(Previous entry — First entry)

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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Friday, February 26
Morning

The hanger facility at Bram is complete. One step closer to operations there.

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15:47

Small craft sighted, mid-air, just off the coast of Nova Scotia. Pursuing.

Bull is back on active duty, no worse for wear; Turtle is joining him on the active roster.

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16:57

Tracking lost. Damn. Putting Interceptor on flyover duty. Let’s see if we get lucky.

21:28

Looks like we picked the bogey back up; same signature. Back near Iceland. C’mon, fella, let’s say hello.

22:29

Lost it again a half hour ago, just off the coast of Ireland; picked him up once again just now, over Wales. Radar problems, or do these guys have counter-measures?

22:58

Interceptor took it down over eastern France. Hot damn. Troop transport still refueling. Hopefully we can get airborne in time to clean up the wreckage, but this is a serious resource problem. We need another transport, and another team for it. I might want to build out Bram faster than expected.

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Saturday, February 27
1:49

Troop transport finished refuel cycle and was en route to the alien crash site when the news came in of another terrorist strike, this time in Casablanca. I hate to leave the crash site behind, but that takes priority.

I need redundancy.

Diverting to Casablanca, maybe we can clean up the crash after the fact if everything goes well.

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5:49

Engaging terror forces at Casablanca. Just before dawn. Wonderful.

Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.

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Notes:

Two greys north, right out the front door. Sgt. Wolf scratches both, return fire takes someone down.

Cpt. Tiger plugs a disc; disc goes up with a boom and takes down the gas station it was in.

Exchange of fire with another grey, we lose another man and the alien shrugs off a solid hit.

…

Chimp notches a grey, south of the ship.

…

Another man down. Fire from the north and the east. Civvies wandering through it all.

Goat reports feeling suddenly disoriented.

Wolvie nails the northern grey and then trips across a disc; fire exchanged, no hits. Goat cleans it up.

…

Wolverine reporting disorientation now, too. This can’t be coincidence. We may be dealing with some sort of mind ray.

I can’t believe I just said that.

But these civilians are behaving like zombies, too, walking into the line of fire. Some sort of generalized psyche field? I’d say gas, but the science team hasn’t turned up anything in the soldiers’ bloodwork after the previous missions, and it seems to be affecting my team on too specific a basis.

…

Peregrine iced. Wolverine gets the disc. Eagle notches a couple greys from serious distance.

…

Chimp iced, point blank.

…

Mission complete.

—

Debrief:

Lost five men. A slaughter. Got most of the civilians out alive, however, and took a lot of xenomorphs down in the process.

Nixing the mopup job in France. It’ll have to wait, I need to get these people home and rested.

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Saturday, February 27
Morning

15 men left. Barely enough to fill a transport. Putting in a requisition for five more soldiers, but I can’t afford much more than that. Need that March disbursement.

Crash in France disappeared. Local gov’t? Alien cleanup? Hard to say, but sounds like there’s nothing for us to go back for. We’ll need to act quick on these things, it looks like.

(On to entry #8…)