by Diane Duane
“What’s dinner? Beef-o-pap?” Ari more or less shouted after him, but the shout cracked and turned into a squeak halfway, as Gyorgi shut the door behind him.
“He’s torturing me for fun, Jonelle,” Ari muttered. “Just because I told him Crud was a dumb game.”
“Serves you right.” She pulled up a chair to the bed and glanced around her. “I see Molson’s moved on.”
Ari nodded. “He said to tell you he said thanks, and he’ll be back.”
“Damn straight he will. He’s a good man.” She looked at Ari and smiled, an expression that felt so odd, after the strains of the last few days, that she was amazed her face didn’t crack. “And how about you? How’re you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been tap-danced on by elephants. The usual, after you have a brush with them.” Jonelle knew the feeling.
The use of the psi-amp itself was not without its strains and side effects, and when you had a mind-to-mind tussle with an alien, you tended to feel afterwards as though someone had been beating you with baseball bats—another result of the body’s tendency to render psi-sourced traumas into physical terms that it could understand. When the alien got the better of the argument, though, the physical effects were much more marked— but Jonelle had never felt it fair to complain about this afterwards. She had been glad enough still to be alive.
“Has Gyorgi said anything about when you’ll be able to go back on duty?”
“A few days, he thinks. But I am not going to survive three days of these.” He gave the milkshake a look that should have shattered the glass.
“Yes, you will. You just do what he says—he knows what he’s talking about. Remember Michaels, that squaddie who didn’t come out of a coma for six weeks….”
Jonelle broke off, for Ari was gazing at her with a most peculiar expression. “What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?” she asked sarcastically.
“I was going to ask you the same question. You look awful. You’ve got big circles under your eyes.”
She laughed, just a breath’s worth. “Well, I didn’t get to bed until late.”
“Overwork again. You’re going to ruin yourself, Jonelle—”
“I was out drinking with the locals, actually”
Ari blinked. “You mean your yodeling partner?”
“Ueli Trager, yes, and his friends.” Jonelle chuckled. “If the guys here ever get tired of Crud, I’m in a position to put them onto a new betting sport. Cow-fighting is more complex than you might think. I got about two hours’ sleep before I had to go out on a run. Bagged us a large Scout.”
“You had to go out on a—since when does the base commander do interceptions?”
“Since there was no one else available to handle it, and I had the necessary craft on hand but not enough other senior staff,” Jonelle said. She then added, in a slightly more dangerous tone, “Which I might have had, had you been available. Of course, when a colonel disobeys a direct order not to go out and do interceptions, but to stay in one place where he can advise everybody…”
Ari suddenly became very interested in the ceiling, the milkshake, and the bed curtains, one after another. “Well. I wondered if that might come up. I—”
“Not today,” Jonelle said, with a wry look. “Gyorgi would have my head, and rightly. But you and I are going to have a discussion about this at a later date. Yes, I’ve read the transcripts, and talked to the people you led out that night, and yes, I understand what you thought the case for going out was, and yes, you did a nice job in Zürich. But your job was not to be in Zürich.”
Ari opened his mouth. Jonelle looked at him. Ari shut his mouth again.
“Quite,” Jonelle said. “So let’s let that rest for the moment. But yes, I’m pretty wiped out, and I won’t mind the sight of my bed tonight…even though you’re not in it.”
Ari was still looking at her with a slightly astonished expression. “You were worried about me!” he said.
What seemed about a hundred possible responses to this statement went through Jonelle’s head in the space of about three seconds. She threw them all out and simply paused to look at the statement itself, unadorned. Then she smiled again.
“Yes,” she said. “But, for the moment anyway, I’m not anymore. You just lie here and drink the strawb-o-pap, and take the tests Gyorgi gives you, and do what’s necessary, because I need you back in the saddle in a hurry.”
He looked at Jonelle thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he said. “OK. But Commander—”
She raised her eyebrows at him.
“I’m sorry about the Avenger.”
“‘Sorry’ butters no bread, Colonel,” Jonelle said calmly. “I’m going to have to take it out of your pay. Let’s see: one Avenger at $900,000, plus fusion-ball launcher, that’s $242,000, plus one fusion ball used, let’s see, that’s $28,000….”
“Wait a minute! The one I used worked! I fried a goddamn Battleship with it!”
“The use wasn’t authorized. Well, maybe I can get you a discount. Let’s say $20,000. The total is $1,162,000—”
“What about the materials costs on the Battleship! What about all those alien corpses, and all that Elerium—”
“Belongs to Regional Command, I’m afraid. Sorry, Colonel. So, let’s see. Assuming you live another fifty years—”
“I’m beginning to hope I won’t,” Ari muttered.
“Well, think about it, it’s not so bad: only $23,000 a year and some loose change to pay back. Plus interest on the debt—”
“Commander,” Ari said rather desperately, “I feel fatigued. If the Commander would excuse me—”
Jonelle looked at him with what she hoped was an expression suggesting tolerance of a subordinate’s unavoidable inability to cope. “Why, of course, Colonel. I’ll drop by tomorrow, and we can continue working out the details.”
She got up and made for the door, turning quickly to hide her smile. He doesn’t know how I’m going to handle this when he’s better, she thought, and that’s just as well, for the moment…because I don’t know either.
“But, Commander—thanks for the report.”
She turned again, looking at him with slight surprise. “Which one?”
“The one you gave me the other night.” He swallowed, and that big, prominent Adam’s apple of his went up and down. “It was dark where I was…I was wandering around …I didn’t know where to go.” The mere admission made Jonelle’s heart wrench a little—he was always so certain whenever he opened his mouth. “I wandered around for a long time. I was so tired…I wanted to just lie down and not think about anything anymore. I almost did that. But after a while I heard something, someone giving a briefing, I thought, and I went over in that direction and stood outside the room. I thought it was a room, anyway The voice was muffled, like someone on the other side of a door. It was you, giving someone a briefing. Then after a while I knew it was you giving me a briefing. So I stayed.”
She swallowed too, and nodded, and turned again. “It was a good briefing,” Ari said, very quietly. “Thank you,” Jonelle said, as quietly, and left in a hurry.
Commander DeLonghi was somewhat surprised by the mellow mood in which he found Jonelle when they met. She was at some pains to let him know this wasn’t simply because she had had an opportunity to go out and handle an interception herself, thereby blowing off some steam. She was genuinely pleased by the way he had set his teams up, making sure that everyone had the right weapons and equipment to deal with the specific threats at hand. She spent their hour together not yelling at him (as Jonelle knew very well he had expected), but going over his ship and troop assignments in detail to make sure that he did as well next time, or better. I’m going to be up to my nose in Andermatt for the next little while, she thought, and the more positive reinforcement Joe gets from planning wisely and doing well, and being praised for it, the better.
After seeing him, Jonelle went off to do her rounds— the first really leisurely tour of the base she’d had since the Anderma
tt business broke over her so suddenly. She found the usual Crud tournament in progress, and the pilots and assault crews shouted cheerfully at her as she came through, a sound that reassured her. These were people who were clearly settling successfully into a changed routine, feeling confident about it and about their results the night before. Jonelle had found a long time ago that success spawns more success, and failure breeds failure—the latter more quickly than the former, unless a smart commander moved speedily to nip it in the bud. DeLonghi would be discovering this himself shortly, she was sure, as soon as his own confidence was in place.
In the engineering areas and the workshops she found business progressing pretty much as usual, but spent as much time there as she had with the pilots and assault crews. It was imperative for the “support” end of an X-COM base to understand that it was as just important as the flashier departments, and that firing guns was difficult for anyone until they had first been built. The workshop staff, as usual, chaffed Jonelle for wasting any time at all with the pilots, when the really important side of business was taking place down here, on the assembly line. She laughed, agreed with them completely, and went on her way.
Jonelle left the alien containment facilities for last, as usual. It was simply not her favorite part of the base even under the best of circumstances. She swung through fairly quickly, pausing longest with one of the teams that was doing an interrogation on the Snakeman leader her interception had caught. In one outer office, two scientists and one of Jonelles captains, Arwe Ngadge, were busy working on the alien with a mind-probe. The scientists were watching the readings from the probe on their monitoring console while Ngadge sat wearing a headset-mike and making copious notes on a legal pad. Behind the armor glass in the confinement module, the alien sat stiff, blank-eyed, and robotic-looking on the cells little bench.
As Jonelle looked in, Ngadge glanced up and smiled slightly. “Commander—half a second.” He took off his headset, handed it to one of the scientists, and said, “Look, try twelve and fifteen again—the responses to those were awfully equivocal.”
The scientist nodded, and Ngadge unfolded his dark, seven-foot-tall self, got up, and went out into the hall. Jonelle peered through the windows at their captive. “Anything useful, Arwe?” she said.
“Hard to say until we’re finished. But I confess that the thing I’m most interested in is why they had so many Silacoids aboard that ship.”
Jonelle nodded. Of all the alien species that X-COM had had to contend with since the invasion began, Silacoids were probably considered the least threatening of the lot. They were not aggressive on their own—other species, usually Mutons, controlled them via telepathy and cybernetic implants. They looked like nothing so much as lumpy boulders, and their whole purpose in life seemed to be eating rock and dirt. True, they were annoying enough when they attacked you—which they did in a very straightforward manner: by throwing themselves at you, with about the same results as if someone had chucked a hundred-pound rock in your direction. But they were easily blown up, or shot up, assuming you had some form of ammunition that could pierce the coat of stone that was a Silacoid’s skin. For her own part, Jonelle (when she thought about them at all) felt vaguely sorry for them, the only alien species that could possibly have provoked such a response. Their silicon-based physiology and their tiny brains suggested that the other, more intelligent alien invaders had simply picked the poor things up from their native planet, wherever it might be, and started using them as mobile, dim-witted weapons.
“When you send the stripping team up, Commander,” Ngadge said, “would you have them do some scanning? I’d like to make sure that no Silacoids were missed in the shuffle.”
“The way they generate heat,” Jonelle said, “I’d have thought we would have picked them all up without any trouble. But, yes, I’ll have it checked. Anything else from this gent?”
“Nothing much so far. Indications are that he was on a mission to an alien base somewhere—the hyperwave decoder records confirm that much. But where, or what it was about—” Ngadge shrugged. “At any rate, we’ll keep working. This guy is a lot more resistant than some we’ve worked with lately, and I’m curious to see just why.”
“Send a report along to Andermatt as soon as you have any ideas. Have you seen Jim Trenchard?”
“He’s down in his office.”
“Right. Thanks, Arwe.”
Jonelle strolled down the corridor to Trenchard’s office. He was sitting with the door open, as usual—she had often wondered how he could possibly work that way— humming to himself and hammering away at his computer keyboard. At the sound of her footsteps, he glanced up and said, “Commander! Got a moment?”
“Several.” She came in and sat down, glancing around in slight amusement, as she always did, at the increasing number of articles, photos, and clippings pinned to all four of Trenchard’s office walls. This was his filing system, apparently highly developed and effective, though it looked utterly chaotic. Pictures of elephants and pandas, and crayon drawings by one of his nursery-school-age nieces, were pinned over scribbled-on pages from Scientific American and The New England Journal of Medicine. Graphs and printouts mixed with handwritten notes and the occasional incomplete crossword puzzle. The only things on his two desks were books, piled up neatly, and a coffee mug full of pens and pencils.
Trenchard saved whatever he was working on at the computer, then leaned over to one side and started ruffling through some papers pinned to the wall. “I’ve got the initial research proposals and master schedule for the new place,” he said, giving up on that particular spot and leaning over the other way to try another set of papers, half underneath a map of the solar system, on which some wag had written, pointing out of the system and (theoretically) in the direction of the alien homeworlds, “WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS.““Right, here we are.”
He detached the sheaf of papers and handed them to Jonelle. She ruffled through them, impressed. “This whole thing? This must be a year’s worth.”
“Two.”
Jonelle glanced over the chapter headings and subheadings. Reapers: Floater liaison methods—defeating neural and cardiac redundancy—neural neutralization—aerosols? Sectoids: Neurocortical analysis—recombinant cloning: cloning back to type. Snakemen: Remote sterilization techniques? Second-generation in ovo sterilization.
“Haven’t missed much here, have you?” Jonelle said, admiringly. “Ambitious, to say the least. What am I supposed to mortgage to afford all these scientists and researchers, Jim?”
“Well, nothing much, Commander,” Trenchard said. “If you look at the costing analyses on the back few pages— that’s right.” Jonelle turned to them and found herself looking at a very professional estimate of the next two years’ earnings at Andermatt, based on her first thirteen months at Irhil M’Goun, and showing estimated growth of the new base’s income and ways in which part of that income could be used to fund the new researches.
“If I didn’t know better,” Jonelle said, “I’d think you’d been bribing my secretary for these figures.”
“Hardly any need for that, Commander,” Trenchard said, sitting back in his typing chair and stretching a little. “It’s common knowledge in the base what comes in over a given week, in terms of Elerium and alien alloys and so forth. Notice that nothing much is said about outgoings.” He smiled slightly. “Not my table, so to speak. But the market values of these things are all well enough known.”
She nodded, put the sheaf of papers down. “I’ll look these over in more detail…but if you’re as effective at Andermatt as you have been down here, I’m hardly going to quibble. Who are you recommending I leave handling the supervision of research down here?”
He looked a little shocked. “I’d hoped to manage both ends myself, Commander. There are things going on down here I’d hate to have to drop in the middle. My research assistants are OK, I suppose, but….”
“All right, all right!” she said, and chuckled a little, for
he was starting to talk faster and faster, always a bad sign. “Look, Jim. Are you sure you can handle a load like that? I’d hate to have the researches down here wind up getting slighted while you’re getting the Andermatt end of things up to speed.”
He let out a long breath, then grinned a little. “It’s always hard to let go, isn’t it?” Trenchard said. “I’ll reassess, if you like. But truly, Commander, I think I can manage. I’ll have to delegate a little more at this end, is all.”
“Good man,” Jonelle said and glanced around the walls again. “So let me take this ‘home’ and look at it. Meanwhile, how’s your own work going? The business I interrupted you in the other night.”
“Pretty well. A lot more raw material to work with, lately, thanks to the colonel.”
“Enough for your uses?”
Trenchard laughed a little ruefully. “I’m not sure a whole planetful would be enough…. Well, maybe it would…but it would still leave me with unanswered questions, I’m sure. The line of investigation I’ve been pursuing, the question of energy transport to and from the cells of the Ethereals’ bodies, and specifically into and out of their brains, is probably going to elude us for a good while yet. The trouble is that you need to have clearly formulated questions to ‘ask’ the research material, and finding the right questions to ask….” He sighed. “The ones I’m stuck with right now are fairly general.”
“Such as?”
“Well, the biologist’s basic one, when looking at any new species. What do you have to do to a species, in the evolutionary sense, to make it turn out this way? That’s the one that usually gives you a sense of where to start work, depending on your intentions toward the species in general—whether you want to help it be more efficient, or stop it, kill it. What trials, what twists and turns in its home environment, what disasters or encroachments from other species, can cause the changes from whatever the original form was to what you see before you? And how do those changes reflect on its life cycle now?”
