by Diane Duane
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 v
oice. “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. “Nga
dge 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?”