X-COM: UFO Defense

Two

So let me get this straight,” Jonelle said to Ari, two hours later in her little office. “You went out into the middle of an open space under attack by hostiles, without backup, without even one team member to back you up—”

“They were covering me!”

“Not that you told them what for. I’ll come to that in a moment—”

Ari doubted she would. This debrief had not exactly been turning out the way he’d intended. He’d brought his teams home with minimal losses, he’d brought back a tremendous load of equipment and salables, and he’d expected at least a pat on the head. It hadn’t turned up yet.

“I did play back the transcripts,” Jonelle said while she sat behind the desk, and Ari stood very straight in front of it—and sweated. She had her command persona very firmly in place at the moment, and there was no hope for him except to keep his mouth shut and listen. “On the off chance that there might be something in them to exonerate you for this kind of behavior. A clout on the head or some such. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind turned up, so I must assume that you did what you did while in control of your faculties. Very sad, since right now I need people around me with their brains about them, and you seem to have gotten rid of yours during our last garage sale.”

Jonelle flung her hands in the air. “This is no time to discover that I can’t depend on you to behave like an officer instead of a rookie. Tomorrow we have to go to the goddamn land of snow and ice, and 1 have to take you with me because I certainly can’t leave you here after your performance yesterday, which doubtless looks like wild heroism to your poor deluded teams, who would only encourage you to do more of the same, and get you killed, which might not matter that much except that you’d take the whole lot of them with you. No, I’ve got to go haring off north with you and a few others, and we have to go scouting for some bloody half-excavated hole in the ground to stick a base in. In two months! Not that we can tell anyone what we’re doing, mind you. We are going to have to set up an office somewhere in a new country and convince the locals to cooperate with us even though we can’t and won’t tell them what we’re really up to. And someone is going to have to run that office. I have just about decided, for your sins, that it should be you. The only thing that remains for me to discern is whether or not you are sane enough to be trusted to feed yourself with a blunt spoon, let alone to be left alone with a loaded fax machine. Do you understand my concern?”

“Commander, I—”

“Colonel. Let me get very straight about this with you. I don’t care two farts in a high wind about the details of your personal psychology. It must be at least tolerable, otherwise they would never have let you into X-COM. But I have had it up to here with your goddamn gutsier-than-thou behavior and your tendency to indulge yourself in these damn death-or-glory stunts. You endanger your teams by not explaining your game plan to them, you endanger yourself by doing dumb-ass things that the merest rookie would shudder away from, and by both of these actions you endanger the civilians we are supposed to be protecting. Now what holes you allow to be shot in your flinty hide I don’t care in the slightest, but when you put your teams and the civilians in danger, I get cross. Cross. Is some of this beginning to penetrate the layer of ablative that surrounds your alleged brain?”

“Yes, Commander,” Ari said, very evenly.

“Good. I will be watching for evidence of this in the near future. And by God, if I don’t see it, I am going to pull so many stripes off your uniform, you’re going to find yourself wearing a tank top in midwinter.” She looked disgusted. “Winter,” she said. “Horrible. All right, Colonel. My hat is off for the moment, unless you have anything to add.”

“No, Commander.”

“OK. Then sit down and help me look at these goddamn maps.”

Ari sat down and looked across Jonelle’s desk. It was invisible—unusual for her. Usually whatever she was working on stayed on her desk only one piece at a time, and when she was finished with it, wound up on the floor with everything else. The biggest map, the one of the whole country, was more or less buried. Jonelle pulled it out.

Ari whistled. “Look at the engraving on these,” he said, though still in a rather subdued mode. He felt somewhat scorched around the edges. “Don’t these people have lives?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Jonelle said, sitting down again and peering across the map. It was most beautifully rendered, all the more so because the mapping technology was absolutely up to date, with laser-and satellite-guided scanning and drafting. But the map still looked like a work of art, its shadings of valley-green, mountain-gray, and glacial-blue sliding one into another with tremendous delicacy, with contours in places so close together that Ari could barely see them. “Well,” Jonelle said, “here we are. We have carte blanche from the national government, so the Upper-Ups tell me. We can build anywhere we like. Where would you put a base?”

“This is a sleazy attempt to pick my brains and let me make up your mind for you.”

Jonelle smiled at him with eyes slightly narrowed. The look told Ari that, as usual, the Commander already had her mind made up, and was expecting him to reveal any weakness in her plans that she had missed. It was a game they played nearly every day, in one form or another, and Ari loved it when he won.

“OK,” Ari said. He leaned over the map too, considering it as a whole for a moment. “Forget the lowland sites,” he said. “But those mountains….”

He trailed off, musing. “Did you know,” Jonelle said, “that the shape of the country is the basis for the Chevrolet logo?”

Ari blinked. “This?” The country was vaguely four-lobed, and longer from side to side than from top to bottom, but to call it a Chevrolet logo seemed a stretch. “You mean the cross-shaped thing?”

“Yup.”

“Weird.”

“But true. Chevrolet was Swiss.”

Ari shook his head. “The only thing cross-shaped I can see about the country is this.” He traced with one finger the long complex of deep valleys that ran from just south of Lac Léman nearly over to the Austrian border, and the north-south valley complex stretching more or less from Zurich in the north to Locarno and the border lakes in the south.

Having done so, he paused and peered a little more closely at the place where the arms of the cross would intersect. “Those are mountain passes, there, aren’t they?” Ari leaned down to look at the names. Sankt Gotthard, Furkapass….”

This map too said URSEREN. It looked exactly like the other, so much so that Ari folded it and the other map to match, laid them side by side, and started doing a “blink” comparison. No more than two or three blinks were necessary to show him that the second map had many small additions in black that the first map did not: tiny rectangles scattered about the landscape, halfway up mountainsides, apparently buried in cliffs.

“This one’s under the glacier!” Ari muttered. “This one’s in the lake! What the deuce—”

“The Swiss army likes to hide things,” Jonelle said, standing up and coming around to look at the map herself. “And face it, they don’t have a lot of flat land to devote to army bases and airfields and so forth. What flat land they do have, they need to grow food on. So they got busy, early in the century, and started digging. A lot of these mountains are hollow. This one”—she pointed at a rectangle apparently on the north slope of a mountain called Gletschhorn—“that’s full of fighter planes. They have them stacked up in cradles, like cars in a parking lot in Manhattan. They launch by steam catapult.”

“How the heck do they get them back in?”

“They ship them by rail to one of the little stations down the valley here, Realp, I think,” Jonelle said. “After that”—she shrugged—“it’s ‘need to know’, and I don’t. But they manage. Other mountains are similar. That one’s full of tanks. That one’s an ammo dump. All kinds of other stores, weaponry, hardware—all tucked away for a rainy day. Somewhere down here,” and she looked thoughtfully at their map, “they dug a nuclear-proof base for their heads of state and senior commanders. No one knows where it is, not even the people who built it, and I’m sure it’s not on even this map. They say they decommissioned it years ago. I was tempted to ask if I could use it. But such a request would have to go through the highest army echelons, and I’d sooner not annoy them. Especially since I suspect it’s not as decommissioned as they say it is.”

“Interesting people.”

“They are. Anyway, there are a lot of these old hidey-holes that really are decommissioned—places they didn’t need after the Cold War cooled off. X-COM’s liaison in the Swiss government has agreed to let us have one of those, and there are plenty to choose from. We’ll go up to Andermatt tomorrow and have a look around.”

“Who are we?” Ari said.

Jonelle raised her eyebrows. “A strange moment to go all existential on me, Colonel.”

“You know what I mean. What’s our cover?”

Jonelle grinned. “We’re going to tell them we’re with the UN.”

“They’re going to love that.”

“Yes. Practically the last country on the planet to join, and I’m sure they only did it because of the aliens. No mere human threat could get them to join in the last century, anyway—that old distrust of theirs of outside alliances. But then they were burned by them so many times in the past…. Whatever. Wherever we do finally settle, our cover is that we’re setting up a ‘neutral observation’ facility to test UN cooperation with local defense forces.

Some army people will be helping us with this, though they won’t be in on the secret behind the cover. We’ll be setting up a small, ‘overt’ base somewhere in the area, and we’ll have a little office, probably in Andermatt itself, to answer the locals’ questions and act as a PR front end. If you’re not very careful and don’t start flying a little straighter on your ground assaults,” Jonelle said, “I’m not kidding—you may wind up running it.”

Ari made a sour face. “Yes ma’am, Commander ma’am. I’ll be good. I promise.”

“You’ll wind up behind that desk occasionally no matter how good you are,” Jonelle said, “and so will I, since a good commander doesn’t send her people into any fix she wouldn’t go into herself.”

“Just so long as I don’t have to do filing.”

The look on her face suggested that she agreed with him. But she said, “We will both do whatever we bloody well have to, Ari. As usual. Including leave this nice, comfortable place, which I finally was getting to run the way it should….”

“Would it be indelicate to suggest to the Commander that this is her own fault for being so efficient?”

“Yes. But at least I can’t fault where they’ve asked me to put the new base,” Jonelle said, gazing placidly at the map. “The Swiss location is good for Europe-wide cover, as I told them. The Andermatt location is the best in Switzerland, as far as I can figure. A near-impassable gorge to the north, a backstop of very difficult peaks to the south—most of them twelve to fourteeners—a very avalanche-prone pass on our right flank, and on our left, the longest glacier in Europe.”

“Sounds like a holiday wonderland.”

Jonelle snorted. “Unfortunately, it is. When its not being a garrison town, Andermatt is a ski resort. A lot of our people are going to have to ski in their spare time, as a cover.”

“How they’ll suffer!”

“Don’t tell me about suffering, Ari. The average daytime temperature there is already down to twenty-five degrees-—it’s going to be an awful winter. But at least the ground-based strategic qualities of the area are plain. Air-based strategic defense is another matter, but those mountains lend us another advantage: only pilots practiced in handling those air currents will be able to move at any speed there. And if we find a spot we like, we’ll start practicing right away. Aliens doing low-level work anywhere in the area will be badly handicapped. Now, can you make any case for a better spot elsewhere? None of this is written in stone yet.”

Ari sat quiet for a minute or two, then shook his head. “It looks sound.”

“Thanks, Colonel,” Jonelle said. “I’m reassured. I’m going around to inform the team I’m taking with me on the assessment run. Would you care to accompany me?”

“Delighted, Commander.”

It took them about two hours to get around to everybody. Jonelle never liked to hurry when doing her rounds, at the best of times. Now, late in the evening, with the night shift settling in and the day and evening shifts mostly in the lounges, she kept the pace leisurely on purpose.

She and Ari ambled through the main lounge in the second living quarters module. The place was full of an affable mix of ranks and specialties, some sitting and reading, a few playing cards off to one side, but these people were in the minority. There was a lot of noise at the moment because there was a serious game of “Crud” going on. Around the billiards table, a crowd of about twenty men and women were yelling their heads off at two teams of four people, who were enthusiastically body-blocking one another as they took turns trying to get at one of two billiard balls and use it to knock the other one into a pocket.

Jonelle eyed the blackboard where the intricate score-keeping grid was laid out. It seemed that the squaddies were beating the sergeants, which was the reason for a lot of the noise. As she watched, two of the sergeants shouldered a squaddie onto the floor. One of them sprawled across the table and made a mad swipe for the free cue ball. Another squaddie dove across the table, rescued it, and flung it at the free ball. It was certainly an accident that the ball hit the sergeants head instead.

“I never could get into this,” Ari said, watching with a wry expression as the sergeant, amid much laughter, staggered away from the table clutching his head.

“That’s why I’m a commander,” Jonelle said under her breath, with a twist of smile, “and you’re not.” She had been one of three people who routinely placed in the top three of the Crud championships in Rio. There was no X-COM base where the game wasn’t played. “Where there is no Crud,” the saying went, “there is no life.” Some went so far as to claim that X-COM people had invented it, even though it had actually been caught, rather like athlete’s foot, from fighter pilots formerly in the British and Canadian forces.

“Can you see Rory in this crush?”

“Markowitz?” Ari looked for a moment, saw nothing, then put his head down and listened. “There,” he said, glancing off leftward. “Can’t miss that laugh.”

They headed that way. After a moment, Rory Markowitz slid out of the crowd, heading for the coffee dispenser. “Oh. Commander—”

“That was a nice job this morning, Rory,” Jonelle said to him. “Doctor Trenchard is going to be very pleased.”

Rory ran one hand through his dark, curly hair and grinned. He had one of those amiably ugly faces that prevents fights just by other people looking at it, speculating about how it got that way, and deciding they don’t want to be involved in anything similar. “Thought he might like that little parcel, ma’am,” he said.

“Well, so did 1.” He had single-handedly captured not merely one but two Ethereals while out with the team he commanded in an interception and ground assault that morning, down in Sudan. Jonelle was very pleased with Rory, as well as pleased to see him still alive. The assault had been a particularly bad one, out in an open plain with no cover of any kind. “So I’ve got a little parcel for you. Better run up to the quartermaster’s office tomorrow morning and get yourself some colonel’s stripes in time for the a.m. briefing.”

That grin stretched right across Rory’s face. If it could go any farther, the top of his head would fall off. “Whatever you say, Commander.”

“Don’t you look at me that way, Colonel. Our staff strengths support the move, and you’ve been a captain more than long enough. Besides, there are going to be some other changes, and I want you where you’ll be able to do the most good. Capisce?”

“Uh, I think so, ma’am.”

“Don’t let them catch you thinking, Rory. They’ll promote you.” She gave him a little wave and headed off.

Ari walked quietly beside her for a moment as Jonelle worked her way around the table. “Other changes?” he said.

“You don’t need to take that innocent tone with me. You know who Rory will work best with.”

“Chavez.”

“That’s right. This time tomorrow, she’ll be a colonel as well. So will Riordan. We were lucky in having a lot of ground assaults in the past few days—they make the changes I want easier. The numbers now back up my intentions very nicely.”

“If I didn’t know you better,” Ari said, “I’d suspect you of changing the team makeups so that the results of the assaults would reinforce your intentions.”

Jonelle gave him a look. “I’m not God yet,” she said. “I will not under any circumstances put people in harm’s way to further my own aims. But I can see, sometimes, how the dice are going to fall. And if I help them a little…it’s all for a good cause.”

“So who are you leaving in command?”

Sidelong, Jonelle regarded him with amusement. “The answer you’re looking for is, ‘Not you.”’

“Is it that obvious?”

“Is the Pope Irish?…Well, never mind. Who would you pick?”

He stood thinking while Jonelle looked through the other side of the noisy crowd, hunting a particular face. Not seeing it, she turned and made for the door. Ari came after her, and together they went out into the hall and headed down toward the living quarters.

“DeLonghi,” he said finally.

Jonelle nodded, not saying anything for a few moments. Let him work it out, she thought.

“I thought you hated his guts,” Ari said very softly. “After all the grief he gave you after you were assigned. ‘I should have been Commander—’”

“He never said that.”

“Not to your face. To everybody else who would hold still and listen, though. Insubordinate, self-righteous son of a—”

“He’s the right man for the job,” Jonelle said just as softly, “and I will not let my personal feelings get in the way of doing my job well, or seeing others’ jobs done that way. DeLonghi is popular with the rest of the command-level staff. He’s thoughtful, in his slightly plodding way. He has a temper, but I’ve seen no evidence that he lets it influence his command decisions. He knows how to think, if the officer directly above him isn’t discouraging him from doing so—the way the last one did.”

“And by leaving him in command here,” Ari said, “you defuse his hostility—you hope. And give him so much to do that he doesn’t have time for it anymore.”

Jonelle sighed. “Politics,” she said. “I hate politics. Intrapersonal, or any other kind. But you quickly become a political animal in this job. So will he. If DeLonghi makes the mistake of indulging his more malicious opinions while he’s in command, he’ll find out it doesn’t work—the hard way and very fast. He’ll behave, I think,” she said, as they turned the corner down the long main hallway of the living quarters. “He’ll do anything not to give me reason to relieve him. He hates any appearance of failure—it’ll keep him honest.”

They paused by a door with a doorplate that said DE LONGHI R.J., COL. Jonelle reached into her pocket, fished out a folded piece of notepaper, and carefully tucked it under the door.

“Another X-COM promotion ceremony completed,” Jonelle said sarcastically while giving the briefest of salutes.

“One other I want to see,” she said, “but he won’t be down here. Come on.”

They went back up the hall. “And you say you’re not interested in my psychology,” Ari said, only half joking. “I wonder.”

Jonelle glanced at him. “When I’m dressed like this,” she said, tugging at her uniform sleeve, “anything that serves my job—which is killing aliens who want to move into my home—is an interest, and I’ll use it as a weapon against them, any way I can. Insofar as the contents and motives in your mind affect the way I do that job, they’re an interest. When I’m dressed differently, though…”—she waggled her eyebrows suggestively—“I promise I won’t use it against you.”

Ari smiled. They walked quietly together for the next few minutes, Jonelle leading the way toward the lab blocks. And is it true? she wondered. Would I really not use what I know against him? True, she had access to his psych profiles, as well as to everyone else’s under her command, on a need-to-know basis. Not that she’d ever looked at them. It would be a bad day, she thought, when I couldn’t tell what was on someone’s mind just by looking at them. So far, in neither their professional nor their private relationship, had there ever been need. But what if there was, some day?

She knew what a fine line they walked, this tightrope stretched between their physical and emotional relationships and their positions as commander and subordinate. Lesser men, Jonelle suspected, would have a hard time of it. Ari was smart, flexible, and sufficiently accomplished at his own job that he didn’t feel much of a need to prove himself to the people around him. His impulsiveness in battle and crisis situations was just that, impulsiveness, not an indication of a man overcompensating for his position below a tough and capable woman who just happened to be his lover.

I think, anyway…

They passed through the first set of containment doors at the entrance to the lab blocks. “Trenchard?” Ari said.

“Uh huh. When did he ever go to bed early when he had a new toy?”

The lab blocks were almost deserted this time of night. After the containment doors shut after them, Jonelle and Ari passed door after door of dark and empty offices, and laboratories with all the equipment shut down except for the computers monitoring ongoing experiments. Lab staff did not stand the heel-to-toe watches that interception crews did, though teams of scientists and researchers took turns going “on call” to deal with new acquisitions of live aliens. Most of the researchers had been off duty for hours by this time of day. But there were always those who were too interested, or too driven, to stop work.

As they passed through the second, heavier set of containment doors, the ones that separated the alien containment unit from those labs where only corpses or tissue were held, Jonelle wondered which of the two categories Trenchard fit in best. His history was mostly unremarkable except for his involvement in a terror raid, during which he came close to being killed. Shortly thereafter, he had been recruited covertly by X-COM, under cover of a shell organization that claimed to be doing “nonaggressive” work on the alien genome series. His own pursuit of genome data on the aliens had proved less than nonaggressive—he worried his work like a dog worrying a particularly juicy bone. But psych profiling showed no ax to grind, no trauma to drive him. It seemed that he simply, almost greedily, wanted what the aliens had: a brand new biology that no one had ever seen before, which wasn’t well understood, and which was a fertile field for a smart researcher who was willing to work hard. Jonelle was glad enough to let him get on with it. He was one of few scientists who hadn’t been slacking off when she arrived, and since then Jonelle had found him a hard-headed and dependable source of advice on how to distribute appropriations. Too, other scientists and researchers around him tended to work harder in response to the way he worked, which was a dividend the commander appreciated.

Jonelle greeted the guard on duty, she and Ari accepted sidearms from him—no X-COM personnel worked with aliens unarmed, even when they were confined—and they walked on down the central hallway. The brightest lights in the area shone there, looking greenish through several layers of armor glass. That was “maximum security,” for species that were psionically or physically the most dangerous. The side rooms, where other less dangerous live aliens were confined, lay off to both sides, and fainter lights glowed in them, both from normal illumination and the firefly lights of local confinement fields inside the cells. As they passed a series of smaller cells where Celatids and Silacoids were held, Ari peered in through the outer armor-glass windows and raised his eyebrows. “A lot of those on hand this week,” he said.

“Yeah. Dr. Ahu asked me to have the teams bring him any Celatids…he’s working on some kind of adaptation of their venom, a ‘universal solvent.’ He claims it’ll eat through lead when he’s finished with it. Anyway, he’s already come up with a variant that the Celatids themselves are very vulnerable to.”

“Useful. What do we administer it with? Squirt guns?”

“Don’t ask me—that’s not my table,” Jonelle said as they reached the maximum-security area and looked through the thick glass window of the outer office. Inside, Jim Trenchard was working over a console, watching a series of multicolored sine waves weave themselves together on a computer screen and occasionally stopping to tap something into the keyboard and change the amplitude or frequency of the waves. Trenchard was a taut little man in his late forties, fit and wiry, going prematurely bald, but otherwise looking nothing like the stereotypical research scientist. His preferred lab wear was a worn blue coverall of the kind favored by furnace repairmen. Few central heating technicians, however, had the audience for their work that Trenchard had. In the inner office, hovering gently in midair and illuminated by the glow of a boosted psionic-confinement field, was an Ethereal. It seemed to watch Trenchard, though of course that was an illusion.

“They give me the willies,” Ari said softly. Jonelle nodded. Of all the aliens X-COM dealt with, the Ethereals were, to her way of thinking, the deadliest. Others might be able to rip you limb from limb, or eat you alive, or dissolve you like a sugar cube in coffee, but the ones that could get inside your head and change the way you thought about yourself struck Jonelle as far worse. They were telepaths and telekinetics of dreadful power, easily the most powerful of all the alien species who worked with the weapons of the mind. There was some speculation in X-COM that these aliens might indeed be the top echelon, the ones “running things,” and research was going on everywhere into the best way to interrogate these creatures.

They were very resistant, though—that was the problem. And that resistance, and their power, were both made more horrible by the creatures’ physical reality. Except for their brains, there seemed hardly anything to them.

Jonelle looked at the Ethereal that floated, restrained, in the inner office. Except for the huge head that encased the thing’s awful brain, the Ethereal looked pallid, withered, a mere husk of a humanoid shape, no bigger than a child. A terminally anorexic child, it would have been, the skin so thin that the blood vessels showed right through it like parchment. Not that much blood seemed to get out to the skinny, underdeveloped limbs. It all seemed destined for the brain, and from autopsy reports Jonelle had read, this seemed logical enough—if there was anything logical about an Ethereal. The internal organs were all either vestigial or hardly functional. They could not run a body, even this feeble, wizened one.

But something ran that body, even though the muscles were barely as thick as ropes and the trunk looked frail enough to break between your hands. Something—if only some kind of toxic will—lived behind those blind, dark eyes. As the creature floated, helpless, a chance air current from the ventilation system touched it, so that its body turned, and those eyes seemed to look slowly toward Jonelle. She shuddered. Only twice had she been unlucky enough, while out on an assault, to feel the touch of one of those cold, inhuman minds behind those eyes, and it had taken all the training the psi people had given her to keep her from crumpling under the force that went into your mind like a knife and began slicing away at what made you human. Since those encounters, she had become a serious convert to psionic training, and when she became commander at Irhil M’goun, she had thrown all of her people into it who had enough psi talent to bend a cat’s whisker, let alone a spoon.

“Right,” Jonelle said, and touched the doorbell.

Trenchard didn’t look up for a moment, though he waved one hand at the door. He kept his eyes on the screen until he’d watched that pattern of sines through one long cycle, about thirty seconds’ worth. Then he straightened up, rubbed his back—which must have been aching if he’d spent much time in that position—turned around, and saw who was waiting. Trenchard grinned a little sheepishly, came over to the door, and opened it.

“Sorry, Commander,” he said, “I was up to my ears in something just then. How are you, Colonel?”

“Doing OK, doctor.”

“Jim,” Jonelle said, “we’ve had a little surprise from the Great Upstairs. I’ve got to go up to Switzerland tomorrow and start building a new base. I’m going to need to start a new research department there, and I’d like you to head it.”

Trenchard’s mouth dropped open. Then he laughed out loud for sheer pleasure, the kind of sound you might expect from a small child let loose in a candy store. “You’re serious? You’re serious!”

“Even for me, it’s late in the day for jokes,” Jonelle said.

“Switzerland! Anywhere near some skiing?”

Ari guffawed. Jonelle gave him a wry look and said, “We’re looking at Andermatt.”

“Haven’t been there, but I hear it’s nice,” Trenchard said. “Unspoiled.”

“You let me know. Meanwhile, I’d welcome an auxiliary opinion on how the sites we’re going to look at will support the kind of research establishment we’ve built down here. Or rebuilt, I should say. Will your work permit you to leave it. with your assistants for a day or two? Three max.”

“That many, yes,” Trenchard said. “More would be a problem. Two would be best.”

“We’ll plan on that, then. A transport will be ready to pick us up at oh-eight-hundred. It’ll drop us at the commercial airport at Agadir. We’re covert on this run, so dress and pack accordingly. There’ll be a briefing pack waiting in the terminal in your quarters.”

“Right, Commander.”

They all paused for a moment to look at the still, drifting form in the inner office. “How’s it going?” Ari said. “Is this part of that new interrogation routine you were working on?”

“This? No. This is all diagnostic investigation. I’m trying to work out where the energy to run that brain comes from.”

“Any luck?”

Trenchard let out a single breath of laughter, a harassed sound. “No. The input-output figures for the creature’s metabolics have never made any sense on any level, either in terms of available chemical or gross energy, no matter how you twist them. The illogic of it is beginning to affect some of my colleagues, I think. One of them went so far as to suggest in a paper that Ethereals have a ‘metabolic extension into another dimension.’”

Ari raised his eyebrows. “Whatever that means.”

“Don’t ask me, because I haven’t been able to figure it out either. I’ve been doing some work on ATP/ADP transport in the Ethereals’ cells, but as usual there are no close analogues among the other alien species, so all the lysine-lysoid work has to be started from scratch, and—”

Jonelle laughed and held up a hand. “I’d as soon you’d write me a précis,” she said, “because if you tell me now, I’ll lose it. I’ve got about eighty things to do before I turn in tonight. We’ll see you in the morning, then.”

“Right, Commander. Thanks!”

“Good work is its own reward, Jim,” she said. “You brought it on yourself. Good night!”

They left; the door went solidly thunk behind them. Jonelle and Ari walked back up the hall, returned their sidearms to the guard, and went out into the open side of the base again. “Amazing,” Ari said after a while, “no matter how many times I go in there…I always breathe better after I come out.”

“Me too. I didn’t mind killing them…I didn’t mind catching them and turning them over to the White Coat Brigade. But the thought of spending serious time with them….” Jonelle shook her head.

“We’re just not suited,” Ari said, “we simplistic, basic, emotional types. Give us a gun and a place to use it….”

“What you mean ‘we,’ kimo sabe?” Jonelle said, laughing. She laced one arm through Ari’s, and they headed off toward the living quarters.

Ten hours later, and twelve hundred miles north, they stood, separate again, under a bitterly clear blue sky. It was thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, or one degree Celsius, and as far as Jonelle was concerned, no matter how you did it, even in Kelvin, it was too goddamn cold.

They stood under the shadow of the peak of a mountain, in snow about two feet deep. Off to one side, the helicopter’s rotors had slowed almost to a stop, and the whuff, whuff, whuff of their turning was, surprisingly, the only sound in that still blue air. Jonelle had expected howling wind, blowing snow. Instead there was nothing but this unnerving silence, and a world all in shades of blue: hard blue sky, softer, deeper blue snow-shadow, the royal blue brush strokes of occasional crevasses, and about six hundred feet below them, the intense sapphire of the little glacial lake.

Jonelle and Ari were in civvies, which at the moment meant the kind of cold-weather gear that moderately well-off tourists might wear: boots and one-piece snowsuits in muted outdoor colors, mottlings of brown and gold and several greens. Jim Trenchard’s tastes varied; he was in a fashionable but god-awful one-piecer in a shade of violent electric puce that ensured he would never be lost in an avalanche. The thing glowed like neon, even in the shade, and against the blue-shadowed snow, he positively vibrated.

Jonelle and Ari were actively embarrassed to be with him, but the fourth of their party just laughed and told them not to worry. “That’s what everyone’s wearing this year,” said their guide, Konni. “He’ll blend in perfectly.”

Jonelle wondered, but said nothing about it for the moment, since their guide came highly recommended.

Konrad Egli was a liaison between X-COM and the Swiss intelligence agency, a group so secret it genuinely did not have a name, the way MI5 had tried not to, and failed. But then, Jonelle thought, in the country that invented the numbered bank account, why should I be surprised at this? The agency, in turn, had ties with the army, though again the nature of these ties was never precisely described to Jonelle, and she was sure she didn’t need to know. “Just so long,” she had said to Konni when they met at the airport earlier in the day, “as someone at the army knows that someone is likely to be, uh, renting one or another of their facilities…so that they don’t start shooting at us one day when we come out to take care of business.”

“Oh, no,” Konni said, “you needn’t worry about that. It’s all taken care of.” That was the way about half of Konni’s sentences ended. His general bearing was less like that of a military attaché than that of an efficient restaurant maitre d’. He looked like one, too: a tall, blocky, middle-aged man with iron-colored hair and gray eyes, like a walking block of granite. His voice was gravelly, too, except when he laughed. Then you suspected it might start avalanches.

Now Jonelle looked over at Jim’s purple suit and said, “Is that taken care of, too? How do we explain his presence up here? Or ours?”

“You’re fat-cat UN officials wasting public funds,” Konni said cheerfully, “renting expensive helicopters to go on a heli-skiing jaunt. The perfect cover, since any good Swiss would believe it instantly.”

“What if someone sees we didn’t do any skiing?” An said.

“You chickened out,” Konni said and laughed delightedly. “Even better. They’ll definitely believe that”

“Wonderful,” Jonelle said, but she had to smile a little. “Why exactly did you want us to see this spot?”

“Look around you,” Konni said. They did. Even from the strictly tourist point of view, it was a view worth seeing. Northward lay Andermatt town, a scatter of hotels and a lot of little brown and golden houses, held inside a triangle of roads. These led west down the Furkapass valley, east to the set of murderous switchback curves that climbed to the Oberalppass, and north to Göschenen and the northern end of the great Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel. Past them, above them, the lowlands of Switzerland dwindled away into hazy views of Germany. Directly westward rose the great triangular peak of the Furkahorn, ten thousand feet high, and over its shoulder, a crevasse-streaked hundred-lane highway of ice a mile wide: the Grosser Aletschglacier, oldest and biggest glacier in Europe. Beyond that, through the clear air, you could see straight to Geneva, and France beyond. South lay mountain after mountain, like waves in the sea, the Sankt Gotthard pass and the other lesser passes spilling downslope, like rivers, into a golden haze that held Italy beneath it. Then, to the east, the heights of the great north-south running mountain chains of Graubunden, behind which lay Liechtenstein and Austria, and more distant but amazingly still visible, the Czech Republic and the borders of Eastern Europe.

“What if someone sees we didn’t do any skiing?” Ari said.

“You chickened out,” Konni said and laughed delightedly. “Even better. They’ll definitely believe that.”

“Wonderful,” Jonelle said, but she had to smile a little. “Why exactly did you want us to see this spot?”

“Look around you,” Konni said. They did. Even from the strictly tourist point of view, it was a view worth seeing. Northward lay Andermatt town, a scatter of hotels and a lot of little brown and golden houses, held inside a triangle of roads. These led west down the Furkapass valley, east to the set of murderous switchback curves that climbed to the Oberalppass, and north to Göschenen and the northern end of the great Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel. Past them, above them, the lowlands of Switzerland dwindled away into hazy views of Germany. Directly westward rose the great triangular peak of the Furkahorn, ten thousand feet high, and over its shoulder, a crevasse-streaked hundred-lane highway of ice a mile wide: the Grosser Aletschglacier, oldest and biggest glacier in Europe. Beyond that, through the clear air, you could see straight to Geneva, and France beyond. South lay mountain after mountain, like waves in the sea, the Sankt Gotthard pass and the other lesser passes spilling downslope, like rivers, into a golden haze that held Italy beneath it. Then, to the east, the heights of the great north-south running mountain chains of Graubunden, behind which lay Liechtenstein and Austria, and more distant but amazingly still visible, the Czech Republic and the borders of Eastern Europe.

Jonelle nodded. “It’s certainly central,” she said matter-of-factly like someone trying to resist the wies of a good real estate agent.

“That’s not so much the point at the moment,” Konni said. “Tell me: can you see any signs of, shall we say, building activity in this area?”

Jonelle looked around, hard, for about five minutes, before venturing an answer. The others did the same, though she knew they were going to leave the answering to her. The trouble was that the Swiss were past masters at this kind of concealment. You could look straight at a cliff wall and not see the fiberglass fake stone that someone had built and painted to match the real rock—not until someone came along and lifted it away to reveal the iron door underneath.

“On first glance, no,” Jonelle said. “But you’ve got to assume that anyone who might be involved in espionage would have a lot more time to study the area than we’ve got today.”

“That’s true,” Konni said. “But I wanted you to look for yourself because when we investigate the site more closely, you’ll want to recognize your landmarks and remember what you didn’t see. All ready, then?”

Jonelle was ready enough. Wind or no wind, her feet were freezing. With the others, she climbed hurriedly back into the helicopter.

Ten minutes’ flight brought them down to the little helicopter landing site near the train station in Andermatt. “Now what?” Jonelle said.

“Now we take the train to Göschenen.”

“Is the Rhaetische Bahn giving you a commission on this?” Ari inquired. Jonelle gave him a look.

They all dutifully got on the one-car RhB train. It was a most peculiar little creature. The track was slanted at about a twenty-degree angle down from the platform where they boarded, and the train car itself was built at the same angle, with all the seats slightly one above the other, as though on steps or bleachers. After a few minutes of sitting and hissing quietly to itself, the train gave a strangled hoot and started down the slope.

The track twisted and doubled back on itself several times as it made its way down a steep stone face, then went over and through a gorge nearly two hundred feet deep, with a ferocious, green-white, melt-swollen river running through the bottom of it. Finally the track straightened out somewhat, and the train car pulled up and stopped, still slanted, at another platform.

They got out. “Now,” Konni said, “we pick up our ride.”

He led them across the platform to where something most peculiar waited on one of the main-line tracks: a little open maintenance car, painted bright yellow. If you took a Ford flatbed pickup and put it on train wheels, Jonelle thought, it would look like this. Two Swiss railway staff were standing by the little creature, holding bright orange servicemen’s vests and hardhats. Konni greeted them, took the vests and hats and handed them out to Jonelle and Ari and Jim, putting one on himself. “All aboard!” he said then.

They all looked at each other and got onto the “flatbed.” Konni took what looked more like a tiller than anything else, turned an ignition key, started the little beast’s diesel engine, and started running it down the track, southward, toward the opening of the Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel.

Jonelle eyed the approaching tunnel with some concern, sparing only a glance for the bas-relief carved monument to the men who died building this first of the great rail tunnels. “Konni,” she said, “you’re quite sure nothing’s coming?”

“Oh, no,” Konni said, “we’re on the southbound track, not the northbound.”

“You’re sure nothing’s coming behind us?” Ari said.

“We’re well ahead of the twelve-fifty,” Konni said.

I wish I could get at my watch a little more easily, Jonelle thought as the shadow of the tunnel mouth fell over them, swallowing them up. Soon they were left with only the light of the little maintenance car’s front spot, and even that didn’t go very far in this darkness.

It got cold, and colder, and then, bizarrely, started to get warmer. Jim looked around him with amusement, seeing how the stones, which had been frosted closer to the tunnel mouth, were now wet, and ahead were perfectly dry and much warmer. “In these amounts,” he said, “stone is one heck of an insulator.”

“This time of year, yes,” Konni said. “But it’s early, yet. Now then….” They were about a mile into the tunnel. Faintly, they could hear, or rather feel, a rumbling— something rushing by, somewhere. “The other tunnel,” Konni said, “diverges from this one more and more widely as we go through—it’s about half a mile away through the stone, that way.” He gestured to the left. “Our business, though, is over here.”

He looked right and stopped. “All right,” he said, “everybody out.”

Jonelle blinked, then shrugged and let herself down over the edge of the car. It was about five feet down to the track bed. The others followed, and Konni, the last one out, reached for a capped switch on the side of the car, pushed the cap up, tapped a number into the revealed keypad, and slapped the cap down again. The maintenance car jerked a little, then took off back down the track, backwards, leaving them all standing there in the cold and the dark.

Konni came up with a flashlight and turned it on. “Here we are,” he said and walked over to the wall. He put his fingers under a protruding piece of rock and lifted it away—

It was just a fiberglass shell, with a big metal door behind it, for which Konni produced a key “You’ll pull that back in place behind us, will you, Colonel?” he said to Ari.

“No problem,” Ari said. As Konni opened the door, lights came on in a short corridor that ended in another metal door.

They went in, Ari replaced the shell, and Konni locked the door. “I’m not so sure about this,” Ari said. “Anybody could just walk down that train tunnel, at night, say—”

“No, they couldn’t,” Konni said and smiled, and that was all he said, so that Jonelle wondered about the statement for a while afterward. Meanwhile, Konni led them down the corridor to the second metal door, and pushed the button beside it.

The door slid open. It was an elevator, a big freight-hauling one with a door on the other side, as well. They got in, and Konni pushed one of the two buttons. The doors closed.

The ride took about two minutes, during which everyone looked at the floor, or the walls, since there were no numbers to watch. Then the door opened. Jonelle stepped out.

She opened her mouth, and closed it, and opened and closed it again before saying, very quietly, “Holy Buddha on a bicycle!”

They were in the top of the mountain, and it was hollow. It was simply the biggest enclosed space Jonelle had ever seen. To the slightly domed ceiling, far above them, it had to be three hundred feet—though it was hard to tell, with the glare from the lights on the framework hanging from that ceiling. To the far side of the main floor on which they stood, it had to be the better part of a mile. That floor showed signs of having had heavy installations of various kinds on it, though they were all gone now. The huge, echoing place had that vacated feel of an apartment waiting for a new renter.

“It’s the Mines of Moria,” Jim said, looking up at several narrow windows, which let in a surprising amount of light, even though they were at the bottom of crevasses.

“It’s the goddamn Hall of the Mountain King,” Ari said, and the echo took a second or so to come back.

Konni nodded, looking satisfied. “We’re about four hundred feet directly below the lesser peak of Chastelhorn, where we were standing,” he said. “This is only the top level. There are four more below it, each one with a ninety-foot ceiling, all with different accesses for heavy equipment and so forth. All quite secure.”

Jonelle stood there, looking around for a long, silent few minutes, considering. The others were still gazing around them, absorbing the size of the place, but Konni was looking at her, as she could well feel even with her back turned. When she finally swung around to look at him, he said, rather abruptly, “If you don’t like it, I can show you some others—”

Jonelle burst out laughing. “Konni,” she said, “you’re out of your bloody mind. This is exactly what I need. We’ll take it.”

He nodded, and the satisfied, it’s-all-taken-care-of expression came back. “I thought you would,” he said. “I’ll inform…my people…that you’ll be taking possession. The upper echelons will sort out the details.”

“I want to see the downstairs, first, of course.”

“Of course. Right this way, Commander—”

They walked off together, Ari and Jim bringing up the rear. “And if there’s any little thing we can do for you,” Jonelle said, “for…your people, in return for this tremendous favor….”

As they walked, Konni lost most of his smile for the first time since Jonelle had met him that morning. He nodded, leaned close like someone about to ask a favor, and said, “Kill them. Kill every last one of the sons of bitches, Commander. Kill them all.”

She took a breath.

“Konni,” she said, “believe me, it’ll be my pleasure.”