Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

The high whine that started to become audible made some of the passersby look up, and some who were closer to the Hauptbahnhof looked back toward the train station, though dubiously. Sometimes one heard the occasional screech of wheels from the train yards, but it wouldn’t be so prolonged a sound. Others glanced up the road to see if a tram was coming that possibly had an engine fault. But the trams were making no louder a hum than usual. Maybe it was just the fog. It could seem to concentrate the sound, sometimes.

But no fog could make anything—tram, train, or jet— sound like this. The whine scaled up into a scream, and the scream got louder and louder.

That was when the shape came slowly, gently bellying down out of the mist over the Zürich train station. It looked like two very large octagons stacked on top of each other, with four octagonal pods underneath. Slowly and with seeming care, it sat itself down on the stately neo-Baroque upper hall of the station—and down, and farther down, until huge blocks of stone burst out of the structure under the pressure and flew across the plaza, smashing into the hotels there and rendering some of the guests’ stays unexpectedly permanent. Other fragments shot into the fairy-tale towers of the Swiss National Museum behind the Bahnhof, knocking the greened-bronze conical tops off them and leaving them like stumps of broken teeth.

At the same time, a Terror Ship settled down out of the fog onto Paradeplatz, crushing a tram underneath it. The driver of a second tram, turning the curve out of the plaza and heading north toward the Bahnhof, saw what had happened to that building and decided it might be wiser not to continue his run much farther. He stopped the tram, opened all its doors, and held his post while his passengers fled. Then he powered the tram down, checked it to make sure no one had been left behind, and jumped out himself, turning by the front door to put in the key that would let him shut the doors and lock the tram from the outside. It was the last thing he ever did as a human being. A. second later, a Chryssalid’s venom was blasting through his body, and the tram key fell ringing gently onto the cobbles, unnoticed.

The screams in Paradeplatz, as Floaters and Reapers poured out of the Terror Ship and descended on the terrified crowds of commuters, were echoed from the Hauptbahnhof. Not even the bulk of a Battleship was able to completely crush the iron skeleton of the great railway station, Jakob Wanner’s masterpiece; but destruction of mere landmarks was secondary to the aliens’ purposes.

Snakemen and Chryssalids poured out of the Battleship and made their way down the stations three levels underneath the old main building. Sirens were beginning to howl outside, the police beginning to respond, but the shrieks and cries of those in the station—both those maimed or dying under its wreckage and those being torn apart or taken alive by aliens—were louder still. On the street level, at the end of the Bahnhofstrasse, people ran desperately in all directions, looking for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere. Stores locked their doors, but Snakemen crashed in through plate glass windows to find their prey. Cyberdiscs blasted their way through hastily dropped security shutters and racketed around inside the breached premises like psychotic Frisbees, killing everything that moved, shooting everything that didn’t. Plasma-weapon fire began in earnest out on the streets, and stun bombs and grenades could be heard everywhere. Unconscious and wounded humans were carried into the waiting ships to be experimented on later. Others, more fortunate, died quickly, burned or blasted or torn apart. The gray and white pavements began to acquire a new color: red.

And in the Bahnhof, that temple to punctuality, the trains stopped running on time.

A few hours after he left Jonelle, as he had predicted, Ari landed at Irhil—and he could hear the buzz from the hangars before he ever got near them. People were running in all directions, some with pleased expressions, others with looks that suggested they felt more like the denizens of a kicked anthill.

The last thing he wanted to do was head away from the hangars, but he did that regardless, making his way to the commanders office as quickly as he could. It was very strange to knock on that door and not hear the familiar “Ngggh?” which was Jonelle’s standard response. DeLonghi’s voice said, “Come!” from inside, and Ari was astounded to feel a pang at it not being Jonelle. No time for this, he thought.

He walked in to find DeLonghi sitting in the middle of a desk piled high with reports and God only knew what else. The sheer weight of stuff, on a desk that he had only seen clean before, made Ari pause in amazement.

“You wanted something, I take it?” DeLonghi said, looking up and frowning. “I’m rather busy at the moment.”

Ari saluted and said, “Sorry, sir. The commander—”

“Yes, I know, sit down and let’s get on with it,” DeLonghi growled. Ari sat down, not feeling entirely comfortable. DeLonghi had never been the easiest man to get along with. There was not precisely bad blood between them, but DeLonghi had never been that accomplished a fighter, or pilot, or strategist. There was a feeling in ranks that he was one of those who had accomplished his climb strictly “by the numbers,” because he couldn’t have managed it any other way. Ari suspected that DeLonghi knew perfectly well about this opinion of his peers, and that it rankled him. Privately, Ari—regarded on the base as one of their best pilots—wished that Jonelle had stuck him with almost any other job than that of having to advise this man, who would almost certainly take any advice as something meant to make him look dumb.

“What’s the situation at the moment?”

“Thought you would have checked on the way up,” DeLonghi said irritably.

“I did, sir,” Ari said, “but much may have changed since then.” He glanced at the ceiling, as if calculating, and said, “One Interceptor is in Kenya, having splashed an alien Scout Craft. Two dead, equipment and resource recovery uncertain. It appears to have been a feint. The other Interceptor is in the Péloponnčse, scrambled just after the first one. Chased a medium Scout into the water between islands. One dead, and the Interceptor is on its way back here, having suffered damage. This too may have been a feint of some kind. Our Skyranger is en route to an alien landing site in the Canary Islands. The first ship we sent in, a Lightning, has been destroyed with loss of all crew. It was carrying a full load of twelve soldiers.” Who do I know who is ashes or a corpse in the Atlantic right now? Ari thought. “Another Lightning is en route to a landing site near the old diggings at Çatal Huyuk in Turkey. ETA ten minutes. The third Lightning is in Burkina Faso, cleaning up an alien terror site. Heavy casualties: the captain on site reports two-thirds of his assault team dead, along with fifty-odd civilians. The fourth Lightning is still finishing maintenance, should be ready tonight. Two of three Firestorms are out, one on an interception over the Mediterranean, heading toward Egypt when last reported. The other is heading up the French coast toward Brittany, in pursuit, reporting that the alien craft, a Harvester, seemed to be making toward Great Britain but has now doubled back and may be bound for Paris or the Benelux region instead. As of my last check, anyway.”

Ari watched DeLonghi go increasingly red, and he could understand why: his information was no more than three minutes’ old—possibly fresher than the commander’s own.

There was no question, apparently, that the commander knew this. “Colonel,” DeLonghi said, “I hear the sound of a man looking to catch me in a mistake. Are you bucking for my job?”