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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5194277" data-attributes="member: 143">Session 22 (September 22, 2008)Chapter 88The Miami mission had started the same way that Mary’s arrival at X-COM had: with chaos. Jane found her as the alarm had blared from the speakers in the walls.  People were running around, some of them only half-dressed, tugging on clothes as they ran.  Jane was clad in a bulky suit of armor that emitted a low hum as she moved.  She barely had time to grab her own gear before Jane was pulling her along.  Others moved out of the way for them, she noticed.  Mary had been out of breath by the time that they got to the hangar, and saw the ship.  It looked like a giant bug, and she didn’t notice the open hatch in the back until Jane half led, half dragged her over to it.  She didn’t learn the name of the ship—Lightning—until later, or that this was the craft’s first operational mission.  In this case, ignorance was probably for the best. For all the speed with which she’d been hustled here, she and Jane were the last to arrive.  The others were fully armored and strapped in.  The hatch was closing behind them even as she stood there, and one of the men, the other doctor, got up and helped her get into the bulky harness.  Jane helped her get her gear stashed away, into the racks built into, under, and above the padded jump seats.  And then they were blasting off—quite literally, with the force of the aircraft’s acceleration driving her back into her seat with enough pressure to make it difficult to draw breath.  “Wow, this is cool,” Jane said.  Mary thought the experience anything but “cool.”  She dropped her helmet, and nearly lost it, jabbing her foot into it so it didn’t fly about the cabin.  “Is… different, I give it that,” Vasily said.  Mary could barely hear them over the noise of the ship’s engines.  Vasily pointed to the earpiece he wore, and Jane helped her get her own communicator fitted.  “You going to have to learn on the job,” the Russian said.  “Keep head down, stick to corners, is all classic army stuff.  But expect unexpected and if we say do something, is not just suggestion.”Catalina was fiddling with a small handheld device that looked sort of like a portable vacuum cleaner with a display attached to it.  Her expression as she looked at Mary was anything but encouraging.  “Should almost double the range with this,” she said to the others.  “And it will be more accurate on IDing targets.”“Terror strike, been long time since this happen,” Vasily said.  “Street fighting.  Civilians.  Will be messy.”“Kill anything that moves, except, ah, us,” James said. “What?” Vasily interjected.  “No.  Not kill anything moves.  Is Miami.  I gather is pretty crowded city?”“Not by now, I bet,” Catalina said. “Bunch of Cubans and drug dealers,” James said.  The voice of the pilot came over the intercom.  “Okay team, we’re flying at top speed, 2600 miles per hour.  We’re going to be there before you know it.  Patching through coms to HQX…”The voice that followed a moment later was a woman’s.  “Wagner here,” she said.  “Hyperwave decoder reads snakemen, and something else.”“Snakemen?” Mary asked. “Not getting a clear differentiation on the signal,” the woman on the speaker said.  “The aliens may be blocking.”“Did you get a chance to read the files you were sent on your xPhone, Doctor?” Catalina asked. “Well… I skimmed, sort of.”“They kind of big snake men,” Vasily said, with a shrug. “They’re hard to kill,” James added.  “Make sure your plasma weapons are ready to go, Mary.”Mary looked down at the plasma gun hanging in a harness from the rack next to her seat.  She still hadn’t had a chance to fire the weapon, even in practice, although the engineering staff had explained how it worked.  She closed her eyes and let out a tinny moan, but the woman on the intercom kept speaking, adding nothing but bad news. “The aliens have set down six terror pods,” she said.  “Centered on the area around Broad Street and 12th downtown.”“Six pods!” James exclaimed.  “Yikes.  How many aliens is that?  Six times six?”“I’m betting that it’s like previous invaded cities,” Jane said.  “All-Mart comes to mind… civilians huddled in buildings trying to avoid being killed.”“We’re not getting a lot of useful data from the city,” Wagner added.  “Looks like a mess from top to bottom.  We need this, Alpha.  Garret didn’t want to say anything in front of Drake, but you should know.  There are elements in the American government that have been questioning the decision to continue the fight against the aliens.  They see X-COM’s presence here as the reason that New York was vaporized.”“Going to do the same as the French, roll over and offer the belly up?” Catalina said, her voice harsh. Wagner’s voice was broken up by hisses of static.  “We’re… You’re entering an electric… Losing our comm… We’ll pick you up when you…”“Damn it, the relays are bugged again,” Ken broke in.  “Wish they hadn’t killed all our comm satellites.”They continued on in silence after that.  Jane helped Mary check her armor, making sure that everything was securely fashioned.  She gave her some pointers on her weapon, but all Mary kept hearing was “aliens,” over and over again.  “Save the humans, kill the aliens, typical priority list,” Jane told her, in a voice that was perhaps meant to be reassuring.  “We stun any new aliens for study, so listen to Vasily’s orders on what to shoot and what not to shoot.”Mary gulped.  She reached down and picked up her helmet.  “Are we going to see aliens, then?”“Yes,” Vasily said.  “Yes, we are.”The ship lurched, and Mary almost dropped her helmet again.  “We’re approaching Miami,” Ken said over the intercom.  “Firestorm-1 has set up cover over the city, but it looks like the alien ship bugged out after dropping the pods.  I’m reading alien contacts in several places; U.S. Army and National Guard units are deploying.  I’ve got a parking lot nearby one contact site where we can set down.  Get ready for touchdown in 90 seconds.”The Alphas began quick and efficient preparations.  Mary wasn’t sure how they kept their footing with the ship lurching and shifting under them, the quick descent causing her stomach to feel like it was trying to rise up into her chest.  She swallowed and kept in her seat.  The Russian loomed over her, strapping on a ferocious looking assembly that included a three-barreled cannon as big as her leg, linked by a flexible belt to a backpack that presumably held a lot of bullets.  He was dressed in armor like Jane’s, that made her own bulky suit seem practically svelte by comparison.  He looked down at her.  “Do not worry.  Stick with us.”“Close up and personal,” Catalina said.  She seemed particularly grim as she checked her own weapons, like some black-clad goddess of death.  The ship jolted once roughly and then settled.  “We’re down!” Ken announced, as the hatch in the rear of the craft split and swung open.  Mary could smell smoke, and heard a chaotic welter of sounds from the city outside.  Someone screamed, a woman by the sound of it. “Go, go, go!” Vasily urged, leading the way, turning to one side as he exited, Catalina fast on his heels.  Jane and Hadrian turned the other way, quickly fanning out with their weapons scanning the area for threats.  The two groups moved around the edges of the Lightning and quickly disappeared from view. Mary was just getting out of her seat when she heard gunfire from outside, and the yells of her teammates. “Snakes!” “Got one!  Two!”James had lingered for a moment with her, but as soon as the first shots had cracked out—the sizzling cough of the plasma guns different than the sharp barks of normal firearms—he darted out through the hatch, hitting the ground running and quickly disappearing around the sides of the craft.  “I need to dust off here, Doctor Ranma,” Ken’s voice came over the intercom.  Her heart pounding, Mary followed after the others.  Dust and smoke swirled in the air, and she could smell the acrid tang of burning flesh even through the air filters on her helmet.  They were in a nearly deserted parking lot, with several two-story apartment buildings rising up around them.  As she came around the front of the aircraft she saw the others, in cover in the lee of the nearest building.  There was a body lying in the street, so obviously alien that she stared at it, mesmerized.  She was buffeted from behind as the Lightning lifted off into the air, clouds of dust and bits of debris enveloping her and briefly obscuring her vision.  She could still see the other members of Alpha, each of them outlined by a thin green glow by the Visual Display Unit in her helmet.  She resolved to stay close to Vasily, and hurried after him. As they approached another intersection, they saw people running ahead, fleeing in panic.  The Alphas moved quickly in that direction.  There was a massive thump that his Mary like a punch in the chest, and she blinked, staring at a crater in the middle of the intersection that had not been there a moment before.  A car that had been left abandoned on the intersection had been flung onto its side, smoke rising from its undercarriage.“Incoming!”  Vasily warned.  “On the left!”  He stepped around the front of a small market that sat on the corner of the intersection, all of its windows blown out.  Ducking into the cover of the front doorway, his autocannon spit rounds down the street.  Catalina and Hadrian quickly darted out into the street, ducking low behind the cover of the overturned car.  A bolt of plasma shot out at them, hitting the front of the car and exploding in a bright halo of light and fire. Mary felt paralyzed.  She didn’t want to see what was coming up the street.  She moved closer to Vasily, but remained in the lee of the market building.  There was an explosion not to far away, and she flinched.  A helicopter streaked overhead, trailing fire.  And then she looked up, across the street, just in time to see another alien emerge from the mouth of an alley almost directly in front of her.  The thing was a creature of nightmare, with the head and long body of a snake, only a snake that sprouted arms that clutched a deadly-looking rifle in its hands. “An alien!  Right over there!” she yelled, as the thing lifted its weapon, and pointed it right at her.</blockquote>

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