Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

She swallowed too, and nodded, and turned again. “It was a good briefing,” Ari said, very quietly. “Thank you,” Jonelle said, as quietly, and left in a hurry.

Commander DeLonghi was somewhat surprised by the mellow mood in which he found Jonelle when they met. She was at some pains to let him know this wasn’t simply because she had had an opportunity to go out and handle an interception herself, thereby blowing off some steam. She was genuinely pleased by the way he had set his teams up, making sure that everyone had the right weapons and equipment to deal with the specific threats at hand. She spent their hour together not yelling at him (as Jonelle knew very well he had expected), but going over his ship and troop assignments in detail to make sure that he did as well next time, or better. I’m going to be up to my nose in Andermatt for the next little while, she thought, and the more positive reinforcement Joe gets from planning wisely and doing well, and being praised for it, the better.

After seeing him, Jonelle went off to do her rounds— the first really leisurely tour of the base she’d had since the Andermatt business broke over her so suddenly. She found the usual Crud tournament in progress, and the pilots and assault crews shouted cheerfully at her as she came through, a sound that reassured her. These were people who were clearly settling successfully into a changed routine, feeling confident about it and about their results the night before. Jonelle had found a long time ago that success spawns more success, and failure breeds failure—the latter more quickly than the former, unless a smart commander moved speedily to nip it in the bud. DeLonghi would be discovering this himself shortly, she was sure, as soon as his own confidence was in place.

In the engineering areas and the workshops she found business progressing pretty much as usual, but spent as much time there as she had with the pilots and assault crews. It was imperative for the “support” end of an X-COM base to understand that it was as just important as the flashier departments, and that firing guns was difficult for anyone until they had first been built. The workshop staff, as usual, chaffed Jonelle for wasting any time at all with the pilots, when the really important side of business was taking place down here, on the assembly line. She laughed, agreed with them completely, and went on her way.

Jonelle left the alien containment facilities for last, as usual. It was simply not her favorite part of the base even under the best of circumstances. She swung through fairly quickly, pausing longest with one of the teams that was doing an interrogation on the Snakeman leader her interception had caught. In one outer office, two scientists and one of Jonelles captains, Arwe Ngadge, were busy working on the alien with a mind-probe. The scientists were watching the readings from the probe on their monitoring console while Ngadge sat wearing a headset-mike and making copious notes on a legal pad. Behind the armor glass in the confinement module, the alien sat stiff, blank-eyed, and robotic-looking on the cells little bench.

As Jonelle looked in, Ngadge glanced up and smiled slightly. “Commander—half a second.” He took off his headset, handed it to one of the scientists, and said, “Look, try twelve and fifteen again—the responses to those were awfully equivocal.”

The scientist nodded, and Ngadge unfolded his dark, seven-foot-tall self, got up, and went out into the hall. Jonelle peered through the windows at their captive. “Anything useful, Arwe?” she said.

“Hard to say until we’re finished. But I confess that the thing I’m most interested in is why they had so many Silacoids aboard that ship.”

Jonelle nodded. Of all the alien species that X-COM had had to contend with since the invasion began, Silacoids were probably considered the least threatening of the lot. They were not aggressive on their own—other species, usually Mutons, controlled them via telepathy and cybernetic implants. They looked like nothing so much as lumpy boulders, and their whole purpose in life seemed to be eating rock and dirt. True, they were annoying enough when they attacked you—which they did in a very straightforward manner: by throwing themselves at you, with about the same results as if someone had chucked a hundred-pound rock in your direction. But they were easily blown up, or shot up, assuming you had some form of ammunition that could pierce the coat of stone that was a Silacoid’s skin. For her own part, Jonelle (when she thought about them at all) felt vaguely sorry for them, the only alien species that could possibly have provoked such a response. Their silicon-based physiology and their tiny brains suggested that the other, more intelligent alien invaders had simply picked the poor things up from their native planet, wherever it might be, and started using them as mobile, dim-witted weapons.

“When you send the stripping team up, Commander,” Ngadge said, “would you have them do some scanning? I’d like to make sure that no Silacoids were missed in the shuffle.”

“The way they generate heat,” Jonelle said, “I’d have thought we would have picked them all up without any trouble. But, yes, I’ll have it checked. Anything else from this gent?”

“Nothing much so far. Indications are that he was on a mission to an alien base somewhere—the hyperwave decoder records confirm that much. But where, or what it was about—” Ngadge shrugged. “At any rate, we’ll keep working. This guy is a lot more resistant than some we’ve worked with lately, and I’m curious to see just why.”

“Send a report along to Andermatt as soon as you have any ideas. Have you seen Jim Trenchard?”

“He’s down in his office.”

“Right. Thanks, Arwe.”

Jonelle strolled down the corridor to Trenchard’s office. He was sitting with the door open, as usual—she had often wondered how he could possibly work that way— humming to himself and hammering away at his computer keyboard. At the sound of her footsteps, he glanced up and said, “Commander! Got a moment?”

“Several.” She came in and sat down, glancing around in slight amusement, as she always did, at the increasing number of articles, photos, and clippings pinned to all four of Trenchard’s office walls. This was his filing system, apparently highly developed and effective, though it looked utterly chaotic. Pictures of elephants and pandas, and crayon drawings by one of his nursery-school-age nieces, were pinned over scribbled-on pages from Scientific American and The New England Journal of Medicine. Graphs and printouts mixed with handwritten notes and the occasional incomplete crossword puzzle. The only things on his two desks were books, piled up neatly, and a coffee mug full of pens and pencils.

Trenchard saved whatever he was working on at the computer, then leaned over to one side and started ruffling through some papers pinned to the wall. “I’ve got the initial research proposals and master schedule for the new place,” he said, giving up on that particular spot and leaning over the other way to try another set of papers, half underneath a map of the solar system, on which some wag had written, pointing out of the system and (theoretically) in the direction of the alien homeworlds, “WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS.““Right, here we are.”

He detached the sheaf of papers and handed them to Jonelle. She ruffled through them, impressed. “This whole thing? This must be a year’s worth.”

“Two.”

Jonelle glanced over the chapter headings and subheadings. Reapers: Floater liaison methods—defeating neural and cardiac redundancy—neural neutralization—aerosols? Sectoids: Neurocortical analysis—recombinant cloning: cloning “back to type.” Snakemen: Remote sterilization techniques? Second-generation in ovo sterilization.