Chapter 3: He only wanted to help.

Thierry Leroy crouched behind a barrier, the kind of thin sort-of metal waist high walls that ADVENT used for everything from crowd-control to (as was the case this time) separating the sidewalk from the road. He clutched his rifle tightly in hands clammy beneath his gloves and watched a pair of ADVENT troopers shining lights through car windows. A red-armoured officer watched their search with that odd detachment that would have marked them as something not-quite human in his mind even if he’d never seen the oversized eyes on a dozen of their comrades corpses. His Gremlin hovered quietly at his side, also hidden by the barrier, mechanical eyes twitching in a fashion similar to its master.

Across the road Cesar Vargas and on the other side of another barrier Cesar Vargas watched the enemy trio with cool eyes and a slowly moving jaw. The young Mexican had an almost magical ability to produce chewing gum (both the kind for blowing bubbles and the kind that freshens the breath) and was constantly, to borrow a line from Eva Degroot, “doing his best impression of a cow.” A few car lengths to their rear Li Ming Cheng and Emily Adams crouched beside a parked sedan. Adams had a reassuring hand on the shoulder of a terrified Doctor Colin Lynch, the man Menace One had been sent to rescue. Cheng looked edgier than normal. Leroy knew she hated bringing up the rear, probably resented being on babysitter duty with Adams. Front and centre spitting death and destruction was where she wanted to be, but her heavy cannon and the grenade launcher slung between her shoulderblades meant that she was ill-suited to leading the way when stealth was required. Like this mission had until these three fuckers had appeared around the corner and begun searching the parked cars in front of them.

“Menace One,” the Commander’s voice crackled slightly in Leroy’s ear, “we’ve confirmed other active patrols in the area and hostile aircraft inbound. We don’t have time find a way around these guys or make it to an alternate extraction zone. We’re going to have to go through them. Over.”

Leroy’s eyes darted between the troopers, the officer and Vargas. His posture had shifted slightly, shoulders a little more slumped, his back and neck a little straighter. Not by much, of course, it was barely noticeable unless you knew the man well and knew what to look for. But still, it made him look meaner, better prepared for violence.

“Avenger this is Menace One-Two,” Cheng’s voice was soft in his ear, “Has Firestarter got a location for the other patrols? Over.”

“You know that’s a negative Menace One-Two. But I expect they’ll come to us. Menace One-Four,” that was Adams, “take out the Trooper on the left. Menace One,” Leroy, “Menace One-Three,” Vargas, “Hit them while they scatter. Menace One-Two move forward and hit anything still moving. Weapons free. Adams, you may fire when ready. Over.”

“Roger that,” Adams kept her voice low like Cheng. Not a whisper, since it can be difficult to control the volume of a whisper, more like a low murmur.

Leroy crossed himself (an unconscious habit) and looked back at Adams for a moment. She’d taken her hand off Doctor Lynch’s shoulder and now bent over the bonnet of a surprisingly large hatchback, elbows propped on the bright red surface, staring down the scope of her long rifle. Her target was maybe a hundred metres away, and the girl had the talent to hit it with her (admittedly also oversized) sidearm. The Commander – monitoring the battlefield on a dozen monitors displaying blueprints, street maps, passive scanners, body cameras, hacked security cameras and whatever drones could safely be put into the air – would probably put her on a rooftop as soon as possible to watch over their advance up the street, up high where she’d be able to put her superior range and accuracy to most use. For now though, unable to get onto a rooftop without passing the ADVENT patrol in front of them, she’d take the easy shot.

Cheng meanwhile had made her way to the left side of the street, west by Leroy’s reckoning, and was unhurriedly padding up the sidewalk towards them. They all wore specialised soft soles on their boots to muffle their footsteps, but the aliens would notice her approach in moments.

Leroy turned his attention back to the enemy in front of him. They had moved to the next car, again shining flashlights through its windshield and windows, one trooper taking the trouble to get on his (her? Its?) knees and check beneath the undercarriage. Leroy wondered if they actually expected to find Menace One just sitting in the back of a sedan, waiting to be discovered. Wondered if they even knew of X-Com’s involvement in Doctor Lynch’s disappearance and escape. Perhaps they just expected some terrified scientist shivering in the back seat. Perhaps they didn’t even know what it was they were looking for.

Adams’ target stepped over to the opposite side of a parked car from her. Leroy expected her to shift targets. She didn’t.

“Firing.”

There was an enormous crack that echoed between the high glass and steel building fronts surrounding them, like the end of the world compared to the silent streets and muffled words that had preceded the shot. And it was a decent shot, shattering its way through passenger window and windscreen of the vehicle that had been in the way, catching the trooper in the centre of the chest and sending her (him? It?) sprawling backwards and out of Leroy’s line of sight.

The other two reacted as expected, scattering quickly and immediately at the sound of the shot. The flash of red armour sprinting towards the relative safety of another traffic barrier drew Leroy’s eye and Vargas’, who shot first. A full burst straight into the right side of the ADVENT officer’s chest. The fucker was staggered for a moment but seemed like it (it) would keep going, until Leroy pulled the trigger and caught it in the unprotected neck and jaw. The officer was pitched sideways in a spray of orange blood, bone and teeth. Momentum caused it to bounce and roll forward a few times upon hitting the ground before coming to a rest laying on its stomach.

The other trooper managed to hurl itself behind one of the parked cars it had just searched along the east side of the street. Cheng didn’t give it a chance to get its bearings. At the sound of Adams’ shot the big, lean Chinese woman had started to sprint forward, sliding into the side of a bus shelter to break her momentum, the barrels of her rotary cannon already spinning. The ADVENT trooper didn’t see her coming, didn’t know she was there until her long burst tore through its armour and sent it flying into the gutter. Cheng held down the trigger until she was quite sure it wasn’t getting up again, not as long as it seemed due to the echoes of her heavy weapon, like the roar of a chainsaw. Afterwards, Leroy would run past the trooper and see that its right arm had nearly been severed from its torso, white bone showing through red and orange flesh held on by a few scraps of tendon and a few intact pieces of its armour.

For a long second after there was nothing at all. Everyone stood still, peering at the street ahead or the street behind. North or south. Then Leroy’s hearing began to some back. He heard a few screams and remembered that ADVENT hadn’t completely cleared this area of civilians. He heard alarms and knew that more than just the few patrols ahead now knew where the armed human soldiers were. He heard his own breathing, deep but rapid, chest moving in time with his eyes. What he did not hear was the sound of footsteps. The piercing screeching warcry of the sectoids or the garbled language of the ADVENT troopers.

The other patrols were holding position, or far enough away that they weren’t about to come spilling out of the buildings. The others were waiting for it as well, and everybody seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time.

“Nice shooting everyone,” the Commander’s voice again crackled in his ear, “let’s move Doctor Lynch forward and find a decent vantage point for Menace One-Four.”

Behind him, Adams nudged Doctor Lynch and pointed him in Leroy’s direction.

***

It sounded odd when said out loud but, back when everyone called him by his christian name instead of his surname, Thierry Leroy had joined the army because it seemed the fastest way to learn how to help people.

Thierry’s father was an electrician, his mother a nurse. She named him after a grandfather she never talked about, but always seemed to remember fondly. They raised him in Lyon, walking distance from the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste which seemed to be the centre of his world for much of his young life. His father was not overly religious (Thierry’s mother was the devout Catholic) but loved the old church, and would often take his son for ice cream by its steps.

When he was twelve years old a friend of the family gave him a book written by a nurse who had been an aide worker in a dozen different countries from Haiti to Somalia to Sri Lanka. To everyone’s great surprise, the pre-teen Thierry had loved the book, reading it three times before he turned thirteen and searching for similar books, movies and magazines. By fourteen his walls were covered with posters adorned by Croix-Rouge française and Médecins Sans Frontières between the more stereotypical kind that advertised bands, movies and tv shows.

At fifteen everyone knew what the young man believed his calling to be. Everyone had plenty of advice on how to get there, but he only listened to a few of them. When, aged sixteen, Thierry asked for his father’s permission to travel with a church youth group to go build an orphanage in Central Africa (a first step, he believed, to becoming a real aid worker). Being a practical man Thierry’s father made a great show of going through the pamphlets, brochures, websites and booklets provided about the trip. Being a practical man he of course said no.

“First thing is first, we can’t afford it,” he told his son over a coffee at a place not far from the Cathedral, “Second, you don’t want to do this. This is tourist shit. The Red Cross wants people who actually know what they’re doing, not some little fucker who went on holiday and pretended to build a wall.”

The refusal hurt, but he was a practical young man and he saw sense in the words. So he began looking for other ways. Considered getting into nursing (his grades weren’t high enough to become a doctor), carpentry and becoming an electrician like his father. He began volunteering at an aide agency, calling people asking for donations.

Six months after that chat with his father, Thierry’s sister (older, at university) dropped a pamphlet on his keyboard. The front page showed a picture of a man in camouflage with a red cross on his arm giving a small African child an inoculation.

“You should join the army,” she said with the kind of confidence that only older siblings possess for talking to their inferiors, “You’d get paid to learn how to do what you want to do, and they might send even send you on aid missions.”

Thierry had told her to mind her own fucking business, but kept the pamphlet. He began to check the army’s recruitment website, and consider how useful it might be in, say, a refugee camp in a combat zone to have some military experience. He’d certainly know what he was doing then. He was seventeen when he told his parents of his plan to enlist. They supported him. His sister took the credit. He enlisted a month after turning eighteen and climbed onto the bus to a CFIM for his initial training.

They were just starting to hear about a strange terrorist attack that had occurred in Frankfurt, which killed dozens. No one knew who did it, but everyone knew who didn’t do it, which seemed to be everyone else.

Within a month there was talk about strange aircraft, attacks on other civilian centres and remote communities across the globe just disappearing. Everyone thought, but no one wanted to say it out loud.

Within two months no one cared anymore. It was aliens.

At the end of his training Leroy was given a rifle and his regiment sent to fight in the south. It wasn’t just aliens. It was a war. A week after that it was called a slaughter, and the aliens didn’t care if you were wearing a red cross armband or not.

***

Cheng grinned as she fired her grenade launcher, grinned harder when it exploded and sent another ADVENT trooper cartwheeling backwards. The sectoid that had been beside it screeched and waved about its shredded left arm. Vargas put a tight burst into its skull and bits of brain streaked the road. Adams guided Doctor Lynch forward cautiously towards the extraction zone.

Leroy caught movement to his left, spun, fired without thinking, caught a second ADVENT trooper in the neck. The black clad fucker went down in a gurgling pile, clutching at its mess of a throat as orange blood pooled through its fingers. Cheng jogged up beside him and watched the mess cooly.

“Leave him to bleed out?” she asked.

Leroy scratched his beard. It had gotten long recently.

“Non, I like to help when I can.”

He raised his rifle, took careful aim and pulled the trigger.