X-COM: UFO Defense

Six

Back in the mountain above Andermatt the next morning, Jonelle allowed herself the luxury of sleeping late, just for once, and didn’t get up until about nine. There had been no UFO sightings or interceptions the night before. Thank Heaven for small blessings, she thought as she stretched and yawned and set about getting herself ready to face the day.

She spent it, until about noontime, looking over the number-two hangar space, making phone calls and comms calls, and generally catching up on the paperwork end of business. When her desk was cleared—or rather, when everything she had started piling on her office floor had been dealt with, as far as possible—Jonelle changed into civvies and took the little “covert train” down into town.

The day was bright and sunny, and the whole town was full of skiers, chattering at one another in three or four different languages and generally making Jonelle’s eyes hurt at the violent way their ski clothes’ colors clashed. I can’t wait for a couple of years from now, she thought, when the styles will change and soft colors, or earth tones, or anything else, will be in fashion.

The PR office was having a quiet day, at least relatively so. “The skiers keep mistaking us for the tourist information center,” Callie complained to Jonelle when she came in. “I’ve had three different groups of people come in here and try to get me to make hotel reservations for them. I’m beginning to think we should go down there and get a bunch of brochures.”

Jonelle smiled a little. “Maybe you should. I don’t know if they’d like us horning in on their business, though.”

“As long as we don’t try to sell lift passes,” Callie said, “I suspect we’d be OK.”

Jonelle laughed and sat down to go through some of the paperwork that was piling up down here: mostly written complaints and protests at the “UN’s” presence, left by local people. X-COM required that its cover offices, when such were opened, function like the real thing, so Jonelle or someone she delegated had to write letters to the people who had complained, explaining— exactly as if she were a UN representative—what could or, most often, what couldn’t be done regarding the problems they were complaining about. She spent an hour or two dictating some of these letters to Callie and (when Callie’s lunch hour came around) tapping them out herself. It was not work that came particularly easily to Jonelle, especially the part where she had to tell people again and again that there was nothing she could do to help them. More than once, she wished she could simply take a laser cannon to the whole miserable pile.

Nonetheless, Jonelle finished the work and felt insufferably virtuous at the end of it. When Callie came back from her lunch break, Jonelle happily left the office to her and went out to get a sandwich of her own from the delicatessen just past the hotel.

She never made it quite that far. Having paused to look briefly in the window of the bookstore next to the hotel, she turned to cross the street to the deli and saw Ueli Trager coming along the street. His expression was furious, and at the same time somehow tragic.

“Herr Präsident—” she said.

He paused and looked at her. “Fräulein Barrett,” said Ueli, “how are you doing this morning?”

Jonelle thought that the exercise of “bedside manner” would help Ueli no more than it would have helped Molson the other day. “I’m doing well enough,” she said, “but Ueli, you look like you just lost your best friend! What’s the matter?”

The expression he gave her was grim enough, though there was a kind of surprise in it as well, like the look he had given her when she’d admitted to forgetting his cow’s name. “I’m very upset,” Ueli said, “and I’m going to have a drink. Perhaps you would like to drink with me?”

The naked appeal in that face, always so reserved and controlled, except for the other night, shocked her somewhat. “Not alcohol, this early in the day,” Jonelle said, “but yes, certainly Let me just have a word with my assistant.”

She went hurriedly back to the office, told Callie where she was going to be if she was needed, and then made her way back to Ueli. Together they walked to the Krone, and Ueli led the way into the bar. They sat down at one of the old, scarred wooden tables farthest back, underneath an ancient, rusty plow that some decor expert had thought would look picturesque hanging from the rafters. When Stefan the barman came back to them, Ueli said, “Kornschnaps, bitte—a double.”

“Just a cola for me.” Stefan went off to fetch the drinks, and Jonelle said, “Without any beer, Ueli?” Most of the people here, she had seen, preferred to drink the local firewater as a chaser.

“I would like to get drunk,” Ueli said with a bitter air, suggesting that he thought he might not be able to.

“Tell me what’s wrong!”

The schnapps and the cola came. Ueli picked up the slim, straight glass with the schnapps in it, stared at it, and knocked it straight back in one neat drink. He put the glass down and said to Jonelle, “My pugniera is gone.”

“Gone? You mean your cow? Rosselana? Where?”

“I don’t know. Someone has taken her.”

Jonelle took a long drink of her cola, hoping nothing of what she was thinking showed in her face. “Who would take your cow?”

“The same person, perhaps,” Ueli said heavily, “who left four of my other cows—” He shook his head. “Stefan? Another, please.”

“Left them where?”

“Not where—how. Left them in pieces, on the ground. Cut up. The hearts torn out of them.”

Stefan arrived with another glass. Ueli took it, glancing at him. “Keep them coming. Fräulein, you may not understand how it is—”

“Jonelle.”

“Jonelle. I thank you. We are simple people in our way, and probably city people would not understand very well how we feel about these things. Certainly our cows are our livelihood. Its either do dairy work, in this part of the world, or cater to the skiers. There’s nothing else, really, not enough land to farm, we’re too far off the beaten track for industry. But there’s little enough grazing so that we can only keep small numbers of cattle, and when you keep them in small groups, when one man has maybe ten or fifteen cows, they become not pets, but work associates. You get familiar with them, you come to know their ways and their habits. You are friends. With a pugniera, who’s smarter than the others, stronger, a creature that stands out a little from its crowd—even if the crowd is only cows—you become friendly indeed. It’s almost like a shepherd and a sheepdog: each of you is doing the same job, though in different ways, on different levels. You appreciate each other. Now a third of my own small herd are gone. It will have an impact on my income, yes, replacing them will require a big capital outlay, yes—but speaking of ‘replacing’ them is idle: they were associates of mine. And Rosselana, not butchered like the others, just gone—” He stared at the table. “Human beings did not do these things. No human was near the lower pastures. It’s those others, isn’t it? The aliens.”

Jonelle kept her feelings out of her face. “I’ve heard they do that kind of thing, yes….”

“So.” Ueli looked grim. “Why they come here to us, now, I don’t know. It wasn’t like this last year. We thought all that trouble that people were having, terror attacks, we thought all that kind of thing was for the cities, that it would pass us by. History has generally done that,” he said, and glanced up with a wry look as the third schnapps appeared. “That’s why so many people here still speak Romansh, the old language. Conquerors might come and go, but these high valleys were too much trouble to send troops to. Tax collectors, yes.” The wry look went ironic. “One prince might lay claim to your valley one year, another one the next, a bishop the year after. You would pay the taxes and not care too much who you paid them to. Eventually the conquerors went off and left us to ourselves, and we gladly stayed up here, out of the way, and let the world pass us by But this,” he said, downing the third glass, “will not pass us by, I think.”

Jonelle shook her head slowly. “As I see it,” she said, “you’re right. They mean to take the whole planet, if they can. And isolated valleys are not isolated, when you can look right down into them from space.”

“Well,” Ueli said. “You are a UN neutral observer facility, you say. Can you do nothing about this?”

Jonelle opened her mouth to say Sorry, I can’t help, and then she shut it again. All morning, she had been saying that about things regarding which it was, alas, true. But this was a different case.

“We have,” she said carefully, “some people who are supposed to be expert in these matters. I can send for one or two of them, if you request it. What exactly would you be asking that they do?”

“It’s not just for me,” Ueli said. “But I would certainly like to spare anyone else the kind of loss I’ve just suffered. We don’t like to complain, as a rule, but if there are more butcheries like this one, many people in these parts, those who don’t work in the tourist sector, will suffer badly in the next year or two. If it could be stopped, that would be a good thing. Even if we could find out where the cows have gone that have been stolen, whether they are dead or alive….”

Probably dead, Jonelle thought, for she knew all too well what happened to cattle that the aliens kidnapped whole. Poor Ueli! But she nodded. “Certainly,” she said, “the organization can send some people to investigate. They would need to talk to anyone who saw anything strange. We might need some language help, Ueli. The investigators wouldn’t all be German-speaking.”

“There are certainly people here who would help,” Ueli said. “Jonelle, when could they come?”

“If I can get down to the office and make some phone calls,” she said, “possibly even today.”

Ueli nodded. “Let us start, then.”

Jonelle left Ueli at the bar and went back to her office. There she spent about two hours on the phone and on comms. So un-covert an operation had to be cleared through her superiors, and it didn’t go through easily, or without considerable opposition. There were some members of Senior Regional Command who felt that no civilians should have anything whatsoever to do with X-COM operation, that there were too many possible leaks from civilians to those who might be giving information to the aliens. Others, though, were more willing to listen to reason, and Jonelle knew where they were, and who. Once matters were settled with them, she went back to the bar and found Ueli there—surprisingly, not much the worse for wear, despite what she suspected were an appalling number of schnappses downed while she was gone. “We’ll start in the morning,” she said. “They’ll send over three or four people from Geneva.” “They” was she, of course, and the people would not be coming from Geneva, but from Irhil M’Goun “They’ll need to talk to everyone who lost a cow or has had a mutilation or abduction recently.”

“All right,” Ueli said. “But what can they do?” Jonelle sat and looked at him over the glass of white wine that she had finally permitted herself. “In all honesty, I don’t know. They can try to establish a pattern, they can try to keep it from happening again elsewhere, by notifying your government….” She trailed off. She suspected Ueli knew as well as she did that the government could do precious little about a threat that dove down on it from space.

“But it’s got to be better than nothing,” she said.

“You’re right, of course,” said Ueli. But he didn’t sound terribly convinced…and Jonelle couldn’t blame him.

So it was the next morning that four X-COM people, with proper “UN” credentials in place, turned up in Andermatt and began querying the locals. Jonelle told the investigators to leave no stone unturned, or at least to appear to leave no stone unturned. They went clear down the Urseren Valley, starting at the next town down, Hospental, and farther yet to Realp—to any of the major areas nearby where there was enough pastureland for people to bother keeping cows. One investigator stayed in Göschenen and worked her way up the Göschenertal, which was where many of the Andermatt cows spent the summer, there being a lot more green there than there was locally. Another went over the Oberalp Pass to little hamlets like Tschamut and Selva. To each of the investigators, Ueli sent along a local man or woman who could handle the Urnerdeutsch dialect that nearly everyone around there spoke, and who would serve as native guide and icebreaker. A lot of the people who lived in the area, especially those farthest upcountry, were intensely private, and not used to strangers. In fact, people from Andermatt tended to use a dialect word, waelisch, to describe people from Realp and Hospental. It meant “foreigner.”

The team met in Jonelle’s office in Andermatt that evening, with no obvious conclusions to show for its day’s work, though there were indications that the kidnapping and mutilation problem was much worse than Jonelle had thought. One of her people, Matt Jameson, a statistician, had spread one of the Swiss topographic maps out on the wall and was sticking pins into it.

“The red pins,” he said, “are mutilations. The yellow ones are cownappings. The orange ones are a combination of the two in the same incident. Here are the most local ones.” Matt pointed. “We have mutilations up by Göschenen, at Abfutt, Schwandi, Hochegg, the Gander-enalp, and Gurst. These aren’t sorted by time, by the way. I’ll be adding that later—probably flags on these pins. Up here, north of Göschenen, we had a cownapping in Riedboden, another one in Band. Then farther up the valley, in Standental, one in Standen, one in Hochberg, one at Hoerli, another one farther up by the rail tunnel at Heggbricken, and the farthest one north, by Gurtnellen.” Matt paused, checking the map against the sheaf of papers he was holding and paging through. “On the west side, around the Oberalp Pass, we had a mutilation at Carnihutt, a mutilation at Pardatsch di Vaccas—” He smiled grimly. “Apparently the name means ‘the place where the cows hang out’ in Romansh. Another one at Missas Grond, and a fourth at Uaul.” He turned a page of his notes over. “Apparently there are none too close to Disentis, the big town in the middle of the western side of the east-west valley—our mutilators seem pretty chary of being seen. All the mutilations have been in quite isolated areas, with peaks around them high enough to prevent anyone seeing them from any kind of distance.”

Jonelle nodded, and Matt turned back to the map. “Now, the cownappings have by and large been in areas a little less remote. One near the village of Medel, here—another at Caspausa, just on the other side of the Oberalp Pass. Another one just outside of Göschenen, which is surprising, and yet another at Vausa, which is nearly as large as Göschenen.

“No one involved in such an operation would want to be noticed if they could avoid it,” Jonelle said. “Any increase in local awareness means the supply of cows will decrease.”

“Now here,” said Matt, “are the rest of the combination kidnappings and mutilations. Some cows were lifted; others were lifted, dissected, and dumped. Like Ueli’s case, the other night, from the Urserenwald Alp. That one too was surprisingly close to a large conurbation. Then another one over by Vieler, between Gurtnellen and Göschenen. Over on the other side of the Furka Pass, one at Unterwasser, and another outside a town called Münster, at a place called Schlapf. And, interestingly, one down here in Valle Leventina, at a place called Quinto. A much better populated area—nearly two thousand people living around there. But again, the valley is narrow there, and the peaks so close together that there are at least a couple of places where someone could quite easily take cows and not be seen from the town, even though it’s only half a mile away as the crow flies.”

“All right,” Jonelle said. “Matt, that’s quite a lot, for one day’s work.”

“There are incidents we heard about secondhand but haven’t yet had time to verify with the people who actually own the cows or the land involved,” Matt said. “What you see here is only firsthand info. We’ll doubtless pick up another ten or fifteen incidents tomorrow, if the stories we heard today are true. One blip, by the way: we have a place that was hit twice. Munster.”

“Twice,” Ueli said, shaking his head. “That is news. I hadn’t heard about it.”

“All right.” Jonelle turned to Ueli. “But I just want to be clear about this. If Matts data is correct, these mutilations and cownappings have been going on as close to you as Oberwald and Münster, just the other side of the Furka Pass, not ten miles away—and you didn’t know anything about it?”

“Well,” Ueli said, and shrugged and spread his hands. “That’s the Goms Valley over there, that’s another canton: it’s Valais over there. We’re in Uri. We don’t exchange official information—that’s private. And we don’t socialize much with the Gomsers. They’re a long way away…it’s hard to get there in the winter, the pass is closed, you have to put your car on the train and take it through the tunnel…. Then in summer, we’re busy. The tourists, and the cows…. And local news, you see, it mostly stays local…you don’t want other people, strangers, prying into your business.”

Jonelle raised her eyebrows, remembering the word waelisch, “foreigner,” used, to her initial amusement, for someone twenty miles away. But in the old days, when the local mindsets were first formed, twenty miles over the pass might as well have been two countries over. It was difficult to reach, the other side didn’t really have anything you wanted, anyway—why go? Why talk to those people? Why think about them?

“I heard a story,” Jonelle said. “Tell me if it’s true—that some people in a village up in these mountains built a gallows to execute criminals on, and when a neighboring village asked to borrow it to hang a thief of theirs, the people in the other village said, ‘No—these gallows are for us and our children.’”

Ueli nodded, wearing a slightly rueful look. Jonelle smiled at him and said gently, “You’re really going to have to change your habits and start talking to each other, even if the people over the other side of the mountain are just from Valais, or Vaud.”

She rubbed her head and looked at the map. “We’ll have another run at this tomorrow. I’ve got some other things to take care of.” Matt looked down, decorously, busying himself with his papers; the others looked in other directions, their expressions studiedly blank. “But Ueli, do me a favor. When my people go back to do more investigations tomorrow, I’m going to have them ask not just about cows that have gone missing, but strange occurrences. If people have seen odd lights, strange things they can’t account for in the mountains around here, I’d like to know about it. I’d like you to talk to the locals here tonight too, if you would, and just take sort of a straw poll for me. Have people seen odd things, heard weird noises? I mean, if all these mutilations and cownappings have been the work of UFOs, of aliens, well, you know how people can be about such things. Often they don’t want to talk about them. Well, maybe you don’t know how they are about such things,” Jonelle amended hastily, “and come to think of it, neither do I, but…see if you can draw people out a little bit. You’ll probably have a little more luck than we waelisch.” She put a slight twist on the word.

Ueli gave her a look that was ironic, but slightly impressed. “Well,” he said. “I have to warn you, you may get more than you bargained for. This is not one of the most normal parts of the world.”

Jonelle gave him back his ironic expression, with interest. “No,” Ueli said, earnestly, “you really don’t know what I mean. This part of the Alps, there are a lot of strange stories…people have been seeing odd lights and strange creatures in these mountains since they settled here, almost two millennia ago. You’re going to have to be careful how you ask your questions. Otherwise, people are going to start thinking you want to hear folktales, local monster stories, about things like the dwarves or the buttatsch—”

“Buttatsch?”

“It’s a cow belly with eyes,” Ueli said, straight-faced. “A flayed cow skin, with the udders flapping. It glows in the dark. The thing comes rolling downhill at you when you’re on some lonely mountain track, moaning and howling and speaking in tongues—”

“Check, please,” said Matt, standing up hurriedly. “If we leave now, we can be at the train station before nightfall.”

Jonelle laughed. “This is not something I want to meet. But—heavens, Ueli, it sounds like some kind of—alien—”

“Don’t ask me,” Ueli said. “I’ve never seen one, and I’m not sure I believe in it. But if you do see what looks like a glow-in-the-dark cowhide coming at you, I would take myself elsewhere. Consider it a public safety announcement from the local government.”

“Believe me,” Jonelle said, “if I see anything like that, I’ll call for backup right away.”

They broke up for that evening. As Jonelle strolled back to the train station with her people, one of them said, “Cow bellies!”

“I don’t know,” Jonelle said softly. They were on the sidewalk that ran through the middle of the park, and well away from listening ears. “Could it be that the aliens have been hanging around here for some time?…But let’s find out some more about these strange creatures Ueli’s been talking about—it might do us some good. Think about how long people reported skinny little, big-headed aliens being involved in their own abductions, and then we found out they had been dealing with Sectoids.” “All right, Boss…we’ll look into it.”

“The rest of you, keep on the mutilation and abduction end of things. I had no idea there were so many of them down here. I’ve never heard of such a concentration of events. I may have to go back down to Irhil tonight or tomorrow, but I want to keep this rolling. These people have been very helpful to us in a lot of ways…and I want to try to return the favor, just a little, even if it’s only covertly.”

She did indeed go back to Irhil M’Goun that evening. Repairs were coming along well on the various craft that needed them, and DeLonghi looked almost glad to see her. He at least had had a chance to get some rest and some planning done regarding his next strategies for what to do should the pace of interceptions speed up again. Jonelle, in turn, told him about the cow situation in Switzerland.

“We keep hearing that there’s been a decrease in mutilations and abductions,” she said, “but I’m not sure I believe it. I’m going to be a little busy at Andermatt tomorrow again, but if you would keep on it from this end, Joe—.” She gave him a quick rundown on the bases whose data-processing people she had already talked to. “They think I’m nuts, Joe,” Jonelle said, “so you might want to play it that way too—that you’re ‘humoring the commander.’ But see what else you can find.”

“I wonder,” DeLonghi said, “if an increase in human abductions simply blinded the upper-ups to the cow situation? Or whether they’ve bought into a blip in the statistics, one that happened at the same time the human stats jumped? You could make a case that the Powers That Be would be pleased to think that cownappings and mutilations were dropping off while they had the human problem to consider…and you could also believe that their own statisticians might not be willing to rock the boat, if they knew which way the official wind was blowing.”

Jonelle sighed and said, “Too likely to be true. Well, see what you can find out. Any paperwork for me down here?”

“It’s all been shipped back up to Andermatt.”

“Fine. How are you holding up, Joe?”

DeLonghi chuckled a little. “Better than I was. It can be a bit of a shock, I suppose, taking on command….”

“Tell me about it.”

“You didn’t show any signs of distress when you came to it, I have to tell you.”

“That,” Jonelle said softly, “is because I was doing absolutely everything I could not to let on. If I had given any sense of how frustrated and unnerved I was by the situation the way it was when I came, do you think that everybody in the place wouldn’t have noticed immediately? Imagine the effect on morale.”

DeLonghi nodded slowly. “You keep your chin up,” Jonelle said. “Never show fear—they can smell it. And don’t dwell on past performance. This has not been the easiest couple of weeks for anybody.”

“Nor for you, I would think,” said DeLonghi.

Jonelle shrugged. “I’m doing all right…I have a new toy to play with.”

DeLonghi grinned. “So have I.”

“Enjoy,” Jonelle said, patted him on the arm, and headed out.

She went on down to the infirmary. Ari was sitting up in bed, looking better. He seemed to have stopped complaining about the food—but he had not stopped complaining.

“I want out!” he was shouting at Gyorgi. “I feel fine! I don’t ache anymore!”

Gyorgi was standing across the room from him, scribbling in a chart. “You’re going to lie there,” he said, “until tomorrow, whether you like it or not. Isn’t he, Commander?”

“Of course you’re going to lie there, if that’s what Gyorgi says.”

“It’s not fair. I’m perfectly fit and ready to fly!”

“The constitution of a great ape,” Gyorgi said, sounding resigned, “and the brains of a gerbil.”

“Far be it from me to disagree with a considered medical opinion,” said Jonelle demurely “How’s the food today, Ari?”

“Better.”

“I let him have the chili,” Gyorgi said. “If he gets indigestion, serves him right. It won’t hurt his brains now, such as they are.”

“And how are his brains, such as they are? And the rest of him?”

“He can fly tomorrow,” Gyorgi said. “I just want him to take another day to restore himself.”

“I don’t need any restoring. I’m in great shape. All I want is to get up. And I want some more chili.”

“Shut up, Ari,” said Gyorgi, hanging up the chart and picking up another one. “Commander, tomorrow morning, as I said, he can fly And I’ll be pleased to get him out of here—I need the bed. Complaints, complaints all day!”

“If the food weren’t terrible—” Ari said.

Standing quite close by the bed, Jonelle bent down. “My lion,” she said, “shut up.” She raised her voice and added, “Anyway, it’s just as well, for by tomorrow I’m really going to need you back in the saddle. Things to take care of…also, I want you to come along and have a look at the Avenger.”

“They can’t have finished repairing it already!”

“No, they can’t. I want you to look at the pitiful thing and see the error of your ways.” She scowled at him, but she couldn’t hold the mood and smiled again after a few seconds. “I do have other flying for you to do. Your Firestorm is all right?”

“As far as I know.”

“Good.”

“What’s DeLonghi going to say when you take another piece of equipment away from him?”

“Nothing much, probably. He’s doing better.” Jonelle grinned. “It takes a little while to get the hang of making bricks without straw, but he’s shaking down nicely. As for you, if you’re up in Andermatt about noontime, that’ll suit me fine.” She was determined not to push him too hard; even though Gyorgi said he would be back in shape to fly, there was a slightly harrowed look about Ari, one that suggested he had looked farther down into the abyss of that Ethereal’s mind, and the abyss of death, than he would have liked to.

“I’ll be there,” Ari said. “Sooner, if the jailer will let me.”

Jonelle patted his hand and left him, then went off to make her rounds. As she was moving through the base, the Klaxons went off, signaling an interception. Jonelle hurried down to the operations center and found everything under control: DeLonghi was already there, looking over the dispatch operator’s shoulder. “Got a small Scout near Cape Town,” he said. “Just the one…first peep we’ve had out of them for a while.”

“Go get ‘im,” Jonelle said, “and good hunting!” She made her way back to the hangar for a ride to Andermatt.

As the Skyranger that brought her back settled into the hangar, Jonelle looked around and for the first time really felt herself able to think of the Hall of the Mountain King as Andermatt Base. It had the proper look and feel of an X-COM base now: busy maintenance people hurrying about, the buzz of voices, the underlying hum of big machinery. Only a few things missing now, she thought as she disembarked. That mind shield…. Well, more than a few things, actually. There was the small matter of better base defenses. But there was nothing she could do about those right now.

Jonelle sighed and made her way back to her office. Afternoon was coming on, and she had another meeting scheduled with Ueli and her “UN representatives.” On the desk in her office, she found a sealed courier box with all the paperwork from Irhil M’Goun. She looked at it, briefly sorry (as she had been more than once, lately) that her secretary Joel still wasn’t going to be coming up here for a few days. She had left him with DeLonghi to ease the transition, with instructions to train a replacement. Oh well, it won’t get any better by just leaving it here.

Jonelle sat down and started to page through it. The fattest sheaf of papers in it was the transcript of the interrogation of the two Ethereals that had been captured in the attack on the Battleship in Zürich. She skimmed through it, knowing she couldn’t take time to deal with it right now. It was the kind of thing that required slow, careful reading, especially since the transcript format always slowed her down.

The cover letter on it was from Ngadge. Commander, it said, here is the first set of interrogation results on subjects B122 and B123 from the Zürich raid. Trenchard did this interrogation in company with Origen—he was one of the intelligence officers—and the results are particularly good. Trenchard seems to have a gift for this kind of work. Indications are of some kind of major thrust going on in the southern hemisphere, among less developed and prepared countries. Also odd alien interest in Antarctica…? We are investigating this and will be following it up with subject B124,B125 in the next couple of days.

Something else that’s working right, Jonelle thought with satisfaction. The southern hemisphere, though,… There had been talk among some of the statistics people that attacks in the southern hemisphere did seem to be increasing. Jonelle thought someone should look into it. Africa in particular was such a big continent that she wondered whether it was wise to have just the one base there. And it was possible that a South African-based X-COM facility might be useful. Then again, Jonelle thought, God help me, what happens if I suggest it, and they tell me to go build it? Maybe I should just keep my big mouth shut.

She changed into her civvies again and swung by the cafeteria long enough to grab a sandwich. As she ate it, Jonelle reflected that this was definitely becoming a proper X-COM base, for the sandwich was badly made and showed signs of going stale already, even though it had almost certainly been made only that morning. Oh, well, maybe I can get something in town. She left the second half of the sandwich there and headed off to the elevator, to catch what had now been christened “the Tooner-ville Trolley.”

When she walked into her office in Andermatt, Jonelle found a level of tension there that she had never yet seen The office was occupied by all her assistants, their various local translators, Ueli, and about four other people, members of the cow-betting cartel that had been drinking in the bar the other night. Half of them were talking at the tops of their lungs, and the other half were listening with dreadful interest.

“Gruezi mitenands, hello, everybody!” Jonelle shouted, also at the top of her lungs, and some semblance of quiet fell, though she got a clear sense that it was temporary. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

Ueli came over to her. “Jonelle,” he said. “You remember when you asked me to ask whether people had seen strange things? Well. Quite a few people have—strange lights at night, and strange noises. That’s nothing unusual around here—we get those all the time.” There was much nodding from the other men. “However,” Ueli said, “just a while ago we had a phone call from someone who says he spoke to someone who said he spoke to a lady who lives up on the alp across the valley—Rotmusch, the spot is called, just under the Spitzigrat Ridge. She says—they said—well, the person who talked to the person who talked to her says—that she saw a spaceship, she saw a spaceship come down and take our cows from the alp the other night!”

“You mean she saw it take your cow? Rosselana?”

“Well, it sounds like it, yes. The problem—” He looked embarrassed. “Jonelle, you must forgive me, there is no politically correct way to say this. She’s a crazy lady. She’s been telling everybody about howling ghosts and monsters in the ravines for years. To hear her say that she’s seeing spaceships now, well, maybe she’s just changing a little with the times—”

“Ueli,” Jonelle said, “eyewitnesses may sometimes see more than they suspect. Don’t you think we should go talk to this lady and see what she has to say?”

“Well, it’s up to you. It’s not easy to get up there. The road doesn’t go all the way, it stops and there’s just a foot track for a mile or so. Anything heavy has to go by the wire-elevator, it’s so steep.” Jonelle had seen these contraptions before: wire pulleys with electric motors attached to them. The motors would pull themselves and a pallet of cargo along a wire strung between two points; this was a favorite way of getting things up to otherwise inaccessible chalets and huts in the mountains, and the presence of one suggested immediately how easy—or not—it was going to be to get to a certain place.

“1 think we should go see her,” Jonelle said. “Assuming that she’ll see us. Is she going to take kindly to having strangers come out of nowhere to grill her? Does she have—” Jonelle stopped. Local etiquette suggested that it was impolite to inquire too closely about your neighbors’ weaponry or how much of it they had; this was a private matter.

“Oh, she’s safe enough. She might shoot you with a crossbow, but not with a gun.”

“I feel much safer,” said Jonelle. “What’s the best way to go?”

“We can take my four-wheel drive up,” Ueli said. “That last mile, though, we’ll have to walk. Or climb, rather.”

“As long as you don’t make me go up on the cargo pulley. Who else—” She looked at her statistician. “You, I think, Matt. Geneva might want to hear your take on it. Let’s go.”

Ueli had not been exaggerating when he said the run up would be difficult. They left Andermatt on the back road that led out of town past the pilgrimage chapel of Maria-Hilf, and went under the train tracks and the main road just past the train station. The road went across a small bridge over the river Reuss, its banks there reinforced with concrete to prevent flooding from the glacier-melt in the spring, and then started to climb the far side of the Reuss’s flood plain and up onto the lower walls of the Spitzigrat Ridge.

They passed a few houses and a farm, and then the road gave out and turned into a rocky track, a narrow switchback trail that zigged and zagged back and forth across the face of the ridge. Jonelle hung on tight as the ride got more and more jarring. Biggish stones were all over the track, and more of them fell down onto it as they passed, as she watched. Ueli drove like a man who knew the road well, but this was no particular consolation to Jonelle. There were no guard rails, and the hairpin turns at the end of each straight stretch of the road showed that it was an appallingly long way down, and getting longer all the time.

This road ran into another, after about twenty bone-shaking minutes—a road patched with snow and ice as ‘the lower one hadn’t been, and with snow piled on either side. “Odd to see this here,” Ueli said conversationally as they turned north, onto the other road, and started to climb again, “but this spot tends to hold the snow. The ridge top is practically scoured clean, at the moment. It’s the wind.”

“Tell me about it,” Jonelle said, shivering. Ueli smiled tolerantly and turned the heat up.

Very shortly thereafter, this road, if one could grace it with such a name, simply ran out in a large field full of boulders. Upslope—a slope that topped out at least two hundred feet higher than the spot where they stood, if Jonelle was any good at judging such things—she could see a tiny, brown wooden house with the typical broad, shallowly sloping Alpine roof. The place looked to have been there since the Flood.

“It’s about three hundred years old, that house,” Ueli said, “maybe older.”

“And this lady lives all by herself up here?” Jonelle said, looking around in bemusement. “She must have a heck of a time getting down to do the shopping.”

“Ah, she does well enough,” Ueli said as they started climbing. “About twenty years now, since her husband died, she has been there by herself. People tried to get her to move down into town, but she wouldn’t. She said she’d been moving all her life, and she wasn’t going to do it anymore. She does all right, Duonna Mati does. She has money put aside so every few weeks she comes down to town for things: She hunts, too. She has wood for the stove, a generator for electricity if she wants it, a cellphone if she needs it. But she doesn’t use the more modern things very much, as far as I know.”

They kept climbing. Once or twice Ueli had to stop to let Jonelle and Matt get their wind. Finally, after about another twenty minutes, they came out on top of the ridge and found themselves at the edge of a small, incongruous patch of green, a grassy place that appeared to have been laboriously weeded of its stones and boulders over a long period. Off to one side, a tethered goat grazed the greenery, looking at them incuriously out of its strange eyes.

Ueli paused there and shouted, “Duonna Mati, bien di”

There was no answer for a few seconds. Then the brown front door opened, and a woman came out. She was fairly thin, and very tall, with startlingly silver hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was wearing jeans and a plain red sweatshirt, and almost new running shoes. From inside came a faint glow, as if from a fire. She shouted back, “Bien onn, Ueli,” and then added something else that Jonelle couldn’t catch.

Ueli saw the look on Jonelle’s face. “Romansh,” he said. “She uses the old local language sometimes, but then so do a lot of us here in the southeast. She says we should come in and get warm.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jonelle said softly.

They went in. Shortly Jonelle found herself ensconced by an open fire with the others, in a one-room house that, though completely made of wood that looked much older than three hundred years, was nevertheless perfectly tidy. This was something Jonelle had noticed in every building she’d been in since she came to Switzerland: the astonishing cleanliness of them, apparently another of the national traits. As for drinking, shortly she found she had to do that too, for as soon as she and Matt and Ueli were seated by the fire, Duonna Mati presented them all with small, thick, green-clear glasses of some clear liquid. Jonelle sniffed it, and smelled plums, and alcohol.

“She makes it herself,” Ueli said encouragingly.

Oh wonderful, Jonelle thought: a moonshiner. Nonetheless she lifted the glass, toasted her hostess, and said “Viva” as they had taught her the other night in the bar. Then she knocked the glass back in one swoop.

The old woman looked at Jonelle and nodded an approving expression. Seen more closely, it was plain she had been beautiful when she was younger. Now her face was a mask of fine lines, out of which brilliant, vivid green eyes looked, examining Jonelle minutely, then glancing at Matt. Her hands were very gnarled, so much so that Jonelle wondered if she was in pain. After a moment the woman spoke to Ueli, and he spluttered slightly in mid-drink.

“What does she say?” Jonelle said.

“She says,” Ueli said, “that she knows you’re from the people who’re working with the government. She wants to know what you’re going to do about her old age benefit, which they keep trying to cut.”

Amused, Jonelle smiled the smile she had become good at this past week. “Please tell her,” she said, “that I’ll look into it, and if there’s anything I can do, I’ll try to help. But I’m not sure there’s much I can do.”

The old woman eyed Jonelle with an expression that suggested she recognized bureaucratic bull when she heard it, but she smiled slightly. Then she spoke again. Ueli listened attentively, then said, “Duonna Mati says, if you can’t do anything about that, what do you think you’re going to be able to do about the spaceship that’s stealing people’s cows? My cow, she says.”

Jonelle opened her mouth, closed it again. “Well,” she said, “please ask her if she could possibly describe this spaceship to me.”

Ueli translated the request. The old lady spoke briefly, measuring out distances with her hands, and Ueli said, “She’s describing something that would be—oh, I’d say the size of two tractor-trailer trucks laid end to end. Octagonal and three stories tall, she says. She saw it quite clearly, though by moonlight. She was up late.”

The old lady held her hands up to Jonelle and made a motion as if trying to flex them. Jonelle nodded. “I see. What did the ship do?”

Ueli translated this. Duonna Mati spoke in a low voice, then glanced out the window for a moment, into the dusk. “She says it came low from over the mountains, from southward. It came down to the field and landed, and people—creatures, rather, creatures in shells of some kind, she says—came out of it and took the cows. Some were small, like ‘nanin, like dwarves or children. They came out, and some took the cows into the ship. Then after awhile”—and here Ueli’s face worked, while Duonna Mati spoke again—“they threw pieces of these cows out of the ship, onto the ground. The ship rose up and took off again.”

“Forgive me,” Jonelle said, “but I have to ask. Your alp is nearly two miles away. How could she have seen anything so clearly, at night, at this distance?”

Ueli translated the question.

The old lady smiled, got up with a creak of joints, and went over to beside the head of the carved wood bed.

There was a tripod standing there, with something fixed to the top of it. She brought the tripod back, standing it beside Jonelle.

Jonelle looked at the top of the tripod. Fastened to it was a pair of battleship-bridge binoculars: army surplus, and over fifty years old, but well taken care of—25 x 100s, with built-in filters. “My lord,” she said, “that answers that question. If there were cows on that alp, she could have read the names written on the cowbells with these.” She nodded at Duonna Mati to go on. Plainly she saw the Harvester that they lost the other night. “Where did it go? Did she see?”

The old woman nodded, understanding, and spoke. Ueli said, “It rose and flew after a while. But it didn’t go far. She says—” He paused, like a man who thinks he’s about to translate something quite mad. “She says she saw it go into the mountain.”

Jonelle opened her mouth and shut it again, confused. Could Duonna Mati have seen one of her ships going into Andermatt Base? But how could she possibly confuse that with the Harvester, which she had correctly described?

Duonna Mati spoke again and got up. “She says to come, and she’ll show us where it went in,” said Ueli.

Jonelle followed the others out into the deepening dusk. It had been clear that day, but now clouds were riding up out of the west, catching the last light of the sun, which was already below the horizon. The sunset was spectacular even in its fading stages, and on the mountains to the east, Jonelle could see an effect that she had heard described, but never seen—the reflected light from those sunset clouds on the snow-covered mountains, which seemed to burn a deep, incandescent rose against the purple-blue of the oncoming night.

Duonna Mati led them over to one side of her property, where there was a better view of the Urseren Valley. All of Andermatt lay below them, its lights sparkling through the windy air. The old lady paused a moment, as if making very sure of her directions, and she pointed. “Cheuora,” she said. “Cheuora muntogna.”

“There—that mountain,” Ueli said. Duonna Mati pointed a little south of due east, not at the Chastelhorn under which Andermatt Base lay, but at a mountain that reared up high above a number of others, chief of a group that rose to it in a long south-pointing ridge.

“Scopi,” Duonna Mati said, and Ueli nodded. “She’s right. The mountain is called Scopi. It’s a ten-thousand-footer down south of the Urseren Valley proper, just above the Lucomagno Pass. There’s a lake there, an artificial one produced by damming the valley—produces much of the hydroelectric power for the area.”

Jonelle shook her head, astonished. She turned to the old woman and said, “Please ask her to forgive me, but I must be very sure about this. Are you telling me that you saw the ship go in that mountain? Not just behind it?”

Duonna Mati looked at Jonelle with a serious expression, spoke to her slowly in her old language, as if to a child. Ueli blinked and said to Jonelle, “She says, ‘I know you think perhaps I am mad. But I saw the mountain open, and the ship go inside. I saw lights inside, and then the vanishing of the lights. It was bright moonlight between the clouds, and there was no mistaking it. Not with those.’” She gestured back at her house and, indirectly, at the battleship-bridge binoculars.

No, there wouldn’t be, Jonelle thought, not with those. They were made for this kind of work.

“Thank you,” Jonelle said after a moment. The old woman said, “Te’ bienvegni” and turned to head back to the house.

They went back with her, for courtesy’s sake, to talk just a little more and thank Duonna Mati for her help before leaving. But Jonelle’s mind was abuzz, and Matt was looking at her with an expression of barely concealed horror. She could understand why.

Right on our doorstep, Jonelle thought. Right in our back yard. An alien base, twenty miles away…full of God only knows what.

What the hell do I do now?