Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

“They give me the willies,” Ari said softly. Jonelle nodded. Of all the aliens X-COM dealt with, the Ethereals were, to her way of thinking, the deadliest. Others might be able to rip you limb from limb, or eat you alive, or dissolve you like a sugar cube in coffee, but the ones that could get inside your head and change the way you thought about yourself struck Jonelle as far worse. They were telepaths and telekinetics of dreadful power, easily the most powerful of all the alien species who worked with the weapons of the mind. There was some speculation in X-COM that these aliens might indeed be the top echelon, the ones “running things,” and research was going on everywhere into the best way to interrogate these creatures.

They were very resistant, though—that was the problem. And that resistance, and their power, were both made more horrible by the creatures’ physical reality. Except for their brains, there seemed hardly anything to them.

Jonelle looked at the Ethereal that floated, restrained, in the inner office. Except for the huge head that encased the thing’s awful brain, the Ethereal looked pallid, withered, a mere husk of a humanoid shape, no bigger than a child. A terminally anorexic child, it would have been, the skin so thin that the blood vessels showed right through it like parchment. Not that much blood seemed to get out to the skinny, underdeveloped limbs. It all seemed destined for the brain, and from autopsy reports Jonelle had read, this seemed logical enough—if there was anything logical about an Ethereal. The internal organs were all either vestigial or hardly functional. They could not run a body, even this feeble, wizened one.

But something ran that body, even though the muscles were barely as thick as ropes and the trunk looked frail enough to break between your hands. Something—if only some kind of toxic will—lived behind those blind, dark eyes. As the creature floated, helpless, a chance air current from the ventilation system touched it, so that its body turned, and those eyes seemed to look slowly toward Jonelle. She shuddered. Only twice had she been unlucky enough, while out on an assault, to feel the touch of one of those cold, inhuman minds behind those eyes, and it had taken all the training the psi people had given her to keep her from crumpling under the force that went into your mind like a knife and began slicing away at what made you human. Since those encounters, she had become a serious convert to psionic training, and when she became commander at Irhil M’goun, she had thrown all of her people into it who had enough psi talent to bend a cat’s whisker, let alone a spoon.

“Right,” Jonelle said, and touched the doorbell.

Trenchard didn’t look up for a moment, though he waved one hand at the door. He kept his eyes on the screen until he’d watched that pattern of sines through one long cycle, about thirty seconds’ worth. Then he straightened up, rubbed his back—which must have been aching if he’d spent much time in that position—turned around, and saw who was waiting. Trenchard grinned a little sheepishly, came over to the door, and opened it.

“Sorry, Commander,” he said, “I was up to my ears in something just then. How are you, Colonel?”

“Doing OK, doctor.”

“Jim,” Jonelle said, “we’ve had a little surprise from the Great Upstairs. I’ve got to go up to Switzerland tomorrow and start building a new base. I’m going to need to start a new research department there, and I’d like you to head it.”

Trenchard’s mouth dropped open. Then he laughed out loud for sheer pleasure, the kind of sound you might expect from a small child let loose in a candy store. “You’re serious? You’re serious!”

“Even for me, it’s late in the day for jokes,” Jonelle said.

“Switzerland! Anywhere near some skiing?”

Ari guffawed. Jonelle gave him a wry look and said, “We’re looking at Andermatt.”

“Haven’t been there, but I hear it’s nice,” Trenchard said. “Unspoiled.”

“You let me know. Meanwhile, I’d welcome an auxiliary opinion on how the sites we’re going to look at will support the kind of research establishment we’ve built down here. Or rebuilt, I should say. Will your work permit you to leave it. with your assistants for a day or two? Three max.”

“That many, yes,” Trenchard said. “More would be a problem. Two would be best.”

“We’ll plan on that, then. A transport will be ready to pick us up at oh-eight-hundred. It’ll drop us at the commercial airport at Agadir. We’re covert on this run, so dress and pack accordingly. There’ll be a briefing pack waiting in the terminal in your quarters.”

“Right, Commander.”

They all paused for a moment to look at the still, drifting form in the inner office. “How’s it going?” Ari said. “Is this part of that new interrogation routine you were working on?”

“This? No. This is all diagnostic investigation. I’m trying to work out where the energy to run that brain comes from.”

“Any luck?”

Trenchard let out a single breath of laughter, a harassed sound. “No. The input-output figures for the creature’s metabolics have never made any sense on any level, either in terms of available chemical or gross energy, no matter how you twist them. The illogic of it is beginning to affect some of my colleagues, I think. One of them went so far as to suggest in a paper that Ethereals have a ‘metabolic extension into another dimension.’”

Ari raised his eyebrows. “Whatever that means.”

“Don’t ask me, because I haven’t been able to figure it out either. I’ve been doing some work on ATP/ADP transport in the Ethereals’ cells, but as usual there are no close analogues among the other alien species, so all the lysine-lysoid work has to be started from scratch, and—”

Jonelle laughed and held up a hand. “I’d as soon you’d write me a précis,” she said, “because if you tell me now, I’ll lose it. I’ve got about eighty things to do before I turn in tonight. We’ll see you in the morning, then.”

“Right, Commander. Thanks!”

“Good work is its own reward, Jim,” she said. “You brought it on yourself. Good night!”

They left; the door went solidly thunk behind them. Jonelle and Ari walked back up the hall, returned their sidearms to the guard, and went out into the open side of the base again. “Amazing,” Ari said after a while, “no matter how many times I go in there…I always breathe better after I come out.”

“Me too. I didn’t mind killing them…I didn’t mind catching them and turning them over to the White Coat Brigade. But the thought of spending serious time with them….” Jonelle shook her head.

“We’re just not suited,” Ari said, “we simplistic, basic, emotional types. Give us a gun and a place to use it….”

“What you mean ‘we,’ kimo sabe?” Jonelle said, laughing. She laced one arm through Ari’s, and they headed off toward the living quarters.

Ten hours later, and twelve hundred miles north, they stood, separate again, under a bitterly clear blue sky. It was thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit, or one degree Celsius, and as far as Jonelle was concerned, no matter how you did it, even in Kelvin, it was too goddamn cold.

They stood under the shadow of the peak of a mountain, in snow about two feet deep. Off to one side, the helicopter’s rotors had slowed almost to a stop, and the whuff, whuff, whuff of their turning was, surprisingly, the only sound in that still blue air. Jonelle had expected howling wind, blowing snow. Instead there was nothing but this unnerving silence, and a world all in shades of blue: hard blue sky, softer, deeper blue snow-shadow, the royal blue brush strokes of occasional crevasses, and about six hundred feet below them, the intense sapphire of the little glacial lake.