Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

He sighed. “The fortunes of war. Congratulations, Commander.”

“Hold the triumph, Commander,” Jonelle said. “I’ll be down in the morning, after I get a good night’s sleep. I want to have a nice long talk with Trenchard.”

He sounded slightly surprised. “I’m sorry, Commander, I thought you’d heard about that. He’s gone.”

“What?”

“As you ordered,” said DeLonghi, “a team went to secure him as the operation was about to get under way. But he was gone. I had the place searched, but he couldn’t be found, and no one even saw him leave, or had any idea where he might have gone.” DeLonghi paused. “Now that I think of it, though—that little local raid we had—”

“An hour or two after he went missing, was it?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. It was a Scout. We lost its trace, briefly—then picked it up again.”

“But the Scout itself got away.”

“Yes. At the time, with the major operation going down, we needed that Interceptor back here. I recalled it when it was plain it had lost what it was chasing.”

“Damn,” Jonelle said softly. “Well, you did right. As for Trenchard, damn it, I should have had him put on ice earlier. This one’s my own fault—you can be too secret, I guess. Well, there’s no point in crying over spilt milk. But have the civil authorities in Irhil look for him anyway. If there’s the slightest chance that he missed his ride….”

So it was that police forces all over the planet were alerted to look for Jim Trenchard. They looked in vain: no sign of him ever turned up. Jonelle had his quarters carefully searched for any clue or suggestion as to where he might have gone, what he might have intended. She found nothing. The research in his computer was all wiped. Most of his research associates’ files had been wiped as well, by hidden “Trojan Horse” programs he had apparently put in place in their computers long before. After a couple of weeks, she gave up, closed his file, and forwarded it and all his materials to X-COM Central for them to deal with. But she could not quite get out of her mind one scrap of paper that had been pinned up on Trenchard’s office wall, among his niece’s crayon drawings and the Far Side cartoons. It said, in his neat, small print, IT IS BETTER TO REIGN IN HELL THAN TO SERVE IN HEAVEN.

If he was where she thought he was, then by Jonelle’s definition of such things, he was in hell, all right. Often, as time passed, Jonelle would wake up in the middle of the night and wonder whether, among the aliens, there was now a human becoming increasingly more Ethereal, another master of that cold hand that had closed around her heart—perhaps a far deadlier one, able to control humans more effectively with fear because it understood those fears so much better. Or, an equal possibility, perhaps they now had among them an Ethereal who remained annoyingly human and threatened to make them more so. Jonelle still wondered what Trenchard might have told them, or might now be telling them, that would endanger Earth further, selling out his own people for the bizarre ideal of some impossible and inhuman future that might never need to happen. Never mind that, she thought. If I ever run across him, orders or no orders, he’ll be “shot while trying to escape.”

Meantime, there was nothing she could do about it. “Uh oh,” Joe said down the phone just then. “Got an interception.”

“Go do your job, Commander,” Jonelle said, weary. “I’m going to get a meal, and some sleep.”

In Andermatt the next day there was a small parade through the towns main street—of several weak, scarred, tired, sick-looking cows, which nonetheless wore the satisfied expressions of creatures who were having a big fuss made over them. Ueli’s brown Rosselana was there, and a thin, weary-looking black pugniera called Portia, the one that had been taken from Münster, the town the aliens had raided twice (apparently because they missed the genetically valuable pugniera the first time), and another one called Dutscha, a spotty cow with a foul temper. With her UN hat on, Jonelle had only been able to say to Ueli, when he asked for explanations, “Apparently the aliens think your cows are special.” She was not able to explain anything about their recovery, just that they had been “found in the mountains,” which was true enough.

A day’s stay in Irhil M’goun, where Ngadge and his people had checked them over, revealed little except that the cows’ immune systems seemed unusually robust. “That alone would be useful to the aliens,” Ngadge said. “We’ve theorized for a long time that the reason they keep stealing cattle is because they have trouble breeding them.” The day’s stay had also resulted in one of the lab modules being kicked nearly to pieces—the cows did not like anyone who looked like someone carrying lab equipment, a fact that suggested how unpleasant their stay with the aliens had been. But they had survived, which few of their kind had before, and now they swaggered down the street in Andermatt. Ueli, following them, stopped with Jonelle by the door of her little office.

“Well,” he said, “it’s not too late to start thinking about the next betting season….”

“Oh, Ueli, look at them,” she said as Ari came up to join them. “Give them a break!”

He shook his head and smiled. “The way ‘they’ give you one?” he said. “You look terrible. Circles under your eyes.”

“It’s the filing,” Jonelle said, with a glance at Ari. She was beginning to have her suspicions about what Ueli knew about goings-on in the locality. “Takes it out of you something shocking.”

“Come have a drink,” Ueli said, “and don’t tell me all about it.”

They went to the bar, and ahead of them the cowbells bonged softly. Up at the top of town, church bells answered. At the sound of them, Jonelle smiled, considering that, for the moment anyway, she could relax: the demons were held at bay.

Until tomorrow….

Diane Duane is the author of several Star Trek novels including the New York Times bestseller The Wounded Sky . She also wrote two fantasy series, “The Door” series for adults and “The Wizardry” series for young adults. She lives in Ireland.

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