Requested file: S8-212 - "Old Base, Older Men"
Old Base, Older Men


As Dmitri Samusenko walked along his patrol route with Alex Kirov, he was preoccupied with his thoughts. When, only a day or so ago, he entered the XCOM base, he felt a surge of memories wash over him. He'd lived there for almost three years. His friends lived there with him. Then, they either went up to Mars and died, or they stayed on Earth and died. Dmitri thought back to the time the aliens had attacked the base - the Battleships hovering overhead, too many for the defenses to handle.

The battleships destroyed the fighters and vehicles at the base and then proceeded to let smaller alien craft through, filled with mutons and psionic ethereals. The aliens blasted through the doors, and the defending troopers behind them. Dmitri managed to stay alive long enough to join a group which counterattacked - smashing through a group of aliens between them and the woods. There, Dmitri was knocked out by a stun bomb and left for dead. When he awoke, the aliens had left, taking with them the lives of almost all of Dmitri's comrades.

Dmitri turned to the right, looking at Kirov, walking alongside him, a slightly older man. He knew that Kirov was probably thinking about the same thing - he had friends at that base. Dmitri pulled out the XCOM badge he found on a corpse - Captain Alfred Geissler - the one who led the counterattack - had worn that badge. Dmitri chuckled as he remembered the Captain, who had tripped over a fire hose during a terror mission just as a plasma bolt flew over his head. Alfred had saved Dmitri plenty of times and Dmitri returned the favor. The two were on different sides during the cold war, but that was forgotten in the face of greater danger. Dmitri remembered - laughing Alfred, who always had a joke to tell, no matter how bad. Now, Alfred was dead, far from home, and Dmitri was hiding out from the aliens in some god-damned forest. He kicked at a rock.

Dmitri thought about the psi-amp that Alkaviades found. 'Psi-Defense'. 'Psi-Strength'. 'Psi-Rating' my ass! What the hell did those scientists know about what it felt like when an alien got into your mind, tearing and pulling, ripping your neurons in half? Did the high 'Psi-Defense' help Berger when an alien tore into him when he had a grenade primed? Not many of the others knew what it felt like. Dmitri knew. He'd killed a friend that way, shooting him in the back with a plasma gun, while an alien sat in a nearby building, probably laughing its proverbial ass off.

With these depressing thoughts, Dmitri finished his rounds and walked into the camp. Civilians were bustling around, doing whatever it was that civilians did. Dmitri didn't know - he hadn't been a civilian for ... 15 years now? All of his life was spent killing things - humans, then aliens. Then again, all of this brooding wouldn't help matters, so he decided to look up - after all, a depressed soldier is a dead soldier.

"Hey Dmitri, glad to see you wake up. You've been looking like crap all through the patrol. I didn't want to bother you - figure I'd let you work it out on your own. Come on, relax! You can't keep all of this crap pent up inside of you. I say we get our replacements, and then get something to eat. I'm starving like a bear." Kirov said this in russian. For some reason, he wasn't depressed.

Dmitri looked up at him. "Yeah, why the hell not. It will not do Dmitri any good to starve to death, right?" he chuckled.

The two soldiers met Scott Wright while walking through the civilian camp. He was sitting down on a crate, and Dmitri's eyes flew wide open - Wright was sitting on a rock, holding a baby in his hands. Then, Dmitri remembered. That was the baby who was inside a box a sectoid was carrying.

"Hey Colonel!" Dmitri called out. "We're done with our patrol. We did not see much."

"Yeah... especially since you were half-asleep." Kirov nudged Dmitri with an elbow and grinned as he whispered this.

"Shhhhhhhh!!! You'll wake him up!" Wright whispered.

"Sorry, Colonel." Dmitri whispered. The baby twitched a bit, but then fell back asleep.

"Phew. For a second, I thought he was gonna wake up and start yelling, and give away our position." Wright grinned as he whispered this. The camp made enough noise that any alien who was nearby would have found them anyway. Dmitri chuckled and grinned as well.

"Oh yeah, Freed wanted to tell you something, but I can't remember what it was. Something about the alien device you two found?"

"All right." Dmitri answered. "By the way, sir, if you want more mushroom soup, we're running out of mushrooms around here. Dmitri had to go all the way to the stream yesterday..."

"Aw, geez. There he goes about the mushrooms again... " Wright almost groaned, but then remembered the baby sleeping in his arms.


Later, Dmitri approached Jason Freed sitting by a campfire, fiddling with the little blinking alien thing that they had found in the corpse of an XCOM soldier. Or at least, it used to be the little blinking alien thing. Now it was a few wires and pieces of metal and a couple of lenses.

"Hey, Jason. What you do with little device?" Dmitri inquired.

"I took it apart. The lens was whirring and annoying me." Jason grinned. "Although it's a good thing we snapped the antenna thing off - that WAS a camera. Aliens probably would have tracked us back to here... "

"Well, that is one good thing." Dmitri sat down next to Jason. "So how's your head?"

"Well, i've got a headache, not related to that stone i got hit by." Freed grinned. Then he turned serious. "I take it you were stationed at that base?"

"Yes. That is where Dmitri lived." Dmitri replied, looking into the flames.

"Not a bad place." Freed grinned. "Clean it up a little and we could move on in. Hey, you gonna make any more of that mushroom soup?"

"Yes. When Dmitri can get more mushrooms, that is. For now, we eat synthetic civilian food." With that, Dmitri shuddered - that crap tasted awful. "Needless to say, Dmitri won't be leaving bathroom area for next week."

"So that's what caused those aliens to find us... " Freed laughed at his own joke.

"Dmitri not think so - aliens have perverse sense of smell."

"I see... well, it's my turn to stand watch, as I can tell since Belial is walking over here and he's supposed to be on watch. I'll see you around."

With that, Freed got up and left, while Dmitri stared into the flames. There was something soothing about just sitting there, and watching the flames flicker. No moment in an army R&R period seemed as peaceful as this moment right now - Dmitri sat in front of the flames and watched them flicker and die out. Then, he sat in the dark, looking up at the sky and wondering.

Created May 6th 1999 by Andrew Pokrovski, AKA Dimitri Samusenko