X-COM: UFO Defense

Seven

Jonelle made her way back to Andermatt Base in a state of mind varying between panic and fury, but the chilly ride through the rail tunnel, with Matt watching her in silent assessment, steadied her mind. When she got back, she had her courses of action fairly well lined up.

The first thing she did was to look around the hangar to see what was there. Two Lightnings—that was good. And one of their pilots was there, doing a walk-around of his craft, preparatory to going out on a routine patrol. Better still, Jonelle thought.

“Ross,” she said, joining him at the back of the craft and looking it over with him. “Getting ready to head out?”

“That’s right, Commander. About fifteen minutes. Just routine stuff.”

“That’s fine. Could I get you to do something for me?”

“Sure, Commander. What?”

“I want to do an infrared survey of the mountains in the neighborhood,” she said. “The weather people have been complaining about not being able to predict the air currents around here, due to some of the mountains being hotter than others, they say We need to start getting a handle on it. When you finish your patrol—when will that be?”

“About ten, Commander.”

“Fine. Take an extra half hour or so, and just have a high-level look at the mountains within a twenty-mile radius. You see any hot spots, make a note of them. I’d like to see your results when you get in. I promised Meteorology that I’d have some preliminary data for them tonight. Can you do that for me?”

“No problem at all, Commander,” Ross said. “Anything else you need?”

“Not a thing. I’m going down to the cafeteria to see if I can get something fit to eat.”

Ross laughed hollowly “Good luck, Commander.”

She waved at him and left him to his walk-around. Jonelle did indeed go to the cafeteria and did eat the food there, though she hardly tasted it. She chatted amiably enough with the staff and assault crews she met there, but afterwards she could hardly remember anything she said. She was watching the clock. Ross had left for his patrol just shortly after they talked, at about eight-thirty Jonelle dawdled over her coffee for as long as she thought looked natural, then headed out to do an informal evening rounds. She stopped in the main lounge of the living quarters, where an incipient game of Crud paused. She looked at it, tempted, and then waved at her people and moved on. All through the base she walked, the finished parts and the empty ones, peering at everything. Her people greeted her wherever they met her, and Jonelle returned the greetings and went on, leaving behind her an increasing number of X-COM staff who wondered whether perhaps “the colonel” had had some kind of relapse. One maintenance crewman who saw Jonelle come into the hangar for the third time in twenty minutes, around ten-thirty that evening, later said, “I saw her bite her nails. You ever see her do that before?”

The Lightning that had been out on patrol landed shortly thereafter, and almost before its pilot was down the ladder, the commander was back. The hangar staff saw her and Ross stand together for a moment, chatting. Then the commander grinned at him, thanked him for the extra work, and walked off whistling. That at least looked normal, and the hangar staff went back to what they had been doing, shrugging at one another. “She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” said one of them. “Cut her some slack.”

“Completely routine, Commander,” Ross had said to Jonelle. “Nothing much out there tonight—at least nothing we’re interested in.”

He handed her a cassette from the Lightning’s mission recording console. “1 taped that IR survey for you,” he said, “just in case the weather boys need extra detail.”

“That was a good thought. Anything in particular stand out?”

“I’m not sure, Commander,” Ross said, scratching his head. “Weather’s not my area of expertise. There’s one mountain out there, though, looks like it’s got a hot spring under it or something.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Mountain called Scope. No, Scopi—I just thought it said Scope at first. Funny name. Anyway, it reads about seven Kelvin higher than everything around it. A little higher in places, up to say eight point five. The air currents around there were pretty fierce.”

“Huh,” Jonelle said. “The geologists are going to have fun with that. This area wasn’t supposed to be volcanic anymore.” She sighed, smiled. “Well, thanks, Ross. I appreciate the extra time you took.”

And off Jonelle went to her office, her mind already much calmer than it had been. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, that was always the hardest part of an operation for her, but dropping the shoe herself—that would have its own peculiar pleasures.

She went into her office, closed the door, picked up the secure phone, and dialed a certain number.

“Hallo?”

“Hello, Konni. It’s Commander Barrett.”

“Commander! What a pleasure. What can I do for you?”

“Just help me with a general knowledge question.”

“Anything.”

“What do you know about a mountain called Scopi?”

“A good climbing mountain,” Konni said, casually enough. “I know a lot of people who go up there for holidays.”

“Do you indeed? Well, I think I know a few, as well. Konni, what’s underneath that mountain?”

“Uh. Commander, you know that kind of information is on a need-to-know basis—”

“Well, Konni, you’d better believe that I need to know!” she hollered down the phone. “Because there is something in that mountain! And unless you convince me otherwise, I am going to first tear that mountain open, and then blow it to kingdom come! If it’s something of yours, then I want to give you a chance to explain. If it’s not, then I’ve got the unhappy duty to tell you that you have squatters on your property—and if they’re who I think they are, this call is to give you ample warning of what I’m going to do about it, so that your government doesn’t become upset when I change the terrain of a small area in their Alps! And I am going to change it. So you start getting me some answers!”

There was a lot more than that to the phone call. It was interrupted for a while, so that Konni could go off and make a call on another phone. Then it resumed again, in a much more communicative and conciliatory style on both sides. After it was finished, Jonelle sat back, put her feet up on her desk, and felt briefly much better, for whatever was going on in that mountain, it had nothing to do with the Swiss government. There had been a facility there once, a long time ago, but it had been quite small compared to, say, Andermatt, and it had been closed for almost thirty years.

Jonelle explained to Konni that it was not closed anymore. Konni, speaking to her on the government’s behalf, said that he, and they, understood entirely, and that if Jonelle needed to have something happen to that mountain, they would not charge X-COM for damage to their real estate. But they did ask that they be consulted when final plans were in place, so that a suitable cover story could be arranged.

That was all she had wanted to hear from them.

She did not go to bed that night. She stayed up in her quarters, working, working at the little desk, tapping away at her computer, making the occasional scrambled phone call. She would let no one into her office but people from the cafeteria, who she called every now and then to have them bring her sandwiches and coffee. This she did several times. The cafeteria staff were bemused, for she ate the sandwiches. “She’s enjoying herself,” one of them said to the others, “whatever she’s up to. Maybe it’s that the colonel’s coming back in the morning…. She’s trying to get the paperwork done so they can have at least one hot night without business intruding.” This explanation was widely accepted, with much good-natured snickering.

Jonelle did not come out until about nine that morning, when she went straight to the number-one hangar. There she found a newly arrived Firestorm waiting, with maintenance people working around it. She said to them, “Is he here?”

“Yes, ma’am,” one of them said. “Went down to the living quarters to get his place set up. “

Jonelle headed in that direction and, opening one of the “blind” solid-metal security doors that led to the living quarters, actually bashed right into Ari, chest to chest, so that they had to grab each other to stay upright. The two of them reacted to one another, then burst out laughing while the people down the corridor hooted and applauded appreciatively. Ari backed off and saluted, Jonelle returned the salute, and they walked down together into the living quarters.

“Well, Colonel,” Jonelle said. “How are you feeling?”

“Very well, Commander,” Ari said. “I have something for you.”

“Not right now,” Jonelle muttered, with a slight smile.

“Not that kind of something. If the Commander will indulge me—”

“That’s what I do mostly, I believe,” Jonelle said.

Ari sighed. “I have a note for you.”

“I would have thought we were past the note-passing stage,” Jonelle said cheerfully, as they came to the door of Ari’s quarters.

“Not from me,” Ari said with exaggerated patience. “One of the people in the labs, in Xeno, asked me to give it to you.”

“Why so hush-hush?”

“How should I know? I don’t read your mail.” They stepped through the door of Ari’s quarters, and with it half-closed behind him, Ari took an envelope out of his uniform jacket pocket and handed it to her.

Jonelle looked at it, seeing her name written there in Ngadge’s bold print. She opened it, pulled out the several sheets, and stood there in the doorway with her back mostly to the hall, reading them.

When she looked up at Ari again, she was feeling physically weak. “What is it?” he said, seeing the unnerved expression on her face. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

She took a long breath, looked up at Ari, and shook her head, doing her best to get her composure back in place. “I can’t discuss it,” she said, folding the letter and putting it in her own jacket pocket. “It’s probably not incredibly important in the big picture…and believe me, Ari, we’ve got more important things to think about. I’m going to need to talk to everybody here, and everybody at Irhil M’goun, at nine tonight, and I’ve still got to get the final wrinkles worked out of my script. You can help me best by telling everyone who asks you what this is about that you don’t know.”

“I don’t know. I just got here!”

“Good. But one thing you could do for me that I would really appreciate—”

“Sure,” he said, “what?”

“Make an appointment with me,” she said, “for a few hours in the next twenty-four when we can get really, really physical.” She smiled at him, a sad smile. “Because it’s going to be a good while before we get another chance.”

He looked at her, sobered by the tone of her voice. “I’ll check my appointments calendar,” he said, “and get back to you.”

“Good,” she said. “You do that.”

That evening, about nine, Jonelle called the base complement of Andermatt together in the hangars, there being no other place that could hold them all. She also had a camera stationed to transmit her image into a scrambled link that would be shown at Irhil M’goun, where DeLonghi had also assembled everyone in the main hangar to hear what Jonelle had to say. Only DeLonghi knew what the content of the announcement was going to be. She had had a long, quiet talk with him about it earlier in the day.

She stood up in front of the camera and tried to look easy, though she didn’t feel so. Public speaking was not one of Jonelle’s great gifts. “This is Commander Barrett,” she said. “X-COM Main Command has asked me to make the following announcement to you, as many other X-COM base commanders will be doing to the bases under their control about now.

“X-COM has located what may be one of the oldest alien bases on Earth, hidden away in a location where its presence has been unsuspected for what may have been years—we don’t know for sure. Preliminary reports— based on analyses of all spacecraft trajectories that have occurred over the last year and a half—have identified the base’s location as somewhere in the Carnic Alps between Austria and Italy, in a spot that I’m not going to identify exactly to you at the moment because there’s no need.

“X-COM has decided that as soon as Andermatt Base is fully operational—which will be about three weeks from now—we will be the staging area for an assault on the alien base. This is going to be an assault of considerable size and difficulty, since we suspect that base to be ‘dug in’ to a mountain, similar to the way Andermatt is.

“This assault will have to be swift and well-organized to be effective. Planning of the details has already begun and will be complete by the time Andermatt Base is ready to stage it. That said, I intend to bring both Andermatt and Irhil M’goun bases to their highest possible levels of readiness by the approximate assault date three weeks from now. This announcement is in the nature of an early warning, to help you start work on achieving that readiness. Unusually rigorous drills and exercises, to prepare us for this assault, will be starting next week. I will be publishing details within the next day or so.

“You are all going to be asked to work very hard. Not harder than you’re able to—and I refuse to work you harder than I’ll be working myself. But you know how I work.” Jonelle grinned, and a good-natured groan went up from the listeners at both Andermatt and Irhil M’goun.

“We’re doing a good thing here,” Jonelle said. “Many of the alien attacks that have so bedeviled us for the past year are thought to have come from this hidden alien base. By destroying it, we’ll be buying ourselves and other bases time to prepare ever more effective weapons and strategies against the invaders…and to follow them, eventually, to other hidden bases, and possibly even to their base out in the solar system, wherever it is. But that’s for the future. For the meantime, you’ll liaise with your captains and sergeants to find out what each of you needs to do during this preparation period. And I want you to know that I’m going to be leading this assault from the front. We will go in together; as many as possible of us will come out together—and the aliens will come out only as prisoners, or corpses. That’s the goal.”

Jonelle looked briefly uncomfortable. “We have a planet to protect. A lot of our friends have gone out to do that, come up against the aliens, and not come back. This will be our chance to even the score a little, on their behalf— for the failed interceptions counted as much toward finding this hidden base as the successful ones did. So—lets get on with it.”

She turned and walked away from the camera, gesturing at the tech person to cut the link. Applause started behind her—softly, at first, then louder. Jonelle held her head high and kept walking. There was only one thought in her mind at the moment:

Please, God, don’t let me have to spend all their lives on this. Please don’t make me kill them all.

Much later that evening, after a session of being very, very physical, Jonelle sighed and lay back with an absent look. Ari padded over to the bed, on his way back from the bathroom.

“I see Ross has been transferred,” he said. “I’ll miss him—he was a good man.”

“Family emergency,” jonelle said, gazing thoughtfully at the wall. “He’ll be back next month.”

“‘Family emergency’?” Ari said. “He doesn’t have any family. Hasn’t for years now.”

Jonelle looked at him in the dimness of the one little lamp, then blushed a little and looked at the floor. “Ah. Well.”

“The trouble with you,” Ari said, “is that you’re not a good liar.”

She glanced at him swiftly.

“About personal things, I mean,” said Ari. “Professionally, you can lie with the best of them. Can’t you?”

“For the next week and a half,” Jonelle said softly, “that’s a thought I would keep to myself. Are you asking me to take you into my confidence?”

Ari took a long breath. “No.”

“Good,” Jonelle said. “There are, however, some things I want to discuss with you.” She got up, went over to where her uniform jacket hung over the chair, and fished out the letter that Ari had brought her. “Take a look,” she said.

He opened it and began to read. Jonelle sat back down on the bed and pulled the covers up, huddling under them for a moment.

“…Have for some time suspected that some colleague’s experiments were of a rather odd nature. In particular, some serology projects being stored in the communal cold storage area have peculiar labeling anomalies, apparently being attributed to people whose experiments they were not. Some of these containers contained human blood serum samples that, on closer examination, show profound shifts away from the usual acid-base codings present in human blood and serum DNA. Some tissue samples that I had a chance to examine briefly, but which have since disappeared, show similar changes.” Ari turned the page. “About a week ago, the absence of one of the research staff from the base on other business permitted me to examine these samples in more detail. While hardly being expert in this particular area, I can safely say that these samples indicate research along the following lines: Investigation into the blood serology of Ethereals. Investigation into the neural tissue serology of Ethereals. Investigation into the storage locations of lower cerebration facilities and the ‘memory trace’ in Ethereals. I have not been able to find any notes or other written material to substantiate further my investigations, but my guess is that all these researches are pointed toward a single purpose, and this is evidenced by one tissue sample I examined that has since disappeared: the progressive genetic alteration of human neural and blood tissue into Ethereal neural and blood tissue, by chemical means, by forward recombining of DNA and use of so-called ‘rogue’ and ‘interweave’ strands of messenger RNA, to construct a ‘bridge’ sequence between human and Ethereal genomes. The end product seems to be tissue of originally human provenance, but altered by the assisted action of Ethereal DNA, and various ‘semi-viral’ mechanisms—making material that would be, in essence, more Ethereal than human, and which in contact with other human material would derange it similarly. Such experimentation, while not strictly unethical if the material was locally derived, still strikes me as both dangerous and inappropriate for our facility. I must therefore advise you that I believe Jim Trenchard must be considered a security risk until more or better information can be obtained on exactly what the thrust of his research is.”

Ari put the letter down, looking distinctly pale. “Trenchard,” he said. “What’s he doing?”

Jonelle wrapped her arms around her knees and put her chin down on them. “I think he’s working on turning humans into Ethereals,” she said.

“He’s stark, stinking, blinking nuts!”

“No, I don’t think so. I think he’s sane…and that’s the problem.” She sighed. “Ngadge sent me a report on interrogations Trenchard was helping with. Said they were going a lot more smoothly since he started working on them. He was getting better results, somehow…the aliens were spilling more material….” Jonelle shook her head. “Are they spilling it because they were sent to do that?”

Ari lay back against the pillow, looking confused. “You lost me.”

“I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of sense myself. But haven’t you noticed we’ve been catching a whole lot more Ethereals lately?”

“We catch what we can,” Ari said. “It’s chance…isn’t it?”

“Who decides crew complements on alien ships?” said Jonelle. “We don’t know. How do we know for sure that some of the interceptions we’ve been making haven’t been allowed to happen?”

“Oh, now, wait a minute! Are you saying that my Battleship the other day—”

“Maybe not the Battleship, but certainly some of the others. Ari, we really have come up with an unusual number of Ethereals lately. Who’s helping who, here? And that other line in Ngadge’s letter: ‘If the material was locally derived—’”

Ari looked at Jonelle. “You mean from someone here—”

“I mean from Trenchard! It’s the old joke for a geneticist: the version of the human genome that you’re most familiar with is your own! These days, in any good four-year course in genetic engineering, one of the first things you do, practically, is take a strand of your own DNA— you own it, after all, it’s legally safe—take it apart, look at your own genes, and see what’s in their pockets!”

“Ouch.”

“It is an old one. If he’s using his own genetic material to experiment with—well. Those tissue samples that Ngadge said were already showing significant drift toward the Ethereal. Who’s to say just how human Trenchard is anymore?”

“And he’s been doing all these interrogations,” Ari said, musing. “Who’s been interrogating who?”

Jonelle nodded. “My thought exactly. He likes them, Ari. It’s something I don’t think I really saw until the other night…and then I thought it was just a quirk. It bothered me so much, I couldn’t see it right away even then. He likes them. He said to me, ‘This is something we need to look at for human beings.’ He really thinks that their way of existence is an option for us.”

“Effing traitor,” Ari muttered. “He needs to be shot.”

“No,” Jonelle said. “That’s the one thing we can’t do.”

“Whaddaya mean ‘can’t’? One bullet would do it. I must have a gun here somewhere.” He made as if to get out of bed.

She pulled him back down. “No, if he is a spy I want him right where he is. The thing to do with a spy or a traitor is to give him the mushroom treatment.”

“Sorry?”

“Keep him in the dark and feed him shit. But most importantly, don’t let him know you know he’s a spy. Trenchard will feed our disinformation to his friends among the aliens, which suits me just fine. And I’d like to know how he does it. I’m having comms monitored…but it’s occurred to me that there might be other ways. Neural tissue….” She leaned back against the pillow, against Ari. “Supposing that he’s managed to acquire some of their telepathic ability? If information about this projected raid gets to them via that route, and there’s no trace in comms, we’ll know that’s how he did it. They might be able to read him like a book if he comes out from under the mindshield. That would be worth knowing about… and if it works for him that way, maybe he’ll have discovered a weapon we can use on our own side, later. There’d be a nice irony in that.”

She smiled grimly. “But no matter how they get the information, the aliens will know there’s no base where I’ve announced it. I’m sure they’ll be delighted to let us go off on a wild goose chase and attack some mountain with nothing in it, instead of the one I’ve already had some preliminary scans done on, the one that’s full of the Silacoids they’ve been importing, and which have been tunneling it out for God knows how long. What they won’t know, until too late anyway, is that we know exactly where they are, and that we’re going to hit them a week and a half before I said we were. Other X-COM commanders have, indeed, made the same announcement I made tonight. It’s not just to back up my story: Main Command is interested in finding out whether other bases have spies working in them. We’ll see where this disinformation surfaces, and in what shape. Meantime, your business, and the other colonels’, and mine, is to make sure…in the most easygoing and casual kind of way, without it particularly showing…that the attack is ready to happen a week and a half before the announced date.”

“And what about Trenchard?”

“The day the balloon is really scheduled to go up,” Jonelle said, “I’ll be having him arrested and held incommunicado until it’s all over. Then I’m going to come down and debrief him myself. Possibly with a nail file.”

Ari looked at the expression on Jonelle’s face, and swallowed.

“I’m beginning to regret ever having brought him to Andermatt,” she said. “He knows where it is, and I can only assume that they know where it is. Our survival so far rests on two factors: that Trenchard doesn’t know the exact locations under the mountain of some of our facilities here, and maybe the aliens don’t want to risk exposing their spy. By the time they realize we’re on to him…it’ll be too late for them, or at least for their base under Scopi.”

Ari nodded. “Weird name,” he said. “What does it mean?”

Jonelle smiled in grim amusement, as she had when asking Duonna Mati about this through Ueli, and closed her eyes. “It means ‘target.’”

A week and a half passed, and there came the only day of the week when even the Swiss sleep late: Sunday morning. Having gone to town early on another Sunday to look into some other matter, Jonelle had found herself wondering how they managed it. The chapel at the bottom of town, Saint Peter’s and Paul’s, and the one at the top of the town, Saint Kolumban’s, began ringing their bells at eight forty-five, in what Jonelle could only describe as “dueling churches,” a four-toned fight that went on deafeningly for half an hour, and certainly left everyone in town wide awake. It was, Jonelle had been told, traditional: not only an announcement that church services were about to start, but a sure remedy against demons, which could not stand the sound of bells. Much earlier than bell-time on this particular Sunday, though, Jonelle had set about her business: exorcising the local demons, as permanently as possible.

It went off like clockwork, in the initial stages—almost precisely like clockwork, for Jonelle had started to work out the timings on that first night when she came back from Andermatt after seeing Duonna Mati, and since then she had had plenty of time to refine them.

Everything would have seemed quiet enough, in the dawn. In those mountain fastnesses, in fair weather, dawn can be unearthly still: not a whisper of wind to blow the snow out into the “banner” that so often streams from the sides of mountains like Scopi, not even enough to trigger the veil of mist caused by the differential in temperature between the air updrafting along the mountainsides and the colder air above. In the silent dawn, Scopi reared its graceful peak against a sky of the purest pellucid royal blue at the zenith, fading down to crimson-rimmed peach at the jagged horizon, and everything held its breath and was still.

The sound that slowly leached into the silence, breaking it, echoed from the walls of Piz Rondadura and Piz Gannaretsch and all the other mountains around: a high, singing whine, slowly growing stronger, scaling up like the screech of an increasingly angry eagle. Nothing moved on the mountain in any kind of reaction; nothing lived there to move. But the screech grew more deafening, echoing more loudly from the mountains around and, abruptly, a flash of motion appeared from the south to match it.

It was a single Avenger, coming low along the treacherously wiggly line of the Lukmanďer Pass, zigging and zagging madly from one cliff-bound wall of the pass to the other, as if the pilot had had too much to drink the previous night, or wanted to look as if he had. At the southern end of Lai da Sontga Maria, the Avenger dove straight toward the surface of the lake and skimmed along it so low that an unprepared observer might have thought the pilot was about to take up powerboating. The thin skin of ice on the water cracked under him from the noise of his engines and the pressure of their thrust. Twin plumes of water burst up and out of the lake behind the Avenger as it skimmed along the length of it, no more than three feet above the lake’s surface, and seemingly made straight for the automated hydroelectric dam at the northern end. At the last possible moment, the Avengers pilot pulled up in what could have passed as the second leg of a right angle, and headed straight for the zenith.

Now the mountain spoke. Plasma fire burst from the eastern and southern sides of it, lancing out at the Avenger—but the pilot had other ideas. The Avenger angled around hard toward the northeastern side of Scopi, the one most nearly vertical. His craft made a sound like a giant cough, and a fusion ball leaped out from it and struck the mountain right in the middle of the slope called Puoza. In a great bloom of lightning, fire, and snow vaporized instantly and explosively to steam, the side of the mountain blew in.

There had been a door there, once, clearly marked in infrared view by an eye-shaped hot spot. The main question about this door had been, was it hardened? When the smoke and steam and the fire of the fusion ball cleared away, the answer was plain enough. Metal still showed there—badly buckled, but still not breached.

A routine had been prepared for this possibility. About six different craft descended on the mountain from all directions, peppering it with missies, plasma beams, and cannon and laser fire. More defensive fire erupted from the mountain and the attacking craft veered and dodged, trying to keep from destroying one another, as well as from being destroyed themselves. At least with the mountains exit door damaged, there seemed no danger of alien ships coming out, so for the time being, the attacking X-COM vessels busied themselves with targeting the aliens’ defensive facilities. One Interceptor took a direct hit up its six, and it and its pilot went out together in a spectacular fireball that crashed on Scopi’s slopes. The snow went black with ash, where it wasn’t scoured off the mountainside by the heat. Twisted wreckage tumbled down Scopi’s side and fell steaming into the lake.

But only a second or so later, the Avenger—with Ari in the driver’s seat—came roaring ‘round the mountain and let the “front door” have it with another fusion ball. A globe of lightning crashed into the mountainside, clinging there, random discharges forking and flickering from it— and this time, the door blew into fragments. When the steam and the fireball cleared away, all that remained of the door was a jagged, metal-edged hole. The Avenger dove away to the north, executing a virtuoso victory roll complete with showy but unnecessary hesitations every ninety degrees.

In the cockpit of the Lightning from which she was leading the attack, Jonelle grinned evilly inside her armor and said softly down her commlink, “Go.”

Their full complement of craft went in: everything from Irhil M’goun, everything from Andermatt, everything that Omaha and China could spare them. This was just as well, for immediately thereafter, all hell broke loose as alien ships leapt out of the ruined, but somewhat widened, opening. Small and medium and large Scouts, an Abductor, a Terror Ship.

Between the Abductor and the Terror Ship, like a swallow diving between two eagles, the Avenger, twisting and sliding between bursts of fire from the mountain, angled in and went straight through the blasted door. People on one Lightning in the attack group, and on others if they chanced to be tuned in to the commander’s chat frequency, were almost deafened by a furious shout of “You utter asshole, what the eff are you doing!”

While the aerial battle went on outside, several other ships followed the Avenger in.—these by design, instead of by opportunity. They flew into a huge, empty cavern filled with smoke and flying debris, for the Avenger had immediately fired at, and disabled, the Harvester ship presently sitting on the floor of the cavern. Weapons fire was also everywhere, but the X-COM ships put down regardless, opened up, and let their assault teams out.

Jonelle was with one of them. “By the numbers,” she said down her commlink to the assault teams listening to her. “Pathfinders, go do your thing, and Godspeed. Immediate assault, with me—”

By the time all the craft were empty, there were about thirty X-COM people, all in either power or flying suits, on the floor of the main cavern, and all armed with heavy plasmas, small launchers, or better—blaster launchers. They began by simply sweeping the place clean of every alien that got in the way. The problem was that it would not stay clean; more and more kept flooding up from the lower levels.

This was something Jonelle had expected. The scans she had managed to conduct, ever so quietly, over the last week and a half had shown her that Scopi was a warren of tunnels, chimneys, and deep-delved caverns. The upper level, the “hangar” level, would have to be secured first; then her people would have to work their way down. Securing the whole facility might take hours, and kill them all. They did not have hours to spend, or that many lives. It was Jonelles uncomfortable job to decide when enough lives had been spent, and to call for the final intervention that would destroy the alien base and end the battle.

At the same time, they could not destroy the base before being sure that all possible information and useful materiel had been removed, that everything that could be saved had been saved. The scans had shown that on the first and second levels down, there were larger “delvings” that were probably labs and armories. These had to be sacked if possible, destroyed if not. Farthest down were tunnels, into which the aliens would probably retreat for a last-ditch defense. In those, Jonelle had less interest. They could, and would, be sealed by the last destruction. But that was a little farther along. By her timing, no more than an hour….

On the floor of the main level, everything was smoke, laser fire, plasma eruptions, explosions—the air and the stone shook with them. There was a huge crash off to one side as the Avenger came down too hard on the stone floor. It was perhaps just luck that it came down on a party of Zombies, all of which immediately died, hatching out many new premature but savage Chryssalids in their stead. A few of one of the assault teams got busy on them with incendiaries.

More aliens came pouring up, and Jonelle found herself, as always, with less and less time to think about her timings, and more and more aliens to shoot at. She had a small, intent bodyguard of five to protect her, besides her flying armor, and she had a heavy plasma. With that, she got busy. I’m the cleaning woman, she thought, and concentrated on cleaning the main floor of every alien she might see. There was little trouble about this until a big force of Snakemen came slithering and hissing across the floor toward her and her group, maybe fifteen or twenty of them at once. Jonelle lost track of how long these kept them busy. As fast as she and her team could burn them down, more Snakemen came, a little army of them, into the teeth of better weaponry than they carried, trying to overwhelm Jonelle and her team by sheer force of numbers. Numbers were not going to be enough, though. The bodies began to pile up around them, a wall of writhing, persistent snake meat with blasted-off patches of scorched and peeling scales flaking off them. That god-awful, sweet smell of burnt flesh somehow always reminded Jonelle of Chinese food, and always put her off it for days after a raid. After what seemed an eternity, but was probably only fifteen minutes or so, she and her team found themselves with a moment to breathe, and nothing to shoot at for a few seconds. “OK,” she said, peering through the smoke and the tumble and scatter of destroyed craft and dead aliens, through which her people moved like deadly ghosts, firing at anything that moved and wasn’t one of them. “Report. How are we—”

That was when something caught her mind by its scruff, and shook it. Irrational terror flooded Jonelle. The assault troops around her, her bodyguard, dropped their weapons and collapsed, wailing, shrieking with fear.

Jonelle froze with the immediacy of the fear. She had never been a screamer; she was the kind of person who froze when she felt death coming, and watched it, silent, her voice stuck in her throat. She watched it come now, dark, drifting along the floor toward her, over the rubble and the corpses: a shrouded form like an alien Grim Reaper. Something concealed within the dark robes veiling that form spoke, intimately, to her mind. Not with words, but the feeling said, You know us too well. You know things about us that cannot go any further. Therefore, die.

The hand of fear squeezed her heart. Jonelle gasped, trying to get her breath past the ice in her chest, the lump of fear that was growing, that would force the breath out of her body, the warmth out of her bones, the life out of her brain….

And abruptly the cold “hand” dropped her. While plasma fire racketed over her head, and stun bombs howled and smoke drifted by, Jonelle groveled on the floor, gasping, trying to remember why she was there and what her name was. She looked up—

—to see an armored form standing straight and still in the smoke and the laser fire, staring at the silent, hovering form of the Ethereal, which hung still and stared at him. Ari stood there, in his own armor, with his psi-amp. The Ethereal faced him. The air practically itched with the strain of the two minds grappling together—and then Ari laughed out loud.

“Sorry, pal,” he said between gritted teeth. “The last one tried that trick. Now I know what to do about it!”

For a moment there was silence. Then the Ethereal wavered, turned to flee, and was ripped apart by a burst of auto-plasma fire.

Normality reasserted itself as Jonelle struggled to her feet and helped her bodyguard get up. “Come on,” she said, throwing a glance at Ari, “work to do. Come on—”

Another sound was added to the screaming of the aliens” a bizarre roar. “What the—” Jonelle said, and turned.

From inside the grounded Harvester Ari had hit on first diving through, the one that some of her people had started fighting their way into, a god-awful banging and kicking began. The sound of things crashing, being knocked around—Jonelle looked concerned. “Hey, Team Five,” she said down her commlink, trying to sound matter-of-fact after having an Ethereal in her brain, “don’t mess up the hardware, we can sell that—”

From inside the Harvester, bizarrely, came laughter. “Not us, Boss!” someone shouted. And someone else added, “Won’t be much left in here worth salvaging after these guys are through with it!”

And cows burst out: three of them. They looked awful— more like demon cows from some confused hell, with bones showing through their coats, with tubes sticking out of them, and wounded sides where they had been gouged for tissue samples. They were fiery-eyed, bellowing creatures, wild with abuse and rage, and now wild with liberty. Jonelle was suddenly irrationally glad that all the Chryssalids seemed to be dead. I don’t think I could handle a Zombie cow at this point.

A small crowd of Sectoids burst from behind some alien maintenance equipment, firing heavy plasmas and flinging grenades at the X-COM personnel. They ignored the bellowing, rampaging cows. This was possibly a mistake, as the first cow out of the Harvester, a brown one that Jonelle suspected was Ueli’s Rosselana, threw up her head and bellowed defiance, then plunged at the Sectoids and gored the Sectoid leader, lifting him on her horns and tossing him some twenty feet away onto a grenade that one of his own people had thrown. This promptly exploded and blew the Sectoid to bits, the timing producing such a slapstick effect that a lot of the X-COM assault troops who saw it burst out laughing helplessly.

Jonelle laughed too. “Come on,” she shouted down her command frequency, “let’s get ‘em!”

With their own versions of her laughter, all of which became more terrible as the rest of the hour went by, the troops followed Jonelle, and whether the aliens fought them, or fled, mostly they died. Furious at the sight of their dead comrades as they passed the ones already fallen, or as more fell, the X-COM people went on, fighting in cold and bitter rage, until they had gone as far down into the alien base as strategic needs required. The whine of weapons and the sporadic lightning of their fire racketed inside the mountain for a long time, and the sweet burnt smell got stronger all the time.

Then, at the end of the hour, Jonelle sounded the recall signal.

Taking everything of value with them—alien equipment, lab materials, Elerium, weapons, captured aliens, corpses, and, with some care, the furious and belligerent cows, who had to be stunned first—the X-COM troops retired to the transport ships, which came in the smoking entry and opened up for them. Jonelle wanted her people out of there before there was time for retaliation, in more strength, to come from space. She refused to leave until the last ship, the Avenger, was ready to go, and Ari, the second-to-last one out, pulled her in.

They lifted out and away. “How did we do?” Jonelle said, still gasping. It was reaction now, and she didn’t mind.

Dispatch, which had been keeping score, said down her commlink, “We lost two Interceptors, one Lightning, and a Skyranger. They lost six Scouts of various kinds, two Harvesters, two Terror Ships, and an Abductor. Everything that was inside at the time. We have twelve dead. They have—no count yet. Still compiling, hut better than a hundred and twenty, I’d say.”

Jonelle nodded, getting her breath. “I’ll talk to you when we get back,” she said to Dispatch. “Out.”

The commlink cut. Jonelle reached behind her and swung the cockpit door shut. Then she said to Ari, absolutely furious now that she had leisure to be, “Now I want you to tell me whatever made you pull that goddamned crazy stunt! I swear to God, you’re going on charges this time. There is no way in hell I’m going to be able to justify this to the Powers That Be. They saw our timings four days ago, they know exactly what was planned, they are not going to believe anything I tell them about us having discussed this previously—we never did—or about me telling you to do any such dumb-ass thing, because they’ll have the comms recordings! If you have to do crap like this, why don’t you do it in ways where your fellow beings, deluded besotted creatures that they are, can cover up for you afterwards? Now I’m going to have to—”

“Explain to Command how, because I hit that Harvester, I saved an entire alien research facility from getting away and being damaged or destroyed. Complete with the research materials, still alive…those cows. Who saved a few people’s lives,” Ari added, “besides that business with the grenade. Have you seen those girls kick?”

Jonelle looked at Ari and finally made an expression of extreme resignation. “I’m going to take this out of your hide later,” she said.

“Promises,” said Ari with relish, “promises. Damn,” he added as the com squawked, “looks like we’ve got something coming in.”

Jonelle looked through the cockpit windshield, and her heart clenched inside her. Coming over the mountain, straight at them, was an alien Battleship.

“Three times lucky,” Ari said. Intent on his controls, even while the terrible huge thing began firing at them, he zigzagged, then slapped the controls and let one last fusion ball loose. It streaked away, and Ari cut his thrust and dropped the Avenger straight down about three hundred feet. There were screams of surprise and outrage, and sounds of things crashing into other things from the troop compartment, as everyone went briefly weightless, then got their weight back again as Ari accelerated once more, about two and a half Gs worth, hard off to the right of the Battleship.

The fusion ball hit it amidships punching a gaping hole into its side. Pieces rained down out of the fireball and onto Scopi, and alien bodies fell down out of the black cloud of the explosion, gently and slowly, like snow, into the snow. The great craft hovered, then headed straight for the horizon at a slower than normal speed.

Jonelle gulped. “Dispatch,” she said. “Add one damaged Battleship to the count. Are all our craft out of the way?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Track that ship out, then call for the cleanup.”

They headed for Andermatt—and behind them, through the dawn, abrupt and blinding, fire fell from the sky.

Within hours, all the major news agencies in the world were carrying the story of how a Boeing 797 airliner, belonging to a freight carrier carrying a cargo of explosive materials to Southeast Asia for use by a gold-mining cartel, and a United Nations cargo plane, carrying “humanitarian supplies,” suffered a catastrophic collision over the Swiss Alps and crashed onto Mount Scopi, narrowly missing the hydroelectric plant nearby and destroying some of the upper part of the mountain. No local people were killed, but the force of the crash and explosion had been so tremendous, and the terrain was so remote and inaccessible, that it was feared that the bodies of the crew would never be found. Their names were given to the press, and the story made all the major papers. People went “tsk, tsk” on five continents, and then forgot all about it. Nothing remained of the disaster but scraps of twisted metal, which soon rusted or were buried in the snow and ground down into the body of the glacier, which—as it had been for centuries—was slowly twisting its way down the north side of Scopi. Already snow and ice were compacting down into the crater formed by the explosion, sealing it. Scopi’s peak was simply a slightly different shape these days, and no one particularly cared.

The X-COM assault force came back to Andermatt and started dealing with the inevitable: healing the human wounded, burying the dead, processing the alien wounded and captured, stacking the corpses, and assessing and storing the consumables and the items that needed to be processed, catalogued, or sold. Jonelle knew she didn’t need to supervise this, but she did, for a while, until the weariness began to catch up with her. Then she went to her office to call DeLonghi.

Except for one minor local raid, it had been quiet at Irhil and its catchment area today—but Jonelle was unwilling to bet that condition would last. “I’m sending your complement back to you,” she said, “minus a couple. My apologies, Joe.”

He sighed. “The fortunes of war. Congratulations, Commander.”

“Hold the triumph, Commander,” Jonelle said. “I’ll be down in the morning, after I get a good night’s sleep. I want to have a nice long talk with Trenchard.”

He sounded slightly surprised. “I’m sorry, Commander, I thought you’d heard about that. He’s gone.”

“What?”

“As you ordered,” said DeLonghi, “a team went to secure him as the operation was about to get under way. But he was gone. I had the place searched, but he couldn’t be found, and no one even saw him leave, or had any idea where he might have gone.” DeLonghi paused. “Now that I think of it, though—that little local raid we had—”

“An hour or two after he went missing, was it?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. It was a Scout. We lost its trace, briefly—then picked it up again.”

“But the Scout itself got away.”

“Yes. At the time, with the major operation going down, we needed that Interceptor back here. I recalled it when it was plain it had lost what it was chasing.”

“Damn,” Jonelle said softly. “Well, you did right. As for Trenchard, damn it, I should have had him put on ice earlier. This one’s my own fault—you can be too secret, I guess. Well, there’s no point in crying over spilt milk. But have the civil authorities in Irhil look for him anyway. If there’s the slightest chance that he missed his ride….”

So it was that police forces all over the planet were alerted to look for Jim Trenchard. They looked in vain: no sign of him ever turned up. Jonelle had his quarters carefully searched for any clue or suggestion as to where he might have gone, what he might have intended. She found nothing. The research in his computer was all wiped. Most of his research associates’ files had been wiped as well, by hidden “Trojan Horse” programs he had apparently put in place in their computers long before. After a couple of weeks, she gave up, closed his file, and forwarded it and all his materials to X-COM Central for them to deal with. But she could not quite get out of her mind one scrap of paper that had been pinned up on Trenchard’s office wall, among his niece’s crayon drawings and the Far Side cartoons. It said, in his neat, small print, IT IS BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN TO SERVE IN HEAVEN.

If he was where she thought he was, then by Jonelle’s definition of such things, he was in hell, all right. Often, as time passed, Jonelle would wake up in the middle of the night and wonder whether, among the aliens, there was now a human becoming increasingly more Ethereal, another master of that cold hand that had closed around her heart—perhaps a far deadlier one, able to control humans more effectively with fear because it understood those fears so much better. Or, an equal possibility, perhaps they now had among them an Ethereal who remained annoyingly human and threatened to make them more so. Jonelle still wondered what Trenchard might have told them, or might now be telling them, that would endanger Earth further, selling out his own people for the bizarre ideal of some impossible and inhuman future that might never need to happen. Never mind that, she thought. If I ever run across him, orders or no orders, he’ll be “shot while trying to escape.”

Meantime, there was nothing she could do about it. “Uh oh,” Joe said down the phone just then. “Got an interception.”

“Go do your job, Commander,” Jonelle said, weary. “I’m going to get a meal, and some sleep.”

In Andermatt the next day there was a small parade through the towns main street—of several weak, scarred, tired, sick-looking cows, which nonetheless wore the satisfied expressions of creatures who were having a big fuss made over them. Ueli’s brown Rosselana was there, and a thin, weary-looking black pugniera called Portia, the one that had been taken from Münster, the town the aliens had raided twice (apparently because they missed the genetically valuable pugniera the first time), and another one called Dutscha, a spotty cow with a foul temper. With her UN hat on, Jonelle had only been able to say to Ueli, when he asked for explanations, “Apparently the aliens think your cows are special.” She was not able to explain anything about their recovery, just that they had been “found in the mountains,” which was true enough.

A day’s stay in Irhil M’goun, where Ngadge and his people had checked them over, revealed little except that the cows’ immune systems seemed unusually robust. “That alone would be useful to the aliens,” Ngadge said. “We’ve theorized for a long time that the reason they keep stealing cattle is because they have trouble breeding them.” The day’s stay had also resulted in one of the lab modules being kicked nearly to pieces—the cows did not like anyone who looked like someone carrying lab equipment, a fact that suggested how unpleasant their stay with the aliens had been. But they had survived, which few of their kind had before, and now they swaggered down the street in Andermatt. Ueli, following them, stopped with Jonelle by the door of her little office.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not too late to start thinking about the next betting season….”

“Oh, Ueli, look at them,” she said as Ari came up to join them. “Give them a break!”

He shook his head and smiled. “The way ‘they’ give you one?” he said. “You look terrible. Circles under your eyes.”

“It’s the filing,” Jonelle said, with a glance at Ari. She was beginning to have her suspicions about what Ueli knew about goings-on in the locality. “Takes it out of you something shocking.”

“Come have a drink,” Ueli said, “and don’t tell me all about it.”

They went to the bar, and ahead of them the cowbells bonged softly. Up at the top of town, church bells answered. At the sound of them, Jonelle smiled, considering that, for the moment anyway, she could relax: the demons were held at bay.

Until tomorrow….