Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

Jonelle Barrett sat behind the desk, which was very clean and shiny, occupied only by her computer console and one piece of paper. The floor, though, was chaotically piled with paper, tapes, diskettes, cassettes, and other detritus, all bespeaking a person who preferred the least-kinetically-loaded form of filing: pile it up on the floor, where it can’t fall any farther. Some of the piles (mostly the ones leaning against the wall) were quite straight and organized-looking; others were doing their best to threaten others, slumping alarmingly sideways or forward.

At the moment, Jonelle herself was taking the latter approach to life. She was leaning on her elbows over that piece of paper, staring at it, while listening idly to the chatter over her computers comm circuit from one of the teams out on intercept.

“—keep it quiet, now—”

“—Boss’ll be annoyed if we come back without any goodies—”

Jonelle smiled slightly, a one-sided, crooked expression. She shook her head in a particular way, sideways, which activated her secretary’s link.

“Joel?”

“Yeah, Boss?”

“That’s Five on the blower now, is it?”

“Right. They’re in Tripoli.”

“Give me Team Eight. Where are they now?”

“Still chasing their chicken, Boss. Somewhere over the Med.”

“Where’s Three?”

“Ravenna.”

The smile got more crooked. “The criminal returns to the scene of the crime,” Jonelle said softly.

“Colonel Laurentz take a team down there before?”

“Not a team,” Jonelle said, and smiled more crookedly yet. “Never mind.”

Her earpiece clicked, and someone said, “Over here behind this giant tit, Boss. “

“That’s a mausoleum, you big dumb nyekulturnyi. Haven’t you ever seen a mausoleum before?”

Her eyebrows went up. “The model of tact, as always,” Jonelle murmured.

“Boss?”

“Nothing, Joel.”

The silence from her secretary’s link suggested raised eyebrows, and an opinion that more than nothing was involved. Jonelle waggled her own eyebrows at the dartboard, then reached out and straightened the piece of paper in front of her.

It said:

TO: BARRETT, JONELLE, CMDR, X-COM IRHIL M’GOUN

FROM: KENNY, DENNIS, SR CMDR, X-COM CENTRAL

WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT YOU ARE PEOMOTED REGIONAL COMMANDER SOUTHERN EUROPE / NORTH AFRICA. AUTHORIZATION DOCUMENTS AND CODE KEYS FOLLOW BY COURIER.

That had been nice to read, the first time. And it had made her smile when it landed on her desk the previous week.

Thirteen months, now, she had been commander down here at Irhil M’Goun. Not what you would normally call a peach assignment. Not down here, where the major natural resources were rock and sand or, if you went out of your way looking for something different, sand and rock. Morocco was a serious pain in the neck.

Take a part of the world that held little to interest anyone, human or alien (you would have thought, anyway), dig a deep hole in it—well, several holes—and build a base. Stock it with several hundred stir-crazy scientists, researchers, and (worst of all) pilots and soldiers.

Then just sit there and twiddle your thumbs. That was what the former commander had done. Jonelle couldn’t understand how anyone who had risen through the ranks in X-COM could possibly think that a base was a place that would just run merrily along by itself without serious attention or constant infusions of money. The former commander had mismanaged the place until there were chronic staff shortages, equipment shortages, even food shortages. Jonelle had trouble understanding how such a situation had been allowed to go on for so long. Whether the commander had had the fabled Friends in High Places, or whether (as Jonelle suspected) the people in High Places had simply been too distracted with more severe problems elsewhere, either way Irhil M’goun had gone quietly to hell in a handbasket, and no notice was taken…until the aliens’ Good Friday terror attack on Rome.

Jonelle grimaced at the memory. Irhil had been the only base in a position, that day, to handle that particular interception. They hadn’t handled it. The result had been more than six hundred dead and the oldest part of Rome devastated. What two thousand years of weathering, tourist chipping, and opportunistic quarrying had failed to do, the aliens had done in about ten minutes, leaving the Colosseum a pile of rubble and (almost as a side issue) the Pope dead underneath it. To say that the Italian government was annoyed would be somewhat understating the case.

Shortly thereafter—before the bodies were cold, Jonelle suspected—the former base commander was relieved of his command. There was a brief interregnum period of a week or so while an investigative team came down and looked the place over. Then Jonelle, at that point a colonel over in Rio, had abruptly been promoted to X-COM base commander and shipped off to run this godforsaken pit.

At the time, while not entirely understanding the rationale that had caused this sudden boon to land on her, Jonelle had been delighted. It had been a career advancement far beyond her expectations, at least in terms of time—she hadn’t expected to make commander for years yet. And she was further excited because the Powers That Be plainly wanted her to act like a “new broom,” in the same way she had on a lesser level with her previous commands. Jonelle had jumped into the job joyously. Now, though, she wished desperately for the good old days when she had been able to just jump out of a Lightning and blow up, with a clean conscience, anything that looked like it intended to make her day less than pleasant. She could no longer allow herself the simple luxury of handling her problems with grenades or an autocannon. Now she had to use balance sheets—nearly as deadly, to humans anyway, and a lot less satisfying.

The basso-static noise of gunfire rattled in her earpiece. “People, target the vehicles. The light won’t last, but it’s better than nothing.”

Jonelle smiled to herself. Ari was never one to waste resources. He had been about the only one of that mind around Irhil when she arrived.

Thirteen months. Jonelle had been busy since then. She had come to a place where the tension levels seemed so much higher than they ever should at a base that was working properly. There were plenty of reasons for it, but at the bottom of them the simple fact that no one there really trusted anyone else to do their job because no one Up Top had spent any serious time making sure they did it. Jonelle sensed this very clearly but said nothing about it to anyone at first. She spent a peaceful first couple of weeks as Queen Log, sitting still and looking around to see who was using what and who was wasting it. Fighting aliens was, after all, an expensive business, and even with the whole planet in crisis, under siege by what appeared to be half of some alien planet’s ecology, money to fight them still didn’t grow on trees. The previous base commander at Irhil—wherever he was, and Jonelle hadn’t inquired, knowing someone would gossip the info to her sooner or later—had started out with a good kitty. But he had blown an astonishing amount of it on research, producing few results and managing little successful control of that period’s repeated alien terror attacks in North Africa. Jonelle had looked over the accounts and became determined to do better. There were a lot of things Irhil M’goun needed if the aliens were not simply to move in and set up housekeeping. At the end of those first two weeks, Queen Log became Queen Stork in earnest, and Jonelle set out to start shaking the place into order, and specifically to make a lot of money.

She fired a lot of science personnel who had been sitting around wasting perfectly good money and food on vague projects the former base commander had never sufficiently investigated. She started to sell even slightly outdated munitions and captured alien paraphernalia to all the anonymous bidders in sight. “I’d sell laser cannons to the Tooth Fairy if he turned up with cash,” Jonelle announced, and shortly thereafter many little private flying craft started dropping out of the sky, their pilots and passengers offering Jonelle’s secret civilian intermediaries all manner of hard currencies for guns and alien corpses and invaders’ metal and all the other salables that successful interceptions provided. The alien corpses sometimes gave her second thoughts. What are they doing with them? Using them for alien snuff movies? It was something of a mystery. The corpses weren’t a source of anything valuable, in the sense of pharmaceuticals or other chemicals, and no one she knew used them as food.