Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

No one she knew. Jonelle made a wry face, wondering whether those corpses were being rendered down somehow and the components sold as instant soup to other aliens for the various subspecies that needed it. Such a discovery wouldn’t have surprised her. Humans would buy anything from anyone, and sell anything to anyone. Treachery was as commonplace as honesty, and Jonelle couldn’t stop it. All she could do was work to do her best for her own side.

She dug new hangar facilities and built new labs and engineering works. Then she hired scientists to replace the ones she had fired. She looked most carefully at their credentials and gave her department heads meticulous instructions regarding what researches she wanted done and how fast she wanted to see results. If they blew it, she fired them—within minutes, some complained. Jonelle let them complain. Irhil M’goun swiftly got a name as a place where someone who could produce results would be given large amounts of research space, whether they were looking at the immune systems of Floaters or neural chemotransmission in Chryssalids. It was all the same to Jonelle, and extremely talented scientists started fighting to work at Irhil. Not bad, she thought, for a place that’s just a bare patch in the rock.

She started building guns, big time. “You can never have enough guns” was Jonelle’s motto. Laser cannon were her specialties, mostly because of their extravagant profit margins. She sometimes wondered whose armory she was supplying—what nation might suddenly find itself with an extremely well-armed rebellion on its hands. But Jonelle entertained such thoughts only briefly. At the moment, national rebellions had to be considered mere local squabbles, compared with what X-COM and the world had to deal with. If the cost of driving the aliens off the planet was the fall of a local government or two, well…that was life. There wasn’t a nation on Earth whose internal balances hadn’t been thrown out of whack by the aliens’ incursion. When they were gone, there would be time for the normal state of affairs to reassert itself. Of course, there would still be losses of life and other injustices, but at least people native to this planet would be the ones cleaning up the mess.

And there was always the small matter of UFO components. The previous interceptor crews had felt no particular pressure from their boss to shoot down alien craft where they could be properly plundered—a shocking laxity. There had been much too much of the “who cares, why risk our own skins, just dump it in the Med” mindset at Irhil. Jonelle had watched the interceptor crews operate for those first couple of weeks. Then she sacked almost all the colonels and some captains, started retraining a few others, and restocked the crews. Indeed, their attrition rate had already been so high that this wasn’t hard. Then she personally took them out on a few runs to show them how it was to be done.

Gunfire in her earpiece, very close. A grunt—someone coming down on the ground, hard. Jonelle stiffened, listened. There was still certainly breathing going on in the background, quick but not labored. He’s OK. The sound of plasma fire, again very close. Ari’s typical staccato pattern, careful, not scattershot, not wasteful of energy. Sudden silence.

“Report.”

“They’re scattering, Boss. This batch is heading northwest.”

Jonelle smiled again, that same slightly crooked smile. He had been a big help to her during those first couple of weeks, one of only two or three people in Irhil who appeared to have their heads screwed on the right way. Colonel Laurentz had not precisely followed her around—as some had, seeking to butter up the new commander or to find out where her weaknesses were—but always seemed to be somewhere handy when something needed explaining. That big, blond, broad-shouldered shape with the scarred face and the droopy-lidded brown eyes would be leaning against a wall in the mess, or half sticking out of one of a Firestorm’s maintenance access ports, accessible, ready to talk to—easy to talk to. He had not gone out of his way (as some of the Irhil staff had done) to bad-mouth other staff or officers. Laurentz would simply state what seemed to be wrong with something, and what seemed to be needed to fix it. Then he would let you draw your own conclusions. Blame did not seem to interest him; having things work—a Firestorm, a cannon, a command structure—did interest him. So cool, straight-headed, and unusual an attitude could hardly avoid attracting Jonelle’s attention, for she too was more interested in fixing things than in wasting time complaining about what went wrong. Soon enough, she began talking to Laurentz regularly about getting the base working properly again. Soon enough, Laurentz became Ari.

And, after a while, he became more than that. But that was his business, and Jonelle’s. No one else’s.

More fire noises in her earpiece—the insistent booming of autocannon—and more chat between the teams as they worked toward some common goal. The piazza? Jonelle briefly thought of the leave they had taken together nine months ago, while discussing private business. Ari had insisted they go up to Ravenna to see some mosaics. Jonelle, never much of an art fan, had gone along to humor him and had been somewhat surprised by Ari’s profound silence in the face of the ancient, stiff-robed, dark-eyed figures laid into the walls and floors of the tomb there. She was surprised, too, to find herself moved by the haunting expressions looking at them from the far end of time: sorrowful, thoughtful—and Ari’s expression, which matched theirs. A little while afterward, in the café in the street, Ari had drunk wine and filled the evening air with laughter, belittling his own response. Jonelle had smiled and nodded, going along with him. But she realized then that there was a lot more to this man than she had suspected, and that it was going to take her a long time to find out what else might be there.

If they survived, of course, for the world was not exactly the safe and stable place it had seemed before the aliens had arrived. She laughed softly at that thought: that the late nineties now seemed “safe and stable” compared to what the world had lately become.

“Paula, got a clean perimeter back there?”

“No problems, Boss. A lot of Mutons over this way. One damn near pulled dive’s arm off, but he’s still alive. “

He’s coping, Jonelle thought, and bent her head to gaze at that piece of paper again. They had all been coping, and doing it better than ever. Irhil M’goun had finally become a viable proposition, after thirteen months of her attacking its weak spots one after another. Its manufacturing arm was doing very nicely at keeping the necessary money rolling in. Interceptions were going well. Few of them happened over water anymore, if Jonelle’s teams could help it. She had taught them better. They were doing fairly well in terms of Elerium-115 pickup—better, judging by the monthly averages, than many older and better-established bases. She intended to improve that, and to go on improving her teams’ response times and results on terror attack sites.

There were still things about M’goun that bothered her. Jonelle’s great local worry, the lack of a mind shield, had finally been handled a few months ago. Six months back, she had hocked or sold nearly everything the base didn’t really need to make the balloon payment on the screen, over the howls of protest of some of her under-officers. They had spent a lean couple of months “making do” and hanging on, financially, by their nails, waiting for the parts and technicians to arrive. Jonelle had turned into something of a harpy on the subject of economically successful interceptions, until the flight crews began to complain that she would sell her own grandmother to an anonymous bidder as an alien artifact. (The nastier of the wits added that, considering the commander’s present conduct, Jonelle’s grandmother probably was an alien— possibly a Celatid or some other poisonous old bag. And as for Jonelle—!) Yet it was astonishing how the morale of the place improved the day the screen went on. The tension in Irhil dropped off as though someone had thrown a switch. Well, Jonelle thought with some satisfaction, someone did. And it always helped knowing that your enemies couldn’t hear you thinking.