Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

They got out. “Now,” Konni said, “we pick up our ride.”

He led them across the platform to where something most peculiar waited on one of the main-line tracks: a little open maintenance car, painted bright yellow. If you took a Ford flatbed pickup and put it on train wheels, Jonelle thought, it would look like this. Two Swiss railway staff were standing by the little creature, holding bright orange servicemen’s vests and hardhats. Konni greeted them, took the vests and hats and handed them out to Jonelle and Ari and Jim, putting one on himself. “All aboard!” he said then.

They all looked at each other and got onto the “flatbed.” Konni took what looked more like a tiller than anything else, turned an ignition key, started the little beast’s diesel engine, and started running it down the track, southward, toward the opening of the Sankt Gotthard rail tunnel.

Jonelle eyed the approaching tunnel with some concern, sparing only a glance for the bas-relief carved monument to the men who died building this first of the great rail tunnels. “Konni,” she said, “you’re quite sure nothing’s coming?”

“Oh, no,” Konni said, “we’re on the southbound track, not the northbound.”

“You’re sure nothing’s coming behind us?” Ari said.

“We’re well ahead of the twelve-fifty,” Konni said.

I wish I could get at my watch a little more easily, Jonelle thought as the shadow of the tunnel mouth fell over them, swallowing them up. Soon they were left with only the light of the little maintenance car’s front spot, and even that didn’t go very far in this darkness.

It got cold, and colder, and then, bizarrely, started to get warmer. Jim looked around him with amusement, seeing how the stones, which had been frosted closer to the tunnel mouth, were now wet, and ahead were perfectly dry and much warmer. “In these amounts,” he said, “stone is one heck of an insulator.”

“This time of year, yes,” Konni said. “But it’s early, yet. Now then….” They were about a mile into the tunnel. Faintly, they could hear, or rather feel, a rumbling— something rushing by, somewhere. “The other tunnel,” Konni said, “diverges from this one more and more widely as we go through—it’s about half a mile away through the stone, that way.” He gestured to the left. “Our business, though, is over here.”

He looked right and stopped. “All right,” he said, “everybody out.”

Jonelle blinked, then shrugged and let herself down over the edge of the car. It was about five feet down to the track bed. The others followed, and Konni, the last one out, reached for a capped switch on the side of the car, pushed the cap up, tapped a number into the revealed keypad, and slapped the cap down again. The maintenance car jerked a little, then took off back down the track, backwards, leaving them all standing there in the cold and the dark.

Konni came up with a flashlight and turned it on. “Here we are,” he said and walked over to the wall. He put his fingers under a protruding piece of rock and lifted it away—

It was just a fiberglass shell, with a big metal door behind it, for which Konni produced a key “You’ll pull that back in place behind us, will you, Colonel?” he said to Ari.

“No problem,” Ari said. As Konni opened the door, lights came on in a short corridor that ended in another metal door.

They went in, Ari replaced the shell, and Konni locked the door. “I’m not so sure about this,” Ari said. “Anybody could just walk down that train tunnel, at night, say—”

“No, they couldn’t,” Konni said and smiled, and that was all he said, so that Jonelle wondered about the statement for a while afterward. Meanwhile, Konni led them down the corridor to the second metal door, and pushed the button beside it.

The door slid open. It was an elevator, a big freight-hauling one with a door on the other side, as well. They got in, and Konni pushed one of the two buttons. The doors closed.

The ride took about two minutes, during which everyone looked at the floor, or the walls, since there were no numbers to watch. Then the door opened. Jonelle stepped out.

She opened her mouth, and closed it, and opened and closed it again before saying, very quietly, “Holy Buddha on a bicycle!”

They were in the top of the mountain, and it was hollow. It was simply the biggest enclosed space Jonelle had ever seen. To the slightly domed ceiling, far above them, it had to be three hundred feet—though it was hard to tell, with the glare from the lights on the framework hanging from that ceiling. To the far side of the main floor on which they stood, it had to be the better part of a mile. That floor showed signs of having had heavy installations of various kinds on it, though they were all gone now. The huge, echoing place had that vacated feel of an apartment waiting for a new renter.

“It’s the Mines of Moria,” Jim said, looking up at several narrow windows, which let in a surprising amount of light, even though they were at the bottom of crevasses.

“It’s the goddamn Hall of the Mountain King,” Ari said, and the echo took a second or so to come back.

Konni nodded, looking satisfied. “We’re about four hundred feet directly below the lesser peak of Chastelhorn, where we were standing,” he said. “This is only the top level. There are four more below it, each one with a ninety-foot ceiling, all with different accesses for heavy equipment and so forth. All quite secure.”

Jonelle stood there, looking around for a long, silent few minutes, considering. The others were still gazing around them, absorbing the size of the place, but Konni was looking at her, as she could well feel even with her back turned. When she finally swung around to look at him, he said, rather abruptly, “If you don’t like it, I can show you some others—”

Jonelle burst out laughing. “Konni,” she said, “you’re out of your bloody mind. This is exactly what I need. We’ll take it.”

He nodded, and the satisfied, it’s-all-taken-care-of expression came back. “I thought you would,” he said. “I’ll inform…my people…that you’ll be taking possession. The upper echelons will sort out the details.”

“I want to see the downstairs, first, of course.”

“Of course. Right this way, Commander—”

They walked off together, Ari and Jim bringing up the rear. “And if there’s any little thing we can do for you,” Jonelle said, “for…your people, in return for this tremendous favor….”

As they walked, Konni lost most of his smile for the first time since Jonelle had met him that morning. He nodded, leaned close like someone about to ask a favor, and said, “Kill them. Kill every last one of the sons of bitches, Commander. Kill them all.”

She took a breath.

“Konni,” she said, “believe me, it’ll be my pleasure.”

Four days later, the machinery needed for building a base was swinging into action. Materiel was being stockpiled, transports were being arranged, personnel were being wheedled or co-opted from other facilities. Mercifully—or perhaps it was just one of those cruel quirks of fate that sets you up for something really nasty—the number of alien craft spotted dropped off abruptly during this period. These odd quiet periods happened every now and then, for no reason that anyone could understand—though everyone had theories, ranging from biological reasons to sunspots. As a commander, Jonelle had long since learned not to question these quiet times—just to be grateful for them, and to take advantage of them to improve her base’s defenses. When you were building a whole new base, a few such quiet days were a godsend. Jonelle began to think there was a good chance of actually having Andermatt Base in operation within a month.