X-COM: UFO Defense Read online

  “That’s a mausoleum, you big dumb nyekulturnyi. Haven’t you ever seen a mausoleum before?”

  Her eyebrows went up. “The model of tact, as always,” Jonelle murmured.

  “Boss?”

  “Nothing, Joel.”

  The silence from her secretary’s link suggested raised eyebrows, and an opinion that more than nothing was involved. Jonelle waggled her own eyebrows at the dartboard, then reached out and straightened the piece of paper in front of her.

  It said:

  TO: BARRETT, JONELLE, CMDR, X-COM IRHIL M’GOUN

  FROM: KENNY, DENNIS, SR CMDR, X-COM CENTRAL

  WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT YOU ARE PEOMOTED REGIONAL COMMANDER SOUTHERN EUROPE / NORTH AFRICA. AUTHORIZATION DOCUMENTS AND CODE KEYS FOLLOW BY COURIER.

  That had been nice to read, the first time. And it had made her smile when it landed on her desk the previous week.

  Thirteen months, now, she had been commander down here at Irhil M’Goun. Not what you would normally call a peach assignment. Not down here, where the major natural resources were rock and sand or, if you went out of your way looking for something different, sand and rock. Morocco was a serious pain in the neck.

  Take a part of the world that held little to interest anyone, human or alien (you would have thought, anyway), dig a deep hole in it—well, several holes—and build a base. Stock it with several hundred stir-crazy scientists, researchers, and (worst of all) pilots and soldiers.

  Then just sit there and twiddle your thumbs. That was what the former commander had done. Jonelle couldn’t understand how anyone who had risen through the ranks in X-COM could possibly think that a base was a place that would just run merrily along by itself without serious attention or constant infusions of money. The former commander had mismanaged the place until there were chronic staff shortages, equipment shortages, even food shortages. Jonelle had trouble understanding how such a situation had been allowed to go on for so long. Whether the commander had had the fabled Friends in High Places, or whether (as Jonelle suspected) the people in High Places had simply been too distracted with more severe problems elsewhere, either way Irhil M’goun had gone quietly to hell in a handbasket, and no notice was taken…until the aliens’ Good Friday terror attack on Rome.

  Jonelle grimaced at the memory. Irhil had been the only base in a position, that day, to handle that particular interception. They hadn’t handled it. The result had been more than six hundred dead and the oldest part of Rome devastated. What two thousand years of weathering, tourist chipping, and opportunistic quarrying had failed to do, the aliens had done in about ten minutes, leaving the Colosseum a pile of rubble and (almost as a side issue) the Pope dead underneath it. To say that the Italian government was annoyed would be somewhat understating the case.

  Shortly thereafter—before the bodies were cold, Jonelle suspected—the former base commander was relieved of his command. There was a brief interregnum period of a week or so while an investigative team came down and looked the place over. Then Jonelle, at that point a colonel over in Rio, had abruptly been promoted to X-COM base commander and shipped off to run this godforsaken pit.

  At the time, while not entirely understanding the rationale that had caused this sudden boon to land on her, Jonelle had been delighted. It had been a career advancement far beyond her expectations, at least in terms of time—she hadn’t expected to make commander for years yet. And she was further excited because the Powers That Be plainly wanted her to act like a “new broom,” in the same way she had on a lesser level with her previous commands. Jonelle had jumped into the job joyously. Now, though, she wished desperately for the good old days when she had been able to just jump out of a Lightning and blow up, with a clean conscience, anything that looked like it intended to make her day less than pleasant. She could no longer allow herself the simple luxury of handling her problems with grenades or an autocannon. Now she had to use balance sheets—nearly as deadly, to humans anyway, and a lot less satisfying.

  The basso-static noise of gunfire rattled in her earpiece. “People, target the vehicles. The light won’t last, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Jonelle smiled to herself. Ari was never one to waste resources. He had been about the only one of that mind around Irhil when she arrived.

  Thirteen months. Jonelle had been busy since then. She had come to a place where the tension levels seemed so much higher than they ever should at a base that was working properly. There were plenty of reasons for it, but at the bottom of them the simple fact that no one there really trusted anyone else to do their job because no one Up Top had spent any serious time making sure they did it. Jonelle sensed this very clearly but said nothing about it to anyone at first. She spent a peaceful first couple of weeks as Queen Log, sitting still and looking around to see who was using what and who was wasting it. Fighting aliens was, after all, an expensive business, and even with the whole planet in crisis, under siege by what appeared to be half of some alien planet’s ecology, money to fight them still didn’t grow on trees. The previous base commander at Irhil—wherever he was, and Jonelle hadn’t inquired, knowing someone would gossip the info to her sooner or later—had started out with a good kitty. But he had blown an astonishing amount of it on research, producing few results and managing little successful control of that period’s repeated alien terror attacks in North Africa. Jonelle had looked over the accounts and became determined to do better. There were a lot of things Irhil M’goun needed if the aliens were not simply to move in and set up housekeeping. At the end of those first two weeks, Queen Log became Queen Stork in earnest, and Jonelle set out to start shaking the place into order, and specifically to make a lot of money.

  She fired a lot of science personnel who had been sitting around wasting perfectly good money and food on vague projects the former base commander had never sufficiently investigated. She started to sell even slightly outdated munitions and captured alien paraphernalia to all the anonymous bidders in sight. “I’d sell laser cannons to the Tooth Fairy if he turned up with cash,” Jonelle announced, and shortly thereafter many little private flying craft started dropping out of the sky, their pilots and passengers offering Jonelle’s secret civilian intermediaries all manner of hard currencies for guns and alien corpses and invaders’ metal and all the other salables that successful interceptions provided. The alien corpses sometimes gave her second thoughts. What are they doing with them? Using them for alien snuff movies? It was something of a mystery. The corpses weren’t a source of anything valuable, in the sense of pharmaceuticals or other chemicals, and no one she knew used them as food.

  No one she knew. Jonelle made a wry face, wondering whether those corpses were being rendered down somehow and the components sold as instant soup to other aliens for the various subspecies that needed it. Such a discovery wouldn’t have surprised her. Humans would buy anything from anyone, and sell anything to anyone. Treachery was as commonplace as honesty, and Jonelle couldn’t stop it. All she could do was work to do her best for her own side.

  She dug new hangar facilities and built new labs and engineering works. Then she hired scientists to replace the ones she had fired. She looked most carefully at their credentials and gave her department heads meticulous instructions regarding what researches she wanted done and how fast she wanted to see results. If they blew it, she fired them—within minutes, some complained. Jonelle let them complain. Irhil M’goun swiftly got a name as a place where someone who could produce results would be given large amounts of research space, whether they were looking at the immune systems of Floaters or neural chemotransmission in Chryssalids. It was all the same to Jonelle, and extremely talented scientists started fighting to work at Irhil. Not bad, she thought, for a place that’s just a bare patch in the rock.

  She started building guns, big time. “You can never have enough guns” was Jonelle’s motto. Laser cannon were her specialties, mostly because of their extravagant profit margins. She sometimes wondered whose armory she w
as supplying—what nation might suddenly find itself with an extremely well-armed rebellion on its hands. But Jonelle entertained such thoughts only briefly. At the moment, national rebellions had to be considered mere local squabbles, compared with what X-COM and the world had to deal with. If the cost of driving the aliens off the planet was the fall of a local government or two, well…that was life. There wasn’t a nation on Earth whose internal balances hadn’t been thrown out of whack by the aliens’ incursion. When they were gone, there would be time for the normal state of affairs to reassert itself. Of course, there would still be losses of life and other injustices, but at least people native to this planet would be the ones cleaning up the mess.

  And there was always the small matter of UFO components. The previous interceptor crews had felt no particular pressure from their boss to shoot down alien craft where they could be properly plundered—a shocking laxity. There had been much too much of the “who cares, why risk our own skins, just dump it in the Med” mindset at Irhil. Jonelle had watched the interceptor crews operate for those first couple of weeks. Then she sacked almost all the colonels and some captains, started retraining a few others, and restocked the crews. Indeed, their attrition rate had already been so high that this wasn’t hard. Then she personally took them out on a few runs to show them how it was to be done.

  Gunfire in her earpiece, very close. A grunt—someone coming down on the ground, hard. Jonelle stiffened, listened. There was still certainly breathing going on in the background, quick but not labored. He’s OK. The sound of plasma fire, again very close. Ari’s typical staccato pattern, careful, not scattershot, not wasteful of energy. Sudden silence.

  “Report.”

  “They’re scattering, Boss. This batch is heading northwest.”

  Jonelle smiled again, that same slightly crooked smile. He had been a big help to her during those first couple of weeks, one of only two or three people in Irhil who appeared to have their heads screwed on the right way. Colonel Laurentz had not precisely followed her around—as some had, seeking to butter up the new commander or to find out where her weaknesses were—but always seemed to be somewhere handy when something needed explaining. That big, blond, broad-shouldered shape with the scarred face and the droopy-lidded brown eyes would be leaning against a wall in the mess, or half sticking out of one of a Firestorm’s maintenance access ports, accessible, ready to talk to—easy to talk to. He had not gone out of his way (as some of the Irhil staff had done) to bad-mouth other staff or officers. Laurentz would simply state what seemed to be wrong with something, and what seemed to be needed to fix it. Then he would let you draw your own conclusions. Blame did not seem to interest him; having things work—a Firestorm, a cannon, a command structure—did interest him. So cool, straight-headed, and unusual an attitude could hardly avoid attracting Jonelle’s attention, for she too was more interested in fixing things than in wasting time complaining about what went wrong. Soon enough, she began talking to Laurentz regularly about getting the base working properly again. Soon enough, Laurentz became Ari.

  And, after a while, he became more than that. But that was his business, and Jonelle’s. No one else’s.

  More fire noises in her earpiece—the insistent booming of autocannon—and more chat between the teams as they worked toward some common goal. The piazza? Jonelle briefly thought of the leave they had taken together nine months ago, while discussing private business. Ari had insisted they go up to Ravenna to see some mosaics. Jonelle, never much of an art fan, had gone along to humor him and had been somewhat surprised by Ari’s profound silence in the face of the ancient, stiff-robed, dark-eyed figures laid into the walls and floors of the tomb there. She was surprised, too, to find herself moved by the haunting expressions looking at them from the far end of time: sorrowful, thoughtful—and Ari’s expression, which matched theirs. A little while afterward, in the café in the street, Ari had drunk wine and filled the evening air with laughter, belittling his own response. Jonelle had smiled and nodded, going along with him. But she realized then that there was a lot more to this man than she had suspected, and that it was going to take her a long time to find out what else might be there.

  If they survived, of course, for the world was not exactly the safe and stable place it had seemed before the aliens had arrived. She laughed softly at that thought: that the late nineties now seemed “safe and stable” compared to what the world had lately become.

  “Paula, got a clean perimeter back there?”

  “No problems, Boss. A lot of Mutons over this way. One damn near pulled dive’s arm off, but he’s still alive. “

  He’s coping, Jonelle thought, and bent her head to gaze at that piece of paper again. They had all been coping, and doing it better than ever. Irhil M’goun had finally become a viable proposition, after thirteen months of her attacking its weak spots one after another. Its manufacturing arm was doing very nicely at keeping the necessary money rolling in. Interceptions were going well. Few of them happened over water anymore, if Jonelle’s teams could help it. She had taught them better. They were doing fairly well in terms of Elerium-115 pickup—better, judging by the monthly averages, than many older and better-established bases. She intended to improve that, and to go on improving her teams’ response times and results on terror attack sites.

  There were still things about M’goun that bothered her. Jonelle’s great local worry, the lack of a mind shield, had finally been handled a few months ago. Six months back, she had hocked or sold nearly everything the base didn’t really need to make the balloon payment on the screen, over the howls of protest of some of her under-officers. They had spent a lean couple of months “making do” and hanging on, financially, by their nails, waiting for the parts and technicians to arrive. Jonelle had turned into something of a harpy on the subject of economically successful interceptions, until the flight crews began to complain that she would sell her own grandmother to an anonymous bidder as an alien artifact. (The nastier of the wits added that, considering the commander’s present conduct, Jonelle’s grandmother probably was an alien— possibly a Celatid or some other poisonous old bag. And as for Jonelle—!) Yet it was astonishing how the morale of the place improved the day the screen went on. The tension in Irhil dropped off as though someone had thrown a switch. Well, Jonelle thought with some satisfaction, someone did. And it always helped knowing that your enemies couldn’t hear you thinking.

  Other things still needed doing, too. She wanted to build more hangar space. She also needed more research space. One of her people was doing really sterling work on Ethereals, and other scientists from all over were fighting to come work for him, but she had nowhere to put them. They needed more containment space for captured aliens, too. She sighed. A commander’s work is never done…

  Until you get something like this.

  She stared at the paper. The next paragraph said:

  YOU ARE ALSO REQUIRED TO DELEGATE LOCAL AUTHORITY TO YOUR STAFF AS NECESSARY SOONEST PURSUANT TO YOUR IMMEDIATE RELOCATION TO SWITZERLAND FOR LOCATION SCOUTING AND BEGINNING CONSTRUCTION ON NEW MAJOR BASE. PLANNING PARAMETERS REQUIRE NEW BASE TO BE SITED AND ESTABLISHED WITHIN TWO MONTHS.

  Jonelle swore softly and opened one of her desk drawers, where she felt around for a spare dart. It was all her own fault, of course. She had complained, privately to Ari, and more publicly in reports to Central, that the base at M’goun was insufficient to handle terror attacks in central and northern Europe. Granted, attacks down this way had fallen off somewhat after the base got its mindshield in. But Europe had been heating up, and her teams were badly stretched getting up there in time to do anything useful. Yes, she knew how badly the Frankfurt and Moskva bases had just been hit, but it was hardly fair for M’goun to hold the bag for two continents at once. It barely had enough resources for North Africa.

  And here was her answer, in black and white. Central had listened to her. She swore again. “Save us from bureaucrats with ears,” she muttered, “and brains. Two month
s! Two goddam months’ She sighted on the picture of the former base commander, let fly, and hit him unerringly in the nose.

  This is my reward, for being right, Jonelle thought bitterly. For getting this job done correctly, and whipping this place into shape. It was just beginning to work smoothly, things were settling down, it’s not fair.

  And I hate the cold!

  She got out another dart. “If I ever meet you in the flesh,” she said conversationally to the picture, “you’d better pray there’s nothing sharp nearby.”

  In her ear, someone said, “Twenty Mutons dead.”

  “Twenty!”

  “We were busy.”

  Jonelle nodded. Her teams had learned good habits. Or simply relearned them. Either way, they were doing their jobs. She felt sure that some of the tension she had felt when she first came to M’goun was attributable to a lot of people feeling that they weren’t doing their jobs, weren’t being pushed past their own fears by a commander who knew what they were all there for: defending the Earth as though every battle was the last one. Any single, chance skirmish or interception could be the hidden turning point that would make all the difference to the planet’s survival. The teams were missing that vital sense that they made a difference in what was going on. There had been resistance to Jonelle’s pushing, at first, though not from the people who counted. Ari, in particular, had listened to some of Jonelle’s more savage pep talks, to her flying and fighting teams and had come away with an expression of silent, grim approval, the look of a man who has wanted to say something similar to his teams for a long time, but has lacked the support from Higher Up. That support, Jonelle knew, meant everything to a base. A base with a lackadaisical boss gets nothing done, loses its purpose…dies under stupid circumstances.

  Whatever happens, that’s not going to happen to my people.

  But, oh God, who the hell am I going to leave in charge here?