Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

“Once more,” Jonelle said softly.

“Loading four—he’s still heading south. Nope,” Ron added. “Angling west, now.”

Deeper still into more remote territory, Jonelle thought. If that Scout knew where they had come from, it was definitely trying to get them as far away from any kind of help as possible. “It had better be the next one, Ronnie,” Jonelle said, “or you won’t have anything to protect us with if a friend of his shows up. And if he gets much farther south, and you drop him there, he’s going to fall right on St. Moritz. That would not be a good thing.”

Ron looked furious. “Four ready,” he said. “Accelerating. Ten kilometers. If I can’t hit him at that range, Boss—”

Jonelle said nothing. Ron’s face set. “Targeting. Acquire. Firing!”

The fourth missile leapt away. They watched. Jonelle clenched her teeth, thinking, Come on, you, come on! The dots drew closer, drew closer. Merged. The screen flashed—

“It’s a hit!” Ron cried, and the forward speed of the dot representing the alien Scout decreased abruptly. It veered almost due south. “Going down, Boss! Tracking now. Losing altitude: one thousand meters—five hundred—passing over the lake—now gaining a little. He’s trying to make it over the mountain—” Ron chuckled.

The dot stopped. “Down,” Ron said. “On the north slope of…what’s its name here? Monte dell’Oro. One of the mountains south of the lake.”

Jonelle bit her lip. It was not the kind of place she would normally choose for a ground assault. Attacking either uphill or downhill was a nuisance, no matter what the tacticians said. You wound up with gravity as the chief enemy, in a fight where you already had one that was deadly enough. But this was no time to be complaining. “Right. Notify the Skyranger that our boy’s on the ground, and then take us down easy. Nice shooting, Ronnie!”

She turned and went back to talk to her people, a last few words before they put their tender skins out where aliens could shoot at them. In her own days as sergeant and captain and colonel, Jonelle had always made sure to take those few moments, for the simple reason that— ground assaults being what they were—it was likely to be your last chance to ever talk to some of these people. Or, alternately, their last chance to talk to you. But what she mostly wanted to communicate to them now was something she had been feeling on and off since she left Ari’s bedside:

I’m sick of sitting around. I’m going to go kill something.

The Lightning grounded, harder than necessary perhaps—a function of the bad terrain, or of the fact that Ron Moore was better at flying than he was at landing. Jonelle hefted her heavy laser and said, “Everybody ready, now?”

From the others, all armored, came a chorus of “Yes, Boss” and “Let’s go!”

The Lightning’s deployment doors opened out over the icy ground strewn with rocks and boulders. It helped a little that the Lightning’s jets had blown the site mostly clear of snow, but around the Scout there was still a fair amount, and the wind whipping past them was bringing more in the beginnings of drifts from the upper slopes of the neighboring mountain. At least there was no danger of an avalanche: all the snow that could fall down in the immediate neighborhood had fallen down.

Fire erupted from the downed Scout. It might not be able to fly, but at least some of whatever aliens were inside it were apparently all right. This annoyed Jonelle, and made her suspect that the inmates were of the more robust types of aliens. Damn.

“By fours,” she said to the sergeant in the other team. “Don’t hurry. Get your folks safely disposed, and if there’s snow for them to use as cover, have them make the most of it. It’s no protection, but it can be a distraction.”

Jonelle’s first four went out, one of them with a motion scanner.

“Nobody outside, Boss,” said the squaddie with the motion detector after a few moments. “Nobody out here at all but us chickens—whoops! Six high!”

Something moved upslope, on the narrow ledge at the top of a jagged cliff face. Squaddies whirled, fired. The creature leapt apart in a burst of blood, shrieked, and fell down among them.

They all stared. It looked like a goat, but it was bigger, and had huge back-curved horns. “Holy shit,” one of the squaddies said. “It’s a big-horn sheep.”

“It’s an ibex,” someone else said.

Jonelle shook her head regretfully. “It’s toast,” she said. “Poor thing. Never mind. It’s getting on toward breakfast time—let’s go crack this egg.” She hefted her laser cannon and left the Lightning, followed by three more of her squad.

The assault took the better part of two hours. From Jonelle’s point of view, it was the usual crazed, confused melange of noises, images, and general craziness, everything seeming to happen at once. Afterward, people always told Jonelle how organized and cool she seemed, and how structured her handling of the situation was. She never believed it. She always lost track of how many grenades she had thrown, how many targets she had fired at, lost, fired at again. Her heavy laser was damaged about halfway through the assault, and she was forced to pick up one belonging to one of her dead squaddies and work with that—something that always obscurely bothered Jonelle when she was fighting. She thought of the life this weapon should have saved, and didn’t, through lack of skill or bad luck—there was never any way to tell, and it was too late now. She fired at and killed every alien that came within sight of her, first assessing them for commercial value, but all of them seemed strangely devalued today. One she stunned, a Snakeman leader who would at least be useful for interrogation. Her team did most of the aliens in before she had a chance. She wondered whether the cold was slowing her down, or whether her people were simply actively protecting her. There was no telling. She wished they would concentrate more on themselves. For herself, she went on firing.

By the time the shooting stopped, four of her people were dead inside that ship, or outside, in the dark, in the drifting snow. Jonelle and the survivors, including the sergeant, stood around shortly thereafter, surveying the wreckage of the ship. “Kind of strange, if you ask me, Boss,” said the sergeant.

Jonelle was still trying to make sense of it. “How many of them did you say?”

“Four Snakemen, including the leader. Two Chryssalids and a whole pile of Silacoids.”

“Silacoids,” Jonelle muttered, shaking her head. “Why?”

“Seven of them,” said one of the squaddies, rejoining the group. “I just got the last one—it was trying to run away in the snow. They don’t do too well at that—the snow melts off them, and the trails are kind of obvious, they’re so hot.”

“All right,” Jonelle said. “Let’s clean up here. Strip the ship of things that can be easily carried, and make pickup on the corpses. Get the prisoners stowed. I’ll call Irhil for a strip team to get the metal and the other consumables.”

She made her way slowly back to the Lightning. That was when the last Chryssalid jumped her. The thing seized her with its claws, hunting for somewhere to inject the venom that would put out her humanity like a candle being snuffed. Jonelle grappled with the thing, gasping with revulsion. After a moment her suit training cut in, and she jumped, and flew. There she hung, in midair, badly balanced and wondering if she was going to crash—hovering, or trying to, in a storm of blowing snow, while the Chryssalid hung from her, squirming and shrieking and thrashing, trying to breach her armor.

Both her hands were busy holding it away. Jonelle had nothing to get a shot at it with, and her people wouldn’t dare shoot at it for fear of hurting her. As if this wasn’t enough, a gust of wind blew her, back first, into the nearby cliff face from which the poor ibex had been blasted.