by Diane Duane
X-COM: UFO Defense
Diane Duane
Commander Jonelle Barrett is determined to win. Having moved from Morocco to a new base in Switzerland, she is well-placed to build a fortified base and defend Europe from the marauding aliens who harvest humans as lab animals for breeding stock… and for their dinner tables!
Barrett soon finds that her new territory is already riddled with alien invaders. Her handpicked garrison is all she has—until she learns that one of her most trusted people may be a traitor. Her task is twofold: keep the aliens at bay and keep her own sanity in the face of despair. She doesn’t know which will prove more difficult.
X-COM
UFO Defense™
A Novel
by Diane Duane
For Richard Arnold:
because, as the saying goes,
Damaun vein nis bia da far
One
It was dark that night in the streets of Ravenna. Even in the first years of the twenty-first century, the streets didn’t have much more light than they had when the place was still the second city of the dying Roman Empire. Too many city councils fond of kickbacks had siphoned off funds from “unnecessary” public lighting budgets again and again, and the crooked contractors had done the rest of the job, leaving the city’s narrow streets drowned in a near-premedieval gloom. There were exceptions to the rule, of course—such as tonight, when the place was better lit than usual, not by moonlight, but by muzzle flashes.
The horizontal lightning of energy weapons stitched the dark air, leaving everything stinking of ozone, and all the air so ionized that your hair stood up in it like a cat’s fur stroked in dry weather. Sparks jumped from everything that wasn’t already singed or on fire, which at the moment wasn’t much. The alien craft had landed at one end of the Piazza dei San Vitale, starting what Ari could only assume was intended as a terror mission. They started it very well, by the simple expedient of either frying or crushing to death the several hundred people in the open air there. They had been sitting drinking espresso corto or vino rosso in the close, airless stillness of an unusually warm autumn night, eating pastas and honey pastries, talking and laughing the night away. Then the night had come down on them in a blaze of thrusters and a crushing weight, and now not much was left of them but their screams, by now mostly faded to sporadic faint moans and weeping. Around the piazza, everything was dark now, all the lights out in the apartments—the silence indicative of human beings praying that the things out there would somehow, by some miracle, pass them by. The darkness had a lot of prayer in it, and a lot of weapon fire, and not much else—and it was uncertain to Ari which would do the most good in the long run. For preference, he would depend on the guns.
“Got a bad patch over here, Boss,” said one of the voices in his armor’s earphones. That was Mary, a captain and one of his sub-team leaders. She sounded more cheerful than worried. Ari grinned, firing around the corner he was stuck behind. That tone of voice, when stuck in a tight spot, was one of the traits he used to pick his teams.
“You pinned down?”
“No worse than usual. I could use some help in a while.” There was a flash as she disposed of a grenade, and some aliens, and then another grenade to keep honest any other aliens who might have been behind the first little party.
“Noted. Mihaul?”
“You rang, Boss?”
“Gimme a sign.”
An abrupt set of blasts at an alien said M in Morse code. It came from off to Ari’s right, up past where the café had been, half-sheltered under a sign that had said PANETTERIA and now said P ETT R, punctuated with blast holes.
“Good. How you doing?”
“Got you some nice cold cuts here, Boss. Her Nibs’s gonna be pleased.”
“Let’s not count the chicken before it’s home in the fridge, OK? And don’t despise the live free-range livestock if you can catch any. Meanwhile, get your butt over by Mary there and make yourself useful. She’s got a few too many hands for bridge at the moment. You see the front doors of the church? Those big bronze ones.”
“Got it. On my way with the bridge mix,” Mihaul said.
Ari pulled back from the corner for a moment and took a breath, staring out at the alien ship. The few aliens that had been close to it were dead now. Some that had broken away immediately after the X-COM team arrived were now lying helter-skelter about the cobbled pavement, the “cold cuts” Mihaul had mentioned. Some of his teammates occasionally ragged Mihaul for not firing as much as he might, but Mihaul firmly believed in not firing until he was sure of his target and referred with amiable scorn to some of his teammates’ spray-gun weapon firing as “premature ejaculation.” His own technique had been gaining converts lately, both by evidence of its success and as a result of Ari’s—and the commander’s—open approval, with the result that Ari’s teams’ attacks were sounding a lot less like a Yugoslavian cease-fire. His method also worked better and saved money—which counted with the commander, as well.
Now, though, Ari was thinking more about killing the rest of the aliens loose in the square than about the value of weapons charges, or the valuable elements in the alien craft, or the possibility of live captures, or anything else. One of an X-COM assault team’s duties was to drive home to the aliens in the simplest possible language that terror raids were simply too costly to continue, either in terms of personnel or materiel. You did this by killing or catching every one of them, taking home every scrap of their stuff that could be used, and depriving them of everything else they had, whether it could be used or not. But mostly you did it by the killing.
The problem, here as in many other terror spots, was that the aliens loved to attack by night—and the night was their friend. Almost all of them could see better in it, unassisted, than humans could even with artificial augmentation. It gave them an advantage Ari hated, and refused to concede. He was not going to concede it now.
“Elsabet?” he said. “Report.”
“Over here behind this giant tit, boss.”
“That’s a mausoleum, you big dumb nyekulturnyi. Haven’t you ever seen a mausoleum before?”
“Oh, a tomb,” Elsabetta Yanovna said. “I know tombs when I see them, Boss, and I don’t wanna be in one just now. Even pretty ones like this—” She broke off, and there was a brief flare of cannon fire. Ari saw something down the road blow up most satisfactorily.
“Watch where you point that thing,” Ari said. “There’s an empress buried in there, for goshsake!”
“Won’t bother her none,” Elsabetta said, “not the noise, anyway. “
“You may have a point, but just—” Another burst of cannon fire. Ari was glad Elsabetta had nothing heavier than an autocannon at the moment. Her tendency was to use the complete destructive ability of whatever you gave her, and to “let God sort them out” afterward. Ari could imagine the results of Elsabetta with a heavy plasma tonight —mostly God sorting out a lot of irreplaceable late-Empire architecture and artwork. “Oh, never mind,” he muttered as something blew up even more spectacularly. What the heck was she hitting over there? Whatever it was, it gave more light to shoot aliens by. A small truck, Ari thought.
“People, target the vehicles. The light won’t last, but it’s better than nothing.” He glanced over toward Galla Placidia’s splendid cruciform mausoleum, with its massive dome, and spared only a brief thought for the fifth-century mosaics inside and out. The twenty-first century was his main concern at the moment.
Here and there around the piazza, vehicles began to blow up with more regularity They were mostly just little cars, though, and most of their fuel tanks didn’t have enough gas in them to last more than for a few seconds’ worth of light—though that was spectacular enough while it lasted. More
gunfire erupted around the square as Art’s people took advantage of the brief light, and the aliens scattered around started melting farther back into the shadows in the side streets.
Don’t want them doing that, Ari thought. I want them centrally located where we can deal with them fast. But if wishes were any good by themselves, the Earth would long since have been free of the invaders. No chance of that. There has to be a way, though. I don’t want to get involved in house-to-house if I can avoid it.
Ari thought hard while the firefight out in the square began to attenuate, the firing more outward than inward now. He was acutely aware of someone looking over his shoulder, as it were, listening to his comms or his teams’, with what kind of thoughts he could only suspect—and he suspected he would find out.
WHAM! The blast went right past his ear, and Ari threw himself not to one side, because that would be what they were expecting, but forward, tucking and rolling fast and hard, straight over the cobbles into the piazza. Behind him, against the wall where he had been standing, something went smack, a small wet noise. That was followed by a sound he had come to recognize from too many street fights: plaster and the underlying brick crumbling as a jet of venom from a Celatid hit it, splattered, ate the outer surface, and started to work on the inner ones. That was followed by an odd little squeak as the creature got its second load ready.
Ari was already up on his knees, sighting on the nasty little sack of poison: he blasted it, and then hit the great ugly Muton that was loping along behind it, which went down and lay struggling. Don’t die, he thought, eyeing the huge, bulging-muscled humanoid as it lay there. We can always use a few more live ones. All the same, he had no desire to have it get up behind him, after he’d moved on, and surprise him later. Carefully, he put a blast through each of its elbows and knees, which tended to ruin most anyone’s mobility, human or alien. Then he crouched and scuttled back to the corner where he had been hiding, careful to avoid the slimy venom from the Celatid, which was still running sizzling down the wall, digesting the old, crumbling stucco.
“Report,” he said quietly, watching the muzzle flashes disappear down the side streets.
“They’re scattering, Boss,” Elsabet said. “This batch is heading northwest. “
“They’ll hit the city wall—it’s only a block behind the mausoleum. You should be able to trap some there. If you can’t, though, push them around the far side and back into the square.”
“Right.”
“Got a whole lot of splat-bags over here, Boss,” said another voice. It was Roddy McGrath, another captain. “And some Reapers. They’re pushing pretty hard to get through this parking lot.”
The Reapers were a particularly nasty threat, especially as far as any civilians who might be in the area were concerned: fierce hungry furry bipedal things, ravenous as wolves, that would come loping along at you and rip your head off and eat it before you knew you were an appetizer. “Don’t let ‘em out,” Ari said, “whatever you do. If you can get them to cooperate, drive ‘em back up the road toward the piazza.”
“Cooperate!” Roddy’s irony showed more forcefully than usual. “Might be fun to try….”
Suddenly, a burst of plasma fire exploded from the direction of Roddy’s team, down the Via Salara a block to the east of the piazza—Roddy’s way of encouraging “cooperation.” Ari grinned. “Mihaul?”
“We linked up with Mary, Boss,” Mihaul said, cheerful. “Not much left of the batch she was chasing. A jew Sectoids are sniping from one of the apartment buildings. All the Mutons are down. A few of them are still breathing.”
“Get those snipers. Then you and Mary pitch in and help Roddy. He’s got his hands full. Your losses?”
“Dagmar’s down. Rio’s making pickup on her.”
“Dead?”
“Don’t know.”
“Have Rio get her home and then meet you. Go!”
Ari held his spot, watching his people work. This was the hardest part, sometimes—keeping out of their way, letting them get their job done. Behind him was the sound of more plasma fire. His own team was closing in behind him, tidying up and securing the area where their own ship had landed, in the small square at the end of the Via 4 Novembre. “Paula,” he said, “got a clean perimeter back there?”
“No problems, Boss. A lot of Mutons over this way. One damn near pulled Clive’s arm off, but he’s still alive. Brian’s taking him back to the ship.”
“Other losses?”
“Nobody. Doris’s link’s down.”
Ari raised his eyebrows. It was less trouble than he had been expecting, and comms in particular had been working well on this run. “Fine. Close in behind me. We’re going to have some cleanup to do in the square in a little while.”
“Right.”
He leaned against the wall, watching the square. The muzzle flashes were getting closer again, coming from the side streets. Off to the left and southward, a startling bang! rattled back and forth between the walls of the old five-story stucco buildings and, as if knocked off by the sound, a big piece of the facing of one of them—including a couple of windows—blew outward and fell down into the street.
Then it got quiet. “There’s your snipers, Boss.”
“Good boy, Mihaul. Get your butts up by Roddy now.”
“Team’s there now. I did that last bit.”
“Alone? You brainless—” Ari stopped, since that was exactly what he was at the moment—alone. “Never mind. You sure you got them all?”
“Looking at the bits and pieces right now. I’ll have to count them up and take an average, but—”
“Oh, just get moving.” Again he thought of that silent presence who might or might not be listening to his comms. It would probably have something to say about his being there all by himself, without even one team member for backup—if indeed it had been watching at all. It was a little like being six and worrying about Santa Claus. He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good…. You think he’s watching anyway, but there’s no way to tell for sure, and the uncertainty cramps your style something fierce.
The sound of footsteps approaching brought him around. It was Paula and her team: Paula in the lead, in armor since she had been hogging “point” as usual, with Matt behind her and, some ways back, big blond Doris bringing up the rear. Across the piazza, a chain of explosions went off—probably Mihaul’s team laying down some grenades for cover while they joined Roddy’s. Then heavy plasmas stitched the air again.
“Report,” Ari said.
Paula glanced over her shoulder, the way they had come. “Twenty Mutons dead.”
“Twenty!”
“We were busy,” she said mildly. “I told you about Clive. He died on his way to the ship.”
“Shit,” Ari said softly. “All right. We’ve got some business to clean up yet. I want you to get your—”
He paused. Behind the rest of Paula’s team, Doris was coming toward them, more and more quickly. Head down, looking staggery, looking decidedly bad. Looking somehow lumpy. Bulkier than she should. Running now, running at them.
Then Doris was on him. Ari saw—just before the mutated arm slammed into his helmet—her slack face, warping out of shape now, and her empty eyes. Just barely gone Zombie, he thought—the second-to-last straightforward thought he had before the fire became everything in the world. God, the boss is going to be pissed.
A thousand and three miles away, a woman sat in a small windowless office. It had a desk, two plain chairs— the one behind her desk and the one in front of it, neither any more comfortable than the other—and a door with a dartboard fixed to the back of it. The dartboard showed signs of frequent and savage use, both for normal competition—the “double” ring was thoroughly pitted— and for other purposes. Right now the center of the dartboard featured, a thoroughly targeted picture of a man with a big, round, florid face and a mustache that seemed big and tough enough to jump off his face on it
s own and go off to seek its fortune. The picture had no eyes left: only beige cork showed where they should have been, and a dart was presently sticking, cigar-like, out of one corner of the formerly smiling and now ragged mouth.
Jonelle Barrett sat behind the desk, which was very clean and shiny, occupied only by her computer console and one piece of paper. The floor, though, was chaotically piled with paper, tapes, diskettes, cassettes, and other detritus, all bespeaking a person who preferred the least-kinetically-loaded form of filing: pile it up on the floor, where it can’t fall any farther. Some of the piles (mostly the ones leaning against the wall) were quite straight and organized-looking; others were doing their best to threaten others, slumping alarmingly sideways or forward.
At the moment, Jonelle herself was taking the latter approach to life. She was leaning on her elbows over that piece of paper, staring at it, while listening idly to the chatter over her computers comm circuit from one of the teams out on intercept.
“—keep it quiet, now—”
“—Boss’ll be annoyed if we come back without any goodies—”
Jonelle smiled slightly, a one-sided, crooked expression. She shook her head in a particular way, sideways, which activated her secretary’s link.
“Joel?”
“Yeah, Boss?”
“That’s Five on the blower now, is it?”
“Right. They’re in Tripoli.”
“Give me Team Eight. Where are they now?”
“Still chasing their chicken, Boss. Somewhere over the Med.”
“Where’s Three?”
“Ravenna.”
The smile got more crooked. “The criminal returns to the scene of the crime,” Jonelle said softly.
“Colonel Laurentz take a team down there before?”
“Not a team,” Jonelle said, and smiled more crookedly yet. “Never mind.”
Her earpiece clicked, and someone said, “Over here behind this giant tit, Boss. “
