Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

As they approached, they were joined by Mihaul O’Halloran, who came over to them and took off his helmet long enough to wipe some sweat out of his eyes. “Here’s the colonel’s catch of the day, Commander,” he said. “The Battleship was nice shooting, but this one was just plain old wickedness in action. I’d give a pretty penny to know how he knew what was under here.”

“What did he tell you, Mihaul?” Jonelle said as they walked over to the hole to examine it more closely.

“Not much, ma’am. He was crashing in the lake about that time, and after that, most of the way up here he was busy fighting. He couldn’t give us detailed explanations. He just said to me, ‘Do me a favor,’ he says, ‘see the ground all around that thing? Shoot it out.’ And I said, ‘What, Boss?’ I mean, ‘Sir.’ Ma’am.”

“Never mind, Mihaul.”

“Yes, ma’am. Well, he said it again, ‘Just do that. Get whatever firepower you can. Grenades, rocket launchers, heavy laser, I don’t care. Concentrate on where the tracks are, first. Then just dig yourself a hole to China. Get some help. And you’ll want to post a guard afterwards.’”

Mihaul shrugged. “So we did. It took the devil’s own time to get anywhere with this. I mean, ma’am, we didn’t see what point shooting at the ground was, anyway. And of course the aliens inside were shooting at us all the time. But after a little while, the ship started to sag over sideways—as if something under it were weakening. So we got two of those HWPs in as quick as we could, and let them really have a go at it. The ground gave way then, all right! Not just the ground, as you can see. And when it was over, the ship just fell right into the hole with almost all its weapons ports under the surface, and it couldn’t shoot anything much after that but this underground stuff, nor go anywhere much after that but toward China. We had plenty of leisure to storm it then. We got out every single civilian that they’d stowed in it, without damaging it at all. Six captures, ma’am—Ron over there will give you the whole list. And,” Mihaul said, and laughed softly, “we saw why the colonel said we might need to post a guard.”

They came to the edge of the hole. The Terror Ship was tilted down into it at a forty-five degree angle, with God-knew-what alien lubricants spilling down from it, and water from broken pipes, and snapped wires and cables fizzing all around, so that everything stank of ozone and Lionel trains. And down there, under the ship, scattered higgledy-piggledy with corpses of Snakemen and Chryssalids, was the gold—the gold that lay in the sunken vaults all up and down the length of the Bahnhofstrasse, vaults shared and policed by the Big Three banks, secret to most, known of in an abstract way by many, though this was not the kind of information that the Michelin guide normally reveals. There it lay, gold in heaps and piles, bars and bars of it, crushed and scattered under the remains of the Terror Ship, melted by the heat of all the weaponry concentrated on that spot since the attack that Ari ordered began—gold running away in little rivulets and puddling like bright coins, here and there still glowing red, most places just gleaming dully in wriggly, abstract sculptures and splashes on the sub-floor forty feet down.

Mihaul shook his head and laughed. “So we posted the guards, ma’am. Though I think anyone nuts enough to come here and try to steal probably deserves some.”

“Mihaul,” Jonelle said, “you’re dead right. Well, the Swiss police will be along shortly to handle this. Meanwhile…let’s go up to the station and see how they’re doing.”

All the way up, Jonelle received reports, asked questions and answered them, and started settling the dispositions of the teams once they’d gotten the Swiss started on the cleanup. She sent for a stripping team to start work on the Terror Ship—it would be a little while before the Battleship was ready to be stripped of all but the easiest things, such as the Elerium. I’ll have the funds for that new mind shield now, Jonelle thought, even a new hyperwave decoder. That was possibly the brightest aspect of this whole situation. But all the time, as she gave orders and received information, Jonelle could not get rid of the memory of a night when she and Ari had been out on leave in Paris, and she had come back from shopping to find him exchanging terrible ethnic jokes with someone who (he later told her) was a genuine “Gnome” of Zürich, a junior manager with one of the Big Three banks, and who was full of interesting stories. Jonelle had afterwards laughed at the idea, and teased Ari for the better part of half an hour about how he so hated eating or drinking by himself that he’d strike up a conversation with anybody, even a banker.

And it was true. Oh, please, let it go on being true. Oh, Ari, please, don’t die!

“So we have a mole,” she said much later to DeLonghi, who looked at her out of a face pale with weariness, and now creased with shock.

“Here?”

“Possibly. Somewhere in the organization, certainly, or possibly among the Swiss. In any case, we have to look at who knows about the building of the new base, and start turning over some rocks to see what we find.”

DeLonghi sighed. “Commander, with all due respect, I think we have more immediate problems. We’re very shorthanded right now. Half our craft are down for maintenance of some kind. Several are seriously damaged and won’t fly again before the end of the week, no matter how many engineering crew we put on the job—and we only have so many.”

“I’ve requisitioned more,” Jonelle said. “Some of the Andermatt staff will be coming down here.”

“It’s not going to be enough,” DeLonghi said.

“Commander, if you’re suggesting that we stop construction on the new base because we’re having problems down here, I’m afraid that’s not an option that’s open to us—and senior command would laugh themselves blue if they heard it. After cashiering us, of course.”

He looked more shocked than previously. “No, Commander, I didn’t—”

“Good,” Jonelle said.

“But we’re still left materially unable to deal with any serious threat. We had an Interceptor destroyed, another one that’s been seriously damaged and will be out of commission for about a week. One of our Skyrangers limped home on half its propulsion system—that one needs about a week in the shop, as well. One of our Lightnings was destroyed. One of the Firestorms that went out yesterday was damaged. The Avenger—” He shrugged. “That’s worse—it’s a write-off.”

Jonelle smiled slightly. “That’s what the insurance company says?”

DeLonghi threw a look at her that suggested he wasn’t wild about the joke. “Commander,” he said, “it’s just a blessing that it was empty when it went down.”

“It’s not exactly a blessing,” Jonelle said. “It has to do with Colonel Laurentz’s disposition of the craft, I believe. He knew well enough that you don’t keep an Avenger in the air with a full complement any longer than you have to. Which brings me to another subject.”

DeLonghi swallowed. “What was he doing in that ship? My orders to him were most specific. He was not to put himself in the front line.”

“Commander,” DeLonghi said, with the air of a man who knows he’s already beaten, “you know the situation last night. You’ve seen the transcripts and the timings. The colonel put a very compelling case to me. And your orders to me also required that I was to take his advice, unless I could find compelling reasons to the contrary. There were none. There were two large reasons sitting in Zurich, which meant when he said he was going, I had to let him. If the commander can suggest to me what she would have done in my place, in that situation—I’ll listen gladly, and note the lesson for later.”