Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

Jonelle nodded and went on back.

There were only four beds in the wing, two of them screened off. The first one had a squaddie named Molson in it. Jonelle stopped, looked at the chart hung over the records rack at the bottom of the bed.

“Molson?” she said. “How you doing?”

“OK, Commander. A little chopped up, is all.”

“Is it OK to look?”

“If you don’t feel like throwing up—”

She put her head through the curtain. Molson was lying there with one leg up in traction, sandbags on either side of his body, and a cervical collar and “crown brace” around his skull, fastened by steel pins inserted through the skin and into the bone. Jonelle suspected this was no time for bothering with a bedside manner, especially when the voice that answered her had been relatively cheerful. “Good God, man,” she said, “you look like the Bride of Frankenstein.”

“Pinhead, my buddy Rogers says.”

“That too. They’re going to ship you up to the main hospital shortly, I take it.”

“In a couple of days, yeah. Doc says ‘after I stabilize.’ Jeez, Commander, I’ve got enough metalwork stuck in me to stabilize anything.”

“Well, you get your beauty sleep, Molson.” She gave him a wicked look. “I’d say you could use it.”

“Thanks loads, Commander.” His eyes flickered toward the next bed over. “How’s he doing—the colonel?”

“Catching up on his beauty sleep too, or so I hear,” Jonelle said. “If we had anything around here so low-tech as a baseball bat, I’d take it to the big lazy lump.”

“Yeah, well, give him one for me,” Molson said. “He saved my butt last night.”

“I’ll do that.”

She let the curtain fall and stepped over to the other bed, where the curtain was only partially drawn.

He was lying on his side in a position that immediately looked wrong in Jonelle’s eyes. Whenever Ari lay on his side, he always curled up like an infant—something Jonelle had teased him about more than once. Now he lay stretched out, one arm tucked under, one laid over the covers, in a position she recognized as part of the usual turning routine used on comatose patients. In a little while Gyorgi would come in and turn Ari onto his back, or his front. She was determined not to be there for that. The sight of this strong, lithe body flopping helpless and limp, like a doll, would do bad things for her composure.

There was no chair by the bed. She had to stand and look down on him, his unruly blond hair somewhat lank at the moment, for with other more pressing medical matters to attend to, no one would have washed it. That hurt her as much, in its way, as his odd position, for Ari was always personally fastidious. She had accused him once of taking more baths than a cat, and he’d laughed and said, “There’s enough dirt in the world—I don’t want any of it sticking to me.”

His face was untroubled. He might have been sleeping, except that his breathing was so quick that it sounded slightly unhealthy. Amazing, Jonelle thought, how much you can come to notice about a person, even about how they are just when they’re sleeping. Let alone about the things they say, they do…. She looked down at that amiably ugly face, so very still when it was usually so mobile. Even in sleep, it would twitch, expressions coming and going in flickers that surfaced from his dreams.

Jonelle breathed out. “This is a very untenable position, Colonel,” she said. “A bad spot. You get your butt out of that bed. I need your help—and your teams need you.”

She stood quiet for a few breaths, and then—with a reminder to herself that the next bed was occupied—began giving Ari a briefing, as she would have were he awake: how the raid went, the success of his stratagem in Zurich, who was alive. She didn’t mention who was dead. When she finished, Jonelle said, “I have to go back to Andermatt. If you need me, just ask. Gyorgi will keep me posted on how you’re doing.”

She reached down and touched his face. “Take care of yourself, my lion,” Jonelle said, very softly, not for the ears in the next bed to hear. Then she turned and left, keeping her voice cheerful and matter-of-fact as she said good night to Molson in the next bed, and to Gyorgi as she went out into the hall. It was all just part of the job, after all. It was the commander’s business to keep up hope for everybody else, even when she wasn’t sure where to find it for herself.

The next morning, Jonelle was back up under the mountain, inspecting the progress there. The living quarters were nearly finished: the last of the cooking facilities were going in as she made her tour. Work on the alien containment facilities was still ongoing. There were some details Jonelle had wanted added, some extra security doors and so forth. For her money, you could never be too careful about aliens when they were inside your own base. The first hangar space was within hours of being complete.

That morning, after much thought, she had told DeLonghi that she was taking the Skyranger that was presently doing transport duty between Andermatt and Irhil, and would be moving it permanently into Andermatt that afternoon, along with its crew and a small maintenance team for it. She was also taking two Lightnings.

He argued bitterly with her about this, but lacking better reasons—for she had none, only a growing streak of what she hoped was healthy paranoia—she finally had to fall back on good old-fashioned rank-pulling. She explained to him that this was just the way it was going to be. They did not part company on warm terms, which Jonelle regretted but was perfectly willing to cope with. She too had occasionally had to cope with disagreements with a superior officer, and there was no regulation that said one had to like it—just to comply.

Jonelle spent the better part of that day seeing that the new hangar space was to her liking. By and large, it was—large being the operant term. The most finicky bit of business had been the removal of the old steam catapult, neither the Skyranger nor the Lightnings needing anything of the kind. But while she checked the work of the hangar teams, other issues were on Jonelle’s mind. If someone was indeed getting intelligence from inside her base about the battle-readiness of Irhil M’Goun, or its lack of it, she intended to find out quickly. This was another of the reasons DeLonghi had been unhappy

“Let’s see,” Jonelle had said, “just how good their intelligence is. I’m going to go down to our hangars, notify the pilots myself, put them in their craft and send them off. No one else is to know where they’re going, not even our own air traffic control. We’ll be credited shortly for the various consumables we picked up during the Battleship capture. I’ll have the Lightnings I’m taking replaced within the week. That information, too, is to stay between you and me. When the new ones are ready, they’re going to be delivered to me at Andermatt, under wraps, and the old ones will be ‘returned’ to you down here.”

And so it had been arranged. The completion of the living-quarters work being literally about as interesting as watching paint dry, Jonelle divided her attention for the rest of the day between the installation of the new control and command center—all modular and meant to “plug and play,” a smart development in situations where fast replacement was vital, such as after a base attack—and watching the drying of another batch of paint: the markings on the vast number-one hangar floor. Space for one Avenger was marked out, for one Skyranger, two Lightnings, and two Interceptors. There was room for much more hardware downstairs on the number-two and number-three hangar levels, but it would be weeks yet before those were ready. Off to the sides of the huge, hollowed-out space was room for the Heavy Weapons Platforms and other ancillary gear—weapons lockers and the smaller ammunition storage “pots.”