Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

Jonelle sat back and sighed. “Joe,” she said, “sometimes you can be a real pain in the butt, you know that? But you’ve got me there. Well, all we can do is get on with requisitioning new supplies and equipment, and transferring in some new staff. At least we won’t be short of money to pay for them.”

“What was the total haul?” Jonelle shook her head. “I’m still working on the figures. But it’s large. We’ve got a big Elerium supply now—I wouldn’t exactly say we have it to burn, but we’ve got plenty on hand. I’ve ordered a mind shield and hyperwave decoder for the new facility. The first set of hangars are almost ready, and the living blocks. I want to move about half the engineering staff down there and start them making guns.” She smiled, a slightly grim look. “We should do well up there. Some parts of Switzerland, you can’t spit without hitting an arms dealer—the market’s active enough for anybody.”

“I’ll take care of it tomorrow, Commander. Anything else?”

She shook her head. “I’ll be going back to Andermatt tonight. My operations and command center was being installed today—I want to keep an eye on that, and see if I can hurry the hyperwave decoder, as well. That won’t be in a minute too soon to please me.”

“Operations down here, then….” DeLonghi trailed off.

She looked at him, knowing what he was asking: was she going to pull back command from him, after such a bad start? “Let’s just say I’ll be keeping a general eye on things. But otherwise, you’re mistaken if you think I’m likely to have much time for you. We’ll be salvaging the Avenger at the Andermatt site. Between that, and overseeing the new installations….” DeLonghi nodded. “There is one thing I want, though,” Jonelle said. “I want an inventory of all communications activity in and out of Irhil over the last two weeks.”

“All of it?”

“All. Including ship-to-ship. Not transcripts—just the basic records of who called who and when.”

“Very well, Commander.”

“Good. See to it.”

She got up, went out, and walked down the corridor that led from her office to Operations and the rest of the base, greeting her people as she went. There were fewer of them than usual.

We have a traitor, she thought. We have a spy in our ranks. Someone who may have been working with my people—friends with them—or seeming friends. But someone who has no trouble in, directly or indirectly, sending them to their deaths. Jonelle sighed. She had sent people to their possible or probable deaths nearly every day lately—but it was a death she herself was willing to share if she had to. She had come close enough to that, in her own time as a team member. What she had great trouble understanding was how one of her own, or for that matter how anyone from Earth, could willingly sell information about Earth defenses to the aliens. Oh, Earth-based treason she could understand readily enough. Jonelle was enough of a student of military history to understand that, even as there are people who will readily sell weapons, any weapons, to any buyer—a tendency she was not above exploiting—there were other people who would as eagerly sell information, that deadliest of weapons, to whoever would buy, even the sworn enemies of the whole human race. But a traitor of one country against another could always just move to another country afterward. Where do these people think they’ll be able to escape to, Jonelle thought, when the aliens rule Earth and start making soup out of everything that walks? Do they think they’ll move to the Moon? Don’t they realize they’re in the pot with the rest of us already?

Apparently one of them didn’t. Her feelings about such people were robust. If she caught any of them, she supposed she would have to submit them to due process and let them be tried. But if she caught any of them in the field, in the middle of a fight, she doubted she would be so upright. “Killed while trying to escape” was an old and effective excuse, behind which—especially in these times— the authorities tended not to look too closely. That suited her completely, especially since, in her view, whoever had fed the aliens the information about the change of command at Irhil M’Goun was directly responsible for the deaths of ten of her people.

Possibly eleven.

Jonelle made her way through the part of the living block that was set aside as the infirmary. It wasn’t a large area—partly because of the typical space restrictions, partly because there was generally not much need for many beds. Most injuries suffered by troops out on ground assault were either severe enough to kill them right away, or’minor enough—with the present medical technology—to see them either ambulatory, or able to recuperate in quarters or ship out to a real hospital, within several days or a week. Some few cases, though, fell outside these boundaries.

There were two doctors who usually manned the place. Pierre Fleurie was off duty today. Jonelle found Gyorgi Makharov on duty instead. He was sitting at his desk by the corridor door, scribbling frantically on someone’s chart as she came in.

He looked up at her out of those startlingly blue eyes of his, and frowned. In his young face, the expression made him look a little like a pouting child. Jonelle tensed a little. She had quickly learned that that frown on Gyorgi meant all was not well with the world—and, specifically, with his patients.

“Commander,” he said. “They’ve been keeping you busy…”

“They have been, Gyorg,” she said. “How is he?”

“Not conscious yet.”

“What happened to him?”

“Psychocortical shock,” Gyorgi said, pushing the chart away with a disgusted look. “The usual.”

Jonelle nodded; the syndrome was all too familiar. It had come as a surprise, the first time people started running up against Ethereals and the other psi-talented species of aliens, that there was actual physical damage to the brain associated with psychic attack. It seemed that the brain interpreted attack “from within” as physical, at the chemical level—a finding that, paradoxically, had sped up X-COM’s researches into the adaptation for humans of the technology that would eventually become the psi-amp. The problem was that, because the injury to the brain was literally a psychosomatic one, it didn’t respond to the treatments that would normally have been useful for straightforward brain damage. Often enough, brains that seemed very little damaged did not survive, leaving a body that might function well enough, but that had no one “at home” in it, and was good for nothing but transplant parts. Others, who took more massive and physical-seeming damage, made more or less full recoveries. It was a puzzling part of neurophysiology, unpredictable and frustrating—so her medical staff had told Jonelle, more than once. More than once she had bugged them about coma cases whose etiology she couldn’t understand. This one was going to be no exception.

“Can I see him?”

“Sure. By the way,” Gyorgi added as she went past him toward the infirmary’s bed wing, “he also took a good knock on the head, either when he fell or just before. He had a case of contrecoup when he came in that I thought might kill him all by itself—but it’s reduced nicely without surgery, and there was no significant damage to the brain.”

“Contrecoup?”

“You hit somebody on one side of the head,” Gyorgi said, “and the bruise forms on the inside of the other side—the brain actually slams up against the bone. Fortunately”—and he looked somewhat wry—“the colonel either has softer bone or a harder brain than most people. He broke some minor blood vessels on the inside surface of the pia mater, but that was all. His other problems are worse.”