X-COM: UFO Defense

by Diane Duane

  Plasma fire stitched the air all around them. Rosie did something sudden at her console, and the Avenger lurched upward and sideways through the air as she plunged toward the ruined train station. The ferocious lines of fire stitched along and upwards after them, the only thing visible through the fog. “Gonna drop her real quick, Boss,” she said. “Three seconds—two—”

  Fire or not? Hold it just for a second more— The bottom dropped out of the world. Ari swallowed and kept his eye on the screen, on his target. The Battleship was still rising, but not as fast as it should have. What the hell—is it caught on something? An infrared trace was showing, a faint network of residual heat, like a spiderweb tangled around the leftward end of the Battleship, and the right-ward one, where the ship had sunk into the structure of the building— .

  Now, Ari thought, and fired.

  There was always a moment after you hit the fire button, some X-COM people said, when the fusion-ball projector seemed to hold its breath and think about whether to blow up what you fired it at, or to blow you up. That moment came and went. A blur, a blob of light like a small sun, leapt away from the Avenger and struck the Battleship just right of its middle.

  The night lit up, and everything around the half-destroyed train station showed clear in an actinic light like lightning for a long, long few seconds as the fusion ball did its work. Rosie veered east to miss the glare, then plunged on past the station, now visible (if nothing else was) through the fog. She had a look at it while Ari stared at his screen and tried to make sense of it.

  “Half a minute to your first stop, Boss,” she said. “Looks like you left some of that ship, but I don’t think it’ll be going anywhere soon. That stuff was all tangled around it—some kind of iron or steel reinforcement, I think. Meantime, the buildings around are still standing. Nice shooting.”

  “Super,” Ari said. “Let’s get the first team out. When we’ve dropped everybody, we’ll go have a shot at that Terror Ship and see if we can’t cripple it, too. Meanwhile, I’m going to go put on my armor.” He undid the straps, got up, headed downstairs. “And then I’m going to get me a psi-amp and go hunting.”

  Four

  Five hours later, the hunting was nearly over, though large parts of it had not gone according to anyone’s expectations. Jonelle met the remains of the first assault teams where the pilot of her Skyranger had dropped her, outside the Hauptbahnhof. She was in heavy armor, her flying suit— only sensible, since the area was not yet completely secured, and X-COM would take it most unkindly if a regional commander should be taken out by a chance shot from a Sectoid sniper. The use she would have preferred for the armor was to go down into the depths of the Hauptbahnhof and be busy in other ways. But she couldn’t so indulge herself—not anymore, and particularly not now.

  She met with Colonel Amesson, who had been sent to Zürich after his interception team finished its work in the Canaries. Together, with a couple of squaddies as de facto bodyguards, they walked down the Bahnhofstrasse, past the broken shop windows and the burned-out stores, and he briefed her.

  “It seems as if the Battleship fell afoul of the cast-iron reinforcements in the old building,” he said. “There was nothing like that in the new construction to give it any problems, but what it did sink through seems to have slowed it enough for Colonel Laurentz to stick the spear in its side, so to speak. When my team got in, we managed to get out about ninety civilians who were trapped in the ruble.”

  Jonelle nodded and looked around her. “How are they doing?”

  “About eighty percent survival, the hospital says. Then the Avenger dropped its assault teams, just the other side of the river,” Arnesson said., “The squads came across, destroyed the bridges, killed some Floaters they found on their way over, and started working northward. They met heavy resistance on the way up, and Colonel Laurentz broke off his attack on the Terror Ship down in Paradeplatz and flew down to help them. That’s when the Avenger went down. The aliens had two teams with blaster launchers waiting down there. I suspect they were waiting for an attack from the south. If Ari had come in straight, he’d have been dead, and all his teams with him—not even an Avenger could have taken both those things in the teeth.”

  Jonelle nodded. Leaving strategic considerations aside, Ari had a love of sneakiness for its own sake. He would never go straight when he could go crooked. Jonelle used to tease him, Your brain could be used for a corkscrew, you know that? And he would laugh.

  “The Avenger went down just on the lakeside,” Amesson said, “into the water. That was what saved his and Melanchion’s lives. They both got out OK—they were both armored, and Ari came out with a psi-amp. The crews say that to have heard Ari, as he went down, you’d have thought he was discussing what bus stop he was going to get off at, he was so casual. In the middle of ditching, he was still giving them instructions on how to attack the craft in Paradeplatz, and insisting on casualty reports.”

  “I wouldn’t mind one of those myself,” Jonelle said, a little tartly.

  Arnesson looked at her in some surprise. “Weren’t you given one already? My apologies, Commander—there’s been a breakdown in communications somewhere. Of a total of thirty-four deployed, we lost ten.”

  “So many,” she said softly.

  “It’s a miracle it wasn’t more, Commander. We were spread very, very thin on the ground here, and if the aliens had had even a slight advantage in numbers or tactics, a whole lot more of us would be dead. As it was, our people fought like madmen…and the aliens, a lot of them, didn’t seem to be functioning up to full efficiency after the Battleship went.”

  “The masterminds were on it,” Jonelle said, “or at least so I suspect.”

  “Some of them, at least. We got several stunned Ethereals of several ranks off it, and various other dead ones. They’ve gone down to Irhil M’goun to be held until Doctor Trenchard gets back down there from ‘Moria.’”

  Jonelle smiled slightly. “Yes, he would want to be there for the interrogations. That’s fine.” She lost the smile, then, as they came to the Zürich branch of the EA.O. Schwartz toy store. It was burned out, the biggest and most beautiful of the antique rocking horses in the front window lying on its side on a carpet of shattered glass, plasma burns marking its side. He’ll never buy me that horse now. Not that he could have anyway—the bloody thing costs about half a year’s salary…and where would I have kept it?

  “At any rate, the initial teams’ assaults were surprisingly successful, despite the aliens’ resistance. We had a little unlooked-for help, too: a lot of the locals took exception to the terror raid and sniped at the aliens from their windows. Some of them died for their trouble…a lot of them did us some good. While the first-in teams were working north, Colonel Laurentz and his pilot made their way north as well, joining up with the southernmost team about twenty minutes into their attack. They were pushing north to join another team when they ran into an attack group of aliens apparently sent to stop them. That was where about a third of our casualties came, right there. There were two Ethereal leaders with the force, a lot of Snakemen, and some Chryssalids. The team killed the Chryssalids first, as you might expect, and then started working on the others. But they came under psi attack. According to the survivors, Colonel Laurentz engaged one of the Ethereals with his psi-amp and killed it—but the other one got control of several of his people and then forced them to attack him. There was a battle for control of their minds, apparently. Colonel Laurentz won it—just—but must have sustained some blow to his mind. He went down, and the teammates he had been protecting went down with him—a couple of them died. The others are on their way back to Irhil.”

  Jonelle nodded calmly “And the colonel?” she said, as though no more concerned about him than about anyone else.

  “After the fighting finished in this area, a recovery team made pickup on him and his teammates. He seems never to have regained consciousness after he went down, Commander. He was shipped down to Irhil with the rest of them
. As far as I know, he’s still comatose. I haven’t heard any updates, though we should have one for you shortly.”

  “Very well. So. That particular alien attack was resolved, more or less in our favor, I take it. What happened to that other Ethereal?”

  “It must have been considerably weakened by Colonel Laurentz’s struggle with it, Commander. It was stunned and taken prisoner a little later, with surprisingly little trouble.”

  They stopped a block north of Paradeplatz, looking up at a shot-out window. Someone had draped a Swiss flag out of it at some stage of the fighting, and the flag lay limp and somewhat singed around the edges. “Around that time,” Arnesson said, “my team came in. We put down troops and Heavy Weapons Platforms between the Limmat and the Sihl and began a sweep eastward to meet Colonel Laurentz’s troops. The team from Greece landed at the train station and headed down inside.

  “I’ll want a more detailed report from them shortly,” Jonelle said, “but what’s the general story down there?”

  “About six hundred civilians dead. A lot of Chryssalids and Zombies—we had to kill all those, of course. A whole lot of dead aliens of various kinds. At least eight of our own assault team members.” Arnesson looked somber, and Jonelle guessed that some of those were his own people. “The station is in a bad way. Once we’ve got all the dead and wounded out of there, the place will probably have to be demolished.”

  “To think they just renovated it,” Jonelle said. “Well, never mind. So the assault teams consolidated….”

  “Yes, Commander. And several HWPs joined forces and began concentrating on the second alien craft, the Terror Ship. Colonel Laurentz was very insistent that we shoot the site up thoroughly.”

  “The site?” Jonelle said, looking at him curiously.

  For the first time in all this, Arnesson, always something of a sobersides, cracked a small, thin smile. “You’d better have a look.”

  They walked on down the Bahnhofstrasse to the point where it bends slightly crossing Pelikanstrasse, and Jonelle gazed down at Paradeplatz, past the wreckage of burned and derailed trams—and opened her mouth, and shut it again.

  The Terror Ship was tipped over on one end, sticking out of what appeared to be a large hole in the street. As they got closer, Jonelle could see that the upper levels of the hole were full of cables and conduits, and what appeared to be several hallways or corridors, some ten or fifteen feet under ground-level proper.

  As they approached, they were joined by Mihaul O’Halloran, who came over to them and took off his helmet long enough to wipe some sweat out of his eyes. “Here’s the colonel’s catch of the day, Commander,” he said. “The Battleship was nice shooting, but this one was just plain old wickedness in action. I’d give a pretty penny to know how he knew what was under here.”

  “What did he tell you, Mihaul?” Jonelle said as they walked over to the hole to examine it more closely.

  “Not much, ma’am. He was crashing in the lake about that time, and after that, most of the way up here he was busy fighting. He couldn’t give us detailed explanations. He just said to me, ‘Do me a favor,’ he says, ‘see the ground all around that thing? Shoot it out.’ And I said, ‘What, Boss?’ I mean, ‘Sir.’ Ma’am.”

  “Never mind, Mihaul.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Well, he said it again, ‘Just do that. Get whatever firepower you can. Grenades, rocket launchers, heavy laser, I don’t care. Concentrate on where the tracks are, first. Then just dig yourself a hole to China. Get some help. And you’ll want to post a guard afterwards.’”

  Mihaul shrugged. “So we did. It took the devil’s own time to get anywhere with this. I mean, ma’am, we didn’t see what point shooting at the ground was, anyway. And of course the aliens inside were shooting at us all the time. But after a little while, the ship started to sag over sideways—as if something under it were weakening. So we got two of those HWPs in as quick as we could, and let them really have a go at it. The ground gave way then, all right! Not just the ground, as you can see. And when it was over, the ship just fell right into the hole with almost all its weapons ports under the surface, and it couldn’t shoot anything much after that but this underground stuff, nor go anywhere much after that but toward China. We had plenty of leisure to storm it then. We got out every single civilian that they’d stowed in it, without damaging it at all. Six captures, ma’am—Ron over there will give you the whole list. And,” Mihaul said, and laughed softly, “we saw why the colonel said we might need to post a guard.”

  They came to the edge of the hole. The Terror Ship was tilted down into it at a forty-five degree angle, with God-knew-what alien lubricants spilling down from it, and water from broken pipes, and snapped wires and cables fizzing all around, so that everything stank of ozone and Lionel trains. And down there, under the ship, scattered higgledy-piggledy with corpses of Snakemen and Chryssalids, was the gold—the gold that lay in the sunken vaults all up and down the length of the Bahnhofstrasse, vaults shared and policed by the Big Three banks, secret to most, known of in an abstract way by many, though this was not the kind of information that the Michelin guide normally reveals. There it lay, gold in heaps and piles, bars and bars of it, crushed and scattered under the remains of the Terror Ship, melted by the heat of all the weaponry concentrated on that spot since the attack that Ari ordered began—gold running away in little rivulets and puddling like bright coins, here and there still glowing red, most places just gleaming dully in wriggly, abstract sculptures and splashes on the sub-floor forty feet down.

  Mihaul shook his head and laughed. “So we posted the guards, ma’am. Though I think anyone nuts enough to come here and try to steal probably deserves some.”

  “Mihaul,” Jonelle said, “you’re dead right. Well, the Swiss police will be along shortly to handle this. Meanwhile…let’s go up to the station and see how they’re doing.”

  All the way up, Jonelle received reports, asked questions and answered them, and started settling the dispositions of the teams once they’d gotten the Swiss started on the cleanup. She sent for a stripping team to start work on the Terror Ship—it would be a little while before the Battleship was ready to be stripped of all but the easiest things, such as the Elerium. I’ll have the funds for that new mind shield now, Jonelle thought, even a new hyperwave decoder. That was possibly the brightest aspect of this whole situation. But all the time, as she gave orders and received information, Jonelle could not get rid of the memory of a night when she and Ari had been out on leave in Paris, and she had come back from shopping to find him exchanging terrible ethnic jokes with someone who (he later told her) was a genuine “Gnome” of Zürich, a junior manager with one of the Big Three banks, and who was full of interesting stories. Jonelle had afterwards laughed at the idea, and teased Ari for the better part of half an hour about how he so hated eating or drinking by himself that he’d strike up a conversation with anybody, even a banker.

  And it was true. Oh, please, let it go on being true. Oh, Ari, please, don’t die!

  “So we have a mole,” she said much later to DeLonghi, who looked at her out of a face pale with weariness, and now creased with shock.

  “Here?”

  “Possibly. Somewhere in the organization, certainly, or possibly among the Swiss. In any case, we have to look at who knows about the building of the new base, and start turning over some rocks to see what we find.”

  DeLonghi sighed. “Commander, with all due respect, I think we have more immediate problems. We’re very shorthanded right now. Half our craft are down for maintenance of some kind. Several are seriously damaged and won’t fly again before the end of the week, no matter how many engineering crew we put on the job—and we only have so many.”

  “I’ve requisitioned more,” Jonelle said. “Some of the Andermatt staff will be coming down here.”

  “It’s not going to be enough,” DeLonghi said.

  “Commander, if you’re suggesting that we stop construction on the new base because we’re hav
ing problems down here, I’m afraid that’s not an option that’s open to us—and senior command would laugh themselves blue if they heard it. After cashiering us, of course.”

  He looked more shocked than previously. “No, Commander, I didn’t—”

  “Good,” Jonelle said.

  “But we’re still left materially unable to deal with any serious threat. We had an Interceptor destroyed, another one that’s been seriously damaged and will be out of commission for about a week. One of our Skyrangers limped home on half its propulsion system—that one needs about a week in the shop, as well. One of our Lightnings was destroyed. One of the Firestorms that went out yesterday was damaged. The Avenger—” He shrugged. “That’s worse—it’s a write-off.”

  Jonelle smiled slightly. “That’s what the insurance company says?”

  DeLonghi threw a look at her that suggested he wasn’t wild about the joke. “Commander,” he said, “it’s just a blessing that it was empty when it went down.”

  “It’s not exactly a blessing,” Jonelle said. “It has to do with Colonel Laurentz’s disposition of the craft, I believe. He knew well enough that you don’t keep an Avenger in the air with a full complement any longer than you have to. Which brings me to another subject.”

  DeLonghi swallowed. “What was he doing in that ship? My orders to him were most specific. He was not to put himself in the front line.”

  “Commander,” DeLonghi said, with the air of a man who knows he’s already beaten, “you know the situation last night. You’ve seen the transcripts and the timings. The colonel put a very compelling case to me. And your orders to me also required that I was to take his advice, unless I could find compelling reasons to the contrary. There were none. There were two large reasons sitting in Zurich, which meant when he said he was going, I had to let him. If the commander can suggest to me what she would have done in my place, in that situation—I’ll listen gladly, and note the lesson for later.”