Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

Their full complement of craft went in: everything from Irhil M’goun, everything from Andermatt, everything that Omaha and China could spare them. This was just as well, for immediately thereafter, all hell broke loose as alien ships leapt out of the ruined, but somewhat widened, opening. Small and medium and large Scouts, an Abductor, a Terror Ship.

Between the Abductor and the Terror Ship, like a swallow diving between two eagles, the Avenger, twisting and sliding between bursts of fire from the mountain, angled in and went straight through the blasted door. People on one Lightning in the attack group, and on others if they chanced to be tuned in to the commander’s chat frequency, were almost deafened by a furious shout of “You utter asshole, what the eff are you doing!”

While the aerial battle went on outside, several other ships followed the Avenger in.—these by design, instead of by opportunity. They flew into a huge, empty cavern filled with smoke and flying debris, for the Avenger had immediately fired at, and disabled, the Harvester ship presently sitting on the floor of the cavern. Weapons fire was also everywhere, but the X-COM ships put down regardless, opened up, and let their assault teams out.

Jonelle was with one of them. “By the numbers,” she said down her commlink to the assault teams listening to her. “Pathfinders, go do your thing, and Godspeed. Immediate assault, with me—”

By the time all the craft were empty, there were about thirty X-COM people, all in either power or flying suits, on the floor of the main cavern, and all armed with heavy plasmas, small launchers, or better—blaster launchers. They began by simply sweeping the place clean of every alien that got in the way. The problem was that it would not stay clean; more and more kept flooding up from the lower levels.

This was something Jonelle had expected. The scans she had managed to conduct, ever so quietly, over the last week and a half had shown her that Scopi was a warren of tunnels, chimneys, and deep-delved caverns. The upper level, the “hangar” level, would have to be secured first; then her people would have to work their way down. Securing the whole facility might take hours, and kill them all. They did not have hours to spend, or that many lives. It was Jonelles uncomfortable job to decide when enough lives had been spent, and to call for the final intervention that would destroy the alien base and end the battle.

At the same time, they could not destroy the base before being sure that all possible information and useful materiel had been removed, that everything that could be saved had been saved. The scans had shown that on the first and second levels down, there were larger “delvings” that were probably labs and armories. These had to be sacked if possible, destroyed if not. Farthest down were tunnels, into which the aliens would probably retreat for a last-ditch defense. In those, Jonelle had less interest. They could, and would, be sealed by the last destruction. But that was a little farther along. By her timing, no more than an hour….

On the floor of the main level, everything was smoke, laser fire, plasma eruptions, explosions—the air and the stone shook with them. There was a huge crash off to one side as the Avenger came down too hard on the stone floor. It was perhaps just luck that it came down on a party of Zombies, all of which immediately died, hatching out many new premature but savage Chryssalids in their stead. A few of one of the assault teams got busy on them with incendiaries.

More aliens came pouring up, and Jonelle found herself, as always, with less and less time to think about her timings, and more and more aliens to shoot at. She had a small, intent bodyguard of five to protect her, besides her flying armor, and she had a heavy plasma. With that, she got busy. I’m the cleaning woman, she thought, and concentrated on cleaning the main floor of every alien she might see. There was little trouble about this until a big force of Snakemen came slithering and hissing across the floor toward her and her group, maybe fifteen or twenty of them at once. Jonelle lost track of how long these kept them busy. As fast as she and her team could burn them down, more Snakemen came, a little army of them, into the teeth of better weaponry than they carried, trying to overwhelm Jonelle and her team by sheer force of numbers. Numbers were not going to be enough, though. The bodies began to pile up around them, a wall of writhing, persistent snake meat with blasted-off patches of scorched and peeling scales flaking off them. That god-awful, sweet smell of burnt flesh somehow always reminded Jonelle of Chinese food, and always put her off it for days after a raid. After what seemed an eternity, but was probably only fifteen minutes or so, she and her team found themselves with a moment to breathe, and nothing to shoot at for a few seconds. “OK,” she said, peering through the smoke and the tumble and scatter of destroyed craft and dead aliens, through which her people moved like deadly ghosts, firing at anything that moved and wasn’t one of them. “Report. How are we—”

That was when something caught her mind by its scruff, and shook it. Irrational terror flooded Jonelle. The assault troops around her, her bodyguard, dropped their weapons and collapsed, wailing, shrieking with fear.

Jonelle froze with the immediacy of the fear. She had never been a screamer; she was the kind of person who froze when she felt death coming, and watched it, silent, her voice stuck in her throat. She watched it come now, dark, drifting along the floor toward her, over the rubble and the corpses: a shrouded form like an alien Grim Reaper. Something concealed within the dark robes veiling that form spoke, intimately, to her mind. Not with words, but the feeling said, You know us too well. You know things about us that cannot go any further. Therefore, die.

The hand of fear squeezed her heart. Jonelle gasped, trying to get her breath past the ice in her chest, the lump of fear that was growing, that would force the breath out of her body, the warmth out of her bones, the life out of her brain….

And abruptly the cold “hand” dropped her. While plasma fire racketed over her head, and stun bombs howled and smoke drifted by, Jonelle groveled on the floor, gasping, trying to remember why she was there and what her name was. She looked up—

—to see an armored form standing straight and still in the smoke and the laser fire, staring at the silent, hovering form of the Ethereal, which hung still and stared at him. Ari stood there, in his own armor, with his psi-amp. The Ethereal faced him. The air practically itched with the strain of the two minds grappling together—and then Ari laughed out loud.

“Sorry, pal,” he said between gritted teeth. “The last one tried that trick. Now I know what to do about it!”

For a moment there was silence. Then the Ethereal wavered, turned to flee, and was ripped apart by a burst of auto-plasma fire.

Normality reasserted itself as Jonelle struggled to her feet and helped her bodyguard get up. “Come on,” she said, throwing a glance at Ari, “work to do. Come on—”

Another sound was added to the screaming of the aliens” a bizarre roar. “What the—” Jonelle said, and turned.

From inside the grounded Harvester Ari had hit on first diving through, the one that some of her people had started fighting their way into, a god-awful banging and kicking began. The sound of things crashing, being knocked around—Jonelle looked concerned. “Hey, Team Five,” she said down her commlink, trying to sound matter-of-fact after having an Ethereal in her brain, “don’t mess up the hardware, we can sell that—”

From inside the Harvester, bizarrely, came laughter. “Not us, Boss!” someone shouted. And someone else added, “Won’t be much left in here worth salvaging after these guys are through with it!”