X-COM: UFO Defense

Four

Five hours later, the hunting was nearly over, though large parts of it had not gone according to anyone’s expectations. Jonelle met the remains of the first assault teams where the pilot of her Skyranger had dropped her, outside the Hauptbahnhof. She was in heavy armor, her flying suit— only sensible, since the area was not yet completely secured, and X-COM would take it most unkindly if a regional commander should be taken out by a chance shot from a Sectoid sniper. The use she would have preferred for the armor was to go down into the depths of the Hauptbahnhof and be busy in other ways. But she couldn’t so indulge herself—not anymore, and particularly not now.

She met with Colonel Amesson, who had been sent to Zürich after his interception team finished its work in the Canaries. Together, with a couple of squaddies as de facto bodyguards, they walked down the Bahnhofstrasse, past the broken shop windows and the burned-out stores, and he briefed her.

“It seems as if the Battleship fell afoul of the cast-iron reinforcements in the old building,” he said. “There was nothing like that in the new construction to give it any problems, but what it did sink through seems to have slowed it enough for Colonel Laurentz to stick the spear in its side, so to speak. When my team got in, we managed to get out about ninety civilians who were trapped in the ruble.”

Jonelle nodded and looked around her. “How are they doing?”

“About eighty percent survival, the hospital says. Then the Avenger dropped its assault teams, just the other side of the river,” Arnesson said., “The squads came across, destroyed the bridges, killed some Floaters they found on their way over, and started working northward. They met heavy resistance on the way up, and Colonel Laurentz broke off his attack on the Terror Ship down in Paradeplatz and flew down to help them. That’s when the Avenger went down. The aliens had two teams with blaster launchers waiting down there. I suspect they were waiting for an attack from the south. If Ari had come in straight, he’d have been dead, and all his teams with him—not even an Avenger could have taken both those things in the teeth.”

Jonelle nodded. Leaving strategic considerations aside, Ari had a love of sneakiness for its own sake. He would never go straight when he could go crooked. Jonelle used to tease him, Your brain could be used for a corkscrew, you know that? And he would laugh.

“The Avenger went down just on the lakeside,” Amesson said, “into the water. That was what saved his and Melanchion’s lives. They both got out OK—they were both armored, and Ari came out with a psi-amp. The crews say that to have heard Ari, as he went down, you’d have thought he was discussing what bus stop he was going to get off at, he was so casual. In the middle of ditching, he was still giving them instructions on how to attack the craft in Paradeplatz, and insisting on casualty reports.”

“I wouldn’t mind one of those myself,” Jonelle said, a little tartly.

Arnesson looked at her in some surprise. “Weren’t you given one already? My apologies, Commander—there’s been a breakdown in communications somewhere. Of a total of thirty-four deployed, we lost ten.”

“So many,” she said softly.

“It’s a miracle it wasn’t more, Commander. We were spread very, very thin on the ground here, and if the aliens had had even a slight advantage in numbers or tactics, a whole lot more of us would be dead. As it was, our people fought like madmen…and the aliens, a lot of them, didn’t seem to be functioning up to full efficiency after the Battleship went.”

“The masterminds were on it,” Jonelle said, “or at least so I suspect.”

“Some of them, at least. We got several stunned Ethereals of several ranks off it, and various other dead ones. They’ve gone down to Irhil M’goun to be held until Doctor Trenchard gets back down there from ‘Moria.’”

Jonelle smiled slightly. “Yes, he would want to be there for the interrogations. That’s fine.” She lost the smile, then, as they came to the Zürich branch of the EA.O. Schwartz toy store. It was burned out, the biggest and most beautiful of the antique rocking horses in the front window lying on its side on a carpet of shattered glass, plasma burns marking its side. He’ll never buy me that horse now. Not that he could have anyway—the bloody thing costs about half a year’s salary…and where would I have kept it?

“At any rate, the initial teams’ assaults were surprisingly successful, despite the aliens’ resistance. We had a little unlooked-for help, too: a lot of the locals took exception to the terror raid and sniped at the aliens from their windows. Some of them died for their trouble…a lot of them did us some good. While the first-in teams were working north, Colonel Laurentz and his pilot made their way north as well, joining up with the southernmost team about twenty minutes into their attack. They were pushing north to join another team when they ran into an attack group of aliens apparently sent to stop them. That was where about a third of our casualties came, right there. There were two Ethereal leaders with the force, a lot of Snakemen, and some Chryssalids. The team killed the Chryssalids first, as you might expect, and then started working on the others. But they came under psi attack. According to the survivors, Colonel Laurentz engaged one of the Ethereals with his psi-amp and killed it—but the other one got control of several of his people and then forced them to attack him. There was a battle for control of their minds, apparently. Colonel Laurentz won it—just—but must have sustained some blow to his mind. He went down, and the teammates he had been protecting went down with him—a couple of them died. The others are on their way back to Irhil.”

Jonelle nodded calmly “And the colonel?” she said, as though no more concerned about him than about anyone else.

“After the fighting finished in this area, a recovery team made pickup on him and his teammates. He seems never to have regained consciousness after he went down, Commander. He was shipped down to Irhil with the rest of them. As far as I know, he’s still comatose. I haven’t heard any updates, though we should have one for you shortly.”

“Very well. So. That particular alien attack was resolved, more or less in our favor, I take it. What happened to that other Ethereal?”

“It must have been considerably weakened by Colonel Laurentz’s struggle with it, Commander. It was stunned and taken prisoner a little later, with surprisingly little trouble.”

They stopped a block north of Paradeplatz, looking up at a shot-out window. Someone had draped a Swiss flag out of it at some stage of the fighting, and the flag lay limp and somewhat singed around the edges. “Around that time,” Arnesson said, “my team came in. We put down troops and Heavy Weapons Platforms between the Limmat and the Sihl and began a sweep eastward to meet Colonel Laurentz’s troops. The team from Greece landed at the train station and headed down inside.

“I’ll want a more detailed report from them shortly,” Jonelle said, “but what’s the general story down there?”

“About six hundred civilians dead. A lot of Chryssalids and Zombies—we had to kill all those, of course. A whole lot of dead aliens of various kinds. At least eight of our own assault team members.” Arnesson looked somber, and Jonelle guessed that some of those were his own people. “The station is in a bad way. Once we’ve got all the dead and wounded out of there, the place will probably have to be demolished.”

“To think they just renovated it,” Jonelle said. “Well, never mind. So the assault teams consolidated….”

“Yes, Commander. And several HWPs joined forces and began concentrating on the second alien craft, the Terror Ship. Colonel Laurentz was very insistent that we shoot the site up thoroughly.”

“The site?” Jonelle said, looking at him curiously.

For the first time in all this, Arnesson, always something of a sobersides, cracked a small, thin smile. “You’d better have a look.”

They walked on down the Bahnhofstrasse to the point where it bends slightly crossing Pelikanstrasse, and Jonelle gazed down at Paradeplatz, past the wreckage of burned and derailed trams—and opened her mouth, and shut it again.

The Terror Ship was tipped over on one end, sticking out of what appeared to be a large hole in the street. As they got closer, Jonelle could see that the upper levels of the hole were full of cables and conduits, and what appeared to be several hallways or corridors, some ten or fifteen feet under ground-level proper.

As they approached, they were joined by Mihaul O’Halloran, who came over to them and took off his helmet long enough to wipe some sweat out of his eyes. “Here’s the colonel’s catch of the day, Commander,” he said. “The Battleship was nice shooting, but this one was just plain old wickedness in action. I’d give a pretty penny to know how he knew what was under here.”

“What did he tell you, Mihaul?” Jonelle said as they walked over to the hole to examine it more closely.

“Not much, ma’am. He was crashing in the lake about that time, and after that, most of the way up here he was busy fighting. He couldn’t give us detailed explanations. He just said to me, ‘Do me a favor,’ he says, ‘see the ground all around that thing? Shoot it out.’ And I said, ‘What, Boss?’ I mean, ‘Sir.’ Ma’am.”

“Never mind, Mihaul.”

“Yes, ma’am. Well, he said it again, ‘Just do that. Get whatever firepower you can. Grenades, rocket launchers, heavy laser, I don’t care. Concentrate on where the tracks are, first. Then just dig yourself a hole to China. Get some help. And you’ll want to post a guard afterwards.’”

Mihaul shrugged. “So we did. It took the devil’s own time to get anywhere with this. I mean, ma’am, we didn’t see what point shooting at the ground was, anyway. And of course the aliens inside were shooting at us all the time. But after a little while, the ship started to sag over sideways—as if something under it were weakening. So we got two of those HWPs in as quick as we could, and let them really have a go at it. The ground gave way then, all right! Not just the ground, as you can see. And when it was over, the ship just fell right into the hole with almost all its weapons ports under the surface, and it couldn’t shoot anything much after that but this underground stuff, nor go anywhere much after that but toward China. We had plenty of leisure to storm it then. We got out every single civilian that they’d stowed in it, without damaging it at all. Six captures, ma’am—Ron over there will give you the whole list. And,” Mihaul said, and laughed softly, “we saw why the colonel said we might need to post a guard.”

They came to the edge of the hole. The Terror Ship was tilted down into it at a forty-five degree angle, with God-knew-what alien lubricants spilling down from it, and water from broken pipes, and snapped wires and cables fizzing all around, so that everything stank of ozone and Lionel trains. And down there, under the ship, scattered higgledy-piggledy with corpses of Snakemen and Chryssalids, was the gold—the gold that lay in the sunken vaults all up and down the length of the Bahnhofstrasse, vaults shared and policed by the Big Three banks, secret to most, known of in an abstract way by many, though this was not the kind of information that the Michelin guide normally reveals. There it lay, gold in heaps and piles, bars and bars of it, crushed and scattered under the remains of the Terror Ship, melted by the heat of all the weaponry concentrated on that spot since the attack that Ari ordered began—gold running away in little rivulets and puddling like bright coins, here and there still glowing red, most places just gleaming dully in wriggly, abstract sculptures and splashes on the sub-floor forty feet down.

Mihaul shook his head and laughed. “So we posted the guards, ma’am. Though I think anyone nuts enough to come here and try to steal probably deserves some.”

“Mihaul,” Jonelle said, “you’re dead right. Well, the Swiss police will be along shortly to handle this. Meanwhile…let’s go up to the station and see how they’re doing.”

All the way up, Jonelle received reports, asked questions and answered them, and started settling the dispositions of the teams once they’d gotten the Swiss started on the cleanup. She sent for a stripping team to start work on the Terror Ship—it would be a little while before the Battleship was ready to be stripped of all but the easiest things, such as the Elerium. I’ll have the funds for that new mind shield now, Jonelle thought, even a new hyperwave decoder. That was possibly the brightest aspect of this whole situation. But all the time, as she gave orders and received information, Jonelle could not get rid of the memory of a night when she and Ari had been out on leave in Paris, and she had come back from shopping to find him exchanging terrible ethnic jokes with someone who (he later told her) was a genuine “Gnome” of Zürich, a junior manager with one of the Big Three banks, and who was full of interesting stories. Jonelle had afterwards laughed at the idea, and teased Ari for the better part of half an hour about how he so hated eating or drinking by himself that he’d strike up a conversation with anybody, even a banker.

And it was true. Oh, please, let it go on being true. Oh, Ari, please, don’t die!

“So we have a mole,” she said much later to DeLonghi, who looked at her out of a face pale with weariness, and now creased with shock.

“Here?”

“Possibly. Somewhere in the organization, certainly, or possibly among the Swiss. In any case, we have to look at who knows about the building of the new base, and start turning over some rocks to see what we find.”

DeLonghi sighed. “Commander, with all due respect, I think we have more immediate problems. We’re very shorthanded right now. Half our craft are down for maintenance of some kind. Several are seriously damaged and won’t fly again before the end of the week, no matter how many engineering crew we put on the job—and we only have so many.”

“I’ve requisitioned more,” Jonelle said. “Some of the Andermatt staff will be coming down here.”

“It’s not going to be enough,” DeLonghi said.

“Commander, if you’re suggesting that we stop construction on the new base because we’re having problems down here, I’m afraid that’s not an option that’s open to us—and senior command would laugh themselves blue if they heard it. After cashiering us, of course.”

He looked more shocked than previously. “No, Commander, I didn’t—”

“Good,” Jonelle said.

“But we’re still left materially unable to deal with any serious threat. We had an Interceptor destroyed, another one that’s been seriously damaged and will be out of commission for about a week. One of our Skyrangers limped home on half its propulsion system—that one needs about a week in the shop, as well. One of our Lightnings was destroyed. One of the Firestorms that went out yesterday was damaged. The Avenger—” He shrugged. “That’s worse—it’s a write-off.”

Jonelle smiled slightly. “That’s what the insurance company says?”

DeLonghi threw a look at her that suggested he wasn’t wild about the joke. “Commander,” he said, “it’s just a blessing that it was empty when it went down.”

“It’s not exactly a blessing,” Jonelle said. “It has to do with Colonel Laurentz’s disposition of the craft, I believe. He knew well enough that you don’t keep an Avenger in the air with a full complement any longer than you have to. Which brings me to another subject.”

DeLonghi swallowed. “What was he doing in that ship? My orders to him were most specific. He was not to put himself in the front line.”

“Commander,” DeLonghi said, with the air of a man who knows he’s already beaten, “you know the situation last night. You’ve seen the transcripts and the timings. The colonel put a very compelling case to me. And your orders to me also required that I was to take his advice, unless I could find compelling reasons to the contrary. There were none. There were two large reasons sitting in Zurich, which meant when he said he was going, I had to let him. If the commander can suggest to me what she would have done in my place, in that situation—I’ll listen gladly, and note the lesson for later.”

Jonelle sat back and sighed. “Joe,” she said, “sometimes you can be a real pain in the butt, you know that? But you’ve got me there. Well, all we can do is get on with requisitioning new supplies and equipment, and transferring in some new staff. At least we won’t be short of money to pay for them.”

“What was the total haul?” Jonelle shook her head. “I’m still working on the figures. But it’s large. We’ve got a big Elerium supply now—I wouldn’t exactly say we have it to burn, but we’ve got plenty on hand. I’ve ordered a mind shield and hyperwave decoder for the new facility. The first set of hangars are almost ready, and the living blocks. I want to move about half the engineering staff down there and start them making guns.” She smiled, a slightly grim look. “We should do well up there. Some parts of Switzerland, you can’t spit without hitting an arms dealer—the market’s active enough for anybody.”

“I’ll take care of it tomorrow, Commander. Anything else?”

She shook her head. “I’ll be going back to Andermatt tonight. My operations and command center was being installed today—I want to keep an eye on that, and see if I can hurry the hyperwave decoder, as well. That won’t be in a minute too soon to please me.”

“Operations down here, then….” DeLonghi trailed off.

She looked at him, knowing what he was asking: was she going to pull back command from him, after such a bad start? “Let’s just say I’ll be keeping a general eye on things. But otherwise, you’re mistaken if you think I’m likely to have much time for you. We’ll be salvaging the Avenger at the Andermatt site. Between that, and overseeing the new installations….” DeLonghi nodded. “There is one thing I want, though,” Jonelle said. “I want an inventory of all communications activity in and out of Irhil over the last two weeks.”

“All of it?”

“All. Including ship-to-ship. Not transcripts—just the basic records of who called who and when.”

“Very well, Commander.”

“Good. See to it.”

She got up, went out, and walked down the corridor that led from her office to Operations and the rest of the base, greeting her people as she went. There were fewer of them than usual.

We have a traitor, she thought. We have a spy in our ranks. Someone who may have been working with my people—friends with them—or seeming friends. But someone who has no trouble in, directly or indirectly, sending them to their deaths. Jonelle sighed. She had sent people to their possible or probable deaths nearly every day lately—but it was a death she herself was willing to share if she had to. She had come close enough to that, in her own time as a team member. What she had great trouble understanding was how one of her own, or for that matter how anyone from Earth, could willingly sell information about Earth defenses to the aliens. Oh, Earth-based treason she could understand readily enough. Jonelle was enough of a student of military history to understand that, even as there are people who will readily sell weapons, any weapons, to any buyer—a tendency she was not above exploiting—there were other people who would as eagerly sell information, that deadliest of weapons, to whoever would buy, even the sworn enemies of the whole human race. But a traitor of one country against another could always just move to another country afterward. Where do these people think they’ll be able to escape to, Jonelle thought, when the aliens rule Earth and start making soup out of everything that walks? Do they think they’ll move to the Moon? Don’t they realize they’re in the pot with the rest of us already?

Apparently one of them didn’t. Her feelings about such people were robust. If she caught any of them, she supposed she would have to submit them to due process and let them be tried. But if she caught any of them in the field, in the middle of a fight, she doubted she would be so upright. “Killed while trying to escape” was an old and effective excuse, behind which—especially in these times— the authorities tended not to look too closely. That suited her completely, especially since, in her view, whoever had fed the aliens the information about the change of command at Irhil M’Goun was directly responsible for the deaths of ten of her people.

Possibly eleven.

Jonelle made her way through the part of the living block that was set aside as the infirmary. It wasn’t a large area—partly because of the typical space restrictions, partly because there was generally not much need for many beds. Most injuries suffered by troops out on ground assault were either severe enough to kill them right away, or’minor enough—with the present medical technology—to see them either ambulatory, or able to recuperate in quarters or ship out to a real hospital, within several days or a week. Some few cases, though, fell outside these boundaries.

There were two doctors who usually manned the place. Pierre Fleurie was off duty today. Jonelle found Gyorgi Makharov on duty instead. He was sitting at his desk by the corridor door, scribbling frantically on someone’s chart as she came in.

He looked up at her out of those startlingly blue eyes of his, and frowned. In his young face, the expression made him look a little like a pouting child. Jonelle tensed a little. She had quickly learned that that frown on Gyorgi meant all was not well with the world—and, specifically, with his patients.

“Commander,” he said. “They’ve been keeping you busy…”

“They have been, Gyorg,” she said. “How is he?”

“Not conscious yet.”

“What happened to him?”

“Psychocortical shock,” Gyorgi said, pushing the chart away with a disgusted look. “The usual.”

Jonelle nodded; the syndrome was all too familiar. It had come as a surprise, the first time people started running up against Ethereals and the other psi-talented species of aliens, that there was actual physical damage to the brain associated with psychic attack. It seemed that the brain interpreted attack “from within” as physical, at the chemical level—a finding that, paradoxically, had sped up X-COM’s researches into the adaptation for humans of the technology that would eventually become the psi-amp. The problem was that, because the injury to the brain was literally a psychosomatic one, it didn’t respond to the treatments that would normally have been useful for straightforward brain damage. Often enough, brains that seemed very little damaged did not survive, leaving a body that might function well enough, but that had no one “at home” in it, and was good for nothing but transplant parts. Others, who took more massive and physical-seeming damage, made more or less full recoveries. It was a puzzling part of neurophysiology, unpredictable and frustrating—so her medical staff had told Jonelle, more than once. More than once she had bugged them about coma cases whose etiology she couldn’t understand. This one was going to be no exception.

“Can I see him?”

“Sure. By the way,” Gyorgi added as she went past him toward the infirmary’s bed wing, “he also took a good knock on the head, either when he fell or just before. He had a case of contrecoup when he came in that I thought might kill him all by itself—but it’s reduced nicely without surgery, and there was no significant damage to the brain.”

“Contrecoup?”

“You hit somebody on one side of the head,” Gyorgi said, “and the bruise forms on the inside of the other side—the brain actually slams up against the bone. Fortunately”—and he looked somewhat wry—“the colonel either has softer bone or a harder brain than most people. He broke some minor blood vessels on the inside surface of the pia mater, but that was all. His other problems are worse.”

Jonelle nodded and went on back.

There were only four beds in the wing, two of them screened off. The first one had a squaddie named Molson in it. Jonelle stopped, looked at the chart hung over the records rack at the bottom of the bed.

“Molson?” she said. “How you doing?”

“OK, Commander. A little chopped up, is all.”

“Is it OK to look?”

“If you don’t feel like throwing up—”

She put her head through the curtain. Molson was lying there with one leg up in traction, sandbags on either side of his body, and a cervical collar and “crown brace” around his skull, fastened by steel pins inserted through the skin and into the bone. Jonelle suspected this was no time for bothering with a bedside manner, especially when the voice that answered her had been relatively cheerful. “Good God, man,” she said, “you look like the Bride of Frankenstein.”

“Pinhead, my buddy Rogers says.”

“That too. They’re going to ship you up to the main hospital shortly, I take it.”

“In a couple of days, yeah. Doc says ‘after I stabilize.’ Jeez, Commander, I’ve got enough metalwork stuck in me to stabilize anything.”

“Well, you get your beauty sleep, Molson.” She gave him a wicked look. “I’d say you could use it.”

“Thanks loads, Commander.” His eyes flickered toward the next bed over. “How’s he doing—the colonel?”

“Catching up on his beauty sleep too, or so I hear,” Jonelle said. “If we had anything around here so low-tech as a baseball bat, I’d take it to the big lazy lump.”

“Yeah, well, give him one for me,” Molson said. “He saved my butt last night.”

“I’ll do that.”

She let the curtain fall and stepped over to the other bed, where the curtain was only partially drawn.

He was lying on his side in a position that immediately looked wrong in Jonelle’s eyes. Whenever Ari lay on his side, he always curled up like an infant—something Jonelle had teased him about more than once. Now he lay stretched out, one arm tucked under, one laid over the covers, in a position she recognized as part of the usual turning routine used on comatose patients. In a little while Gyorgi would come in and turn Ari onto his back, or his front. She was determined not to be there for that. The sight of this strong, lithe body flopping helpless and limp, like a doll, would do bad things for her composure.

There was no chair by the bed. She had to stand and look down on him, his unruly blond hair somewhat lank at the moment, for with other more pressing medical matters to attend to, no one would have washed it. That hurt her as much, in its way, as his odd position, for Ari was always personally fastidious. She had accused him once of taking more baths than a cat, and he’d laughed and said, “There’s enough dirt in the world—I don’t want any of it sticking to me.”

His face was untroubled. He might have been sleeping, except that his breathing was so quick that it sounded slightly unhealthy. Amazing, Jonelle thought, how much you can come to notice about a person, even about how they are just when they’re sleeping. Let alone about the things they say, they do…. She looked down at that amiably ugly face, so very still when it was usually so mobile. Even in sleep, it would twitch, expressions coming and going in flickers that surfaced from his dreams.

Jonelle breathed out. “This is a very untenable position, Colonel,” she said. “A bad spot. You get your butt out of that bed. I need your help—and your teams need you.”

She stood quiet for a few breaths, and then—with a reminder to herself that the next bed was occupied—began giving Ari a briefing, as she would have were he awake: how the raid went, the success of his stratagem in Zurich, who was alive. She didn’t mention who was dead. When she finished, Jonelle said, “I have to go back to Andermatt. If you need me, just ask. Gyorgi will keep me posted on how you’re doing.”

She reached down and touched his face. “Take care of yourself, my lion,” Jonelle said, very softly, not for the ears in the next bed to hear. Then she turned and left, keeping her voice cheerful and matter-of-fact as she said good night to Molson in the next bed, and to Gyorgi as she went out into the hall. It was all just part of the job, after all. It was the commander’s business to keep up hope for everybody else, even when she wasn’t sure where to find it for herself.

The next morning, Jonelle was back up under the mountain, inspecting the progress there. The living quarters were nearly finished: the last of the cooking facilities were going in as she made her tour. Work on the alien containment facilities was still ongoing. There were some details Jonelle had wanted added, some extra security doors and so forth. For her money, you could never be too careful about aliens when they were inside your own base. The first hangar space was within hours of being complete.

That morning, after much thought, she had told DeLonghi that she was taking the Skyranger that was presently doing transport duty between Andermatt and Irhil, and would be moving it permanently into Andermatt that afternoon, along with its crew and a small maintenance team for it. She was also taking two Lightnings.

He argued bitterly with her about this, but lacking better reasons—for she had none, only a growing streak of what she hoped was healthy paranoia—she finally had to fall back on good old-fashioned rank-pulling. She explained to him that this was just the way it was going to be. They did not part company on warm terms, which Jonelle regretted but was perfectly willing to cope with. She too had occasionally had to cope with disagreements with a superior officer, and there was no regulation that said one had to like it—just to comply.

Jonelle spent the better part of that day seeing that the new hangar space was to her liking. By and large, it was—large being the operant term. The most finicky bit of business had been the removal of the old steam catapult, neither the Skyranger nor the Lightnings needing anything of the kind. But while she checked the work of the hangar teams, other issues were on Jonelle’s mind. If someone was indeed getting intelligence from inside her base about the battle-readiness of Irhil M’Goun, or its lack of it, she intended to find out quickly. This was another of the reasons DeLonghi had been unhappy

“Let’s see,” Jonelle had said, “just how good their intelligence is. I’m going to go down to our hangars, notify the pilots myself, put them in their craft and send them off. No one else is to know where they’re going, not even our own air traffic control. We’ll be credited shortly for the various consumables we picked up during the Battleship capture. I’ll have the Lightnings I’m taking replaced within the week. That information, too, is to stay between you and me. When the new ones are ready, they’re going to be delivered to me at Andermatt, under wraps, and the old ones will be ‘returned’ to you down here.”

And so it had been arranged. The completion of the living-quarters work being literally about as interesting as watching paint dry, Jonelle divided her attention for the rest of the day between the installation of the new control and command center—all modular and meant to “plug and play,” a smart development in situations where fast replacement was vital, such as after a base attack—and watching the drying of another batch of paint: the markings on the vast number-one hangar floor. Space for one Avenger was marked out, for one Skyranger, two Lightnings, and two Interceptors. There was room for much more hardware downstairs on the number-two and number-three hangar levels, but it would be weeks yet before those were ready. Off to the sides of the huge, hollowed-out space was room for the Heavy Weapons Platforms and other ancillary gear—weapons lockers and the smaller ammunition storage “pots.”

She watched with satisfaction as the first of the Lightnings came in, in mid-afternoon, and settled into the spot prepared for it. The entrance had been adapted with a set of camouflaged sliding doors that looked, from outside the mountain, like a stony cornice overhung with snow.

Unfortunately, the snow that gathered above it, also part of the camouflage, had a tendency to fall in through the opening doors, shortly thereafter leaving the floor awash in meltwater, and the markings teams began complaining about what it was probably doing to their incompletely dried paint job.

When they started yelling about this for the second time, on the arrival of the second Lightning, Jonelle realized it was time to get out of there. She went down to her quarters—a very bare-bones arrangement so far, barely more than a camp bed with a desk off to one side, on which was mounted her terminal to the command-and-control network installation—and went rooting around in her closet for the necessary civvies for going to town.

This, of course, was no simple matter. It meant first checking the train schedule to make sure that the way would be clear for the little automated shuttle car. After going to all this trouble over the new base, there would be no point in being killed by the 4:10 InterCity from Göschenen to Basel. Once you’d checked, you then went down in the elevator, called the car with the control in the elevator, put on a big, loose coverall (which wrought havoc with your skirt, if you were wearing one) and a fluorescent reflective vest so that at first glance you looked like railway personnel. Then you waited on the chilly, windy platform—an amazing forty-mile-an-hour draft came through that tunnel at all times—until the car came along and stopped for you. Once on it, you activated the controls that started it trundling back up to the light at the end of the tunnel. There it veered off to one side, onto an auxiliary track before and to one side of the main Göschenen station platforms. The track ran through what was essentially a little shed open at both ends. You climbed out, hung up your railway gear neatly on a hook provided for the purpose, and then made your way down a flight of stairs inside the “shed,” through an underground passage and out through a plain locked door, which let you into the other underground corridors, which more normal passengers changing trains at Göschenen used to get from one track to another. After that, you walked around the end of the main-line platforms to the smaller one, which serviced the little “slanted” Göschenen-Andermatt train. You climbed aboard, showed the conductor your rail pass, and waited a few minutes until the little train hooted and started on its . winding, leaning way up through the Schöllenen Gorge.

At the little station at Andermatt, you would get off to find yourself surrounded by either mad skiers waiting for one of the local commuter trains to take them up to the ski-drag lines at the bottom of the Oberalp Pass, or else a crowd of sated tourists, some rather the worse for wine drunk at unusual altitude, just off the Glacier Express, breaking the seven-hour trip before continuing on to either St. Moritz or Zermatt. Jonelle found herself among the skiers this time, it being a little late in the day for the tourists.

She made her way to the turnstile through what, as far as she could tell, was an impassioned argument about ski wax among a batch of fluorescently clad downhill enthusiasts. Out she went into the station parking lot, then full (in the swiftly falling dusk) of the cars of parents meeting kids now returning from the senior school in the next town over, Hospental. Once past the cars, Jonelle turned right at the bottom of the parking lot, past the tourist board building, and walked a little down the main street until the gap in the wall where she could cut through the town’s park to the center of Andermatt village proper.

With the snow beginning to fall again through a dusk going peach-colored from sunset light coming from a rift in clouds to the west, and the lights coming on warm in stores and houses, the town was an inviting place. There was very little architecture in Andermatt that was modern-looking. Most houses and buildings were wooden, either new wood, beautifully golden, or old wood, sometimes a couple of hundred years old, aged to a brown so dark it was almost black. And the architecture was generally a lot alike—broad, flat, shallowly sloping Alpine roofs, sometimes with stones on top to hold the tiles on (though once, on one of the local restaurants near a ski slope, Jonelle discovered that what she thought were stones were actually potatoes destined for rosti, and put up there in the snow to cool faster after boiling). Those buildings that were stuccoed rather than wooden were usually decorated with sgraffito, the swirling, abstract designs cut through white plaster into a deeper, gray plaster layer. The whole place was almost offensively rustic, quiet, and pretty, and (inevitably for Switzerland) clean.

Jonelle heartily wished she had some time to spend here that was not going to be taken up with concerns about traitors, equipment shortages, and other, deeper troubles. But since there was no chance of that, at least in the foreseeable future, she enjoyed the few minutes she had to spare, crunching through the foot-deep snow in the park. The quiet was pleasant, after the echoing clangor of the Hall of the Mountain King. There was little sound anywhere except the soft rush of the occasional car going by on the main road, the subdued jingle of snow chains, and the distance-muted shouts of children pelting one another with snow-balls over by the west side of the park, near the residential part of town.

She came out into the middle of town by the small alley that led past the town hall and made her way down to the “UN” office. Her PR assistant, an earnest young squaddie named Callie Specht, was tidying away the contents of her desk into a locked filing cabinet. She stood up hurriedly at the sight of Jonelle and said, “Oh, C—Ms. Barrett, I mean—”

“Hi, Callie,” Jonelle said, and shrugged out of her jacket. “Busy day?” Specht nodded. “Anything interesting?”

“No, ma’am. The usual complaints about the interference of government—their government and all the others—and about people from the army stomping around, doing God knows what—”

“They mean us?”

“No,” Callie said, “I think they really do mean their army. This town may depend on it for a lot of its income, but they’re still ambivalent about it. And a lot more about cows… “

Jonelle chuckled, “Inevitable. Listen: you go on ahead. Leave me the keys—I’ll lock up here.”

Her squaddie went on willingly enough. Jonelle locked herself in and lost herself, for half an hour or so, in the business of finishing cleaning the place up for the night while her head buzzed with figures and conjectures.

Now that the number-one hangar is ready—and I’ve got my Lightnings out of harm’s way—what next? The mind shield, or the hyperwave decoder? Which first? If they can have the containment area ready by the end of the week, I’d say the mind shield.

She went over it and over it. There were arguments for both pieces of equipment, but none of them seemed so overwhelming that it would leave her with a clear answer. Jonelle suspected that this was either because there really was not much difference between the two at the moment, or because she was dead tired and in no condition to make a choice on which lives might depend. Probably the latter.

She looked around her, could see nothing else that needed doing, and got busy securing the office. As she was locking the front door, a crowd of cheerful men in cold weather gear were heading up the street toward her, most of them familiar faces that she had seen in the office over the past week. One of them was Ueli Trager, the president of the town. The men were laughing and joking, and one of them was waving a wad of cash in another one’s face.

The president saw Jonelle standing there and paused while his crowd of cronies went on ahead. “Fräulein Barrett!” he said. “If you are done for the day, perhaps you will come and celebrate with us?”

“What’s the occasion?”

“My cow,” Trager said, “has gone into the national qualifiers.”

“Forgive me,” Jonelle said, somewhat bemused, “but I seem to have missed something. The national qualifiers for what?”

“The Stierkampf, the pugnieradienst,” the president said, “the cow fights which determine the herd leaders for the next year.”

“Well, congratulations! I’m sure—” Jonelle stopped, slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry—I’ve forgotten her name. And after you told me, the other day.”

“Fräulein,” Trager said, looking at her with a surprised expression, “it’s very kind of you even to be concerned about such a thing. At any rate, my Rosselana”—and he broke into a grin broader than Jonelle had ever seen on anyone there—“has, I think the English idiom would be ‘cleaned up.’ We are going down to the Krone to celebrate. Come on along!”

From these fairly reserved people, Jonelle felt sure that such an invitation was rare. Besides, it would be good PR. And it’s not like I couldn’t use something else to think ahout at the moment. “Well, thank you,” she said. “I think I will.”

She found, as she and Trager rejoined his friends and they made their way to the hotel, that reserve was not on any of their minds. They did not go to the Krone directly—they went right down to the main street, to where it curved and the other biggish hotel sat, the Stern und Post. From outside it, where some townspeople had been sitting and drinking, they collected about another ten men and women and then doubled back up to the Krone again, laughing and shouting all the way. Jonelle wondered how they were going to fit into the bar there—and indeed they didn’t. That bar was about twice the size of her office back in Irhil M’Goun, no more. But somehow, in the next ten or fifteen minutes, there were about ten or fifteen people packed into that little space, shoulder to shoulder, all very determinedly drinking schnapps and paying off a lot of bets.

Jonelle ordered a glass of the local white wine, and as she watched several particularly large cash transactions take place, she said to Ueli, only partly in jest, “Goodness, I didn’t know this kind of thing played such an important part in your local economy!”

Ueli grinned and waggled his eyebrows at her. “It is strictly seasonal.”

“But there seems to be a lot of interest. Some of these gentlemen have been collecting other people’s bets, it seems—”

“Well, lots of people in town either work with the herds routinely, or own cows themselves, or have friends who work with the herds or own cows…. A lot of competitive feeling builds up.”

“What amazes me,” Jonelle said, “is that the cows remember who wins these contests when they go out to pasture again in the spring. They do remember?”

“Oh, yes indeed. They’re not stupid. They have better memories than you might suspect—these cows in particular. They have been bred away from the original stock somewhat—what Americans call the ‘Brown Swiss.’ But they are the culmination of a long selective breeding program. Down here, where the population is so sparse and sometimes we cannot spare people to be with the cows all the time, especially at busy times like the spring and fall, the cows have to learn to take care of themselves. They have been bred to do so. And the pugnieras, the fighting cows, are bred to take care of the others, as well. It is a very special blend of aggression and caution, in these cows. I don’t think there would be any question that they are smarter than usual. Not to mention more hardy, and more active—almost athletic, you might say.”

Something clicked in Jonelle’s mind, and she found herself thinking about the increase in cow stealings and mutilations down this way. I wonder… who besides humans might be interested in the genetic heritage of cows that are so different from the norm? One more thing to look into…. “So when does she compete again, your cow? Maybe I should put some money down.”

Ueli nodded at her, an approving look. “Well,” he said, “in all honesty, you must know what to bet on. Peter? Peter, lean over this way, this lady is looking to bet in the nationals….”

Much more drinking followed, and much more discussion of the best points of a fighting cow: big shoulders, a deep chest, short horns rather than long ones—though this particular characteristic was argued with great passion from several sides. An hour or so later, Jonelle knew more than she ever needed to on the subject. Around then, the conversation began to trail off and was replaced by singing. They sang like angels, these people. One of the biggest and brawniest-looking of the men, whom Jonelle had first thought was a farmer (only to find that he ran one of the ski lifts on the north side of town), was producing an astonishingly high, pure, sweet soprano, while the others followed him in tenor and bass harmony, about twenty strong, in some mournful piece of local folk music. It was deafening, and made Jonelle’s head pound somewhat…or was that the wine?

She made her excuses, thanked Ueli, and headed out into the night. There she shivered—the cold was beginning to get to her again. It was snowing again, through still air. She walked back to the train station, caught the slanty train down to Göschenen, and called the little rail car to take her back up to the Hall of the Mountain King. She had some phone calls to make.

By the end of the evening, the data-processing centers at four other X-COM bases were sick of the sound of her voice. She refused to leave them alone until they gave her figures on cattle heists and mutilations, which at the moment the other bases seemed to consider a lot less important than the human abductions presently going on. But Jonelle pressed. When she was finished, she had more data than she was quite sure what to do with, so she began attacking it in the simplest way: by having a spare map of the world printed out for her, so that she could begin sticking pins in it.

Late that night she heard the scream of engines from upstairs and went up to see a Skyranger arrive, along with the second group of maintenance crew and extra pilots. Enough of the living block was ready to put them up, and she showed them down there herself and got them settled, warning that service in the cafeteria was likely to be spotty until the rest of the venting was installed for the catering ranges. They took it cheerfully enough, which Jonelle could understand: pilots were notorious for having extra food cached in their quarters, just in case. “The really important question,” one of them called after her when she left them to get settled, “is where’s the Crud table?”

She laughed as she made her way back to her own quarters. The desk terminal, her link to the command-and-control center, showed no messages waiting. Jonelle looked at it, reached out to it, stopped herself, and then went ahead and touched the button to call Comms. “Anything from Irhil for me?” she said.

“No, Commander,” came the Comms officer’s voice. “Are you turning in now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want me to call you if I hear anything?”

“Yes, please.”

Wearily, Jonelle locked up, undressed, and got into bed. Her mind was buzzing with cows and hyperwave decoders. Business…she could have been grateful for it, except that it didn’t do what it should have done. It didn’t shut out the one thought that wouldn’t go away. The still face on the pillow, the body stretched out sideways, not curled up properly, the concern that, in the proper conduct of her duty, she must put aside during the day—and with which she was now alone, in the dark.

When it went off, the alarm on the console sounded about a hundred times more jarring than she had expected it would—the acoustical brightness of this little bare-walled room with nothing on the walls. Her mind cried, Ari! She fumbled for the lamp, found it, stumbled out of bed toward the console, and slapped the comms button. “Yeah?”

“Trouble, Commander. M’Goun’s got a hot one coming our way.”

“What are they sending?”

“Nothing, Boss. They’re empty”

“What, again? Shit! Can’t anyone else—”

“No, Commander. That’s why they called.”

“Scramble the pilots and an assault team,” she said, heading for the closet to get dressed. “We’re going. What have they picked up?”

“Large Scout, ma’am.”

“Right. That means one of the Lightnings, and have the Skyranger loaded as backup. Get them moving.”

She pulled out a flight coverall, scrambled into it, pulled on her boots. Thank God the pilots are here, she thought. I sure couldn’t fly, not six hours after drinking. Jonelle went pounding out the door into the screech and hoot of the newly installed Klaxons. As she went by one installation, she noticed one hooter that wasn’t working. Make a note of that—

Up the stairs. The place was coming quickly alive. The bright lights were on in the number-one hangar, pilots and crews already hurrying out into the big space. Some of them looked at Jonelle in astonishment as she headed for the equipment rack and pulled off her flying armor. “Ma’am—” one of them said.

It was a captain, her only one, Matthews. She wheeled on him. “We’ve got nobody higher-ranked on hand than you right now, Matt. I will not send out a ground assault with no one higher-ranking to advise. That’s me. Get your team suited and get them loaded!”

People ran in all directions. “Command,” Jonelle shouted, “where are they?”

“Over Bellinzona now, Boss,” the voice came back. “Heading northeast.”

Chur, she thought. That was the first city of any size nearby. Thirty thousand people—the aliens would have a party there, if allowed to land. “I don’t want them to get any farther north than our latitude,” she yelled to Comms and the public at large. “Let’s go!”

The Skyranger’s troop complement was loading; its HWP was getting ready to trundle into position, last in to be first out. Jonelle headed for the Lightning. As she did, the new hangar exit door slid open. Snow fell inside in a great lump and splatted wetly on the floor. “I’ve got to do something about that,” she muttered as she ducked through the Lightning’s door.

She made her way up to the ships cockpit, buttoned up, and started to lift. There was barely room for her to wedge herself into the observer’s seat behind the young pilot, Ron Moore.

“Ronnie,” she said, “all we’ve got on this one are Stingray missiles. Your job isn’t to get too close to that guy. Just hurt him, put him down as fast as you can. But under no circumstances are you to let him get any farther north than Andermatt.”

“You got it, ma’am.” Ron hit his comms control to put his chat with Central Command at Irhil M’Goun on “open air.” “Central, where’s our baby?”

“Transferring our targeting to you until you acquire,” said Central. The screens in the cockpit came alive as the Lightning shot out the opened door in the mountain, and Jonelle braced herself in place—no straps would fit around the flying suit.

“Thanks, Central, we’ll need it. Cloud’s bad. Ceiling eighteen and snow.”

Gray cloud boiled against the cockpit windows. “He’s still heading northeast,” Ron said. “Four thousand meters.”

“Wouldn’t go much lower than that if I were him,” Jonelle muttered. In this neighborhood, the higher moun-taintops could come up on you with deceptive speed.

“Neither would I, ma’am,” Ron said. “Still heading northeast. I think he wants to go to ground in the Lukmanier Pass.”

“Don’t let him in there,” Jonelle said. “He’ll run right up to the main east-west valley and have a straight shot at Chur. Waste a shot or two if you have to, but tum him, Ronnie.”

“Will do, Boss,” the pilot said.

He climbed, heading southeast to intercept. Conventional motion detection picked the alien up as they were swinging past the peak of Piz Paradis, one of the taller mountains southeast of Andermatt. “There he is,” said Ron, and the screen lit with the trace of the large Scout ahead of them.

“Force him up—don’t let him down into the valley!” “Stingray one,” said Ron, “targeting—”

At this range? Jonelle thought, but even with as big a miss as Ron was likely to make, the Scout might still turn at the shot across its bow. This part of the chase was going to be up to Ron, at any rate.

“Stingray one away—”

The Lightning gave the little idiosyncratic jump, which was typical when it launched a missile. Jonelle peered at the radar and motion detection screens, which were more than usually difficult to read, cluttered with ground artifact from the mountainous terrain below. The alien craft was shooting straight as an arrow for Chur: northeast, northeast—and then abruptly, it zagged almost due westward.

“He’s out of the valley, Boss. Heading toward Sedrun, right into the mountains now.”

“Good. Put him down as deep in as you can. I don’t want him near anybody”

They plunged through the air over the mountains, passing over the small town of Sumvitg, south of the main east-west valley. “Some nice glaciers down there, Boss,” Ron said, comparing the heads-up display’s map against the radar/motion detection screen. “Wouldn’t bother anybody if we knocked him down there, would it?”

“Only us,” Jonelle said, shivering, “on recovery. You really want to do a ground assault on a glacier?…But if it seems the best spot, never mind, just do it!”

She watched the screen. They were creeping closer to the Scout. “Thirty kilometers now,” said Ronnie. Then a few moments passed. “Twenty-five…Stingray two targeting. Acquire. Launch!”

The Lightning bounded again. A third dot appeared, the missile. Jonelle watched the targeting trace from the missile lock onto the alien craft, watched the two dots draw closer together, closer, almost merge—

The alien craft jogged sideways again, southward, just as the missile should have struck it. Ron swore. “Sorry, Boss,” he said. “Still too much range. And they know the speed of these missiles too well—I wish I had some more vector to add. I’m closing—”

The Lightning leapt after the Scout. The Scout leapt too, almost due southward now. “Whatever he’s going for,” Ron said, “it won’t be Chur, not unless he does another one-eighty.”

“He may have that in mind. You just make sure you put one of these up his butt: before he gets a chance, Ronnie.”

“Kinky,” Ron said mildly The Lightning accelerated— Jonelle had to brace herself more firmly

“Don’t let him get as far south as the San Bernardino pass,” Jonelle said. “He’ll vanish down that like water down a drain.”

“I won’t,” Ron said. “Twenty kilometers now, Boss. Targeting Stingray three now. Acquire—”

“Wait for fifteen kilometers, Ron—”

“That’s my intention, ma’am.”

She watched as the two dots, the Scout and the Lightning, slowly slid closer together. “Fifteen point four—fifteen point two. Fifteen kilometers—firing!”

Bound! went the Lightning. Once again a third dot appeared as the missile leapt away. The targeting trace from the missile indicated positive lock. They watched while the dots inched closer, closer, merged—

The screen flashed. “It’s a hit!” Ron said, but the Scout didn’t slow or veer. “Damn. Not enough damage. Must have winged him.”

“Once more,” Jonelle said softly.

“Loading four—he’s still heading south. Nope,” Ron added. “Angling west, now.”

Deeper still into more remote territory, Jonelle thought. If that Scout knew where they had come from, it was definitely trying to get them as far away from any kind of help as possible. “It had better be the next one, Ronnie,” Jonelle said, “or you won’t have anything to protect us with if a friend of his shows up. And if he gets much farther south, and you drop him there, he’s going to fall right on St. Moritz. That would not be a good thing.”

Ron looked furious. “Four ready,” he said. “Accelerating. Ten kilometers. If I can’t hit him at that range, Boss—”

Jonelle said nothing. Ron’s face set. “Targeting. Acquire. Firing!”

The fourth missile leapt away. They watched. Jonelle clenched her teeth, thinking, Come on, you, come on! The dots drew closer, drew closer. Merged. The screen flashed—

“It’s a hit!” Ron cried, and the forward speed of the dot representing the alien Scout decreased abruptly. It veered almost due south. “Going down, Boss! Tracking now. Losing altitude: one thousand meters—five hundred—passing over the lake—now gaining a little. He’s trying to make it over the mountain—” Ron chuckled.

The dot stopped. “Down,” Ron said. “On the north slope of…what’s its name here? Monte dell’Oro. One of the mountains south of the lake.”

Jonelle bit her lip. It was not the kind of place she would normally choose for a ground assault. Attacking either uphill or downhill was a nuisance, no matter what the tacticians said. You wound up with gravity as the chief enemy, in a fight where you already had one that was deadly enough. But this was no time to be complaining. “Right. Notify the Skyranger that our boy’s on the ground, and then take us down easy. Nice shooting, Ronnie!”

She turned and went back to talk to her people, a last few words before they put their tender skins out where aliens could shoot at them. In her own days as sergeant and captain and colonel, Jonelle had always made sure to take those few moments, for the simple reason that— ground assaults being what they were—it was likely to be your last chance to ever talk to some of these people. Or, alternately, their last chance to talk to you. But what she mostly wanted to communicate to them now was something she had been feeling on and off since she left Ari’s bedside:

I’m sick of sitting around. I’m going to go kill something.

The Lightning grounded, harder than necessary perhaps—a function of the bad terrain, or of the fact that Ron Moore was better at flying than he was at landing. Jonelle hefted her heavy laser and said, “Everybody ready, now?”

From the others, all armored, came a chorus of “Yes, Boss” and “Let’s go!”

The Lightning’s deployment doors opened out over the icy ground strewn with rocks and boulders. It helped a little that the Lightning’s jets had blown the site mostly clear of snow, but around the Scout there was still a fair amount, and the wind whipping past them was bringing more in the beginnings of drifts from the upper slopes of the neighboring mountain. At least there was no danger of an avalanche: all the snow that could fall down in the immediate neighborhood had fallen down.

Fire erupted from the downed Scout. It might not be able to fly, but at least some of whatever aliens were inside it were apparently all right. This annoyed Jonelle, and made her suspect that the inmates were of the more robust types of aliens. Damn.

“By fours,” she said to the sergeant in the other team. “Don’t hurry. Get your folks safely disposed, and if there’s snow for them to use as cover, have them make the most of it. It’s no protection, but it can be a distraction.”

Jonelle’s first four went out, one of them with a motion scanner.

“Nobody outside, Boss,” said the squaddie with the motion detector after a few moments. “Nobody out here at all but us chickens—whoops! Six high!”

Something moved upslope, on the narrow ledge at the top of a jagged cliff face. Squaddies whirled, fired. The creature leapt apart in a burst of blood, shrieked, and fell down among them.

They all stared. It looked like a goat, but it was bigger, and had huge back-curved horns. “Holy shit,” one of the squaddies said. “It’s a big-horn sheep.”

“It’s an ibex,” someone else said.

Jonelle shook her head regretfully. “It’s toast,” she said. “Poor thing. Never mind. It’s getting on toward breakfast time—let’s go crack this egg.” She hefted her laser cannon and left the Lightning, followed by three more of her squad.

The assault took the better part of two hours. From Jonelle’s point of view, it was the usual crazed, confused melange of noises, images, and general craziness, everything seeming to happen at once. Afterward, people always told Jonelle how organized and cool she seemed, and how structured her handling of the situation was. She never believed it. She always lost track of how many grenades she had thrown, how many targets she had fired at, lost, fired at again. Her heavy laser was damaged about halfway through the assault, and she was forced to pick up one belonging to one of her dead squaddies and work with that—something that always obscurely bothered Jonelle when she was fighting. She thought of the life this weapon should have saved, and didn’t, through lack of skill or bad luck—there was never any way to tell, and it was too late now. She fired at and killed every alien that came within sight of her, first assessing them for commercial value, but all of them seemed strangely devalued today. One she stunned, a Snakeman leader who would at least be useful for interrogation. Her team did most of the aliens in before she had a chance. She wondered whether the cold was slowing her down, or whether her people were simply actively protecting her. There was no telling. She wished they would concentrate more on themselves. For herself, she went on firing.

By the time the shooting stopped, four of her people were dead inside that ship, or outside, in the dark, in the drifting snow. Jonelle and the survivors, including the sergeant, stood around shortly thereafter, surveying the wreckage of the ship. “Kind of strange, if you ask me, Boss,” said the sergeant.

Jonelle was still trying to make sense of it. “How many of them did you say?”

“Four Snakemen, including the leader. Two Chryssalids and a whole pile of Silacoids.”

“Silacoids,” Jonelle muttered, shaking her head. “Why?”

“Seven of them,” said one of the squaddies, rejoining the group. “I just got the last one—it was trying to run away in the snow. They don’t do too well at that—the snow melts off them, and the trails are kind of obvious, they’re so hot.”

“All right,” Jonelle said. “Let’s clean up here. Strip the ship of things that can be easily carried, and make pickup on the corpses. Get the prisoners stowed. I’ll call Irhil for a strip team to get the metal and the other consumables.”

She made her way slowly back to the Lightning. That was when the last Chryssalid jumped her. The thing seized her with its claws, hunting for somewhere to inject the venom that would put out her humanity like a candle being snuffed. Jonelle grappled with the thing, gasping with revulsion. After a moment her suit training cut in, and she jumped, and flew. There she hung, in midair, badly balanced and wondering if she was going to crash—hovering, or trying to, in a storm of blowing snow, while the Chryssalid hung from her, squirming and shrieking and thrashing, trying to breach her armor.

Both her hands were busy holding it away. Jonelle had nothing to get a shot at it with, and her people wouldn’t dare shoot at it for fear of hurting her. As if this wasn’t enough, a gust of wind blew her, back first, into the nearby cliff face from which the poor ibex had been blasted.

OK, Jonelle thought. Two can play at that game. She forced the suit to leap back away from the cliff again, and swung herself around in midair, so that the Chryssalid was toward the wall of stone. Then she launched herself at the cliff, full force.

Some time before, back in the States, Jonelle had gone with some friends from the Washington base to a crab joint near the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. There they were all issued wooden mallets and shown to a large table covered with newspaper, where, as soon as they were seated, many large, steamed crabs were unceremoniously dumped in front of them. The sound the mallets made when cracking the crabs open was very like the sound Jonelle heard now, except that this was considerably louder, and the crabs in Baltimore hadn’t screamed. Stones fell down from the cliff, and the Chryssalid shrieked and fell away from her. As it fell, laser fire lanced out from one of the teams preparing to board the Lightning. The pieces caught fire as they came down, and lay there in the snow, hissing, burning, until more blowing snow put the fire out.

Jonelle landed, breathing hard, more from the shock than anything else. Two of the squaddies hurried over to her with the sergeant. “Are you all right, Commander?”

“I’m OK,” she said. “Let’s get ourselves stowed. I’m going in to make that call.”

Jonelle made her way back to the cockpit of the Lightning and looked out as her people got ready to be boarded. She hit the comrns control for a connection to Irhil M’Goun. “Dispatch—”

“Yes ma’am, Commander.”

She looked out the cockpit window at the early, early primrose-colored light of dawn, creeping into the eastern sky. “We’ve taken down that large Scout,” she said, “about fifteen kilometers southwest of St. Moritz. We’ll need a strip team. What’s the condition down there?”

“We’re secure down here, Commander. No damage.”

“Other intercepts?”

“One successful, one failed.”

“What failed?”

“A Harvester came through on the same trajectory as your Scout, Commander. There was nothing to send after it but an Interceptor, and it lost that.”

“Where did it go?”

“Lost, Commander. We haven’t a clue. Sorry. “

“Wonderful,” Jonelle said, more to herself than anyone else. “Wonderful. All right, Dispatch, we’ll be back in Andermatt shortly. Tell Commander DeLonghi I’d appreciate a call.”

And she hit the comms button to close down the line, and began, softly, and with some virtuosity, to swear.