by Diane Duane
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 Sw
itzerland: 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?
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 someth
ing 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?”