A small crowd of Sectoids burst from behind some alien maintenance equipment, firing heavy plasmas and flinging grenades at the X-COM personnel. They ignored the bellowing, rampaging cows. This was possibly a mistake, as the first cow out of the Harvester, a brown one that Jonelle suspected was Ueli’s Rosselana, threw up her head and bellowed defiance, then plunged at the Sectoids and gored the Sectoid leader, lifting him on her horns and tossing him some twenty feet away onto a grenade that one of his own people had thrown. This promptly exploded and blew the Sectoid to bits, the timing producing such a slapstick effect that a lot of the X-COM assault troops who saw it burst out laughing helplessly.
Jonelle laughed too. “Come on,” she shouted down her command frequency, “let’s get ‘em!”
With their own versions of her laughter, all of which became more terrible as the rest of the hour went by, the troops followed Jonelle, and whether the aliens fought them, or fled, mostly they died. Furious at the sight of their dead comrades as they passed the ones already fallen, or as more fell, the X-COM people went on, fighting in cold and bitter rage, until they had gone as far down into the alien base as strategic needs required. The whine of weapons and the sporadic lightning of their fire racketed inside the mountain for a long time, and the sweet burnt smell got stronger all the time.
Then, at the end of the hour, Jonelle sounded the recall signal.
Taking everything of value with them—alien equipment, lab materials, Elerium, weapons, captured aliens, corpses, and, with some care, the furious and belligerent cows, who had to be stunned first—the X-COM troops retired to the transport ships, which came in the smoking entry and opened up for them. Jonelle wanted her people out of there before there was time for retaliation, in more strength, to come from space. She refused to leave until the last ship, the Avenger, was ready to go, and Ari, the second-to-last one out, pulled her in.
They lifted out and away. “How did we do?” Jonelle said, still gasping. It was reaction now, and she didn’t mind.
Dispatch, which had been keeping score, said down her commlink, “We lost two Interceptors, one Lightning, and a Skyranger. They lost six Scouts of various kinds, two Harvesters, two Terror Ships, and an Abductor. Everything that was inside at the time. We have twelve dead. They have—no count yet. Still compiling, hut better than a hundred and twenty, I’d say.”
Jonelle nodded, getting her breath. “I’ll talk to you when we get back,” she said to Dispatch. “Out.”
The commlink cut. Jonelle reached behind her and swung the cockpit door shut. Then she said to Ari, absolutely furious now that she had leisure to be, “Now I want you to tell me whatever made you pull that goddamned crazy stunt! I swear to God, you’re going on charges this time. There is no way in hell I’m going to be able to justify this to the Powers That Be. They saw our timings four days ago, they know exactly what was planned, they are not going to believe anything I tell them about us having discussed this previously—we never did—or about me telling you to do any such dumb-ass thing, because they’ll have the comms recordings! If you have to do crap like this, why don’t you do it in ways where your fellow beings, deluded besotted creatures that they are, can cover up for you afterwards? Now I’m going to have to—”
“Explain to Command how, because I hit that Harvester, I saved an entire alien research facility from getting away and being damaged or destroyed. Complete with the research materials, still alive…those cows. Who saved a few people’s lives,” Ari added, “besides that business with the grenade. Have you seen those girls kick?”
Jonelle looked at Ari and finally made an expression of extreme resignation. “I’m going to take this out of your hide later,” she said.
“Promises,” said Ari with relish, “promises. Damn,” he added as the com squawked, “looks like we’ve got something coming in.”
Jonelle looked through the cockpit windshield, and her heart clenched inside her. Coming over the mountain, straight at them, was an alien Battleship.
“Three times lucky,” Ari said. Intent on his controls, even while the terrible huge thing began firing at them, he zigzagged, then slapped the controls and let one last fusion ball loose. It streaked away, and Ari cut his thrust and dropped the Avenger straight down about three hundred feet. There were screams of surprise and outrage, and sounds of things crashing into other things from the troop compartment, as everyone went briefly weightless, then got their weight back again as Ari accelerated once more, about two and a half Gs worth, hard off to the right of the Battleship.
The fusion ball hit it amidships punching a gaping hole into its side. Pieces rained down out of the fireball and onto Scopi, and alien bodies fell down out of the black cloud of the explosion, gently and slowly, like snow, into the snow. The great craft hovered, then headed straight for the horizon at a slower than normal speed.
Jonelle gulped. “Dispatch,” she said. “Add one damaged Battleship to the count. Are all our craft out of the way?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Track that ship out, then call for the cleanup.”
They headed for Andermatt—and behind them, through the dawn, abrupt and blinding, fire fell from the sky.
Within hours, all the major news agencies in the world were carrying the story of how a Boeing 797 airliner, belonging to a freight carrier carrying a cargo of explosive materials to Southeast Asia for use by a gold-mining cartel, and a United Nations cargo plane, carrying “humanitarian supplies,” suffered a catastrophic collision over the Swiss Alps and crashed onto Mount Scopi, narrowly missing the hydroelectric plant nearby and destroying some of the upper part of the mountain. No local people were killed, but the force of the crash and explosion had been so tremendous, and the terrain was so remote and inaccessible, that it was feared that the bodies of the crew would never be found. Their names were given to the press, and the story made all the major papers. People went “tsk, tsk” on five continents, and then forgot all about it. Nothing remained of the disaster but scraps of twisted metal, which soon rusted or were buried in the snow and ground down into the body of the glacier, which—as it had been for centuries—was slowly twisting its way down the north side of Scopi. Already snow and ice were compacting down into the crater formed by the explosion, sealing it. Scopi’s peak was simply a slightly different shape these days, and no one particularly cared.
The X-COM assault force came back to Andermatt and started dealing with the inevitable: healing the human wounded, burying the dead, processing the alien wounded and captured, stacking the corpses, and assessing and storing the consumables and the items that needed to be processed, catalogued, or sold. Jonelle knew she didn’t need to supervise this, but she did, for a while, until the weariness began to catch up with her. Then she went to her office to call DeLonghi.
Except for one minor local raid, it had been quiet at Irhil and its catchment area today—but Jonelle was unwilling to bet that condition would last. “I’m sending your complement back to you,” she said, “minus a couple. My apologies, Joe.”
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?”