XCOM 2 Read online

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Epigraph

  * * *

  1

  Reaper

  * * *

  2

  Hunter

  * * *

  3

  Skirmisher

  * * *

  4

  Assassin

  * * *

  5

  Avenger

  * * *

  6

  Tracks

  * * *

  7

  Contact

  * * *

  8

  Quarry

  * * *

  9

  Anomaly

  * * *

  10

  Couloir

  * * *

  11

  Quid Pro Quo

  * * *

  12

  Indigo Pass

  * * *

  About the Author

  * * *

  After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

  —Terry Eagleton

  LIGHTLY, ALMOST LOVINGLY, Alexis Petrov slid her index finger across the Vektor’s trigger. Its carbonitride coating provided the perfect lubricity for moments like this. With a pull weight adjusted down to just six-and-a-half ounces, the slightest tap would send a copper-jacketed round burrowing straight through a target at one thousand meters per second.

  “Step into the light, you slimy little bastards,” she whispered.

  Eye to scope, Petrov waited hungrily on targets six hundred meters below. Her mouth, dry for so long, moistened. A thin Pavlovian film of saliva thickened her tongue. Her stomach gnawed with both hunger and hatred. The enemy is food.

  A deep voice off to her right mumbled something incoherent.

  “What’s that, CK?” she called.

  “I don’t like it,” growled a big man, straddling a boulder on the rock ledge. He was sighting through his rifle’s optics too. “They been in there, what, an hour? Place is deserted ten years now.” He spat. “The hell they looking for?”

  CK Munger was a large mound of a man. In his meaty hands, even a bulky laser rifle looked like an elaborate toy. Few Reapers had such girth. Size like his typically didn’t work well in the highlands where they operated. But CK could traverse a rockslide like a puma. It was an amazing thing to see.

  Petrov turned to her left. “What you got, Natter?”

  “Nothing, chief.” Jean Natter was a petite woman with the voice of a little girl. But you didn’t want her tracking you. Not if she was hungry.

  Suddenly, CK whispered, “Yo, here we go!”

  Below, three Sectoids emerged one by one from a half-collapsed A-frame chalet. Two were old-time Xrays, just a meter high. The other was new-breed more than twice their height. Petrov’s scope view put her right in their midst. The bastards could sense something, she could tell. They crouched and moved warily. But their psionic reach did not extend six hundred meters.

  “Three tangos, marked,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah, mark three,” called CK.

  “One, two, three,” whispered Natter.

  Petrov’s rifle team was well-trained. Even basic field intel got multiple confirms.

  CK spat again and looked over at her. “What do you think, chief?” he asked.

  “We go hot,” said Petrov.

  “Roger that.” CK sounded happy.

  “I got left,” said Natter. “Head shot, fool.”

  CK cackled. “Yoda is all head, pardner,” he said. “You can’t miss.” He rotated his eye socket tighter into his scope. “Okay, so I go right,” he said.

  Petrov nodded grimly.

  “I’m on the gollum, dead center,” she called.

  She put her crosshairs on the new-breed’s nasty, grinning head. She rubbed the slick Elite trigger gently.

  “On my call,” said Petrov.

  “Ready.”

  “Ready.”

  Petrov exhaled slowly. “Now.”

  * * *

  Aliens did not look appetizing at first glance. Not by classic human standards anyway.

  Petrov remembered the first time she field-dressed a Muton. The smell almost knocked her unconscious. Properly seasoned and prepared, however, Muton meat was remarkably tender and tasty. Some Reapers of American descent called it “roast beast,” flashing back to their prewar Dr. Seuss childhoods.

  But Sectoids presented entirely different culinary problems.

  For one, the skin was tough as duck canvas, which made sense, considering the buggers ran around essentially naked, regardless of weather. But equally off-putting was Sectoid bodily fluid. Once you finally cracked open the skin, the steamy yellow slime that poured out looked like something leaking from a head gasket.

  Amazingly, it made an excellent gravy.

  “Natter, get those giblets bagged,” said Petrov.

  “Hurrying, chief,” replied Natter. She was shoveling dirt over the dressing stains on the ground with her entrenching spade.

  “Skip that,” said Petrov. “We need to scoot before these guys are missed.” She glanced up the ridgeline. “I don’t like this.”

  “Why?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  CK emerged from the chalet. “Nothing,” he said. “Not a goddamned thing.”

  Petrov wiped her gutting knife, folded it shut, and slid it into a utility pocket. She said, “They were in there forever, CK.”

  “I know, man.”

  “What were they doing?”

  CK gave her a look. “Resting,” he said.

  “Sectoids don’t rest.”

  “I know.” He shrugged.

  Petrov slung a game bag over her shoulder. “Okay, whatever,” she said. “Let’s get this meat back to camp.”

  As CK scooped up the other game bag, Natter sealed a plastic pouch full of Sectoid organs and slipped it into her field pack. Reapers took a lot of pride in their economies—of motion, scale, action, resourcing, and consumption. Nothing wasted, not even the viscera. And they usually covered up their kill sites.

  But Petrov felt edgy.

  “Move out,” she said.

  Fifteen years in the Wild Lands had taught her to respect edgy feelings.

  * * *

  They hauled their kill down the old Shadow Canyon Trail right under Devil’s Thumb.

  It was a cool, cloudless mid-autumn day. Gaps in the tree line gave glimpses of New Denver’s luminescent towers rising forty miles to the east. The new city had been erected adjacent to the old one, now a toxic pit and mass grave. Some estimates put one hundred thousand bodies sealed under the resin dome that covered fifty square miles of old Denver’s downtown and residential districts.

  “So many sheep,” said CK, gazing east at the skyline.

  “But I bet they sleep well,” said Petrov.

  CK hefted his game bag. “Hey, I sleep like a baby,” he said.

  Natter stared at the new city with dark eyes. “I want to slaughter them all and eat their children,” she said in her little girl’s voice.

  This cracked up Petrov. “Jesus, Natter,” she said.

  Natter looked at her. “I hate them so much,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “They’re cowards.”

  Petrov turned to continue down the trail. “Not sure that’s fair.”

  “They gave up,” said Natter, falling in behind. “Just like XCOM did.”

  This was the general outlook among Reaper regulars: XCOM had been weak, a dismal failure. Under pressure, the vaunted agency had folded like a cheap dome tent.

  “You’re what, twenty-one?” asked Petrov.

  Natter shrugged. “Don’t really know.”

  “What?!”

  Natter tromped al
ong a few steps, then said, “Somebody found me somewhere.”

  “So . . . you don’t remember what it was like before the invasion.”

  “Nope.”

  “I do,” said Petrov. “I’m thirty. My dad grew up in Chicago, but his people came from Bulgaria. He once told me his own father, my grandpa, did bad things in Sofia during the Soviet era.” Her smile was crooked. “And said he’d do them all again no hesitation. Because it gave his family food and comfort.”

  “That sucks,” said Natter.

  Now CK chimed in. “Look, I get it, man,” he said. “Most people can’t do this, what we do.” He gestured around them with his huge hands. “If I had starving little kids, yeah, I’d probably drag them into the New Cities too.”

  Petrov gave him a look. “But Natter would eat them.”

  CK frowned. “All of them?” he asked.

  Natter nodded. “Yep,” she said.

  “But you’d kill me first, right?”

  “Only if you’re home.”

  * * *

  It had been a busy summer for Resistance cells all along the Front Range.

  Hostile patrols were pushing from New Denver way up into the higher passes, a troubling development. This uptick of activity followed a pattern. First, a few old-school alien shock troops—Sectoid, Muton, Chryssalid, maybe a few Floaters in support—would deploy into a settlement area and terrorize the locals.

  Then a day or two later, a transport of ADVENT Troopers would drop into town.

  They’d administer medical aid to any wounded settlers, distribute food and fresh water, act semihuman (which is of course what they were), then start recruiting in the New Cities. High country survivors were skeptical folk, leaning toward tinfoil-hat paranoia, so the recruitment effort rarely went well.

  Boulder got the worst of it. Once an upscale university town, it had become a rundown cluster of fire-camps, hardscrabble havens for survivalists and other flinty Neanderthal types. ADVENT paid frequent visits and never left without conducting a few rigorous interrogations as well.

  Word afterwards was always the same: They were digging for intel on XCOM.

  Petrov found it insulting. She hadn’t seen any sign of XCOM in years. The locals all knew that Reapers ran the show along the Front Range.

  * * *

  Petrov’s team was part of a twenty-one-man hunting detachment sent out from New Samara, the governing encampment of the Reaper clan. All of the Reaper enclaves east of the Divide were stocking up for winter. The foray had been good so far: Elk, deer, and small game were back, just twenty years after large swaths of the Front Range had been blasted black and polluted by the war. Forests on the eastern slopes were no longer ashen or deathly silent.

  Of course, venison was fine. But the Reaper taste for alien flesh—once the product of desperation—had undergone years of refinement. CK and Natter had been arguing over recipes for months.

  As they humped around the ridge, the grand debate continued.

  “You’re insane,” grunted CK. “How can you not like the stroganoff?”

  “Because it’s disgusting,” said Natter.

  “What’s disgusting about it?”

  Natter just looked at him.

  “Come on!” howled CK. “You got something against Sectoid loin?”

  “I love Sectoid loin,” said Natter.

  “So?”

  “So why would you ruin it by adding sour cream?” said Natter. She shook her head. “That just nauseates me.”

  Petrov was gazing up at Devil’s Thumb, a curved granite spire jutting 150 feet up from the shoulder of Bear Peak. It was as familiar a landmark as anything in Petrov’s life. Raised in a Reaper camp in the moraines below the Indian Peaks, she’d passed the rock thumb dozens of times on supply runs down the Shadow Canyon North Trail to the Boulder settlements.

  CK followed Petrov’s gaze upward.

  “Ever been up on that thing?” he asked. “I mean, like, up top?”

  “Couple times,” replied Petrov.

  CK nodded. They stopped for a few seconds, looking at the Thumb.

  “Tough climb?” he asked.

  “Nah,” said Petrov. “The approach up the talus there is harder than the climb itself.” She squinted. Something looked different. “What’s that?”

  CK squinted too. “How would I know?” he said. “It’s your thumb.”

  Petrov’s eyes widened. “The hell?”

  She slipped the game bag strap off her shoulder, then slid her Vektor rifle from its sling. Bringing the stock to her shoulder and the scope to her eye, Petrov focused the optics on the top of the Thumb.

  “It’s gone,” she said.

  “What is?” asked CK.

  “Something big up there,” she said. She lowered the rifle.

  “A hawk maybe.”

  Petrov frowned. “I’ve never seen a ten-foot hawk,” she said.

  “Ten foot?”

  “It was big,” said Petrov.

  She looked at Natter, then at CK. They clearly didn’t know what to make of it. But then something seemed to strike Natter. She cocked her head.

  Petrov noticed and asked, “What, Jeannie?”

  Natter said, “You can probably sight the camp from up there.”

  They looked at each other for a second. Then Petrov started sprinting down the trail.

  “Son of a bitch,” she hissed.

  They left the game bags behind.

  GUNFIRE BEGAN CRACKLING in the distance before Petrov was even halfway around the ridge.

  Their detachment’s base camp was tucked a half mile up Shadow Canyon next to a creek on the back side of the ridgeline that included Devil’s Thumb. The trail took a wide swing around the ridge before snaking up the canyon along the creek. As Natter pointed out, the top of the Thumb would likely provide a clean view of the camp.

  It took ten long minutes to reach the creek. By that time, Petrov could hear screams up ahead too.

  Terrible screams. Agonized.

  Good god! she thought, the back of her neck crawling in alarm.

  Using hand signals, Petrov directed CK and Natter to split and move up either side of the canyon. Pistols drawn, they dashed into the low scrub trees along opposite walls. Off to her left, Petrov spotted a rock shelf jutting upward from the side of the canyon. Scrambling up, she slid into a cleft behind a long-dead tree trunk stripped of bark.

  Above, Devil’s Thumb leaned over the canyon. Petrov slid her Vektor from its sling again and flipped it up to her shoulder. Using the Nightforce scope, she quickly aimed upward to scan the top of the spire and saw nothing. Then she tried sighting high ledges on either side of the canyon. But again, nothing.

  Up the canyon, two quick rifle shots seemed to add final punctuation to the terrible howling, which suddenly stopped.

  Now there was nothing but silence.

  Petrov hoped that was a good sign. Other than two or three sentries posted up the canyon, her full detachment should have been manning the camp. Fifteen Reapers could punch evenly with an entire battalion of aliens or ADVENT Troopers. And any enemy force that size moving on the ground would’ve been marked by spotters long ago.

  But the screaming unsettled her. It had been tortured, like a gut-shot animal.

  Petrov could see Natter up ahead, still hugging the left wall of the canyon. The small woman dashed like a sparrow hawk from tree to boulder. It didn’t appear that she’d spotted anything yet; she was glancing around, checking all directions. After a second, Natter darted out of visual contact. Trees in the steep canyon were stunted by shadow and the shallow bedrock, but they still cut off sight lines. So Petrov slipped her rifle back into the sling and drew her pistol too. Rolling off the shelf, she landed lightly on the ground and scuttled upstream along the creek.

  Now the silence was disturbing. Petrov ducked behind an outcropping right on the creek bed. The campsite was still out of view, but she knew it was just around the bend about fifty meters ahead. She listened tensely for a few seconds.
There was no sound at all.

  Then a flash of movement across the creek caught her attention.

  It was CK. Despite his bearish bulk, he slipped lightly around a boulder and whistled the Reaper tactical warning call, the two-note song of the mountain chickadee. Then he started flashing hand signals at someone across the canyon: Flanked to your left. Alarmed, Petrov leapt up and sprinted lightly up the creek, glancing at CK. When he spotted her advance, his eyes grew big.

  He spun toward her and raised his hands in two quick signals: Stop. Cover.

  Then the back of his head exploded in a red spray.

  His body fell hard and heavy.

  In the seven years that she’d known CK Munger, from the first day he wandered into camp looking for food and a chance to fight ADVENT, Petrov had never seen the big man fall hard or heavy. He moved with impossible grace, always.

  As her eyes clouded red with rage, Petrov heard another scream.

  It could only be Natter, that voice.

  But like the previous screams, it had a guttural, inhuman resonance.

  “No,” murmured Petrov.

  She holstered her pistol and crept to a thick cottonwood half submerged at the bend. Wielding her Vektor again eye to scope, she sighted upstream. In glacial increments, she leaned out from the trunk. Every inch she leaned out, the scope revealed more horror.

  Reaper bodies were strewn across the camp. Some had been hit unawares—carrying a stew pot, stoking the fire, stepping out of a tent. Most were clearly fighting back or trying to. Gunned down behind rocks, trees, weapons in hand. Apparently, no location had provided sufficient cover. Nowhere was safe.

  But an unlucky few suffered a different fate.

  Three Reaper soldiers—Petrov’s old friends, comrades in arms, family—had been incapacitated somehow. Then strung up—alive and conscious, from the looks frozen on their faces—and torn open.

  Sickness and hatred gurgled in Petrov’s throat.