X-COM: UFO Defense

One

It was dark that night in the streets of Ravenna. Even in the first years of the twenty-first century, the streets didn’t have much more light than they had when the place was still the second city of the dying Roman Empire. Too many city councils fond of kickbacks had siphoned off funds from “unnecessary” public lighting budgets again and again, and the crooked contractors had done the rest of the job, leaving the city’s narrow streets drowned in a near-premedieval gloom. There were exceptions to the rule, of course—such as tonight, when the place was better lit than usual, not by moonlight, but by muzzle flashes.

The horizontal lightning of energy weapons stitched the dark air, leaving everything stinking of ozone, and all the air so ionized that your hair stood up in it like a cat’s fur stroked in dry weather. Sparks jumped from everything that wasn’t already singed or on fire, which at the moment wasn’t much. The alien craft had landed at one end of the Piazza dei San Vitale, starting what Ari could only assume was intended as a terror mission. They started it very well, by the simple expedient of either frying or crushing to death the several hundred people in the open air there. They had been sitting drinking espresso corto or vino rosso in the close, airless stillness of an unusually warm autumn night, eating pastas and honey pastries, talking and laughing the night away. Then the night had come down on them in a blaze of thrusters and a crushing weight, and now not much was left of them but their screams, by now mostly faded to sporadic faint moans and weeping. Around the piazza, everything was dark now, all the lights out in the apartments—the silence indicative of human beings praying that the things out there would somehow, by some miracle, pass them by. The darkness had a lot of prayer in it, and a lot of weapon fire, and not much else—and it was uncertain to Ari which would do the most good in the long run. For preference, he would depend on the guns.

“Got a bad patch over here, Boss,” said one of the voices in his armor’s earphones. That was Mary, a captain and one of his sub-team leaders. She sounded more cheerful than worried. Ari grinned, firing around the corner he was stuck behind. That tone of voice, when stuck in a tight spot, was one of the traits he used to pick his teams.

“You pinned down?”

“No worse than usual. I could use some help in a while.” There was a flash as she disposed of a grenade, and some aliens, and then another grenade to keep honest any other aliens who might have been behind the first little party.

“Noted. Mihaul?”

“You rang, Boss?”

“Gimme a sign.”

An abrupt set of blasts at an alien said M in Morse code. It came from off to Ari’s right, up past where the café had been, half-sheltered under a sign that had said PANETTERIA and now said P ETT R, punctuated with blast holes.

“Good. How you doing?”

“Got you some nice cold cuts here, Boss. Her Nibs’s gonna be pleased.”

“Let’s not count the chicken before it’s home in the fridge, OK? And don’t despise the live free-range livestock if you can catch any. Meanwhile, get your butt over by Mary there and make yourself useful. She’s got a few too many hands for bridge at the moment. You see the front doors of the church? Those big bronze ones.”

“Got it. On my way with the bridge mix,” Mihaul said.

Ari pulled back from the corner for a moment and took a breath, staring out at the alien ship. The few aliens that had been close to it were dead now. Some that had broken away immediately after the X-COM team arrived were now lying helter-skelter about the cobbled pavement, the “cold cuts” Mihaul had mentioned. Some of his teammates occasionally ragged Mihaul for not firing as much as he might, but Mihaul firmly believed in not firing until he was sure of his target and referred with amiable scorn to some of his teammates’ spray-gun weapon firing as “premature ejaculation.” His own technique had been gaining converts lately, both by evidence of its success and as a result of Ari’s—and the commander’s—open approval, with the result that Ari’s teams’ attacks were sounding a lot less like a Yugoslavian cease-fire. His method also worked better and saved money—which counted with the commander, as well.

Now, though, Ari was thinking more about killing the rest of the aliens loose in the square than about the value of weapons charges, or the valuable elements in the alien craft, or the possibility of live captures, or anything else. One of an X-COM assault team’s duties was to drive home to the aliens in the simplest possible language that terror raids were simply too costly to continue, either in terms of personnel or materiel. You did this by killing or catching every one of them, taking home every scrap of their stuff that could be used, and depriving them of everything else they had, whether it could be used or not. But mostly you did it by the killing.

The problem, here as in many other terror spots, was that the aliens loved to attack by night—and the night was their friend. Almost all of them could see better in it, unassisted, than humans could even with artificial augmentation. It gave them an advantage Ari hated, and refused to concede. He was not going to concede it now.

“Elsabet?” he said. “Report.”

“Over here behind this giant tit, boss.”

“That’s a mausoleum, you big dumb nyekulturnyi. Haven’t you ever seen a mausoleum before?”

“Oh, a tomb,” Elsabetta Yanovna said. “I know tombs when I see them, Boss, and I don’t wanna be in one just now. Even pretty ones like this—” She broke off, and there was a brief flare of cannon fire. Ari saw something down the road blow up most satisfactorily.

“Watch where you point that thing,” Ari said. “There’s an empress buried in there, for goshsake!”

“Won’t bother her none,” Elsabetta said, “not the noise, anyway. “

“You may have a point, but just—” Another burst of cannon fire. Ari was glad Elsabetta had nothing heavier than an autocannon at the moment. Her tendency was to use the complete destructive ability of whatever you gave her, and to “let God sort them out” afterward. Ari could imagine the results of Elsabetta with a heavy plasma tonight —mostly God sorting out a lot of irreplaceable late-Empire architecture and artwork. “Oh, never mind,” he muttered as something blew up even more spectacularly. What the heck was she hitting over there? Whatever it was, it gave more light to shoot aliens by. A small truck, Ari thought.

“People, target the vehicles. The light won’t last, but it’s better than nothing.” He glanced over toward Galla Placidia’s splendid cruciform mausoleum, with its massive dome, and spared only a brief thought for the fifth-century mosaics inside and out. The twenty-first century was his main concern at the moment.

Here and there around the piazza, vehicles began to blow up with more regularity They were mostly just little cars, though, and most of their fuel tanks didn’t have enough gas in them to last more than for a few seconds’ worth of light—though that was spectacular enough while it lasted. More gunfire erupted around the square as Art’s people took advantage of the brief light, and the aliens scattered around started melting farther back into the shadows in the side streets.

Don’t want them doing that, Ari thought. I want them centrally located where we can deal with them fast. But if wishes were any good by themselves, the Earth would long since have been free of the invaders. No chance of that. There has to be a way, though. I don’t want to get involved in house-to-house if I can avoid it.

Ari thought hard while the firefight out in the square began to attenuate, the firing more outward than inward now. He was acutely aware of someone looking over his shoulder, as it were, listening to his comms or his teams’, with what kind of thoughts he could only suspect—and he suspected he would find out.

WHAM! The blast went right past his ear, and Ari threw himself not to one side, because that would be what they were expecting, but forward, tucking and rolling fast and hard, straight over the cobbles into the piazza. Behind him, against the wall where he had been standing, something went smack, a small wet noise. That was followed by a sound he had come to recognize from too many street fights: plaster and the underlying brick crumbling as a jet of venom from a Celatid hit it, splattered, ate the outer surface, and started to work on the inner ones. That was followed by an odd little squeak as the creature got its second load ready.

Ari was already up on his knees, sighting on the nasty little sack of poison: he blasted it, and then hit the great ugly Muton that was loping along behind it, which went down and lay struggling. Don’t die, he thought, eyeing the huge, bulging-muscled humanoid as it lay there. We can always use a few more live ones. All the same, he had no desire to have it get up behind him, after he’d moved on, and surprise him later. Carefully, he put a blast through each of its elbows and knees, which tended to ruin most anyone’s mobility, human or alien. Then he crouched and scuttled back to the corner where he had been hiding, careful to avoid the slimy venom from the Celatid, which was still running sizzling down the wall, digesting the old, crumbling stucco.

“Report,” he said quietly, watching the muzzle flashes disappear down the side streets.

“They’re scattering, Boss,” Elsabet said. “This batch is heading northwest. “

“They’ll hit the city wall—it’s only a block behind the mausoleum. You should be able to trap some there. If you can’t, though, push them around the far side and back into the square.”

“Right.”

“Got a whole lot of splat-bags over here, Boss,” said another voice. It was Roddy McGrath, another captain. “And some Reapers. They’re pushing pretty hard to get through this parking lot.”

The Reapers were a particularly nasty threat, especially as far as any civilians who might be in the area were concerned: fierce hungry furry bipedal things, ravenous as wolves, that would come loping along at you and rip your head off and eat it before you knew you were an appetizer. “Don’t let ‘em out,” Ari said, “whatever you do. If you can get them to cooperate, drive ‘em back up the road toward the piazza.”

“Cooperate!” Roddy’s irony showed more forcefully than usual. “Might be fun to try….”

Suddenly, a burst of plasma fire exploded from the direction of Roddy’s team, down the Via Salara a block to the east of the piazza—Roddy’s way of encouraging “cooperation.” Ari grinned. “Mihaul?”

“We linked up with Mary, Boss,” Mihaul said, cheerful. “Not much left of the batch she was chasing. A jew Sectoids are sniping from one of the apartment buildings. All the Mutons are down. A few of them are still breathing.”

“Get those snipers. Then you and Mary pitch in and help Roddy. He’s got his hands full. Your losses?”

“Dagmar’s down. Rio’s making pickup on her.”

“Dead?”

“Don’t know.”

“Have Rio get her home and then meet you. Go!”

Ari held his spot, watching his people work. This was the hardest part, sometimes—keeping out of their way, letting them get their job done. Behind him was the sound of more plasma fire. His own team was closing in behind him, tidying up and securing the area where their own ship had landed, in the small square at the end of the Via 4 Novembre. “Paula,” he said, “got a clean perimeter back there?”

“No problems, Boss. A lot of Mutons over this way. One damn near pulled Clive’s arm off, but he’s still alive. Brian’s taking him back to the ship.”

“Other losses?”

“Nobody. Doris’s link’s down.”

Ari raised his eyebrows. It was less trouble than he had been expecting, and comms in particular had been working well on this run. “Fine. Close in behind me. We’re going to have some cleanup to do in the square in a little while.”

“Right.”

He leaned against the wall, watching the square. The muzzle flashes were getting closer again, coming from the side streets. Off to the left and southward, a startling bang! rattled back and forth between the walls of the old five-story stucco buildings and, as if knocked off by the sound, a big piece of the facing of one of them—including a couple of windows—blew outward and fell down into the street.

Then it got quiet. “There’s your snipers, Boss.”

“Good boy, Mihaul. Get your butts up by Roddy now.”

“Team’s there now. I did that last bit.”

“Alone? You brainless—” Ari stopped, since that was exactly what he was at the moment—alone. “Never mind. You sure you got them all?”

“Looking at the bits and pieces right now. I’ll have to count them up and take an average, but—”

“Oh, just get moving.” Again he thought of that silent presence who might or might not be listening to his comms. It would probably have something to say about his being there all by himself, without even one team member for backup—if indeed it had been watching at all. It was a little like being six and worrying about Santa Claus. He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good…. You think he’s watching anyway, but there’s no way to tell for sure, and the uncertainty cramps your style something fierce.

The sound of footsteps approaching brought him around. It was Paula and her team: Paula in the lead, in armor since she had been hogging “point” as usual, with Matt behind her and, some ways back, big blond Doris bringing up the rear. Across the piazza, a chain of explosions went off—probably Mihaul’s team laying down some grenades for cover while they joined Roddy’s. Then heavy plasmas stitched the air again.

“Report,” Ari said.

Paula glanced over her shoulder, the way they had come. “Twenty Mutons dead.”

“Twenty!”

“We were busy,” she said mildly. “I told you about Clive. He died on his way to the ship.”

“Shit,” Ari said softly. “All right. We’ve got some business to clean up yet. I want you to get your—”

He paused. Behind the rest of Paula’s team, Doris was coming toward them, more and more quickly. Head down, looking staggery, looking decidedly bad. Looking somehow lumpy. Bulkier than she should. Running now, running at them.

Then Doris was on him. Ari saw—just before the mutated arm slammed into his helmet—her slack face, warping out of shape now, and her empty eyes. Just barely gone Zombie, he thought—the second-to-last straightforward thought he had before the fire became everything in the world. God, the boss is going to be pissed.

A thousand and three miles away, a woman sat in a small windowless office. It had a desk, two plain chairs— the one behind her desk and the one in front of it, neither any more comfortable than the other—and a door with a dartboard fixed to the back of it. The dartboard showed signs of frequent and savage use, both for normal competition—the “double” ring was thoroughly pitted— and for other purposes. Right now the center of the dartboard featured, a thoroughly targeted picture of a man with a big, round, florid face and a mustache that seemed big and tough enough to jump off his face on its own and go off to seek its fortune. The picture had no eyes left: only beige cork showed where they should have been, and a dart was presently sticking, cigar-like, out of one corner of the formerly smiling and now ragged mouth.

Jonelle Barrett sat behind the desk, which was very clean and shiny, occupied only by her computer console and one piece of paper. The floor, though, was chaotically piled with paper, tapes, diskettes, cassettes, and other detritus, all bespeaking a person who preferred the least-kinetically-loaded form of filing: pile it up on the floor, where it can’t fall any farther. Some of the piles (mostly the ones leaning against the wall) were quite straight and organized-looking; others were doing their best to threaten others, slumping alarmingly sideways or forward.

At the moment, Jonelle herself was taking the latter approach to life. She was leaning on her elbows over that piece of paper, staring at it, while listening idly to the chatter over her computers comm circuit from one of the teams out on intercept.

“—keep it quiet, now—”

“—Boss’ll be annoyed if we come back without any goodies—”

Jonelle smiled slightly, a one-sided, crooked expression. She shook her head in a particular way, sideways, which activated her secretary’s link.

“Joel?”

“Yeah, Boss?”

“That’s Five on the blower now, is it?”

“Right. They’re in Tripoli.”

“Give me Team Eight. Where are they now?”

“Still chasing their chicken, Boss. Somewhere over the Med.”

“Where’s Three?”

“Ravenna.”

The smile got more crooked. “The criminal returns to the scene of the crime,” Jonelle said softly.

“Colonel Laurentz take a team down there before?”

“Not a team,” Jonelle said, and smiled more crookedly yet. “Never mind.”

Her earpiece clicked, and someone said, “Over here behind this giant tit, Boss. “

“That’s a mausoleum, you big dumb nyekulturnyi. Haven’t you ever seen a mausoleum before?”

Her eyebrows went up. “The model of tact, as always,” Jonelle murmured.

“Boss?”

“Nothing, Joel.”

The silence from her secretary’s link suggested raised eyebrows, and an opinion that more than nothing was involved. Jonelle waggled her own eyebrows at the dartboard, then reached out and straightened the piece of paper in front of her.

It said:

That had been nice to read, the first time. And it had made her smile when it landed on her desk the previous week.

Thirteen months, now, she had been commander down here at Irhil M’Goun. Not what you would normally call a peach assignment. Not down here, where the major natural resources were rock and sand or, if you went out of your way looking for something different, sand and rock. Morocco was a serious pain in the neck.

Take a part of the world that held little to interest anyone, human or alien (you would have thought, anyway), dig a deep hole in it—well, several holes—and build a base. Stock it with several hundred stir-crazy scientists, researchers, and (worst of all) pilots and soldiers.

Then just sit there and twiddle your thumbs. That was what the former commander had done. Jonelle couldn’t understand how anyone who had risen through the ranks in X-COM could possibly think that a base was a place that would just run merrily along by itself without serious attention or constant infusions of money. The former commander had mismanaged the place until there were chronic staff shortages, equipment shortages, even food shortages. Jonelle had trouble understanding how such a situation had been allowed to go on for so long. Whether the commander had had the fabled Friends in High Places, or whether (as Jonelle suspected) the people in High Places had simply been too distracted with more severe problems elsewhere, either way Irhil M’goun had gone quietly to hell in a handbasket, and no notice was taken…until the aliens’ Good Friday terror attack on Rome.

Jonelle grimaced at the memory. Irhil had been the only base in a position, that day, to handle that particular interception. They hadn’t handled it. The result had been more than six hundred dead and the oldest part of Rome devastated. What two thousand years of weathering, tourist chipping, and opportunistic quarrying had failed to do, the aliens had done in about ten minutes, leaving the Colosseum a pile of rubble and (almost as a side issue) the Pope dead underneath it. To say that the Italian government was annoyed would be somewhat understating the case.

Shortly thereafter—before the bodies were cold, Jonelle suspected—the former base commander was relieved of his command. There was a brief interregnum period of a week or so while an investigative team came down and looked the place over. Then Jonelle, at that point a colonel over in Rio, had abruptly been promoted to X-COM base commander and shipped off to run this godforsaken pit.

At the time, while not entirely understanding the rationale that had caused this sudden boon to land on her, Jonelle had been delighted. It had been a career advancement far beyond her expectations, at least in terms of time—she hadn’t expected to make commander for years yet. And she was further excited because the Powers That Be plainly wanted her to act like a “new broom,” in the same way she had on a lesser level with her previous commands. Jonelle had jumped into the job joyously. Now, though, she wished desperately for the good old days when she had been able to just jump out of a Lightning and blow up, with a clean conscience, anything that looked like it intended to make her day less than pleasant. She could no longer allow herself the simple luxury of handling her problems with grenades or an autocannon. Now she had to use balance sheets—nearly as deadly, to humans anyway, and a lot less satisfying.

The basso-static noise of gunfire rattled in her earpiece. “People, target the vehicles. The light won’t last, but it’s better than nothing.”

Jonelle smiled to herself. Ari was never one to waste resources. He had been about the only one of that mind around Irhil when she arrived.

Thirteen months. Jonelle had been busy since then. She had come to a place where the tension levels seemed so much higher than they ever should at a base that was working properly. There were plenty of reasons for it, but at the bottom of them the simple fact that no one there really trusted anyone else to do their job because no one Up Top had spent any serious time making sure they did it. Jonelle sensed this very clearly but said nothing about it to anyone at first. She spent a peaceful first couple of weeks as Queen Log, sitting still and looking around to see who was using what and who was wasting it. Fighting aliens was, after all, an expensive business, and even with the whole planet in crisis, under siege by what appeared to be half of some alien planet’s ecology, money to fight them still didn’t grow on trees. The previous base commander at Irhil—wherever he was, and Jonelle hadn’t inquired, knowing someone would gossip the info to her sooner or later—had started out with a good kitty. But he had blown an astonishing amount of it on research, producing few results and managing little successful control of that period’s repeated alien terror attacks in North Africa. Jonelle had looked over the accounts and became determined to do better. There were a lot of things Irhil M’goun needed if the aliens were not simply to move in and set up housekeeping. At the end of those first two weeks, Queen Log became Queen Stork in earnest, and Jonelle set out to start shaking the place into order, and specifically to make a lot of money.

She fired a lot of science personnel who had been sitting around wasting perfectly good money and food on vague projects the former base commander had never sufficiently investigated. She started to sell even slightly outdated munitions and captured alien paraphernalia to all the anonymous bidders in sight. “I’d sell laser cannons to the Tooth Fairy if he turned up with cash,” Jonelle announced, and shortly thereafter many little private flying craft started dropping out of the sky, their pilots and passengers offering Jonelle’s secret civilian intermediaries all manner of hard currencies for guns and alien corpses and invaders’ metal and all the other salables that successful interceptions provided. The alien corpses sometimes gave her second thoughts. What are they doing with them? Using them for alien snuff movies? It was something of a mystery. The corpses weren’t a source of anything valuable, in the sense of pharmaceuticals or other chemicals, and no one she knew used them as food.

No one she knew. Jonelle made a wry face, wondering whether those corpses were being rendered down somehow and the components sold as instant soup to other aliens for the various subspecies that needed it. Such a discovery wouldn’t have surprised her. Humans would buy anything from anyone, and sell anything to anyone. Treachery was as commonplace as honesty, and Jonelle couldn’t stop it. All she could do was work to do her best for her own side.

She dug new hangar facilities and built new labs and engineering works. Then she hired scientists to replace the ones she had fired. She looked most carefully at their credentials and gave her department heads meticulous instructions regarding what researches she wanted done and how fast she wanted to see results. If they blew it, she fired them—within minutes, some complained. Jonelle let them complain. Irhil M’goun swiftly got a name as a place where someone who could produce results would be given large amounts of research space, whether they were looking at the immune systems of Floaters or neural chemotransmission in Chryssalids. It was all the same to Jonelle, and extremely talented scientists started fighting to work at Irhil. Not bad, she thought, for a place that’s just a bare patch in the rock.

She started building guns, big time. “You can never have enough guns” was Jonelle’s motto. Laser cannon were her specialties, mostly because of their extravagant profit margins. She sometimes wondered whose armory she was supplying—what nation might suddenly find itself with an extremely well-armed rebellion on its hands. But Jonelle entertained such thoughts only briefly. At the moment, national rebellions had to be considered mere local squabbles, compared with what X-COM and the world had to deal with. If the cost of driving the aliens off the planet was the fall of a local government or two, well…that was life. There wasn’t a nation on Earth whose internal balances hadn’t been thrown out of whack by the aliens’ incursion. When they were gone, there would be time for the normal state of affairs to reassert itself. Of course, there would still be losses of life and other injustices, but at least people native to this planet would be the ones cleaning up the mess.

And there was always the small matter of UFO components. The previous interceptor crews had felt no particular pressure from their boss to shoot down alien craft where they could be properly plundered—a shocking laxity. There had been much too much of the “who cares, why risk our own skins, just dump it in the Med” mindset at Irhil. Jonelle had watched the interceptor crews operate for those first couple of weeks. Then she sacked almost all the colonels and some captains, started retraining a few others, and restocked the crews. Indeed, their attrition rate had already been so high that this wasn’t hard. Then she personally took them out on a few runs to show them how it was to be done.

Gunfire in her earpiece, very close. A grunt—someone coming down on the ground, hard. Jonelle stiffened, listened. There was still certainly breathing going on in the background, quick but not labored. He’s OK. The sound of plasma fire, again very close. Ari’s typical staccato pattern, careful, not scattershot, not wasteful of energy. Sudden silence.

“Report.”

“They’re scattering, Boss. This batch is heading northwest.”

Jonelle smiled again, that same slightly crooked smile. He had been a big help to her during those first couple of weeks, one of only two or three people in Irhil who appeared to have their heads screwed on the right way. Colonel Laurentz had not precisely followed her around—as some had, seeking to butter up the new commander or to find out where her weaknesses were—but always seemed to be somewhere handy when something needed explaining. That big, blond, broad-shouldered shape with the scarred face and the droopy-lidded brown eyes would be leaning against a wall in the mess, or half sticking out of one of a Firestorm’s maintenance access ports, accessible, ready to talk to—easy to talk to. He had not gone out of his way (as some of the Irhil staff had done) to bad-mouth other staff or officers. Laurentz would simply state what seemed to be wrong with something, and what seemed to be needed to fix it. Then he would let you draw your own conclusions. Blame did not seem to interest him; having things work—a Firestorm, a cannon, a command structure—did interest him. So cool, straight-headed, and unusual an attitude could hardly avoid attracting Jonelle’s attention, for she too was more interested in fixing things than in wasting time complaining about what went wrong. Soon enough, she began talking to Laurentz regularly about getting the base working properly again. Soon enough, Laurentz became Ari.

And, after a while, he became more than that. But that was his business, and Jonelle’s. No one else’s.

More fire noises in her earpiece—the insistent booming of autocannon—and more chat between the teams as they worked toward some common goal. The piazza? Jonelle briefly thought of the leave they had taken together nine months ago, while discussing private business. Ari had insisted they go up to Ravenna to see some mosaics. Jonelle, never much of an art fan, had gone along to humor him and had been somewhat surprised by Ari’s profound silence in the face of the ancient, stiff-robed, dark-eyed figures laid into the walls and floors of the tomb there. She was surprised, too, to find herself moved by the haunting expressions looking at them from the far end of time: sorrowful, thoughtful—and Ari’s expression, which matched theirs. A little while afterward, in the café in the street, Ari had drunk wine and filled the evening air with laughter, belittling his own response. Jonelle had smiled and nodded, going along with him. But she realized then that there was a lot more to this man than she had suspected, and that it was going to take her a long time to find out what else might be there.

If they survived, of course, for the world was not exactly the safe and stable place it had seemed before the aliens had arrived. She laughed softly at that thought: that the late nineties now seemed “safe and stable” compared to what the world had lately become.

“Paula, got a clean perimeter back there?”

“No problems, Boss. A lot of Mutons over this way. One damn near pulled dive’s arm off, but he’s still alive. “

He’s coping, Jonelle thought, and bent her head to gaze at that piece of paper again. They had all been coping, and doing it better than ever. Irhil M’goun had finally become a viable proposition, after thirteen months of her attacking its weak spots one after another. Its manufacturing arm was doing very nicely at keeping the necessary money rolling in. Interceptions were going well. Few of them happened over water anymore, if Jonelle’s teams could help it. She had taught them better. They were doing fairly well in terms of Elerium-115 pickup—better, judging by the monthly averages, than many older and better-established bases. She intended to improve that, and to go on improving her teams’ response times and results on terror attack sites.

There were still things about M’goun that bothered her. Jonelle’s great local worry, the lack of a mind shield, had finally been handled a few months ago. Six months back, she had hocked or sold nearly everything the base didn’t really need to make the balloon payment on the screen, over the howls of protest of some of her under-officers. They had spent a lean couple of months “making do” and hanging on, financially, by their nails, waiting for the parts and technicians to arrive. Jonelle had turned into something of a harpy on the subject of economically successful interceptions, until the flight crews began to complain that she would sell her own grandmother to an anonymous bidder as an alien artifact. (The nastier of the wits added that, considering the commander’s present conduct, Jonelle’s grandmother probably was an alien— possibly a Celatid or some other poisonous old bag. And as for Jonelle—!) Yet it was astonishing how the morale of the place improved the day the screen went on. The tension in Irhil dropped off as though someone had thrown a switch. Well, Jonelle thought with some satisfaction, someone did. And it always helped knowing that your enemies couldn’t hear you thinking.

Other things still needed doing, too. She wanted to build more hangar space. She also needed more research space. One of her people was doing really sterling work on Ethereals, and other scientists from all over were fighting to come work for him, but she had nowhere to put them. They needed more containment space for captured aliens, too. She sighed. A commander’s work is never done…

Until you get something like this.

She stared at the paper. The next paragraph said:

Jonelle swore softly and opened one of her desk drawers, where she felt around for a spare dart. It was all her own fault, of course. She had complained, privately to Ari, and more publicly in reports to Central, that the base at M’goun was insufficient to handle terror attacks in central and northern Europe. Granted, attacks down this way had fallen off somewhat after the base got its mindshield in. But Europe had been heating up, and her teams were badly stretched getting up there in time to do anything useful. Yes, she knew how badly the Frankfurt and Moskva bases had just been hit, but it was hardly fair for M’goun to hold the bag for two continents at once. It barely had enough resources for North Africa.

And here was her answer, in black and white. Central had listened to her. She swore again. “Save us from bureaucrats with ears,” she muttered, “and brains. Two months! Two goddam months’ She sighted on the picture of the former base commander, let fly, and hit him unerringly in the nose.

This is my reward, for being right, Jonelle thought bitterly. For getting this job done correctly, and whipping this place into shape. It was just beginning to work smoothly, things were settling down, it’s not fair.

And I hate the cold!

She got out another dart. “If I ever meet you in the flesh,” she said conversationally to the picture, “you’d better pray there’s nothing sharp nearby.”

In her ear, someone said, “Twenty Mutons dead.”

“Twenty!”

“We were busy.”

Jonelle nodded. Her teams had learned good habits. Or simply relearned them. Either way, they were doing their jobs. She felt sure that some of the tension she had felt when she first came to M’goun was attributable to a lot of people feeling that they weren’t doing their jobs, weren’t being pushed past their own fears by a commander who knew what they were all there for: defending the Earth as though every battle was the last one. Any single, chance skirmish or interception could be the hidden turning point that would make all the difference to the planet’s survival. The teams were missing that vital sense that they made a difference in what was going on. There had been resistance to Jonelle’s pushing, at first, though not from the people who counted. Ari, in particular, had listened to some of Jonelle’s more savage pep talks, to her flying and fighting teams and had come away with an expression of silent, grim approval, the look of a man who has wanted to say something similar to his teams for a long time, but has lacked the support from Higher Up. That support, Jonelle knew, meant everything to a base. A base with a lackadaisical boss gets nothing done, loses its purpose…dies under stupid circumstances.

Whatever happens, that’s not going to happen to my people.

But, oh God, who the hell am I going to leave in charge here?

And then, in her earpiece, the scream. Very close. And another sound, a kind of shocked grunt: Ari. The sound she had heard him make when surprised or badly hurt. Silence—

—followed by an explosion that blew the connection dead.

Jonelle sat very still behind her desk for a few seconds. The connection did not come back. “Joel?” she said.

“Lost it, Boss.”

“All right,” she said, as though nothing was the matter. “Reestablish when you can. Call down to the library—I need some maps. Europe, at one to fifty-thousand, and some big-scale ones of Switzerland. One to ten-thousand, if they’ve got them.”

“Right, Boss,” Joel said, very softly, and cut the connection.

Jonelle laid aside the second dart, felt around for a pen, turned over that piece of paper, and very deliberately started to make two lists. One was a list of people she would take with her when she left—tomorrow, or the next day—for Switzerland. The other was a list of officers who might be trusted to take over the handling of Irhil M’goun while she was away.

She started to put Ari’s name on the first list. Jonelle stopped, looked at it, and at the second list. Then she most deliberately put them both aside and started to make a third one, a list of projects for her new sub-commander to start work on at M’Goun. There’s going to be a lot to do here, she thought, and ignored the way her eyes were starting to sting.

The light was everywhere. For a moment there wasn’t anything else, just that and the heat, a great wash of it, and a smell of hot stone and cloth and metal singeing. Ari blinked, trying to figure out which way he was facing. Up? Down? He still couldn’t see.

Something grabbed him from behind. He struggled briefly, but then got a glimpse of the right color for an armored suit: Paula, of course. She was yelling, “Get the Chryss! Get it!”

Ari blinked hard, able to see some shapes and movement now, though not much of it in the dimness. One of Paula’s other armored people—probably Matt—must have been carrying a rocket launcher with an incendiary round loaded. “What the hell was he thinking of letting it off at such close range—”

“Better fried than wind up as a host for one of those, Boss,” Paula said. Ari looked around and saw what she meant. The blackened, burnt shape that had been poor Doris before a Chryssalid got her now lay on the cobbles, straining and squirming like a horrible pupa of some giant moth. The seared skin split with a sound like tearing paper. In a shower of thin, serous fluid and boiled blood, out burst another crablike Chryssalid, young and hungry. Snarling, its claws snapping, it jumped right for Paula. It never saw Matt, standing off to one side with something a little more suitable than a rocket launcher. The smaller autocannon incendiary rounds hit the monster, stitching it in four or five places in front. So many of them hit it so close together that a pyrophoric reaction began. The Chryssalid simply burst into one hot flame, burnt fiercely for a moment, and then blew itself to pieces, the pressure of the interior organs shattering the fire-damaged carapace outward.

The fumes and smoke choked Ari for a moment while he shook loose of Paula. “Thanks,” he said.

“Hey, think nothing of it,” Paula said as the rest of the team gathered around, all looking rather scorched around the edges but otherwise none the worse for wear. “What now, Boss?”

“Let’s go help the others. They’re working up toward the top of the piazza. Any more Chryssalids behind us?” Ari looked back the way Doris had come.

“Don’t think so,” Paula said, though she sounded doubtful. She was plainly thinking what Ari was: none of them knew how or when the Chryssalid had hit Doris.

“We’ll find out in a few days,” Ari said, grim. “Meanwhile we’ve got other problems. Plenty of our cuddly little friends up that way at the moment, and I want to make a clean sweep of them.”

“Wouldn’t mind some more light,” Paula muttered as they headed around the corner and into the square.

Ari grinned and gestured to Matt, who picked up Ari’s heavy-plasma weapon from where it had fallen and tossed it to him. “I’ve got an idea about that,” he said. “You guys stay close to me. See the big church up top there? That’s where I’m headed.”

“Bad moment for an upsurge of religious feeling, Boss,” Matt said as they headed up through the square.

Before Ari could answer, plasma fire rained down around them from a window up on their left. It was one of those snipers that Mihaul had missed, Ari thought. Matt lifted that rocket launcher again as the others scattered. He took aim, waited, fired.

The front of the building fell off. “I really love that,” Matt said, catching up with the group as it reformed.

Ari sighed. “There was a great pastry shop in there.”

“First religion, now food,” Paula said, and chuckled. “Boss, you’re a fickle one.”

“Religion first. Come on.”

They made their way up through the square, past the now-disabled alien Terror Ship, picking their way over burned and crushed café tables and chairs, and around many bodies, both human and alien. Ari was pleased enough about their response time on this one: they had been no more than five minutes behind the alien craft, though he would have preferred to force it down outside the city Still, just good luck that we were in the right place at the right time. If we’d had to come all the way up from Irhil on this run, none of this would be left now. None of that, either….

He glanced at the church. Muzzle flashes and the reports and billowing explosions of grenades were thick off to the right side of it, near the head of the Via Alighieri. But there were no flashes any farther down.

“Who’s holding the corner there?” he said down the commlink. “By that pale-colored building?”

“Us, Boss,” Roddy McGrath’s voice came back. “We’ve got a good bunch bottled up here. Some trapped behind the big church, some others between it and the stone tit.”

“Good. You hold ‘em there. I’m gonna get you some light to work with.”

“Gonna get the moon to rise this late, Boss? Nice trick,” said Elsabetta’s voice.

“Not quite. Just hang on.”

All around them, it began to rain white-hot fire from plasma rifles and God knew what else. Ari and his team zigzagged their way up the piazza, and all around them shots hit the burnt-out cars and soot-covered, upended café tables. Cobbles were kicked out of burning mortar by the plasma fire, and any stone not made of igneous rock to begin with immediately blew up, splintering with the heat. Fragments flew in every direction like some kind of primitive fléchette grenade. Ari dodged and jumped and cursed when splinters glanced-off of his armored legs. One struck him squarely somewhere rather more embarrassing, but there was nothing to do about it but keep running.

They were getting quite close to the church, but as they approached it, the downpouring fire got so serious that Ari and his team were forced to take refuge up against the buildings on the left side of the square. They stood in front of what used to be a department store, now wall after wall of broken plate glass and shocked-looking, blast-denuded mannequins. “They’re up there, Boss,” Matt said, jerking his head up at the church tower, another of the low domes that seemed popular in this part of the world. “No one’s going to get anything done until we get that bunch killed.”

Ari breathed in, breathed out. “Damned Sectoids. On the dome?”

Matt was already limbering up his rocket launcher. “Yup.”

“OK. See that rectangular bit sticking out there, on the left? That’s the church’s chancel. Don’t hit that. When you fire, make sure the debris doesn’t fall on it.”

“You got relatives in there, Boss?” But Matt was loading up already.

“I’ll explain later. Just keep firing. I’ve got something else to do.” Ari stared around him for a moment, wearing what must have looked to his team like an oddly quizzical expression. “Listen,” he said, “any of you have a couple of hundred-lire coins?”

Paula, through her armor’s thick faceplate, and all the rest of them from under their helmets or eyeshades, looked at Ari as though he had just landed from Saturn. He looked back, and after a few seconds—one after another and with all kinds of bemused expressions—they began to check their pockets.

“I’ve got a dollar—”

“Uh—I’ve got eighty dirhams, fifty francs, and a Kenyan shilling.”

“Sorry, Boss. I don’t usually bring my wallet on these shindigs. I always figure somebody else’ll pay for the drinks—”

“Never mind,” Ari said. “I’ll fake it. Matt, start firing. The rest of you, cover me too. Don’t you stop until— you’ll know when.” And he shouldered his heavy plasma and plunged off across the piazza, toward the church’s bronze doors.

They were not his main objective, but they were where the best cover was. Under the massive, arched tympanum sheltering the main doors, no fire could reach him from above—assuming he could reach the tympanum. Behind him, a number of indiscreet burping noises, like a giant paying the price for bolting his nachos, suggested that Matt was getting into his assignment. Above and behind Ari, burning stone and ancient brick leaped away from the dome. Above the noise of the explosions, he thought he heard a couple of screams in the little high voices of Sectoids. “Good,” he muttered to himself. There was something particularly satisfying about shooting Sectoids, with their sinister looks, like dark-eyed elfin children stolen and turned into something sinister and deadly. Ari paused by the last street corner, across from the brick walls of the church, getting his breath for the big run across the exposed space. “You guys in the back,” he muttered down the link, “that light is coming up. I expect you to drive all your targets down into the piazza. Matt, when you finish with the dome, you and Roddy’s bunch get ready to turn all your attention to the middle of the piazza, between the church and the tomb. About thirty seconds. Ready?”

Acknowledgments came from one team leader after another. “Matt,” Ari said, “hammer it—!” And he ran out into the open.

The Sectoid snipers above had little time to get off more than two or three volleys of plasma bolts before Matt’s really serious attack on them began. The old brick cornices around the dome practically leapt into the air, raining down into the piazza. Miss the chancel, miss the chancel! Ari thought as he ran desperately, zigzagging again, for the shelter of the church’s tympanum. Thirty yards—twenty—

He was under, in cool black shadow, looking out into night only occasionally lighted by weapons flashes and explosions. Ari paused, listening to the tempo and ferocity of the fire increasing from the back of San Vitale’s Church, as the other teams started to drive their assailants around front. Better move now, before they come around the church and find you right out there in the middle of things.

Ari sucked in one last deep breath. Odd, how sweet these frantic breaths could taste, when you weren’t sure you were ever going to get another one. He ran for it, up the piazza and to his right, across the empty space and toward the massive iron-grille gates of Galla Placidia’s mausoleum. Explosions in the night, shouts of the living, snarls of the dying, the sounds of alarms and excursions everywhere, but nothing came close to him, none of the flying fire came to lodge in his flesh. Ari came up against the iron grille with a clang, seized it, shook it: locked. After hours. No way to get in and under cover. Never mind.

Ari made his way over to the right of the grille. There it was, the plain little steel box fastened to the gate, with its stenciled message. LUMINATIO AUTOMATICO, 200 L

Ari shook his head with a look both bemused and grim. “Sorry, guys,” he said, and unslung his heavy plasma. With the greatest possible care in this darkness, he shot one corner of the box off.

Heat and the stink of molten metal and scorched paint flew up in his face. Ari choked and waved the smoke away, then bent and felt about at his feet. “Ow, ow, ow, oh, shit!” About half the coins that had fallen out of the coin box were molten, and lay scattered around in little pale puddles on the pavement. “Goddamn gun!” After a moment, though, he found one of the last-fallen hundred-lire coins, which was still intact, and then another. “Awright,” he said, and straightened. He put them into the coin slot on the top of the box, praying that he hadn’t destroyed anything important. One coin in, push the plunger. The second coin in, push the plunger.

And wait…

And wait…

Then, sudden glory, as though the sun had come up in the piazza: a blaze of pinkish-colored sodium-vapor light burst out from ten different sources, so that the front of the mausoleum and the front of San Vitale’s Church and the piazza in between them turned into a shining space burning in the red of brick and sandstone, the white of anciently quarried marbles. The town council had really done themselves proud on this lighting installation, as Ari had remarked to Jonelle not too long before. The spotlights were set up on some of the buildings surrounding the piazza, and some were set into the ground in front of the mausoleum and in front of the church, turning the whole area, in a blink, from a dark and dangerous open space into a well-lit shooting gallery for his people—a space now abruptly filling with aliens being forced into it, for his people had taken him at his word when he told them “thirty seconds.”

He took a moment now to shoot the chain and lock off the grille-door in front of the mausoleum so that he could tuck himself into the low, arched doorway there and fire from cover. There was almost no need, for all hell was breaking loose out in the middle of the piazza. Plasma and laser blasts darned the air from four different directions, grenades flew, and stun rods crackled and zapped. In the midst of this chaos, stately and gleaming, the architecture of Byzantine Rome looked calmly down on the carnage. This son-et-lumiere part of the operation lasted no more than another five minutes, and finally the firing started to die away, the grenades exploding no more. It was just as well, for after six minutes—as Ari knew would happen—the lights went off again. You only got so much light for two hundred lire.

He sighed, chuckled, and went out to the fallen coin box to get another couple of coins. When the lights came back on, his teams were beginning to reassemble in the piazza, taking stock of the aliens they had stunned and captured alive. There were some Mutons, dumped in a muscly heap like a bunch of green-skinned professional wrestlers, and a Sectoid leader, semiconscious and lying helpless, like a drugged child, while being secured. Others of the teams were assessing their own casualties. One of Roddy’s team was dead, his head blown off. Mihaul had a bad leg burn from a plasma rifle, self-cauterizing as usual, but there was always the danger that the victim would go abruptly into shock. Fortunately, Mihaul showed no such signs as yet. He was pale, but hanging on all right, and would make it home to Irhil without too much trouble, Ari judged.

“Nice job, you people,” Ari said to them as they gathered around him. “Nice job. Her Nibs is going to be seriously pleased with us when we get home. We get all the Chryssalids? You sure?”

The teams gathered around him were nodding. “Not that many in this batch, Boss,” Roddy said. “I’m sure we got them all.”

“OK. Call home and have them send up a stripping team for this Terror Ship. We’ll take the important stuff with us. Paula, go in with another suit and get the Elerium out of that thing. The usual pickup on discarded weapons: take anything big or obvious. Then post a guard. The strippers can salvage the rest, and they should be here before the rest of the town turns out for souvenirs or to pick up a little bargain. Anything else need doing?”

Heads shook all around. “Nice job,” Ari said again. “We saved the world again tonight. Let’s clean up here, and then go home and have our dinner.”

The teams began to disperse, going about their tasks. A few stayed with Ari for several moments. “Nice trick that,” Elsabetta said, “with the light. How’d you know that was there?”

Ari smiled, thinking of Jonelle’s face in the light of a little wavering candle in a glass, out here in the piazza not too long ago. He also thought that there were some things a team commander should keep to himself. “Hey,” Ari said, “when you go somewhere new in Europe, don’t you read the Michelin guide first? You’re missing all the good stuff. Get the green one.”

Elsabetta snickered. She and Matt and the others stood a little longer with Ari, just breathing the air, all quiet now with that particularly terrible silence that falls after a firefight. “Whose church is this, Boss?” Matt said, looking up into the church’s tympanum, which was no longer shadowy. Up in the arch, ranks of carved, brightly painted and gilded saints, choirs of angels, and herds of fabulous beasts looked down at them with incurious eyes. “It’s really something.”

“Various people had a hand in building it…but most of this work was the Empress Theodora’s, originally.” Ari couldn’t help but smile. Theodora had been the religious type only insofar as it served her purposes—but when she built a church, she built one.

“No, I mean what saint?”

“Saint Vitalis,” Ari said.

Matt blinked. “Something to do with barbers, right?”

“Matt,” Ari said with great affection, “you are living proof of the triumph of popular culture and the decline of the classical education. As though it matters while we’re having an alien invasion. Come on, let’s get all our people together and go home.”