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trbl-will-find-me · 7 years

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Every Exit, An Entrance (15/?)

There are two (and only two) possibilities: either she led XCOM to victory and they are now engaged in a clean up operation of alien forces, or XCOM was overrun, clearing the way for an alien-controlled puppet government to seize control of the planet.

She’d really like to figure out which it is, but asking hardly seems the prudent option.

Read the rest here

Shout out to @inbatcountry17 for letting me borrow @commanderweir for a cameo.

They manage to make contact with the local cell a few days later, buying their trust with food and medical supplies. In return, their scouts lead Moon and Kelly right to the perimeter of the complex.

“Don’t get close, but see what you can gather,” she instructs over the comms. “I don’t want to go in totally blind.”

“Looks like an outbuilding and some sort of tracks on the approach,” Moon says. “Hard to see the facility from here.”

“Any sense of what kind of cover we can make use of?”

“Not much,” says Kelly. “A lot of low, barrier-type fences. Could maybe scale that outbuilding, but that’s more perch than protection.”

“What are you seeing in terms of a defensive complement?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Confirmed visual on an officer, some grunts, and a Sectoid, but other than that, it looks pretty light.”

“They weren’t counting on anyone finding this place,” Central says, crossing his arms. He stands across the Hologlobe from her, eyes fixed on scan data of the AO. “Still, I’m betting they’ve got some kind of back up.”

“Well, let’s not meet them just yet. Kelly, Moon: head back to the ship. We’ll debrief here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Wilco.”

“Thoughts?” She asks, turning her attention to Bradford.

“Whatever’s in there, I doubt we’re gonna like it.”

“Agreed, but who do we send in? Zaytsev’s down. Krieger’s in no position to be back on the duty roster. Thomas, Kelly, and Wallace are the obvious answers, but I hesitate to field them again without having a better sense of what they’re up against.”

“It’s a luxury we don’t have.”

She sighs. “I don’t disagree, but everyone has a breaking point. We can’t afford to have any of them finds theirs. Especially not on this op.”

“They’ve had time to process.”

“Digging graves isn’t exactly R&R.”

He rubs at his neck. “Unless you’re hiding seasoned recruits somewhere, Commander, I don’t see many other options.”

She runs her fingers through her hair, jostling strands loose from her braid. “We need more people.”

“I’m working on it. But for now ---“

“We’ll have to make do.”

He nods.

She knows the rules of war. If you want people to fight, you have to give them a cause to believe in. It can’t be any cause, though, and it can’t just be a good one. People don’t fight futile wars; they fight wars they believe they can win. Half the job of a propaganda campaign is convincing the masses they aren’t stepping into a slaughterhouse when they commit to the fight.

The other half, of course, is reassuring them that the cause is worth the lives of their brothers and sisters, the blood of their children, the conspicuous emptiness where friends once stood.

They’ll need concrete results if expect to make any inroads.

She leans on the rail surrounding the Hologlobe, eyes fixed on stills from the video feeds. “God, please let this go better.

Bradford shoots her a look. “Not like you to tempt fate.”

“I’d throw salt, but I don’t think we have any to spare.”

“They’ll make it in, Commander.”

“Yeah, but at what cost?”

A key part of successful subterfuge is plausible deniability, minimizing the risk that they’ll both be caught if the Council catches wind. A key part of plausible deniability is minimizing interactions inside and out of the public sphere.

It leaves her with entirely too much time on her hands.

She is sprawled on the couch of the Common Room, scrolling through the news on her tablet, when she clicks onto some story about the resurgence of the Asbury Park boardwalk.

She’d been to Asbury once, years ago. She’d gone with friends to see the sights, walk in the footsteps of Springsteen and his E Street Band. The Casino was an empty shell, a gorgeous, rotting ghost at risk of being reclaimed by the ocean. From the empty winter beach, she could see trees spouting from the ruined interior. They had bundled their way down to the Wonderbar, shrugging off coats and gloves and scarves to wrap themselves in the mystique of the shoreside town.

They’d made sure to leave before dark.

Apparently, some things do change.

The pictures of the boardwalk shine with color and life. People crowd into bars and restaurants, stroll down the street with armfuls of beautiful packages. Her gut twists at the sight of the Casino, badly damaged by storms and the forward march of time. Tilly is still there, smiling down, but the place is otherwise unrecognizable.

There’s a link at the bottom to the local paper, the Asbury Park Press, with an article from some years ago. Her gaze flicks up to the clock on the wall; she has plenty of time before her shift begins. She clicks, and finds her way to the most recent headlines.

There’s nothing particularly interesting at first. News of local school sports teams, of recent real estate developments, an editorial about the governor pass unremarked before her.

And then she stops dead.

Four missing in Pine Barrens, reads the headline. Fifth confirmed to be mauling victim discovered last month.

She opens her email and briefly scrolls through. She doesn’t see his address among her recent mail, but that’s hardly surprising.

She copies and pastes the link to the article into the body of an email and addresses it, trying not to smile as she does: [email protected]

Only Weir, she thinks.

She tabs up to the subject line. Pertinent to your interests … assuming you’re not on scene already, she types.

She keys in a cursory search, turning up a string of recent disappearances, and adds those links in. She suspects he’s already well aware, but she’s in want of anything better to do.

Besides, she thinks. Maybe, one day, he’ll actually catch the bugger.

She tries to picture Weir’s face, almost always serious, with the grin of a proud fisherman, catch hung from a rack beside him, its blood pooling below, splashed across the front page of a newspaper. It’s a ridiculous image, the mere concept of it an exercise in absurdity.

Still, it makes her laugh.

As if Weir would ever allow that kind of publicity.

She hits send and checks the time yet again. The whole endeavor has only taken up a paltry fifteen minutes.

She sighs. There is a reason she did not go into intelligence work.

“Hit the deck!” She shouts, as the MEC launches a grenade volley.

It had been going well. It had been going so well. They had made short work of the troopers and the captain, and had dispatched the Sectoid without incident. Kelly had caught the Lancer as it rounded the corner, greeting it with a shotgun blast to the face.

They had moved through the trainloads of bodies, taking cover behind the glowing green sarcophagi, and picking off would-be assailants. She knows that the sight of her men, living and breathing amidst a sea of the dead and good-as-dead will be an image she carries with her for the rest of her life, the memory of Central’s horrified whisper in her ear.

The turret had given them all a scare, but even then, they’d managed to breach the facility with only the most minor of injuries.

But, they had all missed the opening volley, and things had gone downhill rapidly from there.

“Fuck,” she hears Wallace mutter. “That’s a lot of blood.”

“Medkit it and get ready to fire,” she says. “Moon, what’re your sightlines like to the target?”

“They’re good, ma’am.” “Take the shot.”

The spray of bullets connects squarely with the MEC’s chest armor, sending it clattering to the ground and exposing the understructure. “Nice shot! Kelly, see what you can do to weaken it, but stay back.”

The ranger takes aim and fires, grazing the device. “Damnit,” she mutters. ”I’ll get it next time!” “Thomas, your move.”

She watches in vague horror as he removes the pin from his grenade and hurls it towards the MEC.

“Down!”

The feed from all four cameras distorts, the shock and debris from the explosion occluding her view.

“Menace? Menace!”

“Everyone’s here, ma’am,” Kelly groans.

“What the hell were you thinking, Thomas?”

“It solved the problem, no?”

“It’s not a solution with the risk of collateral this high!”

“It is down, and that is what matters.”

“Come on, cowboy,” she hears Kelly say, and watches the feed as she hauls Wallace to his feet. “Break time’s over.”

“Ugh,” Wallace groans. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Just a little longer,” Kelly says, voice softer. “We’re almost there.”

“Prepare to breach the facility, but don’t take any risks you don’t have to,” the Commander says. “Thomas, keep it in your pants and let Moon and Wallace handle the demolition duties. That’s an order.”

“Putain de merde,” Thomas mutters.

“Je vous comprends,” she retorts. In the background, Sally chuckles to Central’s obvious displeasure. The ranger’s cheeks flush red and she grins, satisfied.

She takes a moment to watch them, caught in one another’s video feeds: Thomas’s disdain, Moon’s vigilance, Kelly’s gentle concern, and Wallace’s growing fear. She forces herself to swallow the growing lump in her throat. Not the time, she thinks. You’ve got a job to do and people counting on you to do it. “Come on, people, let’s go find out what ADVENT has in store for us.”

He is waiting for her at her office door when she clocks off shift that night.

“Commander.”

“Central.”

“Do you have a minute?”

She nods. “Come in.”

The whole interaction feels like a kind of elaborate kabuki, some grotesque approximation of their relationship. Even so, it’s a comfort to have him close.

He leans back against her office door, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I have good news, and I have bad news.”

She sinks into her desk chair, trying to get a read on the situation. There is still color in his face, which bodes well, and he does not have the hunched look of a man on the lam. He catches on quickly. “It’s not that bad,” he adds.

“Alright, shoot.”

“We can fake an intrusion, but we’ll need help.”

“You have someone on the outside?”

He shakes his head. “We risk too much if we go out of house.”

“So, we’re cooked.”

He shakes his head. “Not exactly, but this op got a lot more risky.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Engineering a hack is way outside my scope of practice.”

“But not Dr. Shen’s.”

She leans back in her chair. “We can’t. He’s got a kid. I can’t ask him to do that.”

“We give him a device entirely isolated from our network. We destroy the hard drive after he’s done.”

“Where do we launch it from?”

��We can proxy it off, make it look like it’s coming from somewhere else.”

She nods. “How do we keep Vahlen off the scent?”

He sighs. “That’s the risk.”

“I don’t think she’d turn us in, but ---“ “But, if anyone would use that information for leverage, it’d be her.”

She nods. “Exactly.”

“For the moment, I think you’ve appeased her. She’s got plenty of work on her hands and once she’s involved there. Well. She’s a dedicated professional.”

“Fanatical.”

“I was trying to be polite.”

She shrugs. “I’m just glad there’s enough of an institutional safety net to keep her in check.”

“Harm reduction’s never a bad operating procedure.”

“My policy of choice.” She pulls the elastic from her hair, shaking it loose from its bun. “So, this is your area of expertise. How do we bring Shen in?”

He cocks his head. “Sooner, rather than later. Odd hours. Entirely word of mouth.”

She nods. “Who’s making the ask?” “Probably easier if it comes from you.”

Again, she nods. “Sometime tomorrow?”

“I’ll be here when you need me.”

She chews on her lip. “I can’t believe this is what it’s coming to.”

“We made the right call, Lizzie,” he says, with far more certainty than she’s expecting.

Her gaze shoots up. “You’re seem awfully confident in that.”

“Comes with having friends in shady places.”

“So, they’re moving on something.”

He nods. “No one’s sure on what, though.”

“Damnit,” she mutters. “How are they always one step ahead of us?”

“Power, money, sleep. Take your pick.” His face softens. ”If it’s any help, general consensus is they have no idea what’s going on from our end.”

She nods. “Small mercies. Still, I don’t have a good feeling about that call.”

“They’re absolutely looking to weaponize the modified SHIV, but that’s not a surprise.”

She shrugs. “There’s only so much it can do with conventional weaponry. Still, I’ll take that over the alternative.”

“You and me both, Commander.”

She buries her face in her hands for a moment, wishing for a little peace and quiet, a few weeks without an emergency. Somehow, she doubts even that would soothe her nerves. “So, tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

#fic #xcom #every exit an entrance #commander/central #that is weir's canon email address friends

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