PmWiki | XcomAcademy / Mission35b

If they are risking to send a lich to look around in a small UFO, it'd be a great target -- of course, we can't get to it. We watch the UFO land near Guelph unopposed, and leave after a few minutes, just in time to let the air force take potshots at it. We have no idea what happened there; Bradford hopes it doesn't do too much damage.

Polina, Tova, Sarah and Archie are graduating - they have seen enough action to get back to their home countries and in turn teach how to fight the aliens. Oddly, the flying boat brings us no replacement; this leaves a little bit more room in the barracks, save for one room which is repossessed by Dr. Shen to store the new mass-produced drone tanks in.

Doctrine had to be changed again to cover liches; more so than sorcerers, they are now the priority target. The dreadnought is explained in as much detail as we can, and after a quick vote, the decision is made to include in the dangly file the information that some danglies may have been grown from human cells - the file details how these beings do not have human minds.

I expected more outrage at that; our doctrine file exists mostly for military use and, well, this is the first war in which we haven't fought other humans; danglies, like everything else, are simply the enemy.

Work begins on a containment facility for the Soul Sphere; we're calling it a Gollop Chamber at the request of the guys who did the design. It's built as deep as we can go, the only other facility on that level is our geothermal plant - hopefully, that will be sufficient to shield it. Vertical piping allows it a narrow view of the sky if we so choose, with huge stone cylinders moving aside to uncover the hole. Calisthenics has been replaced with digging this as an option - we have enough robotic diggers, of course, but digging a hole is excellent exercise.

Whatever the small UFO did a few days ago, it's followed by a much larger trace - this is big enough to be seen optically; it looks like an anime space battleship, bristling with guns on all sides; if it's intended to land, it better have some good landing legs. It's around the size of the defunct ISS, except this is all solid metal rather than solar panels.

"Its active sensors are blanketing its surroundings, it's like it's searching for something..."

"Can we intercept it?"

Given its erratic movement - Shen notes in admiration that if that thing was working on chemical rockets, it'd be using one moon launch worth of fuel every thirty seconds -- our best bet is to launch our Firestorms scattershot and hope that one is close enough for an active interception after its suborbital hop.

The battleship finds what it was looking for: our satellite. For the next forty minutes, we are blind. NORAD calls us to let us know that they've got a F-102 armed with a nuclear Falcon missile out of mothballs, and will launch it if our interception fails; ICBMs do not have the ability to hit a moving target and would surely hit the ground below.

The engineering team sets up the transceivers on the Firestorms to act as a local positioning system and relay to ground stations as they reenter, so that one of them can perform the interception. It was a contingency plan from the beginning, in case we had to use the drone spaceplanes to go hunt a target in high orbit; hopefully it will work within the ionosphere.

"Target is padlocked!"

The spaceplane reports a number of firings and a number of hits on its frame before signaling shutdown and drogue opening; we tell as much to NORAD. They reply not two minutes later that the alien battleship has stopped weaving around and is on an unpowered reentry trajectory - it's going down! The mission control room explodes with cheering.

"From what we could get out of its NAVCOM, there are no liches or dreadnoughts on this flight; the crew is mostly sectoids and orks. Definitely a military mission. The Headmaster will assign crew to assault the wreck..."

I'm going to take Kip and Vee with me for this one, as well as Grant, Kowalski and Semyenov. I understand wanting to blind us, but this doesn't make sense strategically. No dreadnoughts; are they still making them, and we faced a prototype? Are they running out of resources? But if so, why hold the big gun in until now? That spaceship alone could've trashed a city Independence Day style by itself, and without suborbital interceptors we couldn't have stopped it even two weeks ago.

The plan is to briefly land in Seattle, send one of our two spare microsatellites to Wallops Field via overnight courier to be launched by an Antares rocket, and get coverage back in forty-eight hours.

Vee stomps on the Skyranger with the "Dreadnaught-booster" upgrade to her cybersuit ready; we don't expect any of the big bots on this mission, but it will be a good field test for the new systems. The extra armor doesn't slow it down any; we've moved from a diesel generator, to high energy batteries, to... "Yes, that is an Elerium power plant, essentially half a Firestorm engine block. It provides power for the upgraded linear actuators, and the new EMP pulse system."

Vee steps away from the Skyranger. "Basically, it'll electrocute anything around me, and hopefully force robotic enemies to reboot."

"Wait, how about the suit itself?" Vee smiles. "I turn all the software stuff off" the suit makes, I kid you not, the Windows 95 shutdown sound "trip the EMP with a mechanical switch" and to that there's a flash, and a pungent smell of ozone, and all the lights and the automated forklift next to Vee shut down "and then take the suit out of sleep mode!" She lifts her particle cannon and smiles. "I'm taking advantage of my meat bits, which they can't do."

"Oh, makes sense. So where's the mechanical switch?"

"Like I said, I'm taking advantage of my meat bits!"

Kip harrumphs at me. I should probably leave it at that. We're all decked out in power armor; Kip and Kowalski have the heavier plasma rifles that we got off the orks, while I'm still using my scatter laser. Unfortunately, it turns out a plasma shotgun is apparently not feasible - it'd behave more like a flamethrower, and my decision to make one anyway was overridden by the fact that every single weapons dev team member I asked told me that they don't want to encourage me to walk up to aliens any more than I already do.

OPERATION