Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

She turned and walked away from the camera, gesturing at the tech person to cut the link. Applause started behind her—softly, at first, then louder. Jonelle held her head high and kept walking. There was only one thought in her mind at the moment:

Please, God, don’t let me have to spend all their lives on this. Please don’t make me kill them all.

Much later that evening, after a session of being very, very physical, Jonelle sighed and lay back with an absent look. Ari padded over to the bed, on his way back from the bathroom.

“I see Ross has been transferred,” he said. “I’ll miss him—he was a good man.”

“Family emergency,” jonelle said, gazing thoughtfully at the wall. “He’ll be back next month.”

“‘Family emergency’?” Ari said. “He doesn’t have any family. Hasn’t for years now.”

Jonelle looked at him in the dimness of the one little lamp, then blushed a little and looked at the floor. “Ah. Well.”

“The trouble with you,” Ari said, “is that you’re not a good liar.”

She glanced at him swiftly.

“About personal things, I mean,” said Ari. “Professionally, you can lie with the best of them. Can’t you?”

“For the next week and a half,” Jonelle said softly, “that’s a thought I would keep to myself. Are you asking me to take you into my confidence?”

Ari took a long breath. “No.”

“Good,” Jonelle said. “There are, however, some things I want to discuss with you.” She got up, went over to where her uniform jacket hung over the chair, and fished out the letter that Ari had brought her. “Take a look,” she said.

He opened it and began to read. Jonelle sat back down on the bed and pulled the covers up, huddling under them for a moment.

“…Have for some time suspected that some colleague’s experiments were of a rather odd nature. In particular, some serology projects being stored in the communal cold storage area have peculiar labeling anomalies, apparently being attributed to people whose experiments they were not. Some of these containers contained human blood serum samples that, on closer examination, show profound shifts away from the usual acid-base codings present in human blood and serum DNA. Some tissue samples that I had a chance to examine briefly, but which have since disappeared, show similar changes.” Ari turned the page. “About a week ago, the absence of one of the research staff from the base on other business permitted me to examine these samples in more detail. While hardly being expert in this particular area, I can safely say that these samples indicate research along the following lines: Investigation into the blood serology of Ethereals. Investigation into the neural tissue serology of Ethereals. Investigation into the storage locations of lower cerebration facilities and the ‘memory trace’ in Ethereals. I have not been able to find any notes or other written material to substantiate further my investigations, but my guess is that all these researches are pointed toward a single purpose, and this is evidenced by one tissue sample I examined that has since disappeared: the progressive genetic alteration of human neural and blood tissue into Ethereal neural and blood tissue, by chemical means, by forward recombining of DNA and use of so-called ‘rogue’ and ‘interweave’ strands of messenger RNA, to construct a ‘bridge’ sequence between human and Ethereal genomes. The end product seems to be tissue of originally human provenance, but altered by the assisted action of Ethereal DNA, and various ‘semi-viral’ mechanisms—making material that would be, in essence, more Ethereal than human, and which in contact with other human material would derange it similarly. Such experimentation, while not strictly unethical if the material was locally derived, still strikes me as both dangerous and inappropriate for our facility. I must therefore advise you that I believe Jim Trenchard must be considered a security risk until more or better information can be obtained on exactly what the thrust of his research is.”

Ari put the letter down, looking distinctly pale. “Trenchard,” he said. “What’s he doing?”

Jonelle wrapped her arms around her knees and put her chin down on them. “I think he’s working on turning humans into Ethereals,” she said.

“He’s stark, stinking, blinking nuts!”

“No, I don’t think so. I think he’s sane…and that’s the problem.” She sighed. “Ngadge sent me a report on interrogations Trenchard was helping with. Said they were going a lot more smoothly since he started working on them. He was getting better results, somehow…the aliens were spilling more material….” Jonelle shook her head. “Are they spilling it because they were sent to do that?”

Ari lay back against the pillow, looking confused. “You lost me.”

“I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of sense myself. But haven’t you noticed we’ve been catching a whole lot more Ethereals lately?”

“We catch what we can,” Ari said. “It’s chance…isn’t it?”

“Who decides crew complements on alien ships?” said Jonelle. “We don’t know. How do we know for sure that some of the interceptions we’ve been making haven’t been allowed to happen?”

“Oh, now, wait a minute! Are you saying that my Battleship the other day—”

“Maybe not the Battleship, but certainly some of the others. Ari, we really have come up with an unusual number of Ethereals lately. Who’s helping who, here? And that other line in Ngadge’s letter: ‘If the material was locally derived—’”

Ari looked at Jonelle. “You mean from someone here—”

“I mean from Trenchard! It’s the old joke for a geneticist: the version of the human genome that you’re most familiar with is your own! These days, in any good four-year course in genetic engineering, one of the first things you do, practically, is take a strand of your own DNA— you own it, after all, it’s legally safe—take it apart, look at your own genes, and see what’s in their pockets!”

“Ouch.”

“It is an old one. If he’s using his own genetic material to experiment with—well. Those tissue samples that Ngadge said were already showing significant drift toward the Ethereal. Who’s to say just how human Trenchard is anymore?”

“And he’s been doing all these interrogations,” Ari said, musing. “Who’s been interrogating who?”

Jonelle nodded. “My thought exactly. He likes them, Ari. It’s something I don’t think I really saw until the other night…and then I thought it was just a quirk. It bothered me so much, I couldn’t see it right away even then. He likes them. He said to me, ‘This is something we need to look at for human beings.’ He really thinks that their way of existence is an option for us.”

“Effing traitor,” Ari muttered. “He needs to be shot.”

“No,” Jonelle said. “That’s the one thing we can’t do.”

“Whaddaya mean ‘can’t’? One bullet would do it. I must have a gun here somewhere.” He made as if to get out of bed.

She pulled him back down. “No, if he is a spy I want him right where he is. The thing to do with a spy or a traitor is to give him the mushroom treatment.”

“Sorry?”

“Keep him in the dark and feed him shit. But most importantly, don’t let him know you know he’s a spy. Trenchard will feed our disinformation to his friends among the aliens, which suits me just fine. And I’d like to know how he does it. I’m having comms monitored…but it’s occurred to me that there might be other ways. Neural tissue….” She leaned back against the pillow, against Ari. “Supposing that he’s managed to acquire some of their telepathic ability? If information about this projected raid gets to them via that route, and there’s no trace in comms, we’ll know that’s how he did it. They might be able to read him like a book if he comes out from under the mindshield. That would be worth knowing about… and if it works for him that way, maybe he’ll have discovered a weapon we can use on our own side, later. There’d be a nice irony in that.”