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Saturday, May 1
13:08

Animal Squad are on return vector to HQ from the alien base they’ve just routed in Fiji when our intel guys report a terror attack in Beijing. Christ on a crutch.

Deploying the squad from Bram. The vamps. They’re armed and armored and itching for some action; I hope they don’t get more than they can handle.
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May 1
9:59

Infiltrating alien base on Fiji. I don’t know if we’re ready, but we’re as ready as we can be and this isn’t a chance I’m going to let slip by.

—

Located two ground-level elevator shafts. Split into two teams to make the descent. Don’t like coming down blind like this.

Gazelle is first down to what appears to be ground level of the alien base. Big place, lots of corridors. Same general material as the alien crafts we’ve seen — is this thing a pre-fab structure flown in from wherever the xenomorphs came from, or is this earth-side construction? I’m not sure which answer I’m less eager to hear.

Immediate contact, a grey. Clean take for Gazelle, and proof that these plasma weapons work just as well when we’re the ones firing them.

Hamster nailed coming down the elevator. Dammit. Wolvie gets revenge.
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Thursday, April 1
Morning

Going ahead with the third-base initiative. I’d like to be able to have a non-combat facility, to focus specifically on research and manufacturing projects.

Pricing things out, we can’t do better than to build in India, and there’s some excellent infrastructure available for our tech needs. We’re setting up a bit west of Hyderabad.

I’m calling the new base Kali Yuga. I’m honestly not sure if that’s me being pessimistic or optimistic or fatalistic or what. Three months ago I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me this is how I’d be spending April Fool’s Day.
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Friday, March 26
Afternoon

Craft assault on French/Spanish border went well, but that only tempers the loss of the Interceptor trying to take it down in the first place. Will have to order another one for Bram, not a budget outlay I had planned for.

Aliens clearly have significant, if not outright superior, firepower on the larger aircraft. I wonder if I can get the lab guys to take apart their weapon systems on the crafts we’ve recovered.

Wish in one hand, shit in the other, though. Right now I’m ordering an Avalanche missle launcher for Bram’s new Interceptor.

The cannons we have can do the job on the smaller craft well enough, but the Avalanche has great range according to the specs and I’d love to be able to hit them before they can hit us. Maybe end these firefights decisively before the xenomorph gunners can get a shot off at all.

And with that I’m damn near broke for the month. Time to review our stores, maybe have a little garage sale.
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Friday, March 19
Morning

Time to build up the command structure. Congratulations, Colonel Tiger.

It’s increasingly clear we’re dealing with a significant and organized threat, and X-Com will need to staff up to meet it.

Expanding our warehouse space at HQ. A lot of alien tech coming in, we’re going to need space to keep it all until we can figure out what’s worth keeping and what’s worth putting on the market.

And I’m transferring our second Interceptor to Bram.

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Tuesday, March 23
0:11

Terrorist attack in Manila. Still two suits of armor short. Will have to make do.

Chasing the sun and losing. We’ll get there after dark. Dammit.
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Monday, March 1
Morning

Good feedback again from the funding consortium. No raise from Spain this time out, though. Apparently we didn’t fly over enough.

Lab geeks finished their alloy research. Judging by all the smiles, this is some exciting stuff. And apparently we can make it ourselves, if we need to.

My interests are more practical, and they’ve learned that by now: they’re pitching a new armor design for the troops. Couldn’t have happened sooner. We need something to keep my guys alive.

I’m stationing some new men at Bram, and transferring some of our overstock of laser rifles there to arm them. After the fly-by scare earlier in the month, I’d like to have someone keeping an eye on the facility, even if it’s just a skeleton so far.

I’m also bulking up the science team some. We’ve got too much to research to do and not enough brains to throw at it.

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Sunday, March 7
Evening

Personal Armor research complete. It’s an improvement. We’ll start manufacturing immediately.

Throwing the labcoats at a medi-kit project they’d proposed back at the start of the year, despite their protests — they’re as curious about all this alien gear as I am, but they aren’t in charge of keeping people alive, and I need everything I can get to help out on the field.
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Monday, February 15
20:56

Gila promoted to Sgt.

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Saturday, February 20
8:00

Laser rifle production run complete. Re-upping.

One option I haven’t explored yet: remote-piloted heavy weapon platforms. As a potential solution to our troops’ vulnerability out of the transport, it’s an attractive idea — lead the way with a small tank — but the cost is considerable, nearly half a million bucks for one platform. Given that I don’t know how well these things would work in this unusual situation, that’s a lot of my budget to gamble.

Maybe next month.
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Thursday, January 28
Evening

Goat, Cheetah, and Badger to active duty.

Standing force down to a dozen and a half. I need some more recruits.

And I need a new facility in Europe. Ears, at least, at first; an Interceptor as well, ASAP. We’ll go from there.

But there’s no money yet. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the budget meeting, exactly, but I’m ready to get it over with.

Laser pistols performed well. Squirrely aim, but they fire fast and clean. May phase out conventional rifles for all but my snipers going forward.

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Monday, February 1
00:43

Who holds a budget meeting at midnight? I’m all for promptness but we could at least wait till normal business hours.

But then I wasn’t expecting to be literally handed a suitcase full of money, either. “Petty cash”, apparently.

So much for the weird news. The good news: the international consortium funding the project is happy with our work. Seven nations, in particular, gave us a funding boost.

None of those countries saw any direct intervention by X-Com in the last month, though. We may have briefly buzzed Spain with a fighter jet a couple weeks ago, I suppose, but that’s usually not grounds for a pay raise.

The good news is we’re flush again; with three million in pocket I can safely start construction on a new base.
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Sunday, January 24
Morning

$400K for this Alien Containment lab. Worth it, I suppose, but I’m getting down to lint in my pockets at this point. Talked to my handler about budget advances, but he just turned me down gentle. Suggested I should seek revenue opportunities based on my existing resources.

February can’t come soon enough.

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Tuesday, January 26
8:00

Production run on our first ten laser pistols just completed. Looking forward to field testing the things. With nothing else for them to do with their time, I’ve put the engineers on building another ten. I doubt we’ll need them, but the resale market has to be good.

And the larger radar array is now live. Hope that helps with our tracking. No sign of alien craft for several days now. Too much to hope that we’ve seen the last of them, though.

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Wednesday, January 27
11:36

Report just came in of an alien strike of some sort in Novosibirsk, of all places. Not sure what to make of it; if civilians are involved, where’s the Russian military on this?

Scrambling the transport. Let’s go take a look.
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