There was a dull clang that reverberated through the hull of The Avenger as the Skyranger touched down, an ugly bird with surprising grace and a full belly swinging back onto its nest. There was a long moment as a half dozen of the big ship’s technical crew (mechanics some of the time, analysts the rest) and three of the five soldiers who’d remained behind for this mission simply stood in the long shadows hiding them from the very early morning sun, watching as the Skyranger’s powerful jet engines began to cycle down. Then the ramp fell, quick yet controlled, and they rushed forward.

The four troopers who’d made up Menace One were already on their way down the ramp. Gerry O’Neill looked grimly at the crew jogging towards him and grunted something lost over the whine that still came from the slowly stilling turbines and high winds that whipped across The Avenger‘s landing deck. Gabriela Navarro was strung between Li Ming Cheng and Thierry Leroy. There was blood leaking from a gash where her arm connected to her shoulder and a hole in her guts just above her left hip. She was barely walking, her head bowed lower than normal, a grimace on her face, inaudibly mouthing what were probably curses with every step. Given warning of the wounded before hand two of the techs had brought a stretcher to the deck and with a grunt Leroy and Cheng heaved the injured woman onto it as gently as they could.

“CHINGA TU MADRE!” She cried far more audibly, so it obviously wasn’t gently enough. Cheng laughed and Leroy squeezed her uninjured arm in apology.

“I’ll take her to Tygen,” Leroy said, eyes darting between her wounds and the lift down to the bowels of the ship, “I may be of some use.”

Cheng shrugged. O’Neill nodded. The techs were already starting to push her towards the lift.

“Make sure you report to the Commander when you know her condition. He’ll want to be updated on how long she’ll be out of the field for.” O’Neill spoke with a quiet, low brogue. He could be loud when he wanted to, and often had to, but when given the choice spoke like he was singing a lullaby.

Leroy dipped his head and chased after the techs and the stretcher. O’Neill smoothed back his blonde hair (unnecessarily since not a strand had come loose from his tightly bound ponytail) and stared at the activity around the deck. The techs were busy securing the Skyranger with magnetic locks, checking the hydraulics in the struts, examining the still powering down engines and a lot of other things that he wouldn’t have a clue about. The three troopers – Emily Adams, Eva Degroot and Cesar Vargas – were unrolling body bags on the deck in front of the ramp. To hold the loot from the mission. He gave Cheng a look somewhere halfway between a glance and a death-stare.

“We should report to Central and the Commander. They’ll want to debrief us properly.”

Cheng smiled back and sat down on the Skyranger’s ramp, one leg stretched out along its length and the other over its edge and resting on The Avenger‘s deck, her rifle propped beside her.

“You can. I’m going to stay here and supervise the unloading. If the Commander wants to debrief me I’m sure he’ll call.”

O’Neill gave her a look somewhere halfway between acceptance and resentment, grunted a whispered “Okay,” then turned on his heel toward the lift where Leroy, Navarro and the two techs had disappeared two minutes before. Cheng watched him disappear then stretched out and laid back, cradling her head in her hands.

“That, my friends, is a man who probably sleeps with a shotgun under his pillow because a knife didn’t make him feel safe enough.”

That got a laugh out of everyone, even Degroot who did her best to exorcise her sense of humour while on duty. Gertrude Wilders, one of the techs securing the Skyranger to The Avenger nodded as she pulled out a spanner and began making adjustments to the magnetic locks.

“Did you see how tight he held onto his rifle? His knuckles were so white I thought they were going to burst!”

“Too true!” shouted John Tipene, another tech and a big man with a bigger voice, “Anyway, thought you guys would be celebrating more! First successful mission and all that.”

That was true, and barely two days since the Commander had been recovered from the alien facility. He’d been awake just over three hours when he’d gathered the nine frontline combat personnel in the armoury to introduce himself and discuss the direction he planned to lead X-Com and the fledgling resistance towards. Throughout it all he’d been brimming with natural authority and confidence, but polite, courteous, formal and very careful about speaking in clear, plain language (most likely in acknowledgement of those in the group who didn’t speak English as a first language) right until he got to the end and the planned first step.

“Our immediate concern is to make a statement of intent, so that other resistance cells know we exist and the aliens know we are a threat. Thankfully Central was able to point us towards a big fucking statue in what was New York. Now, I don’t know about you but I reckon the best way to make a big statement is blow the shit out of one of theirs. So that’s what we’re gonna do.”

Fours hours later they were gunning down ADVENT Troopers and planting X4 charges on the base of a statue taller than the buildings surrounding it. The mood in the Skyranger had been good…

“Oh, they were celebrating dude,” Louise Seo, Firestarter, pilot of the Skyranger at the centre of everybody’s attention and proud Canuck, had finished her post flight checks and was striding around the aircraft with her helmet under one arm, “even Gerry was laughing at Li here’s jokes. Right up until Gabbie fell onto her face and was forced to admit that the blood loss was worse than she’d told us.”

Cheng nodded and looked at her gloved hands, covered in semi-dry blood til halfway up her forearms. There’d a been a few desperate minutes as Leroy had gone through the Skyranger’s first aid kit and Cheng had been putting pressure on Navarro’s wounds to staunch the bleeding while O’Neill kept her conscious. The desperation had passed when Leroy found what he was looking for, two red injectors that he’d stabbed into the unprotected side of her abdomen and a blue injector stabbed into her neck. She’d stabilised and the bleeding had stopped. The miracles of modern medicine. Cheng had grinned and leant back on her haunches. O’Neill said something nobody could hear but looked relieved nonetheless. Leroy continued to look after Navarro, putting to work the combat medicine he’d been learning around the time the aliens had first started landing and stealing people from Earth.

“Da bien,” Cheng said in Mandarin, “Shit,” she repeated in English.

“What?” Seo gave her a curious look.

“Nothing.”

A second ago she’d been resting her head in her hands. Her blood soaked hands. Dried blood, sure, but it was still in her hair now and the close-shaved sides of her head. She needed a shower anyway, but it probably still didn’t look great. That was fucking annoying.

“It’s fine,” she continued, looking at all the concerned faces.

“Will… will Gabriela be okay?” Degroot asked, cautiously. She had a high voice with an almost English accent when she spoke the language, and a habit of using people’s full names. She was probably the only person who called Cheng “Li Ming” instead of just “Li.”

“She’ll be fine. Leroy says it missed the kidneys and anything else important. She’ll probably still be out of it for a while though. Besides,” Cheng grinned and looked back into the Skyranger’s hold where six relatively fresh corpses bled onto the metallic deck, “she got the bastard who shot her.”