by Diane Duane
Ari stiffened, knowing what it was. It’s been three days since I’ve flown, he thought. Not that that was precisely a lifetime. But three days could remove enough of your edge to kill you.
DeLonghi slammed the receiver down. “Zurich. They’re in the middle of Zurich. A Battleship and a Terror Ship.”
Ari was up out of his chair and had already yanked the door open. “I’ll scrape the rest of a team together and get moving.”
“Colonel,” DeLonghi said, his voice oddly strained. “The regional commanders orders to me were quite clear. You are not to—”
“What was it you said,” Ari said softly, “about protection, Commander? And positions? I’m still speaking freely By permission.” DeLonghi blinked again. “You have no one else to send. Our people are all over the place. I just came in, I have half a crew with me, the other half can be assembled in about three minutes, and my Firestorm is in the hangar prepped and ready where I left her. Not that she’s likely to do any good in this case. I’ll have to take the Avenger…and you might need that Firestorm for something later. Meanwhile, I can at least do some good while you get the teams freed up to back me. Pull the Canaries team back when they’ve finished their intercept, and the Greek team then send them along.”
“I said it was a Battleship and—”
“Commander,” Ari said, “screw them. Screw them right into the ground. Which I will, if I get the chance. You mentioned protection? I’m going to get out there and do some. Thats my job, and yours. You have no other options, and neither do I…orders or no orders.”
He grinned, and only for a moment the ferocity showed. “You wanted command,” Ari said. “Enjoy. And when those other intercepts are finished with Zurich, get them back here and load them up again, because our cuddly friends out there aren’t finished with us. Call Medical and get them ready, too—we’re going to need them tonight. And before the others come back, whatever you do, don’t send out that last Firestorm! Because….” He
stopped himself from saying “she”; sometimes a pronoun could be too loaded. “It would not be typical of previous command…and besides, they’d know then that you’re empty.”
“Sir,” Ari added after a moment.
They simply looked at each other.
“Go,” DeLonghi said.
Ari nodded and went out the door, noticing—with, another odd pang—that, as he slammed it shut behind him, the old half-a-second-later thump of the dartboard was missing.
Odd, how such little things hurt.
In the darkness around the Hauptbahnhof, silence came and went. Every now and then it would be broken by gunfire, but the sound always stopped quickly. Where there was organized resistance, it soon ceased, as armed aliens came upon it and stopped it. No city police force was equal to this kind of onslaught.
On the Bahnhof itself, the alien Battleship squatted low and menacing, while smoke from electrical fires in the station and steam from broken pipes rose around it and wreathed it in fog. Down by Paradeplatz, civilians culled from other streets were being loaded into the Terror Ship, some stunned unconscious, some dead. Snakemen and Floaters came hurrying like worker bees, bringing more and more of the human cargo.
The Bahnhofstrasse holds some of the world’s most expensive real estate. There is not much residential housing there, the street being occupied mostly by stores, hotels, and banks. But in the little side streets between the Bahnhofstrasse and the Limmat River on one side, and the smaller river Sihl on the other, many apartments were tucked three and four stories up in buildings hundreds of years old. From these back streets, slowly, the sound of gunfire began again. The guns did not belong to the police.
The tempo of the aliens working in Paradeplatz began to quicken. They were used to some level of resistance, but normally this fell off quickly as the humans realized it did them no good. These humans, though, seemed slower to realize this than usual, and their gunfire was finding some marks among the less well-protected aliens who ventured down the winding back streets. As if in obedience to some overriding will, the percentage of better-armed and armored aliens foraging down those side streets began to increase. The ones servicing the ships, picking up more humans and stowing them, slowly came to the aid of the less well-defended aliens. They were safe enough—and no humans had yet been mad enough to try to approach the ships.
All this was as the aliens had predicted. Their food supplies would be well-augmented from this raid—and experimental supplies, as well. Their plan would continue unhindered.
Two hundred miles away to the east, a single Avenger was plunging through the night sky over Fribourg, heading for Lac de Neuchâtel and the Jura Mountains. It was taking advantage of the low clouds, and of being low— and it was giving Ari the willies.
“Where do you want me to turn, Boss?” said Rosie, the pilot. “Basel?”
He sat himself down in the spare chair, the fire-control position next to the pilot in the main cockpit, and shook his head. “No sooner than Colmar. Hang a right there. We’ll head straight over the Black Forest, come down on the other side of it near Schaffhausen, and then low and fast, straight for Zürich.”
“You got it. You want to take the hot seat then?”
“No,” Ari said. “Gunnery.”
“Gunnery?”
“We’ve got a sitting duck at the moment. If someone misses, I want it to be me. Don’t want to have to blame it on any of you guys.”
“The trouble with you, Boss,” Rosie said, “is that you don’t know how to delegate.”
Ari closed his eyes and laughed, just briefly He could remember Jonelle saying something like that, and not just once, either. “You may have something there. But this one’s mine. You just fly, and be glad I’m letting you do that.”
“Gosh, Boss, you gonna let us fight when we get there, or will we be stuck standing around and cheering?”
“Don’t get cute,” Ari said, but he was grinning. “My first interest is catching a Battleship just sitting there on the ground. I don’t intend to let them just waltz off with that thing. Get on the horn—tell the captain and the sergeants I want them up here for a fast briefing.”
“Yes, sir.”
Within five minutes, they were assembled in the cramped cabin, and those who couldn’t fit inside were at least standing within earshot. They looked at him somberly. “Is it true,” one of them said when Ari called them to order, “that we’re going to be the only craft responding to this call?”
Ari nodded. “Until the commander back at Irhil manages to free us up some backup. So I’m going to have to drop you people sequentially, and you’re going to have to work your way in from the perimeters. I know this is not our preferred method of working, but we’re short of options at the moment.”
He brought the city map up on the screen. “OK, here’s the scoop. We are, I believe, fully loaded.”
Captain Hecht nodded. “Four heavy weapons platforms are loaded,” he said, “and we’re carrying twelve soldiers. Six in armor.”
“OK. Take a good look at this. Here’s the central part of the city—it runs down either side of the main river, the Limmat. The river veers east just above the railway station. Farther down, there are a lot of bridges over that river. Now at the moment, all the aliens are still on the east bank, as far as we know. So I’m going to have Rosie take us through town in two passes. The first one is to take out that Battleship, if God smiles on us and the big ugly thing is still sitting where it was reported. I’m not likely to get more than one shot without it knowing exactly where I am, so that one’s got to count. I’m hoping that will be enough.” The hope was fervent. The Avenger was carrying a fusion-ball launcher, and he had heard that one “good one” correctly placed was enough to take down a Battleship. But this was not a weapon he had worked with frequently, and there were so many variables. The worst one was that the ship was on the ground. A miss, if that ship decided to move at the wrong moment, could destroy buildings all around the strike site and kill a lot o
f civilians, while possibly not doing what had been intended. And then there would be six long seconds before he could reload and come about again. During which time, God only knew how many directions the Battleship would have splattered him and his people in.
He put that thought forcefully aside. “Then we have to drop you folks to best advantage. Now, the biggest concentration of civilians is going to be south of the train station. I’m sure the aliens know that perfectly well, and are concentrating on it, rather than the industrial area full of factories and train tracks that’s a little farther north, or the Zurichberg and the Uetliberg, the two hills just past it. Not worth their time, and any of them that go that way will be very exposed and easy to pick off. My guess is that our cuddly friends’ll be heading south, first down the left side of the river and then the right, if we let them. But if we seal off those bridges first, that’ll be a big help right there. It’ll confine everything but the Floaters and Cyberdiscs to this side of the water—and those guys we can hunt down later if we have to.”
“What about the train station itself, Boss?” said one of the sergeants.
“That’s a problem. A lot of the aliens will probably be down there right now, since at any given moment there are usually about five thousand people in it. They’ll be having a field day. But they’re going to have to get the people up out of there and get them into that Terror Ship. That won’t be easy, or quick, especially since they’ve trashed the upper levels. It’s a good thing that they won’t have had time to get too many into the Battleship…which makes me feel not completely like a bastard for blowing it up. Once it’s done, there won’t be any more captives taken from the train station, anyway, which is probably going to be the aliens’ best source.”
There was a mutter from the sergeants. No one liked the idea of killing civilians they were meant to save, but all of them realized the occasional necessity. “Don’t blow it completely to shit, Boss,” the captain said. “Her Nibs won’t like it. All that Elerium scattered all over town….”
“I’ll try not to,” Ari said, and fervently hoped he would somehow be able to confine the damage. But if it was a choice between utterly destroying the Battleship and attempting to keep the ship partially intact and then having it get up and go elsewhere, he much preferred the former. It would be much easier to shamefacedly say to Jonelle, “Sorry, it went off while I was cleaning it,” and to take the blame for losing a lot of potential funds, rather than let the aliens have back a Battleship that they would certainly use against X-COM again.
“So,” he said. “I’m assuming they haven’t made it all the way down to the bottom of the Bahnhofstrasse, where it hits the lake. We can only hope. But when we make our second pass, I’m going to drop you people in the neighborhood of these bridges, on the far side.” He showed them the six main bridges connecting the left and right banks of the Limmat, like sutures over a long, straggly scar. “Cross them, and secure them.”
“Any preferred method, Boss?” said another of the sergeants. “There are only twelve of us.”
“I know that. How do you think I meant? Just blow ‘em up. The one by the station is the main priority, and the two really big ones, two-thirds of the way down, and the one by the lake. Take the others out any way you like. A few good hits with a rocket launcher will probably do it—they’re not very big. Once over, I want two teams to cross the Bahnhofstrasse and start working their way up it, and through the main street paralleling it on the left side. The other teams, come at it from the right side. The middle bridge there is about on a level with where we think the Terror Ship is. It’s the only place where there’s really room for the thing to put down, anyway.”
He pointed at Paradeplatz on the map. “The right side of the Bahnhofstrasse is part of the Old Town. It’s partially residential. A lot of twisty little streets, a lot of them go uphill or downhill kind of steeply, especially over by this church with the big clock, St. Peter’s.”
“Residential, huh?” Captain Hecht looked thoughtful. “We’ve been monitoring police band. They say there’s a lot of fire coming from over there—not police.”
Ari chuckled grimly. “It’s the Swiss army.”
“Huh?”
“Just about every man in this country has his gun and ammo at home in case there’s need for a sudden call-up,” Ari said. “I have a feeling some of the locals have decided this constitutes a call-up. Good for them. Just watch your backs and make sure they don’t shoot you in an excess of enthusiasm.”
The team leaders nodded. “OK. The southern teams push north, up the Bahnhofstrasse. We try to get them concentrated in one place, to make it a little easier for the reinforcements when they show up. And for us, of course.”
“When are the reinforcements going to show up, Boss?”
Ari looked at them. “Before we’re finished, I hope,” he said, and let them take the pun as they pleased. “We may just have to handle this ourselves—no telling.”
The sergeants looked at one another. “Just passing Basel, Boss,” said Rosie.
“Very good. Let me know when we hit Colmar.” To the team leaders, he said, “Are we all clear on the order of battle? Blow those bridges. Then come up around the bottom of the Bahnhofstrasse and start pushing upwards.”
“If reinforcements do show, Boss, where you going to put them?”
“East side,” Ari said, “and they can keep the aliens from breaking out that way, and push toward us. Then more for the train station. When we’ve handled the ones in the streets, we’re going to have a lot of mopping up to do, I’m afraid. It’s just strategically sound, from their point of view, to head down into the station’s lower levels. Hundreds of nooks and crannies, offices and hallways to hide in….” Ari shook his head.
“Thinking of blowing the place, Boss?” Rosie said from behind him.
“No…just too many civilians. It’s going to be the underground shopping center version of house-to-house fighting, I’m afraid.”
“‘Shopping center’?”
“There are about a hundred stores down there. Stay out of the deli in the front, by the escalators,” Ari said “The prices are god-awful.”
“Colmar, Boss,” Rosie said. “Coming about.”
“All right, everybody,” Ari said, “rejoin your teams. One pass for me, as I said. Three stops for you and your teams. You’ve got thirty seconds each before I button up and go. After that, I’m going to take a run at that Terror Ship and see whether I can’t disable it without killing all the kidnapped people inside. If I’m lucky, if it’s where I think it is…we’ll see. Good luck, all of you!”
They saluted and went out. Ari sat himself down, looking out. The cockpit windshield was a blur of charcoal-gray cloud. The Black Forest beneath them was lost in it, visible to radar but to nothing else. “How low are we?” Ari said to Rosie.
“Fifty feet above treetop, Boss. I’d rather not push it any further. Some of these trees get tall without warning.”
“Don’t push it on my account,” Ari said. He strapped himself in at the gunnery console, wiped his hands on his uniform, and got himself settled. This one shot was going to matter profoundly. If that Battleship got up in the air again, he was going to have a lot more trouble than he wanted.
“Schaffhausen,” Rosie said. “I’m starting descent. Increasing to two hundred knots.”
Ari had to swallow. Even though they were less than forty feet above the streets of the small city, he couldn’t even see the lights of the town, the fog was so thick. “Just be sure you don’t hit anything pointy.”
“No chance, Boss. I’ve got a nice, direct run-in. I’m running right down the S-bahn tracks, the local light rail. It’s just like playing with slot cars.”
It was beginning to feel like it, too. Rosie made a rather abrupt left turn that would have knocked Ari out of his seat had he not been strapped in. He gulped and got busy with the gunnery console. This was one of the few problems he had in this business: letting someone else fly It drove
him crazy
“Feeding heads-up to gunnery,” Rosie said. Overlaying the green of the radar on the gunnery screen, the false-color images of the heads-up display now appeared. “Two minutes to primary target. I’ll warn you at one. Passing the military airfield at Dübendorf.” She listened to something in her earpiece. “They see us, but they’re not doing anything.”
It’s all taken care of, said that cheerful voice in Ari’s memory. Was this prearranged, he wondered. Or had someone in the government received a quick phone call from a UN PR office down in Andermatt, or from “the Hall of the Mountain King”? No telling now No time to think about it.
Ari settled himself in the chair, did his best to become one with the gunnery screen. Odd, to be able to concentrate on shooting and not have to think about flying, as well—. That was the only good thing about this.
“One minute, boss. Acquisition.”
Up over the “virtual horizon” of the gunnery screen came the image of the Katenberg on the right, the Zurichberg on the left, and between them the depression marking the old river delta of the Limmat, on which Zürich was built. At the end of it all lay the Zürichsee, Lake Zürich, stretching off in a long blob of residual heat, now that they were close enough to get a residual heat signature, as well. Closer, brighter, a smaller blob of light. Concentrated. Other signatures, as well: the presence of Elerium was registering.
Ari hunched himself over the joystick, ignoring the thought of what the “real world” looked like through the windshield at the moment. This was all that mattered, those slowly rising octagons emerging from what once was the Hauptbahnhof.
“Trouble, Boss!” Rosie said. “Getting some movement.”
Ari swallowed. The Battleship had acquired their signal by now, he was very sure. He had hoped that approach from this side would win them a few precious seconds. Maybe it had. But the Battleship was moving, shouldering its way upward—though slowly. Very slowly.
Ari uncapped the fire button on the joystick. Range isn’t optimum, he thought. If I let loose with a fusion ball at this range, and I miss, the whole station and everybody in it’ll—
