by Diane Duane
And then, in her earpiece, the scream. Very close. And another sound, a kind of shocked grunt: Ari. The sound she had heard him make when surprised or badly hurt. Silence—
—followed by an explosion that blew the connection dead.
Jonelle sat very still behind her desk for a few seconds. The connection did not come back. “Joel?” she said.
“Lost it, Boss.”
“All right,” she said, as though nothing was the matter. “Reestablish when you can. Call down to the library—I need some maps. Europe, at one to fifty-thousand, and some big-scale ones of Switzerland. One to ten-thousand, if they’ve got them.”
“Right, Boss,” Joel said, very softly, and cut the connection.
Jonelle laid aside the second dart, felt around for a pen, turned over that piece of paper, and very deliberately started to make two lists. One was a list of people she would take with her when she left—tomorrow, or the next day—for Switzerland. The other was a list of officers who might be trusted to take over the handling of Irhil M’goun while she was away.
She started to put Ari’s name on the first list. Jonelle stopped, looked at it, and at the second list. Then she most deliberately put them both aside and started to make a third one, a list of projects for her new sub-commander to start work on at M’Goun. There’s going to be a lot to do here, she thought, and ignored the way her eyes were starting to sting.
The light was everywhere. For a moment there wasn’t anything else, just that and the heat, a great wash of it, and a smell of hot stone and cloth and metal singeing. Ari blinked, trying to figure out which way he was facing. Up? Down? He still couldn’t see.
Something grabbed him from behind. He struggled briefly, but then got a glimpse of the right color for an armored suit: Paula, of course. She was yelling, “Get the Chryss! Get it!”
Ari blinked hard, able to see some shapes and movement now, though not much of it in the dimness. One of Paula’s other armored people—probably Matt—must have been carrying a rocket launcher with an incendiary round loaded. “What the hell was he thinking of letting it off at such close range—”
“Better fried than wind up as a host for one of those, Boss,” Paula said. Ari looked around and saw what she meant. The blackened, burnt shape that had been poor Doris before a Chryssalid got her now lay on the cobbles, straining and squirming like a horrible pupa of some giant moth. The seared skin split with a sound like tearing paper. In a shower of thin, serous fluid and boiled blood, out burst another crablike Chryssalid, young and hungry. Snarling, its claws snapping, it jumped right for Paula. It never saw Matt, standing off to one side with something a little more suitable than a rocket launcher. The smaller autocannon incendiary rounds hit the monster, stitching it in four or five places in front. So many of them hit it so close together that a pyrophoric reaction began. The Chryssalid simply burst into one hot flame, burnt fiercely for a moment, and then blew itself to pieces, the pressure of the interior organs shattering the fire-damaged carapace outward.
The fumes and smoke choked Ari for a moment while he shook loose of Paula. “Thanks,” he said.
“Hey, think nothing of it,” Paula said as the rest of the team gathered around, all looking rather scorched around the edges but otherwise none the worse for wear. “What now, Boss?”
“Let’s go help the others. They’re working up toward the top of the piazza. Any more Chryssalids behind us?” Ari looked back the way Doris had come.
“Don’t think so,” Paula said, though she sounded doubtful. She was plainly thinking what Ari was: none of them knew how or when the Chryssalid had hit Doris.
“We’ll find out in a few days,” Ari said, grim. “Meanwhile we’ve got other problems. Plenty of our cuddly little friends up that way at the moment, and I want to make a clean sweep of them.”
“Wouldn’t mind some more light,” Paula muttered as they headed around the corner and into the square.
Ari grinned and gestured to Matt, who picked up Ari’s heavy-plasma weapon from where it had fallen and tossed it to him. “I’ve got an idea about that,” he said. “You guys stay close to me. See the big church up top there? That’s where I’m headed.”
“Bad moment for an upsurge of religious feeling, Boss,” Matt said as they headed up through the square.
Before Ari could answer, plasma fire rained down around them from a window up on their left. It was one of those snipers that Mihaul had missed, Ari thought. Matt lifted that rocket launcher again as the others scattered. He took aim, waited, fired.
The front of the building fell off. “I really love that,” Matt said, catching up with the group as it reformed.
Ari sighed. “There was a great pastry shop in there.”
“First religion, now food,” Paula said, and chuckled. “Boss, you’re a fickle one.”
“Religion first. Come on.”
They made their way up through the square, past the now-disabled alien Terror Ship, picking their way over burned and crushed café tables and chairs, and around many bodies, both human and alien. Ari was pleased enough about their response time on this one: they had been no more than five minutes behind the alien craft, though he would have preferred to force it down outside the city Still, just good luck that we were in the right place at the right time. If we’d had to come all the way up from Irhil on this run, none of this would be left now. None of that, either….
He glanced at the church. Muzzle flashes and the reports and billowing explosions of grenades were thick off to the right side of it, near the head of the Via Alighieri. But there were no flashes any farther down.
“Who’s holding the corner there?” he said down the commlink. “By that pale-colored building?”
“Us, Boss,” Roddy McGrath’s voice came back. “We’ve got a good bunch bottled up here. Some trapped behind the big church, some others between it and the stone tit.”
“Good. You hold ‘em there. I’m gonna get you some light to work with.”
“Gonna get the moon to rise this late, Boss? Nice trick,” said Elsabetta’s voice.
“Not quite. Just hang on.”
All around them, it began to rain white-hot fire from plasma rifles and God knew what else. Ari and his team zigzagged their way up the piazza, and all around them shots hit the burnt-out cars and soot-covered, upended café tables. Cobbles were kicked out of burning mortar by the plasma fire, and any stone not made of igneous rock to begin with immediately blew up, splintering with the heat. Fragments flew in every direction like some kind of primitive fléchette grenade. Ari dodged and jumped and cursed when splinters glanced-off of his armored legs. One struck him squarely somewhere rather more embarrassing, but there was nothing to do about it but keep running.
They were getting quite close to the church, but as they approached it, the downpouring fire got so serious that Ari and his team were forced to take refuge up against the buildings on the left side of the square. They stood in front of what used to be a department store, now wall after wall of broken plate glass and shocked-looking, blast-denuded mannequins. “They’re up there, Boss,” Matt said, jerking his head up at the church tower, another of the low domes that seemed popular in this part of the world. “No one’s going to get anything done until we get that bunch killed.”
Ari breathed in, breathed out. “Damned Sectoids. On the dome?”
Matt was already limbering up his rocket launcher. “Yup.”
“OK. See that rectangular bit sticking out there, on the left? That’s the church’s chancel. Don’t hit that. When you fire, make sure the debris doesn’t fall on it.”
“You got relatives in there, Boss?” But Matt was loading up already.
“I’ll explain later. Just keep firing. I’ve got something else to do.” Ari stared around him for a moment, wearing what must have looked to his team like an oddly quizzical expression. “Listen,” he said, “any of you have a couple of hundred-lire coins?”
Paula, through her armor’s thick faceplate
, and all the rest of them from under their helmets or eyeshades, looked at Ari as though he had just landed from Saturn. He looked back, and after a few seconds—one after another and with all kinds of bemused expressions—they began to check their pockets.
“I’ve got a dollar—”
“Uh—I’ve got eighty dirhams, fifty francs, and a Kenyan shilling.”
“Sorry, Boss. I don’t usually bring my wallet on these shindigs. I always figure somebody else’ll pay for the drinks—”
“Never mind,” Ari said. “I’ll fake it. Matt, start firing. The rest of you, cover me too. Don’t you stop until— you’ll know when.” And he shouldered his heavy plasma and plunged off across the piazza, toward the church’s bronze doors.
They were not his main objective, but they were where the best cover was. Under the massive, arched tympanum sheltering the main doors, no fire could reach him from above—assuming he could reach the tympanum. Behind him, a number of indiscreet burping noises, like a giant paying the price for bolting his nachos, suggested that Matt was getting into his assignment. Above and behind Ari, burning stone and ancient brick leaped away from the dome. Above the noise of the explosions, he thought he heard a couple of screams in the little high voices of Sectoids. “Good,” he muttered to himself. There was something particularly satisfying about shooting Sectoids, with their sinister looks, like dark-eyed elfin children stolen and turned into something sinister and deadly. Ari paused by the last street corner, across from the brick walls of the church, getting his breath for the big run across the exposed space. “You guys in the back,” he muttered down the link, “that light is coming up. I expect you to drive all your targets down into the piazza. Matt, when you finish with the dome, you and Roddy’s bunch get ready to turn all your attention to the middle of the piazza, between the church and the tomb. About thirty seconds. Ready?”
Acknowledgments came from one team leader after another. “Matt,” Ari said, “hammer it—!” And he ran out into the open.
The Sectoid snipers above had little time to get off more than two or three volleys of plasma bolts before Matt’s really serious attack on them began. The old brick cornices around the dome practically leapt into the air, raining down into the piazza. Miss the chancel, miss the chancel! Ari thought as he ran desperately, zigzagging again, for the shelter of the church’s tympanum. Thirty yards—twenty—
He was under, in cool black shadow, looking out into night only occasionally lighted by weapons flashes and explosions. Ari paused, listening to the tempo and ferocity of the fire increasing from the back of San Vitale’s Church, as the other teams started to drive their assailants around front. Better move now, before they come around the church and find you right out there in the middle of things.
Ari sucked in one last deep breath. Odd, how sweet these frantic breaths could taste, when you weren’t sure you were ever going to get another one. He ran for it, up the piazza and to his right, across the empty space and toward the massive iron-grille gates of Galla Placidia’s mausoleum. Explosions in the night, shouts of the living, snarls of the dying, the sounds of alarms and excursions everywhere, but nothing came close to him, none of the flying fire came to lodge in his flesh. Ari came up against the iron grille with a clang, seized it, shook it: locked. After hours. No way to get in and under cover. Never mind.
Ari made his way over to the right of the grille. There it was, the plain little steel box fastened to the gate, with its stenciled message. LUMINATIO AUTOMATICO, 200 L
Ari shook his head with a look both bemused and grim. “Sorry, guys,” he said, and unslung his heavy plasma. With the greatest possible care in this darkness, he shot one corner of the box off.
Heat and the stink of molten metal and scorched paint flew up in his face. Ari choked and waved the smoke away, then bent and felt about at his feet. “Ow, ow, ow, oh, shit!” About half the coins that had fallen out of the coin box were molten, and lay scattered around in little pale puddles on the pavement. “Goddamn gun!” After a moment, though, he found one of the last-fallen hundred-lire coins, which was still intact, and then another. “Awright,” he said, and straightened. He put them into the coin slot on the top of the box, praying that he hadn’t destroyed anything important. One coin in, push the plunger. The second coin in, push the plunger.
And wait…
And wait…
Then, sudden glory, as though the sun had come up in the piazza: a blaze of pinkish-colored sodium-vapor light burst out from ten different sources, so that the front of the mausoleum and the front of San Vitale’s Church and the piazza in between them turned into a shining space burning in the red of brick and sandstone, the white of anciently quarried marbles. The town council had really done themselves proud on this lighting installation, as Ari had remarked to Jonelle not too long before. The spotlights were set up on some of the buildings surrounding the piazza, and some were set into the ground in front of the mausoleum and in front of the church, turning the whole area, in a blink, from a dark and dangerous open space into a well-lit shooting gallery for his people—a space now abruptly filling with aliens being forced into it, for his people had taken him at his word when he told them “thirty seconds.”
He took a moment now to shoot the chain and lock off the grille-door in front of the mausoleum so that he could tuck himself into the low, arched doorway there and fire from cover. There was almost no need, for all hell was breaking loose out in the middle of the piazza. Plasma and laser blasts darned the air from four different directions, grenades flew, and stun rods crackled and zapped. In the midst of this chaos, stately and gleaming, the architecture of Byzantine Rome looked calmly down on the carnage. This son-et-lumiere part of the operation lasted no more than another five minutes, and finally the firing started to die away, the grenades exploding no more. It was just as well, for after six minutes—as Ari knew would happen—the lights went off again. You only got so much light for two hundred lire.
He sighed, chuckled, and went out to the fallen coin box to get another couple of coins. When the lights came back on, his teams were beginning to reassemble in the piazza, taking stock of the aliens they had stunned and captured alive. There were some Mutons, dumped in a muscly heap like a bunch of green-skinned professional wrestlers, and a Sectoid leader, semiconscious and lying helpless, like a drugged child, while being secured. Others of the teams were assessing their own casualties. One of Roddy’s team was dead, his head blown off. Mihaul had a bad leg burn from a plasma rifle, self-cauterizing as usual, but there was always the danger that the victim would go abruptly into shock. Fortunately, Mihaul showed no such signs as yet. He was pale, but hanging on all right, and would make it home to Irhil without too much trouble, Ari judged.
“Nice job, you people,” Ari said to them as they gathered around him. “Nice job. Her Nibs is going to be seriously pleased with us when we get home. We get all the Chryssalids? You sure?”
The teams gathered around him were nodding. “Not that many in this batch, Boss,” Roddy said. “I’m sure we got them all.”
“OK. Call home and have them send up a stripping team for this Terror Ship. We’ll take the important stuff with us. Paula, go in with another suit and get the Elerium out of that thing. The usual pickup on discarded weapons: take anything big or obvious. Then post a guard. The strippers can salvage the rest, and they should be here before the rest of the town turns out for souvenirs or to pick up a little bargain. Anything else need doing?”
Heads shook all around. “Nice job,” Ari said again. “We saved the world again tonight. Let’s clean up here, and then go home and have our dinner.”
The teams began to disperse, going about their tasks. A few stayed with Ari for several moments. “Nice trick that,” Elsabetta said, “with the light. How’d you know that was there?”
Ari smiled, thinking of Jonelle’s face in the light of a little wavering candle in a glass, out here in the piazza not too long ago. He also thought that there were some things a team co
mmander should keep to himself. “Hey,” Ari said, “when you go somewhere new in Europe, don’t you read the Michelin guide first? You’re missing all the good stuff. Get the green one.”
Elsabetta snickered. She and Matt and the others stood a little longer with Ari, just breathing the air, all quiet now with that particularly terrible silence that falls after a firefight. “Whose church is this, Boss?” Matt said, looking up into the church’s tympanum, which was no longer shadowy. Up in the arch, ranks of carved, brightly painted and gilded saints, choirs of angels, and herds of fabulous beasts looked down at them with incurious eyes. “It’s really something.”
“Various people had a hand in building it…but most of this work was the Empress Theodora’s, originally.” Ari couldn’t help but smile. Theodora had been the religious type only insofar as it served her purposes—but when she built a church, she built one.
“No, I mean what saint?”
“Saint Vitalis,” Ari said.
Matt blinked. “Something to do with barbers, right?”
“Matt,” Ari said with great affection, “you are living proof of the triumph of popular culture and the decline of the classical education. As though it matters while we’re having an alien invasion. Come on, let’s get all our people together and go home.”
Two
So let me get this straight,” Jonelle said to Ari, two hours later in her little office. “You went out into the middle of an open space under attack by hostiles, without backup, without even one team member to back you up—”
“They were covering me!”
“Not that you told them what for. I’ll come to that in a moment—”
Ari doubted she would. This debrief had not exactly been turning out the way he’d intended. He’d brought his teams home with minimal losses, he’d brought back a tremendous load of equipment and salables, and he’d expected at least a pat on the head. It hadn’t turned up yet.
“I did play back the transcripts,” Jonelle said while she sat behind the desk, and Ari stood very straight in front of it—and sweated. She had her command persona very firmly in place at the moment, and there was no hope for him except to keep his mouth shut and listen. “On the off chance that there might be something in them to exonerate you for this kind of behavior. A clout on the head or some such. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind turned up, so I must assume that you did what you did while in control of your faculties. Very sad, since right now I need people around me with their brains about them, and you seem to have gotten rid of yours during our last garage sale.”