Chapter 3: Line of Duty

I awoke in the sick bay, lying in a hospital bed with tubes coming out of my arms. I tried to move, but I was weighed down by something, and the needles were sore where they pierced my skin. I looked down at my body to see Vi’s huge head resting on my legs, her eyes closed as she slept. Her long body trailed off into the room, passing under the curtain that divided the beds. I was hooked up to monitoring equipment, and my muscles ached, as if I had been lying still for too long. My ribs hurt when I breathed, but it was a dull and distant pain. I moved my arm, wincing as the intravenous drip tugged at my skin, and prodded the sleeping Viper.

Her eyes slowly opened, and she peered at me with her yellow pupils, blinking sleepily. They widened, and she rose up to full height on her tail, her hood flaring wide with happiness and she hissed my name in her alien language. She made to pluck me from my bed and hold me in her arms, but hesitated, and settled for an affectionate nuzzle to the face instead. The nurse on duty pulled the curtain aside to enter, stepping gingerly over Vi’s tail and standing beside the bed with a tablet computer. She was a blonde woman, probably in her thirties, clad in a white uniform.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Sir.”

“How long was I out,” I asked, my mouth dry and my throat sore.

“About three weeks, we had to put you into a medically induced coma, you were suffering from a cerebral edema and internal hemorrhaging due to trauma to your thoracic cage.” She rolled her eyes as I shot her a confused glance. “You hit your head and broke your ribs, which caused internal bleeding. Your shattered ribs damaged your soft tissue and pierced your lung, causing your chest cavity to fill with blood. It was touch and go for a while there, we almost lost you. I don’t know many people who have weathered a punch from a Berserker.”

“What’s my prognosis now?”

“You’ll be fine. Cutting up all those trooper corpses seems to have given Doctor Tygan a flair for surgery. Stay in bed for another week, then you should be able to leave the med bay. You won’t be returning to active duty any time soon though.” She checked the monitoring equipment, taking some notes on her tablet, watching curiously as Vi lowered her head so that I could scratch under her fleshy hood. “Your damned Viper wouldn’t leave your side, kept getting in the way of the doctors, is she like your pet or something?”

“Something like that,” I chuckled, then winced as it stung my bruised ribs. “We’ve been through a lot together.”

“Well she’s certainly loyal, she brought you to the sick bay directly from the hangar and she’s been here since. Hasn’t even eaten to my knowledge.”

Vi reached across to my bedside table, and I noticed she had brought the tablet computer she used to communicate, as her alien vocal cords couldn’t replicate human speech. She seemed to understand English well enough, but it was sometimes hard to tell what she was thinking. She tapped at its touch screen with her long finger, then her synthesized speech echoed from the device’s speaker.

[YOU SAVE ME, I SAVE YOU]

“Yeah, I guess we’re even,” I replied. “You should go get some food though, I’m fine now, you can see that.” She huffed at me.

[IN TIME MAYBE]

She set the tablet down and curled up beside the bed with her head resting beside me on the mattress.

“You may have just woken up from a coma, but try to sleep as much as you can,” the nurse said, then she turned to leave. She stopped as she pushed past the curtain, and called back over her shoulder. “Oh, and you’ve been promoted to Sergeant.”

The time passed quickly, Vi did eventually take a break from watching over me to go to the mess hall and gorge herself on her backed up supply of meat. Her metabolism must work like large reptiles on Earth, perhaps she could go for a long time between meals but simply chose not to when there was food readily available. News of our heroics had traveled quickly, and my hospital bed became a sort of shrine to passing soldiers who would drop in to express their gratitude to both me and Vi, our actions having apparently saved the Avenger and its crew. We had destroyed the alien electromagnetic pulse generator in the nick of time, and the fact that it had been a squad of rookies who had saved the most decorated XCOM team was not lost on them. I had apparently earned my own nickname, they had started to call me ‘Last Chance’.

Garcia stopped by to check on me, he was friendly towards Vi now and obviously enjoying his new status as savior of the ship.

Vi was ever present, she never seemed to get bored and simply wanted to be near me, resting her coils on me for warmth when I had healed enough to sit upright in my bed. Those who had been wary around her before the mission had warmed up to her now, after hearing about the part she had played in our daring escape, and the way she had taken down a Berserker in hand to hand combat.

We were gaining ground in the war against ADVENT, at least that’s what the reports I read told me as I lay in my bed. I felt a little guilty that I couldn’t participate, though being injured after saving the Avenger and her crew was about as good of an excuse as anyone had ever had for taking time off. Nobody seemed to bother Vi either, I had expected the Commander or one of the higher ups to come down to the med bay and chew her out for dereliction of duty, but they seemed to have a pretty clear understanding of where her allegiance lay. Not so much in XCOM, or even in ADVENT, but in me.

A couple of weeks passed, and I was able to get out of bed and roam the ship now, finally able to take my meals in the mess hall rather than eating the carefully regulated hospital food that the nurses brought me. I was a little unsteady on my feet, and Vi hovered around me like I was some kind of baby bird that could fall from the nest at any moment. My prolonged recovery seemed to have rattled her, and she was being hyper-protective whereas before she had been happy to depart on missions and leave me unattended. I wonder if she thought I was weak, she was so much larger and stronger than a human, but surely my heroics had dispelled any such impressions she might have of me.

It occurred to me that we had never really talked much, we had never had any significant length of free time in which we might have gotten to know more about eachother. When we had first met she had been redeployed in a matter of days, when I had been living in the city she had only been able to visit me occasionally, and our flight from ADVENT and subsequent enrollment in XCOM had left us scant few moments of privacy. The odd connection we shared would not be enough to sustain us, as passionate as our relationship was, we’d need to get to know eachother better when this was all over.

I chewed on a spoonful of unidentifiable minced meat as I sat at one of the tables, Vi coiled up behind me in a heap as she wolfed down her rations. I still had a wicked purple bruise that ran up one side of my body, the bandages had been removed but it was still very tender and I generally treated it as if it was made of glass. My brush with death really hadn’t effected me much, perhaps it was because I had been put under during my surgeries and the majority of my recovery, but I hadn’t developed any crippling fear of mortality and it hadn’t brought out any buried religious tendencies as I had seen it do to some of the other soldiers who had been gravely injured. Things just ... were the way they were, thinking about it too hard was a waste of time.

I heard footsteps outside the mess hall, and the small handful of people eating around us turned their heads to the door to see a crowd of soldiers run past. One of them ducked into the room for a moment, his eyes wide and his expression wild.

“Something’s going down, there’s going to be a big announcement! We’re all going to the hangar!”

He left as abruptly as he had arrived, and the soldiers in the mess exchanged glances before rising to their feet and discarding their half eaten meals. I tried to follow, wincing as I stood up too fast and a bolt of pain shot through my side. I felt Vi’s hands steadying me, she helped me off the bench and slithered beside me as I hobbled along.

When we arrived in the hangar it was packed with personnel, there were engineers and scientists here too, everyone was standing around as if they were waiting for something to happen. There was a low murmur passing through the crowd as people chatted and speculated. There had been no announcement over the intercom so far, why were we all here?

As if to answer my question an automatic door slid open on the second level of the hangar, and the Commander stepped out to lean on the railing, surveying us from atop the walkway. I had rarely seen him in person, he was the leader of the resistance and all of its military assets, clad in his grey dress uniform emblazoned with the organization’s logo. The room went quiet as the military personnel stood to attention and the technical staff stopped to look up at him.

“At ease,” he said, waving his gloved hand. “As many of you know, we have made significant inroads recently in our resistance against ADVENT. The path each of you made the choice to take has been long and difficult, and I commend you all for your valiant efforts up to this point. We believe that we have discovered a way to strike back at ADVENT in a way that could potentially ruin them, hitting the Elders where they live and ending their occupation of Earth in the process.”

A chorus of cheers and gasps of disbelief rose from the crowd, and the Commander gestured for us to be silent.

“We’re only going to have one shot at this, and we need our most accomplished operatives to carry out a series of precision strikes on enemy infrastructure, notably their communications. We must seize control of their network tower and substitute their planned broadcasts with our own, sowing chaos in the ADVENT-controlled population centers and allowing our resistance contacts to fan the flames. This will serve as a distraction to tie up the majority of their forces. Once that is done, we must send a crack team of soldiers directly into the Elder’s fortress, the location of which we have recently discovered. We don’t know exactly what we will find there, but if we can destroy their physical bodies, we will disrupt their control over their troops and cripple the ADVENT war machine. I’m not going to lie to you, this mission will be dangerous, the risk of the team not returning is high. I won’t order any of you to do this, it has to be your own decision, and as such I will be accepting volunteers. Sleep on it, then make your decision known in the morning, we leave this time tomorrow. I understand that I’ve not given you much time to think about it, but we’re pressed for time as you well know, and this window will only be open for a short while.”

This was it then, the final push. If we succeeded then we would be free of ADVENT rule and things could go back to the way they used to be before the invasion. A chorus of mumbling and speculation filled the hangar as the Commander left the way he had come, the automatic door sliding closed behind him. I saw equal amounts of apprehension and excitement as I turned my head to look around me, watching the crowd of people as they started to file out. I turned to Vi, recognizing the look on her face.

Of course she would go, they needed her, and I wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it.

I sat on the edge of the bed, Vi coiled around me, her massive body practically filling our small quarters. We had never argued before, and this was a strange way to have an argument. Vi tapped furiously at her tablet computer in order to convey her feelings, the synthesized voice oddly robotic and emotionless as she flared her hood in frustration.