A bit of fanfic/documentary for the OpenXCom PirateZ mod, which is perhaps of questionable taste but unquestionable amazingness. Stupid things happened in game and this kept rattling around in my brain until I had to let it out. It, uh, got kind of grim actually. That base defense mission was a bit tight.

The Battle For Booze

Striped Dynamite (Boomy to her friends) hunkered down in the barracks, listening to the distant rumble of explosions. As long as the occasional distant thud pounded against the base’s fortified entrance doors, the assault hadn’t broken through, and it wasn’t yet time to fight for their lives.

Spiral Tits paced back and forth like a panther, her high-tech armor rippling around her as she moved, the slick-looking blue-tinted surface shimmering slightly as she walked beneath each trembling overhead light. She seemed nothing but impatient, perking up a little at each explosion far overhead, pausing an instant in anticipation for the echoing clunk and alarms that would signal the beginning of battle. In one hand she hefted the high-caliber heavy autocannon she’d scrounged form the base’s weapon stores, her belt hung heavy with ammo chains and grenades. She was carrying at least three times the weight of what Boomy could but showed no sign of discomfort or even slowing down; part of that was the synthetic muscle of her armor, but only part of it.

Spiral Tits (Boomy hadn’t seen the tattoos that were rumored to have given her that name, but they were supposed to be impressive) was the veteran of dozens of battles. One of the founding members of the pirate crew, she was only here in the middle of nowhere to rest and recuperate for a time from yet another skirmish, making room at the main base for more fresh recruits. She was officially on bed rest, but the half-healed bullet wound in her leg barely slowed her down, and at the moment, it was all hands on deck.

The reason for the attack was still a complete mystery. Well… apart from the “band of cutthroat pirates and outlaws” thing. Under the rule of the Star Gods, armed men breaking into one’s home could be caused by much less. But the hideout that was fondly dubbed The Distillitorium was hardly the bustling center of the budding pirate empire. A tiny hole dug into the hardscrabble flat plains of the northern Confederacy, it was hardly more than a makeshift still, a ramshackle barracks and a hyperwave decoder intercepting official signal traffic and beaming it back to the main base in… wherever. Somewhere in the Central Province, Boomy thought, but wasn’t sure. The Distillitorium was just a listening post, though the newly-finished a workshop was full of bottles waiting to be filled with rum and smuggled off to fund the less glamorous parts of the pirate operation. There were no armies of recruits tromping back and forth, no scavenged, rebuilt or stolen vessels launching daring raids from well-hidden hangers, no Cap’n lurking in her lair orchestrating the movements of dozens of soldiers and hundreds of support personnel. Nothing but a couple dozen runty technicians currently crammed into hideouts and closets to stay out of the line of fire, and five complete rookie soldiers. Plus one cat-like vet who was impatiently fiddling with the crossed sword and stun baton slung over her back, the pirates’ signature weapons.

Speaking of weapons, they were barely even equipped properly. Oh, they had plenty of guns, that was never a problem for the pirates. Booty of a hundred raids overflowed their armory; the trouble was finding anything useful. The main base, what little Boomy had seen of it, had a glistening (if mismatched) row of high-tech weapons and armor lined up for each raid, ready for action at all times. To outfit the Distillitorium however, they had (as far as Boomy could tell) pretty much just scooped up whatever was at the back of the storehouse and shipped it over. Everything had ammunition and was in working order, mostly, but it was a huge mess: giant handcannons, rusty revolvers and gleaming combat knives were strewn around the barracks along with an incredible assortment of random…. stuff. Most of which looked far too unwieldy to ever actually use: rocket launchers, giant sniper rifles, four different models of combat shotgun, home-made high-caliber cannons, rocket-propelled grenades, submachine guns of half a different makes, something that looked maybe like some sort of weird grenade launcher but nobody had figured out any way to actually make it work… Pretty much all of which was too heavy or unwieldy for the green recruits to use with any degree of competence. There wasn’t even any real body armor, scarce and hard to manufacture as it was. Spiral Tits had brought her own, mainly it seems because nobody had told her not to. The only uniformity was in the pirates’ signature hats and the sword-and-stun-baton sidearms. And the first aid kits, fortunately. Unfortunately, said kits consisted entirely of a roll of bandages and a bottle of top-grade rum.

The whole mess had arrived only recently in a pile of giant crates, and the fresh recruits had been hard at work trying to sort and maintain the weaponry, for lack of anything more interesting on their horizons. With no transport aircraft stationed at the base, it had seemed like backwater defense duty in the middle of nowhere hile the construction crews worked on building more facilities, the technicians set up the distillery production line, and the smugglers and fences worked out supply routes. Work for everyone except them, protecting a long elevator shaft and four roughly-dug rooms with still-wet paint from an enemy that had no reason to harass them and shouldn’t even know the base existed yet. Up until the hyperwave decoder had chattered and chimed “SHIPPING CONTACT #138 – VESSEL CLASS: CRUISER – FLAG: CHURCH OF SIRIUS – MISSION: CRACKDOWN – ZONE: NORTH AMERICA”. Given that there was only one base in North America that would rate an official crackdown visit from a cruiser, suddenly a skeleton crew of barely-trained recruits with ad-hoc gear became all that was protecting thirtysomething people and a base that, while small, represented months of work and a small fortune in equipment and construction. The Cap’n had plans for the Distillitorium.

“Pack heavy”, Spiral Tits had said with a toothy grin when asked for advice on armament. “We ain’t gonna be fighting one-on-one, so ditch the SMG’s and fill your pockets with grenades, girls. Don’t slow yourself down –speed above all else!– but never pass up an extra stick grenade if you can fit one in somewhere.” This with a salacious wink. After a moment’s more judicious thought, she added “besides, we don’t have anywhere to keep prisoners on this side of the planet, so there won’t be any.”

On this encouraging note, the pirate who had been given the name of Striped Dynamite (always a fan of explosives) found a grenade launcher that looked like it worked and some grenades that seemed like they matched the thing. None of the grenades were labelled aside from colored striping around the base of them though: there were two red ones and three yellow ones, which was about all she had pockets for anyway. She supposed she’d figure out what they were soon enough. She’d found a pistol that she could fit her hands around and aim properly and strapped it to her hip, but Spiral Tits had just taken it out of the holster as she brushed by and put another grenade in its place.

Striped Dynamite leaned over to one of the other swabbies, a wiry little girl who had introduced herself with an irrepressible grin and the unencouraging title of Salty Sodom. The small, dark-haired, freckly pirate was fine-tuning the action on the flamethrower she was hefting; that at least they knew worked properly, unlike the rest of the weaponry, as it was their main cooking utensil. Soylent flambe wasn’t much better than the stuff raw, but, that was pretty much all the variety they had. Still better than most; plentiful and boring food with occasional murder, death and pillaging was a pretty good deal these days. And the rum, what little of it they got out of the runts at the workshop, was fantastic.

“Why are they attacking here of all places anyway?” she whispered between the dull crump of explosions. “We haven’t done any raids, shot down nothing. Hell, the listening post barely came online a week ago. How do they even know where to look?” Salty shrugged.

“Well it’s the Church of Sirius, innit?” she asked. “I bet th’ alien-kissing buggers’ve got all the booze trade on th’ whole bloody continen’ locked up. Trade Guild is prolly in on it, but they’s all in cahoots anyhow. Now we show up here, start explorting a bit o’ the ol’ dropsy, and they know there’s competition. Obvious they’d wanna hammer it down firs’ thing.”

Boomy had consulted Round Olivia on the matter as well, but the quiet woman (who had been named for part of her figure, apparently, but not her stomach) just cast as suspicious look at Spiral Tits and murmured “I think they have a turncoat who just arrived recently.” Though given the boss gal’s enthusiasm, Boomy couldn’t see that.

“Right, it’s go time!” Spiral Tits shouted as the klaxons sounded and a final explosion echoed through the hallways. Nerves twanging, Striped Dynamite and the rest of the crew hustled down the stairs and took up positions behind doors and tucked into corners. The access shaft only had one exit, leading into an intersection of two hallways lined with storage cupboards. In the middle of the intersection was a broad concrete pillar that housed a stairwell and small bathroom, built with typical rough and sturdy outlaw architecture. While hardly a fortress, the setup provided some cover where hopefully even a few pirates could, with sufficient firepower, hold off an full strike team. That was the plan anyway, in typical pirate fashion: lure the enemy into the bottleneck, plaster them with explosives, finish off any survivors, repeat. Striped Dynamite and Salty Sodom covered one side, Damascian Melanie and Bonny Maiden on the other, the boss hanging back with Round Olivia to sweep in and support one side or the other when necessary.

Boomy pressed herself to one wall to peer around a corner, then nearly fired a grenade into the ceiling as something warm and damp with the approximate consistency of unfinished concrete pressed into the center of her back.

“Mister Reaps!” she shouted in surprised dismay. “Don’t do that!” The reaper, three tons of muscle and armor about the size and shape of a bipedal, vaguely ursine pickup truck, just said “gworf” and shoved its nose against her side again. He was doing the “pet me” gesture, trying to rub up affectionately against Boomy’s arm. She freed a hand from her grenade launcher and gave the creature a reluctant scratching under the armor-plate bolted into its skull. It just craned its bullish neck up into her fingers and gave a loud, moist sigh of happiness. The tamed reaper had been rather unexpected. He’d arrived in a crate along with the rest of the weapons, with nothing but a name collar and a crude hand-built remote consisting of a single three-way switch, labelled “Asleep”, “On” and “Kill”. They’d tried “Kill” once outside, near a wrecked vehicle, and everyone agreed that the results had been pretty good once they’d switched it back to “Asleep” and gotten some of the workers to haul the creature out of the wreckage.

But the reaper had to eat, cybernetic alien death machine or not, and was endearingly derpy once you got used to the smell, so they’d sort of gotten into the habit of just leaving it on and letting it wander around the meager common areas of the base. At least after the runts had chased him out of the workshop/distillery with shouts and thrown wrenches and broken bottles and some sort of impromptu heavy laser weapon. It’d eaten a couple tables and clawed up a weapon locker and drooled a lot, but on the whole wasn’t entirely unlike a giant, stupid version of the five-legged puppy Boomy had kept in a box for a while when she was a kid. The lumbering thing had become sort of an unofficial mascot.

They had asked Spiral Tits about when she’d arrived and she’d said it had served basically the same capacity at the the main base. “We always took him on raids, back in the day. But he’s big and slow and can’t fit through most doors, so, not really that useful. And really when you’re in a fast-moving fight trying to push forward to knife range or capture prisoners for ransom, he’s only actually good as mobile cover. We tried a boomasaurus too, but the damn thing blew itself up.” So Mister Reaps been left behind in favor of bringing more gear and warm bodies for a few missions, then a few more, then eventually shipped off to the Distillorium along with everything else that nobody had used for a while.

“Striped Dynamite, is that you Mister Reaps is with?” Spiral Tits’ voice cracked over her radio.

“Yes Boss,” Boomy replied, keying the handset on her shoulder.

“Send him forward when I give the signal.”

Right, impending flamey doom from the fanatical agents of our alien overlords.

“Right, here they come,” Spiral Tits called. “Mel, rocket the corridor when I give the sig–”

There was the FWOOSH of an RPG, then an ear-shattering explosion that filled the hallway to the access shaft with smoke and fire.

“WHEN I GIVE THE SIGNAL!” the boss pirate reiterated.

“I saw one, Boss!” Damascian Melanie protested her quick trigger on the rocket-propelled grenade as she reloaded on the other side of the intersection, but Boomy’s ears were ringing and the white flash of gauss rifle fire streaked down the hallway, knocking chips off the small service room in the center. Suddenly figures in blue-green combat armor were pouring down the hallway, and Salty Sodom was charging past Boomy to fill the passage with napalm from her flamethrower. Two of the figures fell as flames washed over them, another went down to bullets from the team on the opposite side, but one trooper ducked through the torrent and kept coming forward, gauss pistol blazing. Salty Sodom ducked out of sight and into the bathroom, leaving Boomy as the obvious target, who was trying to back away as he came on and wishing she had a weapon that didn’t involve a minimum safe distance.

Her back bumped into Mister Reaps, and she ducked around him. “Kill!” she ordered, then keyed her radio. “Boss, turn Mister Reaps on!” The reaper’s movement shifted from bemused shambling to a sudden charge and a toothy roar an instant later, so presumably Spiral Tits had heard her. The last soldier went down with a scream, and Boomy fired a grenade or two blind down the hallway as she ducked through the smoke and into the bathroom to reload.

“Nabbad, eh?” Salty Sodom said with a grin, sitting on the loo, topping the flamethrower’s tank up from a spare. “C’mon, I’ll ’andle the ones close up and you take care of the ones in the back.” The pair poked heads around the corner to see Mister Reaps standing in the middle of fire and death, waiting placidly for the next order as the enemies down the wide hallway took pot-shots at it.

“Oh for… Mister Reaps, back here!” Boomy called, beckoning him back. The heavy head lifted her way even as a gauss projectile ricocheted off a shoulder plate, and Mister Reaps amiably stomped towards them. Boomy lobbed another grenade over his head (oh, yellow stripe means incendiary) and was about to key her radio again when Damascian Melanie’s voice cried out and her blood ran cold.

“CHRYSSALID! CHRYSSIE IN THE EAST HALL–” The call was cut off ominously.

“I’ll get it,” Spiral Tits’s voice crackled over the radio. “Stay up front, keep any more from getting through.” Salty Sodom nodded with wide eyes. There was a lull in the gunfire, smoke and flames billowing in the corridor, and Boomy wordlessly ducked to the other side of the hallway, hoping to catch any oncomers in a crossfire.

The sounds of gunfire came down the crossing hallway, and after a moment Salty Sodom gestured to indicate she was going to get closer to the access shaft to get a better look. She vanished off into the smoke for a moment… Only to return at high speed, pursued by a figure that was humanoid in outline, but in detail consisted of sharp edges and grey chitin and skittering horror.

“KILL IT! KILL IT!” Salty Sodom shrieked, her back to the wall in the intersection now, opening up with her flamethrower on the approaching chryssalid. Boomy barely had time to react; the thing was fast. She hesitated only an instant, but Salty just looked straight at her, terror written on her face as the thing sprinted through the flames, apparently unscathed. “DO IT!”

The monster was maybe ten feet from the woman when Striped Dynamite lifted her grenade launcher, took an instant to aim, and fired. Both figures were tossed aside by the explosion.

“oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap” Boomy repeated to herself as she ran down the hall, the chatter of gunfire and shriek of gauss rifles seeming faint in her ringing ears. The Chryssalid was in pieces; Salty Sodom… fewer pieces, as far as she could tell. Still breathing, at least, blood pumping. They’d all practiced the motions; bottle of rum comes off the belt, pull the cork out with your teeth, dump it on the wound, wrap with a bandage and tie as tight as you can. Repeat as necessary, and hope for the best. Mister Reaps roared somewhere behind her, accompanied by more gunfire and the rushing pound of an RPG.

Someone called her name. Not Mia, not the name she’d been born with, but Striped Dynamite, the name she’d been given when she joined the pirate crew, agreeing to barter her propensity for explosions in exchange for a steady meal and enough money to maybe keep her brother and nieces safe. The name was called again before her head came up, to see a figure lurching down the corridor through the wisps of smoke. It was Damascian Melanie, of course, but… rocket launcher discarded, a terrible wound in her midsection slowly oozing, footsteps unsteady and skin grey as steam rose from her clothes…

The heavy rat-tat-tat of an autocannon shook the figure, and Striped Dynamite came back to herself as the new-hatched chryssalid tore its way out of the corpse, shedding its coccoon in a spray of gore. Breath catching, she lifted her grenade launcher and, not even thinking about minimum safe range by now, pulled the trigger.

Click. It was empty. It only held one shot, the one she’d hit Salty Sodom with. Suddenly Boomy’s mind turned from drifting clouds to frantic lightning, fingers fumbling at her belt as she broke open the breech of the weapon. She had some grenades left somewhere, minimum safe distance be damned. More gunfire was spattering over the armored, insectoid form, but it was barely slowing down…

Spiral Tits seemed to just appear, diving out of a cross-corridor into a roll, ending up on her knees beside the chryssalid, the momentum having carried her braced sword into its leg. The creature whirled to face her, claws lashing out, but the pirate boss was faster, bringing the mono-edged alloy sword up through its chest carapace as she stood, then gripping the blade in both hands and bringing it down again through the creature’s head. She pulled her blade free and shook ichor from it as the remains of the monster fell.

“She all right?” Spiral Tits asked, gesturing to the unconscious Salty Sodom. Boomy shrugged helplessly, but the pirate was already kneeling beside her, checking the bandages. The shimmering armor was dented and burned, and blood oozed from a fresh hole in the calf of her already-wounded leg. “She’ll keep,” the pirate boss concluded, dribbling a little more alcohol onto the reddening fabric, then swigging the last of it herself.

“For luck,” she said with an irrepressible grin, pulling Boomy to her feet, then wincing as she got her own legs under her. “C’mon, Olivia can’t hold ’em all herself.”

The entrance to the access shaft was only half a hallway away, but it seemed another world. Most of the fire was guttering out, but smoke was still thick in the air, the floor strewn with bodies. Round Olivia huddled behind the corner of the cross-corridor, her assault rifle rattling as she traded potshots with unseen assailants in the access shaft.

“Good, I need more ammo!” she called across the hallway, checking the magazine in her rifle and slotting it back home. “I… I… Hey no, I… I want… to… help…” Her voice trailed off as she stood, then walked fearlessly across the battlefield. No enemy fire came to meet her as she crossed the hall to where the pirate and the rookie crouched, leveling her gun in their direction. Spiral Tits pulled Boomy back around the corner as bullets raised concrete dust from the floor.

“What the hell!” Boomy squawked indignantly. “Round Olivia, it’s us! Stop shooting!” Spiral Tits shook her head.

“Stun rod, now,” she snapped, reaching into a pocket in her sleek armor. Boomy unslung her stun baton from over her shoulder, gripping it tightly to stop her hands from shaking as she snapped it on with a crackle of electricity.

“Boss, what the shit is she doing?” Boomy hissed.

“Bad mojo,” Spiral Tits whispered leaning close. “They got one of their wizards back there, the ones that mess with your head. Knock her out, she’ll be fine in a bit.” The pirate eschewed her own stun baton and just slipped a set of heavy-looking brass knuckles over one fist. “Hit ’er fast and hard. Ready…”

Round Olivia came around the corner, and they pounced. The assault rifle went rat-tat-click, the last bullets zinging down the corridor worryingly close to Boomy’s hip as she brought her stun baton up underhand, ramming it hard into Round Olivia’s stomach. The voluptuous rookie jerked but stayed upright, teeth gritted and eyes glazed as she took an awkward one-handed swing at Boomy with her rifle. Spiral Tits stepped in close, inside the arc of the swing, and landed a heavy cross on Round Olivia’s jaw, spinning her nearly all the way around.

“Oh– b-better,” she murmured dreamily as she slumped. “Watch…” And then she she fell, Spiral Tits’ arm snaking around her to keep her upright.

“I gotcha, babe,” the pirate said, letting her down gently. It was only then that Boomy realized Olivia’s left hand held a grenade, the tiny red ‘armed’ light at the top blinking rapidly. Spiral Tits had her hand around it too, carefully freeing the unconscious woman’s grip from it without releasing the handle that triggered the timer.

“That could have gone worse,” Spiral Tits said with a grin, holding up the primed grenade, then drop-kicking it down the hallway to ricochet off a wall towards the access shaft. “She’ll be fine, if none too happy, but she’s out for a while.” The pirate pocketed her brass knuckles and gave her sword a twirl to loosen her wrist before shooting Boomy a grin. “Don’t be fooled kid, the stun rod’s just a crutch for noobs like you. If yer fast and strong enough, a bit of fistycuffs is way better.” Uncovering her ears after the explosion of the grenade, she snuck a quick glance around the corner. “Can’t be more than a couple, three left. Maybe four, but it’s close quarters. We’d better do something about them before they just mind-melt us and have us stab each other. Got any grenades left?”

“Just the one,” Striped Dynamite mumbled blankly. Shouldn’t she have one more? Must have gotten used somewhere. She couldn’t stop looking down at the unconscious Olivia. Salty Sodom was down as well. Damascian Melanie was– gone. Where was Bonny Maiden? Oh, she was… over there… with a hole in her chest… Were her and Spiral Tits really the only ones left to fight?

“Where’s Mister Reaps?” she asked suddenly, the thought striking her all at once. “Mister Reaps! Come here, boy! Boss, we can have him go down the corridor first and we’ll follow up behind him.”

Spiral Tits looked at her, some respect in her gaze as the reaper lumbered into view through the smoke, battered and scorched but not apparently the worse for wear, tongue lolling happily. “That’s… not a bad idea, girl. Okay Mister Reaps, out in front. We go fast and hit them hard, standard procedure. Lead in with a grenade about halfway there to keep their heads down when we come in, and try to scoop up a real weapon along the way.”

Almost easier done than said, in the end. Mister Reaps lumbered happily down the hallway, filling it quite effectively with his bulk, a couple gauss shots glancing off his armored bulk. One punched through metal plating to sink deep into his flank, but reapers don’t really bleed much or feel a lot of pain, and he kept trundling with barely a missed step. They piled through the blast doors and burst through the flames of Striped Dynamite’s last incendiary grenade, leaping through the fire too fast to really get more than singed. There were three figures beyond, reeling with the sudden assault; Spiral Tits had whipped her sword through two of them already by the time Striped Dynamite brought up the gauss pistol pilfered from a corpse and emptied it into the last one.

After sweeping the base one last time, they climbed the long ladder up the access shaft, scrambling through destroyed baffles and blast doors. They reached the surface just in time to catch the faint, dark disk of a cruiser far in the blue of the horizon, rising rapidly as it accelerated, fleeing.

Epilogue

As part of the cleanup operation, the hard-eyed women and men who were the link between the pirates and their black market supply lines asked a lot of very specific questions of the work crews and base staff. Some weeks later, there came news that the ship of a particular smuggler had gotten shot down near the coast in the Central Province, and a strike team dispatched to comb the site and capture any survivors. The Church of Sirius officially denied any rumors of military action in the northern reaches of the Confederacy, citing the sanctity of theological mysteries to rebuff the investigations from local governments and the Trading Guild.