Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

Heat and the stink of molten metal and scorched paint flew up in his face. Ari choked and waved the smoke away, then bent and felt about at his feet. “Ow, ow, ow, oh, shit!” About half the coins that had fallen out of the coin box were molten, and lay scattered around in little pale puddles on the pavement. “Goddamn gun!” After a moment, though, he found one of the last-fallen hundred-lire coins, which was still intact, and then another. “Awright,” he said, and straightened. He put them into the coin slot on the top of the box, praying that he hadn’t destroyed anything important. One coin in, push the plunger. The second coin in, push the plunger.

And wait…

And wait…

Then, sudden glory, as though the sun had come up in the piazza: a blaze of pinkish-colored sodium-vapor light burst out from ten different sources, so that the front of the mausoleum and the front of San Vitale’s Church and the piazza in between them turned into a shining space burning in the red of brick and sandstone, the white of anciently quarried marbles. The town council had really done themselves proud on this lighting installation, as Ari had remarked to Jonelle not too long before. The spotlights were set up on some of the buildings surrounding the piazza, and some were set into the ground in front of the mausoleum and in front of the church, turning the whole area, in a blink, from a dark and dangerous open space into a well-lit shooting gallery for his people—a space now abruptly filling with aliens being forced into it, for his people had taken him at his word when he told them “thirty seconds.”

He took a moment now to shoot the chain and lock off the grille-door in front of the mausoleum so that he could tuck himself into the low, arched doorway there and fire from cover. There was almost no need, for all hell was breaking loose out in the middle of the piazza. Plasma and laser blasts darned the air from four different directions, grenades flew, and stun rods crackled and zapped. In the midst of this chaos, stately and gleaming, the architecture of Byzantine Rome looked calmly down on the carnage. This son-et-lumiere part of the operation lasted no more than another five minutes, and finally the firing started to die away, the grenades exploding no more. It was just as well, for after six minutes—as Ari knew would happen—the lights went off again. You only got so much light for two hundred lire.

He sighed, chuckled, and went out to the fallen coin box to get another couple of coins. When the lights came back on, his teams were beginning to reassemble in the piazza, taking stock of the aliens they had stunned and captured alive. There were some Mutons, dumped in a muscly heap like a bunch of green-skinned professional wrestlers, and a Sectoid leader, semiconscious and lying helpless, like a drugged child, while being secured. Others of the teams were assessing their own casualties. One of Roddy’s team was dead, his head blown off. Mihaul had a bad leg burn from a plasma rifle, self-cauterizing as usual, but there was always the danger that the victim would go abruptly into shock. Fortunately, Mihaul showed no such signs as yet. He was pale, but hanging on all right, and would make it home to Irhil without too much trouble, Ari judged.

“Nice job, you people,” Ari said to them as they gathered around him. “Nice job. Her Nibs is going to be seriously pleased with us when we get home. We get all the Chryssalids? You sure?”

The teams gathered around him were nodding. “Not that many in this batch, Boss,” Roddy said. “I’m sure we got them all.”

“OK. Call home and have them send up a stripping team for this Terror Ship. We’ll take the important stuff with us. Paula, go in with another suit and get the Elerium out of that thing. The usual pickup on discarded weapons: take anything big or obvious. Then post a guard. The strippers can salvage the rest, and they should be here before the rest of the town turns out for souvenirs or to pick up a little bargain. Anything else need doing?”

Heads shook all around. “Nice job,” Ari said again. “We saved the world again tonight. Let’s clean up here, and then go home and have our dinner.”

The teams began to disperse, going about their tasks. A few stayed with Ari for several moments. “Nice trick that,” Elsabetta said, “with the light. How’d you know that was there?”

Ari smiled, thinking of Jonelle’s face in the light of a little wavering candle in a glass, out here in the piazza not too long ago. He also thought that there were some things a team commander should keep to himself. “Hey,” Ari said, “when you go somewhere new in Europe, don’t you read the Michelin guide first? You’re missing all the good stuff. Get the green one.”

Elsabetta snickered. She and Matt and the others stood a little longer with Ari, just breathing the air, all quiet now with that particularly terrible silence that falls after a firefight. “Whose church is this, Boss?” Matt said, looking up into the church’s tympanum, which was no longer shadowy. Up in the arch, ranks of carved, brightly painted and gilded saints, choirs of angels, and herds of fabulous beasts looked down at them with incurious eyes. “It’s really something.”

“Various people had a hand in building it…but most of this work was the Empress Theodora’s, originally.” Ari couldn’t help but smile. Theodora had been the religious type only insofar as it served her purposes—but when she built a church, she built one.

“No, I mean what saint?”

“Saint Vitalis,” Ari said.

Matt blinked. “Something to do with barbers, right?”

“Matt,” Ari said with great affection, “you are living proof of the triumph of popular culture and the decline of the classical education. As though it matters while we’re having an alien invasion. Come on, let’s get all our people together and go home.”

So let me get this straight,” Jonelle said to Ari, two hours later in her little office. “You went out into the middle of an open space under attack by hostiles, without backup, without even one team member to back you up—”

“They were covering me!”

“Not that you told them what for. I’ll come to that in a moment—”

Ari doubted she would. This debrief had not exactly been turning out the way he’d intended. He’d brought his teams home with minimal losses, he’d brought back a tremendous load of equipment and salables, and he’d expected at least a pat on the head. It hadn’t turned up yet.

“I did play back the transcripts,” Jonelle said while she sat behind the desk, and Ari stood very straight in front of it—and sweated. She had her command persona very firmly in place at the moment, and there was no hope for him except to keep his mouth shut and listen. “On the off chance that there might be something in them to exonerate you for this kind of behavior. A clout on the head or some such. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind turned up, so I must assume that you did what you did while in control of your faculties. Very sad, since right now I need people around me with their brains about them, and you seem to have gotten rid of yours during our last garage sale.”

Jonelle flung her hands in the air. “This is no time to discover that I can’t depend on you to behave like an officer instead of a rookie. Tomorrow we have to go to the goddamn land of snow and ice, and 1 have to take you with me because I certainly can’t leave you here after your performance yesterday, which doubtless looks like wild heroism to your poor deluded teams, who would only encourage you to do more of the same, and get you killed, which might not matter that much except that you’d take the whole lot of them with you. No, I’ve got to go haring off north with you and a few others, and we have to go scouting for some bloody half-excavated hole in the ground to stick a base in. In two months! Not that we can tell anyone what we’re doing, mind you. We are going to have to set up an office somewhere in a new country and convince the locals to cooperate with us even though we can’t and won’t tell them what we’re really up to. And someone is going to have to run that office. I have just about decided, for your sins, that it should be you. The only thing that remains for me to discern is whether or not you are sane enough to be trusted to feed yourself with a blunt spoon, let alone to be left alone with a loaded fax machine. Do you understand my concern?”