Chapter 4: Cut the Head Off the Snake

She was gone when I awoke, cold in the absence of her coiled body that was usually wrapped around me like a heavy blanket. They had probably set out already, I had no duties while I was on sick leave, there was no reason for me to get up. I rolled over on the mattress and tried for a while to go back to sleep, but the knot in my stomach would not allow it. I decided to get up and make my way to the situation room, maybe I could watch the progress of the mission. I swung my legs out of bed and pulled on my clothes, careful to avoid hurting my side, then left the room and made my way sluggishly towards the front of the ship.

When I arrived at the situation room it was packed with people crowding around the many displays and monitors that lined the walls, showing all manner of information on mission status and progress. I found Garcia in the throng of people, and we chatted for a while as we sat on one side of the large room and tried to see the screens over the heads of the anxious and excited personnel. Apparently almost fifty people had volunteered, Garcia included, but in the end the Commander had only picked ten of them. Vi had gone, along with most of the higher ranked operatives, all kitted out with the most advanced equipment our engineers could produce. He told me that the science staff had unlocked some kind of Elder secret weapon, and the Commander himself was using it against them, some kind of remote control proxy. I didn’t really understand, but the concept was interesting.

Garcia got us coffee, and we sat in silence for a while as we sipped at our mugs, watching the readouts on the displays. We couldn’t see helmet cam footage, the team had gone through some kind of teleporter or portal that was interfering with the signal. We would only know the fate of the operatives and the status of the mission when they returned through it.

The mission to capture and subvert ADVENT transmissions had gone according to plan, and now scenes of carnage filtered in from news reports and our own surveillance systems, the monitors showing images of insurgency and battle all around the world. The cities were ablaze, civilians were taking up arms to fight against ADVENT and the resistance were launching guerrilla operations in every population center. Things had been quiet, and the population had been complacent for so long that ADVENT had been taken by surprise, completely unprepared for a mass revolt of this scale. They had thought that they were in the last stages of their occupation, that their war against humanity was over, but their broadcasts proclaiming breakthroughs in gene therapy that would have seen billions of humans flock to their clinics to be mulched and turned into genetic goop for use by the Elders had been replaced with our own recorded footage of their real plans. Partially disintegrated people floating in tanks as their bodies were broken down into raw materials, pools full of the dead and dying, alien machines performing grotesque surgeries and experiments on unwilling patients. Needless to say, the public had not taken kindly to these revelations, they were awake, their eyes had been opened just as mine had been when I had first witnessed the cruelty of the occupation, and they were out for blood.

As I watched one of the monitors, shaky footage probably from a livestream showed a dozen civilians assailing an ADVENT trooper who had been caught alone, beating him with whatever they could find. Rocks, sticks, pieces of broken paving stone, a traffic cone, a broken stop sign. I had to chuckle at the brutality of it all, righteous anger could motivate even the most peaceful and tolerant people into feats of extreme violence. I felt a little guilty, but this was the only way, and the aliens deserved it.

Did they really deserve it though? I felt a pang of doubt as I remembered what Vi had told me the night before, that her people had been enslaved by the Elders too. Were they all slaves, fighting wars for the Elders against their will? Perhaps that was true of the Vipers and Mutons, but what of the genetically engineered abominations like the Sectoids and the Troopers? Was the mental conditioning, and in some cases actual psychic mind control so powerful that they had no will of their own, or were they eager attack dogs raring for an opportunity to inflict suffering on what they saw as their subjects?

Didn’t matter now, the revolution had already begun and all ADVENT forces were targets, I had to keep in mind that it was they who had forced our hand and not the other way around. They had come to Earth seeking conflict, and they had found it.

There would be witch hunts too, collaborators would be strung up like in the final days of the Nazi regime or the terrors of the Russian and French revolutions. Historical images of Mussolini, the Italian dictator, flashed in my mind. He hung upside down alongside his fellows, beaten savagely and suspended in the air like a farm animal at a slaughterhouse, his clothing in tatters as the partisans put his corpse on display. It wasn’t up to me to decide what was right and wrong, what measures were necessary and which were gratuitous. My job was to set these events in motion, the people of the world would sort themselves out one way or another.

As I watched an alien mech strode through the crowd, firing its massive plasma cannon in short bursts, its purely logical AI subsystems cutting down the rioters without a hint of remorse. They scattered, and the cameraman fled, his phone pointed at the ground as he ran for his life.

On another screen the ADVENT News Network scrolled past, their propaganda channel that masqueraded as journalism. A well-coiffed and finely dressed woman was talking, footage of the civil war erupting on a green screen behind her, her expression calm as she read her prompter and promised leniency for those who turned themselves in. All lies of course, ADVENT had never had humanity’s salvation in mind, from the very start they had planned to recycle the population and turn every man, woman and child into Soylent Green.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Garcia muttered, taking another sip of his steaming coffee. “The whole planet is on fire. I know the alternative would be extinction, but it hardly makes this any easier to watch.”

As if to punctuate his point, more amateur footage came in of a team of Mutons pinned behind a wrecked dropship, the vessel having seemingly been shot down over a gas station. It had cratered and dug a trench in the street, hitting the pumps and erupting into what must have been an impressive ball of flame. All that was left now was the broken hull and the fires raging around it, the surviving payload of aliens hunkered down within the wreckage, trying to avoid incoming fire from a group of insurgents. I watched a grenade fired from a launcher off-camera bounce into the ship and detonate, throwing a Muton clear of the wreck to land limply on the ground. Its obviously lifeless body was peppered with small arms fire from overly eager rioters, the resistance must be giving out stockpiles of weapons to anyone who showed up to fight.

The room was full of murmured conversation along with cheers or gasps when a particularly exciting image was displayed on one of the screens. Some of the soldiers seemed downright bloodthirsty, reveling in the scenes of carnage, but I had to remember that many of them were veterans of the invasion war and that some had lost friends to the aliens. This must seem like deserved retribution to them, revenge for twenty years of oppression. As much as I lived and breathed XCOM’s cause, I just couldn’t see things in such simple terms, not after my time with Vi. The aliens weren’t mindless killing machines, at least not all of them, some had been in the position we were in right now and had lost the fight that we seemed to be winning. If we failed here, the next planet to be conquered by the Elders would surely see human troops fighting alongside their menagerie of alien soldiers, perhaps genetically modified or brainwashed to carry out their orders just as ADVENT did.

“Did they say how long the mission should take,” I asked Garcia, and he shook his head.

“No idea, they don’t know what they’ll find in the fortress.”

I sat back in my chair and tried to drink some more of my cooling coffee, my stomach churning. More waiting, always waiting, I couldn’t stand sitting here not knowing. The carnage on the monitors didn’t do much to improve my mood, but I had to keep telling myself that there was no humane solution to the problem ADVENT had created. I looked away as an ADVENT checkpoint exploded into an orange fireball, some kind of improvised explosive hidden in a car it looked like. Maybe I would go back to my quarters and try to sleep through this, but I wanted to be here when Vi returned, if she returned...

Suddenly one of the ADVENT mechs that was marching through a crowd of rioters on one of the larger monitors to my right stopped, freezing as if someone had pressed its ‘off’ button, then it seemed to collapse into standby mode. As I watched with wide eyes, the same happened to two others, then the Troopers who had been using them as fire support faltered. They hit their helmets with their hands as if their equipment was malfunctioning, losing all coordination and starting to fall back in a panic. I rose out of my seat, scrutinizing them as they turned and began to run. I had never seen anything like it before.

On another display a Muton was looking around, bewildered and lost as protesters pelted it with rocks and bottles. It lowered its weapon and bellowed, its rage and confusion obvious, but so abrupt. It was happening everywhere, ADVENT machinery was shutting down, their troops were losing coordination, their formations dissolving and their will to fight wavering. Something had just happened, something big.

“What the fuck is going on,” Garcia muttered, “it’s like they all went crazy at the same time.”

“The network ... the ADVENT network that lets them communicate with eachother, it’s down! Their comms are down, the psychic link that lets the Elders give out orders, it’s been silenced!” I pointed to one of the monitors and gripped his arm. “Look! That Viper doesn’t know where she is, like she just woke up from a dream. See how the hood is flared? She’s scared, she doesn’t understand what’s happening.”

“You can tell that just from its body language?”

“Yeah, and I assume the rest of them are just as disoriented, you don’t have to be an empath to see how terrified those Troopers are. What the hell is going on? Did the mission succeed?”

“I think that’s a safe assumption,” Garcia replied. “Have ... have we won?”

The sound of the intercom filled the room, it was the voice of Bradford, the second in command on the Avenger. The crowd went quiet, eager to hear the report.

“Now hear this, now hear this! The mission to assault the fortress was a success, the Elders are dead.”

A deafening cheer rang out in the room, the personnel pumping their fists and hugging eachother. A few dress berets were thrown into the air, and Garcia slammed his fist on our table in triumph, almost spilling our coffee.

“ADVENT forces are in disarray all over the world,” Bradford continued. “Reports are coming in from all major alien-controlled cities that their resistance is crumbling, they have lost command and control, they can no longer mount an effective defense now that their leaders are gone.”

The images on the monitors confirmed what he was saying, it was as if they couldn’t think for themselves, they had no initiative. Heavily armed Troopers were being brought down by rioters armed with rocks, all because they didn’t have the sense to provide covering fire. Was the ADVENT army really so reliant on a top-down command structure? They seemed to have no contingency plan for this scenario. Was their control over their soldiers being interrupted, even temporarily, so unthinkable to the Elders that they didn’t even have a backup plan?

The room was full of celebration, cheering, revelry. The troops were overjoyed, and as much as I felt pride and hope welling in my chest, I would not be able to relax until Vi was back. They must have taken some casualties, there’s no way they had walked into the heart of the ADVENT war machine and come out unscathed. Bradford had not announced any fatalities, likely so as not to dampen the spirit of the men, but I had no doubt that they wouldn’t all be returning. Vi was fast and she was strong, she had a better chance of surviving than most, but I couldn’t speculate as to what exotic aliens and robots they might have fought in there.

A crate of beer was being passed around, pre-war, kept cold in the morgue for just such an occasion. It was morbid, but there was something to be said for leaving our round of victory drinks in the custody of our dead comrades. A can of beer was cracked open and thrust into my hands, frothing its amber foam down my wrist and falling into my lap. Garcia caught one and took a hearty draw, climbing up onto the table and shaking the can, showing a crowd of chanting soldiers with the beverage as if it were champagne. Some sat apart from the rest, holding their heads in their hands or resting on a table and relaxing, sighs of relief inaudible over the noise. I downed my beer in one, the bitter liquid cooling my throat, more for something to occupy myself than for revelry.

I gave Garcia a pat on the back, and made my way to the exit, leaning against the wall in the narrow hallway as I closed the door behind me and shut out the cacophony. It was really over then, the Elders were dead and their troops were leaderless and cut off, no reinforcements or supplies would be coming in now. I should go back to my room, that’s where Vi would expect me to be when she came back.

I made my way down the corridor, my boots tapping on the metal deck, and after a while I arrived at my quarters. The automatic door slid open with a whir to allow me access, and I collapsed onto my bed, wincing as the impact jolted my healing ribs. If they made any more announcements I would hear them in here, I didn’t want to sour the mood in the situation room, there would be time to celebrate and reflect once Vi returned.

The digital clock on the wall advanced sluggishly, the red neon numbers ticking past as if in slow motion. Why were they not back yet? They hadn’t taken a dropship, they had gone through some kind of teleporter that had been constructed on the engineering deck, reverse engineered from technology recovered in the field. It was the only way to access the fortress, impenetrable with no conventional means of reaching it.

After a while I started to fall asleep, the stress and worry overcoming me. As my eyes began to close I heard something approaching in the hall outside the room, like a towel being dragged across metal. I rose to a sitting position, alert now as the door opened, and Vi stood before me in her metal chest plate. Without a word she lunged towards me, taking me in her long tail and wrapping it around me, pulling me against her chest plate. She remembered too late that my ribs were bruised, and huffed apologetically, but I didn’t care. She was back, she was alive.

She rubbed her large head against my face affectionately, running her long fingers through my hair, then lowered me back to the ground. She fumbled for the tablet on her belt, then tapped on its touch screen furiously.

[ELDERS DEAD, ALL ARE FREE]

“You did it,” I replied, unable to mask the admiration in my voice. “You really did it, you killed them. What was it like? What did you find in that fortress?” I waited eagerly for her to type a reply.

[HEAVY DEFENSE, POWERFUL ENEMIES, WE GO FORWARD AND OVERCOME]

“You pushed through the defenders? What did the Elders look like?”

[FRAGILE AND WEAK, POWER OF MIND, ELDERS USE PUPPETS]

Puppets? What was she talking about? Some kind of proxy they used to fight perhaps? It sounded as if their bodies were frail but that they possessed enormous psychic powers. That must have been what had been disrupted, sending the troops into chaos, like unplugging a data cable the ADVENT forces had been disconnected from their masters in one fell swoop. It didn’t matter right now, all that mattered was that she was alive, and we were together. I would have ample time to pick her brain for details.

“I can’t believe we won. We beat them.”

[TASK DIFFICULT, WE OVERCOME]

She lowered her hand to ruffle my hair, smiling at me in her own way, then lifted me gingerly in her tail to position me on the bed. She curled around me, her chubby body enclosing me in a blanket of smooth scales.

[TIRED, LONG BATTLE, SLEEP ALONGSIDE]

I didn’t complain, it wasn’t every day we won a war, she deserved all the rest she wanted.

We stood in the hangar bay of the Avenger, I had a rucksack full of what belongings I had accrued during my stay with XCOM, along with my rifle and some ammunition that we had been permitted to keep. The war was over, the occupation had been broken and ADVENT had been routed. There were still pockets of resistance here and there, usually wherever the aliens had been the most entrenched, but they were disorganized and poorly supplied. The human rebels, or as we should now refer to them ‘the status quo’, were mopping up the remaining loyalists. Many had defected, mostly Vipers and Mutons it seemed, losing the will to fight now that their leaders were dead. They were likely thinking in individualistic terms for the first time in their lives. They were no more cooperative and wanted nothing to do with the human rebellion, but their only concern seemed to be to seek out like minded members of their own species and vanish into the wilderness, presumably to make their own way in the world. The Vipers behaved similarly, choosing to self-segregate and disappear, leaving the population centers in massive swarms. It was a matter of some contention as to whether they should be pursued and killed or not, but in the chaos it was very difficult to make any such declarations, much less see that they were enforced.

The Commander at least agreed that the organic aliens were not a threat, he had consulted both myself and Vi and had concluded that the aliens were as much victims of the Elders as we were, and that they would not seek conflict. The robotic and synthetic troops were a different story, most of the resistance was coming from the larger bases and depots that had been manned by creatures such as Troopers and Archons, aliens that had been genetically engineered and cybernetically modified to serve as soldiers, they knew no other life and had nothing to fall back on. They could not be integrated, they would fight to the death, and XCOM still had some work to do on that front.

The Commander had declared that whoever wanted to leave was free to go however, we had served and we had won, those who wished it would be honorably discharged and shuttled to wherever they wanted to go.

I knew of only one place that was away from the still tumultuous population centers, a place where me and Vi could live together without scrutiny while things died down, my family’s old farmhouse. I hadn’t been back there since ADVENT had evicted me and relocated me to an apartment in the city, and I hoped that it was still in a livable condition. The Commander was sorry to see Vi go, and thanked us profusely for our help, then instructed the shuttle pilot to take us wherever we asked.

“I don’t know what kind of future XCOM will have when this is all over,” he said, holding the dropship door open as he shouted over the engines. “But if you ever need anything, anything at all, we will be there for you. The organization, and the world, owes all of our personnel a great debt.”

We said our goodbyes, then he closed the door and the dropship rose off the deck, shooting out of the Avenger’s hangar and into the clear sky. I craned my neck to look back on the ship out of the window, watching the massive vessel diminish as it hung in the air like a floating skyscraper. This might be the last time I would ever see it, it had been my home for months, I had gotten to know its cramped interior as well as any place I had ever called home. What would become of it when the ADVENT resistance was all cleared up? Would it serve as a mobile headquarters for whatever new government arose from this mess? Would it become a museum piece like the USS Constitution? It had saved the human race after all, as had we. It was a strange sensation to have all that responsibility on your shoulders, it still seemed unreal to me. Sure I had not played too big of a role for the most part, besides in helping to destroy the electromagnetic weapon, but that was how we would all be remembered. The title of ‘Savior of Humanity’ hardly suited me.

“So where are you guys headed,” the pilot asked, turning her helmeted head over her shoulder to look at us. I flushed, realizing I hadn’t given her the coordinates yet.

“Oh, sorry, here.” I reached over and passed her a printout with the GPS coordinates of my farmhouse.

“Kansas, eh? Good idea avoiding the cities, things are gonna be rough for a while until things get sorted out. You own land out there?”

“Yeah, I have a farmhouse.”

“Is it in working order? You know, now that ADVENT have been driven off there are gonna be a lot of people out there without basic necessities, they took over and automated so much of the food production and shipping. We’re gonna be needing farmers more than soldiers in the coming years.”

“I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Probably, yeah. All the old equipment is still lying around, we have a tractor in the barn, plows, all kinds of stuff. Though I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to run a farm.”

“Well you’ll have time to learn.”

I leaned over to give Vi a nudge, her long body was taking up almost the entire deck of the troop bay.

“How about it Vi, we could cut some overalls to fit you, you’d be the first Viper farm hand.”

She shrugged, not really understanding, and I laughed at her aloofness. I turned around to look out of the window, watching the patchwork of terrain that peeked from between the fluffy clouds below us as we sped along. There was a silver lining to the dark storm cloud of near total genocide at the hands of the Elders, at least they had left us their technology. Some of their advances in medicine and genetics had been genuine and not aimed at exploiting us, and the revolutions in transport and sustainable energy alone had set humanity forward hundreds of years. Whatever world we managed to forge in their wake would be better off than it had been before the war. Maybe the pilot was right, the supply system would have broken down, I could do a lot of good if I managed to get the farm operational again.

Hell I would have been bored anyway, might be nice to get some fresh air and do some honest labor, if I had to go back to working in a factory I’d go stir crazy.

The dropship swooped low over the flat Kansas terrain, fields of wheat and corn extending from horizon to horizon, the landscape was just as flat and featureless as I remembered it. The state gave you a kind of surreal feeling, as if you weren’t on Earth anymore, your brain sometimes rejected what it saw and insisted that there should at least be a mountain or a tree to break up the endless nothing. I had always liked that feeling, it made me feel lonely, but in a good way. My property came into view below us, the central house, the barn, and the unused silo casting a long shadow in the sunlight. The pilot brought us around, circling and decelerating as she shed altitude and brought the craft to a hover over the dirt road that linked the farm to the civilized world.

I felt the landing gear bounce as they hit the ground, and I slid the door open, hefting my bag over my shoulder.

“Take care,” the pilot called after us as I hopped out of the dropship, Vi slithering behind me to flop heavily to the dirt. “If you need anything, you know how to contact us. Vigilo Confido.”

I nodded, waving to her as the ship lifted off in a cloud of dust, then vanished over the horizon. We stood together in the middle of the road, Vi perched on her long tail and me holding my pack full of equipment as the dust cleared.

“Well, here we are,” I said, gesturing towards the house. “You remember this, right? This is where we met.”

She examined it, then nodded. We made our way up to the porch, and I realized I didn’t have a key. I stood on the threshold sheepishly, then set my bag down and started looking around for a sizable rock. Vi watched with interest as, red faced, I smashed one of the window panes in the front door, then reached inside to unlock it. It swung open with a creak, and I stepped inside. It wasn’t exactly in a state of disrepair, but it had clearly not been maintained in any way after I had been evicted, hell I would have to be insane to expect Troopers to apply a new coat of paint or check for water damage in my absence.

Some of the wallpaper was peeling, the roof had leaked in numerous places, and the whole place was covered in a layer of dust.

“Looks like the farming is going to have to wait,” I muttered, and Vi cocked her massive head at me. “How do you feel about becoming the first Viper to do home renovation?”

I stowed my gear in the master bedroom, and it looked as if this room was relatively unscathed beyond the dust. The king sized bed with its old wooden supports might even be sturdy enough for Vi to sleep with me, rather than having to pile mattresses and sheets in the living room as we had done when she had first visited me so long ago. The first order of business would be to get up into the attic and patch those leaks, I might even need to do some work on the tiles. Damn it, where was I going to get roofing supplies in this day and age? There was also the matter of checking that the electrics still worked, and the plumping. They had been idle for so long that I couldn’t estimate what kind of condition they might be in.

I walked around the house and took inventory of what supplies we still had, there was plenty of canned food and it was still good. There were cleaning supplies and a few tools in the garage, along with a truck that may or may not work. Home improvement I could do, but repairing an engine was another matter entirely. Remarkably nothing seemed to have been stolen, at least there was no sign of forced entry and nothing was conspicuously missing, rural Kansas must have been far too remote for even rebels to operate out here.

Fortunately the wood fire that warmed the house was perfectly intact, and the chimney wasn’t clogged, so I set to work cutting some wood from the stockpile in the barn as Vi watched curiously. Burning wood for fuel must have seemed incredibly quaint to her, she had likely lived her entire life aboard ADVENT vessels or in ADVENT-controlled territory, on Earth or otherwise. In fact I had no idea how old she was, or how her people measured time. If I were to ask, would their years even translate to ours? One orbit of her home planet could take days, or decades, we would have no common point of reference. When I was done chopping wood she helped me carry it back inside, and I struggled to light the fire with a box of matches I had found in one of the kitchen drawers. Finally the kindling ignited, and before long we had a roaring fire.

Vi curled up in front of it on the moth-eaten carpet, enjoying the heat as the dancing, orange flames drew patterns on her scales. I figured she couldn’t be of much help until I worked out an itinerary and decided what actually needed fixing and what we could reasonably do about it. She was cold blooded after all, she would be more active once I gave her a chance to warm herself. I left her to rest, and marched off to inspect the rest of the property.

Vi cocked her head as she watched me paint, I dipped the roller into a bucket of the green liquid, spreading it on the kitchen wall to cover up the mess the wallpaper had left when I had taken it down. It was far too damaged by the damp and mold to save, and so I had decided to just paint over the whole room. I had gone with a nice viridian, at least that’s what was written on the side of the can that I had found in the barn. Sure there were more pressing matters, repairing the roof was especially important, but there was just some amusingly mundane about painting a kitchen after everything we had been through. Vi was bemused, she had no idea what the point of this activity was, and so I gestured for her to approach and thrust a paintbrush into her scaly hand.

“Dip it in the paint, then spread it, like this.” I gripped her wrist and showed her how to spread the paint around. She looked confused, then gurgled in a way that I knew was a dismissive and sarcastic ‘why?’.

“Because we want the kitchen to look nice.” She stroked the dripping brush over the wall experimentally, then huffed, amused. “See, I knew you’d be a natural.”

We painted for a while, and her clumsy strokes became less so as we coated the walls in a green sheen. She didn’t seem to understand the point of it, but she did as instructed, as she must have been conditioned to do throughout her life. It bothered me a little that she would follow orders with no regard for their purpose, or even that she would consider my requests and suggestions as orders. She was ever the enigma, as much as I understood her body language and expressions, it was hard to tell exactly what she was thinking.