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==Humans (''Alien Crossfire'')== === Interlude: Burning Sky === It has been a rough $NUM1 years on Planet, eking out an existence on the strange surface of this alien world. $BASENAME2 had established itself as your command center, and you are gradually reaching out to the other faction leaders, trying to restore balance to the remnants of a tattered humanity. On this day, as you take a routine inspection tour of your base defenses, your rebreather begins to rattle in your mouth. Clouds suddenly boil up from the horizon as two bright lights flash in the sky high above you and then expand out in waves of purple fire. "$TITLE0!" your lieutenant chokes out, grabbing your shoulder. You forgive the impropriety. She seems ready to push you to the ground, but you tense against her, trying to see through the chaos tearing the sky apart. Besides, there is nowhere to hide. The first wave of purple fire washes across the sky and buffets you with a strange, cold wind, then the second one chills you deep to the bones. You close your eyes, feeling as if your body has been shaken to its core. Finally a calm descends. Your lieutenant is staring at her hands, which still tremble. You quickly pull out a pair of binocs and look through them, searching the sky. "What are you looking for?" she asks. "That," you finally say, and start to hand the binocs to her. But as you look she is already staring at the sky, where two streaks of light approach the new world. The streaks dance and twist around each other as they grow larger in the sky. "New arrivals," you say. "And it doesn't appear that they like each other." === Interlude: The Meeting === You tap through the report from some perimeter scouts, perturbed. It was the first known contact with the offworlders, and it did not go well. Of course, you are offworlders as well, and perhaps these...things...are the real natives, returning home. A quicklink to the visual data feed from the advance rover catches your attention. The image blooms on the screen in full color...the rover pilot, steering across Planet's surface and speaking sideways into the feed. "We're doing a routine patrol of the border, now...just looking for signs of whatever's out here. These are the times that..." He breaks off and you find yourself clutching the thin metal surface of your desk, anticipating. "Woah," comes the choked interjection from the pilot. The camera swivels to the outside. "Tracking one, make that two unknowns." Outside the rover an alien lurches, hunched beneath a load on its back. The alien's strange gray-green carapace is outfitted with strange silver plating that looks like armor. You take the controls of the camera and zoom in, taking in that inverted pyramid of a face, those eyes set so deep in the folds of the skull. They look sinister, but you never know. Maybe their faces are just...stuck that way. You zoom back and take a look at the alien's burden. It is another alien, slumped over the carrier's body. The pilot throws open the rover hatch and the entire cockpit fills with a strange wail that ebbs and flows. The pilot curses and hesitates at the door. "Worm's Breath, I can feel that...through my chest, in my head..." You flip down the volume. The sound vibrates through the rover. The alien turns slowly, and you see that the one it carries has scars on its face, as if eaten away by a mindworm attack. "Greetings," says the rover pilot, but the alien just looks at him. "Who are you?" the guard talks again, and now you hear it...his own voice returning, as if echoed from the alien, but with a strange warble that seems like a part of the wailing. "Can you understand?" and those words come back as well. The pilot shakes his head, helpless. Finally, the alien turns away. === Interlude: Waiting === "$TITLE0 $NAME1, we are approaching the alien unit." You watch the video feed as your people approach the alien craft. You can feel your heart pounding--will your people be able to alter the resonance, using the crude tools you've developed, and communicate with the aliens? Your craft moves closer. The alien vessel, blank and sinister, waits. "They are just sitting there, doing nothing, sir. Shall we move clo..." A low hum begins emanating from the alien craft. Even over the link, you can feel it vibrating your teeth. "What's happening there?" "Nothing so far, $TITLE0. It sounds like an engine, but they're not moving. I'm not sure if we should go closer. They do have weapons, we think." "Alter that. Alter the sound, the way the betrayer taught us. Say 'GREETING.'" "You mean alter the engine sound? Talk to the vehicle?" "They're in there," you say. You look at the video feed, at the impassive silver-green panels of the alien craft. "They're listening." === Interlude: Invasion! === The line of aliens marching into $BASENAME5 look like ants, but ants that advance with malice, ready to consume whatever gets in their way. You watch them cut through $BASENAME5's defenses, and take heart at the specks of humanity fleeing in all directions...refugees that might survive this onslaught. You watch for a moment and then continue punching through the archival tapes, the final transmissions from your loyal lieutenants at $BASENAME5. At least what were your loyal lieutenants. The final transmission from $BASENAME5 shows the full story...humans rounded up and pounded to the ground with the strange alien resonance attacks. Visions of the alien advance guard, their weird, tall forms seeming to push through the very structure of the walls in the base. The humans dying in the hallways, clutching their faces, their heads, their bellies. And then that one quick flash, from those three visiting holo-journalists that ran down the wrong hall with their handheld camera. You review the transmission again, almost against your will. When that door opened...to see all those humans lying on the floor like stacked wood, their bodies altered into a strange jellylike substance...and that terrifying image of one living human with his face in the corner as the aliens cubed the corpses on the floor and loaded them into white containers. Then the camera falls and cuts out. You feel your jaw clenching, against anger and also against fear. It looks like the aliens don't want to be friends. === Interlude: First Victory === The alien defenses have at last fallen and you take up a survey position near the perimeter. Your Elite Alien Attack Force moves in on the breach with quick, decisive movements, using their scramble guns to disrupt the resonance fields around $ALIENBASENAME5. Bursts of light and fire erupt from the base, followed by waves of vibrating sound and energy that hit your chest like a jackhammer. A nearby guard goes suddenly pale. "Alien screams," you say, as another burst of fire and a loud pop comes from the strange four-legged bases. "They tear the resonance field when they die." [And their hard carapaces burst open like popcorn kernels,] you also think, but decide not to share it with the queasy guard. The popping increases, and the screams. You and the guard turn away and one of your lieutenants turns on a device that dulls the sonic assault. On the land surrounding the base you can see alien refugees fleeing for the hills, a few being chased down by your faster moving troops. At last the pops slow in frequency and the all clear signal comes. Two guards at the breach stand at full attention and you can feel the pride radiating from their stiff faces. You nod to them as you pass. You enter the base, the first base captured from the alien menace. === Interlude: Beacon in the Sky === You awaken in your chambers bathed in a strange greenish light, coming through the round reinforced window that looks over the landscape outside. A strange deep hum fills the room, and you recognize deep echoes of the aliens in it...echoes of their voices, of their weapons. You quickly tap into a touchscreen built into the back of your headboard, seeking through video feeds positioned around Planet. [There.] From the alien base $ALIENBASENAME5, a green column of light lances into the sky. You quickly bounce the image to the large viewpanel along one wall, expanding it. You get out of your bed. With the image in your wall-sized viewpanel, it seems as if you are staring out across the landscape of Planet itself, at the strange curved shapes of the alien bases. The green light illuminates the rolling terrain near the alien base eerily, and you can feel the hum of the resonance in your body and through the cold floor. $SHIMODA9's voice suddenly fills the room, using an emergency band. "We're analyzing it, $TITLE0 $NAME1. As fast as we can." "Look at it." You touch the cool glass of the viewpanel, tracing the brilliant light. "What is it?" "A powerful signal, but it is going nowhere that we can tell. It may have some unknown resonance fields associated with it, but we can't..." Abruptly, the beam cuts off, making the sky seem suddenly empty. "That was just a test," you say into the silence. === Epilogue=== Now that you are part of the vast matrix of the Planetmind, you spend your time wandering from thought nexus to thought nexus, despairing that $ALIENLEADER5 merged with the Planetmind and became its dominant personality. You just can't let it go. Everywhere you move, the Usurper's dominant personality has imprinted itself. Everywhere you look, there are human souls adrift, trapped in a master personality that is completely alien to all of you. This is the cost of losing. Not death, but an eternity living in someone else's dream, constantly assaulted by sounds and images that are not your own. You catch a thread of thought, a tiny sliver of energy in the vast new Planetmind. The thought is small but fills you with longing...Earth. It is a thought of Earth, the old Earth left behind, with its green forests and blue oceans regenerating after Armageddon. You quickly realize that $ALIENLEADER5 is reaching out to nearby planets, trying to expand its domain. It is sending some of the Usurper sub-personalities from the matrix to Earth, to colonize it. There is only a moment to decide, and a moment is all it takes. You piggyback on a particularly dense alien personality, riding it silently into the mind of the colony ship. You feel the ship closing down, the personalities settling into synthetic bodies for the journey. You remain in the dark, shrouding yourself in silence, squeezing into the farthest corner of one body's thought matrix. If the alien intelligence detects you, you will be sentenced to a far worse fate than wandering the Undermind, but it doesn't matter. Here is a second chance, and a possible redemption. A return home. === Epilogue=== [Twenty four metric hours], you think, as the two alien guards hustle you along a dark and narrow hallway. That's how long you ordered your troops to hold out against torture if captured. But now that the aliens have overrun your bases, decimated your population, and grabbed your very body on the way to an escape pod, it's difficult to see what twenty four hours of time will do. Thinking of the ruin they have made of your entire faction, you realize there's no one left to protect. Your mind works on overdrive, absorbing details about the alien base as you walk...the tall, narrow hallways, the resonance chambers set at intervals along the hallway, the constant high thrum that gives the aliens an easy bed for altering, to communicate with each other. You turn down an even darker hallway, and a metal door hisses open. They hustle you forward, toward what looks like... [...a Punishment Sphere]. Including a few special alterations, courtesy of the alien scientists. You scan your memory, piecing together everything you can of the alien language. A part of you wonders if they enjoy human pain. Then the Sphere closes around you, and soon nothing else matters. === Epilogue=== The first bright lance of green into the sky above Planet startles you, even though you had begun to sense its inevitability as the $ALIENS5 slowly overtook the human factions in every way. You stop your pep-rally address to the people from your balcony and look up into the sky. Then, on the horizon, you see another beam, and the sky is filled again with thick waves of harmonic sounds. You look down to see the assembled population transfixed. The sound changes again, rippling out from even farther away, and then again, and again, building in waves. Bright beams lance the sky from all directions. Your comm board lights up with communications from the other human factions, perhaps desperate enough to talk now, finally realizing that it is time to work together, all of you, to address this menace. The beams meet high above the surface of Planet and the sky opens with a groan that rocks Planet to its core. You look at the comm board helplessly. You wonder if any human alive knows what is in store for you next. To the other human leaders, the last of humanity, and to yourself you can only think... [Too late.]
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