by Diane Duane
They paused by a door with a doorplate that said DE LONGHI R.J., COL. Jonelle reached into her pocket, fished out a folded piece of notepaper, and carefully tucked it under the door.
“Another X-COM promotion ceremony completed,” Jonelle said sarcastically while giving the briefest of salutes.
“One other I want to see,” she said, “but he won’t be down here. Come on.”
They went back up the hall. “And you say you’re not interested in my psychology,” Ari said, only half joking. “I wonder.”
Jonelle glanced at him. “When I’m dressed like this,” she said, tugging at her uniform sleeve, “anything that serves my job—which is killing aliens who want to move into my home—is an interest, and I’ll use it as a weapon against them, any way I can. Insofar as the contents and motives in your mind affect the way I do that job, they’re an interest. When I’m dressed differently, though…”—she waggled her eyebrows suggestively—“I promise I won’t use it against you.”
Ari smiled. They walked quietly together for the next few minutes, Jonelle leading the way toward the lab blocks. And is it true? she wondered. Would I really not use what I know against him? True, she had access to his psych profiles, as well as to everyone else’s under her command, on a need-to-know basis. Not that she’d ever looked at them. It would be a bad day, she thought, when I couldn’t tell what was on someone’s mind just by looking at them. So far, in neither their professional nor their private relationship, had there ever been need. But what if there was, some day?
She knew what a fine line they walked, this tightrope stretched between their physical and emotional relationships and their positions as commander and subordinate. Lesser men, Jonelle suspected, would have a hard time of it. Ari was smart, flexible, and sufficiently accomplished at his own job that he didn’t feel much of a need to prove himself to the people around him. His impulsiveness in battle and crisis situations was just that, impulsiveness, not an indication of a man overcompensating for his position below a tough and capable woman who just happened to be his lover.
I think, anyway…
They passed through the first set of containment doors at the entrance to the lab blocks. “Trenchard?” Ari said.
“Uh huh. When did he ever go to bed early when he had a new toy?”
The lab blocks were almost deserted this time of night. After the containment doors shut after them, Jonelle and Ari passed door after door of dark and empty offices, and laboratories with all the equipment shut down except for the computers monitoring ongoing experiments. Lab staff did not stand the heel-to-toe watches that interception crews did, though teams of scientists and researchers took turns going “on call” to deal with new acquisitions of live aliens. Most of the researchers had been off duty for hours by this time of day. But there were always those who were too interested, or too driven, to stop work.
As they passed through the second, heavier set of containment doors, the ones that separated the alien containment unit from those labs where only corpses or tissue were held, Jonelle wondered which of the two categories Trenchard fit in best. His history was mostly unremarkable except for his involvement in a terror raid, during which he came close to being killed. Shortly thereafter, he had been recruited covertly by X-COM, under cover of a shell organization that claimed to be doing “nonaggressive” work on the alien genome series. His own pursuit of genome data on the aliens had proved less than nonaggressive—he worried his work like a dog worrying a particularly juicy bone. But psych profiling showed no ax to grind, no trauma to drive him. It seemed that he simply, almost greedily, wanted what the aliens had: a brand new biology that no one had ever seen before, which wasn’t well understood, and which was a fertile field for a smart researcher who was willing to work hard. Jonelle was glad enough to let him get on with it. He was one of few scientists who hadn’t been slacking off when she arrived, and since then Jonelle had found him a hard-headed and dependable source of advice on how to distribute appropriations. Too, other scientists and researchers around him tended to work harder in response to the way he worked, which was a dividend the commander appreciated.
Jonelle greeted the guard on duty, she and Ari accepted sidearms from him—no X-COM personnel worked with aliens unarmed, even when they were confined—and they walked on down the central hallway. The brightest lights in the area shone there, looking greenish through several layers of armor glass. That was “maximum security,” for species that were psionically or physically the most dangerous. The side rooms, where other less dangerous live aliens were confined, lay off to both sides, and fainter lights glowed in them, both from normal illumination and the firefly lights of local confinement fields inside the cells. As they passed a series of smaller cells where Celatids and Silacoids were held, Ari peered in through the outer armor-glass windows and raised his eyebrows. “A lot of those on hand this week,” he said.
“Yeah. Dr. Ahu asked me to have the teams bring him any Celatids…he’s working on some kind of adaptation of their venom, a ‘universal solvent.’ He claims it’ll eat through lead when he’s finished with it. Anyway, he’s already come up with a variant that the Celatids themselves are very vulnerable to.”
“Useful. What do we administer it with? Squirt guns?”
“Don’t ask me—that’s not my table,” Jonelle said as they reached the maximum-security area and looked through the thick glass window of the outer office. Inside, Jim Trenchard was working over a console, watching a series of multicolored sine waves weave themselves together on a computer screen and occasionally stopping to tap something into the keyboard and change the amplitude or frequency of the waves. Trenchard was a taut little man in his late forties, fit and wiry, going prematurely bald, but otherwise looking nothing like the stereotypical research scientist. His preferred lab wear was a worn blue coverall of the kind favored by furnace repairmen. Few central heating technicians, however, had the audience for their work that Trenchard had. In the inner office, hovering gently in midair and illuminated by the glow of a boosted psionic-confinement field, was an Ethereal. It seemed to watch Trenchard, though of course that was an illusion.
“They give me the willies,” Ari said softly. Jonelle nodded. Of all the aliens X-COM dealt with, the Ethereals were, to her way of thinking, the deadliest. Others might be able to rip you limb from limb, or eat you alive, or dissolve you like a sugar cube in coffee, but the ones that could get inside your head and change the way you thought about yourself struck Jonelle as far worse. They were telepaths and telekinetics of dreadful power, easily the most powerful of all the alien species who worked with the weapons of the mind. There was some speculation in X-COM that these aliens might indeed be the top echelon, the ones “running things,” and research was going on everywhere into the best way to interrogate these creatures.
They were very resistant, though—that was the problem. And that resistance, and their power, were both made more horrible by the creatures’ physical reality. Except for their brains, there seemed hardly anything to them.
Jonelle looked at the Ethereal that floated, restrained, in the inner office. Except for the huge head that encased the thing’s awful brain, the Ethereal looked pallid, withered, a mere husk of a humanoid shape, no bigger than a child. A terminally anorexic child, it would have been, the skin so thin that the blood vessels showed right through it like parchment. Not that much blood seemed to get out to the skinny, underdeveloped limbs. It all seemed destined for the brain, and from autopsy reports Jonelle had read, this seemed logical enough—if there was anything logical about an Ethereal. The internal organs were all either vestigial or hardly functional. They could not run a body, even this feeble, wizened one.
But something ran that body, even though the muscles were barely as thick as ropes and the trunk looked frail enough to break between your hands. Something—if only some kind of toxic will—lived behind those blind, dark eyes. As the creature floated, helpless, a chance air current from the ventilation system tou
ched it, so that its body turned, and those eyes seemed to look slowly toward Jonelle. She shuddered. Only twice had she been unlucky enough, while out on an assault, to feel the touch of one of those cold, inhuman minds behind those eyes, and it had taken all the training the psi people had given her to keep her from crumpling under the force that went into your mind like a knife and began slicing away at what made you human. Since those encounters, she had become a serious convert to psionic training, and when she became commander at Irhil M’goun, she had thrown all of her people into it who had enough psi talent to bend a cat’s whisker, let alone a spoon.
“Right,” Jonelle said, and touched the doorbell.
Trenchard didn’t look up for a moment, though he waved one hand at the door. He kept his eyes on the screen until he’d watched that pattern of sines through one long cycle, about thirty seconds’ worth. Then he straightened up, rubbed his back—which must have been aching if he’d spent much time in that position—turned around, and saw who was waiting. Trenchard grinned a little sheepishly, came over to the door, and opened it.
“Sorry, Commander,” he said, “I was up to my ears in something just then. How are you, Colonel?”
“Doing OK, doctor.”
“Jim,” Jonelle said, “we’ve had a little surprise from the Great Upstairs. I’ve got to go up to Switzerland tomorrow and start building a new base. I’m going to need to start a new research department there, and I’d like you to head it.”
Trenchard’s mouth dropped open. Then he laughed out loud for sheer pleasure, the kind of sound you might expect from a small child let loose in a candy store. “You’re serious? You’re serious!”
“Even for me, it’s late in the day for jokes,” Jonelle said.
“Switzerland! Anywhere near some skiing?”
Ari guffawed. Jonelle gave him a wry look and said, “We’re looking at Andermatt.”
“Haven’t been there, but I hear it’s nice,” Trenchard said. “Unspoiled.”
“You let me know. Meanwhile, I’d welcome an auxiliary opinion on how the sites we’re going to look at will support the kind of research establishment we’ve built down here. Or rebuilt, I should say. Will your work permit you to leave it. with your assistants for a day or two? Three max.”
“That many, yes,” Trenchard said. “More would be a problem. Two would be best.”
“We’ll plan on that, then. A transport will be ready to pick us up at oh-eight-hundred. It’ll drop us at the commercial airport at Agadir. We’re covert on this run, so dress and pack accordingly. There’ll be a briefing pack waiting in the terminal in your quarters.”
“Right, Commander.”
They all paused for a moment to look at the still, drifting form in the inner office. “How’s it going?” Ari said. “Is this part of that new interrogation routine you were working on?”
“This? No. This is all diagnostic investigation. I’m trying to work out where the energy to run that brain comes from.”
“Any luck?”
Trenchard let out a single breath of laughter, a harassed sound. “No. The input-output figures for the creature’s metabolics have never made any sense on any level, either in terms of available chemical or gross energy, no matter how you twist them. The illogic of it is beginning to affect some of my colleagues, I think. One of them went so far as to suggest in a paper that Ethereals have a ‘metabolic extension into another dimension.’”
Ari raised his eyebrows. “Whatever that means.”
“Don’t ask me, because I haven’t been able to figure it out either. I’ve been doing some work on ATP/ADP transport in the Ethereals’ cells, but as usual there are no close analogues among the other alien species, so all the lysine-lysoid work has to be started from scratch, and—”
Jonelle laughed and held up a hand. “I’d as soon you’d write me a précis,” she said, “because if you tell me now, I’ll lose it. I’ve got about eighty things to do before I turn in tonight. We’ll see you in the morning, then.”
“Right, Commander. Thanks!”
“Good work is its own reward, Jim,” she said. “You brought it on yourself. Good night!”
They left; the door went solidly thunk behind them. Jonelle and Ari walked back up the hall, returned their sidearms to the guard, and went out into the open side of the base again. “Amazing,” Ari said after a while, “no matter how many times I go in there…I always breathe better after I come out.”
“Me too. I didn’t mind killing them…I didn’t mind catching them and turning them over to the White Coat Brigade. But the thought of spending serious time with them….” Jonelle shook her head.
“We’re just not suited,” Ari said, “we simplistic, basic, emotional types. Give us a gun and a place to use it….”
“What you mean ‘we,’ kimo sabe?” Jonelle said, laughing. She laced one arm through Ari’s, and they headed off toward the living quarters.
Ten hours later, and twelve hundred miles north, they stood, separate again, under a bitterly clear blue sky. It was thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, or one degree Celsius, and as far as Jonelle was concerned, no matter how you did it, even in Kelvin, it was too goddamn cold.
They stood under the shadow of the peak of a mountain, in snow about two feet deep. Off to one side, the helicopter’s rotors had slowed almost to a stop, and the whuff, whuff, whuff of their turning was, surprisingly, the only sound in that still blue air. Jonelle had expected howling wind, blowing snow. Instead there was nothing but this unnerving silence, and a world all in shades of blue: hard blue sky, softer, deeper blue snow-shadow, the royal blue brush strokes of occasional crevasses, and about six hundred feet below them, the intense sapphire of the little glacial lake.
Jonelle and Ari were in civvies, which at the moment meant the kind of cold-weather gear that moderately well-off tourists might wear: boots and one-piece snowsuits in muted outdoor colors, mottlings of brown and gold and several greens. Jim Trenchard’s tastes varied; he was in a fashionable but god-awful one-piecer in a shade of violent electric puce that ensured he would never be lost in an avalanche. The thing glowed like neon, even in the shade, and against the blue-shadowed snow, he positively vibrated.
Jonelle and Ari were actively embarrassed to be with him, but the fourth of their party just laughed and told them not to worry. “That’s what everyone’s wearing this year,” said their guide, Konni. “He’ll blend in perfectly.”
Jonelle wondered, but said nothing about it for the moment, since their guide came highly recommended.
Konrad Egli was a liaison between X-COM and the Swiss intelligence agency, a group so secret it genuinely did not have a name, the way MI5 had tried not to, and failed. But then, Jonelle thought, in the country that invented the numbered bank account, why should I be surprised at this? The agency, in turn, had ties with the army, though again the nature of these ties was never precisely described to Jonelle, and she was sure she didn’t need to know. “Just so long,” she had said to Konni when they met at the airport earlier in the day, “as someone at the army knows that someone is likely to be, uh, renting one or another of their facilities…so that they don’t start shooting at us one day when we come out to take care of business.”
“Oh, no,” Konni said, “you needn’t worry about that. It’s all taken care of.” That was the way about half of Konni’s sentences ended. His general bearing was less like that of a military attaché than that of an efficient restaurant maitre d’. He looked like one, too: a tall, blocky, middle-aged man with iron-colored hair and gray eyes, like a walking block of granite. His voice was gravelly, too, except when he laughed. Then you suspected it might start avalanches.
Now Jonelle looked over at Jim’s purple suit and said, “Is that taken care of, too? How do we explain his presence up here? Or ours?”
“You’re fat-cat UN officials wasting public funds,” Konni said cheerfully, “renting expensive helicopters to go on a heli-skiing jaunt. The perfect cover, since any good Swiss would be
lieve it instantly.”
“What if someone sees we didn’t do any skiing?” An said.
“You chickened out,” Konni said and laughed delightedly. “Even better. They’ll definitely believe that”
“Wonderful,” Jonelle said, but she had to smile a little. “Why exactly did you want us to see this spot?”
“Look around you,” Konni said. They did. Even from the strictly tourist point of view, it was a view worth seeing. Northward lay Andermatt town, a scatter of hotels and a lot of little brown and golden houses, held inside a triangle of roads. These led west down the Furkapass valley, east to the set of murderous switchback curves that climbed to the Oberalppass, and north to Göschenen and the northern end of the great Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel. Past them, above them, the lowlands of Switzerland dwindled away into hazy views of Germany. Directly westward rose the great triangular peak of the Furkahorn, ten thousand feet high, and over its shoulder, a crevasse-streaked hundred-lane highway of ice a mile wide: the Grosser Aletschglacier, oldest and biggest glacier in Europe. Beyond that, through the clear air, you could see straight to Geneva, and France beyond. South lay mountain after mountain, like waves in the sea, the Sankt Gotthard pass and the other lesser passes spilling downslope, like rivers, into a golden haze that held Italy beneath it. Then, to the east, the heights of the great north-south running mountain chains of Graubunden, behind which lay Liechtenstein and Austria, and more distant but amazingly still visible, the Czech Republic and the borders of Eastern Europe.
“What if someone sees we didn’t do any skiing?” Ari said.
