Diane Duane: X-COM: UFO Defense

It was dark that night in the streets of Ravenna. Even in the first years of the twenty-first century, the streets didn’t have much more light than they had when the place was still the second city of the dying Roman Empire. Too many city councils fond of kickbacks had siphoned off funds from “unnecessary” public lighting budgets again and again, and the crooked contractors had done the rest of the job, leaving the city’s narrow streets drowned in a near-premedieval gloom. There were exceptions to the rule, of course—such as tonight, when the place was better lit than usual, not by moonlight, but by muzzle flashes.

The horizontal lightning of energy weapons stitched the dark air, leaving everything stinking of ozone, and all the air so ionized that your hair stood up in it like a cat’s fur stroked in dry weather. Sparks jumped from everything that wasn’t already singed or on fire, which at the moment wasn’t much. The alien craft had landed at one end of the Piazza dei San Vitale, starting what Ari could only assume was intended as a terror mission. They started it very well, by the simple expedient of either frying or crushing to death the several hundred people in the open air there. They had been sitting drinking espresso corto or vino rosso in the close, airless stillness of an unusually warm autumn night, eating pastas and honey pastries, talking and laughing the night away. Then the night had come down on them in a blaze of thrusters and a crushing weight, and now not much was left of them but their screams, by now mostly faded to sporadic faint moans and weeping. Around the piazza, everything was dark now, all the lights out in the apartments—the silence indicative of human beings praying that the things out there would somehow, by some miracle, pass them by. The darkness had a lot of prayer in it, and a lot of weapon fire, and not much else—and it was uncertain to Ari which would do the most good in the long run. For preference, he would depend on the guns.

“Got a bad patch over here, Boss,” said one of the voices in his armor’s earphones. That was Mary, a captain and one of his sub-team leaders. She sounded more cheerful than worried. Ari grinned, firing around the corner he was stuck behind. That tone of voice, when stuck in a tight spot, was one of the traits he used to pick his teams.

“You pinned down?”

“No worse than usual. I could use some help in a while.” There was a flash as she disposed of a grenade, and some aliens, and then another grenade to keep honest any other aliens who might have been behind the first little party.

“Noted. Mihaul?”

“You rang, Boss?”

“Gimme a sign.”

An abrupt set of blasts at an alien said M in Morse code. It came from off to Ari’s right, up past where the café had been, half-sheltered under a sign that had said PANETTERIA and now said P ETT R, punctuated with blast holes.

“Good. How you doing?”

“Got you some nice cold cuts here, Boss. Her Nibs’s gonna be pleased.”

“Let’s not count the chicken before it’s home in the fridge, OK? And don’t despise the live free-range livestock if you can catch any. Meanwhile, get your butt over by Mary there and make yourself useful. She’s got a few too many hands for bridge at the moment. You see the front doors of the church? Those big bronze ones.”

“Got it. On my way with the bridge mix,” Mihaul said.

Ari pulled back from the corner for a moment and took a breath, staring out at the alien ship. The few aliens that had been close to it were dead now. Some that had broken away immediately after the X-COM team arrived were now lying helter-skelter about the cobbled pavement, the “cold cuts” Mihaul had mentioned. Some of his teammates occasionally ragged Mihaul for not firing as much as he might, but Mihaul firmly believed in not firing until he was sure of his target and referred with amiable scorn to some of his teammates’ spray-gun weapon firing as “premature ejaculation.” His own technique had been gaining converts lately, both by evidence of its success and as a result of Ari’s—and the commander’s—open approval, with the result that Ari’s teams’ attacks were sounding a lot less like a Yugoslavian cease-fire. His method also worked better and saved money—which counted with the commander, as well.

Now, though, Ari was thinking more about killing the rest of the aliens loose in the square than about the value of weapons charges, or the valuable elements in the alien craft, or the possibility of live captures, or anything else. One of an X-COM assault team’s duties was to drive home to the aliens in the simplest possible language that terror raids were simply too costly to continue, either in terms of personnel or materiel. You did this by killing or catching every one of them, taking home every scrap of their stuff that could be used, and depriving them of everything else they had, whether it could be used or not. But mostly you did it by the killing.

The problem, here as in many other terror spots, was that the aliens loved to attack by night—and the night was their friend. Almost all of them could see better in it, unassisted, than humans could even with artificial augmentation. It gave them an advantage Ari hated, and refused to concede. He was not going to concede it now.

“Elsabet?” he said. “Report.”

“Over here behind this giant tit, boss.”

“That’s a mausoleum, you big dumb nyekulturnyi. Haven’t you ever seen a mausoleum before?”

“Oh, a tomb,” Elsabetta Yanovna said. “I know tombs when I see them, Boss, and I don’t wanna be in one just now. Even pretty ones like this—” She broke off, and there was a brief flare of cannon fire. Ari saw something down the road blow up most satisfactorily.

“Watch where you point that thing,” Ari said. “There’s an empress buried in there, for goshsake!”

“Won’t bother her none,” Elsabetta said, “not the noise, anyway. “

“You may have a point, but just—” Another burst of cannon fire. Ari was glad Elsabetta had nothing heavier than an autocannon at the moment. Her tendency was to use the complete destructive ability of whatever you gave her, and to “let God sort them out” afterward. Ari could imagine the results of Elsabetta with a heavy plasma tonight —mostly God sorting out a lot of irreplaceable late-Empire architecture and artwork. “Oh, never mind,” he muttered as something blew up even more spectacularly. What the heck was she hitting over there? Whatever it was, it gave more light to shoot aliens by. A small truck, Ari thought.

“People, target the vehicles. The light won’t last, but it’s better than nothing.” He glanced over toward Galla Placidia’s splendid cruciform mausoleum, with its massive dome, and spared only a brief thought for the fifth-century mosaics inside and out. The twenty-first century was his main concern at the moment.

Here and there around the piazza, vehicles began to blow up with more regularity They were mostly just little cars, though, and most of their fuel tanks didn’t have enough gas in them to last more than for a few seconds’ worth of light—though that was spectacular enough while it lasted. More gunfire erupted around the square as Art’s people took advantage of the brief light, and the aliens scattered around started melting farther back into the shadows in the side streets.

Don’t want them doing that, Ari thought. I want them centrally located where we can deal with them fast. But if wishes were any good by themselves, the Earth would long since have been free of the invaders. No chance of that. There has to be a way, though. I don’t want to get involved in house-to-house if I can avoid it.