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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5028723" data-attributes="member: 143">Time for little Monday plot-thickening...* * * * * Session 11 (June 23, 2008)Chapter 36The noise and chaos in the street around Riverside Elementary School contrasted with the eerie silence that had reigned before, when X-COM had first arrived on the scene.  Over two dozen fire, police, and recovery vehicles were crowded into the area directly in front of the school, and men in khaki with M-16s were helping the police keep back the hundreds of people who were gathering around the edges.  The Skyranger sat slightly off to one side, protected by its own cordon of guards, but even with the alien ship sitting there in plain view, it still drew more than a few stares of its own.  Vasily sat on the running board of a fire engine, grimacing as a paramedic worked on a deep gash that ran across his skull.  His face was darkened with black char, and his expression remained a thundercloud.  A few feet away, Buzz sat alone, rubbing his fingers through his hair, muttering something under his breath.  James came over from one of the ambulances.  “The children are stable, but we still don’t know what the aliens did to them,” he reported.  “They’re being taken to a secure medical facility for treatment.”Vasily nodded.  “We done here,” he said.  “Recovery team have to work with Americans on what to do with that,” he said, indicating the alien ship.  He shrugged off the paramedic and stood, touching his communicator.  He shook his head.  “Broken.  Tell Ken we ready to leave,” he said to James. As James passed on the message, Vasily walked over to where Catalina and Jane were engaged in conversation with two men, one wearing the khakis of an army officer, the other dressed in the familiar black suit that indicated a member of one of the various American security agencies.  The two women also looked somewhat the worse for wear, although the engine housing had protected them from the worst of the explosion that had torn through the alien ship.  “We leaving,” he said.  “Wait a minute, we need to—” the man in the suit began.  “We leaving,” Vasily repeated, moving through the man, who had to step aside to avoid being trampled.  Catalina offered a few more diplomatic reassurances, but she wasn’t far behind the others as they boarded the Skyranger.  The military personnel pushed people back as its engines fired, but the aircraft’s engines didn’t provide much backblast, the highly focused jets pushing the ship into the sky like a rocket.  There wasn’t much conversation as the aircraft returned to X-COM HQ.  All of them were exhausted, battered, and drained by what they had seen.  “I feel sick,” Catalina said, and the words summed up the spirit of the team as the Skyranger arced over the desolate landscape below.  * * * * “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Stan White said.  “Physically, he’s fine.”“He doesn’t look fine,” James observed. X-COM’s medical bay was an extension to one of its research labs, the beds just a few steps from the workstations where the base’s biological sciences team conducted their work.  It was even more crowded with the members of Alpha Team crowded into Stan’s workspace.  At the moment, only one of the beds was occupied, with the pale, comatose form of Doctor Fadil Sandesh. “I’m telling you,” Stan went on, “I’ve checked every organ and system in his body.  There’s no tissue trauma, no chemicals, no damage at all that showed up on any of our scans.  It’s almost like his brain just decided to… shut down.”“Could he be telepathically shut down by the aliens?” Jane asked.Stan looked up, his face showing surprise.  “What do you mean?”“These aliens, could they be suppressing Doctor Sandesh to keep him under with some sort of telepathic ability?”Stan looked thoughtful.  He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, a voice from out in the lab interrupted him. “Doctor White!” They turned to one of the scientists—a middle-aged woman with her hair tightly bound up—working at one of the big diagnostic computers in the lab.  “What is it?” Stan asked, heading over to her. “Sir… the scans on these new aliens.. they’re… they’re human!”“What?”“The floaters… their physiology has been radically altered, but the DNA, it’s fundamentally human!”The surgical nurse standing behind Doctor Sandesh’s bed looked a bit green.  “You mean they… they made humans into those… things?”“Christ, who have we been shooting?” Catalina asked. Buzz frowned.  “Well, they were shooting at us… still ain’t right,” he said. I don’t think there’s much left of them that we could call human,” the scientist said.  “They didn’t have legs,” Catalina pointed out.Stan stared at the researcher’s screen for a long minute.  Then, abruptly, he turned and walked quickly back to the comatose Egyptian’s bed.  “Hook up that new monitor, Garvis,” he said to the surgical nurse. “The hyperwave?”“Yes.”  The pair worked together to shift a bulky device—it resembled a merging between a desktop computer and a microwave oven—on the shelf behind Doctor Sandesh’s head.  After double-checking to verify that the shelf would hold the weight, Stan played out a lead and hooked the new machine into his diagnostic computer.  The members of Alpha, unsure what was going on, watched him as he adjusted the settings both on the machine and his computer terminal; several of the researchers, likewise curious, had wandered over to observe.“There’s some odd readings here,” Stan finally reported.  He looked up at one of the researchers.  “Try putting up a screen of low-intensity alpha waves from the portable generator, Doctor Harrison,” he said.  The researcher hurried off and returned in a few seconds with a small machine that looked like a diving mask that had swallowed a softball.  He flicked a switch on top of it, and a low hum filled the room. Doctor Sandesh groaned, and blinked.  “What… what… where am I?” he managed to say. Stan leaned over him, checking his pupils with his penlight.  “Doctor Sandesh, can you hear me?”“Not… so… loud,” the research managed.  “Voices gone… whispering.”“All this time, we looking for someone try to kill Doctor Sandesh,” Vasily said.  “It possible Sandesh was saboteur, but he not know?”Stan looked up at him, but again, before he could respond, he was interrupted again, this time from a scientist that ran into the room.  “Doctor!” he yelled.  “One of the sectoids… containment unit 2a!  It’s crashing!” Stan cursed, pausing only to grab his bag before running after the man.  A few of the Alphas started after him, but he yelled back, “Stay here!  The lab is secure level 4!”</blockquote>

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