Part 53

Tynam is nearing the end of his imaginary war. After X-COM received the fourth alien message, researched on Earth kicked into high gear in order to located the alien threat, and find a way to deal with it. As always, my comments are in italics, with Tynam's entries appearing normal.

Otto Zander

A lot of the new technology we've been downloading is way over my head.

Trans-dimensional fields?

Trans-dimensional shields?

As I've stated in my journal previously, the aliens were themselves researching dimensional technology in an effort to find a weapon to defeat humanity. It's incredibly complicated technology, but human scientists were making advances nearly as fast as the aliens.

I have to say, for all we now know about the aliens and sectoids, the motivations and desires of the ethereal still elude us. There's still a great mystery for X-COM to solve one day out in deep space, and the only thing we know of for sure is that the ethereals are somehow part of it.

STOP THE PRESSES IT'S A MISSILE THAT ISN'T USELESS. The Permeator missile goes straight through shields using a powerful gravitas pulse. It's powerful, it's fast, and it's a human invention. The aliens don't have anything similar! We're certainly going to equip these guys on our ships.

The most recent alien freighters were towing around this thing - a huge alien drive component. Whatever they're building, it must be titanic to need engines of this size.

Psionic projection...

...plus psionic holography equals...

Doppleganger missile. These are really cool at first glance. Fire one, and it turns into a copy of your ship, flying around and acting as a decoy. Except the missile runs out of fuel in like ten seconds and one missile slot only holds one missile. Why did our scientists give us so many missiles that suck?

Fortunately, they've now discovered what I'm sure will turn out to be the two most important discoveries of the alien war.

The dimension jump drive finally gives us the ability to follow the aliens into the black hole we've seen them enter on the earlier messages. If they're trying to hide something from us in an alternate universe, we also have the weapon we need to destroy them.

The Nova bomb.

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Due to the massive destruction the Nova bomb causes, its use is limited almost exclusively for terrorism. The  combat version of the  nova bomb requires  it to be armored  and travel  quickly to its target .  So quick in fact that  the ship firing the nova bomb cannot escape the blast radius. The  test  bomb  had its speed reduced to the point where escape was possible .

Considering the incredible danger this weapon poses, I'm quite glad X-COM was able to put the genie back into the bottle. Only  three  nova bombs were ever made, one of them being the one used in the test. All records of this technology were successfully destroyed before it could proliferate. There was  one scientist almost exclusively responsible  for its development, so by keeping an eye  on that scientist , we have ensured that this weapon will never fall into the wrong hands.  That scientist  was so brilliant I knew I had to  hire him  to  lead all future X-COM research operations .


_{Message censored by Otto Zander on June 2, 2084}

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We have a plan and the means to succeed. All we need is to find the alien black hole entrance. From an intercepted transmission, we know of the location of five black holes in the Frontier, and probes were launched to find them.

Except the holes found our probes first! The powerful gravitas field sucks in everything around them, including our probes.

Very common misconception about black holes. They don't "suck" in matter like a vacuum, they only capture bits of matter that have failed to sustain a stable orbit.

Of course it had to be the last one of the five discovered.

From behind this portal lies the alien doomsday weapon.

People back on Earth aren't taking this news very well.

And this is exactly why X-COM needed to destroy all evidence of the Nova bomb. People get panicky, and most of them don't view X-COM favorably. Cult membership skyrocketed after the news of the Doomsday weapon leaked. The last thing we wanted was some nutjob getting their hands on a Nova Bomb and destroying humanity with it.

We need to stop this doomsday weapon ASAP to calm the people on earth.

What Gravitas? and four other top-of-the-line Super Avengers will be sent to my base, loaded onto the MacArthur and sent to the black hole. What Gravitas? will be loaded with a nova bomb,  as will my wingman "Terminator" .  He's been flying with me since nearly the start of the  Frontier war,  and his bomb will be our backup plan in case I fail in my mission .

This is close enough to what really happened to need to censor.

We all know the consequences if we fail in our mission.

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