INT. XCOM MOBILE COMMAND – AFTER HOURS Low red emergency lighting. A holographic globe spins slowly, dotted with alien contact markers. Outside the reinforced viewport, a Viper corpse is being winched into a containment bay. Three figures stand around a scarred briefing table.
NELLY (leaning on the table, voice low and steady) We’re not handlers, Ange. We’re not studio people. We’re the ones who still answer when the rest of the world goes dark. Real friends. The kind that show up with plasma rifles and a medkit instead of a press release.
JOE “SNAKE” JUKIC (arms crossed, that half-smile that never reaches the eyes) She’s right. We’ve been watching your six longer than you know. While the cameras were rolling and the red carpets were burning, we were out here counting the bodies. You’re not alone in this war.
ANGELINA JOLIE (quiet, studying both of them) Most people who say that want something. A photo. A quote. A piece of the legend. What do you want?
SNAKE Truth. And maybe a little less blood on the floor.
(he taps the holotable; a file blooms open – Richard Rockefeller, MSF letterhead, flight data, redacted after-action reports)
Richard Rockefeller. “Head doctor” of Doctors Without Borders. Nice title. Nice obituaries. The whole operation was a front – funding streams that never reached the field hospitals, personnel lists that didn’t match the bodies we recovered. Classic XCOM pattern: humanitarian cover for something that needed to stay buried. We cut the head off the snake. Literally, in a couple of cases.
NELLY We didn’t come to recruit you for charity galas. We came because the aliens already know your name. And because the people who claimed to protect you were selling the coordinates.
SNAKE (steps closer, voice dropping into that dry, gravel rasp) You’re too wild to live in their world, Ange. Too beautiful to die in ours. That combination gets people killed – or worse, used. So here’s the offer: walk with us. Real friends. Real war. No handlers. No scripts. Just the three of us and whatever’s left of the planet when the Vipers finish coiling.
A distant klaxon chirps once. The holographic globe flashes a new contact – Southeast Asia, high priority.
NELLY Mission clock’s already running.
SNAKE (almost gentle) Welcome to XCOM.
Angelina looks from the glowing map to the two of them. Outside, something large and scaled scrapes against the hull. She exhales, then nods once.
ANGELINA Load the dropship.