Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

“Commander, I—”

“Colonel. Let me get very straight about this with you. I don’t care two farts in a high wind about the details of your personal psychology. It must be at least tolerable, otherwise they would never have let you into X-COM. But I have had it up to here with your goddamn gutsier-than-thou behavior and your tendency to indulge yourself in these damn death-or-glory stunts. You endanger your teams by not explaining your game plan to them, you endanger yourself by doing dumb-ass things that the merest rookie would shudder away from, and by both of these actions you endanger the civilians we are supposed to be protecting. Now what holes you allow to be shot in your flinty hide I don’t care in the slightest, but when you put your teams and the civilians in danger, I get cross. Cross. Is some of this beginning to penetrate the layer of ablative that surrounds your alleged brain?”

“Yes, Commander,” Ari said, very evenly.

“Good. I will be watching for evidence of this in the near future. And by God, if I don’t see it, I am going to pull so many stripes off your uniform, you’re going to find yourself wearing a tank top in midwinter.” She looked disgusted. “Winter,” she said. “Horrible. All right, Colonel. My hat is off for the moment, unless you have anything to add.”

“No, Commander.”

“OK. Then sit down and help me look at these goddamn maps.”

Ari sat down and looked across Jonelle’s desk. It was invisible—unusual for her. Usually whatever she was working on stayed on her desk only one piece at a time, and when she was finished with it, wound up on the floor with everything else. The biggest map, the one of the whole country, was more or less buried. Jonelle pulled it out.

Ari whistled. “Look at the engraving on these,” he said, though still in a rather subdued mode. He felt somewhat scorched around the edges. “Don’t these people have lives?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Jonelle said, sitting down again and peering across the map. It was most beautifully rendered, all the more so because the mapping technology was absolutely up to date, with laser-and satellite-guided scanning and drafting. But the map still looked like a work of art, its shadings of valley-green, mountain-gray, and glacial-blue sliding one into another with tremendous delicacy, with contours in places so close together that Ari could barely see them. “Well,” Jonelle said, “here we are. We have carte blanche from the national government, so the Upper-Ups tell me. We can build anywhere we like. Where would you put a base?”

“This is a sleazy attempt to pick my brains and let me make up your mind for you.”

Jonelle smiled at him with eyes slightly narrowed. The look told Ari that, as usual, the Commander already had her mind made up, and was expecting him to reveal any weakness in her plans that she had missed. It was a game they played nearly every day, in one form or another, and Ari loved it when he won.

“OK,” Ari said. He leaned over the map too, considering it as a whole for a moment. “Forget the lowland sites,” he said. “But those mountains….”

He trailed off, musing. “Did you know,” Jonelle said, “that the shape of the country is the basis for the Chevrolet logo?”

Ari blinked. “This?” The country was vaguely four-lobed, and longer from side to side than from top to bottom, but to call it a Chevrolet logo seemed a stretch. “You mean the cross-shaped thing?”

“Yup.”

“Weird.”

“But true. Chevrolet was Swiss.”

Ari shook his head. “The only thing cross-shaped I can see about the country is this.” He traced with one finger the long complex of deep valleys that ran from just south of Lac Léman nearly over to the Austrian border, and the north-south valley complex stretching more or less from Zurich in the north to Locarno and the border lakes in the south.

Having done so, he paused and peered a little more closely at the place where the arms of the cross would intersect. “Those are mountain passes, there, aren’t they?” Ari leaned down to look at the names. Sankt Gotthard, Furkapass….”

This map too said URSEREN. It looked exactly like the other, so much so that Ari folded it and the other map to match, laid them side by side, and started doing a “blink” comparison. No more than two or three blinks were necessary to show him that the second map had many small additions in black that the first map did not: tiny rectangles scattered about the landscape, halfway up mountainsides, apparently buried in cliffs.

“This one’s under the glacier!” Ari muttered. “This one’s in the lake! What the deuce—”

“The Swiss army likes to hide things,” Jonelle said, standing up and coming around to look at the map herself. “And face it, they don’t have a lot of flat land to devote to army bases and airfields and so forth. What flat land they do have, they need to grow food on. So they got busy, early in the century, and started digging. A lot of these mountains are hollow. This one”—she pointed at a rectangle apparently on the north slope of a mountain called Gletschhorn—“that’s full of fighter planes. They have them stacked up in cradles, like cars in a parking lot in Manhattan. They launch by steam catapult.”

“How the heck do they get them back in?”

“They ship them by rail to one of the little stations down the valley here, Realp, I think,” Jonelle said. “After that”—she shrugged—“it’s ‘need to know’, and I don’t. But they manage. Other mountains are similar. That one’s full of tanks. That one’s an ammo dump. All kinds of other stores, weaponry, hardware—all tucked away for a rainy day. Somewhere down here,” and she looked thoughtfully at their map, “they dug a nuclear-proof base for their heads of state and senior commanders. No one knows where it is, not even the people who built it, and I’m sure it’s not on even this map. They say they decommissioned it years ago. I was tempted to ask if I could use it. But such a request would have to go through the highest army echelons, and I’d sooner not annoy them. Especially since I suspect it’s not as decommissioned as they say it is.”

“Interesting people.”

“They are. Anyway, there are a lot of these old hidey-holes that really are decommissioned—places they didn’t need after the Cold War cooled off. X-COM’s liaison in the Swiss government has agreed to let us have one of those, and there are plenty to choose from. We’ll go up to Andermatt tomorrow and have a look around.”

“Who are we?” Ari said.

Jonelle raised her eyebrows. “A strange moment to go all existential on me, Colonel.”

“You know what I mean. What’s our cover?”

Jonelle grinned. “We’re going to tell them we’re with the UN.”

“They’re going to love that.”

“Yes. Practically the last country on the planet to join, and I’m sure they only did it because of the aliens. No mere human threat could get them to join in the last century, anyway—that old distrust of theirs of outside alliances. But then they were burned by them so many times in the past…. Whatever. Wherever we do finally settle, our cover is that we’re setting up a ‘neutral observation’ facility to test UN cooperation with local defense forces.

Some army people will be helping us with this, though they won’t be in on the secret behind the cover. We’ll be setting up a small, ‘overt’ base somewhere in the area, and we’ll have a little office, probably in Andermatt itself, to answer the locals’ questions and act as a PR front end. If you’re not very careful and don’t start flying a little straighter on your ground assaults,” Jonelle said, “I’m not kidding—you may wind up running it.”