by Diane Duane
“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.
Jonelle nodded. “It’s certainly central,” she said matter-of-factly like someone trying to resist the wies of a good real estate agent.
“That’s not so much the point at the moment,” Konni said. “Tell me: can you see any signs of, shall we say, building activity in this area?”
Jonelle looked around, hard, for about five minutes, before venturing an answer. The others did the same, though she knew they were going to leave the answering to her. The trouble was that the Swiss were past masters at this kind of concealment. You could look straight at a cliff wall and not see the fiberglass fake stone that someone had built and painted to match the real rock—not until someone came along and lifted it away to reveal the iron door underneath.
“On first glance, no,” Jonelle said. “But you’ve got to assume that anyone who might be involved in espionage would have a lot more time to study the area than we’ve got today.”
“That’s true,” Konni said. “But I wanted you to look for yourself because when we investigate the site more closely, you’ll want to recognize your landmarks and remember what you didn’t see. All ready, then?”
Jonelle was ready enough. Wind or no wind, her feet were freezing. With the others, she climbed hurriedly back into the helicopter.
Ten minutes’ flight brought them down to the little helicopter landing site near the train station in Andermatt. “Now what?” Jonelle said.
“Now we take the train to Göschenen.”
“Is the Rhaetische Bahn giving you a commission on this?” Ari inquired. Jonelle gave him a look.
They all dutifully got on the one-car RhB train. It was a most peculiar little creature. The track was slanted at about a twenty-degree angle down from the platform where they boarded, and the train car itself was built at the same angle, with all the seats slightly one above the other, as though on steps or bleachers. After a few minutes of sitting and hissing quietly to itself, the train gave a strangled hoot and started down the slope.
The track twisted and doubled back on itself several times as it made its way down a steep stone face, then went over and through a gorge nearly two hundred feet deep, with a ferocious, green-white, melt-swollen river running through the bottom of it. Finally the track straightened out somewhat, and the train car pulled up and stopped, still slanted, at another platform.
They got out. “Now,” Konni said, “we pick up our ride.”
He led them across the platform to where something most peculiar waited on one of the main-line tracks: a little open maintenance car, painted bright yellow. If you took a Ford flatbed pickup and put it on train wheels, Jonelle thought, it would look like this. Two Swiss railway staff were standing by the little creature, holding bright orange servicemen’s vests and hardhats. Konni greeted them, took the vests and hats and handed them out to Jonelle and Ari and Jim, putting one on himself. “All aboard!” he said then.
They all looked at each other and got onto the “flatbed.” Konni took what looked more like a tiller than anything else, turned an ignition key, started the little beast’s diesel engine, and started running it down the track, southward, toward the opening of the Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel.
Jonelle eyed the approaching tunnel with some concern, sparing only a glance for the bas-relief carved monument to the men who died building this first of the great rail tunnels. “Konni,” she said, “you’re quite sure nothing’s coming?”
“Oh, no,” Konni said, “we’re on the southbound track, not the northbound.”
“You’re sure nothing’s coming behind us?” Ari said.
“We’re well ahead of the twelve-fifty,” Konni said.
I wish I could get at my watch a little more easily, Jonelle thought as the shadow of the tunnel mouth fell over them, swallowing them up. Soon they were left with only the light of the little maintenance car’s front spot, and even that didn’t go very far in this darkness.
It got cold, and colder, and then, bizarrely, started to get warmer. Jim looked around him with amusement, seeing how the stones, which had been frosted closer to the tunnel mouth, were now wet, and ahead were perfectly dry and much warmer. “In these amounts,” he said, “stone is one heck of an insulator.”
“This time of year, yes,” Konni said. “But it’s early, yet. Now then….” They were about a mile into the tunnel. Faintly, they could hear, or rather feel, a rumbling— something rushing by, somewhere. “The other tunnel,” Konni said, “diverges from this one more and more widely as we go through—it’s about half a mile away through the stone, that way.” He gestured to the left. “Our business, though, is over here.”
He looked right and stopped. “All right,” he said, “everybody out.”
Jonelle blinked, then shrugged and let herself down over the edge of the car. It was about five feet down to the track bed. The others followed, and Konni, the last one out, reached for a capped switch on the side of the car, pushed the cap up, tapped a number into the revealed keypad, and slapped the cap down again. The maintenance car jerked a little, then took off back down the track, backwards, leaving them all standing there in the cold and the dark.
Konni came up with a flashlight and turned it on. “Here we are,” he said and walked over to the wall. He put his fingers under a protruding piece of rock and lifted it away—
It was just a fiberglass shell, with a big metal door behind it, for which Konni produced a key “You’ll pull that back in place behind us, will you, Colonel?” he said to Ari.
“No problem,” Ari said. As Konni opened the door, lights came on in a short corridor that ended in another metal door.
They went in, Ari replaced the shell, and Konni locked the door. “I’m not so sure about this,” Ari said. “Anybody could just walk down that train tunnel, at night, say—”
“No, they couldn’t,” Konni said and smiled, and that was all he said, so that Jonelle wondered about the statement for a while afterward. Meanwhile, Konni led them down the corridor to the second metal door, and pushed the button beside it.
The door slid open. It was an elevator, a big freight-hauling one with a door on the other side, as well. They got in, and Konni pushed one of the two buttons. The doors closed.
The ride took about two minutes, during which everyone looked at the floor, or the walls, since there were no numbers to watch. Then the door opened. Jonelle stepped out.
She opened her mouth, and closed it, and opened and closed it again before saying, very quietly, “Holy Buddha on a bicycle!”
They were in the top of the mountain, and it was hollow. It was simply the bigges
t enclosed space Jonelle had ever seen. To the slightly domed ceiling, far above them, it had to be three hundred feet—though it was hard to tell, with the glare from the lights on the framework hanging from that ceiling. To the far side of the main floor on which they stood, it had to be the better part of a mile. That floor showed signs of having had heavy installations of various kinds on it, though they were all gone now. The huge, echoing place had that vacated feel of an apartment waiting for a new renter.
“It’s the Mines of Moria,” Jim said, looking up at several narrow windows, which let in a surprising amount of light, even though they were at the bottom of crevasses.
“It’s the goddamn Hall of the Mountain King,” Ari said, and the echo took a second or so to come back.
Konni nodded, looking satisfied. “We’re about four hundred feet directly below the lesser peak of Chastelhorn, where we were standing,” he said. “This is only the top level. There are four more below it, each one with a ninety-foot ceiling, all with different accesses for heavy equipment and so forth. All quite secure.”
Jonelle stood there, looking around for a long, silent few minutes, considering. The others were still gazing around them, absorbing the size of the place, but Konni was looking at her, as she could well feel even with her back turned. When she finally swung around to look at him, he said, rather abruptly, “If you don’t like it, I can show you some others—”
Jonelle burst out laughing. “Konni,” she said, “you’re out of your bloody mind. This is exactly what I need. We’ll take it.”
He nodded, and the satisfied, it’s-all-taken-care-of expression came back. “I thought you would,” he said. “I’ll inform…my people…that you’ll be taking possession. The upper echelons will sort out the details.”
“I want to see the downstairs, first, of course.”
“Of course. Right this way, Commander—”
They walked off together, Ari and Jim bringing up the rear. “And if there’s any little thing we can do for you,” Jonelle said, “for…your people, in return for this tremendous favor….”
As they walked, Konni lost most of his smile for the first time since Jonelle had met him that morning. He nodded, leaned close like someone about to ask a favor, and said, “Kill them. Kill every last one of the sons of bitches, Commander. Kill them all.”
She took a breath.
“Konni,” she said, “believe me, it’ll be my pleasure.”
Three
Four days later, the machinery needed for building a base was swinging into action. Materiel was being stockpiled, transports were being arranged, personnel were being wheedled or co-opted from other facilities. Mercifully—or perhaps it was just one of those cruel quirks of fate that sets you up for something really nasty—the number of alien craft spotted dropped off abruptly during this period. These odd quiet periods happened every now and then, for no reason that anyone could understand—though everyone had theories, ranging from biological reasons to sunspots. As a commander, Jonelle had long since learned not to question these quiet times—just to be grateful for them, and to take advantage of them to improve her base’s defenses. When you were building a whole new base, a few such quiet days were a godsend. Jonelle began to think there was a good chance of actually having Andermatt Base in operation within a month.
She had two main worries. First, she had seen her budget for the new base. There wasn’t enough money in it for a mind shield, a discovery that gave her a new case of heartburn every time she considered it.
The other worry was that her new day job was going to drive her crazy—if not because of the clientele, then because of the way the place smelled.
The new office of the United Nations Neutral Observer Project Central European Region had been opened three days previously in the main street of Andermatt, between the Hotel Krone and the Backerei Arens, in a building that had previously been a TV and stereo store. Just as soon as it opened, a stream of concerned Swiss began coming in the door, demanding to know who was running this place and what was being done there—they hadn’t been consulted. In a country where people take to public life the way people in other countries go for contact sports, and where all you need is a petition with a hundred thousand names to force a national referendum on anything, to “not be consulted” is an extremely serious matter, one that Jonelle heard about every five or ten minutes.
She did what one usually did when managing these PR “branches” of X-COM: she gave out glossy brochures that either explained nothing in particular, or explained something that purported (erroneously) to have something to do with why you were really there. These brochures were masterpieces of misdirection, and they usually fooled most of the people most of the time. To the rest of the people, Jonelle spent at least one shift a day listening patiently nodding a great deal, and exercising her no-better-than-college-level German. None of these helped particularly, since for reasons of both content and expression, she couldn’t understand much of what she was listening to. People kept complaining to her about things that weren’t her fault, like the European Union’s farm subsidies, and the United Nations’ interference in Switzerland. And they generally did their complaining in the local dialect of Swiss-German, a variant called Urnerdeutsch (Andermatt being located in the Swiss canton called Uri). It was very difficult to make sense of. People tended to either sing it or cough it—sometimes both. This made for more than usually interesting complaints.
Worst of all, her office was situated between the best hotel/restaurant in town and a bakery that produced bread so good it was rumored that angels came down from God first thing in the morning to get breakfast rolls and the sliced light rye. Jonelle had to sit there and listen to people going on about silage allowances and non-mandatory bomb shelters while her stomach growled, and at the back of her mind, the issue of where to get money for that mind shield kept gnawing at her.
Ari took one afternoon shift in the office, but Jonelle quickly relieved him of this duty when she discovered that his German was even worse than hers, and that he was completely tone-deaf for the local accent. Instead, she kept him busy up under the mountain, seeing about the installation of the initial space dividers for the living quarters and so forth. Fortunately, this was all modular, and would go in fairly quickly. There were other concerns, such as where the new alien containment facilities would go. Irhil M’goun had been getting short of space for a while now, and Jonelle was keen to expand their holding facilities so that live alien research could also be expanded, to two or maybe three times as much as was going on at Irhil.
During their first day’s more exhaustive inspection of the under-mountain facility, Ari had found just the place for this. Down on the third level was a series of chambers hewn out of an isolated, projecting spur of the Chastelhorn mountain: Wildmannsalpli, it was called. These fifty-meter-wide chambers, carefully isolated from one another, had originally been used for ammunition storage and were designed so that if something should set the stuff off, the blast would be confined both from the other chambers and from the rest of the base. Except for multiple baffled and booby-trapped ventilation holes, there was no way in or out of them except through a long, narrow “bottleneck” tunnel where security would be easy to maintain. The whole mini-facility was completely surrounded—above, below, and on all sides—by granite a hundred feet thick. It would make a most satisfactory holding space for even the most dangerous alien.
That afternoon, near closing time, Ari came down to the PR office to brief Jonelle on how things were going. They took refuge in the back office, where they could watch the front through a venetian-blinded window but not be heard, and Ari started his briefing. To Jonelle’s amusement, however, it didn’t immediately concern the new base. He had spent a long time outside the front door, carefully wiping his shoes on the mat.
“There are about eight hundred cows up at the top of town,” he said, examining his boot soles carefully. “Did 1 step in anything?”
“No.” Jonelle sat down
at a small desk, which was covered ‘with paperwork and brochures and carefully written complaints waiting to be filed.
“They came right through the town. Have you ever seen anything like that before? It’s like the Wild West out there. And they had bells and flowers all over them. The bells I knew about. What’s with the flowers?”
“They’re awards.”
“What?”
“The cow that produces the most milk gets an award to wear.”
Ari burst out laughing. “You’re trying to tell me that was an awards ceremony!”
“Not as such,” Jonelle said. “But those cows and most of their herds have been up in the high pastures over by Gesehenen since May. This is when they bring them down, when the weather starts; to turn nasty and the grass growth falls off.”
“1 doubt the cows care much about the awards.”
“I don’t know… some of them looked pretty proud.”
“1 didn’t notice. I was looking at the big, mean guy at the front of the parade. Thought they gave him more flowers to keep him from getting jealous.”
“1 have news for you,” Jonelle said, grinning. “That was a she. Didn’t you look at the rear end? That’s unlike you.”
It was rare for Jonelle to get Ari to blush. She managed it this time. “You seem to know a whole lot about this all of a sudden,” Ari said, turning away and busying himself with a filing cabinet.
“I had a full mornings worth of briefings on the subject from the president.”
“The what?”
“The mayor, Ueli Trager. Präsident, the guy who presides—where do you think we got the word? It came from here, via France, I think. Anyway, that big cow up front, that’s the head cow of the herd, the pugniera. She’s the one who enforces the pecking order, since she’s at the top of it. She also scares off wolves and such.”
“I bet she does. Did the president give you a yodeling lesson, too?”
“He did not,” Jonelle said, pointedly ignoring the teasing. “Herr Trager did tell me, though, that there have been a lot of abductions and mutilations of cattle around here lately. People are getting very annoyed.”
