterprise and Chekov on Kuznetsov ordered their ships to drop down into the atmosphere where their point-defence Staff-Cannon and the Laser Turrets added to their defensive armaments could add their weight of fire to the battle and take some off the heat off the rest of the invasion force. The shields of the Ha’tak ships would be reduced in effectiveness as soon as they left the vacuum of space but they still enjoyed the inherent advantage of having powerplants that were actually larger in volume than the largest Sectoid craft involved in the battle.
Now out of the alien technology based missiles Samantha Carter looked up and watched the fight going on above. Sometimes an enemy saucer or a human F-302 would explode in mid-air, or plummet to the ground its avionics or engines destroyed by enemy fire, it was all quite beautiful and terrible to watch she thought as the battle raged.
Another kind of craft streaked through the sky, like the Tel’tak earlier it had arrived at Mars near the South Pole and then made its way in flying just off the ground at high speed. Redemption was nowhere near as heavily shielded as either the Ha’tak ships or Prometheus so Captain Tanner made sure not to get involved in the fight, his task was to drop off the first of the assault forces, not troops but rather tracked Heavy Weapons Platforms armed with laser cannon and rotary staff-weapons. Not needing to do anything so crude as land the crew of the Redemption simply teleported their cargo of the things out of the hold one by one and deposited them on the Martian soil where they began scouting the area, sending back telemetry and looking to anything to shoot at.
Cameron Mitchell got on the tail of a wildly manoeuvring Type 2 and found that as promised the greatly upgraded F-302X Tranche 2 was finally a match for its opponent across the performance envelope. Firing his lasers over and over again he began to knock down its shield until eventually his cannon began to bite into metal. ‘One good hit and...’ he said just before one of his lasers holed the elerium reactor on the Spectre and it exploded into a cloud of debris in a blinding flash. ‘Hell yeah!’ he exclaimed, banking his Grim Reaper and looking for another alien to scythe from the skies.
Elerium torpedoes fired from silos on the surface began to launch, targeting Prometheus. Multi-kiloton nuclear explosions crashed against her already depleted shields in volleys, helping drain them even faster. Colonel Ronson gritted his teeth and was about to order the ship to pull out of range when the gigantic shape of the Ha’tak Admiral Kuznetsov flew past and placed itself between the BC-303 and the incoming missiles, Colonel Chekov taking some of the heat off Prometheus by soaking up the incoming fire with his own ship.
‘We need more support’ Colonel Caldwell realised. The enemy were putting up stuff resistance and the grinding battle was using up good men and machines. Ideally they had hoped not to have to call in the Avengers in an air-combat role, they lacked the manoeuvrability of the Reapers, but another dozen ships in the air right now could make all the difference. After quickly checking that Ronson and Chekov agreed with him he ordered a hyperwave transmission to be sent back to Earth requesting the assault transports to join the battle.
Waiting in Earth orbit the Avengers went into hyperspace above the blue skies and oceans of their homeworld only to emerge high above her blood-red neighbour. Major John Sheppard led the formation into a steep dive towards the surface and the ongoing battle, shields raised, elerium plasma beams ready and the troopers in the back praying that he wasn’t going to get them killed before they got a chance to get at the enemy on the ground.
Utilising engines of goa’uld design the Avenger didn’t burn precious elerium to move around but that meant it handled like a Tel’tak at best, not one of Loki’s saucers. Sheppard opted to simply make a high speed attack run and fire his weaponry at anything alien which happened to get in front of him as he swooped through the dog-fight at hypersonic speed. One unfortunate recipient of this treatment was a Type 3 strike fighter which had just made an attack run of its own against Enterprise and had come out of it with shields depleted by the ships laser cannon turrets. As the saucer shaped craft made a high-speed turn it found itself right in the path of Sheppard who fired his plasma beams from three kilometres out, spearing the Type 3 with far more energy than its shields could take and destroying it.
It was entirely hit or miss as the Avengers ploughed their way through the air-battle, but as they turned around for a second pass it was clear that their intervention was turning the tide. The remaining alien fighters now simply had too many opponents to shoot at, those which chose to try and engage the Avengers or capital ships finding that they would soon have an F-302 on their tail.
In a months time NASA was due to launch the first of its Mars Exploration Rovers towards the planet, the little six wheeled robot named Spirit would trundle over the surface of Mars for several years though both it and its twin Opportunity were not going to be sent anywhere near Cydonia mainly because it would be very hard to explain away all the track marks being left behind by the much larger X-COM Heavy Weapon Platforms which were now rumbling towards the enemy missile silos firing continually as they went. An Elerium Torpedo was struck by a bolt from a rotary-staff-weapon just as it launched and it exploded, part of the blast heading back down into the silo destroying it and making O’Neill who was watching from a distance wince. They were trying not to destroy too much of the base ideally and it seemed likely that they had just accidentally blown part of the underground complex all to hell with that one he thought.
The F-302X Grim Reapers supported by the three capital ships and the Avengers were clearly winning the fight, indeed it was the end-game, but the cost was proving high. Nearly half the Reapers had either been shot down to crash on the red soil of Mars or had simply exploded in mid air, the remains of pilot and aircraft falling like rain over the surface. Before the last few Type 2 and Type 3 alien fighters were overwhelmed Prometheus was already headed in to land, it had cargo to unload.
Normally Prometheus would have been carrying fighters but for this mission her flight bays were carrying other machines. As she set down “Mega MALP” Hovertanks flew out of the hangers and then lowered themselves gently towards the ground before heading towards their destination, hovering a metre off the surface, shields raised and weapons powered. They were going to have to blast a way in for the Infantry and with estimates of the enemy forces running possibly into the thousands this was not going to be easy.
The Avengers waited until the Hovertanks were close enough to provide fire-support for the Infantry they carried and then they came into land themselves, rear ramps lowering before they touched down.
Colonel Gomez Rodrigues knew he was widely considered the best soldier in X-COM, wearing his Powered Armour and carrying a P3A1 Heavy Plasma Rifle he also realised that he couldn’t possibly miss out on this opportunity of a lifetime and he switched his radio to transmit just before the Troopers began to pour out onto the ground. ‘Come on you apes’ he yelled out, ‘you wanna live forever?’ he exclaimed.
The next time he led his troopers into battle, that being against the goa’uld, they all had “Rodrigues’s Roughnecks” painted on their armour.
Cydonia Pyramids – Mars – May 2003
Decades ago Loki had ordered the construction by his creations of several three and four sided pyramids, some of which were now fully or partially obscured by the shifting Martian sands. Starting around the 1940’s his interest in Earth had expanded from merely genetic curiosity to a certain fascination with the rapid race of technological change taking place on the planet, and as the first high-powered radar signals reached to the heavens he first started sending reconnaissance craft to investigate more thoroughly.
The original “Foo Fighters” witnessed by many combat aviators during World War Two did belong to Loki, although they were far less advanced than the fighters X-COM had hung the old nickname on over half a century later. Loki’s Sectoid minions and his own genius had greatly improved his weapons technology and spaceship designs since then, indeed his rate of progress far exceeded that of his Asgard brethren over the same period, but to his increasing chagrin he had to admit that the Earth humans had themselves advanced much faster than he had. The mystifying speed at which the humans seemed to leap from coal fired steam engines to controlled nuclear fission had already perplexed Loki and then watching their breakneck progress over the last five years had left him almost dazed. A hundred of their years ago they didn’t even have powered flight and now they were building starships, even with the help they had received from other worlds, and the technology they had stolen, that was truly inexplicable. Unless that is the rumours that the Ancients had meddled with them a great deal culturally and genetically were true and one of Loki’s hobbies was trying to prove that for the sake of scientific curiosity.
Loki had learned a great deal about war from the humans, the personal weaponry and small-unit tactics of his Sectoid and Muton creations had improved by leaps and bounds as they faced the elite soldiers of Earth and with each year his forces became more formidable. His Asgard brethren had some talent at naval warfare, fighting the Replicators so long had helped ensure their fleet was well equipped, trained and battle-hardened, but they had long neglected fighter-craft and their lack of infantry skills and equipment had hurt them badly during boarding actions. Loki had sought to remedy that weakness and had evolved a more rounded military force which could fight enemies effectively in all arenas, or at least that’s what he had thought.
A copy of Loki’s consciousness downloaded into an Asgard computer buried deep underground commanded the Cydonia base, freeing up the rogue Asgard himself to be elsewhere. The copy had made plans to deal with an attack on the facility but had not put enough effort into defences against a ground assault believing an aerial or orbital bombardment to be far more likely and this had now placed it in a quandary. There were a large number of autonomous fighting machines rolling around above firing at the air-defence batteries and other surface targets and the computer lacked the ability to deal with them directly. It wanted them gone and therefore ordered its own equivalent machines to be bought on-line and head towards the surface to fight them off, meanwhile it began deploying its available troops to key points assuming the humans were going to try and invade the base.
The tracked Heavy Weapon’s Platforms used by X-COM looked much like small robot tanks, which is basically what they were. Armed with either a rotary-staff-weapon or a small laser cannon they were intended to provide direct fire-support to UFO Retrieval Squads and also to act as scouts for human soldiers, an HWP was expensive but it was far less of a valuable asset than an experienced Special Forces soldier. Their counterparts in Loki’s forces were the Cyberdisc Hovertanks and the large bipedal Sectopod robots which now started to emerge from doors which opened in the sides of the various pyramids. Mounting powerful elerium plasma weapons and with tougher armour than the human built HWP’s the Cyberdiscs and Sectopod units were soon starting to punish the invader and as their numbers grew and grew the HWP’s were rapidly being dispatched.
The Heavy Weapon’s Platforms were of course bait and the defenders had swallowed it. As the fight seemed to be going very much Loki’s way the much larger “MegaMalp” Hovertanks which Prometheus had landed arrived on the scene and proceeded to lay waste to the Cyberdiscs and Sectopods in short order. Usually deployed against either very large formations of Jaffa, or else Goa’uld fortifications, the new machines were far to large to be carried by an Avenger, they only just fitted through a stargate at its widest point, and hence they had not been encountered by Loki’s forces before. Shielded, and also heavily armoured underneath in any case, the new combat vehicles that entered the fray could easily one-shot any of Loki’s machines with their heavy laser cannon and they simply took out one after another with impunity as their shields absorbed any incoming plasma fire directed against them.
Another machine was watching the fight with interest, this one being much more intelligent than the others although some who had a casual acquaintance with him might possibly have doubted that. As the various fighting robots duelled the android known as Jack O’Neill, or sometimes irreverently RobO’Neill, found to his great amusement that with his personal cloaking device still engaged he could use his Heavy Plasma Rifle to snipe the Cyberdiscs with impunity. They exploded with just as much pyrotechnic ferocity as he remembered from his mission against Loki’s base in South America and it was a lot of fun taking the things out. As long as he moved after every couple of shots and avoided getting run over by all the hardware rolling and flying about, O’Neill could take out target after target and having plenty of ammunition and little else to do he indulged himself. ‘Your rampaging killbots are no match for our rampaging killbots’ he cackled to himself after a three-round burst from his rifle detonated the power-core of another cyberdisc. I should check with Carter that I don’t have a preset kill limit, he thought, diving out of the firing line of a Rotary-Staff HWP which was sending a storm of fire into a Sectopod, the repeated hits eventually blowing off one of its legs. The low gravity made the robots collapse to the ground less dynamic than it would have been on Earth but the thrashing of its remaining leg was far more energetic until more firing from the HWP put it out of its misery.
Following the destructive wake of their hovertanks X-COM Infantry in Powered Armour began bounding in, firing as they went. Weighing just over a third what they would have on Earth the bulky suits gained a considerable boost in mobility and long loping strides had quickly eaten up the ground between where the Avengers had dropped them off and the battle. Finishing off the last of the Sectopods and Cyberdiscs with a hail of plasma they quickly deployed to secure the area and the leading squads began moving towards where they knew there was a suitable access point to the labyrinthine complex below.
Armoured blast doors had sealed over the main entrance, this might have been a problem for a less well equipped military force but a naquada/potassium demolition charge soon blew them open again and after throwing in a varied assortment of stun, fragmentation, concussion and goa’uld shock-grenades to make sure the area behind was safe to enter the first X-COM soldiers made their way inside.
The eight Avengers assigned to the mission had dropped off just under a hundred and fifty soldiers between them but as the area around Cydonia became secure reinforcements began to arrive. The captured Goa’uld Al’kesh usually used to transport naquada ore from the asteroid mine in the Oort Cloud landed between two Pyramids and began dropping off additional troops via its rings, firstly another twenty-five troops in Powered Armour and then two dozen more support personnel in EVA suits.
Jonas Quinn was relieved to find out his EVA suit was much less of a pain in the ass to wear once he was away from the one-gee artificial gravity field that had been present whilst aboard the Al’kesh but he would have still been much happier to be wearing something that wasn’t so fragile. As he looked around he turned towards the “Face of Mars” and realised he was looking at an artefact that was likely millions of years old and sculpted by the Ancients, the famed gate-builders themselves. ‘Doctor Jackson would be jealous’ he decided as he was beckoned to follow a number of others heading towards another of the structures.
Powering down their personal cloaks SG-1A went to join the humans. Dressed much as they would be on any other mission they very much stood out for their lack of EVA suits or Powered Armour and the android O’Neill couldn’t help but make a comment via his internal radio that “Oxygen was for wimps” as he took off a boot and shook out some of the Martian dust which had gotten into it.
Commander Sharp had also arrived with the Al’kesh and after assigning the flesh and blood Andianov to make sure Jonas remained alive he then acknowledged the gears and wires version who had trotted over to meet him before making his way towards Colonel Rodrigues. Given his greater experience in fighting Loki’s troops over the past couple of years Colonel Rodrigues was now in tactical command of the mission and Sharp was relegated to being one of the reserves as they prepared to take the enemy base. Fighting Jaffa was not the same as fighting Muton’s and Sharp had freely admitted that despite his name he had lost his edge a little whilst at the SGC so he was more than willing to be the one taking instead of giving orders for a while.
When the news came that the gravity elevator down into the complex was in their hands X-COM sent in the few remaining HWP’s first as scouts and then began to follow them down into the unknown to take the fight to the enemy in his own lair. Resistance was expected to be heavy, the price to be paid high, but determination, self-sacrifice and righteousness of cause would win the day the troopers knew... and if those weren’t enough the lavish application of extreme firepower was always a sure-fire winner anyway.
Cydonia Base – Mars – May 2003
Goa’uld weaponry, or to be more specific zat’nik’tels and plenty of Shock Grenades, make reconnaissance by fire a workable doctrine even if you’re trying to avoid collateral damage. As the X-COM Troopers started to deploy into the base from the base of the gravity elevator shaft they made considerable use of the proven tactic of putting their P3-A1 Heavy Plasma Rifles around the corner of the next corridor they came to and blind-firing rapid zat discharges down it before ever thinking of taking a look themselves.
Colonel Rodrigues used a small mirror as a makeshift periscope to check the way ahead was clear before he led his team onwards. Passing a sectoid which had caught a hit from a zat and was now lying on the metal floor unconscious he paused to shoot it again to make sure it wasn’t ever going to get back up before proceeding.
The sounds of plasma fire echoed down the corridors from the south indicating another team had run into heavier resistance. It continued for a minute or so before a very large explosion rattled the complex indicating one side or the other had fired one of their guided micro-nukes, perhaps in an attempt to end the fire-fight, but the continued shooting that followed indicated it hadn’t achieved that objective at least.
Another sectoid, this one carrying a plasma pistol, stepped out into view perhaps twenty-five metres ahead and had just enough time to realise its mistake before Rodrigues blew a hole in it with his rifle, the bolt of green plasma creating a wound large enough to put your arm through. Another sectoid emerged firing a Heavy Plasma Rifle wildly in the direction of the Colonel but only managed to ruin a few sections of wall plating before its right leg was blown off by return fire and it hit the ground screaming.
Rodrigues shot the writhing clone with a zat discharge to shut it up and then left it to bleed out. ‘Looks like a major crossroads up ahead’ he told his troops, some of the corridors were much wider than others indicating they likely went somewhere important and had a lot of traffic. ‘I’ll take Alpha Squad forward, Richter you take Bravo Squad to the left, Gaston you go right with Echo’ he ordered. ‘These aren’t Jaffa Gaston, don’t play with them, or taunt them, just kill them’ he added to laughter.
Gaston grinned behind his armour, he was the youngest squad leader on the mission and had worried that he might have missed out because he had been on assignment to the SGC when it had been ordered but fortunately it was decided he hadn’t been there long enough to go rusty and his known high psionic resistance and plenty of proven ability in the field had earned him command of Echo squad. They had given him one of the most experienced NCO’s however to keep an eye on the young officer, Sergeant Nash was twelve years older than he was and had been fighting the bugs almost as long as Rodrigues himself being a “99” who had started out in X-COM before the days of personal armour or the earliest laser weapons, the era when losing three quarters of an assault team in combat was routine.
The Cydonia facility was vast with several levels. According to radio chatter other squads had already come across great cloning chambers where Loki created his armies and as Jake Gaston led his half dozen troopers forward another group reported finding what they described as a small underground jungle filled with alien plantlife and also it seemed a number of the hated Chryssalids who had killed two troopers before they could be bought down with zat fire and then put down for good with a few head-shots. After that rather than proceed onwards through the clearly dangerous area the Squad leader had thrown in incendiary grenades to flush out anything else hiding amongst the thicket. When four more Chryssalids had then emerged from the inferno in close proximity to each other they were summarily gunned down with obvious glee judging by the tones heard on the radio.
Gaston felt something alien skitter across his mind. ‘Psionics’ he growled. ‘Powerful too, we’ve got an Ethereal around’ he told his squad as the alien telepath tried to get into his mind and then failing began probing the rest of Echo squad.
‘Go fuck yourself’ Sergeant Nash thought with determination as the Ethereal connected with him. One of the criteria for getting on the roster for this operation was proven resistance to this kind of meddling and Nash had faced psionic attacks from Ethereals and the smarter types of Sectoids numerous times. ‘Party tricks aren’t going to work, this is a real fight you skinny bastard’ he continued, keeping mental focus to keep the thing out.
Nava Eitam squeezed her eyes shut and prepared for her turn. Her psionic strength was just at the limit of disqualifying her from this mission and it was only really the fact she was one of the best at using a goa’uld handheld healing devices that got her into the Cydonia operation. Even after the injection of some naquada and goa’uld genetic markers into your system so it worked at all only a small number of people seemed to have the ability to use the devices with any skill and even then it took extreme focus months of continual daily practice to become proficient as Nava had done. ‘Someone had better be ready to zat me’ she told the rest of Echo as the Ethereal began probing her mind.
The nearby Ethereal found the human female a little too strong to take control of her mind but it required far less effort to panic one of the creatures it knew sending waves of psionically induced fear in her direction. Far more intelligent than most Sectoids, let alone the hulking Muton footsoldiers, the Ethereal was physically weak but mentally it was extremely strong with greater psionic ability than any human from Earth. It tore into the females pitiful mental defences and began to rend terror into her psyche. It was unfortunate however that it’s telepathic efforts had attracted the attention of a human that was not Earth-born and just as the female was about to crack the Ethereal itself was struck by the feeling of impending doom.
Jonas Quinn had dealt with Ethereals before, the most senior of their officers had almost as much psionic strength and skill as he did, but almost just wasn’t good enough as he tore through the aliens mental barriers and reached inside the things mind. Loki had begun his second campaign of abductions against Langara because he had learned of the little quirk in divergent evolution that made the humans of that world a little smarter and a fair deal psionically stronger than human norm but he hadn’t used his research to make a better Ethereal, concentrating instead on starting a whole new creation that was taking a while to perfect.
Nava didn’t know why the attack against her suddenly stopped but was grateful it did and suppressing a shudder, and trying to ignore the icy feeling still running down her spine, she told the rest of the squad to stop pointing their guns at her. ‘You only wish it was one of you probing me with something that wasn’t your mind’ she told them as Echo Squad started moving again.
The computer copy of Loki’s consciousness had inherited one overriding trait from its progenitor this being a desire for self-preservation and it was for this reason that it had mustered almost all of its best available forces to guard itself. The bulk of the defenders had moved to protect the computer core rather than the other parts of the base such as the factories, assembly lines and in particular the hangers where only a few stragglers tried to hold back a large proportion of the X-COM forces who were tasked with capturing as many craft as possible, and it was the drive towards the computer that was costing the human soldiers the most in lost blood and equipment.
Broken suits of Powered Armour leaking blood and hydraulic fluid littered a path through the base. Some of the dead troopers might still be intact enough to be saved, or rather bought back, by a sarcophagus but enough had already either been blown apart completely, or taken direct hits to the head, to make the butcher’s bill for the day would be high.
The deeper into the complex they went, approaching their final objective the harder the fighting became. Bolts of bright green plasma hurtled along corridors destroying metal or flesh, zat’nik’tel fire and grenades adding to the mayhem.
As the lead units were worn down by the relentless battle the reserves began to move up to take their place. Even though they were managing to kill or incapacitate large numbers of Loki’s soldiers for every X-COM trooper the sheer grind of the battle was starting to tell and when Colonel Rodrigues realised that if this lasted much longer he was going to have to start throwing the men and women wearing nothing but EVA suits into the fray he made the call to start using naquada/potassium demolition charges to start opening up new ways through the complex, hoping that the roof was going to stay up and that the collateral damage wouldn’t be too severe.
Although small by the standards of nuclear devices the naquada/potassium charges still had yields measured in the equivalent of hundreds of tons of TNT and the first certainly made the base shake underfoot as it blasted away a section of wall and the rock behind it. The detonation of a second device opened up a breach right into the heart of the enemy position and Rodrigues led a mishmash of survivors from several squads through the billowing clouds of smoke and dust using the Infra Red sensors in their helmets to see.
A mix of Ethereals and Sectoids clearing suffering from the concussive effects of the explosion were the first opposition that the Colonel ran into and then immediately ran over, some of them simply being smashed aside by X-COM Troopers who Rodrigues led in an attack on the rear of the main body of the defenders who were holding the main corridor and a few cross-passages that secured the way towards the computer core.
Commander Russell Sharp had eventually found himself on the front line and was just starting to wish he was only fighting Jaffa not these tough bastards when the enemy in front of him seemed to crumble. ‘Gomez just hit them in the ass’ he realised triumphantly. ‘Don’t give them time to get their shit back together and form a new line’ he shouted. ‘Hit them hard now and don’t stop moving’ he declared, starting to advance at the run firing repeatedly from the shoulder with both zat and plasma fire.
Figures came sprinting through the billowing dust. ‘Chryssalids!’ someone cried out. ‘Kill those fuckers’ he added as a storm of fire cut down the aliens as they sprinted towards the human soldiers intent on slashing them open and implanting one of their young.
Echo Squad had been securing a hanger and had managed to avoid too much hard fighting until now but as Gaston led them on a long winding run through the complex towards the main scene of the action he ran right into the path of a number of Mutons who seemed to be heading the same way from another part of the Cydonia base. Finding themselves almost tangled together Gaston was extremely grateful that he was wearing his Powered Armour when one of the genetically engineered aliens knocked his rifle aside and tried to tear him apart with its bare hands.
Gaston grappled with the thing for a few moments then found himself in the right position to deliver a head-butt, bringing his armoured helmet forward as hard as he could into the things face smashing it and covering his visor in blood.
The young officer was about to start punching the thing when a bolt of plasma blew half its head off, adding its brains to the mess already over him. ‘Stop fucking about Sir’ Nash told him, lowering his rifle. ‘We don’t have time for the Marquis of Queensbury rules’ he told him wryly.
‘If they had anything down there I’d have hit him below the belt’ Gaston responded, trying to wipe his visor clean, the other Mutons had already been quickly dispatched.
‘I thought when you yanks fought dirty it was ear biting but I guess the helmet stopped you doing that’ Nash replied.
‘Have you ever tasted Muton blood Sergeant?’ Gaston asked rhetorically, ‘I’d sooner stick a piece of Chryssalid on a grill and eat that’ he said seriously. ‘Come on Echo Squad’ he yelled, ‘Up and at ‘em X-COM!’ he exclaimed, starting to run towards the fighting once again.
Nash sighed and followed with the rest of the squad, the enthusiasm was all well and good, he thought, but maybe it would be for the best if Gaston was killed in action a couple of times to cut down the lapses into full-blown peppiness.
One of the drawbacks to making his creations smart enough to operate with some degree of autonomy, and a certain degree of personal initiative on the battlefield, was that they were also intelligent enough and sufficiently self-aware to suffer from morale problems when things were going badly for them. As such when the defenders started to fall apart in terms of order and organisation they also started to flag in terms of bravery and with the assistance of a few mental suggestions from Jonas a few cases of panic and distress began to deteriorate into a complete rout.
The last few instances of determined defence were encountered in the last few hundred metres of passageway leading to the computer core. Fortunately for Colonel Gomez Rodrigues the smooth metal floor plating was ideal for rolling Goa’uld Shock Grenades and the attackers simply kept bowling them down the corridors, sometimes ricocheting off walls to go around corners, until the last of the return fire ended and they could finish the job.
A sealed door barred the way but was soon blasted open with C4 and after pitching in another Shock Grenade Colonel Rodrigues, always one to lead from the front, stepped through into the chamber where the computer core was situated.
Using external speakers the copy of Loki’s consciousness soon began appealing to not be destroyed, assuming that the human was going to open fire but instead Rodrigues listened for a while before starting to laugh, they weren't going to destroy the damn thing, it was valuable technology with valuable information residing within it, they were going to mind-rape the computer version of Loki and then maybe introduce a nasty little computer virus which would hopefully take a long time to kill it so it got to suffer.
The fighting tailed off and eventually ceased as the last of the aliens was dealt with. Upon receiving the all-clear the Ha’tak Enterprise prepared to land on one of the pyramids in order to deploy additional troops, technicians and engineers to secure the facility.
A hyperwave transmission was sent back to Earth, text only as an Avenger carrying a pair of X-COM Troopers in EVA suits landed on the highest point of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the Solar System. “Be pleased to inform the Secretary-General on behalf of X-COM that the flag of the United Nations flies uncontested over Mars” it said simply as the flag was raised.
A few days later a metal plaque was placed on the base of the pyramid where Enterprise had landed.
HERE MEN AND WOMEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON MARS
MAY 2003
WE CAME IN WAR FOR ALL MANKIND