Jonelle gave him a look. “I’m not God yet,” she said. “I will not under any circumstances put people in harm’s way to further my own aims. But I can see, sometimes, how the dice are going to fall. And if I help them a little…it’s all for a good cause.”
“So who are you leaving in command?”
Sidelong, Jonelle regarded him with amusement. “The answer you’re looking for is, ‘Not you.”’
“Is it that obvious?”
“Is the Pope Irish?…Well, never mind. Who would you pick?”
He stood thinking while Jonelle looked through the other side of the noisy crowd, hunting a particular face. Not seeing it, she turned and made for the door. Ari came after her, and together they went out into the hall and headed down toward the living quarters.
“DeLonghi,” he said finally.
Jonelle nodded, not saying anything for a few moments. Let him work it out, she thought.
“I thought you hated his guts,” Ari said very softly. “After all the grief he gave you after you were assigned. ‘I should have been Commander—’”
“He never said that.”
“Not to your face. To everybody else who would hold still and listen, though. Insubordinate, self-righteous son of a—”
“He’s the right man for the job,” Jonelle said just as softly, “and I will not let my personal feelings get in the way of doing my job well, or seeing others’ jobs done that way. DeLonghi is popular with the rest of the command-level staff. He’s thoughtful, in his slightly plodding way. He has a temper, but I’ve seen no evidence that he lets it influence his command decisions. He knows how to think, if the officer directly above him isn’t discouraging him from doing so—the way the last one did.”
“And by leaving him in command here,” Ari said, “you defuse his hostility—you hope. And give him so much to do that he doesn’t have time for it anymore.”
Jonelle sighed. “Politics,” she said. “I hate politics. Intrapersonal, or any other kind. But you quickly become a political animal in this job. So will he. If DeLonghi makes the mistake of indulging his more malicious opinions while he’s in command, he’ll find out it doesn’t work—the hard way and very fast. He’ll behave, I think,” she said, as they turned the corner down the long main hallway of the living quarters. “He’ll do anything not to give me reason to relieve him. He hates any appearance of failure—it’ll keep him honest.”
They paused by a door with a doorplate that said DE LONGHI R.J., COL. Jonelle reached into her pocket, fished out a folded piece of notepaper, and carefully tucked it under the door.
“Another X-COM promotion ceremony completed,” Jonelle said sarcastically while giving the briefest of salutes.
“One other I want to see,” she said, “but he won’t be down here. Come on.”
They went back up the hall. “And you say you’re not interested in my psychology,” Ari said, only half joking. “I wonder.”
Jonelle glanced at him. “When I’m dressed like this,” she said, tugging at her uniform sleeve, “anything that serves my job—which is killing aliens who want to move into my home—is an interest, and I’ll use it as a weapon against them, any way I can. Insofar as the contents and motives in your mind affect the way I do that job, they’re an interest. When I’m dressed differently, though…”—she waggled her eyebrows suggestively—“I promise I won’t use it against you.”
Ari smiled. They walked quietly together for the next few minutes, Jonelle leading the way toward the lab blocks. And is it true? she wondered. Would I really not use what I know against him? True, she had access to his psych profiles, as well as to everyone else’s under her command, on a need-to-know basis. Not that she’d ever looked at them. It would be a bad day, she thought, when I couldn’t tell what was on someone’s mind just by looking at them. So far, in neither their professional nor their private relationship, had there ever been need. But what if there was, some day?
She knew what a fine line they walked, this tightrope stretched between their physical and emotional relationships and their positions as commander and subordinate. Lesser men, Jonelle suspected, would have a hard time of it. Ari was smart, flexible, and sufficiently accomplished at his own job that he didn’t feel much of a need to prove himself to the people around him. His impulsiveness in battle and crisis situations was just that, impulsiveness, not an indication of a man overcompensating for his position below a tough and capable woman who just happened to be his lover.
I think, anyway…
They passed through the first set of containment doors at the entrance to the lab blocks. “Trenchard?” Ari said.
“Uh huh. When did he ever go to bed early when he had a new toy?”
The lab blocks were almost deserted this time of night. After the containment doors shut after them, Jonelle and Ari passed door after door of dark and empty offices, and laboratories with all the equipment shut down except for the computers monitoring ongoing experiments. Lab staff did not stand the heel-to-toe watches that interception crews did, though teams of scientists and researchers took turns going “on call” to deal with new acquisitions of live aliens. Most of the researchers had been off duty for hours by this time of day. But there were always those who were too interested, or too driven, to stop work.
As they passed through the second, heavier set of containment doors, the ones that separated the alien containment unit from those labs where only corpses or tissue were held, Jonelle wondered which of the two categories Trenchard fit in best. His history was mostly unremarkable except for his involvement in a terror raid, during which he came close to being killed. Shortly thereafter, he had been recruited covertly by X-COM, under cover of a shell organization that claimed to be doing “nonaggressive” work on the alien genome series. His own pursuit of genome data on the aliens had proved less than nonaggressive—he worried his work like a dog worrying a particularly juicy bone. But psych profiling showed no ax to grind, no trauma to drive him. It seemed that he simply, almost greedily, wanted what the aliens had: a brand new biology that no one had ever seen before, which wasn’t well understood, and which was a fertile field for a smart researcher who was willing to work hard. Jonelle was glad enough to let him get on with it. He was one of few scientists who hadn’t been slacking off when she arrived, and since then Jonelle had found him a hard-headed and dependable source of advice on how to distribute appropriations. Too, other scientists and researchers around him tended to work harder in response to the way he worked, which was a dividend the commander appreciated.
Jonelle greeted the guard on duty, she and Ari accepted sidearms from him—no X-COM personnel worked with aliens unarmed, even when they were confined—and they walked on down the central hallway. The brightest lights in the area shone there, looking greenish through several layers of armor glass. That was “maximum security,” for species that were psionically or physically the most dangerous. The side rooms, where other less dangerous live aliens were confined, lay off to both sides, and fainter lights glowed in them, both from normal illumination and the firefly lights of local confinement fields inside the cells. As they passed a series of smaller cells where Celatids and Silacoids were held, Ari peered in through the outer armor-glass windows and raised his eyebrows. “A lot of those on hand this week,” he said.
“Yeah. Dr. Ahu asked me to have the teams bring him any Celatids…he’s working on some kind of adaptation of their venom, a ‘universal solvent.’ He claims it’ll eat through lead when he’s finished with it. Anyway, he’s already come up with a variant that the Celatids themselves are very vulnerable to.”
“Useful. What do we administer it with? Squirt guns?”