Nightmare Fuel / XCOM: The Hades Contingency

The aliens are scary enough in the games, but this fic manages to take this entire situation and make it a lot more frightening.

The Commander and the War on Terror

The amount of information on the Commander of XCOM and his past, across all three fics, is so steeped in Nightmare Fuel that it honestly needs its own folder.

• When reading the story for the first time, it might be surprising for the first prominent bit of Nightmare Fuel in this series to come not from the aliens, but from the Commander of XCOM. The fact that the Council retrieves him from a cell in a CIA black site should be a clear enough hint as to the kind of reputation he has.
  • What could possibly warrant such measures? Simple; the Commander used to be a CIA agent himself, one who became infamous after his and his team's extreme actions during the War on Terror. And as the War on Terror files show, the man did every single thing that could be done: assassination of Caliphate-aligned imams, of Caliphate military officials and their families, human crucifixion, terror attacks on Caliphate-occupied cities, culminating in the razing of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. One can hardly blame Patrick Rush for considering him the worst war criminal in human history; the man is unfettered to the greatest extreme possible, and in war, he will do anything to put an end to the enemy. He may feel sadness at what has to be done, but he will do it anyway.
    • A further note on the reputation he has: when the time came for his execution, the Council opted to fake his death, locking him up in the aforementioned black site, simply because a man of his talents was too useful for them to kill. Come the alien invasion, he's forced to use a cover story, posing as a defector from his own old unit. Even that is met with surprise at a minimum, up to apprehension and/or shock.
• As reviled as the Commander's acts were (and for very good reasons), one needs to bring attention to the Caliphate itself... or, to be more specific, to the Caliph: Abbas Hazeem. The Commander's actions might have ruined the Middle East, but the worldwide persecution of Islam, and the Caliphate's original decline? Both of these things are Hazeem's fault; having seized power after the assassination of his predecessor, the Inheritor King (which is heavily implied in the Files to have been instigated by Hazeem himself), he was obsessed with notoriety, intending to carve his name into history by any means, and so he used his newfound power as Caliph to attempt the annexation of every Muslim-majority nation, and wage holy war on the rest of the world, while enforcing his rule through executions, tortures, and indoctrination. In the words of one of his former advisors, Hazeem had basically turned the Caliphate into an "abhorrent, diseased reflection of himself".
  • His interrogation of the leaders and facilitators behind the protests in Germany only add to the general picture. One of them folds after learning the Commander has snipers trained on his family. Another, despite proving to be immune to torture, talks when the Commander takes a blowtorch to his pet dog. The third one, however... she ends up being tortured for her information, losing four fingers in the process and nearly losing an eye as well.
• As vile as the Commander's reputation makes him out to be, not everyone has it out for him. Mira Vauner, one of XCOM's soldiers, openly admits to approving of his methods, and she happens to have a pretty good reason: she, her husband and her friends were captured and tortured by the Caliphate, and as for Mira herself... she was used as a guinea pig for "experiments" in disguise surgery, and as a result, her face has been completely stripped of any skin, forcing her to use a hood to obscure her features. For all the war crimes the Commander commited, for all the extremes he went to, the Caliphate was more than able to surpass him in what they did to its captives. One can only wonder what other horrors the Caliphate may have inflicted on its victims...

• XCOM's contingencies, written and designed by the Commander in order to prepare for every kind of worst case scenario. Every kind. There are twelve of them in total.
  • The Thanatos Contingency: When enacted, it grants XCOM forces the authority to essentially kill anyone they find who may pose a risk to XCOM operations. Including human armed forces, dignitaries and civilians. If you're opposing XCOM interests or standing in the way of their missions? Dead. Suspected of harboring forces hostile to XCOM? Dead. Cannot be identified as friendly? Dead. Held hostage by a hostile force? Your only hope is if the captors are human, because at least there's hope for a negotiation... and even then it may fail, in which case, there's every chance you may get caught in the crossfire.
    • Granted, there are a few aspects that can somewhat alleviate the unsettling implications: first, the Thanatos Contingency is not an order, but an authorization, meaning that Squad Overseers who oppose it on a moral or other basis can elect not to follow it; second, the Contingency itself expressly states that XCOM forces are to open negotations if the hostile party is human. That being said, if negotiations fail, XCOM is still cleared to execute the hostile party, be they military, law enforcement or civilian. All the same, the true horror of the Thanatos Contingency is not so much in the fact that it entails killing anyone who's a risk to XCOM operations, but that it establishes such as a very distinct possibility.
  • The Zeus Contingency involves calling in an airstrike in the event of an XCOM retreat, loss of a full squad, alien-overrun cities... and nations openly working against XCOM. Among the weapons that can be used in such an event are chemical and/or nuclear warheads. If you're a civilian living in one such country, you may find your hometown bombarded without warning, seeing your loved ones and neighbors potentially succumb to chemical or radiation poisoning (if you don't die first), all because your country worked to impede XCOM's operations.
  • The worst thing is, these two contingencies described above aren't even the worst of them. They're relatively standard ones, and any soldier is cleared to read them. The ones restricted to the Internal Council are even worse, because they can only be enacted in the absolute worst-case scenarios. Case in point, the Hades Contingency, as detailed further below.
• The attack on Hamburg. After so much buildup around the protests and political instability in Germany, the aliens finally reveal themselves to the world at large, with extreme prejudice. And to make matters worse? This is a terror attack. The Chryssalids have been deployed.
  • The Chryssalids themselves are already enough Nightmare Fuel on their own. One extremely unfortunate couple bore witness to their handiwork, and were in a state of shock by the time Shawn's team found them, to the extent that he believed them to be mistaken as a result of the trauma.
    • The actual first appearance of the zombies themselves. The corpses were all piled together by the Thin Men, who were also killing indiscriminately, just to add to the piles.
    • Perhaps the best part of it all is that Shawn is killed by these things, and turned into just another zombie. The 2022 Edition goes the one logical step further, and his teammates are granted the highly dubious "honor" of seeing a newborn Chryssalid pop out of his ruined cadaver.
  • The Chryssalids aren't the only development on the aliens' side: the couple who first mentioned them? One of them turns out to be a Thin Man, taking XCOM (and the other man) by surprise. It managed to kill Cortez, and would've probably killed more soldiers had Shawn noticed it a second too late. Now, they are no longer limited to the suited male design seen in Enemy Unknown.
    • The effects of the Thin Men's acid clouds are also seen for the first time, as several police officers were unlucky enough to be caught in one. Their skin is completely melted off, and it is assumed that they were being eaten away from inside as they breathed in the poisonous cloud.
• The titular Hades Contingency, enacted in response to the situation in Germany. Among XCOM's contingencies, this is one that is restricted to the Internal Council, and for good reason; in essence, it explains the procedures to undertake when a country withdraws from the Council and/or supports the aliens, either willingly or via mind-control. This is also the first actual look into the Commander's M.O. during a war.
  • So what exactly does the Hades Contingency entail? Well, in the event that the government of a country, its military, or both are hostile to XCOM and friendly to the aliens, XCOM will undertake a series of false-flag terror attacks and sabotage operations against key infrastructure to generate anti-alien sentiment among the population, and remove the country's political/military leadership, paving the way for new leaders to take over and condemn the alien invaders. We see all this in action in Chapter 24.
    • The false-flag attacks in particular deserve particular mention: XCOM Intelligence agents actively start shooting innocent civilians and law enforcement while disguised as Thin Men, and two particularly frightening incidents occur when several people turn violent against two alleged thin men... who are actually two regular people seduced and disguised as Thin Men in their sleep by XCOM operatives. Paranoia Fuel kicks into high gear when you realize that what happened to these two innocent people could easily happen to you if your country's government or military voices their support of the aliens.
• As of the 2022 Edition, EXALT can definitely be considered Nightmare Fuel of the highest order. Gone is canon's nebulous paramilitary organization implied to be part of an Ancient Conspiracy. Gone is the original edition's take on the Illuminati with an excessively secular mindset, scrambling to put people in control of as many nations as possible. This edition's take on EXALT remains The Illuminati, but their reach has been magnified to a horrifying extent: every major government, company and institution has EXALT agents embedded in it. The worst part? With so many people implanted in crucial positions, others in similar positions, who are not aligned with EXALT (such as the Council) are very much aware of this. And they're either powerless or unwilling to stop it.
  • Not all of EXALT's agents are in prominent positions of leadership; rather, they go for the "underbelly", the positions where the true work happens behind the scenes - engineers with access to critical infrastructure and software, policy writers responsible for putting legislation to word, deputy commanders of private military organizations, secretaries and ministers, every position of the sort is one that EXALT will have likely taken over.
• The epilogue sees the introduction of Annette... in an EXALT base, undergoing the experiment that unlocks her psionic powers, under abhorrent conditions; she's been a guinea pig for EXALT's experiments for three months, during which EXALT injects some form of substance that always leaves her in agonizing pain. She's also under constant observation, and if she tries anything to escape her predicament - from using force against her captors to suicide - they electrocute her via an implant, stopping her in her tracks.