I own neither Stargate nor the X-COM franchise. No infringement is intended, no profit is to made and I'm just not worth the hassle of suing anyway unless you want a share of the wages of an underpaid Civil Servant.
Stargate - Planet PX9-757 – July 2000
The Jaffa guarding the Chappa'ai raised their staff weapons and charged them, anything could be coming through and they didn’t want to meet the fate of the guards who had clearly been caught unawares by the Tau’ri agents who had recently come to this world and sabotaged the vessel that was being constructed here. There was a rumour in the ranks that the Tau’ri had used salvaged Atoniek technology to achieve the feat but nobody knew for sure. In any case the loyal Jaffa warriors would meet any enemy of their God Apophis with courage in their hearts and their staff in their hands as benefits the scions of millennia of martial tradition and service.
The splash-like energy backwash caused by the Chappa'ai’s incoming wormhole bought the half dozen Jaffa to full alert. The planetary garrison was smaller now the shipyard was destroyed and the redeployment of troops and weaponry to more important worlds meant they had no Staff-Cannon trained on the gate but nevertheless anything that came through the shimmering event horizon of the gate at less than supersonic speed was going to be in trouble once plasma bolts began to rain down upon it.
It was no man that stepped through the gate but instead a machine of some kind that clattered through the stargate on metal tracks. One of the Jaffa laughed. ‘It is one of the Tau’ri reconnaissance devices’ he declared, the heart that had been pounding in his chest in anticipation of battle starting to slow its frantic beat immediately. They all knew of the use of such mechanisms by the humans of Earth though none present had set eyes upon one before.
‘I have heard that the Tau’ri call them “Malps” or something similar’ another Jaffa declared. ‘It must mean something in their language though I know not what.’
‘They must have sent it to see if we had vacated this world’ the Jaffa who had first identified the machine theorised. ‘Shall we destroy it?’ he asked, aiming his staff.
‘It is no threat’ a third Jaffa stated. ‘We could capture it and offer it to Lord Apophis as a trophy’ he suggested. ‘It’s technology is inferior to that of the Gods but he may reward us for our initiative.’
‘You speak wisely’ the first Jaffa agreed. ‘Come help me see how we can disable its power source. We may need a litter to drag it back to camp but it is not so big’ he said putting down his Staff and starting to walk towards the machine which supposedly carried audio and visual recording devices that were undoubtedly sending pictures and sound to the fools that had thrown it away by sending it here. He fought back the urge to yell insults at the machine, better they see the smug impression on his face as he approached.
Part of the machine swung around to point itself at him as he approached. Assuming it was a camera the Jaffa could not help but give it a wave. A split second later some kind of external speaker fitted to the “Malp” device spoke up.
‘Lay down your arms and surrender’ the machine commanded in a slightly distorted electronic tone. ‘If you fail to do so immediately you will face lethal force’ it told them.
The Jaffa laughed again. ‘You have a better sense of humour than I thought Tau’ri Gonach’ the closest to the machine replied wondering if they knew enough of the Goa’uld tongue to recognise the foul insult and hoping they did.
‘You were warned, no second chances’ the machine replied and a beam of bright coherent red light lanced out from the part of the device pointing at him and instantly burned a gaping hole right through the Jaffa’s chest, vaporising both flesh, breast-plate and the chain-mail armour underneath in a split second.
The first Jaffa was still falling to the ground with an astonished expression on his face when the machine's weapon started to swing swiftly around to engage the next warrior.
They were well trained and had worshipped their Lord for many years, practising for combat every day so that they could serve him to the best of their ability, so the remaining Jaffa got over their shock very rapidly and the first on numerous staff-blasts hit the machine just before it fired again. Unfortunately for the warrior who was promptly cut neatly in half by the now scything laser beam, the plasma merely scorched and slightly pitted the thick armour plate the Tau’ri combat-capable robot carried, and did not prevent him ending his days in two separate pieces.
More staff blasts rained in but the machine simply shrugged them off and kept firing. It had originally been designed to withstand considerably more powerful weapons than these and had been subsequently upgraded since then with additional armour. After taking out two more Jaffa in quick succession it starting rumbling down the ramp that led to the stargate, firing on the move as it went, plasma blasts continuing to scorch and pit its metallic surface but doing nothing to stop it.
‘We must flee’ one of the remaining Jaffa declared.
‘Coward’ another retorted continuing to fire again and again to no avail. The Tau’ri had no honour to send a device to do the work of a warrior he thought, they must be surely cowards too he decided before the laser burned into him, incinerating both his lower torso and the Goa’uld larvae that nestled within it.
The skirmish, such as it was, lasted barely two minutes, the last of the Jaffa, the youngest, least experienced and battle-hardened shot in the back as he fled, having already cast aside his staff.
One of the Chappa'ai guardswas still conscious, and from where he lay bleeding into the dirt from a massive, and only partially cauterised wound, he watched a pair of humans emerge from the gate, sound followed by several more and all carrying what he assumed were weapons though he did not recognise from the pictures he had been shown of captured Tau’ri firearms.
Loyal to the last, unlike his feint-hearted comrade, the Jaffa fought back his pain and tried to raise his staff to shoot at the humans in a last gesture of defiance and piety but one spotted the movement, shouldered his mysterious weapon and fired a less powerful though still deadly version of the laser the machine had used before the Jaffa could get off a shot of his own. The beam struck the Jaffa right between the eyes killing him instantly, the energy boiling his brains as it burned right through his skull on both sides and back out again, lancing through his tight fitting thin metallic skull-cap helmet.
One of the humans surveyed the carnage and nodded his approval. ‘I want these corpses back at base for dissection ASAP’ he ordered. ‘The staff things too, the geeks might find a use for them but they don't look like much to me’ he added. ‘Alright clear the ramp we’ve got a jeep coming through any second’ he continued, ‘I want this ball of rock swept clean of any technology we can salvage and any of the Naquadah shit especially’ he said. ‘That crap’s got real potential boys and girls’ he reminded them, ‘and someone check if the HWP needs more than a new paintjob’ the officer commanded. ‘If it's badly damaged send it back and have them send a replacement in case we need the backup’ he told the trooper that was headed for the machine. A Heavy Weapon’s Platform could give you a very nice edge.
‘Don’t think much of these Jaffa assholes Sir’ one of them observed.
The officer nodded his agreement. ‘They’ve been kicking their asses with MP-5’s and the like for years so I’m told’ he replied. ‘Feudal society with badly designed clumsy weaponry’ he noted. ‘Christ if they thought those SGC pussies were bad wait until they get used to us coming through the gates’ he declared with a grin.
‘This one is still breathing’ one of the soldiers said loudly, checking a fallen Jaffa.
‘Stick a medkit on him and stabilise the poor bastard’ the officer ordered. ‘Guess one of them doesn’t get dissected after all’ he said then smiled evilly. ‘Just interrogated and maybe vivisected instead’ he added with a feral grin.
An injection of stimulant bought the wounded Jaffa around just as a four wheeled vehicle rolled through the gate, this wasn’t how the Tau’ri operated, they worked in smaller groups as a rule and were not so… ardently military. ‘Who are you?’ he gasped at the invader who seemed to be treating his wound.
‘Extraterrestrial Combat Unit at your service’ the human replied evenly. ‘They call us X-COM back home, sorry to tell you this but the bad Tau’ri are loose in the Galaxy now, so if there’s a real God you pray to have a quiet word now, because we’re going to rip the fake Goa’uld ones a new asshole’ he declared.
By the time the X-COM team was done scavenging PX9-757 another thirty-two Jaffa warriors were dead, six were taken alive mostly thanks to being shot in non-vital spots then ganked with a stun-rod and the first one from the skirmish at the gate was sitting in Alien Containment in the European XCOM Base in Poland, where the Stargate recovered from the Pacific had been taken. The Jaffa was heavily bandaged up, though both the wondrous Tau’ri battlefield medical kits and the rejuvenating power of his larval Goa’uld had together prevented and otherwise mortal wound from killing him.
The Jaffa had many questions but to be honest the one he was wondering about most was why exactly the Tau’ri had an unusually buff looking Asgard of all things in the next cell? He thought they were allies?
Meanwhile beyond the walls of the armour-plated, sound-proofed, airtight and utterly infallible prison for captured extra-terrestrials the negotiations between X-COM and the representative of the SGC were starting to draw to a conclusion. Things were going to be done very different at Cheyenne Mountain from now on, the days of the old SG teams were numbered, from now on it would be the newly christened XSGCOM that was going to lead the fight against the Goa’uld threat not that the SGC was particularly happy about it.
The X-COM Troopers slated to be assigned to the other Alien War were fairly upbeat about it, why worry abut the Goa'uld? At worst they might implant you with a symbiote, but at least that was still a lot less scary than being impregnated by a damn Chryssalid and as for the notion of fighting Jaffa instead of Sectoids and their freinds for a few months, well that just sounded like a period of badly needed R&R. Most of them them needed some light duty to get over the damn PTSD that was endemic among any of them with more than half a dozen of missions under their belts.
How scary the System Lords were depended largely on whether you were used to fighting really unpleasant aliens. It’s all a matter of perspective when you think about it, and if there was only one thing you were allowed to say about the perspective of the average X-COM grunt, it would be "warped".
Cheyenne Mountain – Earth – August 2000
‘It’s not like we had a choice’ General Hammond told Colonel O’Neill and Major Carter, the two sat across from him around the briefing table, ‘they already had a Stargate of their own and with the DHD they could override ours’ he pointed out. ‘We either allowed them into the program or we ran the risk of having them in the driving seat with no prospect of acting as a moderating influence.’
O’Neill crossed his arms. ‘With all due respect Sir from what I can see of their methods it’s going to be like we recruited the NID guys that went around the Galaxy stealing technology instead of putting them in the stockade where they belonged’ he opined.
‘Which is precisely why we need to be there with them, so they don’t alienate our existing allies or worse actually increase our number of enemies blundering about like amateurs’ Hammond responded. ‘I assume you’ve read the files they provided’ he asked, ‘or at least the summary pages’ he added looking at O’Neill.
Carter shook her head in amazement just thinking about it. ‘Casualty rates of well over fifty percent per mission’ she said incredulously. ‘And the average is only that low now because of the laser weapons they’ve been using recently’ she continued. ‘For the first few months of last year they often took seventy-five percent losses from a single mission, she said. ‘I doubt any other military organisation in history has ever sustained losses that high as a matter of course.’
‘Guess they didn’t have the right personnel’ O’Neill surmised.
Carter looked at him. ‘X-COM have access to a far wider recruitment base than we do’ she pointed out. ‘They’ve got the Special-Forces from over a dozen different countries to choose from and they took the very best they could find’ she continued. ‘If you compared our SG Teams with X-COM, half of our people wouldn’t even get past the first stage of being considered to join them, their required standards are too high’ she told him, tapping the file in front of her. ‘Just to get your foot in the door you have to be the elite of the elite.’
Hammond nodded. ‘United States Military personnel on secondment do in fact make up a fair sized portion of X-COM, which made it easier for me to establish a line of communication with them over the last week or so than it might have been otherwise, and everything I’ve heard bear's out Major Carter's analysis’ he concurred, ‘but even more than that, the losses they take in combat acts like some kind of sick process of Darwinian selection’ he continued. ‘Only the best, and maybe the luckiest, of them last through enough missions to fully adapt to the nature of the high-intensity combat they are involved in on a regular basis’ he said. ‘If you can’t run like an Olympic sprinter, shoot like Annie Oakley and have reaction times like a rattlesnake you die, it’s as simple as that, I’m exaggerating but not by as much as I wish I was’ he added. ‘I couldn't imagine being in a position where I regular sent men on missions where their was a better than even chance of them not coming back but that's normal for these people.’
‘Our problem is’ Carter interjected, ‘and to continue General Hammond’s analogy’ she continued, ‘they’ve evolved a shoot-first and dissect later mentality, which is fine for the war they’ve been fighting until now, but it could be disastrously counterproductive if they play it the same way with us’ she said. ‘This is especially true as regards the Asgard, because like it or not, it’s pretty inconceivable that these “Sectoids” they’ve been fighting aren’t related to our little grey friends, despite the huge gulf in their respective modus operandi.’
O’Neill frowned. ‘I can’t see the Asgard doing some of the stuff that I’ve read about in the files and by the way the photographs clipped to the after-action reports ruined my lunch’ he declared. ‘Abductions? Mutilations? Does that sound like Thor’s people to you?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘It sounds more like the X-Files’ he added.
‘Mulder and Scully never had a Grey locked up in a cell to show people when they asked for proof’ Carter replied wryly. ‘X-COM provided detailed autopsy results, DNA and blood samples plus video recordings of Sectoids in captivity’ she pointed out. ‘Other than the fact they look more generally muscular than any Asgard we’ve encountered before, physically overall they appear to be the same species.’
O’Neill snorted. ‘So who are they?’ he asked. ‘Asgard body-builders that overdid the steroids and got over-aggressive like the guys who take too much testosterone?’ he asked sardonically.
Carter chuckled as she got the mental image of Thor pumping iron. ‘They’re still noticeably weaker than the average human’ she noted. ‘Given the size and weight of the weapons these things carry maybe they needed to bulk up to use them effectively?’ she suggested. ‘A regular Asgard would make for a lousy grunt.’
‘But even if they wanted to do this stuff why would they need to bother with the way they’ve been doing it?’ O’Neill asked. ‘Asgard ships could beam anything they wanted right off the planet from orbit and we’d never know they were there’ he said.
O’Neill took a sip from the glass of water in front of him. ‘These guys land in ships and drag people away, I mean other than the weaponry they’re not even at the technological level of the damn Goa’uld as far as I can tell’ he continued. ‘I mean if they were Asgard what’s the chances you could tag one of their ships with a couple of missiles? Even nuclear ones?’ he asked. ‘We couldn’t even knock down a Ha’tak with a thousand megaton warhead because of the shields, so how the crap is X-COM splashing them with these “Avalanche’s”?’ he queried. ‘They’re just a glorified Phoenix Missile with a low kiloton yield proximity fused warhead slapped to the front’ he noted tapping one of the pieces of paper scattered across the table.
‘It’s a mystery’ General Hammond agreed. ‘We’re contacting the Asgard and hopefully they can show up with all the answers, but until then there are other issues to consider as well’ he said. ‘Firstly the integration of transferred X-COM personnel into the existing SGC structure’ he began. ‘They’re pushing hard for one or two of their people on SG1.’
‘No chance’ O’Neill responded in a flash. ‘We’re already fully staffed Sir’ he pointed out.
‘It’s not written in stone that an SG Team only has four members Colonel’ Hammond replied evenly.
O’Neill grimaced. ‘Couldn’t you give them their own teams?’ he asked. ‘I bet they’d love that.’
‘I’m sure they would but when a dozen alien battlecruisers turn up in orbit demanding the heads of the people that just shot up their planet we wouldn’t love it’ Hammond told him. ‘I want them kept on a leash so we don’t end up with a noose around our necks.’
‘What about Teal’c?’ Carter asked. ‘I hope I’m not being harsh but these people are firmly in the camp that says if it’s not human it ends up on an autopsy table or being tied down and having electrodes inserted into uncomfortable places’ she said. ‘I’ll be fair if I had their track record on meeting aliens I’d be leaning towards xenophobia myself but wouldn’t we be better keeping them away from Teal’c?’ she suggested.
‘Good point Major’ O’Neill agreed. ‘Could be a clash there, wouldn’t want to risk any additional tension between us and them’ he added. Hopefully this would ensure he didn’t have to put up with someone else on his team.
General Hammond looked thoughtful. ‘I agree’ he said. ‘I guess the only choice is to pull Teal’c from SG1 and hand him over to X-COM to be placed in confinement because that’s what they’re asking for.’
O’Neill’s jaw dropped. ‘You’ve got to be kidding George?’ he exclaimed.
‘The only way Teal’c stays out of a cell is if he’s on SG1 and we are going to have someone from X-COM on the team too’ Hammond replied. ‘It’s out of my hands’ he said. ‘I pulled all the strings I could to keep him out of a room with bars on the window but if he’s on the loose, which is how they see it, they want one of their people alongside to shoot him if they think it becomes necessary.’
‘So after everything Teal’c has done for us, for this planet’ O’Neill replied, ‘we’d allow these rookies to lock him up and throw away the key unless they’ve always got someone around to blow his brains out?’
Hammond nodded. ‘That’s about it’ he confirmed with a shrug. ‘Oh and there’s other news I received just before you arrived’ he added. ‘Technically the SGC is seconded to X-COM so the field personnel like yourself are being put on the same salary as them, it was considered likely to cause further strife between the teams if we didn’t. The Pentagon is picking up the tab and it’s not coming out of my budget I’m glad to say.’
‘Don’t they pay the same to all ranks or something?’ O’Neill asked with a wince. As a Colonel he was bound to get screwed here even if the majority of SG Team members might get a raise.
Hammond sighed. ‘X-COM pay their combat soldiers twenty thousand dollars a month before deductions, and by international agreement those don’t include income tax’ he said. ‘You’ll be on a lot more than I am’ he said with a mild hint of resentment in his voice. ‘Actually I checked and you’ll be making more than any of the Joint Chiefs, or the Vice-President for that matter.’
O’Neill blinked. ‘Twenty thousand a month’ he repeated. ‘Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?’ he asked. ‘I’d have requested a transfer as soon as they started up.’
‘Until recently the SGC and X-COM didn’t even know each other even existed’ Carter pointed out. ‘Only a few people knew about both organisations which is why we never got to share technology before. Sometimes you can take secrecy too far’ she opined.
‘And it just had to be the NID that was one of the groups that knew about both’ O’Neill said sadly. ‘Not that I’m surprised given all the nasty black ops they’ve got a hand in’ he continued. ‘Finding out Maybourne had gone to X-COM once he discovered they’d salvaged the gate didn’t shock me one little bit’ he said. ‘Filled in all the blanks and then acted as an intermediary between them and his Russian KGB buddies when they negotiated for the DHD, goddamn typical.’
‘So you did read all the files?’ Carter asked in surprise.
‘Slow night on TV’ O’Neill replied, actually he wasn’t as averse to paperwork and the like as he made out to be, just as he wasn’t as uneducated as he pretended sometimes also. If you had the reputation of not dealing with reports or memo’s properly, people tended to send you less to deal with, which was all to the good, as was having people underestimating you because you came across like you weren’t necessarily the sharpest knife in the drawer. In reality he had a razor edge and was always ready to draw it across an unsuspecting throat if the ideal opportunity to do arose, which it did pretty often in this line of work.
Carter shrugged, that made sense she thought then frowned. ‘What about Daniel?’ she asked. ‘He’s not military so I guess he’s not included in the new pay deal?’ she asked.
‘Fortunately for Doctor Jackson no he’s not’ Hammond replied with a wry smile on his face.
‘Fortunately?’ O’Neill queried suspiciously.
The General smiled. ‘As a civilian, X-COM are listing him as a member of their science personnel’ he said. ‘That pays thirty thousand a month, tax free as before’ he told them. ‘So I’m not the only one here getting paid less as a nominal superior than my staff is.’
This time Carter blinked. ‘If I resigned my commission how long would it be before I got the extra money?’ she asked eventually. If nothing else she had just discovered why X-COM seemed to have even better R&D people than the SGC and it wasn’t just because they had a wider recruitment base to work with.
X-COM BASE 2 (North America) – Earth – August 2000
The Marines of SG3 were led from the elevator through the base corridors straight to one of the aircraft hangers which was currently void of the Skyranger VSTOL transport aircraft that normally lived there. The craft was currently sitting on a landing strip at Area 51, it had transported some of the bases science and engineering teams there so they could check out the stockpile of alien hardware the SGC had been accumulating over the last few years in the hopes they could bring some of their reverse-engineering magic to bare. X-COM lived by the truth that knowledge was power, and sometimes more importantly it was firepower.
The team had been chosen by General Hammond to go check out the X-COM hardware that others had been raving about before he approved its use by the SGC, and they were more than happy to do so, though they found it hard to believe some of the stuff they had been told during the trip from Cheyenne Mountain.
‘So you’re the SGC blokes?’ a trooper with a British accent wearing the standard X-COM jumpsuit and sergeants stripes asked, looking them up and down. ‘Come here to see the toys’ he added then grinned. ‘Well at least they sent Marines’ he said, ‘could have been worse I suppose’ he declared and stuck out his hand. ‘Kevin Nash formerly of Her Majesties Royal Marines Special Boat Service and now seconded from Special Forces to X-COM, or as we like to think of it, very Special Forces’ he said shaking their hands. ‘Come along lads you’ll like these’ he promised heading for a bench that had been set up and which now held a number of different weapons and other indeterminate items.
Major Wade the commander of SG3 looked over the hardware. ‘These the Lasers?’ he asked pointed at a bulky looking pistol and a large boxy looking rifle. It had been painted from the looks of it, and then subjected to harsh treatment so that in some places the paint had flaked off revealing what looked like a shell of red plastic underneath. Why the hell would anyone make it red, he wondered? Well at least someone else, probably a grunt with more brains than the designer, had seen fit to change it to a more tactically useful colour.
‘L2-A1 Hades Laser Rifle’ the XCOM Sergeant nodded reaching down to pick it up. ‘couple of pounds heavier than an ordinary assault rifle like the M16A2 or G-36 but you more than make up for it in the weight of ammunition you don’t have to carry.’
‘How many shots, or how much charge does it hold I mean?’ Wade asked, not being sure what the correct terminology was.
‘Unlimited’ the British Sergeant told him in a serious tone then after a couple of seconds of incredulous looks he grinned again. ‘No not really, but it seems like that’ he told them. ‘It’s around two-hundred and seventy-five to three hundred shots off a full charge, you just plug them in after a mission to power them up again, most of the casing is taken up by the power-pack.’
‘But what if you run out of… charge… in the middle of a firefight?’ Wade queried.
‘How many magazines do you carry for your M16A2 when you go off on a mission?’ the Sergeant responded. ‘More than ten?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘The L2-A1 carries the equivalent of that many shots and it’s a fuck load more dangerous with each one Sir trust me’ he said. ‘Leading the target is a piece of piss with a laser, you don’t really need to’ he told them. ‘It’ll burn through armour like a hot knife through butter which would stop a tungsten-cored 7.62mm armour-piercer dead in its tracks, and as for aiming it's just point and shoot, no bullet-drop in flight to worry about’ he continued. ‘There’s not even any recoil, so you can fire a three shot burst and they all end up in exactly the same place as long as you’ve got a steady hand.’
Major Wade looked at the weapon again, more appreciatively this time. ‘Are you on commission for selling these things Sergeant?’ he asked. ‘Because that’s the best sales pitch I’ve ever heard’ he told him seriously.
‘If we were a company Sir I’d buy shares in us’ the sergeant replied with a smile. ‘Once we start selling these on the open market every other weapons manufacturer on the planet is going out of business’ he declared. ‘Even the L1-A2 Laser Pistol there is beyond anything I could have hoped for before I started this job, it’s just a fucking shame the bug gear is even better’ he added regretfully.
‘Bug?’ Wade queried.
‘Sectoids’ Nash explained. ‘I hear that you call them the Asgard, good name because they’d better be watching their little grey arses when we get the new ships off the drawing board.’
‘Jury’s out on whether they’re the same race’ Major Wade advised him. They looked very much alike he had to admit, but the differences in technology and behaviour were so great as to render that seem trivial as far as most of the SGC was concerned.
‘I don’t believe much in coincidences Sir, but they just pay me to slot bugs and I leave the politics to the people higher up the chain’ the sergeant told him. ‘But I’ll tell you straight that if the Commander decides we’re going to war with these Asgard, then there’s not a Trooper or Pilot in X-COM that won’t follow’ he vowed.
‘Sergeant they’re more powerful that you can imagine’ Wade told him, trying not to sound condescending. ‘Earth is barely holding it’s own against people that the Asgard think are third-raters. You don’t know just how outclassed we truly are compared to the rest of the universe’ the Marine stated honestly.
‘It’s only a matter of time Major’ the sergeant replied confidently, Wade thought it was hubris but made no comment. ‘Right' the sergeant began, changing the subject, ‘we’ve set up targets on the other side of the hanger for you to have a go at with the Lasers, no need to worry about ricochets of course’ he said. ‘Those metal plates are equivalent to the armour the Jaffa wear so prepare to see why these Goa’uld you’ve been fighting are going to start waking up at night in a cold sweat every time they dream of the day they decided to fuck with the human race’ he declared haughtily. ‘Oh yeah, the guys over in Europe tried out one of those Staff-Weapons on our new armour, no penetration but just don’t get hit too many times in the same place because they say repeated blasts start to crystallise the alloy whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.’
‘Any other secret weapons?’ Major Wade asked curiously.
‘Well the Motion Scanners are bloody high-tech, I ain’t got a clue how they work, but we don’t use them too often in the field anyway’ Nash replied. ‘The Medi-Kits are the dogs bollocks though, saved my arse more than once when I was leaking like a sieve’ Nash replied. ‘What we’re all waiting for in the ground-pounders is when they get plasma-guns figured out so we can even things up with the bugs but I hear that’s on hold while the egg-heads see what we can do with Goa’uld gear. They’re supposed to be raving about something called a Zatty-nickle.’
‘Zat’nik’tel’ the Major corrected him. ‘We call them Zat guns, only decent weapon the Jaffa carry, at least it’s the only one we ever bother to use.’
‘Well whatever you call it they say it’ll make retrieving live aliens a lot easier and it might even be a solution to those crab bastards’ the X-COM man said, an involuntary shudder running through his body just thinking about them.
Wade looked at him. ‘Crab bastards?’ he queried.
‘Chryssalids’ the Sergeant explained, ‘be grateful you’ve never met one, I had to shoot a mate who got impregnated with an incendiary round before he turned into one himself’ he said. ‘Runs at better than forty miles an hour, claws that’ll rip through a HWP and they always look like they’re grinning’ he continued. ‘Makes your skin crawl it does. We only ever got one of them alive, they played the tape of the science team cutting it up when it was still breathing to us in the mess hall later that week, we were cheering, swear to god’ he said raising his right hand. ‘So do you want me to show you how the Hades works then Sir?’ he asked. ‘There’s not much to it, no moving parts so nothing to strip down and clean, just an on/off switch, a fire-selector and a trigger’ he said. ‘It’s the Infantryman’s dream’ he said then smiled, ‘and every extra-terrestrial wanker’s nightmare’ he added.
After the first dozen shot’s with the L2-A1 Hades the whole of SG3 would have given their right nut to take them back with them to the SGC. Fortunately for them X-COM only accepted cold-hard cash and offered them for $36,900 apiece, well they did have overheads after all and it wasn’t like they were a charity or anything. They did offer a bulk discount on the armour however, $50,000 each and they already came with the new XSGCOM badge painted on. Well you’ve got to brand the product right?