Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

“If reinforcements do show, Boss, where you going to put them?”

“East side,” Ari said, “and they can keep the aliens from breaking out that way, and push toward us. Then more for the train station. When we’ve handled the ones in the streets, we’re going to have a lot of mopping up to do, I’m afraid. It’s just strategically sound, from their point of view, to head down into the station’s lower levels. Hundreds of nooks and crannies, offices and hallways to hide in….” Ari shook his head.

“Thinking of blowing the place, Boss?” Rosie said from behind him.

“No…just too many civilians. It’s going to be the underground shopping center version of house-to-house fighting, I’m afraid.”

“‘Shopping center’?”

“There are about a hundred stores down there. Stay out of the deli in the front, by the escalators,” Ari said “The prices are god-awful.”

“Colmar, Boss,” Rosie said. “Coming about.”

“All right, everybody,” Ari said, “rejoin your teams. One pass for me, as I said. Three stops for you and your teams. You’ve got thirty seconds each before I button up and go. After that, I’m going to take a run at that Terror Ship and see whether I can’t disable it without killing all the kidnapped people inside. If I’m lucky, if it’s where I think it is…we’ll see. Good luck, all of you!”

They saluted and went out. Ari sat himself down, looking out. The cockpit windshield was a blur of charcoal-gray cloud. The Black Forest beneath them was lost in it, visible to radar but to nothing else. “How low are we?” Ari said to Rosie.

“Fifty feet above treetop, Boss. I’d rather not push it any further. Some of these trees get tall without warning.”

“Don’t push it on my account,” Ari said. He strapped himself in at the gunnery console, wiped his hands on his uniform, and got himself settled. This one shot was going to matter profoundly. If that Battleship got up in the air again, he was going to have a lot more trouble than he wanted.

“Schaffhausen,” Rosie said. “I’m starting descent. Increasing to two hundred knots.”

Ari had to swallow. Even though they were less than forty feet above the streets of the small city, he couldn’t even see the lights of the town, the fog was so thick. “Just be sure you don’t hit anything pointy.”

“No chance, Boss. I’ve got a nice, direct run-in. I’m running right down the S-bahn tracks, the local light rail. It’s just like playing with slot cars.”

It was beginning to feel like it, too. Rosie made a rather abrupt left turn that would have knocked Ari out of his seat had he not been strapped in. He gulped and got busy with the gunnery console. This was one of the few problems he had in this business: letting someone else fly It drove him crazy

“Feeding heads-up to gunnery,” Rosie said. Overlaying the green of the radar on the gunnery screen, the false-color images of the heads-up display now appeared. “Two minutes to primary target. I’ll warn you at one. Passing the military airfield at Dübendorf.” She listened to something in her earpiece. “They see us, but they’re not doing anything.”

It’s all taken care of, said that cheerful voice in Ari’s memory. Was this prearranged, he wondered. Or had someone in the government received a quick phone call from a UN PR office down in Andermatt, or from “the Hall of the Mountain King”? No telling now No time to think about it.

Ari settled himself in the chair, did his best to become one with the gunnery screen. Odd, to be able to concentrate on shooting and not have to think about flying, as well—. That was the only good thing about this.

“One minute, boss. Acquisition.”

Up over the “virtual horizon” of the gunnery screen came the image of the Katenberg on the right, the Zurichberg on the left, and between them the depression marking the old river delta of the Limmat, on which Zürich was built. At the end of it all lay the Zürichsee, Lake Zürich, stretching off in a long blob of residual heat, now that they were close enough to get a residual heat signature, as well. Closer, brighter, a smaller blob of light. Concentrated. Other signatures, as well: the presence of Elerium was registering.

Ari hunched himself over the joystick, ignoring the thought of what the “real world” looked like through the windshield at the moment. This was all that mattered, those slowly rising octagons emerging from what once was the Hauptbahnhof.

“Trouble, Boss!” Rosie said. “Getting some movement.”

Ari swallowed. The Battleship had acquired their signal by now, he was very sure. He had hoped that approach from this side would win them a few precious seconds. Maybe it had. But the Battleship was moving, shouldering its way upward—though slowly. Very slowly.

Ari uncapped the fire button on the joystick. Range isn’t optimum, he thought. If I let loose with a fusion ball at this range, and I miss, the whole station and everybody in it’ll—

Plasma fire stitched the air all around them. Rosie did something sudden at her console, and the Avenger lurched upward and sideways through the air as she plunged toward the ruined train station. The ferocious lines of fire stitched along and upwards after them, the only thing visible through the fog. “Gonna drop her real quick, Boss,” she said. “Three seconds—two—”

Fire or not? Hold it just for a second more— The bottom dropped out of the world. Ari swallowed and kept his eye on the screen, on his target. The Battleship was still rising, but not as fast as it should have. What the hell—is it caught on something? An infrared trace was showing, a faint network of residual heat, like a spiderweb tangled around the leftward end of the Battleship, and the right-ward one, where the ship had sunk into the structure of the building— .

Now, Ari thought, and fired.

There was always a moment after you hit the fire button, some X-COM people said, when the fusion-ball projector seemed to hold its breath and think about whether to blow up what you fired it at, or to blow you up. That moment came and went. A blur, a blob of light like a small sun, leapt away from the Avenger and struck the Battleship just right of its middle.

The night lit up, and everything around the half-destroyed train station showed clear in an actinic light like lightning for a long, long few seconds as the fusion ball did its work. Rosie veered east to miss the glare, then plunged on past the station, now visible (if nothing else was) through the fog. She had a look at it while Ari stared at his screen and tried to make sense of it.

“Half a minute to your first stop, Boss,” she said. “Looks like you left some of that ship, but I don’t think it’ll be going anywhere soon. That stuff was all tangled around it—some kind of iron or steel reinforcement, I think. Meantime, the buildings around are still standing. Nice shooting.”

“Super,” Ari said. “Let’s get the first team out. When we’ve dropped everybody, we’ll go have a shot at that Terror Ship and see if we can’t cripple it, too. Meanwhile, I’m going to go put on my armor.” He undid the straps, got up, headed downstairs. “And then I’m going to get me a psi-amp and go hunting.”

Five hours later, the hunting was nearly over, though large parts of it had not gone according to anyone’s expectations. Jonelle met the remains of the first assault teams where the pilot of her Skyranger had dropped her, outside the Hauptbahnhof. She was in heavy armor, her flying suit— only sensible, since the area was not yet completely secured, and X-COM would take it most unkindly if a regional commander should be taken out by a chance shot from a Sectoid sniper. The use she would have preferred for the armor was to go down into the depths of the Hauptbahnhof and be busy in other ways. But she couldn’t so indulge herself—not anymore, and particularly not now.