Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

Ari blinked. He had realized on the way there that Jonelle had sent him to Morocco in the hopes of forestalling this situation, but the aliens had had other plans. “Sir,” Ari said, “if you think—”

“Because don’t think that I don’t know, as does everyone else here, the nature of your relationship with the regional commander. And if you think that her position will protect you when you make your move, then you’ve—”

“Commander,” Ari said, “permission to speak as freely as you have already begun to.”

DeLonghi blinked—a dreadful expression, like a cobra blinking while it had a slow, cold thought—and then said, “Granted.”

Ari sat back in his chair and said, “Sir. Your materiel is spread dangerously thin. You have scattered a large force, which would otherwise have been in a position to lend itself assistance, as it were, internally, over two continents.” DeLonghi’s face was a study: whatever he had been expecting Ari to say, it wasn’t this calm assessment. “I understand the cause of this, and indeed you had no choice. You reacted to each crisis, and logically, as it arose. But these crises show signs of having been designed to do precisely what you have—spread us out. Someone knows from experience what resources we have here. Someone may also know that there has been, shall we say, a change in management. Whether they knew before, or not, the actions of the past few hours have convinced them. Now, you find yourself with few resources left to deal with any large incursion. I would expect such an incursion to happen any minute. I’ve seen this happen before, when the regional commander first took over here, and the pattern—”

The klanger went off somewhere down the hall, and after it the pilots-to-hangar shouter, a melancholy hooting like an elephant sorry it ate that last tree. At the same time, the commander’s phone went off. He snatched up the handset and almost yelled, “What?”

Ari stiffened, knowing what it was. It’s been three days since I’ve flown, he thought. Not that that was precisely a lifetime. But three days could remove enough of your edge to kill you.

DeLonghi slammed the receiver down. “Zurich. They’re in the middle of Zurich. A Battleship and a Terror Ship.”

Ari was up out of his chair and had already yanked the door open. “I’ll scrape the rest of a team together and get moving.”

“Colonel,” DeLonghi said, his voice oddly strained. “The regional commanders orders to me were quite clear. You are not to—”

“What was it you said,” Ari said softly, “about protection, Commander? And positions? I’m still speaking freely By permission.” DeLonghi blinked again. “You have no one else to send. Our people are all over the place. I just came in, I have half a crew with me, the other half can be assembled in about three minutes, and my Firestorm is in the hangar prepped and ready where I left her. Not that she’s likely to do any good in this case. I’ll have to take the Avenger…and you might need that Firestorm for something later. Meanwhile, I can at least do some good while you get the teams freed up to back me. Pull the Canaries team back when they’ve finished their intercept, and the Greek team then send them along.”

“I said it was a Battleship and—”

“Commander,” Ari said, “screw them. Screw them right into the ground. Which I will, if I get the chance. You mentioned protection? I’m going to get out there and do some. Thats my job, and yours. You have no other options, and neither do I…orders or no orders.”

He grinned, and only for a moment the ferocity showed. “You wanted command,” Ari said. “Enjoy. And when those other intercepts are finished with Zurich, get them back here and load them up again, because our cuddly friends out there aren’t finished with us. Call Medical and get them ready, too—we’re going to need them tonight. And before the others come back, whatever you do, don’t send out that last Firestorm! Because….” He

stopped himself from saying “she”; sometimes a pronoun could be too loaded. “It would not be typical of previous command…and besides, they’d know then that you’re empty.”

“Sir,” Ari added after a moment.

They simply looked at each other.

“Go,” DeLonghi said.

Ari nodded and went out the door, noticing—with, another odd pang—that, as he slammed it shut behind him, the old half-a-second-later thump of the dartboard was missing.

Odd, how such little things hurt.

In the darkness around the Hauptbahnhof, silence came and went. Every now and then it would be broken by gunfire, but the sound always stopped quickly. Where there was organized resistance, it soon ceased, as armed aliens came upon it and stopped it. No city police force was equal to this kind of onslaught.

On the Bahnhof itself, the alien Battleship squatted low and menacing, while smoke from electrical fires in the station and steam from broken pipes rose around it and wreathed it in fog. Down by Paradeplatz, civilians culled from other streets were being loaded into the Terror Ship, some stunned unconscious, some dead. Snakemen and Floaters came hurrying like worker bees, bringing more and more of the human cargo.

The Bahnhofstrasse holds some of the world’s most expensive real estate. There is not much residential housing there, the street being occupied mostly by stores, hotels, and banks. But in the little side streets between the Bahnhofstrasse and the Limmat River on one side, and the smaller river Sihl on the other, many apartments were tucked three and four stories up in buildings hundreds of years old. From these back streets, slowly, the sound of gunfire began again. The guns did not belong to the police.

The tempo of the aliens working in Paradeplatz began to quicken. They were used to some level of resistance, but normally this fell off quickly as the humans realized it did them no good. These humans, though, seemed slower to realize this than usual, and their gunfire was finding some marks among the less well-protected aliens who ventured down the winding back streets. As if in obedience to some overriding will, the percentage of better-armed and armored aliens foraging down those side streets began to increase. The ones servicing the ships, picking up more humans and stowing them, slowly came to the aid of the less well-defended aliens. They were safe enough—and no humans had yet been mad enough to try to approach the ships.

All this was as the aliens had predicted. Their food supplies would be well-augmented from this raid—and experimental supplies, as well. Their plan would continue unhindered.

Two hundred miles away to the east, a single Avenger was plunging through the night sky over Fribourg, heading for Lac de Neuchâtel and the Jura Mountains. It was taking advantage of the low clouds, and of being low— and it was giving Ari the willies.

“Where do you want me to turn, Boss?” said Rosie, the pilot. “Basel?”

He sat himself down in the spare chair, the fire-control position next to the pilot in the main cockpit, and shook his head. “No sooner than Colmar. Hang a right there. We’ll head straight over the Black Forest, come down on the other side of it near Schaffhausen, and then low and fast, straight for Zürich.”

“You got it. You want to take the hot seat then?”

“No,” Ari said. “Gunnery.”

“Gunnery?”

“We’ve got a sitting duck at the moment. If someone misses, I want it to be me. Don’t want to have to blame it on any of you guys.”

“The trouble with you, Boss,” Rosie said, “is that you don’t know how to delegate.”

Ari closed his eyes and laughed, just briefly He could remember Jonelle saying something like that, and not just once, either. “You may have something there. But this one’s mine. You just fly, and be glad I’m letting you do that.”