X-COM: UFO Defense

by Diane Duane

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “All of it?”

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

  “Very well, Commander.”

  “Good. See to it.”

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

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

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

  Possibly eleven.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not conscious yet.”

  “What happened to him?”

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

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

  “Can I see him?”

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

  “Contrecoup?”

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

  Jonelle nodded and went on back.

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

  “Molson?” she said. “How you doing?”

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

  “Is it OK to look?”

  “If you don’t feel like throwing up—”

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

  “Pinhead, my buddy Rogers says.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’ll do that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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