I wish I could analyse the greatest pieces of gaming music with a more professional air, but I'm no music expert and all I can offer are my personal opinions. As such, here are my top five pieces of game music from the past few decades.

1) Phendrana Drifts, from Metroid Prime

The Metroid series has featured some pretty iconic musical pieces throughout its twenty-seven year history, but those themes reached a sublime peak (IMO) with Metroid Prime, a game that not only reinvigorated the franchise but also reinterpreted and updated many of the classic SNES themes to stunning effect.

Stepping out on to the icy plains of Phendrana for the first time was a jawdropping moment, but exploring those snow-packed peaks and foreboding chasms wouldn't have been half as wondrous without this composition. It's subtle, mysterious, and yet lively enough to drive you on into the ice wastes.

Bonus - this instrumental metal cover by Stemage is soothing, yet also rockin'. No complaints:

2) The Opened Way, from Shadow of the Colossus.

The Opened Way is one of many spectacular tracks from Shadow of the Colossus, and choosing any single song to represent what is (IMO) one of the greatest videogames of all time was quite a trial. Composer Kow Otani has spent over twenty five years crafting soundtracks for games, film and anime, but his work on SotC is undoubtedly some of his best.

What adds to the grandeur of Kow's orchestral soundtrack is that Shadow of the Colossus is largely a quiet game. There's no music playing as you explore the vast world of SotC - just the sound of hoofbeats, and you calling for your horse. This sweeping, heart pounding score is your reward for finally locating and fighting one of the titular colossi. As such, each and every track is distinct and unforgettable.

Thank you, Kow.

3) Setting Sail, Coming Home, from Bastion

When the first previews for Bastion were released, people were amazed by the hand-painted art and the introduction of an omnipresent narrator. Few people were prepared for a multi-award winning soundtrack by composer Darren Korb, which became so popular that the developers eventually released the complete soundtrack as a limited edition CD (which completely sold out, of course).

Setting Sail, Coming Home is a great song even out of context, but a real tear-jerker when you hear it for the first time in game. You have few friends in Bastion, and each NPC character has their own distinct, soulful theme music. Setting Sail, Coming Home is a combination of two of those themes, the lyrics of two opposing characters suddenly intertwined as they face up to the consequences of their actions.

Full marks, Darren.

4) Wind Waker Theme, from Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker

I should point out that there's no BAD Zelda theme, but everybody has a personal favourite theme, and it's almost always their first encounter with the series. I never owned a SNES or 64, so Wind Waker was my first proper Legend of Zelda title, and it still occupies a special place in my heart. That endless ocean! The freedom of setting out across the waves, headed for a tiny speck on the horizon! The terror when a storm started and threatened to tip your boat, and the relief when morning came and brought back the sun!

Unforgettable. If they change a single dang note of that song for the upcoming WiiU HD re-release, I'll flip a table.

Bonus: This orchestral remix by Hyperduck Soundworks is the most uplifting rendition I've ever found. It hasn't left my iPod in over a year.

5) E1M1, from Doom

E1M1 (Episode 1, Mission 1). For many people, this song accompanied their first glimpse of the future of gaming. Never mind the fact that the melody was ripped from Metallica, E1M1 was the musical embodiment of Doom - hard rock riffs mashed up against anarchic electronica, raw and pulsing, blended perfectly with the cries of the damned and the roar of your shotgun. It's not "beautiful" like many other pieces I've listed here, but it is absolutely iconic.

E1M1 has been remixed and covered more times than I can count, so I'll just leave you with this sweet cover by Evil Horde.

There were ten or so other songs I really wanted to put on this list, but I couldn't keep writing forever. So, what'd I overlook? What songs should go into part 2? Drop me your feedback below!

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4, part 1
Chapter 4, part 2
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7, part 1

- - -

Chapter 7: Operation Lone Mountain

It wasn't so much a smattering of gunfire as an eruption.

The six XCOM soldiers lined up along the back wall of the chamber opened fire as one, the electric sizzle of lasers lost entirely beneath the boom and rattle of Lieutenant White's LMG. Lieutenant Chi just kept her head down and tightened her aim. The trigger was warm beneath her gloved finger. It understood her. When she tugged, it obeyed.

Her first shot missed the floating disc by an inch, and in the time it took to reload Rudd and Lewis had begun sweeping it with laser fire, burning it out of the air. The disc dipped beneath the impact, spun away from their beams, and fired back.

“Down, down!” Rudd called, but even as he was ducking the plasma slammed him to the floor. Chi saw splintered armour plating and smoke wending upward from Rudd's gut, but she couldn't move from her position, not without losing her perfect field of fire.

“Medic!” she called, but Wise was fifty yards away, pinned behind a balustrade as the mutons swept him with plasma fire. It might as well have been fifty miles. “Ace!” she called. “Move on three!”

'Ace' Wise nodded, and Chi counted down fast as she fixed her aim on the first of the two mutons, settling her crosshairs just below the scaly asshole's eyes. She exhaled. Her finger danced on the trigger.

She fired, and the muton's skull sheared in two like it'd been struck by the fist of God. Wise popped out of his cover, laser rifle flashing, and the second muton fell back screeching.

“Put it down, put it down!” Young turned his laser rifle on the muton, and in the strobe-flash of his fire Chi saw the creature shear down the middle, its armour melting beneath the onslaught. The air filled with the sweet smell of barbecued pork and Chi's aim wavered as she inhaled the smoke.

Three chryssalids still coming, and the disc-sentry was still coming, sweeping rapidly from left to right across the chamber. It ducked and wove like a linebacker, skipping between Lewis's laser fire almost too fast to believe.

Almost. Chi didn't bother pressing her eye to the scope. She led the disc on instinct, her finger tense on the trigger, and fired. The rifle bucked against her shoulder hard enough to bruise, but the explosive pang of steel on steel was worth it. The disc wobbled, tumbled, and shed sparks as it hit the floor. Its steel panels flapped spasmodically, little black gunbarrels retreating inside the carapace. Then it kicked once more, spat fire, and fell still.

“Spiders, coming in fast!” That was 'Crater' White, hosing the back wall of the chamber like he had ammo to spare. The three chryssalids were scrambling over each other in their eagerness, and even when Crater's wild fire chopped one out of the air the others clawed their way over their companion's body. Rudd was down and Wise was up to his elbows in blood as he tried to stem the bleeding, which left Young, Chi and Lewis to stem the tide.

The two chryssalids jumped the ruined hulk of the disc. They dripped acid-yellow ichor from their jaws as they clacked and clattered, and through the scope of her rifle Chi could swear she saw a sickly intelligence behind their alien eyes.

She sighted and pulled the trigger.

The bolt caught. Magazine empty. Chi felt her stomach drop away. “Out, I'm out!” she called, yanking the magazine and fumbling at her belt for another. Young was down on one knee, raking the X-rays with laser fire, and one of the chryssalids split down the middle like overripe fruit. But the last of the three was still coming, a silhouette of claws and shadow.

Lewis ducked out from his alcove and swept the last of the chryssalids, his laser rifle hissing steam as it vaporised the water in the air, but even with its guts hanging loose around its legs it kept on coming, tearing itself apart as it hauled its carcass across the steel floor.

Chi's spare magazine wouldn't fit. She rammed it up into her rifle but something had jammed. There was no list of curses long enough in English, and she spat epithets in French as she let the magazine fall to the floor.

Her left hand found her pistol and slid it from the holster, tugging free of butter-smooth leather. The chryssalid loomed closer, claws scraping on steel. Its guts were knotted, leaking black fluid with every step, but it never slowed. Its two claw-arms swept up, lights gleaming on serrated bone.

Chi brought her pistol up, sighted, and fired.

The pistol bucked as she squeezed the trigger, three quick shots echoing off the riveted walls. The first two shots were wide but the third took the chryssalid in the right eye, leaving a bloodied hole so wide Chi could see clear through to the far side.

The creature skittered across the floor, legs splayed, canting drunkenly as its brain shut down cell by cell. Its claw-arms came up, and Chi threw herself aside, expecting the spider-thing to cut her in half, to live on even though it was missing half its head. But the creature only sighed, gases hissing through the rent in its skull, and collapsed to the floor.

Chi stood slowly, pistol held tight in both hands. The chryssalid lay still at her feet.

She put the rest of the magazine into its head just to make sure.

When the last echo of gunfire had faded she turned to the remainder of the crew. White had slammed a fresh magazine into his LMG and was walking the perimeter of their little basecamp, while Young and Wise were still crouched over Rudd. Captain Rudd's face was deathly pale, his right hand clenching and unclenching inside his heavy gloves as Wise injected anticoagulants deep into his chest.

Chi knelt beside them, her pistol still smoking in her hands. “Is he okay?”

“Fingers crossed,” Wise said, not even glancing up from his work.

“You see the size of the hole?” White called. “The Captain is fucked.”

“Don't count him out. Santa's tough.” But Sergeant Wise didn't look so sure as he sounded. His forehead dripped sweat as he yanked the last of his bandages tight. “Captain, you hear me?”

Rudd blinked slowly, lizardlike. “Sergeant?”

“We got you, Captain. You gotta hold-”

“I know the drill,” Rudd whispered. He folded both hands over the bandages and squeezed. “Apply pressure and wait for evac. Do the fucking job, Sergeant!”

Wise nodded. His adam's apple bobbed. Then he stuffed the remainder of his hypodermics back into his medic's satchel and snatched up his rifle.

“You heard the Captain. We're moving on!” Wise met Captain Young's eyes, and the two men nodded to each other, communicating without a word. Wise turned to Chi. “Got my back, Alpha?” he said.
Lieutenant Chi dared a grin. “All the way, Ace.”

“Then let's move.”

#

It hurt Sergeant Wise to leave Captain Rudd behind, but he'd seen more of the man's injuries than anyone and knew the old bastard would live if they had him on a Skyranger within an hour. So long as he kept pressure on the gaping hole in his chest and didn't pass out...

But Wise knew the math. If they stopped the infiltration to drag Rudd to safety, whoever was running the base would have enough time to evac themselves. Then they'd set up base somewhere else, vacuum up more civilians, burn whole cities. Leave townships as craters of ash.

Rudd was a small price to pay, in the end.

Wise stayed up front as Captain 'Cash' Young led the way into the bowels of the base. The five remaining soldiers moved close together, Chi bringing up the rear, their footfalls echoing strangely off organic curves of steel. They passed through doors that opened like irises, snicking closed behind them, like airlocks forcing them deeper and deeper into the bunker, one hatch at a time.

The corridors wound down, and down, and further still, until Wise began to wonder whether he'd ever feel sunlight on his skin again. His rifle shook in his hands as they stepped through another silken iris. The air didn't taste like rot any more. It tasted electric, a charge tingling on the back of his tongue. Like plasma vapour.

“I don't wanna die down here,” he whispered.

White was by his side, lugging his LMG, sweat shining on his brow. “You're not gonna die.”

“That's what they all say.”

“What they all say doesn't count for shit.” White stopped, panted, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “You know what, Wise?”

“What?”

“They need to put wheels on this thing.”

“Why don't you mount it on a bicycle?”

“It'd overbalance. Need a baby carriage.”

“Bring a go-kart, then. You can be our mounted cavalry.”

“I'll put it in Pournelle's suggestion box... holy shit.”

They'd stepped through a tall door into a chamber the size of a football stadium. The ceiling arched far overhead, revealing walkways and balustrades, a balcony on the second floor glowing with the light of holographic consoles.

There were no further doors, no other exits. The heart of the base, Wise realised. This was their neural hub, their command centre. And somewhere behind the consoles would be the X-ray Commander, their own Pournelle.

Chi dropped to one knee and swept the chamber through her scope. “Two mutons at the base of that pedestal... thing,” she whispered. “Two hundred meters.”

Young was by her side, watching through his own scope. “Armed?”

“Heavily.”

“Anything else?”

“Something moving behind the pedestal. It looks like... What the fuck?”

Wise peered through the scope on his laser rifle. He'd recognised the silhouette at the far end of the chamber and thought it only another sectoid, one of the bobble-headed bastards who'd gunned Nyssa Zelman down so many months before, but now that he saw it moving he realised it was subtly different. Its skull was somehow larger, swollen, and there was an electrical glow behind its eyes, a flare of phosphorescence.

He remembered where he'd seen a creature like that before. The chest-cam footage recovered from the very first contact. Corporal Lebedev and Ramirez getting torn apart by X-rays in a dim warehouse on the outskirts of Hamburg.

And now, they'd found the bastard.

His finger was already on the trigger when Young grabbed his shoulder. “Alive! We need it alive!”

Wise growled. “Whatever you say, boss. How'd you want this done?”

“We need those two pinned.” Young pointed out the mutons circling the pedestal. “Shredded if possible. I'll take the leader myself.” He patted the arc thrower hanging on his belt. “Crater, you blow the one on the left. Full artillery. Alpha, Ace, hammer the one on the right. Devil-Dog, watch the rear. No idea if there's any more coming through the pipes, and I don't want to be surprised. See that ramp?” He pointed to the incline leading up to the control console far overhead. “I'll go up, come off the far side and stun the leader from behind. He'll never know what hit him.”

“Sir!” 'Crater' White unslung his rocket launcher and fitted an explosive into the tube. “Just give the word.”

“No better time than now,” Young said, and ran.

For a moment Wise was frozen, watching his Captain sprint up the ramp and into the shadows. He could almost hear Young's brass balls clanging together as he reached the peak and vanished into the shadows. Then White's rocket-launcher roared, and the two mutons turned in surprise just in time for the sucker on the left to disappear behind a cloud of flame and shrapnel.

“Take 'em down!” White called, but Wise was already firing, spraying the second muton with laser fire. The beast stumbled, its weapon almost slipping from its hands, and managed to crawl behind a barricade. Wise's laser scattered harmlessly off the steel.

Up top, Young was a blur behind the hologram shimmer of the consoles. He was still running fast, and the sectoid commander didn't seem to have noticed him yet. “Couple seconds more!” Wise called. “Chi, can you hit that thing?”

Chi was already folding out her bipod. “On it,” she muttered, one eye pressed to the socket of her scope. A quick exhalation. A click. A crack of gunfire. “Missed.”

The black cloud left by Crater's rocket was clearing and Wise could make out something moving at the centre. The muton was on its knees, bleeding, dragging its guts behind it along the floor, but still alive, raising its plasma rifle to bear.

Wise's rifle gave a sad little hum as the battery depleted. He ejected, letting it hit the floor, and slammed a new battery home. “What's it take to kill these bastards?”

“I'm on it!” Chi reloaded and fired again. “Fuck! Missed!”

“Stop screwing around!” The muton's rifle flashed, and Wise leaped back as plasma burred past his shoulder. “Down, down!”

It was little consolation, but at least the X-rays were concentrating on him and not Captain Young. 'Cash' was a silhouette far overhead, and Wise held his breath as the Captain hung off the railing of the balcony, lowering himself to ground level, out of sight of the sectoid commander. Almost there, Wise thought. Just a few more seconds...

Captain Young dropped, a solid thud echoing around the chamber as ceramic armour met steel plating. The sectoid commander spun, his huge head bobbing on his tiny shoulders, and screeched like a cat dropped into cold bathwater.

The alien didn't even have time to fire. Young rolled as he hit the hit the floor and came up with his arc thrower in both hands. There was a lightning flash, the crackle of burning flesh, and the X-ray dropped face-first.

“It's down!” Young called, scurrying for cover behind one of the steel barriers. “It's-”

The plasma flare was searingly bright, like staring into the sun. Wise hadn't even seen the second muton turning – one moment the X-ray was pinned and the next it was on its feet, rifle in hand, fire boiling across the length of the chamber. Young screamed as he fell, tumbling mid-stride, hands flung out before him. Then he landed behind the barricade and vanished from sight.

Wise's stomach knotted in panic. “Get the Captain, get him out of there!” He raked the muton with laser fire but the alien was already scampering away behind solid cover. “Chi, hit the goddamn thing!”

“On it!” Sweat gleamed on Chi's brow as she lined up her shot. “Breathe... breathe...”

The crack of gunfire echoed around the vast chamber, and the muton behind the barricade collapsed in a spray of bone and blood. That only left the muton half-shredded by White's rocket, somehow still crawling on hands and knees, stitching the ceiling with mis-aimed plasma fire.

“I've got it!” White had ditched the empty rocket-launcher tube in favour of his massive LMG. He braced against the back wall of the chamber and hosed the last muton, ricochets pinging off the steel floor like fireworks. But the muton kept crawling despite the heavy fire, and its own wild plasma bursts were inching lower, blowing fat holes out of the walls less than a meter over Wise's head.

Now or never, he thought. He had to move.

“Keep him pinned!” Wise called to White, and dashed across the open chamber. The muton saw him coming but Tama Wise already had his rifle up against his shoulder. He pulled the trigger, waiting for the laser flash that would take the muton's head off.

Nothing happened. He glanced down and saw the charge light blinking. Another dead battery.

Wise didn't break his stride. He let the rifle fall clattering on the floor and drew his pistol. His gloves were slick with blood and sour alien mucus and when he tried to pull the trigger his finger slipped. Exhaustion that had left him broken but he knew what he had to do.

His aim was true. White had let off the LMG fire long enough for Wise to close the gap. He pressed the barrel against the creature's temple.

“Ciao, Uso,” he said, and fired.

#

It was only hours later, as Pournelle was pinning the badge on the lapel of his uniform jacket, that the echo of the gunshot began to fade.

“Congratulations, Lieutenant Wise.” Pournelle stepped back. The handshake was brief and professional. “XCOM thanks you for your service.”

“Sir.” Wise blinked. He was standing in the briefing room on the second floor of XCOM HQ, but he couldn't remember how he'd gotten there. His right hand was still curling unconsciously into firing position, gripping an invisible pistol, finger on a non-existent trigger.

“You've done something incredible,” Pournelle said. The commander's eyes were sunken by exhaustion but there was a smile dancing on his lips. “The thing you brought in? The commander? We're already learning from it. This may be a turning point in the war.”

Wise nodded automatically. “Sir.”

“Get some rest. You've earned it.” A pat on the shoulder. A quick squeeze. “At ease, Lieutenant.”

And that was that. Pournelle turned on his heel and walked out, and Wise exited out the other door, talking the long, lonely walk to the elevators that would take him down to the barracks. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead and every footstep echoed strangely off the concrete walls. The world seemed muted, the volume knob stuck on one, cotton wool jammed in his ears.

And then he passed the shrine, and stopped dead.

The shrine was just a corkboard propped on a ledge along one wall of the corridor, just outside the mess hall. A simple thing, those few colour photos pinned there oddly out of place against the grey concrete wall, the concrete ceiling, concrete floor.

He'd walked past those photos more times than he could count, but he never stopped to really look at them. It was easier not to. Easier to pretend certain things hadn't gone down the way they had.

Ramirez, Lebedev and Hashimoto. Nyssa Zelman. Lucien Hickman. Jake Solomon. Six names, six photographs. Six that could become eight if Young and Rudd didn't pull through. They were still in surgery, getting stitched and sutured and cauterised. Medics said Young was 50/50. Rudd, somewhat less.

He remembered how close the muton's wild fire had been to his head. The claw of a chryssalid sweeping down. A matter of inches, every time.

And somehow, he knew things were only going to get worse.

Someone was laughing in the mess hall. The crew that hadn't been on the Skyranger, watching Young and Rudd bleed out. Huang, Shephard, Richardson, Nyssa Zelman's brother Alan, Gollnick... Wise knew they'd all been there, under fire, but somehow Wise felt apart from them all. In a day he'd be one of the crew again, but for now he still had gore dried on his boots. The pin on his lapel was oddly heavy. It still didn't feel like he'd done anything to deserve it. And yet...

He brushed the bank of photos with numb fingers. “For you, guys,” he said, and marched on, towards the laughter and the light.

- - -

Author's Note:

PHEW. The end of Chapter 7 is a major milestone in the story of The B-Team (those who've played XCOM understand why). Things are only going to get worse from here, because I'm ramping up the in-game difficulty to compensate for how well things have gone so far. I mean, three deaths outside the tutorial level? That's barely a warm-up!

A couple thousand people have read through The B-Team already, and I thank each and every one of you for sticking with me so far. It's hard to believe, but chapters 1-7 total 36,000 words, which is longer than any of my Olesia Anderson novellas. So if you've read this far and would like to support me, why not do me a favour and give my Olesia Anderson series a go? The latest entry, Burning Bridges, is pretty much a stand-alone story! For $2.99 you get 35,000 words of espionage, sex, gunfights, double-crosses and beautiful scenery. Or, if you're the sort of reader who likes to try before you buy, why not read Dirty Deals? It's the first Olesia Anderson thriller, and is available as a free download in Kindle and Epub formats!

Keep an eye out for Chapter 8 of The B-Team sometime soon!

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4, part 1
Chapter 4, part 2
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

- - -

Chapter 7: Operation Lone Mountain

The pistol shook in Sergeant Tama Wise's hand. His gloves were slick with blood and sour alien mucus and when he tried to pull the trigger his finger slipped on the steel, the pistol almost falling from his grip. It wasn't fear but exhaustion that had left him broken. The comedown after two hours spent under assault, the non-stop adrenaline rush, the screaming, the plasma, the stink of cooking flesh.
“Ciao, Uso,” he said, and fired.

#

TWO HOURS EARLIER

Captain Adam Rudd was starting to wonder why the soldiers he commanded called him Santa. The only presents he brought them were third degree burns and bodybags. So when a runner knocked on the door of Rudd's private bunk at four in the morning and summoned him into Commander Pournelle's office, his stomach was already doing backflips.

“Captain.” Pournelle was seated behind his desk, hands folded before him, his face illuminated from below by a desk lamp. The Commander had grown thin since Rudd had first met him, drawn skeletal by sleepless nights. His cheekbones jutted and his eyes were sunken deep into his skull. His skin was yellowed like he had jaundice. There was grey in his hair now, as if a year spent running XCOM had sucked a decade from his bones.

“Sir.” Rudd hoped the fear wasn't showing on his face. Not the fear of the mission, but the fear of what always followed. The black plastic shrouds. The paperwork. Comrades reduced to files in a cabinet.

Pournelle's Adam's apple bobbed. “Are you familiar with what we've been doing... below?”

Below. The euphemism for the alien containment laboratory. Rudd had never been down there, but he knew what went on. Advanced interrogation. Thumbscrews and manacles for the twenty first century. Rudd nodded.

“There have been developments,” Pournelle continued. “Developments which the council would like us to pursue immediately.”

“Of course, sir.”

“You and Captain Young will be lead a team of four. You choose your soldiers. Only the best for the task.”

“Sir.” Young's brow furrowed. “Where's the landing zone?”

“Three kilometres outside Krakow.”

“Poland? Forgive me, sir, but it doesn't seem a logical place for an abduction.”

Pournelle's hands tensed on the top of his desk. “This isn't an abduction, Captain. The information we took from our captive...”

“Sir?”

It wasn't quite a smile and not a grimace. More like invisible fingers had hooked the Commander's lips back in a parody of a grin. It only made him look more like a living skeleton.

“Something better than an abduction, Captain,” Pournelle said. “We have their home base.”

#

Two hours later they were airborne.

Rudd sat at the head of the Skyranger, across from Captain 'Cash' Young. They hadn't spoken since liftoff. Young, like Rudd, knew what it was to bag and tag a comrade. It was easier not to talk.

The other four, their personal picks, were doing their best not to look grim. Lieutenant Nomi 'Alpha' Chi, sniper specialist, her rifle half a foot taller than her. Lieutenant 'Devil Dog' Lewis, laser rifle racked by his side. Lieutenant 'Crater' White, explosives expert, a bandolier of rockets slung across his chest. Finally, Sergeant Tama 'Ace' Wise, Rudd's preferred support specialist, who somehow had the calm of a monk under fire and surgeon's fingers hidden beneath his bulky armoured gloves.

He wished they'd sent the entire XCOM force, but Pournelle had insisted on a small insertion team. Quick, fast, quiet. Rudd doubted anything would be quiet, but in the end he had to defer to the man upstairs. They were armed, jacked on uppers and fresh from burying Solomon. Five angry men and a tiny, furious Canadian sniper.

Rudd hoped it would be enough. It had to be.

Lieutenant Chi spent the next four hours cleaning her weapon, her brow furrowed with concentration. Devil Dog and Crater shot shit up the back while Ace slept against the bulkhead.

Rudd tried to sleep. It wouldn't come.

Then, long before he was ready, he felt the Skyranger dip. The pilot's voice crackled over the intercom. “If you look out the left window, you'll see one of Poland's most popular tourist features.” There was a smirk in the pilot's voice. “The bunker bomb.”

Rudd just had time to peer through the tiny slit window and get a glimpse of the sweeping Polish hills before the world went white. The Skyranger duked sideways, and Rudd was thrown from his seat as the shockwave tossed the entire ship aside. The engines whined as their pilot compensated. “Jesus,” Young said, clinging tight to the bulkhead. “You think they could've found a more subtle way in?”

Rudd returned to the window. The green fields were gone. Pine trees lay flat against the ground in an ever-expanding circle, torn out by the roots by the force of the explosion. The air was choked with dust and flame.

At the epicentre of the explosion was a great hollow blown from the earth. It was impossible to miss the steel shining beneath the churned mud.

The X-rays home base, buried beneath Poland. They'd chased the bastards back and forth across the planet, killed them in every continent beneath the sun, and all the while they'd been hiding just outside Krakow.

Rudd didn't know whether it was tragic or hilarious. Maybe a bit of both. But the Skyranger was banking hard, and he knew he didn't have any more time for philosophising. The job had to be done.

“Move fast,” he told the team, meeting their eyes in turn. “If there's a leader in there, we bring it back alive. If not, kill everything that moves. But for the love of God, keep each other safe. Understood?”

The Skyranger jolted. They'd touched down.

Go time.

#

Rudd led the team out onto the still smoking grass and down the muddy crater left by the bomb. The base of the pit was a hole thirty feet wide, leading into darkness. They'd blown straight through the outer shell of the base, although whether they were about to rappel down into the X-Rays barracks or their larder was impossible to tell.

Rudd dropped a flare. Bright green light shone on curved steel surfaces, chrome and rubber coiling organically until it vanished beyond the edge of the chemical glare. “Devil Dog,” he said. “You first. Then Crater, me, Ace, Alpha, Cash. Go!”

They slid down one after the other, rope whizzing through their gloved hands. The ground shot up towards them and Rudd hit hard, rolling over his shoulder and coming up hard against the wall. His armour clicked against a surface like glass, and he shone his light upwards, letting the beam play across the slick, curving walls.
He gasped.

Beyond the curving glass, rimed with frost, was a tall figure. Stone still, eyes closed, mouth and nose sealed away behind an intubation mask, but unmistakeably human.

Wise, Chi, and 'Cash' Young thudded down behind him, taking up positions around the perimeter of the room. “Captain,” Chi said, her hand on his shoulder. “Are you...” She saw where his light was trained and jumped back, reaching for her pistol. “Fuck! What is that?”

“Abductee,” Rudd said, running one hand across the glass. Even through the gloves he could feel the chill. It was a woman on the far side of the glass, naked beneath her blanket of ichor and frost. She wasn't breathing, but that didn't mean she was dead. “This is where they bring them.”

“Why?”

“Same reason we have the basement. They want to know what we are.” When Rudd swept his light across the chamber he saw more of the glass tubes set into the walls, more figured muzzled by piping. There might've been ten. Might've been thousands.

Captain Rudd forced himself to step away. It wasn't the time, and they had a job to do. “Medical will come in and help them when we're done. Move fast!”

He took the lead with 'Devil-Dog' Lewis and 'Crater' White close behind. The chamber they'd dropped into was a womb of steel, their footsteps echoing down long black corridors. Their path was lit not by bulbs but by a skin of something like moss clumped on the walls, glowing with a sickly blue phosphorescence. The ceiling rose high overhead until it was lost in the darkness, and Rudd began to forget there was any ceiling at all. He could almost imagine they were walking through a thin mountain pass, the stars obscured by cloud, instead of descending ever further into the bowels of the earth.

And still, no X-rays. Hadn't they heard the explosion? Maybe the intel had been wrong, he thought. Maybe the aliens had cleared out weeks before and found somewhere new, carving a chunk out of the loam beneath Washington or Tokyo...

A door loomed out of the black. It was like the breaching doors aboard the downed UFOs, eight foot tall and reinforced, a small panel in the centre just the size for Rudd's hand.

He pressed against the cold steel. When he closed his eyes he could just make out something on the far side. A skittering, like claws.

“God dammit,” he whispered, motioning for Lewis and Wise to take up positions on either side of the door. Chi was twenty meters back, pressed against the wall of the tunnel with her massive sniper rifle braced across her knees. Captain Young had his rifle up and White's LMG was unslung, his finger resting alongside the trigger.

Rudd's heart hammered inside his chest. He'd killed so many X-rays he'd lost count but there was no way to forget the way Solomon had returned to base, cut through the middle like a bratwurst. There could be anything on the far side of that door. There might be six XCOM soldiers boarding the Skyranger in a few hour's time, or six bodybags being extracted by a backup team.

No way around it. He pressed the button and jumped back, rifle hard up against his shoulder.

The doors slid open soundlessly. Lewis whispered, “Goddamn.”

Rudd counted five shapes on the far side of the door. Two were huge, hulking, muscled, piggy eyes glinting inside bulky armour, plasma weaponry glowing in their fists. Mutons, the beserker bastards that had nearly killed Shephard on that rooftop in Germany. The three behind them...

The spider-things that HQ had dubbed the chryssalids. They advanced in a pack, their huge claw-legs clacking on the steel, bright yellow eyes shining in the dim phosphorescent glow. They raised their claws as one.

Rudd could even have sworn that they chittered.

“Fire, fire, fire!” he shouted, but Lewis was already moving, yanking a grenade from his belt and slipping the pin. Rudd saw him and dropped flat as the grenade bounced through the doorway and between the first Muton's legs, vanishing somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Rudd shielded his eyes.

The crash of the detonation was immense. It ricocheted down the corridor and slammed through Rudd's lungs, knocking him flat against the wall. Shrapnel rang off his armour. The corridor was choked with smoke, the X-rays invisible behind a curtain of debris.

And then, out of the darkness, they came.

“Take them down!” Captain Young called, his rifle already spitting laser-fire. One of the mutons fell with its skull ruptured, bleeding thickly across the floor, but the other was raising its weapon and the three chryssalids were clawing their way down the corridor, dragging their ruined bodies with what was left of their many legs.

A high crack rang out in the corridor, reverberating down the hidden halls; the familiar sound of Chi's sniper rifle as she racked the slide, the ejected cartridge skittering away across the floor. The first of the chryssalids didn't just tumble. It exploded, spraying Rudd with yellow gore as thick as pudding.

Rudd didn't take the moment to wipe the blood from his eyes before he hosed the X-rays. The one living muton duked left, pressing into a hollow along the length of the corridor, and Rudd's wild laser spray took the second chryssalid in the gut. It went down kicking, its long claws carving arcs through the air. The third didn't even pause as its comrade died. It leaped over the bodies of its comrades, claws striking sparks through the patina of blood, and leaped for Captain Rudd's face.

The roar of Lieutenant White's LMG was immense. It was like being picked up and battered by a tornado, the sheer volume deafening, and Rudd fell back with his hands over his ears as the chryssalid erupted in a spray of chitin and blood. The battering of bullets went on until the chryssalid and the muton hiding behind it were nothing more than smears of protein across the metal floor.

Finally, White's belt of ammunition ran out, and the bolt of his LMG locked down. The gunner panted, grinning, his dark curls sodden with alien fluids. “Nothing but a crater,” he whispered.

Rudd stood on shaking legs, sliding a fresh battery into his laser rifle. “You don't always have to live the dream, White. Subtlety is a virtue.”

White cocked his head. “I don't even know the meaning of the word.”

“I believe you.” Rudd motioned the team in close: 'Alpha' Chi reloading her rifle, White already slamming a fresh magazine into his LMG, Young and Wise checking that their own laser-rifles were humming and ready to fire. He could barely believe that nobody had been hurt. Five X-rays down and they hadn't suffered a scratch.

In Rudd's experience, if it seemed too good to be true it probably was.

“Wise, up front,” he whispered. “And for God's sake, be careful.”

#

The air in the tunnels smelled bad. Not just stale, but rotten. Lieutenant Nomi 'Alpha' Chi knew bad smells. She'd toured the X-ray UFOs twice now, dragged leaking corpses out in plastic sacks. The whole base had the same smell. Like it was less a command centre and more a tomb.

Her footsteps echoed off the steel walls as the team moved single-file down the corridors. She was at the back, her rifle at the ready, scope uncapped, ready for her trained eye. The rifle and she were a trained unit. She knew it better than any of the other men and women she fought beside. She understood its bad moods.

So when the tunnels opened up suddenly into a wide, dark hall, Chi knew just where to set up shop. She hugged the back wall, finding an alcove where she could extend her bipod and sweep the length of the cavern, inspecting the steel nooks and the vast arched ribs of the ceiling. Nothing moved in those dark spaces.

Captain Young sidled up beside her. “Anything?”

“Nuttin'.”

“Is that bad?”

“You tell me, sir.” There was a whirring in the distance, a metallic whisper she couldn't quite make out. Machinery? An iris door opening and closing? “Think you'd better find some cover, sir.”

Young snapped around. “Lewis, Wise, defensive line! Rudd, you hear that?”

“Coming in fast!” came the reply. “Artillery?”

“Inside?”

“I don't know! You tell me-”

Even as the two Captains squabbled, Nomi Chi knew what was going down. Her eye was glued to the scope, and so she was the first to see the disc floating through the hallway at the far end of the chamber. It was twice as wide as a satellite dish and near a foot thick, and it floated on what looked like a bed of steam. Superheated air spilled from vents on its underside, somehow strong enough to keep what looked like a tonne of steel wobbling through the air. Or maybe that was just the backwash of hidden plasma jets, or a magic spell cast by an alien wizard. Chi didn't give a shit. All she needed was the order to fire.

“Sir!” she called.

“Chi?”

“Target four hundred yards ahead!”

Young squinted. “Hostile?”

“No idea! Inorganic, possible drone.”

“Shoot the asshole, just to make sure.”

“You're the boss,” Chi grunted, and lined up her shot. The disc wasn't advancing, wasn't making any aggressive moves – simply hanging in the air, bobbing like it was suspended on string.

Better safe than sorry, Chi thought, and fired.

The boom echoed off the walls. The disc jumped like it'd been bitten, sparks spraying against the ceiling. Perfect shot, but it hadn't even left a dent.

Chi was still racking the slide when the disc made a sound like a low-budget Transformers toy. The disc turned slowly, seams opening in is previously seamless flanks.

“Uh, Captain-”

The disc unfolded. One moment it was floating peacefully, and the next moment it had split down the middle to reveal dark electronic guts. Slim black barrels slid out from nested cavities, already glowing with plasma.

And behind the disc, marching through the same door, were the backup. Two mutons, the hulking bastards raising their rifles to bear, and behind them the spidery silhouettes of chryssalids, more limbs rising and falling than Chi could count.

“Fuck me blind,” Chi whispered, and pulled the trigger.

TO BE CONTINUED

- - -

Author's Note: Phew! Sorry about the massive wait in between installments of The B-Team. In short, life got in the way... specifically, writing and publishing Olesia Anderson 5! But I have some free time now, so I'll be polishing off Chapter 7 some time this or next week.

If you enjoy stories with explosions and pulpy action, why not give my Olesia Anderson series a go? The latest entry, Burning Bridges, is pretty much a stand-alone story! For $2.99 you get 35,000 words of espionage, sex, gunfights, double-crosses and beautiful scenery. Or, if you're the sort of reader who likes to try before you buy, why not read Dirty Deals? It's the first Olesia Anderson thriller, and is available as a free download in Kindle and Epub formats!

Read on to Chapter 7, Part 2 of XCOM: The B-Team!

That's me. I jumped into a discussion for which I wasn't culturally prepared, and I came equipped with an aggressive, pigheaded attitude. I'm amazed that responses to my post didn't rip the shit out of me to a greater degree.

I'm going to step away now before I make an even bigger arse of myself and get back to something I actually have some experience with - writing about magic and junk. Apologies to anyone who I offended.

The list (and obviously, if you haven't played Bioshock Infinite and don't want things spoiled for you, just TURN AWAY NOW)

racial oppression is a huge part of the game, but is still considered secondary, and used mainly to further the white cis-male main character’s personality development.

It fails utterly as a social commentary because the issues of why the racial apartheid in columbia is wrong is never addressed.

It’s all basically white tears about how “fighting violence with violence is bad” coming from white people about why there shouldn’t ever be any kind of violent uprising, regardless of what kind of violence is used to actually oppress PoC in the context of the game.

Daisy Fitzroy, is a black WoC who we’re apparently supposed to think is “equally as bad” as Comstock, the leader of this racist ass society, (Regardless of the fact that white people had been stepping all over, and murdering the PoC in columbia) because she leads a violent uprising against the white bourgeoisie.

You have to watch PoC be harmed and murdered in order to demonstrate fucking game mechanics.

Later in the game, you are forced to kill literally hundreds of PoC because they belong to the Vox Popli, which is Daisy’s revolutionary army

Again it’s legit just white tears about why violence is bad, but no commentary on why them perpetuating centuries long violence against PoC was bad. It’s like “waaaaanh this is what will happen if u choose ~violence~ white genocide and oppression” and it just shows a total lack of understanding of oppressor vs. oppressed dynamics

Okay, lets address these issues one at a time. Firstly, yes, racism and bigotry are fundamental to the world of Bioshock Infinite. The game is set in 1912, in a floating city that exists as a symbol of American exceptionalism. The racial oppression that exists throughout the city is a reflection of the real-world oppression taking place in the world below. Racism is your introduction to Columbia and is ever-present throughout the journey, beginning with the public shaming and abuse of a mixed-race couple, later evoked subtly when you step into a "Irish and Coloured's Only" restroom and the black man cleaning inside begs you to leave so trouble doesn't fall on his head, referenced when the Irish workers you meet discussing their second-class treatment in the engine rooms, and again evoked in the way the industrialist Fink oppresses his workers with 'tough love', giving patronising speeches about how it's necessary for his employees to work 80 hour weeks lest they instantly fall into lives of alcoholism and violence as soon as they have any leisure time. Racism in Columbia is explored along a long scale, beginning with almost cartoonish hatred for people of colour and continuing to those who genuinely believe that their oppression is a form of kindness.

What exactly was the Great Emancipator emancipating the Negro from? From his daily bread. From the nobility of honest work. From wealthy patrons who sponsored them from cradle to grave. From clothing and shelter. And what have they done with their freedom? Why, go to Finkton, and you shall find out. No animal is born free, except the white man. And it is our burden to care for the rest of creation. - Zachary Comstock

Seeing as this oppression sparks a war that forms the centrepoint of the game up until the final two chapters, I have no idea how anyone could consider it a secondary theme. It is always as present and as important as the other primary themes: that violence forms an unbroken circle, and whether redemption is ever possible for truly evil men.

As for whether the game "fails utterly as a social commentary because the issues of why the racial apartheid in columbia is wrong is never addressed", I don't know how to answer. I didn't realise that violence against minorities and the stoning of mixed-race couples needed to be accompanied by a banner screaming RACISM IS WRONG. These events are always heinous and unforgivable in the context of the game. Unless the author was expecting a speech outlining the history of racial oppression? The actions of the players in the game, the environment and your own characters actions speak for themselves.

Daisy Fitzroy, is a black WoC who we’re apparently supposed to think is “equally as bad” as Comstock, the leader of this racist ass society, (Regardless of the fact that white people had been stepping all over, and murdering the PoC in columbia) because she leads a violent uprising against the white bourgeoisie.

That's an outright lie. The main character aids Daisy Fitzroy and fights alongside her revolution up until the point where she attempts to murder a child purely because his parents were of the white upper class. We later witness the Vox, Daisy's revolutionary army, lining up and gunning down blindfolded civilians. Again, for those that didn't hear it - your character supports and assists in social revolution and the uprooting of a white bourgeoisie. He does not support the slaughter of children.

You have to watch PoC be harmed and murdered in order to demonstrate fucking game mechanics.

You have to watch people of ALL colours be harmed and murdered in order to demonstrate game mechanics. The very first scene involving such racial oppression features a white man and black woman being lined up for stoning, side by side.

Later in the game, you are forced to kill literally hundreds of PoC because they belong to the Vox Popli, which is Daisy’s revolutionary army

Again I point out that you were working alongside the Vox Populi until the point where their leader tried to shoot a child in the head, and you kill her in order to save the aforementioned child. After that, they try to kill you, at the same time as Comstock's army of all-white Americans are trying to kill you. You're a man caught between two wars, fighting people of colour and people not of colour in roughly equal proportions. It's dishonest to suggest that this is some sort of racial imbalance. If you want to complain about white men gunning down people of colour without context or racial sensitivity, you're welcome to attack Borderlands.

Again it’s legit just white tears about why violence is bad, but no commentary on why them perpetuating centuries long violence against PoC was bad. It’s like “waaaaanh this is what will happen if u choose ~violence~ white genocide and oppression” and it just shows a total lack of understanding of oppressor vs. oppressed dynamics

To which I quote:

I told you, Comstock-- you sell 'em paradise, and the customers expect cherubs for every chore! No menials in God's kingdom! Well, I've a man in Georgia who'll lease us as many Negro convicts as you can board! Why, you can say they're simple souls, in penance for rising above their station. Whatever eases your conscience, I suppose. - Jeremiah Fink

To tax the black more than the white, is that not cruel? To forbid the mixing of the races, is that not cruel? To give the vote to the white man, and deny it to the yellow, the black, the red -- is that not cruel? Hm. But is it not cruel to banish your children from a perfect garden? Or drown your flock under an ocean of water? Cruelty can be instructive, and what is Columbia, if not the schoolhouse of the Lord? - Zachary Comstock

Yes, the ultimate message of Bioshock Infinite (putting aside the quantum entanglement plotlines) is that violence begets violence begets violence. Your character is a murderer of women and children, caught in the middle of a war between white industrialists who exploit and kill people of colour, and a young black woman who is prepared to murder children in order to achieve social revolution. There are no heroes. Every major player in this story is a terrible human being. But that doesn't make the ACRES of commentary on the oppression and violence inherent in turn-of-the-century US society any less relevant. Would the game - and the player - have benefited if the focus had turned entirely towards racial oppression? Or does it function so well precisely because it's an omnipresent theme, a constant undercurrent that never bludgeons the player with an outright RACISM IS BAD message? According to Google, the terms 'Boxer Rebellion', 'Wounded Knee' and 'Pinkerton' have all been trending lately, almost certainly as a direct result of Bioshock Infinite providing players with enough information to give context, but not so much that it becomes a chore for the player. Isn't that exactly what games should do? Incite curiosity without preaching a message?

Perhaps, on that point, Infinite's big sin is hammering home the 'violence begets violence' theme that seems to diminish Daisy's efforts to achieve social equality. If that theme had been a little more subtle, would we be having this conversation? Are these complaints really about a lack of commentary on racial inequality, or just a lack of narrative balance?

I don't really know, but I do know that it'd be a damn shame for anyone to miss out on a rich gaming experience because of preconceived notions about Infinite functioning as a racist apologist text.

Then you should buy Hero of the Grey Area by SGX, a $5 digital album that I bought immediately upon listening to the demo track A Meal Fit For A Whale. It's everything I look for in my electronica - complex, layered melodies, a subtle breakbeat to drive it all forward, and a sense of place that makes me feel like I'm being taken on an adventure while I listen. It's flippin' great.

Also, you can stream the whole thing for free before you purchase, so why the hell not?

FROM THE SITE:

This is the most focused, cohesive album by SGX focusing on instrumental pieces. SGX intersperses electro, breakbeat, and industrial beats between lush orchestrations, growling synth basses, and transporting soundscapes. "Hero" is at the same time electronic and synthetic plus natural and human.

Unlike his previous albums such as Chroma and Synesthetic which feature a mixture of not only genres, but tones, Hero of the Grey Area exudes a more homogeneous tone and feeling while still exploring fusing ideas from many genres. This is music for listening and sometimes takes its time exploring an idea in the vein of BT's "This Binary Universe."

Hero of the Grey Area features A Meal for a Whale - a track made with only a software sequencer/sampler, a piano, and the audio toy/game Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS as sound sources. SGX effects, samples, records, and manipulates his way through this at once lo-fi and lush recording creating tides of relaxed beauty and exuberance.

So, yeah. $5 for a quality album of dreamlike indie electronica. Give it a go.

Dirty Deals: Free Kindle Edition
Dirty Deals: Free Epub Edition

Olesia Anderson - sharpshooter, quick-talker, and corporate spy-for-hire - has been given a second chance by her shadowy employers, the Blackrock Association. A Lockheed engineer has stolen the schematics for a new missile defence system, and Lockheed wants that data back... along with whoever he was planning to sell to.

It's supposed to be an easy job - get in, shake down the engineer, get out. But with a gorgeous foreign agent and a gang of uzi-toting teenage thugs thrown into the mix, Olesia will have a hard time keeping her head on her shoulders...

Dirty Deals is 24,000 words long - a quick, pulpy, action-packed read - and is absolutely 18+ only!

This isn't a slimmed-down preview edition, or some hack-job where I've inserted an ad at the beginning of every chapter. It's the same story that I sell on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with the addition of a couple paragraphs at the very end of the book where I ask very nicely for reviews (and, hopefully, further sales. Duh).

I hope that this brings a whole new world of readers to the Olesia Anderson series, for good or bad. If you do take the time to read Dirty Deals, I thank you in advance, and hope you enjoy your time with it as much as I've enjoyed writing these adventures.

Dirty Deals: Free Kindle Edition
Dirty Deals: Free Epub Edition

Olesia Anderson, corporate spy-for-hire, is headed to Venice for what's supposed to be a low-key fraud investigation job. Step 1: steal financial data from Aureo Real Estate. Step 2: deliver it to the client. Step 3: enjoy some private time with a pair of gorgeous Italian twins, eat gelato and get a tan, all paid for by Olesia's mysterious employers, the Blackrock Association.

But Olesia's only been in town a day when she uncovers a multi-million Euro insurance scam built upon a foundation of heroin and Semtex. Somebody has a lot of money invested in Venice... enough that they'd be willing to kill to protect it.

The bodies are piling up fast, and the simple job has soon become a desperate struggle to survive in a city of secrets. Olesia will be lucky to get out with her hide intact... if she gets out at all.

If you want gunfights and saucy nights, you know where to find them! Burning Bridges is available now on Kindle, Nook and coming soon to Kobo and iBooks.

And remember, if you don't want to miss a single new release from either Christopher Ruz or D. D. Marks, sign up for my mailing list!. No blogspam, no sales pitches, just info on new releases and giveaways.

Give me a neck so I may strange it.

On the plus side, I now have Olesia #5 properly formatted and ready for launch. But even so... RARGH.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4, part 1
Chapter 4, part 2
Chapter 5

- - -

Chapter 6: Operation Swift Sword

Commander Pournelle woke and stared at the blank concrete ceiling of his private quarters. For the first time in weeks he didn't feel the need to jump out of bed, pull on his uniform and sprint upstairs to mission control. For the first time in weeks, he felt rested.

Five soldiers went out on Operation Enduring Mother. Five came back, battered and bleeding but dragging with them two live specimens. Vahlen had been working the big bastards over in her chamber beneath the base for forty-eight hours. The reports were promising. Vahlen hadn't figured out how to talk to the things yet, but she'd learned a lot about what made them squeal. She'd dubbed them Mutons, based on how their organics had been artificially fused to their armour. It was, Pournelle thought, as good a name as any.

No UFOs had been sighted in two days. Sergeant Lewis was looking more and more like top leadership material, and he shrugged off burn wounds and shrapnel blasts like he was cast from iron. And Rudd was shaping up as a fine combat medic as well – his team of Solomon, Bedford, Sullivan and Young were shaping up to be a fine, cohesive unit.

It seemed as if great clouds were lifting from the horizon. God, if everything went this well, they might even win the war. Six months ago such a thought had seemed an impossibility, but now...

The phone by his bed rang, vibrating on the hook. Pournelle sighed, dug a lump of wax from his ear, and answered. “This is the Commander.”

“Sir!” Panic on the far end of the line. One of the techs up in mission control. “We've just had contact from Lagos. X-rays on the ground, sir!”

Pournelle straightened, snatching for his glasses. “What, another abduction?”

“No sir! This is an attack!”

“What?”

“It's a slaughterhouse, sir! Hundreds of civilian and military dead! They're massing at the Dodan Barracks. The city's military force is being decimated!”

Pournelle squeezed the receiver so tight he felt the plastic bending. What Nigeria couldn't do would fall to XCOM, as always. But Sergeant 'Vandal' Shephard and Sergeant 'Devil-Dog' Lewis were his two most experienced soldiers, and both were bed-ridden. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Huang seemed to be developing an unhealthy attachment to assault-specialist Shephard – unhealthy because he didn't need the man flaking out when one of his squadmates was under fire. Huang had been spending altogether too much time in the infirmary over the past two days, which made him a liability.

Which meant that Rudd and his crew were the front line.

“Call the barracks,” Pournelle barked. “I want Rudd, Bedford, Solomon.” He paused. Heavy artillery would be necessary. “Richardson too. And is Lewis out of bed yet?”

There was a pause as the man on the other end contacted the infirmary. “Patched up as of this morning.”

“No time for R&R. Get him loaded and ready. Briefing in five.”

#

Assault Specialist Jake Solomon could barely bring himself to look out the Skyranger windows as they descended into Lagos. It was the fires that terrified him the most, the flares of red in the darkness. From half a mile up it looked as if the entire city was bathed in flame, a miniature apocalypse centered in Nigeria. The knowledge that every one of those points of flame was a burning car, or even a dying man, their clothes and hair fuelling the fire.

He couldn't hear the screams, but he could imagine them well enough. It was a holocaust, and they were descending into it at two hundred miles an hour.

“Hey. Specialist.”

Solomon looked up into 'Santa' Rudd's eyes. “Sir?”

“Chin up, soldier. This is just another job.” But even Santa looked rattled. He was gripping his laser rifle so tight that Solomon thought it might bend in his hands. “This is a rescue mission. We collect civvies and get the fuck out. No big deal. God, it's hot in here. Bedford, you got any gum?”

Bedford handed a stick across wordlessly. The Skyranger bounced as it hit an air pocket, and Solomon swallowed bile. “Do we know how many civilians are in the drop zone?”

“As many as three hundred. Maybe none.”

None. Code for, everyone dead. It wasn't something Solomon wanted to think about. All the months he'd spent developing XCOM's battlefield software had forced him to think of soldiers and civilians alike as numbers, blips of light on a screen. He'd managed that. That had somehow been okay. That was war. But civilians? They could never just be dots.

“Look at me, Specialist!” Rudd punched Solomon in the shoulder hard enough to sting. “You're gonna get down there and do what you were trained to do, understand? No bullshit, no theatrics. Deal?”

“Sir!”

“Awesome.” Rudd rolled his gum from one side of his mouth to the other. “Fuckin' awesome.”

- - -

Solomon could feel the heat before he even stepped off the back tray.

They'd come down just inside the walls of the Dodan Barracks, the central military outpost in Lagos. The light of the flames was so intense that Solomon could barely see what he was running into, but incurring the wrath of Sergeant 'Santa' Rudd was more terrifying than staying on board. He sprinted blind into the smoke, Lewis and Bedford thundering behind him, until he came up against a tall brick wall. There, he crouched low and took stock.

The base was in ruins. Dodan was a small outpost, a barracks with a tank and jeep yard attached, but those tanks were now burning in neat rows, their treads melting into the dirt. The jeeps were overturned, blasted black. The horizon was strangled by smoke.

Worst of all were the screams. They rose above the crackle of flames, wavering, desperate. Solomon didn't understand the language but he didn't need to know those people were in pain. Somewhere amidst the tangled wreckage of cars and corpses were people that needed help.

Blips, he reminded himself. If he thought of them as anything else it'd drive him mad.

Rudd led them into the flames, the heat strong enough to blister, directing them to cover behind a head-high wall of sandbags. “Bedford, get your rifle deployed. I want you in solid, covering the north approach. Lewis, you see the second tank? Get up by the tread and watch the crates. Solomon... shit, shit, incoming!”

Solomon spun, laser rifle up hard against his shoulder. Floaters, the mutant half-steel sons of bitches he'd gunned down in Russia. First two, then two more, moving in formation above the flames, plasma rifles venting energy in their hands.

“Down, down, down!” Rudd was the first to fire, and Solomon joined him, the sizzle of their rifles louder than the crackle of flames. One of the floaters tumbled from the sky, screaming thinly as it impacted and exploded across the parade ground, but the other three slipped behind the line of burning tanks, vanishing into the shadows.

Solomon panted. His sinuses were full of ozone, the discharge of his laser rifle coiling in his nostrils. Rudd slapped him on the shoulder. “Good shot. We need a defensive perimeter, before those fuckers surround us. You got the arc thrower charged?”

Solomon nodded, his mouth dry. He'd drawn the unlucky straw in the Skyranger, being handed the taser in lieu of something useful, like a grenade.

“Good. Doctor Vahlen wants one alive. Again.” Rudd's lips drew back over his lips in a rictus grin. “God damn it. Okay. Bedford, cover! Lewis, Richardson, on me!”

There was no way to say no, and Solomon found his legs moving automatically, propelled by the chain of command, as they slipped across from the wall of sandbags to the steel shipping containers facing the line of tanks. Solomon could hear the floaters but couldn't see them. Their metallic roars echoed in the night air.

“Stay low,” Rudd whispered. “Lewis, up front. They-”

The three floaters rose above the tanks, blue flames jutting from their undercarriages as they shot into the air, propelled by plasma. The bright lance of Bedford's sniper rifle cut across the sky, missing the pack by inches. Solomon fired instinctively, Richardson's LMG chattering beside him, their combined gunfire deafening.

Two of the floaters spun, collided, and fell to earth, spitting blood and electricity. The third ducked low, slipping behind the line of tanks. “Go, go!” Rudd called. “Chase that fucker down!”

Solomon ran, flanking the parked tanks, his rifle up hard against his shoulder. Rudd was by his side, pistol in hand, and as they rounded the final tank they found the last floater hovering a foot above the ground, hiding behind a stack of wooden shipping crates.

When it came to swinging a pistol, Rudd was fast and true. He aimed and plugged the floater through the chest three times, sending it crashing to the ground. “Stun the fucker!” he called, and Solomon jammed the arc thrower into the monster's chest.

Electricity leaped from his hand to the beast, and it fell in the dirt, flailing and throwing up dust. Solomon jumped back, keeping his distance as the creature finally settled. It was bleeding bad, yellow blood pumping sluggishly from gaping wounds. “You, uh, you beat it up pretty bad, Sarge.”

Rudd grinned. “It'll live long enough for Vahlen to poke at it.” He sauntered back towards where Bedford had set up his sniper rifle. “Okay, that's the frontal assault, but there'll be more in the wings. Lewis, I want you up front, full loaded. Richardson, you see that garage? Find a way up on that roof. Bedford, you ranged in? I-”

The Sergeant's shouting had all faded into the distance for Solomon. Something had caught his eye on the far side of the compound, beyond the flames and the upturned jeeps and corpses lying blackened in the mud.

There was a row of shipping containers against the furthest wall, stacked two-high, lined up neatly. Some were seared black by plasma blasts, others half melted by the flames, slumping into the mud like candlewax.

In the darkness, beyond the shipping containers, yellow eyes gleamed.

Every X-ray Solomon had seen, whether in the flesh or on shaky chest-cam footage, had been monstrous. The spindle-bodied sectoids, the thin men with their skin-suits and thin smiles, the mutons roaring in their containment cages deep below XCOM Headquarters... Each new alien was a new, terrible assembly of bone and steel, and Solomon had thought he was numb to the horrors that the invasion could throw at him.

He was wrong.

The thing that stalked out of the black was eight feet tall, multilegged, claws scraping on the concrete. At first he thought it was a spider grown impossibly huge, some mutant tarantula emerging from its web, but then he saw the skinny torso emerging from the centre of all those multi-jointed legs, the grasping arms, the two eyes shining with sickly intelligence.

“Jesus,” Solomon whispered, as a second set of eyes appeared behind the first, blinking lazily, reflecting flames. The two spider-creatures advanced, claws ringing like steel on the concrete. “Jesus Christ.”

The creatures pounced.

Solomon turned and ran, rifle clutched against his chest, lungs pounding, vision blurred by panic. Lewis and Rudd were waiting behind the crates, and their eyes widened as they saw his terror. “Shoot!” he screamed. The crates were only a few feet away, close enough to touch. The clatter of claws rang in his ears. “Shoot them!”
Laser light ripped across the tank yard. One of the creatures hissed, a sound like oil and water crackling on a stovetop, but the other was close, so close he could feel its foetid breath on the back of his neck.

He spun, raising his rifle, finger on the trigger. The creature loomed over him, blocking out the stars, carapace gleaming.

The claws lifted and fell, so fast they were a blur, and Solomon fell in two neat pieces.

#

Sniper Specialist Paul Bedford was close enough to Solomon that the squaddie's blood splashed across his boots when the monster cut him down. He staggered back, finger on the trigger of his laser rifle, unable to speak, unable to scream. His entire world was the blackness of its chitinous armour, the claws descending, gore dripping thickly from the blades.

Then a voice brought him back. “Bedford, get the fuck down!”

A small shape arced past his head, bouncing on the wooden crates. A grenade. Instinct took over and Bedford threw himself to the floor, just as the grenade detonated. The explosion was a hammer in the guts, smashing the air from his lungs. His ears were filled with a dog-whistle tone.

“Back, back!” That was Sergeant Rudd, his hand on Bedford's shoulder, dragging him away from the line of jeeps. The vehicles were on fire, he realised, great gouts of flame boiling from below the undercarriage. What the X-rays had been unable to do, the grenade had done for them. They were about to blow.

The two creatures were still advancing, but they limped now, dragging their segmented limbs. Thick yellow blood puddled beneath them with every step, but their claws were still long and vicious.

The first of the monsters crouched, tensed, and leaped.

Sergeant Rudd's hand left Bedford's shoulder long enough for him to aim and fire. The laser sliced the creature from the air, leaving it steaming in the dirt. “Get the fuck up!” he said, and Bedford couldn't help but obey.

The second monster jumped too fast for Bedford to track. It skittered back into the shadows of the shipping crates, leaving a trail of sizzling ichor. The clicking of claws echoed off the steel, and then all was silent.

Bedford gripped his rifle tight, waiting for his heart to slow. “What the fuck was that?”

Rudd wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You think I know?”

“God, it just-” The jeep nearest Bedford exploded as the fuel line caught. Glass shards sheeted across the muck. “Is Solomon-”

Squaddie Richardson had already crossed to where Solomon fell. His face was ashen white. “He's, uh-”

“I know.” Bedford's hands had stopped shaking. He swept his rifle across the shipping crates, watching through the scope for any signs of life. There were none. Solomon's blood was drying on his kneepads, and that fact made him want to scream. He'd been joking with the man less than an hour before as they swept south over Lagos, and now he was in two pieces.

It didn't seem possible. It didn't seem fair. Then again, what did fair have to do with war?

Rudd waved towards the shipping containers. “Bedford, keep an overwatch. Richardson, Devil Dog, on me.” The Sergeant advanced, rifle up, and although he looked grim Bedford could see his shoulder shaking. “You see anything move, you blow it away.”

“Sir.” Bedford racked a new battery into his laser rifle and unfolded his bipod, propping his rifle up on the crates where Solomon had died. Rudd's grenade had done terrible things to the Squaddie's corpse, and the floater he'd stunned with the arc thrower had taken shrapnel as well. Their live specimen was dead. Solomon had exposed himself for nothing.

It made Bedford's trigger finger itchy. “Come on, you fuckers,” he whispered, sweeping his rifle back and forth across the crates, watching through the night-vision scope as Rudd and his team-mates advanced. “Come on, stick your dicks out, come on-”

A shadow unfolded behind the steel. The monster was back.

Bedford fired, his laser searing across the parade-ground. His shot was precise, and the creature faltered, one of its many terrible legs tumbling into the dirt. But it was still upright, still moving, and there was something behind it, lurching out of the dark. Something upright, two legged, human, ragged and burned black by the fires, moaning through a mouth full of broken teeth.

“Jesus Christ,” Bedford whispered. All his childhood nightmares had come to life.

The aliens were fielding zombies.

#

Squaddie Michael Richardson was five paces behind Rudd when the Sergeant fell back, scrambling for cover behind one of the shipping containers. He caught a glimpse of a shambling figure, a man dragging his way out of the dark, and then Rudd's hand caught his wrist and hauled him to safety. “You see that?” the Sergeant hissed.

Richardson wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Looked like a civvie to me.”

“That's no civilian. That guy was...” Santa shuddered. “Okay. Lewis, you're with me. Let's blow this thing away. Richardson, cover. On two-”

They rounded the shipping container, and Richardson found himself face to face with the walking dead.

He couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was a monster ripped from a cheap horror B-movie, a man staggering from the flames, his eyes rolled back in his skull and his chest soaked with gore. Richardson might still have mistaken him for a civvie, if not for the massive wound in his neck - he could see right through to the bone. Something had nearly sliced the man's head off, and he was still walking, still biting at the air.

A zombie. A real life walking zombie.

Then came the sizzle of gunfire as Bedford, Lewis and the Sergeant opened up simultaneously. Three lines of light arced across the compound, and the zombie thing fell apart, still groaning and twitching, carving snow angels in the dirt. Richardson gaped as the thing whistled out the last of its air and, mercifully, died.

Devil-Dog Lewis kicked the thing in the guts. It twitched, but didn't get back up. “You think that came down from the ship?”

“Check the uniform,” Richardson said. The zombie was dressed in Nigerian camo, two gold pips on his shoulder. “They're turning soldiers into... shit, Sarge! That isn't right!”

“Focus, Specialist! Still at least one of them out there, and-” Rudd swung around. “Up high, up high!”

Richardson looked up in time to see the spider-thing silhouetted against the night sky. It was scuttling along the lip of the shipping container, dragging its severed limb along the steel, but despite its injury the creature's claws still looked sharp enough to shear through bone.

Panic rose up like glue in his throat as it leaped, arcing high overhead. Rudd and Lewis fired, but too slow, too late, their lasers slicing harmlessly across the night sky. Richardson watched it soar. He could already see where it was going to land.

His finger was on the trigger. He was ready.

The spider thing hit the dirt less than a yard away, mud splashing across its carapace. Firelight slid across its armoured bulk. It turned to Richardson with its jaw hanging low, revealing rows of needle teeth.

He hosed the bastard, not letting go of the trigger until his LMG was dry.

#

They swept the rest of the base but the only things left alive in the maelstrom were two guard dogs driven mad by the heat. Richardson let them out and led them to a busted water main, where they drank gratefully before loping away into the night.

Santa fetched the body bags from the Skyranger. It took two trips to get Solomon inside.

It was a smooth ride back to HQ, but Richardson's stomach kept turning regardless. This was the second time he'd had to sit next to a body in the Skyranger, and the knowledge that Solomon was so close, still there in the flesh but not breathing, not thinking, reduced to meat and bone, made him sick.

He drank water until the shakes stopped, then closed his eyes and willed the flight to go faster.

He was asleep when they bumped down in XCOM HQ, but the jolt brought him back to attention. The tray eased down, and the first thing Richardson saw beyond the glare of the landing bay lights was Commander Pournelle himself, standing at attention.

“Jesus,” Bedford whispered. “The Commander-”

“Keep it in your pants,” Sergeant Rudd said. He stood slowly, rifle resting on his shoulder. “Solomon goes first.”

Richardson stood stiffly, his LMG by his side, bent beneath the Skyranger's low ceiling, as the medical technicians marched in and collected the body bags. This time, at least, Rudd had gotten the zips done up securely. There was no blood on the floor of the Skyranger for a change.

Once the bags were gone, Pournelle crooked one finger towards Sergeant Rudd. “Debrief. Now.”

Lewis stood tall by Rudd's side. “Santa, you need any-”

“You too, Lewis. Bedford, get your ass down to the range. I was watching your chestcam. That shit will not pass, soldier.”

Bedford's jaw jutted. “Sir!”

Richardson trembled. He'd gunned floaters out of the sky and watched some nightmare spider-thing cut one of his fellow soldiers in half, but Pournelle's sunken eyes and razor-thin scowl was more terrifying than either. So when Pournelle's eyes fell on him his breath seized in his chest.

“Corporal Richardson,” Pournelle said.

“Uh, Squaddie Richardson, Sir-”

“What did I say, Corporal? Did I say Squaddie? Am I going deaf in my old age? Clean your weapon and return to the bunks, Corporal!”

Richardson nodded, snatching his LMG from the rack and snapping off a quick salute. He met Sergeant Santa's eyes as he passed, and a look of sympathy passed between them. Then he sprinted past, into the corridors, far beyond Pournelle's judging gaze.

Half an hour later he stepped out of the elevator and into the barracks. He'd heard no announcements while cleaning and storing his LMG, which meant that Solomon's death was still hush-hush. Soon, all the troops would be summoned up to the briefing room. The mission would be summarised in a few sentences. Solomon's death and the blame for it would be passed over in moments. The rest would be a eulogy, just like that read out for Nyssa Zelman and Lucien Hickman. All of Solomon's mistakes wiped clean. Turned into a hero post-mortem.

Which, Richardson thought, he was. But Pournelle's speeches made the XCOM dead into fake heroes. TV heroes. Not real people, scared people, who went down screaming.

He didn't like Pournelle very much.

He passed the pool tables and the drinks machine. The riot of colours behind the glass was just a smear. He punched a dollar into the machine and bought a Twix. It tasted like ash.

He spat the chocolate down the sink and went into the bunkhouse.

Corporal Wendy Gollnick was in her bunk, legs crossed, a book open in her lap. She looked up as Richardson walked in. “Hey! Easy op? No scrapes?”

Richardson nodded numbly. He could just make out the cover of her book – an X-Men hardcover collection. Something twitched in her lap, and long white ears poked out from above the lip of the book. “How's Ripley?”

Gollnick set her comic down, revealing the white rabbit curled up in her lap. “She needs some sun. The UV lamps aren't enough, I think. But they don't mind me stealing salad from the mess, so she's eating all her greens.”

Richardson couldn't help but grin. “How'd you get the Commander's approval?”

“I just asked nicely! Pournelle's a nice guy.”

“If you get him on a good day.”

“I guess.” Gollnick flipped a few pages, met Richardson's eyes, and snapped the comic closed. “Where're the others?”

Richardson swallowed. “They're... debriefing.”

“Oh God. Who-”

“Solomon.”

Gollnick nodded slowly. “Was it... bad?”

“The worst.”

Gollnick stroked Ripley almost mechanically. “I'm...”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“They say they're following a signal from the UFOs. Might lead us to their base.” Gollnick ducked her head. “It'd be nice to end all of this.”

“Yeah. If that is the end.”

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Gollnick didn't meet Richardson's eyes. The rabbit in her lap combed its ears.

It didn't seem like there was anything else to say.

- - -

Author's Note: SOLOMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

What a damned tragedy. Jake Solomon cut down in his prime, and for what? The captured floater was killed by the grenade blast. Another poor squaddie thrown into the meat grinder.

It ain't fair, bro. It ain't fair.

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