by Diane Duane
“And he’s been doing all these interrogations,” Ari said, musing. “Who’s been interrogating who?”
Jonelle nodded. “My thought exactly. He likes them, Ari. It’s something I don’t think I really saw until the other night…and then I thought it was just a quirk. It bothered me so much, I couldn’t see it right away even then. He likes them. He said to me, ‘This is something we need to look at for human beings.’ He really thinks that their way of existence is an option for us.”
“Effing traitor,” Ari muttered. “He needs to be shot.”
“No,” Jonelle said. “That’s the one thing we can’t do.”
“Whaddaya mean ‘can’t’? One bullet would do it. I must have a gun here somewhere.” He made as if to get out of bed.
She pulled him back down. “No, if he is a spy I want him right where he is. The thing to do with a spy or a traitor is to give him the mushroom treatment.”
“Sorry?”
“Keep him in the dark and feed him shit. But most importantly, don’t let him know you know he’s a spy. Trenchard will feed our disinformation to his friends among the aliens, which suits me just fine. And I’d like to know how he does it. I’m having comms monitored…but it’s occurred to me that there might be other ways. Neural tissue….” She leaned back against the pillow, against Ari. “Supposing that he’s managed to acquire some of their telepathic ability? If information about this projected raid gets to them via that route, and there’s no trace in comms, we’ll know that’s how he did it. They might be able to read him like a book if he comes out from under the mindshield. That would be worth knowing about… and if it works for him that way, maybe he’ll have discovered a weapon we can use on our own side, later. There’d be a nice irony in that.”
She smiled grimly. “But no matter how they get the information, the aliens will know there’s no base where I’ve announced it. I’m sure they’ll be delighted to let us go off on a wild goose chase and attack some mountain with nothing in it, instead of the one I’ve already had some preliminary scans done on, the one that’s full of the Silacoids they’ve been importing, and which have been tunneling it out for God knows how long. What they won’t know, until too late anyway, is that we know exactly where they are, and that we’re going to hit them a week and a half before I said we were. Other X-COM commanders have, indeed, made the same announcement I made tonight. It’s not just to back up my story: Main Command is interested in finding out whether other bases have spies working in them. We’ll see where this disinformation surfaces, and in what shape. Meantime, your business, and the other colonels’, and mine, is to make sure…in the most easygoing and casual kind of way, without it particularly showing…that the attack is ready to happen a week and a half before the announced date.”
“And what about Trenchard?”
“The day the balloon is really scheduled to go up,” Jonelle said, “I’ll be having him arrested and held incommunicado until it’s all over. Then I’m going to come down and debrief him myself. Possibly with a nail file.”
Ari looked at the expression on Jonelle’s face, and swallowed.
“I’m beginning to regret ever having brought him to Andermatt,” she said. “He knows where it is, and I can only assume that they know where it is. Our survival so far rests on two factors: that Trenchard doesn’t know the exact locations under the mountain of some of our facilities here, and maybe the aliens don’t want to risk exposing their spy. By the time they realize we’re on to him…it’ll be too late for them, or at least for their base under Scopi.”
Ari nodded. “Weird name,” he said. “What does it mean?”
Jonelle smiled in grim amusement, as she had when asking Duonna Mati about this through Ueli, and closed her eyes. “It means ‘target.’”
A week and a half passed, and there came the only day of the week when even the Swiss sleep late: Sunday morning. Having gone to town early on another Sunday to look into some other matter, Jonelle had found herself wondering how they managed it. The chapel at the bottom of town, Saint Peter’s and Paul’s, and the one at the top of the town, Saint Kolumban’s, began ringing their bells at eight forty-five, in what Jonelle could only describe as “dueling churches,” a four-toned fight that went on deafeningly for half an hour, and certainly left everyone in town wide awake. It was, Jonelle had been told, traditional: not only an announcement that church services were about to start, but a sure remedy against demons, which could not stand the sound of bells. Much earlier than bell-time on this particular Sunday, though, Jonelle had set about her business: exorcising the local demons, as permanently as possible.
It went off like clockwork, in the initial stages—almost precisely like clockwork, for Jonelle had started to work out the timings on that first night when she came back from Andermatt after seeing Duonna Mati, and since then she had had plenty of time to refine them.
Everything would have seemed quiet enough, in the dawn. In those mountain fastnesses, in fair weather, dawn can be unearthly still: not a whisper of wind to blow the snow out into the “banner” that so often streams from the sides of mountains like Scopi, not even enough to trigger the veil of mist caused by the differential in temperature between the air updrafting along the mountainsides and the colder air above. In the silent dawn, Scopi reared its graceful peak against a sky of the purest pellucid royal blue at the zenith, fading down to crimson-rimmed peach at the jagged horizon, and everything held its breath and was still.
The sound that slowly leached into the silence, breaking it, echoed from the walls of Piz Rondadura and Piz Gannaretsch and all the other mountains around: a high, singing whine, slowly growing stronger, scaling up like the screech of an increasingly angry eagle. Nothing moved on the mountain in any kind of reaction; nothing lived there to move. But the screech grew more deafening, echoing more loudly from the mountains around and, abruptly, a flash of motion appeared from the south to match it.
It was a single Avenger, coming low along the treacherously wiggly line of the Lukmanďer Pass, zigging and zagging madly from one cliff-bound wall of the pass to the other, as if the pilot had had too much to drink the previous night, or wanted to look as if he had. At the southern end of Lai da Sontga Maria, the Avenger dove straight toward the surface of the lake and skimmed along it so low that an unprepared observer might have thought the pilot was about to take up powerboating. The thin skin of ice on the water cracked under him from the noise of his engines and the pressure of their thrust. Twin plumes of water burst up and out of the lake behind the Avenger as it skimmed along the length of it, no more than three feet above the lake’s surface, and seemingly made straight for the automated hydroelectric dam at the northern end. At the last possible moment, the Avengers pilot pulled up in what could have passed as the second leg of a right angle, and headed straight for the zenith.
Now the mountain spoke. Plasma fire burst from the eastern and southern sides of it, lancing out at the Avenger—but the pilot had other ideas. The Avenger angled around hard toward the northeastern side of Scopi, the one most nearly vertical. His craft made a sound like a giant cough, and a fusion ball leaped out from it and struck the mountain right in the middle of the slope called Puoza. In a great bloom of lightning, fire, and snow vaporized instantly and explosively to steam, the side of the mountain blew in.
There had been a door there, once, clearly marked in infrared view by an eye-shaped hot spot. The main question about this door had been, was it hardened? When the smoke and steam and the fire of the fusion ball cleared away, the answer was plain enough. Metal still showed there—badly buckled, but still not breached.
A routine had been prepared for this possibility. About six different craft descended on the mountain from all directions, peppering it with missies, plasma beams, and cannon and laser fire. More defensive fire erupted from the mountain and the attacking craft veered and dodged, trying to keep from destroying one another, as well as from being destroyed themselves. At least with the mountains exit d
oor damaged, there seemed no danger of alien ships coming out, so for the time being, the attacking X-COM vessels busied themselves with targeting the aliens’ defensive facilities. One Interceptor took a direct hit up its six, and it and its pilot went out together in a spectacular fireball that crashed on Scopi’s slopes. The snow went black with ash, where it wasn’t scoured off the mountainside by the heat. Twisted wreckage tumbled down Scopi’s side and fell steaming into the lake.
But only a second or so later, the Avenger—with Ari in the driver’s seat—came roaring ‘round the mountain and let the “front door” have it with another fusion ball. A globe of lightning crashed into the mountainside, clinging there, random discharges forking and flickering from it— and this time, the door blew into fragments. When the steam and the fireball cleared away, all that remained of the door was a jagged, metal-edged hole. The Avenger dove away to the north, executing a virtuoso victory roll complete with showy but unnecessary hesitations every ninety degrees.
In the cockpit of the Lightning from which she was leading the attack, Jonelle grinned evilly inside her armor and said softly down her commlink, “Go.”
Their full complement of craft went in: everything from Irhil M’goun, everything from Andermatt, everything that Omaha and China could spare them. This was just as well, for immediately thereafter, all hell broke loose as alien ships leapt out of the ruined, but somewhat widened, opening. Small and medium and large Scouts, an Abductor, a Terror Ship.
Between the Abductor and the Terror Ship, like a swallow diving between two eagles, the Avenger, twisting and sliding between bursts of fire from the mountain, angled in and went straight through the blasted door. People on one Lightning in the attack group, and on others if they chanced to be tuned in to the commander’s chat frequency, were almost deafened by a furious shout of “You utter asshole, what the eff are you doing!”
While the aerial battle went on outside, several other ships followed the Avenger in.—these by design, instead of by opportunity. They flew into a huge, empty cavern filled with smoke and flying debris, for the Avenger had immediately fired at, and disabled, the Harvester ship presently sitting on the floor of the cavern. Weapons fire was also everywhere, but the X-COM ships put down regardless, opened up, and let their assault teams out.
Jonelle was with one of them. “By the numbers,” she said down her commlink to the assault teams listening to her. “Pathfinders, go do your thing, and Godspeed. Immediate assault, with me—”
By the time all the craft were empty, there were about thirty X-COM people, all in either power or flying suits, on the floor of the main cavern, and all armed with heavy plasmas, small launchers, or better—blaster launchers. They began by simply sweeping the place clean of every alien that got in the way. The problem was that it would not stay clean; more and more kept flooding up from the lower levels.
This was something Jonelle had expected. The scans she had managed to conduct, ever so quietly, over the last week and a half had shown her that Scopi was a warren of tunnels, chimneys, and deep-delved caverns. The upper level, the “hangar” level, would have to be secured first; then her people would have to work their way down. Securing the whole facility might take hours, and kill them all. They did not have hours to spend, or that many lives. It was Jonelles uncomfortable job to decide when enough lives had been spent, and to call for the final intervention that would destroy the alien base and end the battle.
At the same time, they could not destroy the base before being sure that all possible information and useful materiel had been removed, that everything that could be saved had been saved. The scans had shown that on the first and second levels down, there were larger “delvings” that were probably labs and armories. These had to be sacked if possible, destroyed if not. Farthest down were tunnels, into which the aliens would probably retreat for a last-ditch defense. In those, Jonelle had less interest. They could, and would, be sealed by the last destruction. But that was a little farther along. By her timing, no more than an hour….
On the floor of the main level, everything was smoke, laser fire, plasma eruptions, explosions—the air and the stone shook with them. There was a huge crash off to one side as the Avenger came down too hard on the stone floor. It was perhaps just luck that it came down on a party of Zombies, all of which immediately died, hatching out many new premature but savage Chryssalids in their stead. A few of one of the assault teams got busy on them with incendiaries.
More aliens came pouring up, and Jonelle found herself, as always, with less and less time to think about her timings, and more and more aliens to shoot at. She had a small, intent bodyguard of five to protect her, besides her flying armor, and she had a heavy plasma. With that, she got busy. I’m the cleaning woman, she thought, and concentrated on cleaning the main floor of every alien she might see. There was little trouble about this until a big force of Snakemen came slithering and hissing across the floor toward her and her group, maybe fifteen or twenty of them at once. Jonelle lost track of how long these kept them busy. As fast as she and her team could burn them down, more Snakemen came, a little army of them, into the teeth of better weaponry than they carried, trying to overwhelm Jonelle and her team by sheer force of numbers. Numbers were not going to be enough, though. The bodies began to pile up around them, a wall of writhing, persistent snake meat with blasted-off patches of scorched and peeling scales flaking off them. That god-awful, sweet smell of burnt flesh somehow always reminded Jonelle of Chinese food, and always put her off it for days after a raid. After what seemed an eternity, but was probably only fifteen minutes or so, she and her team found themselves with a moment to breathe, and nothing to shoot at for a few seconds. “OK,” she said, peering through the smoke and the tumble and scatter of destroyed craft and dead aliens, through which her people moved like deadly ghosts, firing at anything that moved and wasn’t one of them. “Report. How are we—”
That was when something caught her mind by its scruff, and shook it. Irrational terror flooded Jonelle. The assault troops around her, her bodyguard, dropped their weapons and collapsed, wailing, shrieking with fear.
Jonelle froze with the immediacy of the fear. She had never been a screamer; she was the kind of person who froze when she felt death coming, and watched it, silent, her voice stuck in her throat. She watched it come now, dark, drifting along the floor toward her, over the rubble and the corpses: a shrouded form like an alien Grim Reaper. Something concealed within the dark robes veiling that form spoke, intimately, to her mind. Not with words, but the feeling said, You know us too well. You know things about us that cannot go any further. Therefore, die.
The hand of fear squeezed her heart. Jonelle gasped, trying to get her breath past the ice in her chest, the lump of fear that was growing, that would force the breath out of her body, the warmth out of her bones, the life out of her brain….
And abruptly the cold “hand” dropped her. While plasma fire racketed over her head, and stun bombs howled and smoke drifted by, Jonelle groveled on the floor, gasping, trying to remember why she was there and what her name was. She looked up—
—to see an armored form standing straight and still in the smoke and the laser fire, staring at the silent, hovering form of the Ethereal, which hung still and stared at him. Ari stood there, in his own armor, with his psi-amp. The Ethereal faced him. The air practically itched with the strain of the two minds grappling together—and then Ari laughed out loud.
“Sorry, pal,” he said between gritted teeth. “The last one tried that trick. Now I know what to do about it!”
For a moment there was silence. Then the Ethereal wavered, turned to flee, and was ripped apart by a burst of auto-plasma fire.
Normality reasserted itself as Jonelle struggled to her feet and helped her bodyguard get up. “Come on,” she said, throwing a glance at Ari, “work to do. Come on—”
Another sound was added to the screaming of the aliens” a bizarre roar. “What the—” Jonelle said, and turned.<
br />
From inside the grounded Harvester Ari had hit on first diving through, the one that some of her people had started fighting their way into, a god-awful banging and kicking began. The sound of things crashing, being knocked around—Jonelle looked concerned. “Hey, Team Five,” she said down her commlink, trying to sound matter-of-fact after having an Ethereal in her brain, “don’t mess up the hardware, we can sell that—”
From inside the Harvester, bizarrely, came laughter. “Not us, Boss!” someone shouted. And someone else added, “Won’t be much left in here worth salvaging after these guys are through with it!”
And cows burst out: three of them. They looked awful— more like demon cows from some confused hell, with bones showing through their coats, with tubes sticking out of them, and wounded sides where they had been gouged for tissue samples. They were fiery-eyed, bellowing creatures, wild with abuse and rage, and now wild with liberty. Jonelle was suddenly irrationally glad that all the Chryssalids seemed to be dead. I don’t think I could handle a Zombie cow at this point.
A small crowd of Sectoids burst from behind some alien maintenance equipment, firing heavy plasmas and flinging grenades at the X-COM personnel. They ignored the bellowing, rampaging cows. This was possibly a mistake, as the first cow out of the Harvester, a brown one that Jonelle suspected was Ueli’s Rosselana, threw up her head and bellowed defiance, then plunged at the Sectoids and gored the Sectoid leader, lifting him on her horns and tossing him some twenty feet away onto a grenade that one of his own people had thrown. This promptly exploded and blew the Sectoid to bits, the timing producing such a slapstick effect that a lot of the X-COM assault troops who saw it burst out laughing helplessly.
Jonelle laughed too. “Come on,” she shouted down her command frequency, “let’s get ‘em!”
With their own versions of her laughter, all of which became more terrible as the rest of the hour went by, the troops followed Jonelle, and whether the aliens fought them, or fled, mostly they died. Furious at the sight of their dead comrades as they passed the ones already fallen, or as more fell, the X-COM people went on, fighting in cold and bitter rage, until they had gone as far down into the alien base as strategic needs required. The whine of weapons and the sporadic lightning of their fire racketed inside the mountain for a long time, and the sweet burnt smell got stronger all the time.
