"Pettersen, Yang, to me!" Taking two soldiers, Pierre begins running alongside the warehouse to another door, intending to flank the aliens.

One Feldjäger falls to Eva's bullets while the others to find their own cover. Andrew's flashbang makes that much harder - one trips and falls in the open, and his companion barely gets behind a pillar.

"Commander! That UFO turned around, it's coming back down! ETA four minutes to the LZ."

As soon as the flashbang goes off, Jonah rushes into the building, finding some lousy cover behind a waist-high tool cabinet and spraying bullets at the disoriented MPs.

Hoping the enemy is focused on Jonah, Eva gets up and moves deeper into the warehouse, trying to get to a flanking position or to spot and shoot the grey creature.

Arriving at the next door, Pierre has Pettersen take up a firing position by the wall, and then kicks open the door and rushes in, instinctively finding cover and scanning for hostiles. Yang follows him.

"Where are those Eagle-Cs? Any chance we can get air cover over the ops zone?" 

"They're on their way to the ops zone. Already at the extreme range limit of their missiles, and they'll be within optimal range once the U-FO gets close."

"Have the team stay in the warehouse, X-Ray CAS won't be much use for them if our guys are next to theirs."

The Commander pauses briefly. The Skyranger is a sitting duck on the ground. If he orders the Skyranger engines shut down, it might not be targeted -- but it will also be completely unable to escape. If the engines stay hot, it will be an obvious target for the UFO. "Tell Big Sky to take off and fly away at a heading perpendicular to the U-FO's current heading. If they're going to chase him, they'll have to abandon their own people."

Pierre and Yang see two MPs on the ground dying or dead, one pinned down by Jonah's fire, and, rather more importantly, two grey monsters right in front of them taking aim at Eva's back.

It's a beautiful shot. Coming in from the side, Pierre and Yang fire on the monsters. Their small stature reminds Pierre uncomfortably of children, but the glowing green weapons in their oversized hands show them to be dangerous foes.

Only one of them gets a shot off, a searing line of green light blazing from its weapon - and just past Eva's shoulder. Then they both go down in a spray of orange blood.

Eva turns away from the dead monsters, firing a quick burst in the general direction of the MPs.

"U-FO is on radar, climbing for missile launch." The two Eagle-C fighters gain altitude to increase their missiles' range.

The craft is coming down fast and not making any attempt at evasion or stealth. Heat glow builds around it as it falls through the atmosphere back towards Cologne.

Eva catches a glimpse of a purple nimbus building around the first alien as it scurries towards the back of the warehouse. Then it peeks out around a rack of crates and she feels a weight slam down on her thoughts, squeezing her brain inside her skull. All she can see is a brilliant purple light, getting brighter and brighter as it drowns out everything else, and the thunder of gunfire is muted as if heard through thick glass. 

"Fox Three, Second Fox Three." Two AMRAAMs fly out towards the UFO. A few seconds later, two more launch from the other fighter.

Andrew fires at the creature's exposed head, but it ducks into cover.

Eva tries to screw her eyes tight, tries to move, tries to figure out what's going on. Outwardly, she calmly turns her rifle on Andrew, and shoots him three times in the head.

Pierre sees the glow from the grey monster and realizes in an instant what happened to the MPs. He throws a fragmentation grenade behind its crate.

As the grenade explodes, Yang runs in, trying to shoot the creature before it recovers.

Still in cover behind the door, Emma Pettersen shoots an MP who was about to kill Pierre.

Yang finds a shredded pile of grey skin and orange blood, ripped apart by the grenade. The weight on Eva lifts and she sees Andrew fall.

A rapid descent turns into a rapid climb at a rate that would have killed any human. Still, physics cannot be totally defied and the craft slows down enough in the process that three of four missiles manage direct hits. Molten metal sprays across the sky, but the remaining four-fifths of the UFO rise out of range faster than any follow-up missiles.

The warehouse is suddenly still, echoes of the grenade still ringing off corrugated walls.