by Diane Duane
Then, at the end of the hour, Jonelle sounded the recall signal.
Taking everything of value with them—alien equipment, lab materials, Elerium, weapons, captured aliens, corpses, and, with some care, the furious and belligerent cows, who had to be stunned first—the X-COM troops retired to the transport ships, which came in the smoking entry and opened up for them. Jonelle wanted her people out of there before there was time for retaliation, in more strength, to come from space. She refused to leave until the last ship, the Avenger, was ready to go, and Ari, the second-to-last one out, pulled her in.
They lifted out and away. “How did we do?” Jonelle said, still gasping. It was reaction now, and she didn’t mind.
Dispatch, which had been keeping score, said down her commlink, “We lost two Interceptors, one Lightning, and a Skyranger. They lost six Scouts of various kinds, two Harvesters, two Terror Ships, and an Abductor. Everything that was inside at the time. We have twelve dead. They have—no count yet. Still compiling, hut better than a hundred and twenty, I’d say.”
Jonelle nodded, getting her breath. “I’ll talk to you when we get back,” she said to Dispatch. “Out.”
The commlink cut. Jonelle reached behind her and swung the cockpit door shut. Then she said to Ari, absolutely furious now that she had leisure to be, “Now I want you to tell me whatever made you pull that goddamned crazy stunt! I swear to God, you’re going on charges this time. There is no way in hell I’m going to be able to justify this to the Powers That Be. They saw our timings four days ago, they know exactly what was planned, they are not going to believe anything I tell them about us having discussed this previously—we never did—or about me telling you to do any such dumb-ass thing, because they’ll have the comms recordings! If you have to do crap like this, why don’t you do it in ways where your fellow beings, deluded besotted creatures that they are, can cover up for you afterwards? Now I’m going to have to—”
“Explain to Command how, because I hit that Harvester, I saved an entire alien research facility from getting away and being damaged or destroyed. Complete with the research materials, still alive…those cows. Who saved a few people’s lives,” Ari added, “besides that business with the grenade. Have you seen those girls kick?”
Jonelle looked at Ari and finally made an expression of extreme resignation. “I’m going to take this out of your hide later,” she said.
“Promises,” said Ari with relish, “promises. Damn,” he added as the com squawked, “looks like we’ve got something coming in.”
Jonelle looked through the cockpit windshield, and her heart clenched inside her. Coming over the mountain, straight at them, was an alien Battleship.
“Three times lucky,” Ari said. Intent on his controls, even while the terrible huge thing began firing at them, he zigzagged, then slapped the controls and let one last fusion ball loose. It streaked away, and Ari cut his thrust and dropped the Avenger straight down about three hundred feet. There were screams of surprise and outrage, and sounds of things crashing into other things from the troop compartment, as everyone went briefly weightless, then got their weight back again as Ari accelerated once more, about two and a half Gs worth, hard off to the right of the Battleship.
The fusion ball hit it amidships punching a gaping hole into its side. Pieces rained down out of the fireball and onto Scopi, and alien bodies fell down out of the black cloud of the explosion, gently and slowly, like snow, into the snow. The great craft hovered, then headed straight for the horizon at a slower than normal speed.
Jonelle gulped. “Dispatch,” she said. “Add one damaged Battleship to the count. Are all our craft out of the way?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Track that ship out, then call for the cleanup.”
They headed for Andermatt—and behind them, through the dawn, abrupt and blinding, fire fell from the sky.
Within hours, all the major news agencies in the world were carrying the story of how a Boeing 797 airliner, belonging to a freight carrier carrying a cargo of explosive materials to Southeast Asia for use by a gold-mining cartel, and a United Nations cargo plane, carrying “humanitarian supplies,” suffered a catastrophic collision over the Swiss Alps and crashed onto Mount Scopi, narrowly missing the hydroelectric plant nearby and destroying some of the upper part of the mountain. No local people were killed, but the force of the crash and explosion had been so tremendous, and the terrain was so remote and inaccessible, that it was feared that the bodies of the crew would never be found. Their names were given to the press, and the story made all the major papers. People went “tsk, tsk” on five continents, and then forgot all about it. Nothing remained of the disaster but scraps of twisted metal, which soon rusted or were buried in the snow and ground down into the body of the glacier, which—as it had been for centuries—was slowly twisting its way down the north side of Scopi. Already snow and ice were compacting down into the crater formed by the explosion, sealing it. Scopi’s peak was simply a slightly different shape these days, and no one particularly cared.
The X-COM assault force came back to Andermatt and started dealing with the inevitable: healing the human wounded, burying the dead, processing the alien wounded and captured, stacking the corpses, and assessing and storing the consumables and the items that needed to be processed, catalogued, or sold. Jonelle knew she didn’t need to supervise this, but she did, for a while, until the weariness began to catch up with her. Then she went to her office to call DeLonghi.
Except for one minor local raid, it had been quiet at Irhil and its catchment area today—but Jonelle was unwilling to bet that condition would last. “I’m sending your complement back to you,” she said, “minus a couple. My apologies, Joe.”
He sighed. “The fortunes of war. Congratulations, Commander.”
“Hold the triumph, Commander,” Jonelle said. “I’ll be down in the morning, after I get a good night’s sleep. I want to have a nice long talk with Trenchard.”
He sounded slightly surprised. “I’m sorry, Commander, I thought you’d heard about that. He’s gone.”
“What?”
“As you ordered,” said DeLonghi, “a team went to secure him as the operation was about to get under way. But he was gone. I had the place searched, but he couldn’t be found, and no one even saw him leave, or had any idea where he might have gone.” DeLonghi paused. “Now that I think of it, though—that little local raid we had—”
“An hour or two after he went missing, was it?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. It was a Scout. We lost its trace, briefly—then picked it up again.”
“But the Scout itself got away.”
“Yes. At the time, with the major operation going down, we needed that Interceptor back here. I recalled it when it was plain it had lost what it was chasing.”
“Damn,” Jonelle said softly. “Well, you did right. As for Trenchard, damn it, I should have had him put on ice earlier. This one’s my own fault—you can be too secret, I guess. Well, there’s no point in crying over spilt milk. But have the civil authorities in Irhil look for him anyway. If there’s the slightest chance that he missed his ride….”
So it was that police forces all over the planet were alerted to look for Jim Trenchard. They looked in vain: no sign of him ever turned up. Jonelle had his quarters carefully searched for any clue or suggestion as to where he might have gone, what he might have intended. She found nothing. The research in his computer was all wiped. Most of his research associates’ files had been wiped as well, by hidden “Trojan Horse” programs he had apparently put in place in their computers long before. After a couple of weeks, she gave up, closed his file, and forwarded it and all his materials to X-COM Central for them to deal with. But she could not quite get out of her mind one scrap of paper that had been pinned up on Trenchard’s office wall, among his niece’s crayon drawings and the Far Side cartoons. It said, in his neat, small print, IT IS BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN TO SERVE IN HEAVEN.
> If he was where she thought he was, then by Jonelle’s definition of such things, he was in hell, all right. Often, as time passed, Jonelle would wake up in the middle of the night and wonder whether, among the aliens, there was now a human becoming increasingly more Ethereal, another master of that cold hand that had closed around her heart—perhaps a far deadlier one, able to control humans more effectively with fear because it understood those fears so much better. Or, an equal possibility, perhaps they now had among them an Ethereal who remained annoyingly human and threatened to make them more so. Jonelle still wondered what Trenchard might have told them, or might now be telling them, that would endanger Earth further, selling out his own people for the bizarre ideal of some impossible and inhuman future that might never need to happen. Never mind that, she thought. If I ever run across him, orders or no orders, he’ll be “shot while trying to escape.”
Meantime, there was nothing she could do about it. “Uh oh,” Joe said down the phone just then. “Got an interception.”
“Go do your job, Commander,” Jonelle said, weary. “I’m going to get a meal, and some sleep.”
In Andermatt the next day there was a small parade through the towns main street—of several weak, scarred, tired, sick-looking cows, which nonetheless wore the satisfied expressions of creatures who were having a big fuss made over them. Ueli’s brown Rosselana was there, and a thin, weary-looking black pugniera called Portia, the one that had been taken from Münster, the town the aliens had raided twice (apparently because they missed the genetically valuable pugniera the first time), and another one called Dutscha, a spotty cow with a foul temper. With her UN hat on, Jonelle had only been able to say to Ueli, when he asked for explanations, “Apparently the aliens think your cows are special.” She was not able to explain anything about their recovery, just that they had been “found in the mountains,” which was true enough.
A day’s stay in Irhil M’goun, where Ngadge and his people had checked them over, revealed little except that the cows’ immune systems seemed unusually robust. “That alone would be useful to the aliens,” Ngadge said. “We’ve theorized for a long time that the reason they keep stealing cattle is because they have trouble breeding them.” The day’s stay had also resulted in one of the lab modules being kicked nearly to pieces—the cows did not like anyone who looked like someone carrying lab equipment, a fact that suggested how unpleasant their stay with the aliens had been. But they had survived, which few of their kind had before, and now they swaggered down the street in Andermatt. Ueli, following them, stopped with Jonelle by the door of her little office.
“Well,” he said, “it’s not too late to start thinking about the next betting season….”
“Oh, Ueli, look at them,” she said as Ari came up to join them. “Give them a break!”
He shook his head and smiled. “The way ‘they’ give you one?” he said. “You look terrible. Circles under your eyes.”
“It’s the filing,” Jonelle said, with a glance at Ari. She was beginning to have her suspicions about what Ueli knew about goings-on in the locality. “Takes it out of you something shocking.”
“Come have a drink,” Ueli said, “and don’t tell me all about it.”
They went to the bar, and ahead of them the cowbells bonged softly. Up at the top of town, church bells answered. At the sound of them, Jonelle smiled, considering that, for the moment anyway, she could relax: the demons were held at bay.
Until tomorrow….
About the Author
Diane Duane is the author of several Star Trek novels including the New York Times bestseller The Wounded Sky. She also wrote two fantasy series, “The Door” series for adults and “The Wizardry” series for young adults. She lives in Ireland.
Copyright
Prima Publishing
© 1996 by MicroProse Software, Inc. All right reserved.
X-COM is based on characters and design by Mythos Games.
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