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Into the Fire

"The trouble with cayenne pepper," said Matushek as he rigged a pair of 4-pound rockets to balance the pair on the other hip, "is it's just as hot on your asshole as it is in the mouth."

The remainder of C41 had rearmed from the ammo trailer immediately after their battle with the natives. Abbado hadn't had the energy to do that because of the excitement when 3-3 got home. That meant they had to be up ahead of most of the others this morning. They were lead squad again.

A bulldozer started with a squeal of steam and the slowly-building thrum of the turbine flywheel. Meyer stood on the deck, putting her armor on. One of the civilian men was helping her.

Good for Essie.

Horgen was stuffing grenade magazines into the empty pockets of her bandolier. She paused. Nodding across the tailgate she murmured, "Look who's come to visit."

Abbado stepped away from the trailer. He didn't lower his visor. The sky was too dark to distinguish from the canopy, but his eyes had adapted to the light of the few lamps still lit. Caius Blohm walked toward the trailer with a kid hanging onto his pants' leg.

"Hello, Blohm," Abbado said. "Figure you've got something to say to us?"

"Nothing you don't know," Blohm said. "Nothing I haven't said to the major. I screwed up bad. I won't screw up that way again."

"Expect us to kiss you, then?" Matushek said, stepping around the trailer from the other side. His hands weren't any nearer his weapons than any striker's were at any time, but the threat was obvious.

The kid buried her face against Blohm's thigh. He caressed her dark hair. "No," he said. "I don't even expect you to let me buy you a drink when we get out of this. I just came to say it to your faces."

"Ace," Abbado said sharply. "Hop up in the trailer and see if there's another grenade launcher in the front there, will you? I'm thinking of carrying one myself."

Blohm turned. As the scout walked away, he bent and lifted the child to his shoulder. Abbado returned to the tailgate.

"Sorry, Sarge," Matushek muttered.

"No big deal," Abbado said. He had one bandolier pocket empty, so he dragged a case of stinger magazines closer. "Just remember we got a whole jungle out there to fight."

Horgen climbed to the side of the trailer and perched there, reaching into an open box of hand grenades among the jumble of miscellaneous weaponry. "Do you really want a launcher, Sarge?" she asked.

"Naw, I was never much good with one," Abbado said. "I'll take an extra pack of rockets instead."

At least twenty lasers ripped simultaneously into the encampment from the west and south. A stinking black tear zigzagged across the tarpaulin folded over the front of the trailer.

"Contact!" Abbado shouted. He knelt as he armed a rocket, then rose again to launch it into the undergrowth from which the Kalendru fire spat. Backblast whanged the side of the trailer. "Contact!"

Blohm was down but unharmed, raking the jungle with aimed bursts from his stinger. "Medic!" he cried. He hunched to his feet and sprinted for the open south side of the clearing.

Abbado sent his second rocket into a Spook in the direction Blohm was heading. Abbado didn't know what the scout had in mind, but one target was as good at the next in an ambush.

The kid lay twitching on the ground where Blohm had dropped. Her hair smoked. A laser bolt had burned through it and the skull beneath.

The pulsing laser sheared wires from the protective grate on the side window of the bulldozer's cab. "Get down, Matt!" Meyer said as she stepped back and grabbed the grenade launcher slung across her breastplate.

The laser hit the heavy support member at the rear of the cage. A large collop of metal vaporized, then combined with atmospheric oxygen in a secondary flash and a shockwave that flung Lock off the deck.

"Get the kid to a medic!" Meyer said, firing around the cab. She aimed a few feet above the bolts snapping from the jungle. Launched grenades weren't heavy enough to do a lot of damage with tree bursts, but the shrapnel spread over a wide area and suppressed Spook fire better than just killing a couple would do.

Seligman tried to get up from his seat. Meyer pushed him back down. He couldn't get past her out of the cab. "Drive!" she said. "Right into those fuckers in front! Keep the blade up and they can't touch you!"

Not really true, since once the tractor got close the Spooks could shoot from the sides. Either Seligman didn't see that or he figured the bad guys were less likely to kill him than the striker on his deck was. He lifted the blade six inches from the ground and put the tractor in gear.

The land-clearing blade rang as lasers struck it a series of quick hammerblows, marking the surface but doing no appreciable harm. Meyer knew what it felt like to have an unstoppable machine bearing down on you. The Kalendru shooters wouldn't stand long if all they had was anti-personnel weapons.

Meyer switched on the flame gun's pump and pointed the nozzle at the treeline eighty feet away. Her visor was cloudy where redeposited metal vapor plated the outside. The AI corrected, but trees and undergrowth looked as though they were plastic and had been extruded from simplified molds.

She swept her flame rod across the brush to the south a little faster than the tractor's own westward motion would have taken it. The treeline was barely within range. The white glare arched high and started to break up as it fell, spattering rather than sledging the beaten zone.

Light vegetation withered. The bark of giants puffed red and orange fire, but a brief touch of flame didn't ignite the wood itself.

Kalendru ran hooting, then spun and fell in a storm of stinger pellets.

When her thirty seconds of fuel were exhausted, Meyer dropped the flame gun and plucked a grenade from the satchel at her waist. She hadn't attached the hard suit's left thigh piece before the shooting started, so she hoped like hell the hot nozzle didn't twist around that way.

She hoped Matt was okay. The docs probably couldn't do much for a kid who'd been head shot, but if Matt carried her to them they'd take care of his burns.

Meyer threw the grenade over the bulldozer's blade. Rockets and bombs were saturating the jungle from which the Spooks had fired. They'd figured on surprise, but a strike company reacts with no more hesitation than a mousetrap. After the first volley it was a two-way fight and C41 had the firepower.

Meyer hoped a lot of things, but right now what she particularly hoped was that she'd kill the Spook who'd missed Matthew Lock's head by under a centimeter.

The forest was by now Caius Blohm's closest acquaintance. Not a friend, never a friend; but they knew one another. The scout moved as water does on a rough, gently-sloping surface: without haste or certain direction, but inexorably.

Blohm was going to capture a prisoner. They needed a prisoner. And he was going to kill all the other Kalendru he found.

He'd switched off his helmet and stinger. Spook sensors were so discriminating that they could identify even the slight leakage from a stinger's electronics at a hundred yards. It would take thirty seconds to cool the weapon's coils, but Blohm wouldn't need a stinger for what he had in mind.

He didn't think he'd need his helmet sensors, and he didn't want the communications. This was his business alone.

Blohm paused. The roots of forest giants spread as broadly as the branches above, bracing the trunk and sucking nourishment from a wide circuit of the thin soil. A six-foot band of leaf litter lay flat with no striations from surface roots.

He jumped over instead of going around because he was in a hurry. The ground on the other side was firm. If he'd stepped on the open space, a trap would have sprung as sure as the sun rose above the canopy. Blohm neither knew nor cared whether it would have been a pit, a gummy surface, root tentacles or some possibility unguessed.

He hadn't had time to get behind the Spooks before the survivors retreated from C41's storm of fire. He was following a group of six. Paralleling their course, rather, because he'd learned that a moving animal tended to sensitize the vegetation so it reacted instantly to the next one by.

The Kalendru were by their quickness and delicacy better adapted to survive here than humans were, but Blohm didn't have the impression that any of this group understood the forest the way he did. They overcame the forest with speed instead of brute force like the strikers of C41.

Caius Blohm coexisted with the forest, moving through it as a midge does a coarse screen. The forest might resent his presence, but it couldn't touch him while his mind remained one with it.

He hadn't seen the Kalendru since the first exchange of fire. They chittered to one another as they moved, but for the most part Blohm tracked his quarry by the way the forest itself reacted. Leaves turned, branches rustled without wind; even the air pressure shifted. All those things pointed to the Kalendru as surely as a blind man can locate the sun by the touch of light on his bare skin.

The Kalendru moved in quick spurts like mice scurrying from one bit of cover to the next in an open landscape. Blohm's progress was steadier and marginally faster. Eventually the Spooks would stop and Caius Blohm would not.

They were insertion troops, the Kalendru equivalent of the Strike Force. They wore baggy garments that stored body heat electrochemically in tubing along the seams, and they had facial scarves—which they'd pulled down as they ran—that absorbed CO₂ from their breath.

But the Spooks had only personal lasers for armament and their clothing was ragged. Whatever they had been when they arrived on Bezant, these Kalendru were shipwrecked castaways now.

Blohm heard them pause on the other side of a fallen tree eight feet in diameter; its further end was lost in the undergrowth a hundred feet beyond. He moved close, careful not to touch the log. Fungus on the bark formed tiny fairy castles—turret on turret on turret, each sprouting from the top of the one below. Dust motes that drifted onto the amber droplets beading the domes stuck as if to hot tar.

The Kalendru were talking. If Blohm turned on his helmet, the translation program would have told him what they were saying. That didn't matter.

Moving with even greater care than before, Blohm worked around the fallen tree to the opposite side. A tangle of vines as dense and spiky as a crown of thorns now separated him from his prey. Miniature white flowers grew from the vines. Their faces rotated toward the human's warmth. The tips of the vines themselves began to stretch in his direction as slowly as lava oozing from a volcanic fissure.

Blohm smiled at the brambles. Oh, yes, he understood malevolence like theirs.

He took a grenade from his belt and tossed it over the vine thicket with an easy motion.

The morose jabbering became hooting terror. Blohm was moving away with the best speed safety permitted in case one of the Spooks did what Blohm would have done—throw a grenade back the other way.

None of them did. He heard thuds and despairing cries. Limbs thrashed. For ten or fifteen seconds Spook lasers screamed like angry cats on the other side of the brambles.

Blohm switched his stinger on and circled carefully to the opening by which the Spooks had entered the passage between the thicket and the fallen tree. He'd been sure of getting one of them, hoped to bag several. In the event, he heard none of them escape.

They were waiting for him, though only three could turn their heads in Blohm's direction. They'd attempted to climb to safety on the other side of the tree when the grenade landed among them. They stuck like six long-legged flies on a honey-coated rod.

Blohm reached down and dropped the grenade back into a trouser pocket. He hadn't armed it. The Kalendru didn't wear rank insignia any more than strikers did in the field, but one of the silent captives had the prominent facial veins that were signs of nobility among the species.

"You'll do," Blohm said to the officer. He'd switched on his helmet. Its voice synthesizer chittered a translation.

The Spook's torso and both arms were stuck to the log. He held a laser in his right hand, but it was glued in the fungus also. Blohm bent, aimed carefully, and chiseled away the log's surface with a long burst from his stinger.

The Spook hooted as splinters whacked his belly at fire-hose velocity. The chunk of bark holding him pulled loose at the bottom. Blohm grabbed the neck scarf and tugged hard, half-choking his captive but freeing him the rest of the way from the tree. The Kalender's arms were still pinioned like those of a yoked slave.

Blohm fired a single pellet into the laser. Plastic disintegrated with a fat purple spark. The captive flinched away, but he wasn't badly hurt.

"Let's go back to the column, Spook," Blohm said. He gestured the captive forward with a crook of his finger. "You know the way. You just came from there. The major's going to want to talk with you."

They started down the corridor between log and thicket, the prisoner preceding. Behind them the remaining Kalendru hooted desperately. The brambles were easing closer.

Blohm didn't look around.

Abbado's squad had joined Blohm in the jungle, but they took their positions with most of C41 on the perimeter and let the scout bring his prisoner the last of the way to Farrell by himself. At least half the civilians waited to see what was going to happen, though only a few dozen at the front of the crowd would have anything to watch but the backs of their fellows.

An electronic interrogation was about as boring as waiting for paint to dry anyway. Unless the interrogator screwed up, got too deep, and went psychotic, of course. Art Farrell hoped he was too experienced and too careful to let that happen.

"That was a slick a piece of work, Blohm," Farrell said. The interrogation gear was laid out and waiting. He gestured to it and said, "You want to control on the spare set? You've earned it."

Blohm looked more like a corpse than a man; except for his eyes. He shook his head minusculy. "I'll check in with Mirica," he said. "But I did my job first."

"Right," Farrell said. He figured Blohm had to know the score about the kid already. If the scout wanted to hope for a miracle, well, didn't they all? "Kristal, you take—"

"Major Farrell?" said Tamara Lundie. "It might be more efficient if I carried out the interrogation. My equipment includes expert systems for the purpose."

Farrell wondered if he ever in his life had been so earnest. He didn't actually see Manager al-Ibrahimi smile, but he had a feeling God was having similar thoughts.

"Thank you, Administrator," Farrell said, preserving the public formality, "but however expert your systems are, they're not soldiers. I'll handle this one myself."

Kristal and Nessman had laid the prisoner flat on the sheet and taped his ankles. Occasionally the interrogation subject flailed around. The slab of sticky wood pinioned the Kalender's arms so well that they left it. Farrell wasn't sure that the glue could be removed without killing the subject anyway.

"With your permission, Major," al-Ibrahimi said. "I could be of service on the control panel. Not to direct the interrogation, of course; but to support you."

God might not be any smarter than his blonde aide, but he sure as hell wasn't naive. "Yeah, all right," Farrell said. "Let's do it."

He seated himself beside the quiescent prisoner and fitted the leads from the control box into the socket in his helmet. Kristal had already attached the induction pads to the Kalender's bare scalp. Al-Ibrahimi plugged another set of induction leads into the panel's second output jack and placed the pads at the base of his own skull. Farrell had expected the manager to hook the box to his headset or just to use the control panel's holographic projection.

Farrell closed his eyes and focused on a bead glowing against an azure field; it was the way he always prepared for an interrogation. "Go," he said. Al-Ibrahimi rolled him into the prisoner's mind.

Interrogation by any method is an art. As with all arts, the successful artist has to both know what he wants and be ready to exploit unexpected opportunities.

Some interrogators liked to drug themselves for closer rapport with the subject. That technique provided clearer images, but it increased the danger that the subject's attitudes and perceptions would bleed into the interrogator's unconscious and affect his judgment when he evaluated the data. Even without the risk, Art Farrell wasn't about to be another person for the sake of detail he didn't need.

Farrell started with the landing. His will guided the AI in the control box as it furrowed the Kalender's memory the way a plow does a field. The dirt is in no way changed or damaged, but its alignment shifts in accordance with the plowman's desires.

Images appeared in Farrell's mind, flashes of memory:

The Kalendru had made a normal landing, and they'd been fully prepared for trouble. The prisoner had been an officer with the party of eighty troops who set up perimeter defenses while the main body unloaded aircars. There were three or four hundred Spooks all told; the precise number was deeper in the subject's memory and of no immediate concern to Farrell. 

They'd had casualties immediately. The troops hadn't worn body armor even at the beginning. Injuries were more frequent and more serious than those the strikers received from similar dangers. Though the shooting trees were only waist high—they'd sprouted after the asteroid hit to form the landing site—their inch-long spikes punctured limbs and body cavities, killing and maiming. 

Memories cascaded into Farrell's awareness faster and more clearly than he had expected. It was more like a training exercise with recorded images than the real interrogation of a non-human subject. The surface of Farrell's mind was aware of Manager al-Ibrahimi seated across from him, smiling like a hatchet-faced Buddha.

"I could be of service on the control panel," he'd said, and that was true with no mistake. Maybe he really was God.

The prisoner watched as troops filed from the ship into the eight large aircars. Farrell caught the subject's unease and regret even though at this stage the interrogation was primarily after data, not reactions to them. The prisoner was very angry at being given the dangerous job of guarding the landing site while others flew to the goal in armored safety.

The cars flipped on their backs and dived into the ground, all of them within a half-second of one another. The subject's eyes stared at a plume of smoke rising from the distant jungle and felt a relief as enormous as the fear and anger of a moment before. 

The fear returned at once. It overlaid every perception from that point on, though al-Ibrahimi's hands on the controls shifted it into a thing Farrell was aware of rather than something he felt personally.

Farrell moved forward, telescoping time:

The perimeter guards and others from the ship set out on foot toward their goal. The Kalendru hadn't brought land-clearing equipment, but they were armed soldiers without a mass of civilians to protect. 

Casualties were constant and horrible, though the Spooks learned the way the strikers had. The rate of loss slowed. Some of the troops who'd taken off their helmets ran amok; the unaffected seared swollen insects off the brain stems of the survivors, but the victims died immediately in convulsions. 

Thus far everything the subject had experienced was familiar to Farrell at least in outline. The subject's hope began to mount; the column was near its goal. Then—

The image failed in horror so complete that the subject's mind could not fix the cause in memory. Farrell viewed a confused montage of hills, of broad boulevards cut through the landscape, of running in blind terror. 

Humans couldn't have survived the panicked dash through half a mile of this jungle; a surprising number of the Kalendru did. Their quickness saved them where the strikers wouldn't have been able to bring their firepower to bear. 

The subject didn't see the starship lift off and immediately crash, though he was aware of the event when it happened. Farrell couldn't be sure whether the vessel fled in response to whatever had happened to the ground expedition or if the crew was reacting to threats against themselves. It was the wrong decision, but perhaps there was no right one. 

The column's forty survivors set off to hike out of the crater. Their only goal now was personal survival. The jungle killed them, but only a few. They were crack troops, experienced in the dangers of their environment and driven by desperate need. 

Again Farrell coursed forward in time:

The subject's first sight of the crater's wall brought a glow of elation that forced aside fear's crushing miasma like a bubble forming as water boils. Farrell felt personal joy: the sheer rock wall was the human expedition's goal, too, and this was the first time he'd seen it. 

The ground twenty feet back from the edge of the cliffs was almost clear. Vines or roots, yellow-gray and whip thin, ran up the rock at frequent intervals. They had no foliage, but their suckers invaded minute cracks. 

Three Kalendru took off their boots and all equipment except a coil of fine cord each. They began to climb while their fellows kept guard on the ground. The climbers studiously avoided the vines. Instead, they found hand and footholds in the slight cracks and knobs present even on a smooth rock face. The Spooks' long limbs were an advantage in a task like this. 

The subject stood with his back to the stone, looking up the green wall of jungle rising nearly as high as the cliffs did. He—and Farrell—expected something to come from the trees to attack the climbers. 

When the climbers were halfway to the top the rocks supporting their weight crumbled. 

The Kalendru plunged a hundred feet straight down in a spattering of gravel. Two died instantly. The third lay with his eyes open and his lips moving slowly while blood spread in a brown pool beneath the body. 

The subject's slender fingers appeared in memory, lifting one of the pebbles that had dropped with the climbers. Hair-fine rootlets still clung to what had been its inner surface. The roots' hydrostatic expansion had wedged the rock loose; the victim fell with it, unharmed until impact crushed him against the stone beneath. 

The subject's memory stared at the cliffs, then covered his face with his hands. His skin puckered and was turning blotchy green in the Kalendru equivalent of weeping. He and his fellows would never be able to climb the rock. To attempt to use the wood of this jungle as building material would be a slower, surer form of suicide. 

Something iridescent and sun-bright gleamed in the high sky. A ship was landing in the crater. An enemy ship, but still a vessel which could be captured or at least might supply the weapons and equipment the remnants of the Kalendru expedition lacked. 

It was their only chance to escape this crater. 

Major Arthur Farrell's body writhed as he came out of the interrogation trance. Kristal and Nessman grabbed him. Even without drugs, the similarity of his situation to that of the subject was so close that he'd been dragged in deeper than he'd expected.

"There's no way out!" Farrell shouted. "There's no way out!"

"They move pretty good," said Caius Blohm. "Now, a lot of it's the way they're built, sure, legs and arms sticking way out like some kind of spider."

The patients lay under the trailers against the likelihood of rain, but a clear tarpaulin sheltered the life support system itself. The lighted control panel gleamed, slightly distorted by folds in the fabric. Dr. Ciler sat sideways to it as he stolidly ate spoonfuls of his dinner. His back was to Blohm.

"It's not just that, though," Blohm said. His left hand cradled Mirica; his right gestured, miming Kalendru limbs. "They really see, sense, things better than we do. Sure, they got great electronics, but that wouldn't do them any good if they couldn't see differences that fine, you see?"

The membrane covering Mirica's mouth and nose wicked oxygen in one direction and carbon dioxide in the other. It wasn't quite as efficient as a pressure tent, but it was readily portable. Thin control wires connected the child's upper chest and several sections of her skull to the support system.

"So they should've been able to grease me, right?" Blohm said. "There's six of them besides. But they don't have the instinct for it. Talent, sure, but they don't feel the forest. That was the difference, and that was all the difference in the world."

Mirica's face was waxen. Her chest rose and fell with mechanical efficiency.

"Now, I wanted to get around behind them right at the start," Blohm said with a flick of his free hand. "They ran too fast when we laid fire on them, so that meant I was in for a chase."

Dr. Ciler chewed a gruel that was supposed to taste like chicken and rice. He had no expression at all.

The brain function column on the monitor beside him was as flat as the surface of a pond.

Even without the panoramic display Meyer would have recognized the careful footsteps approaching her from behind. "Go on and lie down, Matt," she said softly. She knew he couldn't get much sleep when he had to keep his arms around her all night or she'd wake up shouting again. "I'm off guard in forty minutes."

"I'm all right," Lock said. He stood close but without touching. Meyer continued to look toward the jungle.

The attorney had lost twenty pounds since the landing; sweated it off, worked it off, worried it off. Like all the rest of them. This operation had been a bitch.

"Esther," Lock said. "Manager al-Ibrahimi and his aide are Category Fours. I watched them with the interrogation equipment. They have to be Category Fours to use it the way they did. Do you think your major knows that?"

Meyer frowned as she tried to assign the words a context from her own experience. "Rejects, you mean?" she asked.

"No, no," the civilian said. By the time the second syllable left his mouth, he'd purged his tone of irritation. "Civil Service Category Four. That's the highest classification there is. They have implanted computers wired to their brains."

Meyer nodded, thinking that she understood. "Oh," she said. "Well, I guess we need all the help we can get, right?"

"Esther," Lock said, frustrated that the only person in the camp he was ready to confide in didn't have the background to understand what he was saying. "I don't think there's a hundred Category Fours in the entire Unity. What are two of them doing here?"

Meyer raised her visor and rubbed her eyes, then lowered it again. The exercise gave her a moment to think.

"I don't know," she said. "Finding us a way out of the worst ratfuck I've ever been dropped into, maybe."

Lock cleared his throat but didn't speak.

Meyer patted his thigh with her free left hand. "Look, Matt," she said, "go get some sleep, okay. And let's not bug the major. He's got enough on his plate with stuff that's likely to get people killed."

Abbado snapped alert when he felt the plastic flex under the weight of someone kneeling beside him. "Hey, Doc," he said to Ciler. "I'd been meaning to look you up."

"I didn't mean to wake you, Guilio," Ciler said. "I had to wait until Dr. Weisshampl took over from me at the medical facility."

"If a striker doesn't learn to take catnaps," the sergeant said, "he doesn't sleep."

He frowned. "There isn't a problem with Methie's leg, is there?"

"No, he's doing as well as one could hope," Ciler said. "Better than I expected, certainly. Ah . . ."

He looked at Matushek, sleeping beside Abbado with both arms over his face. The rest of 3-3 was scattered: Horgen and Methie were on guard, while Caldwell had found a trio of civilian friends and was relaxing in her own fashion.

"Let's go check the perimeter," Abbado said, rising to his feet and snapping his equipment belt around his waist. "About time I did that anyway."

"You're aware that a little girl, a Mirica Laubenthal, was injured in the attack this morning," Ciler said as they picked their way among sleepers to the camp's open border near the berm.

"Yeah, poor kid," Abbado agreed. "Saw it happen. Shot right through the head, right?"

"A through wound, yes," Ciler said. "Not to mince words, Guilio, the child is dead. There's no possibility that she'll ever regain brain function. Eighty percent of the tissue has been destroyed by the trauma."

"Poor kid," Abbado repeated. "Well, that lot won't kill any more. Blohm took care of the ones that broke away and that wasn't very damned many, I promise you."

This close to the berm you could hear the vines move. It was like the sound a cat makes at birds it can't reach through a window: a rapid ticking, not very loud, but thick with frustrated rage.

"It's Striker Blohm who concerns me," the doctor said. "He apparently doesn't realize that the child's condition is irreversible."

Abbado looked at Ciler. "Well, Doc," he said, "A lot of times what a guy knows and what he lets himself know aren't the same thing. Methie'll swear to you that his wife back on Organpipe's got cobwebs growing on her pussy, waiting for him to finish his tour. Don't worry about Blohm."

"Guilio," Ciler said, "we are operating on a shoestring for medical support here. You know how many sick, how many wounded we have. The child is on our only full life-support system, and it's of no use to her. You see that, don't you?"

"Ah," said Abbado. "Ah."

He put his hand on Ciler's shoulder and squeezed it. "Look, Doc, sure I see. But I think you'd better keep the kid hooked up anyhow. Like you say, we're short of medical resources."

"I don't understand," Ciler said.

Abbado grimaced. "Doc," he said. "I know Blohm. Now, don't mistake what I'm saying—he may be crazy as a bedbug, but he's okay mostly, you know?"

"Of course I don't want to increase the stress on Striker Blohm," Ciler began. "But—"

"That's not what I mean, Doc," Abbado said. "The thing is, if Blohm ever gets the notion you, you know, finished off his little buddy, he'll wax your ass as sure as I'm standing here. And we can't afford to lose so good a medic, you see?"

"Ah," said Dr. Ciler. "Yes, I suppose I do."

Farrell watched the images al-Ibrahimi and Lundie together had forced from the Kalender in the last instants before the subject died. Jungle lay crushed to either side of a ragged boulevard; then blankness and a kaleidoscope of images—none of them frightening though obviously the cause of the subject's terror.

And death, when the interrogator and controller continued to force the subject's mind toward what it refused to recall.

"It doesn't mean anything to me," Farrell said.

"The last portion isn't really memory," Lundie said. "They're icons for what he wouldn't remember."

Farrell wished that he hadn't been in the Spook's mind himself. These recorded images of the final interrogation were harmless in themselves, but Farrell recalled the fear that suffused the cursory glance he'd had of the same memories. Kalendru psychology differed enough from the human variety that you normally couldn't empathize with the other species; but if you'd been one, this one . . .

"Poor bastard," Farrell muttered. He looked at al-Ibrahimi and said, "We've got the bulldozers. We can maybe undercut the side of the cliff and make a ramp up."

There were no campfires because of the recent rain. A group of civilians sat around a minilight eating gruel. The pair of strikers with them sang a verse of a cadence song: "I gotta guy, his hair is red . . ." 

"It appears probable that as soon as a tractor comes within range," Lundie said, "a boulder of size sufficient to destroy the vehicle will drop from the top of the cliff. The only way we can test the theory is to venture a bulldozer, of course."

"Yeah," said Farrell. "Shit. But that's the only choice, isn't it? We get out or we all die—after the ammo runs out if not before."

"—he makes his living by lying on a bed." 

The civilians bellowed the chorus, "Go to your left, your right, your left!" 

"If we can't get out from the rim of the wheel," the project manager said, "and I agree with Tamara that we can't, then the choice is to strike for the hub."

"C41 heads for wherever the Spooks were trying to go, you mean?" Farrell said, thinking of the montage that cloaked the subject's fear.

"I got a girl, her hair is black . . ." 

"The entire column," al-Ibrahimi said. "There's no point in separating us civilians from our protection. The known dangers would overwhelm us."

Lundie nodded solemnly. "The Kalendru came here at great risk," she said. "Whatever it was they were looking for may mean our safety."

There was a shout of triumph across the camp. Somebody'd gotten a fire to light.

Al-Ibrahimi smiled. "Or it may mean that I satisfy my curiosity before I die. Either result is more satisfying than simply being devoured by the vegetation, wouldn't you say?"

Art Farrell started to chuckle. Not because the joke was particularly funny; but because he knew that to the project manager, it wasn't really a joke.

"Go to your left, your right, your left . . ." 

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Framed

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Into the Fire

"The trouble with cayenne pepper," said Matushek as he rigged a pair of 4-pound rockets to balance the pair on the other hip, "is it's just as hot on your asshole as it is in the mouth."

The remainder of C41 had rearmed from the ammo trailer immediately after their battle with the natives. Abbado hadn't had the energy to do that because of the excitement when 3-3 got home. That meant they had to be up ahead of most of the others this morning. They were lead squad again.

A bulldozer started with a squeal of steam and the slowly-building thrum of the turbine flywheel. Meyer stood on the deck, putting her armor on. One of the civilian men was helping her.

Good for Essie.

Horgen was stuffing grenade magazines into the empty pockets of her bandolier. She paused. Nodding across the tailgate she murmured, "Look who's come to visit."

Abbado stepped away from the trailer. He didn't lower his visor. The sky was too dark to distinguish from the canopy, but his eyes had adapted to the light of the few lamps still lit. Caius Blohm walked toward the trailer with a kid hanging onto his pants' leg.

"Hello, Blohm," Abbado said. "Figure you've got something to say to us?"

"Nothing you don't know," Blohm said. "Nothing I haven't said to the major. I screwed up bad. I won't screw up that way again."

"Expect us to kiss you, then?" Matushek said, stepping around the trailer from the other side. His hands weren't any nearer his weapons than any striker's were at any time, but the threat was obvious.

The kid buried her face against Blohm's thigh. He caressed her dark hair. "No," he said. "I don't even expect you to let me buy you a drink when we get out of this. I just came to say it to your faces."

"Ace," Abbado said sharply. "Hop up in the trailer and see if there's another grenade launcher in the front there, will you? I'm thinking of carrying one myself."

Blohm turned. As the scout walked away, he bent and lifted the child to his shoulder. Abbado returned to the tailgate.

"Sorry, Sarge," Matushek muttered.

"No big deal," Abbado said. He had one bandolier pocket empty, so he dragged a case of stinger magazines closer. "Just remember we got a whole jungle out there to fight."

Horgen climbed to the side of the trailer and perched there, reaching into an open box of hand grenades among the jumble of miscellaneous weaponry. "Do you really want a launcher, Sarge?" she asked.

"Naw, I was never much good with one," Abbado said. "I'll take an extra pack of rockets instead."

At least twenty lasers ripped simultaneously into the encampment from the west and south. A stinking black tear zigzagged across the tarpaulin folded over the front of the trailer.

"Contact!" Abbado shouted. He knelt as he armed a rocket, then rose again to launch it into the undergrowth from which the Kalendru fire spat. Backblast whanged the side of the trailer. "Contact!"

Blohm was down but unharmed, raking the jungle with aimed bursts from his stinger. "Medic!" he cried. He hunched to his feet and sprinted for the open south side of the clearing.

Abbado sent his second rocket into a Spook in the direction Blohm was heading. Abbado didn't know what the scout had in mind, but one target was as good at the next in an ambush.

The kid lay twitching on the ground where Blohm had dropped. Her hair smoked. A laser bolt had burned through it and the skull beneath.

The pulsing laser sheared wires from the protective grate on the side window of the bulldozer's cab. "Get down, Matt!" Meyer said as she stepped back and grabbed the grenade launcher slung across her breastplate.

The laser hit the heavy support member at the rear of the cage. A large collop of metal vaporized, then combined with atmospheric oxygen in a secondary flash and a shockwave that flung Lock off the deck.

"Get the kid to a medic!" Meyer said, firing around the cab. She aimed a few feet above the bolts snapping from the jungle. Launched grenades weren't heavy enough to do a lot of damage with tree bursts, but the shrapnel spread over a wide area and suppressed Spook fire better than just killing a couple would do.

Seligman tried to get up from his seat. Meyer pushed him back down. He couldn't get past her out of the cab. "Drive!" she said. "Right into those fuckers in front! Keep the blade up and they can't touch you!"

Not really true, since once the tractor got close the Spooks could shoot from the sides. Either Seligman didn't see that or he figured the bad guys were less likely to kill him than the striker on his deck was. He lifted the blade six inches from the ground and put the tractor in gear.

The land-clearing blade rang as lasers struck it a series of quick hammerblows, marking the surface but doing no appreciable harm. Meyer knew what it felt like to have an unstoppable machine bearing down on you. The Kalendru shooters wouldn't stand long if all they had was anti-personnel weapons.

Meyer switched on the flame gun's pump and pointed the nozzle at the treeline eighty feet away. Her visor was cloudy where redeposited metal vapor plated the outside. The AI corrected, but trees and undergrowth looked as though they were plastic and had been extruded from simplified molds.

She swept her flame rod across the brush to the south a little faster than the tractor's own westward motion would have taken it. The treeline was barely within range. The white glare arched high and started to break up as it fell, spattering rather than sledging the beaten zone.

Light vegetation withered. The bark of giants puffed red and orange fire, but a brief touch of flame didn't ignite the wood itself.

Kalendru ran hooting, then spun and fell in a storm of stinger pellets.

When her thirty seconds of fuel were exhausted, Meyer dropped the flame gun and plucked a grenade from the satchel at her waist. She hadn't attached the hard suit's left thigh piece before the shooting started, so she hoped like hell the hot nozzle didn't twist around that way.

She hoped Matt was okay. The docs probably couldn't do much for a kid who'd been head shot, but if Matt carried her to them they'd take care of his burns.

Meyer threw the grenade over the bulldozer's blade. Rockets and bombs were saturating the jungle from which the Spooks had fired. They'd figured on surprise, but a strike company reacts with no more hesitation than a mousetrap. After the first volley it was a two-way fight and C41 had the firepower.

Meyer hoped a lot of things, but right now what she particularly hoped was that she'd kill the Spook who'd missed Matthew Lock's head by under a centimeter.

The forest was by now Caius Blohm's closest acquaintance. Not a friend, never a friend; but they knew one another. The scout moved as water does on a rough, gently-sloping surface: without haste or certain direction, but inexorably.

Blohm was going to capture a prisoner. They needed a prisoner. And he was going to kill all the other Kalendru he found.

He'd switched off his helmet and stinger. Spook sensors were so discriminating that they could identify even the slight leakage from a stinger's electronics at a hundred yards. It would take thirty seconds to cool the weapon's coils, but Blohm wouldn't need a stinger for what he had in mind.

He didn't think he'd need his helmet sensors, and he didn't want the communications. This was his business alone.

Blohm paused. The roots of forest giants spread as broadly as the branches above, bracing the trunk and sucking nourishment from a wide circuit of the thin soil. A six-foot band of leaf litter lay flat with no striations from surface roots.

He jumped over instead of going around because he was in a hurry. The ground on the other side was firm. If he'd stepped on the open space, a trap would have sprung as sure as the sun rose above the canopy. Blohm neither knew nor cared whether it would have been a pit, a gummy surface, root tentacles or some possibility unguessed.

He hadn't had time to get behind the Spooks before the survivors retreated from C41's storm of fire. He was following a group of six. Paralleling their course, rather, because he'd learned that a moving animal tended to sensitize the vegetation so it reacted instantly to the next one by.

The Kalendru were by their quickness and delicacy better adapted to survive here than humans were, but Blohm didn't have the impression that any of this group understood the forest the way he did. They overcame the forest with speed instead of brute force like the strikers of C41.

Caius Blohm coexisted with the forest, moving through it as a midge does a coarse screen. The forest might resent his presence, but it couldn't touch him while his mind remained one with it.

He hadn't seen the Kalendru since the first exchange of fire. They chittered to one another as they moved, but for the most part Blohm tracked his quarry by the way the forest itself reacted. Leaves turned, branches rustled without wind; even the air pressure shifted. All those things pointed to the Kalendru as surely as a blind man can locate the sun by the touch of light on his bare skin.

The Kalendru moved in quick spurts like mice scurrying from one bit of cover to the next in an open landscape. Blohm's progress was steadier and marginally faster. Eventually the Spooks would stop and Caius Blohm would not.

They were insertion troops, the Kalendru equivalent of the Strike Force. They wore baggy garments that stored body heat electrochemically in tubing along the seams, and they had facial scarves—which they'd pulled down as they ran—that absorbed CO₂ from their breath.

But the Spooks had only personal lasers for armament and their clothing was ragged. Whatever they had been when they arrived on Bezant, these Kalendru were shipwrecked castaways now.

Blohm heard them pause on the other side of a fallen tree eight feet in diameter; its further end was lost in the undergrowth a hundred feet beyond. He moved close, careful not to touch the log. Fungus on the bark formed tiny fairy castles—turret on turret on turret, each sprouting from the top of the one below. Dust motes that drifted onto the amber droplets beading the domes stuck as if to hot tar.

The Kalendru were talking. If Blohm turned on his helmet, the translation program would have told him what they were saying. That didn't matter.

Moving with even greater care than before, Blohm worked around the fallen tree to the opposite side. A tangle of vines as dense and spiky as a crown of thorns now separated him from his prey. Miniature white flowers grew from the vines. Their faces rotated toward the human's warmth. The tips of the vines themselves began to stretch in his direction as slowly as lava oozing from a volcanic fissure.

Blohm smiled at the brambles. Oh, yes, he understood malevolence like theirs.

He took a grenade from his belt and tossed it over the vine thicket with an easy motion.

The morose jabbering became hooting terror. Blohm was moving away with the best speed safety permitted in case one of the Spooks did what Blohm would have done—throw a grenade back the other way.

None of them did. He heard thuds and despairing cries. Limbs thrashed. For ten or fifteen seconds Spook lasers screamed like angry cats on the other side of the brambles.

Blohm switched his stinger on and circled carefully to the opening by which the Spooks had entered the passage between the thicket and the fallen tree. He'd been sure of getting one of them, hoped to bag several. In the event, he heard none of them escape.

They were waiting for him, though only three could turn their heads in Blohm's direction. They'd attempted to climb to safety on the other side of the tree when the grenade landed among them. They stuck like six long-legged flies on a honey-coated rod.

Blohm reached down and dropped the grenade back into a trouser pocket. He hadn't armed it. The Kalendru didn't wear rank insignia any more than strikers did in the field, but one of the silent captives had the prominent facial veins that were signs of nobility among the species.

"You'll do," Blohm said to the officer. He'd switched on his helmet. Its voice synthesizer chittered a translation.

The Spook's torso and both arms were stuck to the log. He held a laser in his right hand, but it was glued in the fungus also. Blohm bent, aimed carefully, and chiseled away the log's surface with a long burst from his stinger.

The Spook hooted as splinters whacked his belly at fire-hose velocity. The chunk of bark holding him pulled loose at the bottom. Blohm grabbed the neck scarf and tugged hard, half-choking his captive but freeing him the rest of the way from the tree. The Kalender's arms were still pinioned like those of a yoked slave.

Blohm fired a single pellet into the laser. Plastic disintegrated with a fat purple spark. The captive flinched away, but he wasn't badly hurt.

"Let's go back to the column, Spook," Blohm said. He gestured the captive forward with a crook of his finger. "You know the way. You just came from there. The major's going to want to talk with you."

They started down the corridor between log and thicket, the prisoner preceding. Behind them the remaining Kalendru hooted desperately. The brambles were easing closer.

Blohm didn't look around.

Abbado's squad had joined Blohm in the jungle, but they took their positions with most of C41 on the perimeter and let the scout bring his prisoner the last of the way to Farrell by himself. At least half the civilians waited to see what was going to happen, though only a few dozen at the front of the crowd would have anything to watch but the backs of their fellows.

An electronic interrogation was about as boring as waiting for paint to dry anyway. Unless the interrogator screwed up, got too deep, and went psychotic, of course. Art Farrell hoped he was too experienced and too careful to let that happen.

"That was a slick a piece of work, Blohm," Farrell said. The interrogation gear was laid out and waiting. He gestured to it and said, "You want to control on the spare set? You've earned it."

Blohm looked more like a corpse than a man; except for his eyes. He shook his head minusculy. "I'll check in with Mirica," he said. "But I did my job first."

"Right," Farrell said. He figured Blohm had to know the score about the kid already. If the scout wanted to hope for a miracle, well, didn't they all? "Kristal, you take—"

"Major Farrell?" said Tamara Lundie. "It might be more efficient if I carried out the interrogation. My equipment includes expert systems for the purpose."

Farrell wondered if he ever in his life had been so earnest. He didn't actually see Manager al-Ibrahimi smile, but he had a feeling God was having similar thoughts.

"Thank you, Administrator," Farrell said, preserving the public formality, "but however expert your systems are, they're not soldiers. I'll handle this one myself."

Kristal and Nessman had laid the prisoner flat on the sheet and taped his ankles. Occasionally the interrogation subject flailed around. The slab of sticky wood pinioned the Kalender's arms so well that they left it. Farrell wasn't sure that the glue could be removed without killing the subject anyway.

"With your permission, Major," al-Ibrahimi said. "I could be of service on the control panel. Not to direct the interrogation, of course; but to support you."

God might not be any smarter than his blonde aide, but he sure as hell wasn't naive. "Yeah, all right," Farrell said. "Let's do it."

He seated himself beside the quiescent prisoner and fitted the leads from the control box into the socket in his helmet. Kristal had already attached the induction pads to the Kalender's bare scalp. Al-Ibrahimi plugged another set of induction leads into the panel's second output jack and placed the pads at the base of his own skull. Farrell had expected the manager to hook the box to his headset or just to use the control panel's holographic projection.

Farrell closed his eyes and focused on a bead glowing against an azure field; it was the way he always prepared for an interrogation. "Go," he said. Al-Ibrahimi rolled him into the prisoner's mind.

Interrogation by any method is an art. As with all arts, the successful artist has to both know what he wants and be ready to exploit unexpected opportunities.

Some interrogators liked to drug themselves for closer rapport with the subject. That technique provided clearer images, but it increased the danger that the subject's attitudes and perceptions would bleed into the interrogator's unconscious and affect his judgment when he evaluated the data. Even without the risk, Art Farrell wasn't about to be another person for the sake of detail he didn't need.

Farrell started with the landing. His will guided the AI in the control box as it furrowed the Kalender's memory the way a plow does a field. The dirt is in no way changed or damaged, but its alignment shifts in accordance with the plowman's desires.

Images appeared in Farrell's mind, flashes of memory:

The Kalendru had made a normal landing, and they'd been fully prepared for trouble. The prisoner had been an officer with the party of eighty troops who set up perimeter defenses while the main body unloaded aircars. There were three or four hundred Spooks all told; the precise number was deeper in the subject's memory and of no immediate concern to Farrell. 

They'd had casualties immediately. The troops hadn't worn body armor even at the beginning. Injuries were more frequent and more serious than those the strikers received from similar dangers. Though the shooting trees were only waist high—they'd sprouted after the asteroid hit to form the landing site—their inch-long spikes punctured limbs and body cavities, killing and maiming. 

Memories cascaded into Farrell's awareness faster and more clearly than he had expected. It was more like a training exercise with recorded images than the real interrogation of a non-human subject. The surface of Farrell's mind was aware of Manager al-Ibrahimi seated across from him, smiling like a hatchet-faced Buddha.

"I could be of service on the control panel," he'd said, and that was true with no mistake. Maybe he really was God.

The prisoner watched as troops filed from the ship into the eight large aircars. Farrell caught the subject's unease and regret even though at this stage the interrogation was primarily after data, not reactions to them. The prisoner was very angry at being given the dangerous job of guarding the landing site while others flew to the goal in armored safety.

The cars flipped on their backs and dived into the ground, all of them within a half-second of one another. The subject's eyes stared at a plume of smoke rising from the distant jungle and felt a relief as enormous as the fear and anger of a moment before. 

The fear returned at once. It overlaid every perception from that point on, though al-Ibrahimi's hands on the controls shifted it into a thing Farrell was aware of rather than something he felt personally.

Farrell moved forward, telescoping time:

The perimeter guards and others from the ship set out on foot toward their goal. The Kalendru hadn't brought land-clearing equipment, but they were armed soldiers without a mass of civilians to protect. 

Casualties were constant and horrible, though the Spooks learned the way the strikers had. The rate of loss slowed. Some of the troops who'd taken off their helmets ran amok; the unaffected seared swollen insects off the brain stems of the survivors, but the victims died immediately in convulsions. 

Thus far everything the subject had experienced was familiar to Farrell at least in outline. The subject's hope began to mount; the column was near its goal. Then—

The image failed in horror so complete that the subject's mind could not fix the cause in memory. Farrell viewed a confused montage of hills, of broad boulevards cut through the landscape, of running in blind terror. 

Humans couldn't have survived the panicked dash through half a mile of this jungle; a surprising number of the Kalendru did. Their quickness saved them where the strikers wouldn't have been able to bring their firepower to bear. 

The subject didn't see the starship lift off and immediately crash, though he was aware of the event when it happened. Farrell couldn't be sure whether the vessel fled in response to whatever had happened to the ground expedition or if the crew was reacting to threats against themselves. It was the wrong decision, but perhaps there was no right one. 

The column's forty survivors set off to hike out of the crater. Their only goal now was personal survival. The jungle killed them, but only a few. They were crack troops, experienced in the dangers of their environment and driven by desperate need. 

Again Farrell coursed forward in time:

The subject's first sight of the crater's wall brought a glow of elation that forced aside fear's crushing miasma like a bubble forming as water boils. Farrell felt personal joy: the sheer rock wall was the human expedition's goal, too, and this was the first time he'd seen it. 

The ground twenty feet back from the edge of the cliffs was almost clear. Vines or roots, yellow-gray and whip thin, ran up the rock at frequent intervals. They had no foliage, but their suckers invaded minute cracks. 

Three Kalendru took off their boots and all equipment except a coil of fine cord each. They began to climb while their fellows kept guard on the ground. The climbers studiously avoided the vines. Instead, they found hand and footholds in the slight cracks and knobs present even on a smooth rock face. The Spooks' long limbs were an advantage in a task like this. 

The subject stood with his back to the stone, looking up the green wall of jungle rising nearly as high as the cliffs did. He—and Farrell—expected something to come from the trees to attack the climbers. 

When the climbers were halfway to the top the rocks supporting their weight crumbled. 

The Kalendru plunged a hundred feet straight down in a spattering of gravel. Two died instantly. The third lay with his eyes open and his lips moving slowly while blood spread in a brown pool beneath the body. 

The subject's slender fingers appeared in memory, lifting one of the pebbles that had dropped with the climbers. Hair-fine rootlets still clung to what had been its inner surface. The roots' hydrostatic expansion had wedged the rock loose; the victim fell with it, unharmed until impact crushed him against the stone beneath. 

The subject's memory stared at the cliffs, then covered his face with his hands. His skin puckered and was turning blotchy green in the Kalendru equivalent of weeping. He and his fellows would never be able to climb the rock. To attempt to use the wood of this jungle as building material would be a slower, surer form of suicide. 

Something iridescent and sun-bright gleamed in the high sky. A ship was landing in the crater. An enemy ship, but still a vessel which could be captured or at least might supply the weapons and equipment the remnants of the Kalendru expedition lacked. 

It was their only chance to escape this crater. 

Major Arthur Farrell's body writhed as he came out of the interrogation trance. Kristal and Nessman grabbed him. Even without drugs, the similarity of his situation to that of the subject was so close that he'd been dragged in deeper than he'd expected.

"There's no way out!" Farrell shouted. "There's no way out!"

"They move pretty good," said Caius Blohm. "Now, a lot of it's the way they're built, sure, legs and arms sticking way out like some kind of spider."

The patients lay under the trailers against the likelihood of rain, but a clear tarpaulin sheltered the life support system itself. The lighted control panel gleamed, slightly distorted by folds in the fabric. Dr. Ciler sat sideways to it as he stolidly ate spoonfuls of his dinner. His back was to Blohm.

"It's not just that, though," Blohm said. His left hand cradled Mirica; his right gestured, miming Kalendru limbs. "They really see, sense, things better than we do. Sure, they got great electronics, but that wouldn't do them any good if they couldn't see differences that fine, you see?"

The membrane covering Mirica's mouth and nose wicked oxygen in one direction and carbon dioxide in the other. It wasn't quite as efficient as a pressure tent, but it was readily portable. Thin control wires connected the child's upper chest and several sections of her skull to the support system.

"So they should've been able to grease me, right?" Blohm said. "There's six of them besides. But they don't have the instinct for it. Talent, sure, but they don't feel the forest. That was the difference, and that was all the difference in the world."

Mirica's face was waxen. Her chest rose and fell with mechanical efficiency.

"Now, I wanted to get around behind them right at the start," Blohm said with a flick of his free hand. "They ran too fast when we laid fire on them, so that meant I was in for a chase."

Dr. Ciler chewed a gruel that was supposed to taste like chicken and rice. He had no expression at all.

The brain function column on the monitor beside him was as flat as the surface of a pond.

Even without the panoramic display Meyer would have recognized the careful footsteps approaching her from behind. "Go on and lie down, Matt," she said softly. She knew he couldn't get much sleep when he had to keep his arms around her all night or she'd wake up shouting again. "I'm off guard in forty minutes."

"I'm all right," Lock said. He stood close but without touching. Meyer continued to look toward the jungle.

The attorney had lost twenty pounds since the landing; sweated it off, worked it off, worried it off. Like all the rest of them. This operation had been a bitch.

"Esther," Lock said. "Manager al-Ibrahimi and his aide are Category Fours. I watched them with the interrogation equipment. They have to be Category Fours to use it the way they did. Do you think your major knows that?"

Meyer frowned as she tried to assign the words a context from her own experience. "Rejects, you mean?" she asked.

"No, no," the civilian said. By the time the second syllable left his mouth, he'd purged his tone of irritation. "Civil Service Category Four. That's the highest classification there is. They have implanted computers wired to their brains."

Meyer nodded, thinking that she understood. "Oh," she said. "Well, I guess we need all the help we can get, right?"

"Esther," Lock said, frustrated that the only person in the camp he was ready to confide in didn't have the background to understand what he was saying. "I don't think there's a hundred Category Fours in the entire Unity. What are two of them doing here?"

Meyer raised her visor and rubbed her eyes, then lowered it again. The exercise gave her a moment to think.

"I don't know," she said. "Finding us a way out of the worst ratfuck I've ever been dropped into, maybe."

Lock cleared his throat but didn't speak.

Meyer patted his thigh with her free left hand. "Look, Matt," she said, "go get some sleep, okay. And let's not bug the major. He's got enough on his plate with stuff that's likely to get people killed."

Abbado snapped alert when he felt the plastic flex under the weight of someone kneeling beside him. "Hey, Doc," he said to Ciler. "I'd been meaning to look you up."

"I didn't mean to wake you, Guilio," Ciler said. "I had to wait until Dr. Weisshampl took over from me at the medical facility."

"If a striker doesn't learn to take catnaps," the sergeant said, "he doesn't sleep."

He frowned. "There isn't a problem with Methie's leg, is there?"

"No, he's doing as well as one could hope," Ciler said. "Better than I expected, certainly. Ah . . ."

He looked at Matushek, sleeping beside Abbado with both arms over his face. The rest of 3-3 was scattered: Horgen and Methie were on guard, while Caldwell had found a trio of civilian friends and was relaxing in her own fashion.

"Let's go check the perimeter," Abbado said, rising to his feet and snapping his equipment belt around his waist. "About time I did that anyway."

"You're aware that a little girl, a Mirica Laubenthal, was injured in the attack this morning," Ciler said as they picked their way among sleepers to the camp's open border near the berm.

"Yeah, poor kid," Abbado agreed. "Saw it happen. Shot right through the head, right?"

"A through wound, yes," Ciler said. "Not to mince words, Guilio, the child is dead. There's no possibility that she'll ever regain brain function. Eighty percent of the tissue has been destroyed by the trauma."

"Poor kid," Abbado repeated. "Well, that lot won't kill any more. Blohm took care of the ones that broke away and that wasn't very damned many, I promise you."

This close to the berm you could hear the vines move. It was like the sound a cat makes at birds it can't reach through a window: a rapid ticking, not very loud, but thick with frustrated rage.

"It's Striker Blohm who concerns me," the doctor said. "He apparently doesn't realize that the child's condition is irreversible."

Abbado looked at Ciler. "Well, Doc," he said, "A lot of times what a guy knows and what he lets himself know aren't the same thing. Methie'll swear to you that his wife back on Organpipe's got cobwebs growing on her pussy, waiting for him to finish his tour. Don't worry about Blohm."

"Guilio," Ciler said, "we are operating on a shoestring for medical support here. You know how many sick, how many wounded we have. The child is on our only full life-support system, and it's of no use to her. You see that, don't you?"

"Ah," said Abbado. "Ah."

He put his hand on Ciler's shoulder and squeezed it. "Look, Doc, sure I see. But I think you'd better keep the kid hooked up anyhow. Like you say, we're short of medical resources."

"I don't understand," Ciler said.

Abbado grimaced. "Doc," he said. "I know Blohm. Now, don't mistake what I'm saying—he may be crazy as a bedbug, but he's okay mostly, you know?"

"Of course I don't want to increase the stress on Striker Blohm," Ciler began. "But—"

"That's not what I mean, Doc," Abbado said. "The thing is, if Blohm ever gets the notion you, you know, finished off his little buddy, he'll wax your ass as sure as I'm standing here. And we can't afford to lose so good a medic, you see?"

"Ah," said Dr. Ciler. "Yes, I suppose I do."

Farrell watched the images al-Ibrahimi and Lundie together had forced from the Kalender in the last instants before the subject died. Jungle lay crushed to either side of a ragged boulevard; then blankness and a kaleidoscope of images—none of them frightening though obviously the cause of the subject's terror.

And death, when the interrogator and controller continued to force the subject's mind toward what it refused to recall.

"It doesn't mean anything to me," Farrell said.

"The last portion isn't really memory," Lundie said. "They're icons for what he wouldn't remember."

Farrell wished that he hadn't been in the Spook's mind himself. These recorded images of the final interrogation were harmless in themselves, but Farrell recalled the fear that suffused the cursory glance he'd had of the same memories. Kalendru psychology differed enough from the human variety that you normally couldn't empathize with the other species; but if you'd been one, this one . . .

"Poor bastard," Farrell muttered. He looked at al-Ibrahimi and said, "We've got the bulldozers. We can maybe undercut the side of the cliff and make a ramp up."

There were no campfires because of the recent rain. A group of civilians sat around a minilight eating gruel. The pair of strikers with them sang a verse of a cadence song: "I gotta guy, his hair is red . . ." 

"It appears probable that as soon as a tractor comes within range," Lundie said, "a boulder of size sufficient to destroy the vehicle will drop from the top of the cliff. The only way we can test the theory is to venture a bulldozer, of course."

"Yeah," said Farrell. "Shit. But that's the only choice, isn't it? We get out or we all die—after the ammo runs out if not before."

"—he makes his living by lying on a bed." 

The civilians bellowed the chorus, "Go to your left, your right, your left!" 

"If we can't get out from the rim of the wheel," the project manager said, "and I agree with Tamara that we can't, then the choice is to strike for the hub."

"C41 heads for wherever the Spooks were trying to go, you mean?" Farrell said, thinking of the montage that cloaked the subject's fear.

"I got a girl, her hair is black . . ." 

"The entire column," al-Ibrahimi said. "There's no point in separating us civilians from our protection. The known dangers would overwhelm us."

Lundie nodded solemnly. "The Kalendru came here at great risk," she said. "Whatever it was they were looking for may mean our safety."

There was a shout of triumph across the camp. Somebody'd gotten a fire to light.

Al-Ibrahimi smiled. "Or it may mean that I satisfy my curiosity before I die. Either result is more satisfying than simply being devoured by the vegetation, wouldn't you say?"

Art Farrell started to chuckle. Not because the joke was particularly funny; but because he knew that to the project manager, it wasn't really a joke.

"Go to your left, your right, your left . . ." 

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