X-COM: UFO Defense Page 4

  Jonelle flung her hands in the air. “This is no time to discover that I can’t depend on you to behave like an officer instead of a rookie. Tomorrow we have to go to the goddamn land of snow and ice, and 1 have to take you with me because I certainly can’t leave you here after your performance yesterday, which doubtless looks like wild heroism to your poor deluded teams, who would only encourage you to do more of the same, and get you killed, which might not matter that much except that you’d take the whole lot of them with you. No, I’ve got to go haring off north with you and a few others, and we have to go scouting for some bloody half-excavated hole in the ground to stick a base in. In two months! Not that we can tell anyone what we’re doing, mind you. We are going to have to set up an office somewhere in a new country and convince the locals to cooperate with us even though we can’t and won’t tell them what we’re really up to. And someone is going to have to run that office. I have just about decided, for your sins, that it should be you. The only thing that remains for me to discern is whether or not you are sane enough to be trusted to feed yourself with a blunt spoon, let alone to be left alone with a loaded fax machine. Do you understand my concern?”

  “Commander, I—”

  “Colonel. Let me get very straight about this with you. I don’t care two farts in a high wind about the details of your personal psychology. It must be at least tolerable, otherwise they would never have let you into X-COM. But I have had it up to here with your goddamn gutsier-than-thou behavior and your tendency to indulge yourself in these damn death-or-glory stunts. You endanger your teams by not explaining your game plan to them, you endanger yourself by doing dumb-ass things that the merest rookie would shudder away from, and by both of these actions you endanger the civilians we are supposed to be protecting. Now what holes you allow to be shot in your flinty hide I don’t care in the slightest, but when you put your teams and the civilians in danger, I get cross. Cross. Is some of this beginning to penetrate the layer of ablative that surrounds your alleged brain?”

  “Yes, Commander,” Ari said, very evenly.

  “Good. I will be watching for evidence of this in the near future. And by God, if I don’t see it, I am going to pull so many stripes off your uniform, you’re going to find yourself wearing a tank top in midwinter.” She looked disgusted. “Winter,” she said. “Horrible. All right, Colonel. My hat is off for the moment, unless you have anything to add.”

  “No, Commander.”

  “OK. Then sit down and help me look at these goddamn maps.”

  Ari sat down and looked across Jonelle’s desk. It was invisible—unusual for her. Usually whatever she was working on stayed on her desk only one piece at a time, and when she was finished with it, wound up on the floor with everything else. The biggest map, the one of the whole country, was more or less buried. Jonelle pulled it out.

  Ari whistled. “Look at the engraving on these,” he said, though still in a rather subdued mode. He felt somewhat scorched around the edges. “Don’t these people have lives?”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Jonelle said, sitting down again and peering across the map. It was most beautifully rendered, all the more so because the mapping technology was absolutely up to date, with laser-and satellite-guided scanning and drafting. But the map still looked like a work of art, its shadings of valley-green, mountain-gray, and glacial-blue sliding one into another with tremendous delicacy, with contours in places so close together that Ari could barely see them. “Well,” Jonelle said, “here we are. We have carte blanche from the national government, so the Upper-Ups tell me. We can build anywhere we like. Where would you put a base?”

  “This is a sleazy attempt to pick my brains and let me make up your mind for you.”

  Jonelle smiled at him with eyes slightly narrowed. The look told Ari that, as usual, the Commander already had her mind made up, and was expecting him to reveal any weakness in her plans that she had missed. It was a game they played nearly every day, in one form or another, and Ari loved it when he won.

  “OK,” Ari said. He leaned over the map too, considering it as a whole for a moment. “Forget the lowland sites,” he said. “But those mountains….”

  He trailed off, musing. “Did you know,” Jonelle said, “that the shape of the country is the basis for the Chevrolet logo?”

  Ari blinked. “This?” The country was vaguely four-lobed, and longer from side to side than from top to bottom, but to call it a Chevrolet logo seemed a stretch. “You mean the cross-shaped thing?”

  “Yup.”

  “Weird.”

  “But true. Chevrolet was Swiss.”

  Ari shook his head. “The only thing cross-shaped I can see about the country is this.” He traced with one finger the long complex of deep valleys that ran from just south of Lac Léman nearly over to the Austrian border, and the north-south valley complex stretching more or less from Zurich in the north to Locarno and the border lakes in the south.

  Having done so, he paused and peered a little more closely at the place where the arms of the cross would intersect. “Those are mountain passes, there, aren’t they?” Ari leaned down to look at the names. Sankt Gotthard, Furkapass….”

  This map too said URSEREN. It looked exactly like the other, so much so that Ari folded it and the other map to match, laid them side by side, and started doing a “blink” comparison. No more than two or three blinks were necessary to show him that the second map had many small additions in black that the first map did not: tiny rectangles scattered about the landscape, halfway up mountainsides, apparently buried in cliffs.

  “This one’s under the glacier!” Ari muttered. “This one’s in the lake! What the deuce—”

  “The Swiss army likes to hide things,” Jonelle said, standing up and coming around to look at the map herself. “And face it, they don’t have a lot of flat land to devote to army bases and airfields and so forth. What flat land they do have, they need to grow food on. So they got busy, early in the century, and started digging. A lot of these mountains are hollow. This one”—she pointed at a rectangle apparently on the north slope of a mountain called Gletschhorn—“that’s full of fighter planes. They have them stacked up in cradles, like cars in a parking lot in Manhattan. They launch by steam catapult.”

  “How the heck do they get them back in?”

  “They ship them by rail to one of the little stations down the valley here, Realp, I think,” Jonelle said. “After that”—she shrugged—“it’s ‘need to know’, and I don’t. But they manage. Other mountains are similar. That one’s full of tanks. That one’s an ammo dump. All kinds of other stores, weaponry, hardware—all tucked away for a rainy day. Somewhere down here,” and she looked thoughtfully at their map, “they dug a nuclear-proof base for their heads of state and senior commanders. No one knows where it is, not even the people who built it, and I’m sure it’s not on even this map. They say they decommissioned it years ago. I was tempted to ask if I could use it. But such a request would have to go through the highest army echelons, and I’d sooner not annoy them. Especially since I suspect it’s not as decommissioned as they say it is.”

  “Interesting people.”

  “They are. Anyway, there are a lot of these old hidey-holes that really are decommissioned—places they didn’t need after the Cold War cooled off. X-COM’s liaison in the Swiss government has agreed to let us have one of those, and there are plenty to choose from. We’ll go up to Andermatt tomorrow and have a look around.”

  “Who are we?” Ari said.

  Jonelle raised her eyebrows. “A strange moment to go all existential on me, Colonel.”

  “You know what I mean. What’s our cover?”

  Jonelle grinned. “We’re going to tell them we’re with the UN.”

  “They’re going to love that.”

  “Yes. Practically the last country on the planet to join, and I’m sure they only did it because of the aliens. No mere human threat could get them to join in the last century, anyway—that old di
strust of theirs of outside alliances. But then they were burned by them so many times in the past…. Whatever. Wherever we do finally settle, our cover is that we’re setting up a ‘neutral observation’ facility to test UN cooperation with local defense forces.

  Some army people will be helping us with this, though they won’t be in on the secret behind the cover. We’ll be setting up a small, ‘overt’ base somewhere in the area, and we’ll have a little office, probably in Andermatt itself, to answer the locals’ questions and act as a PR front end. If you’re not very careful and don’t start flying a little straighter on your ground assaults,” Jonelle said, “I’m not kidding—you may wind up running it.”

  Ari made a sour face. “Yes ma’am, Commander ma’am. I’ll be good. I promise.”

  “You’ll wind up behind that desk occasionally no matter how good you are,” Jonelle said, “and so will I, since a good commander doesn’t send her people into any fix she wouldn’t go into herself.”

  “Just so long as I don’t have to do filing.”

  The look on her face suggested that she agreed with him. But she said, “We will both do whatever we bloody well have to, Ari. As usual. Including leave this nice, comfortable place, which I finally was getting to run the way it should….”

  “Would it be indelicate to suggest to the Commander that this is her own fault for being so efficient?”

  “Yes. But at least I can’t fault where they’ve asked me to put the new base,” Jonelle said, gazing placidly at the map. “The Swiss location is good for Europe-wide cover, as I told them. The Andermatt location is the best in Switzerland, as far as I can figure. A near-impassable gorge to the north, a backstop of very difficult peaks to the south—most of them twelve to fourteeners—a very avalanche-prone pass on our right flank, and on our left, the longest glacier in Europe.”

  “Sounds like a holiday wonderland.”

  Jonelle snorted. “Unfortunately, it is. When its not being a garrison town, Andermatt is a ski resort. A lot of our people are going to have to ski in their spare time, as a cover.”

  “How they’ll suffer!”

  “Don’t tell me about suffering, Ari. The average daytime temperature there is already down to twenty-five degrees-—it’s going to be an awful winter. But at least the ground-based strategic qualities of the area are plain. Air-based strategic defense is another matter, but those mountains lend us another advantage: only pilots practiced in handling those air currents will be able to move at any speed there. And if we find a spot we like, we’ll start practicing right away. Aliens doing low-level work anywhere in the area will be badly handicapped. Now, can you make any case for a better spot elsewhere? None of this is written in stone yet.”

  Ari sat quiet for a minute or two, then shook his head. “It looks sound.”

  “Thanks, Colonel,” Jonelle said. “I’m reassured. I’m going around to inform the team I’m taking with me on the assessment run. Would you care to accompany me?”

  “Delighted, Commander.”

  It took them about two hours to get around to everybody. Jonelle never liked to hurry when doing her rounds, at the best of times. Now, late in the evening, with the night shift settling in and the day and evening shifts mostly in the lounges, she kept the pace leisurely on purpose.

  She and Ari ambled through the main lounge in the second living quarters module. The place was full of an affable mix of ranks and specialties, some sitting and reading, a few playing cards off to one side, but these people were in the minority. There was a lot of noise at the moment because there was a serious game of “Crud” going on. Around the billiards table, a crowd of about twenty men and women were yelling their heads off at two teams of four people, who were enthusiastically body-blocking one another as they took turns trying to get at one of two billiard balls and use it to knock the other one into a pocket.

  Jonelle eyed the blackboard where the intricate score-keeping grid was laid out. It seemed that the squaddies were beating the sergeants, which was the reason for a lot of the noise. As she watched, two of the sergeants shouldered a squaddie onto the floor. One of them sprawled across the table and made a mad swipe for the free cue ball. Another squaddie dove across the table, rescued it, and flung it at the free ball. It was certainly an accident that the ball hit the sergeants head instead.

  “I never could get into this,” Ari said, watching with a wry expression as the sergeant, amid much laughter, staggered away from the table clutching his head.

  “That’s why I’m a commander,” Jonelle said under her breath, with a twist of smile, “and you’re not.” She had been one of three people who routinely placed in the top three of the Crud championships in Rio. There was no X-COM base where the game wasn’t played. “Where there is no Crud,” the saying went, “there is no life.” Some went so far as to claim that X-COM people had invented it, even though it had actually been caught, rather like athlete’s foot, from fighter pilots formerly in the British and Canadian forces.

  “Can you see Rory in this crush?”

  “Markowitz?” Ari looked for a moment, saw nothing, then put his head down and listened. “There,” he said, glancing off leftward. “Can’t miss that laugh.”

  They headed that way. After a moment, Rory Markowitz slid out of the crowd, heading for the coffee dispenser. “Oh. Commander—”

  “That was a nice job this morning, Rory,” Jonelle said to him. “Doctor Trenchard is going to be very pleased.”

  Rory ran one hand through his dark, curly hair and grinned. He had one of those amiably ugly faces that prevents fights just by other people looking at it, speculating about how it got that way, and deciding they don’t want to be involved in anything similar. “Thought he might like that little parcel, ma’am,” he said.

  “Well, so did 1.” He had single-handedly captured not merely one but two Ethereals while out with the team he commanded in an interception and ground assault that morning, down in Sudan. Jonelle was very pleased with Rory, as well as pleased to see him still alive. The assault had been a particularly bad one, out in an open plain with no cover of any kind. “So I’ve got a little parcel for you. Better run up to the quartermaster’s office tomorrow morning and get yourself some colonel’s stripes in time for the a.m. briefing.”

  That grin stretched right across Rory’s face. If it could go any farther, the top of his head would fall off. “Whatever you say, Commander.”

  “Don’t you look at me that way, Colonel. Our staff strengths support the move, and you’ve been a captain more than long enough. Besides, there are going to be some other changes, and I want you where you’ll be able to do the most good. Capisce?”

  “Uh, I think so, ma’am.”

  “Don’t let them catch you thinking, Rory. They’ll promote you.” She gave him a little wave and headed off.

  Ari walked quietly beside her for a moment as Jonelle worked her way around the table. “Other changes?” he said.

  “You don’t need to take that innocent tone with me. You know who Rory will work best with.”

  “Chavez.”

  “That’s right. This time tomorrow, she’ll be a colonel as well. So will Riordan. We were lucky in having a lot of ground assaults in the past few days—they make the changes I want easier. The numbers now back up my intentions very nicely.”

  “If I didn’t know you better,” Ari said, “I’d suspect you of changing the team makeups so that the results of the assaults would reinforce your intentions.”

  Jonelle gave him a look. “I’m not God yet,” she said. “I will not under any circumstances put people in harm’s way to further my own aims. But I can see, sometimes, how the dice are going to fall. And if I help them a little…it’s all for a good cause.”

  “So who are you leaving in command?”

  Sidelong, Jonelle regarded him with amusement. “The answer you’re looking for is, ‘Not you.”’

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Is the Pope Irish?…Well, never mind.
Who would you pick?”

  He stood thinking while Jonelle looked through the other side of the noisy crowd, hunting a particular face. Not seeing it, she turned and made for the door. Ari came after her, and together they went out into the hall and headed down toward the living quarters.

  “DeLonghi,” he said finally.

  Jonelle nodded, not saying anything for a few moments. Let him work it out, she thought.

  “I thought you hated his guts,” Ari said very softly. “After all the grief he gave you after you were assigned. ‘I should have been Commander—’”

  “He never said that.”

  “Not to your face. To everybody else who would hold still and listen, though. Insubordinate, self-righteous son of a—”

  “He’s the right man for the job,” Jonelle said just as softly, “and I will not let my personal feelings get in the way of doing my job well, or seeing others’ jobs done that way. DeLonghi is popular with the rest of the command-level staff. He’s thoughtful, in his slightly plodding way. He has a temper, but I’ve seen no evidence that he lets it influence his command decisions. He knows how to think, if the officer directly above him isn’t discouraging him from doing so—the way the last one did.”

  “And by leaving him in command here,” Ari said, “you defuse his hostility—you hope. And give him so much to do that he doesn’t have time for it anymore.”

  Jonelle sighed. “Politics,” she said. “I hate politics. Intrapersonal, or any other kind. But you quickly become a political animal in this job. So will he. If DeLonghi makes the mistake of indulging his more malicious opinions while he’s in command, he’ll find out it doesn’t work—the hard way and very fast. He’ll behave, I think,” she said, as they turned the corner down the long main hallway of the living quarters. “He’ll do anything not to give me reason to relieve him. He hates any appearance of failure—it’ll keep him honest.”