Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

She smiled grimly. “But no matter how they get the information, the aliens will know there’s no base where I’ve announced it. I’m sure they’ll be delighted to let us go off on a wild goose chase and attack some mountain with nothing in it, instead of the one I’ve already had some preliminary scans done on, the one that’s full of the Silacoids they’ve been importing, and which have been tunneling it out for God knows how long. What they won’t know, until too late anyway, is that we know exactly where they are, and that we’re going to hit them a week and a half before I said we were. Other X-COM commanders have, indeed, made the same announcement I made tonight. It’s not just to back up my story: Main Command is interested in finding out whether other bases have spies working in them. We’ll see where this disinformation surfaces, and in what shape. Meantime, your business, and the other colonels’, and mine, is to make sure…in the most easygoing and casual kind of way, without it particularly showing…that the attack is ready to happen a week and a half before the announced date.”

“And what about Trenchard?”

“The day the balloon is really scheduled to go up,” Jonelle said, “I’ll be having him arrested and held incommunicado until it’s all over. Then I’m going to come down and debrief him myself. Possibly with a nail file.”

Ari looked at the expression on Jonelle’s face, and swallowed.

“I’m beginning to regret ever having brought him to Andermatt,” she said. “He knows where it is, and I can only assume that they know where it is. Our survival so far rests on two factors: that Trenchard doesn’t know the exact locations under the mountain of some of our facilities here, and maybe the aliens don’t want to risk exposing their spy. By the time they realize we’re on to him…it’ll be too late for them, or at least for their base under Scopi.”

Ari nodded. “Weird name,” he said. “What does it mean?”

Jonelle smiled in grim amusement, as she had when asking Duonna Mati about this through Ueli, and closed her eyes. “It means ‘target.’”

A week and a half passed, and there came the only day of the week when even the Swiss sleep late: Sunday morning. Having gone to town early on another Sunday to look into some other matter, Jonelle had found herself wondering how they managed it. The chapel at the bottom of town, Saint Peter’s and Paul’s, and the one at the top of the town, Saint Kolumban’s, began ringing their bells at eight forty-five, in what Jonelle could only describe as “dueling churches,” a four-toned fight that went on deafeningly for half an hour, and certainly left everyone in town wide awake. It was, Jonelle had been told, traditional: not only an announcement that church services were about to start, but a sure remedy against demons, which could not stand the sound of bells. Much earlier than bell-time on this particular Sunday, though, Jonelle had set about her business: exorcising the local demons, as permanently as possible.

It went off like clockwork, in the initial stages—almost precisely like clockwork, for Jonelle had started to work out the timings on that first night when she came back from Andermatt after seeing Duonna Mati, and since then she had had plenty of time to refine them.

Everything would have seemed quiet enough, in the dawn. In those mountain fastnesses, in fair weather, dawn can be unearthly still: not a whisper of wind to blow the snow out into the “banner” that so often streams from the sides of mountains like Scopi, not even enough to trigger the veil of mist caused by the differential in temperature between the air updrafting along the mountainsides and the colder air above. In the silent dawn, Scopi reared its graceful peak against a sky of the purest pellucid royal blue at the zenith, fading down to crimson-rimmed peach at the jagged horizon, and everything held its breath and was still.

The sound that slowly leached into the silence, breaking it, echoed from the walls of Piz Rondadura and Piz Gannaretsch and all the other mountains around: a high, singing whine, slowly growing stronger, scaling up like the screech of an increasingly angry eagle. Nothing moved on the mountain in any kind of reaction; nothing lived there to move. But the screech grew more deafening, echoing more loudly from the mountains around and, abruptly, a flash of motion appeared from the south to match it.

It was a single Avenger, coming low along the treacherously wiggly line of the Lukmanďer Pass, zigging and zagging madly from one cliff-bound wall of the pass to the other, as if the pilot had had too much to drink the previous night, or wanted to look as if he had. At the southern end of Lai da Sontga Maria, the Avenger dove straight toward the surface of the lake and skimmed along it so low that an unprepared observer might have thought the pilot was about to take up powerboating. The thin skin of ice on the water cracked under him from the noise of his engines and the pressure of their thrust. Twin plumes of water burst up and out of the lake behind the Avenger as it skimmed along the length of it, no more than three feet above the lake’s surface, and seemingly made straight for the automated hydroelectric dam at the northern end. At the last possible moment, the Avengers pilot pulled up in what could have passed as the second leg of a right angle, and headed straight for the zenith.

Now the mountain spoke. Plasma fire burst from the eastern and southern sides of it, lancing out at the Avenger—but the pilot had other ideas. The Avenger angled around hard toward the northeastern side of Scopi, the one most nearly vertical. His craft made a sound like a giant cough, and a fusion ball leaped out from it and struck the mountain right in the middle of the slope called Puoza. In a great bloom of lightning, fire, and snow vaporized instantly and explosively to steam, the side of the mountain blew in.

There had been a door there, once, clearly marked in infrared view by an eye-shaped hot spot. The main question about this door had been, was it hardened? When the smoke and steam and the fire of the fusion ball cleared away, the answer was plain enough. Metal still showed there—badly buckled, but still not breached.

A routine had been prepared for this possibility. About six different craft descended on the mountain from all directions, peppering it with missies, plasma beams, and cannon and laser fire. More defensive fire erupted from the mountain and the attacking craft veered and dodged, trying to keep from destroying one another, as well as from being destroyed themselves. At least with the mountains exit door damaged, there seemed no danger of alien ships coming out, so for the time being, the attacking X-COM vessels busied themselves with targeting the aliens’ defensive facilities. One Interceptor took a direct hit up its six, and it and its pilot went out together in a spectacular fireball that crashed on Scopi’s slopes. The snow went black with ash, where it wasn’t scoured off the mountainside by the heat. Twisted wreckage tumbled down Scopi’s side and fell steaming into the lake.

But only a second or so later, the Avenger—with Ari in the driver’s seat—came roaring ‘round the mountain and let the “front door” have it with another fusion ball. A globe of lightning crashed into the mountainside, clinging there, random discharges forking and flickering from it— and this time, the door blew into fragments. When the steam and the fireball cleared away, all that remained of the door was a jagged, metal-edged hole. The Avenger dove away to the north, executing a virtuoso victory roll complete with showy but unnecessary hesitations every ninety degrees.

In the cockpit of the Lightning from which she was leading the attack, Jonelle grinned evilly inside her armor and said softly down her commlink, “Go.”